Sex Without Stress Page 2
This book follows the same structure and path that I take with my therapy clients:
Create understanding
• Understand how disappointment, avoidance, and pressure become a cycle
• Uncover and adjust your unrealistic expectations
• Change your beliefs about how sex and relationships work
Figure out what’s going on and what’s your part
• Learn to talk with your partner about your issues
• Unpack your baggage
• Discover what kinds of issues are complicating your sex life
• Deconstruct your unique dynamic around having (and not having) sex
• Create your individual action plan about what you need to change
Take action to change your sex life
• Learn the exercise that you’ll use to create change
• Put insight into action with my 9-phase plan
• Resources, now and in the future
At the moment, you are stuck in a negative cycle, feeling things like disappointment, sadness, fear, frustration, and loneliness. But there truly is a way to escape that cycle to create a sex life that feels easy, joyful, pleasurable, and even playful. It’s probably hard to imagine sex being anything but serious and stressful (if you can imagine having sex at all), but you can work with your partner to completely transform how you interact in and around sex. No matter how stuck you feel, there is a way to move forward. I want this book to help you change your sex life, connect with your partner, and look forward to intimacy rather than avoid or dread it. The first step in the process is to sort through this mess you are in now: understanding the Avoidance Cycle and how it works.
A few disclaimers
I have created several example couples, based on the stories and experiences from clients over the years. These couples are composites of the situations, details, and feelings that are common when people are dealing with sexual issues. You may feel like I am describing you specifically, but that’s because I’ve found that the issues, themes, and even statements people make are common among couples struggling with sex. You will get to follow their journey throughout the book as they go from feeling stuck and hopeless to finding joy and ease in their sex lives.
I make every effort to use inclusive language throughout this book. I affirm every sexual orientation, gender identity, relationship structure and consensual sexual behavior, and I hope that is clear in my writing. This book is for couples. All couples. And it is meant to address sexual avoidance between any two people. I do not assume you are monogamous, straight, able-bodied, identified with your assigned gender—or any other particular trait. If you find any instance of less inclusive language or assumption, it is unintentional, and I apologize. My intent is to include everyone.
SECTION 1:
SET THE STAGE FOR SUCCESS
CHAPTER 2
The Sexual Avoidance Cycle
Despite the common belief that “sex is supposed to be fun, easy, and natural,” a surprising number of people struggle with it. If you are having problems in your sex life, you are not alone. In my practice, I have seen young couples who haven’t consummated their marriage, who struggle with sexual pain, or who argue about their different levels of sexual interest. I’ve seen middle-aged people who are dealing with stress and responsibilities overtaking their relationship, who have lost interest in sex, or who have gotten complacent and bored in their sex life. There are older couples who struggle with sexual dysfunction, are feeling the effects of disease and its treatment, or are just now beginning to talk about what they want out of their sex life. This isn’t a complete list, of course. This is just a sample of the kinds of sexual concerns experienced by so many people. People like you. People like me. And people who don’t realize that problems with sex are commonplace.
Struggles in your sex life can make you sad and anxious—especially if they happen often. If you aren’t having sex, or at least not as much as you want, you may feel inadequate, as well as disappointed. If sex doesn’t seem to go well when you do have it, the result leads to feelings of disappointment, or worse, failure.
And because it is human nature to avoid difficult and anxiety-provoking feelings, you may find yourself avoiding sex altogether: having it, talking about it, and doing anything to change it.
In general, once you start to avoid something, your anxiety about it gets worse. It becomes harder and harder to approach whatever it is that you’re avoiding. You start to feel pressure building up and bearing down on you. This compounding pressure only adds to the anxiety, creating a downward spiral of deeper and more ingrained sexual issues. Feelings of disappointment, failure, and inadequacy lead to avoidance. Avoidance creates increased anxiety and pressure. Heightened pressure just makes it harder to have a fulfilling sexual encounter, creating more feelings of disappointment, failure, and inadequacy.
Disappointment. Avoidance. Pressure. This is the Avoidance Cycle, and it is a vicious one, so it’s important to discuss each of these experiences separately.
Sex feels disappointing.
Feelings of disappointment are the most common cause of the Avoidance Cycle; they kick off the whole process. Different couples will tolerate sexual struggles to different degrees, but it’s common to start avoiding sex when bad feelings about it occur more frequently.
Sex can feel disappointing for many different reasons. You may have unrealistic expectations (although you may not realize they’re unrealistic), leaving you sad and afraid when reality isn’t living up to your ideal. You may have the unfounded idea that sex should be spontaneous, that men should last a long time, that women should orgasm through penetrative sex, or that penetration is the only sex that counts. These are a few common errant expectations, and there are many more. Every time you have sex that falls short of your expectations, it can feel like a failure, diminishing your confidence for the next time. Sex can feel disappointing because of what is happening instead of what isn’t. You may see things about yourself or your partner that dishearten you. No matter where the disappointment originates, it leads you to feel more sad and anxious. It reaches the point where every sexual encounter holds the weight of the world, because each time is a test you expect to fail. Eventually, the survival of your relationship seems to hang in the balance. It feels like you are risking everything each time you have sex, depending on what happens during and afterward.
