When There's No Sex With The One You Love
How Sexuality Works: The Dual Control Model
Sexuality has a brake and an accelerator. If the brake is down, no matter how hard we push on the accelerator, we are going nowhere.
And if we keep pushing down on the brake, and still try to push forwards, because of coercion from our partner, or inner coercion from ourselves (I'll just do it to make them happy, or for the sake of peace), we develop an aversion to sex with our partner.
Sexual aversion is one of the most difficult things to deal with.
And because it is systemic, it has to be deal with as a team, as a couple.
It doesn't matter how good you are as friends, and how many good other things are in the relationship. These good things are typically really helpful in our lives and in our relationship. They could even be accelerators, which inspire closeness, and bring up the desire for physical connection and emotional intimacy. And we want to cherish these things.
However, no matter how good our life as a couple is in other areas, if the brakes are on in areas which affect our sex life we are going nowhere.
The Brakes can seem unrelated to sexual intimacy. These can include the areas of being criticized, feeling emotionally wounded by our partner, feeling not connected to them, or repeatedly mis-attuned with our partner - without repair or emotional re-attunement...physical boundary issues of having sex without clear consent...affairs...preferring different types of sex and wanting different ways of connecting...all of these things can act as brakes in the relationship, and they need to be dealt with on an individual couple basis, to be really worked with and resolved, so that the sexual side of relationship has the freedom to flourish and bloom.
Learning the Mindset of Pleasure-Oriented Connection
Couples need to learn that the mindset that goal-oriented sex (where intercourse is the goal) can lead to a very limited view of what sex is, and damage a relationship, where as pleasure-oriented physical and emotional connection is a mindset which can take a couple on a journey where each person can find their brakes and accelerators, find what they are truly willing for, and begin to get some traction around creating the sexual and emotional intimacy they are truly willing for.
When you are with someone who is truly willing, you know it, in your heart.
Real embodied pleasure and connection goes beyond us having sex to really being with each other on another level. This is the kind of connection most of us really want. And adopting a pleasure-oriented mindset, which tunes in to your own body, your own desires, your own pleasure, and opens out the landscape of your heart safely and playfully to your partner, and they with you, makes this beautiful connection truly possible.
Great Sex Doesn't Always Require Desire
One thing which amazed me when I first discovered it, was the fact that great sex also doesn't require desire. Some people experience no desire whatsoever, and still come to have a great sex life. What they do have, is genuine willingness.
If a person starts with what they are truly willing for, this is a great place to start.
There is a fine-tuning around what really turns a person on, and what they feel pleasure doing, and are willing for, which helps, when a person asks themselves, what do they feel pleasure for? It could be holding hands. It could be a hug. It could be for when they feel safe and connected only then things can begin to happen and only then they allow themselves to feel pleasure with their partner, in whatever way is appropriate for them.
Every one of us, wants a partner that is truly motivated, by their own willingness and wanting - what they are really up for, what lights them up, what turns them on, what connects them to their body, their heart and spirit - and (if we are open) to us!
We somehow know what is going on inside someone else when they are really driven by their own wishes and willingness and connected with us.
What Authentic Sex and Intimacy Therapy does is give us the space and tools to connect to ourselves and each other in a beautiful way.
Spontaneous Desire Versus Responsive Desire
As there are two types of desire, Spontaneous Desire and Responsive Desire, sometimes people won't have spontaneous desire imagine they don't feel desire at all. These are those of us who don't feel anything until we're in the act, and then suddenly come alive and enjoy it. This is Responsive Desire.
Sometimes people who are looking for desire within themselves before they begin to engage in pleasurable connections with their partner sometimes literally never start, because they believe they need to feel desire first of all, before they start anything.
If they have Responsive Desire as opposed to Spontaneous Desire, they never feel it to begin with, so for them, the motivation is missing, so they never start, because of their belief system.
So, if a person has Responsive Desire (as 75% of women and some men do) psycho-education about the different types of desire sometimes can help these couples enormously.
