“They should already know what I want”

This feeling is so familiar and so comfy to go to for so many of us when we feel like our desires aren’t being met. It extends to everything from conflict resolution with people we love, to care we need when we are sick, to our lover(s) knowing what we love in sex and intimacy. This phenomenon and expectation is so common that we have a name for it in therapy and healing: “mind-reading”. We expect that people should know exactly what we need and if we have to tell, it’s less authentic and less “real”.

It feels SO good when someone just knows exactly what we need and what to do. It’s what our inner child selves wanted when we were kids: for the parents to figure out what we want and how to care for us when the only signal we are giving them is crying. As adults, those inner child selves are still very much with us; they want to be cared for, and they want us and the people we love to know exactly what we want without us having to say it.

However, as we become independent beings, we have to relearn what care means to us, how to get care in the world, and how to provide care to ourselves. Part of that is learning how to ask for our needs, desires, and care from our sexual and intimate partners. They might be able to intuit some of what we desire, and that points to a degree of compatibility, but no one will be able to figure out all our needs all the time.

Luckily, it’s a skill and a muscle we can develop and exercise! I will work with you to develop the work with and soften and heal the hurdles and blockers to communicating our true desires, to listen and truly know and feel confident in our desires, and be able to express our desires and negotiate with partner(s) and lover(s).

This okay is you.

“They might reject me if I express what I want”

There can be so many forms of hurdles and blockers to communicating our desires that I talk about above. One that I often find with people struggling to say what they want and need from their partners is a fear of rejection, or shame around their desires. It can often lead to feeling shutdown or withdrawn when try to be intimate with a partner, or a feeling or irritability over unsaid desires. There can also be a feeling of shame or learned gender expectations around desires. These feelings can be crippling for our true desires, and often buries them so deep that it becomes hard for us to know about our own desires.

The playful childlike wonder around bodies and intimacy and sexuality is what helps with being in our flow when we are engaging intimately or sexually with our partners. It helps us stay with our curiosities and desires and bodies instead of being in our head with our narratives around “what it means” to be asking our partners for what we truly want and need in intimacy.

The shift from not communicating our desires to starting to share our inner world and desires with our partners can often need a lot of slowness and care and communication. It takes the facade of masking and pleasing and suppressing our desires away which lets us see our partners and lovers in a more honest light.

Of course a lot of this relearning needs safety first and foremost. Safe partners, safe environments to try things in, safety in our own bodies to explore new ways of engaging in intimacy and sex. We also need to learn how to navigate the relational and communication complexities it brings up when we open the door to more honest clear communication. I will work with you and your partner(s) to grow our capacity to say the things that we might feel shame around, and I will help navigate the difficulties the complexities of relating honestly, communicating vulnerably and directly and with kindness.

Here are some examples of reframes and moving away from narratives to embodiment.

• Narrative: “Will they think that our chemistry is fading if I ask for slowness and more buildup when we have sex?”
• Embodiment: “I feel the need to be slower right now. It will help me actually feel more sexual and turned on and safe.”
• Notice how the second thought can also quickly turn into a narrative if we start to justify and come up with a story for why we need slowness. Embodiment is listening to our bodies, not necessarily or compulsively needing a narrative around it, and then acting through what our body is needing and wanting.

• Narrative: “Will it hurt my partner if I tell them to touch my _____ differently?”
• Embodiment: “The way my partner is touching my _____ doesn’t do it for me. I want to try something different, and I will communicate it to my partner.”

Rewriting narratives around communicating desires

I celebrate the idea of embodiment and not narrativizing our needs and wants above, but the next steps after growing our capacity to stay embodied and not feeling the need to narritivize is to replace old narratives with prettier, kinder, more embodied narratives. Rushing to replace narratives right away can feel very inaccessible and can add more shame when we search for other narratives but don’t have the experiences and safety and embodiment to support those narratives.

From the examples above:

• Narrative: “Will they think that our chemistry is fading if I ask for slowness and more buildup when we have sex?”
• Embodiment: “I feel the need to be slower right now. It will help me actually feel more sexual and turned on and safe.”
• Rewriting narrative: *“My need for slowness with some partners is part of who I am. I love the space it creates for me to truly explore the shared chemistry, it lets me appreciate prettiness I am seeking: the texture of their skin, their facial expressions, holding silence and touch together. Slowness is just as valid a way to explore intimacy as a fiery explosive chemistry. My need for slowness is sacred and beautiful.”

This renarritivizing is really only accessible from a place of embodiment and self-compassion. Without compassion, self-awareness and embodiment can bring our attention to and hyper fixate on the same narratives of shame.