Intimacy & Desire: Awaken the Passion in Your Relationship (52 page)

Gaze following seems to be hard-wired in your brain, which contains neurons that respond selectively to faces, bodies, and eye gaze. Specific cell assemblies in your cerebral cortex respond specifically to eye gazing. This part analyzes biological motion for signals about another individual’s actions. It is activated by movements of someone’s eyes, mouth, hands, and body, as well as static images of a face or body that imply motion.
¹⁹⁵

Newborns spend more time looking at a photograph of a face with the eyes open than at one with the eyes closed. They may have a special neural mechanism that detects eye-like stimuli and orients attention toward them.
¹⁹⁶
Joint attention triggered by eye gaze increases and speeds up visual activity in their brains. This demonstrates how eye gaze can rapidly create a plastic moment that modifies visual information processing.
¹⁹⁷

Depending on whether you make eye contact or not, and your anticipation of what it will be like, dopamine-producing neurons are activated (especially in your right hemisphere) and engage your brain’s central reward system. Making eye contact with a face you perceive as attractive increases dopamine production. Dopamine decreases when eye gaze is lost. The opposite pattern happens if you anticipate eye-contact being a negative experience.
¹⁹⁸

You need more than just a multi-level focus. You want a multi-level focus that creates
focal attention
. Someone who is focally aware is highly
attentive and consciously focusing on something, and deliberately using their short-term memory (as opposed to automatic attention that occurs without conscious effort). When you focus your attention on something, you bring it into your “working memory.” Focal attention is the mental chalkboard of your mind. Some measure of focal attention is also required for your brain to store information, so you can retrieve it if you want to think about it later.
Heads on pillows
rivets your attention on right brain and left brain processes during an intensely meaningful interpersonal encounter. Your focus of attention shifts to many things: what you see, mind-mapping your partner, your feelings, body sensations, and autobiographical memories that cross your mind. Focus your attention wherever you will, something comes to mind when you and your partner are up close, eye to eye.

Developing an optimal framework is important. Could you successfully resolve sexual desire problems if you did
hugging till relaxed, heads on pillows
, or
feeling while touching
like simplistic behavioral techniques (e.g., “exercises”)? Possibly you could. But why would you want to? Sexual desire problems are hard enough to change. An integrated, multi-faceted, multi-level approach increases your likelihood of success.

My clients like seeing the many ways their therapy fits together and how all the different levels line up. It’s more than intellectual curiosity. Understanding different things that are going on, and what you are trying to accomplish, helps you appreciate and fully harness the benefit of whatever you do. It increases your willingness to tolerate discomfort for growth.

Anyone can see how hugging and relaxing with your partner might improve your relationship and increase sexual desire. But
hugging till relaxed, heads on pillows, feeling while touching
, and curing ticklishness are also wonderful tools for quieting and regulating your brain. They use your prefrontal neocortex and your body to regulate your limbic system. They create the seven conditions thought to encourage brain change. They produce intense “moments of meeting.” And they differ
from meditation because they are
interpersonal experiences
and exploit the fact that your brain wires itself interpersonally.

I often work with clients’ spontaneous sexual behavior. I did this with Kate and Paul’s hand-holding. I also work with kissing. Kissing, holding hands, and other spontaneous behaviors, all create
interpersonal somatosensory experiences
. They stimulate parts of your brain that track your body’s experience (e.g., physical sensations, location in “space,” physical orientation) and parts that make meaning of them. This “cross-talk” permits learning across multiple dimensions of experience. Curing ticklishness does the same thing.

Brain research and thousands of years of Buddhist psychology indicate that focused purposeful attention is a powerful tool. You can use it to quiet your mind and calm your brain. But what happens when you use your mind and body simultaneously, bringing together the power of sex, the crucibles of marriage, the Four Points of Balance, and knowledge of brain function? I think you have a method of growth and change equivalent to an atom-smashing cyclotron.

It’s amazing how many levels we’ve covered, and how they all come together in something as simple (and complex) as a hug. We started by seeing how developing and maintaining a solid flexible self became a primary shaper of human sexual desire. From there, we discovered how natural differentiation processes make sexual desire problems inevitable for normal healthy couples. You learned about the Four Points of Balance. You’ve seen how these four abilities underlie your sense of self, and how they bolster your functioning, help you resolve gridlock, and directly or indirectly resolve sexual desire problems.

Well, simultaneously with these selfhood and differentiation issues, there’s lots of brain activity going on. It’s all part of one big package. The human self originally arose from changes in the brain. The human brain evolved through differentiation. Your Four Points of Balance play critical roles in your brain’s moment-to-moment operations. Your Four Points
of Balance determine if and when your brain becomes dysregulated and your mind falls apart. Focusing on your Four Points of Balance pulls your head back together. Doing this repeatedly strengthens your brain’s ability to function under stress. And there are other ways you can pull everything together and help yourself, which I’ll cover throughout this chapter.

Doing
heads on pillows
and
hugging till relaxed
challenged Kate and Paul’s Four Points of Balance.
Hugging till relaxed
challenged Paul’s sense of self. He was the high desire partner for sex, but the low desire partner for hugging. He was more uncomfortable with hugging than Kate. On the surface, the possibility that
hugging till relaxed
might help his difficulty reaching orgasm sounded great. But it put his problem on the table. Paul had to quiet his mind and calm his heart a lot when they finally did it.