They suddenly realize they have Responsive Desire, and can work with that, compassionately, to turn their sex live around, with their partner, as a collaborative and kind team, together.
Taking off the brakes and exploring accelerators
Once we find what is working as the brakes in your relationship, and help you to take them off, only then can you freely begin to explore what your accelerators are, and safely and curiously in Sex and Intimacy Coaching explore what really turns you on, and what you are willing, if you are open to that?
Mostly couples are open and willing to explore once the relationship is made safe. So to do this, please read on below, about the three aspects of friendship, which, once they are working, create Positive Sentiment Override, which is the relational foundation upon which to approach building sexual and emotional intimacy, together as a team.
Your Authentic "No" creates space for your authentic "Yes"
Each person has to be able to have their own "No," without ay coercion, eyerolling, remarks, anger, withdrawal, blame, without any comebacks whatsoever. Only when each person has their own space for their "No," have they also the space for an authentic "Yes."
Only when this genuinely begins to happen and be experienced, is there the freedom to really explore pleasure oriented connection with oneself and one's partner, safely and adventurously.
Two Types of Desire
As I mentioned above, there are two types of desire. Spontaneous Desire, when we feel it in our bodies and want to have sexual intimacy with our partner and rip their clothes off, and Responsive desire, which happens only when sexual intimacy starts and the person begins to feel desire in
the act. 75% of women, and a small percentage of men, only have Responsive Desire.
Sometimes women are waiting to feel Spontaneous Desire and never do, and then imagine they feel no desire whatsoever; but when things start up, they really enjoy it, and begin to experience pleasure and desire. These are the people who have Responsive Desire. And this is entirely normal. Sometimes knowing the kind of desire a person has frees them up from the stigma and the mistaken belief that they have no desire, and once they understand the kind of desire they have, they begin to work with that, and be much kinder to themselves and their partner, and begin to enjoy what they have much more. Their connection with themselves and their partner can really open out in a lovely way.
Sex and Intimacy Coaching
If you are having sex and intimacy issues, the dual model of sexuality gives you ways in which you can really open up and explore the different dimensions of your relationship, heal hurts from the past, create much better attunement with each other in the present, take off the brakes that are preventing you from having the freedom to explore deeper connection, and go on to explore and discover the accelerators which are your individual motivations for sexual and emotional intimacy, and coaching helps you gain the freedom to gain some traction in the area of sexual aversion, low desire, and sexless relationships, and create a genuinely pleasure oriented couple bond and growing sexual and emotional connection.
Friendship is the foundation of a great sexual relationship
As a foundation to working on sexual issues, your relationship needs to be working really well. This means that your friendship needs to be working really well. There are three aspects of friendship:
1) Turning Towards. The bids you make for each others' attention and affection during the day, those little moments of either turning towards or away from each other, will literally make or break your relationship over time. I want offer you and your partner the secrets of Master Couples, who live and grow together authentically and happily for years together, so that you have an enduring foundation for love and growth which you can consciously implement and embody for the rest of your lives.
2) An attitude of Admiration and Fondness. This is one of the grounds of unconditional appreciation and gratitude which can enter into your relationship, and like fertile soil for plants, provide the soil for growth, personal development, and genuine intimacy.
3) Love Maps. This is your intimate exploration and getting to know the landscape of each others' hearts. This includes the way you think, feel, and process - understanding the specific person you are and the language you use. Although we will do everything, most of us are either Visual, Auditory, or Kinetic (feeling). To understand the way we process, and the way our partner processes, helps us literally to understand the language of each others' hearts.
Once you learn the way you yourself process things, you have greater self-understanding, and once you understand how your partner prcesses things, you have the key to understanding how your partner communicates, and how to make them feel loved.
Your Love Map also encompasses each of your life goals and visions. Understanding this, means you can, if you choose, really work together, and head in the same direction.
You life goals and direction will encompass your individual and joint fulfilment.
