Sexual Energy in Loving Touch and Family Intimacy

This post is inspired by my experiences with my first-born son, who is now 2 and a half years old. My wife, now pregnant with our 2nd and having a weak back, has always been uncomfortable sleeping together with our son at night, as he will toss and turn and kick and burrow all over her body, making it hard for her to sleep, and impossible to change her sleeping posture when needed, so she often wakes up with a sore back and subsequent chiropractor appointments. So I had been tasked to put him to sleep at night, and to pacify him when he wakes up in the middle of the night. I often end up sleeping with him most of the time as that is the most practical way to ensure he stays quiet and I get to sleep more. 

Even though I complain about having to sleep next to him and having my own rest disturbed, I believe I will start to miss doing that when he gets old enough to kick me off his bed. I am just filled with so much love and desire to hold him tight and smell him, all the time. Then as he drifts off to sleep, he will pull up my shirt, rub his small hands over my naked tummy, poke his finger into my belly button (at that point I will shout at him to stop as it is really painful), and he will pull up my shirt further and scratch my nipples and then pinch them (and then I will really shout at him to stop). In any case he is probably doing all that out of habit as he was breast-fed previously, and touched my wife in the same way. 

What struck me was that the desire I have to hold him tight and smell him, is not essentially very different from my desire to do the same to my wife. His rubbing my tummy and nipples were pleasurable, and physically not different from my wife doing the same. Yet in the case of my wife doing that to me, it might be labelled under "being sexualized" and part of sexual foreplay, while in the case of my son it might be labelled as "physical comforting and care". But is that distinction real? The times my wife and I touch each other may only be "physical comforting and care" in intent, without leading to sexual foreplay and penetrative sex. And of course in the case of my child touching me, it would be ridiculous to suggest that there was any sexualized intent on the part of my child, although the comforting stimulation he gave to my tummy and nipples made me wonder about the difference between his touch and a sexualized one, and how I perceived his touching. 

Can you sense my intellectual confusion at this point? The conflation of sexual energy with "being sexualized" as propagated by the modern world creates this confusion. I believe it makes more sense to regard the intimate sexual relations between a copulating couple (whatever the sexual orientation) and the intimate touching within a family, as a continuum along the spectrum of sexual energy. They share many similar energetic qualities, only differing as to the specific intent and its position along that continuum. 

The need to give and receive touch, is a fundamental human need, increasingly acknowledged as being pivotal to health and dignity. In the human touch, sexual energy flows, whether you are aware of it or not. Healthy touching enlivens the individuals giving and receiving, even conferring life and health, and as such sexual energy is entwined with it. That is also why you recoil from some people's touch, where perhaps you sense the malicious intent, or the disguised "sexualized" agenda of that person. At the same time, if you have issues with acknowledging your own sexuality, or if your sexuality was brutalized through instances of abuse before, that hurt you carry would colour your own reaction to touch and sexual energy, so that you have difficulty accepting positive expressions of touch and sexual energy, or you habitually fear them and reflexively close yourself off to them. You could also be hasty in judging instances of touch as being "sexualized", either coming from others or initiated by yourself.

A healthy expression of sexual energy through touch, is important in nourishing intimate relationships, between partners and with children. It is in the safety of the family environment and in loving relationships, that we open ourselves to giving and receiving loving touch. It is thus sad to reflect on the amount of sexual abuse and sexual repression happening all over the world, as this creates a wound that can be passed down through generations of human beings. If you have been a victim of sexual abuse and repression, it might give you a broader perspective that the perpetrators of your hurt, have almost invariably been hurt themselves before in a similar way, and that this hurt often goes back generations. At the same time, nourishing your loved ones through loving touch and sexual energy, is the best collective solution to resolving the hurt that we have inherited and carry now. That is the hope we see in our children and the future of mankind, when we express ourselves through loving touch and sexual energy.

I will end this post with my own take on Sigmund Freud, grandfather of psychoanalysis, who attributed much of normal human behaviour to the underlying sexual drive. What made me really fed up when I read his work in my teens, was how he even attributed the baby's suckling the mother for milk to an underlying sexual drive. I remember being totally exasperated at Freud for seeing sex in everything and anything. Now I am more nuanced, in that I see sexual energy at play in all dynamics of life and nature, but not in the cheap "sexualized" definition of that term.