What Your Upbringing Says About Who You Are in Bed

A Q&A with Esther Perel

Tell me how you were loved and I will tell you how you make love,
sexuality expert, therapist, and author of The State of Affairs, Esther Perel said
in a backstage conversation at our In goop Health wellness summit in June.
Its a line thats stayed with us since, and came again to the surface at an
intimate dinner where Perel and GP led a secret, women-only sex talk
in celebration of the new Netflix show Gypsy, alongside creator Lisa Rubin;
much of the conversation centered around common relationship roadblocks.
Still intrigued, we asked Perel to do a deeper dive into the roots of
some of these issues, like: Why is it that many women dont seem to know what
they want? Where does the sense of being disconnected from your own body stem
from? How can it be so hard to talk about sex with our partners? As Perel explains,
much of our adult sexuality, our current desires, the way we relate to others,
how we perceive our self-worthis the product of the way we were raised
and the environment in which our sexuality developed. (If youre not yet
familiar with Perels work, start by listening to her podcast Where Should We
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Begin? and reading our first interview with her on gender differences and
stereotypes, or her bestselling Mating in Captivity.) Here, she outlines the
concept of erotic blueprints, and paths for moving beyond whatever from
your past might be holding you back.

A Q&A with Esther Perel

Q
Youve said that if you know how someone was raised, you can tell how they will
be as a lover. Can you explain?
A
Consider a paradigm weve always known in modern psychology: Tell
me how you are loved, and Ill have a good idea of what may be some of your issues,
your concerns, your worries, your aspirations, and how you love.
But this paradigm never got translated into: Tell me how you were loved
and I will tell you how you MAKE love. How your emotional history is
inscribed in the physicality of sex. How your body speaks a certain
emotional biography.
For example, the question I often ask people is: How did you learn to
love, and with whom? Were you allowed to want? Were you allowed to have
needs growing upor were you told, What do you need that for? Were
you allowed to thrive? Were you allowed to experience pleasureor was
pleasure just a break between work sessions, a reward after a lot of effort?
Were you allowed to cryand were you allowed to cry out loud, or did you
have to hide it? Were you allowed to laughout loud? Did you feel
protected as a child by those who needed to protect youor did you flee for
protection? Did the people who were supposed to take care of you do so
or did you have to take care of your caregivers, becoming the parentified
child?

Q
Whats an example?
A
I was talking to a couple, two women. The first woman said: I never
know what you want sexually, you never tell me what you like. I know that
you want to be left alone when youre done caring for the kids all day, but
you never seek pleasurable, intimate connection with me. Your free time is
being free of caretaking duties, but never the pleasure of being physically

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and affectionately nurtured. The only thing you let me do is make coffee for
you in morning.

Tell me how you were loved and I will tell you how you MAKE
love.
Then I find out that the other partner grew up taking care of her mother in
nearly every sense. She was the dutiful, straight-A student. She learned not
to have any needs, so as to not burden her mother. So, as an adult, she has
no idea what she needs, wants, or likes. Its not her mind; but that her body
has no idea: You can touch her and ask her, Does this feel good, or does that feel
good? And she doesnt really know the difference.

Q
Is this part of what you call the erotic blueprint?
A
There are various ways to explore peoples erotic blueprints, and you
can spend hours drawing them out. (Some of this comes out of the work of
a colleague of mine, psychologist Jack Morin, Ph.D., author of The Erotic
Mind. Another colleague, Jaiya, often divides the blueprint into four
quadrants: mental, physical, emotional, spiritual.)
The blueprint, for me, is: If you tell me some of these details of your
emotional history, it helps me to understand how you experience receiving,
taking, asking for something, and pleasure in the full sense of the wordthe
abdication of responsibility, the unselfconsciousness, the freedom, the
playfulness, the unproductive nature of the erotic. This all gets at how you
experience aliveness. Do you let yourself feel alive, outside of just feeling
safe? Safety is the first base, but its not yet alive. Feeling truly alive involves
risk-taking, mischief, curiosity. All of these experiences weevery man and
every womanhave, we experience in our bodies. They are embodied
experiences, part of being human.

