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Join me as I discuss the common experience of feeling stuck in sex with Dr. Julia Kukard of Aephoria Partners. Discover how stuckness is a cycle, that it’s rooted in old wounds and unresolved issues, and how shame holds it in place. Learn how to leverage your body's wisdom and become literate in discussing sex to enhance sexual fluidity and become unstuck. Embrace the cyclical nature of growth and how experiencing both stuckness and fluidity in sex is normal for everyone.
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Meet our guest:
Dr. Julia Kukard
Dr Julia is an existential coach and psychotherapist. She is a personal and professional expert on stuckness.
Routledge is publishing her book “The Art and Joy of Stuckness for Coaches and their Clients” in December 2024.
For more, visit Aephoria Parnters.
Meet your host:
Andrea Balboni
Andrea is a certified Sex, Love and Relationships Coach at Lush Coaching.
Her mission is to help people experience as much pleasure and fulfillment in their personal intimate lives as they desire.
Want even more? Read these articles we co-authored on Medium:
How to fix a stuck sex life (Pt 1 of 3)
Episode overview
Overcome Sexual Stuckness with Dr. Julia Kukard
I welcome Julia Kukard, an expert in stuckness, to discuss the common experience of feeling stuck in sexual relationships. Julia explains that stuckness is a normal part of life and relationships, often rooted in old wounds and unresolved issues. The cycle of stuckness involves five stages: the emergence of an old wound, living in that wound, experiencing pain and shame, grieving unlived lives, and finally moving towards fluidity and growth.
Julia shares insights on how shame holds stuckness in place and how grieving can help release negative energy. I provide case studies illustrating how stuckness manifests in relationships, such as the inability to ask for what one wants sexually or the pressure to perform. We discuss the importance of recognizing and addressing the underlying wounds and shame, and the potential for healing and growth within the cycle of stuckness.
The conversation emphasizes the need for self-compassion and the value of seeking support from coaches, therapists, or wise individuals. Julia and I also highlight the importance of leveraging the body's wisdom and becoming literate in discussing sex to enhance sexual fluidity. We conclude by sharing resources and ways to connect with our work, encouraging listeners to embrace the cyclical nature of growth and the necessity of experiencing both stuckness and fluidity.
Let’s continue the conversation
Overcome Stuckness in Sex with Dr. Julia Kukard
Andrea: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to Lush Love, the podcast. I'm your host, Andrea Balboni. And in this podcast, I explore the nuance and complexity of intimate relationships with thought leaders, teachers, and guides of all kinds so that we can navigate through the intensity of intimacy, the highs and lows of love, the joy and pain of desire, the promises and despair of relationships more easily. And allow ourselves to be nourished by deep, meaningful connection, passion, and pleasure in all its forms.
Intimate relationships offer us an incredible opportunity to know ourselves, one another, and the world in whole new ways. Listen in as we navigate the [00:01:00] incredible world of intimacy together. In this episode, I speak with Dr. Julia Kukard, existential psychotherapist and an expert on stuckness, to explore the common experience, often quite frustrating, of feeling stuck in sex and intimate relationships.
Julia and I dive deep into the cycle of stuckness, its underlying causes, and how to navigate through it to achieve more fulfilling, connected experiences in sex. And now, here's our conversation on Stuckness and Sex with Dr. Julia Kukard.
I am so excited to invite Julia Kukard to the room today with [00:02:00] me and So excited for all of you listening to how the experience of her, she is an expert in stuckness. And if there's one thing that I hear over and over again from clients who come to me for people who are looking for help in sex is that they feel stuck.
They feel stuck in having the sex that they want to be having. They feel stuck because they're not having enough of it. And they really don't know what to do. And so Julia, I am so excited to welcome you to this conversation so that you can help us maybe understand what stuckness is and how we can get to the other side of it so we can have the sex we want because sex is wonderful.
Welcome Julia.
Julia: Thank you, Andrea. It's really fantastic to be here and to apply the, the stuckness cycle, the cycle of stuckness to sex, because sex is such a juicy and, um, useful [00:03:00] subject for, for us as humans. So I am an existential psychotherapist and coach, and stuckness. I got here, not because of my intellectual curiosity, but because of my personal stuckness.
And so I'm very keen to explore how we can apply this methodology to sexual stuckness. So thank you, Andrea, for having me here.
Andrea: My pleasure. Oh, in our conversation before hopping on and in the work that I've read that you've done, there is a definite cycle to stuckness. And one thing I really loved that you shared is that stuckness happens to all of us.
Every single human on the planet gets struck at some point and then moves through it, I'm hoping most of the time. So, making that a normal experience [00:04:00] that all of us have felt really important for me to share. And to have you share your unique vision on what exactly it looks like. Why do we get stuck?
What are the phases of stuckness? And how can we get to the other side? So maybe the best place to start is for you to share the cycle of stuckness. And, um, so people know what's happening.
Julia: Thank you. So as you said, Andrea, it's absolutely normal. It's, uh, it's something everyone does, not just sexual stuckness, but stuckness overall in life as well.
