In today’s episode we are spending time focusing on when it goes well. As therapists we look for these ‘glimmers’ as a way to retrain the brain and body to focus on progress, not just the problem. It’s common for couples to get bogged down by what doesn’t go well. This is the brain’s way to keep you safe and protected but it also makes it hard to let progress take hold.
Join Laurie and George today in this great conversation focused on glimmers of eroticism in your relationship. There are two great ways to hone in on glimmers. One is to recall past positive sexual experiences in the relationship. The other is to dig below the surface of the complaint and listen to the request being made. Is your partner giving you the clues for a glimmer that you might be missing?
More glimmers help us feel more hopeful and united against the negative cycle. Take a moment today to look back at your past week and explore what went well in your sexual relationship. Even the slightest change is worth noting and sharing with your love. Keep it hot y’all!
Check out this episodes sponsors (and help the pod!)
Addyi.com — FDA-approved treatment for certain women with low libido!
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Transcript
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Announcement [00:01:41]:
The following content is not suitable for children. Catching glimmers of sexual energy. Let’s do it.
Laurie Watson [00:01:49]:
Oh, I love glimmers.
Laurie Watson [00:01:53]:
Welcome to Foreplay sex therapy. I’m Dr. Laurie Watson, your sex therapist.
George Faller [00:01:58]:
And I’m George Faller, your couples therapist.
Laurie Watson [00:02:01]:
We are here to talk about sex.
George Faller [00:02:03]:
Our mission is to help couples talk about sex in ways that incorporate their body, their mind and their hearts.
Laurie Watson [00:02:10]:
And we have a little bit of fun doing it right g. Listen and.
George Faller [00:02:14]:
Let’S change some relationships. Loving Glimmers. Not bad, Laurie. Right? This is, I think so many of us spend so much time catching what’s wrong, looking for what makes us scared, what’s not gonna work. That we don’t train ourselves to look for the possibilities of what could work. These long these. This is why the need to drive. All that good stuff that’s there too, right?
Laurie Watson [00:02:37]:
Exactly. You know, when I first started practicing, women would say to Me, things like, I could care less if I ever had sex again, you know, and you just. You hear that, and you’re kind of taken aback, like, oh, wow, that’s the ball game. But then as they talked about it, I began to listen really carefully, and I would hear things that they would say, and I’m like, well, you actually have quite a bit of eroticism, or your body is really responsive, more responsive than most women, or there would be things that they would reveal in the conversation that I would know kind of gave me hope about them having enough libido, enough desire, enough of that erotic quality to be very happy in a relationship with a partner that seemingly had differences. So that’s what I began to listen for when I was working, particularly first with women. And certainly I’ve heard that in men as well. Sometimes they’ll talk about, you know, they’re tired of sex, they don’t. They don’t really want to have sex anymore.
Laurie Watson [00:03:39]:
And then I listen really carefully, and it’s like, well, they want a type of sex. You know, they want something to happen sexually that does excite them, but for whatever reasons, they either block it inside themselves. They tell themselves that’s impossible to get with this partner, or. Or, you know, something happens where they block that, and then they don’t let it out with their partner. And so they can’t change. They can’t make it the exciting sex that they want it to be.
George Faller [00:04:08]:
This is, for all our listeners, Laurie’s superpower. She’s the queen of glimmers. I mean, it is amazing how you trained yourself to catch those little minute, tiny shifts that are happening in session. Right? Because, you know, that, you know, we could keep focusing on what causes things to go wrong and keep, like, that arduous task. Right. Or you could try to catch those.
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It’s.
George Faller [00:04:30]:
To me, it’s like a flicker of flame. It’s like, you know, you get this little life force that if you’re ready for it, you can kind of grow that flame. Like that glimmer.
Laurie Watson [00:04:38]:
Exactly. And, you know, I really believe people were asking me at work yesterday, I did a presentation, and they were saying, you know, how do you keep having hope? You know, because I’d been working with somebody for many years.
George Faller [00:04:50]:
Yeah.
Laurie Watson [00:04:50]:
And they were really blocked. And it was like, I have hope because I believe libido is a life force. You know, this erotic energy makes life exciting. It’s a spark. You know, it is kind of the essence. I remember the first time my partner touched me, what my body felt like. It was so electric. And I know that everybody has felt those things by and large, you know, and so I know it’s there.
Laurie Watson [00:05:19]:
And I just am excited to listen to people, to uncover that, you know, to hear, hear that, uncover. No pun intended, you know. Right. We’re getting under the covers and figuring it out.
