When Your Partner Doesn’t Want to Grow – Transcript
When one person wants to grow and the other person, not so much.
This is a common issue that comes up in relationships where one person is really invested in their own evolution and personal growth and development, and the other person might be pretty content to just stay where they are. This will often come up in the sexual sphere, where things hit a standstill and aren’t really developing or growing. They feel really stagnant, so one person typically is more invested in the idea of jumpstarting this part of the relationship and changing it, and the other person may or may not be interested in doing that as well.
Typically, that reservation would come from unresolved trauma and stuff that they haven’t looked at in their past, so when they connect in an intimate relationship and those things start to get provoked and triggered and unearthed, either you go forward and decide to confront those things head on to heal them and transform them, or you want to back off and continue to put those underneath the carpet.
It really comes down to how you view life and your relationship. In my philosophy, a relationship is a vessel for personal growth and transformation. We expect that in a personal, intimate relationship, our most deep-seated issues, traumas, and unresolved stuff get triggered and come to the surface in this beautiful container to be illuminated and looked at with our partner in this beautiful light of love and passion and desire for each other.
We can unearth those things, bring them up, and then heal them together. Or we can all do our individual work, but we’re also doing this stuff together.
This is what I find most profound. It’s one of the biggest messages in my work; this really is the true function of relationships, to hold the growth of the individuals, so your growth, my growth, and the growth of the relationship itself. There are three entities that we’re constantly looking at to see how we can better grow them, develop them, and take them to the highest level possible.
Some people look at their relationships as having this capacity, but I’d say that most people don’t. They might look at other parts of their lives as having this ability to grow and evolve, like maybe their health and their well-being, or most people look at their careers as a place where they can grow and develop. They definitely adhere to the concept that they can go get some education or training in a particular area, and then they go out into the world, do this work, and continue to get training and workshopped and seminars and mentorships and keep abreast of the latest developments in their industry. Most people accept that as something they have to do to really stay on top of their game.
People don’t tend to apply the same concept to an intimate relationship, and that’s partly connected to this whole repression around sexuality and intimacy, where nobody really gets taught how to do relationships and certainly no one’s getting any good sex education out there.
Imagine if you go buy a new plant, bring it home, and set it in the corner of your room. At first, you’re all excited about the plant, so you give it great sunlight and buy it the best fertilizer, water it exactly when you’re supposed to water it, and it flourishes.
Then you get a bit bored, you’ve got other things going on and other priorities in your life, and so you just neglect the plant and forget about it. You say, “You know what? The plant is taking up space, so I’m going to put it in the corner over here. It’s still an all-right plant, but I’ve got other stuff. I just got this new chair, so let’s put the chair over there.” And the plant starts to wither and die of neglect.
Of course, the exact same thing happens to our relationships. They don’t die a natural death. They die a neglect death where people have been ignoring them and not putting positive energy and intention into them, not using them as the vessels for growth that they were intended to be.
I see intimate relationships as one of the most powerful personal growth tools that are out there, but they have to have the ingredient of gourmet, passionate sex. Not just a buddy relationship. I talked about this last week in the podcast, “Are You Lovers or Are You Roommates?”
If you’re just roommates, you’re not tapping into the true potential of your relationship. You can be good partners and make a good couple in a lot of administrative ways. But if you’re not tearing each other’s clothes off and f**king the demons out of each other, you’re not really justifying a relationship and using it to its true potential.
I live by the philosophy “grow or die.” Meaning that if you’re not growing, you’re dying. Nothing in nature remains in stasis. That’s an illusion. We’re either going forward and learning and developing and hitting new heights in everything we do, or we’re going backward. Nothing just stays stagnant. The stagnancy eventually turns into more rot and decay and destruction. People often don’t see that, and they certainly don’t connect the two things together.
I see personal relationships or intimate sexual relationships as this incredible venue for you to really self-actualize.
As I said, we want and expect that our deepest wounds will get triggered. Often, our family-of-origin wounds are where they’re going to come up, in our most vulnerable, intimate relationships.
This is good. We want this to happen, but it’s only really good if both people have an understanding that this is what is supposed to happen and we’re both committed to working through these things as they come up. Because if you don’t look at the relationship that way, you’re going to see these things as annoyances, or “Oh, this person has a lot of baggage.” Or you’ll just keep going in circles around the same issues and never be able to break out of these patterns. And you’ll carry these patterns from relationship to relationship because they never actually get healed.
Let’s say you’re in this position where you realize that you want to grow, you want to develop, and it’s really hard to do that if you’re in a relationship with someone who doesn’t. I’m all for the idea that we have our own individual paths and lives, but as you’re so intimately connected with somebody, after a while, if you keep growing and evolving and moving forward, and your partner doesn’t, you’re going to leave them behind.