It's The cycle of stuckness, as we're going to explore, is very much like other learning cycles. And the sort of biological driver behind this is to help us to learn and grow and to heal from, from whatever in our history leaves healing from. [00:05:00] So when we get stuck, we are in a situation that is undesirable.
We don't know how to get out of it. We try all sorts of things and nothing seems to work. When we get stuck, it's always a relationship issue. It's a relationship between ourselves and someone else, or between ourselves and context, or between aspects of ourselves. You know, our relationship to ourselves might be stuck.
We might be stuck in a rigid identity. So it always relates to a relationship. And we get stuck when our inner worlds are at odds with our context, but more on this later. There are five broad stages in the cycle of stuckness and we're going to go through this, um, after I've given you a summary and I think you're going to give us case studies for each stage, Andrea.
I'm excited to hear [00:06:00] about those. So the stuckness is An old wounding comes up and it looks for a context in which it can heal. So as we move into a new place in the world, an old wounding comes up and it thinks it can heal. We're going to give you examples of it later. That's the stage one. Then we go into this wound and we live in this wound.
And so our inner world relates more fully. to the wounding than to the current context that we're in. So what happens is our behaviours develop around the previous context and not the context that we're currently in and as a result our actions have no traction or in fact may be destructive. So now we're stuck.
And the reason why our stuckness [00:07:00] sticks in place like it does is because in the process of dealing with our old wounding, we lose connection with ourself as we are now, with the people around us, and with meaning as it exists for us now. So in order to release stuckness, we have to work with the original wound.
And in particular, we have to work with shame. Shame holds stuckness in place. But grief allows us to discharge the negative energy and roll towards a more fluid existence. So, so that stage of the cycle is when we, we learn to work around or live with or release our shame. We grieve our unlived lives and we get going again to reconnect with ourselves, others, and build a more contemporary version of meaning for us.
This enables us to become more fluid. We start [00:08:00] learning and growing and getting on with our lives in the world. In this, in this sense, it's a moment of peaking and plateauing after the peak. So we get better and better at growing and learning and then we plateau and then A new healing cycle comes in to take us through the process all over again and heal us and help us learn and grow.
So, it's, it's a lemniscate, we just go round and round and round. We can do a turn in the lemniscate or a week or 20 years. Depends how fast we grow and learn. So that's broadly the lemniscate of Stuttgart. But maybe let's um, let's look at how we can actually apply this because so far it's quite a lot of words and it's quite difficult to visualize.
So this is the section where we integrate your knowledge of sex [00:09:00] and my knowledge of stuckness. Um, and yeah, are you, should we just roll forward?
Andrea: Yeah, I wanted to ask, um, a question or maybe share. So many of the people who come to me know they have a problem and would describe it as things were good and now they're not or, um, everything in our relationship is perfect except for the sex.
or we've never really been matched. Like we've never really been an exact great match. I've had sex with other people before this person who is my chosen life partner. That's been much better. And I just, it's just, there's something there. I don't know that they would describe or even recognize that there is a wound to be healed within them [00:10:00] or the other person, usually both.
Um, often, 100 100 percent of the time, we'll know. Never say ever, always, but, um, they would describe it as this is a problem we're having and then as we move into the deeper underlying issues, then they might recognize, ah, there's a wound to heal. So there's some shame here. I feel so ashamed I can never ask for what I want.
Okay, that shame and that experience of not being able to voice what it is that you want would be an example of a wound. So I just wanted to give people an understanding when we say the word wound, if they're like, I don't really feel like I have a wound, we're just not having sex. It's like, okay, if you know, if it was that easy of a kind of a, like a logistical fix, then you'd have done it.
There's something deeper going on. And so that I just wanted to articulate, but that's what you mean by wound. Um, did I get it? [00:11:00] Yeah.
Julia: Yeah, that's helpful. That's very helpful, Andrea. And, and maybe that kind of leads us into a little bit more exploration of, of what an incomplete wound is and how it looks for a context where it can heal.
So in the case of sexuality, the wounding doesn't need to be sexual. It could even be something like heavy handed parenting or socialization, where we may learn that we can't ask for what we need or that we have to comply or we have to conform with various ideas of Being in the world and then we take this wounding into our sexuality.
And then we have an opportunity to shift that and to explore ourselves more fully. But in order to do that, we have to experience the pain of stuckness. Otherwise, [00:12:00] we might not deal with the issue. So, so an incomplete wound can be all sorts of different kinds of things that we have to learn about or heal from.
It's just looking for a moment to complete its process of healing and discharged and inexpressed energy. and help you understanding how that that wounding happened and what you need to do in order to heal. So this wounding is looking for a context that has a similar patterning to the earlier context that created the wounding.
So this This was very interesting in the research, um, what I didn't mention was in the, a lot of this theory comes from my doctoral research at Middlesex University, that, that all the people that were getting stuck in the research, Um, we're getting stuck in a very similar way [00:13:00] to when they got stuck initially to the, to the situation that first created the wounding.
Um, so that in the case of that compliance example, you know, early requirements around getting compliance were then transferred to the sexual relationship until the sexual relationship didn't become a source of pleasure. and intimacy and then it was requiring dealing with. So I know you've got some beautiful case studies that illustrate this.
