Sex Without Stress Read online

  SEX

  WITHOUT STRESS

  A couple’s guide to overcoming

  disappointment, avoidance, and pressure

  Jessa Zimmerman

  MA, LMHC, CST

  Copyright ©2018 by Jessa Zimmerman

  1st edition, September 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic, or electronic process, or in the form of a phonographic recording; nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, or otherwise be copied for public or private use—other than for “fair use” as brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews—without prior written permission of the author.

  The author of this book does not dispense medical or psychological advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, medical, or psychological problems without the advice of a physician or psychologist, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional, physical, and sexual well-being and not as a substitute for advice or treatment that may or should be prescribed by a physician or therapist. Some sexual difficulties may be caused by medical problems. A thorough medical examination is always wise, and if you believe you have a medical problem, consult a doctor promptly. Before adhering to any information or recommendations given here, you should consult your physician or therapist. In the event you choose to use any of the information in this book for yourself, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions or results.

  Case examples are composites of cases from clinical practice.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-7321646-0-4 (Print Book)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-7321646-1-1 (eBook)

  Cover design by John Thompson

  Artwork by Darko Hristov

  Interior text design and printing by Gorham Printing

  Printed in the United States of America

  Kirkland, WA

  www.legacyoneauthors.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Zimmerman, Jessa.

  Title: Sex without stress; a couple’s guide to overcoming disappointment, avoidance, and pressure / Jessa Zimmerman.

  1. Intimacy (Psychology) 2. Sexual health. 3. Sexual behavior and attitudes; Sexuality 4. Sexual desire disorders

  ADVANCE PRAISE FOR SEX WITHOUT STRESS

  Whether being in a couple or working with couples, skill, perseverance and perspective are always important. Jessa Zimmerman, an expert in counseling couples, has written a much-needed book about couples. Her book is accessible and insightful. Her advice is never ‘formulaic’ but instead focuses on thoughtful and practical discussions about growing as a couple. I’ve wanted to refer to a book like this for a long time. So glad and not a moment too soon, Zimmerman has written it. I give it my highest recommendation!

  —Sallie Foley, Director, University of Michigan Sexual Health Certificate Program & Co-author, Sex Matters for Women

  Jessa Zimmerman takes the reader through a straightforward and no-nonsense journey, highlighting the most common struggles that couples experience. This book identifies the top issues with which couples struggle: from defining what sex is or should be, desire discrepancies and differences in couples’ sexual styles. She clearly maintains that it is essential for each partner to be accountable for themselves—and to each other—to follow the useful action steps she walks them through that are necessary to bypass avoidance, disappointment and pressure.

  —Dr. Joe Kort, LMSW, Author & Speaker

  A definitive resource that helps couples face and identify the pain of lost sexual intimacy. Jessa bridges the gap between sexual desire and sexual despair as she offers concrete methods to stop avoiding sex. Her techniques clearly outline ways to have “sex without stress” that are accessible to all couples, regardless of gender or sexual orientation. As a sex therapist, I highly recommend this book as it pursues reducing the pressure and finding the pleasure of sex.

  —Edy Nathan MA, LCSWR, CST

  Over the last 40 years, I have met many good couples struggling to become great, trying to recapture the passion they had when they first met. Sexual problems are common over a long-term relationship. Many couples avoid sharing their personal feelings about their sexuality, failing to address the personal barriers to recapturing that loving lust. Jessa Zimmerman’s book addresses just that, helping couples who avoid sex to find transparency and willingness to share and explore oneself and each other’s sexual map. Sex Without Stress can help your love life become great again.

  —Dr. Kevin Seymour, Clinical Psychologist

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am so grateful that I have so many people to thank for their contributions to this project.

  Thanks to my partner, Kevin Makela, for his unending support. His continual votes of confidence, his unwavering belief in me, and his commitment to doing everything he could to help me get this done have been essential.

  Thank you to my children. I love them more than anything, and they are the reason I do everything. A special thanks to Emma who provided the first (and very impactful) edit of this book.

  Thank you to my coach, Jessica Butts. She promised me that if I wrote my book, I would get clear about my point of view and what I have to offer the world. I believe her now.

  Thank you to Dr. Elizabeth Larson for introducing me to the concept of the Giver/Receiver exercise.

  Thank you to my editor, Joshua Moro. He has done an amazing job of making the book so much better without diluting my voice or my message at all. In fact, by some sort of magic, his work has made them somehow even more mine.

  Thank you to all the clients who have shared their stories, their pain, and their journey with me. They have inspired me in my work. This book is for them and for all the others that have known heartbreak in their sex lives.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1 Help Is Here: An Introduction

  Chapter 2 The Sexual Avoidance Cycle

  Chapter 3 Your Expectations Are the Problem

  Chapter 4 Change Your Mindset

  Chapter 5 Honey, Can We Talk?