If sex isn’t easy or natural, you may assume there is something wrong with you, your partner, or your relationship. You may worry that you’re with the wrong person or that you are broken. Worries consume your thoughts, and you begin to question everything. The worries don’t go away during sex. In fact, the worries tend to be magnified during sex, leaving you unable to be present with your partner. Inevitably, you wonder if your relationship is doomed.
When you’re having sexual problems, it is common to worry about how your partner is feeling, both while having sex and in general. You may feel guilty about your sexual struggles because you want your partner to be happy. During sex, you spend time on your partner’s “side of the court,” trying to read whether they are pleased and what they want. For the most part, you are not allowing yourself to think about or pursue what you want because sex feels fragile and fraught with tension. You are vigilant during sex instead of getting to enjoy it. “Is this one of the times that will go pretty well, and I get to feel relief?” “Can the two of us ‘check off the box’ and feel like we’re off the hook for a while before the pressure mounts again?”
The walls seem to close in. The space around sex gets smaller and tighter, constricting until it feels like there is no room to move or change.
You begin avoiding sex.
When sex seems to fail, when you feel disappointed afterward, when it ends in tears, sex begins to feel risky and negative. Sex is not the positive, enjoyable experience you hoped for, or that you may have shared with your partner in the past. Before you have any sexual problems, it’s hard to
imagine that having sex will ever seem negative or difficult. But now sex has become an increasingly negative experience: the more disappointing sex is, the more you end up avoiding it.
One of you is probably adept at missing the opportunities to have, or even to talk about, sex. It’s common to make yourself busy in the evening or to fall asleep earlier than your partner. Perhaps you say, “I’m exhausted” at bedtime almost every night to signal that sex is off the table.
One or both of you may deflect any comments about sex or any bid to have sex. You may act like you’re oblivious to the comments or actions—going on as if they never happened or that they mean something else. Or you use humor to respond to a genuine attempt to deal with the subject, effectively telling your partner that you’re not going to take it seriously.
Perhaps you or your partner take those attempts to address sex and steer towards a fight, instead. You put the focus on your partner’s level of sexual desire, high or low, or how sex is initiated, instead of addressing the fact that you’re not having it. Or maybe you maneuver any mention of your sex life into a fight about a completely different topic, driving the conversation even further away from the subject of sex.
These techniques enable you to avoid addressing what’s happening (or not happening) in your sex life. Indeed, there may be real issues to “fight” about—concerns about your relationship that need to be dealt with—before you’re going to want to have sex with your partner. Those topics will need to be addressed. However, if you stage these fights instead of having a conversation about sex, you are creating even more problems. These are diversion tactics, a way to avoid saying, “I know we’re not having sex, and I have some good reasons that have to be addressed so that we can make progress on our sex life.”
The pressure mounts.
Avoiding your sexual problems doesn’t make them go away. You might experience a brief respite once the subject of sex seems to be off the table. But unless you and your partner are both content in a sexless, sex-limited, or sexually problematic relationship, you can’t escape the knowledge that at least one of you is unhappy. Even if you manage to put it out of your mind for a while because your partner isn’t bringing it up, sex is right back at center stage as soon as you have your next heart-to-heart (or fight) about it. Even if there are no outward signs that either of you is thinking about sex, you think about it. A lot. More and more as time goes by. The thoughts start to monopolize your mental energy.
Avoidance creates pressure. Pressure comes from the belief that you should be having sex more often than you do. It comes from one person wanting sex while the other doesn’t. It comes from the energy it takes to avoid the subject. Additionally, once your frequency of sex decreases due to avoidance, there is more and more pressure that the encounters you do have should go well. And when sex doesn’t go well again (and again), the whole cycle amplifies. This is when you wonder if things will ever get better.
The pressure is becoming an ever-increasing presence in your relationship. You end up with that elephant in the room—suffocating any chance you have to enjoy sex together, to ever feel like it’s successful. You are stuck in your head the whole time. You’re certainly not connecting with your partner. This pressure can also manifest itself in other ways, like sexual dysfunction. It’s not surprising that it’s difficult to get aroused in such a state, much less reach an orgasm. Things are getting worse and you are getting...desperate? Resigned? Devastated?
So this is where you are. Your expectations aren’t met. You feel disappointed. You start to avoid sex. Your sense of pressure increases. You have a harder time enjoying sex. And round and round you go. Once you’re trapped in this cycle, it’s hard to see any way out.
Fear can keep you from moving forward. Anxiety and avoidance rob you of the chance to improve your partnership and your sex life. Don’t let the cycle consume you any longer. Your paralysis in the face of fear is what feeds the cycle. You’re caught in the vortex of swirling feelings of inadequacy, disappointment, failure, hopelessness, pressure, and anxiety. As long as you stand still in the middle of all that, you can’t escape to the other side, where it’s light, playful, relaxing, and free. Instead of avoiding the things that scare you, you need to confront these issues, so you can move past them.
