The Body You Bring to Bed
The Body You Bring to Bed by Rebecca Hiraoka.
How Body Image Shapes Pleasure, How Therapy Can Help
Pleasure asks us to be in our bodies, but that can feel challenging. While having sex have
you ever felt yourself leave the experience, enter your mind, and begin to wonder how your body
is being perceived, tuning into the parts of your body that you do not like and feel fairly certain
others are judging?
Our Body Image Comes to Bed With Us
If so, you are not alone. Research suggests roughly 20-60% of people experience, at
times, significant body dissatisfaction. Our concepts of our bodies come into our sexual
experiences with us. This is part of living in a human body within a cultural system that has
taught many of us that our bodies do not conform to the norms of beauty and power framed by whiteness, thinness, youth, ableism, and heteronormativity. We are all swimming through cultural messaging that understandably can produce complex ideas and feelings about our bodies, and research suggests that stronger body image is associated with greater sexual satisfaction. So, what can we do if we want to experience more connection and pleasure during intimacy, but are struggling to accept or make friends with our bodies?
The Great News: Therapy Can Help!
Therapy can help us build a deeper relationship with our bodies, support our development
of stronger, more integrated, body images, and explore what it means to experience pleasure and connection sexually in the midst of navigating a complicated relationship to our bodies.
What Does This Look Like in Therapy?
We can take many approaches, therapeutically, to explore our relationships with our
bodies. This can be done in individual sessions or couples’ therapy. We will explore what we
think about our bodies, where these ideas come from, and what we would like to experience in our bodies.
Therapy around body image and sex does not mean that the goal is loving our bodies
100% of the time. That is far too much pressure and one of our aims is taking pressure off our
bodies. Body image therapy can look like self-awareness, compassion, self-acceptance, present- moment awareness through embodiment work, reduction in time spent analyzing our bodies, and ultimately, developing a deeper understanding of who we are and what we want. Perfect body confidence is not the goal. We can have complicated feelings about our
bodies and still have great sex!
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