If your Love Map of yourself, your partner, and your relationship is not functioning well, you will literally be living in dysfunctional relationship. That is how important this last aspect of your relationship is!
I want you to create a workable Love Map, which encompasses your individual and joint fulfilment, gives you direction, helps you support each other's self-actualization, and creates a vision for both of you, of what your growing life together looks like, and how your dreams together are realized.
These are the three elements of true friendship.
In order for friendship to be working, we also need to get rid of Criticism, Defensiveness, Withdrawal, and Stonewalling.
I will teach you how to transform your criticism into positive requests, defensiveness into hearing your partner's issues as an opportunity to meet their unmet needs, withdrawal into a pause where you are coming back to the situation and your partner in a positive state when you are ready, and stonewalling to a dead stop where advanced couples can pause, identify their partners' concerns, and respond in a deeply understanding way, which makes their partner feel safe and deeply heard and "gotten," in a way that fundamentally understands their personality, and rescripts their deepest fears into real positive life experiences between the two of you.
Once everything in the realm of friendship is working, we can only then begin to approach sexual and emotional intimacy, from a much more eloquent place, as stronger team.
Unless you can talk about sexual issues, you can't have a good sexual relationship. Once you have these three aspects of friendship in place, you have the foundation to approach authentic and deeply connected sexual and emotional intimacy from a place which John Gottman calls Positive Sentiment Over-ride. That is, we think well of ourselves and our partner, and come from a place of trust, grounded in our experience of the three aspects of friendship genuinely working well.
When you are in this place, and you have some of the skills above, as a team you can approach sexual issues, such as sexual aversion, sexless relationships, and much more, from a compassionate place, which helps couples produce the best outcomes. This often, through time, because this is not a quick fix but a genuinely deep, heartfelt process, leads to couples experiencing the best sexual and emotional physical and spiritual intimacy they have ever experienced in their lives.
If you and your partner would like to work as a team and change your sex life, call me on 0795 4129046, or use the contact form. I would love to hear from you.
Sexuality has a brake and an accelerator. If the brake is down, no matter how hard we push on the accelerator, we are going nowhere.
And if we keep pushing down on the brake, and still try to push forwards, because of coercion from our partner, or inner coercion from ourselves (I'll just do it to make them happy, or for the sake of peace), we develop an aversion to sex with our partner.
Sexual aversion is one of the most difficult things to deal with.
And because it is systemic, it has to be deal with as a team, as a couple.
It doesn't matter how good you are as friends, and how many good other things are in the relationship. These good things are typically really helpful in our lives and in our relationship. They could even be accelerators, which inspire closeness, and bring up the desire for physical connection and emotional intimacy. And we want to cherish these things.
However, no matter how good our life as a couple is in other areas, if the brakes are on in areas which affect our sex life we are going nowhere.
The Brakes can seem unrelated to sexual intimacy. These can include the areas of being criticized, feeling emotionally wounded by our partner, feeling not connected to them, or repeatedly mis-attuned with our partner - without repair or emotional re-attunement...physical boundary issues of having sex without clear consent...affairs...preferring different types of sex and wanting different ways of connecting...all of these things can act as brakes in the relationship, and they need to be dealt with on an individual couple basis, to be really worked with and resolved, so that the sexual side of relationship has the freedom to flourish and bloom.
Learning the Mindset of Pleasure-Oriented Connection
Couples need to learn that the mindset that goal-oriented sex (where intercourse is the goal) can lead to a very limited view of what sex is, and damage a relationship, where as pleasure-oriented physical and emotional connection is a mindset which can take a couple on a journey where each person can find their brakes and accelerators, find what they are truly willing for, and begin to get some traction around creating the sexual and emotional intimacy they are truly willing for.
When you are with someone who is truly willing, you know it, in your heart.
