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Dr. Trish Leigh Podcast
#Episode 160: Formula to Perform Healthy Sexuality in The Bedroom — Dr. Trish Leigh
00:14:45
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Hey, welcome back. If you are having difficulty performing in the bedroom, I want you to know your formula is off. So I'm going to help you figure out what that formula is. Why is it off, and how can you get it back on. Welcome to another episode of the podcast with me, Dr. Trish Leigh, Brain health and sex addiction recovery coach. I'm glad you're back. This is an important discussion, so let's dive in. What is this formula that I'm talking about? Well, it's more. More than what you think. I always say that, you know, relationships, especially when explicit matters in the mix, are a deep end issue, not a shallow end. So we have to wait out to the deep end on this one. Let's do it together. So here's the idea is that there's actually a lot to it from a nervous system standpoint to be able to be relaxed enough and stimulated enough to have a good time in the bedroom with your partner. So if something's off in that formula, you might not be able to make it happen. And there's a lot of working parts. So we're going to break those working parts into three distinct categories right now. Number one is your environment. That's where people will go first, usually externally. What things outside of myself might be off. So we'll talk about that. Number two is your partner. When you're having a nice, engaged, fun, pleasurable, enjoyable experience with someone else, it involves a partner. So we would be remiss to not look at the partner aspect. So we're going to look at the partner. After we look at the obvious thing you internally, we're going to have to look at what's happening in your brain, your mind, your body, and your spirit. And your spirit is what I call the self with a capital S. So we're going to dig into all four of those aspects in just a second and we're going to look at what might be off in the formula. What can we fix? So first, let's start with the environment. This is obvious enough right from the mom of five kids. You know, there are challenges in getting to be able to spend enough quality time with your partner. So first of all, if you have children, you know, locking the door and ideally making sure no one's around because that can let your nervous system come down. People don't think about this. Your nervous system has to relax enough to be able to be the least amount of stressed with the lowest level of anxiousness or anxiety to engage what's called the parasympathetic nervous system. It's a branch of the automatic, automatic or autonomic nervous system. It's the branch for rest and relax. So you have to be relaxed enough. So you know, if there's kids outside the door or your besties are picking you up in five minutes, that keeps your nervous system ramped up. That's why the environment is important to think about. Another thing, if it's 6am, you might be aroused, but your partner might not be, simply because if your partner is coming out of sleep, then they're not awake enough. The other branch of the automatic nervous system is called sympathetic. Your system has to be stimulated enough, not over stimulated, which is a problem in today's day and age, but also not under stimulated. Read asleep. Right? So these are all factors, you know, time of day, how awake you are, how stressed out you are. And you can facilitate your environment by thinking of engaging all the senses and especially engaging your. Your partner in a way that he or she feels comfortable too. So the idea is you get some candles going, you get some music going, maybe you have a charcuterie board and a little wine. You let you bring the lights down low and you relax for a little while. You're engaged, sympathetic, but relaxed enough. Parasympathetic. When you're trying to squeeze in a little sesh in between lunch and going back to work, it can be more difficult. Don't get me wrong, you can pull it off, but it can be more difficult. Now, here's what we're talking about. Healthy sexuality, which might be different from what you're used to, which would be hypersexuality, the most amount of pleasure in the least amount of time, and not necessarily worried about the connectedness. So in this journey of leaving explicit matter behind, this shifts so the environment becomes more crucial so that you are trying to keep it balanced between sympathetic and parasympathetic. So put your dog in the other room, make sure no one's around, make sure you have ample time, make sure everybody's awake, and try to engage all the senses to be together in an engaged way. Think happiness, trifecta. Dopamine for pleasure, serotonin for joy and happiness in that engaged piece, and oxytocin for connection. It's wonderful when you're able to pull that off. Okay, so now let's transition from environment to you. Now let's think about your brain. We're going to start there. Remember, we're going brain, mind, body, self or spirit. So first let's start with your brain. We know that if you've Been consuming explicit matter for any amount of time with consistency, frequency, and especially with intensity that you may be struggling with. You likely are, I would bet the farm on it, that you are struggling with dysregulation in your brain. Brain dysfunction, which I have seen on hundreds, the same pattern, hundreds of brain maps. And what this pattern shows is a combination of two things. That one brain pattern I call strained brain. The other brain pattern I call drained brain. So strain brain is a brain that's running too fast and too slow, wired and tired. Now, I just told you, you have to be not stressed out, the least stressed as possible and awake as possible. So if you struggle with strained brain, you are ramped up and exhausted at the same time. And even though you might be pushing through your days on your brain map, I can see you have a lot of underlying stress and you're fatigued and overwhelmed out in the extremes. Very difficult to be relaxed enough and aroused enough to be able to have an erection and to see that through to orgasm with a partner. Strained brain. The next pattern is drained brain. Drain brain shows me that the reward center and the reward pathways in your brain have been desensitized by hitting that button for very high levels of dopamine over. Over time, the desensitization of the dopamine receptors leads you to need very high level of stimulation to feel aroused. So strain brains out in the extremes. Drain brain actually is in the middle where you want your brain to be, but it's at the nth degree way up here, meaning your brain is flooded with dopamine. You're stuck in artificial neutral and you need a lot of stimulation to go because you're too chill and you're looking for big amounts of stimulation. So we have strain brain in the extremes and we have drain brain in the middle up at, you know, arousal on steroids. So you need very high levels of stimulation. Strain brain, drain brain. I have seen this in hundreds of brain maps. This is at the core of why you can't have a pleasurable, enjoyable experience in the bedroom. If explicit matters in the mix, it's a very high likelihood it's created and has your brain stuck in strain brain brain and likely drain brain too. So number one is your brain. If you're dealing with dysregulation and dysfunction, trying to do all the other things we talk about here won't work. That's the reality. I work with