I’ve been meditating and continuing to struggle with my tickle fetish in various ways. On the bright side, I have discovered some pretty cool things:
1) Everything I want to do to girls, I actually want done to me.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve hated being tickled. The feeling I’ve always had when I’m tickled is one of being “violated.”
Lately one of my most common fantasies is of having my girlfriend lie flat on her stomach with her bare feet hanging off the edge of a bed, with me sitting on her ankles so she can’t get away and tickling her upturned soles with both hands. When I imagine this scenario, I feel lustful, energy rushing to my groin and the tense, anxious restlessness of wanting to get off.
When I imagine the same scenario with roles reversed, her sitting on my ankles and tickling my feet, I feel aroused, but it’s a freeing feeling. I feel myself opening up, the muscles around my hips relax, and I even feel traces of joy.
I think my having felt ‘violated’ was a reaction against what I knew I was doing to girls all along: objectifying them, using them for my pleasure, demoting them from their true identity as goddesses and angels on earth to a tool of my gratification, like a back scratcher. On some level I’ve always been aware of this, and upon being tickled myself I would instinctively interpret it as being ‘demoted’ in the same way.
So to allow myself to be tickled, is to give girls back what I had been trying to take. It’s not that I’m allowing them to “take revenge” on me and justice is served that way, but I am giving myself the opportunity to feel what I’ve made others feel, so that I can have compassion for them instead of seeing them as potential outlets for my insanity. I’m directly paying back the karma of tickling girls.
Jesus once said something like, “If you look upon a woman with lust, already you have committed adultery with her in your mind.”
So for everything I fantasize about doing to girls, it could be very healing to ask my girlfriend to do them to me.
2) It’s all about guilt and pleasure issues.
In my studies of spiritual and psychological stuff, I’ve learned that guilt is basically the antidote to pleasure. If you want to make yourself immune to feeling pleasure, feel guilty.
There are several reasons why I may be a particularly guilt-ridden person:
1) I’m Jewish
2) I’m an INFP as profiled by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personality type categorizer thing. The acronym stands for Introverted iNtuitive Feeling Perceiver. I read somewhere that we’re likely to feel responsible for more than our share, notice our defects more than our gifts, notice what’s missing from a given situation as opposed to what’s present, etc.
3) I have been addicted to porn for almost ten years (and I’m 19).
4) I’ve always been expected to perform well in school, but I’ve never given it my best shot due to tons of inner resistance to it after having “work hard” pounded into my head every day, so I have an insecurity complex about being lazy, which I am, so I feel guilty about that all the time.
5) I was pretty mean to my little brother for years, while he’s done nothing but look up to me and seek my approval. Hm, I bet that was a part of it. I hated the part of myself that seeks approval, so I rejected him for seeking my approval. Sibling issues; man, I haven’t even really begun to look into those.
Anyway, so I’m a guilty guy. And the more guilt you have, the more “blocks” up you have to experiencing pleasure. Guilt is an attempt to punish yourself and buy God’s forgiveness by saying, “Look how much I’m suffering for what I’ve done.” This allows you to continue doing the things you feel guilty about. “As long as I’m paying for it, I don’t have to change,” the ego believes. So the guiltier you are, the higher quality chocolate, the hotter girls, the more expensive clothes, the more alcohol, etc. you need in order to penetrate your own blocks to pleasure.
I discovered early on that the easiest, most fun, intense way for me to get through my blocks to pleasure was masturbation. Soon after, I discovered fantasy. Oh boy, what a deadly combo. Then one day I went online (AOL 3.0, the good ol’ days) and did a search for “tickling.” I was amazed and delighted and transfixed.
“I’m not alone!”
“So this is why I love tickling!”
“Wow, there are limitless pictures and video clips of my exact fantasies being played out!”
It was the happy day to end all happy days.
Oh man, what a cool sentence. It describes the situation so perfectly.
Anyway, another important effect of allowing myself to be tickled is that I’m allowing myself to feel pleasure. Being tickled when you want to be is pleasureable. Laughing? Being touched and played with by another human being? Pleasureable. I’m healing the hole in my soul that I’ve been trying to fill by tickling others. Perhaps I’ve even been trying to live vicariously through the girls I tickle, like “Since I’m not allowed to feel pleasure, I’ll get pleasure through them by forcing them to feel pleasure!” Somewhere along the line I forgot I just want to be tickled and be free to laugh like a little kid.
Old habits die hard.
