Intimacy & Desire: Awaken the Passion in Your Relationship (47 page)

A
re you ticklish? How about your partner? Odds are that one of you is. Ticklishness is a bigger problem than you may realize. Ticklish touch can directly interfere with sexual desire. I routinely ask my clients if they are ticklish for an additional reason: Taking care of ticklishness can really help desire problems and put a sexual charge in your love life.

There are many common forms of ticklishness. Do you have difficulty settling down when it’s time for sex or snuggling? Do you feel twitchy or jumpy when your partner touches you? Does your partner’s touch feel noxious or irritating? You can cure these feelings. Even if you’re not ticklish and don’t have any of these problems, understanding ticklishness teaches you a lot about sexual desire problems and collaborative alliances.

Ticklishness is a disagreeable tingling sensation, distinct from itching or pressure. It is often accompanied by nervousness, involuntary squirming, twitching, and laughter. Genetics may determine how ticklish you are; however, the majority of people are ticklish.
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I began studying ticklishness decades ago, when I realized many of my clients struggled with it. I paid close attention to how and why people became ticklish, and how this operated between partners. For example, laughter accompanying ticklishness can confuse you
and
your partner because it’s reflexive and not a sign of pleasure. This creates mind-mapping errors and kills collaborative alliances.

To my surprise, curing ticklishness turned out to be a wonderful way to resolve desire problems because it increases your Four Points of Balance, improves your relationship, and enhances your love-making. Best of all, many couples finally experience
peace
lying relaxed in each other’s arms.

Anthony and Colleen weren’t familiar with peace. After three years of celibacy, they sought my help restarting their sexual relationship.
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They had been married seven years and had two children, a boy and a girl, age six and four. When they met in college, Colleen liked having sex with Anthony. It felt great to be with him, and she had orgasms when they made love. In my office, Colleen said she didn’t know what her problem was now, but she had no desire for sex. She didn’t think this had anything to do with her feelings for Anthony, or a dozen other things she’d considered and rejected.

Anthony brought up Colleen’s ticklishness, with obvious exasperation. At that point in our session they both became defensive and their alliance cratered. According to Anthony, Colleen was too ticklish and she didn’t like sex. According to Colleen, Anthony was too impatient and he wouldn’t listen to what she needed. She explained, “When Anthony touches me, my skin starts crawling. I have to fight with myself just to let him touch me. I get angry at him for touching me that way, and angry at
myself for being this way. Believe me, Doctor, at that point I’m not the least bit interested in sex.”

Colleen had traits that predispose ticklishness. In general, she was shy, easily frightened, prickly, and easily upset. Her overall demeanor said,
I am someone who needs special handling. I am delicate. Be careful with me
.

Talking about sex was a touchy situation. Colleen was clearly on the defensive. Anthony was embarrassed about being celibate. Their alliance crashed at the first sign of either partner’s displeasure with the other.

There are couples for whom tickling is a delightful game of “gotcha!” But not couples like Colleen and Anthony. They couldn’t see that resolving ticklishness could create a stronger relationship. Colleen complained, “Anthony was tickling me last night, and I am extremely ticklish. He barely touched me, and I was laughing hysterically.”

Anthony’s reply was condescending. “You need to stop acting so hysterical. Just calm down.”

Colleen’s voice rose. “I can’t! When you’re tickling me, I panic. I get into a kind of fear-driven frenzied state. I feel like I’m freaking out.” Turning to me for support, she said plaintively, “I get annoyed when Anthony tries to tickle me. If I’m in the right mood I can handle it, but not for very long. I get defensive. It makes my skin crawl. One time I tried to show him how bad it feels to be tickled, but I got nowhere. Tickling Anthony is like tickling a rock.”

“I was extremely ticklish until I was thirteen,” Anthony replied with derision. “Then I made up my mind I wouldn’t be ticklish anymore. It worked. I just decided. That’s the same way I developed good pain tolerance, too. If I can do it, she can do it. I know she has lots of strength. She just doesn’t show it.”

I asked Anthony, “What made you decide to not be ticklish anymore?”

“My family took turns holding each other down and tickling the victim until he peed in his pants. They helped my mother, who was the ringleader, because she only had one arm. My dad frequently joined in. I was the youngest of three brothers and a sister, so this happened to me a lot.” I wondered if Anthony’s life script was
You’re not going to get to me!

“Your wife has difficulty with ticklishness and you come from a family of ticklers.”

Colleen interjected, “I think tickling is pretty common. I’ve been getting tickled in my family for as long as I can remember, and I still can’t stand it. I’m ticklish all over my body.”

“Well then, you and your husband have at least two things in common.”

“Let me guess.” Colleen’s flat tone said we didn’t have a collaborative alliance. “Both our families are into tickling. What’s the other?”

“You both drop your alliance at the first sign of trouble.” Colleen sat up and gave me a curious look.

Anthony asked, “You think we don’t have sex because people in our families tickle each other?” His face said,
What on earth are you talking about? Why are we talking about this?

“I’m not sure the reason you don’t have sex has anything to do with ticklishness. But if it does, then dropping your alliance with your spouse is probably an important part of your problem.“

“This is why we don’t have sex?”

“That’s been the case for some of my clients.”

“Does this approach work?” Anthony sounded doubtful.

“In terms of solving ticklishness, it’s never failed.”

Anthony took a hard look at me. “It’s never failed?”

“It’s never failed.”

Colleen perked up. Anthony still looked skeptical.

“Let me put it this way: You may be the first.”