Do you let yourself feel alive, outside of just feeling safe?

Another way of thinking about the blueprint is that it is comprised of
whatever thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, and messages you have about your
sexuality. You might think sex is dirty, dangerous, fun, power. You might
carry negative messages of sex with you: Dont give it to them; the minute you
do, they wont want you anymore; the only power you have is the power of refusal.
There can also be positive messages about turn-onwhat entices you, what

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awakens you. Then there are the feelings: I feel shy, I feel small, Im afraid, I feel
powerful, I feel big.

The Erotic Blueprint Exercise

Heres a summary of an exercise I often do (its part of my
online workshop, Rekindling Desire).
Create separate lists for the following feelings, grouping them
together as shown:
Love
When I think of love, I think of:

When I love, I feel:

When I am loved, I feel:

If youre in a relationship, you can addWhen I think

about the love between you and me, I feel:
Desire
When I think of sex, I think of:

When I desire, I feel:

When I am desired, I feel:

If youre in a relationship, you can addWhen I think

about the desire between you and me, I feel:

The lists can be very telling. Many people are extremely closed,
meaning that their blueprint doesnt integrate concepts like, love and desire,
intimacy and sexuality, connection and separateness, security and
adventure, very well. For instance, a word you will often find associated
with love is warm. But you rarely hear the word warm in sex. Its either
hot or cold. Tender or affectionate are more likely to be associated with both
love and sex. But, hungry, greedy, powerful, aliveyou dont often see those
words associated with the love categories.
Drawing your own blueprint can help you understand how these
concepts intersect, what blocks what, and what animates you, what actually
enlivens or heightens. Then, the most beautiful thing is to share blueprints
with the people you are making love with. Those are the conversations about
sexuality that most partners have never had.

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 Q
Can you talk more about the significance of embodiment, and what happens when
theres a disconnect from the body?
A
Heres an example from a woman Ill never forget: She had been
married for twenty-something years and never had an orgasm. Her husband
really wished she would enjoy sex; the last thing he wanted was a woman
who just took it.
As I talked to them, I found out that that she always stops when hes
climaxedshe figures thats what Im going to get, or, he got what he
needed. And then I find out that as child she had a very hard-working mom
who was in a perpetual rush. For instance, her mom would cook for her and
feed her, but she was always rushing her daughter: Finish quick, or,
Okay, are you done, are you done?
So, this woman did not know how to take the time to be in her own
body, to allow for the mounting sensations, the excitement. She didnt know
how to not worry about taking too long. Thats a concern Ive heard many
women talk about. In order to feel that youre not taking too long, you need
to feel worthy of taking whatever time you take. That means that youre not
thinking about what the other person thinks. It means that youre not
thinkingperiodbecause youre in your body, experiencing the beauty
and pleasures of lovemaking, of erotic intimacy. When someone wonders if
theyre taking too long, theyre not in their body.

In order to feel that youre not taking too long, you need to feel
worthy of taking whatever time you take.
This is also where we see the fear of greed; and the fear that the other
person will not be patient enough for youthe fear that they dont care
enough about you to give you the time that you need, whatever that may be.
This goes back to your relationship to desire and the connection to your self-
worth. [See this goop piece with Perel on What Women Need to Hear
About Desire.]

Q
Do you think this is unique to women/mothers?
A
No: Its not just about our relationship to our mothers. Relationships
with fathers (and others) come into play, too.

