A few weeks ago I recorded an amazing episode on sex and intimacy after baby with The WTF Trimester creator, Chelsea Skaggs. And it seemed to hit a nerve, because I received tons of feedback from that episode! For some of you, learning how to communicate your needs to your partner in a way they would be able to hear you was just what you needed. But I also got some DMs from moms who are facing a different problem when it comes to sex in early parenthood…

Whether after the birth of a child, or a few years down the road, parents can sometimes feel themselves pulled in so many directions that at the end of the day, they find it difficult to have anything left to give. This can be especially true for postpartum mamas.

So this week’s episode is filled with actionable strategies and mindset shifts that you can make if you are feeling touched out, overstimulated or anxious about intimacy. These can help you to feel connected to yourself so you are open to having a vulnerable and deep connection with your partner. This is an episode you won’t want to miss!

 

Dr. Sarah (00:00):

We are constantly being sucked on, pulled on, grabbed on, hung on, climbed on. And by the end of the day, a lot of times you’ve given all of your physical energy to your child, and then you really have nothing left for yourself or for your partner.

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Plus, for a limited time only, I’m taking 12 parents under my wing and offering six weeks of exclusive group coaching calls so that I can personally guide you through the course and help tailor these strategies directly for you and your child. But hurry, these 12 spots will probably go quickly. Go to drsarahbren.com/tap. That’s drsarahbren.com/tap. To equip yourself with the tools you need to successfully navigate your child’s first year.

Hi, I’m Dr. Sarah Bren, a clinical psychologist and mom of two in this podcast. I’ve taken all of my clinical experience, current research on brain science and child psychology and the insights I’ve gained on my own parenting journey and distilled everything down into easy to understand and actionable parenting insights. So you can tune out the noise and tune into your own authentic parenting voice with confidence and calm. This is Securely Attached.

Hey, everybody, it’s been a while since I have done a solo episode. But I got a really interesting question from a listener about, in reference to a podcast that I actually did a little bit ago that I felt very compelled to respond to because I think this person brings up a really good question and a really good point. So she wrote: Hi, Dr. Bren. I loved your episode on intimacy after baby, and the ways you talk about increasing confidence, speaking up and learning how to get our own needs met to increase intimacy with our partners. But as a new mom, I’m having the opposite problem. I am super touched out. And the last thing I want to do is have sex with my husband. I feel so bad. I know he wants to, and I know he’s trying to be patient with me, but I just can’t get there. I feel like I’m hurting his feelings help. So first of all, I just wanna acknowledge like that episode that we did, it was with Chelsea Skaggs. It was a really interesting episode and we talked a lot about kind of finding ways to when we want something, to be able to ask for it, or being able to get connected with our own self and our own needs and feeling like more sort of confident in being able to ask for what we need in a way that our partner can hear. And I’m hearing you that for some moms it’s, that’s not exactly the problem that they’re having. There’s this other phenomenon that happens in parenthood and this listener like hit the word on the head, which is like being touched out, like being just really over stimulated in motherhood. We are, we there’s a lot being asked of us.

We are giving a lot of our energy of our, of our cognitive capacities of our bodies. And so I’m really glad you used the word touched out, cuz that is actually a very real thing that really happens a lot in motherhood, especially new motherhood, but kind of long term. So kind of like how that episode on intimacy with our partners, we were talking about how this is really true for postpartum moms that are just kind of coming into this new parenthood identity and, and figuring out what their sex life looks like after baby. But it’s also really true for moms of like toddlers and older kids, because sometimes we don’t address it right away. And then we kind of let it sit for a early long time. And maybe it takes us a couple years to be able to say, you know what, I wanna shift my relationship with sex and with my partner and improve it feel more comfortable get my needs met.

But again, I think whether you are a brand new mother just navigating your changes in your body and then intense demands of a newborn or your mom of a toddler, or maybe multiple children, and you are just touched out, it’s gonna make sex really hard. It’s gonna make desiring more touch, really challenging. So I think feeling over touched makes sense. You know, we’re, we’re really, yeah, our bodies are in high demand in motherhood by other people than our partner, like, we are constantly being sucked on, pulled on, grabbed on, hung on, climbed on. And by the end of the day, a lot of times you’ve given all of your physical energy to your child and then you really have nothing left for yourself or for your partner. And I just wanna normalize that. It really, it, it happens. I don’t think we need to add on to that blame or shame or any kind of like self criticism because it’s part of this season of life, but also it doesn’t have to be this way.

