Mature Sexuality and Assertiveness

Maturing sexually is the last part of the developmental process. After that you just go on growing in potential. Mature sexuality comes with growing up and separating from your parents, but particularly your parent of the opposite sex. This happens at a time when you take up your power and assert yourself and move out into the world as an independent person, capable of interdependence. If your parent of the opposite sex is immature sexually, you will not be able to separate, take up your power and assertiveness or mature sexually. What you will do instead is rebel. This is not mature but adolescent – and eventually self-destructive. You will achieve only pseudo-independence.

If your parent of the opposite sex is not mature sexually, they will be seductive. This is immature and will not allow you to safely become sexually mature yourself. You will have to steer clear of them to an extent that prevents you from developing the ability for intimacy. So you may grow up being able to act out sexually, but this does not mean you are achieving intimacy, or mature sexual relationships. If this is so, there will always be an element of dependency in your relationships.

If your contra sexual parent is immature sexually, then so will your same sex parent be, otherwise they wouldn’t be with that partner. If this is so, your same sex parent will also be jealous of you, another undermining factor in your mature sexual and assertive development. You will be looking to your partner for the recognition of your sexuality that you didn't get from your parents, while being afraid to own it for yourself.

So how does this dependency work in your relationships? It’s the pattern of strong man and weak woman. The man has to be strong to play the role the woman needs him to play so that she can play her role, of weak woman, needing the strong man. In other words, he has to play her father (who was weak) and she had to play his mother (who didn’t take up her power). That means he has to stifle his vulnerable, receptive qualities, as he had to do with his seductive mother and his jealous father. And she has to stifle her strong, assertive qualities, as she had to do with her jealous mother and her seductive father. In this way neither of you can achieve intimacy in the relationship, nor mature sexuality. You are both dependent on one another to maintain the roles you play in order not to expose the weakness of the man and the repressed power of the woman. More so, the man has adopted the weak, probably ‘macho’ model of his father and the woman the ‘seductive’ model of her mother.

You are, in fact, both weak and unassertive and neither owning the full power of your sexuality and assertiveness, nor your vulnerability and receptiveness. You cannot open your hearts to love or passion, although you may experience rage. I call this rage oedipal rage, as opposed to the narcissistic rage that babies feel. The situation ends up with the man becoming impotent and the woman bossy and neither is happy in the relationship or with the other person, who fails to be what they want them to be and what they are unwilling to be for themselves. Their oedipal rage, their adolescent rebellion, becomes self destructive and destructive to the relationship.