  Chapter 6 Who Packed Your Bags?

  Chapter 7 What Are You Avoiding?

  Chapter 8 What Is Your Unique Dance?

  Chapter 9 What’s on Your Side of the Court?

  Chapter 10 Put Insight into Action

  Chapter 11 The 9 Phases of Taking the Stress Out of Sex

  Chapter 12 What’s Next?

  Resources

  CHAPTER 1

  Help Is Here: An Introduction

  The most effective and powerful way to develop as a person and to change your relationship is to make the changes required to transform your sex life. That is why, from the beginning, I focused my therapy practice almost exclusively on working with couples and their sexual issues. Subsequently, I’ve assisted hundreds of couples in their work to reconnect intimately, emotionally, and sexually. I have been granted access to the inner workings of relationships and sex in a way few people ever experience. Over years of dedication to this field, I have developed ways to think about sex (and what’s important about it) that create permission, freedom, and lightness in a relationship instead of heaviness and pressure. My practical exercises help people learn how to bring these ideas to fruition and apply them in their sexual lives. This is what I will share with you here.

  Are you avoiding your sex life? I want to help.

  If you’ve picked up this book, I imagine that you are unhappy about the state of your sex life. Perhaps in your relationship, sex is not working well. You love your partner, and you know sex matters, but sex has become a source of hurt, doubt, and confusion. I also imagine you’re anxious a
bout confronting the topic of sex with your partner. You have no idea what you’ll find or where the conversation will go. It’s scary when you feel like sex isn’t working. It often causes you to doubt yourself, your partner, and your relationship. Frequently, it’s the thing keeping you awake with worry at 4 a.m. The human tendency is to avoid whatever scares us, so I imagine you and/or your partner are avoiding sex at this point. You’re not happy, your partner’s not happy, you can’t talk about it productively, and the problems are palpable between you. This is the proverbial elephant in the room, and it is crowding out the positive parts of your relationship.

  There is a way forward: you and your partner can get to a place where you’ll enjoy your sex life. If you both want an intimate connection, then you can absolutely create it. That’s probably another reason you’ve picked up this book. You know you want to be more than just roommates. You no longer want to feel lonely in bed with your partner, with that invisible, impenetrable wall between you. You don’t want to repeat the awkward dance around having sex (or not having sex). You don’t want to keep putting on the charade and continue living in a world where you don’t enjoy your sex life. You don’t know how to make it better, but you do know something needs to change. You still have at least a slight sliver of hope that there is something you can do that will make a difference. So you find yourself here, with this book. I want to help you do exactly that—get on a path where you and your partner can feel good about the state of your sex life, instead of feeling sadness, shame, frustration, confusion, doubt, and dread.

  Since you are reading this, you have already shown you are willing to do something with that sliver of hope. You have hope in the possibility that things can improve. Embrace that hope. Believe that things can be good. Know that by adjusting your expectations, you will feel lighter. Sex can feel easy—and even playful. From where you are now—and this is vital to success—you must be willing to have the type of honest and open conversations that are the hardest part of this process. These conversations with your partner (and conversations with yourself) are a soul-searching reckoning about what’s happening between you and your role in the dilemma. Can you commit to that? You’ve got to go on faith, at least in the beginning, by not knowing if your relationship can bear the weight of the process. But, I promise you, things won’t get better on their own. What do you have to lose?

  Who is this for?

  I have written this book to help great couples—couples just like you—who wish their sex lives were great, too. What makes you a great couple? When at least some of these apply:

  • You are still friends, even best friends.

  • You manage something well together: you co-parent successfully, you manage your money, or you are cooperative partners in the home.

  • You can still have fun together.

  • You have a great relationship, separate from sex.

  • You can talk about most things.

  • You share a basic kindness and decency with each other.

  This is not to say the two of you never quarrel, or that there aren’t some problems in your relationship. But to get the most out of this book, you will need to have a solid foundation. If you have goodwill, love, and respect but don’t know what to do to address your sex life, this book can help.

  If this doesn’t sound like your relationship, though, it may not be time to use this book. John Gottman, a famous researcher of marital stability, writes about what he calls the four horsemen of the apocalypse: defensiveness, stonewalling, contempt, and criticism. These behaviors are good indications of bigger issues in your relationship that will need to be addressed before you can work as a team to tackle your sexual issues. Find a good therapist and get some help, so you can be honest about your issues and learn how to interact as allies. If you do not feel good about the person you are or the person you’re with, it’s going to be difficult to change your situation—because to transform your sex life, it is more effective if you work together.

  What do I know?

