Intimacy & Desire: Awaken the Passion in Your Relationship (45 page)

1. Sooner or later, one partner loses her physical balance. If this starts to happen, let go of your partner, regain your balance, and re-engage. Emotionally fused couples sway back and forth, struggling to regain their balance while rigidly holding on to each other. If your stability comes from your partner, you have to control her to stabilize yourself. Physical and emotional balance works the same: The best thing to do when your partner starts to lose herself is hold on to
your
self, maintain your own balance, and quiet down.

2. If your partner pulls or pushes you off balance, or leans on you, move as is necessary to keep your own balance.
Just don’t drop your alliance
. It can be as simple as whispering, “You’re pulling me off balance. I need to readjust my position,” and shifting your feet to regain your balance. If need be, you can bring your arms down while you remain in place. Let your partner know you need to momentarily disengage before you do it. If your partner is really leaning on you or pulling you off balance, step back if need be. Keep your purpose collaborative. Step forward to your partner. Re-center yourself. Reach out your arms and resume
hugging till relaxed
.

3. If you’re not used to a relaxed physical connection, you may feel stiff and awkward when you start. When you finally start to relax, you’ll probably have to readjust your body’s position. What initially suited you no longer feels balanced. You need to move to get more comfortable on your feet
and
to better “fit” your partner. Couples feel constrained to move, fearing this will rupture their alliance. They fear their partner will misinterpret this as a signal they want to stop. They end up increasingly tense and uncomfortable in a misguided gesture. It’s difficult to move in a hug—or a relationship—when partners take each other’s readjustments as personal rejection.

It works best to gently say, “I’m shifting position to get more comfortable. I don’t want to stop.” A collaborative alliance requires doing what is necessary to keep your balance. Remember this when your partner wants to adjust her position.

4. A two-minute hug often seems like eternity at first. Ten seconds is a long time for some couples. I recommend ten minutes to start. You may need fifteen minutes or more to finally relax your body, quiet your brain, and reach a deep, relaxed connection. Once you can do it, it will happen more quickly, and you’ll do it longer because it feels good.

5. Start by focusing on your body sensations and slowing your breathing until you are emotionally and physically quiet. If you can’t quiet down, focus on the emotions, perceptions, and memories from your past (“autobiographical memories”) that occupy your mind. You don’t have to concentrate on breathing or relaxing your body, particularly if that’s not working for you. If you can’t relax, pay attention
to what’s getting in the way. If the pictures are upsetting, once you see what they are, try calming your mind by counting breaths.
¹⁷²
You don’t have to worry if you’re not relaxing. There is always something to focus your attention on that can help you.

6. As you get better at doing
hugging till relaxed
, you can add new layers of attention: What’s happening between you and your partner? Is your partner able to relax? What happens when you deliberately try to change your position? How do you make sense of your partner’s response?

7. When
hugging till relaxed
becomes warm, comfortable, and reliable, use it to work through prior negative experiences. Briefly focus on mental images and memories of bad times that haunt you. Then return to focusing on your body, your solid relationship with your partner, and the feel of her body and the smell of her hair.

This multilayered focus of attention produces new associations in your mind and possibly new information-processing configurations in your brain.

Juanita couldn’t calm down the first three times she and Larry tried
hugging till relaxed
. But she was determined to keep up her end of their alliance. They kept at it, and she got to the point where she wasn’t so tense. Then they started doing it more often. After doing it five or six times in a week, for ten minutes at a time, Juanita felt “good” while doing it. After three weeks, Juanita finally
relaxed
.

Shortly thereafter, there was a time where Juanita adjusted her position to get more comfortable. She smelled Larry’s hair. She breathed deep to fill herself with his scent. Her brain recognized this as “home.” She felt balanced within herself, and balanced with Larry. She could feel he felt the same. Juanita realized she was finally with Larry in the midst of an embrace. The impact was staggering.

Juanita’s mind flashed to her parents. She couldn’t imagine feeling this ease with either one of them. Father was a weak man who sexually
exploited her and had affairs, and Mother was a empty bitter woman who loved to spread misery. Juanita swayed just a bit as she thought this, and Larry instinctively tightened his arms around her. It was just a tiny adjustment, but enough to register in Juanita’s mind. She realized Larry was holding her. Juanita relaxed her body and her mind, and let herself be held. It wasn’t so much a change in body position, it was more of a state of mind. She took a deep breath and exhaled a long, deep sigh of relief from the bottom of her soul.

Use
hugging till relaxed
to get the two sides of your brain better integrated. Your left brain thinks methodically, like a serial processor in a computer. It thinks in language and operates by logic. Your left hemisphere is dominant for drawing cause–effect relationships (syllogistic reasoning), linear thinking, and language semantics. It stores your autobiographical memories (your life history) in “explicit memory,” meaning you can recall events by consciously thinking about them.

Your right brain has a distinctly different personality. It focuses on this present moment right now. It thinks in pictures rather than words. It operates like a parallel processor, taking in information from your five senses (your entire body) and producing an explosive integration that makes you conscious of the world around you and the people in it. Your right hemisphere connects you with other people by how they taste, smell, feel, sound, and look.

Your left brain takes the collage of activity in your right hemisphere, pulls out huge numbers of details, associates them with past learning, and projects the present out into future possibilities. This is where your inner voice (“I am!”) and your calculating cunning intelligence reside.
¹⁷³

Your right hemisphere is “online” from birth. (Your left brain and explicit memories come online later). It grows markedly in your first three years, and its development is impacted by relationships with parents and other caregivers. The right side of your brain is dominant in tracking and regulating your body, and learns through body movement. It is more involved in perceiving and processing emotion, including facial
displays of emotion and nonverbal aspects of language like gestures and tone of voice. It is especially involved in intense emotional experiences, retrieval of autobiographical memories, and mapping other people’s minds.

