Sensate Focus for Better Sex

by Carolynn Aristone | Oct 27, 2021 | Blog, Relationships, Sex, Sex Education, Sex Positive, Sex Therapy

Sensate Focus

In couples and sex therapy, one of the best suggestions I give some couples who struggle with sex is to not have sex. Seems counterintuitive, right?

After all, how are couples supposed to work on their sex life or create better sex if they stop having it?

I suggest abstaining as a temporary measure. It helps alleviate the pressure of sex. Think about it. When sex isn’t happening or if it’s happening awkwardly, it can occupy a lot of your mental space and emotional energy.

If you’re the seeker, you might constantly look for sexual signs or windows of opportunity, the right way to approach your partner without annoying them, or to get a “yes”.

If you’re the avoidant partner, you might wonder “what’s wrong with me?”, seek ways to discourage physical contact or feel anxious about whether your partner will ask again tonight.

Loss of libido, a sense of rejection, different levels of sexual desire, sexual dysfunction or different sexual needs can make you feel mentally and emotionally consumed, put stress on your relationship and an unconscious pressure on both of you.

When I suggest abstention, it alleviates that pressure. There’s no more figuring out what to do. As you adjust to this new arrangement, I slowly introduce new, evidence-based ways for you to physically re-engage that likely carry far better results.

The Impact of Your Troubled Sex Life

Your sex life holds its own peaks and valleys. This is normal and natural in long-term relationships. But when you have prolonged periods of time where you either can’t meet each other’s sexual needs or you stop having sex altogether, physical engagement can feel awkward and stressful.

When I ask you to take sex off the table, we make room for you to heal your erotic and emotional wounds first. Problematic sex impacts how you relate to each other. Whether you’re feeling constantly pressured or rejected, the intimacy dance between you can cause emotional injury for everyone.

Sometimes these emotional injuries shut down the avoidant partner’s sexual system. Their body learns that sex feels emotionally unsafe so, over time, their libido takes a nosedive.

Ironically, the seeking partner’s sexual system can often shut down just as the avoidant partner’s system starts to wake up! Chronic rejection inevitably leads to resentment which is a sexual turnoff.

After healing your erotic and emotional injuries in couples’ and sex therapy, you understand each other better. Mutual understanding helps you see the good in each other again. You’ll communicate more effectively and connect more.

Sometimes, this is enough to get the sexy wheels turning. But not always.

So what’s a couple to do when they reignite emotional connection but not sexual connection? I help couples reconnect physically through a step-by-step proven exercise.

A Powerful and Proven Exercise

When couples tune into and attend to their sensuality, they lay the ground for their sexuality to emerge in a powerful and connective way.

Known as a Sensate Focus exercise, it requires different levels of physical touch. It combines mindfulness and present-centered awareness with some specific steps, rules, limits.

This slow progression of touch builds a sense of safety and trust in each partner again. It also helps you break unhealthy touch habits and creates pleasurable touch experiences.

The power of sensate focus is in its ability to keep you focused on touch in a deliberate, purposeful and conscious way. This skill often gets lost in long-term love. Over the years, sex can become routine and often mindless. Sensate focus helps you break old patterns and establish new, more pleasurable ones.

Unlike traditional, goal-oriented sex, sensate focus helps you enjoy the pleasure of the sexual journey by staying tuned into your senses. After all, good, fully-embodied sex is a sensual experience.

Rules for a Successful Sensate Focus Experience

Before you embark on your sensate focus journey, there are a few rules to understand.

Rule #1: Suspend judgment

Let go of any expectations for this exercise. Treat this entirely as an experiment and stay curious as to what it produces for you without judging your experience. Learn from it.

Rule #2: Mark your calendars

Mark your calendars together. Initially allow for 30 minutes of sensate time for each recipient. Try to choose times when you can relax and rest and where you can have privacy without distractions. However, make sure to also choose a time where you will stay awake.

Rule #3: Clothing Decision

While the goal is to maximize skin-to-skin contact, clothing is optional. If you choose to wear clothes, choose your least restrictive clothing. As you move through the exercises, your clothing preferences may change. Keep your room at a comfortable temperature.

Rule #4: Focus on sensuality, not sexuality

The purpose of sensate focus is to strengthen present-centered awareness, mindfulness and sensate awareness through touch. This means that even if you get turned on, you will not act on your sexual impulses.

The Sensate Focus Exercise

Below are the steps to follow for your sensate focus exercise.

Step 1: Non-Genital Touching

Decide who will be the Toucher and who will be the Receiver.

The receiver will focus on the sensation of being touched, without judgment. They will allow the toucher to explore their body freely. The receiver should not direct the touch but will allow the toucher to have his/her own exploratory experience.

The receiver can and should communicate if the toucher creates physical discomfort for the receiver. At that point, the toucher should change the type of touch they are practicing.