People are free to choose what they want to do. You can invite them to come with you, and if they don’t want to come, they don’t want to come.
But let’s say that you’re in love with this person, so you have an attachment and a vested interest in them coming. This is what this podcast is really all about. What do you do?
First off, to say that you’ve been in a relationship where your shared value was stagnation—I’m not being extremist here. People knowingly or not commit to stagnation. “Let’s keep the same the same. We’ve got a don’t ask/don’t tell policy in the relationship. We’re totally committed to the idea of white lies, to not hurt each other’s feelings.” [Laughs] It’s a commitment they have.
If you entered your relationship under those pretenses, then you’re changing the status quo. You’re changing the rules of the game that you both agreed on when you entered into the relationship. Your partner may or may not want to follow you along on your new adventure in this new direction that you’ve decided on because you changed the way that things were.
This is where you need to initiate a conversation about how this is what you’ve discovered, and this is what you’ve learned. Even if people introduce my work into the conversation of, “Look, there’s nothing wrong with our sex life,” people often feel like their partner will be threatened to hear, “But did you know that women can have cervical orgasms? And this crazy lady, Kim Anami, says all women can. She guarantees it. She says every guy can f**k like Sting, and every woman can shoot ejaculate across the room, and every guy can have sex for hours and hours and have multiple orgasms and full-body orgasms.” Then they’ll say, “Huh, really?”
You’re not saying, “Hey, you’re not so great in bed,” but “This is what’s actually possible.”
That’s part of the framework. And truly, there might be problems that really do need to get fixed, but you can frame the conversation in this light of, “Look at all the incredible things that are out there that I didn’t even have any idea about.”
So you can start from there. Most people, unless they’ve had intense sexual trauma, will be intrigued because, wow, why wouldn’t that sound amazing? And if they don’t think it sounds amazing, it’s because they’ve got a lot of deep-seated trauma they haven’t looked at.
Obviously, we’ve got extremely high statistics around incidents of sexual assault, sexual abuse in our culture, and these are only the reported numbers. So most people are carrying around some wounding and trauma around sexuality.
Stuff builds up in the relationship if you do not clear it out and do the work. In a relationship where the tacit agreement is “Don’t ask/don’t tell, instead, tell white lies,” you’re going to have this eventual pileup of stuff that does not get dealt with. People are afraid of confrontation. They want to keep the peace and shovel things under the rug instead of telling the truth, but this takes a toll.
You end up with this mountain of unresolved stuff that piles up, and this turns into a wall, which translates into not feeling connected, and then that translates into not wanting to have sex. Then this will show up as somebody’s premature ejaculation, erectile dysfunction, low libido, or the woman’s inability to lubricate.
Because Western medicine is so f**king dumb and people are conditioned to think that things are so totally unrelated to the state of relationship, people don’t connect them. They don’t think there’s any relationship between what’s happening and their symptoms, and these are just the sexual ones, not to mention all the other life symptoms, like depression or weight gain, or really struggling in your career or financially.
My view is that these things are a direct barometer of stagnancy in our relationship. Because sexual energy is so powerful, it is, I always say, our life force energy. If it’s being suppressed, it takes a massive toll not just on the relationship but on you as an individual and your health, eventually. These things become physical manifestations of the symptoms of stagnation.
The first thing to do is to have a conversation and express what you’ve discovered, what you’re learning about, and invite them. If you don’t already have that dynamic, invite it. “This is what I’d like to do. I’d like to look at our relationship as this place of growth and evolution. Are you interested in that? Look at all the possibilities out there for this.”
Then send them to me. Send them to some of my videos. I’ve got tons of free content out here. My podcasts, my YouTube channel, tons of old blog posts. You can send them over to any of this stuff. I have a bunch of video series on my website under Sexual Savant Salons for couples, women, vaginas, sexy mamas, and men. People can sign up for any of those to get a deeper sense of what I’m talking about and what’s really possible.
That’s one of my favorite things in this work, showing people what’s possible, and then obviously, showing them how to get there.
Let’s say that the best-case scenario is the partner says, “Wow, that sounds amazing, so sign me up. You really want to learn more about the best blow jobs you can give? I totally support that. Fantastic.”
If they don’t come along, then you give them the most gentle, loving invitation that you can. Sometimes, because things have gotten so bad that you have to express that, you start out with a gentle invitation of, “This is what could happen. These are the possibilities for us.”
If they don’t hear that, then you might go deeper into how you’re being affected by the lack of growth in the relationship.
Try to keep it really on you. Try not to blame them. Try not to put it on them. But talk about how you feel and the effect it’s having on you.
Then, if they still don’t bite and they’re not interested, I suggest that you pull all the focus and the attention away from them. You bring all the attention back to you and focus on your growth, development, and healing.
