234: Sex & Science with Emily Nagoski, PhD

Welcome back to The Couples Therapist Couch! This podcast is about the practice of Couples Therapy. Each week, Shane Birkel interviews an expert in the field of Couples Therapy to explore all about the world of relationships and how to be an amazing therapist.

In this episode, Shane talks with Emily Nagoski, PhD about sex & science. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and your other favorite podcast spots, and watch it on YouTube – follow and leave a 5-star review.

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The Couples Therapist Couch 234: Sex & Science with Emily Nagoski, PhD

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In this episode, Shane talks with Emily Nagoski, PhD about sex & science. Emily is a Sex Educator & Researcher and New York Times Bestselling Author of Come As You Are and other books on sex. Hear why there needs to be more sexuality education out there, the different forms of desire, how the sexual accelerator & brake work, how to bring up sex with your clients, and the most surprising findings from Emily’s research. Here’s a small sample of what you will hear in this episode:

• Why pleasure is the measure
• Who's to blame for the lack of sexual awareness?
• How is sexuality different for males and females?
• What's left when desire is gone?
• What factors can interfere with sexual desire?

To learn more about Emily Nagoski, PhD, visit:

EmilyNagoski.com

Come As You Are Book

Come Together Book

Burnout Book

Feminist Survival Project Podcast

Check out the episode, show notes, and transcript below: 

 Show Notes

• 234: Sex & Science with Emily Nagoski, PhD
• [0:14] Welcome to The Couple's Therapist Couch
•  [1:41] Introducing Emily Nagoski, PhD
• [4:53] What surprised Emily about the lack of knowledge or understanding sexuality?
• [6:20] Is the lack of sex education (Sex Ed) a failure on the part of the educational system or society as a whole or parents?
• [7:18] What do you mean you can die?!
• [8:41] What are the implications of poor sex education?
• [12:42] How is sexuality different for males and females?
• [15:43] If we were taught differently, would women experience more spontaneous desire?
• [16:50] How important is neutrality when supporting a couple talking about sex?
• [17:39] Should sexuality training be required for therapists?
• [21:48] Can you find a place of neutrality and curiosity and be freed from those sort of reactions?
• [23:16] How has society's reaction to sexuality changed in the past 15-20 years?
• [27:30] How do we discuss sex with our clients?
• [28:19] What factors can interfere with sexual desire?
• [32:38] What's left when desire runs out?
• [35:32] What would it take just to add a spark?
• [41:11] The two most valuable interventions for improving sexual satisfaction among women and in couples
• [46:53] Moving away from shame
• [48:41] Did you know people remember what you say better and believe you more if what you say rhymes?
• Check out Emily's book and podcast!

What is The Couples Therapist Couch?

This podcast is about the practice of Couples Therapy. Many of the episodes are interviews with leaders in the field of Relationships. The show is meant to help Therapists and Coaches learn how to help people to deepen their connection, but in the process it explores what is most needed for each of us to love, heal, and grow. Each week, Shane Birkel interviews an expert in the field of Couples Therapy to explore all about the world of relationships and how to be an amazing therapist.

Learn more about the Couples Therapy 101 course: https://www.couplestherapistcouch.com/

Find out more about the Couples Therapist Inner Circle: https://www.couplestherapistcouch.com/inner-circle-new

Transcript

Please note: Transcript is not 100% accurate.

00:00
The lack of sex education is impacting the way helping professionals talk to their clients. And it means that a lot of clients and patients are receiving false information that just reinforces a lot of the lies they've been told their whole lives because their helping professionals have not had those lies debunked for themselves.

00:26
to the Couples Therapist Couch, the podcast for couples therapists, marriage counselors, and relationship coaches to explore the practice of couples therapy. And now, your host, Shane Birkel.

00:42
Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Couples Therapist's Couch. This is Shane Birkel and this is the podcast that's all about the practice of couples therapy. Thank you so much for tuning in. So excited to be here. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist and I try to bring you all the best topics and guests in the world of couples therapy. And one of the topics that comes up most when I work with couples is talking about sex. And this can be a really tricky topic.

01:10
to deal with for couples. A lot of times people have a hard time saying what they want. A lot of times people have a hard time just talking about sex in general. It's really hard when you and your partner have differing levels of desire. How do you talk about it without making the other person feel bad? I want to share with you this interview that I did. This is actually something from the archives. I did this interview back in 2020. It's one of the most amazing guests I've had on the show.

01:41
Dr. Emily Nagoski, and she's a sex therapist who became famous for writing the book, Come As You Are. And more recently, she just wrote a book called Come Together, and she does a really good job talking about sex, talking about science. She comes from a very scientific perspective, but it really helps to make people feel less triggered by the conversation and help navigate the communication with their partner. So.

