Sexual Healing

by Barbara Keesling

  Exercise 97. TOWEL OVER THE FACE

  This exercise is especially good for women who have problems reaching orgasm and for men who have problems with erections. Often these problems are due in part to worrying about what your partner thinks of you. Searching our partner’s facial expression for an indication of his or her response or feelings can distract us from our own enjoyment of a sexual encounter. Covering your partner’s face removes a source of feedback and pressure about performance. This exercise can be done with either partner active or passive. Start with spoon breathing and focusing caresses, as described in Chapter 19.

  To begin, let’s have the man passive and lying on his back. Women, place a piece of clothing or a towel lightly over your partner’s face, so that he’s comfortable but you can’t see his facial expressions. You are to pretend that you partner’s body is a toy that you will be allowed to play with for twenty minutes to half an hour. He will remain completely passive. During this time, if you do something that bothers your partner, he will let you know, as in previous exercises. You can use any part of your partner’s body to give yourself maximum enjoyment.

  Here are some suggestions. Slowly rub yourself all over your partner. Lick his body. Masturbate with his penis. If he has an erection, climb on top of his penis and slowly thrust in and out. Experiment with different angles for thrusting. Masturbate by rubbing your clitoris on your partner’s knees or hips. Use your partner’s penis to find your G-spot.

  Men, when you are passive, you are not to move or respond in any way. That means no talking, no moaning, no twitching, even if your partner is doing something that drives you crazy. Just focus on what she does and how you feel. If you become aroused, if you have an erection, or if you have an orgasm, just enjoy yourself. Your partner has been instructed to enjoy herself with whatever is available on your body. Don’t push any arousal away, and don’t try to make it better. Besides reducing performance pressure by eliminating facial feedback, this exercise allows you to give up all responsibility for the sexual interaction. When you are passive the only thing you can possibly do is relax and enjoy. Your partner is completely responsible for what happens. You do not have to respond at all.

  Doing this exercise with the man passive and the woman active is helpful for men with erection problems and for women who have trouble becoming aroused and reaching orgasm. Reversing the roles can benefit men with inhibited ejaculation and women who try too hard to reach orgasm. If you want to do this exercise with the man active and the woman passive, have the woman lie on her back. The man then pretends his partner’s body is a toy for him to play with. Have you ever had a fantasy about making love to a sleeping woman? Now is the time to indulge in this fantasy. The secret to doing this exercise is to use the sensate-focus techniques and to touch your partner gently and slowly. This isn’t the exercise for you to work out your fantasies of porn movie sex. The man’s mindset is very important in this exercise. Adjust your mindset so that you envision yourself healing your partner by awakening her sexuality while you are also touching her in ways that give you maximum pleasure.

  To accomplish this, rub yourself all over your partner. Lick her body from head to toe, starting on the peripheral areas of the body and moving toward her genitals. Do oral sex with her if you enjoy it. If you want to have intercourse, gently spread or raise her legs. Your female partner will remain as quiet and passive as possible during this exercise. If you do something that bothers her, she will let you know.

  Because this exercise really stretches the boundaries of trust, some people have a strong emotional reaction to it. If you are used to always having sex a certain way (for example, if the man always initiates intercourse), the woman’s activity may cause the man discomfort. Some people are so uncomfortable initially that they stall out and do nothing the first time they are in the active role, or they drive themselves crazy trying to do something to force their partner to respond. In the passive role, they become upset because they want to respond. They think, “How can she really enjoy herself if I’m not doing anything?” For other people, being unable to see their partner’s facial reactions is frustrating or feels unnatural. But with practice, this exercise can become extremely pleasurable. It is a relief to be able to enjoy yourself without having to do anything. I think all of us like the feeling of being “done to” once in a while.

  This exercise can also reinforce the idea that you are responsible for your own arousal. It can encourage you to experiment with sexual activities you may not have done before because someone was watching. It can force you to pay attention to your own enjoyment because there is nothing else to pay attention to. It can wean you from being dependent on your partner’s enjoyment in order to have a good time yourself.

  It can also reduce some of your inhibitions about being “animalistic” during sexual activities. Sexual activity serves a number of purposes, one of which is to express love for your partner. There are other legitimate reasons for engaging in sexual activity, and one is to express the fact that sexual activity is also an animal activity. The active partner should always feel free to growl, grunt, or bare his or her teeth while touching and squeezing parts of their partner’s body.

  In another version of the exercise, the active partner also wears some type of blindfold. This forces the active partner to completely focus on sensations of touch.

  Finish the exercise with spoon breathing and partner feedback.

  Exercise 98. ASKING FOR WHAT YOU WANT

  This exercise begins the minute you enter the room; you do not do focusing caresses to prepare for it. The partner who is active asks for anything that he or she wants. Let’s assume that the woman is active first. Nothing will happen in the exercise until she requests it. If she wants her partner to remove his clothes, she must say, “Take off your clothes.”

