Backstory
I grew up in a family of man haters. Not overt man haters. Just women who had been kinda fucked over by men.
My Gramma Frieda had been married to Bernie and to this day, I still don’t know the awful thing that must have happened, but something catalyzed her to get a divorce, even back before that was really A Thing. I always wonder if he cheated on her with his second wife Sylvia, who came along awfully quickly. But I never had the courage to ask. And now they are all dead. But it was OK because after Bernie, Frieda met Max and fell madly in love. But then he died hella quickly. Damn men.
My mom’s first sexual and romantic experiences were somewhere between unsavory and traumatic. Then she wound up marrying my dad, who was an open-minded artist when she met him, but became a Fundamentalist Christian after they had been married, and spent the next several decades telling her she was going to hell because she was Jewish.
The women had an unspoken but palpable collusion. We’d go on shopping trips and sit by the pool and cook and drink tea and watch tv and talk for hours. Our intimacy was fulfilling. And one of the things we did together was binge sugar.
Ok, I’m being a bit melodramatic when I say “binge.” We are not talking about bulimia or even anything visibly excessive. We’re talking a few “nice pieces of pie” or slice of “nice banana bread” or a “nice glass of Roma with milk and honey” or a “nice bowl of ice cream.”
See, all our sweets were Nice 😉
There’s some good and some bad here.
The good is, the matriarchs put love in the food, and shared it together in a space of love and bonded intimacy. It felt and tasted good. It was basically decently healthy and not even too excessive. This is back when it was considered a normal thing to eat dessert every night after dinner.
The Problem
The problem is that knowing what I know now, I can see that these sweets were a poor replacement for something else, a deeper desire.
These sweets were in lieu of romantic love, intimate physical touch, and sex.
Hello, emotional eating.
I still do it, don’t get me wrong.
Just last night I indulged in a fresh baked health food store turnover and saved it for my late night Netflix binge session as a form of pre-menstrual self care.
It tasted good.
But not as good as the 4 hours of cuddles I enjoyed with a lover, as another form pre-menstrual self care.
The Discovery
It wasn’t until I did $7000 of training to become a Sex, Relationship & Intimacy Coach that I got (mostly) over my aversion to, and discomfort with, casually touching strangers in intimate ways. (Dude, I mean cuddling. Get your mind out of the gutter) 😉
I used to go to Ecstatic Dance and manage the mild symptoms of anxiety I had as mostly-well-meaning men would suss out my availability to do Contact Improv with.
I ran the story inside my head that they were all disgusting, un-attuned, near-predators who were trying to hit on me, and that letting any contact in would mean losing my boundaries and being energetically, if not physically, taken advantage of by sexual vampires.
Damn. It’s tiring even to type that.
Even more tiring to acknowledge that if you think I was the only woman in the room feeling like that, or even in the minority, you’re wrong.
This is cultural programming, running solidly alongside the Disney Princess Rescue Me fantasy, gently skull fucking all of us all the time.
We can run but we can’t hide.
All we can do is go down, and in.
In the Somatica coaching training, I was fortunate to have several practice sessions with men where I got to process some of these issues. I got to see the ways in which it was, and was not, true. And more importantly, I got to see the impact of my feelings on the actual real men sitting in front of me. Which helped me realize they were humans with feelings, not just heartless vampires scanning for pussy.
Once I saw their vulnerability, a giant crack shattered in the mythos that I had been fed, and believed my entire life: that men had the power and control, and were in charge here, at least somewhat actively creating a system that oppressed, dominated, and de-humanized women. Because that gave them the power, money and prestige, and that was how they liked it.
What I saw when the first wave feminist blinders had been removed, was instead, men who, like me, had basic human needs for connection, and were struggling just as much as me, but in different ways, to get them met.
I saw the violent and de-humanizing Man Box that I had been just as complicit in creating as the Patriarchal system that was inherited, emergent, and only actually partially reified by actual men around me.
I saw the tragedy of disconnection based in fear. So big it’s hard to even see it.
Arguably, epidemic.
But this isn’t an article about how I learned to stop hating men.
This is an article about how I became a person who cuddles.