This piece is really important. You need to just stop asking them and then feeling resentful and irritated, and punishing them secretly. No. You need to totally detach and withdraw that invitation. Let go of the fact that they said no and come back to yourself.
Now you’re going to throw yourself into therapy, healing modalities, coaching, and working on yourself. Whatever you can do. If you find that you have trauma that hasn’t been resolved, I talk a lot in my salons about different ways to clear trauma from a neural pathway perspective, a really deep way to erase that in your system.
Even the study of sexual energy, just familiarizing yourself and reconnecting with your sexual energy, is a huge quantum leap in your growth and development.
Whatever that looks like for you, start doing your own internal work. If you’ve identified places where you’re holding pain, like you’ve got family-of-origin issues, you’ve got stuff that’s happened in your twenties, thirties, forties, anything, you identify it. And maybe you don’t identify it as that. Maybe all you’ve got is the knowledge that you’ve got patterns that you keep repeating that are sabotaging your relationship and keep happening over and over again.
That’s fine. That’s enough to start with, and then bring that to somebody and initiate the process of doing some work.
Then something like this will happen. You start to clear your own trauma and blockages. The things that have been imprinted upon you and your nervous system, when you start to collapse those neural pathways, it means you won’t continue to act in the same ways. Those patterns that kept haunting you for years will fall away. You won’t be manifesting the same kinds of situations into your space and your life, and you’ll be reacting differently to your intimate partner.
There’s a whole philosophy that we attract people who are meant to trigger us. They’re holding energetic imprints that are very similar to ones that we were either hurt by or had trauma around in our family of origin or beyond, and we do that because, at an unconscious level, we want to clear them. We want to be able to heal and grow.
So we bring people to us who have a similar energy pattern that will help us to do this. What you often notice then is that things that used to trigger you about your partner suddenly just roll off your back. You just take it in stride and deal with it.
At the same time, whatever you notice about your partner that you’re getting triggered by, write it down, make a list, and then take it into contemplation and/or to your counselor or therapist or wherever you’ve decided to go. You can ask your higher self for guidance on what this is and how you can best heal it.
As you grow, shift, and transform, you’ll have more clarity on what you want, and you’ll have the confidence to take action, whether that’s getting more clear about your needs and expressing them to your partner and requesting what you want, setting boundaries in the relationship, or doing things that you didn’t do before, or not doing things that you used to do, or maybe it’s even leaving.
But at this point, you don’t have to make the decision. You just have to keep doing enough work until you get that level of healing and clarity, where you’ve shifted to another level within yourself.
In doing this work, the next thing that happens is that your partner is going to start to sense that there’s something different in you. They might not be able to put their finger on it exactly, but maybe a way that you were pressuring them or nagging them or resenting them or belittling them is toned down or even gone. They’ve suddenly got more space. They’ve got more breathing room.
The same puzzle pieces of trauma and dysfunction that were once there don’t lock together in the same way anymore. This shifts the entire dynamic in the relationship.
You will interact with each other in a new way, and you will get triggered much less because now you’ve cleared your own stuff.
The partner will feel the shift and, typically, they are intrigued. Now they’re a little more interested and thinking, “What do you have going on over there?” It’s like when people do personal work or go to the gym, they have a whole new wellness routine, and people say, “What are you doing? You feel different, you look different. What are you doing?” They’re curious because they can feel it, and it feels good.
That’s what happens with the partner, generally; they feel that something’s different. Now they’re a little more interested. They’re feeling more attracted to you because you’re more whole, you’re more healed, and you’re not acting out in as much of a wounded place as you were before.
Plus, you’ve stopped pointing the finger at them as the source of your ills. You’ve taken full responsibility for your healing and wellness. The pressure and the attacks are off them. Now they can let down their guard again and assess what’s really going on. If it feels good, as I said, they may draw closer, and then they may start to be more intrigued and ask you about what you’ve been up to.
But leaving the space is quite important for them to catch their breath from whatever energy you’ve been throwing at them and perceive and feel some difference in you. That’s the part that we’re really waiting for. And we’re not waiting for it in the sense of, “Oh, we can’t go forward until this happens,” or “When is this going to happen?” You have to release all attachment to it even happening.
I’m just telling you what typically happens, but you’re doing this for your own good and investment in yourself, and ultimately the relationship. But it’s not about waiting for the moment they come running. That’s not the focus.
All right, the next stage would be maybe nothing changes in them, but everything has changed in you. Maybe they don’t really feel affected by what you’ve done. They seem to still be stewing in a lot of their own stuff and not really reacting to you or your training. They’ve still got walls up. That’s really what it is. They’ve built up walls over the years, either through being in a relationship together or their own past trauma or a combination of both, and they’re still locked in.
