Where Sex Gets Stuck

The obstacles to intimacy that relate to identity are. This is a really rich area for unlocking our latent sexual capacity because we often get locked into early in life who our parents let themselves be or who the other adults around us, maybe religious leaders or community leaders or whoever, allow themselves to be sexually. And so if they have really narrow lanes, then we wind up with really narrow lanes too. Hi, welcome to Sex Love Power. I'm your host, Michelle Lizenberry Christensen. This podcast is where I convene the conversations about love and sex that help powerful women and those who love them to create the intimacy and intensity they really want in bed and in life. Together, we navigate the tensions between our desire and our devotions, between our wildness and our security with our eyes wide open. This podcast is designed to help you create more closeness, ease, pleasure and justice in your relationship. And we do it by blending wisdom from the fields of sexuality and spirituality, trauma and self regulation, and intersectional feminism. I'm so glad you're here. In today's episode, we're going to follow up our last conversation, which was all about the core qualities that make a great lover in a long term relationship. With the other side of that same coin, there are four categories of obstacles to great passionate sex that just gets better for a lifetime. And the results I get with clients all trace back to my devotion to pinpointing and addressing these obstacles in a systematic way. Naturally, that all starts with knowing what those obstacles are in the first place. So that's why today we'll walk through the four obstacles to great, passionate sex. Right away, you're going to be able to see where you and your partner may have gotten blocked. When you listen carefully and ask yourself which of these obstacles are present in your relationship, you'll start to get a sense of the roadmap for where you can open up a wide, smooth highway toward the kind of closeness and passion you really want in your relationship and that you deserve to have as fuel for the other parts of your life. Naming and addressing these obstacles turns the gap between your desires and your current state into a traversable pathway. Instead of it being an overwhelming, mysterious hall of mirrors like it might have been in the past, when I do this with clients, they immediately start to feel more clarity, more confidence, more determination. And all of that gets them into the kinds of little doable actions that make all the difference in your relationship with your body, yourself and your partner. So that's what you can take from this episode. So let's dive into today's topic, the four obstacles to great, passionate sex. Each of these is really common, and a lot of us have something in all four categories. Naturally, all of us have different bodies, different histories, different mindsets and preferences around sexuality. And that's all before we start to come together with a partner who has their own set of complexities. So the variety of combinations of these obstacles is literally endless. But that's why over the last 24 years I have looked for and discovered patterns that let me simplify the unblocking process. And I want to pull back the curtain and show you these four categories. They include physiology, identity, presence and energy. And if you go to the show page for this episode on my website@lizandberry.com, you'll be able to download a printed guide that my team has put together that shows you visually the four areas and gives you some hints as to the kinds of obstacles you want to look for in each area. Now, I know the acronym PIPE isn't as eloquent as if the first letters added up to say like Y U M M or S E X Y or something. But at least P I P E helps me remember them. And maybe that helps you too. I hope I'm going to go through these with a little example. Story of two Clients we'll call them Jack and Angela. This couple came to me saying we thought sex was supposed to be natural since we've gotten stuck in a dry spell. Does that mean there's something wrong with us? But as we talked about how common it is for long term couples to find themselves blocked in their intimate connection, even if the relationship is fairly good in a lot of other and perhaps somewhat owing to some of the friction points in other places, they both started to see that it's not a sign that one of them is broken or that they just don't belong together. Their stuckness was simply evidence that they needed some maintenance and skill building on their intimacy. Another thing that held Jack and Angela back was that they carried what I call assistance seeking shame. Yes, ass for short. Ass when you've got it. You think what they told me? Jack said. We kept telling ourselves we'd figure it out on our own. It wasn't that bad that we needed couples counseling, Angela added. We weren't on the brink of divorce or anything. I created a whole episode of this podcast on that mistaken belief. Episode 13 because sex is at least as nuanced as plumbing or electrical work, am I right? And we don't try to figure those challenges out on our own, do we? Asking for expert guidance and support is not a sign that you are profoundly messed up. It's a sign that you're smart. And frankly, couples who wait to get help until it is really bad are like people who never so much as go and get their teeth cleaned until they've got a throbbing toothache and need a root canal. It takes a whole lot of tooth pulling to help them at that point, and the infection has almost certainly hurt their hearts. See the parallel? So what I showed Jack and Angela is on the physiology level, we looked at their body image, their body parts and their