I'm always amazed at what happens when a couple is radically honesty with each other.
Let me share a couple of recent examples:
In one case, a young man told his wife that he didn’t find her sexually attractive and never really had. He had naturally felt he couldn’t tell her that for fear of insulting and upsetting her, but he was really finding it hard to have sex with her because of this feeling.
With my encouragement, he told her how he truly felt, which was, as expected, insulting and upsetting for her. However, because they were able to have this conversation from a gentle, open, sharing place, he could give her the space to sit with the information. There was no intensity of emotion on his part, no aggression, no judgment or condescension or fear, and this enabled her to sit with the news, process it calmly and accept it.
On his part, releasing this huge burden, this terrible secret he’d been keeping, freed him up enormously.
The outcome: he actually opened up to the possibility, and then the reality, that he did find his wife sexually attractive.
She found freedom in understanding what was behind their sexual problem, realized that now that she had... read more