Episode 52 - THE SEXUAL STAGES IN RELATIONSHIP AND HOW COUPLES CAN INCREASE INTIMACY & PASSION with Tammy Nelson
THE SEXUAL STAGES IN RELATIONSHIP AND HOW COUPLES CAN INCREASE INTIMACY & PASSION, Tammy Nelson, Licensed Professional Counselor, Registered Art Therapist, Certified Imago Therapist, mother of two children, about to be married, Director of Passionate Partnerships, Author of "Getting the Sex You Want."
In this episode, Tammy reveals the 6 sexual stages of relationship and how to work with them. Learn to create structure in your life that gets you sex. Develop a plan for spontaneity. Explore the Erotic Curiosity Spectrum. Learn what kind of fantasy 65% of women have. Deepen connection and create a safe space to talk about sex.
Transcript
Transcript
Francesca Gentille: Welcome to Sex: Tanta & Kama Sutra bringing you the soul of sex. I am your host Francesca Gentille and with me today is Tammy Nelson. Tammy is amazing, she is a certified imago therapist which I wanna hear that is in a moment. She is the director of passionate partnership, the author of getting the sex you want, we gonna talk about reigniting the passion in a relationship. She has a private practice.
Their intimacy and passion. I want to ask you what is an imago therapist….
Tammy Nelson: well imago therapy was actually developed by Harvel Handrix who is the author of getting the love you want and Harvel Handrix has been on about 21 times and he has been around the world training therapists in this new way of couples counter make become almost a mainstream form of working with couples to focus on the reasons what brought them together and also learning ways to communitcate in ways to help us grow as individuals and I really think found that in the twenty years that I have been in private practice that it has been the only type of couples therapy that really worked for couples so the way that he has developed the type of dialogue helps couples…and deep in their connection has really been helpful for me and my work with couples intimacy and sexuality and I have sort of taken those skills and …into working them around sex and intimacy so I have wrote a book called getting the sex you want which Harvel said was the best…for helping couples …the sexual pleasure which he has ever seen so he has recommended also using those techniques to help couples with their sex life. I think … way of providing sort of a safe for people to begin to have a conversation about their sexuality which I think you know its probably the hardest things to do you are sort of a umm you know setting the stage for many of us to have a voice to talk about sexuality in a lot of different ways because most couples in general, most of us…individuals have a hard time talking about sec and actually I have been you know like you have mentioned around the world teaching couples and …training therapists to use some of these techniques to help couples in their sexuality and I have talked to people probably in fifteen different countries and I have asked them you know what is their most difficult thing in their culture around sexuality and almost to the world every single person has always responded the hardest thing in their world around sexuality is that no one really talks about it and that we talk about sex beliefs…with the person we are having sex with.
Francesca Gentille: That seems to be a common thing even in cultures where people are comfortable with nudity or maybe thing which we are not comfortanle with, thez have different values have different values around some forms of sexuality but they stll finding it hard to talk about with their partners.why is that? Why is it so hard do talk about umm you know I like to be touched like this and I don’t want to be touched like that..ahh…umm this position hurts or when you say this I feel frightened and its hard for me…feeling attached with passion when it happens. I really want to try this
position or why is that so hard.
Tammy Nelson: well I think past of the issue comes from the stages we are going to talk about in relationship and in the beginning when you meet someone you know we get into this romantic phase. Hallen Fischer did all this research that romantic love really only last from three months to twenty seven months. Sort of this bio chemical romance phase where you have all this big brain chemicals which release all adrenaline,cyratonaine and all these great chemicals that make you feel this great rush of love and the sex is really great and we are really comfortable with each other and attracted and intensity and erotism for eachother and then we move out of romantic love phase into the different phases of the relationship and I think that the way we talk to our partners about what we need begins to change and the way we share our fantasies and desires begins to change and it switches from being really comfortable and turned on to having other meanings and we can talk about that if you want about the different stages in a relationship but I think in general people have a natural resistance to talking about fantasies because they are afraid that not only that their partners are going to be resistant like I am not sure if I want to do that or where did you come up with that or g I thought I was doing everything you wanted or even more prevealant is that people are somehow afraid that if they ask for their fantasies and desires the partners are actually going to run out and actually do them you know I have a couple who you know know she wants to share with her partner what her fantacies are but she is afraid that he is actually going to run to the hardware store and buy the rope and the hooks.
