Whether you're reading this because your infidelity was just uncovered or you're looking to see what your partner should be doing after you've discovered their infidelity, this is a great place to start. Many resources and guides exist for those who have been betrayed; we have a great starting point here. Those who have been found out often feel just as lost and directionless, and you deserve guidance too.

This brings us to the explosive part of this bomb going off - and that's your partner's emotions. They've got a lot of big emotions right now and the right to express them. Normally most of us have no problem listening to and supporting our partners. However, when the anger and hurt are pointed at you, it triggers an overwhelming feeling of shame that can cause you to shut down, walk away, or even get angry in return. Learning to manage and process this shame is a key component to successfully moving forward. A good starting point is to try and shift that shame into guilt. This sounds like changing "I'm a bad person" into "I did a bad thing." All of the focus may be on your partner as the one who is hurt, and right now the focus does need to be on their hurt. This doesn't mean that you don't get to hear that this is a hard process with a lot of hurt and hard feelings to process on your side too. That's why getting support for yourself as well is so important.

Something also might be broken in the relationship. Maybe you and your partner have grown further and further apart without taking the steps to fix it. Your connection emotionally, sexually, or both is broken and your needs aren't being met. I want to be very clear on this: regardless of what needs aren't being met in the relationship, the choice to cheat is your own and anything less than complete ownership of this choice isn't going to help. However, recognizing how both people may have had a hand in pushing you towards that choice can be necessary to identify and resolve these underlying causes of infidelity. Working together, or with a therapist, to identify just what caused the infidelity and how to fix it internally, or between the two of you, is a necessary step in moving forward.

Using this model to hear and validate your partner is a step you'll take a thousand times. Be ready to hear the same things and have the same conversations over and over again. But know that every time you can listen and validate, you're chipping away at the massive ball of hurt your partner is now carrying around. As I said above, this is hard because your partner's hurt and anger may trigger your own shame about your choices. You need to be spending some of your own time processing those feelings of shame. (I can't say this enough.)

What do I even mean by this?
​Women are missing out on orgasms for one simple reason:

Eleanor Roosevelt was quoted to say comparison is the thief of all joy. I don’t really think she was talking about orgasms when she said this but she could’ve been. Women often get stuck in what orgasms are supposed to look like. We are inundated with media and pop culture that shows us a man is supposed to climb on top of a woman and within seconds or minutes she’s having a mind blowing orgasm. Will let me be the first to tell you this is not how it goes for most women. As a sex therapist who is talked with hundreds of women over the last 10+ years about how they reach orgasm, I feel confident in saying I know that this is not how most women get there.
And even if you are one of those women who can reach orgasm with penis in vagina intercourse, you’re still missing out on orgasms. It is much easier for a woman to reach an orgasm if she has had the proper sexual build up to that orgasm, along with having adequate clitoral stimulation. So even if you are reaching orgasm in other ways you could be reaching orgasm much more by incorporating build up and clitoral stimulation.

​What do I mean by build up? I thought you’d never ask.

Build up can look different for different women - but keep one thing in mind. It takes the average woman around 10-15 minutes of stimulation to reach orgasm. This is in contrast to men who average 3-7 minutes.

I highly recommend the book She Comes First by Ian Kerner. It will help teach you all you need to know about female anatomy and pleasure.
While taking your time do things that feel good and try to keep it at an arousal level that is on the higher end, but remember that you don’t need to be at a 10/10 arousal level or even close to build arousal. If it feels good, keep doing it, and watch arousal build over time.
This is also where expectations come in. Try not to expect that your arousal will go the same every time Or that it’ll look like the movies. Arousal and desire are can be a finicky thing. What feels good right now might now feel good in 3 minutes, or 5 seconds, or tomorrow. You get my drift.

