Sexuality « Conscious Transitions

Debunking Sexual Myths: Genital Response Means Desire

By Sheryl Paul, on June 17th, 2018

One of the spokes of any anxiety wheel is cognitive distortions: the assumptions, misunderstandings, and expectations we form about love, relationships, romance, parenting, sexuality, and nearly every realm of being human. Because we’re not explicitly taught how our minds and bodies operate – how to understand and attend to our thoughts, feelings, and sensations – we’re left to form our own conclusions based largely on what we see in mainstream media. Since the mainstream seems to know virtually nothing accurate about these aspects of being human, the vast majority of these conclusions are incorrect, which invariably leads to anxiety since reality will rarely align with what we’re told we “should” be thinking, feeling, and experiencing.

In the realm of relationships, as I’ve written about repeatedly on this site, this often sounds like, “I should be wildly attracted to my partner” or “I should just know when I meet The One.” … Click here to continue reading...

A Foundational Key for Breaking Free From Anxiety

By Sheryl Paul, on June 10th, 2018

“This is your body, your greatest gift, pregnant with wisdom you do not hear, grief you thought was forgotten, and joy you have never known.”

― Marion Woodman, Coming Home to Myself: Reflections for Nurturing a Woman’s Body and Soul

We’re a neck-up culture. We place a high premium on words and believe that our salvation comes from intellectual prowess. We talk and think and ruminate: talking our way out of problems, thinking our way through dilemmas, and fully believing that all of life’s answers are found in our heads. Some of this propensity toward talking comes from our extroverted culture (Americans have a particularly bad reputation worldwide for being blabber-mouths) but it also comes from a defense mechanism that begins early in life for many children: when the pain is too big, they travel away from their bodies, which is the locus of pain, and into their heads.

This … Click here to continue reading...

“My Partner Doesn’t Know How To Touch Me”

By Sheryl Paul, on June 3rd, 2018

Clients often say to me, “My partner isn’t a great lover. He or she doesn’t know how to touch me like past partners have.” To which I respond, “Maybe that’s true, but if your own anxiety, current life circumstances, and sexual/body history are weighing down on you, you will shut down. Anxiety kills desire. Past pain around sexuality eclipses sexual freedom. Body shame circumvents arousal. The work must begin with you. And from there you can have a very different conversation with your partner about what you like and what you don’t like.”

There’s usually a long pause, and then a sigh of relief that speaks to their realization that perhaps there’s hope for the relationship and their sex life after all. Paralyzed by the expectations of the culture that says that sex should be sizzling hot from the first kiss and that this initial spark should fan into fireworks … Click here to continue reading...

Lack of Desire

By Sheryl Paul, on January 7th, 2018

I hear a lot of whispered truths from women about their sex lives. I hear that they don’t like kissing, that they haven’t had sex in months (or longer), that they would be perfectly fine never to have sex again. But the statement I hear more than any other is: I don’t feel like having sex.

What they mean when they say this is that they’re experiencing a lack of desire and they’re bumping up the expectation that they should feel hot and bothered by their partner more often, sometimes, or even vaguely. They’ve been flooded by the dysfunctional messages about sexuality that permeate the culture and have formed the belief that if desire isn’t instantly and frequently coursing through their body there’s something wrong. Like all forms of anxiety, the “something wrong” usually takes the form of “there’s something wrong with me, my partner, or our chemistry.”

There’s nothing … Click here to continue reading...

The Beauty of Sacred Sexuality

By Sheryl Paul, on January 1st, 2018

When I launched the first round of Sacred Sexuality: A 40-day course for women to heal body shame and ignite desire last June 2017 I had no idea what to expect on the forum. Would the members feel reticent to share their innermost fears, secrets, questions, and stories around this most vulnerable area or would they feel safe enough to write from a place of honesty around a topic that had remained hidden for most of their lives? What I delightedly discovered from day one of the course was the latter: the women simply blew me away. They shared and divulged, dug deep and explored. They cried together as they shared their pain and they celebrated each other as they shared their beauty around every aspect of their bodies and their sexuality. The following are just a few of the posts that caused a body-wide smile to bloom when I … Click here to continue reading...