Hello Pleasure Activists,

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How do you like to be touched?

 

The question lands, and my body does something before my mind can intervene. Heat rises in my cheeks. My chest tightens just slightly. There is a pause that stretches longer than I intend it to. I smile, reflexively, hoping the smile might carry me through whatever comes next.

 

Nothing does.

 

Inside, there is a strange emptiness, like reaching for a word that should be there and finding only air. My thoughts scramble. My body feels suddenly very present and very uninhabited at the same time. I laugh, softly and awkwardly, as if humor might disguise the fact that I have absolutely no idea how to answer.

 

The silence feels exposing as my lover intently awaits my answer. I am realizing in real time that I have never been asked this before. There is a pressure to respond, to offer something, but my nervous system has already made a decision. It has gone still. My mouth stays quiet. My mind stalls. The question hovers between us, patient and unyielding.

 

What I understand now many years later, with much more compassion, is that this freeze was never a personal failing. It was linguistic. If someone asked me to speak French right now, I would not assume something was wrong with me when no words came out. I would simply recognize that I had never learned the language. And yet, when it came to sexual touch, I held myself to an impossible standard. I believed I should already know. I believed desire should be intuitive and fluency should be innate.

 

What makes this even clearer to me now is how much language I do have in other embodied realms. If someone asked me how I like to be massaged, my body would respond immediately. I could talk about pressure and pacing, rhythm and temperature, slow grounding touch versus more focused intensity. That language exists because I have practiced it.

 

So why did all of that disappear when the touch became sexual?

 

Coming from sex negative, heteronormative, mononormative systems, my nervous system learned early that sexual desire was not simply another form of embodied preference. It was charged, moralized, and watched. Pleasure was not framed as a skill to develop, but as something risky to manage. Of course, the language never formed. The silence was trained. Pleasure was forbidden.

 

I felt behind. I felt ashamed. I felt like everyone else had received a handbook I somehow missed. I carried a quiet sense of defectiveness for years, convinced that my struggle meant something was wrong with me rather than wrong with the systems that raised me.

 

And yet, here is the part that still humbles me.

 

Now, I could write a dissertation on how I like to be touched, seen, felt, and attuned to. That is not because I was born with some special erotic wisdom. It is because I practiced. I stayed curious. I built a community. I learned to treat pleasure like a language rather than a verdict on my worth.

 

This contrast is why I am so passionate about this work. I know exactly how painful it is to live without language for your own desire. I know how isolating it feels to assume everyone else knows something you do not. I know how much shame grows in that silence.

 

I see this pattern everywhere.

 

I see it in people who are articulate, competent, and confident in nearly every other area of their lives. I see it in long term relationships where care and commitment are strong, yet erotic communication feels strangely brittle. I see it in how many of us became expert mind readers in sex because asking directly never felt safe.

 

When a language is missing, we do not stop needing to communicate. We just find workarounds. We guess. We perform. We accommodate. We override our own signals in service of being desirable, easy, or good. Over time, this creates a quiet disconnection and the muscle of attunement wanes.

 

One of the subtler consequences of this is how feedback begins to feel dangerous. When no one ever taught us how to talk about touch, any redirection can land as rejection. Any request for something different can feel like criticism. The nervous system responds defensively, not because we are fragile, but because we were never given another framework.

 

This is where the reframe changes everything.

 

Touch is not a static request. It is not a one time instruction you either get right or wrong. It is a dance. It is a living, responsive process where nervous systems are constantly listening, adjusting, and finding rhythm together. When someone says “a little slower,” “less pressure,” or “can you move your hand,” they are not evaluating you. They are offering information so the dance can continue.

 

So many of us were trained to experience feedback as failure. We learned to hear adjustment as rejection and to collapse into ego and self judgment the moment something shifted. In embodied intimacy, however, feedback is not evidence that you did something wrong. It is evidence that someone is staying present with you. It is evidence that they trust the connection enough to co create it in real time.

