Episode 451: The Pleasure Keys Process to Reclaiming Connection

No need to whine, it's Whiny Palooza! Have some wine and join us on the Whiny Palooza Podcast with Rebecca Greene.

Welcome to the Whiny Palooza Podcast. I'm your host, Rebecca Greene. I'm a wife, mother of 3, and licensed clinical social worker. I also have 3 fur babies at home too. My passion has always been to help children and their families. I always dreamed of being a wife and a mother. Parents are always learning through their struggles, failures, and successes and joys. I am no stranger to this wild ride of parenting, and I know behind every great parent lies a team of supportive friends and family. I want to be part of your support system. I want you to know that you are not alone. We are in this parenting world together. Join me every week for insightful discussions with experts on parenting and marriage, as well as other parents who have found the secret to successes in parenthood. You'll learn tips and tricks to make life with your family better than ever. I hope you will follow along with me while we dive into what it takes to achieve a happy family.

Hello everyone, this is Rebecca Greene for the Winey Pooza Podcast, and I am so I am so excited today because I get to talk to the wonderful Susan Morgan Taylor. Susan, thank you so much for being here with me today.

Rebecca, thanks for having me. I'm so happy to be here, and I cannot wait for our conversation today. I think it's going to be really informative for your listeners.

Oh my goodness, I'm so excited. We've been talking, and I love this topic. So let me tell you about Susan so that you know why I'm so excited. Susan Morgan Taylor, MA, is a somatic sex therapist, relationship coach, and the insightful host of the Sex Talk Cafe podcast. I love the title of your podcast. With more than 25 years of experience in body-based healing and over a decade in private practice, Susan brings a deeply transformative approach to intimacy and relationships. She is the creator of the Pleasure Keys retreats and the developer of the Pleasure Keys process, a revolutionary 3-part method designed to help couples rekindle passion, overcome desire discrepancy, and eliminate shame in the bedroom. Susan's mission is rooted in the belief that we can change the world through how we love, connect, and experience pleasure. So now everyone knows why I'm so excited to talk to you.

All right, yes, let's go! Super excited.

Okay, so to start with the Pleasure Keys process.

Okay.

Okay. Can you tell us what inspired this and tell us how this works?

Yeah. So the Pleasure Keys process consists of— it's essentially 9, a set of 9 skills that are grouped under 3, 3 triads. And I'll maybe get into sharing maybe one of those triads for your listeners today. That's really easy to remember and very relevant to what we're gonna be talking about. Awesome. But really it's from years of studying with some of the best in the field of sex therapy and somatic sex therapy and really learning and also my own journey. I don't teach anything that I don't apply to myself. So really what I've done is I have just developed a framework. The Pleasure Keys is really just a framework for helping people, individuals and couples, to be able to access desire and get back on the same page. But first, by connecting deeply with one's own self, by the relationship that we have with our own bodies, with the sensations, with our own capacity to receive and respond to to pleasure within our own bodies, and then being able to be resource for how do we actually negotiate in the relational space, the horizontal relational space with an intimate other, of how we actually negotiate to get back on the same page so that we can have more fun, more flow, and more ease when it comes to sex and intimacy. So that's really what the Pleasure Keys is. And at the end, I have a free resource too for anyone who kind of wants to learn a little bit more about the Pleasure Keys. I'll be happy to share that at the end of our conversation for how your listeners can access that.

Perfect. It sounds wonderful. And as I told you before I pressed record, I think one of the biggest things I hear from women is the desire discrepancy. So we know that's huge. And I'm just wondering if you can help us, like, how do we work on that?

This is— yeah, it's a huge issue and a very common one. So first of all, I want to say to your listeners, you are not broken and it's not all your fault. And I know a lot of women So I started out as a specialist in women's sexuality. However, what started showing up in my practice, what was coming through the door was actually couples. It was men dragging their wives and going, fix my wife. Why doesn't she wanna have sex with me? So I just, I'm gonna lean into this. So I now mostly work with couples, but my specialty is women's sexuality and particularly low desire women. So labeled low desire women. And I was so passionate about getting into that area, working with women, because that was me. I was in a marriage for 10 years where I basically lost all interest in sex. My husband wanted it much more than I did. And so I lived through that. So I found my way out of it. My own sexual awakening, which happened in 2011, was really the thing that launched me into becoming a sex therapist and now a somatic sex therapist and relationship coach. But let's talk about women and low libido. So first I wanna clarify the term desire discrepancy. Not a lot of people might know what that means. That's a clinical term for what we would say mismatch libido. So commonly women are the ones who are labeled low libido often, at least in the couples that I work with. And I'm sure the questions that you get, Rebecca, are from women that are probably the ones who identify as I'm the lower desire partner. What's wrong with me? How do I fix this? And the secret fear is that they're going to lose the relationship in one way or the other. Maybe, maybe the fear is, and sometimes it is the fear that it's going to end, the marriage might end, divorce could happen. But there's also fears like someone could go outside the relationship, like an affair could happen, or there's exiting that happens in other ways. Ways. You can exit the relationship just by pornography use or watching TV and drinking beer. There's a lot of ways that, like, that disconnect can show up that doesn't necessarily always mean that it ends in divorce. Unfortunately, in my situation, it did end in divorce. But so that's the secret fear that's happening for a lot of women. We have to look at this issue as, I think, completely reframing it from high desire, low desire. I think that's a dead-end conversation, yet that's where we always land. And often what's happening is we're trying to get this lower lower desire partner, often the woman, to rise to meet the higher desire partner, who is often the man. It's a losing battle all around because somebody always ends up feeling broken inside of that dynamic. There's always one person in that dance who feels like it's their fault and there's something wrong with them. And anytime we're coming at it from that place, it's not a place that's conducive to being able to really solve the problem and also to being able to get to where you need to get to in order to solve the problem, which is to be able to access your own desire and your own pleasure to be able to really find that. We're not gonna— we're gonna have a much harder time finding that within ourselves if we're so concerned that something's wrong with me, I'm broken, he's not going to love me if I don't increase my sex drive, this relationship could end if I don't fix this. That is like, we are in the wrong part of the brain to access what we need to be accessing, which is relaxation, awareness, development of sensitivity, and then this whole part of being able to really notice and name What I want and what I desire, and then being able to negotiate that in the relationship. Those are the three— one of the triads of the Pleasure Keys process, by the way, what I call the three Ns: notice, name, negotiate. We can get into that a little bit later.

