The Sexy Spirit

How would you use your ISIS wheel in a couples therapy session?
I ask couples to imagine that they're standing in a big circle, which is divided into more or less equal quarters. One of the quarters is body, one is mind, one is heart or emotions, and one is spirit. I tell couples to speak from each of those quadrants. So when you get a picture of, say, a man who's saying, "I want to have sex 12 times a week," and the woman is saying, "Well, that doesn't feel good to me," the man will usually be standing in the quadrant of physical, and the woman may be standing in the emotional place. What she may really be saying is, "Honey, I want you to look at me when we have intercourse. I want you to talk to me about your feelings. I don't want you just to hump me and then roll over and go to sleep. We need to have some more connection here."

Then, I would ask them to become exquisitely aware that sex is more than just physical and just performance. So I would ask them to speak from the emotional place, from the mind place, from the place where maybe the guy is saying, "I was told that the only way to be virile and to be a man was to score—50 times a week wouldn't be too much for me." And the woman may be in the place of saying, "I've been told that I'm a 'loose woman' if I have that much sex." So you begin to get that discrepancy between the couple. But if they can discuss where they're coming from, and what messages they grew up with and are saluting to in the present, then they can come to a more reasoned outcome.