CHAPTER
8

Pillow Talk
and Much More

Make love with the whole of yourself.

Bring your innocence and experience to the
bedroom. Be pure of heart and lust for your
lover. Hold out the promise of thrills—
and the comfort of safety, all at once.

Don’t try, just do.

—Philip T. Sudo (1959–)

Pillow talk brings you to a deeper level of risking and exploring boundaries. Imagine you and your partner are awake in the early-morning hours before the busy day starts, or you’re lying together in the late-night hours before slumber sets in. Your quiet privacy presents a good opportunity for pillow talk—straightforward, honest sharing and heartfelt discussions.

Congratulations on the work you’ve done thus far. It will help you navigate the tasks at hand without being triggered or reacting to your partner.

Say No Respectfully

While “pillow talk” can encompass any type of talk you have in bed, three aspects of pillow talk are essential to your well-being. The first is being able to say no, meaning it, and having your boundaries respected. The second includes saying yes, being heard, and following through. The third involves offering an alternate plan if the one that’s being presented to you is not right in the moment. All three aspects are vital to maintaining a positive connection with yourself and your partner.¹

Because shame has most likely had a stranglehold over your sexuality for a long time, responding to your partner in more authentic and vulnerable ways requires courage. Consider these suggestions:

• Listen with an open mind and heart: no blame, no shame. Be mindful of what it takes for your partner to stick his or her neck out and ask for what he or she needs.

• Take time to appreciate your partner’s invitation to try a new technique that you may not be in the mood for.

• Never place judgment on the sexual act your partner requests. Saying things like “That’s disgusting” or “It’s immoral,” or rolling your eyes doesn’t help to diminish your fears, discomfort, and limitations regarding the sexual act. Projecting your judgments onto your partner only shames your partner and gets you off the hook of looking at yourself.

• It’s always okay to say no, but be mindful about how you say it. For example, if your partner wants to have oral sex and you don’t, then decline with honesty and offer an alternate plan like, “I’m glad that idea turns you on, but I’m tired and want sex to be quick tonight. Can I take a rain check for the weekend?”Another response might be, “I understand that you’re turned on by rear-entry vaginal sex, and I may want to try that with you later, but I’m not sure you’re really connecting with me in that position. Until I feel more trusting of you, I want to wait.”

Offer an alternate plan when it comes to touch as well. For example, if your partner is rubbing you in a way that feels good at first but begins to feel irritating, then communicate that you would like a lighter touch or prefer to be touched on another part of your body.

Mainly, talk to your partner about your personal experience and what you need to keep the sexual interaction open. If you’re on the receiving end of the alternate plan, don’t take it as rejection of you. Instead, hear the message as an invitation to comfort your anxieties while staying connected to your partner. It’s also an opportunity to practice empathy for your partner’s feelings and preferences.

These three keys to honest pillow talk leave both of you feeling heard and loved, not ignored and blamed:

1. Use the language of “I” statements to express your truth or feelings without judgment. For example, you might say, “I’m interested in what you’re suggesting, but I need a little time to think about it.”

2. Speak from the heart so it comes across as sincere and is less likely to sound like personal rejection.

3. Ask about your partner’s feelings and express your own to open the door for an empowering conversation about the topic. Both of you will feel heard.

Care, Give, and Ask

At this point, any sex you’re having with your partner has become more associative, connected, and embodied versus dissociated, disconnected, and mechanical. You are friendly lovers who care about and take care of each other. You give generously and receive well. You remember that you are responsible for your own sexual experiences, including your orgasms. You don’t expect your partner to be a mind reader who’s responsible for figuring out what you want and need. You don’t take your partner’s sexual preferences as a personal affront.

Instead, you talk about what you like and need. For example, if you’re female and not lubricated enough, tell your partner so you don’t have sex in silent discomfort. Such a scenario only leads to resentment. Make sure you have the lubrication you like at your bedside and use it freely, without shame. This is what real-time adult sexuality requires, unlike the sexuality promoted in movies and romance novels where no one bothers with such communication.

