What if you started to replace words like enjoyment and satisfaction with the concept of pleasure? Would that make it easier to understand that pleasure is essential for your fulfillment? Your desire is your power, so long as you believe you are worth fulfilling it.

If you were raised in any industrialized culture of the past several decades (hell, centuries), I can almost guarantee you have a complicated relationship with pleasure. I can also almost guarantee your understanding and experience of pleasure has not been in alignment with our collective wellbeing. Chances are you learned to care more about what people think of you than what you think of them. If you were raised as a cishet woman, chances are you learned you weren’t supposed to pursue, but to be chosen. This has variations in the experiences of different genders and sexualities, but the point now is that your sense of choice needs to come back with a vengeance. Reclaiming your pleasure is about reclaiming this agency; you do not need to wait to be chosen and it does not serve you to prioritize being chosen over connecting more deeply with your own felt sense of what you like and desire.

When you pursue your true desires, you become the most well-resourced version of yourself. There will be some uncomfortable bumps along the road of this re-programming, but the most well-resourced version of yourself is the one that can show up in relationships in the most confident, secure, fulfilling way. On a physiological level, reclaiming pleasure is a supportive parallel process to trauma resolution; the health benefits of pleasure help to balance out the physiological stressors of trauma. When our body is responding to a threat, it increases the production of certain hormones like cortisol and adrenaline (let’s call them the “pricklies”). When the threat passes, or we get supportive regulation, our body is meant to metabolize that spike of hormones, not keep producing them. Other hormones, like endorphins (let’s call these ones the “sparklies”) help us to suppress over-producing the pricklies. In short, the more sparklies in your system, the less pricklies, making you a sparklier self, partner, and community member. Learning to commit to your pleasure as a resource ripple out to heal your relationships and communities by changing how you interact with others.

Pleasure also drives pro-social behavior and human connection. Sure, if I ask you to think of your primary relationship right now, there might be some big feelings of conflict that come up. But if I ask you to think of the moments you knew you were falling in love, what memories come to mind? I bet those memories feel pretty good. What we call “new relationship energy” floods the body with feel-good neurotransmitters: this is how pleasure bonds us in relationships.

Holistic Pleasure: The Four Realms of Being Human

You are physiologically designed for pleasure to guide every aspect of your life. We are designed for pleasure to be a motivating force not just in our procreation (which is an essentially Darwinist attitude that I’d like us to toss out the window), but in everything we do. Physical pain – i.e., the absence of pleasure, or the unpleasant – is meant to teach us what to avoid, whereas physical pleasure rewards us with neurochemicals that build brain circuits that say, “Do more of that,” and support our social engagement system. Pleasure helps our bodies in understanding what to move toward, and also how to do it in connection with other humans. Pleasure, therefore, is a guiding force in building interdependence. But I bet you weren’t raised to see it that way. If you were, you probably don’t need to be reading this.

When I talk about pleasure, most people immediately assume I’m talking about sex. And sure, a lot of the time that’s a safe assumption. (I do love talking about sex, and thankfully I’ve built a career that involves quite a bit of that). But to me this assumption highlights just how much our cultural conditioning obfuscates our sensuality, our connection to our bodies. Pleasure is not just about sex, it’s about our ability to embody a joyous, connected life. If I ask you to imagine the scent of your favorite flower, the texture of your favorite food on your tongue, the sound of your beloved arriving home after a long trip, the feeling of connection from doing what you love, wouldn’t those imaginings also bring up pleasure for you? That’s because human pleasure shows up in all realms of our life.

This can be a hard concept to grasp when we’ve spent decades internalizing that sex is dirty, rest needs to be earned, we are failing if we’re not self-sufficient, and worth (including our own) is inherently tied to sacrifice, hard work, and struggle. The framework I teach my clients is something I refer to as a holistic approach to pleasure, meant to help us reclaim its primacy in our lives. A holistic approach to pleasure basically frames it as an integral human experience across four realms of our being: body-based, mental-emotional, spiritual or energetic (depending on whether you identify as spiritual), and relational. When we are more or less balanced across the four realms, we are generally well, happy, and fulfilled. In times of struggle, we will usually find that at least one of the realms of pleasure is lacking.

For you to feel at ease, connected, and confident within your practice of non-monogamy, the most important thing is your own relationship to holistic pleasure. When you are feeling distraught, insecure, or overwhelmed, look to balance your own pleasure just as much as you work on the relationship with another person. You can do that by turning to your four realms: body-based, mental-emotional, spiritual-energetic, and relational.

the polyamory paradox finding connection in consensual non-monogamy irene morning

Reprinted with permission from The Polyamory Paradox: Finding Your Confidence in Consensual Non-Monogamy. where you can find more detail about the four realms. Visit Irene Morning’s website to learn more.

See our interview about polyamory with Irene Morning.