A female reader asks: How can I be more present during sex with my husband? I’m going to answer the question as asked, but we could easily replace wife with husband and get a very similar answer.
When I read the question I thought of Jennifer, who came to see me because she wanted to want to have sex with her husband, Bob. (Over the years I have seen many “Jennifers” and a few “Kens” for help with this problem.) Jennifer and Bob had been married for several years and had sex about once a week. It had become painfully obvious that sex was a chore for her and a grand happening for her husband.
The difference in the two experiences was difficult for both of them. They had been to couples’ therapy for help with their sex life. The therapy helped them communicate better, but this had little impact on their sex life. In fact, Jennifer and Bob concluded that their therapist was as uncomfortable talking about their sex life as they were, so they quit therapy.
But Jennifer and her husband had learned a lot from that experience.
Jennifer realized that she held onto resentments that prevented her from connecting in many ways with Bob, not just sexually.
Her resentments were legitimate, but they were hurting her and the marriage. They had both learned that Bob’s angry outbursts and his refusal to help out with most household chores (even though they both had careers) and his generally negative mood was affecting all areas of their relationship. As a result of the therapy, Bob had made some real changes.
This helped every area of their marriage--EXCEPT their sex life.
This is not an unusual story. I hear this frequently enough to urge men and women to take care of these imbalances and get the resentments to a low enough level to let them go FIRST. While this does not automatically fix a sex life, it appears to be a pre-requisite. They’ll need to understand that their sex life may be suffering because they aren’t able to GET PRESENT during sex.
So how do you do this? Let’s return to Jennifer’s therapy. I sent Jennifer home with an exercise that could be called Mindfulness Sensuality. It’s simple really. Spend time alone, naked, breathing in deeply and slowly until you feel safe and relaxed. Touch yourself in non-sexual areas of your body. Pay attention to what feels good. Also, pay attention to judgmental statements you make about your body. Breathe in deeply, and when you breathe out tell yourself to let go of the judgment. Repeat!
Jennifer came back (as most men and women do who take this exercise seriously) noting that she had a lot of judgments about her body. She felt herself becoming particularly tense when she touched her stomach. She liked her stomach when she was in great shape, but she’d gained ten pounds after her second child. Now when she touched her stomach she found it very difficult to feel anything but disgust. By the end of the exercise, however, she felt a little better about it and generally had enjoyed herself more than she had imagined. She even took a nap at the end, which was the “nicest nap I’ve had in years,” she said.
The next step for Jennifer to take was to follow the same procedure and extend it to the sexual areas of her body. My instructions typically go something like this:
After you have relaxed and touched yourself as before, take the same approach by touching yourself in sexual areas of your body. Again, focus on the way you like to be touched and repeat the exercise noticing and then letting go of judgments. When you begin getting aroused instead of taking the quickest path to an orgasm, slow things down. Try touching areas that you haven’t previously. Notice if there are areas you avoid that are actually pleasurable. Notice the judgments and breathe deeply and let them go.
Jennifer returned for her next appointment and started with something that did not totally surprise me. She was furious with her husband because he was “backsliding” and walking around the house “pissed off and making everyone miserable.” How could he expect her to want to have sex with him? Because she was so angry she had not done the exercise.
I wasn’t surprised because many people do some backsliding of their own in therapy. I asked her if she wanted to learn to be more present with her own body as a gift to her husband or because she wanted to be a sexual being as a gift for herself.
This is actually a critical question. The only way to become a fully sexual being is to want it for yourself. The reason she came in for help was because she wanted to want to have sex, and now she wasn’t even willing to masturbate when she was upset with her husband.
Jennifer immediately recognized the errors in her thinking and had a sense of humor about it. Over the next couple of sessions Jennifer reported feeling more like she felt sexually early on in her relationship with Bob now that she was masturbating using a mindful approach. She even looked forward to her “homework” and joked that she had gotten some “extra credit” by masturbating a couple of extra times.
Next time I’ll describe the next phase of Jennifer’s therapy where she learns to apply her Mindful Sensuality experience to sex with her husband. In this phase we invited her husband for some couples’ sessions to help them reach a greater sexual potential.
Gerald Drose is an Atlanta-based couples’ sex therapist. Visit Dr. Drose at Powers Ferry Psychological Associates, LLC.
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