People Pleasing In Bed | Szn. 4 Ep. 13

Hi, it's Dr. Jen Kennedy. I'm a sexologist and couples therapist. The Pleasure Project is about sex and relationships. That includes desire, dysfunction, dissatisfaction, exploration, toys and trends. Sometimes I'll enlist other experts. Sometimes it'll just be me. We'll increase your insight and enhance your pleasure. So tune in. You probably don't have a libido problem. You have a self-abandoned problem. If your sex life feels tense, mismatched or confusing, if one of you is always pursuing and the other is always pulling away, it might not be about desire levels at all. It might be people pleasing. The subtle ways you override your body to keep the peace. The ways you say yes to avoid rejection. The ways you initiate to avoid abandonment. The ways you perform arousal you don't actually feel. Do that long enough and something critical happens. You stop knowing what you want. This episode is about the disappearing self in intimate relationships and why adaptation kills desire. So tune in. So sometimes the biggest problem in your sex life isn't communication. It's that you don't actually know what you want anymore. We often think that desire issues are just about libido. Like, I get calls all the time, I don't have libido or I have high libido or low libido. But actually underneath that, many times what's actually happening is conflicts about something that's a little bit more subtle. It could be about self abandonment. It could be about people pleasing and it could be about chronic adaptation either way. So that's what we're going to impact today. This isn't just about sex. This is about identity. So thanks for joining me. Welcome back to Pleasure Project. So both high and low partners can choose, low can lose access, sorry not choose access, lose access to their authentic wanting. And I see this happen because over time, most of the couples I see have been together a very long time. And so this isn't just sort of a spontaneous thing that happens. It's a reproach that happens over and over again. And eventually they're like, okay, I'm just giving up. I'm not trying anymore because what has played out repeatedly doesn't really feel very good. And so it starts to be kind of a stepping down of what they have done and they just don't want to do that dance anymore. And I find that if we can look at what this dance means and what's at play because the self abandonment is interesting, it's sometimes kind of the path of least resistance. But in that resistance is something that matters. And if you stop showing up, if you stop advocating for yourself, if you stop advocating for the relationship, eventually there's resentment, there's a sadness, kind of a low level depression. So I just want to talk about kind of what happens in each of these stages. The people pleasing is also really interesting. Sometimes I get couples where both people identify as like people pleasers, like they want to get it right. They want to be pleasers. If you've got two people that are trying to please, good luck because they're both really eager. They don't want to say no. They don't want to disappoint anybody. So it ends up being a sort of hot potato of let me make things go well. It's better than two people who don't care what anyone thinks. But it's almost like when you have two anxiously attached people, then you've got a lot of pleasing but not a lot of actually satisfaction happening. And then that leads into the third one I mentioned, which is the chronic adaptation. So part of this is looking at the self abandonment that happens in relational terms. So that looks like prioritizing relational harmony over self truth. Now of course the relationship matters and we have to consider what is for the greater good sometimes. We have to go along to get along sometimes and we also have to recognize what do we need. And I'm not just talking about like in this moment with this actual act, I'm talking about relationally in a larger context. And I think that sometimes couples check out because it's too hard and they don't want to name what's actually going on and what feels needed and necessary. I do this exercise with many couples called Fanos, which I really, really love. And it is really simple. It's five steps, F-A-N-O-S are the acronyms and it starts with feelings, naming a feeling. A is affirm your partner. So just name something that you appreciate that they've done and is name a need, a need that you have that may or may not be met by your partner. O is ownership. So take ownership over something. Maybe you could have done better. Maybe something you need to clean up. And then S is something that you're struggling with. And it's really interesting because in the relational harmony kind of thing, like in that idea of looking back and seeing sort of in the greater piece of this, what is actually working and what needs to be cleaned up and what are your needs. A lot of times people can't even identify what their needs are. They're looking outward or maybe they're only looking inward. They're just really thinking about what hasn't worked in their caring resentment. So if I find that couples that can go through this Thanos with some success on a regular basis, it really keeps their relational structure in much better shape. So I will put that in the show notes. If you want to go through this exercise, I think it's a really helpful thing to do on some regular basis, but prioritizing the relational harmony over yourself, truth, not great. I think both are important. The other piece about