Consent and Your Nervous System
I’m in bed with my partner of 3 years. The sunlight is beginning to stream through the curtains, and we’re just stirring from slumber. He’s spooning me and his hands start to roam across my body in a gentle, barely-awake way. His hands speed up, almost imperceptibly, he gently pushes his hips into mine, and in a flash, I go from feeling held and relaxed to scared and trapped. I can’t move. My breathing becomes shallow and rapid. I want him to stop, but my voice is as frozen as my body, as if it’s stuck beneath layer upon layer of ice, mud, and muck.
A few long moments later, it dawns on me: I’m in a freeze response. I breathe into my belly, feel the ground beneath me, and ask him to pause. I name what’s happening for me, he asks what I need, I ask to change positions so we are face to face, and in a few relatively short moments, the freeze has melted and we move into sweet, connected love-making.
The freeze response arises out of the oldest branch of our Triune Autonomic Nervous System (TANS), one that we share with nearly all multi-cellular organisms, from worms to lizards to other mammals. Think of a lizard, its skin nearly matching the shade of the earth beneath it. A bird flies overhead hunting for a meal, there’s nowhere to hide, and the lizard can’t possibly fight the bird, so it’s nervous system freezes, making it more difficult for the bird to see. The bird flies on and the lizard lives to see another day.
My nervous system usually defaults to freeze. This is true for me in all kinds of situations, not just sexual ones. Thanks to all that I’ve learned about the TANS in the last few years, combined with somatic trauma therapy, I can now do what I did in the situation above: recognize when I am in a freeze response and resource myself. It also helps that my partner has learned what my freeze looks and feels like and can sometimes notice that it’s happening before I do.
The follow-up move of asking for help – which took me some time, effort, and encouragement to learn – engages the most sophisticated and evolutionarily newest part of our nervous system: the Social Engagement Branch. We share this branch with the other great apes, and it allows us to use our connection with other human beings - through eye contact, facial expressions, tone of voice, and touch - to regulate our nervous system. A parent singing lullabies to soothe their startled, crying infant back to sleep is a simple example of this branch of our nervous system in action, and it was the one that I ultimately used in the story above to get my nervous system out of reaction.
This moment with my partner is ultimately an example of navigating consent. Not in the superficial ‘yes means yes, no means no’ way that we’ve been taught to think about it, but as an embodied, moment-to-moment process. In the experience above, I could have felt all that was happening in my body and assumed that it meant I was a solid ‘no.’ I also could have gone in the opposite direction, and used past experiences with him to assume that I was a ‘yes’ and override what was actively happening in my body. Instead, I was able to attune to my nervous system, invite my partner to attune to me, and come into a different experience entirely that didn’t require that I dismiss or ignore myself, or leave connection with my partner.
Rather than a black and white concept that occurs in our minds, consent is a highly nuanced, deeply relational situation in which we feel safe enough to enter into an unknown situation. We feel safe enough to potentially feel unsafe. How we come to understand this in ourselves needs to include and be informed by the response that’s occurring in our TANS at any given moment.
This why the TANS is crucial for our erotic embodiment. Navigating our yes, no, and maybe is the foundation for erotic exploration, expression, and wellness because it allows us to participate in safe-enough containers for growth and experience. Talking and reading about this is not enough; to really come into understanding and intimacy with our TANS, and with our yes, no, and maybe, we need community support and opportunities to practice.
Our upcoming live and online program, Erotic Embodiment and the Triune Autonomic Nervous System, and our in-person, 4-Month Verdant Collective Immersion are specifically designed to help us develop intimate relationships with our Triune Autonomic Nervous Systems and the process of engagement that has been called ‘consent’. Join us for these practical, experiential, communal explorations into your unique version of embodiment and consent. We would love to have you there.
