Ep #1: Where Are You Now?

Welcome to The Midlife Sex Coach for Women Podcast, episode 1.

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.

Everybody, I am Dr. Sonia Wright and I am glad you joined me here for episode 1. So, first of all greetings from Minnesota, it’s a beautiful time of year out here. I really love the fall in Minnesota, the sunshine’s bright and the air is crisp, everything smells so good. It’s really my favorite time of year.

But right now I’m recording this episode at 5:00am in the morning in the basement before my eight year old wakes up. Whenever I tell her I’m going down to the basement to do my work she says, “Mommy, are you going to be talking about sex again?” And I say, “Yes, honey, this is what mommy does, she helps people by talking about sex.” And then she says, “It sounds kind of boring, mom.” But I love it and I’m so excited to be here.

Welcome everybody, welcome diamonds. You might as well know I’m going to be calling you guys, diamonds and you might be wondering why. Well, basically you’re all unique, you’re valuable and no two of you are alike. You all come with your own special gifts and talents, and your own unique concerns, especially sexual concerns. And so I love to use the word diamonds because I want you to know how valuable you are.

As I said before, I’m Dr. Sonia Wright. I’m a certified life coach, a sexual counselor and a medical doctor. And there’s a rumor going around that I’ve even worked in a sex toy store for a while. And you know what, that rumor is correct. So I combine all these roles together and I provide a unique brand of sex coaching as the midlife sex coach for women.

You may have heard that I’m on a mission. I actually have several missions. I’m on a mission to end the emotional pain and isolation associated with sexual difficulties. And I’m also on a mission to help women embrace their sexuality and become sexual badasses at any age.

Finally, I have a big audacious mission, I want to positively impact the lives of a million women or more, yes, I said it, a million women. So I want to positively impact the sex lives of over a million women. And that’s just my start, that’s just my beginning. And everybody has to start somewhere, this is my beginning. This is my episode 1.

So you might be wondering how I ended up as a sex coach, how does a radiologist end up as a sex coach? I bet you’re wondering, and not just any kind of radiologist, but a pediatric radiologist. Well, basically I was once where you might be now. I was dealing with my lack of intimacy in my relationship.

And I really want to take a moment to say that I take full responsibility for the sexual difficulties in my relationship. But I didn’t know where to turn to at that time to solve and to deal with these problems. And I actually suffered in silence for a number of years.

I kept telling myself, I’m a medical doctor; I should be able to figure this out. I should be able to juggle my career, raising kids and figure out how to solve or add more intimacy into my relationship. I finally did figure out what to do and I reached out, I got the help that I needed. Unfortunately it was too late at that point for my relationship, but I continued to do the work. And I persevered because I didn’t want to bring these issues into any new relationship that I might get into.

So over time I was able to learn to embrace my sexuality. I owned my sexuality. I incorporated it into my life. I learned to express it. I learned to become comfortable with it and then I became whole. And I have to say that I love my life now. And I want that for you too, for all of my diamonds.

So let’s look at one of the main reasons that women come to me, they reach out to me and they want to work with me. The most common reason that women in midlife reach out to me is because they’re juggling with too much and they’re completely exhausted. Sex has fallen off the radar and they’re not sure how to get it back. They’ve gone from sexual intimacy two to three times a week to maybe one time a week, now it’s about once every two weeks or maybe even once a month.

Sometimes clients come to me and they haven’t had sex in years. They feel like something’s wrong with them because they’re not interested in sex anymore, they feel like their libido is broken. Their partner is pressuring them for more intimacy but they’re just exhausted, they’re raising their kids, dealing with a demanding, time consuming job. They have to take care of the household and they’re trying to be a good spouse too, but something has to give. And usually what ends up giving is a woman’s self-care and the fact that she’s stopped prioritizing herself.

As a coach, I’m the guide that accompanies you on the journey to rediscover your libido, to honor your self-care and to eventually become the sexual badass that you want to be. But in order to accomplish this we have to go on a journey to owning our sexuality. So step one on this journey is to identify the starting point. In other words, look at the situation that you may find yourself in now in terms of your sexual intimacy in your life or the lack thereof.

We’re going to have to acknowledge where we are, where we’re starting from, but we’re not going to do it from a place of judgment. We’re going to do this from a place of neutrality. When I say that we’re going to look at this from a place of neutrality I mean that we’re going to tell ourselves the truth. We’re going to look at the facts. We’re going to bring it all out in the open.

So there may be some questions that I might ask you like how often in the month are you actually having sex, is it four times, maybe two times or maybe not even once a month? Maybe there’s even months or years in between since you’ve been sexually intimate with yourself or your partner.

So once we get this number or frequency of the sexual intimacy then we’re going to look at our thoughts around that number.  So we first start with getting the number and then we start to look at our thoughts. Hey, you know, I’m a life coach, so eventually it’s going to have to come down to the thoughts.

So the next step, we look at our mind, we look at the thoughts. We have some other questions that can help us with those thoughts as well like, why have you been lacking sexual intimacy in your life? Do you feel like it’s too much of an effort? Or maybe we feel like life is so crazy and stressful that we’re just not in the mood. Maybe we have issues with our body, we don’t feel sexy.

Maybe we don’t feel that there’s a connection between ourselves and our partner like there used to be. Whatever it is we just write the thoughts down, we list them out. And then we’re just going to think about them. We’re just going to look at the thoughts, but we’re not going to specifically judge. We’re not going to judge, that’s one thing that I require of my diamonds is not to judge the thoughts, just to kind of look at them. And we’re definitely not going to judge the situation that we find ourselves in.