Don’t forget to ask for oral sex. Oral sex can be a wonderful alternative to intercourse because there’s no pressure involved to perform— just the receiving of pleasure. The act of oral sex allows you the experience of being in both the giving and receiving positions. If you don’t like oral sex or being either the giver or receiver, I recommend that you ask yourself why. If your partner had oral sex with prostitutes and oral sex has become aversive to you as a result, talk about it. Express your feelings and consider how and if you can heal your aversion. If you can’t come to a resolution with your partner, you may need more in-depth conversations with a therapist.

Often people don’t like oral sex because they are uncomfortable with their own taste or the taste of their partner. Take time to talk about this with each other. Experiment with tasting your own sexual fluids and your partner’s. Don’t force oral sex on your partner. Instead, explore with each other doing things like bathing together and playing with flavored lubricants. This is another one of those times that may seem awkward or odd because it’s so deliberate or conscious. In order for sex to take off in erotic and spontaneous ways, you have to be deliberate and explicit first. Power and control play out in all aspects of sexuality; giving is often the controlling position while receiving is the vulnerable position. Which position do you avoid and what do you know about your avoidance?

If you’re male and your erection fails you, don’t blame your partner or collapse into shame. Instead, enlist your partner’s participation to get aroused. If your partner’s erection fails, don’t invent any stories about you doing something wrong or not being attractive or sexy enough.

At this stage of honesty and connection, hold on tight and stay true to yourself. Affirm that you are perfect, whole, and complete— for both you and your partner.

Find Happiness Through Connection

What part does happiness play in your ability to experience intimate, erotic sex with your partner? Your level of happiness gauges how well you’re communicating and interacting with each other. When you’ve been through the painful, fearful times that make you question your abilities and emerge victorious, a remarkable growth takes place. Your inner resilience—the fire within you—becomes your strength and makes you far happier than having a high IQ, loads of money, or years of education. Happiness comes from your best, most challenging moments.

People who demonstrate happiness have strong ties to family and friends. Your commitment to each other adds to your happiness and can be further enhanced by your activities together. Having sex, relaxing, or engaging in spiritual practices together empowers couples to feel supported and safe, which equates to happiness.

In the end, happiness is about your ability to connect with yourself and your partner, and to give and receive with a pure heart and clear intention. Your interpersonal engagement, whether in pillow talk, hot sex, or conversation over a cup of hot chocolate, is your key to success, as you’ve known throughout your recovery stages. Keep up the kindness and gratitude!

Move into Erotic Sex

As you move from intimate sex into erotic sex, remember that you include each facet of learning from previous chapters and then add to that experience. The new stage includes and transcends the previous one, creating richness, texture, and depth to your life story. Engaging in intimate sex, you’re no longer hiding out and fantasizing about others. You have become fully present with yourself and your partner, preparing for your journey into the erotic.

Trust and commitment are essential for intimate sex, and orgasm is not a measure of your self-worth. From this vantage point, you learn that surrender and unleashing passion make for erotic sex.

What Is Erotic?

The term “erotic” conjures up different images in different people’s minds, and those images change by gender, age, and personal experiences. “Erotic” refers to the intention to arouse sexual desire in oneself and the other. “Arouse” is active; therefore, erotic translates into actions and insinuations that can be subtle and either solitary or shared. Sex becomes erotic when one loses oneself in a loving connection with another person. It’s this loving connection that transforms a common sex act into an erotic experience. As a result, the people involved are changed and affirmed.

Being erotic involves:

• Allowing passion

• Imagining

• Conversing

• Flirting

• Touching

• Planning and engaging in ritual

• Gazing into each other’s eyes

The actions that you consider erotic are unique to you and your partner’s experiences. I think of “eroticism” as a vital, pulsing energy in the body that longs to create and connect, like a live electrical wire flopping around loose after a disconnection. The live wire moves frenetically because the pulse dances in it. When it’s reconnected to the correct charge, it finds a home. The no-longer-frenetic flow smooths out and feeds the connection.

So from my perspective, eroticism is:

• Connecting

• Dancing

• Pulsing

• Flowing

• Reconnecting

• Harmonizing

When Is the Right Time?

Erotic sex happens when both people become self-differentiated, meaning you’ve taken a stand for who you are sexually, are clear about it, and have revealed it to your partner. You and your partner have had conscious conversations and have been honest with each other about your feelings and your preferred sexual acts.