self-abandonment is over adapting to maintain attachment security. So I mentioned before, those that run a little bit anxious sometimes will really bend backwards to make sure that things seem okay rather than sometimes sticking your neck out and saying, this doesn't work for me. And not like it's an ultimatum, but saying what you said or what happened or the tone or whatever, right? Naming and actually engaging in healthy conflict is sometimes necessary in relationships. And you must be willing to do that. So not over adapting to maintain security at all costs. I think you just can't do that. So you can't do that in service of self, you know, the self-abandonment in that way doesn't ultimately serve you or the relationship. Lastly, suppressing internal cues to avoid conflict, rejection or shame. Now this is going to happen sometimes. It can happen actually with the high or the low desire partner, the internal cues where you're like, you know, you're getting cues and it might look like I feel like I, a conflict is coming on and I want to avoid it or I feel rejection is coming on. I want to avoid it or I feel a wash of shame because I'm not good enough, whatever version of that is coming on for you. And so to at all costs, you're trying to avoid those feelings. And sometimes you have to experience those feelings. Rejection and shame are part of being in a relationship at times and it's okay. You will survive. You'll get to the other side of it. So you can't abandon yourself to avoid those feelings and stay in a healthy relationship at all costs. Like you can't do that. So let's tie it over to the attachment dynamics. So anxiously attached partners may overperform desire to maintain closeness because more than anything, they want proximity. They want confirmation effort. And so sometimes they are going to do that at all costs, even at their own self. Sometimes what actually is true for them or what they wanted in terms of how this was going to manifest, they are going to mask that. That's what the anxious person sometimes is going to do, unfortunately. The avoidantly attached partner may suppress desire to maintain autonomy because they don't want to feel consumed and subsumed. They need some autonomy that is more important to them. Whereas like anxious person wants proximity, sometimes the avoidantly attached person does not want too much. It starts to feel overwhelming. So they may suppress desire. Even though they're feeling it, they may not act on it in the same way. The secure attachment, however, allows for differentiation. The securely attached person, which is what we're going for ideally, we're moving toward ideally in healthier relationships, allows for us to be close and for us to be separate. And wanting is okay, is acceptable, is tolerable within themselves and within their partners without a collapse, an inner collapse. Because desire really does require differentiation. So we want desire to be present, but it also requires the ability to have differentiation, meaning I'm separate from you and you might want different things than me. If you cannot tolerate your partner being disappointed, you cannot access your own erotic truth. So at times your partner is going to want different things or dislike what you said or did or how do you touch them, you have to be able to tolerate that. That is a normal process of negotiating desire and erotic experiences. So let's look at the high desire and the people pleasing that tends to sometimes manifest in that dynamic. So the higher desire partner, which was on the previous podcast that I did, you might want to tune into that. That partner initiates sex not from necessarily always authentic arousal, but sometimes from anxiety. They also sometimes seek reassurance through sex. So they might be wanting to get confirmation, affirmation of closeness, of relational security, not always, but sometimes there is, you know, there's even unconscious sense of like, are we still okay? Can you confirm with me? Is this going well? And so there's, there's sometimes in, you know, when they're in their people pleasing side of things, a panicked feeling by distance or lack of proximity, and they might overfunction erotically as a result. So in, in that space, you might see over functioning that is happening that looks like, let me do everything for you. Let me take over. Let me be so responsive. The cost is that sometimes that higher desire partner can feel resentment, burnout, they can feel unchosen, they can feel a lack of regulation and not a sense of connection. That becomes really difficult because they're, they're operating from and they're initiating from more of a over functioning place. They're seeking reassurance through sex. They're feeling panicked, necessarily not always. These are not always or never, but sometimes their initiation comes from a place of anxiety. They're initiating less from an authentic arousal and more from a desire to calm their anxiety so they don't like the distance. And so sometimes that can also result in just trying to calm themselves instead of an authentic connection. Now let's flip that to the low desire people pleasing says yes, when they might mean actually maybe and they more perform arousal. The lower desire partner avoids kind of naming their turn offs. So there might be things that they're not that into, but they feel less inclined to actually tell you what those are. And so that gets hard because if it's like, if you don't really know what the turn ons are, the turn offs are, then it starts to feel like, well, I can't read