I discovered a note I wrote to myself in 1994. In it I detailed the cure for ticklishness I use today, including treating it as a co-constructed interpersonal system. (I’ll explain in a moment.) According to the note, I had treated ticklishness for over a decade, and the approach had been “so efficient and reliable that every one of my clients who received the treatment showed marked improvement. Since then I have worked with hundreds of couples and it has never failed.” That was in 1994, and this unbroken record (knock on wood) continues to this day.

Neurobiologists, social psychologists, and people who like bondage and “tickle torture” have also studied tickling. State-of-the-art brain scanners now document how this happens in our nervous system. Your brain tracks your body’s position and movements because mammals developed brains that enhanced their own response. Your brain produces a “map” of commands sent to your muscles, and “subtracts” this from all other sensations to detect when you’re being touched by someone else.

Your brain makes important distinctions between “self” and “other” when it comes to touch. This difference lies at the root of ticklishness.
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Your ancestors’ ability to rapidly detect being touched by an animal, bug, or object increased their chances of survival. Body parts that are crucial when damaged are among the most ticklish (feet, chest, and armpits).

Your brain’s organization around “self” and “other” doesn’t permit you to tickle yourself. It’s not simply because you know you’re doing it and you can’t “attack” yourself. It’s because, neurologically speaking, your brain keeps track. Scientists have discovered your brain “cancels out” self-produced movements, and the more a given touch registers as “that’s not me touching me,” the more your ticklish reflex is triggered. Generally speaking, it takes two to tickle.

However, ticklishness involves more than an involuntary neurological response. Your prefrontal cortex adds another layer of complexity. That’s where different flavors of ticklishness, from noxious and intolerable to fun or even hot, come from. Research indicates that ticklishness coincides with activity in portions of your brain involved in thoughts, emotions, pain, action, and mapping other people’s minds.
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“Where your partner is coming from” hugely determines whether or not you become ticklish. Tickling can be pleasure, and it can be used as punishment. It’s how we play out power relationships, like all other primates. Chimpanzees, in particular, love to tickle.

Ticklishness “protects” us from unwanted touch, but tickling also satisfies our basic need for touch. Tickling is probably evolutionary human social and sexual behavior. Parents tickle children, lovers tickle each
other, but you don’t tickle strangers. You’re more likely to be ticklish when touched by someone of the opposite sex. This is because we are meaning-making animals.

Ticklishness illustrates how the human prefrontal cortex hijacked archaic physiological self-protection brain mechanisms and harnessed them for more sophisticated struggles of “self” protection. Many aspects of selfhood include tracking your body. Your core sense of self in past, present, and future, and mind-mapping all occur in the same brain circuitry.
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The laughter accompanying ticklishness confuses lots of people. This was certainly Anthony’s situation. “Look, Doctor, what am I supposed to do?” he started off. “Sometimes she likes it, and sometimes she doesn’t. She was laughing, and I thought she was having a good time. I was laughing along with her. How am I supposed to know she’s having a bad time? I always think we’re just playing with each other!”

Anthony didn’t know laughter tends to occur with tickling because they are much alike: Laughter is part neurological reflex and part socially induced by close physical contact with another person (co-constructed).
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When your brain detects laughter (your own or someone else’s), this triggers other neural circuits in your head, larynx, and chest that generate more laughter. This is why laughter is contagious.

Your ticklish reflex and your laughter reflex are connected by nerve cells in your brain.
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The tickle-laughter reflex arc has physical, emotional, and cognitive components, and any one can trigger the others.
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Research indicates that your tendency to feel ticklish is related to your propensity for other reflexes, like laughing, giggling, smiling, blushing, crying, and goose bumps.

Most people find ticklishness interferes with orgasms, but for some it truly enhances them. One person wrote, “If God never endowed
humans with ticklishness, I’d be bored to death and I’d be stripped of one of the most exciting sources of eroticism … I love to be tickled, even though it is pure torture sometimes, and it makes me horny as hell. I like to tickle women, too. There is nothing like a helpless, bound, ticklish woman.”
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For the rest of us, there are many reasons to consider curing ticklishness:

1. Ticklishness can usually be cured relatively quickly.

2. When ticklishness diminishes it is often replaced by an intense erotic experience. Resolving ticklishness can produce hot sex that reveals untapped eroticism and meaning lying dormant in your bedroom.

3. Resolving ticklishness often increases sexual desire.

Do I have your attention? Do these perk your interest? You can accomplish other important things at the same time:

1. You can learn to quiet the limbic system of your brain, which handles emotional reactivity and startle responses.

2. You can deliberately use mind-mapping to quiet things down.

3. You and your partner can get better at maintaining a collaborative alliance.

4. Overall, you and your partner can get better at holding on to your selves, period.

5. You can change core dynamics of your relationship and create a deeper and more positive emotional connection.

Ticklishness in the bedroom often goes hand in hand with a sense of losing control of yourself elsewhere in your life. In Anthony and Colleen’s case, this happened because Anthony “took up too much space in the relationship,” and Colleen’s weak Four Points of Balance made her perpetually accommodate. When Colleen did speak up for herself, Anthony took this as criticism. There wasn’t much room for
her to disagree or say she didn’t like something he was doing—in or out of bed.

For instance, Anthony wanted to open another store in their furniture business. Colleen wanted to stick with one store because she was afraid of losing what they had. Anthony was determined to go ahead nonetheless. Although all their personal property was owned conjointly, and technically Colleen owned half their business, Anthony took out a business loan that Colleen reluctantly co-signed.

Colleen felt vulnerable because she couldn’t protect herself. But she went along because Anthony was saying clearly,
If you love me, have confidence in me. Bet on me. Didn’t I get us this far? Trust me
.