02:08
I brought back this episode in the inner circle. This topic has been coming up a lot and I wanted to give people a resource to listen to. So without further introduction, here is the interview with Dr. Emily Nagoski. Hey everyone, welcome back to the Couples Therapist Couch. This is Shane Burkle and today I'm speaking with Emily Nagoski, author of Come As You Are. Hey Emily, welcome to the show.

02:34
I'm so excited to talk with you today. Obviously, we're going to be talking all about the science of sex. But before we get into all of that, I'd love it if you'd tell us a little bit about yourself. Sure. So I'm a sex educator. I started out as an undergraduate peer health educator going into residence halls talking about condoms, contraception, and consent. And the more of that work I did,

03:01
eventually becoming a sexual violence prevention educator and then a sexual violence crisis responder. The more I did that work, the more I felt like this is how I can make a positive impact on the world. So at the same time, I was getting a degree in psychology with minors in cognitive science and philosophy. I love the nerd stuff. I love brain research in particular. As an undergraduate, I wanted to be a clinical neuropsychologist, work with people with traumatic brain injury and stroke.

03:31
But as fascinating as it was, it just couldn't compete with how much my work as a sex educator made me feel like I was doing something that really contributed and I liked myself as a person. So I chose that path. actually got trained to be a sex therapist and realized about halfway through that process that I do not have the magical something that therapists have to be able to just sit in a room with client after client going, mm-hmm.

03:58
That's funny. Right. Tell me how that makes you feel. Everybody has different strengths, right? Yeah. It was in the middle of trying to be a therapist that I realized I'm an educator by temperament. So I continued on to get a PhD in public health and that's the path I've been on. That's great. And is that what you do now? You do a lot of research and teaching. Yeah, actually I spend most of my time training.

04:25
therapists and medical providers and social workers and doulas and midwives and all different kinds of people who work around issues of sexuality in this specific topic of the science of sexual response. Yeah. Oh, that's great. And one thing that I think is so important about your book and that you talk about is how little education there is out there about sexuality. I'd love you to talk, you can either

04:53
with the people who you teach today who you were just mentioning, or going back to these conversations you were having with university students in those roles, what things were surprising you about the lack of knowledge or understanding that's out there? Literally everything. Right. The most common response to my first, when I was teaching at the university level, my first lecture is just anatomy, and every single time.

05:21
every semester a student would come up to me or more than one student and say, you know, I took this class because I thought it'd be an easy A and I already knew a whole lot about sexuality, but I really learned a lot even just in this first class. Right, I'm sure. People feel like they know a lot because they've been exposed to information about sexuality like all day every day their whole lives very often or it was hidden from them in a really dysfunctional way. But unfortunately most of the information we get from the mainstream is

05:51
the opposite of true, really basic information about how genitals respond to sex-related information or how sexual desire works in a long-term relationship, how BDSM works. I had a therapist in one of my workshops basically say that her only exposure to BDSM was 50 Shades of Grey, and I had to pause and be like, okay, so the BDSM community, FacePalms,

06:20
at 50 Shades of Grey, that is not what it's like. Let's spend a little time talking about what that really is so that you don't bring to your clients this very screwed up idea of how power differential can work consensually in relationships. Basic stuff. Yeah, that's great. And so do you think that this is a failure on the part of the educational system or just society as a whole or parents? mean, kids just aren't getting much information at all.

06:49
Yeah, almost no one is getting even close to adequate sex education. And if we think about what's happening in schools, it's not just that people are not getting access to good information, it's that they're getting access to actively false information. Students are being lied to about, the relationship between sex and dying. abstinence only until heterosexual marriage.

07:18
or else you can literally die with metaphors about like, well, a piece of tape, the more you like stick it to a surface, the more it loses its stickiness, like active destructive lies being told to children in our schools. could, what do you mean that you can die? Oh, so literally talking, talking about the ways lying about the prevalence of STIs, especially HIV, like you're going to die.

07:46
Right, right. Scare tactic, education, talking about also dangers of abortion, not only not talking about other forms of contraception like hormonal contraception and condoms, going straight to abortion and talking about high risk associated with abortion. So if you have sex and get pregnant, high risk of death if you get an abortion. Yeah. And so, so this is, this is a big conversation. I do want to,

08:16
break it down a little bit, but I guess we're going to stay a little bit general here. So what are some of the implications for kids and who eventually become adults as they enter into relationships and they enter into, you know, exploring their own sexuality when they get this information or lack of information and then they try to be sexual in the world? Yeah, it does not work out well.

08:41
I have a sort of benign, my own story is like a gentle example of this. got, know, sex education in school and my family was not very sex negative. They were just sort of like regular sex negative. But I remember driving home from the library. I was sitting in the front passenger seat with my mom and I must have seen the word vagina in a book at the library because we driving home and I at 11 go, mom, what's a vagina?

