Intimacy & Desire: Awaken the Passion in Your Relationship (51 page)

Palm over groin
shows your partner you respect his or her physical and psychological integrity.

W
hat you’re learning can change your sexual desire problems, and the rest of your life for that matter. Couples in treatment have a more intense and focused multi-level experience than you have by reading about them. But no doubt the
mirror neurons
in your prefrontal neocortex are firing away just the same. Seeing or imaging something happening to someone else produces the same reaction in your brain as if it was happening to you. Mapping the minds of the couples you’re reading about produces the same feelings and reactions as if you were going through it.

By letting the couples come alive in your mind—and mapping out their minds—you’ve probably learned more than you ever dreamed you could know. When you put this into action, you’ll realize you learned even more. You may also find it’s not enough. Keep at it. Take a second pass through this book. You’ll reap the benefits for years to come.

Independent research on my three-day Passionate Marriage® Couples
Enrichment Workshop indicates couples continued to make methodical incremental progress when they were re-evaluated four months later. Partners were interviewed together and individually, four months before and after attending the program. Their responses during a two-hour structured interview were coded into statistical data and analyzed. Results indicate virtually all couples increased their differentiation, sexual satisfaction, intimacy, and ability to handle conflict, and conflict itself decreased.
¹⁹²
They learned the same things you are learning here. Put this into action, and several months from now, it’s likely you’ll have made significant progress too.

Let’s take another methodical step forward. For many people, sex worth wanting has two characteristics: It’s loving and it’s hot. This chapter focuses on tender loving sex, and our final chapter will turn up the heat even more. However, tender loving sex doesn’t have to be lukewarm sex. As you’ll see, it can be powerful in unimagined ways.

To be clear, tender loving sex is not a type of sex. It is a meaning that permeates your sexual experience. Tender loving sex is not reducible to specific techniques. If you don’t have much capacity to love, or you can’t stand being tender, nothing you do creates tender loving sex.

You can, however, develop your capacity to love and be tender by using your sexual relationship. You can repair yourself emotionally, replenish your soul, invigorate your relationship, and tickle your toes. You can change the face you show the world, and get control of your emotions, especially your temper. Tender loving sex can make a new person out of you. It can probably rewire your brain.

Kate and Paul came to see me for their sexual desire problems. They had been married eight years. This was the second marriage for both. Both felt sexual problems were major factors in the breakups of their first marriages. In this marriage, Paul was frustrated with their lack of sex, which only happened once a month. Kate and Paul were highly emotionally fused, and their gridlock over sex was intense.

Kate had a long history of promiscuity during adolescence, but in this
and her prior marriage, Kate quickly became sexually uninterested. She had intermittent difficulty having orgasms, and while she felt bad about this, she didn’t feel this was why she didn’t want sex. Kate felt Paul’s difficulty with orgasms had much bigger impact on her.

Paul often had difficulty being able to have an orgasm. When he was able, it took thirty minutes or more. Everything focused on him getting off. Kate and Paul often felt exhausted by that time, so when he came they would stop altogether. When he couldn’t climax, Paul rolled over to his side of the bed and broke off all contact. Either way, sex wasn’t very rewarding, and afterward was worse. Kate learned it didn’t pay to get aroused because she was going to be disappointed, one way or another.

Paul and Kate had other problems too: They both had difficulty regulating their emotions. Paul had “emotional eruptions,” and Kate’s episodes of “bottoming out” were frequent and precipitous. Kate was often severely depressed, with crushing low self-esteem and feelings of inadequacy. Both partners felt anxious much of the time. Paul had emotional eruptions throughout his life in which he became angry, defensive, and accusatory.

The tremendous tension between Kate and Paul was obvious from the outset. This made therapy more difficult. They were highly guarded people. Kate led off by clarifying why she wasn’t willing to have sex with Paul: She was too angry at him, and she wasn’t up for more repetitions of frustrating empty sex. She said they were more at the level of holding hands. Paul scoffed at the idea.

I said there might be great utility in holding hands, depending on how they did it. I asked if they were willing to hold hands right there and then. Kate thought this was odd and Paul thought it was juvenile—but they agreed.

First I let them hold hands without my saying anything. I noticed they held each other’s hand in a wooden and mechanical way. It was as though they were trying not to notice they were touching each other. There was no positive emotional connection between them, or any attempt to create one. They weren’t even paying attention to the sensation in their own hands. They just looked nervous and awkward. They let go of each other when I nodded.

I asked if they’d be willing to try holding hands a little differently. Kate and Paul agreed. I suggested that when they took each other’s hand, they
take a deep breath and focus on calming themselves down. They were awkward at first, but ultimately they were able to do this. As they started to relax, I directed their attention to the actual point of physical connection between their hands. Kate got nervous again and giggled, and Paul twitched, so we repeated the process of calming themselves down.

Kate and Paul commented that holding each other’s hand felt much more pleasant once they calmed themselves down. I said this was a microcosm of what was probably happening during sex. They could make sex feel much better—and each have an easier time with orgasms—if they could learn to calm themselves down during sex.

