Intimacy & Desire: Awaken the Passion in Your Relationship (12 page)

This is why I no longer preach compromise, negotiation, and consideration. Instead, I help people hold on to themselves. I’ve learned there’s more than enough power and control to go around, when you empower and control
yourself
. When clients first realize this, as you are now, they stop bickering, and pay more attention to what’s going on.

Mind-mapping can create a powerful psychological encounter known as an “intersubjective state.” It happens when you stop using mind-mapping to figure out how to present yourself, and instead allow yourself to be known. When you let your mind be accurately mapped, your partner can map that you are doing this. It creates the intersubjective state—something like “I’m seeing you, and you are seeing me, and we know we are being seen by each other, because we are both letting this happen.”

In
The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life
, Daniel Stern describes intersubjective states as socially based co-created experiences of great overlap in partners’ phenomenological consciousness. Each person has a similar experience. Each is acutely aware of the other’s experience, and aware that the other is aware of having a concordant experience.
⁹¹
Stern says we are capable of intersubjective states by the age of nine to twelve months old.

Intersubjective experiences with a partner are special moments of intense interaction, engraved in your mind. You often think back to them after they are over. They are shared events, something you’ve gone
through together, which impact you as an individual and briefly define you as part of a “unit.” Co-created experiences.
Moments of meeting
. Experts believe intersubjective states play a pivotal role in how your brain wires itself, and continually rewires itself, throughout your life.

Here’s why
moments of meeting
are special: Not all mind-mapping (sometimes called tracking) creates a profound intersubjective experience. Trackers often
mask
the fact they’re tracking the people around them, to
minimize
the possibility of an intersubjective experience. Perhaps the sweetest and most profound aspect—if not the essence—of sex, intimacy, and eroticism is two people openly mind-mapping each other and allowing themselves to mapped.

You may have moments of meeting every day with people you barely know. But moments of meeting between lovers during sex have a special place in human existence. The same is true between parents and children. It always involves two people mapping each other’s minds, and allowing their own mind to be mapped.

The following week Robert and Sally reported that they’d played out their pattern again. Robert made sexual overtures, and Sally was willing but unenthusiastic. Robert exploded, and Sally backed down one more time. They had sex, but the next day Robert was still in a black funk. Before long, Robert and Jason were at each other again. Robert lost his temper and called Jason “worthless” several times.

Sally spent several days berating herself for not speaking up. Fearing she was losing any vestige of self-respect, Sally asked Robert to come to their bedroom. There she took a stand: There would be no further belittling comments from Robert. Not to Jason, and not to her. “When we start treating ourselves and each other with a little respect, then maybe Jason will have some for us.”

“How dare you talk to me this way?!” Robert flared.

“Dare? What happens if I don’t dare?” Sally said firmly. “Jason can’t stand us, and he’s right. I can’t stand myself. And I can’t stand you. You’re angry all the time, and I’m always apologizing. I have sex to pacify you.
You make Jason obey you because you’re afraid he won’t respect you. We’ll he doesn’t, and neither do I! I don’t even respect myself! This whole thing is so unappealing and unattractive, why on earth would I want sex? The three of us are going down the toilet. And you can forget sex until we get out.”

This was a powerful “moment of meeting.” Robert mapped out Sally’s mind and knew this wasn’t bluster. She wasn’t kidding. Sally wasn’t looking down apologetically; she looked him squarely in the eye. She seemed scared but determined. Her voice wasn’t shrill or tremulous, which unsettled him. Robert said they would talk about this after he had a chance to think about it.

For several days Robert didn’t say much, but his withdrawal was different. He wasn’t pounding on Sally emotionally. He seemed preoccupied with his thoughts, considering what to do next. Sally let him stew.

Four days later Robert came to Sally. He said he’d thought about what she said about not respecting him or herself. His tone was somber and introspective. “I’ve needed you to make me feel like a man, the same way I’ve needed Jason to respect me as a man. I guess I’m needier than I realized. I never imagined it was so obvious.” Robert looked down at the floor. There was clearly more on his mind, but once he stopped he couldn’t bring himself to say anything else. He looked up at Sally, smiled weakly, and quietly said goodnight.

The next morning, as they ate breakfast, Robert and Jason had another incident. Jason spilled milk on the table. Expecting to be called names, he prepared to spar with Robert. Instead of being concerned with his own feelings, Robert let himself map Jason’s mind. Robert saw his son wasn’t being disrespectful. He just felt stupid in front of his father.

Robert suddenly saw the situation in an entirely new way. He moved to defuse the situation. He took his toast, mopped up the milk, and ate it. Jason stared in disbelief. For a moment he wasn’t sure if his father was mocking him. Jason kept staring at Robert, trying to map his mind.

After a moment, Robert said, “It’s not good without milk. It’s too dry.” Then he smiled at Jason.