The toucher will explore the receiver’s body by focusing on texture, shape and temperature. They will also explore different forms of pressure on the body.

Notice the difference between the texture of your partner’s cheeks versus their hands. Notice what it’s like to offer a quick, steccato type of touch versus touch that is elongated. Notice how touch with your full palm differs from fingertip touch.

Only touch non-genital areas. That means that breasts, penis’s, vaginas, buttocks’ and kissing are off limits!

It’s recommended that, if sexual arousal occurs, neither partner attempts to satisfy the arousal. This would shift the focus away from sensuality toward sexuality and probably keep you in your same dysfunctional touch patterns.

Be sure to change roles and reciprocate. Do not compare experiences as they will be different.

Step 2: Genital Touching

Kissing and penetration are not included here.

Even though we’re introducing genital touch, the goal is to explore each other’s bodies through touch. Allow your focus to stay on the sensation of touching and being touched.

All of the same rules apply. The toucher should stay focused on the sensory experience beneath her/his hands. Move slowly and/or quickly; move deliberately. Trace and run your fingers and hands along your partner’s body, including their genitals.

In this scenario, the receiver now has permission to put their hand over the toucher’s hand and move with them if they so choose. Do not lead the toucher. Instead, follow their movement. The receiver can practice communicating what they might want through their hand, perhaps with a gentle squeeze. The toucher can decide whether or not to abide.

It’s important that the toucher not make the genitals their sole focus. The touch should still maintain a whole-body curiosity.

Again, switch roles without comparison.

Step 3: Mutual Touching

Kissing and penetration are not included here.

With greater sensory awareness, partners can now play with mutual touch, including genitals. If you’re becoming sexual instead of sensual, simply spend less time touching the genital areas and stay focused on other parts of the body. Attune to texture, shape and temperature.

An add-on to mutual touching is exploration with your mouths. That doesn’t mean jumping into oral sex. It means exploring your partner’s whole body with your lips and tongue. It means tasting them and feeling their body from an oral sensory perspective. Remember to stay focused on your sensory experience, not your sexual experience.

Step 4: Kissing and Sensual Penetration

Following the same principles from your previous steps, you can now include touch through kissing and penetration from a sensory perspective.

Approach the experience from a sensual lens. Imagine what kissing and penetration look and feel like from a sensory experience. Notice the warmth and the wetness. Allow your fingers, hands, lips and mouth to guide you.

Begin with a non-genital focus and gradually bring the genitals into contact. Allow for genital touching and rubbing without penetration.

If both partners seek penetration, move slowly and intentionally into this form of touch. Allow yourselves to fluctuate in movement, including stillness, as penetration occurs.

Step 4 invites both partners to touch and receive, simultaneously. It’s important to stay relaxed and pleasure-focused as the body increases in it’s arousal, intensity and possible orgasm.

Some couples like to linger in each step for several dates before moving onto the next step. Take each step at your own pace, practicing mutual respect, curiosity and openness.

The Benefits of Sensate Focus

Sensate focus has so many profound benefits. In addition to helping couples slow down and tune in, it strengthens your ability to be both sensual and sexual, allowing them to overlap but without confusing the two.

Let’s face it. We live in the age of instant gratification. Got a headache? Take a pill. Feeling lonely? Hop on Facebook. Need the book now? Instantly download it to your e-reader.

Good partnered sex doesn’t work “in an instant”. It doesn’t have to be slow. But it does need to be mindful. It requires your fullest attention. It needs you to shift your focus to pleasure.

In our fast-paced world, if you’ve forgotten how to be mindful with your lover, sensate focus provides you with the path for deeper, more meaningful and satisfying sex.

When Sexual Desires Differ

by Carolynn Aristone | Aug 30, 2021 | General, Relationships, Sex, Sex Education, Sex Therapy

Sexual desire mismatch may be more common than you realize.

As a relationship and sex therapist, I see a common problem amongst couples: one partner often wants more sex than the other. I can safely say that I discuss this issue with clients on a weekly basis. It’s that common.

Typically, one partner wants us to “fix” the other. Either by making the “lower” desire partner have more sex or by making the “higher” desire partner back off. This issue spans many types of couples across many different faiths, races, sexuality and genders.

But more sex doesn’t exactly create sex worth wanting. It just creates more unsatisfying sex. And less sex doesn’t exactly ease the tension around sex. It just creates more resentment.

So how do couples solve their differences?

Take a WE Approach

As mentioned earlier, when couples come in for couples or sex therapy, each partner often wants us to “fix” the desire of the other. Each partner sees the other as the “problem” causing them so much pain.

Our early sessions usually involve helping the couple see that any sexual problems they experience, including differences in sexual desire, are a couple’s problem. Not an individual problem.

I help couples shift away from blame and criticism of each individual, to recognizing that sexual desire differences are a shared problem and a shared responsibility.

