GROWING YOUNGER ON THE INSIDE

AS YOUR BODY AGES ON THE OUTSIDE

At seventy-two, I am less and less interested in the exterior of people’s lives – what their bodies, clothes, houses, vacations, or social media images look like.  I pay more attention now to how their eyes twinkle, how their voice dances, how their laugh breaks out across a room, whether both children and adults enjoy their company.  When the people showing these signs of vitality are old, I really pay attention.  When I sense a fountain of youth, I don’t just want to take a drink, I want my own fountain.

Despite frailty and senility, incontinence and immobility, acute and chronic pains, or long years outliving their mates, siblings, and old friends, some older people never talk about these frustrating things.  They change the subject to more positive things outside themselves they are more interested in.  This makes them a pleasure and a privilege to visit or take care of.

I’ve been asking people like this to share with me how they live this way.  I’ve learned that some blessed few believe they are actually growing younger on the inside faster than they are growing older on the outside.  I can see it in their lives.  Besides the obvious devotion to keeping their bodies and brains in shape, here is what they have taught me:

  1. Stay open-minded. Educate your prejudices away.  Ask people what they think about public things, and listen – especially when they don’t agree with you.  Whatever they believe or believe in, try to understand why.  Keep learning new things, and telling others what you’re learning.  Tell people what you aren’t understanding, and ask for help.
  2. Stay open-hearted. Take an active interest in your loved ones’ personal lives.  Ask about them, care about them, and lift them up in your conversations and prayers.  Avoid newsfeeds and filter bubbles that are pessimistic, hateful, fearful, or biased toward vested interests.  Make sure the people and media you pay attention to broaden and deepen your circle of concern.
  3. Embrace mystery and wonder. Spending time exploring nature is great for this.  So is researching questions you can’t answer.  Don’t think you understand why things happen.  Keep a childlike amazement and curiosity about you.
  4. Tell the truth with kindness. Children do this, and we love them for it.
  5. Be a little naughty and adventurous. Say and do things people don’t expect from you.
  6. Keep growing your sense of humor. Aging itself is hysterical.  Give nicknames to your character flaws, and ask people to tease you about them.  Build a treasury of funny stories, and learn to tell them well.  Learn from your mistakes, but enjoy when you have embarrassed yourself – everybody else does!
  7. Embrace your lack of influence. Use reverse psychology here:  don’t give uninvited opinions or advice.  People are more likely to ask for them if you don’t offer.
  8. Keep a balance of work, rest and play. If your life’s work seems mostly behind you, volunteer to stay busy thinking of others.  Make sure your leisure life truly re-creates you and others.  These things will naturally help you sleep well.
  9. Don’t sweat the small stuff, or the big stuff either. Avoid news and conversations that are biased, fearful, hateful, or pessimistic.  Let God handle the future of the world, and your family.  Don’t spend much of yourself on solving problems you didn’t create, unless you’re resolving most of the ones you did (like your health, family, or job).
  10. Stay up with technology. It is the love language of young people.  We need to stay in touch with them, so ask younger people to help you here.  It will keep the doors in your soul open to the outside world, and to younger generations.
  11. Keep seeking new spiritual experiences. Growing younger at heart faster than our bodies are aging requires somewhat of a miracle even to imagine.  Many of the best descriptions and examples I’ve found of this reverse-aging process are in the Bible.  The man-child King David believed people could “still bear fruit in their old age, remaining fresh and green.”  Jesus told his followers to humble themselves to become like little children.  The apostle Paul got it too, advising us:  “Do not lose heart.  Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.”  Traditionally, the best ways to renew this spiritual new life from within are prayer, worship Bible study fellowship and service.
  12. Keep seeking new sensual experiences. Try new places, foods, music, and art with people who enjoy them.  Find ways of giving affection to your closest family and friends in ways they enjoy, and at times when you are generous enough to give without expecting or needing anything in return.
  13. Plan future conversations. Use your spare time to recall what others are doing and feeling.  Rehearse asking them about all this when they call or visit, which they’ll do more often.
  14. Downsize and entertain. Don’t hoard, bequeath.  Keep room around you for visitors.  Minimize artifacts to the parts of your past that only interest you.  Invite people over for their sakes.  Plan how to bless them when they come.
  15. Use medicine as a last resort for pain and dysfunction. Instead of medicating your symptoms, first try exercise, physical therapy, dietary change, attitude adjustment, prayer, counseling, and other lifestyle changes. Remember that over time, medicines usually create both side effects and dependency, and lose some of their effectiveness.
  16. Don’t talk about pain, illness, or disability. Complain about your aches and pains only in the doctor’s office.  Everywhere else, ignore them, or joke about them.
  17. Plan for your death to minimize problems you leave behind for others. Minimize the worries, decisions, and unwanted possessions your death dumps in your loved ones’ laps.  If you’re afraid of death, tell a pastor, not your family.  And if you’re looking forward to heaven, share that with your family and friends.

