Spice Up your Lovemaking, with Susan Bratton

Welcome to this episode of the Five Journeys podcast. I'm Dr. Wendy Trubo. My co host is not here today and he's messing the missing the best episode because we have Susan Bratton, who is an intimacy expert to millions. She teaches people how to achieve ageless passion and unlock the secrets to lifelong vitality. Susan, welcome. I'm so excited to have you here and talk about this today because intimacy and sex, right?

Oh, I know it's so, it's so core to our longevity, but it's also one of our biggest barriers, hurdles, stumbling blocks, frustrations in our life. And so thank you for being willing to talk about how important intimacy is to longevity and personal happiness and connection.

Yeah, and I think I'd love to draw the parallel. When Dan Buettner looked at the great the, the blue zones and all of the places in the world where routinely live to 100, he didn't call it intimacy, he called it community. But to me, there's a bridge between feeling disconnected and not being long lived.

Right.

Because if you're, if you're really an island and not connected to people, especially your most important relationships. And so I think for a lot of people, intimacy might feel out of reach whether they're in or out of a coupled relationship. So the first thing I would want to explore is what is it that has us be so disconnected and how do we get back into intimacy?

Yeah, well, there's a difference between someone who is solo and someone who's in a relationship with regard to how that disconnection starts. And I think there are a lot of people out there who are even afraid to date because they have in their mind. What I think it is, is that we have in our mind the way things are supposed to be, always right, always. And that if we can't measure up to that, we don't even try. And that same thing happens with people in relationship where a really good example is I sent out an email to my email newsletter readers and I said, email me if you're not having the kind of intimacy that you're looking for in your relationship, email me back and tell me what it is that's holding you back. And the only thing I don't want you to say is, I don't have a partner. This isn't about not having a partner. I want to hear from you. If you have a partner and you're not, you don't feel like your intimacy is good, what is it that's holding you back? And I won't be able to respond to Everybody individually, but I will get back to you collectively. And I got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of replies. And Maurice, who's been working with me for a decade, she and I went through every single one of them and we categorized. And it was really interesting because men said that. 35% of men said that health was a health issue was their number one reason, and 28% of it was a sexual reason. Trauma was 15%. Emotional issues were 10%, physical issues were 8%. Stress and time were both 2%. Women were pretty similar in their list. Women had a little more issues with slight sexual issues than they did with health issues and a little higher in emotion. But generally it was. Something was broken. And, oh, the stories that they told me were, you know, so sad. I mean, the list of problems that people had, the health issues that people had, were. Were so, so dire in. In many cases. And what happens when you can't have intercourse, which is what people think sex is, or intimacy? Right.

Intimacy equals intercourse.

Exactly. Then they. They stop even touching each other because they don't want to start something they can't finish. So it's like, if it's not this perfect thing where intercourse is on the table, then we're just gonna essentially, like, revert to being platonic. And then you don't get the hugs and the holding and the petting and the squeezing and the. And the flyby kisses. And, you know, all of the things that really are what intimacy and connection are. They're the what. What you would technically call co regulation. The way that we calm our nervous systems and get into heart connection and feel instead of untethered, we feel connected to other souls. And so I thought, oh, man. Okay. And here was a really interesting thing too, Wendy, and that was that a big lump of people. About 20% of the people who wrote to me said betrayal was the issue. Yeah, they couldn't love again, they couldn't trust again because they had been hurt. And it was interesting. I was talking to Kash Khan over at the DNA company about this. We were on. I was on his show and I said, cash, is there any, like, genetic connection that you're aware of for certain numbers of people who just cannot seem to move through betrayal and get over? Because some people can be like, ah, well, that happened, but the next person's not going to do this to me. And other people are like, well, that happened, so it could happen again. And I can't take the risk of letting my heart be wounded again. It hurt too much. And he's like, there is. And this was so interesting. He said it was a combination of both serotonin and dopamine. Genetic snips where people there were. He said it's about 20% of people who have these. Where when they are betrayed, they feel that feeling way more than the other 80% of us.

So it lives for them, right?

