Last week I teased the criterion velocity. Well, today we’re going to dive into that. Today is all about looking at our expectations as well as how we feel about our feelings (aka meta emotions). It’s about reflecting on how we were told to feel about our desire and turning that into a more gentle, understanding, and supportive outlook.
Let’s start with the criterion velocity. You’ve got this little internal monitor that observes your effort-to-progress ratio. This monitor wants to see if the world is behaving to its expectations. These expectations are set by previous experiences, what it was taught, and the types of messages it received. When these two match up (world + expectation) the criterion velocity is being matched or succeeded. The monitor is satisfied, motivated, and eager. The criterion velocity is the opinion this monitor has about what the ratio should be.
So, for example, if we’ve been taught all our life (aka have the expectation) that our desire will fluctuate and that low desire is not bad or wrong or abnormal - and our actual experience matches up with that - we’ll feel more satisfied and content. We’ll feel more at ease with that ratio. But, if we’ve been taught all our life (aka have the expectation) that our desire should be readily accessible at all times, strong, and consistent - and our experience doesn’t match up with that - we’ll feel dissatisfied, unmotivated, and down on ourselves.
Criterion velocity is this ratio and meta emotions are how we feel about our feelings, or response, to that ratio (if that makes sense). An example of meta emotions is feeling guilty or frustrated that you’re feeling stuck or sad (or whatever the state/emotion is). This creates a kind of resistance as we push back against the emotion.
This is where we can reflect on our ingrained expectations and where they come from. For a lot of us, we were taught that sexual desire is always brewing at the surface; that it is high at all times. We’ve been taught this through hypersexuality and compulsory sexuality - the ideas that we:
1. should all have a frequent and high libido
2. should operate under heteronormative conditions aka straight sex is the ideal sex.
I certainly grew up “learning” this through movies, TV shows, porn, my sex education (or lack thereof), and pretty much only being exposed to heterosexual relationships and images. This taught me that I should default to a man’s pleasure and that I should also be “ready to go” at all times. This, however, hasn’t lined up with my actual experience. My actual experience looks a lot more like a wave - my desire rising and falling; moments of dipping low for a while and moments of it surfacing again. Since my inherited expectations don’t exactly line up with my reality, I’ve been left feeling bad about my desire (feeling bad about how I feel). It has left me feeling less than, shameful, confused, and frustrated.
Until I started learning quality sex education and reading about things like my little monitor and criterion velocity; until I learned that chronic stress is driven by how we feel (aka judge) our experience. It’s not necessarily the stressor or source that is the problem (in this case, our level of desire); it’s how we respond to that stressor. This response - or judgment, or belief - can really impact our level of chronic stress.
This is MAJOR. It’s major because we can call out how unrealistic these inherited expectations are. It’s major because we can realize that we have nothing to feel bad or ashamed about (we were just little sponges absorbing and believing everything we saw/heard/learned). It’s major because we can actually do something about this and work to change our expectations and not be so judgmental about our experience.
Maybe it’s not about changing our expectations but about releasing them. Maybe it’s about being honest about who we are and how we operate. Maybe it’s about accepting where we’re at right now. And if we’re feeling down about our desire it’s about remembering that allowing can be the first step toward reconnecting with our desire.
I invite you to reflect on these questions:
What have you been taught about desire? What have you been exposed/not exposed to?
What expectations have you formed because it?
What would you want to tell your younger self about desire?
What experience(s) are these expectations excluding? (examples: asexual identity, demisexuality, responsive desire, the effects of stress)
How do you want to relate to your desire? What do you want to tell it?
Wherever you’re at with your desire, I want you to know that it’s completely normal. We are up against a lot and are dealing with stress on a daily basis. Give yourself some grace as you cradle whatever state you’re in with love and understanding. And use this as an opportunity to explore other ways of relating to yourself and others; an opportunity to take care of yourself in deeply nourishing ways. I’m writing this because I need to hear it too.
<3 Sarah