09:10
And I do not remember her answer, but I do remember this flash of affect that passed through her body, this like shock and horror and embarrassment and shame and whatever this vagina thing was, I should never talk about it again, is what I learned in that moment. Right. When I got home, I actually looked it up in the medical encyclopedia and found out what it was. So, but the book taught me what it was and my mom taught me how to feel about it.

09:39
So fast forward just seven years, I'm 18 years old, it's my first semester in college, and I'm already being trained as a sex educator. One of my homework assignments was to go look at my own vulva. Go look at your genitals. So I did, I got a little hand mirror, and as I was approaching doing this activity, I hadn't even taken off my clothes yet, but I just had the mirror in my hand, and I felt like I was going to confront the enemy. Yes. No wonder. Right.

10:09
The message I got was whatever this vagina thing is, don't ever talk about it again. And when I did look at my genitals, I burst into tears because it wasn't my enemy at all. It was just like a part of my body. It was normal. It was healthy. And I gradually worked my way to being able to perceive my own genitals as beautiful, but it took unlearning all the messages I had previously received. Oh, that's, that's wonderful.

10:37
And I think I love that term that you use regular sex negative, right? A lot of our parents don't say much of anything about sex and we just read it in their affect like you described so well. without ever being told much and maybe being told things. So then you, well, maybe we make shit up from what we see in on commercials and movies and in society and from the media. And porn, don't forget porn. Oh yes. Yes, absolutely.

11:07
So then there's all this shame and fear, you know, as you described yourself thinking about doing this activity, the shame and fear that people often face and then bringing that into a relationship with another person, it's just incredible to imagine the impact that this has. And I think one of the things that I read about your book is how it's so normalizing. It really makes people feel like, I'm not,

11:37
so messed up after all. Like whatever your experience is, there's such a wide range of what is normal for people. Exactly. And we sort of get this idea that there's a script of the way sexuality is supposed to manifest in our bodies and our lives. And no matter what script you have in your head, it's not your life.

12:00
And if you believe the script more than you believe what's happening in your life, you're gonna judge yourself and believe that you're broken and pursue ways to like make your sexuality conform with the script you have in your head of how you should be as a sexual person instead of turning toward your sexuality, like going and just looking at your genitals, going and looking at your sexual response more metaphorically and embracing and accepting it precisely as it is.

12:28
The reason I take this normalizing approach is because one of the best predictors of sexual wellbeing is your ability to be okay with your sexuality, whatever it is. Right. And can you say a little bit about how it's different for males and females? You know, the more you look at the research, the less of a difference there necessarily is.

12:54
One of the differences I talk about in the book is this thing called responsive desire. So the standard narrative desire is, uh, you're just sort of walking down the street and you just suddenly would, you would like to have some sex. can I get some sex? How about some sex now? It just sort of appears out of the blue. That's spontaneous desire. It emerges in anticipation of pleasure, but there's a second way of experiencing desire called responsive desire. And it responds, it emerges in response.

13:23
to pleasure. So this is more like, you know, Saturday at three o'clock, me and the red underwear, we said we were going to show up, let's do this. You put your body in the bed, you let your skin touch your partner's skin and your body wakes up and goes, oh right, I really like this. I really like this person. That's responsive desire. And in the research in the sort of like 2005, well, I would say 2000 to 2005 range,

13:51
It really focused on women with responsive desire versus men with spontaneous desire. But the more research happens, the more it turns out men are also experiencing responsive desire. They just haven't been granted access to language that describes what they're going through. Because part of the masculinity script is you're supposed to be ready and able all the time and want all the sex and be interested in having any sex that gets offered to you. And when I wrote...

14:20
This is me being sort of braggy, but I wrote an op-ed about this in the New York Times in 2015. got more emails from men than from women saying, thank you for this language of responsive desire. It expresses what I have been experiencing. So I think the more research happens with its intention of normalizing a diversity of sexual experiences saying, hey, look, being a woman is not inherently a disease.

14:49
Women are just different from men. The more we find out, even men are different from what we sort of scripted men to be. Right, right. And so much of the way that this plays out is because of the way that we're socialized, not necessarily anything that's innately part of being male or female, but about the way that we're socialized when we really break it down.

15:14
Yes, and with responsive and spontaneous desire, for example, because women are given such shaming messages, there are a lot of women who get to adulthood believing that they are not supposed to have any sexual desire, that the only sex they engage in should be motivated by desire to satisfy their male partners. Imagine if those same girls were raised to womanhood, believing that they have permission to enjoy sexual pleasure.

15:43
Would they be more likely maybe to experience spontaneous desire as adults? Right. I kind of think so. I've let's try that experiment. Let's do that. Yes. As we're talking, I keep thinking about, you know, so much of your work is about the science of this. I but I feel like so much of what you're saying is about this acceptance and understanding and the freeing people from the shame of what they should or shouldn't do, which I think is so important.

