Page:The Power of Sexual Surrender.pdf/190

 *hood. We have seen these attitudes in every form of frigidity and have seen how they function. If the individual woman can come to grips with these two attitudes in herself, if she can dislodge them, the free flow of her personality toward health and maturity will resume once again. Insight can dislodge these hindering attitudes and keep them dislodged.

Let us start, then, and see how insight into these attitudes can be achieved by the frigid woman.

The first thing you must do is a very practical one. You must give yourself, at least at the beginning, a certain amount of time alone, absolutely alone, each day. It might be for ten minutes or for a half hour or an hour, but you must be alone and you must seek this time regularly. It is most helpful if you can select a time when your mind is relatively free of worries and duties.

What do you do to achieve insight at these junctures? You start, on the simplest level possible, to let yourself ''really feel'' your negative emotions about your husband or sweet-*heart. Your only aim at this point is to let these negative feelings come to the surface, to seek them out, experience them to the full.

Pick out some small but recurrent irritation or annoyance he causes you; the more trifling, the better. Fix on it, then dare to allow your emotions and thoughts about it to hold sway.

Let me give you a single example from the case history of a frigid patient. Every day this woman's husband, on rising, dressed in the bathroom. He invariably left his razor on the sink and his pajamas in an untidy heap in a corner. This had irritated her and she had spoken about it to him several times; he would reform for a few days but then would invariably fall back into his old habits.

This bit of information about their married life had been presented quite casually in the course of my first discussion