Notice, name, negotiate.

Okay. But there's a lot going on. There's also lack of education is really what this comes down to. In our own bodies as women, we have the same amount of erectile tissue that a man has in his penis. It's just that in a woman's body. It's spread out over a number of different organs. The tissue isn't all condensed in one organ like it is in a man. It's spread out over a broader area. We have the G-spot, the cervix, the labia, the clitoris. There's all these different structures, the perineal sponge. We need typically more time for our bodies to really get aroused, for those tissues to get fully engorged where it's like a yes. For being sexual, or yes, I'm turned on, or yes, I want penetration. And it just is a little bit different for the male body. Men tend to be ready much more quickly, and they also, unfortunately for a lot of women, they finish a little too quickly. Ejaculation on average, depending on what studies you consult, it's 2 to 7 minutes. And so most women, however, what they have found, need about 21 minutes or more of warmup time, which we might call foreplay, before they're really gonna be fully ready. For sex, penetrative sex, and consistently orgasmic during sex. So if you have a relationship where that's the dynamic and there's a lack of education, there's not enough foreplay happening for her. It's over before her body's really opened up and juicy and ready. And she's really sunken into her pleasure. There's not going to be a lot in it for her. And so she's probably defaulting to he wants it. I don't want him to get grumpy or I need to be a good wife or I got to keep not rock the boat. So I'm just going to have sex, even though like it's I'm not feeling it. I'm just going to do it anyway. And there's nothing in it for her. So over time, she's going to shut down and lose interest. She's— so it's just a function, ultimately, lack of education. So I'll pause there and let you dig into that.

I mean, that is, that is everything you said is brilliant. And I have found that reminding him that I'm a crockpot has been very helpful. It is not instant for women, but I think that what I hear from women— okay, so yes, definitely, I think that both men and women need to know all of what you just said. And I also think what I hear from women is that sex becomes another thing on their to-do list.

Sure, absolutely. And I know that we're— a lot of your listeners, if not all of them, are moms. And so that adds a whole nother level of— a level of stress. It's stressful being a mom. As much as we love our kids and we might love being moms, there's just another level of responsibility for other human beings. So our attention Often as mothers is outward on our kids and taking care of our kids and taking care of our husbands. And very rarely do we take that time to slow down and just let our attention come back onto ourselves. And what do I want? What do I need? What do I like? Can I— we feel selfish or guilty somehow for doing that. And that's also what tends to show up when we become sexual with our partners. So we're plugged into everybody else and everything else in the house, right? As women, we are plugged into our surroundings. That is an evolutionary, beautiful tactic that our D— it's embedded in our biology and our DNA as women. We were the gatherers of the hunter and gatherers. That does not go away just because we had women's liberation back in the '60s. Like, our DNA evolutionarily, we are plugged into everybody and everything in our environment. We know where everyone is in the house. We can feel what they're doing, right? This is just a beautiful thing about being a woman, but that piece can also get in the way when we go into the bedroom and it's time to be intimate with our partner. Because it takes some time for that part of the brain, which is our prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. The amygdala is the part of the brain that scans the environment for threats, and it's on a hyperarousal, like it's always on. That part of the brain in the woman's body needs to quiet down, and her prefrontal cortex needs to go offline so that she can more deeply into her own pleasure and her own enjoyment. And that can just take a little bit longer for a woman than it does for most men. So we need a little bit more time before we're going to really be able to to sink into that experience. And male partners need to understand that might be the case. She might just need some more time. She might not be ready to go straight for genital touch. Any kind of overt sexual touch sometimes is not the right thing, going straight for breasts, lips, or genitals. It might be like, how about a foot massage or a nice back massage? Let's put on some soft music and a candle, and let's not go into talking. I think that's a default for a lot of women, which is lovely. There might maybe 5 minutes of talking, if talking needs to happen, but then let's have a nonverbal experience where she's able to really breathe and just be in her body. And by the way, let's make sure that we know that the kids aren't going to come barging through the door. We're not going to be able to shut off that part of the brain. We need to have that part of the brain quieted down. And so that's a lot of what's going on for women that is not necessarily the case for men. So naturally we end up in this situation where we think there's something wrong with us because my body's not behaving like his. So what's wrong with me? And that's just not what's true. We're wired differently. And if we understand that, we can work with it. It doesn't become a liability. It becomes actually a huge asset and it benefits the man as well.

