Your DIfY Sex Therapy program starts outside the bedroom.
And, it comes after doing some crucial prep work: understanding what role your physical, medical, and relationship factors have to do with your difficulties, especially ED. You’ve talked with your Doc to make sure the symptoms you’ve been having aren’t signals of a more serious condition, and you’ve talked with your wife to make sure you’re both committed to making your intimate life more satisfying — and you have defined what you want that part of your life to be.
Time to outline and commit to an action program that will ensure you achieve the changes you want.
Commit to Doing the Work
In order to build the love making skills that will bring back the satisfaction and intimacy you want, you must take the time to practice those skills. Most couples find 2 – 4 sessions a week are enough, with each session lasting about 60 to 90 minutes.
At first these sessions will be outside the bedroom, with your clothes on, and be incorporated into your everyday activities. Later sessions will need to be private scheduled time, taking longer, becoming more intimate, and challenging you to feel, do, and even talk about activities you may never have thought someone like you would do — or be able to do.
You’ll need to do exercises to help you get more confident and more competent with your loving making skills that can work for you now, for each of the phases in the Sexual Response Cycle. It is real important to do all the exercises. And, do them in order.
It’s not going to work to increase your excitement skills if you don’t have the desire to have sex. Likewise, if you get focused just on getting an erection, and don’t do the comfort and relaxation exercises, you won’t be able to relax and regain your erection if you start to lose it.
This means making a significant commitment to each other and to yourself to get beyond not just ED, but the fear of ED, the fear of failing to achieve, lose, and then regain an erection. Beyond feeling like a failure as a sexual partner. Beyond measuring your sexual success by the strength, longevity, and size of your erection.
It’s even getting beyond the ideas and lessons you learned at your mother/father’s knee about what it meant to be sexual — what people like you should do.
Expect to be challenged when scheduling your sessions, making time for them in the busyness of your everyday life, and keeping your commitment to work on making your love life better.
This will be a big change in your lives. And, we know that any change can be a challenge. Changing your long held habitual sexual behavior and practices is often a significant challenge.
If this is you, remember, it’s not the challenge that counts, but how you handle the challenge. As a therapist, I assure my clients that the discomfort and struggles they have when trying to change what they’re doing or thinking, are an important part of the process.
If you aren’t feeling uncomfortable, or aren’t struggling, you aren’t paying attention.
Change is stressful. Not changing is even more stressful.
You can expect to feel uncomfortable as you go through some of these exercises, or even when scheduling them. Know you’ll probably reach the point where it just seems too much.
Then relax and realize you are doing just what you need to be doing. Breaking out of the old habits that are as comfortable as old slippers, and making changes that will prove to be even better than those slippers were when they were new.
The other challenge is decreasing your fear about being able to get an erection as you do the exercise. If I were working with you in my office, I would prohibit you from attempting intercourse during the time we were working on building your sexual skills. Don’t focus on intercourse until you have at least a couple of sessions with each of the skill areas.
So follow the rules. When you start your DIfY sex skills training program, agree to stop having intercourse until you’ve finished the six steps. It will really help make a big difference in what you’ll eventually be able to do.