George Faller [00:05:31]:
Yeah. So let’s try to help our listeners catch their own glimmers. What would they need to do to become more aware of this, to kind of retrain their brain that it’s not always what’s going wrong, but these to tap into? I love that. That life force that you talk about. You can see your energy change as you start to, like, this is why we’re here. This one of the ways and primary ways we feel connected. And part of something like this is strong stuff, but if we can’t see it, we can’t find it. We don’t have a map, then we get lost.
Laurie Watson [00:06:01]:
Exactly. So I think one question I’m always asking people who say I don’t have any libido is, okay, when did you last remember having libido? When was desire the strongest for you with this partner? Talk about that. Sometimes people are bogged down in life stages. They’ve got a bunch of young children, school age children, they’re running around, you know, pillar to post. They’re tired. It’s that their libido and their eroticism is drained and blocked. It’s not that it’s not existent. So when I ask them, when did you last have it? Maybe they start talking about, well, you know, when we first got together, it’s like all we would do is, you know, take long weekends together.
Laurie Watson [00:06:49]:
We’d sit and we’d talk. We’d, you know, somebody told me recently that they bought one of those card decks from people who manufacture card decks, you know, of all the sexy questions that they could ask each other. And they started talking about that, and of course, talking about sexual ideas, talking about intimate memories of your partner, learning your partner’s childhood. All of that kind of breeds this atmosphere that says, I feel intimately connected to you and voila. I also feel sexual about you. And I’m telling you these sexual ideas and you know, boom. I feel something in my body. You know, this gives me an idea.
Laurie Watson [00:07:29]:
And they would talk about, this is what it was like for me. And even as they talk about it, George, the act of remembering that gives them something in their body that they feel something.
George Faller [00:07:42]:
Yeah. I love your highlighting this because we know this in trauma work, right. The body doesn’t know time. If you it remembers something scary, it’s alive in the body right in this moment. Why would it be any different with these sexual erotic energy? What you’re saying is we can go back in time, we can, we can grab a memory, right? That’s all it takes to plug that person back into in the present moment. Some of those feelings starting to come up.
Laurie Watson [00:08:10]:
Exactly. And this is a little cheat that therapists do often. Right when they’re getting to know a couple on the first session, they often ask them how did you fall in love? And it’s really to regulate their bodies with good times to get them remembering the ways that they connected, the feelings that they had when they connected. And that actually changes their experience of that first session. It’s like, hey, I’m walking out of there feeling a little better because I have remembered. My mind has reminded me of what it felt like and now my body responds to that. So talking about these memories, talking about the sexy memories that you had actually gives you a sexual feeling.
George Faller [00:08:55]:
A little tingling. The glimmer gives a tingle.
Laurie Watson [00:08:57]:
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George Faller [00:10:35]:
Her kids who came too.
Laurie Watson [00:10:37]:
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Laurie Watson [00:10:52]:
Marshall’s near you, you know? And do you have a good memory that you can just tell us the. The metaphor for with Kathy that you remember a moment?
George Faller [00:11:04]:
I remember the first kiss at the bar.
Laurie Watson [00:11:08]:
Oh, let me hear this one.
George Faller [00:11:11]:
Well, actually, my friend who had a little bit too much to drink, tried to pick up her friend and he fell. He fell down as he was trying to talk to on the floor. This is one of those older bars that had peanuts on the floors and he got all of his hair and like. So this is how we started to talk to each other, you know, but just that not knowing how the night was going to go, my friend just embarrassed us. Probably didn’t want to talk to us. To have that, you know, going from that first kiss. Yeah, I can just feel that, you know, your brain can replay the scene. You could still see, you know, my wife’s face in her eyes and, like, this is going to happen.
George Faller [00:11:48]:
Well, this happening. Can you believe this? And, like, you can. You can feel the charge of that. And how many of us never do that? We never intentionally go back to think about when was sex great and what made it great and what were you doing? What was your partner doing? I just think reliving some of those scenes, you can feel your body start to waken up.
Laurie Watson [00:12:09]:
Yeah. Yeah. And I just love watching your face as you tell that story. You know, I literally can see your eyes change and just a slight blush on your skin. It’s like I can tell you’re in that moment. And of course, I have the blessing of knowing Kathy and you together as a couple. And I just saw that scene. I saw the way Kathy looked at you, the softness in her eyes.