The important part is that we actually look at it from an objective place. Very often we don’t look at it because it brings up a lot of feelings and emotions for us. And these feelings may be very difficult. It could be feelings such as shame, or guilt, or overwhelm. And if you look closer, these feelings are tied to certain thoughts. So our thoughts generate our feelings. The thought might be, I should be doing this more often, there’s something wrong with my relationship, or possibly I’m broken. Whatever the thought is it generates a feeling.

Very often the feeling feels so uncomfortable that we don’t want to feel the feeling and we don’t want to look at the problem. But avoiding the problem actually just perpetuates it. But if we don’t look at the problem and acknowledge what’s happening then we can never get to the place where we possibly solve the problem and we increase our sexual intimacy. We have to look at the problem and feel the feelings in order to figure it out to get to a different outcome.

And I know I’ve been talking a lot and giving you a lot of information. So let’s just review it. So at this point you’ve taken a peek into your sex life. You’ve broken it down and you’ve asked yourself some questions. You’ve looked and you’re seeing how often you’re engaging in sexual intimacy. And you’ve also asked yourself why. And we’ve looked at the thoughts about the frequency of the sexual intimacy.

And we haven’t even gotten to thoughts about the quality of the sexual intimacy. That might be some other questions that you might want to ask yourself. Are you enjoying the sexual intimacy at this point in time? Are you getting pleasure out of it? Is there satisfaction? Is there connection? So those are additional questions that you could ask to generate more thoughts. So you’ve asked yourself some questions and you’ve looked at the thoughts.

You’ve also felt some emotions, some feelings around your sexual intimacy situation. And all these thoughts can bring up uncomfortable emotions and we don’t know what to do with these uncomfortable emotions. So usually we don’t take it any further. And at this point we switch to what I call buffering activities. And buffering is when we look to something external to ourself, some type of item, or food, or activity to block or avoid feelings.

So, buffering activities could look like binging on Netflix, finding a new favorite series. Looking for our favorite food in the fridge, one minute we’re on the couch thinking about sexual intimacy. Something happens and the next minute we’re in the kitchen because we have felt some uncomfortable emotions and we don’t know what to do about it. And food soothes us, so we’re in the kitchen looking for a treat.

Or maybe you’re scrolling on Facebook, you wanted to just check Facebook for five minutes and suddenly you’re on Facebook for an hour and then it’s ‘too late’ to be sexually intimate and you go to sleep. All those activities are buffering activities. But let me tell you, if we never take the time to assess the situation and our thoughts, and figure out our feelings then we can’t change the situation. And remember, I’m on a mission to help you improve your sex life. So we have to do all this work. And I’m here to help you change it.

I’m here to help you figure it out and I know this conversation can be pretty serious. But I also want to remind you that I’m a pretty fun person. And we’re actually going to have a lot of fun while we figure out this situation. And we’re going to figure it out together.

So the first step is to look at the situation from a place of neutrality. As I mentioned, the second step is to look at all the thoughts that come up around this issue of sexual intimacy in your life and to write down all these different thoughts. We’re also going to look at the thoughts, the feelings and we’re going to really spend some time looking at these feelings. We’re going to see what feelings come up because of the thoughts. We’re going to write down all the different feelings that come up. And we’re going to recognize that each feeling is tied to a specific thought.

So at some point we’re going to look at a specific thought and a specific feeling that is generated by that thought. We’re also going to look at our actions that occur as a result of the feeling. And finally we’re going to look at the results that we’ve created from these thoughts, and the feelings, and the actions. And we’re going to do this all in the future, all of the time.

But right now I’m just asking you to do one more thing, just one thing at this point and that is to believe that your sexual intimacy can change and can improve. Sometimes this is the hardest thing to do is to believe that something can change. But I can tell you that it can, I know that things can improve because they have improved in my life. My life is so different, my sexual intimacy is so different compared to where it was four or five years ago. And it doesn’t have to take years, just let me tell you.

And I know that things can change because I see the change in my clients’ lives. I’ve seen things change for the better in a short time. I’m just talking about weeks to months; it’s not a long process. We don’t often know exactly how things will change but that’s okay, we don’t always have to know the how. We just start the process and we will figure it out along the way. But just believe that things can change. So I often tell my diamonds they don’t have to know the how at this point, just believe and envision what your future can look like.

So as we end episode 1, I would love all of you to envision yourselves as sexual badasses and to envision the sexual intimacy of your dreams, your sexual intimacy that you’re going to be creating over time with me. And take some time to think about your future sexual intimacy because your dreams can come true.

To celebrate the launch of The Midlife Sex Coach for Women Podcast I’m going to be giving away a $50 Amazon gift card to five lucky listeners who subscribe, rate and review the show on Apple Podcast. It doesn’t have to be a five star review, although I would really love it if it were a five star review. But more importantly, I want your honest feedback so I can create an amazing show that provides tons of value.

Visit www.soniawrightmd.com/podcastlaunch to learn more about the contest and how you can enter. I’ll be announcing the winners on the show in an upcoming episode. Okay, that’s all for now, see you next time diamonds.

Female Announcer: Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of The Midlife Sex Coach for Women Podcast. If you enjoy Dr. Sonia’s fun and caring approach to sexual intimacy, head to soniawrightmd.com to learn more.