Chapter 1 defined “differentiation” as the balance between individuality and togetherness. As you move toward erotic sex, you make the commitment to comfort your anxieties. You’re relaxed and not driven by fear of abandonment or, conversely, fear of being smothered and dependent.

It’s important to embody the following states of being before you proceed:

• You can genuinely connect with each other.

• You no longer lose yourself to the relationship or act out your sexual desires with others.

• You own your sexuality and make yourself vulnerable by sharing it with your partner.

• You remain separate individuals in your personal truths while merging your energies through the most intimate act in which two people can engage.

Erotic sex allows a freedom to unleash the ravenous self while staying relational. That means when you’re lost in the details of your experience, you’re in the jet stream of eroticism, whether you’re examining your partner’s eyes or genitalia, or experimenting with the pace and rhythm of licking, sucking, or thrusting.

What Being Erotic Means in a Relationship

What is being erotic like in a relationship? Here’s what other couples have shared in answer to this question:

• “I watch my partner watch me during the sexual act, and it arouses me. We experience carnal pleasure and stay connected through eye contact.”

• “In the beginning it was difficult for me to verbally express my feelings of love for my wife during sex. I had to tell myself it would be okay, then I took a leap of faith. At first I blurted the words out. My wife responded in a gentle and appreciative way. It’s gotten easier over time, and now I love telling her I love her while I’m making love to her.”

• “After we worked through being self-conscious, we let our animal passions come out. We accept the animal in totality and trust that a spiritual connection will grow out of that expression.”

Eroticism Flows with Sexual Honesty

Eroticism happens more easily when you honor what is sexually true for you. That contrasts with being dishonorable when in sexual addiction. Now is the time to redeem your dignity. That means don’t have sex if you don’t want to; indeed, doing so could trigger going into fantasy, dissociating, or acting out sexually with your partner.

However, while moving into eroticism with your partner, it’s crucial to ask yourself when you say no if you’re saying no because you’re hiding out. Maybe you don’t want to deal with the discomfort of changing. In that case, the appropriate mind-set is to take responsibility by challenging yourself with rigorous honesty. Also talk with your partner about your discomfort so that both of you can better understand each other. Taking this approach develops a connection and allows for empathy.

When you take a good, deep look at yourself, you know that you will have to come to terms with how you create separation by judging your partner. You will also have to accept that the “frog” you married is your prince or princess. Any fantasies you’ve held on to about the “ideal one” must die and, as an adult, you must grieve that loss. The fact that your partner has “warts” doesn’t make him or her any less perfect—only real. So believe that you are married to the perfect person, warts and all.

When you move into acceptance, you admit that your partner is separate from you, with different likes and dislikes. Can you see him or her as a separate sexual being, yet the two of you as a family? In this scenario, your disappointments and losses will surface. Let yourself grieve the loss of your fantasies, then move into gratitude for what you do have. The closer you get to your partner and the more deeply you connect during sex, the more deeply you will come to love.

Here’s when a paradox arises. You have to hold on to the self you’ve worked so hard to develop in recovery and through the work in this book while merging with your partner during sex. This simple but not easy act creates a space for highly erotic sex to happen. When you reveal your most vulnerable self while staying emotionally connected, you can unleash your animalistic, carnal desires. The result is an experience of deep love, a different way of knowing yourself, and hot sex all at once!

Charlene and George’s Story

In therapy, Charlene talked about her sexual discomfort with her husband, George, as their lovemaking moved from intimate to erotic. During the intimate stage, she and George shared how much they loved each other and were present for each other. But when sex moved beyond the comfortable, intimate stage into the erotic, Charlene had flashes of the pornographic images George used to watch online. These images seemed emblazoned in her mind; she simply couldn’t shake them.

I explained to her that the images had burned themselves into her memory because they were novel and powerful. The brain loves novelty, and her reward-seeking neural networks grabbed on to those images so well, she couldn’t shake them.

Why did these images pop up for Charlene during intercourse? When we examined this issue closely, she admitted that she would mentally leave during erotic sex with George because she felt uncomfortable. On the one hand, she was extremely turned on and wanted to express her full-on sexuality with him. On the other, her discomfort hung on the edge of increasing her love for George, yet she was too afraid to go there completely. Loving and trusting George brought up the fear that she could experience the pain of betrayal all over again. What if George acted out sexually in the future? What would happen if she released those feelings with George during sex instead of switching to the pornographic images?