you very well. They also silence fantasies as well as boundaries. Right? It's like if everything's sort of a muted, then you can't tell where things begin and end. Right? If there isn't a, oh, this really would be wonderful in the way of a fantasy. You also can't completely delineate what the boundary is. So the cost of that is that there's like a numbness sometimes an erotic numbness, a dissociation can sort of occur or feel like a witnessing increase shutdown over time because it just feels like everything's like an ambivalence. Maybe desire drops further because the body learns sometimes that sex isn't safe because it isn't always interested and desired. And yet it performs anyway. So that's where it gets tricky when sex becomes perfunctory and there's a push through it. Then the body learns it and also the partner learns it that there's just like a, it's happening, but it's not really wanted. So suppression doesn't preserve connection. It erodes polarity, vitality and self-trust. All right. We're going to take a quick break and then we're going to talk about the cost of suppressing what you really want. A quick pause here to share something that I've been working on that I think you will really appreciate, especially if you've ever felt confused or disconnected from your sexual desire. It's a self-paced course that I created for women who want a better understanding of their sexual desire, especially if it's felt confusing, inconsistent or hard to access. A lot of us are taught that desires should just be there, effortless, spontaneous, always on, but that is not the reality for most people. And when it's not, it can leave you feeling frustrated or like something is wrong with you. You're turned on one day and completely disconnected the next, or if you've struggled to say what you really want sexually. If you're both excited by the idea of vibrant sex and hesitant about what that even looks like, this course is for you. Desire is complex. It lives in your brain just as much as your body. And in this course, I guide you through the understanding of your unique relationship to it, without pressure, shame or performance. You'll get short videos and guided worksheets to help you map out your personal erotic template, identify what turns you on and off and what shuts you down, understand the blocks that might be getting in your way, reconnect with your body, and you'll explore your sexual self with more confidence and curiosity. You can go at your own pace. You don't need to want more sex. You just need to want to know yourself better. So if this resonates, then head on over to pleasureproject.us and learn more and enroll in the course. Now, back to the episode. All right, welcome back. So when you lose access to your erotic compass, in this case, if you chronically override your internal signals, which is what we were just talking about, your body stops sending clear cues because they don't get honored. You mistake anxiety for desire because sometimes that excitement sort of runs on that same channel. If you think about it, right, there's sometimes like that feeling of excitement I was thinking about going down a roller coaster or thinking about when you really like somebody, there's like a jumping in the stomach almost. Anxiety and desire and excitement sort of feel sometimes physiologically like the cues kind of mirror each other a little bit. And so sometimes there can be a mistake of, am I anxious or am I excited or desirous? You mistake numbness for low libido. It's like, what's happening? You're not sure your internal signals can get a little bit blunted or confused. So unexpressed desire becomes irritability. It can kind of look like criticism, emotional distancing, and then a confusion of like, I don't even know why I'm annoyed. This whole realm feels like work, feels like something I don't necessarily want to participate in because I don't know how. I don't know what's going on. I don't know what's going on internally. If you don't understand your own internal cues, it starts to feel hard to relate because you're not sending clear signals internally and then externally to your partner. So when sex is driven by obligation or fear, there is less curiosity. Curiosity is everything in this erotic space. When the mind is engaged, when it's like, ooh, what is that? What does your body look like? What does it taste like? What does it smell like? What does it feel like? When curiosity is turned off and you're more towards survival or fear or boredom or getting through it, boy, arousal is gone. Fear is gone. So this is the zone where when sex is driven by obligation or fear, there is less curiosity, less spontaneity, less embodied presence. So here's the paradox. The more you try to protect the relationship by suppressing yourself, the less alive the relationship becomes. And most couples jump straight to, we need better communication. That is the number one thing I hear. When couples call in for therapy as we need better communication and they do, but I would say it's not just talking. It is so much about nonverbal. It's eye contact. It's tone. It's timing. It's understanding what's happening and willingness to share that with the other person. So right, we'll kind of go, we want a script. We need to compromise. And yes, but I would say a script doesn't work. It works like the first time because you're hearing it and you're like, oh, but then after you hear the same script, or if you try to return and go to the same place, the same way, the same time, the same thing, it's not going to work