Individual Therapy with the Couple in Mind 4/6: Sex in the Long Run
Learning to talk with a partner about sex and intimacy is an important skill, and one we can help clients develop through individual therapy. In the fourth part of her series, couples therapist, psychoanalytic psychotherapist and author Anne Power explores various challenges and transitions that couples may experience in their sexual lives together – including aging, parenthood, and legacies of child sexual abuse – and shares how she learned as a therapist to broach the topic of sex.
For many couples, sexual desire is a key part of their initial connection, and for a minority that delight in each other’s bodies continues uninterrupted across the decades. For many the initial excitement fades, or possibly crashes at the point when – and if – kids are born.
The transition to parenthood brings practical barriers to sex but also emotional ones. With the arrival of a first child, when two become three, some partners experience the new distribution of affection as a threat. When one parent is breastfeeding, loaning their body to the infant, the other partner can struggle with feeling displaced.
Individual therapy can support either partner to process these very normal adjustments. Getting help early on can enable the couple to come through that transition without the kind of embedded resentments that can fester for years.
Whether or not the couple have children there may be somatic challenges that contribute to asymmetrical desire. If the couple struggle to speak about these they can escalate, so that many micro-injuries and rejections become woven into a dense barrier of disappointment and resentment. Erectile dysfunction in men and vaginismus or pelvic pain in women can be hard to explain, and then there may be a projection of disappointment onto the other.
Where a couple feel safe enough to talk and are open to learning about the other’s experience, they can be more creative about showing sensual affection and then physical difficulties may be managed.
Helping clients talk to their partner about sex
So many of us grew up without comfort in speaking about sex. If we can gain confidence and ease through conversations with our therapist, this could have huge benefits in a relationship.
Couple trainings usually take care to help students think and speak about sex. Learning to address sexual experience at the initial session was helpful for me, as this signals that we expect sex to be part of the conversation. Asking integrated questions can make our enquiries less intrusive: for example I might say, “With the depression in your teens, how did that affect your sexual development?”
Perhaps the most liberating thing can be to realise that many, or even most, people have some difficulty speaking about sex and thus simply naming that can help: “I guess it feels a bit strange to be talking about sex to someone you’ve just met, but hopefully ‘strange’ can be OK”.
Sometimes individuals bring sadness about the loss of sex in a long-term relationship and there may be useful work that can be done – can we help the client to unpack what the loss represents? If therapy provides just one partner with a space for thinking through their experience, there’s a good chance that they’ll bring more clarity and kindness to the exchanges with their other half.
When one partner has experienced child sexual abuse, then individual therapy can be crucial to the couple outcome. If an abuse survivor can think with their therapist about what they want to convey to their partner, and what they may actually be conveying, this can increase the chances of the couple repairing the earlier trauma. Therapy can also enable a deeper mindfulness about their own body and greater comfort in being with the self, whatever comes up. An individual therapist may enable a client to slow down, to take the risk of being with the cascade of feelings that might be triggered when their body becomes aroused.
Individual therapy could also be a significant resource to the partner of someone dealing with sexual trauma, and they themselves may have a story that has led them towards a relationship with a survivor.
My research indicated the special pleasure that older couples feel when they discover a deeper sexual enjoyment in their middle or later years. Sometimes this is because their lives are less stressful and they are more confident about themselves and their bodies but often a key part is that they have learnt to talk about sex. For clients with inhibitions around sex, getting their discomfort out, and into words, can be very freeing.
Anne Power will be writing a regular blog on her website www.contentedcouples.com, where you can find attachment resources tailored to couples