Here then, again, you would be less affected by what they do, or they don’t do. You are more interested in what you need and what makes you feel good. You’re less triggered in the relationship, and you’re not blaming them for things that might be your wounding that you’ve projected on them, and the whole dynamic shifts.
This might mean that you end up leaving the relationship, and so be it. But at this stage, you have the clarity. If you’ve done enough work, you’ve built this up, and I don’t exactly know how long this could take; it could take months. A good, serious, committed therapy, I’d say, could be three to six, maybe.
During this time period, you say to yourself, “Look, I’m taking this timeout of three to six months. I’m not going to be thinking, ‘Do I stay in the relationship? What do I do? How can I …’ Don’t even go there. Focus 1000% on you.
At this point, you’ve done your three to six months, and presumably, you’ll have more clarity about what you actually want and the decision that you’ll make. Do you want to stay in this relationship?
If they’ve started to become intrigued and interested, maybe they’ve started to join you on this path slowly but surely, or sometimes they dive right in. If they’ve done absolutely nothing and there’s still no shift, then you get to make the decision. Is there still more work for you to do? Do you have clarity? Really trust that when you commit yourself to this level of deep, personal work, you’ll know. You’ll know what to do once you go through to the other side of that.
If you leave, you leave. I guess what I also want to say here is don’t be afraid of ending relationships, because sometimes they need to die before they can come back reborn. Sometimes you actually need that physical space and the true burning to ashes of a relationship, and it doesn’t mean you’ll be separated forever.
But maybe you’ll realize, “Okay, I’ve hit a limit where I’m going to walk away from this now because it doesn’t feel good for my self-worth. I’m not being valued and honored, and I’m losing myself. I’m losing the true, authentic, good parts of me by staying in this situation.” So then you make the decision to leave.
And at that point, that can often spur people into action, where they say, “Oh, okay.” Then that’s enough of a shock to their system, so they often come back to say, “All right.” Especially when you’re doing it from such a very genuine achieved place, meaning you worked at this. You earned this. You earned this wisdom and this insight and the spiritual strength to make your decision.
People have a truth barometer. We all have divining rods within us, and when we feel the truth, sometimes it takes that level of shock to the system to penetrate through our walls to get there, and that wakes us up to realize, “Oh, okay. Now or never, what’s my decision?” Then they may come back to you.
In that act of leaving and whatever that looks like, you can rebuild. If the person comes in as a malleable, committed force, willing to do the work on a relationship, then you get to decide, “All right, do I want to pursue now with this person? How genuine are they? Do we need to take some time apart for them to collect themselves or do some work to really prove that they’re serious about it?” It depends where you are on the scale and how you want to play that.
That’s something that, again, I want to repeat: Don’t be afraid to make that decision.
A friend of mine years ago, her mom used to say to her, “What’s meant for you won’t pass by you.” I really love that as a sense of having faith that if this isn’t the right person for you, so be it. If it is the right person, things will work out, as long as we’re always being true to ourselves. That’s the thing that I find has to be there. There can be so much distortion when you’re living in a relationship full of lies or white lies or don’t ask/don’t tell.
But if you are committed to a path of honesty and deep communication in the relationship, then you can figure things out. Then the truth itself becomes something to put your faith into, believing that it will show you the right direction to go in.
That’s obviously like diverging at the crossroads of the direction that you could possibly go. Then the best-case scenario is that your partner, at some point during this process, becomes inspired and wants what you’ve got, or they want that to be applied to the relationship. They see the positive shift and changes in you, and it looks good. They’re attracted. They feel good. They see a new possibility, like a new chrysalis emerging from the relationship, seeing what that could look and feel like. Then you can go forward having this mutual agreement and commitment to use the relationship as a vessel for transformation and growth.
Which means that it is this space where you can bring all your stuff in and not get threatened or so triggered by it, because now you’re both in on the game. You’re both consciously looking at the things, or trying to consciously look at them. A lot of our stuff that comes up is unconscious. It’s stuff that’s been programmed or conditioned, or trauma that’s been wired into us, and so we can have reactions that are totally uncontrolled and unconscious.
As we bond and agree to fight this fight together, then we’re on the same team. When somebody has an episode that is unconscious and comes out into the space, we can try to work on it as allies, rather than as adversaries. And that’s the ultimate place that we want to be.
Of course, no one’s perfect. No one relationship is perfect. Sometimes all of us can get triggered and go beyond that conscious place. But the faster that we recover, the more we know that this is our agreement. This is what we’re here to do, to look at these things, let all our stuff come out from our deepest places, look at it together, and hold it in the space together.