16:12
And it's what the science is for. The purpose of studying sexuality from a scientific point of view is not to create a script of how everybody should do their sexuality, but to give us a real understanding of what sexuality is. And in order to understand sexuality, we have to understand everyone's sexuality and bring a neutral, noticing point of view. And if everybody could bring just a neutral noticing,

16:40
point of view to their own sexual experiences, that by itself is a revolution. Well, and I know you're not a therapist, but I feel like that you would have a lot of important things to say about this. we're talking to couples therapists who are in the room with a couple who is talking about their sexuality, how important is that curiosity and sort of neutral stance important as they're listening to the couple and trying to make them feel supported about talking about sex? Oh my God, it is so important.

17:10
Because just like I could feel my mom reacting to me talking about vaginas, your clients can absolutely feel you reacting to whatever sexual conversation they're having. And it influences whether or not they talk about these issues and how they talk about them if they do. I mean, this is part of the training of being a therapist, right? Is to be able to stay neutral no matter what people bring so that you're not sort of activating your clients' transference.

17:39
I was shocked when I realized that most people who are trained to be couples or marriage and family therapists are not required to have extensive training in sexuality. Right. So say more. Do you think that should be required? Yes. I mean, I it should be required for any therapist. Yes. And physicians in North America on average, a medical education includes 10 hours of sex education.

18:05
I got 10 hours of sex education in my first weekend of training as an undergraduate peer sex educator. Right. Oh my gosh. So when I have physicians saying another one of the topics, so wanting to medicate their patients for having low sexual desire and I explain responsive desire and they're like, Oh, like it's a totally different way of thinking about

18:34
how sexual desire works, and it's the evidence-based way of thinking about how sexual desire works. So the lack of sex education is impacting the way helping professionals talk to their clients, and it means that a lot of clients and patients are receiving false information that just reinforces a lot of the lies they've been told their whole lives because their helping professionals have not had those lies debunked for themselves.

19:02
Right, we bring our own biases into the conversation. You know, and I could say that I'm just being neutral, but if I'm sort of really quiet and not being very curious and not asking more questions, I might be neutral, but I'm also giving sort of an implicit message to the couple that I'm not even comfortable talking about this. Yeah, I did a workshop, I co-facilitated a workshop with a therapist in New York City and we talked about her working with a client. This couple...

19:30
where they were talking about, it was a heterosexual couple and the guy wanted the wife to do something sexually involving oral sex. It was having him ejaculate in her mouth. And the therapist I was working with kept talking about swallowing, kept talking about swallowing and whether or not you wanted to swallow. I was like, so did you ask whether or not swallowing was involved? Because not always when someone ejaculates.

19:58
in somebody else's mouth is their swallowing involved. You can just like leave it. You can do all kinds of things with it. And she was like, wow, you know, I didn't ask. I just assumed that that was what happened. Right. And I, and I think that all of us, this could be one of the most triggering things or, know, as soon as someone starts talking about oral sex, for example, I'm bringing all of my assumptions and my experiences or lack of experiences into the conversation and just,

20:28
I'm probably feeling fearful and overwhelmed as a therapist sitting in that conversation because I don't know if I'm going to say the right thing or I have my own thoughts or opinions about what's right or wrong in the situation or whatever else. just get so activated. Yeah, totally. And I can imagine that I might start asking questions that might not be relevant to what's going on with them, which just speaks to the importance of getting that exposure and education to this talking about these things, the language.

20:58
getting the education about all of the, I mean, just the anatomy, like you were saying, is so important. And people don't realize until they have to begin analyzing their own reactions that they're having such sort of like closing the door, redirecting the conversation kinds of reacting. Sex therapists, educators are required to go through sexual attitude reassessment, which is this like multi-hour educational

21:26
Event where you're exposed to an enormous variety of porn and other sexually explicit media you meet people who live a lot of different sexual lifestyles and you're actively challenged to be exposed to things that make you uncomfortable and to Like work with your discomfort get to know it Where did it come from if a client comes into the room and talks about these things with you?

21:51
What are you going to feel? What's that going to be like? And can you find a place of neutrality and curiosity and be freed from those sort of reactions? So even as I was talking about the blowjob just now, I realized there's probably some people listening to this who the fact that I just talked about oral sex already had that like reactive response where they're just like, that's like, if that happens to you in a session, that's your

22:20
Clay will know. Right, totally. even if you, you know, you've obviously written this book and have talked about this stuff all the time, but you know, you're also, we're also talking about you being considerate of what other people think about what you're saying as you're saying it, which is a whole other element that comes into play when we're talking about these things. Yeah. One of my main jobs as a sex educator is to sort of role model being okay with everything.

22:48
Being able to like spontaneously begin talking about oral sex and the rest of it in a way that's like, look, this is just like talking about, you know, he really wants her to bring her tea, bring him tea every night at six o'clock. He has this expectation. How do we feel about this expectation? The same thing about him having an expectation emotionally. My reaction is the same to he wants a cup of tea at six to he wants to ejaculate in her mouth.