Andrea: Okay. So one example in a client that I worked with of a wound that's totally unrelated to sex at all and intimacy at all, seemingly was showing up in the bedroom for him and how we got underneath and worked out that that was the thing has to do with a bit of The way that I work with the body, um, as much as for the heart and the mind, let's just say we'll, we'll, we'll show that process and what [00:14:00] we did to uncover it.
I just want to share that this, this poor man was in IVF treatments with his wife. They were trying to have their first child. They wanted to conceive and the pressure of that specific time of month from sex had to happen. And all of the pressure that he was feeling, watching his wife go through all of the treatment and seeing her really affected by all he had to do was show up and have sex in that moment.
That was it. He felt terribly that he couldn't do it and he had never had any problems with sex before in his relationship to his wife that he was very attracted to and that he loved. But with all of this pressure of IVF having to happen at a specific time in a specific way, in a specific moment. was really affecting his, uh, his ability to have sex.
So what we unearthed, we did some archaeological research, and what we unearthed was that [00:15:00] a football match that he was in when he was 8 or 10, that his dad was present at, and he was the striker. It was the moment where the goal needed to happen, the ball was passed to him. And he missed. His dad saw, he disappointed the whole team, the person he cared about most in the world, his parents, his father, very, very disappointed.
This feeling of complete disempowerment, just unable to, to do the thing that needed to be done with all the pressure that was there was carried with him into the bedroom. So we did some work on rewriting the narrative. Switching up that memory so that he could relive it as making the goal and being empowered.
And so we tried it. He went into the bedroom feeling in his whole body that feeling of empowerment. And calm and ease and ability to do the thing, even with the person he cared about most in the world [00:16:00] that job done. It was an incredible piece of work that we did. And so I just wanted to bring this one up as it seems so unrelated, like it seems so much out of the blue, this thing, and then it can show up in, in the bedroom and it is a wound.
It is a part of him that was hurt and crushed. He felt completely disempowered in his body. And that was being, that was coming up for him and lovemaking with his gorgeous wife. And now they have a kid and they're happy and that's great. And it was a wound that wanted to be healed. And I would, um, in the work that, that what I've understood about the work that we do in healing our wounds.
And as you described, it's kind of this work that's never really done. What does happen is you do begin to experience a greater sense of fullness. And the learnings that do happen in the process [00:17:00] are beautiful. So I kind of wanted to give people a sense also of hope and the gratification and fulfillment and, um, the beauty that will come through this process.
So even though we'll be healing, we'll be moving through stuckness our whole lives as you shared, kind of like this infinity loop, things do soften and they're still tough and they're still challenging and they're still real and they can still even be really pretty. However, there's more softness around all of it, more compassion around all of it.
That's the experience that clients often have and that I have had personally. So I just also wanted to share that to, um, for people.
Julia: Yeah. I love the, um, example of a completely unrelated earlier wounding that was Um, that was showing up in sex [00:18:00] and, um, and how working with that was able to, um, have some impact on that, that earlier wound as well.
And I think that's the beauty of stuckness is it offers, um, us a moment to digest our past and maybe incubate a new version of ourselves. So if I can drag us back to the cycle. So we've, with the first stage is the incomplete wound, and then it looks for a salient context. So the incomplete wound was the Not being able to score the goal.
And it was looking for a salient context, which was in relationship with his wife. Interestingly enough, not another football team.
Andrea: Um, it was his father that he…
Julia: It was his father.
Andrea: His father, the person he admired most and loved and was there, you know, kind of cheering on him. It was his father [00:19:00] that would be disappointed. As well as the team, but the team was kind of secondary.
It was really this the intimate relationship he had with his father and disappointing that person that he cared about showing up again, but with his, but with his wife.
Julia: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So that's a beautiful example of an incomplete wound, wanting to complete in the intimate relationship. So now we come to stage two of the stuckness cycle when the wounding has got the context.
So during this time, we entered the wound. So suddenly psychically, it's like we are living in the time of the wound. We are right in that wound and when we do this, we de we disconnect from the people we are now and even from others around us. Maybe our intimate us. And also, um, from the context in which we are now, because we're now in a, we're now set in a [00:20:00] historical setting, um, and then what also happens is we start to display behaviours from that historical setting.
And these behaviours, Don't have any traction in the current context. People go like, why did you respond like that? That's inappropriate, or that's not going to help you get anywhere. Um, but those behaviours don't belong to the current context. They belong to the past context. As a result of that, our actions have no traction.
We can't solve problems. We're stuck in a very uncomfortable impasse. So maybe I can turn back to you, Andrea, and you can give us some more rich case studies.
Andrea: Yeah, definitely. So that experience of disconnection from yourself, and then especially in, in partnership with dating couples a lot, um, from the other person, and then beginning to maybe start [00:21:00] Style back, even from the context of the relationship is also something I see a lot.
So I had another couple that I worked with, Steve and Tanisha, I've changed their names for privacy, but it's a very common thing that many couples experience had met and fallen in love and had amazing sex. They were just really having beautiful lovemaking and felt over time though that this began to wane.
