Ad copy

Last Saturday morning my husband Brian came up behind me at the kitchen counter while I was making coffee. He put his arms around my waist. He kissed the back of my neck. He said, against my hair: "You are so beautiful." He said it the way he says it. Quiet. Specific. With the weight of a man who means it. I felt my stomach pull in. The way it does. My hands on the counter. My eyes on the coffee maker. I did not say anything back. He stayed there for a few seconds. Then he kissed my shoulder. Then he went to find his keys. He had a thing at 9. I stayed at the counter and I watched the coffee drip and I thought what I have thought, in some form, every single time he has said that to me, for nine years of marriage: He believes it. I know he believes it. I cannot make myself believe him. I know exactly why I cannot. I have known why for a very long time. The knowing has not changed it. I am writing this because I think a lot of women in CHTR work — women who have been in therapy for years, women who can name every wound, women who understand the mechanism — are still in the wound, and the understanding has not been enough, and I want to say something honest about what I have been trying. I am 36. I have been married to Brian for nine years. We have two kids, Ben who is 6 and Cora who is 3. I have been in therapy with the same person, Dr. Allen, for six years. Dr. Allen and I have done the work. I can recite the work. My mother, who died in 2019, started commenting on my body when I was 8. She did not stop until I was 31. The comments were the loving kind — concern about my health, my future, what boys would think, what would be hard for me later. The comments were also the comments that made me a woman who, at 36, has not stood in front of a full-length mirror naked since 2017. I know all of this. I have written about it in journals. I have sat with it on Dr. Allen's couch and cried for six years. The comments still live in my body. They live there in a way that the years of work have not displaced. But I want to tell you what living-in-the-body actually looks like, because the textbook version does not capture what I am about to describe. Here is what happens, in my head, when my husband and I are in bed together. Brian initiates. He always initiates. He kisses me, the way he kisses me, with his hand on my face. We start. Within the first thirty seconds, I am no longer in the room. I am in my head, and what I am doing is monitoring. I am monitoring how my thigh looks at this angle. I am monitoring whether my stomach is doing something visible from where his eyes are. I am monitoring my face — is it doing the right face, is it doing a face I would not want anyone to see, am I making the kind of expression a man would find attractive or am I making the kind of expression a man would find odd. I am monitoring the sounds I am or am not making and whether they are the right sounds. I am monitoring my arm position. I am monitoring whether I have remembered to engage my core so that my stomach does not look the way I am afraid it looks. I am monitoring my hair. I am monitoring whether what I am wearing — or not wearing — is producing an angle that is going to be a problem. Underneath all of that monitoring, I am running one continuous low-grade calculation: Is he still attracted right now. Is he still attracted right now. Is he still attracted right now. The calculation runs at every moment. I have been running it for nine years. I have not had a sexual encounter with my husband, in nine years, that did not have the calculation running underneath. I want to be clear about something. I love Brian. I want him. I want to be having sex with him. The wanting is real. The wanting is not what is broken. What is broken is that I cannot be in my body during the sex I am wanting to have, because the second my body is in the room, the watching starts. And the watching, by the time I have watched myself for thirty seconds, has produced enough fear of his disappointment that I cannot relax into the part where I would actually receive him. I receive him at a distance. I receive him from outside the body, from the place I am watching from. He has not been in bed with me, in some real way, in years. I have been in the corner of the ceiling, watching a woman who looked like me try to perform something convincing. I am 36 and the watcher in the corner of the ceiling is the watcher my mother installed when I was 8. I want to say this carefully because the audience for this piece will recognize the mechanism without needing the explanation, but I will name it once. My mother watched me from the time I had a body. She watched what I ate. She watched what I wore. She watched how my body developed against the bodies of my friends. She watched and she narrated. The narration was kind. The narration was concerned. The narration was relentless. By the time I was 14 I had a watcher in my head that did the narrating when she was not in the room. By the time I was 22 the watcher had become my own voice. By the time I was 30 the watcher had moved from clothing and weight into intimate spaces, because intimacy was the place the watching mattered most. The man would have access. The man would see. The man would have an opinion. The watcher had to monitor everything the man might see, in real time, so that nothing could be visible that the