How do you live a meaningful life?
A meaningful life is one where you focus on the things that feel important to you.
They don’t have to feel important to other people. In fact, they could be things other people mock.
Meet Bill
My client Bill, a super nice guy in his early 40s, had a string of interesting if not super profitable sales jobs. He’d start off each one pumped and eager, but within a few months, he was bored and stressed out, so he’d update his resume and start looking for another job. Now his wife was leaving him because his career was going nowhere while hers — through years of hard work, sacrifice, and steady climbing — was taking off. “You’re a loser!” she shouted at him.
He was so depressed he became chronically unemployed. He turned down a couple of job offers because he thought they were beneath him. He failed the interviews for jobs he wanted. He didn’t blame his wife for leaving him. She earned three times as much as he did and she was three years younger than him.
He told me that he’d only had one real dream: to be a painter. But since he was a kid, everyone laughed when he told them his dream. Being an artist means poverty, they said. You can’t raise a family, they said. You’ll end up homeless. You’ll get so desperate you’ll cut off your ear, like that Van Gogh guy. Is that what you want?
So he “grew up,” he said, abandoned his dream, met and married a hard-working girl. Now he was trying his best to be the kind of man his relatives and his wife expected him to be.
Bill Was Stuck in a Shame Trap
It may seem ironic that Bill originally consulted with me because he was troubled by his foot fetish far more than his life choices. But his sexual shame washed into every corner of his life. He was almost as ashamed of being an artist as he was about having a foot fetish. They both made him feel like he was too soft, not manly enough.
His wife disapproved of his fetish and while she occasionally indulged him, he sensed that she was silently judging, as if she was doing him a big favor. He already felt like a freak for having a fetish, so the undercurrent of hostility in his wife’s attitude made him stop asking her for it. Then he realized that without doing his fetish, his sex drive went down and, alas, so did his erections.
He began sneaking foot porn on the Internet before coming to bed, hoping the images would help him get through intercourse. It worked for a while but then his wife figured it out and flew into a rage. “You need your fetish more than you need me,” she said. Bill denied it yet felt more broken than ever before. That’s when he contacted me.
I knew that freeing him from shame could open the door to a meaningful life.
We worked through his history with his fetish. Even as a young teen, he knew he wasn’t like other boys. He wasn’t obsessed with girls’ breasts the way other boys were. He thought that was weird and rude. He preferred looking at their feet, sneaking shy glances whenever he could.
By his early 20s, he needed to do more than look. He needed to kiss them. To lick them. To know how the toes and the soles tasted in his mouth. He wanted to immerse himself in the magical sensuality of her feet.
His wife’s caustic criticisms only made him hungrier — and more ashamed of having the hunger. She was saying out loud all the negative things he had privately told himself: that he was born weird, that something was fundamentally wrong with him, that he would never be a “normal” man.
The journey to self-acceptance
I had my work cut out for me! But I’ve done this work so many times, with dozens of different fetishes — from common ones like foot fetishism and adult diaper lovers to rarer fetishes like scat and enemas — that I knew I could guide Bill out of his despair. How? By letting him know that he was one of the millions and millions of people around the world who adore feet, shoes, and hundreds of variations on the foot/shoe theme.
We took a careful inventory of his secret fetish life and examined the pieces. Together, we created a clear picture of where he’d gone wrong and what he needed to change.
He learned, for example, that the worst times in his life emotionally often coincided with a “purge” of his secret porn stash. At the same time, he realized that his boredom at work wasn’t ADHD or self-sabotage, as his wife claimed: he was just BORED. It wasn’t the work his heart craved!
He learned that he was not a freak but simply a sexually unconventional person, which made him as normal as any of the other hundreds of millions of us around the globe.
Shame-busting goes beyond the bedroom
But there was more than just shame for his fetish. He had also allowed his family to shame him into abandoning his true vocation.
It was time for Bill to let go of the shame he’d carried with him since his teens. I helped him accept that being different can be a good thing. Nobody likes cookie-cutter people anyway.
He realized that if he found someone (or many someones) who loved him as he was it could be a path to a meaningful life. The key was letting people know just who he was and what he wanted out of life. He was a man with fetish needs and a need to create art. Anyone who couldn’t accept both of these major pieces of who he is probably wasn’t worth his romantic energy.
He showed me some of his paintings. I was so impressed by their originality, I encouraged him to let his artistic light shine. He agreed. He took photos of his art and began sending portfolios to galleries in hopes someone would take his work seriously. He used the sales and marketing skills he learned at his boring jobs to promote his work successfully on social media, drawing online buyers and fans.
His success raised his self-esteem and his sexual self-esteemed. He vowed never to let anyone into his life who looked down on him for the work he did or the type of sex he loved.
Now the man’s got mojo
Bill was about as unhappy as a man could be when he first walked through my door. His life had no meaning for him, and that meant he had no mojo.
Today, he regularly shows his work at local galleries, has a few art awards and positive reviews under his belt. He isn’t rich (yet) but he is doing okay.
He sought out kink-friendly women and discovered new levels of satisfaction from finally getting to explore his fetish without shame or criticism. Those positive experiences empowered him to jump the final hurdle in his healing process. He felt respected, as a man and an artist. He felt accepted for who he was. He had found what made life meaningful for him — to make art and have great fetish sex. It seemed so obvious in retrospect but it took him almost 30 years to get there. It made Bill feel whole for the first time in his life.
Now the man’s got mojo.
Sometimes sexual shame, as Bill had, can block you from achieving your definition of a meaningful life. If you’re suspecting that a sexual hang-up may be holding you back, email me to schedule a session to talk about it.