There are ways to heal, transform, and adapt to the complexities of your sexual situation. This book is about giving you the framework and the tools to make your sex life better. Before I talk about how you’re going to change your sex life, I need to take a teaching moment and give you some basic information that will set you up for success. The first thing I want you to understand is that your expectations are the root of the problem.
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Before you proceed, I want you to meet some people that illustrate some of the many ways couples get caught in the Avoidance Cycle. These are the couples that serve as examples throughout the book. You’re going to check in with them as they move through the process I’ve designed to help you escape the Avoidance Cycle and recreate your sex life. They are varied in age, gender, and sexual orientation. Their family and sexual histories are different. Some of the people have sexual dysfunction; others don’t. The types of issues and influences that affect their sex lives are all over the map. But they all struggle in the cycle of disappointment, avoidance, and pressure. Each couple feels completely stuck. None of them can imagine a time when sex might be easy or consistently enjoyable. But you will see as you read further in the book, each couple comes to understand exactly what’s playing out between them and what they need to change to improve their relationship and sex life. Each couple completely transforms how they think about sex, what happens during sex, and how they feel about it. They move past being stuck and on to a place where they are happy and fulfilled.
Carol and Todd
Carol and Todd are a couple in their early 60s, empty nesters who have been married for more than 35 years. They’re in pretty good shape, active for their ages. As they near retirement and begin thinking about how they’ll spend their “golden years,” they realize they want to address their sex life even though they haven’t been talking openly about the problems they’re having.
Todd struggles with erectile dysfunction. They have spent a long marriage together equating sex with penetration, so now that intercourse has become difficult, they don’t know what to do. He visited the doctor and has a prescription for Viagra; it works some of the time. When Todd started to need actual physical stimulation to get erect about a decade ago, Carol saw that as a lack of interest in her. When younger, he would just be hard and ready to go. She had taken that as proof that she was attractive and that he wanted her. It wasn’t until he naturally started needing more stimulation that it became apparent she’d made this association. So, as he needs more time and touch to get going, she sees this as a sign he is losing interest in her. This reveals her basic insecurity that she isn’t attractive anymore.
It doesn’t help that she has other factors complicating her ability to feel desirable and attractive. Carol is a breast cancer survivor and underwent a double mastectomy, chemotherapy, and radiation treatment a few years ago. Not only were her breasts removed, but she is also dealing with the ongoing effects of menopause. These changes to her body (and the impact of these changes on her sense of her feminine sexuality) have left her reeling. She is self-conscious about her scars, and she worries that her chest is a put-off for Todd. She isn’t lubricating like she used to, partly due to hormonal changes and partly due to everything going through her mind. Todd is tentative about exploring her changed body, not knowing how she feels about it. Neither of them knows what to do now when it comes to sex. They both miss the way it used to be before cancer and the ED. Back in the day, they had a straightforward sex life that didn’t take much work. They are facing losses (of sexual functioning and unmet expectations) every time they have sex. Every sexual encounter feels terrible to both.
Beth and Yara
Beth and Yara are a married co
uple in their 40s who have been together for almost 10 years. Sex has been a little challenging from the beginning and has gotten much more so in the last 4 or 5 years. They rarely talk about the problem, and when it comes up, they both end up feeling hurt and defensive.
As a result, they mostly avoid talking about sex and fight about other things instead. They always seem to have something that needs be talked about and worked out before they can even begin to address their sex life. They have issues about jealousy (how time is being spent and with whom). There are issues around job stress and who brings how much of that stress home. There are issues about pot and alcohol use and who is using how much and how the other feels about it. They go around in circles on all these various topics. But they never get around to talking about how rarely they have sex, how poorly sex seems to go, and how bad they feel about it.
Because sex has become a loaded topic, Beth avoids sex by keeping busy in the evening, stretching out her tasks to fill up the space before bedtime. Because she makes it take so long to get her stuff done, she doesn’t sit down to “unwind a little” until Yara is ready for bed. She can then appear completely reasonable in wanting a bit of time to watch TV, effectively eliminating the chance for sex at bedtime. They are getting more and more distant as time goes on. They live separate lives, each busy with their own activities and commitments. The evenings are spent in front of the TV, but they don’t even do that together most of the time. They are both unhappy but have largely resigned themselves to this existence.
Beth is struggling with feeling no desire for sex. She is entering perimenopause, and her body is not responding to sexual touch the way it used to. It seems to take forever to get aroused, if she even can, and she feels bad about that. She feels broken, like she doesn’t work anymore. And that sense of brokenness (like something is fundamentally wrong with her) kills any desire she might have had for sex. She also has a hard time quieting her mind and letting go of distractions during sex. This makes their encounters even more difficult.