functioning, their sexual response, and how they thought about each other's bodies. I showed them the ways that our bodies, our partner's bodies, our sexual response, and our stories about all of it can become an obstacle and how we can address that obstacle without needing to change the reality of what is on a physical level. That's the first P Now, the I. On the identity level, we looked at their self image, their moral judgments about sex, about bodies, marriage and parenthood, and the and the sexual information and know how that they were working with. I showed Jack and Angela how to rewrite their rules around sex so that they had more permission to enjoy what's here and now. And I helped them know what they needed to learn and practice, to be really confident and to have fun in a relaxed way with one another today in the bodies they have and inside the life they have now, as opposed to some ideal from the past or the future now. On the presence level, Jack and Angela assessed their capacity to take risks and to reveal themselves to one another. They looked at the flexibility that they each have to adapt in the moment. And most importantly, they looked at the skill they have at regulating their own nervous system in the moment when strong emotions or sensations arise. Because that's often what happens in these intimate moments, right? We're feeling a lot emotionally and we're feeling a lot physically and we have to have capacity for sensation or. Or we're going to want to hop out of the situation. Watch some more Netflix. I helped them see the triggers that sent their nervous systems out of a relaxed, grounded state and how they could each learn tools to build more resilience and capacity so that they could stay in or return to the moment and be passionate and feel the rush of emotions and sensations and still hold on to themselves without retreating or collapsing. And finally, on the energy level, we looked at Jack and Angela's physical vitality and aliveness and how they each took care of their spirits. We looked at their general life outlook and their moods, their attitudes towards sexuality in their relationship and the amount of space they dedicated to thinking about their love and spending time together. We looked at their partnership and how well they respect and negotiate with one another to create adult to adult consensual agreements around shared labor and around the emotional energy that they each expend in the relationship. Finally, we looked at generosity, fun and play in each of their lives and in their relationship. I helped them see how the energy of their overall lives and the energy inside other parts of their relationship shows up in sex as either rocket fuel or as roadblocks for their erotic connection. And then they learned ways to remove those roadblocks and rev up the chemistry between them. This methodical process of examining the physiology, the identity, the presence, and the energy that you each have around sexuality is what I developed. After Kurt and I saw more than a dozen therapists, I went to countless workshops and read hundreds, I'm not exaggerating here, hundreds of books about love and sex. This process is involved, it's thorough, it shines a flashlight into all your nooks and crannies. But when you're done, there is no mystery as to what's blocking sex and when you know what's stopping you more than halfway to getting unstuck. So a little word of warning in my coaching, I don't start with this assessment. The first place we start is with a phase I call choosing. We dig into our motivation with some powerful work on values and vision and a deliberate choice to dive into vulnerability. Until we've done that very deliberate choosing, a lot of people aren't going to be willing to look at their obstacles in as direct a way as I'm introducing here. So if you're doing this on your own, using this episode as your guide, which you absolutely can do, I encourage you to really get clear together first on why you're doing it, what's truly at stake, what do you really want for your relationship and what have you been creating instead as you try to just work around these obstacles that you have yet to pinpoint, why do you want to make a change? The bright shining reason for looking at ourselves has to eclipse the discomfort of that self examination or we will avoid it every dang time. Now I'll create an episode soon to help you with that choosing work. But for now I'm going to presume that at least you, one person who's listening to this episode, at least you know why you want to look at your own obstacles to deeper intimacy. So let's just look at yours, not your Partner's and let's dive in. I'm going to give you some questions you can ask yourself to assess your obstacles in the area of physiology. As you think about your body, do you think that it is ready, willing, able, and worthy of the kind of sex that you desire? How fit are you for the love you want? A lot of us have stories about our bodies that this body doesn't work. It's not big enough, it's not small enough, it's not long enough, it's not thick enough, or the other way around. There's something wrong with me. And that kind of feeling often engenders a projection of that same rejection. So there are a lot of people who have a beef with their partner's body born out of their objection to their own. So when you think about your partner's body, what stories might be blocking you from really feeling at home inside eroticism with your partner? The longer we're together, the more our bodies change. And it's not inevitable that people gain weight or grow weak, but it is inevitable that they change. And so this is the area where, with clients, I look at functioning a lot of the things that change in bodies. When