Healing old hurts

Betty's mother here has done something tremendously important. She has put good body feelings in the category of being good. She has lifted from them the old onus of being wicked and "bad." She has attached them to the warm and lovely yet primitive act of mothering in which body and spirit combine. And she had admitted to wishing that she might have got more of these feelings herself.

She smiled back at Betty. Then she went on. "I've learned that lots of things feel good to babies and children and to big people, too. Things we've been told we should be ashamed of. I've found out we shouldn't be at all!"

Betty stared at Mother, her eyes round and big. "What do you mean?" with a catch in her voice, eager yet somewhat afraid.

"I, too, felt my heart getting a little poundy," her mother confessed when she told of the experience. "But I decided I wasn't going to let Betty go on as I had--so stupidly ashamed of everything human. So I barged ahead! I tried to remember all the mistakes I had made in needlessly stopping Betty from enjoying her body. At the time, of course, I thought I'd been right. But why let old mistakes stay uncorrected? Especially when something as vital to your child is at stake."

Betty's mother thought back. "When you were little," she said, "I was a thumb snatcher, for one thing. I've learned now that it doesn't hurt jaws or mouth for a small child to suck. But I did everything to you then to make you stop.

"And then I was a dessert holder-upper. Custards and apple sauce and the other nourishing, sweetish foods your little body enjoyed with its taste buds! 'No,' I'd say. You couldn't have them unless you ate all the things you didn't like first. That was foolish too.

"But worst of all," and here Betty's mother drew a deep breath, "when you began to touch your tee-tee, which is the thing that feels best of all, why I had fifty-nine cat fits. I've found out since that it's harmless and I could have saved both of us a lot of worry. But I didn't know then . . ."

"You mean"--Betty's mouth hung open--"it's not true that it drives people crazy? Nothing terrible happens to them?"

"No. Not one single terrible thing. It's perfectly natural and normal and I was a very foolish woman ever to have made you think anything else."

In this, Betty's mother was bringing out what has been well established: We know now that masturbation does not injure a person or make him "nervous." We know, however, that anxiety, fear and shame over it often does.

Many an adolescent has acquired just such feelings! They intrude into the respect he has for himself as a person. And this is often what hurts him most.

At the stage where the adolescent now finds himself, sex impulses, as we know, surge freshly. The sight of a girl or a boy to a member of the opposite sex, the sound of a voice, the thrill of a chance touch, daydreams of love and romance--all bring body sensations akin to the earlier ones that were "bad." Just as the love-rivalry "bad" feelings and the touching "bad" feelings got attached to each other earlier, so the adolescent love surgings get attached now. Like a snail pulling in its horns, the boy or girl may retreat from healthy contacts. Or he may run wild to prove to himself that anxiety has no foundation.

What Betty's mother was doing was trying to reassure Betty that fear and anxiety and shame of body enjoyment had no place.