Charlene’s next step was to risk shedding her tears—all mixed with love, anger, and fear—with George. By talking it out, both of them realized that everything she felt was normal, especially in clearing the way for erotic sex.

George’s role during sex was to have empathy for his wife, hold her tightly, keep his penis inside her, and not get defensive and abandon her due to his shame. He was instructed not to take her feelings personally. To honor her and himself in this way would be tender and could lead to a more profound sexual experience between them.

As a couple, George and Charlene learned to tolerate their discomfort in order to experience the depth of connection created by truly looking into each other. When they looked, they were willing to feel their own pain and also the power of their love. In that moment, their sex became a prayer for healing.

Couples like them will connect in a new way when they can answer these crucial questions in the affirmative:

• Can Charlene handle her animal nature without naming it “pornographic”?

• Can she remind herself of who she is, not the damaged, sleazy woman imagined in the porn but a vital, alive, desirous woman?

• Does she believe that her husband can see her for who she is and not mistake her for something dirty?

• Can she allow her heart to open, knowing the perils that lie ahead?

• Can he stay in his integrity and not mislead or lie to his wife again?

• Can they each accept the other’s vulnerabilities?

• Can they both face the discomfort that comes with the call to love each other more deeply?

What If the Flow Ebbs?

When you’re connected to your partner, eroticism ebbs and flows. You invite eroticism because you can’t corral or own it. Eroticism arrives as a result of the intentions you have set, your willingness to be open, and your desire to know yourself and your partner more deeply. Eroticism has its own rhythms and seasons. Given that, you’ll have times when you feel wildly in love with your partner and grateful you sustained your partnership. You’ll also have times when you hardly give him or her a second thought. When the flow ebbs, remember that the intimate sex we talked about in Chapter 7 can be different but just as satisfying as the erotic sex discussed here. So be mindful and know that if you stay aware in the ways we’ve been working toward, the erotic feelings will return and visit you again and again.

Accept Reality; Show Trust

Love is immensely fulfilling, yet it also inherently involves losses. We have to accept that. Marriage is not a bliss trip. Rather, it’s the constant pursuit of change, growth, and the ability to deeply love— and it requires admitting that you can’t have it all.

Grief and love become inextricably bound together as you admit to yourself who you are and who your partner is, and that your body is changing, your looks are fading, your children are aging, and your parents are dying. Moving into your eroticism as an adult requires a reality check, because you have to let the fantasy of storybook love and movie like sex die. On the other hand, adult eroticism allows for ongoing exploration of what love means to you and who you are sexually.

When you have trust as a couple, anything goes. Conversely, if any feelings of betrayal still linger in your partnership, you don’t have a green light to move forward. What happens when fear, pain, or anger arise from your partner about your sex with others, or when past sexual abuse memories come up during sex? Talking with your partner about these can be a powerful healing force, allowing you to work through your issues as part of your erotic exploration. If such conversations are difficult, you can always seek assistance from a qualified therapist.

Grow Spiritually Through Sex

Erotic sex emerges when you engage totally with your partner— and the deeper your connection, the more profound your spiritual feelings will be.

To move toward spiritual sex, any role of victimhood must fade away so you can admit to yourself that you’re in your relationship voluntarily. You take full responsibility for being in your relationship, ready to hold your center while surrendering to the unknown, where you continue to discover your sexuality, your partner, and your relationship with the divine (you’ll find out more about the spiritual aspect of sex in Chapter 11).

Erotic Intelligence Checklist for Chapter 8

Three aspects vital to maintaining a positive connection with yourself and your partner are: (1) being able to say no, meaning it, and having your boundaries respected; (2) saying yes, being heard, and following through; and (3) offering an alternate plan if the one that’s being presented to you is not right in the moment.

Three keys to honest pillow talk that will leave both of you feeling heard and loved, rather than ignored and blamed are: (1) using the language of “I” statements; (2) speaking from the heart; and (3) asking about your partner’s feelings and expressing your own.

Moving into your eroticism as an adult requires a reality check because you have to let the fantasy of storybook love and movielike sex die. On the other hand, adult eroticism allows for ongoing exploration of what love means to you and who you are sexually.