Okay. So let's help the women who have talked to me about the fact that the kids want things from them all day. Then they go into the bedroom and then their husband wants from them. So can we help them maybe reframe that or look at it differently? Cause that is what I hear time and time again.

Yes. Oh my gosh. I know that feeling. It's a terrible feeling. And part of the problem is, is women, we're stuck in the role of give and what we need to do in the bedroom, and this will serve your husband as well, by the way, listening or your partner, if you're not married, you need to be the receiver. You need to practice allowing yourself to deeply receive, which is exceptionally difficult. Much more difficult than you would realize for most of us in general, but for women in particular, where our bodies are designed to receive. If you look at our sexual anatomy, I need to say no more, right? Like we are literally designed to absorb and to receive. And so sexually, if we want to bring the fire back online, we need to learn how to be receivers. And I would bet to guess that your partner, your husband, would probably be super thrilled if you knew what you wanted and you and he could do something to your body that would make you moan with pleasure enjoyment. That is the hottest thing in the world to just about any man on the planet, to see a woman immersed in her pleasure. Like, that's the hottest thing. It's not hot if you're there out of duty, obligation, or you're just doing it because— because he's not turned on by that, ladies.

And they know, they know if you're in it. They do.

And there will be so much more in it for you. And so to go into the bedroom to be the receiver. Just what often what happens because we've overgiven in so many other areas, we need to receive and sometimes for quite a long time until what will happen if you really take this on, what will happen is eventually you'll become so full with enjoyment and pleasure that the giving becomes a natural outpouring of that. There will be this heart opening of extreme gratitude, and then you're giving us from a place of fullness, not from a place of emptiness. It's beautiful. It's a beautiful dynamic, and it can be cultivated. And that's largely my journey, my sexual awakening and the development of the Pleasure Keys process. That was what it began as for me back in 2011 when I started this journey. It was about deeply allowing myself to receive, and I had to start solo. I was not in a relationship at the time. I'd been divorced for a couple of years and just really wanted to learn my own body, my own sexuality. And it began with learning how to open those channels for receiving in my own body. And And then I was very blessed. A number of months after I had my big awakening, I attracted a new partner into my life who was so happy to give. And by this point, I was empowered in my voice. I knew how to ask for what I wanted. I knew what I actually want. I knew what felt good. I knew when to say, hey, that's not great, can we do something different? I didn't feel afraid to do that. And this particular partner was like, your wish is my command, like, how can I serve you? And it was just really beautiful. And I had that experience where I just was in deep receiving until there was a moment where, you know, it was a number of months in where suddenly the this overflowing of gratitude just poured out of me. I just wanted to give. I just had so— I was so full with love and with pleasure and enjoyment that all I wanted to do was, how can I give? How can I give back to you? What can I do? How can I serve you? So that it's really the dance of giving and receiving. And that's where a lot of couples get off the mark. We don't understand the difference between those two things, and things go flat. And that's part of the reason why is because there's an ambiguity around The giving and the receiving and who's doing what and when most people often are trying to give at the same time. So there's nobody in that receiving role. And that's a lot of times when women go in the bedroom with what you just described. Oh, now I have to give to my husband. He's not, what can I give to her? And so you're both in this like giving, who's going to be the receiver in that? So why don't you just be the receiver ladies? Like, why don't you just sign up for that role? And to get empowered in your voice and in your pleasure, that's really where we have to begin. And that's in the Pleasure Keys process is really the crux and the foundation of it before we go into negotiating experiences with our partner, we have to learn how to access what's called direct pleasure in the body. The route for direct pleasure happens through the nerve endings of the skin up to the brain. And often we lose contact with that route, partly— in part because we're defaulting into give all the time. That's one of the symptoms of a disconnect from that direct route.

That is so interesting. And what I love about what you said is that I would say— I, I don't want to generalize— I would say a majority of women maybe have not found their voice in the bedroom.

And I absolutely— right.

And I love that what you're saying is that I think women don't realize that our partners want us to communicate.