It's so alive. Exactly. And every time they think about it, it's not that it gets worse, but it's just as painful. They can't let go of the pain. So it's always present for them as badly as it was when it happened. And I was like, that explains it. Because I always wondered why. And I thought, yep, that makes sense. That some of us have a genetic predisposition to not being able to let go of or get over things. Those people who tend to get bitter in their lives and they're thinking about things that happened 20 or 30 years ago that they could never forgive that person for. That's something that's generational trauma embedded in us, what have you. And I thought, okay, I'm not equipped to help those people. I teach passionate lovemaking techniques, but I can help the people for whom they just felt like, if you can't do the big ask, you can't do anything. It's kind of like black and white versus gray area. So let's get into the gray area. What do people do?

I want to pause for a minute there, Susan, because one of the things that you're talking about, as you're talking, what I'm thinking about, is that we don't often treat intimacy like it's something that we need to be intentional about. We treat intimacy like it's a natural thing. And if it's gone, then, oh, that's too bad. But just as you're not going to be ripped unless you exercise, and even then you might not be ripped. Intimacy requires participation and attention. So it's not an automatic thing that happens. So that's really been striking me, as we were talking, is that in order to maintain, you do have to participate, generate, and show up and respond. Right. You know, if your partner dials it up and you shut them down, then they might not be as likely to dial it up next time. So taking responsibility for the ways in which you may have inhibited intimacy and then complete that, assuming you're not with the 20% of people who can never forgive you, but, like, hey, I shut you down. I apologize. Let's try that again.

There's spontaneous and responsive desire, and spontaneous desire is that lusty, horny feeling where you want to have sex and responsive desire is. Well, I'm not there yet, but I could get there if we take it slow.

So that kind of goes with people who have been married for a long time, right, that the blush is worn off that rose. But if you still genuinely love, honor and respect each other, there's a possibility for rekindling intimacy. So what do you, what do you say to people who say, well, God, we've been together for 35 years. What do you expect? You're obviously, your response is that's there's possibility there.

Of course, there's always possibility. As a matter of fact, you're. It's never too late to have a renaissance in your intimate life. It's never too late to have the best sex of your life.

I'm laughing though. We just have to take a little diversion down sort of rabbit hole. Because when they' studied women's sex drive in particular, the best way to improve a woman's sex drive is not hormones, although that's not harmful. It's actually a new partner. And so if you're married, you're probably not going to get a new partner, but maybe you want to look at your partner with new eyes.

Yeah. Desire. Yeah, yeah. Desire is an equation between trust and adventure or novelty and variety plus safety equals desire. And the problem with long term relationships is they've got all the safety and the trust, but none of the adventure or novelty. And that's why the new partner is fun, because there's no baggage and there's lots of novelty. That makes sense, right?

That really does make sense.

Yeah, but your sexuality is a part of your maturation and it's. These are learned skills. You know, we, we get this idea that sex should come naturally. Well, procreation comes fairly naturally to the homo sapien. Right. We can figure out how to get slot A into tab B and make a baby. But that's not lovemaking and passion and satisfaction. That's just procreation. And so procreation comes fairly naturally. But passionate lovemaking, these are learned skills like any other thing, like learning about your genetics or learning about anything. It's, you know, you have to learn what to intermittent fasting. You have to learn why that's good for you. Right. Jeffrey Bland was talking about that on a recent episode. So sexual skills can be learned. I've been teaching them for a couple of decades. I teach people to do what I call transform. Having sex, which is that notion that intercourse is the thing. Thing you're doing and you know, it's for procreation only. It's into making love satisfying heart connected conscious lovemaking.

This is the doing this conversation versus the beingness. So you're really talking about bringing people from a straight transactional interaction of having sex, meaning point A to point B. Two people have an orgasm, hopefully and then you're done to an experience that may or may not include penetration but that hopefully will include orgasms for both individuals or satisfaction, let's put it that way. Okay.

Can I say something about what you just said, Wendy?

Sure.

I really like that you had orgasm as an important discussion point in that conversation because one of the things that I find with a lot of other sexperts is they say hey, don't be orgasm focused, don't be goal oriented. But I think that's kind of folderol. Because if you consider that orgasms are learned skills, if you think about your sexuality as all being learned skills, you've heard probably about that notion, that concept that Dr. Laurie Mintz talks about called the orgasm gap. Have you heard that?

No.

