Ep #13: You Are Worthy

You are listening to The Midlife Sex Coach for Women Podcast, episode 13.

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 so funny. You’re going to love this. Okay, it’s 1:00am in the morning and I can’t sleep. I can’t sleep because I have a project to do and I did not complete it. I found myself critiquing my entire day and beating myself up about the fact that my project was not complete. It will definitely be done today. I know that it’s going to be done, or at least it’ll be done in the morning. But I’m still not happy about the fact that I didn’t complete it earlier.

I kept looking back over my day and trying to identify missed opportunities and getting more and more frustrated by the minute. My self-judgment is expanding beyond the project and it was actually going into me evaluating different things. I hadn’t exercised in the day and I was not staying on my eating plan either for the day. Now I’m really picking up steam in terms of beating myself up. And I have even more evidence for a good perfectionist beat down. My mind is like bring it, let’s do this.

I feel like I’m in a boxing match and I can hear the announcer saying, “Folks, in this corner we have Dr. Sonia life coach and sex coach extraordinaire who isn’t very extraordinary right now as she not completed her daily tasks. Her project’s not done and she’s feeling a little bit like a failure.

And in the other corner meet the new contender, Dr. Sonia’s altered ego the perfectionist. Ooh, I can feel the self-judgment all the way over here. Folks, this is going to be a new match, the new contender looks pretty buff and ready for a fight. I think this is going to be a quick match with an early knockout. I’m predicting Dr. Sonia’s going down. Folks, you may not want to go get your popcorn at this time, you might miss it all. So let’s get ready to rumble.”

But in the midst of all this self-criticism and blame in this whole scenario that’s going on in my head, there is a small voice and that voice is saying, “Let’s have some self-compassion here, you’re not necessarily perfect. But you know what? You’re a 100% worthy.” That little voice is saying, “Sonia, are these thoughts serving you? Is there another way to look at your day? What if you actually did it right, what if it was okay?”

Well, let’s look at the day and see what actually happened. Well, I spent two hours with my daughter, my little eight year old. And we went on a magical adventure to find the elusive puffy cream donut, which is about an hour drive back and forth. But the look on her face when she realized that mommy was going to stop working and was going to spend some time with her, that was a beautiful precious look. So we picked out matching outfits, we did our hair together and we giggled as we started out on our adventure.

I got back, we found that puffy donut, I came back home and then I actually got the opportunity to check in with one of my former clients who’s dear to my heart and I found that she was thriving six months in. So, that was also pretty wonderful, to be able to talk to her and see how she was doing. And that day I also showed up for my client that had an emergency situation and needed an emergency coaching session and I was there for her as well. And I also spent time working on my future business and planning for 2021.

So when I look through the lens of self-compassion I find that that’s serving me so much better than self-criticism. And my day was actually all perfectly imperfect and that I’m actually worthy. In fact I’m a 100% worthy right now. And the worthiness is not based on my doing, how many tasks I was able to check off in the day. It was just based on my being.

And you know what? This concept is one of the first coaching concepts that we learn during coach training. It’s this concept that we are a 100% worthy right now. And you know what? It’s the same way with my Diamonds. It’s the same way with you. You are a 100% worthy right now. My Diamonds come to me and so often they have different scenarios going on around sex and they need the coaching.

But the answer to most of it is the same, at least the baseline is, you get to choose and you get to choose that you’re a 100% worthy right now. You get to choose that you’re a 100% worthy. You get to choose that you’re a 100% lovable, and you get to choose that you’re a 100% sexy right now. And I know that you all don’t see it at this moment and you know what, that’s okay.

That’s why I do this work and that’s why other coaches do this work. So that you can begin to understand that it’s not better over there at this magical place in time when you’ve met your perfect goal and everything’s been reached, it’s not perfect over there. You’re suddenly not worthy now that you’ve reached your goal, your worthiness is not based on your actions, it’s actually based on your being, it’s not based on your doing. You are innately worthy.

There’s nothing that you have to do or be in order to become worthy, you just are worthy. Worthiness is just like your baseline, it’s a foundational thought. And it’s one that I want to introduce you to at this point in time, because all the work we’re doing in terms of creating your sexual intimacy that you want and your sex life that you want. It has to be based on this foundational thought that you are worthy enough just the way you are right now.

You’re worthy for pleasure, you’re worthy for everything else that’s going to come along, but right now we’re just going to start at the beginning. And it’s the beginning of the work that I do with you.

So let’s look at a few examples of clients. And I have to say that all my examples are like conglomerations of various clients, so not one specific client. So let’s look at somebody I’ll call Jill. Jill comes to me because she doesn’t feel sexy. She tells me that she’s 30 pounds overweight. She doesn’t like her body. She doesn’t want to engage in sex because she feels unattractive.

She thinks that sex is going to get so much better once she loses her 30 pounds. In between she’s beating herself up because she doesn’t conform to what society’s concept of sexy is. But while she’s waiting to meet these sexy requirements that society’s kind of imposed on us, and she’s taken on and is now imposing upon herself. She’s actually missing out on some amazing sexual experiences that she could be having right now, if she realized that she was a 100% worthy right now. Her body is a 100% perfect for her, and that she is a sexual being.

