Page:The Power of Sexual Surrender.pdf/191

 with this patient. At that time she spoke of this peccadillo of her husband's as a minor annoyance. A bit later, when she had returned to the subject for the third time, each time expressing annoyance, I encouraged her to dwell on it, to let herself feel the full measure of her emotions about it. I told her that I suspected there was a good deal more in her feelings about this apparently trifling matter than she suspected, and that I thought this because she had brought it up so many times.

At first she protested that the matter was too small to pay attention to; that there were more important things to consider. But with encouragement she gradually allowed herself to pursue her true feelings. Underneath her commonplace protest was, as I had thought, an emotional cave-of-the-four-winds.

Her husband's "sloppy actions," it turned out, did not merely "annoy" her; they "enraged" her. In her words, they signified his desire "to humiliate me"; "he thinks I have nothing to do but pick up after him, to wait on him hand and foot." Her anger became more and more explosive as she reflected on the matter, and it led very quickly and directly to her underlying attitude toward men as a whole. Men wanted to do nothing more or less than to enslave women, to exploit them. They considered themselves a race apart, superior to women. All they wanted from a woman was sex, or anything else they could get out of them. And they were powerful, and thus dangerous; if a woman really showed her hostility they would use their physical strength against her. And so it went, on and on, the stored-up rage and the hostile and frightened attitudes that lay just beneath the surface and constituted the very bricks and mortar of her frigidity.

In pursuing this technique for getting at one's feelings it is best always to select, as in the example quoted, one or