because you already know, and it feels like you're just in a routine and it feels like you're trying to play out the same thing that's worked before. And it's, I don't know, it's just, it's not going to work the same. So the deeper problem is you cannot communicate a desire that you yourself have not reclaimed. This is kind of where, actually, this is where my course begins because I've always been at the mindset like you can't, yeah, you can't really take someone down a road that you haven't been or that you aren't currently comfortable going. So helping someone understand your own mapping is going to be really important. And so my pleasure circle course actually talks about a lot of this, right? What are the main things that impact women's sexuality? And the reality is the main areas that I cover affect everyone's sexuality. There's differences between men and women, but a lot of this stuff, because I've run through this course with couples, with men and women. And so several of these things affect both, including trauma, including body image, family of origin, cultural, like all those things, those affect men and women. The research came out regarding women, but we are humans and we are all living in these bodies. So yeah, these things affect everybody. So where did you come from? What are the influences on you? And where are you currently in relationship to these things? Are a roadmap for what's happening currently in your relationship, right? Before practicing kind of how to say yes or no to a partner, first clarify what is actually a yes for me? What is a fear-based yes? What is a protective or no versus like an authentic no? So like in my first module, we're identifying authentic desire versus adaptive desire. We're distinguishing anxiety-driven arousal from embodied wanting. Like kind of reconnecting to erotic curiosity, without partner pressure, because I do think that understanding what actually turns you on and what informs your erotic template, meaning your unique template of sexual interest is critical. Now it can change over time. It's not like it's template makes it sound like it's a blueprint that will not change. It definitely changes. It gets influenced by new things that you encounter in your world that delight you or disgust you or whatever new experiences that you have with partners or with yourself, whatever, right? New things are going to come in and influence you, but there is sort of a working template that tends to be your go-to. And when you know that, it really is helpful. So examining sort of the sexual scripts that you've inherited and created, I would say, that as you've gone, noticing kind of where you've learned your wants and if you feel like at times maybe you're too much or not enough. So just kind of conversations around that and start reclaiming your own desire. So I think things to ask yourself maybe this week that are relative to this is where did I say yes this week, but maybe feel contraction or where did I avoid saying yes that I actually wanted to say yes, right? It could be either way. So if you are in the people pleasing realm, where do you reside in that? And are there times you wish you had said yes and didn't or did say yes and wish you hadn't? I just wonder about that sort of for you. So in closing reflection, desire isn't just about what turns you on. It's about whether you're willing to be known. I think that is actually at the crux of so much of what the work I do as a couples therapist is people want to be known. That is who we are as humans. We want to be known. If you're hiding from your own wanting, it makes sense. And also I'm going to challenge you that that is where the gold gets. I think shrinking kind of away from it kills the eroticism and we have to reclaim that. We have to reclaim that to have this more robust bigger life that I think we want to step into. So I think it starts with honesty with ourselves and then honesty with our partner. Some other podcasts that I think you might enjoy if this was helpful. The High Desire Partner podcast, which I recently recorded. I also recorded a podcast with Dr. Diana Hill that was called Wise Effort in the Bedroom. Wise Effort is based on a Buddhist principle and she wrote a book called Wise Effort and we specifically talked about it as it applies to the bedroom. So I thought that was interesting. And then also I wrote or I recorded a podcast about why do you have sex, which is kind of about motivations in the bedroom. So those will all be linked in the show notes. So you can tune into those and if you enjoyed this, please leave a comment. And if you have other ideas of podcasts or topics that you would like to hear more about, please drop me a note, give me suggestions. If things are happening in your life that you find interesting, let me know. I would love to talk more about it. Okay, thanks. Hey, it's Dr. Jen. Thanks for tuning in. If something in today's episode resonated with you, please take a moment to leave us a review and drop a comment. We'd love your feedback. It really helps support the podcast and keeps this content coming your way. If you're looking to dive deeper into pleasure, connection and self-discovery, check out my Pleasure Circle course where we explore these topics in a fun, guided way. I also write a weekly newsletter with articles, insights and inspiration to help you live a more connect, pleasure-filled life. And if you want to connect with me directly, you can message me on Instagram at Dr. Jen Kennedy or email me at drjenkennedy at gmail.com. I'd love to hear from you.