women go through menopause, when men's bodies change, we get medical labels for that are really pathologizing and really make us feel like failures. And that just compounds the problem because then we want to avoid that feeling of failure. So this is the area where you're invited to look at what's been happening when you get into a sexual experience. Is lubrication happening? Is erection happening? Is it reliable? What about ejaculation? How long does that take? What about orgasm? And how long does that take? And what judgments do you have about those things? So there are the facts of what's happening, and then there's the meaning we put on it, and it's the meaning that causes the problems. The facts are not intrinsically problematic. And I help people every day overcome, you know, things that are called medically, like premature ejaculation, failure to ejaculate. Listen to this stuff, man. It's just mean and, you know, lubrication challenges. There's lots of things that happen materially that we can address if we show up with love and acceptance and joy and playfulness to them. So that's why I call this segment of my work Assess and address, because it's not assess and overcome. It's not assess and fix or change. It's look at. And this is also the place, this physiology place, is also where we look at gender expression. Do you feel like man enough or woman enough? Do you feel like you are in your partner's mind, or do you have any gender dysphoria, too? A wonderful thing happening that Kurt and I have a lot of visibility into because we are sex educators for young people. Is that the coming up generation. We work with 8th graders and their generation. And, you know, I have kids who are in eighth grade right now. He's not in our group sex education class for obvious reasons. Wouldn't that be the worst if your parents were your sex ed teachers? But we have him and then his sister, who's 9 at the time I'm recording this. And both of them are living in a culture where people choose their own pronouns very freely and can really express themselves in the place in the world where we live here in Seattle and the kinds of communities that we connect with, including our church community, where Kurt and I teach the Unitarian Universalist Church. People are open to all forms of gender expression and sexual identity and sexual orientation. So there's a lot of room, but for a lot of people, you know, we had to get a lot of education about that. Kurt and I as people in our 40s and 50s, respectively. And you may not have a lot of understanding of the full range of expression that is perfectly normal and healthy. And you may have gotten educated from church or culture or parents or whatever in a way that taught you that it wasn't okay to be outside the gender binary to be anything other than strictly heterosexual, and to step outside very specific gender role expression. Like, this is what it is to be man, and this is what it is to be woman, and this is what it is to be wife, and this is what it is to be husband. So some of those unwritten rules are really getting in the way sexually. So those are the kinds of questions that you want to explore under this physiology piece. And some of what I just said actually starts to bleed into the next area, which is identity. So the obstacles to intimacy that relate to identity are. This is a really rich area for unlocking our latent sexual capacity because we often get locked into early in life who our parents let themselves be, who or who the other adults around us, maybe religious leaders or community leaders or whoever, allow themselves to be sexually. And so if they have really narrow lanes, then we wind up with really narrow lanes, too. So for this area, if you want to start assessing your identity level, you want to look at your image of yourself, who you are supposed to be, kind of your moral judgments, you know, what is marriage supposed to be? What is the rightful role of sex in someone's life? When you're a parent, how sexual are you allowed to be, and in what venues and what things are okay to enjoy and what things are okay to do? And then also on this level, who are you as a lover? What do you know about sex? You know, how skillful are you and how do you feel about that? Do you take pride in your skillfulness? Are you ashamed of your skillfulness? This is where a lot of old slut shaming comes in. If you have a lot of sexual experience, do you feel good about that or bad about that? And how do you feel about experiences that you've had in the past that might not have been consensual? And this is also the place where a lot of men have really pushed down old pain that they have, because one of the narratives in our culture is that men aren't sexually traumatized. You know, the MeToo movement has really brought forward a lot of the experiences that many, many women share of having been subject to non consensual touch and sexualization everywhere, from the street to the office, to relationships that were sometimes consensual. And so we hear a lot about women's sexual trauma, but men's sexual trauma is still pretty closeted. And so inside my work is often the first place that a man ever says, you know what, I was with a girl when I was 16, and we did things that I didn't want to do, that she pressured me into. So that's non consensual. And that can be traumatic. And so a lot of men have had that kind of experience with a lover when they were young. And it doesn't look like rape in any classic way that they understand, but it definitely comes between them and their partners. Today, other experiences involve other boys shaming a young man or pressuring him to do things he doesn't want to do to other boys or to girls, or something as seemingly simple and definitely