Sex Without Stress Read online

  As you are talking about your disappointing sex life, keep in mind that at least one of you probably feels sad, believing they are broken or inadequate. The root cause of avoidance of sex is unmet expectations. Something hasn’t been going well, and avoidance has become the way to deal with it. As you move into the next steps of improving your sex life, give yourselves permission to get rid of all expectations about what sex should be. Talk to your partner about changing the mindset about sex, as I discussed in Chapter 4. Embrace the new rules of the court together so that you can take pressure off the process. Understand that any sexual dysfunction you are dealing with might change what you can experience in sex, at least in the short term, and let that be okay. Figure out what’s possible for now and learn to enjoy that. Freedom from expectation means you can be free to play again. Once you’re reconnecting in your sex life, sex often becomes easier and some of the problems might disappear. And in fact, once you have addressed your role in the sexual issues, you’ll likely find that your other relationship issues get better, too. Improvements in sex ripple out to the rest of your relationship.

  If you and your partner are now in agreement about improving things together, you can move into the conversations that are going to form the “discovery” part of the process. If you are still doing this on your own, you’ll have to explore the topics by yourself. If you and your partner are not in agreement, it will be even more important to push forward and act unilaterally to change your relationship and the dynamics around sex. The goal of this section is to get clear about your own, individual contribution to the cycle, so you will be prepared to change your part. The first place to look for information about your role is in your personal history, in what’s colloquially called “your baggage.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Who Packed Your Bags?

  This is where you start to figure out what you are bringing to the dynamic with your partner. Every situation in your relationship is co-created by you and your partner, and your problematic sex life is no exception. One reason you may not have dealt honestly with your sex life until now stems from your own patterns of dealing with difficult things. Your specific contribution to the cycle, the way you participate in this cycle, is not a coincidence. You have your challenges for a reason (and they likely show up in more than just your sex life).

  When beginning to explore where your patterns were developed, you can start with what’s called your family of origin—your childhood. While it’s not “all about your mother,” as Freud might have said, it’s worth looking back over your childhood and getting real about how things were and how your personality developed in that context, with all the important people in your life at that time.

  I’m going to ask you to think about and answer a whole host of questions that shed light on your patterns and where they originate. It may be helpful to use a journal to record your responses. Hopefully you will gain some clarity about how you were trained to behave and react to things. Go through these with your partner and share your reflections with each other (or answer them yourself if you’re doing this on your own). Take as much time as you need, and let the conversations go where they may. My questions are starting points and prompts, but I want you to really dive in and understand your background and that of your partner. You might want to have separate conversations about each of the topics below.

  Look at your family history.

  The process starts by examining your nuclear family—you, your parents, and any siblings. Your childhood home and the people in it will have had a strong impact on your beliefs, expectations, behaviors, and coping mechanisms. Take your time discussing the following questions with each other or reflecting on them on your own:

  • What were each of your parents like, if you knew them? How was your relationship with each of them then, and what’s it like now?

  • What type of relationship did your parents have with each other, if they had one?

  • Are they still together? If not, what do you know about their separation, divorce, death or other reason for not being together?

  • Who are your siblings? What are they like? What is your relationship like with them now and how was it when you were young?

  • What roles did you each have in the family growing up? How are those the same or different now?

  Go over the same kinds of questions for stepparents, stepsiblings, and any important extended family members.

  POWER IN YOUR FAMILY

  After discussing the members of your nuclear family, it is important to think about how your family handled power. Every family will come up with some way of deciding who is in control of various aspects of family life. There is an inherent power differential between adults and children, but it can show up in a variety of ways from one family to the next. For example, some kids are “parentified” (given more power than they should have). In other households, adults abuse the power they have, and kids have little to no control. Power can be wielded more subtly, too, but even that would have shaped your development growing up. When talking about family power dynamics, you should also examine the power between the adults in your childhood (parents, grandparents, stepparents, aunts and uncles, godparents—anyone you might have witnessed in power struggles during your formative years). Spend some time with the following questions:

  • Who made decisions? Who got their way and how?

  • Did the people in the family acknowledge who really wielded the power? Or was there a way of pretending things were different than they were?

  • How was power handled among the adults in your family? Between adults and children?

  • Was power ever misused or abused? How? Did you push back?

  • How much power did you have growing up? How did you feel about it?

  • How did you know where you had power and where you didn’t?

  • What was your take away about power? How do you tend to handle power dynamics in your life now?