Francesca Gentille: that is so fascinating , so we have this extreme on the one hand I am so nervous and If I put it in the first person that I am no nervous If I am really going to tell you my fantasy then you are going to reject me and its such a personal and private thing that I am really going feel shattered, ashamed that I have revealed something so tender and now you looked at me in a horror, laughter or whatever but on the other hand so its like a double edge sort here if I tell you my fantasies that like I have this fantasy of hung upside down off a cliff then you are going to drag me to the cliff…its that fear that it is there which is stopping us.
Tammy Nelson: I want to share here with my couples something that there is called eroticurosity spectrum in other words there is this spectrum of things we are curious about. On one hand there are things we just wonder about like how does it feel to be really hung down off a cliff and I wonder how it would feel like and people you know really get into that and then in the middle of this spectrum there are things we actually have fantasies about like the things that turn us on and the images that go through our heads you know. There was this study from east coast that sixty five percent of the women have ravishment fantasies so what I make up about it that is that a lot of women have like pirate fantasies. Fantasies like oh please don’t.(giggle)
Francesca Gentille: its even more than oh please no don’t. I think David Data talks about this aswell that the women have desire, I think for male and female we have this desire to surrender into an erotic journey that we have a desire to be taken and to surrender and like someone have this sense power that they are holding us like someone has that power which we can let go into and I think male and female like this but then it comes in archietype like the pirate, pirate fantasy or something more like we are taken into the high scenes you know ohh making love in the rocking ship. So he talks about like men can often get confused and I think women can aswell that its not often or always a rape fantasy, its this sense of a women wants a man to ravish her with a open heart and so to be taken but also have that loving passion at the same time and if there is too much loving passion then it just becomes all soft and watery, something is missing and if there is you know too much like just power power over then something becomes missing so its a wonderful delicious inter world in sweet and sour that we are looking for.
Tammy Nelson: well absolutely and I think part of it is determined by the women physical anatomy that in order for the women to have an orgasm they have to physically surrender and let go and in order to surrender and let go they have to know that someone else is in charge and its directive and sort of being the one holding that space in order to suffix and not let go and I think that is the part of David data thing and the other thing is that I do think that at some level we have done some sort of a disservice to men you know we have taught them about intimacy and gazing into our eyes and touching our face and being emotionally available, making love and being gentle and at the same time women are spending you know 30 billion dollars per year on paper back novels where the guys are ripping off our clothes and pulling our hairs and throwing us on the bed. So I think it is very confusing for the men and its somewhat confusing for the women because they don’t really know how to ask for and like you have said that they don’t know how to ask to be ravish and to be taken over because we have taken violence out of sex and we have worked very hard to educate people about rape and that no means no and yet there is still that desire to surrender so I think there is a confusion.
Francesca Gentille: I want to talk about this when we come back from break. Just to say to our listening audience to encourage you to support our sponsors we have new…and you can see them at the website. They offer free gifts and discounts and by supporting our sponsers you support us and that we continue to have these fabulous shows on the air on internet and we will be back in a moment.
Welcome back to Sex: Tanta & Kama Sutra bringing you the soul of sex. I am your host Francesca Gentille and with me today is Tammy Nelson. We want to find out like when we want that ravishment from the heart, how do we ask for it for male and for female or when we want something different or when we want something that can be confusing, how should we ask for it?