  My journey to become a sex therapist grew out of my own struggles in a marriage that went terribly wrong. Things were great at first, as they are for a lot of people. Sex was easy and important to both of us. We shared interests, we had plenty of time together, and we really didn’t have any stressors in our early life together to create emotional challenges. It was, of course, the honeymoon period, when everything seems simple. I’m sure neither of us imagined it would all come crashing down in the future. Who gets married, at least the first time, with any sense of how hard it is?

  Once we had kids, there was stress on the relationship. That’s when our differences, our inability to work together, and our struggle to collaborate were revealed. Those qualities had never really been tested before, and our relationship didn’t do so well on that test when our children arrived. This, combined with a persistent pain I experienced during sex for months after the birth of our daughter, was a perfect storm. Since neither of us knew how to talk about what was happening, it went downhill from there.

  In general, I tried to pretend everything was okay. But I couldn’t stop the thoughts from flooding my mind in the early morning hours. I continued to experience a terrible dread that my relationship was in a bad place and might not be savable.

  I felt embarrassed to be failing so badly. I grew up in a sex-positive household. My family was open about the topic of sex, and sex was discussed as something normal, positive, and healthy. It was clear my parents shared a happy, intimate life. They were happily married for 52 years, until my mother died. Yet even with knowledge about sex and the model of my parents’ strong, lifelong, intimate relationship, I was completely ill-equipped to manage sex, intimacy, and cooperation with my husband.

  With each passing year and with the addition of two more children into our lives, the tension in our relationship grew to the point where it was palpable. Sometimes we’d explode in a fight, but neither of us handled that well, either. I would pretend to be asleep when he came to bed. I was exhausted, anxious, and unable to handle what was happening. I didn’t understand exactly why I didn’t want sex, and I was overwhelmed by the complexity of our relationship problems. I knew he was hurting in our relationship, too, and I felt guilty. Yet, I did nothing. I was afraid we couldn’t fix it. I was ashamed, I felt like I was failing, and I didn’t know where to start. The marriage that had seemed so easy and joyous at the beginning, with the man I had chosen to have and to hold and raise children with, ended because we didn’t confront our problems and didn’t get therapy until it was too late to prevent our divorce.

  The end of my marriage brought the necessity and opportunity to forge a new career. Although it seemed daunting to undertake graduate school, build a private therapy practice, and transition to life as a single mom of three, I knew enough to follow my heart. I was always the person that other people found “safe” to talk to, and I was passionate about helping people.

  Deciding to become a therapist, I knew from the beginning that I wanted to focus on working with couples. I wanted to understand what makes relationships work and keep others from enduring the same fate of my marriage. I wanted to unlock the secrets of successful marriage that I couldn’t learn just from watching my own parents. My master’s program was incredible because it focused on personal growth and interpersonal experiences with the other members of my cohort. It was designed to challenge us as people and to create opportunities to change how we interacted with others to have more open and honest relationships. It showed me my challenges with intimacy and taught me how to achieve success in relationships, both intimate and otherwise. I met my current partner during that time, and we applied what I was being taught about openness, honesty, confrontation, and boundaries. I was able to take the concepts I was learning about healthy relationships and put them into practice. My partner and I have built our relationship strong from the beginning.

  While I still have my own “messes,” I do know a lot about how to keep the relationship heal
thy. I no longer avoid issues; I speak up when something needs to be addressed. I hold myself accountable, and I also challenge my partner to do the same. I work to be honest about my thoughts and feelings, even when it isn’t to my advantage. I advocate for my needs, yet I strive to remain flexible and giving to ensure that I can meet my partner’s needs. I’m willing to stretch beyond my comfort zone. I care for my emotional state and my reactivity when things are difficult so that I can stay grounded and respond honestly and constructively. I don’t say these things to brag; I share this to illustrate the kinds of changes you can make. These are the kinds of skills I want to help you develop through the process described in this book. These also happen to be the skills that allow you to transform your sex life.

  Early in my training, an instructor gave a seminar about her work as a sex therapist. She described how most of her cases involved grief and loss work. This notion of grief and loss entangled with a problematic sex life hit me square in the gut. Instantly I could relate to how people suffer when they struggle with sex. I know how vital our intimate connections are; it is a loss when they aren’t working. We grieve. It feels extraordinarily painful. We feel hopeless and alone. I knew in that moment, sitting in the seminar: I was going to be a sex therapist. I decided soon after to undertake the extensive training to become nationally certified through the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists

  What will you learn?

  You are going to learn about how people get stuck exactly where you are and why it’s such a common problem. You’re going to learn how to think about sex and what kinds of expectations set you up for success. You will begin to understand what kind of baggage you bring to your relationship and its impact on your sex life. You will also see what your role is in the problems and what you need to do to change your part. You’re going to learn to transform your sex life. In fact, working on the sex problem is going to positively affect the rest of your relationship. When you master what it takes to improve your sex life, you’re set up for success in the other areas of your partnership as well.