The funniest description I’ve found of growing younger inside came from one of the framers of our Constitution, Samuel Johnson.  When someone asked him about his own constitution one day walking along the streets of Philadelphia, he said, “I have never been better in my life!  But this old house I’ve been living in for 84 years is falling apart!”

Dr. Paul Schmidt is a psychologist life coach in Louisville and Lexington, blogging and podcasting at mynewlife.com.

 

 

Overthrowing the Tyranny of the Orgasm

When it comes to the experience of sexual climax, many people feel some performance pressure.  This mental and emotional strain has been called the tyranny of the orgasm.  How would you know if this tension is harming your love life?  You could ask yourself these questions:

These pressures are fueled by various fears, expectations, or entitlements we often pick up from our culture.  Many people harbor tensions like these in their subconscious, without ever realizing it.  The longer we keep these thoughts out of mind, the more pressure they generate.   Why is that?  We feel the pressure to fulfill the hope or to avoid the fear, plus the pressure to avoid admitting we harbor such thoughts.

When hopes and fears like the ones listed above come into a love relationship, people can’t enjoyplayful, spontaneous sex.  Instead, they often resent their partners, for using them, or for depriving them.  We are made so that all pressure makes orgasm more difficult.  As a result, many of these couples find themselves neglecting warm or positive exchanges, afraid of awakening desires they consider insatiable.  It is tragicomic, like people leaving for a vacation who can’t relax and enjoy the trip until they get there, or worse still, until they get home.  It is sad when people focus on arriving at orgasm, and miss most of the adventure of the journey.

Where do we get these toxic fears, expectations, and entitlements?  They come from our contemporary media – movies, TV shows, ads, social media, and most especially from the porn industry.  All paint enticing but deceptively misleading pictures of recreational sex.  Portrayals of recreational life without showing relationship responsibilities are everywhere on television programs and ads, and throughout social media.  Portraying sex without relationship responsibilities is what pornography does.  It pimps out our genitals to hijack our brains.  Electronic brain scans of people on meth and cocaine look astonishingly similar to brains during orgasm.  A romantic sexual climax is the natural high God wants couples to have be having together in private, to protect, celebrate, and consummate their love.

Bob Dylan was right when he told us that “everybody’s got to serve somebody.”  I’ve only seen one power that can set us free from the tyranny of the orgasm without leading us into bondage to something else – believing in the liberating love of our Creator.  We need to believe that God is the author of all freedom, not the push behind legalism, perfectionism, or performance pressure.

After many years trying not to think about God and sex at the same time, my clients typically have quite the struggle trying to even imagine giving their sex lives over to God.  The Bible sees sexual pleasure as something God made for husbands and wives to enjoy sharing with each other.  Is it possible to be loving God, the mate, and ourselves as well, all at the same time, during sex?  Yes, even during sex, the mind can imagine a triangle with God at the top, and each partner as corners of the base, giving and receiving simultaneously, with both God and each other.  A married person can invite herself or her partner into this mindset by making a triangle with her index fingers touching at the top, and her thumbs touching below.

Trying to be aware of God and lovemaking at the same time is hard for many to learn.  It can be like two dogs fighting.  One dog fights for pleasure, dominance, instant gratification, and control over the partner.  The other fights for love, cooperation, gratitude, and acceptance of both partners as is.  One wants to be the top dog, the master of the partner.  The other dog wants to submit, and be mastered by more intelligent love and discipline.

Which dog wins?  It’s always the one we’ve been feeding the most, the most attention, devotion, nourishment, and protection.  We all have an ego, a dog that fights for us to have the most pleasure and the least pain in the short run.  We all have a soul, a heart of hearts, and when God lives there, it wants the most love and joy and peace for the most people over the long haul.  That dog has incredibly good sex, so feed it!

