With great, great respect, I differ with more than one thing you said in
your post re:

<If this
argument were true, then breathing would feel great.  It doesn't.  It
doesn't feel like anything.>

Unless you are having difficulty breathing, that is. Very stressful in a
lot of conditions. One can even accept and get used to some such
conditions. Then, after the breathing compromise is lifted, breathing
healthily really does feel great.

< Same as breastfeeding for most people -- it
isn't painful, it isn't pleasurable, it is just something you do.>

Or give up doing if you have no positive support, too easy alternatives,
and the pain is more than you decide you can bear. One cannot voluntarily
give up breathing, so the two just don't compare in my book.

I have had good reason to dissect my own reactions in retrospect. They
are part of who I am and what I do to this day.

After 3 such "throwing in the towel at 5 days" experiences 45+ years ago,
LLL was then available for my 4th try. After they got me over the pain
hump (and it took 4 weeks), I began to notice that each time I fed,
within a few minutes after I began, I realized I was experiencing, each
time, a new kind of emotional feeling I had never remembered being
consistently conscious of before.

I could only term it "a glow of adoration". I felt it come on and spread
over my consciousness for a good while, as if I adored the whole world,
my home, my family, and especially this soft, cuddly bit of humanity at
my breast.

And gradually I began to realize this was having an  entirely different
effect on my relationship with that child, the other children, and my
husband.

Having been brought up to always strive to be a super achiever, it had
been such a blow to my ego, especially after the 3rd failed attempt, to
have wanted to do what was supposed to be the best, and not to have been
able to "handle it". All I could do was to rationialize that I had done
the best I knew how at the time.

But after experiencing the consistent, strong pleasant emotion, I
remember I began feeling that I personally had been severely cheated out
of a great deal with my first three children. I loved them all dearly,
but I definitely felt cheated for not having had that emotional
experience when they were babies.

I do not remember associating that feeling with the let-down reflex,
though memories of that after the first 2 weeks escape me. I obviously
never had an OALD or I'd remember. On a personal level, I have trouble
with the new research that states, or at least implies this is 100% due
to the effect of oxytocin.

I remember reading a '50's Life magazine reprint from LLL that described
a policeman with a pituitary tumor who felt very nurturing till it was
removed, and of laboratory animals where the males would make nests and
cuddle the young after being given prolactin shots. In light of that
information, I decided that the surge of prolactin stimulated by each
breastfeeding session must have been responsible for that feeling
flooding over me each time.

< When mothers feel physical pleasure from
breastfeeding, it ISN'T SEXUAL.>

While I concur 100%, and the exact opposite can be said as well, that is
not to say that the emotions must always be mutually exclusive.

It is difficult to discuss sexuality in depth without inadvertent
self-revelation of things one would not want in the headlines of the NY
Times. At the risk of being too personal, it has been my own, long
thought out experience that breastfeeding can bring emotional pleasure
from the sheer chemistry it stimulates, and that these same nerve
pathways and glandular responses can, if so desired by the couple, be
used as part of sexual expression and produce those same emotions. And
that it does not correspond to the experience of orgasm or its timing.

My sample of one, in which I was my own control for 8 years prior to
added dimensions after a positive breastfeeding experience.

Jean
**************
K. Jean Cotterman RNC, IBCLC
Dayton, Ohio USA

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