Come As You Are: Revised and Updated: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life

The way to get through is to stay very still, to notice all the aspects of your identity that were tied to the lies you were told, to notice all the grief you feel in letting go of the self you spent your life trying to be. Notice, too, the anger you feel at having been lied to for so long. Notice all of these with nonjudgment. Allow them to be tru

When the map doesn’t fit the terrain, the map is wrong, not the terrain.

Ultimately, the “you” that is consciously aware of being a “self,” an individual distinct from other individuals, is a composite self, a hologram built of these multiple motivational and cognitive processes all engaging with the environment and with each other, in a noisy, messy, multidirectional tug-of-war. As a person capable of desiring multiple

The central approach to orgasm difficulties is to change the goal by making pleasure the goal, not orgasm.

Desire is pleasure in context.

“It’s like one day I just decided that it was all bullshit. Who are they to tell me I’m not amazing exactly as I am?”

What would really happen if you stopped running from yourself or beating yourself up? What would happen if you put down the whip you’ve been flogging yourself with for decades? When you stop beating yourself up—when you stop reinjuring yourself—what happens is… you start to heal.

We can’t understand women’s sexual satisfaction without thinking about body satisfaction, just as we can’t understand women’s sexual pleasure without thinking about attachment and stress.

Women have cultural permission to criticize ourselves, but we are punished if we praise ourselves, if we dare to say that we like ourselves the way we are.