Absolutely, absolutely. He would love it if you just told him how to touch you in a way that would make— give you pleasure, because that's what he's really wanting to do. So at the meantime, he's reading your smoke signals. He's guessing he's, or he's doing what he thinks you like. And meanwhile, you're there, you're there like, yeah, this kind of sucks, but I'm trying to make him happy. This must be what he wants. So I'm just going to go along with it. So nobody's getting what they want inside of that. Right. Yeah. So finding the voice is really critical. That's the second of the three N's. That's the second N, the naming. So the first N is the notice. Can I, it's a skill of learning how to reside. And be present in the body. So we're not in the head, we're not in the future, not in the past. We're not wondering what the kids are doing. We're not thinking about the to-do list. We're also not— at the beginning, at the outset, we learn how to set fantasy aside as well, because fantasy is wonderful. It's a beautiful thing to have in your erotic tool, but it also can take us sometimes in the body. It's a thing of the mind. That's a— it's an indirect route of pleasure. Indirect is through the cortex, coming through the eyes into the visual cortex, and then we get turned on. So fantasy is really a form of indirect pleasure. It's beautiful and lovely to have access to that, but we can get overly dependent on that as a way to get aroused. Instead, we want to have as much, in my opinion, as much range as possible and many different ways we can access our arousal. So the somatic route— somatic just means of or pertaining to the body— so the somatic route would be through the nerve endings on the skin. So first, learn how to notice sensation in the body, notice emotions, allow ourselves to fully embrace— that's another principle that I work with a lot in my private coaching with couples as well as at my couples retreats— this idea of embracing all that we meet and greet that arises within us. Pain, the pleasure, the joy, the sadness, the grief, all of it, meeting and greeting all of that within ourselves. That's our capacity to notice. The naming comes second. Naming is exactly that. It's the development of learning how to name what I'm feeling, what I feel right now is, and then the want or the need and what I want is, or what I need right now is. And that's extremely important because if we're not, if we don't have access to that, what's happening a lot of times where a lot of couples get stuck, they try to jump to the negotiating too quickly. So I, I want this. And so I'm gonna try to get this. And, and if we're not clear on the noticing and the naming, what's happening a lot is someone's defaulting to just giving out of obligation or tolerating or going along with things. So we really need to get good at understanding the skill of noticing and naming and having clear access to my yes or my no. What do I like? What do I not like? What do I need right now so that I could relax more? What would I need right now so that I I might be able to get interested in being intimate with my husband. If I can identify that, then I can either— I can give some of that to myself. Like, sometimes, like, maybe I just need to breathe more deeply. Maybe I need to feel this thing in my chest and let some tears out. Maybe I need to ask my partner to slow down, or maybe I need to hear the words, I love you, or you're safe, or I've got you. I might have something like that, an auditory thing. So we can advocate for that need, either give it to ourselves or ask our partners to give it. And from there, we can start to move into The negotiation part, which can look a lot of different ways. It's not like necessarily let's have a business meeting. I mean, it can look that way, but it can be done in a very sexy way. It can be done even in a nonverbal way. And even the noticing of needs sometimes, and the naming of needs is a form of negotiating. It's a way to actually move in the direction of the desire, depending on whose desire we're following at that time. It's a way to, okay, what would I need so that I could feel a little more connected, or I might feel a little more turned on right now. We have to learn how to do that for ourselves as women. We cannot expect men to do that for us.

Really good advice. I think that I just wanna back up to the word somatic.

Yes.

Because there is sex therapy.

Yes.

And there is somatic sex therapy. So can you tell us the difference? Cause I think most of us don't know.

Yeah. And a lot of people don't even know what sex therapy is either, by the way. But you're right. So sex therapy, no, we don't have sex with our clients. That's sex surrogacy. Just to clear that up right away. Sex therapy is a niche. It's a niche within the mental health field, which really is just a, an emphasis on human sexuality. So sex therapists work explicitly with sexual issues, and that can range anywhere from gender identity to desire discrepancy. So usually a sex therapist is a mental health therapist who has specialized in that area. So that's what I did for a decade. I actually have, I have a master's degree in professional counseling. I went right into sex therapy as soon as I finished my graduate degree. I just knew that was my niche. I worked in private practice for 10 years as a licensed sex therapist, and then I left mental health in part because the somatic sex therapy is really what makes my heart sing. And it's really where I see my clients get better results. And I have a bit more freedom with how I work with my clients being outside of the mental health realm. So I, it's, I just want to make that distinction, but so somatic sex therapy. Regular sex therapy really looks— typically looks more like talk therapy. So you're talking about the challenge and coming up with strategies. Sometimes you might get homework that you would do on your own and you'd come back to the therapist and talk about how it went. I did work very somatically in my sex therapy practice under mental health, meaning that I still brought in a lot of body-based types of practices in real time. So somatic just means of or pertaining to the body. Somatic sex therapy, then it really uses the body as the What's the best way to describe it? Like the ground of information, the place that we actually learn through our own, through meeting and greeting, for example, the thing that's actually in the way. So if let's say there's some shame that's showing up in the bedroom, what we would do in somatic sex therapy is we might create real-time experiences where that shame would arise within the relational space so we can work with it in real time and then start to to have new responses to that shame and a new relationship with it until eventually we can have a new, totally new expression, a new relationship where the shame is no longer like the dominant thing. So we're really working more experientially when we're doing somatic work. Um, so ho— and it's all clothes on with how I work. I don't do hands-on work. There are some, they call them somatic sex educators or sexological body workers. So there's these different threads under the somatic realm. And some of them do hands-on work where there might be explicit touch to the body or massage, or maybe explicit genital touch could be a part of it for educational purposes, kind of like a pelvic floor physical therapist might do hands-on work with a client. That is not what I do. So my work is hands-off. I do coach my couples in some non-sexual practices that help them again, bring up some of the issues they're actually having in the bedroom. We can bring all of that stuff up in real time in non-sexual ways. And so we're doing that and letting the body inform us of what's actually happening. And that's where the wisdom is. And that's why people get such better results. I believe going beyond just analyzing or talking about concepts, we actually go into the experience of the thing itself.