And I think there are ways that we can improve that. I think you have to be in a position where you want to improve it. And I, I think this listener does want to, I think that there are moms out there that are kind of like, you know what, I’m so touched out. I’m not interested in getting better at this part of my life right now. I don’t have the energy to, to even spend thinking about this, in which case I get that I totally get that come back and listen to this episode when you’re ready. There’s no rush go at your own pace, but if you are resonating with this and you’re like, okay, well I do want to be able to want to, but I don’t want to right now I think there are some things that we can do to get ourselves closer to that space of wanting connection, physical connection with our partner being open to it, having the bandwidth for it.

I’m gonna talk about a couple ways that we can really address that specifically. So the first thing starts with acceptance and understanding, being able to say, this is where I am right now. This makes sense and really understanding why it feels this way without labels or without blaming yourself. Just being able to say my body is being used in great demand right now. And so it makes a lot of sense that I’m physically not interested in sharing it with anybody else. Also if you are newly postpartum, knowing that just the hormone shift alone can make, you know, the idea of having sex very overwhelming, like it’s just our libido shifts. It can, it can be, we might not have the same desire for some women. Their libido is more prominent after having a baby for a lot of women. It’s really hard to access again, not never, but right away.

And so I think understanding that these are normal responses to changes in our body changes in our hormones and also our external environment being incredibly demanding of our physical body, our physical attention. And we can get touched out because of that. It’s also in addition to being touched out, there’s another thing, and this listener didn’t mention this, but I’m wondering if there’s for other people listening this, this piece as well. Cause another reason why some women are very hesitant or don’t want to, or avoidant of sex after having a baby is they’re anxious, they’re nervous. And there’s lots of reasons why we might feel anxiety around sex. It could be that we’re afraid of feeling pain. It could be afraid that it’s gonna feel different. It could be a fear that our partner won’t enjoy it as much as they used to. There’s lots of fears that could happen.

I probably am not even naming all of them. It’s probably an exhaustive list. And so, you know, being vulnerable, having this unknown, having this lack of control that makes us anxious. And that’s sort of like I talk sometimes on this podcast, I think about the anxiety formula. I think I’ve talked about it before, but if I haven’t, it’s basically the way I kind of help my patients think about anxiety is to think about it as like a formula. Like it’s think of it like a, a fraction, our numerators on top and our denominators on the bottom. Our numerator is the unknown plus lack of control. So the bigger those two things are the higher, our number is gonna be our denominator is our confidence in our ability to cope. So the higher that is the smaller, our number is gonna be. So our anxiety is going to be lower if we have high confidence in our ability to cope and our anxiety is gonna be higher.

If we either have low confidence in our ability to cope, or we have a lot of the unknown and a lot of things that are out of our control and sex after baby, there’s a lot of the unknown, a lot out of our control. And for most of us, we’re not very confident in our ability to cope, cuz we have not done this before, or maybe we’ve been out of the game for a while. And we’re really not confident that we can cope with the anxiety that might get stirred up in us when we are having sex with our partner in a really meaningful way, in a vulnerable way, in an intimate way, right. We can have sex and dial it in and kind of, you know, just go through the motions. And that might not feel ver as vulnerable to us or stir up as much anxiety in us, but being able to have the kind of like real, authentic, intimate sexual experience with our partners, where we’re talking about what feels good to us and asking for what we need and saying what we don’t want or, you know, involving our partner in a dialogue around sex that is very vulnerable and that can make us very anxious.

So if one of the reasons we’re avoiding sex is because we’re feeling anxious about it. Then what I would suggest doing is first of all, to talk about it, talk to your partner, talk to your doctor, talk to your therapist. And if you have a therapist, you know, preferably someone with training in maternal mental health and postpartum mental health would be helpful. Also seeing a pelvic floor specialist. If you are, you know, worried about feeling pain during sex, you really should talk to a pelvic floor physical therapist because they can help it. It is possible to make sex less painful. It’s common to have pain during sex after having a baby. And that is usually something that can be addressed and resolved by getting the proper support. So advocate for yourself. That’s one thing. And then also you wanna slowly work towards increasing your tolerance for the uncomfortable feelings.

And this is true, whether we’re talking about anxiety around sex and intimacy, or we’re just talking about other things that we’re anxious about, right? Like one of the ways that we treat anxiety is to create a fear hierarchy. And so what you would do is you would kind of take a little bit of time journal, you know, get a piece of paper out and make a list and it doesn’t have to be in any particular order. I tend to people tell people it’s like just brain dump, a bunch of things about this particular thing that you are scared of, right? The parts about it, that you are avoiding, that you are fearful of and just dump them all out on a piece of paper. And then I want you to create like an actual hierarchy. So like, what is the least scary thing?

