Reflections From Reading Sacred Pleasure by Riane Eisler

I took months to read Sacred Pleasure by Riane Eisler, trying to absorb as much of its richness as possible. Sacred Pleasure is really a continuation of Dr. Eisler’s, The Chalice and The Blade. It is an in-depth analysis of historical gender relations in intimate relationships and sexuality. It isn’t just about the oppression and suppression of women and the damage that has been done to women. Dr. Eisler also addresses the harm inflicted on males who are forced to uphold the imbalanced, patriarchal, often violent, dominator system that we all live under to greater or lesser degrees. This imposed dominator system has left our intimate relationships, to say the least, fractured.

In western cultures it seems that there is a real push to regain the intimacy and partnership that was intended by nature to be the foundation of male-female bonding. But, I think the reality is that we have so many patterns to unlearn and so much reconstructing to do that even though we can see the problems clearly, it isn’t clear at all how to deal with them.

I have given much thought to this and one thing I come back to is the importance of the simple skill of identifying and communicating one’s own feelings. Obviously, it helps also to live in a “free” society and since the U.S. is the only society I have first-hand knowledge of, you can assume that’s the context I’m working from. Of course, if you live in a society in which women have restricted personal freedom, then learning to identify and communicate feelings isn’t the first step towards creating a more egalitarian society or towards improving intimate relationships.

But, to return to my point, I have noticed that my young son and myself in particular refer to and react to a whole range of emotions – uncomfortable, unhappy ones – as anger. It seems that our range for identifying emotions is extremely narrow. And, most often when I identify my strong negative emotions as anger, I’m not even certain why I’m angry. This leads me to the belief that I am misidentifying some negative emotions – most likely feelings of fear, worry and frustration – as anger.

There is a long history of buried emotions in both women and men. Particularly, I think women tend to bury their negative emotions, while men tend to bury their positive feelings. As a child, I remember asking my mother what was wrong when she appeared sad, angry or upset. The common answer I got was, “nothing”. So, not to place blame, but just for purposes of identifying my own shortcomings, this dialogue is my foundation for identifying and sharing my feelings: “What’s wrong?” “Nothing.”

One common pattern of communicating from the men in my family is teasing. For lack of a more positive way of relating, the men by and large use teasing as their only means of connecting with or relating to family members. Again, this is a way of attempting to show positive feelings by communicating negatively. It doesn’t get much more twisted than this!

These are my observations so far toward the goal of deciphering the code of unhealthy relationship patterns. For, as Dr. Eisler correctly points out, until we restore and recreate healthy ways of interacting in our intimate relationships, there isn’t much of a chance of learning nonviolent conflict resolution on a planetary scale.

Reflections From Reading Sacred Pleasure by Riane Eisler