That makes so much sense. And you brought up so many things that now I have questions about. So let's talk about shame because I told you I didn't know much about this at all. So how does shame show up? Up? And how do couples work through this?

The shame? Yeah, shame is a really common theme. And to some degree, almost all of us have some little tinge or a big tinge of shame when it comes to our sexuality. So it's a spectrum. I just want to put that out there that, you know, we all carry some small amount, and for some of us, a larger amount where it can really become inhibitive to our sexual experiences. And it's— shame is— it's a very common one. And we have so many sources of it. So we have to really look all the way back to being like little kids, for example, when we are exploring our bodies, not even just our bodies, we're also exploring the world through touch when we're very young, touching things and we get told, no, don't touch that. Right. That starts to register over time as it's not safe to follow my curiosity through touch. We get told, you don't— we're playing and exploring our bodies when we're young. Many of us have been caught in that exploration by our parents and maybe given a sideways glance or told, don't do that. So we register that as somehow I am, I am bad. Something is wrong with me. I am dirty. I am bad. There's also throughout the lifespan, as we become young adults, many of us as women have been slut-shamed. We don't wanna be too sexual and yet we're supposed to be sexy, right? All the movies and the magazines, we have all these sex icons and yet we're supposed to also be the good girl, not be too sexy, not be too easy.

It's, it's, it just, you're not It messes with your mind.

Right. And so the mixed messages don't help. And so what's happening is over time, we're gradually pulling away from what I referred to earlier, that direct route of pleasure, which is that directly, we can just say the hands are one part of the body that have most nerve endings in the whole body, hands, lips, and genitals. So we explore the bodies, kids, through touch. We're told no, we exploring our bodies and our sexuality, and we're told that's bad. So gradually we start to embody the program of it's not safe to explore and way. So we disconnect from that capacity, and we start to lose access to that direct route. So how that shows up in the bedroom, that often shows up in some of the things that we've already talked about, it shows up as a disconnect from my own pleasure. What do I actually want? A big challenge with being able to receive pleasure, because that's going to immediately trigger shame and guilt, like I I shouldn't, I should be giving to my husband. I shouldn't be experiencing joy. My body exists for his pleasure, right? So there's all these mixed up programs that we have. And so it will show up as defaulting. It will show up as faking an orgasm, pretending to something we don't, trying to force ourselves to like something that we don't, which never works by the way. Or pure avoidance. We might just completely avoid intimacy altogether. Some, you might check out, mentally check out during sex, go numb, disconnect, disassociate. Negotiate. It shows up in a lot of ways. And yeah, I'll pause there and then we can talk about some ways we unwind that.

So that is so interesting to me where it begins. I don't think I've ever actually thought this through because I have teenagers. Okay, so you have my wheels turning.

Yeah.

And before we move on with this, I would love some advice for us to not create that with our own kids.

Absolutely. So I'm a really big believer on as soon as they start asking, start educating them around this. My kids started, they're grown now, but they started asking about sex really young, age 4 and 5. Me being the sex nerd and sexuality geek that I am, like I was, I just flat out had the conversation with them. So they knew here's the body parts, here's how it works, here's what it is, here's how babies are made. I started talking to them as soon as they started asking. But if that hasn't been you and now your kids are teenagers, that's okay too. It's never too late. And here's the thing, like as teenagers, I became sexually active when I was in my teens. I think I was 15 and I was extremely shamed when my parents found out. And I had a lovely, wonderful boyfriend and we were being safe about it, of course, and using protection, but I was completely ridiculed and it was a, it's a defining moment in my life. And talk, so talk about shame and shutdown and the inability from that point forward to ever really go to my parents. With anything. So it can really damage the trust in the parent-child relationship. Granted, it's understandable to have fears around pregnancy and STDs. We don't— we want to avoid that, but the way to do that is not by not talking about it. So we have to, as parents, I believe, get comfortable. We have to get comfortable with our own sexuality and understand that our children are sexual human beings. And the teen years, that is when we organically and naturally become sexually active. It's a normal time of life to be curious about our bodies and to be experimenting with our sexuality. So I think that a lot of it has to do with the parents' willingness to invite those conversations and to normalize them because the kids are going to go learn it from somewhere else anyway. And wouldn't you rather they learn it from you than from pornography or the internet or their friends who are just as blind as they are? So that's my belief. And again, if we are uncomfortable and shameful in our own sexuality as parents, that's going to translate to our kids.

Okay, so let's make sure to work on that then. So the parents who are feeling shame in the bedroom, what is a step they can take in a better direction?

