There was once a boy named Ariel, who was confused about sexuality and about gender. There were many reasons for this. To start with, his mother and father did not get along and most of the time they fought like cats and dogs. Ariel rarely, if ever, saw them kiss or express love for each other. Ariel felt torn between his two parents. To love his mother meant betraying his father. To love his father meant betraying his mother. Ariel's parents didn't mean to put him in the middle of their conflict, but that's what happened. Eventually, his mother won the battle for Ariel's affections and his father withdrew. This created some serious problems for Ariel. Without his father around to teach him how to be a man, Ariel only had his mother as a role model. In addition, his mother's anger, criticism and disdain towards his father led Ariel to believe that being a man was something bad, especially a man like his father. Of course, he couldn't help being like his father, as he was his father's son. As a result, Ariel began to act and look more and more like a girl, until people couldn't tell whether or not he was a boy or a girl. Even his name, Ariel, could be the name of either a boy or a girl.

The years that Ariel was the most androgynous were the years when boys usually start noticing girls and wanting to touch them and have sex with them. This was a difficult and painful time for Ariel, as he wasn't sure how boys were supposed to act. His attempts to make girls like him didn't work out too well, and with each rejection, he became more and more insecure. At this time, Ariel developed some very destructive and limiting beliefs about himself, his sexuality, attractiveness and masculinity. It's said that a person's first sexual experience is very important because it deeply imprints beliefs about one's sexuality. As you might imagine, Ariel's first attempt at sex, at age 13, didn't go very well and imprinted some unhealthy beliefs about impotence and rejection.

There was another reason for Ariel's sexual insecurity. As a young child, his mother put him into something called an oedipal triangle. This meant that his mother wanted him to give her the love she didn't get from his father. Ariel's mother wanted him to be, emotionally if not physically, her lover. All boys want to possess their mothers anyway, but usually find that they can't challenge their fathers for this right and win, and so give up the idea and move into the next normal stage of psychosexual development, which is identification with the father. In Ariel's case, much to his detriment, he won, because Ariel's father abdicated his rightful position. This created a very bad situation for Ariel to be in. Instinctually, every boy knows that being his mother's lover is taboo and wrong. and so Ariel developed a deep sense of guilt. He also unconsciously expected his father to harshly retaliate for this ursurping of his position, and so developed a deep sense of fear. Contributing to this fear was the knowledge that being his mother's lover would keep him fused and enmeshed with his mother and not allow him to develop a separate sense of identity, which is something all boys strive for instinctually and usually attain. These powerful feelings of fear and guilt became attached to Ariel's sexual urges. Any time he felt attracted to or wanted to have sex with a female, the guilt and fear would be right there screwing him up emotionally and sabotaging his chances for sexual fulfillment. Ariel was also screwed up by the fact that he saw all women as his mother and looked for his mother in all women. Because as a child, he had to be his mother's lover, he could never really be her son and there was a huge void in him from the lack of adequate, nurturing mothering that he sought to fill with sex, and a deep well of sadness from the loss of his parents' love and his childhood that he looked to sex to heal. Of course, sex could not do these things and Ariel was miserable. When he had a lover, he was afraid and insecure, and when he didn't have a lover, he felt abandoned and worthless. As a teenager, Ariel developed many addictions to avoid feeling the tremendous emotional pain he was in. He stopped taking care of his body and so became truly unattractive, which invited further rejection which further damaged his self-esteem. He came to hate his body and to feel completely disconnected from it.

When Ariel was 18, having cleaned up his act a bit, he fell in love with a girl, got her pregnant and got married. The girl was even more emotionally damaged than Ariel and the marriage broke up after three years. The girl left Ariel and took their daughter with her. Ariel felt as if his heart had been ripped out of his body. The loss of his wife and daughter was devastating. The pain was too much for Ariel to bear and so he stuffed it all down inside himself. By this time, Ariel had actually become a rather attractive young man, although he still continued to see himself as unattractive. Ariel desperately wanted a lover to fill his void and heal his pain, now added to by the loss of his wife and daughter. Unfortunately, whenever Ariel would start to get close to a young woman, all his fear and pain would rear up and he would do something to sabotage the budding relationship. Ariel was miserable. Eventually, he started having relationships again, but they never lasted long, because Ariel would always become insecure and mess things up. With each failed relationship, Ariel's pain grew more and more, his self-esteem dropped lower and lower, and he became more and more fearful of going out and trying to meet women. And so the times in between relationships got longer and longer. These were the worst times for Ariel-when he didn't have a lover. He felt abandoned and worthless and powerless to change his life. He felt as if he were being punished by some unseen higher force. Part of the problem was that Ariel was still stuck at age 16 emotionally and judged himself with a high school mentality, feeling as though he was laughed at and looked down upon for not having a girlfriend. Ariel felt like a pariah. This pattern continued throughout Ariel's 20s and he was very unhappy. The subject of women, romance and sex rarely left his mind. He was tormented by it. It got to the point where he couldn't b ear to even hear about someone else's romance or sexual experience.

When Ariel was 30, he got married again to a woman he barely knew, talking himself into believing he was "in love." In reality, the marriage was a desperate attempt on Ariel's part to change his unfulfilling life and fill the aching void in his heart and being with a quick fix. He was happy for a time, but problems soon arose as you might imagine. Ariel's wife wanted a child and Ariel consented, against his better judgement and true desires, because he could not imagine going back to the barren, joyless life he had lived before. Consequentially, the "spell" wore off and Ariel was no longer in love with his wife or even attracted to her. Eventually, the marriage broke up, and Ariel was actually relieved rather than heartbroken as with his first marriage, but now he was back to the old problem of being alone with his pain and trying to find a lover, with all the angst that that entailed. Luckily, he met someone rather quickly. A very warm and giving woman whose love did actually help heal Ariel's heart a bit. There were problems with this relationship also, however, as both Ariel and the woman still had a lot of unresolved issues around love and sex within themselves. They broke up and got back together several times, but throughout always remained true friends. This was something new for Ariel. It was the first time he had ever truly felt anything like mature love for a woman. The woman, however, wanted a husband and child, and Ariel did not want another marriage and child, and so eventually they parted for good. Ariel was deeply saddened at the loss of the woman, but once again stuffed his feelings. Shortly after this, Ariel took up with a married woman who was experimenting with the idea of "open marriage." Her husband was "bi-curious" and so to please her, Ariel ended up having menage a trois with the woman and her husband. On reflection, Ariel suspected that this was a manifestation of his childhood oedipal triangle acted out in reality, perhaps in an attempt, on the part of his deeper psyche, to resolve the issue. The relationship ended badly, as the woman was emotionally disturbed, and she rejected Ariel rather harshly. This threw him back into his childhood pain. And so, at age 36, Ariel found himself back where he had been after the breakup of his first marriage. Women came into his life who were interested in him, but Ariel's fear and pain caused him to sabotage everything. Eventually, the opportunities for romance grew fewer and fewer and Ariel grew more and more unhappy and more and more hesitant to go out and try to meet women. Five years passed without a lover-the longest "dry spell" Ariel had ever experienced. And with each passing day, he grew more and more desperate and felt more and more like a total loser. However, a change was brewing behind the scenes. Throughout Ariel's adult life, he had been working falteringly but steadily towards understanding himself and working out his sexual problems and at age 41, he had a breakthrough!