She did a TED talk on it. It's worth a watch. She talks about the orgasm gap as being the difference between how easy it is for our male bodied partners to achieve climax from intercourse and how difficult relatively it is for female bodied partners to achieve orgasm from intercourse. And she calls it the orgasm gap. The difference between how easy it is for him and how hard it is for her. And my goal is not say hey, don't make orgasm the focus, make intimacy the focus. I call fol de rol on that because in my mind orgasms are simply just skills that you learn. The human body has the ability to have 20 different kinds of orgasms. Both the male and female XX and XY chromosome homo sapiens. We have incredible capacity for orgasmic pleasure and each one is a learned skill. And so I like to say working on crossing the gasm chasm, closing that orgasm gap. So that intercourse is a lovely part of sexuality. Yes. I want you to expand the playing field. I want you to have incredible kissing and lots of full body touch and genital pleasuring and all kinds of things. But I also want you to have very satisfying intercourse. If you are in a male female relationship, which frankly most people are monogamous, long term male, female pair bonded relationships, then if I say a lot of people think oh well, I just can't have an orgasm. I'm just not the kind of woman who can have an orgasm from intercourse. And then their partner's like well I Guess she can't. And then they stop trying to. And what I want people to think is, oh, we just haven't figured out how. Okay, tell me how. And the tell me hows are so simple. It's so easy once you're like, oh, we didn't know that part. Oh, we didn't know that part. Now we got there. Now we're having great intercourse and we're expanding the playing field to have all these other pleasures too, so that if something does happen in the future, he's got erectile dysfunction, he needs to reverse. She's got some vaginal pain with intercourse. She needs to remediate with sexual regenerative treatments. Then they can be like, that doesn't have to stop us. We can have great, pleasurable, intimate, heart connected, passionate connection together. And we'll fix that stuff and get back to it. Or not.

Okay, so speaking of E.D. erectile dysfunction.

Sure.

So I want to say a couple of things. One is because now we're at this moment, we're talking about women. This really does apply to women in any gender neutral relationship. Women with women, women with men. Doesn't really matter. Because if we're taught you've talked about a female ED crisis. What do you mean by that?

Yeah. You are so sharp and on top of things, Wendy. Thank you. Yes. Women have as much erectile dysfunction as men. And it drives me crazy that men get all the attention about this and women have it and they're like, I didn' even know I had it. Okay, so, like, at the basic bare bones concept of this, there is the idea that if you imagine a banana, I'm holding a banana up, it's pretty easy to imagine that. That, that is a penis. Well, half of a man's penis sticks out from his body, and half of that banana goes in and down toward his testicles. And the entire fruit of his banana is erectile tissue, the corpus cavernosum, the corpus spongiosum. His penis is filled with this spongy tissue that floods with blood very quickly and gives him an erection. So when he has erectile dysfunction, difficulty getting hard or staying hard, or delayed ejaculation, which many men in their older age also suffer with premature ejaculation, which is more anxiety. It's more psychological than physiological for 95% of men. But these are the issues that men struggle with. Well, now I take all the fruit in that banana and I turn it into a donut. And now it's a little circle of this delicious banana fruit and that. And I, I Lift the skin of your vulva up, and I put it right in there and put the skin over it. That's your erectile. It might. It comes to a little point at the glands of the clitoris, but we literally have our vaginal canal wrapped in three erectile tissue systems. The clitoral, urethral, and perineal systems are completely inside our vulva. So we have an innie. He's got a half outy, but we have the same amount of fruit of erectile tissue. And the problem is that what affects erectile tissue is vascular issues. So, you know atherosclerosis. Right. So disease of your vagina.

Actually, erectile dysfunction in men is a great indicator of atherosclerosis for men. But now it sounds like if you don't have good blood flow to your genital region, that's a good indicator of atherosclerosis for females, too.

It is. An. Atherosclerosis is the hardest word there is to say in the medic.

That and trajectory, those are the two words I cannot say. So chalk those up.

It's my professional job to say that word. And I thought that all the time on it.

Can't say.

