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I was dripping wet.

My body clung to his.

As we moved together, I felt it slowly building. The sensation of an orgasm in my genitals.

My mind immediately grabbed a hold of the thought:  “Yes! I want it! I am ready for an orgasm. It is here! Amazing.”

And then—poof! It was gone.

I tried to go back, to move my body in the exact way I was moving it before. My body twisted and wrangled itself unconsciously into positions that I “knew” would help me achieve an orgasm.

And nothing…

Have you ever been unable to orgasm because you were “in your head too much” but unable to pinpoint why your mind wanders or cannot focus enough to reach your breaking point?

This is your anxious attachment showing up to play.

If we’re familiar with our anxious attachment pattern, we’re probably aware of the desperate, love-sucking feeling that comes at the beginning of dating and those early days of relating.

What we might not be familiar with is how our anxious attachment pattern shows up in many different relationships in our life and that the pattern mimics itself in other relationships, unconsciously.

Including our relationship with our orgasm.

Our anxious attachment pattern has many layers and textures, and plays the role of different archetypes in our life. My method, based on my own research and work with clients, is based in archetypal attachment theory, somatics, and sexual development. This method supports men and women to identify their anxious attachment patterns in their body at a more intimate level, an approach which provides more space and awareness around the pattern, to shift the pattern and make the unconscious conscious to allow for different choices while dating.

Let’s take a quick look at the anxious attachment pattern in general.

Roughly 40 percent of people carry the anxious attachment pattern while close to another 40 percent hold the disorganized (combination of anxious and avoidant attachment) patterns. The anxious attachment pattern correlates to the deep feelings and core wounds of abandonment, betrayal, and rejection.

The anxious attachment pattern is activated when we move from deep connection to no connection. The survival pattern is characterized by the feeling of being “dropped.” As an infant and child, we may have received love and connection and then abruptly it was severed by our caretaker.

As an adult, we continue this pattern by abandoning, betraying, and rejecting ourselves and unconsciously choosing relationships that reaffirm these core wounds because this is our pattern of adaptation, or attachment pattern, that we adopted in order to survive as a child.

When we feel “dropped” and disconnected from the connection, when the connection time is over, our anxious attachment is activated and our survival pattern unconsciously reaches out to attach to the possibility of a connection. In general, those with anxious attachment patterns have difficulty staying in the feeling of connection. Soon after connection has ended, the anxious attachment pattern is activated and the mind is activated by the unconscious nervous system response to reach out and grasp for more connection.

My orgasm scenario above is an example of the inability to stay in that feeling of connection.

During sex, we begin to build sensation to an orgasm. Somatically, we are in our body, connected to our sensations and experiencing pleasure. At this moment, our body is open to deep connection. Our anxious attachment pattern is not activated, yet we are enjoying and feeling loved in the connection of arousing sex.

We begin to feel arousal build in our genitals, and our mind recognizes and labels the arousal in our genitals as an orgasm.

Ding. Ding. Ding. 

We pop out of our body and into our mind.

The moment we are in our mind, we disconnect from the sensations of arousal in our genitals.

There is a part of us that wants to grab onto the potential of what that orgasm will be. We want to make it happen. And we become attached to the outcome of having an orgasm.

We continue to disconnect from our body, and our unconscious survival pattern steps in further. We begin to move our body in ways we know will achieve the orgasm. We manipulate and contort our body, focused solely on the outcome of having the orgasm.

Energetically, this pattern is the same one that plays out when someone doesn’t message us back after we’ve opened a connection at the beginning of dating. So we try clever ways to get them to message us back.

In working with my clients as a Somatic Dating Mentor, there are a few pivotal times that the anxious attachment patterns are activated in dating.

In the beginning of dating, our anxious attachment pattern is acutely triggered twice. Both are signified by an openness to connection followed by no connection. The first usually occurs when we step into vulnerability and start chatting with someone, either online or in-person. The second pivotal time is after the first date. Both of these experiences move our body through deep connection and then to little or no connection.

Our patterns with dating, sex, orgasm, and all other parts of our life mimic each other. In sex and pleasure rest valuable opportunities for somatic therapy to support the detachment of old patterns and energetics and the rewiring of new patterns.

Sexual Development and Somatic Theory are closely linked. The ability for us to feel pleasure is based on our ability to feel sensations in our body, or soma. When we get to know our own pleasure, take autonomy over our own pleasure, learn what we like and don’t like, we begin to open up a new neural pathway of connection with ourselves. And in doing so, we further discover our authentic self.

The new neural pathways that develop when we begin to shift our unconscious patterns to conscious patterns open up new opportunities for us to experience life. Because we are not grasping at the outcome our mind wants, we begin to shift into our life force energy, or sensation. This allows our life force to take over, move through, and direct our body, where our minute mind and unconscious patterns can’t take us.

We begin to take autonomy over our own pleasure. I use the Self-Pleasure Modality™ in all of my work, a somatic and therapeutic Globally Accredited Modality that bridges somatic healing with sexual therapy to support others in identifying past patterns and creating new and authentic patterns in the body.

When we develop an autonomous relationship with our own pleasure, we can use the sensations of pleasure to track our unconscious survival patterns in our body. We then begin to create space between the reaction of the old patterns and the conscious choice of the new patterns.

Taking it back to my orgasm issue, here is what happened after I learned how to use pleasure to track my patterns.

Nothing happened when I tried to grab a hold of the orgasm.

I found myself in witness consciousness. Recognizing that I was grabbing on to my orgasm. I brought myself back to the sensations in my body. And I began to notice how my sensations moved differently in my body.

Pleasure sensations began to build again when my awareness moved to my sensations.

The pleasure sensations moved in waves in my body. The arousal continued to build, and I maintained my awareness of my sensations in my body.

The orgasm that moved through my body at that point was filled with sensual waves of pleasure.

An orgasm that I had never experienced before.

It was an experience my mind could have never thought of.

When I somatically let go of the grasping, I surrendered to my life force energy.

I trusted the current.

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