One “Trick” To Revolutionize Your Sex Life

In this week’s quickie episode, Jess describes how understanding your “Core Erotic Feeling” can improve your sex life. Whether you’re turned on by love, tenderness, humiliation or compliments, training your partner to evoke your core erotic feeling is key to a fulfilling sex life!

Podcast Transcript:

It’s not a trick at all. It’s a straightforward exercise you can do on your own and with your partner (if you have one) that really will revolutionize your sex life.

It involves learning to understand your core erotic feeling (CEF).

Your core erotic feeling is the feeling that you most strongly associated with sexual desire, arousal, pleasure, and fulfillment.

To help identify your CEF, answer this simple question: how do you need to feel in order to enjoy sex?

Do you need to feel loved? Relaxed? Appreciated? De-stressed? Desired? Sexy? Challenged? Threatened? Jealous? Subjugated? Powerful? Surprised?

This list is obviously non-exhaustive.

Your core erotic feeling is so intrinsically tied to your erotic script that you may not be able to imagine that someone else feels differently. It’s much like a Love Language.

Some of you may feel as though you don’t need to feel any particular emotion in order to get in the mood for sex — you’re always in the mood. Well good for you!

But you still have a core erotic feeling — the feeling that most intensifies your sexual pleasure.

You may want to answer the question: When I think of my hottest, most intense sexual experience(s), how did I feel?

Once you’ve identified your CEF, you need to identify how to cultivate this feeling. What does it take help you to feel relaxed, for example?

And then you need to communicate both your CEF and how to make you experience it to your partner so that they can be a part of the cultivation process.

Your core erotic feeling may be the experience of feeling desired. But conveying your CEF to your partner requires a bit more specificity. You might say, “Honey, I’ve figured it out! I need you to make me feel desired in order to really want and enjoy sex.”

Your partner might believe they understand you, but their idea of helping you to feel desired might be different than your own.

You might want them to look you up and down. Admire your every curve. Tell you that you’re irresistible.

Whereas they might believe that making you feel desired involves grabbing your boobs like a couple of bags of sand.

I’m exaggerating, but you can easily see the disconnect.

So in addition to identifying your CEF, you also need to specifically outline to your partner how they can evoke this feeling.

But remember, it’s not your partner’s job alone to activate your CEF. You play an even bigger role. You have to make yourself feel this way too!

If you’re CEF involves feeling sexy and desired, but you spend all day complaining about your body, you can’t expect your partner to undo all that damage.

Your CEF can change over time, but it doesn’t tend to change from day-to-day.

I’ll share my partner’s story to illustrate how your CEF may change:

When I met my partner, I quickly learned that feeling relaxed was key to his sexual desire and enjoyment. He needed to wind down and destress before sex was a possibility. We fell into a groove in which he made lifestyle adjustments to promote his own relaxation and I did what I could to help him de-stress.

But five years into our (now 16-year) relationship, everything changed…

In 2006, we visited a nude couples resort for the fist time. It was a highly erotic environment and everyone was very friendly. And though only half of the guests were in consensually non-monogamous relationships, some were also respectfully flirtatious Brandon, who is terribly attractive, received A LOT of attention.

Despite being ridiculously good looking, he has never really received a ton of attention (straight men, unfortunately, don’t often get to indulge in the feeling of being desired, but that’s a whole other topic), so this was a new experience.

And he LOVED it.

And so…his CEF shifted — from relaxation to feeling desired.

And so I had to relearn his CEF. It was a process — a struggle.

In the end, it took our relationship in a whole new direction — a very good one.

***

A couple of reminders…

• You have to teach your partner how to make you feel that CEF; they won’t know.
• Having the same CEF as your partner can actually be more challenging.
• And even if you have the same CEF, the way you reach that feeling may be different, so you still need to train your lover.

There is also another level of CEF. 2.0.

This is the feeling that takes sex to the next level. The feeling that makes sex overpoweringly fulfilling. I call it your elevated erotic feeling - EEF.

So for example, maybe your basic CEF is feeling relaxed, but you find sex is even more exciting when you feel a sense of threat — now you have to find a way to balance your CEF with your EEF so that you’re relaxed enough to have sex, but you can play with the element of threat to make it more exciting. The two may seem at odds, but you can make them work. We’ll do another episode on this another time…

Your missing should you choose to accept it:

1. Identify your CEF. Share it with your partner. Train them to help you access it.
2. Look for ways YOU can evoke this emotion.
3. Learn your partner’s CEF and let them train you.
4. Discuss your EEF, which is often more complicated and nuanced.

As always, send me your questions and feedback! @SexWithDrJess

XOXO