Archive for May 18th, 2009
The reason for starting with the mechanical question is to get it out of the way so that you can look at the more important relationship issues, for these are the areas where disease and handicap have their most profound influence. If we keep taking our banged-up cars into body shops for repair without looking at how we drive in traffic, we will end up with more and more banged-up cars. So it is with disease that, as one paraplegic man stated, “The system is more important than the thing.”
“I just sort of became the chicken-soup type. I mean, I turned over my life to everyone else. My wife became a caretaker, and caretakers are not supposed to screw their patients.” This statement from a husband with multiple sclerosis illustrates the importance of sexual self-concept. Try to answer question two not in terms of skill or attractiveness but on the basis of “how” you are as a person when you are trying to be intimate. If you are experiencing disease, what has the disease process done to your relationship skills. Have you become more dependent, more aggressive, less assertive, more or less withdrawn? What has been the major impact of your illness on you as a person? How people experience disease and illness tells more about how they really are as persons than how they experience health.
I have my patients who are experiencing disease calculate their “N/S Quotient.” This is the balance between nurturance—taking care of someone else—and succorance—being taken care of by another person—that I discussed in Chapter Four. One of the most healing of human experiences, one of the healthiest things you can do, is to help somebody else. When you are sick, you must continue at some level to help others. How would you say your balance is? Do you still profit, even if you are sick, from all the good healing internal chemicals that come from the joy of supporting and helping someone else?
There have been research articles (not many) describing the impact of disease on sexuality. There have been very few articles about the impact of sexuality on disease, on sex as healer, on sexual shamanism. Maintaining and enhancing intimacy throughout the challenge of disease is not only possible but necessary for getting better. Remaining sexually active can actually slow some aging orocesses, protect the genitals to some degree from aging changes, and possibly offer a boost to your immune system. Research has clearly shown that immunoefficiency increases when you love and are loved.
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Masters and Johnson presented a sexual problem-solving book that quickly became the spark for an entirely new form of couples therapy. In Human Sexual Inadequacy and in The Pleasure Bond, they suggest techniques for slowing men down and speeding women up in their sexual response. They present sensate focus, a technique for learning to touch and be touched, and describe the “tease technique” and the “squeeze technique” to help with impotence and premature ejaculation respectively. Their diagnostic categories are based on time, on coming too soon, taking too long, or not spending enough time. Women may have problems having orgasm, but men are always orgasmic if they ejaculate, preferably “on time” for the female. For the first time, we had individual diagnosis based on two people; men were premature, but women were never postmature. Sex clinics proliferated following their work, as Masters and Johnson gave unwilling birth to the Arthur Murray “sex” studios of the seventies. While Masters and Johnson trained only a few teams, their educational programs were offered to hundreds who in turn felt themselves to be “Masters and Johnson” qualified, franchised sexperts. Unlike the first and second perspectives, this third perspective was being directly interpreted for us on talk shows and in popular magazines, each preaching the same “time-frame sex” of this third view of sexuality. Perhaps a society that now had more time to recreate and less need to procreate was more than ready for a perspective on sex that stressed efficient, effective use of our sex time.
There is no question that Masters and Johnson made a significant and lasting contribution to “democratizing” sex. Their treatment program was for couples, and even though their sexual-response model was based on the individual, they treated couples with treatment teams, and saw marriage as much more than a natural state or convenience. They saw it as a challenge, a potential for pleasure and sexual satisfaction as well as companionship, a place where time could be better controlled. In my view, the most significant contribution of Masters and Johnson was not their flawed sexual-response model, which modified the original Ellis model. Their contribution was to focus on a system, an interaction. They were a team, a man-and-woman team, and that allowed the feminist balance so lacking in the first two perspectives. They started the systerns approach to sex that I emphasize in the super marital sex perspective.
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It has not been shown that we marry to make up for a personal deficit, or that we pick partners who balance for some personally perceived deficiency. It is true, however, that our most remarkable (at least in our own eyes) personality deficit influences our bonding.
“I’ve never seen myself as particularly smart, I guess. Just about average,” said a husband. “I’d steer away from real bright people, people with book knowledge. I know my wife is much smarter than I am, but I offer her other things, like steadiness, reliability.”
Our selection of partner may not be determined by our perceived deficits, but you can see in this man’s description that specific areas of experienced inferiority can act themselves out within our relationships.
“I’m not beautiful, but I am smart,” reported one wife. “My husband is beautiful but not too bright. Together, we make a beautifully intelligent marriage.”
Think about your own deficit area on your love map and consider how this may influence your interaction with your spouse.
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