Sexual Containment
The Unconscious Effect of Leaky Sexual Energy
Energetic containment, collectively, is a fairly new concept, as is sexual containment. Energetic containment is the idea that incorporates an awareness of the fact that we don’t have to physically touch another person, in order to impact them with our energy. Energetic containment, is a conscious awareness of the type of energy we are expressing or holding in our field, as well as a sense of responsibility around how we direct it using our attention or intentions.
For example, if we happen to be holding anger or rage in our energetic field, and we express some of that in the direction of a child – that emotional energy actually impacts the child and has a painful affect. We actually inflict a sense of pain when we send raging energy in the direction of another person (or even a pet.)
To be energetically contained, one must have a level of emotional intelligence – an awareness of which energies are being expressed in one’s field – what feelings are coming up? This awareness must be there, to create some space between the feeling, and a reaction or response.
We can feel rage or anger, be embodied in that feeling and energy, without consciously or unconsciously weaponizing it and directing it at someone else. This is the development of emotional intelligence. Unfortunately, today, most people are very disconnected from their own emotional experience, and often the only way they know how to process their feelings is to direct that energy in the direction of another person. This is what we call emotional abuse – when we use another person as a receptacle for our pain and emotional energy.
Also in the realm of energetic containment is the containment of sexual energy. A lot of people today, especially men, have sexual energy that is running rampant, completely uncontained. Many are addicted to driving with their sexual energy, often fueled by porn addiction and sex addiction.
In the same way that we can feel emotional energy when it is projected at us, we also feel sexual energy when it is sent in our direction. When we feel someone else’s sexual energy enter our field, our body often has a sexual response of it’s own. We feel that energy, and our body automatically responds to it. Some experience this as a feeling of attraction or magnetism. Others may experience it as a very dangerous and violating feeling, based on their previous experiences in life.
That same experience that we have of the feeling of someone’s eyes boring into the back of our head when we are receiving focused attention from someone across the room? We are literally experiencing the feeling of the other person’s energy entering our energetic field. We can feel what is in our field. This same experience extends to sexual attention and sexual attraction. We feel it energetically.
Sexual energetic containment is the practice of feeling and noticing a sense of attraction, but holding it in one’s field, and not mindlessly sending it in the direction of a person who has not consented to receive it. Leaky sexual energy is a total lack of containment, and zero responsibility taken for the affect of one’s sexualized attention.
What is not discussed and recognized enough is how this can affect children. If a father has leaky sexual energy, it is essentially a denser energy that is ever-present in the home, running rampant. Young children are often energetically connected to their parents, and children are usually very sensitive to feeling energy, so this sexual energy inevitably permeates their field.
As a young child, one is not aware of being able to feel energy that is sourced from outside oneself. There is only the awareness of what is happening in the physical body, and there is usually belief that it begins and ends with self. Children are born with natural ways of processing and moving energy from the body – they use their voice and volume to move energy, they move their bodies vigorously to move energy, etc. They are naturally contained in their energetic expression because their body just knows how to move energy.
It is conditioning and social programming that teaches us to quell these natural energetic instincts and utilize others as targets for emotional or sexual energy, instead.
When a young child’s field is permeated with sexual energy, their body naturally has a sexual response. Just like a child knows how to move energy via the voice or moving the body, a child can very quickly realize that we can move sexual energy through our body by creating pleasurable, orgasmic release.
A lot of young children get labeled as “hypersexual” when they begin to masturbate at a young age and seem to be obsessed with it. This is seen as problematic because, while exploratory masturbation is common at a young age, it’s not really “normal” for a young child to be experiencing such a high degree of energetic charge in their bodies that would lead to obsessive release. That usually comes on with puberty.
In this case, in a house full of leaky sexual energy, a young child is often not regularly seeking sexual release because their own sexuality is out of control. They are seeking release to alleviate the feeling of sexual charge in their bodies, and that sexual charge actually originates in a parent’s energetic field.
The child is simply having a natural response to empathically feeling someone else’s leaky sexual energy. This can often lead to addiction to sexual energy at a very young age, as the body becomes programmed to experience that regular sexual release.
This is often coupled with a tremendous amount of confusion and shame around sexuality, and may also involve anger or shame, mixed in with the sexual energy. It creates a very confusing energetic experience for a young child, and they usually just respond to it as best they can, physically, unless they are properly shamed out of doing that, as well.
Leaky sexual energy is essentially a state of being without energetic boundaries. It is usually paired with lack of emotional containment, as well. This all stems from a lack of recognition that the leakage of these energies into the energy fields of others causes harm, and is ultimately abusive.
The Importance of holding Sexual Containment in your home
Taking responsibility for the affect of one’s sexual energy is not necessarily easy. It requires taking the seat of the observer, and creating consciousness around your thoughts, and where you are sending your energy. It requires awareness of one’s ability to create energetic boundaries, in the first place. It requires recognition of our power to direct our energy in a way that affects another.
For a lot of people, it is quite a leap to grasp the concept of energetic self-responsibility, and the idea of taking ownership of one’s impact in other’s experiences. Society and culture today is built around disconnection from this idea, that we are so intimately connected, invisibly, in the space between us. The idea that we express communications that move beyond our bodies and carry an actual physical impact. For many, the idea that we can cause actual impact and harm with invisible energy is still a foreign concept. There is so much support out there to show that so much of our communication is energetic.
A child brought up in a home filled with leaky sexual energy will develop a very warped relationship to their own sexuality. Sometimes this translates to learning to use the expression of sexual energy to claim power. Sometimes this translates to complete shutdown of sexual energy. And a myriad of experiences in between.
What is especially important to realize is that a child with this experience is not able to create any mental or physical separation between their parent’s sexuality and their own developing sexuality. They are inevitably confused and combined, and it takes conscious effort later in life to create separation – also known as individuation.
A child who is not able to develop in a space of energetic safety, becomes an adult who only knows how to reach outside of themselves in an effort to create a sense of safety, and they have to learn how to create their own internal sense of safety later in life. This often means confronting a lot of pain and trauma in order to reconnect with themselves and their own bodies.
A child who is not able to establish healthy boundaries with a parent, will continue into adult life without knowing how to establish healthy boundaries. It becomes a skill that must be learned, and until someone realizes that it is something they need to learn, a lot of pain and trauma and confusion can occur in life and in relationships.
The consequences of lack of sexual containment – leaky sexual energy – can be really devastating to a child’s development of both their sexuality, and their identity. Leaky sexual energy creates an environment that doesn’t feel safe. It feels like violation. A repeated sense of violation leads to the inability to establish a baseline of safety.
Energetic containment is healthy, and an important aspect of being conscious of oneself and one’s impact on others. It’s also a concept that is newly evolving, that many people are not even aware of. It begins with the recognition that we as humans are communicating and interacting with each other energetically, and we truly feel both emotional energy and sexual energy that is directed our way. It is important to learn how to create these boundaries, and to learn how to clean up leaky sexual energy.