  When you are active, you need to tell your partner everything that you want him or her to do. You may ask for anything you can think of that you would like your partner to do, but you need to be specific. If what he does is not exactly what you wanted, say so and give him directions until he gets it right. Feel free to enjoy whatever you have asked your partner to do for as long as you want to. When active, you may also do whatever you like, as long as you tell your partner what you are going to do. For example, it you would like to be active for a while, you could say, “I want you to lie back so I can caress you for a while.”

  If you are the passive partner, do as your partner asks. You will have your turn later. Refuse only if your partner asks you to do something that you consider painful or unpleasant. Much as you might want to initiate something, don’t. Try to do exactly what your partner asks, but do it for your own enjoyment and focus on it. The secret is to accommodate your partner’s wishes while still doing the activities for your own pleasure.

  This exercise can sometimes become awkward because many people are not used to asking for what they want. Sometimes a client and I have just sat and looked at each other for several minutes because he couldn’t think of anything to ask for or was afraid to ask for anything. When you are the asker, be assertive and don’t settle for something that is not really what you want. When you are the person being asked, accommodate your partner, but do everything for your own pleasure as much as possible by focusing on your own sensual enjoyment.

  Make your requests clear. For example, instead of saying, “Would you like to give me a front caress?” say, “Please give me a front caress,” or, “I want you to give me a front caress.” If you do not want to do something your partner asks for, just say, “No.” If your partner turns down some activity, it doesn’t mean, “No, never, that’s disgusting.” It simply means, “No, I do not want to do that particular activity right now.”

  You can do this exercise with each person in the active role for half an hour. The exercise can be stressful, but it can also pinpoint problems you may have in asserting or enjoying yourself.

  After the exercise, talk about how you felt. Use the guidelines o
utlined in Chapter 15 for partner feedback. Tell your partner if you had trouble knowing what you wanted, asking for it, or enjoying yourself. Tell your partner if you had thoughts such as, “I would have asked for such-and-such, but I was afraid you wouldn’t do it.” Your anxiety level during this exercise can give you real insight into whether you are still uncomfortable with accepting pleasure for yourself. If you are still uncomfortable, practice asking for one or two small things during other sessions until you become more comfortable.

  Besides making you feel more comfortable with asserting yourself sexually, this exercise can help you feel a sense of equity in your relationship. If you do the exercise the way I have described, each partner has an equal chance to ask and to give.

  Exercise 99. THE ZOMBIE

  The Zombie (also known as The Slave) is a more extreme version of the preceding exercise in that one person is in control throughout the session. One partner orders the other around for a half hour or an hour, and the “zombie” partner is required to do anything sexual the other partner asks (unless there is a severe objection to it). The zombie literally acts like a zombie—silent, obedient, and unresponsive.

  This exercise is a way to experiment with loss of control. Some of your sexual problems may stem from your feeling that you have to be in control of your body or your sexual responses. A few minutes as the zombie may convince you that while you do not want to be out of control all the time, temporarily relinquishing some control of your body is not that bad. It can even be a relief not to have to be responsible for everything that happens.

  The Zombie exercise is extreme and should only be done if you are comfortable with the idea. If done at the right time, it can build trust between partners. You may also find out some things about yourself that you didn’t know. You may find that you are actually comfortable being totally in control or totally out of control. This exercise is a safe way to explore these feelings. Being a zombie with a person you trust is, in a sense, the ultimate in performance pressure. Can you deal with it? At the very least, you will find out if it is something you truly dislike.

  Bear in mind that this exercise is not an excuse to be sadistic or to shock your partner. On the contrary: It is a way to build trust and to practice dealing with extreme performance pressure in a safe environment. When you are the zombie, do you try to perform or do you wonder if you are doing things right? Or are you so well trained in sensate focus that you are able to move into the sensate-focus mode right away and enjoy the interaction? If you become performance-oriented during this exercise, it will literally show you “how not to feel” during other sensate-focus exercises.

  Finish the exercise with spoon breathing and partner feedback.

  Exercise 100. STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

  What does a literary technique have to do with sex therapy? You can use stream of consciousness or free association to help yourself loosen up and deal with spectatoring.

  Begin this session with spoon breathing and focusing caresses. I’ll describe the exercise from the point of view of the man. Lie on your back. Have your partner caress the front of your body and your genitals in any way she enjoys. While your partner caresses you, talk out loud in a stream-of-consciousness style. This means that you say anything and everything that pops into your mind without censoring a word of it.

  There is no way to plan or predict what you will talk about. Your stream may include random thoughts, grunts, moans, jokes, word lists, descriptions of how you feel, descriptions of how your partner is touching you, or descriptions of fantasies. Your partner will not comment on anything you say. In fact, she could wear earplugs or earphones so that she can’t even hear what you say. That way you will be less self-conscious.

  The first time you do this exercise you will be lucky if you let out a minute’s worth of unedited and uncensored material during a twenty-minute exercise. This exercise is not easy! It is probably the most challenging exercise that I have seen clients do. But it is worth it, because the exercise can help you uncover unconscious material that may be interfering with erection or arousal processes. In addition, talking while you are receiving stimulation interferes with the worrying and spectatoring that can slow down your erection or arousal processes.

