Whether you find yourself in a sexless marriage or a sexless weekend, you can find hope. If you are the partner with lower sex drive than this series is for you.
It’s Not Really About the Sex
Ironically great SEX is not really about the sex itself but about the elements that create a meaningful experience. I often say great sex involves three keys:
- You are feeling good about your self
- You are in touch with your senses
- You are feeling positive towards your mate
Let’s focus on step 1 – Feeling good about your self. OKAY, let’s feel GREAT!
Chances are if your sex life is suffering then the thought of being intimate does not make you feel great about your self. Our self esteem is closely tied to our sexual success. In fact a certain Dartmouth University study of 16,000 people reported that the quality of one’s sex life had more to do with that person’s level of overall happiness than any other factor.
So, that could be a vicious cycle: Lousy Sex life leads to unhappiness which leads to feeling bad about yourself which leads to a lousy sex life, which leads to unhappiness…
Instead step 1 of freedom from the downward spiral is to create a way to feel great about yourself now.
How?
A. Acknowledge your distressing emotions
So often instead of acknowledging and honoring our feelings we simply want to get away from them. Instead honor your feelings and spend some time giving the room to “breathe.” After all, our emotions are just energy.
B. Offer acceptance and/or forgiveness
As you acknowledge your unhappiness, it is helpful to accept yourself unconditionally and forgive yourself and anyone else who has contributed to your feelings.
C. Create an empowering choice
As Eleanor Roosevelt said, “No one has the ability to make you feel inferior without your consent.” Once you acknowledge your emotions and offer acceptance and forgiveness you are free to choose how you WANT to feel. For our purposes we will choose to be confident and sexy.
You can do all this with a couple of deep breaths and sentences.
Simply say something like:
“Even though I am angry and frustrated, I deeply accept myself and my emotions, and I forgive my husband for being so insensitive – since he didn’t do it on purpose, and I choose to feel confident and sexy.”
As you breathe in and out, you can rub your chest while repeating this sentence with more and more accuracy.
As you do this habitually, you will learn to quickly move from distressed to delicious any time you want.
If you would like to discover more in depth ways to feel great about yourself and enjoy really great sex when you’re NOT in the mood than download your Free audio and ebook from my Winning At Romance Blog
Tell me, what are some ways that you feel good about your self when you need to change your state?
I love to hear what’s working for you!
Yours,
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Well said Gina! This is something I discuss regularly with my clients! I recommend scheduling some “Me” time to get centered or rejuvenate! Take a long bath, read a great book, enjoy a nap or watch a favorite movie.
I'm a little different, when I know I need to get back to feeling good about myself, I put on my grubby clothes and either head out to my gardens or out to the barn for some quality time with my horse. Sound strange I know, but I'm so full of life and energy after wards! It must be all the endorphins that the physical exertion kicks up!
Oh Rachel, that's fabulous. I wish I had a horse to play with outside. Our neighbors have a Llama. I wonder if it would spit at me! Really though, it is so important to take charge of our ability to feel good about our selves. Thanks for sharing.
Hi Gina! (Hope you don't mind if a male chimes in here!)
I understand your primary ebook method uses Emotion Freeing Technique. My experience with with EFT came after nearly losing my wife at the birth of our third child and, less than 8 months later, having a near-death experience myself … which began my chronic illness (which has not helped our sex life).
I found the EFT moderately effective at dissipating (freeing from?) my grief at (potential) loss. I remember a surprising explosion of grief and tears as the therapist pressed me to rehearse the emotions many months after the causative events.
But I say I found the EFT effects modest probably in part because the primary cause(s) of my illness lay elsewhere, and perhaps also because I always had reservations about unreserved self-acceptance, arguably a bed-rock doctrine in EFT.
Even were I not speaking in regard to my belief in the universal indictment of human nature classically drawn out, for example, in Paul's epistle to the church at Rome (esp. chs. 1 – 3), one ought to have a sense of guilt everyday (cf. for example 1 John 1:8-2:1) despite the presence of false guilt. The absence of guilty feelings is a sign of the suppression of truth in unrighteousness rather than a trick to the subconscious mind to get myself to feel more loving. Or in Jesus' language, the plank is in my eye, the mere speck in yours.
Of course, the picture is more complicated than that. For one thing, real guilt may include failure to accept that God has not given me the same ebullient character, the same knack for numbers, the same social and managerial savvy, the same joy in sex — or whatever — as my neighbor, my coworker, my family member. Yes, as a coach to such things I know you would want to give hope in improvement and rightly so, but here my point is that self-acceptance insofar as it extends to giftedness in nature and nurture may be a legitimate application of EFT's “I totally accept my …” affirmation. Here, my acceptance is of the way God made me and of the influences His many acts of Providence have had on me for my good and His glory.
… And for another thing, the Bible that I believe suffices to give answers to such matters assumes self love. “Love your neighbor as yourself (or as you love yourself).” If anything, “do not regard yourself more highly than you ought … ” (Romans 12) — which assumes the danger is too great a love of self rather than too little.