Again, I’ll come back to this idea that the most powerful tool that you have with each other is a passionate, sexual, love connection.
This isn’t, again, like I said, just buddies or whatever. You have to have that deep level of sexual love. That will help you transform your stuff so much faster. You will burn through it like bionic phoenixes because you’ve got this wild, life-giving, life-changing, transformational tool at your fingertips—literally at your genitals—that you can use with each other.
In my work in my salons, I talk a lot about how couples can consciously use their sexual energy as a way to burn through their stuff even faster. They consciously learn how to exchange and move their energy in ways to process, transform, and uplevel at the speed of light. That’s where we want to be. That’s what we want to be doing to have this totally clear and open emotional channel and this very powerful and conscious sexual channel to reconcile all our stuff and keep evolving and growing.
The more you do this, the more it deepens your bond. When you bring stuff to the surface, process it together, and move through it, that’s the stuff that really cements your bond. You really get to know the deepest levels of your partner, share the deepest levels of yourself, get cherished, witnessed, held, and get loved through it.
There is no greater healing medicine than that experience. To really bring all pieces of you, your deepest parts, your most scared parts, terrified, even shameful parts, and the most vulnerable parts of all this rawness and bring it out and be loved and supported through the process of integrating and evolving together.
Today we have a fantastic All Star. She’s a woman who I think was in my very first Well-F**ked Woman Salon back in the day. In healing professions, and in any profession, like from doctors to psychologists, one of the things that you most love in your clients is compliance. Meaning the best students/patients/clients will do what you f**king tell them to do. [Laughs]
You give them these instructions, this home play, and some people will run with it.
Other people, it’s like pulling teeth. “Oh no, I didn’t do that. I didn’t do this.” You say, “Well, why are you paying me money to help you when you’re not even going to do the work?”
It’s like people who go to a naturopath, and the naturopath gives them all kinds of dietary suggestions, and they say, “No, no, no.” Well, why are you paying money to just come in? Do you just want someone to mommy you for a while?
Anyway, the opposite is true with this woman. She just took everything and ran with it. Just the fiercest homework-doer and home-play-doer, and she had phenomenal results. So she’s one of my favorite all-time Well-F**ked All Stars. Welcome.
***When Your Partner Doesn’t Want to Grow All Star Interview***
KIM: Hi, Maryanne. How’s it going?
MARYANNE: It’s going great. How are you doing?
KIM: Fantastic. We want to hear all about your experiences being in a relationship where you wanted to grow and evolve but felt like your partner wasn’t growing at the same pace. How did you work through that in your relationship? What did that look like for you?
MARYANNE: A lot of the things that I ended up approaching my partner about had resistance. I’d hear, “Yeah, it sounds good. I don’t have time for it,” that kind of thing.
But I remember when I discovered your work, and I read through every blog post. I was standing at the kitchen counter, reading stuff out to him. His whole body lit up, and he said, “Wow, is that really even possible? How does one do those things that you’re referring to, really growing sexually and being able to have this deep relationship and connection and intimacy with your partner?”
I remember noticing that he totally lit up. I remember I contacted you right after that and coached with you and signed up for all your programs.
He really woke up to anything sexually that I was exploring or thinking about doing. He was so excited about it. What I loved about your work was—and love still—is how you connected back to the deeper places within ourselves, the evolution and growth. He was so much better able to receive it through there than any of the other ways that I brought to him. I said, “You know what? I don’t care how you come to it.” [Laughs]
KIM: [Laughs] Through blow jobs or through sit-ups. Take your pick.
MARYANNE: Right. Right, exactly, or through just watching me become more sensual and sexual and open. Because one of the main reasons that I’d come to work with you was because I wanted to heal old sexual trauma and abuse. I’d done a lot of work on it already, but I noticed that there were threads of it showing up in my marriage and in my intimate times with my partner. So I really wanted to work on that.
What you showed me was not just where I didn’t want to be, but also how limitless it is, and that there wasn’t an upper limit on it. I got to explore that and how amazing that was.
I think witnessing me open up in that way really lit a light within him. Then he was so much more open to any other things spiritually or growth-wise that I suggested.
It was just this beautiful evolution that he came to through the sexual, sensual practices.
KIM: Sometimes I hear from men that it’s the full, sensual expression of the woman. When the woman really opens up and gives herself to him, it activates something in him, where his defenses, his resistance, melt away. Then he becomes much more accommodating and open to other suggestions, where before, when they feel this block in sexuality, they feel like maybe they’re being held at bay in some way. Whether that’s conscious or unconscious, they’re not as participating. When you remove that, they become much more willing.
MARYANNE: Exactly. I really think there’s so much truth in that because that was my experience. We joke with each other that it was just the sex part that he lit up about, but you’re right because I really feel that when a woman does fully open up into herself, her sexuality, her sensuality, and her ability to be vulnerable, that changes a man completely.