Don’t let expectations be the thief of your orgasm joy any longer! Take time to build your arousal and do what feels good to you. If you want some additional support to deal with feelings around this, past trauma or pain, consider talking with a professional. Our sex therapists want to help you address sexual concerns here in Plymouth, or anywhere in the state with online therapy in Minnesota. Get started by following these simple steps:

1. Contact the Sexual Wellness Institute to set up your first appointment.
2. Meet with one of our skilled sex therapists for an intake appointment.
3. Begin building better communication with your partner, overcome sexual concerns and experience new fun and intimacy in your relationship!​

Low libido is the number one reason why people reach out to a sex therapist. It’s a common complaint and it can negatively impact both individuals and their partners. This issue cuts across gender, culture, age, ability, religion, and sexual orientation. It can affect most partnerships at some time or another. When this happens, so many people feel stuck in their pattern, unsure of what to do about it. Here are some important things to know when your sexual desire feels low.

There are two types of sexual desire. Spontaneous desire is the one we’re most familiar with. It’s the one we assume to be “normal.” It’s shown to us in movies and television. Spontaneous desire is the idea that desire should just spontaneously occur, without effort. While this is certainly one way that people experience desire, there’s also another pathway to desire called responsive desire. First introduced by Dr. Rosemary Basson, this pathway to desire describes how desire can happen in response to a specific stimulus or preferred context.

Here’s an example of the two types of desire. Let’s say you’re sitting on the couch doing some work on your laptop and suddenly a sexual fantasy or image appears in your mind. You think to yourself, “I feel like having sex.” It didn’t seem to be prompted by anything in particular in your environment. It just emerged on its own. That is spontaneous desire.

Now, let’s imagine that you’re sitting on that same couch doing some work on your laptop, and suddenly your partner comes to sit next to you and starts kissing your neck and caressing you. Prior to them coming to sit with you, sex wasn’t on your mind, but once they started touching you, you think to yourself, “I feel like having sex.” That’s responsive desire.

These two pathways to desire are both normal and valid. They’re just different. It’s very common for us, as sex therapists, to meet couples where they have different pathways to desire, e.g. one partner experiences more spontaneous desire and the other experiences more responsive desire. When that’s the case, what do you do?

Many times when people come to see a sex therapist for low desire, what they actually find out is that they don’t have low libido as they thought, but actually just need the right stimulus to experience desire (responsive desire). They learn that when they are presented with a sexual context that is appealing to them, they experience interest or arousal. If you find that you have a more responsive sexual desire style, here are some things you can do with that:

• Learn and explore what context turns you on and ignites your responsive desire. This could be sexy audio stories, reading romance novels, erotica, watching TV shows with sex scenes, etc.
• Plan some intentional time with a partner to create a sexual context. Set aside time to kiss, caress, touch, massage, etc. This may help to excite responsive desire, though we recommend keeping this flexible so that it doesn’t feel like pressure to have sex.
• Pay attention to what seems to cause responsive desire in you so that you and your partner may replicate it.
• Learn how to turn yourself on without relying solely on a partner to do that for you. Examples of this include exploring what helps you to feel sexy are: Applying lotion to your body, masturbating, exploring how different smells make you feel, wearing certain clothes, etc.
• Go to our page about low desire concerns and watch the various education videos about this concern

Something to keep in mind is that low desire is relative. Perhaps you don’t have low desire, and may just have responsive desire. Or, perhaps you don’t have low desire, and it’s just that your desire is different from that of your partner. Whatever the case may be, please know that you are not “broken”.  Your desire is likely a problem that does not need to be fixed, but something to be curious about and explore. Your sexuality is normal and so are you.

Don’t wait any longer to get sex therapy for low libido. Our sex therapists want to help you address sexual concerns here in Plymouth, or anywhere in the state with online therapy in Minnesota. Get started by following these simple steps:

1. Contact the Sexual Wellness Institute to set up your first appointment.
2. Meet with one of our skilled sex therapists for an intake appointment.
3. Begin building better communication with your partner, overcome sexual concerns and experience new fun and intimacy in your relationship!​

In addition to sex therapy, our LGBT & polyamory friendly sex therapists provide a wide range of mental health services at our Plymouth, MN counseling office. Other services include couples therapy & marriage counseling, EFT, evidence-based couples therapy, EMDR & sexual trauma therapy, as well as, teen therapy. In order to help serve the mental health needs of all those living in Minnesota, we also offer online counseling & sex therapy. We also provide a variety of helpful tips on our mental health blog. Please feel free to reach out with questions, or if you would like to schedule an appointment to begin working with a skilled sex therapist! Your sex life can be amazing. Sex therapy can be a part of that process for you.