Tammy Nelson: Well! I think that it has to do with, part of the problem has to do with sort of a second phase of sexual stages in which by the way there is sex. We talked about the first one, the love phase and the second one is what I call the sweat pants phase of the relationship you know you are sort of comfortable and stable and you know you are going to be together and so you put on the sweat pants. And you sort of loosen up a bit and that is when you go into the sort of maintenance phase of sex. You know you go into the maintenance sex where it is good and you know how to push each others buttons. It may not be as erotic or edgy as it was in the beginning but it is okay and people at that point start sliding into the conflict of power struggle which is normal in the relationships. This is where every body goes and they move in together after they get married. Some of the power struggle issues start to come up and people will either stop having as much sex and they use sex to draw which is the fourth stage they sort of get resigned and they just go to sleep which is the fifth stage where they just say okay this is how it is going to be. I will take my erotic energy and I am going to split it either outside the relationship or I will just put it in a little box deep down inside and now I deny any own sexual needs. And to get to those sixth stage which is the last stage of the sexual stages which is the waking up stage would mean not being asleep anymore would mean saying you know what its not okay for me to compromise sexuality and my erotic needs and umm usually as a couples therapist I see couples when they come in and after ten years when they sort of in that sleepy phase like you know I like my partner but I am not in love anymore and I don’t feel the passion that I did. So this is when we start to wake up a couple and say okay lets start to talk about what your desires are, what your fantasies are so center of the question is how do you ask, how do you begin that process and especially if you sort of slid into that sleepy place of you know I will just settle for this and okay he is nice or she is good or my partner is a god parent or we live together nicely or we are good companions what I usually tell people is that there are two parts of the relationship, companionship and their eroticism. You could be great companion, best friends, good buddys, good partner hang out ability but if you don’t have the erotic connection then you can just feel like sort of room mates so what I work with these couples is that you need to work on the erotic side of the relationship as much as you do on the other side. It doesn’t just happen naturally you know people say if you just work on the relationship, the sex will take care of itself but that is not necessarily true
Francesca Gentille: Great sex and I am going erotic doesn’t happen naturally I don’t think we can say that enough that you know falling in love is programming the body. Helen Fischer and all the researchers say that we get triggered or we get the internal chemical dump and we are going to have amazing sex for few month but having on going great sex is going to take something
Tammy Nelson: You are absolutely right.
Francesca Gentille: Tell us what it takes?
Tammy Nelson: People think that sex should be spontaneous when you have been married fifteen years and you have three kids you don’t have time to have spontaneous desire and arousal and just have sex when you feel like just like in the beginning. What I say to couples is that if you want to be spontaneous you will have to plan that you know so you have to have a date every week for sex and that sex date once a week is a sacred time that you carve out that is just about you and its not the theatre of the movies it is a time that you commit to each other, the erotic aspects of your relationship and every lets just say Friday night is our sex and our erotic time together whether we are sick or whether we are tired whether we are angry with each other whether we are frustrated or whether we have a baby or whether we have to get up in the morning or not this is our time together that is dedicated to sacred space around our erotic connection and during that time…
Francesca Gentille: I have to stop you. Because I love what you said angry or tired but whatever is going on that the time is set aside and I hear this all the time from my boyfriends, couples in eye couch is this sense of well if I am not in the mood then we are not going to have sex, like if we had an argument then we are not going to have sex, if I am too tired then we are not going to have sex, we are not going to be in our erotic nature? So now that you have set aside this time what is going to be your advice to couples lets just say they are not feeling in the mood or they both are angry or both are tired or both are sick how can they have sex of erotic nature and how can that be a fulfilling date giving what they are coming into with.