watcher had not pre-approved. The watcher does not believe in surprise. The watcher does not believe in vulnerability. The watcher does not let me be naked, in a real sense, with anyone, including my husband, because the watcher's job is to make sure nobody ever sees what the watcher knows my mother saw and was disappointed by. This is the architecture I am inside of. I have understood the architecture for years. The understanding is what therapy gave me. The architecture is still the architecture. What this does to my marriage: Brian initiates 100% of the time. I have not initiated sex with my husband in nine years. I want to. In the abstract. Walking through the kitchen on a Tuesday afternoon, I sometimes have the thought "I should pull him into the bedroom tonight." The thought lives for about four seconds. Then the watcher arrives. The watcher's first question is: do you actually look like a woman a man would want pulled into a bedroom right now. The watcher does the audit. The watcher finds the answer is no. The thought ends. I do not initiate because initiating requires the woman in the body to decide, in real time, that she is offerable. The watcher in my ceiling does not let the woman in the body issue that verdict. The watcher has not, in nine years of marriage, signed off on a single moment when initiating felt safe. So I wait. Brian initiates. He has carried that load alone for nine years. He told me, on a Tuesday a few months ago at the kitchen table, that he had begun to feel something he had not had words for. He said: "I want you to want me. I do not want to keep being the one who decides if it happens. I have been deciding for nine years. I am tired of deciding." He said it without anger. He said it kindly. He said it after we had not had sex in three weeks because he had not initiated and I had not initiated and the silence had built into a wall. I cried. I told him I knew. I told him I wanted to. I told him I could not. I told him, for the first time, about the watcher in the ceiling. I told him about the monitoring during. I told him about the calculation. I told him I had been running an audit on whether he was still attracted, in real time, every second of every sexual encounter we had had since our wedding. He went quiet for a long time. Then he said: "Sarah. I have been telling you you were beautiful for nine years. Do you mean to tell me that none of it has been landing." I said, "I hear it. I hear every time. The hearing is not what is broken. I just cannot make my body believe it." He said, "what would make it land." I said, "I do not know." We sat there. We held hands at the kitchen table. We did not have sex that night. We have had sex three times since that conversation. He initiated all three. But something in the third one was different. I will get to that. I want to say something carefully here about the compliments, because this is the part that people who have not lived inside the watcher do not understand. Brian compliments me constantly. Specific compliments. He has told me, in detail, what he likes about my body, my face, the way I move. He has told me which photos of me he keeps in his phone and why. He has told me, after sex, what specifically he found beautiful about a moment. Every compliment lands the same way: I hear it, I file it, and the watcher in the ceiling immediately catalogs it as a thing I now have to maintain. The compliments do not produce belief. The compliments produce pressure. If he tells me my collarbones look beautiful in this dress, I now have a collarbone-related performance to keep up. If he tells me he loves the way I walk away from him, I now have a walking-away performance to keep up. If he tells me my face was so beautiful when I came last week, I now have a came-face performance to keep up, and the next time we have sex the watcher will be running an extra audit specifically about the came-face. The kindness becomes work. I want to say very clearly: Brian has done nothing wrong. He is doing what a loving husband does. The problem is not in the compliments. The problem is in the apparatus that received them. The apparatus turns kindness into pressure because the apparatus does not have a category for "received." The apparatus only has a category for "watched." This is what nine years of "you are so beautiful" has produced in me. I do not, somehow, think I am beautiful. I think I have nine years of compliments to live up to and increasing fear that the moment will come when he sees the truth. That fear is what runs underneath the calculation during sex. It is not abstract. The calculation is asking, every second: is this the moment he sees the truth. I have tried. I have done six years of weekly therapy. I have read "The Body Keeps the Score" and "Burnout" and "Come As You Are" and "Mating in Captivity" and three of the recovery memoirs that come up when you search for daughters of mothers like mine. I have done positive affirmations. I have done mirror work, briefly, until I cried so hard I had to stop. I have bought lingerie. I have not worn the lingerie. I have asked Brian to tell me what he likes about my body, specifically, in detail, and I have made him a list and the list lives in my phone and I have read it on hard mornings and the list does not change anything because the list is words and the wound is not in words. I have tried