Verses 12 and 13 of 1st Corinthians 6 remind us of how we rationalize comfort food, and how addictive it can become.  We tell ourselves that the stomach is made for food, and we have the right eat anything we want.  Then we realize that not everything is good for us, and that we don’t want to be controlled by anything.  These same dynamics apply to sex.

When we are craving sex or love, we can yield ourselves to the One who designed us to both give and receive at the same time.  This surrendering trust is expressed practically in verses 6 and 7 of Philippians 4:  “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.”  Why would we do that with our sexual requests?  Because of the promised results:  “The peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”  More peace means less pressure, and more orgasms.

If you are still too anxious to invite God into your sexuality, maybe first you need to learn how you can drain the tension out of your sex life.  You can do it by releasing pressure into other activities that are part of the sex drive.  For example, you can find other ways to release tension, to feel more attractive, to express love, to feel self‑esteem, to get a spiritual high, to feel powerful and free, to get energized and excited, to feel close and intimate, to share affection, to feel younger, to be charmed, to make someone else happy, and to shut out the world for a while, just to name a few of the good things that loving, faithful sex does.  This whole process of rechanneling the sex drive into more public activities is called sublimation, and you can find tips and insights about this in another article here in this section of my blog.

A good way to gain power over the tyrant is to talk back to it, out loud.  Call BS on its lies, and speak out loud the truth of what you believe.  Hearing your voice loudly when the tyrant suddenly doesn’t have a real voice draws your attention back to what is true, and gives you a good feeling about it.

After all, the tyrant of orgasm is a big liar.  One of the biggest and most common lies you may hear in your head (or push down into your subconscious) sounds like this:   If I go without an orgasm for too long, or if my mate does, unspeakably terrible things will happen.  The addicted mind yells out prophecies of doom – you will suffer, it warns, from obsessions, compulsions, insomnia, insanity, infidelity, divorce, resentment, stonewalling, inflammation of fantasy, and acting out sexually in ways that would be more harmful and shameful them ever.  That is not true.  That’s just the tyrant blaming no sex for all the harm that selfish and hidden sex has already been doing.

As a faith-based alternative, we can approach God, our same-sex friends, and our partner with more thoughtful communications and actions.  In this way when it is necessary, we can be called into a fast from orgasm, like during absence, illness, or misunderstandings with our mate.  Only then can we realize that all the frightening outcomes we just mentioned will actually subside.  Just the way our cravings for junk food subside when we devote ourselves to extra prayer during a fast, the craving for orgasm subsides.  When we trust God to bless us through praying in solitude and through working on our love relationships, we find our lust and self-pity give way to love and self-fulfillment.

In mental health circles, the word dysfunctional refers to people and practices that prevent our emotional needs from being met.  Many of us were taught by our dysfunctional families in childhood that we should never express our painful emotions, or even feel them.  Years later when we grow up and leave those homes, our addicted, tyrannized minds find ways to carry out the old traditions.  The tyranny of the orgasm commands the mind’s fantasies and the body to make our genitals trigger a flood of endorphins in the brain.  Doing this totally short-circuits the heart’s longings to express its needs and emotions.

What needs are we talking about here?  We are all made to need what I call A-pills – Acceptance, Attention, Affection, Amusement, Approval, Appreciation, and Affirmation.  As rude as a big bully in middle school who wants to take all your A-pills for himself, the tyranny of the orgasm pushes us around with threats, insults, and other intimidations we hear in our heads.  All of them are lies, trying to convince us to isolate ourselves physically or at least emotionally.  It wants us to act out our needs alone in fantasy instead of talking our needs out in reality, in relationship with God and our loved ones.

Pride lies to us.  It tells us that if we express our needs in words, our loved ones won’t meet these needs.  The lie of lust says that only this one experience of orgasm can satisfy our longings.  The truth is that pushing for orgasm this way pushes God and others away from us emotionally, and guarantees that the needs of our heart will not be met.  After self-administered orgasms, our longings actually just go to sleep for a short while, only to come back stronger than ever next time.  The truth is that when we learn how to express our needs in words to God and others, we are much morelikely to get our needs met.

Questions?

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Dr. Paul F. Schmidt