people who have had erectile dysfunction for over a decade and they're able to remediate it in four months because we bring drain brain down, we bring strain brain down, and their brain is able to operate again to do all the things we're going to talk about. So let's transition to your mind. What happens in your mind when you are in strained brain and drained brain? What happens is you will feel stress. But stress is sneaky. This whole thing is insidious, I always say. So stress is sneaky because you may actually have a lot more stress in your brain than you know, because your mind calibrates to the stress so you can deal with it, and so you feel stressed, but you don't feel stressed up here because you get used to being stressed here. So when it goes up a little, like you feel a little more stressed, but you don't realize your threshold for stress is much higher than it should be to be healthy. So in your mind, you may be stressed out and you may also be exhausted, like we already talked about. But at the same time, if explicit matters in the mix, you have what I call a distorted mind, which means now you have a partner in front of you who wants to be with you, possibly we'll get there in a second. And it's difficult for you to be aroused because you have euphoric recall of all the explicit matter you've consumed. You are what you eat, if you know what I mean. So if you're consuming a lot of explicit matter, your mind becomes distorted to want that. I mean, we see this at the 11th, actually the 21st level, in stories like P. Diddy and Jared from Subway. I'm dying to make a video about Jared because he's characterized as a monster. And don't get me wrong, I would never condone child pornography, but he needed level 21 dopamine, and it was linked to very young people. And you know what's different about him? He needed very high levels linked to children, which is tragic and awful. That's a dopamine dependency at the highest level. And he got caught because this is happening for many, many. Maybe not with children, thank God, but at the same time, your brain gets linked to what you're watching. And I don't need to tell you what you're watching is not good for your mind. So your mind starts wanting that thing. Another thing that happened to Jared is he started acting those things out in the real world. That's an escalation behavior. So if you've ever thought, I want to go experience the thing that you've watched, you're escalating, my friend. That strain brain tipping into drain brain distorting your mind. So now it's time to be with your partner. Your partner's none of what you've seen and there's a disconnect. Your formula is off. The brain dysfunction leads to a mind that's distorted that makes what you have in your real life so different from the unreality of explicit matter. And your formula's off. It no longer computes. It starts with brain dysfunction. It leads to a distorted mind, which then leads your body to not be able to become aroused. You can't become aroused because your brain has strained brain or drain brain or both, which leads you to that distorted mind that needs very high levels of stimulation from what you've been consuming to become aroused. Which means now your body doesn't work back at the healthy levels. You can't make it work. And then you know what that leads to in terms of spirit or capital S. Self. It leads to shame, it leads to guilt, it leads to maybe the recognition that you are addicted to explicit matter, maybe the recognition that when you're with your partner, you're going to fantasy to try to become aroused. And that can't be good. So the formula is off, my friend. Brain, mind, body and spirit, it's all off. And when your formula is off, you cannot create in your life what you want. It leads to disconnection with your partner, which is what we're talking about now. So now you're trying to be with your partner, you're not able to because of all these things going on with you. And then guess what? Your partner knows. She's not dumb. So partners suffer from something called betrayal trauma. It actually changes the brain performance pattern so that it's kind of like drained brain, but it has a different impetus or mechanism that creates it. So basically the brain shifts into artificial neutral to protect her from the things that she knows or she thinks she knows about what you have going on. It's a protective mechanism in the brain, shifts into neutral. Now she doesn't have to process her reality because she doesn't feel safe insecure with you because of the sexual acting out behaviors. We know from science that porn registers as infidelity in women's minds and nervous systems. So she doesn't feel safe with you anymore. It's very difficult to be aroused with a person you don't feel safe with. And it leads to something that is called reactive intimacy anorexia, which means she's anorexic with wanting to be with you, but she loves you, so she's still trying. But guess what? That's another element of the formula being off. Now. Now let's put these pieces together. Your brain has dysfunction from explicit matter, which means now your mind is distorted. It wants what you've been watching, which gives you ED and sexual arousal dysfunction. It makes you sad. That is giving you shame and guilt. And your spirit, your soul and yourself is being tortured, which is ramping up the stress in your mind, which is creating more brain dysfunction. Now, your partner is aware on some level, even if it's subconscious, she feels disconnected from you because you're not able to connect with her. She is struggling with partner, betrayal, trauma. Whether she knows it or not, her brain shifts into this medium speed, making it difficult for her to be aroused. At the same time, in her mind, she doesn't feel safe with you. So then now she has reactive intimacy, anorexia. She doesn't want to be with you anymore because it doesn't feel safe, even though she does want to be with you. And you do want to be with her, but you can't because of explicit matter. Your formula is off. So how do you get the formula back on this your brain hack strategy for the day. You have to realize explicit matter has caused these problems for you. Get your brain map. If you can go to Dr. Trishleigh.com we can visualize what's happening in your brain. If you're struggling with sexual performance or disconnection in the bedroom, very highly likely that you have a brain map that shows strain, brain, drain, brain, or both. Your partner could get a brain map. Likely she has betrayal trauma in the brain. Then here's the deal. This is the scariest part of everything I'm going to tell you right now. It's time to talk about it. Talk to your partner. You don't want to get to your deathbed. Compartmentalizing your biggest problems. Share it with her. Get on the same page. Interdependent, strong people walking through this world together. Solve it together. Get reconnected together. Get your spirits connected. That way you can connect your mind and body with each other and you can get back to the happiness trifecta. So if you're struggling with this, I encourage you to tell your partner. Ask your partner how she feels. Find out what's going on in there. Share what's going on with you. Get your brain map so you can see the dysfunction and then we can heal it together. This is important stuff. I want you to fight for this like your life depends on it, because it does. All right. I hope this helps you out. And until next time. Control your brain or it'll control you.