Laurie Watson [00:12:34]:
It’s like it just played out. Even you telling that story, I, like, get my own tingle. It’s like watching other people talk about this. Right. Is another avenue. Like some. One question I often ask people, other than how it began for you, is, have you ever seen something, heard a story, seen a movie that you went, that’s what I want. That’s what is the turn on that’s the place that.
Laurie Watson [00:13:01]:
That would make me feel alive sexually if those things were happening with that kind of energy. You know, it’s. It’s really a beautiful thing to witness you talk about it. It’s a beautiful thing to see people in love, to see people begin that sexual moment.
George Faller [00:13:19]:
And we talk a lot about the importance of longings, and a lot of times we talk about it in the emotional cycle, right? The longing to feel special, that you’re irreplaceable, that you’re beautiful, that you know that. And that’s a lot of times also in the sexual cycle. But, you know, we’re really focusing more on that erotic energy that. That part of you that I love. How you describe it, there’s like a tingle years later, like, the body starts to get excited. It anticipates, you know, I was working with a couple where the wife had a hard time, you know, wanting to have sex with all the pressures and typical things you’re describing. And her husband came up to her, you know, in the kitchen. And usually a kiss leads to pressure, right? My husband wants sex so she never can enjoy the kiss.
George Faller [00:14:10]:
But this time, right, he comes in and he says, listen, I just want to kiss. It’s not going to lead to sex. You don’t have to worry about anything. I just want to kiss you. And it was amazing how her body could actually enjoy that kiss. And it remembers times where it enjoyed kisses before.
Laurie Watson [00:14:26]:
Yeah.
Laurie Watson [00:14:28]:
That’S so beautiful. And that’s some of what you’re saying is there was natural eroticism in libido underneath the cycle’s pressure, which was the glimmer, right? That was the glimmer of eroticism. Like when the pressure was taken off, it was actually very present, you know, and she could lean into it. She could feel it in her body. She could, you know, be sort of in her more native state of eroticism without any kind of expectation, you know, with the expectation gone, she could feel something. And of course, that’s oftentimes how sex begins, is, you know, like you said, wow, this is happening. This is actually happening right now. Oh, my gosh.
Laurie Watson [00:15:15]:
You know, there wasn’t pressure that it had to happen. It was just all this incredible energy and excitement about it starting and it happening right as you began. You were so present in the moment, you know, and Kathy’s so present in the moment. You’re just like, boom. And that’s what’s so electric, I think, is that that moment of it’s. It’s starting, it’s beginning, it’s blooming right in front of us, you know, versus bloom already bloom already start to bloom. Why aren’t you opening up? You know, why aren’t, you know, that kind of pressure? You know, it’s like we’re watching the rose bloom and it never does.
George Faller [00:15:55]:
And we could be guilty of it too, right? We could focus so much on eliminating the negative, the pressures. Right. That, you know, we could miss these glimmers that are always, it’s like opposite sides of the coin. We wouldn’t have the pressures if we didn’t have the longings and the glimmers. But we’ve just been so trained to look at trying to remove the brakes that we often don’t see the gas pedals. So I love that we’re being intentional here saying, all right, put the brakes aside for a couple minutes and just try to pay attention to those gas pedals. What are these things? So let’s come back and let’s. Let’s talk about other ways of catching these glimmers.
Laurie Watson [00:16:31]:
Okay?
Laurie Watson [00:16:36]:
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Laurie Watson [00:17:22]:
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Laurie Watson [00:19:37]:
So George, you said something important in this last bit about let’s not focus so much on the brakes and see the gas pedal. And I was working with a couple and one of the things that she complained about is as she got close to orgasm, he roughly and more quickly touched her clitoris. And he was thinking more stimulation, harder stimulation is going to get her there. Made sense. You know, that’s kind of what he liked. But she had told him over and over again that’s not what she liked. And so as I Listened to her say this, I realized she was revealing to him the gas pedal. What she really wanted was him to stay steady, to stay soft, to give her that space of unhurried stimulation so that she could feel her way to orgasm.
Laurie Watson [00:20:31]:
She gave him the glimmer, and I had to slow down the process to say, listen to her. Listen to her. She’s actually saying something about what she does want. You’ve been asking her, tell me what you like. Tell me what you like. And most of the time, she tells you what she doesn’t like. But here she’s saying, this is what I need. I need this, right? In this really pivotal moment before orgasm.