Your right brain is also where your implicit memory is located.
¹⁷⁴
Implicit memory records, among other things, early (pre-verbal) events you were too young to remember, but which impacted you nonetheless. Implicit memory can influence your current reactions even though you can’t explicitly recall what triggers your feelings. If you have negative reactions to sex that you don’t understand, or painful childhood experiences that may be getting in your way, you definitely want to get your body and right brain involved in creating new solutions.

Now let me explain what you’re trying to do with
hugging till relaxed
: You want to get both sides of your brain talking to each other. Your right and left brains communicate through a nerve bundle, but otherwise, the two sides operate relatively independently.
¹⁷⁵
As we’ll discuss in the next chapter, trauma further isolates the hemispheres from each other. But whether or not you have been traumatized or abused, getting both sides working together facilitates neural growth, boosts your functioning, and increases your likelihood of resolving sexual desire problems.

If you want a coherent personal life story based on accurate autobiographical memory, your right and left hemispheres have to exchange information. Your ability to see yourself in the past, present, and future (known as “mental time travel”) predominantly comes from your right hemisphere. Mind-mapping mostly occurs there as well. Your left hemisphere tries to interpret this using autobiographical memories retrieved by your right hemisphere, searching out cause-and-effect relationships through linear logical deductive thinking. If there are holes in your autobiographical memory, or your left and right hemispheres don’t communicate,
your brain will readily construct a picture of your life that’s inaccurate enough to keep your anxiety down, and accurate enough to keep your mind’s deception-detector from going off
.

All this comes into play during
hugging till relaxed
. Your right brain detects that you and your partner are physically and emotionally relaxed with each other (or not). Your left brain infers what this means and where
things are headed.
Hugging till relaxed
can get both sides talking to each other. Our next activity does this too.

Hugging till relaxed
sets the stage for
heads on pillows
.
¹⁷⁶
Heads on pillows
puts you right where couples often have trouble, and lets you do something new about it. Here’s how you do
heads on pillows
:

You and your partner lie on your sides, facing each other. Put your heads on your own pillows. Get your heads far enough apart so your partner doesn’t look like a Cyclops. Then, quiet your mind and calm your heart.
Heads on pillows
is much like
hugging till relaxed
only lying down. They differ in that you’ll be gazing directly into your partner’s eyes and reclining together. If your intimacy tolerance isn’t challenged by
hugging till relaxed
,
heads on pillows
may do that.

In
heads on pillows
, neither partner lies underneath or on top of the other. Both of you have one arm free. If you want to touch, touch each other’s hand or face. With your mind and eyes, try to touch your partner’s heart. You may feel awkward at first, but if you settle down and give yourself a chance, results can be dramatic.

You may not be comfortable with this level of intimacy. You become acutely aware of yourself, your partner, and the connection (or lack of it) between you. If during sex you tune out your partner and focus only on your physical sensations,
heads on pillows
can be challenging and productive.
Heads on pillows
lets you establish and maintain a collaborative alliance physically, in real time. For many couples, it’s a godsend.

Remember, the closer Juanita and Larry got to intercourse, the more Juanita got nervous. No matter how much Juanita relaxed during
hugging till relaxed
, she got nervous when they lay down and intercourse became more likely.
Heads on pillows
allowed them to calm themselves down and re-establish their collaborative alliance once they were in bed. This was the optimal point to catch Juanita’s downward emotional slide, the point where Juanita began to lose herself.

Building on the benefits of
hugging till relaxed
, Larry and Juanita put
heads on pillows
to good use. Instead of getting lost in mental pictures
of things going wrong, Juanita focused on Larry. What she saw in his face showed her that the pictures in her mind were wrong. Rather than her fears and anticipations coming between them,
heads on pillows
made Larry her ally in dealing with them.

Thoughts and feelings of being pressured were still in her mind, but Juanita realized they were coming from her brain rather than from Larry. Larry didn’t expect her to turn herself over to him. Larry wasn’t being like her father. Larry wanted her to get a grip on herself. Thinking this made it easier to settle down and relax again.

After several repetitions, Juanita said, “Hey! Forget intercourse. Just give me
this
. If you want more of this, that’s fine with me.” The warmth of her voice said she wasn’t dodging intercourse. She was invested. She
wanted
to do this with him.

This wasn’t simply because Juanita’s emotional needs were being met. Non-verbal aspects of
hugging till relaxed
and
heads on pillows
probably create “right-hemisphere-to-right-hemisphere brain attunement.” That’s where your right hemisphere can directly connect with your partner’s right hemisphere. The right hemisphere is dominant in regulating your body and emotional states and social and emotional communication, especially nonverbal messages from facial expression, gestures, and tone of voice. It appraises the emotional meaning of things. Getting all these aspects aligned within both of you and between the two of you creates a powerful emotional connection. Your next tool does all of this as well.

Your third tool is
feeling while touching
. After years of living numbed emotional lives, you feel no one and no one feels you. Lots of partners stop feeling each other when they have sex, too. One touches the other, but they have mentally left the room.

Touching without feeling is pretty common, if not the norm. You can avoid feeling your partner during kissing, foreplay, and intercourse. (Imagine deep-kissing when your partner has bad breath, and you’ll feel yourself do it.) You can also make it hard for your partner to feel you. In
theory, sex is a good way to connect with your partner, but, in practice, it’s where many people disconnect.