As you let your feeling come to the surface, please note how quickly you move from contemplation of your husband’s annoying characteristic to very broad generalities about men. In the case above the woman moved almost at once from annoyance, to rage, to ascribing a hidden motive to all men--a desire to enslave women, to exploit them.
It was the generalities she made which (in the end) revealed to her with great clarity that her underlying attitude created a spiritual climate in which real love and therefore a productive marriage were virtually impossible. How can one love, in any real sense, a person one regards, basically, as a tyrant?
Taking this highly emotional inventory cannot be a swift affair. In the beginning, for the first several sessions with herself, a frigid woman may find that no very strong feelings or passionate generalizations will come up. But if she perseveres she will inevitably get to an area where the feelings are intense and negative indeed. We have found that such feelings always exist in frigidity. If they did not, there would be no frigidity.
The frigid woman has hidden the intensity of such feelings from her conscious mind for two reasons. To know these reasons can help you, make you somewhat braver in your attempt to surface the feelings.
The first reason these emotions have remained hidden is their very intensity. They were, in the beginning, felt to be overwhelming; it was as if they proceeded from a bottomless well of feeling. And so, through the years, one has learned to hide them, even from oneself, to fix them on trifles in order to minimize them--to deny that, indeed, they exist at all.
Only by letting them up into the awareness can one experience the fact that their intensity is _not_ overwhelming and that the emotion one experiences has very definite limits; it does not proceed from a bottomless well.
I recall one woman who, in approaching this problem, would not let herself weep over a strong underlying feeling of rejection by men that she had partially uncovered in herself. “If I start crying I feel I’ll never stop,” she told me. She was not being histrionic either; that’s the way she really felt. When she did let herself cry, however, the storm lasted for a mere thirty minutes or so--and then it was done with for good. She was terribly relieved to find that the emotion which, when unexpressed, seemed so boundless had very concrete limits. From that point on she was much more at home with all of her emotions, not nearly so frightened of them.