Yeah, you can get the Pleasure Keys ebook that I'll share with you at the end of this, which will tell you the first three, the first triad, the first three keys, which is really foundational for the beginning of this. But What it really comes down to is slowing down. Slowing down is so important. And oftentimes we're pushing through those things.

We're always rushing everything in life. I need to just slow it all down.

Yeah. We need to learn how to relax, how to slow down, and how to begin to notice what's happening in our body, what the feelings are, and to learn this quality of embrace is really key. It's really critical to this process, embracing what's there. So often because shame feels so uncomfortable, we don't like it and we wanna get rid of it. We're either pushing through it, numbing out, avoiding it, and trying to get onto the next thing. So anytime we're dealing with any kind of trauma or any kind of uncomfortable feeling that's getting in the way of connection, the first step is just to slow down, to breathe, and to start to be more with it, to actually embrace what's happening in the body. We don't have to use it as a knee-jerk reaction to, oh, Oh no, I'm feeling shame. So I'm not gonna do the thing. But what we want is to get to a place where we're not in our comfort zone, where it's just, we're shut down, numbed out, or feeling just totally nope, I'm, or frozen. It's not gonna go there. But we also don't wanna go so far that we're pushing ourselves back into like too much activation where we're traumatized or we're just completely numbed out, for example, not feeling anything. What we want is just enough activation in the somatic field work. It's called the learning zone. Where we're just uncomfortable enough that new information can actually come in. There's just enough spaciousness in there that we can start to break up a little bit of that crystallization that tends to happen when there's uncomfortable feelings or emotions. So the first step in that is slowing down, breathing into it, and allowing space for your body to feel what's there with the shame, not going up into story with it. That can be a part of it as well. I think working with a professional is really good for some of that to get some of the story out, but we don't to get stuck in the story because that's all mind. It's a way of avoiding. So to stay in the body with that, to breathe into it, and to be ideally in the presence of a safe person. If your partner is safe and they can just witness you in that and hold you in that without trying to fix it— guys, men, hey men listening, don't try to fix her feelings. Ask your partner just to witness you, just to see you, just to love you unconditionally and so that you can feel more deeply. And that really is the first step. That's the first step. There's not a whole lot more that we really need to do at the beginning other than that. And yes, there is more like down the line, but if we're not even able to be connected to our own bodies, we're never going to feel connected to our partners. So we have to learn how to slow down and connect to what is actually there right now. And if it's shame, then so be it. We learn to embrace and to fully feel shame in the body. From there, it oftentimes can and will shift into something different, and then we can start to work with it more effectively other than brushing it under the rug or trying to get rid of it.

Now I'm gonna assume based on everything that you've taught us so far, that if we are working on all of these things, then the passion problem changes, because that's the other complaint that I get from women is that what happens to the passion?

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So passion, first of all, the word passion means suffering. It comes from, I think the Latin root is passios. I always chuckle a little bit whenever I want more passion. You really want more suffering?

I don't want to suffer.

I said, just so you know, but I know what you mean. And so there's a lot of different threads to that, different things that are happening. A lot of what happens for couples is The erotic charge or the polarity in the sexual— we need polarity. We need difference in order to create sexual magnetism. And that's often why it's there at the beginning. You don't know the person as well. You're probably not living together yet. You don't have children together. So there's separation and difference, and there's more— that creates more of that polarity. Naturally, what happens when you get married, you move in together, you have kids, you're doing the daily grind together, that polarity gradually neutralizes. Now you're just going through life together and it all starts to feel a little boring. And so there's an aspect of that can be very easily consciously recreated when we learn how to work with polarity. But on it, I'll give you a practical way of how this shows up. If you're constantly in the give, give, moms, moms out there listening, I know how hard it is to not be in giver role, that we have to learn how to be in the receptive whole. And your husband's, or your partner's, probably out there too. He's out there giving, giving, providing, taking care of. Maybe you're also working outside the house, and that has another layer of stress. You're in a different mode of mind too, by the way. When we're in work mode as women, we are accessing our more masculine capacities, our alpha capacities of get stuff done, plan logistics, which is beautiful and awesome. But if we want to have polarity and eroticism in the bedroom, we have to learn how to access the other aspect of that, which is the receptive, or the yin, or the omega, the feminine principle, which is fluidity, non-goal orientation, the capacity to feel and to just be. So it's a very different part of our nervous system where we're not externally focused on other, like kids or husbands or partners, but we're internally focused on the feelings and sensations within our own bodies. So that's a bit of a shift that, that will help to bring back online some of that eroticism and passion. On the flip side, what I see happen with men, if they're the label— so labeled higher desire partner and they've been rejected a lot, what they tend to do— I have seen this— they also carry a lot of shame. Men are often shamed as well. They're, they're shamed for having erections at inappropriate times. They're shamed for being too sexual. They're shamed for— men's sexuality is highly shamed. And it's highly possible too in your relationship that you unintentionally even perhaps shamed him. That could have happened. I have seen and heard of that. If you've caught him masturbating and, ew, that, why are you doing that? Or so, cause he's a sexual being and you're probably not having sex with him.