Kate was challenged differently: She was brought face-to-face with her loss of sexual interest once relationships began. Doing
hugging till relaxed
involved greater emotional investment. Her typical pattern had been to disinvest when her desire waned. She had to soothe her fears of being obligated to have sex if Paul got turned on. They both had to keep themselves from overreacting to the other. Both had to put forth some meaningful endurance for growth.

As Kate and Paul progressed further with
heads on pillows
, they showed the kind of progress I’ve come to expect: Kate’s emotional crashes subsided, and so did Paul’s volatile eruptions.

The change in Kate was readily apparent to Paul. For the first time, she didn’t berate him emotionally in the midst of one of her crashes. For example, Kate was already irritated about how her day was going when something happened in the house that totally frustrated her. Paul prepared for the worst when he saw Kate’s tears. She looked overwhelmed. However, instead of ranting at Paul that he didn’t really care about her, Kate stopped the conversation. She walked out of the house and around
the block several times. As she left she managed to say, “This isn’t your fault. I’ll be okay. This is something I just have to handle for myself.” While she was gone she raged out loud and cried. When she returned, she still felt low. But the important thing was that she didn’t inflict herself on Paul
while
she felt terrible.

Kate’s progress caught her own attention, as well. She felt proud of herself. Gradually her ability to ease and control her crashes improved. She was able to stop several times in mid-crash and pull herself out of it. At best this ability remained shaky, but it was obvious a core change was occurring. It wasn’t just that Kate had more self-esteem. Her “self” was getting stronger. Paul also became less emotionally reactive and didn’t get angry when he would have in the past. (I’ll describe this shortly.)

Kate and Paul even started to
look
different. Their faces changed as
brightening
became apparent. Brightening is a softening of facial features and an appearance of aliveness, vitality, energy, and healthy overall countenance. Women look like they’ve had Botox or a face lift, and men look softer and more handsome. It’s no mystery why many couples resume having sex: They feel and look more attractive, and they are more attracted to each other. Other people find them more attractive and approachable, too.

People who show brightening find their own eyes look clearer and brighter, their mental acuity is sharper, and their general (and emotional) intelligence increases. Brightening often quickly follows difficult-but-collaborative confrontations in our sessions. This happens too rapidly and dramatically simply to be “learning.” It is my belief that
brightening
reflects shifts in brain function.

Brightening is identifiable by untrained observers—that’s how I first came upon it. Around day four of my nine-day Passionate Marriage® Couples Retreat, people start telling each other,
“You look different! You look terrific!”
Couples who demonstrate brightening early in the retreat are invariably the ones other couples felt sorry for on days one, two, and three because they were confronting their issues and looked like hell. On day four other
couples are jealous of them, and anxiously eyeing their own mates. This pattern has held up consistently in ten years of Couples Retreats. Brightening is commonplace in my therapy practice as well.

Couples who show brightening also end up thinking differently and handling their emotions better. Their marriages become more stable and less anxiety-driven. Partners become softer, more considerate, and more direct with each other. Relationships with children, parents, or friends become richer, deeper, and more resilient. These changes are relatively resilient under stress, as one might expect if people’s brains were functioning differently.

Kate became less volatile, and her emotional crashes diminished. She still had days where she was down, but she was better able to catch her emotional slides and she didn’t bottom out as badly. As Kate’s facial expression, emotional tone, and demeanor began to change, so did the reactions she got from the people around her. Paul said he was more relaxed with her and less worried about her next crash. Their teenage son even commented that they seemed to be getting along better. Paul and Kate were amazed. They realized he was tracking them closely, watching their behavior and mapping their minds. From his outward behavior, they’d never guessed he was paying attention.

Equally importantly, Kate’s sexual desire changed. Getting their minds together when their bodies touched increased her desire for sex. Despite all the sex earlier in her life, this was something new. The shift in Kate’s desire wasn’t lost on Paul. Kate felt desire coming out of her that wasn’t about being drawn to Paul. She felt some of that too, but there was more: Kate felt it was
her
desire coming out of her. She likened it to popping the cork on a champagne bottle.

Not coincidently, Kate began remembering more about her childhood. At the outset of our sessions, she said she didn’t remember much, but from what she could remember, things were pretty normal. Her mother stayed home and raised the kids. Her father worked hard and was often gone from home. Her parents got along. She and her sister went to
school. One time her father got steamed when he caught them smoking. She was active in Girl Scouts. Mother helped her sew her badges on her uniform. Nothing unusual, just typical stuff.

Kate’s revised picture looked quiet different: Father was often gone but frequently drunk when he was home. Mother was unable or unwilling to take care of Kate and her older sister. Kate and her sister often ended up doing whatever was necessary to keep the house running and keep their mother stable. Mother would get overwrought about something and withdraw into her room for days. She also was a self-centered, brutal woman who enjoyed wiping the smiles off her children’s faces. The one thing she could do well was sew. Things got worse when Kate’s sister got married at eighteen and moved out. After that Kate stayed out of the house as much as possible, but Mother played cat-and-mouse mental games trying to keep her in. When Kate did get out, much of her time was spent partying and having sex.

How could Kate’s picture shift so radically? Heretofore there were serious holes in her autobiographical memory. Gaps in autobiographical memory occur in traumatic events or overwhelming circumstances. The way Kate saw things before was the picture she’d constructed with the remaining pieces. With enough strategic pieces missing, Kate could put things together as she preferred. Everyone’s life picture is inaccurate enough to keep their anxiety down, and accurate enough to keep their “bullshit detector” from going off. This was particularly true for Kate’s large gaps in autobiographical memory.