Calcified plaque in your blood vessels is really what we're talking about. And that means the smooth muscle tissue that opens and closes and squeezes your blood around your body to your brain, to your heart and to all your parts. That doesn't work so well. And you can't get that blood in there, which means it can't engorge. And the engorgement is his erection and her erection. We have the same amount of erectile tissue. So when we imagine that if I hold my hand in a tight little fist, that's your vulva, you know, the erectile tissue in your vulva or in your male genital system, your penis. And it's small, it's a little tight fist. Then when it floods with blood in arousal, it gets big. What happens when it gets big? It has more surface area. When it has more surface area, it sends more. When. And it's touched and pleasured, it sends more signals to the biggest sex organ, your brain. Yes. And so you feel more pleasure. So as we get heart disease, loss, you know, as we stop moving, as we. As we age, as that tissue atrophies from loss of blood flow, it shrinks and you get less signals. It's harder to have orgasms, it's harder to get erections. It's harder to get. And here's another thing that's Very interesting. For women, women's number one chief complaint as they age is loss of lubrication. Well, the vagina is actually a muscle, an incredible muscle. And it's not a gland. It doesn't self lubricate. The way we lubricate our vagina is through the blood plasma seeping into the pelvic bowl and the fluid coming through the many layers of the vaginal mucosal lining to wet the lining. So if we can't get blood flow, not only do we not get erectile function, we don't get lubrication. So loss of lubrication, vaginal atrophy, the thinning of the tissue, all of this stuff. It's not just your hormones, like you so eloquently said. Got it.

Okay. All right.

But you can fix it all.

I was just going to say I know it's fixable because you do this for a living. Okay, so let's set the fixing part to the side. You also talk about sexual soulmates. Sexual soulmate pact. How do we can you talk about that? Like, how? Because some people will say, okay, we're just naturally good together in bed. And some people say, well, we're, you know, it's kind of struggle and awkward. But your, your philosophy is that anyone could be your sexual soulmate. Is that right?

It is, yes. You do a good job with your homework, helping people. One of the things that I've been doing, my emails have been open even before there were DMs, Wendy. My DMs are also open now. And people just ask. I'm like, kind of like the Dear Abby of sex. They pour their heart out to me, tell me their whole story, and I tell them what, how to solve the problem. And so I've been super lucky that way, where that's really what's enabled me to write 44 books and programs over the last couple decades, was just solving people's problems. I'm just. I'm just a fixer. I'm a sex fixer. And when people would ask me to how to fix something, I would give them some ideas and then they would come back to me, okay, here's where we struggled. This worked, this didn't. And I'm always like, two steps forward, one step back. Two steps forward, one, one step back. That's how it goes. That's what progress looks like. So tell me what the one step was and let me see if I can fix that. And over the years, what I found is that there are six essentials to connected sex. And when you understand? And remember, you go into this thinking, okay, I don't really know how to make love. I've got to learn it. So what are the skills that I need to learn to be a good lover? One of my taglines I love is be a better lover.

Right?

That's an aspirational. Some people want that. They want to be a better lover. A lot of people want to be a good lover. So what are those things? So I came up with, basically, these are the kind of the fundamentals. The very first one is being present because of cultural shame. A lot of us check out in our lovemaking, we're not actually present. And in the moment, this is what creates performance anxiety. This is what happens when we have body shame issues. This is what happens when we're estrogen dominant, we've got our mind on a million things. And sex is really a mindfulness practice. You keep bringing yourself back to heart connection with your partner, being able to stay in the sensation, because we also escape from sensation. Even pleasurable sensation can be overwhelming to us. So presence being a fundamental practice is very important. The second one is.

Go ahead. I'm just thinking about that because years ago I wrote a blog. Are you even on your own list? Because for so many of us, get out of bed and start taking care of others and running around and being demanded and pulled on. And especially for women who have younger children or if you're caring for grandchildren, by the end of the day, you're done being demanded of. So even putting yourself on your own list can be difficult for self care. So I'm just thinking about, first off, if the end of the day you're done, have morning intimacy instead of evening intimacy. Like, have it first, it's dessert, eat it first. So, okay, tell me to tell me part two.