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 Of course, parenthood itself does create a change for many people
both becoming a parent yourself and experiencing your partner as a parent.
In my field, we have something called the love/lust split: people who have
a certain way of loving that makes it harder for them to make love to the
person they love. This can mean that youre the parentified partneryou
become the mother/father of your partneror vice versa.
For example, heres what can happen to the parentified person: In
order to make love you need to be able to let gobecause at some point it is
an experience of surrender, an experience of penetration of boundaries. Its
like playing the game where you fall back into someone elses waiting arms.
If you dont trust that the other person is strong enough to hold you, you
dont let go. If you experience the other person as someone you need to
worry about and protect, as fragile or brittle, as someone who doesnt know
how to attend to your needsyou dont let go.
This isnt gender specific.
Also, while having children is often a time that couples will point to
when they talk about the demise of their sexual relationship, the issues that
we are talking about arent unique to women with children. The experience
of love and caretaking, love and responsibility, the burdens of love, the
inability to hold onto oneselfthat isnt owned by parents.

Q
Fear of abandonment is another theme thats often raised when looking at how
early relationships inform later onesis this something you see?
A
In couples, you will often find that one person is more in touch with
the fear of abandonment, and the other with the fear of being swallowed up
or suffocated. So, some people fear losing others. Some people fear losing
oneself. Translate that into sexuality: If I come close to you and let you in, I
may be afraid that you may never come out, that Im going to be eaten up,
that youre going to be too needy, that Im going to need to take care of you.
You might not experience your partner as wanting you, but as needing you.
We respond sexually when we feel wanted, not needed. Needed elicits
mothering, caretaking, selflessness. (You can imagine the flip side of this if
you lean toward fear of abandonment.)

Q
How do cultural notions of sex tend to impact our sexuality as adults?

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 A
You have a psychological blueprint and a cultural blueprint. In many
parts of the world, the cultural messaging around sex is negative, shaming,
guilt-inducing, silencing. How can you learn to talk about something that
youve learned to be silent on your whole life? How do you know that what
youre experiencing is normal if you can never ask the person next to you?
If I wanted to know about what people do in the kitchen, Id ask: Where do
you buy your tomatoes? How do you cook chicken?

How can you learn to talk about something that youve learned
to be silent on your whole life?
The majority of people have very, very little sex education that speaks
to the overall concept of sexual health, which involves rights, respect,
knowledge, and pleasure. The same way that health is not just the absence
of diseasesexual health is not the absence of sexual disease. Sexuality is
sexual health. Its not just something you do, an act. Its a place you go; it
taps into various parts of you; its a language that you express and
experience.

Q
What about our first, or early, experiences of sexis there typically a lasting
impact?
A
For some, the first experience of sex is lasting, especially if it was
traumatic, and/or involved some kind of violation of their boundaries and
respect. If someone was over-sexualized in childhood by a person who was
not meant to sexualize them, the same holds true.

Everyone thinks they are doing what the other person wants
and no one is talking about what they actually want.
When it comes to early experiences of sex, I think were going
backward in this moment. Im troubled by the relationship between sex and
alcohol, which Ive seen worsen. If you like something very much, you
probably would want to remember it the next day, no? But with sexpeople
get drunk to the point that they remember nothing. Does that speak about
liking sex, or does that speak to masking anxiety?
As mentioned before, Ive seen a decline in pleasure for women in the
hookup culture. Too often, casual sex, booty calls, etc. focus on mens

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pleasure; we know that women tend to get much less pleasure from these
encounters. Why is thisafter a generation fought so hard to stop being at
the service of men? I think many women still find it hard to say what they
want. Sadly, more young women today fake pleasure than Ive ever seen in
the last twenty years. They perform, or often accept the kind of
entertainment sex that men have watched on a screen. And you know what:
The men arent even necessarily interested in the sex thats taking place in
porn, but they think theyre supposed to be. So, everyone thinks they are
doing what the other person wantsand no one is talking about what they
actually want.

Q
This circles back to communication, then?
A
People really lack a vocabulary for talking about many of these topics.
When we say, you need to be able to communicate with the person youre
having sex withpeople dont necessarily know how to do so. (Let alone
bring up conversations on the erotic mind and fantasy, a whole different
dimension.)
You first need to feel loveable and to have self-acceptance. Then you
have to feel desirable. Only then can you have sexual self-awareness, and
that leads to sexual communication. This, hopefully brings you to an
encounter with satisfactionand connection, intimacy, closeness.