Yeah, she can still choose to lose that weight, but if she recognizes that she’s worthy right now, she could be having an amazing sexual experience while she decides to lose the weight. She could be experiencing her body from a place of self-compassion and love. She might even decide that she actually doesn’t need to lose the weight because she’s having that incredible sexual experience.

Let’s look at another example. Alexis, Alexis would like to have more pleasurable sex. Her sex life is pretty unfulfilling, very monotonous and routine. She actually feels like she’s never had a really enjoyable sexual experience with her partner. And that’s because there’s a lack of communication between the two of them. Her partner thinks that he’s a great lover and even though they don’t take the time to explore Alexis’ body and find out what her pleasure zones are, she’s allowing her partner to continue to believe this.

What she would like to do is to say, “Slow down, let me get in the mood, let’s take this slower.” But instead she allows sex to go and proceed at her partner’s pace, and then she just kind of waits for it to be over, she continues to feel frustrated by the entire sexual experience.

What she doesn’t realize is that she’s experiencing what’s called the pleasure gap. This is something that mainly occurs in heterosexual couples at sexual experiences. They find that the male partner about 90% of the time is experiencing pleasure, where the female partner is only experiencing pleasure about 65% of the time. So there is this gap between them.

Now, if Alexis understood that she was a 100% worthy and that her needs were equally important to her partner, then she’d likely be having this conversation with her partner and advocating for her equal pleasure and closing that pleasure gap. Alexis is a 100% worthy right now but she doesn’t realize it. And as such she’s not experiencing the pleasure that she should be experiencing.

Another example would be Monique. Monique prioritizes the needs of her kids and her partner over her own needs. And then wonder why she’s not in the mood for sex. Self-care is a foreign concept to her. She only averages about five hours sleep a night because she’s sleeping with restless kids and a dog. Interesting to note, her partner is not sleeping in the bed with her. Her partner is sleeping in the guest room because she wants to ensure that she is getting enough rest.

So Monique’s job is also stressful, and it’s demanding, and she’s bringing home work quite a bit of the time so she’s not getting a lot of sleep. She’s getting a lot of stress. And then her nutrition is being affected. So it’s hard for her to justify eating a healthy salad, and the salad might cost $15, but the hamburger and the French fries which is cheap, that costs about $5. She actually has the money and she could afford the salad but she actually doesn’t think that she’s worthy enough, that she’s worthy enough for that expense.

What Monique is not understanding is that she would actually be a better partner, and employee, and mother if she actually took care of her own needs first. Monique is a 100% worthy and needs to value herself. But if she gets so rundown and burnt out then a lot of other people are actually going to crash and burn with her. At some point it’s going to be important for her to prioritize herself and to recognize that she is worthy.

Finally, let’s look at Trina. Trina’s interested in initiating sex with her partner more, but can’t seem to get herself to do it. She would like to be more open sexually and ask for the sex that she would like. When we were coaching together we discovered that she’s afraid of being rejected by her partner. If she initiates and her partner says no then she makes it mean that she’s unattractive and that she’s not loved.

She has these ideas in her mind that being turned down by her partner means that she’s unlovable, that she’s not sexy and she’s just not wanted. Those are a lot of thoughts to tie to a single word of no. What if she was completely lovable, and sexy, and worthy, and that no had nothing to do with her or who she was? Maybe the no means sorry, I’m kind of tired tonight. Maybe that’s what her partner means by the no. But Trina takes it to mean so much more.

She fears rejection because she believes that her baseline worth is defined by another person’s actions, another person’s thoughts. Your worth is never defined by somebody else. What would the scenario be like if she were coming from a place of a 100% worthiness where no was just a no and it didn’t mean that she was unlovable? I bet she would probably initiate sex more often because she valued herself more. And she wouldn’t tie her partner saying no to meaning that she was not valuable. And you know what? She’d probably be getting more sex as well.

She needs to understand that her partner’s no is just a neutral circumstance in her life. And then she gets to decide what she wants to thinks about that no. if she were coming from a place of a 100% worthiness then the odds are that she would be able to tap into thoughts that serve her a little bit better, like, okay, that’s okay, self-pleasure is always an option for me. Or maybe another thought she might have would be tomorrow works, tomorrow works well.

But right now the thoughts that she’s coming up with when her partner says no is my partner’s no longer attracted to me, they don’t love me anymore.

So if any of these scenarios ring true to you or they seem familiar, then maybe it’s time to do some work on being worthy. Ask yourself, do you believe you’re a 100% worthy, why or why not? What would your life be like if you understood that you were worthy right now, who would you be? What would you do differently? Just realize that the thought that you’re a 100% worthy is actually available to you right now.

And if this is a new thought for you, this thought that you are a 100% worthy, then just try it on periodically like you might a new jacket or a new pair of pants. Just try it on and feel how it feels to you. Because the truth of the matter is that you actually are a 100% worthy right now. So there you have it Diamonds, our time together for this week is coming to a close, but I’m going to leave you with a secret, and that secret is that you are already a 100% worthy, and lovable, and sexy, and amazing. You just are a 100%.

So ask yourself, what would happen if you functioned in this world from a place of being a 100% worthy? You know, Diamonds, the choice is yours. You get to decide how you want to show up in this world. Remember that you only have one life, so choose this worthiness and see what it means for that life.

Okay Diamonds, till next time, it’s Dr. Sonia out.

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.