Laurie Watson [00:20:56]:
And as we slowed it down, it was really hard, right, because he’s so used to hearing the what doesn’t work. He’s so frantic about wanting to hear what does that he couldn’t even hear it when it was right in front of him, you know, And. And yet she did say, you know, somewhat with a complaint, but as we cleared it up, I get. Got her to say it more gently, like, this is what my turning. Turn on is. This is how I like to be touched. It’s very explicit, you know, and it’s very informative, and it speaks about her own erotic energy, what she needs to reach the pinnacle, the climax of the moment, you know, so there goes your superpower.
George Faller [00:21:40]:
Yeah, that’s a pretty advanced move. I mean, look at what Laurie’s saying, that she caught the glimmer, even though it was packaged in criticism. Right? And. And when we’re working with Glimmers, we got to get the partner to see it in themselves first, and then we get. Get the partner to respond to it. So we need two things to happen to have success with that glimmer, right? You didn’t have either one of them. She didn’t share it. She was in criticism, and yet he was getting defensive to the criticism, and, like, they were missing the glimmer, Right? But because Lori saw the glimmer, she was able to kind of jump in there and grab it and say, oh, hold on here.
George Faller [00:22:14]:
This is what you wanted, a husband. Right? And this is. How do we say it in where he could hear it and just like, you know, what a beautiful example that you were able to get her to actually touch, you know, I do know what I like. It’s proven itself to me, and it works. And if I get it, I will enjoy sex more. Right? And, you know, we’ve been missing each other with this and, you know, negative cycles, but I just love how you saw underneath the criticism, you caught the.
Laurie Watson [00:22:43]:
Glimmer, and it really was the key to her desire. She was so pressured by him that she had given up on orgasm and she had just said, okay, let’s just do it. Let’s just have intercourse. You come. I don’t really need to. But actually she wanted to. She wanted to climax, she wanted to have orgasms, but she didn’t think it was possible anymore between the two of them because of this miscommunication. So unraveling this tiny moment, this tiny glimmer, actually unraveled their whole sex life because she did have desire for orgasm.
Laurie Watson [00:23:20]:
She wanted sensation, she wanted pleasure. But they had kind of gotten screwed up on the way that they were with each other, you know. So you’re saying glimmers are like the tip of the iceberg, right into the deeper erotic core of the person. We see the tiny bit, and what’s underneath it is the whole erotic self.
George Faller [00:23:42]:
Yeah. Nice. Well, you said in the first part, like a good way of catching glimmers is to go back to memories. The second way you’re saying is you can actually catch these when they bubble up. This was a good example of it bubbling up a little bit. Even though it was in a criticism, it bubbled up and you caught it. So how do we help our listeners kind of catch that in everyday conversations? How might it show itself, these little glimmers? Una silla de masajes puede pares er extravagante.
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Laurie Watson [00:25:08]:
Yeah, so, like, I had a friend who, you know, he wanted sex all the time. Like, they. They talked about it, they were older and they had sex a lot. You know, like they went on vacation and they had sex like seven times in four days or something. I mean, it was a lot. I was. I was very impressed but she was overall a sexual withdrawer. And, you know, she kind of poo pooed the whole thing.
Laurie Watson [00:25:32]:
And, you know, like, ah, you know, she’d kind of roll her eyes. He always wants sex, all this stuff. But there was another piece of her that was kind of playful. And at some point she said she was just talking, and this was very much not her language, but she said, you know. You know, and then he just like grabbed her pussy or something. And her husband was teasing her, like, what? Say that again. What was that word? What. Wait, what did you just say? You just said pussy, you know, and teased her with it, you know, and you could tell that underneath this was a tiny bit of playfulness about sexuality that, you know, maybe in more vulnerable places she could let out.
Laurie Watson [00:26:10]:
You know, she was safe. You know, she. I know her, I know she absolutely knew that that was a huck for her husband, you know, that he was going to pick up on that he was going to play back, you know, I mean, so it was. It was fun. It was repartee between the two of them. And you could see that even though most of the time she kind of brushed him off and rolled her eyes at him, that underneath this was a piece of erotic energy. There was a glimmer that she too, kind of could play with.
George Faller [00:26:38]:
And, like, playfulness is a big one, especially with sexual withdrawals. I think sexual pursuit is always throwing things out there. They try to always get a feel out there, you know, but, you know, a sexual withdrawer often doesn’t because of that pressure. But when they do make that joke or that sexual innuendo, like, I think that that, that’s a really good glimmer.