So he's gotta get an outlet somewhere. Oh my gosh.

Men oftentimes also will carry a lot of shame around their sexuality of being much. And if they love their wives, I've seen this happen. I had a couple that I worked with a couple years ago. They're so beautiful. They were soulmates. They'd been married a long time. Two young children, age 4 and 6. And he had reached out to me saying, I don't know what to do. I, to cope because she's rejected me so many times. We love each other deeply, but I just feel like I, I have too high of a sex drive. And so what I've started doing is just tamping it down because I don't want to upset her. And I don't know how else to manage this. And they were just such an amazing success case. I loved working with this couple. I do have a testimonial from them on my website, by the way, if anybody wants to check that out, Matt and Amanda. On pathwaytopleasure.com, you can read their testimonial, but they finally, through our work together, got to a point where we don't want men shutting down their turn-on. So your male partner also, if that's happening, you want to breathe fully. You want to be a fully alive erotic being. And I know how frustrating it can be because if you're approaching your wife all the time and she's turning you down, saying no all the time, it's like, what do you do with all that? Like that you've got to channel channel that somewhere. So it makes sense, but we don't want to do that. So for men, I think the challenge is learning how to work with their sexuality in a way that then she can respond to, where she will respond. And sometimes because maybe it's pent up, like, you just want sex, if you just got sex, everything would be better. And meanwhile, she's, I don't want sex, and that's turning me off, and ew, get away from me, don't touch me. That's a big problem. But some of it is because it— that energy becomes very grabby. And it's, it might also not be the way that your partner is, her arousal map. That's another reason for mismatch desire. We don't know our arousal maps.

Love that. Yes. Yes.

So her gateway into arousal might be that she needs lots more time, no pressure to have sex, soft music, candles, sensual massage. And your gateway might be, hey, just go down on me. Like grab, grab it right now and let's go. Like the direct sexual, explicitly sexual route. So if that's how he's wired, but she's wired. They're in an opposite way, it's not that there's like a mismatch. It's just that you speak in two different languages. Right. And so we need to learn how do we bridge that gap. And to do that, we need to have the skills of knowing how to negotiate and bridge that gap. And that can only be done when you have a frame— it's much easier to do when you have a framework to work from so that you both understand and you're, you have the same language and a similar lens that you're looking at the problem through. That's what the pleasure— where the pleasure keys can really help couples with this because it's a common language that they have. You We can see what's going on. We can figure out, okay, in this moment, whose desire are we going to follow? Because that's what happens is we don't know whose desire we're following. So both people are defaulting into giving. And now we don't— we have that problem, right? If no, no one's receiving. So you can't have two people giving at the same time and have it be like, this is a great experience, right? You have to have a giver and a receiver.

I don't think people have labeled it that way, and I think that right there is going to helps so many people. And I want to tell you the two things that I hear.

I—

and I also want to say that there are women, believe it or not, there are women who want more sex than the men, than their man does. And I say kudos to all of those women listening because I have heard those stories too. And I guess my question is, it's very rare that I hear couples we both want to have sex once a week. It's one person wants to have sex.

I don't know.

I'm going to use that once a week. One person wants to have sex more than that in the week. So how do they come together and negotiate that?

Yeah. I think we have to redefine what we mean by sex. Cause I think when that word, most of us think penetration, penis and vagina. Penetration, and one person only wants that once a week. The other person would like to have it 3 times a week or 4 times a week. Um, so first of all, we have to redefine what we mean by that. And to— if we were to redefine it as pleasure, connection, and enjoyment, there might be a lot more opportunities and willingness for that to happen than penis and vagina. And my What I would guess is often happening is in this type of situation, the arousal maps are just different. One might be more explicitly, let's say explicit sexual is just touch me sexually immediately. And that's the gateway. The other one might, let's say, be more sensually wired where it takes a little more time. No, you know, slow down, more cuddling, more sensual touch. And that gets the sexual arousal turn-on happening. So if we don't know what our arousal maps are, that, that's a challenge. But if we looked at it, just let's have more pleasure, connection, and intimacy. Intimacy instead of sex, love it. Oftentimes what'll happen, cuz if your partner is wired more sensually and that's her gateway into actual sexual intercourse, you're more likely to get the sexual intercourse happening. If we're looking at it and broadening the definition of what we mean by sex.

And I love that answer because my next question, I think you just answered, is that there are couples who are having no sex.

Yes. Yes.

And I know, and it makes me so sad when I hear those stories and I want them to be connecting. And I think that the difference is instead of using the term sex, I love the words that you're using to help them come back together.