Do you have a hunch that some past trauma is impacting your ability to have connected and fulfilling sex?You’re not alone! No matter how recent or long ago you experienced a trauma, until it is fully processed you may experience it impacting many areas of your life, and particular with your sex life.Trauma is, unfortunately, one thing that's very hard to get past without professional help. Getting past trauma, though, can allow you to take your sex life back or even find it in the first place. There are many different types of trauma but for the purposes of this blog post I will be focusing on sexual trauma.

The first thing I want to be very clear on is that you, and no one else, get to determine if events in your life have been traumatic. I see so many people further hurt after traumatic experiences due to people in their lives, even close friends and family, telling them that their experiences, "weren't that bad" or "at least it didn't go farther" or "get over it." If something was traumatic for you, then no one gets to tell you otherwise.
I define trauma as any experience, or persistent experiences, that leave us with an ingrained negative belief about ourselves. Coming from sexual trauma this might sound like, "I'm worthless," "I'm not good enough," "I am weak/powerless," or "I should have known better," to name a few. These negative beliefs attach themselves to traumatic experiences and don't go away until those traumatic experiences are processed in a healthy way. This might be six months or fifty years.
When it comes to trauma, the old adage, "Time heals all wounds" is simply not true. Due to chemicals released in the brain and circumstances following trauma, traumatic memories do not get processed and filed away like normal memories. This means that they float around on the surface and are easily triggered by day to day events or in our specific case, sexual intimacy. So, let's take a look at how trauma can impact sex.

The short answer is that trauma impacts sex in a myriad of ways. Let's break it down and look at some of the primary ones. Again, if it feels like any of this is happening to you, there might be trauma involved. ​
Trauma impacts everyone differently but two common responses to sexual trauma are (1) complete avoidance of sex, or overwhelming negative about yourself or the act itself during sex, and (2) Using sex as a primary interaction or way of connecting with people.
If we look at these from our perspective of negative beliefs, it's easy to understand where these reactions are coming from. The first derives from a powerful feeling of being unsafe. Sex is a supremely vulnerable act, and when your safety is taken away it feels unthinkable to engage in it. Even with these feelings, some people feel they have a responsibility or expectation to be sexual with their partners. This leads to intense negative feelings during sex and can lead to dissociation. This can also lead to negative feelings about a partner who is doing the real or perceived pushing of expectation. On a less intense level, someone might avoid sex because they feel like they're not good enough to be wanted by their partner, wouldn't know what to do or be good at it, or feel like they're gross, making it extremely hard to feel sexy and aroused. This can even make any physical affection with a partner feel scary because it might lead to or create pressure for sex. 
At the other end of the spectrum, some people respond to sexual trauma with highly increased and sometimes risky sexual interaction. While this may be the other end of the spectrum in terms of action, the action is still being driven by negative beliefs about self. In this case, it likely sounds like, "I'm only valued for my body." We all need to feel valued, so this puts people in a difficult spot.

There are several trauma therapies out there, but the most efficacious and evidenced based practice is EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. EMDR uses eye movements to activate our brain's natural processing systems work through trauma in the safe environment of a therapy session. EMDR was originally developed using eye movements (hence the name), but these days therapists can also use sounds and physical stimulation to create the same effect. It's all up to your preference. What this bi-lateral stimulation does is connect up your trauma memories to the processing part of your brain, allowing you to actively process trauma and finally move past it. The amazing thing about EMDR is that once you've gotten through processing, it's done.
Memories don't unprocess themselves. Once you're through processing, you'll work with your therapist to install new positive beliefs about yourself in place of the negative ones, and plan for how you might deal with triggering situations in the future so you can move forward in life feeling confident that you can take back your sex life, or just your life in general!