So Steve, who was the, um, was part, one of the partners experienced a lot of depression and sadness in his life and still carried that through into the relationship. His partner, the person that he had fallen in love with, one of the attributes he fell in love with was her lightness and her ability to laugh at things and Even when lemons were served up, was able to make lemonade [00:22:00] and over time, what he became more and more worried about was that he was no longer desirable to her.
Sex slowed down and began to kind of fade. He began, became more and more worried that he wasn't desirable, that she wouldn't like him, that she'd get bored of his sadness and depression. And that she would leave. So ultimately then he would be, he would be left. He would no longer be loved. He, she would respond.
by withdrawing. So she also would withdraw when she felt he was needing more affection and needing more attention and wanting to have sex with him. She began to also withdraw because she would feel more increasing pressure to show up, to take care of him, to give him what he needed, when actually what she was really needing was some space.
[00:23:00] And both of these people, both partners were unable to express what they needed. So the more that the one person would come towards the other looking for affection, the more that the other person would withdraw. The more that person withdrew, the more this person then would become, well, I would say began to also withdraw.
Neither one were, neither one of them were able to voice what they need. There was an incredible amount of shame on the one side, with Tanisha and with Steve, he just felt, uh, she should be feeling what I want. She should know what I need. She must recognize I want sex and she's not doing it. So I'm not going to say anything in any way.
Who am I to have me? The underlying, you wouldn't have necessarily verbalized this. It came out of her time, but it was. Who am I to even have needs? Who am I to even, um, express them? And they were stuck. [00:24:00] Yeah. So Steve was losing a sense of self. He was in this hole of sadness and depression. Tanisha was beginning to doubt whether she was even sexual at all.
Maybe I'm asexual or maybe responsive desire is my style. Maybe that's me and we're just mismatched. And both were beginning to really lose a sense of self, lose that connection with each other because they were no longer connecting or sharing what they wanted or needed, and then questioning whether that context of relationship was even going to last.
Would it break down? Would it disintegrate? Are we even meant to be together? And so, here we were.
Julia: Yeah. It's fascinating how, um, how a stuck sexual life can kind of wring the meaning out of a relationship in that way. Um, it, because sex [00:25:00] is always kind of connected with, um, really important existential meanings like death and life and all of those forces.
So when there's trouble in, in that particular zone, it always has such a big impact in a person's world and relationships. Yeah. Okay. So that was an illustration of stage two. And it kind of covered the discussion around stage three, which is the developmental impasse, that moment of being stuck, um, and I think you explained in the case studies, the pain, the frustration and the lostness, um, all of those experiences that one can have When you're stuck, interestingly enough, you can be stuck for a very long time.
Some of the people in my research have been stuck for a decade or more. So, I mean, that's [00:26:00] a really interesting thing that humans can stay in an impasse for so long. Often they have to develop a whole lot of other kinds of behaviours to stay there. Um, you know, maybe narcotize. Maybe distract. I don't know.
Maybe work hard. Who knows? People have different ways. in which they can stay frustrated. So, so this is um, a time when the relationship gets stuck and as a result we can see people start acting out. This might be the moment when someone decides to have an affair or when the arguments between the couple um, start becoming even more accelerated.
I don't know if you want to talk a little bit about this time, this terrible moment of stuckness that can go on and on.
Andrea: Definitely, [00:27:00] it lasts, it can last for years and years, and I feel that what I hear from people who will come and say we've been in a marriage for 10 years and have had sex, Sometimes never, or 20 years, sometimes once or twice, and then hardly ever, um, once or twice a month, sometimes once or twice a year, um, so people can stay really stuck in this place and begin to create meaning around it.
Maybe our relationship has been like this, like, you know, many people will say, ah, sex just isn't that important to me. Or it just doesn't, it's not anything that I ever really felt I needed that much of, and so the relationship is great, and so I've always just kind of accepted that, but now I'm beginning to question.
And oftentimes it will come with, I've had an affair or I found myself attracted to this other person. So no, I'm not asexual. I'm just wondering, can it happen also with my partner? Um, I'm [00:28:00] just not sure. And so during this time, there is actually a lot that's happening, even though it is. It's toughness.
There's a lot of meaning that we create, the sense making that we attempt to, to have, because we don't want to release from the relationship, we love the other person, it means so much, and yet, what do we do, because we're feeling frustrated, we wonder if there's something more that we might experience with the other person, or for ourselves, especially when it comes to intimacy and pleasure.
And, yeah, there's, it's just really, it's a tough time. It really is. And then when people feel the pain of that enough, and you speak to this beautifully, that's when they'll finally come for help. They'll finally call a therapist, they'll finally search out a coach, they'll finally speak to someone about it.
And so many of us.[00:29:00]
For me as a coach, sometimes I find it difficult because I wish they had come sooner. Some people will be so far down the line. It's, um, they can be lost and oftentimes people will still, will still be willingness. And that's why they've done the thing of calling someone for help. Will still be willingness to be with the staff.
