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OK here are some of my personal thoughts on arousal…I am NOT a trained professional so…they may be totally wrong.
I did search for, but unfortunately could not find, an excellent article that explained several different types of arousal. For me the article was a big turning point because it presented the idea that the body’s mechanisms for raising its state of arousal was NOT just about SEX. It is important and involved in many, many other body functions that we never think to associate with “arousal”. What I also liked about the article was that it described different types of arousal that may initially or superficially FEEL the same….but were initiated for TOTALLY different reasons. Reading this really helped me because my mind at the time was telling me that I was a closet homosexual but just hadn’t consciously realized it yet. Which as I’ve come to realize is not true… my sexual orientation has very little to do with my general arousal response. Another thing that I liked about the article was that it hinted at the fact that if you allowed you arousal response to continue beyond that general, initial adrenaline rush and take its natural course… the different types of arousals often end with very different results. This was another bombshell for me….ALL adrenaline rushes do not necessarily END BADLY! I’m sorry but I searched for this article all day but couldn’t fine it.
For me as a wild child prone to impulsiveness and “bad” behavior, the adults in my life always seemed to insist that I must learn to control myself and not under any circumstances fall victim to my body’s responses. Maybe this coupled with CSA experiences where I felt the effect of physical sexual arousal but mixed up with other things like power, violence, feelings of helplessness, worthlessness, having a horrendous disability called…FEMALE really messed up my connections. Healthy cognitive associations with arousal were not made. I guess as I developed this mandate to control myself and the threat of succumbing to the evils of the flesh, and all the other crap really distorted my thinking about how to deal with arousal. I think what happened to me is I ultimately learned that the minute I sensed anything remotely like “arousal” to immediately withdraw (physically/mentally) from my body. So I never got a really chance to practice interpreting, managing, decimating, and allowing myself to experience all the OTHER types of arousal responses.
The arousal response is a highly complex but a very generic body response. I now see it in the same way that I see our body’s inflammatory response. Whether you get stung by a bee, inhale an allergen, workout too aggressively, or are cut open during a sterile surgical procedure your body’s initial response to cells dying is pretty much the same. And I might add that the death of even just one of our 50 trillion cells releases chemical compounds that alter the cellular environment of surrounding cells which ultimate causes a ripped effect throughout the whole collective hive-the body. Our body IS that sensitive whether we’re aware of it or not. When you think of the arousal response in this same way…it’s essentially is just a chemically-mediated cellular response. It is what WE assign to it when it is intense enough to be detected by the brain that messes us up. I you’re like me it’s immediately assigned the “sexual arousal” label and then the internal alarm bells go off, the mental noise loops start to play, the trauma cycle starts, and all hell breaks loose.
So for me I’ve been working a lot on when I feel the jolt of an adrenalin rush to tell my brain to create space or a pause before for I start judging it. The good news for me is…the pause is working and SLOWLY I am learning to bring my body back online and practicing the skills I missed.
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"Joy is your sole's knowledge that if you don't get the promotion, keep the relationship, or buy the house, it's because you weren't meant to.You're meant to have something better, something richer, something deeper, Something More." (Sara Ban Breathnach)
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