Put that at the bottom. What is like the most absolute scariest thing, put that at the top and fill in the rest, right? In order ish of like, what’s the least scared, the most scary, and then just start at the bottom, right. Go with the least scary thing. It may still be scary, but it’s probably the least scary thing and attempt exposing yourself to that fearful thing and seeing how it feels. Right. Notice, notice what it’s like to go through it. Do you have a fight or flight response? Do you get, you know, does your heart start to race? Do you, do you have like a tightness in your chest? Do your hands start to sweat? Like what is the physiological sensation that happens when you approach this scary thing? Can you continue to try to expose yourself to this scary thing while managing that fight or flight response?

Can you calm your body down before you do it? So maybe let’s just say, for example, let’s say this, this fearful thing on your hierarchy is being naked in front of your partner. So the first thing you might do is before you’re gonna get naked, you take some moments to just take some deep breaths, calm your nervous system down, activate that parasympathetic nervous system and get your heart rate to have a steady beat and get your blood pressure to lower a little bit. Cuz our blood pressure raises when we are feeling anxious and we’re in fight or flight. So we are just gonna try to calm the body down with some breath, with some grounding exercises, grounding exercises, basically anything that helps you kind of locate your body in space and feel present. So, you know, a really easy grounding exercise is five things that I see, four things that I smell, three things that I touch, two things that I taste.

And one thing that I hear or like, whatever, just go through your senses. And so, but it like kind of locks you into the space, a physical grounding exercise that’s even easier than that is to push your hands against a wall. Just that proper receptive input of that pressure of your body against the wall helps you to feel grounded and helps you to feel regulated so that you can then do the thing that’s scary, right? It doesn’t make it less scary. It just increases your physiological tolerance of that scary thing. You don’t have that intense fight or flight response. That’s the anxiety. The scary thing is still scary, but we’re not being flooded with anxiety while we do it. Okay. So that’s sort of the idea and you work your way up the hierarchy doing one thing at a time and you don’t really move on to the next until you can really do that thing without having a really strong fight or flight response, you might have a small fight or flight response, but it’s more tolerable and you can kind of get through it.

And then you reflect, you reflect on what it feels like to be able to do that thing and not have whatever fearful outcome you were expecting. Like, oh my God, I, you know, something bad. We’re usually afraid something bad’s gonna happen. Right? And so we do the thing and then we have a smaller stress response and we get to the other side of that thing. We realize, you know what? That was survivable. Wasn’t so scary. I can handle this. And then once you’re there, you move on to the next thing on your fear hierarchy and you work your way up slowly and steadily without going too far ahead, you’re really in the here and now. And you slowly expose yourself to the scary things about being intimate with your partner all the while, managing your anxiety simultaneously. So that’s the way we treat anxiety.

And you could do that with anything highly recommend. If you feel anxiety and you’re working on this to get a therapist who knows how to treat anxiety so they can coach you on how to do this so that you’re not doing it all by yourself. So you could have some tangible skills for calming yourself down and working on that hierarchy, but you can do this, you know, you can, this is something that you can do alone if you wanted to. But if it’s not just about anxiety. So like some that’s one reason why some people are like, I don’t wanna have sex. I really just don’t wanna, I’m really just avoiding it cuz I don’t wanna feel anxiety for some people. That’s not the reason why they don’t wanna do it. They are touched out. They’re like, I just don’t want anybody else to touch me because I’m overstimulated.

And if that’s the case, then my suggestion is really to start thinking about boundaries and balance and not just in your relationship with your partner, but you have to kind of zoom out and look at the big picture because the reality is at the end of the day, being all touched out and not having anything left to give your partner or yourself is actually less to do with your partner and more to do with all the other places that that stimulation is coming from all day long. Right? And some of it’s unavoidable, but some of it probably can be managed a little bit better and more intentionally. So we wanna take a bit of an inventory of where we are receiving all of this stimulation and like kind of try to see where can we increase boundaries so that we aren’t so depleted at the end of the day and you it’s gonna be absolutely different for everybody.