To take it one step further, I also provide psychoeducation to help the couple understand that neither partner has the “right” kind of desire. There isn’t a “right” or “wrong” when it comes to how they experience desire with each other. We pivot away from judgment and instead focus on them being “different”.

Why Couples Need This One Shift

Each partner commits pretty fully to their own perspective as the “right” one. As long as we can get some “buy-in” into shifting the focus from “wrong” to “different”, we can work with it and the sex therapy can progress.

This shift allows partners to develop greater curiosity about each other’s sexual desires. It creates an opening for a conversation about desire and what makes sex worth wanting for both of them.

The truth of the matter is, when desire differences show up, even if sex is happening, it often feels empty, rushed and pressured. The seeking partner may “take what they can get” but not necessarily feel satisfied with it. The avoidant partner does it out of obligation.

“We help couples shift away from blame and criticism of each individual, to recognizing that sexual desire differences are a shared problem and a shared responsibility. “

Why Have Sex?

One of my favorite questions to ask couples is these 3 simple words: Why have sex?

Believe it or not, most couples have never stopped to consider why they engage in sex together. In the early courtship phase, it’s often driven by hormones and being in the lust phase or the attraction phase of falling in love.

The couple isn’t exactly asking themselves, “Why am I having sex with you?”. Yet it’s an important question to ask.

Whenever I ask couples this question, most will tell me “to feel closer, to feel loved, to feel more connected, because it feels good”. Most partners are not saying “to pressure my partner”, or “to feel coerced”.

Sex therapist, Dr. Marty Klein emphasizes this question in his work as well, noting that both partners often want the same thing.

In his article, Partner’s Disagree on How Much Sex, he states that in his work, he’ll tell them, “The issue here isn’t just more sex, it’s that you want to FEEL different – whether its’ more loved, or more attractive or whatever, right?”

And he’s right. Partners want to feel better with each other – closer, more attractive, loved – even though their desires look like they differ. At its core, they actually want the same thing.

In reality, neither wants to return to the type of sex they may have been having – quick, distant, empty and chore-like. This only furthers the pain they already feel with each other.

So more sex isn’t the answer. But the answer does involve some sex or erotic exchanges.

Find Common Pain Points

What couples often don’t realize is that while their desires may differ, and they may feel like polar opposites, they actually share similar pain points.

As we unpack the pain points in sex therapy, the “higher” desire partner often reports feeling undesired, unattractive and ultimately rejected. The lower desire partner often reports feeling pressured, guilty, stressed and dysfunctional.

But through these conversations, what partners also discover is that while each has their own experience, they also have other feelings that match: As a couple, they feel misunderstood, disconnected, lost, abnormal and lonely.

Almost always, couples experience an “aha” moment when they realize that despite their differences, they share these painful feelings. This is an important moment in sex therapy because it helps the couple see that they aren’t as polarized as they might feel.

Let me repeat: They aren’t as polarized as they might feel.

Couples start to see that they actually have common emotional ground; both want to feel closer, connected and loved BUT both feel misunderstood, lost, abnormal and lonely. This becomes the fertile soil where they can meet each other. Progress grows with the support and guidance of their sex therapist.

How Sex Takes a Backseat

In long-term relationships, it’s not unusual for life circumstances to steamroll a couple’s sex life. Having kids, career or money stress, supporting in-laws, domestic life, health problems and more are all, well, pretty unsexy.

They leave partners feeling tired. Or partners escape their stress with too much time on Facebook or too many glasses of wine at dinner.

Having better sex isn’t just about the sex itself, although that’s something that might need improvement. It’s also about feeling emotionally supported through the tasks of daily living. Feeling like a team. Feeling like your relationship is reliable and dependable. Easing each other’s burdens.

Talking, being affectionate and showing love each day.

Coming Back to Your Why

Remember, partners don’t want to go back to sex that doesn’t feel good. High desire partners don’t want to go back to sex that feels like they’re dragging their partner along into it. They want sex that feels engaging, energized and mutual.

“Low” desire partners aren’t completely turned off to sex, despite often pushing it away. They may prefer a different sexual experience, or sex that feels like it’s actually for them too.

All of this requires that the couple shift their focus back to the reasons why they want to have sex in the first place: to feel closer, more connected, more loved.

These conversations help the couple begin to understand how their emotional life connects to their sexual life.

Your Next Step

Start by having a conversation with your partner about this article. Discuss which parts of it make sense to you. Share how it helps you understand your partner better, and/or how it reflects your own experience. Share what you think you might have in common.

Then consider your next step. Perhaps you want to seek out some online resources.

Or maybe, you want to work face to face with a therapist to address your concerns.

In either choice, it’s time to stop feeling at odds, show up and work through your differences. Hopefully this article serves as a launching point for you.

It IS possible to find resolve, common ground and to create sex worth wanting again.

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