These positive beliefs might sound like:

• “I deserve to enjoy my sexuality”
• “I am okay just as I am”
• “There’s no right or wrong way to enjoy or have sex”
• “I am safe”

I have many clients contact me during our COVID-19 lockdown stating that they really want to do EMDR but thought that they would be unable to, due to therapists operating through telehealth. I can say that our therapists are happy to engage in electronic EMDR with you and technology has provided several ways to make that happen. If working through your trauma and taking back your sex life sounds like a positive, there's no better time than the present!

EMDR for sexual trauma might be a good fit for you. Our sex therapists want to help you address sexual concerns here in Plymouth, or anywhere in the state with online therapy in Minnesota. Get started by following these simple steps:

1. Contact the Sexual Wellness Institute to set up your first appointment.
2. Meet with one of our skilled EMDR therapists for an intake appointment.
3. Take back your life, and your sexual pleasure, once and for all.

If you have you know that there is some serious sexual tension and build up between the two main characters that results in some extremely steamy sex scenes.
For those of you who haven’t seen it – it is a period drama about a girl from a wealthy family looking for someone to marry and the scandalous things that ensue for her and her family. It also includes lots of sex and sexy scenes sure to give you a little titillation – or at least entertainment!

Something that makes this show interesting is that the main character, Daphne, is finding her sexuality for the time – and doesn’t have social media and friends telling her what to expect. That can seem scary, and I bet it was, but what she doesn’t have to deal with is the BS societal expectations that have come to be about what a woman’s sexuality is “supposed” to look like behind closed doors. Certainly she has the societal expectation that she be “pure” and proper until she gets married – but once she is she’s allowed to explore her sexuality in whatever ways feel naturally good to her instead of trying to adhere to the patriarchal societal expectations.
Even as Daphne “touches herself” for the first time she’s doing it completely not knowing what masturbation is. Can you imagine just being able to masturbate without fears around what is “supposed” to look and feel like?! How freeing!

Women don’t tend to be as “visual” as men and don’t always include watching porn as a part of their regular masturbation routine. However, most women do respond in some way to visual stimuli that is arousing to them. What I like about this his show is very accessible and easy to watch, has some very titillating sexual scenes, and it’s not as “out there” or “raunchy” as much of the main stream porn. This series is basically a romance novel made into a series – and I know many women like to jump start arousal by reading romance novel or two.
What I also know about many women is that it takes responsive desire to build arousal and wanting and that it doesn’t just happening spontaneously. This means we have to have a stimulus of something to jump start that arousal. In long term relationship we have to get more creative about those stimuli in order to maintain a healthy and consistent sexual relationship. This stimulus can be anything from your partner kissing you, seeing your partner excel at something, having a romantic moment with your partner, etc. It can also be from something more obviously sexual like a romance novel, erotic, porn, etc. Or…BRIDGERTON!

So here’s what I suggest. Make yourself your relaxing drink of choice (wine, tea, etc) and sit down and watch this show and pay attention to what happens for you during some of the sexy scenes. This can be some of the more “sexual tension building” type scenes to the first time they have sex. Some of the best buildups include when they are fighting sexual tension while dancing formally together, stolen glances,  barely touch hands while looking at a painting together, and Daphne watching the Duke’s sweaty well defined muscles at the boxing ring and obviously being turned on.
If you want to jump ahead to any scenes, the first sex scene can be found here. (Age restricted, per YouTube)

​Mental arousal includes thinking positive sexual thoughts like “ooo that’s kinda hot” or “he’s really sexy”.

Fantasizing can be as simple as imaging yourself as one of the characters becoming engulfed while dancing and enjoying that romance and sexual build up, or more elaborate and walking yourself through a sex scene imagining you are the one engaging in the act. While doing this you might imagine what each part would feel like to experience yourself.

​Physical arousal is noticing what is happening in your body. This can include:

• Noticing tingles in certain places in your body- particularly genitals
• Noticing warm in places on your body – particularly genitals. When we become aroused blood rushes to our genitals and produces a “warming” sensation
• Noticing lubrication in your genitals

​If you notice any of these things happening – lean into them and try to build upon them. Start touching yourself and see what happens. Or, bring your partner in on the fun and let them touch you. And…go from there!