So when I speak to new, um, clients with people coming for the first time, I'll, I'll. Feel for that willingness. And I'll even ask, are you both willing still? Is there both, is there a desire for both of you to entertain the possibility that things can change? Because in that space, then there's, there's things that you can do.
If both people or even one is just really down, far down the line, it's, it's very difficult to cycle back. Not sometimes impossible. So, um, yeah, my [00:30:00] hope is that having conversations like this will help people come sooner for help because the sooner you come, it's kind of like, and, and the moment is the perfect moment.
Like the moment that you come is always going to be the right moment. It's just, we like to say, okay, the pain that you need to suffer in order to step over the line. Okay. You can do that a little sooner. Then you'll save yourself from some of that, that struggle. Maybe that's what needs to happen. Um, in order for people to actually do the work.
Julia: Yeah, what I find fascinating is that, you know, humans generally only change if there's pain involved.
Andrea: Yeah,
Julia: sort of neurologically, we're not programmed to kind of adapt pre-emptively. We need a little pain to encourage us. Um, and that's why, you know, the role of pain in the stagnant cycle is so crucial, because if there was no pain, or if we managed to narcotize all the pain away, we might never grow and learn.
[00:31:00] We are reluctant learners at best. Very interestingly, so that brings us to the fourth stage of the sadness cycle, which is when we experience pain and we know we can't stay here any longer. So there's kind of three emotions that tend to happen at this stage. The first is pain. The second is around shame.
Now shame is an emotion that is, um, that speaks to our relationship with ourselves. Guilt speaks to what we've done. So they're two different things. With shame, we feel that we are defective as a whole or in some way bad. And the problem with shame is that shame holds stuckness in place. Often there's a shame connection with the original wounding, and that when we enter [00:32:00] shame states, even in the current context, we reconnect with old shame woundings.
And when we do this, it's very difficult for us to go forward. So in order to move back into fluidity in the cycle of stuckness, we have to figure out what we're going to do with shame. And I know there's very specific sex coaching techniques around this, but in the psychotherapy literature, you know, It's about releasing shame or maybe a more existential version is trying to find a way to live with or work around shame.
Um, or even try and keep that shame in the past and not bring it into the future. But I know that's really difficult to do, um, because human minds integrate the past, the present and the future. So there's something that needs to happen around shame to help us release. [00:33:00] Another important factor during this stage is grief and grieving.
So we have to go through a process of grieving. Grieving our lives as they are, grieving our unlived lives, you know, the lack of fantastic sex for the last 20 years, and grieving the loss of our connection to ourselves. to other people and to a meaningful existence. So grieving needs to happen and what it does is it softens us so that we can experience our losses as, um, so that we can grow around our losses rather, rather than experiencing our losses as dead ends.
So grieving allows us to grow, to become soft and grow around our losses. And when we do that, we can find ways. To become more fluid, we can find ways to reconnect to [00:34:00] ourselves, to others, and to meaning. So, let's hear from you, Andrea, about shame, pain, grief, and release.
Andrea: So, the pain paradigm, the other side of pain is pleasure.
And so that promise of pleasure, especially in sex, orgasmic bliss, and expanded states of pleasure and the beauty of that will all will be a pull. So as much as we want to shy away from pain, we're pulled by pleasure as well. So that promise of something new, something plush, something pleasurable, something wonderful to experience.
is also a factor that I wanted to bring in because it does sit alongside the pain. And the work that I do around sex and sexuality, especially when that pain is [00:35:00] wrapped with guilt and wrapped, especially with shame, what we do is we begin to unravel that shame, which oftentimes will be one of the causes of pain.
Alongside expanding into pleasure. So that you have that experience of a space and place that you're going to, even as you're with some of the stuff that's still there. So it's pulling, it's kind of like this beautiful dance. I mean, It's beautiful when you can sit here and talk to it and I've been in it and I know it's challenging so that feeling of release that you describe is the freedom that you'll experience when you move more into pleasure states and as you shift away from Um, the pain, shame, and guilt that is often, especially in sex and sexuality, [00:36:00] so present.
We live in a sex negative culture, most of us, in most parts of the world. We've been shamed for being sexual and, um, desire as well for a very long time in society, culture, religion. There's, there's a very, they're very mixed messages. Like, you know, sex sells, you know, it's good to be sexy. And yet it's also very shameful to be overtly sexual and have too much desire.
And, um, So, how do we think about things? And then there's our bodies that are often shamed. And we carry that shame within our bodies as well, in different parts of our bodies. There's a lot of work to do around releasing shame, especially in, in this work around, um, sexuality. Voicing our desires. There's so much that's been repressed and squished.
Down. Um, and so along with all of that is a deep for many, many people, myself included, a deep [00:37:00] sadness around what's been lost for years of sitting in stuckness or freeze mode, not being able to express freely or share with another person or to experience pleasure that you hear about being so wonderful.
There's a lot of sense of loss. and sadness, deep, deep sadness that wants to be moved through integrated, understood, soften so that you have more space for pleasure. So it's, it may not be that it all ever goes away. It's attenuated though. And it does begin to soften. It begins to lighten. It begins to shift.