Laurie Watson [00:26:59]:
That is. That is like, my husband does not tell dirty jokes, really, ever. But every once in a while he’ll drop this bomb and, you know, it’s like, hysterical to me, you know, because I know that he’s showing me something on the inside of like, sort of the. The more raw part of himself sexually. And so it’s always very exciting to me when I hear that, you know, just some sort of like, innuendo or joke.
George Faller [00:27:27]:
Yeah, I love that he initiates the same with me. I mean, I. I can have a lot of. I mean, Kathy’s receptive to the joking around, which is nice, but, you know, when she initiates a joke out of left field, like, it’s like, whoa, all right, that’s something going on there.
Laurie Watson [00:27:44]:
I think she’s hilarious. It’s like just the way her mind is so sharp and puts things together.
George Faller [00:27:49]:
But that’s a climber. Right. If you’re with your partner and you’re making a comment that normally you wouldn’t want to make because it might suggest something, so the pressure snuffs these things out. Like, if you didn’t have the pressure, more of that person would come out.
Laurie Watson [00:28:02]:
Right.
George Faller [00:28:03]:
So, again, I love that little example. It’s not always just going back into the past, but sometimes you got to listen in the present to see these little things. My strategy has been just, like, laugh that. Don’t bring too much attention to it. I want those glimmers to grow, and sometimes I can see how my stuff can kind of shut those down.
Laurie Watson [00:28:24]:
That’s interesting. You don’t play on it, huh?
George Faller [00:28:26]:
No, I think I acknowledge it, but my intuition is to want to make more of it. You know, I think I’ve learned that sometimes when I try to make more of it, she winds up not having success with it instead of just having a success laughing and moving on to something else. You know, I don’t know. It’s an area.
Laurie Watson [00:28:48]:
It’s a delicate balance as a pursuer. Right. We want. I get the sensitivity that you’re talking about. Like, we want to see the glimmer. Honor the glimmer. We don’t want to overshadow the glimmer with too much, lest we go back to the same old, oh, you’re always bigger about this, more about this than I am. Right.
Laurie Watson [00:29:09]:
I really understand that dilemma.
George Faller [00:29:11]:
That’s. I think the worst thing we could do as a partner who sees your partner’s glimmer is to start making it about you instead of the glimmer. So, you know, I try to put myself in Kathy’s shoes, put on that caregiving hat and be like, she’s bringing this up because she’s having a little bit of fun in an area like that. Wittiness just wants to make a comment. It doesn’t really want a long conversation. Right. But it also wants to be acknowledged. It wants to be like, that was witty.
George Faller [00:29:37]:
That was funny. And that laugh. I think just that that glimmer has success. So for all of us on the opposite side of the glimmer, you know, it’s just no perfect way of responding. But I do think it’s a good rule of thumb to try to keep the focus on the person’s glimmer instead of stop making it about you and what it’s bringing up for you.
Laurie Watson [00:29:57]:
Also to take hope in it. The person is sharing you with you. The tip of the iceberg. They’re sharing with you an erotic joke that is speaking about an erotic inner world. Yeah, like, I notice these things, I see these things. These things are funny to me because I live in an erotic place too. So, I mean, I think we can take hope in it.
George Faller [00:30:22]:
That’s a good word, hope. And I think that’s since it’s your superpower and you work with some of the most shut down sexual people and so often this is how you get them back into their sexuality is by catching these glimmers, is by seeing what they can’t see. So that’s the hope for our listeners, that there are more of these glimmers than you’re probably aware of too, because we haven’t been taught how to look for them and what to do when we get them. So hopefully this is the start of the process where you can just and kind of say, hey, wait a second, I think I have no libido. I don’t want to have sex. And actually every once in a while something happens that says otherwise, and I just don’t really know what to do with that.
Laurie Watson [00:31:05]:
Yeah. Okay, so thanks for listening. I got to tell George about two more glimmers I saw on that trip for him.
George Faller [00:31:12]:
Ooh, ooh. Keep it hot, y’. All.
George Faller [00:31:17]:
Call in your questions to the four play question. Voicemail. Dial 833-MY-4 PLAY PLAY. That’s 833-MY-THE- NUMBER-OUR PLAY. And we’ll use the questions for our mailbag episodes. All content is for entertainment purposes only and should not be considered as a substitute for therapy by a licensed clinician or as medical advice from a doctor. This podcast is copyrighted by fourplay Media.
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