 

When touch is held this way, as an unfolding conversation rather than a performance, something softens. Bracing gives way to curiosity. The goal is no longer to get it right, but to stay in rhythm. What matters is noticing when the music changes and responding rather than defending.

 

Last year, in the Pleasure Liberation: Sexuality Group, someone cried as they shared how they spent their whole life trying to be good at sex instead of actually feeling any of it. The room was full of nodding heads. Everyone understood.

 

That tender moment has stayed with me. Many of us were taught to prioritize performance over presence and confidence over curiosity. We learned to look like we knew what we were doing rather than to build the language that would actually support pleasure.

 

This is where I want to be very clear.

 

Pleasure is a practice. Communication is a practice. Erotic fluency is a practice. None of these are personality traits you either have or do not have. They are learned languages, shaped over time through repetition, safety, and relational experience.

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This is why I cry when I do this work.

 

I cry because I watch people find words they never had before and realize they were never broken. I cry because I see shame soften in bodies that have been carrying it for decades. I cry because when someone learns they can ask for what they want without the world ending, that learning does not stay in the bedroom. It ripples into friendships, work, boundaries, and how they take up space in their lives.

 

Transformation is never contained. Language changes relationships. Relationships change nervous systems. Nervous systems change how people move through the world.

 

If you are here reading this, listening to podcasts, sharing these ideas with friends, or talking about them in your relationships, you are already practicing. You are already building language. You are already participating in collective liberation.

 

Community is one of our most powerful teachers. Every story you hear and every moment you realize that it is not just you contributes to the formation of new possibilities. None of this happens alone.

 

There is a tenderness I feel when I think about the version of me who froze when asked how she liked to be touched. There is an even deeper tenderness when I imagine that version of me encountering something like the Pleasure Liberation Sexuality Group. She would have been terrified. Not mildly nervous. Terrified. The kind of fear that tightens the chest and offers very convincing reasons to stay away.

 

And yet, it is almost painfully ironic, because that space would have been exactly where her next portal of learning lived. It would not have fixed her. It would have given her language, practice, and community. It would have shown her that her silence was not a flaw, but the natural result of never being taught how to speak.

 

This paradox shows up again and again in liberation work. The places that intimidate us most are often the places where something in us already knows there is more. Fear does not always mean danger. Sometimes it means unfamiliarity. Sometimes it means we are standing at the edge of a pattern that has quietly governed us for years.

 

There is nothing inherently wrong with freezing when asked how you like to be touched. That freeze is information. It tells a story about what was never modeled, never invited, and never made safe. The work is not to judge that response, but to gently build the conditions where language can emerge.

 

I no longer feel embarrassment when I think about where I started. I feel respect. That earlier version of me survived systems that offered silence instead of guidance. She did the best she could with the tools she had. Like so many of us, she was never broken. She was simply under practiced.

 

And, practices can be built.

 

Your Pleasure Practice:

 

Journal Prompt:
When you imagine being asked how you like to be touched, what words come easily, and where do you notice blank space or hesitation? As you write, notice whether shame, fear, or self judgment appears, and gently name what you notice without trying to fix it.

 

Somatic Prompt:
Set aside a few quiet minutes to explore pleasure in your body in a simple and non-performative way. Notice what kinds of touch feel nourishing right now, such as pressure, slowness, warmth, stillness, or rhythm. As you notice what you like, practice saying it out loud, even if only to yourself, such as “I like slower touch,” “I like steady pressure,” or “I like being held here.” Notice how your voice sounds the first time you say it, and then repeat the words until they begin to feel embodied rather than theoretical.

 

Relational Prompt:
With a lover you trust, consider opening a conversation focused on enhancing pleasure rather than problem solving. You might ask how you could help them feel their pleasure even more deeply and listen without planning a response. Then share what helps you feel more pleasure and notice how it feels to speak from embodied desire.

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Sending All My Love,
Dr. Nicole

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Dr. Nicole Thompson

Sex and Relationship Psychotherapist

Psychedelic-Assisted Liberation

Clinical Psychology