But I have a feeling I can guess a few of the things that are overstimulating you and touching you out during the day, if you are a mom, right? Like, you know, our little kids are climbing on our bodies. They are pulling on our bodies. They are screaming our name all the time. I mean, it’s not just physical touch, but it’s other stimuli, right? Other senses being activated, being a parent, there are tons of smells. Especially a parent of a new baby, right? We are inundated with sensory input all day long. And also if you are a parent who is home with your children, right? This is even more pronounced. You don’t get that break by going away to work. Although even working parents get touched out, right? There’s a lot of switching back and forth that is exhausting. And that can make us feel really tired and, and tapped out and touched out and overstimulated parents who are with their children all day.

It’s a different level of, of just all encompassing stimulation at all times. So it’s really, really hard. You don’t get a break. So think about like, just pay attention in your day and just start to be really mindful of, you can keep a little log on your phone if you need to, but like keep a little like running inventory of all the things that are physically stimulating to you, whether it’s your children or other, you know, demands in your life. Like not everybody is overstimulated just by their kids. Like if you are a working parent, maybe your job is very stimulating. Keep that in mind too. Right? Have boundaries. There are you getting email alerts every five seconds. Are you constantly checking your email or your phone? That’s overstimulating. That’s also gonna lead to feeling touched out by the end of the day. Believe it or not, our technology can be a drain on our bandwidth for our partners and for ourselves.

But I think, you know, let’s talk about kids first because everybody here I think can relate to this feeling of having children physically pulling on you, screaming at you, climbing on you, sucking on you. Like we are physically very much needed by our children, but some of that can be things we, we wanna be able to actually like have boundaries on. So for example, if you know, I always, I, I often this comes up a lot and like on my kids climb on me too. And I have, you know, they it’s, it’s hard, but I say, I really try to say, I don’t want you to climb on me. That doesn’t feel good to me. You can sit on my lap or you can sit next to me and hold my hand or give them an alternative thing that they can do. But it is okay to say, no, I’m not.

That doesn’t feel good to my body. And I don’t want you to do that. If they’re pulling your hair, you could stop and say, I’m not gonna let you pull my hair. It doesn’t feel good. And I’m, and you know one thing, this happens a lot with very little kids, right? Our infants don’t, aren’t pulling our hair cuz they’re like mad at us. Like older kids might pull hair in a fit of rage, right? Usually not us. Usually they’re grabbing a child’s hair or something, cuz that’s just easier to grab when they’re mad, we’re usually up too high. But when our infants are pulling our hair, like let’s say you’re nursing your child and they’re, you’re playing with them on your lap and they pull your hair. A lot of times parents will have a really big reaction. They’ll be like, oh, or they’ll have a different reaction.

They’ll just laugh and play along with it and let them pull their hair. I would say avoid both of those scenarios, which are kind of the two extremes and come into that middle space, set the limit, but do it in a very neutral way, right? I’m not gonna let you pull my hair and I might put my hand on your hand. And if you, if you wanna let go of a child’s grasp the best way to do that is to put your hand over their hand. And if you can press on their knuckles, just very gently, it will release their grip. So I might, if my child is pulling my hair, I might put my hand on their hand and say, I’m not gonna let you pull my hair. And then I’ll open their hand up and release my hair. And then I’ll say, if you wanna pull something, you can pull on this blanket or you can, you know, give them a toy to play with, but you can redirect it, but it’s okay to say no and have physical boundaries.

It’s okay to go to the bathroom alone. When you have kids at home, if they’re in a safe place and you can, you know, put them in a safe place and go and leave them, they could be distressed. They can protest and share with you how upset they are that you’re leaving them. And you can still go and go to the bathroom and come back modeling that kind of boundaries and that self self care. And that sense of an ability to say what you like. And don’t like with respect to your body is good modeling. It’s really important for our kids to see us model that kind of self preservation and self protection and self care. So it’s teaching them something important. Another thing that comes to mind when I think of like being touched out when it comes to not having anything left, when it, you know, to wanna have sex later with our partners is the issue of breastfeeding, right?

Breastfeeding is a very physically stimulating task that for many people is incredibly enjoyable and they wanna do it. And it’s wonderful and it’s feels good to them and feels good to their child. And it’s a wonderful thing. And if that is the case, fantastic, that might not be the place where you renegotiate your boundaries, right? Maybe that’s where you, you keep that and you other ways to increase your bandwidth. But I, I just wanna say this, cause I think it’s really important for some moms to hear if you are feeling touched out. And part of the reason you’re feeling touched out is because breastfeeding is taking an emotional toll, a physical toll and you are not enjoying it anymore. It is okay to stop breastfeeding. You are allowed to, you have permission to say I’m done. And that’s kind of just the end of the story.

