Ep #38: Cultivating Intimacy

You are listening to The Midlife Sex Coach for Women™ Podcast, episode 38.

Female Announcer: Welcome to The Midlife Sex Coach for Women™ Podcast, the only show that combines a fun personality, medical knowledge, sexual counseling and life coaching together. To create unique sex coaching that helps busy women awaken their libidos, address intimacy issues and learn how to express their sexuality for the rest of their days. Here is your host, certified life coach and sexual counselor, Dr. Sonia Wright.

Hello Diamonds. This is Dr. Sonia here for another episode of fun. Let’s do this. I hope you’re all doing well. So what is on your minds as we start the month of June? Well, for me school is out in Minnesota and I waited too long to enroll my daughter in summer camps this year. So it will be me and my mini me all summer long.

I actually laugh when I say my mini me because she’s just about as tall as I am at nine years old, so not really that mini. And honestly, she doesn’t look like me much. She doesn’t take after me in terms of features. She looks like her grandmother. But as soon as she opens her mouth you know whose child she is, there’s no mistakes there. The other day she told somebody, “You know, there’s no happy ever after. No one comes to save the princess, you have to save yourself.” Oh gee, yeah, she’s definitely mine for sure.

So what else do I have on my mind for the month of June? I have intimacy on my mind and not just sexual intimacy even though that is very important. But I want to talk to you about overall intimacy and why we need it. So we’re going to do a deep dive in the month of June around the issue of intimacy. So what exactly is intimacy? Well, intimacy can be considered a closeness, or a strong bond, a relationship of some sort, a connection. I like that word, connection. You can think of intimacy as a safe reservoir for sharing emotionally and physically with another human being.

So why do we need intimacy? This is a question that I’ve been asking myself for most of my life as I used to be a person that avoided attachment and emotions, I preferred logic. I didn’t trust emotions. I did not trust deep connections. I really preferred to be self-sufficient. And I thought by being self-sufficient and isolated that I was protecting myself from emotions and connections. And I thought that’s how you make sure that you don’t get hurt. But while I was in this protection mode, I was also missing out on life, I was playing it safe but I wasn’t really living.

So usually when we choose not to connect it’s because there’s a history or a perceived prior rejection or trauma at some point in our lives in the past. But even if we’re pushing people away there’s still a part of us that longs for connection. So in my early 30s my logical brain made an illogical choice, illogical but amazing. It was an amazing decision to start exploring intimacy in all its forms and to figure out how to live life.

So for almost 20 years I’ve been on this journey transforming from an avoidant attachment style to a more secure attachment style. And I’ve often had to remind myself that connection and emotional attachment is actually something that’s positive and that relationships are rewarding. And it’s one of the reasons that I became a life coach. I wanted a deeper exploration of how the mind works and thinks in regards to emotions and connections.

So in doing this journey I had to start to ask myself why is intimacy important? Why are connections important? And why are relationships important? And the best answer that I could come up with was just that human beings are meant to be connected with each other, it’s in our nature. We are interdependent beings. We were meant to have a human experience of love and connection.

So, one of my mentors, Brooke Castillo, The Life Coach School would always say that you’re meant to love someone just for the experience of loving, not to change somebody or to make them better, but to love them unconditionally. So intimacy is an experience that’s meant to benefit us. That’s a crazy idea. It’s like a gift that we give ourselves and the gift is to connect with others. So love, connection, vulnerability, it’s all part of the human experience. And we get to want this. We get to experience this.

We are actually meant to experience connection with others. And this connection is vital for intimacy, especially for sexual intimacy. I realize as a sex coach I’m always working on increasing sexual intimacy for my Diamonds. I talk about how to get it, how to keep it, what to think about it and what to do to get it. I tend to put the emphasis upon the sex.

But I want to make it really clear that sexual intimacy cannot be created in a vacuum. It’s important to recognize that sexual intimacy is built upon a foundation of general overall intimacy. And that is built on a foundation of communication and connection. Therefore I encourage cultivating overall intimacy, including communication and including connection because it is necessary. It’s a necessary precursor for sexual intimacy.

In order to engage in pleasurable sex you have to trust and you have to be vulnerable. You have to be able to create a zone of sexual safety. And you know what? You just can’t be vulnerable if the intimacy, connection and communication have not first been established. So whenever I’m working with a woman or a couple and they say that the sexual intimacy has not been there for a number of years, it’s been non-existent. But then they tell me that the rest of their lives are good, and perfect, and wonderful, I kind of challenge that.

I challenge them to really look at their lives. They may be in denial about the relationship because you just don’t end up in a place of having a lack of sexual intimacy without at least a lack of communication. And usually there’s a lack of overall intimacy within the relationship as well. So if the sexual intimacy is not there then usually at least part of the communication has been compromised. There are some truths that are not being discussed. And this lack of communication impacts intimacy.

Often we have an underlying belief that intimacy should be easy. We don’t want intimacy to be work, just like we don’t want to work at our sexual intimacy. We just want it to flow naturally without us having to nurture or to cultivate this intimacy. But that’s not exactly how intimacy works because as I mentioned before, there needs to be a bond or a connection, a feeling of safety that needs to be continuously cultivated. It is not something that just appears out of nowhere.

As I said, if you need to rebuild the intimacy in your relationship the most important thing is to create a safe environment for you and for your partner. And this safe environment comes from good communication but it also comes from getting rid of our old friends, the emotional bullies. Yeah, here we go again. So usually shame, and guilt, and judgment are back again creating havoc and creating havoc in the relationship. And these emotional bullies, they’re really the result of how you’re thinking about your relationships.