Second one that I think is also really important is something I call the sexual soulmate pact, like an agreement. And it's really the foundation of communication, which is that generally, and this is a gross generalization and I recognize that, but it's generally, I don't know what I want. I just know what I'm getting, isn't it? And I don't want to tell my partner what they're doing isn't great because they'll feel attacked, they'll feel rejected, they'll feel like they take it as a failure. And I just don't even want to go there. So I just take what I can get. That's common. And so I teach people with the sexual soulmate pact, which I give that Away for free as well. It's@sexualsolmatepact.com It's a really good way to get on the same team together. Understanding that we live in these animal bodies and they're different every day. How much sleep have we had? Did we eat some carbs or sugar? You know, like, are we stressed out, et cetera? Every. And for women especially, we're on this 28 day cycle even after menopause. Just because our estrogen isn't producing doesn't mean we're not still running with the moon.

We're still lunar. Yeah, I mean we are lunar. Okay, what's three? Is that just soulmate? Sexual soulmate part two.

Right. Sexual soulmate pact is really the second one. The third one is this notion of embodied sexuality which is just using all your senses. When I talk about wanting to transform friction into connection, I'm not talking about rubbing genitals together. I'm talking about full body touch, sensual kissing. Words of endearment and encouragement. A beautiful. And this gets me to the next one. Love space. Setting the space for surrender to your pleasure together. The environment is important as well, which is you have the embodied piece of it. The touch and connection and the presence and the communication. But you need some soft towels, some candlelight, some good, you know, organic lube without a lot of chemicals in it. You need the things that go with the.

You need the things to do the things to get the things.

Okay, Exactly. And then the. The other one is what I like to call erotic play dates. Yes. I teach people techniques and I teach them understanding anatomy and understanding the difference between the masculine and feminine sex drive. Because they are different. Because male. The male body is testosterone dominant, the female body is estrogen dominant. They make us have different behaviors. One's a more spontaneous, one's a more responsive desire, things like that. But we forget, and often it's not even forget, we didn't learn again, going back to that thing, that sex isn't just intercourse. Sex is this whole beautiful playing field of things that can be so much fun. Instead of thinking about having sex, I like to have people think about having erotic play dates. Where either you show up with here's four or five things that might be fun. I created something called the sex life bucket list. It's really fun. You might enjoy this as well with your partner. The sex life bucket list is this idea that I came up with 48 erotic play dates. You go through this list with your partner, they have their list. You mark down things that are A's. Oh, I'd really like to try that with you. We never did this before. B's are. Well, it wouldn't go on my bucket list, but if it's on yours, I would totally do this with you if that's something you want to explore. And Cs are. It's not for me right now because as we mature, the sex we wanted in our twenties is totally different than the sex we want in our 60s. And so, so what do we want now that's interesting to us as we've learned all these things and gotten so much more experience over the years? So erotic play dates are. Gosh, do we, do you want to do a lingerie photo shoot? Should we learn sexy dancing together? Should we have a, should we try a new sex position or have sex in a different location? Should we try one of those 20 kinds of orgasms we've never had? You know, there's just so many things you can learn that when you begin to think about your, your love making as this grand adventure, we go back to, I've got the trust, I need the adventure. When I start to have the adventure with the lover that I trust, we start having the best sex of our life. So what am I doing? I'm just pushing out how you think. I'm just open, broad and expanding how you think about quote unquote sex and turning it into fun, erotic play dates.

Two questions. One, is this six? Because I want to make sure we get six. But I have a question.

Go ahead.

The question is for, there's so many people who have been in long term relationships and may, may say, oh, this is for me. So how do they start that conversation with their significant other to say I want to level up in our intimacy, in our sex life? Is it just to say I want to level up? It's to bring the. It's time to rediscover each other anew. Or is there some secret sauce language that you say, okay, here's what I found really works. What do people say?

Well, it's always different for everyone because every relationship is a snowflake. They are special and unique. But the reason I made the sex life bucket list and what I give you with that, it's free. You just go to sex life bucket list dot com. What I give you with that is a principal download. I don't keep your information. So I give you a printout and a 40 minute video where I walk you through all the play dates. And so some people are like, I'm just going to print this out, read this myself and tell my partner a couple of things I'd like to try. Some people want to go all the way to the other end and they set up a date and they order in Chinese food, and she, you know, one of the two of them prints out the two copies with the clipboard and the pen and the highlighter and puts the.