You don’t, you do not have to do something that does not bring you pleasure. And I think it’s really important for parents to know they have permission to stop now again, like for some people that’s not really where they wanna increase their bandwidth. That’s something that they’re making a choice to do. They like it. They want it. It’s working for them. It’s working for their kids. Fantastic. I breastfed my daughter until she was like almost two and a half. So I’m all about breastfeeding. I also know a lot of parents who it’s, it’s a real tax. They don’t actually wanna keep doing it, but they feel obligated to, or they fear that if they stop, they’re gonna damage their attachment with their child. And I think it’s really important that we clear this up because it is not what you do that gives you a secure attachment with your child.

It is how you do something. It is very much a possibility to wean and not damage a relationship with your child and damage your attachment bond. That is not how attachment works. If you prepare your child and in, you know, give them an, you know, an emotional relationship with you while you remove breastfeeding from that relationship. That is, that is perfectly okay. So that’s just something I wanted to throw in here because I know for a lot of people, the idea of nursing, a child all day long and then go and have sex with your partner. It’s like, there’s just too much physical touch and it’s overwhelming and overstimulating and it, it doesn’t work. And that’s not to say that you have to stop breastfeeding in order to have meaningful sex with your partner either at all. I’m just saying, when you’re doing your, you know, your inventory of the amount of input, your, your senses are getting all day take stock, like what are the things I, I want to keep and what are the things I don’t want to keep?

And it’s gonna be unique to absolutely everyone. And they’re all, there’s really no right or wrong, but just think about it. Think about ratio. Think about balance. Think about, think about a pie chart, you know, and like draw out like all the different slices of pie that are in that are contributing to your over stimulation. My phone, my job, my, you know, breastfeeding, picking up my children being climb, done, you know, all the smells, whatever it is, like, just you’ll know what your pie chart looks like at the end of a 24 hour period probably. And figure out like where is there way too much of one thing where is a way that I can increase boundaries in another? So again, there’s no right or wrong. There’s no one correct ratio. It’s just whatever works for you. But in doing the inventory, you’ll know pretty quickly where you’d like to make some changes.

So that’s increasing boundaries. And so that you’re gonna increase bandwidth, right? If you have better boundaries, you are less likely to be incredibly overstimulated and touched out by the end of the day, but that’s not the only thing. Right? So other things that we can do to increase our bandwidth and reduce over stimulation is to regulate our nervous system throughout the day. Now I talk about this, a lot of the podcast with respect to our children’s nervous system, right? We are always talking about co-regulation and not letting them get kind of like physiologically hangry. You know, like we wanna let them have a physiological release for their nervous system multiple times a day, way before they are dysregulated. We can co-regulate before they get dysregulated, just like we feed them before they get hangry. So we give them opportunities at regular interval intervals throughout the data, like get some of that physical energy out.

We need to do that too for our own nervous systems. And that means that we have to give ourselves moments throughout the day to a, to release tension, to feel like we can calm our nervous system down. So some of the things that we can do again, sort of like what we were talking about with the fear hierarchy, cuz we’re, you know, our nervous system is very much in relation to our fight or flight response. Our fight or flight response is part of our nervous system’ response to threat. And when we’re really overstimulated, our body kind of reads that as a chronic threat. And so we are in sort of a low level fight or flight response. That’s part of what’s happening when we are stimulated, our fight or flight system is activated. So the same things that might help us to reduce our fight flight response when we’re trying to target anxiety is the same stuff we’re gonna wanna do when we’re trying to reset our nervous system.

So we could do grounding exercises that pushing against the wall grounding exercise is actually really helpful for releasing stimulation like pent up physical, uncomfortable energy in our body, you know, releasing that proprial receptive input. And actually an episode that’s worth listening to with this in mind is my episode with Laura Petix, The OT butterfly, where we talk about she’s an occupational therapist and we, she brought walks through all of the different senses cause we have eight, not five. And she talks about proprio receptive input interceptive input and vestibular input in addition to, you know, sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing that is a really good episode to go back to because, and listen to it, literally not for your child but for yourself, like listen to it kind of with your own body in mind, but things that we can do to calm our nervous system to reset appropriate, receptive input, we can do that from doing isometric exercises, yoga, Pilates, or just pushing against a wall or pushing our hands together.