Real embodied pleasure and connection goes beyond us having sex to really being with each other on another level. This is the kind of connection most of us really want. And adopting a pleasure-oriented mindset, which tunes in to your own body, your own desires, your own pleasure, and opens out the landscape of your heart safely and playfully to your partner, and they with you, makes this beautiful connection truly possible.
Great Sex Doesn't Always Require Desire
One thing which amazed me when I first discovered it, was the fact that great sex also doesn't require desire. Some people experience no desire whatsoever, and still come to have a great sex life. What they do have, is genuine willingness.
If a person starts with what they are truly willing for, this is a great place to start.
There is a fine-tuning around what really turns a person on, and what they feel pleasure doing, and are willing for, which helps, when a person asks themselves, what do they feel pleasure for? It could be holding hands. It could be a hug. It could be for when they feel safe and connected only then things can begin to happen and only then they allow themselves to feel pleasure with their partner, in whatever way is appropriate for them.
Every one of us, wants a partner that is truly motivated, by their own willingness and wanting - what they are really up for, what lights them up, what turns them on, what connects them to their body, their heart and spirit - and (if we are open) to us!
We somehow know what is going on inside someone else when they are really driven by their own wishes and willingness and connected with us.
What Authentic Sex and Intimacy Therapy does is give us the space and tools to connect to ourselves and each other in a beautiful way.
Spontaneous Desire Versus Responsive Desire
As there are two types of desire, Spontaneous Desire and Responsive Desire, sometimes people won't have spontaneous desire imagine they don't feel desire at all. These are those of us who don't feel anything until we're in the act, and then suddenly come alive and enjoy it. This is Responsive Desire.
Sometimes people who are looking for desire within themselves before they begin to engage in pleasurable connections with their partner sometimes literally never start, because they believe they need to feel desire first of all, before they start anything.
If they have Responsive Desire as opposed to Spontaneous Desire, they never feel it to begin with, so for them, the motivation is missing, so they never start, because of their belief system.
So, if a person has Responsive Desire (as 75% of women and some men do) psycho-education about the different types of desire sometimes can help these couples enormously.
They suddenly realize they have Responsive Desire, and can work with that, compassionately, to turn their sex live around, with their partner, as a collaborative and kind team, together.
Taking off the brakes and exploring accelerators
Once we find what is working as the brakes in your relationship, and help you to take them off, only then can you freely begin to explore what your accelerators are, and safely and curiously in Sex and Intimacy Coaching explore what really turns you on, and what you are willing, if you are open to that?
Mostly couples are open and willing to explore once the relationship is made safe. So to do this, please read on below, about the three aspects of friendship, which, once they are working, create Positive Sentiment Override, which is the relational foundation upon which to approach building sexual and emotional intimacy, together as a team.
Your Authentic "No" creates space for your authentic "Yes"
Each person has to be able to have their own "No," without ay coercion, eyerolling, remarks, anger, withdrawal, blame, without any comebacks whatsoever. Only when each person has their own space for their "No," have they also the space for an authentic "Yes."
Only when this genuinely begins to happen and be experienced, is there the freedom to really explore pleasure oriented connection with oneself and one's partner, safely and adventurously.
Two Types of Desire
As I mentioned above, there are two types of desire. Spontaneous Desire, when we feel it in our bodies and want to have sexual intimacy with our partner and rip their clothes off, and Responsive desire, which happens only when sexual intimacy starts and the person begins to feel desire in
the act. 75% of women, and a small percentage of men, only have Responsive Desire.
Sometimes women are waiting to feel Spontaneous Desire and never do, and then imagine they feel no desire whatsoever; but when things start up, they really enjoy it, and begin to experience pleasure and desire. These are the people who have Responsive Desire. And this is entirely normal. Sometimes knowing the kind of desire a person has frees them up from the stigma and the mistaken belief that they have no desire, and once they understand the kind of desire they have, they begin to work with that, and be much kinder to themselves and their partner, and begin to enjoy what they have much more. Their connection with themselves and their partner can really open out in a lovely way.