23:16
And I realized that's not true for almost anybody else. Well, what you're doing is so important for because society needs to shift. What have you seen in the last, let's say, 15, 20 years or as long as you've been doing this work, as far as the way that society is moving and the lack of information that existed in the past? I think when you wrote your book, was very, I mean, there was very little out there.

23:44
And what year was it that you wrote your book? It came out in 2015. And I mean, we're just talking about five years ago. And I think even in the last 10 years, there's been more books like that coming out. Yes. before there was nothing. I feel like there was a real shift in the research beginning in the early 80s when more and more women became sex researchers and they brought with them the assumption that being a woman is neither a medical condition nor a moral failing.

24:14
And they integrated that assumption, you know, feminism into that research. And then there was another shift around the sort of the 2000 mark where Viagra happened. And there was this massive explosion in researching sexual desire, sexual response, because there was this funding and this attention that wasn't there before. Not to say there haven't been plenty of challenges for sex researchers.

24:41
But a lot of change has happened in our understanding of how sexuality works in the brain and how relationships sustain a strong sexual connection over multiple decades. That research, I feel like, has grown so much in the last 20 years. We're in a much better place than we were even just 10, 20 years ago. So I would say the dual control model, which was first published in 1999.

25:08
This is the brain mechanism that controls sexual response, changes everything for lot of individuals and couples when they understand that the brain mechanism that controls sexual response is a dual control mechanism. So yeah, there's a sexual accelerator. It notices all the sex related information in the environment and sends that turn on signal. But there's also a break and the breaks notice all the good reasons not to be turned on right now. Everything that's a potential threat.

25:37
whether it's worry about being interrupted, like kids opening the door, or body image stuff, or trauma, or sexual shame, or just being distracted by grit in the sheets or cold feet, literal, your feet are cold, it keeps the brakes on. So the process of becoming aroused is this dual process of turning on the ons and turning off the offs. And when people are struggling,

26:01
Sometimes it's because there's not enough stimulation to the accelerator, but usually it's because there's too much stimulation to the brakes, which means a couple can now start talking to each other about the things that hit their brakes and what they can do to get rid of the things that are hitting their brakes. It's not a conversation about sex even, but it's the one that leads to a stronger sexual connection. That's been just transformative. Yeah. And I feel like you do an amazing job of talking about this in your book.

26:32
And I want to talk more about this because I think this is a really helpful way for us as therapists to bring this into the conversation with couples because I think probably the most prevalent complaint about sex that we hear is differing desire. Right. And so this is a really good way of talking about this. When you're talking about these factors that would be related to the accelerator and other factors related to the brakes,

27:02
Some of them are like present day, like you said, worried that your kids are gonna come into the bedroom or something, you know, that's like sort of in the moment thing. But you're also, I guess that's different from, I had an experience when I was younger that was traumatic for me that makes me feel uncomfortable when we start getting sexual or something like that. Exactly. But talk more about how we can bring these things into the conversation.

27:30
You said it's more about talking about eliminating some of the things that are the breaks probably. So how do we, how do we have that discussion with couples we're working with or even if someone's listening and wants to begin this conversation with their partner or something like that, how do we begin assessing what the, some of those things are and evaluating? So if a conversation about sexuality comes up, you will probably notice that one of the people is talking about

27:56
the obstacles or the barriers or anything that gets in the way. Well, the reason why I didn't want sex is because blah, blah. You can do just this super quick education. There's an accelerator and there's also breaks. And it sounds like you're saying that XYZ situation was really hitting your breaks. Can we talk about like what other things have you noticed can interfere with sexual desire or can shut things down? The key.

28:23
question on the survey instrument that assesses how sensitive a person's brakes or accelerators are is this item, unless things are just right, it is very difficult for me to become sexually aroused. When people strongly associate, relate to that statement, they have probably quite sensitive brakes. And those are folks for whom really understanding what counts as a just right context is going to allow them to have their sexuality really blossom.

28:53
because they need to find that perfect, that really great context in order to access their sexuality. But it also means they can start training their brain, usually through mindfulness or sometimes through graded exposure, to have their breaks and not react to some external stimuli like a stray fingernail or just a little distracting sound in the distance to release those things and return your attention.

29:21
to the pleasure happening in your body. So bring it up. People will spontaneously talk about the obstacles. And if you can frame that as like your brain has an accelerator and it has brakes, it helps people to understand that this is not just about your life being complicated. It's about how your brain responds and processes the information in the world. And it is normal to have your sexuality interfered with by your life circumstances, by context.

