Intimacy & Desire: Awaken the Passion in Your Relationship (59 page)

“Ever had a collaborative alliance with a woman through your penis?”

The picture dazed Phillip. “No.”

“Never had a collaborative alliance when your penis was in her mouth?”

“… Never.”

Nicolle turned to Phillip. “I can handle you getting nervous during sex. I know what that’s like. But I can’t accept you breaking contact with me and expecting me to go on as if you’re still present. I’m not going to do that anymore when I’m receiving, and I’m not doing it when I’m giving to you. The other night, I continued having sex when I knew you were gone, and I’m not doing that anymore. I want you to stop doing it too.”

Phillip’s reply was slow and thoughtful. “I think I finally get what happens for you when I run away from my issues. When I get nervous, I drop our alliance and withdraw. I tell myself I’m worried about disappointing you, while I’m already disappointing you by what I’m doing. But I’m blown away picturing myself doing that while you’re sucking me. My penis is in your mouth, my mind is somewhere else, you know it, but you’re carrying on as if I’m there, because you know that’s what I want you to do. What an awful image. It’s pathetic.”

I said, “You’re dead on. It’s a pleasure watching your mind work.”

Phillip’s functioning was improving. I was tracking him. My comment made him realize I was mapping his mind. Phillip looked at me and we shared a moment of meeting. He looked at me full-on, and he was solid, without a trace of belligerence.

Tears ran down Nicolle’s cheeks. She was tracking our interaction. Phillip was allowing much deeper intimacy in our session. This was a moment of shared attention for all three of us. The room was quiet and alive with possibilities. Nicolle told Phillip, “I really like you when you’re like this.” Then she turned to me. “Why don’t we let our guards down and do this with each other?”

“You are both trackers. You
see
people. You map their minds. The trouble is you’re hypervigilant about other people and blind to yourself. Your hypervigilance and blindness go hand in hand with the holes in your childhood memories and your difficulty regulating your emotions.” Nicolle and Phillip looked at each other.

“Maybe you can stop using your radar to defend yourselves and use it to see and be with each other.”

Phillip didn’t hesitate. “Seeing the picture of us having sex that I just saw, really being with Nicolle doesn’t sound so scary.
Not
being with her sounds
really
scary. You think if we really do this right, for the first time in my life I won’t come so quick?”

Nicolle reached out for Phillip’s hand. “Maybe we can find out when we leave here.” There was a twinkle in her eye and sexual innuendo in her voice.

Phillip and Nicole went through gridlock, held on to themselves, and developed their Four Points of Balance. They came out with a clearer sense of who they were and who they wanted to be. They had confidence they could become those people. Their relationship was more important to them, they were more important to each other, and, last but not least, they were more important to themselves.

Innumerable couples grow through dealing with sexual desire problems. My professional and personal experience makes me believe a people-growing system exists within emotionally committed relationships. Sexual desire, intimacy, and differentiation are the primary (but not the only) drive wheels. Emotional gridlock is how they surface. Resolving gridlock is how you grow.

I believe this is how the human race evolved. How we became more human in the best sense, how “human nature” was shaped. It stretched our brains. I have no hard proof, but this view fits extensive information from many sciences. Whether or not it’s true doesn’t lessen the utility of applying what you’ve learned here.

The brain-changing impact of sex deserves healthy skepticism. I’ve worked marriage’s differentiation system with couples for thirty years. I’ve only pursued brain-changing therapy for a decade. During that time, I saw people who were unable to make progress when they had focused on feelings, insights, and communication make changes when they tried these solutions. When therapy involved their bodies, more accurate autobiographical memory, new meanings for sex, and physical
contact with their partner, many (but not all) made progress like Nicolle and Phillip.

Nicolle became stronger and less willing to automatically defer to everyone. She stopped playing down her abilities. She became alive and vivacious. Partly this came from feeling desirable within herself, and partly from deciding she really liked her carnal side. Through oral sex she and Phillip created the seven brain-change-facilitating conditions we’ve encountered in the last three chapters. This probably helped her, too.