Sex and Intimacy Coaching
If you are having sex and intimacy issues, the dual model of sexuality gives you ways in which you can really open up and explore the different dimensions of your relationship, heal hurts from the past, create much better attunement with each other in the present, take off the brakes that are preventing you from having the freedom to explore deeper connection, and go on to explore and discover the accelerators which are your individual motivations for sexual and emotional intimacy, and coaching helps you gain the freedom to gain some traction in the area of sexual aversion, low desire, and sexless relationships, and create a genuinely pleasure oriented couple bond and growing sexual and emotional connection.
Friendship is the foundation of a great sexual relationship
As a foundation to working on sexual issues, your relationship needs to be working really well. This means that your friendship needs to be working really well. There are three aspects of friendship:
1) Turning Towards. The bids you make for each others' attention and affection during the day, those little moments of either turning towards or away from each other, will literally make or break your relationship over time. I want offer you and your partner the secrets of Master Couples, who live and grow together authentically and happily for years together, so that you have an enduring foundation for love and growth which you can consciously implement and embody for the rest of your lives.
2) An attitude of Admiration and Fondness. This is one of the grounds of unconditional appreciation and gratitude which can enter into your relationship, and like fertile soil for plants, provide the soil for growth, personal development, and genuine intimacy.
3) Love Maps. This is your intimate exploration and getting to know the landscape of each others' hearts. This includes the way you think, feel, and process - understanding the specific person you are and the language you use. Although we will do everything, most of us are either Visual, Auditory, or Kinetic (feeling). To understand the way we process, and the way our partner processes, helps us literally to understand the language of each others' hearts.
Once you learn the way you yourself process things, you have greater self-understanding, and once you understand how your partner prcesses things, you have the key to understanding how your partner communicates, and how to make them feel loved.
Your Love Map also encompasses each of your life goals and visions. Understanding this, means you can, if you choose, really work together, and head in the same direction.
You life goals and direction will encompass your individual and joint fulfilment.
If your Love Map of yourself, your partner, and your relationship is not functioning well, you will literally be living in dysfunctional relationship. That is how important this last aspect of your relationship is!
I want you to create a workable Love Map, which encompasses your individual and joint fulfilment, gives you direction, helps you support each other's self-actualization, and creates a vision for both of you, of what your growing life together looks like, and how your dreams together are realized.
These are the three elements of true friendship.
In order for friendship to be working, we also need to get rid of Criticism, Defensiveness, Withdrawal, and Stonewalling.
I will teach you how to transform your criticism into positive requests, defensiveness into hearing your partner's issues as an opportunity to meet their unmet needs, withdrawal into a pause where you are coming back to the situation and your partner in a positive state when you are ready, and stonewalling to a dead stop where advanced couples can pause, identify their partners' concerns, and respond in a deeply understanding way, which makes their partner feel safe and deeply heard and "gotten," in a way that fundamentally understands their personality, and rescripts their deepest fears into real positive life experiences between the two of you.
Once everything in the realm of friendship is working, we can only then begin to approach sexual and emotional intimacy, from a much more eloquent place, as stronger team.
Unless you can talk about sexual issues, you can't have a good sexual relationship. Once you have these three aspects of friendship in place, you have the foundation to approach authentic and deeply connected sexual and emotional intimacy from a place which John Gottman calls Positive Sentiment Over-ride. That is, we think well of ourselves and our partner, and come from a place of trust, grounded in our experience of the three aspects of friendship genuinely working well.
When you are in this place, and you have some of the skills above, as a team you can approach sexual issues, such as sexual aversion, sexless relationships, and much more, from a compassionate place, which helps couples produce the best outcomes. This often, through time, because this is not a quick fix but a genuinely deep, heartfelt process, leads to couples experiencing the best sexual and emotional physical and spiritual intimacy they have ever experienced in their lives.
If you and your partner would like to work as a team and change your sex life, call me on 0795 4129046, or use the contact form. I would love to hear from you.
