Intimacy & Desire: Awaken the Passion in Your Relationship (42 page)

Attachment is about security. When you really look at it, attachment is about
not
wanting,
not
feeling vulnerable,
not
hungering. Constant attempts to stay safe and secure kill sexual desire.

Marriage gives control to the person who wants to grow. Relationships only remain in the comfort cycle by consensus. One partner can drive it into the growth cycle.

Critical mass is not the worst argument you’ve ever had, but it is the most important.

T
hus far we’ve discussed lots of ideas about sexual desire problems and delved into the complex emotional situations that often surround them. But one thing we haven’t touched on is actually having sex. Not to worry, I’ve been saving this for last.

There are lots of reasons to get your body involved in resolving your sexual desire problems. Holding on to your self during sex presents different challenges than learning to keep your mouth shut during arguments. You can only develop this in real time, while you’re having physical contact with your partner. Moreover, lots of couples have problems during sex which need to be resolved in mid-process.

If you’ve been working on your Four Points of Balance (Solid Flexible Self, Quiet Mind–Calm Heart, Grounded Responding, Meaningful Endurance), your ability to hold on to your self, soothe your own heart, and make grounded responses may have already improved. However, to resolve sexual desire problems, you have to do these things during physical contact with your partner. Close physical and emotional proximity taxes
your Four Points of Balance, and sex is about as close as it gets—especially if you do it right.

Part of sexual desire stems from your physical body. It is where your animal carnality and horniness come from. Your body allows self-expression through a million variations of snuggling, kissing, stroking—and anything else you can imagine! Your brain and mind appreciate luxurious motion, quivers of delight, sensuousness, wetness, tastes, scents, and licks. The feel of flesh on flesh. Palpitating membranes. Raw materials of sweet desire.

Previously we said human sexual desire is unique because of your ability to bring many meanings to sex. You can create new meanings with your partner through your physical senses. That’s what “making love” is really about. Sensory experiences endowed with profound meaning, like more eroticism, deeper commitment, or greater self-mastery, tremendously impact your psyche. More aspects of your brain are activated, because your body as well as your mind is involved. Physical contact adds a whole new dimension in which to learn about yourself, your partner, and your relationship.

That’s important because you want to activate your brain in as many ways as possible. And remember, your brain tracks your body all the time. What it’s doing, how it’s located in space, what’s touching it, and more. So if you want to send your brain a wake-up call, in addition to all you’ve learned thus far, use your body to do it.

You increase your chances of solving sexual desire problems by getting your mind lined up with your body. That’s why you need to know what’s going through your mind while you have sex. Your best bet involves approaching this from the physical
and
mental side. What is your experience of sex really like? What are you typically thinking and feeling while you’re having it? You have to map your own mind in the midst of it. These things drastically affect sexual desire before, during, and after sex. They also probably affect the neural pathways your brain forms as a result of these experiences.

The day isn’t far off when sex education courses will teach teenagers that sexual encounters are “head-wiring” experiences—profound moments of
meeting that shape the neural traces laid down in your brain while it is particularly malleable and subject to change (i.e., “plastic events”).

It turns out your brain is altogether more “plastic” throughout your life than scientists ever imagined, more like soft clay than carved stone. Far from being just a product of your genes or environment, it’s a highly adaptable structure that undergoes constant change throughout your life. Your brain is capable of remarkable positive changes through “neuroplastic training,” which essentially strengthens your brain through repetition, just like a weak muscle. There’s also increasing evidence your brain can rewire itself, even in the face of catastrophic brain damage and emotional trauma.
¹⁴²
It even wires itself interpersonally in response to your experiences with other people, creating neural maps of your interactions with others.
¹⁴³
Mind-mapping plays an important role.
¹⁴⁴

Emotional learning is a good example of brain plasticity.
¹⁴⁵
Emotional learning comes primarily through your body and personal experience rather than your intellect. If your childhood environment greatly impacted you, it was because of plasticity in the neural circuitry underlying your emotions.
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Research indicates plasticity extends down to the level of your genes. Whether or not your genes get to express themselves is directly linked to your environment and personal experiences.
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Chronic stress and anxiety create profound physical and neurochemical changes in the emotional centers of your brain that give rise to your emotions. These include your prefrontal cortex, amygdala, and hippocampus.
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Your amygdala and hippocampus are involved in emotional learning and both are extremely plastic. So much so, scientists speak of “plastic events.”