So there's more space for pleasure. And part of the work that I do with, with, Individuals as well as couples is being able to allow that sadness and all other, a lot of times anger will come up [00:38:00] in response. I would say now thinking about this with you in response to the loss, we experienced that anger.
Something's been taken from us. We've been deprived of some, you know, very natural and healthy and beautiful way, part of being human on the planet. Um, so all of that is happening within the context of the bedroom, um, pleasure. It doesn't have to be a bedroom. It could be anywhere. Um, a space that we learn is supposed to be always, orgasmic and joyful and wonderful and pleasure and bliss.
Well, the reality is that there's so much other stuff there that when we allow that stuff into that space to be seen, to be moved through, to be experienced, to be witnessed in, to be held in, to be. It really is a processing kind of thing to be, to be moved through. That is the healing that happens and that [00:39:00] is what opens you to expanded states of pleasure.
More of you is welcome. More of you is allowed in. More of you can express in whatever, whatever way it wants to happen in that moment. So there's freedom in that. It's liberation. It really is.
Julia: That's very beautiful. And it really fits quite neatly with the theory, which is the more connection you have with yourself, the more aspects of yourself you can pull into being, the more fluid you can become.
And as you rightly say, the broader your sexual experience or the powerful and magnificent and extended. your sexual experience can be. That's a lovely way of working with the theory. Thank you. So now we're having this lovely period of growth and joy and fantasticness and connection with ourselves, connection with others.
Sex is becoming much [00:40:00] more meaningful. It's taking a strong role in the relationship. Um, and so we're on the growth curve. We are fluid. And then what happens is that we start to platter out again and thing platter off and things start to get a little bit rigid and sediment into the new set of behaviours.
And basically in the cycle of stuckness, this is the moment when a new wounding comes up for healing. So maybe you can tell us, Andrea, how that works in, um, in sex coaching.
Andrea: So let's, what I've seen is that we'll work, I'll work through with a couple, some of the challenges they're having around their sex life.
The relationship goes from, Oh, we're, we're going to terminate this thing too. Oh, we're going to have another baby or I'm going to get married and buy a house together. And it's like, okay, [00:41:00] amazing. Wow. And then that child comes or that big life change moment happens. And then the relationship is challenged in a different way.
And so they'll need to work on different aspects of, um, of relating to themselves, to each other, and to the new context that they're in. It's great. Bring up a child where our parenting styles are totally different. We're at each other's throats or we're, you know, we want to move into this house, but it's too close to her parents and not close enough to mine.
And now it's like, and so there'll be a new thing to be with. Some of the skills will carry over. And some new skills will want to be learned. Um, and maybe likely different woundings, different things will be triggered. Um, we'll be, buttons will be pushed in whole new ways. And you were like, we were fine before.
Why did we have to buy that new house? Or yeah. No one told us raising a kid would be so tough. It's like hitting me on my [00:42:00] buttons. Like he's driving me nuts. So then you begin the process again. Yeah.
Julia: So, so this cycle is like um, all the cycles in a way. You know, you can look at the work of um, Freud, Repetition, Compulsion, and Winnicott's work on Rupture and Repair, Even Bob Keegan's work on moving subject to object.
It's all about healing, learning something new, plateauing out, and then re entering the healing cycle again. And then, you know, when we do plateau, It gets to a point where it's good enough. It never gets perfect. It just gets to a point where it's livable and good enough, um, until we duck down into the healing or learning cycle all over again.
So, so Andrea, maybe you can give us an example of a full cycle of stuckness. Maybe I'll do the like part one, part two in [00:43:00] between, just to, to mark the different stages, just so we can get a picture of the full cycle. Noticing the getting stuck and the getting fluid because they're both of equal importance.
So part one is the incomplete wound seeking a salient context.
Andrea: Okay, great. So we are going to follow the story of Adela. She just turned 50 and she's single and has never had a committed long term relationship in her entire life. And when I spoke to her about this, because she wants a relationship, she does not know where to start.
She has no idea where to start. I asked, do you have some, some idea about why this is? And over the course of our conversation, it turns out that her father was very abusive to her mother. And so Adela vowed to herself, she would never have a relationship like that. And [00:44:00] she fears that maybe she's been carrying this her whole life.
She knows she really wants a relationship. And this perhaps could be a reason why. So, this old wound, we'll call it, to use the, the, the verbiage, the old wound would be this experience of, of abuse that she as a child would have witnessed in her mother but experienced almost first hand for herself, because that's how it works.
How it works. Um, that is the wound that wants to be healed. Okay. Contract says now she's gotta get out there and go dating where this wound is gonna get triggered left, right, right, and center.
Julia: So part two is the finding of the salient context and getting stuck in the wound. And then all those behaviours that relate to the wounding, [00:45:00] that, that form around that, that holds stuckness in place and a loss.
Andrea: Okay, so Adela is a superstar at work. She has nailed it. At 50, she's got a leadership position in big corporate. She's really happy with her work. She feels super empowered. And she has no time. She doesn't have time to date, she doesn't have time to think about it, create an online profile, or go out, never has had time.
