How To Talk About Sex In Therapy
How To Talk About Sex In Therapy – It might be awkward at first, but getting your clients to open up about their needs and desires can transform their relationship Sex is a life-affirming act, one of the most intimate things you can do with another person. But talking about it is so much harder. A person is so much more vulnerable talking about sex than doing it, especially to a complete stranger who they have only just met minutes before.
But here is the good news, your client will be so much happier if they open up, and their sex life will reap the benefits as a result. By helping them in sharing their likes, dislikes and expectations, they can then learn more about how to please each other.
Bad communication about sex is often a sign that they are communicating badly about other aspects of their lives, as a psychosexual and relationship therapist. If a couple come to me with a sexual problem, it’s rarely just about that one thing. For example, someone with low desire may have been harbouring many years of resentment about something else.
Is talking about sex ever a bad idea? A therapist who specialises in relationship and psychosexual therapy can make these conversations so much easier, and can always keep the client within their comfort levels. They can make bringing up anything that might threaten this as comfortable as possible.
So where do you start? Here are some tips on how to make talking about sex as helpful, productive and enjoyable as it can be.
Get going straight away
It’s a good idea to start talking about the clients sex lives as early on in the therapy as you can, the longer you wait, the harder it will become. Establish trust first which will make these conversations easier. You can then move on to what feels good, and what doesn’t, and go from there.
When it comes to getting your clients to share their fantasies if they have any, the standard is always to start low, and then go slow. Begin with some tame fantasies to see how the clients then respond. This will help build trust with you all, and will make moving onto other aspects of intimacy between them easier.
But it’s never too late to start
If years have gone by without the couple really talking about sex, I often suggest an amnesty. I tell them, forget everything that’s come before. It’s interesting to sometimes tell couples to pretend they’ve never met. Don’t be afraid to do something like this as it can help the clients to focus on what they want in their future, rather than what’s happened in their past. Communication can be a real problem for older people, who haven’t grown up with the tools and learning how to do this is so valuable. If a person is ‘relaunching’ later in life, perhaps after a divorce or the death of a partner, I will always encourage them to have a good chat about their expectations with me before jumping into bed with a new person.
Open up about their fantasies
People find it hard to share their sexual fantasies, in fact only half of us ever will. But there’s a whole lot to gain from doing so. People who discuss their fantasies say that they have the happiest sexual relationships. But there’s a lot of shame around them doing this also and getting the clients to talk about their sex lives will lighten the stigma surrounding it.
Over 90% of all fantasies will fall into one of these categories.
Multi partner sex; rough sex; novelty and adventure; voyeurism and fetishes; and non-monogamous sex. To help your client to believe that they are more normal than they think they are will help to take the embarrassment they feel for just thinking about these things. Sharing their fantasies, whether they act on them or not is an easy way to introduce novelty into their sex lives. And simply expressing them may be arousing enough.
Timing is everything
It might seem more natural to talk about sex just before or after it, but talking in the heat of the moment, without your clothes on, might make a person feel vulnerable. Instead make time away from the bedroom, at a time when neither of them are rushed.
This on the other hand doesn’t apply when it comes to sharing your sexual fantasies, its best to do this when you’re already turned on, the disgust response lessens when a person is aroused, so both partners may be more receptive. In therapy we don’t have this option, so we have to build the trust factor, once this is done you can then bring in suggestions such as, Breaking the ice: like watching an erotic film, having some wine, finding something that could get the ball rolling for them.
Take responsibility for their own pleasure
In couple’s therapy, one of the most effective exercises I do is ask couples to go away and focus purely on their own pleasure, rather than that of their partners. That way, they’re not thinking, ‘I’ve got to please the other person’. It removes the opportunity of performance anxiety, which is really distracting. It’s transformational: when they do start talking, they have so much more to talk about and to share.”
If you get them to own their experience, it makes it harder to criticise the other person. People believe that they should give the other person an orgasm, they don’t. If you get them to take ownership of your own orgasm, it’s within nobody’s responsibility to give you one. In this way, it’s harder to blame the other person when things go wrong.
Be clear and explain especially when they don’t want sex
A question I often ask couples in therapy is, how do you cope with no? And how do you deliver a no? Getting your client to remember that neither of them are mind readers is extremely important, if our client doesn’t feel like sex because for example they have just had a coffee and their breath smells, or they’ve just been to the toilet and feel dirty, then feeling they are able to tell them that is important, otherwise they won’t understand why and feel that they are being pushed away or they could feel rejected and this could cause conflict between them.
Be positive, not critical
When talking to clients use expressions of “We” rather than “You” this can provide clarity and support for your clients. Getting them to express their feelings differently, will allow them to think about them differently also, simple changes in expression such as ‘I feel ’ rather than ‘You make me feel’ or ‘I’d rather you didn’t do that’ other than ‘Stop doing that’ will make a subject so much easier to talk over. Within therapy we can teach each partner that it is ok to talk to each other. Be nice to your partner “Say ‘I really like it when, that way then it is more than likely it will happen again.
It is always an idea to get each of your clients to say something positive, something their partner has done that they really like, I tell my clients to say something good, say something bad, then finish with something good again, (this applies to non-sexual conversations too). Sounds easy doesn’t it, it takes the edge off of any conversation.
Facts, feelings and fair request. This is a simple rule, so you can then get your clients to ask questions such as ‘I’ve noticed that you like’ or ‘I feel that’. It gives the clients a platform for useful feedback, as opposed to them feeling nagged.” Being vocal about what does feel good, sometimes the conversation need go no further than ‘that felt really, really, good let’s do that again’ and this will encourage them to do just that.
Listen and ask questions
One of the biggest problems in communication is not that people don’t know how to talk, but more often than not is that they don’t know how to listen. People are so worried about how to avoid hurting themselves or the other person; that they spend the whole time thinking about what to say next, rather than really listening to what is being said in the moment.
Try to put yourself in their shoes, in as much as accepting what you’re hearing. We are in nature hardwired to think that our reality is the only one, and that other perspectives are wrong. As a therapist you have to step outside of this, so that these tricky conversations will become much easier.