Sometime into my practice of working with couples on their intimacy issues, I had a couple come to me with a strange request. They were both top executives in an industry that is famous for hustling and long working hours, and they were the living proof of it. Having children of their own and grandparents far away didn’t really do them any favours, and so their time together was sparce, or dare I say downright rare. To add a salt to the injury, she was a morning bird, while he was a night owl.
“Even after all these years, we are madly in love. We respect each other and can work through our differences quite smoothly. We are not intimate though and we would love to be, this surely isn’t the end of our sex life in our age. Can you please help?”
So far, nothing strange about this request. However, she added. “We are hardworking and will do anything you will ask us to do to fix this. Just don’t tell us to slow down or make more time. We like our fast pace, and it is working for us so well.”
The vision of hard working/cooperating clients in therapy took the best of me and I quickly jumped onto their request. A cooperating client who is willing to work hard is every therapist’s wet dream, so I got blinded by this prospect and ignored some important things. We established the request for slowing down was why they left their last therapist. We talked about some ground rules, and I explained what the difference between therapy and counselling is. They were ok with me helping them navigate this issue, rather than being flooded with do’s and don’ts from each session.
And so, we embarked on this together. We explored during the first session, third… and as we were approaching our 5th session, the realisation hit me like a train wreck. They will not see any effect of these explorations unless they make time to process and integrate everything they are uncovering about themselves in between the sessions. The words of slowing down flashed in my mind each time I thought about them.
I found myself having made a promise I was bound to break. Maybe I wanted to know whether it is somehow magically possible to hustle the same, add more work to do and things to try, for intimacy to magically appear with a hard-working couple.
And they were working hard, however every time we had a conversation about various perspectives, we were always brought to the one and only – there are not enough of hours in the day, not enough of days in a week to ease into this in the rhythm intimacy needs.
In the 6th session I expressed my believe that they will need to slow down and create more time, and we never saw each other again.
Over the years of working with couples, I am starting to realise that this is the first thing I am leading on… Trying to discover the time the couple has at their disposal. How they are working with it. What the ordinary days look like for them and how do they switch between each role they play in their lives. But we will talk about that in more detail in a future post.
I hear this so often in my practice. Time heals everything. And while that saying might seem true, it makes a big difference in what we do in that time to how we actually heal. Working with a therapist on your intimacy to help you navigate what you do with that time might be beneficial, but having the time is the first step.
Here are the questions I would love you could ask yourself.
1. When your intimacy and sexual life was working out for you, at what times of the day was it happening? Was there a difference between morning and evening times?
2. What was going on in the rest of your life when your intimacy was happening? How much time did you have for yourself and you as a couple to just simply be?
3. What does your ordinary day look like these days?
4. On a scale 1 to 10 (1 being exhausted, 10 overflowing with energy), where are you energy-wise these days? How does that compare to the times you had the intimacy you wanted?
5. If you were asked to create more space in your day, what would need to go?
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