She has great friendships, and a wonderful social life, but she never seems to find time for a relationship, and hasn't for the past years and years and years and years. So, there she is, stuck, busy, too busy to have a relationship, knowing she needs to do something, feeling overwhelmed, because she knows somewhere deep in [00:46:00] her, she's going to have to look at her stuff.
and work through it and so feels overwhelmed by simply setting up an online profile because the wounding is so big. With that, do you have any questions about her in this, in this part for this stage?
Julia: So she's, um, she's lost herself. She doesn't know how to connect with others, and this whole dating thing feels very scary and not really meaningful.
Andrea: Certainly not fun.
Julia: Certainly not fun.
Andrea: No, and any time anyone begins to come close, one of her, let's say, defenses, is too well up. I'm too busy. They're not good enough. Become overly critical. Is it even worth my time? They're not really worth my time. And so, well, we'll just drop them. I'm going to refocus on work anyway. Got a big promotion coming up. Whatever it is. Yeah.
Julia: Work is glad to fill up the empty spaces or even the [00:47:00] full ones.
Andrea: Yeah. I have more fun with my girlfriends. I'm just gonna go on another trip with my girlfriends.
Julia: So much more fun.
Andrea: Yeah. Easier.
Julia: Hmm. Okay, cool. So stage three is stuck and frustrated and, um, feeling lost and hopeless.
Andrea: So, Adela is there on her own, which is great when she's doing her work thing and she's nailing it and feels super empowered and that's fantastic. She is happy when she's with her friends and then there are times when people are too busy to meet her or she's out of social engagement and everyone else has a date except for her.
There are evenings when she's home alone, really feeling solitude and Kind of like how this happened. I just want to be with someone. This feels awful. Loneliness. It's bone aching. It's really, [00:48:00] uh, she really is grieving in a way, not having someone. She feels that gap. She feels that hole and the desire to share her life with someone is pretty acute.
So she wants to be sharing moments. Because her promotions are beginning to lose meaning, accomplishments are beginning to lose meaning when there's no one to share them with, and she knows that work is great and important, but somehow, somehow, she's softening around that go for it and beginning to say, maybe I need to create some space for something here because I'm just not feeling 100 percent fulfilled.
Julia: Um, okay, so, so she, she had that moment of developmental impasse and now she's moving into the next stage which is the, the pain, the shame and the grieving. Yeah, stage four.
Andrea: She moves into self doubt mode. Maybe I'm just not that [00:49:00] sexy. Maybe people just don't like me in that way. Anyone that I'm attracted to never likes me back.
She starts using never evers, which is usually a sign of a wound making itself be seen. Um, I never liked dating anyway, guys are never really that worth it. Anyway, this is better than being abused and like hit and I'd probably have to lose someone anyway, so I'm just saving myself the time. Um, but really underneath this is deep sadness and deep loss and also hope.
So there is still this flame of hope that things could be different, and why can't she just have it her way? Why couldn't she have the kind of relationship she wants? She's, well, I don't see it around in the world so much so maybe it just doesn't exist, so she'll move back into grief, or back into kind of hopelessness, and then over into hope, and then back out again.
So she's sort of floating around in this space of like, oh, soup. The pain [00:50:00] soup. Yeah, messy.
Julia: So as she starts becoming more fluid and more hopeful, you get this oscillating behaviour. It's so interesting that you mentioned the inning and the outing because it's also, also happens with grief. As we move in and out of states in the beginning, we, we go through this period of oscillating.
So now she's moving into a period of, um, reconnecting to herself, reconnecting to others and finding a new sense of meaning in life.
Andrea: And so she is finally experiencing so much. And also kind of like, well, I just want to give it a chance. Let's just do this thing. I'll do whatever it takes. I really want this.
She begins to own her desire. Like, I really want this thing. And it's painful for her to own her desire as well. [00:51:00] So she's moving through pain, but also moving into and towards what it is that she wants at the same time. Um, and she's like, okay, Where can I start? And she's asked her friends if they know anyone that might be available that might be good for her to meet.
She begins to learn how to flirt a little and open up. She puts herself into some communities. And spaces where people are also sharing in their positive spaces. So, um, positive sex, positive spaces, even where she can begin to express herself as a woman and as a powerful woman and as a desirable woman and feel safe in that she begins to learn.
It's safe to want someone. It's safe to express as a woman. It's safe to receive from someone. All of these beautiful lessons, uh, opening up [00:52:00] to that dance of relationship. So she moves from that walled off, kind of like, I can do everything on my own, to what would it be like to allow someone to bring me flowers?
What would it be like to allow someone to lead the dance? What would it be like for me to actually be taken care of for a minute instead of me taking care of myself all the time and other people? And begins to learn how to be more soft and fluid in dating as well. So she's meeting people that before she would have instantly rejected or not even gotten on the list.
and starts to see what they have to offer, the beauty in them, the power in them that maybe wasn't showing up because she had these kind of like filters on before, even though she would have probably denied it at that point. She begins to soften and open up to more possibilities, begins to feel hopeful about things.