Plastic events can be positive or negative. Negative plastic events are like one-trial learning experiences triggered by aversive events that create subsequent difficulty with long-term memory.
¹⁴⁹
Sexual abuse, rape, accidents, and near-death experiences are powerful neuroplastic events. So is discovering your father or mother is having an affair. Learning by associating feelings with experiences is a plastic event that brings together sensory stimuli with biologically and psychologically relevant (survival) information.
¹⁵⁰
Plastic events happen in your amygdala and hippocampus when upsetting things happen in your life.
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People exposed to severe stress tend to have a smaller hippocampus (which regulates memory). The volume of the hippocampuses of twenty-two women reporting repeated childhood sexual abuse was 5 percent smaller than women who had not been sexually abused.
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A study of seven Vietnam combat veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) found they had 24 percent smaller hippocampus size than non-traumatized active-duty soldiers. In the PTSD group, those with the most severe combat experiences had the smallest hippocampus size.
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A long-term study of fifteen children with PTSD symptoms found they also had reduced hippocampus size.
¹⁵⁴

Unlike your hippocampus, which becomes
less
plastic under stress, your amygdala becomes
more
plastic. Emotionally intense experiences such as fear conditioning heighten its synaptic transmissions and long-term reactivity. Rats exposed to a cat (predator threat) for five minutes showed reduced neural plasticity in the hippocampus and enhanced plasticity in the amygdala. Strong or constant stress impacts your brain in complex negative ways.
¹⁵⁵

However, it doesn’t take something this dramatic. Rats who had four brief encounters with a more aggressive rat over a ten-day period (social defeat stress) were particularly hyper-reactive when injected with amphetamine two weeks and ten weeks later. Episodes of repeated social defeat stress may create long-lasting neural changes that sensitize your amygdala and ventral tagmental area and increase your potential for psychostimulant drug dependency.
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High-arousal experiences produce more durable memory traces than emotionally neutral ones.
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Traumatic emotional experiences generate pathologically strong memories, which can trigger depression and anxiety disorders.
¹⁵⁸

That’s the bad news about neural plasticity. Here’s the good news: Important brain regions remain plastic throughout your life in good ways. New findings reveal nerve growth in the hippocampus of adults. Scientists believe this can be harnessed by psychotherapy and pharmacology to create therapeutic change. Research on plasticity provides new information and realistic hope for shaping the emotional circuitry in your brain and promoting well-being.
¹⁵⁹

The four chapters of
Part Four
offer time-tested ways to use your body to create sex worth wanting, broaden your sexual repertoire, become a better lover, and improve your relationship. They offer nonverbal as well as verbal modes of resolution. These aren’t “sexual techniques” in the traditional sense. For one thing, they develop your Four Points of Balance. For another, they allow you to apply the fast-growing fields of neuroplasticity and interpersonal neurobiology. It doesn’t hurt to use physical interactions with your partner to create circumstances that facilitate positive brain change.

In this chapter I’ll show you three ways you and your partner can physically get together that help couples resolve their sexual desire problems. But before we do that, we need to establish the mental framework on which these activities greatly depend. Physical involvement deepens the emotional impact of working things out with your partner. But understanding of what you’re trying to accomplish emotionally is as important as knowing what to do with your body.

To start with, you need to establish a collaborative emotional alliance with your partner. Then you need to maintain it while you’re having physical contact. Unfortunately, couples with desire problems usually drop their alliance during sex—if they had one to begin with.