We can take deep breaths. Remember that our breathing is actually a huge part of regulating our nervous system. When we take deep diaphragmatic belly breaths, we expand our belly like a balloon, and then we hold for a few counts and then we exhale longer than our inhale. So maybe you inhale for four, you hold for four and you exhale for six. Okay. That is going to cause when you exhale like this long slow exhale, you’re gonna be putting pressure. Your, your neck is actually your neck muscles are actually gonna contract a little bit. And you, when doing that, you put pressure on a, on a nerve called the vagus nerve that runs down your brain, stem all through your throat, all the way down to your, like the rest of your body and stimulating the vagus nerve can activate our parasympathetic nervous system or our rest digest.

So we are kind of like calming down the body when we put pressure on the vagus nerve. So that’s one of the reasons why deep diaphragmatic breathing can actually like calm our nervous system down. So do not underestimate the value of deep breaths because they’re super accessible. You can do them anytime, anywhere. If they’re subtle, people don’t know, you’re like doing a regulation exercise and they’re free. You just they’re always around. And then other things that we can do exercising or moving your body, like taking the baby for a walk around the neighborhood in the stroller, getting some fresh air, getting some cool air. So this is something else that I love to do when you’re feeling really hot or flooded, an easy way to kind of activate your nervous system is to open the freezer and blow. When you blow cold air into your freezer, it will shoot back like kind of like a stream of cool air in your face and that cool air can help calm your body down or reset or relax your nervous system.

Just being in nature can help laying in the grass or having your feet in the grass can be helpful. That’s not always an accessible thing for people, but if you have space outside or can go to a park or can be anywhere in nature that can also help reset your nervous system. Journaling can help writing things down, talking to a friend. But the goal really is by the end of the day, to just not be completely overstimulated because this in, when you’re doing this, you’re, you’re building in these moments of relief and release throughout the day. So that by the end of the day, it doesn’t mean you’re not gonna be tired. It doesn’t mean you’re not gonna be still a little overstimulated, but there’s, it’s just not so depleting. You’re not so fried. Your nervous system is not so fried. So that’s, that is something to keep in mind too.

So let’s recap. So we’re looking at ways that we are potentially distinguishing, is this anxiety and like avoidance, or is this, I just don’t wanna be touched because my body is just not touchable at this moment. If it’s over stimulation, we’re gonna do an inventory and look at all the different ways that our body is being stimulated throughout the day and trying to figure out where can I buy back some space. And then we are going to look at the ways in which we can reset our own nervous system in spite of that stimulation so that we are counteracting the effects of that stimulation. And then the last part is that we wanna be able to communicate effectively with our partner. We wanna be able to say, I see what you want in this moment. And it makes total sense and it’s not what I want right now.

We can validate their need or their wish or their desire. And we can see it both to them and inside of ourselves as a beautiful thing. It’s a positive thing. You know, they want to be with you. They love you. And making that mindset shift is, is gonna help us to hold space for that wish and that feeling and not, you know, leave our partner feeling rejected or unwanted while still not necessarily meaning that we need to have sex if we don’t wanna have sex. Right. I think you might not wanna have sex right now. And that’s okay. And how can you say no in a way that your partner can understand and can feel held as well. And eventually the more you’re able to communicate your needs and your boundaries with your partner and the more you’re able to kind of address some of the overstimulation that’s leaving, you wanting these boundaries may allow you to actually get back to a place of wanting to have sex again, of wanting and seeking more stimulation because you have bandwidth.

So it’s like, it’s kind of counterintuitive, but I think it does make sense when you really think about it, that the more we’re able to say no effectively, no to our children’s jumping all over us, no to other things that are overstimulating us, no to our partner asking for sex, then actually allows us to be in a space where we have bandwidth to actually engage in sex with our partner in a way that feels good to us because we want it because we’re ready for it because we have the physiological space for it. So I think that this is hopefully a very long winded answer to this woman’s question. But I think this idea that we, you know, yes, that episode that I, that I recorded with Chelsea is a great episode. If you want something and you’re looking for ways to ask for the thing you want, and eventually I want you, this, this person who’s writing us now to be able to get to that place.

But if you’re not in that place right now, there’s a lot that has to happen before you’re ready to get there. And so eventually you kind of have to figure out, do I want to start wanting to have sex with my partner? Do I wanna get to a place where I have the bandwidth and when you’re ready to do that work, listen to this, try some of these strategies and see if it gets you closer to that place where you want it. And then maybe go back and listen to that episode where you talk about actually asking for what you want and how you want it and what feels good to you.

So thanks for listening and don’t be a stranger.

 

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