In the days that followed, Robert acted better than he usually did when he and Sally didn’t have sex. He didn’t initiate, and she didn’t either. He could have locked in to Jason any number of times, but he didn’t. Robert didn’t push Jason to defer to his authority. To his credit, Jason wasn’t quite so defiant.

Needless to say, Sally was impressed. She respected Robert for taking a hard look at himself. This, in itself, didn’t resolve things. But Robert didn’t look as weak and small as he had for so long. Sally found herself more interested in sex, and more interested in having it with Robert.

Ever-vigilant about Sally’s perceptions of him, Robert mapped this. He felt better about himself because Sally seemed to like him. But more importantly, Robert thought he handled himself with Jason pretty well. He chuckled every time he thought back to eating the toast. It helped him stop overreacting to Jason and give more measured responses. He became less worried about whether Jason respected him or not.

Robert and Sally made love a few weeks after their big encounter. The important thing was how they got there. It felt different because it had a brand new meaning: Sally wasn’t doing it to placate Robert, and Robert hadn’t demanded it. During sex, they created another new meaning: Robert and Sally stopped trying to bring each other to orgasm to quiet and calm their reflected sense of self. This allowed them to have their first positive moment of meeting during sex: Sally and Robert opened their eyes and looked into each other for several minutes. Neither said a word. They were open with each other in a way they never were.

This episode didn’t resolve all of Sally and Robert’s difficulties. But it was certainly a powerful beginning. At least now they had hope. They had a glimpse of a different way of living. If you appreciate the elegance of love relationships, you can have hope, too. Marriage is driven by people simply being people. A love relationship is a path to becoming more of a person.

Does marriage destroy sexual desire? This question has haunted lovers for ages. People have suspected emotionally committed relationships kill sex at least as far back as two thousand years ago, when the poet Ovid wrote in
The Art of Love
, “Quarrels are the dowry married folk bring one another.”
⁹²
And in more recent times, Oscar Wilde quipped, “Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.”
⁹³

We’ve covered a lot of ground in
Part One
to prove what these authors feared is true! Marriage
does
kill desire! But that answer means something different than they or you might have thought. Sexual desire problems are part of the middle phase of marriage. They are how love relationships grow. They are normal evolutionary developments in the life cycle of a relationship.

What you’re going through feels painful, heartbreaking, frightening, and demoralizing. I’ve been there too, so I speak from personal experience: Realizing you’re going through one of marriage’s processes gives you hope and helps you make the most of it. Understanding what you’re going through makes you more resilient and less defensive, and speeds your progress.
How
you go through desire problems makes a huge difference in how you come out—including whether your relationship comes out intact.

When you started reading
Intimacy & Desire
, perhaps you wanted tips and tricks to get your partner hot or ignite your own rocket. You probably never thought the ebb and flow of sexual desire, and the resultant conflicts, are part of the natural growth processes of love relationships. You probably never imagined you’d be reading about sexual desire, the human self, and mind-mapping co-evolving over millions of years.

Where does love fit in the picture? Not romantic love, driven by your reptilian and mammalian dopamine-laced brain, but mature adult love, driven by your prefrontal neocortex and your solid sense of self. Love
and desire that involve your most uniquely human capacities, like eroticism, intimacy, compassion, and commitment. That kind of adult love and mature desire is exactly where we’re headed.

Since your ancestors hatched the human self, we have all had the potential for exquisite sexual desire and mature adult love. Mastering your sexual desire doesn’t mean conquering your animal nature. It means developing the highly tuned sense of self necessary to explore your sexual potential. This always involves a stretch. Sexual desire problems will stretch your reflected sense of self as taut as a drumhead. Guaranteed.

A more solid sense of self gives you more
capacity
for desire. It may sound strange to think of sexual desire as a capacity you can develop. But think about it in terms of your capacity to love. You wouldn’t think twice if I said your self-development greatly determines your capacity to love. Until you have some degree of solid flexible self, your capacity to love someone—including yourself—is severely limited, as is your tolerance for profound desire. The rigors of mature adult love require an accurate and resilient sense of self, if love is to last. Love, desire, and selfhood are innate human abilities we all need to develop.

In
Part Two
, I’ll show you how to use your desire problems to develop a more solid flexible self. We’ll uncover things that control your capacity for profound sexual desire and mature adult love. I’ll introduce you to the incredible Four Points of Balance™ and a process called
differentiation
. These are core pieces of my approach. The Four Points of Balance are the best way to resolve sexual desire problems because they also reduce emotional fusion, borrowed functioning, and emotional tyranny. Best of all, they increase your dignity and self-respect, and that’s always the best aphrodisiac.

IDEAS TO PONDER

A solid sense of self develops from confronting yourself, challenging yourself to do what’s right, and earning your own self-respect.

Partners are always mapping each other’s minds.