Q
What else do you see as potential ways forward, and ways to heal from sexual
issues with deep roots in our early experiences?
A
There are three directions I tend to look in (not in order of importance):
1. Find someone to talk with who is comfortable with these
discussions. It can be a friend, a coach, a therapist, a grandmother. Find
someone who can show you the conversationwhat to talk about and how.
2. That said, there is a limit to how much talking will change the
experience in the body. You need a new experience in the body in order to
imagine, much less experience other possibilities. You dont change by just
talking about it. (This is why I mix up talk therapy with activities like
painting about love and sexuality.) Sexual healing can come from working
in all kinds of physical healing environments, depending on whats right for

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a particular person. There are so many things that can be done (and theres
way more available for women than for men). For example:
S Factor is very beautiful for many women. Its a womens only
pole dancing class started by Sheila Kelley where you can
experience your erotic persona. Its not therapy, it doesnt focus on
the problem, and its fun. It creates an alternative and a new
experience that is embodied.
Tango dancingyou experience power that is safe. You can play
with boundary and experience contact without intrusion.
Acroyoga (combines yoga and acrobatics) is also great. You get to
be lifted and carriedand you really have to exercise trust with a
partner, as well as attunement, playfulness, risk-taking. And youre
doing a lot of this without talking.
For other people, it helps to see a body practitioner who can help
you experience touch, trust, breath, receiving, and overcome the
frozenness of the body.
3. Watch movies (like Vicky Christina Barcelona, Body Heat) and read
good books (like Come as You Are and She Comes First). For some women, just
walking into a sex shop or an erotic museum says: I am a sexual woman, I dont
hide this body, I dont loathe and always criticize itthis can be a very powerful
experience itself. So, I go with women, and I also have them talk to women
who run places that cater to erotic identitythey are often very comfortable
with sexual curiosity, and know it is healthy and normal.
There are also some excellent workshops at places
like Omega and Esalen, where you can spend weekends with other people
who are all striving for greater sexual trust, expressiveness, and confidence.

Q
Looking ahead to the sexual health of future generations, what do you say to
parents who have children coming into their own sexuality?
A
I think that a conversation about sexuality is a conversation about
relationships, and identity, and power, and society. These arent separate
things.
I was talking with a twenty-something-year-old young man who told
me: I think I like this woman more than she likes me. And I said, I think
you might be experiencing falling in love for the first time, because you say
that in the past, when girls liked you, you felt stifled, and you wanted more

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time alone. He said that he feels very vulnerable right now. I said,
Welcome to love. You are constantly wondering, does the other person love
me, am I good enough? That insecurity is so much a part of falling in love for
the first time.

A conversation about sexuality is a conversation about

relationships, and identity, and power, and society.
The conversations that we should be having with young people should
encompass this and much more. But too often, were only focused on the
dangers of sex. (As an aside, Ill tell you one thing I did say to my two sons
when the time came: I want to know the name of any girl you bring home
and I want her there for breakfast the next morning. Meaning, no secret,
furtive behaviorwith girls running back home to parents who dont even
know where she was.)
I think parents should start talking about sexuality when children are
four years oldwhen they start asking where do people go when they die,
where do we come from, and so on. This is the natural developmental age
to begin early conversations on love, the feeling of closeness, the fear of
rejection, how you feel physically, how you grow. Its a broad, ongoing
conversationnot a conversation about sex in the puritanical definition. Its
a conversation about joy, feeling alive, about fun. Its saying: It feels so good
when I hug you, and one day, youre going to make someone really lucky when you
hug them. Or: The person who discovers that you like circles to be drawn with
fingers on your backthey will have a key to your heart.

Psychotherapist Esther Perel is the bestselling author of Mating in

Captivity and the forthcoming book, The State of Affairs. She is also
the executive producer and host of the original audio series, Where
Should We Begin? Sign up for her monthly newsletter and
relationship wisdom here.

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