Learning to Survive Our Own Aliveness

Pleasure, pain, and how the nervous system learns what “safe enough” feels like

7 minute read
tldr: version for curious skimmers

Pleasure and pain can be opposites in meaning, but they are not always opposites in experience.

Anyone who has loved the burn of a hard workout, the sting of spicy food, the shock of cold water, or the intensity of erotic or kinky play already knows this. Discomfort does not always mean danger. Sometimes discomfort and even pain is part of aliveness.

Erotic excitement, curiosity, play, awe — these states all contain intensity. What distinguishes pleasure from distress is not the absence of activation, but the presence of enough safety.

When I lift weights, I am drawn to the weird joy of playing with pain while simultaneously teaching my body safety. My muscles swear at me, like Victorian aristocrats dramatically collapsing onto the nearest chaise lounge, they announce one more rep may be fatal. And yet, over time, that burn — far from being fatal — has become downright pleasurable. Part of the pleasure comes from feeling my own growing capacity to welcome the discomfort instead of treating it as a problem. My has body has slowly learned: this is effort, not injury — intensity, not threat — and this changes my experience of the sensation itself.

This matters in sex therapy. Many people arrive in my practice believing something is wrong with them. Their body feels tense around intimacy. A body part is not functioning the way they would like. Desire is inconsistent or absent. Pleasure feels distant, complicated, or unapproachable. If the body feels like the problem, it makes sense to assume therapy must be about fixing it.

But approaching ourselves primarily as problems to solve often keeps the nervous system organized around defence. The body stays alert for what might be wrong. Attention narrows. Curiosity disappears. Pleasure, in this context, is not about chasing pleasant sensations or ignoring difficult feelings. It is about learning to stay present with experience — including moments of pleasure that arise alongside discomfort.

There is another paradox here: pleasure often becomes easier to access when we stop trying so hard to produce it. When attention shifts from performance toward curiosity, the nervous system relaxes its vigilance and perception widens. I explored this more deeply in my article Pleasure Begins With Attention.

Sex is a powerful catalyst - for everything. Contrary to the narrow way Western culture often portrays it, sex often brings forward the full spectrum of human emotion: joy, tenderness, uncertainty, frustration, grief, fear, excitement. That might sound overwhelming. But the nervous system is not asking us to solve the whole story of our lives at once. It is asking a quieter question:

Am I safe enough to be fully alive right now?
Am I safe enough to allow the feelings and sensations arising?

Trauma, chronic stress, and difficult life experiences can teach the body to answer that question with caution. Even when danger is no longer present, the nervous system may remain organized around protection, bracing against possible threat. Pleasure can begin to change that conversation — not through argument, but through experience.

The nervous system does not learn safety through ideas. It learns safety through experience and that includes experiences of sex that are as complex as they are pleasurable. 

It also learns through repetition. The nervous system does not learn the way the thinking brain learns from explanation or logic. It learns more like the body learns to walk or ride a bicycle: through small, repeated experiences that build familiarity and trust.

Over time these small moments accumulate, much like the way secure relationships build trust through repeated experiences of safety.

Practice is not a failure of the process.
Practice is the process.

Modern neuroscience offers another way to understand this. The brain is constantly predicting what will happen next. It builds internal models of the world based on past experience and uses those models to anticipate danger or safety. When someone has lived through trauma or chronic stress, the nervous system may learn to predict threat even when danger is no longer present. Pleasurable experiences that feel safe enough can begin to update those predictions.

What is interesting is that many pleasurable experiences contain uncertainty or intensity: flirting, spicy food, exercise, erotic and kinky play, the emotional vulnerability of intimacy. In these moments, the nervous system has the possibility of encountering something new, something that makes us feel the vibrant edge of our aliveness, and realize, we can survive it.

In this sense, pleasure is not just about feeling good. It is a way human beings learn how much aliveness they can tolerate.

For many people, especially those with histories of trauma, pleasure itself may initially feel unfamiliar or even activating. The process is therefore gradual. We begin with small moments: perhaps allowing your belly to soften, feeling your breath deepen — not from force, but from the space that softening creates — letting your face release the work of interacting with the world, and maybe, if your body wants it, touching your own skin with quiet, exploratory tenderness.

Rather than following the narratives of our lives, we practise staying with one moment of experience. A tight chest. A warm hand. A flicker of desire. A wave of embarrassment. A sense of ease. A little pleasure beside a little fear. From there, the body begins to learn that more than one thing can be true at once. Discomfort may still be present, but it can exist alongside safety, neutrality, or pleasure.

Sex therapy is sometimes a microcosm of this. Fritz Perls described therapy as a “safe emergency” — a space where intense feelings can emerge within a context that is safe enough. We might laugh, cry, feel afraid, and slowly discover that we are still okay. Still human. Still worthy of connection. Over time we learn not to eliminate discomfort, but to hold it with less sense of danger. And when the sense of danger softens, more room for pleasure opens. Sex can work in a similar way. 

Sex can become another kind of safe emergency — intimate, vulnerable, alive, emotionally charged, sometimes complex and uncomfortable and held within enough trust, consent, curiosity, and care that we can be fully human and survive it. 

For many people, this can lead to a cultural shift. Many of us were taught that pleasure is indulgent, irresponsible, selfish, or something we earn only after the hard work of life is finished. We may begin to understand pleasure is not a reward waiting at the end of the process.

Pleasure is part of the process itself.

To let pleasure matter is to practise staying with life as it actually arrives: mixed, intense, unfinished, tender, sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes astonishing. The goal is not to become a person who feels good all the time. That would be both impossible and, frankly, in the long run, boring. As Melissa Berry Appleton once said to me, “we all need a little sand in our bathing suit.”

The deeper practice is learning that pleasure and discomfort can sit at the same table. That the body can burn and still be safe. That intensity can rise without becoming danger. That aliveness can move through us without requiring defence.

Pleasure is
not the opposite of pain.

It is one of the ways we learn to be with the full intensity of being human.

For Curious Skimmers

Many people assume pleasure is simply the opposite of pain. But our nervous systems do not organize experience that way.

Discomfort and pleasure can often exist in the same moment. Anyone who enjoys the burn of exercise, the sting of spicy food, the shock of cold water, or certain kinds of erotic play has already experienced this paradox.

What matters is not the absence of intensity, but whether the body experiences that intensity as safe enough.

The nervous system learns safety through experience, not explanation. Small repeated moments — warmth, curiosity, connection, pleasure beside discomfort — gradually teach the body that intensity does not always signal danger.

Over time these experiences update the brain’s predictions about the world. The nervous system learns that aliveness, vulnerability, and connection can sometimes be safe.

This is why pleasure matters in therapy and in intimate life. It is not simply indulgence or escape.

Pleasure is one of the ways human beings learn how to stay present with the full intensity of being alive.