This in-session application of the Four Points of Balance, especially Quiet Mind–Calm Heart, was a revelation to Kate and Paul. Rather than trying to have faith I could help them, they had their own tangible demonstration to go on. By the end of our first session, Kate and Paul were willing to try
hugging till relaxed
. This surprised Kate because Paul didn’t like to hug. Paul agreed because he had liked holding hands, which he usually didn’t.

Paul asked if this might help him with his orgasms. I said it could, but they could do a lot more if they really used their bodies, minds, and brains. Organizing things in terms of these three dimensions had the greatest likelihood of increasing Paul’s ease of having orgasms and Kate’s sexual desire. I added that, if handled properly, resolving their sexual problems could dramatically help Paul’s emotional outbursts and Kate’s bouts of anxiety and depression. Paul and Kate exchanged silent glances.

I suggested that a good dose of tender loving sex could help them. This needed to be sex endowed with great meaning, and they needed to map each other’s minds in the midst of it. As it turned out, just allowing their minds to be mapped during
hugging till relaxed
and
heads on pillows
had tremendous meaning for both of them.

Over the next several sessions Kate and Paul did
hugging till relaxed
several different ways. They started by focusing on quieting their mind and brain while they had their arms around each other. I suggested they
visualize and focus on a spot inside their head, midway between their ears, in the emotional center of their brain.

After doing this a half dozen times, Kate and Paul calmed down and relaxed more quickly and deeply. They could feel the difference. Being in each other’s presence and feeling the other calm down—instead of getting more wound up—was meaningful to them.

I encouraged them to build on this and take things further. They used
hugging till relaxed
to become aware of remaining tensions in their own bodies, to deliberately relax that particular part, and to become more relaxed together. I proposed that if Kate and Paul could relax and feel centered in their own bodies, they would become aware of their partner’s breathing without losing awareness of themselves. If
this
happened, they’d have learned an important lesson about how relationships really worked.

Kate and Paul returned to say it happened several times. Kate said that since I had prepared her, she was able to focus deeper on herself. Several times she was aware of Paul and aware of herself at the same time. One time Paul was able to do it too. I labeled this their initial experience of developing a positive physical and emotional connection without losing their grip on themselves. It was a physically tangible demonstration of what they needed to do in their relationship. It was a testimony to their deepening collaborative alliance.

Kate and Paul reported a special moment when they felt very aware of themselves, each other, and deliberately constructing an experience together. Each was aware the other was invested in making the moment happen, and the other was enjoying it. Both had their own subjective experience, and yet it was intensely shared.

I told Kate and Paul they were describing an “intersubjective experience,” a
moment of meeting
. I said these experiences play a crucial role in human relationships from the moment of birth, and especially during sex. Kate and Paul agreed this was a qualitatively different experience, one they certainly had never had during sex.

Kate and Paul’s bodies, minds, and brains had lined up in a peaceful
and powerful way. During intercourse their minds were usually a million miles apart. Kate said she liked doing
hugging till relaxed
with Paul more than having intercourse. Paul wasn’t sure how to take this. I proposed that if and when Kate looked forward to moments of meeting during intercourse, she would probably like intercourse, too.

We developed a new and more meaningful picture of what happened between and within them when they had sex. By the time Kate and Paul left, they had a more helpful and hopeful view of their difficulties. This picture tied all their experiences together and gave them physical acts they could do to make things better. Instead of feeling at the mercy of things, now they could apply their will.

The picture you develop is important. You have to
do
something to get your brain to think differently. It takes more than just mentally talking to yourself more positively and doing self-affirmations every morning. You have to make sense of your experiences—especially your successes. How you process and organize things makes a huge difference. Given the myriad psychological theories and approaches out there, you can pretty much organize your experience any way you like. Unfortunately, explanations that fit your subjective experience and make intuitive sense aren’t necessarily accurate.

Understanding your successes organizes your subsequent efforts. Whatever you identify as the critical ingredient is what you go after next time. For instance, Kate and Paul could have interpreted their intersubjective moment as feeling safer and more secure with each other. It’s a common interpretation, but it creates a common disaster. If next time they tried to feel “safe and secure” with each other, it would increase their emotional fusion and borrowed functioning, and create an unpleasant experience that would further demoralize them.

I reminded Kate and Paul about where they started from and how they got to where they wanted to go. I took them back to their own physical process. That’s when they got it: The critical ingredient in their success was regulating themselves in close emotional and physical proximity to each other. This is what they set out to do better next time.
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When Kate and Paul felt ready for more emotional and physical contact, after
hugging till relaxed
, they added
heads on pillows
. Eye contact during
heads on pillows
facilitates more core “I to I” connection. It allowed them
to develop the same profound connection people get through
eyes-open sex
(which I’ll discuss later in this chapter), but without the distraction and anxiety of sex per se.

Mutual gaze is a psychological process involving joint attention in which two people have the feeling of a brief link between their minds. Eye gazing is an important part of social perception and interaction, and plays a central role in mind-mapping. Brain imaging studies indicate that mind-mapping and eye gaze processing engage similar regions of your brain.
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.