So even if dates aren't working out, okay, [00:53:00] I'm going to soften around that loss and the grief of it not working and open to what's next. So she's moving into a kind of a space where there is actually different kinds of things happening. She's being different within herself. She's relating different means to the world.
Um, and she's putting herself in healthy contexts, healthy situations where she can meet people in a way that feels really good for her. And she, someone, falls in love and gets married.
Julia: Okay, so that's the peaking and then a new drama comes in. And then a new drama will come in, yeah.
Andrea: Then you meet the in laws
Julia: Then they meet the in the focus. Um, yeah. Okay. Thank you. It's beautiful to see it all in one, um, one cycle.
Andrea: [00:54:00] Yeah, I think there's also something interesting that you've said before, which is even if it's cyclical and even if there's sequential sequence to it, kind of one thing follows the next. That, as I was describing that and hearing myself, it's like, she is moving beyond guilt and shame and sadness and grief.
And she's experiencing it again. So she's moving beyond it and then she'll re experience elements or aspects of it, even though she's moving through the cycles. She may be experiencing things from earlier cycles or stages and that's okay. That's the messiness of life and being human. Any process usually wants a breaking at some point because we're human and things show up in different ways at different times.
So if you're recognizing the process and you're like, oh my god, yeah, but I keep dropping back to meh. Maybe that's okay. Maybe that's part of what this whole thing is about.
Julia: The one thing that's [00:55:00] really interesting is don't get anxious if you get stuck and don't praise yourself if you get fluid. You're always going to be both.
Everyone does both, um, when you see yourself getting stuck, don't panic, it's not a chance for panicking, it's a chance for lying down and thinking what's happening, thinking through what's happening and noticing that getting stuck is, is not a denial of life, in fact, it's an opening up into life, so be happy when you get stuck, it is a joyful moment that affirms your life.
Um, some of the, you know, there's some tips that I put in, in a book that I recently wrote, but one of them is don't take yourself so seriously. Um, be relaxed, play, don't take everything as an insult or criticism. Um, most of us, Get praises we don't [00:56:00] deserve and criticism we don't deserve. So, you know, get a, get a light attitude towards that and, and build that into, into sex.
Um, and then, you know, I'm only going to give you three from, from the book, but the other one is co creator, like collegial. relationship with your body. Many of us try and control our body with an inch of its life. We over exercise it. We don't give it certain kinds of foods and we're constantly anxious about it.
And I don't think that's a collegial relationship. The body might choose fat from time to time and maybe we should just let it. So there's something about having a relaxed attitude to a body and using your body as a source of fluidity, rather than trying to control it and manage it rigidly. So let's hear about some ways of managing fluidity or retaining fluidity in sex.[00:57:00]
Andrea: So I love what you spoke to about the body, because the body is definitely a part of sex. And um, sometimes we don't need to know the story, why we're stuck. Sometimes all we need to do is feel into where we're stuck in our body, relax and release that stuckness, that sense, that feeling of stuckness, breathing through it or moving through it or sounding, singing, dancing.
Out and the process will complete, or an element of the stuckness will begin to get lighter disintegrate. So, um, the power of the body and the body's wisdom to move through stuff without having to necessarily know the why or all the details is incredible. And I would say leverage that. So, um, and what can also be very helpful and [00:58:00] supportive is getting some support.
So some help from a coach, from a therapist, from a community, from a wise one, someone wise in your life, because when we are the stuckness or when we are in the middle of it, it can be very difficult to see the forest for the trees and unpick it and understand it, you know, um, and see what's going on and happening.
So. Support in whatever form feels best for you. Do it. None of us does this thing called life alone. So one last thing that I would share is learn to talk about sex, learn how to bring that conversation to your partner, learn how to be with it with yourself. And, um, and that can change the game fundamentally too.
So I've got a free resource around that. I'll share it in the show notes. Julia's book is coming out, uh, and so she'll share that and other ways to [00:59:00] get in touch. Actually, what are those ways? What is the best way for people to get in touch with you, learn more about your work, read other stuff you've done. You've done amazing work.
Julia: And find me on LinkedIn or look at Aephoria, which is A E P H O R I A. a four-year partner's website where a lot of my, um, Stuckness research will sit.
Andrea: Thank you so much for Conversation. It's been wonderful. And if anyone has questions, wants to connect with us, you know how. Thank you so much for this conversation. It's been great.
Julia: Been an absolute pleasure. I love talking about getting stuck, and I love talking about sex, so it's been a delightful moment. Thank you, Andrea.
Andrea: Thank you for listening to this episode. If you enjoyed it, please share it with someone you love and subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen. We'd be incredibly grateful if you could leave us a rating and review. Your voice helps others discover this work and improve our content for you. If you're interested in diving deeper into the topics we discussed today, you can find additional resources, including full transcripts and supplementary materials on our website at www.lushcoaching.com.
Or reach out to me on social media to continue the conversation. I'd love to hear your thoughts and your experiences. Remember to sign up for our newsletter to stay updated on future episodes. And once again, thank you for tuning in. I'd also like to extend a special thanks to Nicholas Singer for providing our musical signature. Thanks, Nick.