super common as teasing him about his body can create scars that last into a man's 30s, 40s, 50s. And we wind up talking about it way later because it's coming between him and. And the kind of presence that he wants to bring to his sexuality with his wife of many years. So asking yourself about some of those experiences is a great place to go when we're talking about identity. Now, on the presence level, you want to ask yourself, how able do I feel, how interested do I feel in taking risks emotionally, sexually, in doing things that feel a little uncomfortable? To me that feel vulnerable, that require me to reveal my desires, my preferences, things that I don't like and things that I do like when I need to make requests, how do I feel about that? When I need to say, please don't do that, how do I feel? And in the moment, how flexible are you? How able are you to adapt to what's happening right now? When things don't go to plan in bed, what do you do? These are all related to presence and underneath all of those is your capacity to self regulate. How good are you at in essence calming yourself down when you get triggered? So it might be anger or fear or embarrassment or nervousness that gets triggered. And what are your skills for soothing yourself, for returning to yourself, for holding onto yourself in those situations? Because intimate moments when there's a lot of sensation, a lot of emotion, a lot of vulnerability are the times when we need to have a huge capacity for self regulation or we're not going to be able to go very deep. And then finally, so we've gone through P, I and P and now we're on the E. Energy. When you want to look at your energy, you're looking at what each of you brings to the bedroom from other parts of your life. So this has to do with physical vitality and aliveness and it has to do with how well you take care of your own heart. So if you're negative and stressed out a lot of the time, that's bringing something into your life and to your partner that's definitely going to play out in their interest in you sexually and perhaps in your interest in them. So what is your general mood? What is your general attitude? What are the prevalent thoughts, emotions and states that you experience on an ongoing basis? And are those conducive to the kind of passionate sex that you want to have or aren't they? What's your energy generally like? What sort of fuel do you generally use? Are you subsisting on inadequate sleep and lots of caffeine and sugar to keep going? Or do you fuel your body and your brain beautifully and get plenty of sleep? How well hydrated are you and what do you do to restore yourself? Are you somebody who has a running practice and or a meditation practice? How much joy do you have outside the relationship? How do you nourish yourself? These are all questions related to energy. Pinpointing these obstacles is the fourth step in my nine step GPS navigation system for lifelong intimacy. After you've pinpointed, the fifth step is to prioritize the obstacles that are costing you the most and to pick the tools that you're going to use to address those key obstacles. The 40 plus episodes of this podcast are packed with just such tools, and if you join the Conscious Couples Circle, you can ask in the discussions there about your particular obstacles and what practices and tools might work best to address them. So in the podcast notes, you'll find the link to the free Conscious Couple Circle for today. I love that you've listened all the way through and that you're learning about how to systematically pinpoint what's stopping you from having the love and sex you really want. You're amazing and now you get to decide. Do you want to stay vague and frustrated about your intimacy, or do you want to start to prioritize and pinpoint those roadblocks so that you can cruise forward and make sex fun with your partner both today and in the years to come? If you're done wandering in the wilderness of we'll work it out on our own and it's not that bad, you know what to do next. You can pick just one obstacle that you identified today and take action to address it. Maybe you embody the lover who's right there inside the exact body that you already have, with all its beauty and all its perceived flaws. Maybe you bring the goofball you are into the bedroom without apology. Enjoy your partner's body and your own and reveal your energy to them in a way that no one else gets to see. I would love to hear about what happens. I'd love to hear what you're taking away from this episode and what questions you have. Where do you feel this conversation in your body? My free Conscious Couples Circle is the place to continue our conversation. You can share your experiences, ask questions, and get more actionable ideas for creating the love and sex you deeply desire in ways that evolve you both. It's all happening@society lizenberry.com that link is in the show Notes for you. You know, new listeners need to hear what you're taking away too. Podcast reviews are what really help others recognize how this podcast is different from other relationship and sex podcasts. So thank you in advance for leaving a review right now in your podcasting app while you're thinking of it. Before you forget with just a few words about what this show gives you. And hey, have you subscribed? Subscribe to the podcast. You're gonna want to so you never miss an episode. Please go to the app where you listen, hit that subscribe button and then you'll always get notifications of new episodes when they drop. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Michelle Lizenberry Christensen, and this has been Sex Love Power. I will see you on the next episode. And until then, may the light within you illuminate the world around.