I became a person who cuddles when I realized that cuddling didn’t have to lead to exchanging sexual energy. It could be totally its own thing. And furthermore, even if one or both parties DID happen to feel sexual feelings, this could be discussed, or not, but wasn’t guaranteed to be automatically acted upon. And even if it was acted upon, and I wasn’t into it, I could use my words to make it return to just regular cuddling. Or I could decide to not cuddle with that person anymore. Or I could have a discussion about it before cuddling with a person.
I can’t say I’m a complete master of all these skills. It is still awkward for me to bring up my fear that a guy friend might be attracted to me, before a cuddle, to ensure that I don’t wind up tensing up during the cuddle and not enjoying it.
What I have become a master at, however, is sniffing out people with whom it feels deliciously safe and nourishing to cuddle with, and developing elaborate cuddle-lover relationships with them. What I am also a master at is introducing cuddling to my clients, and giving and recieving nourishment in that space too.
Rather than a therapist who will just listen to their clients ramble on week after week about the same topics, I find that when I hold my clients, something usually changes almost immediatey (because Oxytocin). Their system relaxes. The bond between us, and feeling of us being “on the same team” is strengthened. Their perspective on their problems becomes infused with levity and playfulness. They are suddenly feeling safer and therefore more curious about me.
What that Enables me to do
After becoming a cuddle ninja, I learned through experience that a few hours of cuddling per day, 3-4 days a week, goes a long way to keeping me balanced. Seriously, I think it helps more than the anti-depressants, ADD drugs, and mild psychdelics I used to take. (And guess what guys, it’s also fun) 😉
It’s like there is a baseline of nourishment that gets filled up just through contact with another person — even if I barely know them and they are literally just paying me to hold them!!
Because of this experience, I believe our bodies are meant to be way more connected. Our nervous systems relax when they can entrain with other relaxed nervous systems. This is absolutely medicine.
And the interesting part? When I have taken in my daily quota of Vitamin Cuddle, I don’t find myself fantasizing about sweets so much.
Sure, there are biological sugar cravings that can come from things being off in your gut.
But the emotional craving for sweetness is fufilled for me, by the sweetness I experience almost daily of meeting another human in this innocent, vulnerable, cuddly place, where our heartbeats entrain, we feel one another’s warmth, and, even just for 20 minutes, don’t feel like a lone solider alone fighting our personal battle in the world.
Having this sweetness in my life accessible through something as simple as cuddling helps me stay in better health. Sugar, gluten and dairy are the cornerstones of most desserts, and also three of the hardest things to digest. My gut thanks me, that I have found other ways of digesting sweetness in my life.
I forgot to mention that my Grandma Frieda was diabetic. I think it’s quite likely that I’ll stave off my biological risk of diabetes, at least partially through the inclusion of cuddling in my holistic health regiment.
I also have struggled with low-level depression much of my life, but do not struggle with that when I have regular touch and cuddling in my life.
We all know the laundry list of side effects that come with antidepressants, from suicidal tendencies to mania to losing your sex drive. If there was a natural alternative, 100% free and easily accessible, with only POSITIVE side effects of increasing bonding and connection between people, wouldn’t that be a worthwhile thing to investiage?!
We also know the host of health risks that come with diabetes, and that the body-mind connetion is a real thing, and that stress and emotions directly impact our physical health.
An inquiry for the reader
So now is the part where I will poke you a little bit to turn the lens inward towards yourself. How much touch do you have in your life? How much of that touch feels mutually safe and nourishing? If you are feeling like you don’t have enough touch in your life, what do you think is the reason for that? Who might you ask to cuddle? What might happen if you were to ask them? What is the fear that comes up for you there? And is this important enough to you to get through to the other side?
Cuddling isn’t for everyone, and I respect that. Touch is a love language for me, and as someone with a trauma history (which means I feel a baseline of very subtly unsafe and anxious a good deal of the time), who has ALSO done her work to be able to feel safe with touch, touch has become a HUGE resource for me to help me feel grounded and safe. For others, it has the opposite effect.
Wherever you fall on the spectrum, I encourage you to consider what you crave, and what the deeper desire might be instead.
And if you want more touch in your life, working with an intimacy coach like me is not only a way to literally IMMEDIATELY have cuddles available to you, but to work through any glitchiness that comes up when you think about asking that cute girl from work to cuddle, or possibly feeling a sexual feeling during a cuddle, or having your cuddle buddy grab your boob when you don’t want them to, or any other number of horrific thing that could very well happen.
But which you could also totally navigate 😉