When a man fully witnesses that in a woman he’s with, it changes him. As a woman changes, she has so much power to shift him, and that’s really what I found and have carried. I think I met you seven years ago. It’s been that long. It hasn’t stopped evolving, which is so incredible.
KIM: I feel like when I’ve seen that as well, it’s this automatic innate reaction that a man has. When the woman really opens that way, something in him innately responds and feels so much more melted and open within himself to really receive her, look after her, and accommodate her. His masculine gets activated. When her feminine gets truly owned and inhabited through that deep surrender and sex, his masculine gets activated in a crazy, powerful way.
MARYANNE: Crazy-powerful is right. Women always crave for their man to hold them, and you always say, “If I fall, will you catch me?” I felt that so much. I didn’t even know it was so within him to give, pleasuring me. He is all about that.
KIM: Was he like that before, or were you not allowing it, or what’s the deal there?
MARYANNE: I wasn’t allowing it. [Laughs]. So I never got to see that because I was always holding back in some way. Then, when that changed and I wasn’t holding back anymore, it was unreal how, any chance he got, he wanted to help me feel good. Help me experience pleasure. And he was willing to explore the G-spot orgasms and the cervical orgasms. All of it.
I discovered parts of myself that I didn’t even know existed only because he was so willing to be there with no resistance whatsoever.
KIM: Again, so would you attribute his willingness to your opening? Was there anything else that you would say factored into what seemed like a pretty unbridled openness and willingness on his part as well?
MARYANNE: Yeah. I think me opening up drew that out of him too. It was me opening up. There was nothing else that changed at that time in our lives.
KIM: I know that you lead a very holistic lifestyle, so you might have been inviting him into meditation or health practices or whatever before. I’m sure some of that just filters through in your family life. It has to bleed over. But it sounds like he was less interested, and then when you touched on this piece and invited him into this arena, that was the catalyst that opened everything up.
MARYANNE: It really, really did. And yes, I did invite him into many different spaces that I felt were growth spaces for me. I invited him because I thought we should grow together. But I think he saw that as me trying to fix him and that there was a problem.
Maybe I did come across like that. It’s so long ago now, it’s even hard for me to remember. But I’m pretty sure I may have come across in that way. But when I stepped into the sexual work that I was doing just in healing myself, opening up this beautiful, magnetic, powerful, feminine within myself, he was like a moth to a flame. “Okay, whatever you say.” [Laughs]
I witnessed magic in those moments that I didn’t even think was possible, Kim. Ever.
KIM: After that, did he start saying, “Oh yeah, let’s go meditate together”? How did you see that filter out into other parts of your life, that openness?
MARYANNE: Yeah, yeah. It did filter out. He was more willing to meditate. I was doing a program with energy work, and he was more willing to hear about what I was really doing, to hear about triggers and what they are and how we can own them, how we can shift as a result of them, and the workaround. Your work, while it’s focused on the physical aspects of sex, also affects everything in the non-physical.
So when we did your first program—I say we because even though it was Well-F**ked Woman, he did it with me—he watched all the videos and some of the practices about deepening into intimacy. One we still use today is not to let anything get muddy on that glass pane between us. We’ll come to each other and say, “Okay, it feels a little muddy right now, so what are we not sharing?”
KIM: Oh, I love that. That’s beautiful.
MARYANNE: Yeah, what are we holding back? That metaphor has always stuck with us, and we love coming back to that because it’s so visually clear what’s going on there.
And it’s not that we’re not being honest with each other; it’s like a benchmark for us. Is the glass really clear right now, or is there mud on the glass? So what are we not sharing? Where have we held back consciously or unconsciously, or where could we explore something deeper? Where could we spend more time in physical intimacy?
And I think the other thing that we really carry till today is, “How is your emotional day today?” We ask each other that question. Not just “How is your day?”
KIM: How do you end up answering that question? Because it’s a very good distinction, not just narrating, “And then I went for lunch here with my friend, and then this happened at work.” How do you separate that layer, and what does the conversation look like then?
MARYANNE: Yeah, yeah. It’s very powerful for us. We always start with a feeling, and we worked a lot on the difference between “I feel that” or “I believe that” or “I think that” versus what I’m actually feeling and using a feeling word. An emotion to describe the feeling. Because “I think that” or “I believe that” is more of a belief rather than your feeling about something.
He’ll say, “I’m really frustrated about” or “I was frustrated when this happened in my day in the morning at work.” We both work from home, so he’ll say, “I was frustrated in my morning about this, and then I had a really nice break at lunch and I was able to relax a little bit and let go of that. And then the afternoon felt a little bit tense because I had all these things to get done.” Or it could look like, “Oh my god, I was so frustrated this morning with our argument that we had in the bathroom, and I carried that throughout the day.”