  LOVE AND SUPPORT

  Families differ in whether (and how) they show love and affection. Some of you will have been raised feeling loved and supported; others will have known from the beginning that you were on your own. Your family environment shapes your attachment style and expectations in relationships throughout your lives. Experiences with physical touch, emotional support, and reliability have a direct impact on romantic relationships as an adult. What do you learn when you explore the following:

  • What did affection, love, and support look like in your family (if there was any)? Who was it between? Where didn’t it exist?

  • Who would comfort you after a hard day at school?

  • On whom did you rely?

  • What kind of support and love did you see between your parents, if any?

  • In what ways have these experiences shaped your tendencies with love and affection as an adult?

  SEX

  Your family has a big impact on your attitude toward sex. Some of you come from families that were open about sex, talking about it and treating it as a healthy part of life. Some of you got only a little, if any at all, exposure to the topic of sex. Sex was a taboo subject or just absent from any conversation. And others of you grew up in an environment where sex was explicitly negative, either from the way people talked about it or because of how it was acted out or used in the household. Reflect on these questions to explore how your upbringing has affected how you feel and think about sex:

  • Did your family talk about sex? In what kind of way?

  • Did you get “the talk?” Who sat you down and how did that go? What were the messages you got?

  • Was there any sexual energy between your parents? How did you feel about that? Was it appropriate and within bounds? Was it excessive and lacking boundaries?

  • Was there any sexual energy between anyone else in the family? Any sexual contact? What happened? Was it known or acknowledged by family members? If so, how was it treated? How did you feel about it?

  • Did you have
any experiences where you were discovered in sexual activity? What happened and how did the person react? How did you feel?

  • How has your family environment and attitude about sex affected you? What impact does it have on your sexual relationships as an adult?

  CONFLICT

  Your family and upbringing teach you about dealing with conflict. Many of you come from homes where keeping the peace was important. You learned not to need anything and not to rock the boat. Others may have come from chaotic environments where conflict was a constant presence—perhaps even a threatening reality. Many of you were raised with something in between: conflict existed, but you didn’t necessarily learn to deal with it well (in a way that would be satisfying to all parties and lead to mutual understanding). To have a strong relationship with your partner, it’s important to learn about your comfort level with conflict as well as your skill set for handling conflict with others. Consider the following prompts as you evaluate what you learned about conflict:

  • How did your family handle conflict? What behaviors did your parents exhibit during disagreements?

  • Did conflict get resolved in your family? Or did it fester and come out as passive aggressiveness?

  • Was conflict scary in any way? What happened that made it so?

  • Were you allowed to disagree with adults as a child? How did you get that message?

  • What about conflict between you and your siblings? How did that go? What did your parents do about it?

  • What was your basic takeaway about conflict? What are your tendencies now when it comes to addressing or avoiding conflict?

  SUBSTANCE ABUSE AND MENTAL ILLNESS

  Many families struggle with the complicating factors of mental illness or substance abuse, and these will usually have dramatic effects on family life and relationships. Besides the impact of the disease itself and how each family member is affected by the problem, there are family dynamics around admitting and addressing the issues versus avoiding and pretending that they don’t exist. Discuss the following questions:

  • Were there substance abuse issues in your family?

  • If so, who struggled? How were they handled?

  • How did the household adapt to the use?

  • What about mental illness? Were any of your family members anxious or depressed?

  • Did someone struggle with a more significant disorder?

  • How did these struggles play out in your house as you grew up?

  • What was your role around each of those topics? How did it change the way your family members related?

  • Was your family open and honest about any challenges? Did they pretend in public? Did they pretend at home?

  • What did you learn? Are there issues with substance use or mental health that are relevant to your life now?

  SECRETS

  There can certainly be secrets about any of the topics covered so far. Families often act like nothing is wrong amid problems, even very serious ones. Your family may have taught you to turn a blind eye on problems or that appearances matter so much that you can’t acknowledge problems. Secrets may have been used to manipulate you, to put you in positions of power or powerlessness. You may have been encouraged to keep secrets or to break them. All of this has an impact on whether you deal with things directly or whether you prefer to hide. Explore how secrecy played out in your family:

  • Were there secrets in your family? How do you know? What were you told and what did you infer?

  • Were there money issues? Were these spoken about? How did the family navigate around the topic?

  • Was there infidelity? By whom? How do you know or come to suspect? How did your various family members treat that?

  • Were there other things left unspoken?

  • What were you expected to do? What did you do?

  • What did you learn about honesty versus secrecy? How do you handle secrecy now?

  • What are your tendencies toward dealing openly with issues versus hiding them?

