Tell Me How You Were Loved And I Will Tell You How You Make Love

According to sexuality expert, therapist, and author Esther Perel, one’s upbringing says a lot about who you are in bed.

In a recent interview with modern lifestyle publication Goop, at their Health wellness summit, the author of the bestselling book “Mating in Captivity” said that much of our adult sexuality, our current desires, the way we relate to others, how we perceive our self-worth, is the product of the way we were raised and the environment in which our sexuality developed.

Here is the excerpt of the exchange.

Goop: You’ve said that if you know how someone was raised, you can tell how they will be as a lover. Can you explain?

Esther Perel: Consider a paradigm we’ve always known in modern psychology: Tell me how you are loved, and I’ll have a good idea of what may be some of your issues, your concerns, your worries, your aspirations, and how you love. But this paradigm never got translated into: Tell me how you were loved and I will tell you how you MAKE love. How your emotional history is inscribed in the physicality of sex. How your body speaks a certain emotional biography. For example, the question I often ask people is: How did you learn to love, and with whom? Were you allowed to want? Were you allowed to have needs growing up—or were you told, “What do you need that for?” Were you allowed to thrive? Were you allowed to experience pleasure—or was pleasure just a break between work sessions, a reward after a lot of effort? Were you allowed to cry—and were you allowed to cry out loud, or did you have to hide it? Were you allowed to laugh—out loud? Did you feel protected as a child by those who needed to protect you—or did you flee for protection? Did the people who were supposed to take care of you do so—or did you have to take care of your caregivers, becoming the parentified child?

Goop:  What’s an example?

Esther Perel: I was talking to a couple, two women. The first woman said: “I never know what you want sexually, you never tell me what you like. I know that you want to be left alone when you’re done caring for the kids all day, but you never seek pleasurable, intimate connection with me. Your free time is being free of caretaking duties, but never the pleasure of being physically and affectionately nurtured. The only thing you let me do is make coffee for you in morning.” Then I find out that the other partner grew up taking care of her mother in nearly every sense. She was the dutiful, straight-A student. She learned not to have any needs, so as to not burden her mother. So, as an adult, she has no idea what she needs, wants, or likes. It’s not her mind; but that her body has no idea: You can touch her and ask her, Does this feel good, or does that feel good? And she doesn’t really know the difference.

Goop: Is this part of what you call the “erotic blueprint”?

Esther Perel: There are various ways to explore people’s erotic blueprints, and you can spend hours drawing them out. (Some of this comes out of the work of a colleague of mine, psychologist Jack Morin, Ph.D., author of The Erotic Mind. Another colleague, Jaiya, often divides the blueprint into four quadrants: mental, physical, emotional, spiritual.)

The blueprint, for me, is: If you tell me some of these details of your emotional history, it helps me to understand how you experience receiving, taking, asking for something, and pleasure in the full sense of the word—the abdication of responsibility, the unselfconsciousness, the freedom, the playfulness, the unproductive nature of the erotic. This all gets at how you experience aliveness. Do you let yourself feel alive, outside of just feeling safe? Safety is the first base, but it’s not yet alive. Feeling truly alive involves risk-taking, mischief, curiosity. All of these experiences we—every man and every woman—have, we experience in our bodies. They are embodied experiences, part of being human.

Another way of thinking about the blueprint is that it is comprised of whatever thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, and messages you have about your sexuality. You might think sex is dirty, dangerous, fun, power. You might carry negative messages of sex with you: Don’t give it to them; the minute you do, they won’t want you anymore; the only power you have is the power of refusal. There can also be positive messages about turn-on—what entices you, what awakens you. Then there are the feelings: I feel shy, I feel small, I’m afraid, I feel powerful, I feel big.

Read the full interview on Goop.