It could be any of those areas, and for myself too in my emotions that come up, either sadness or anger, “I’m really angry right now.” So being able to express that has been so incredibly liberating because now we don’t necessarily go through our day. And sometimes it’s carrying an emotion that you could be having for a few days and allowing that to surface.
Sometimes it’s not even about that day. It could stem from the weekend or two weeks ago, and you didn’t connect it. And then you’re having the space to really share what you think or what you feel and you can go back and say, “You know what? I think the genesis of this was two weeks ago, when I was going through whatever. I’m struggling with sleep because the kids woke me up early, and I was just so frustrated that day because I had a headache and I couldn’t get my nap in the afternoon because we had so much going on.”
It can really help us connect all these pieces of life. To us, that’s our go-to conversation. And I wouldn’t have had him ever open up to that if it hadn’t been for me exploring self-pleasuring or him wanting to pleasure me and me being okay with that.
There’s such a powerful connection that happens. I think for some people the conversation could come first. For us, the physical came first.
KIM: Right. Yeah. I love that you’ve carried on, because I talked earlier in this episode about looking to have a constant evolution in the relationship. There are relationships that are committed to stagnation, which is most relationships [laughs], and then relationships where both people are committed to growth and evolution.
The way that we keep that in motion, like one of the techniques that you describe that I talk about in my work, is having this open forum for communication. I use a metaphor of having a pane of glass between two people, and whenever you’re holding back, not telling the truth, or you outright lie, then you put a splotch of mud up on that glass. Then, the more mud that gets splattered on the glass, it creates an actual wall. You’ve built a wall between the two people.
It’s a constant effort to ensure that the glass is clean, and you can start to feel that. I like the way you described it. It’s like a palpable feeling. “Okay, we don’t know what’s there exactly, but something is there. It feels like there’s some rift or distance between us. Let’s both try to figure out what that is.”
MARYANNE: Yeah, exactly. The more you tune into it, the easier it becomes to feel that there is something there because then you can tell the difference between when it’s really clear and when it’s not.
KIM: When it’s really clear, that also leads to that really juicy, connected, blissful, and passionate feeling. That’s when libidos are high. That’s, I think, another connection people don’t make—when the glass is clear, when you feel really bonded and close like that, that’s when you have the most desire for each other. It’s in everyone’s best interest to keep that glass clean and that energy field open, and then you naturally just want to be close physically with each other.
MARYANNE: 100% right. [Laughs] Yeah. There’s such a powerful exploration between couples, between partners, because I feel like so many people don’t have the experience of that. Because to be radically honest with someone takes a certain level of vulnerability. It’s like the chicken and the egg. Which came first? Do you let yourself be that vulnerable and hope that they’ll catch you and they’ll be there for you and they’ve got your back?
I think so many people get caught up in, “I’d like to do that, but I’m not sure if I can. I’m not sure if my partner will be on board.” To some degree, you have to just take a risk and do it because that act of vulnerability or showing up, being radically honest, that courage within you, is infectious. It changes other people in their witnessing of it.
I know it has taken both of us courage. I know it sounds easy, but there were definitely moments where I said, “Do I really want to share that with him? I don’t want him to get pissed. I don’t want him to get mad at me.” And I walked away and then we were not talking again.
There are all those glitches we feel inside, knowing that we have our sexual relationship to fall back upon, because that really was a thing for us. We really have that powerfully. We know that we can go there, and it will clear things for us and come back to it over and over.
I’m not sure how it works for others, but I know when I work with people, there’s a big block for many women in trusting, being intimate. I think for women, anyway, the emotional piece is very important, and that piece of vulnerability that they have a hard time going to is also really important. Our greatest strength is our vulnerability, in my opinion.
KIM: I agree that’s the fertile ground from which everything else springs out. That’s the key ingredient to gourmet sex. When I make the distinction between junk food sex and gourmet sex, the difference is vulnerability and openness and pulling down your barriers and really being raw. You can actually learn to live in that place, and I think that’s one of my greatest observations; having cataclysmic sex was brought me to that totally raw, exposed place, and then noticing how incredibly powerful I felt in that vulnerability and how it changed me as a person and changed my life and changed everything about how I interacted out in the world with that energy as an aura around me.
MARYANNE: Oh yeah. Those words are so powerful because the other thing that drew me to your work so much is that I have a background in teaching about natural birth. When I read what you said about vulnerability, I had already had two births by the time I met you, and I had really beautiful births. I had pain-free, event-free, quick births, and I knew that I had been able to bring that to the space of birth, but I really had not been able to bring it to the space of my sexual life with my partner.