This is a working date. You got to work for your pleasure.

Well, I feel like it's the very first erotic play date. Of all the erotic play dates is figuring out what play date you want to have. Right, right, right. And so I basically did this kind of little mini workshoppy thing where I walk you through and make them all sound so much fun. It's like play date shopping where you get to listen to me explain what. Because a lot of people, like, I don't even know what that thing is. I never heard of it, you know, and so I walk you through it, so you get to watch it together. You can pause anytime you want, you can talk about things, and then you come up with. I walk you through making your A, your B or your C list. And then you have the opportunity to kind of merge your lists, and then you can say, okay, each time, let's now. You know, a lot of people talk about scheduling sex, but that just sounds annoying, doesn't it? Like.

Well, it's very transactional, right? That's a transactional interaction. Like, okay, we're going to do this at this time. That's like, I'm having a meeting and now I'm going to have sex. So that's very transactional. So you're. I think all of what you're talking about is very antithetical to a transactional behavior. You're talking about bringing intimacy. Intimacy could or could not be sex, depending on where you land. So you're talking about being connected at every level, you know, brain, heart, and genitals. And then if that leads to sex and orgasm, great. And if it doesn't, great, you'll do it another day. You know, it's. It's.

I think it's a connection. Yeah, it's taking the pressure off of having intercourse that nets you more intercourse and better intercourse. Because now you're not scheduling sex. You have Thursday. We're having a Chinese food and an erotic play date, and we're going to do a lingerie fashion show and a photo shoot or we're going to try this new toy we got and see how it goes and just be silly. Anytime you try something new, you have to give it a Couple of cracks. It's not always going to be the perfect thing.

First time it is French kids eat everything talks about. Kids need to try. People need to try new food 15 times in every form before you can say you like it. Meaning, you know, if you try broccoli and it's steamed versus roasted versus sauteed, you've only tried it once for each category. You can't say you don't like broccoli. You gotta try it 15 times. So you know it's don't see one, do one, teach one. So until you feel comfortable teaching one, you probably should keep doing one.

That was such a good analogy. The broccoli story. May I. May I use that in the future? Wendy Trabot taught me the broccoli. Broccoli concept as quoted.

I've been quoted. Yeah. So have at it. Enjoy. So okay, so that's great. So not only to experiment, but. But experiment multiple times because you will be awkward and uncomfortable or maybe awkward and comfortable uncomfortable the first time you do it. And so don't take your experience on time one to mean that you're bad at that. Take it to mean you should try that again.

Some of your best sexual experiences are the. Are the fails are the goofs. If go into an erotic play date and you try something and it doesn't work and you're cracking up and you're laughing about it, you remember those good times. Also that whole Buddhist beginner's mind begin as a beginner when you begin as a beginner together. That's one of the secret little ninja things about the sex life bucket list, is that it really gets you trying new things at the same time together. And that's what creates new relationships, energy. You feel like a teenager again, even when you're an old boo.

I think this is great, Susan. So you've given us a number of websites.

Yeah.

And as we come to the end of the session, I want to make sure people know how they can reach you. So how can people reach you? Like, how do they find you? Where do they. Where do you want them to go? And we'll put everything in the show notes.

Yeah, I mean, any of those. I think we talked about the sexual soulmate pact and sex life bucket list on this episode. So if you go there, you'll get on my newsletter. You can unsubscribe anytime or you can be on it for decades like most of my readers, because I always have such fun stuff. So you can reply to any email you get from me. And it goes right to my inbox. I have a care team that handles stuff for me, but I get all the personal replies because I think that's what made me good at doing what I do is all the loving questions that people have shared with me over the years. So I'm here for you in that way. Or you can slide into my DMs on Instagram. I'm my name Susan Bratton. I'm super easy to find. I'm not the nutritionist from New York. I'm the Susan Bratton sexpert.

Yeah, I found you when I was doing the pre work so it's good. Okay. Susan, this is fantastic. Thank you so much for talking about the things you've talked about because you know, it's like destigmatizing it and making it exciting and interesting and enrolling again. So thank you. And to the listeners, thank you for joining us for another episode of the Five Journeys podcast Live like youe Matter. Our guest today is Susan Bratton and you should go follow her her. So thank you.