Emily Nagoski Quotes

Polite, socially acceptable suppression of our rage is "inauthentic," insofar as we are not sharing our full selves. And that is part of trust, too. Part of being trustworthy is meeting expectations and staying in line, as if you were a well-behaved woman.

Self-compassion is emphatically not self-esteem. Self-esteem is about self-evaluation, your perceived value as a human being, which is often contingent upon your sense of personal success in comparison with others. Self-compassion, by contrast, is unconditional and nonevaluative. We can have self-compassion when we're doing well and when we're struggling - because life has treated us harshly or because we made a mistake.23

a woman's body and her pleasure belong to her and no one else; that it's possible to say no to intercourse without saying no to all the other things that come with it - the love and the affection and the pleasure and the play; and that my own internal experience was a legitimate guide for whether or not I wanted to try something

It's not about weight or size or fat - weight is a measure of gravity and nothing else - it's about living joyfully inside your body, as it is, today.

The problem isn't the desire itself, it's the context. You need more sexually relevant stimuli activating the accelerator and fewer things hitting the brake.

Sex is an attachment behavior, reinforcing the social bond between adults. Sometimes it takes the form of passionate, joyful sex between people who are falling in love with each other. Sometimes it takes the form of desperate, grasping sex between people whose attachment is threatened.

Healing hurts. If you break your leg, there is no stage in the healing process when your leg feels better than it does after it has healed. There is pain and itching and loss of strength. From the moment your leg is broken, it continues to feel bad ... until, gradually, it starts to feel less bad. It's appropriate that it hurts.

White men grow on an open, level field. White women grow on far steeper and rougher terrain because the field wasn't made for them. Women of color grow not just on a hill, but on a cliffside over the ocean, battered by wind and waves. None of us chooses the landscape in which we're planted. If you find yourself on an ocean-battered cliff, your only choice is to grow there, or fall into the ocean. So if we transplant a survivor of the steep hill and cliff to the level field, natives of the field may look at that survivor and wonder why she has so much trouble trusting people, systems, and even her own bodily sensations. Why is this tree so bent and gnarled?

It's because that is what it took to survive in the place where she grew. A tree that's fought wind and gravity and erosion to grow strong and green on a steep cliff is going to look strange and out of place when moved to the level playing field. The gnarled, wind-blown tree from an oceanside cliff might not conform with our ideas of what a tree should look like, but it works well in the context where it grew. And that tall straight tree wouldn't stand a chance if it was transplanted to the cliffside.

So now you go into the next chamber, where the lights are off, it's quiet and calm, and it smells like home. You love it here, it's like a spa for rats. In this context, when the researcher zaps your top NAc, the same thing happens - approach behaviors. But this is where it gets crazy: When the researcher zaps your bottom NAc . . . approach behaviors! In a safe, relaxing environment, almost the entire NAc activates approach motivation!

This is what science can do for us, if we let it. If offers us an opportunity to lower our defenses and experience the ways that we are all connected.

Emotions are tunnels. You have to go all the way through the darkness to get to the light at the end.

Self-criticism is an invasive weed in the garden, but too many of us have been taught to treat it like a treasured flower, even as it strangles the native plants of our sexuality. Far from motivating us to get better, self-criticism makes us sicker.

Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships by Sue Johnson,

Physical activity is the single most efficient strategy for completing the stress response cycle and recalibrating your central nervous system into a calm state. When people say, 'Exercise is good for stress,' that is for realsie real.

I am done living in a world where women are lied to about their bodies; where women are objects of sexual desire but not subjects of sexual pleasure; where sex is used as a weapon against women; and where women believe their bodies are broken, simply because those bodies are not male. And I am done living in a world where women are trained from birth to treat their bodies as the enemy.

If you're trying to do something where you will inevitably fail and be rejected repeatedly before you achieve your goal, then you will need a nonstandard relationship with winning, focusing on incremental goals.

When you are cruel to yourself, contemptuous and shaming, you only increase the cruelty of the world; when you are kind and compassionate to yourself, you increase the kindness and compassion in the world. Being compassionate toward yourself- not self-indulgent or self-pitying, but kind- is both the least you can do and the single most important thing you can do to make the world a better place...the world is changed when we change.

About 10 to 20 percent of both men and women report an increase in their sexual interest when they're anxious or depressed. But a guy who wants sex more when he's anxious or depressed probably has less sensitive brakes. In contrast, a woman who wants sex more when she's anxious or depressed is likely to have a more sensitive accelerator.

Nonjudging is neutrally noticing your own internal states.

What can I say? Science is made of people, and people can be stupid.

As Perel puts it in her TEDx talk, In desire, we want a bridge to cross.

All your body requires of you is that you turn toward it with kindness and compassion, with nonjudgment and plain-vanilla acceptance of all your contradictory emotions, beliefs, and longings.

Anyway, our fellow apes eat insects out of each other's fur; maybe bath bombs and body glitter are the modern human equivalent.

The moral of the story is: We thrive when we have a positive goal to move toward, not just a negative state we're trying to move away from.

When you were born, you were deeply, gloriously satisfied with each and every part of your body.

we all have phalluses and urethras

We're raising women to be sexually dysfunctional, with all the 'no' messages we're giving them about diseases and shame and fear. And then as soon as they're eighteen they're supposed to be sexual rock stars, multiorgasmic and totally uninhibited. It doesn't make any sense. None of the things we do in our society prepares women for that.

Not knowing why is, itself, a profound type of suffering.

Love is having. Desire is wanting. And you can want only what you don't already have.

What turns us on (or off) is learned from culture, in much the same way children learn vocabulary and accents from culture.