Yeah. Yeah. And we have to, of course, because we also have to look at what's going on and granted, do they want to be engaging sexually, like genitally sexually in that way? Or I imagine the people that come to us, Rebecca Greene Greene, want that, right? And then they get to us like they're having problems and they want some help in that area. But there's some people that are perfectly fine with that. So for you, that's fine. So this conversation I think is for the people who are in that kind of situation and they're not okay with it. And we have to look at sort of the root of what's— there's different things happening there. A lot of times there's walls of resentment that have been built, the baggage in the relationship. So one of the first steps that we do at the Pleasure Keys retreats is we slowly bring those walls down and we just come back into connection, which is remarkably— it's actually a very simple pathway. It doesn't require rehashing the past and digging it all up. It requires courageousness and vulnerability and willingness to feel. That's where we get stuck. We've stopped allowing ourselves to feel deeply, or we're scared to, or we're angry about what happened and we never really had the tools or the courage to clear the air on that. And so there's these walls of resentment and disconnect. There's blame, a lot of blame that happens, making the other partner responsible, helplessness, hopelessness, all that stuff just feeds into this disconnect. And meanwhile, what I see a lot of couples do is they're waiting for the other person to change it. This never ever works. So I know one commitment that I have made with myself and to my, to my partner, I am absolutely committed and devoted to not letting that wall of resentment grow and build. So it doesn't mean that I don't get activated and triggered or go cold. Like, I am human and I'm moody. I'm a moody woman. But I have this commitment to do whatever it takes to address that as quickly as possible. So I asked myself, what do I need right now? Do I need to talk to him about something, ask him a question? Do I need to ask him to help me? Sometimes I get stuck. I can ask him, help, like, help, like, I am stuck, I'm in a funk, I can't get out out. Um, so we have that agreement together. And I think that's a really important thing that we absolutely can as individuals in the relationship be responsible for our own experience, meaning I'm feeling this right now. So what am I gonna do with it? What I do with it is up to me. It's not up to my partner to do anything or to change it or to shift. It's up to me. And from that, we have the power to make a change, but we have to be courageous. And it's hard to do when, you know, we're activated and we're in defensive mode. And So we have to learn to bring down those resentment walls first, come into vulnerability, come into connection, rebuild trust, all of those things.

I think that you gave us so much amazing advice, and I guess for the person listening who is, okay, I'm gonna start, I'm gonna take a step in the right direction. Where do you want them to begin today?

Sure. You can begin. I have The Pleasure Keys ebook. So if anybody would like to get a free guide on how to deepen connection, increase your orgasmic potential, those beginning steps of getting back on the same page, it really starts with ourselves first. It's the first 3, the first triad of the Pleasure Keys process, and that's at pleasurekeys.com. So that's an ebook. And then on my website at pathwaytopleasure.com, all of my other stuff lives there. There's also a section called free resources. If you click on that tab, I have a couple other resources on there. You can browse through that and see if anything. Particularly lights you up on there. A lot of things to— there's some videos, there's some other practices. I have a self-pleasure guide on there that getting started in that area is a lovely thing to have just to know where to start, begin. And that all lives at pathwaytopleasure.com.

Now tell us all before I let you go about the retreats and about the podcast and anything else that people can access.

Yeah, thank you so much. So I do have my podcast as we talked about earlier, the Sex Talk Cafe. You can find that on all the podcasting platforms. We're also on YouTube. And that's just great. It's really about juicy conversations on sexuality. And I've got a lot of different types of guests that I bring on for that. It's really about education. So a great spot to go for that. So if you want to get a little bit more education happening. And then the retreats are fabulous. It's the Pleasure Keys retreats. And I host these several times a year in the mountains of Western North Carolina. And the dates are all up on the website at pathwaytopleasure.com. If you click under, I think it's under work with me, there's a little tab that says couples retreat, the Pleasure Keys retreat. Retreat, and they are an amazing way. One of the reasons I love doing the retreat format is because couples really get to go deep, and it, in my opinion, really helps them build that foundation much more quickly and efficiently than if you're, say, meeting once a week, just doing a session here, a session there. It's harder to bridge those skills and really go deep with them. You're in your daily life, you've got kids, you've got work, you're in your normal environment. It's challenging sometimes to really build a new skill set when you're bombarded on all sides by your daily life. So to pull away from life and to really go deep, I take you into the Pleasure Keys process. We learn all 9 keys, and you leave that experience really with a skill set that's going to serve you for the rest of your life and the rest of your relationship. Not just your intimate relationship, I might add. The Pleasure Keys apply to every relationship. What you'll learn there will illuminate new things that you had never been able to see before, and they're just such an invaluable tool. They've been life-changing for me, and I love, love, love share, share those with my couples and help them get back on the same page in their intimacy. But it also can really make big changes in other areas of our lives as well.

Now, are you seeing couples in person, or will you see couples from anywhere?

Yeah, so I work online. So most of my private coaching is online. I do have some options to do some in-person aspects of it, intensives with me in person, like VIP days. But I do work with couples worldwide. The retreats obviously are in person, and right now we're hosting them in western North Carolina. That's near where I live. Eventually, at some point, we may do them in other locations around the world. But the mountains here in North Carolina are absolutely stunning, absolutely magical. The oldest mountain range in the world. Wow. It's very mystical and exceptionally beautiful, and I just— it's a beautiful place to get away to.

I cannot thank you enough. I kept you way too long, and I absolutely love I loved talking to you.

Thank you, Rebecca. Likewise. This was so much fun. Thank you so much for having me as your guest today.

This is Rebecca Greene, and I want to remind everyone to spend every day laughing, learning, and loving.

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