Yet my gut-level, intuitive response to what I now understand of your ebook is that you are on to something real, something worthwhile, something that helps explain many a woman's poor experiences with the gift of sex, not least because it places responsibility on the woman to change what the woman can, namely herself. And I can begin to understand how emotions and bodily health are connected. (I also do not doubt that there are parallel applications to men using EFT, though the male in some ways acts like a different species–or so it sometimes seems!)
A way out of guilt (false or real) may incorporate the human will and, for all I know, the reverse-engineering of emotions via EFT's tapping-with-affirmation. And within a Christian milieu, the central model ought to include accepting one another “as the Lord accepted you” (Romans 15) — defeatist and discouraged and unbelieving warts and all.
For me, the bed rock doctrine is not self-acceptance per se, but accepting the love of God for unlovely me. Jesus said “Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Me.” As the self dies to sin in identification with the death of Jesus, so it is raised with Jesus, enabled in this life not to sin (not that the Christian never sins–the struggle continues … so Romans 6). And as far as I can tell, there ought to be an application, a joyful application, to sex as God created it.
Thus in sum you see my ventilation of an issue with which I have struggled from time to time over a period of years. I hope you will indulge me an ear and offer any wisdom God may have given you, but hitherto withheld from me (cf. Deut. 29:4).
Hi Gina! (Hope you don't mind if a male chimes in here!)
I understand your primary ebook method uses Emotion Freeing Technique. My experience with with EFT came after nearly losing my wife at the birth of our third child and, less than 8 months later, having a near-death experience myself … which began my chronic illness (which has not helped our sex life).
I found the EFT moderately effective at dissipating (freeing from?) my grief at (potential) loss. I remember a surprising explosion of grief and tears as the therapist pressed me to rehearse the emotions many months after the causative events.
But I say I found the EFT effects modest probably in part because the primary cause(s) of my illness lay elsewhere, and perhaps also because I always had reservations about unreserved self-acceptance, arguably a bed-rock doctrine in EFT.
Even were I not speaking in regard to my belief in the universal indictment of human nature classically drawn out, for example, in Paul's epistle to the church at Rome (esp. chs. 1 – 3), one ought to have a sense of guilt everyday (cf. for example 1 John 1:8-2:1) despite the presence of false guilt. The absence of guilty feelings is a sign of the suppression of truth in unrighteousness rather than a trick to the subconscious mind to get myself to feel more loving. Or in Jesus' language, the plank is in my eye, the mere speck in yours.
Of course, the picture is more complicated than that. For one thing, real guilt may include failure to accept that God has not given me the same ebullient character, the same knack for numbers, the same social and managerial savvy, the same joy in sex — or whatever — as my neighbor, my coworker, my family member. Yes, as a coach to such things I know you would want to give hope in improvement and rightly so, but here my point is that self-acceptance insofar as it extends to giftedness in nature and nurture may be a legitimate application of EFT's “I totally accept my …” affirmation. Here, my acceptance is of the way God made me and of the influences His many acts of Providence have had on me for my good and His glory.
… And for another thing, the Bible that I believe suffices to give answers to such matters assumes self love. “Love your neighbor as yourself (or as you love yourself).” If anything, “do not regard yourself more highly than you ought … ” (Romans 12) — which assumes the danger is too great a love of self rather than too little.
Yet my gut-level, intuitive response to what I now understand of your ebook is that you are on to something real, something worthwhile, something that helps explain many a woman's poor experiences with the gift of sex, not least because it places responsibility on the woman to change what the woman can, namely herself. And I can begin to understand how emotions and bodily health are connected. (I also do not doubt that there are parallel applications to men using EFT, though the male in some ways acts like a different species–or so it sometimes seems!)
A way out of guilt (false or real) may incorporate the human will and, for all I know, the reverse-engineering of emotions via EFT's tapping-with-affirmation. And within a Christian milieu, the central model ought to include accepting one another “as the Lord accepted you” (Romans 15) — defeatist and discouraged and unbelieving warts and all.
For me, the bed rock doctrine is not self-acceptance per se, but accepting the love of God for unlovely me. Jesus said “Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Me.” As the self dies to sin in identification with the death of Jesus, so it is raised with Jesus, enabled in this life not to sin (not that the Christian never sins–the struggle continues … so Romans 6). And as far as I can tell, there ought to be an application, a joyful application, to sex as God created it.
Thus in sum you see my ventilation of an issue with which I have struggled from time to time over a period of years. I hope you will indulge me an ear and offer any wisdom God may have given you, but hitherto withheld from me (cf. Deut. 29:4).
I haven’t felt good about myself in about 45 years. Thats when we were married and on our wedding night sex,intimacy,love lived and died. We had sex onceand that was it. He told me the next day that was the worst night he ever had. He felt dirty by having sex, it was digusting, meaningless, pointless, smelly, messy, was a total waste of time and way to much work for so little. Also it would never happen again. He then moved down to the basementand started working the midnight shift. He didn’t want to be near me, I was treated like an apartment deweller. He was cold and heartless. I cryed screamed for no use he just stared at me in disgust turned around and went down stairs. We haven’t talked in years other thatn primitive grunt and groans. iI’ve learned to live with this, and in my mid 60s and don’t care about him and myself. I hate all men there all B**%$#ds. I have my anti-depressants and my shrink and thats all I care about.