Tammy Nelson: Okay part of it is that we have given commitment, okay so what we are going to do with our erotic stuff this is you know the time we set aside for sex even though I am really angry, you didn’t do the dishes, you know you didn’t play with the kids and you know whatever resentments I had and what I usually do is that I give people some structure you know that it happens only within a structure and going back your question how do you tell what you desire part of what I found is that people who sort of stop having sex is because they are not getting what they desire and they don’t know how to ask for it. There are some studies which say that we stop having sex because of resentments, its like to climb over that mountain to get to their partner and so I always tell people that on sex night, which they start with a dialogue, a dialogue is different than a regular conversation. A dialogue is when someone shares something and the other person just mirrors it back and then they switch and they always have people starting with appreciation. Appreciations are sort of ways that open up your frontal robe you know. The cortex of your brain is in the survivor mode, like flight mode or stress mode part of you that resists our partner, we sort of need to soften that up and open up so the way you do that is through appreciation. I will give you a make standard sort of a worksheet for assignments that I give for sex night. And one starts with telling three things that you appreciate about your partner and I might start and say that one thing I appreciate about you is that you have come home every night after work without going out with your friends because you really appreciate our time together and you will just mirror back and say you appreciate that I have come home every night after work without going out with my friends because I really appreciate our time together and yes one thing I really appreciate about you is that you make dinner for everyone every Wednesday night so we do three appreciations and then I have people say three things they appreciate in each other sexually. And when you move into sexual appreciation, people start to focus on the things they are working on, a lot of times when people are talking about sex, they talk about the things they don’t like , I don’t like when you do this, I hate it when you do that, this really isn’t working for me. I wish you were doing this, but when you start focusing on a different way of Lang aging sexuality, I really appreciate how gentle you are when you touch me or when you touch my breast, I am really gentle when I touch your breasts and I really love the way when you or when you, really begin to share that kind of sexuality appreciation, what happens is that magical thing happens that you always get more of what you appreciate.
Francesca Gentille: Welcome back to Sex: Tanta & Kama Sutra bringing you the soul of sex. I am your host Francesca Gentille and with me today is Tammy Nelson. She is enlightening us on how to ask for what we want. Share some more exercises that we appreciate what is next.
Tammy Nelson: For first we share three things we appreciate in each other and then we share something that we really like sexually and that what we want more of so something specific what can do with our partner or our partner is doing with us in which we really get into and would love to do more of that. And might be a specific sex act or might be having sex outside would be an example. Might be something we did ten years ago, I would love to have sex on the back seat of the car and I would love to do more of that and remember there is safety around these acts which no one has ever did anything about. You probably don’t want to do uh that is just gross or he might will say lets just do it there really is no room for frustration or agreement or commitment. It is all there holding this space to be seen and heard. So that your desires and you fantasies get seen and heard when your partners says you know I hear you and I mirror back what you say then you have the chance to actually know that your partner is hearing what you want and what you desire and then you can go into the place of maybe we can do that and the last piece would be you know something that we haven’t done I would like to try because now you have moved into a place of rest you know. Gone from creating safety through the appreciation and now we are going to take the risk and may be we could try this and again your partner doesn’t have to agree or disagree so just holding space and then you end with an appreciation like on thing I have appreciated about this dialogue with you is and at the end of that time of dialogue there is so much appreciation going on and so much erotic energy and good juicy stuff going on that we are not focused on how resentful we are with each other now the mood has shifted to that erotic phase and so this is something which you can do on sex night you can do it any night but you should do it definitely on your sex date night. It’s a way of bringing that erotic energy into the relationship as we set up that evening and sort of setting the stage to have more deep and passionate connection for that evening.
Francesca Gentille: I can tell that would just be great its delicious even if you come with some bit of anger and tiredness that sacred feeling of trustful. You can always just tell him he can and you can cuddle and always do this appreciation and not only, I love that you added the sexual piece because we have talked in some of our shows before that bringing in appreciation for that someone and body and sexuality. We would love to try even if you wanted to sleep after that feeling sick it starts to build the foundation that more nurturing, more positive for the next night or the next morning.
Tammy Nelson: Well exactly! And you know as women we have this tendency to need to feel more emotionally connected in order to have sex but men usually feel connecting by having sex. So this has begun to stand off and realistically you don’t have to feel totally forgiven or loving in order to have sex with your partner at that moment sometimes having a sexual connection and working on your eroticism helps heal a lot of the other stuff like I can work weak helping people like he never takes out the garbage and they might come back next week okay well he has sort of taking out the garbage and she sort of left resentful and maybe by the third week, they come in late sort of discourage about therapy but I tell you if I work with people on changing their sex life, they are wanting to come back to the sexual therapy and she doesn’t care if he has taken the garbage out because things have changed in their erotic connection and other things in their life takes lesser priority and less intensity around them.