You made me see how similar they were and that if I could do it there, I could do it with him too, realizing that the most vulnerable I had ever been in my entire life was when I was giving birth. I went on to have another child whose pregnancy and birth were probably the most ecstatic experiences of my life. The birth of my third child was truly ecstatic. I’d done so much work with being vulnerable, by the time I had my third, the ability to open up was so much greater. I’d experienced cervical orgasm before that, and then when I had my third child, I experienced it again, and it was just this incredible, beautiful high that you talk about, the hormone oxytocin.
Having my partner with me in the birth pool together, bringing this child forth together, it was not just me doing it, but that experience is one that I think I’ll never forget. I think your work and me engaging with all of that helped really set the ground for having that birth experience as well.
KIM: That’s such a beautiful example of how when you hit that place in yourself and in your relationship, that then becomes this energy, and extra power becomes infused into every other part of your life. Everything else gets upleveled. You already achieved a very powerful birth experience, it sounds like, very unlike what most women have. Then, with that added piece of deepening that vulnerability and that openness and these higher levels of orgasms, you even get to a more magnificent place in that birth.
MARYANNE: Yeah. It’s a feeling that, if you’ve not experienced it, it’s really hard to understand through words and description because you’re not here. [Laughs] You’re very much in a different realm of consciousness. It’s like this African proverb—they say right when she’s giving birth, the mother reaches all the way out into the stars and brings forth her baby; that’s the closest that I think I can describe that with. You go somewhere else completely.
And then knowing that through intimate experiences and intimacy and having this gourmet sex experience with your partner, it’s not exactly the same, but it comes close, that level of vulnerability and ecstasy. There’s nothing quite like it.
KIM: Amazing. So let’s say we’re back to a couple where one person is more engaged and passionate about growing, and the other person isn’t so much. What advice would you give couples in that situation, based on your experience?
MARYANNE: I would say that if you’re the one who wants to grow and evolve more and your partner is not quite there yet, just do what you have to do for you. Because when you do that, the people around you change. Either they come along with you, or they no longer want to be in your orbit.
Either way, if you’re focusing on your growth and doing the thing that’s supporting you the best way and helping you evolve and you grow, then you do that. If they’re the right person for you or they’re meant to be around you, then they will grow with you.
KIM: Awesome. Yeah. That’s exactly what I was saying earlier; either way, it’s a win/win. If you do the work on yourself, either way, you’ll know what to do. Either the relationship transforms, or you have the clarity about stepping away from it.
MARYANNE: Exactly. And it is a win/win. I don’t think anyone that I’ve met who’s evolved and grown has ever said, “I wish I hadn’t done that.” [Laughs]
KIM: [Laughs] “What a mistake! All those years of working on myself! I could’ve been at the bar.”
MARYANNE: Right. No one. No one I have ever worked with or have ever known has said that. If you work on yourself, you always win.
KIM: Love it. All right, let’s end it on that note. Thank you so much.
MARYANNE: Thank you. It was a pleasure.
***
Thank you so much for listening. If you’d like to go deeper into all things orgasms, sign up for my free Orgasmapedia Series here, where you’ll learn about nine different types of orgasms everyone can have.
Thank you Monika! Aw, that’s so lovely to hear! I so appreciate it all and so glad to hear of your growth. 🙂 xx
Kim, you are an incredible woman yourself and you have been inspiring me so much since I follow you. The story of your guest speaker is so inspiring. I have been working on myself for quite a while to become a more sensual, vulnerable and sexual woman and I learned most of it from you. One of the best content I have come across. It just brings it all together. Thank you! You work is so impactful, life changing.
Never too late, as you are amazing testament to! You are so inspiring Pauline! x
Clare! 🙂 So glad to hear it! xxx
Kim! This is simply the best relationship advice I have EVER heard – it’s super useful to me with my somewhat frictional partnership right now – perfect timing for my needing to delve into my own stuff and stop being triggered.
THANK you!
I was that person who didn’t grow sexually and I knew I really needed help and got it and grew in ways to live my life better and differently but something was always missing. You see, I found coaches who guided me to be more emotionally mature, make better choices, but never sexually.
When I watched this podcast I recognized that there were ways I could have, if I had known this guidance. My husband died 4 years ago and what I miss most, especially now, is that intimate touch with his hands even though we were room mates for the last years of our marriage. I feel sad that this information was not as open when I needed it or maybe I was just not ready.
I believe that the teacher arrives when the student is ready. So, instead of beating myself up I am recognizing and taking action because this student is ready!! I feel empowered by your Salons and courses. I recognize with these podcasts and Orgasm Cleanse for Her and VKF that I have permission to open and explore my sexuality with more freedom than ever before!! Thank you!