Hello Pleasure Activists,

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There is a question that arrives again and again in my Discovery Calls, and it almost never comes in direct or obvious language. Instead, it tends to sneak in sideways, wrapped in practicality, guilt, and hesitation.

 

It sounds like,

 

“I’m really excited, but I don’t know if now is the right time.”

Or, “I want this so badly, but with everything happening in the world…”

Or, “I feel drawn to this work, and also, who am I to focus on pleasure right now?”

Sometimes it shows up as, “I should probably wait until things calm down,” or even, “I feel selfish just thinking about this.” Underneath all of it, pulsing quietly and persistently, is the real question:

 

Do I deserve pleasure?

 

Do I deserve to honor my desire?

 

Do I deserve to set aside time for my body, my heart, my erotic life, and my relational healing?

 

Do I deserve to invest time, energy, and attention, real resources, into something that nourishes me?

 

Do I deserve this now, not later, not once I’ve earned it, and not once the world is finally fixed?

 

I want to slow us down here and sit with this question gently and fiercely at the same time because this is not a personal failing. It is not a lack of discipline, clarity, or commitment. This is a political wound.

 

I see this pattern so clearly in my clinical work. I work with brilliant, thoughtful, deeply caring people, often women, queers, non-monogamous, and other marginalized bodies, who are resourced in empathy and responsibility. These are people who show up for their communities, who hold others with care, who donate, organize, volunteer, advocate, parent, teach, create, and serve.

 

And yet, when it comes to themselves, something tightens. There is hesitation, constriction, and guilt. Pleasure begins to feel like something that must be justified, as if joy needs to be defended, or as if rest, eroticism, play, intimacy, and expansion require a permission slip signed by capitalism, productivity culture, and moral purity.

 

We have been trained, explicitly and implicitly, to believe that pleasure is frivolous, indulgent, or extra, and that it must be postponed until we are “good enough,” healed enough, stable enough, or deserving enough. Layered on top of this is the current moment we are living in, shaped by collective grief, political collapse, genocide, climate crisis, and economic precarity. The unspoken message becomes: How dare you feel good right now?

 

What I want to offer you, grounded in years of clinical work, relational theory, and lived experience, is this truth:

 

Pleasure is not a distraction from the world’s suffering; pleasure is one of the ways we stay human inside of it.

 

When we are deprived of pleasure, our nervous systems contract over time. We become brittle, burned out, and numb, and we slowly lose imagination. We also lose access to nuance, patience, creativity, and compassion. This is a physiological reality.

 

Chronic stress without replenishment narrows our capacity to respond with care. It pushes us into survival modes like freeze, fawn, dissociation, and over-functioning, which makes us reactive instead of responsive and rigid instead of relational.

 

Pleasure, on the other hand, expands capacity. It softens the body, widens the emotional range, increases tolerance for complexity, and brings us back into contact with desire, which is the same internal system that fuels hope, vision, and movement. This is why I say, without hesitation, that pleasure is essential to the revolution, not because it ignores injustice, but because it gives us the resilience, attunement, and relational depth required to face it without losing ourselves.

 

An exhausted body does not build sustainable change. A disconnected heart cannot hold collective grief. A pleasure-starved nervous system struggles to stay present in long conflicts. When you orient toward pleasure, you are not opting out of care; you are actively increasing your capacity for it.

 

And yet, even knowing all of this intellectually, the question often persists:

 

But do I deserve it?

 

I want to be very honest with you here. I have stood at this threshold myself. Earlier in my life, there was a version of me who believed that pleasure was something to access only after I had done enough, healed enough, or proven enough. I was deeply invested in being “good,” responsible, ethical, and self-sacrificing, and I quietly conflated worthiness with restraint.

 

I told myself stories about humility, discipline, and not taking up too much space, and my body paid the price for those beliefs. My relationships suffered, my creativity dulled, and my nervous system stayed on high alert. I showed up for everyone around me, but I was not fully showing up for myself.

 

Crossing the threshold into pleasure was not indulgent for me; it was terrifying. Pleasure asked me to trust myself, to believe that my desires were not inherently harmful, to invest in my growth, and to choose aliveness in a culture that rewards self-denial. What ultimately shifted everything was not a single dramatic moment, but a series of small, brave yeses to listening to my body, to slowing down, to investing time, money, and energy into spaces that nourished me, and to being supported instead of endlessly self-sufficient.

 

Each of those yeses rewired something deep inside me, not into selfishness, but into capacity.

 

I see this same transformation unfold in my clients again and again. One person told me after months of working together, “I was afraid that if I felt too good, I’d stop caring about the world, but the opposite happened. I have more patience, more generosity, and more clarity now.”

 

I want to name something gently, especially if you struggle with investing resources like time, money, or attention into pleasure-based work. Capitalism teaches us that value only exists when it produces something measurable. Patriarchy teaches us that pleasure, especially erotic, relational, and embodied pleasure, is dangerous, distracting, or morally suspect. White supremacy teaches us that rest and joy are privileges rather than necessities.

 

These systems live not only “out there,” but inside our nervous systems. So when you hesitate, freeze, overthink, or feel guilt about investing in pleasure, you are not broken. You are deconditioning, and deconditioning takes time, repetition, and support.

 

Whether you engage with this work through the podcast, free resources, community spaces, or deeper containers like the Pleasure Liberation groups, what matters most to me is that you hear this clearly:

 

Your pleasure is not frivolous, irresponsible, or in need of justification. It is worthy of your attention, your care, and your investment because it brings you back into aliveness and deepens your capacity to stay present with yourself and the people you love.

 

I want you to leave feeling resourced, and maybe even able to stop asking whether you deserve pleasure and start asking a different question: What becomes possible when I trust that I do?

 

The world does not need more burnt-out, disconnected, self-sacrificing people who have abandoned their own bodies. It needs people who are nourished enough to stay, soft enough to feel, resourced enough to keep going, and brave enough to choose joy without permission.

 

Another world is possible when we embrace pleasure and allow ourselves to dream.

 

Your Pleasure Practice

 

Journal Prompt:
Where did you learn, explicitly or implicitly, that pleasure must be earned, delayed, or justified? Whose voices do you hear when you question whether you deserve it, and what might shift if you gently challenged those narratives?

 

Somatic Practice:
Place one hand on your chest and one on your belly, and take three slow breaths. Ask your body, not your mind, what kind of pleasure would support you right now, and notice what arises without judgment. Let the answer be small, simple, and enough.

 

Relational Invitation:
Share this question with a trusted person or partner: “What helps you feel deserving of pleasure, and what makes it hard?” Listen not to fix, but to understand, and notice how naming this together softens something between you.

 

You are not behind, selfish, or naive for wanting more. You are responding to a deep and intelligent longing for aliveness, and that longing is not a distraction from the world. It is one of the ways we heal it together.

 

Sending All My Love,
Dr. Nicole

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Dr. Nicole Thompson

Sex and Relationship Psychotherapist

Psychedelic-Assisted Liberation

Clinical Psychology