You may have what we call a manual for how your relationship should be, how your partner should act, including how they should fulfill your needs. And you may also have a manual about how you as a woman should show up in this relationship. So a manual is kind of like a book or a mental blueprint of how things should be and how everyone should be, do and act in a situation. The problem is this manual is not often based on reality.

And this manual is usually something that you’re keeping to yourself. You’re not even sharing your ideas about how things should be with anybody else. This manual stays hidden in a dark closet but it’s controlling all your actions. And this manual is negatively impacting your relationship. So we have to look at this.

Usually with the manual there is a central belief that other people should be meeting your needs and that there’s a right way as to how they should be meeting your needs and there’s a wrong way. And usually they’re engaging in it the wrong way but you know what? They don’t even know there is a right way, you haven’t told them anything. And they’re kind of operating in the dark. Well, I’m here to tell you that you’re a grown ass woman and there’s only one person who needs to meet your needs, just like my nine-year-old says, “No one is going to save the princess.”

So break into the palace, burn the fairytale books and the manual while you’re at it, get on your own horse and go and save yourself. Let me make this clear. You are responsible for meeting your own needs. Do I need to say that again? You are responsible for meeting your own needs. Once you get this point then you’re not expecting anything from anyone else and you can actually enter a relationship just for the fun of it, just for the connection, just for the love. And you can start to love unconditionally and you can rebuild that trust in your relationship that needs to be there.

You can really start to build the intimacy that you want with yourself and with your partner. So spend some time identifying what your needs are. One of my favorite exercises is to write down all the things that I think a perfect partner should do. So go ahead and write down all the things that you think your perfect partner should do. How they should fulfill all of your wants and all of your needs. And then look at this list. There you have it. This perfect list, you have basically identified all your own wants and your needs and here it is.

This is the list for you to investigate and to journal on. This is the list for you to fulfill for yourself, not anyone else. I really want to make that clear. Look at this list and recognize these are your needs and these are the needs that you get to fulfill yourself.

If you think your perfect partner should buy you gifts every week, or shower you with words or affection, or make you breakfast in bed, then get to it. You get to shower yourself with gifts every week. You get to say words of affection to yourself. You get to make breakfast and crawl back into bed. But you don’t get to expect other people to do this for you. You are your own perfect partner and you get to fulfill this wish list for you. And you get to love yourself. This is something that is so important is this self-care, this intimacy with yourself. This is the first place to start.

If you want intimacy to grow in your life, if you want to have the experience, the human experience of connection, give that experience to yourself first. But you get to go even deeper. You get to find out more about yourself. Ask yourself some questions. Why do you need this list fulfilled? What would it mean if you had this list fulfilled? What would it mean about you to have these things done for you?

Originally this is a list that you made where you wanted somebody else to do these things for you so what do you make it mean about yourself if somebody were able to do all these things for you? This is going to give you some insight into really what you’re thinking about and why it’s so vital and important that you have partners doing things for you.

What would it mean if these things were done for you? Would it mean that you’re worthy? Would it mean that you’re lovable? Would it mean that you’re pretty enough, that you’re good enough, that you’re smart enough, you’re valuable? What would this mean? What do you make this list mean about you? Well, let me tell you that you’re enough right now. Let me tell you that you’re 100% lovable right now. And you’re completely worthy just because you are, just because you exist, not because anything that you need to be, do or have.

So go ahead and meet your own needs. Go ahead and have that love affair with yourself. Go ahead and cultivate that intimacy. Go ahead and blow your own mind. And then, then when you’ve met your own needs, reach out and connect with your partner, reach out and connect with your friends, reach out and connect with your family members just so that you can love them. And see what happens to your intimacy when you don’t have any expectations about how they should show up and how they should show up and what they should do for you.

Go ahead and meet your own needs and then see what your life is like then. Let the intimacy with your partner, with your friends and with your family grow just because you want to experience a connection, just because you want to experience intimacy. Give yourself the gift of unconditional love and intimacy.

Okay Diamonds, that’s all I have for you this week. We’re going to tap into some intimacy and we are going to figure this out. Lots of love, Dr. Sonia out, I’ll see you next week.

Diamonds, do you feel like you’re missing out on passionate intimacy and amazing pleasure even though your life looks fabulous to everybody else? Or maybe you feel like sex is just an obligation that’s on your to do list right after taking out the trash. Perhaps you would love to get rid of the story that plays again and again in your mind that sex is shameful. Or maybe you just want to want to want sex again.

Well, Diamonds let me tell you the time has come. My Own Your Sexuality Now 90-day program to greater intimacy and pleasure in your life is open for enrolment. In fact I’ve actually reorganized the structure of Own Your Sexuality Now so that you can join at any time. You don’t have to wait for a three month increment anymore. Just think, you can talk to me weekly and get all your coaching needs met in my anonymous weekly group coaching calls. And we have so much fun with these calls and we get the work done.

Best of all, you get a community of other women that are dealing with similar issues. You get to know that you are not alone. So this amazing program, Own Your Sexuality Now includes 12 self-paced modules that lead you on a journey to create the sexual intimacy of your dreams. You start from exploring concepts of you as a sexual being. And then you progress all the way to the point where you’re creating a pleasure plan, a unique pleasure plan for you that ensures that you get the pleasure and the sexual intimacy that you deserve.

And I’m so excited about this, and as a special bonus, Own Your Sexuality Now is going to include an additional three months of weekly group coaching calls and support from me, Dr. Sonia. So click on the link below, Diamonds, or visit my website www.soniawrightmd.com to find out more about Own Your Sexuality Now and to join. I can’t wait to see you all.

Alright Diamonds, that’s it from me, Dr. Sonia out.