Phillip went on to cure his rapid orgasms. Intense physical and emotional stimulation during oral sex had its predictable impact once he was able to let himself receive it. Phillip maintained his alliance and confronted his issues by straight-out asking Nicolle to give him head and fuck him. His Four Points of Balance and his penis got a workout. This did more than raise his ejaculatory threshold (which increased his control during intercourse too). His reflexive anger, reactivity, and belligerence declined. His control of his temper was so much better that Nicolle started calling him “Sweetie.”

“Sweetie” was more than terribly touching. It was a measure of therapy outcome. All their struggles to hold on to themselves were summed up in that word. To go from emotional crashes and rage to “Sweetie” suggests these people had developed more than insight. Things like this make me think my clients are rewiring their brains. Perhaps my respect and admiration for them reduces my ability to be totally objective. But “Sweetie” sounds a lot like what Daniel Siegel, who coined the term “interpersonal neurobiology,” specified as the criterion for effective treatment:

One can deduce that the general approach to psychotherapy for individuals with unresolved trauma is to attempt to enhance the mind’s innate tendency to move towards integration, both within the brain and within interpersonal relationships.

The measure of efficacy for such an approach is an enhancement in self-regulation and emotional processing. In addition to the dissolution of the many and varied symptoms of PTSD, one could also predict numerous other fundamental changes in the individual’s functioning. From a systems perspective, therapeutic improvement would be revealed
as a more adaptive and flexible mind capable of responding to changes in the internal and external environment. Mood stability would replace emotional liability. An increased capacity to experience a wider range and intensity of emotions would emerge, as would a greater tolerance for change. Resolution would also be indicated by the individual’s movement toward more differentiated abilities while simultaneously participating in more joining experiences. This increased individual differentiation and interpersonal integration would reflect the mind’s movement toward increasingly complex states. Overall, these changes would reflect not only the freedom from post-traumatic symptomatology but also the enhanced capacity of the individual to achieve integration (internal and interpersonal) and thus more adaptive and flexible self-regulation.

This enhanced integration would result in more coherent autobiographical narratives of specific traumatic events and the life of the individual as a whole.
²¹⁴

When you started reading
Intimacy & Desire
you probably never thought you’d end up learning about your brain. Then again, when you’re drowning in sexual desire problems, you never envision finding the divine in the middle of giving or getting oral sex. You never think of desire problems and oral sex as co-construction and co-evolution, either. But, like everything we’ve seen so far, there’s a lot more going on than is apparent—until you learn about differentiation.

You’ve seen the incredible people-growing processes that come from simply falling in love, becoming a couple, and staying together. As a scientist, I see in this the self-organizing processes found in all ecological systems. Sexual desire is human evolution in action: We are both scientists and the experiment.

Working with couples has shown me how dark our dark side can truly be, especially when the worst in us hijacks our ability to map other people’s minds. And yet, the more I see how desire, sex, intimacy, and love work together to produce the absolute worst and best of times, the
more I think I’m seeing spirit in action. It has inspired my own personal spirituality. This is the Great Oneness embodied in daily life. This view of God is acceptable to the left side of my brain.

When I started doing therapy I never imagined I’d end up talking about Creation. I never thought of two-choice dilemmas, emotional gridlock, and fucking as blessed sacraments capable of embodying our highest abilities and aspirations. But then again, I never imagined that developing and preserving your self lies at the heart of sexual desire. Are sexuality, spirituality, and self-discovery a holy trinity that drives human evolution? As I’ve come to appreciate the Four Points of Balance, I am inclined think so.

If, as I propose, we’re dealing with the Great Oneness, is it possible to condense everything down to one single point? Something simple and profound that captures the essence of differentiation? Something to keep you hopeful when you have the urge to quit? Something to reassure you that your struggles are worthwhile? Something to help you, humor you, pique your narcissism, and welcome you to the club?

I’ve pondered long and hard, and here’s the best that I can do:

You can work on your relationship all you want,

but your relationship will be working on YOU!

POINTS TO PONDER

You can be the low desire partner and sex-starved too.

Your spouse is the hardest person in the world to fuck (and sometimes the easiest to screw over). Fucking your partner requires being aggressive, passionate, playful, adventurous, and generous. You may be stroking her body, but you’re aiming for her mind.

Getting your body and mind quietly aligned with your partner may help you change your brain.