  Finish with spoon breathing and partner feedback.

  Exercise 101. LISTENING TO MUSIC

  The music-listening exercise is similar to the stream of consciousness exercise. It can help in cases of severe performance anxiety in people of either sex. Most people can learn to focus on sensations of arousal in their genitals. But for some people, it is impossible to “turn off their head” and stop worrying about erection, arousal, or orgasm. The solution is to provide some kind of stimulation that distracts your mind.

  For this exercise, you will need a cassette player or CD player with headphones, and a cassette or CD of music that you don’t particularly like. A good tape to use would be something that provides a constant low level of distraction, something that has little or no discernible musical quality, something that does not have lyrics, or even something that is mildly annoying. Don’t use anything pleasant, such as a relaxation tape. A tape of white noise will work. (No offense to any fans out there, but when I used to do this exercise with clients, I used a tape of Black Flag. It was perfect.)

  Begin with spoon breathing and focusing caresses. Next, the passive partner lies on his or her back while the active partner stimulates his or her genitals. As the active partner, you should still do the caress for your own pleasure. The music will distract the passive partner just enough so that he or she cannot worry about performance, but not enough to interfere with arousal and erection. As always, finish with spoon breathing and partner feedback.

  In addition to helping you along on your sexual healing journey, I hope that the exercises in this chapter have made you and your partner feel closer than ever.

  chapter 35

  Healing Your Relationship: Play and Verbal Intimacy

  This chapter continues the theme of using sexuality to heal various aspects of your relationship. An important part of sexual healing is the ability to be innocent, to appreciate simple pleasures the way a child does, and to comfortably express the closeness you feel to your partner.

  Play

  A lot of our unstructured lovemaking serves the same function for us that play does for kids. It lets us relax and take the pressure off ourselves. It is dynamic, creative, expressive, and not self-conscious. Unlike most activities in our adult lives, lovemaking isn’t goal-oriented (or at least it shouldn’t be). If you and your partner wish to enrich your relationship, one of the best things you can do is to play together. In fact, there are several forms of therapy (such as sand play) that use childhood activities to reconnect us with our ability to be playful.

  You don’t necessarily need any special equipment or expensive sex toys to play with each other sexually. You can often use things you already have around the house, such as food. Or the two of you could try a couple of the following romantically playful exercises:

  Exercise 102. SENSUOUS SHOWER

  The sensuous shower is a whole-body caress that takes place in the shower. The purpose of the sensuous shower is not just to get clean (although you probably will) but also to enjoy your body and your partner’s body in a different way.

  There are a number of ways to savor a sensuous shower. You can share any of the caresses you have learned in this book, caressing each other’s face, back, chest, or genitals. You can include oral sex. If you like, you can alternate taking active and passive roles. Or you can make this exercise a mutual caress, caressing each other at the same time. Don’t forget that you can caress with all the different parts of your body, not just your hands.

  Try using a liquid bath soap or fragrant bath gel, and caress any parts of your partner’s body that feel good to you. When you caress, touch for your own pleasure. Focus on the silky sensations of your partner’s wet skin and hair. When you receive a caress, concentrate on exactly where yo
u are being touched, just as you would during any sensate-focus exercise. The only thing you have to watch out for is soap on the female genitals, because it can burn.

  If you become aroused during the sensuous shower, simply allow yourself to experience the arousal. Don’t try to make your arousal level go higher or push it away. Relax and enjoy the feeling of your partner caressing you and the water beating down on your skin. If you have an erection, ejaculation, or orgasm, welcome it. After your shower, pat each other dry with warm towels and a loving, healing touch.

  If you prefer baths rather than showers, dim the lights in the bathroom, light a few candles, and take a bath together using scented bath oils or soaps. The sensuous shower or bath can be a relaxing prelude to healing exercises such as the genital and oral caresses.

  Exercise 103. TOM JONES DINNER

  Many of us gobble our food or eat while doing other things, like watching television or driving a car. We fail to take the time to enjoy the simple, sensuous aspects of eating. The ability to really take the time to enjoy food is highly related to a person’s ability to enjoy sex. This is especially true for men who have difficulty with rapid ejaculation. Believe it or not, learning to eat more slowly trains you to focus more on all aspects of sensuality, including the ability to last longer during intercourse. The Tom Jones Dinner is named for the incredibly indulgent eating scene in the movie Tom Jones.

  We did this exercise as part of surrogate training. Everyone in the class (ten to twelve people) brought some type of food that could be eaten with our hands. We spread a sheet out on the floor and arranged the foods beautifully. We were all nude (this was 1980) and there were three rules: no feeding yourself, no talking, and no utensils. Everybody fed each other. Some of these dinners got pretty wild, with people eating food off of each others’ bodies. This is much more fun than your normal potluck supper, believe me! The point of the dinner was not to have a wild food orgy, but rather to learn to enjoy the purely sensuous aspects of eating, free from the restraints of table manners.