29:49
which is both your internal state. for example, if you have a trauma history, that's going to change how your brain and body respond to sexual stimuli and by your external circumstances, which is your relationship characteristics and your partner characteristics, the setting, uh, all the stress and other life circumstances. Oh man, stress is stress. Right. The single most common thing that interferes with sexual desire. Yeah. And the way you're talking about it is,

30:19
so non-shaming. I think that's so important. It's sort of this reality that we all fall on the spectrum somewhere of this and no one's more right or wrong, but it's about getting curious and figuring out how do we make this work with each other. Yeah, a thing that couples can do to each other, they learn about this and they kind of weaponize it against each other. They find out like it hits your brakes when this happens.

30:47
And then they say something like, it shouldn't or people judge and shame themselves. This hits my brakes, but it shouldn't. Why does it? got, how do I, how do I make it not hit my brakes? Eh, right. It's about knowing that it does and working with what you got. Like it's, it's normal and healthy. Like you want your brain to notice when you're being interrupted. Like if the fire alarm goes off,

31:13
stop having sex and get out of the house, right? Like that's normal and healthy. The breaks are there for a reason. Let's not break shame each other. Like whatever's true is true and it's allowed to be true and people are allowed to be different. Yeah. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. The lack of judgment is so important. vary. Yeah. is there, there is like a spectrum. I think you talk about this, you know, as far as the research shows of

31:43
where people fall in that desire and things like that. Yes, people vary tremendously. I mentioned that I was in the, I'm doing a science update. Um, and one of the places where I was really hoping there would be some advancement in the science is some statistics about like what proportion of people, men and women have spontaneous desire versus responsive desire. Nope. We have really like no

32:11
good information about who has which kind of desire. What has happened instead in the research is, so take for example Peggy Kleinplatz, who is a sex therapist and a researcher, who studied people who self-identify as having extraordinarily good sex lives. So she asked them, okay, so what are the components of an extraordinary sex life and how did you get to a place

32:38
where you could have these extraordinary sex lives because the average age at first extraordinary sexual experience among her participants was 55. Oh wow. Yeah. So how did they get here? When you ask them what their extraordinary sex life looks like, desire is not on the list. It turns out desire is not the thing. So people are really worried about not experiencing spontaneous desire and the people who are having great sex don't

33:08
give up flaming anything about desire. What they have is pleasure. They have sex, this is the way Peggy Klein plots, they have sex worth wanting. And the pleasure gives rise to the desire. They're motivated to create contexts that activate their accelerators and get rid of the brakes because they find that when they do that, the sex they have

33:39
enhances their lives. Yeah and I hear this thing from couples sometimes it's like there's this expectation that we should just be so you know that we walk out of a movie theater and we start holding hands and then we just become so filled with desire that we just want to have you know great sex all of sudden like it should overcome people like that you know. Yeah.

34:05
It doesn't really work like that. people seem disappointed when that's not happening, but I feel like what you're saying is it's understanding that it doesn't have to work that way in order to still be able to have great sex. Yeah, from a brain science perspective, that sort of like we watch a movie, we start holding hands and that's all it takes to spark desire makes really good sense in the context of like the hot and heavy fall in love stage of a relationship where

34:35
Your attachment mechanism is like stoking the fire of sexual desire so that it just takes a tiny little spark to like get your accelerator going and your brakes are like, I don't care about anything. I have this new, fabulous attachment object. Everything is safe. Everything is awesome. This is fantastic. 10 years later and two kids, you're in a context where you have this secure, stable, hopefully, attachment.

35:03
in your relationship, but you also have 10 years of accumulated frustrations and disappointments and like, yes, you're kissing my neck and that's very sweet, but could you go help the kids with their homework? That's not dysfunction. That's normal. What it means is that now you put in a little extra effort to create that sort of like stoked fire.

35:32
what would it take just to add a spark? Because it doesn't happen just out of the blue. And the people who have great sex lives put in the work. It doesn't just happen spontaneously. It matters to them. And so they make it a priority. Do you think And I want to make sure people know that sex doesn't have to matter to you. Sex doesn't have to be a priority. It is normal for it to drop off the radar for periods in your life. Because it's not...

35:59
gonna kill you if you don't have any sex and relationships can sustain and be good through droughts. That's okay. The worst thing you can do when sex goes away is to panic about the fact that sex went away. If you know what context facilitates sex, it's like knowing what kind of soil lets a plant grow really healthy. You create the soil, you plant the seeds and it will grow when the conditions are right.

36:29
And panic is a terror. Panic is like, it's like the opposite of what's going to weed killer. Yeah. It's like, it's just going to be like how to not have any sex is to panic about sex. I wonder if that's why at 55, you know, you have the kids out of the house. Finally, you're not feeling so stressed about the finances and running the rat race. And you finally can take a step back and actually focus on, you know,

36:59
what you want your life to look like. That plus when you get to a certain point in your life, you stop feeling like that whole sexual script and all those standards apply to you. Like you're like, that has nothing to do with me. I don't have to compare myself to anybody else's script of what it should be. In fact, Peggy Kleinplatz's subjects say, the way I got here is I relearned everything I thought I knew about body, sexuality, gender.

37:27
pleasure, love, safety, power. They start from scratch. They stop believing all the wrong things they were taught and they just notice what works for them, for their relationships, what creates pleasure in their bodies, how they can connect more authentically and deeply to access their partner's pleasure too. Yeah, that's great. That's great. And I was going to say too, I'm really happy that you mentioned this.

37:56
idea that if you don't have any sexual desire, that's totally fine too. And that's totally normal. Yeah. I'm curious what else you're finding out or studying as you're doing this research, updating the research. Oh gosh, there's so many exciting things. There's more and more understanding of how differences in the sensitivities of the accelerator and the brakes changes how people respond.

38:22
So for example, if you have a really high sensitivity, or if you have a very low sensitivity break and a very high sensitivity accelerator, obviously you're going to have more like response to sex related stimuli. But the fascinating thing is that if you have a high sensitivity break and a high sensitivity accelerator, so we're talking about like 2 % of the population, but those are folks, high sensitivity accelerator, those are the folks likely to show up in your office.

38:52
They actually experience lower response, even than people with moderate accelerator and moderate brakes. Interesting. Somehow having a really sensitive brake creates the opposite response. It actually shuts down even a high sensitivity accelerator. So they have like worse sexual functioning when they're exposed to something sex related. these look like very emotionally?

39:20
up and down kind of people in our office oftentimes? It's unclear how much high sensitivity accelerator and break sexually is linked to sort of people's generic high sensitivity or their anxiety level or anything else like that. We don't really know. This will be a client who comes in and is like, like all these things can shut me down and things have to be just right. But also like

39:46
I notice when sex is happening and when I notice like my partner approaching me, for example, wanting sex, everything shuts down and they notice their partner approaching them for sex at the drop of a hat. These are people who need an enormous amount of distance in order not to feel like they're being pressured. Does that make sense? Yes. Mostly what it tells us is whatever

40:12
variety of experiences your clients bring into the room. Yeah, like there are so many variables factoring into the way people respond that we can't say here's sort of the order all these steps are going to go into. Here is the way your brain or body is going to respond to the stimulus. Because the way a person's brain or body responds to something is dependent on six other factors in their individual personality, their attachment style, and the sensitivity of their accelerator and brakes.

40:42
and their trauma history and their body image stuff and their stress response, like all of these things. So don't try to like box people into specific categories. Each person has a very specific mix of an enormous number of variables. So whatever is happening for them is a thing that you discover together by exploring all the different variables. The research is also showing

41:11
When we're thinking about clinical interventions, it turns out directly addressing sex is not the thing. The two most valuable interventions for improving sexual satisfaction among women and in couples, because the research I'm aware of is mostly studying either women or couples. One of them is mindfulness. I'm talking about Lori Brotto's research here. She has worked with

41:39
all kinds of women experiencing sexual dissatisfaction from women who like sexual dissatisfaction is their only complaint, survivors of sexual trauma, survivors of gynecological cancers. She does these mindfulness interventions and a lot of the structure of these interventions, partly it's just educational. It's things like normalizing responsive desire, talking about the brakes and accelerator, and then mindfulness meditations on sensations that are not sex sensations.

42:07
So if you imagine a room full of women in this mindfulness group, all sitting with their arms held above their heads for like three minutes, the sensation you get in your arm when you do that is quite uncomfortable. And this is an actual meditation she has clients in this program do to notice the discomfort of their arm over their head. Can you practice a non-judgmental awareness of this uncomfortable sensation?

42:37
It turns out training people to practice non-judgment around non-sexual sensations, it absolutely translates to people being able to practice non-judgmental awareness of their sexuality. And in Peggy Kleinplatz's interventions with couples experiencing lower no sexual desire, lower no sexual frequency, she does not give her clients sexual homework. She gives them play.

43:04
homework, she gives them relationship communication homework, she asks them to talk about with each other about what feels good and how they can support each other, but she does not give them sexual homework. And her outcomes are bananas when you look at the statistical significance of the improvement, so much so that her research participants, who of course, because she's doing research, she hasn't do like a pre-test and a post-test.

43:34
They send back the post-test blank and write an angry email about how they're like, your questions on this validated survey don't come anywhere close to reflecting the depth and transformation that we have experienced. These questions are irrelevant. Your sexual satisfaction survey doesn't even begin to recognize what we have experienced. Wow. That's amazing. Yeah. Her book is coming out very soon actually.

44:03
I have no stakes in her book. I just want everyone on earth to read it. The title, best title ever. The title is Magnificent Sex. Oh, that's great. Right? Right to the point. Yeah. That's great. And well, as you're talking about this, it just makes me so much more hopeful. I think the more complicated you make it sound, the more hopeful I feel. The reason for that is because a lot of times when couples come into

44:30
our office or we're experiencing it in our own relationship, I think most of us can relate to having this feeling. It just feels like we're stuck and we're hopeless. It's like, oh, my, my partner doesn't want to have sex with me and I feel sort of hopeless about this because we can't figure it out and we keep getting stuck. And when you talk about all of these factors and you talk about all of these ways that we can think about it in different ways and understand, you know, six different variables that are going on,

45:00
all of sudden it opens up the door that we've only scratched the surface of what this conversation could be. And there's so much more to be hopeful about because there's so much here to explore. Yeah. So a thing that happens, we know when people are stressed out, they get really sort of like problem focused and they can't look away from the problem and they just want to talk about the problem and they're like picking at the problem. And if they can, this is one of the reasons why normalization is so important because you can take a deep breath.

45:30
and let your body relax. And when your body relaxes, your brain can take a step back from the situation and see it in its larger context. And you can start to see the relationship between this little knot of a problem that's so uncomfortable in your relationship, how it's being held in place, not on its own, but by the body image changes that happened to a partner after giving birth, followed by...

45:58
wondering about their purpose in life because they stopped going to their job and it has nothing to do with the sex. Right, absolutely. It's, I'm not sure I'm me anymore. If we can fix that, we can probably fix the sex. Right, right. I think it's so connected, absolutely. But people can only begin to have that perspective. I love that you said the more complicated it sounds, the more hope you feel.

46:23
Because if you can begin to acknowledge like, look, there's a lot of factors involved here. We don't have to go right to the sex. Let's understand. Let's be calm and curious in our exploration of where sexuality fits within the larger context of this relationship. Right. And you mentioned attachment. Obviously we couples therapists love talking about that, but you know, this, I, everyone just wants to feel accepted and understood and like they're not crazy and like,

46:53
you know, have someone really just understand them for who they are instead of feeling judged or blamed or you basically are saying my wedding vows right now. I just want to know crazy honey for the rest of my life. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And so when we can begin to get to that place, which other people describe as moving away from shame, right? That ability to be accepting of myself and have self esteem then, um,

47:22
Obviously we're going to feel a lot more open and spontaneous and free to express ourselves and that includes sexuality of course. Yeah, yet another researcher and relationship therapist I talk about a lot. Sue Johnson, founder of Emotionally Focused Therapy, talks about trust. John Godman also talks about trust and I talk about trust all the time.

47:45
That ability, the question is, are you there for me? And R, of course, is an acronym that stands for emotionally accessible, emotionally responsive, and emotionally engaged. Are you there for me? If I turn toward you with my difficult feelings, are you going to show up for me with those difficult feelings? And some of those difficult feelings are about sexuality. Can you support me in a loving way without getting swamped by your overwhelm around this issue too?

48:13
When we can heal our own sexuality, puts us in a better position to be able to love and support our partner through whatever they're going around with going through around their sexuality. Right, right. That's amazing. And I know we have to wrap it up for today. other final thoughts? Such a great conversation. I'm so grateful, Emily, that you're taking the time for us. Yeah, any other final thoughts as we wrap it up? Oh, it's my pleasure. This is my very favorite thing in the world to talk about.

48:41
And I have boiled it. Did you know people remember what you say better and believe you more if what you say rhymes? No, I didn't know that. Turns out that's true. So I made it rhyme. Ready? This whole conversation in three words, pleasure is the measure. OK, great. Pleasure is the measure of sexual well-being. It is not how much you crave sex. It's not how often you do it or where you do it or with whom or even how many orgasms you have. It's just whether or not you enjoy the sex you have.

49:11
That's great. And how can people find out? Obviously I'll put your book in the show. When is your updated version going to be coming out? It will be out in September of 2020, I hope. Great. Where else can people find you? My website is just EmilyNagoski.com. My project for the year is actually a podcast called the Feminist Survival Project 2020, which I'm recording with my twin sister, which did I mention stress? Stress management?

49:40
because my second book is called Burnout and it's about it's for people who feel overwhelmed and exhausted by everything you have to do and still worry that they're not doing enough. everybody so you can find me at the Feminist Survival Project. Oh, that's great. I'm excited to check that out. Okay, great. All right. Thank you so much, Emily. And hopefully we can catch up again at some point in the future. I would love that. All right. Thank you so much, Emily. And thank you to all you listeners out there.

50:08
Just so grateful for you coming on and sharing your wisdom. Definitely go to CouplesTherapistCouch.com to catch up on all the episodes on the podcast. You can also find more resources. I'd love to have you leave a rating or a review if you're enjoying the podcast. That really helps other therapists and other people who are interested in relationships find the show, the more ratings and reviews there are. So wherever you listen to it, just leave a little rating or a review.

50:36
Definitely not if you're driving or something like that, but if you have a chance to look down at your phone and take a minute to do that, I'd really, really appreciate it. It really helps spread the word to other therapists. I'm Shane Birkel, and this is The Couples Therapist Couch. Thanks, everybody. Have a great week.