dressing differently. I have tried weight loss and weight maintenance and weight neutrality. I have tried "embodiment" practices from a women's group that recommended dance. I tried the dance. I cried during the dance. I have tried the meditation that promises body acceptance. I have tried the breathing that promises presence. I have tried explicitly telling the watcher in the ceiling, out loud, in my own bathroom, that the watcher could leave. The watcher did not leave. None of it has displaced the watcher. None of it has made me able to be in the room. I had started to wonder, somewhere around year five of therapy, if the work was the wrong work. A friend of mine — a woman who has been in CHTR work for longer than I have — sent me an article last winter. She had highlighted one paragraph. The paragraph said something that I had not let myself think. It said that talk therapy can do everything except the body. The body, the paragraph said, learns by experience. The body learns through repeated, regulated, safe physical experience. Words do not reach the body. Insight does not reach the body. The body has to be brought into safety, slowly, in small increments, through the nervous system itself. Not through the mind that already understood. I read the paragraph three times. I had been doing the right work for the wrong layer. The article mentioned an app — I am not going to name it, I do not want this to read like a pitch. My friend had been using it. She said it had given her, at year four of doing somatic-adjacent work, something she had not been able to find in therapy alone. I downloaded it. I started in February. What has changed in nine months: I am still not initiating. I want to say that first. I have not crossed that threshold. I do not know if I will. I am not promising you I will. I am not promising myself I will. What has changed is much smaller and is happening underneath. When Brian touched my stomach two weeks ago, I did not pull it in. The stomach pulled in is a thing I have done, automatically, for thirty years. I had not noticed I was doing it until I stopped doing it once. The not-pulling-in is the change. When he held my face during sex three weeks ago, I kept my eyes open. I had been closing them for nine years. When I got out of the shower last Sunday and there was a brief gap between the bathroom door and the bedroom mirror, I did not skirt around the mirror the way I have been skirting around it for years. I walked past it. I did not look directly at myself. I did not flinch either. The not-flinching is the change. But the thing I want to tell you about is the third sex. The third sex after our kitchen-table conversation. About two weeks ago. Brian had initiated. We were maybe four minutes in. The watcher was in the ceiling, doing the audit, running the calculation. The thigh angle. The face. The is-he-still-attracted question. And then — for I do not know how many seconds, maybe six, maybe ten — I noticed I was watching. Just that. I noticed. The noticing did not stop the watching. The watching kept going. But for those six or ten seconds, I was in two places at once: in the ceiling, doing the audit, and also in my body, noticing the audit was running. The being-in-the-body, however briefly, was a thing I do not believe I have done during sex with my husband in nine years. The watcher came back. The audit resumed. I lost the body part again. We finished. I cried after, but quietly, the way I sometimes cry after, that he has learned to let me have without asking what is wrong. But I had been in the room for six seconds. I had not been in the room in nine years. Now I had been in the room for six seconds. That is what I have to tell you. I am going to be honest with you about where I am. I still do not look in the full-length mirror. I still cannot dress in front of him with the lights on. I still hear my mother in my own voice when I look at myself. The watcher is still in the ceiling. The watching has not stopped. The audit has not stopped. The calculation has not stopped. What has happened is that, very rarely, for very small windows, I have been able to be in the body underneath the watching. That has not happened to me before, in any sustained way, since I was a child. The body is still in there. The body has been waiting underneath the watcher. The work is to make the windows bigger. I do not know how big they will get. I do not know how often. I do not know if I will ever initiate. I am not going to lie about it. What I know is that two weeks ago, for six seconds, I was in the room with my husband. He was there. I was there. There was a body in the bed and I was inside it. That is what nine months of working underneath the words has produced. If you have been doing this work — you know if you have. You know what your husband has been carrying. You know what you have been hiding from yourself in mirrors, in bedrooms, in showers, in front of cameras at family events. You know how loud the watcher is. You know how exhausting the calculation is. You know that the compliments do not land. The link is below. I am not promising you confidence. I am not promising you a body you love. I am not promising you that you will initiate. I am telling you that two weeks ago, for six seconds, I was in the room with my husband. The room had a body in it. The body had me in it. For me, that was a thing.