  In talking about your family and its experience with love, power, conflict, secrets, substance abuse, mental illness, and more, you can probably see how you ended up with the baggage that you have. Most of your baggage was packed for you; you didn’t get to choose your experiences, your training, or your beliefs.

  Regardless of what type of home you were raised in, you were raised in a way that gave you messages about how you should behave and what’s expected of you—and what you learned is not the same as everyone else. Your experience (and theirs) is unique and impactful.

  Growing up, you learn what earns you praise, what gets you punished, and how to be left alone. If you have never examined this before, it can be hard to see it at first—it’s like the water you swim in—but you grew up in different water from other families. It’s common to assume everyone grew up with the same influences, but it’s important to realize that your family was unique, and in fact, your experience is different than those of any siblings you have, too. There is nothing absolute about how things need to be now, in your relationships as an adult. You need to see that your patterns are adaptations to your environment—and recognize you can change them, too. You don’t have to keep everything that is packed in your baggage!

  Examine your sexual history.

  Now that you have examined your family life and how that shaped your personality and coping mechanisms, it is time to look back at your relationship and sexual history. It’s not only your family who has put things into your baggage. You need to understand your sexual beliefs and expectations when you’re trying to improve your sex life. Again, go through these topics and questions with your partner (if they are working with you) or alone (if not). Take all the time you need and see where the prompts lead.

  ABOUT SEX

  Think back to the messages you received about sex—in your family, your culture, your religion, your community, and from media and other sources. Think about what you learned about sex as you reflect on the following questions:

  • What things were said to you about sex and intimacy?

  • Where did those messages come from? Family? Church? Friends? Other places?

  • What messages were unspoken?

  • How much of what you heard seemed relevant to you?

  • What parts of it were shaming?

  • How were you viewing sex by the time you entered adolescence? Did you think it was the best thing since sliced bread? Shameful, dirty, and wrong? Scary and unknown?

  • What expectations about sex have you developed?

  • How do these messages and views impact you and your sex life now?

  YOUR SEXUAL IDENTITY

  Your sense of yourself as a sexual person develops over time. Some of you have always had a clear understanding of who you are and what your sexual interests are. Others may still be struggling to figure that out. You have a personal journey in getting clear about your sexual orientation, gender identity, and sense of your eroticism. Your path may have been direct and short, or it may have taken a more roundabout route. Learn more about the unfolding of your identity by discussing these prompts:

  • What was it like for you as you became aware of yourself as a sexual person?

  • What did you know about your sexual orientation and gender? How did you feel about it?

  • How has your understanding of yourself changed over time?

  • How did you come to understand these aspects of yourself?

  • How did you feel about your body? How do you feel about it now?

  • What issues arose around you figuring out how you identify in terms of gender and orientation?

  • How were you supported, or not, as you learned about who you are?

  • How has this exploration shaped your experience of sex and your expectations of what it can be?

  • How might you feel limited or affected by your identity?

  EARLY SEXUAL EXPERIENCES

  Your past sexual experiences inf
orm your expectations and desires, one way or another. Perhaps you rebel against the things that have happened to you, determined to live differently in the future. Or perhaps you absorbed your experiences, and they dictate what you come to expect in a relationship. For some, early experiences were positive. But for others, they were disappointing, shaming, scary, or confusing. It’s worth understanding and sharing what your experiences have been and how they have affected you. Go through these questions and see what you learn:

  • What were your earliest sexual experiences?

  • How did you feel about them at the time? How do you feel about them now?

  • Do you wish you had had more sexual experiences? Fewer?

  • Did you self-pleasure? How did you feel about it?

  • What messages did you get about that?

  • What about chosen experiences with other people?

  • How did these experiences shape your attitudes, beliefs, and expectations about sex? How are they relevant to your current situation?

  Sexual trauma

  So many people have had traumatic, coercive, confusing, or inappropriate experiences with sex and sexuality in their history. This can have a profound effect on future sex lives. Depending on whether you have had these experiences and whether you have processed and dealt with them, you may need additional support in moving forward in your sex life. There are therapists that specialize in working with trauma, and there are resources available for the process. If you think you are still highly reactive or triggered around sex, if you find yourself upset or dissociated during sex, or if you have never talked to anyone about your experiences, I suggest you seek out that extra support. I have listed some books that could be helpful in the resources section at the end of the book. When sharing answers to these questions, tread gently. Feel free to take care of yourself if any of this material is triggering to you or your partner. Take your time with the following exploration: