Hello, my friends! We are back with our number one most downloaded guest in the history of Ask a Sex Therapist. It’s Susan Bratton, intimacy expert to millions. And before we get into it, I just want to say thank you is a wonderful human and I love her and I’m very grateful that we’ve connected and stayed in touch since you were last here on our episodes.
So thank you for coming back today. Um, we’re going to talk about revive her drive. That’s the theme of the episode today. Um, probably the number one issue I’ve been helping people with, uh, lately is, you know, low sex drive, mismatched libidos. , Susan, how did you, how did you get into this topic?
Because I didn’t have any, I didn’t want to have sex with my husband, Heather.
so hard to believe. It’s like so hard to believe like knowing you now, but I do love that that is part of your journey.
Yeah, literally for two decades, I’ve been writing passionate lovemaking techniques and bedroom communication skills and helping people with intimate wellness so that you can have great sex your whole life long. And it all started over two decades ago when I’d been married to Tim for a dozen years.
Mm hmm.
I literally was using every trick in the book to get out of having sex with him.
I would give him mercy sex when I absolutely felt so bad for him. And he was just, so miserable that I would just like have him spoon me and, you know, come inside me kind of thing. And it was really weird because my whole life I wanted to have great sex. I married him because the sex was good with him.
When we first got together, our sex was incredible. But it was incredible at a pretty low bar all in all honesty. I’ll tell you the love chemicals that surge during new relationship energy. They really can, um, you know, cover a lot of problems. Of lack of knowledge, and honestly, that was all that was wrong with us.
Heather was that we were the blind leading the blind in the bedroom
Like everybody, that’s like everybody out there
and that is so true because the only kind of sex. Education that we get is very minimal. It’s not pleasure based. It’s not female pleasure based at all. And then we’re just, you know, subjected to porn, which is primarily degrading to women and movies, which is like, he rips her, you know, shirt off, pulls her pants down.
Her, she’s still wearing her bra and he jams his penis inside her. Expecting her to be like dripping wet or whatever. Maybe you can get away with that the first couple months of your relationship, but it goes away within months to a matter of years. You just don’t have that same new relationship energy.
Now there are some, there are some hacks, which I, I’d love to talk about with regard to that, but it was interesting because recently. I’m going to say in the last year, I had a guy who, and men are like this, they’re very, um, analytics oriented and data collectors. And he, um, he sent me a spreadsheet of all of the excuses his wife had used not to have sex with
You have to be kidding me. You made a
five years or something.
He had it like organized by year. And I looked at it and I was like, yep, I’ve used all those.
wow.
um, it was so interesting because I said to him, Oh, honey, I’m so sorry that sex isn’t good enough for her to want to do it. Let’s get you some training and some skills and teach you how to get her turned back on again.
Like when you were married or when you were first married, when you
Yep. Yep.
And that is pretty much what I say to guys. So one of the very first programs that I authored, wrote, produced was this program called Revive Her Drive.
Mm hmm.
And one of the caveats that I always say is If sex was good in the beginning and it’s petered out, I can help you.
But if you married her and it was always a problem, like you’ve, she’s never really liked it, then you need Heather. You need to go to Heather Shannon because you need a sex therapist. If it’s
Yeah.
So that’s. The delineation here is that this episode is for you if you’re in a relationship where the sex used to be good, but it is not anymore and you want to rekindle your marriage.
The second thing that I would say is that you can have many Renaissance in your relationship over the decades and that you can bring it back. You can restart your romance no matter how distant those memories are. I am such a believer because I’ve seen it myself in thousands and Thousands and thousands of relationships over the last 15 years that since I wrote Revive Her Drive, um, it’s been actually 16 years.
Um, it’s a proven system to rekindle hot sex in your marriage. And I talk about the four elements of revival. That’s what the program really walks you through. And so I thought it would be good to just start out with, okay, what are the steps? Where, where am I now? And where do I want to get to? And where you are now is likely, she’s avoiding you for sex.
You might even be in separate bedrooms now. Um, if she has sex with you, it’s probably one certain way,
Yeah. Yep. Yep.
Um, it’s probably lights off. She probably has body image issues. She probably doesn’t, um, feel comfortable integrating pleasure toys or you don’t. Um, you don’t really talk about it because it is such a hot potato.
Yep.
And you don’t feel like talking about it because you know that you’ll either be stonewalled,
Mm hmm.
she just will be unable to talk to you at all, or she’ll have a fit to deflect, you know, or do really like childish things, like throw temper tantrums or screaming matches to get you to leave her alone.
Yeah, that’s never good.
Or she will talk circles around you and you won’t be able to, you will, you will lose. And so that is common. All of that. That’s how it works. That’s what goes on.
Yep.
And I still believe you can revive her drive.
It’s true and I’m so glad you’re saying that like emphasizing the hope piece because like that’s one of the things that comes up when I do the free consultations with people is they’re like, do you think there’s hope for us? That’s often like the last question after I kind of go over. Okay, what’s going on with you?
And here’s my method and blah blah blah and they’re like, Do you think there’s hope? Like, could we actually, and I’m like, yes, yes, of course, you know, and sometimes they go into it and they’re like, oh, but this, this, this is wrong. I’m like, I know that’s actually what makes me feel hopeful is that we have clearly identified things that we can fix, you know?
It’s so true. So, um, four, the four elements of, of revival, let me just walk through what those are because I kind of broke it down. The very first one is interesting because I call it creating polarity, trust, and surrender.
Oh, interest. That’s a lot. Okay.
The second, they work, they’re really intermeshed, intermeshed, so they work together as a system.
The second is overcoming resistance. and understanding escalation.
Hmm.
The third is female psychology strategies, essentially seduction skills.
We oh my that’s so needed. So needed. Yeah,
the fourth is understanding her female anatomy may be better than she even does herself. and some advanced sexual mastery techniques that will make all the difference in her openness to your offers for pleasure. So the first one is really about you. how you’re showing up in the relationship. The second one is how she’s showing up in the relationship and what you can do about it.
Mm hmm.
third is how her brain works and what you need to know because you keep shooting yourself in the foot by accident. And the fourth is how her body works because it’s nothing like yours.
And that you’re also shooting yourself in the
Uh huh.
And a lot of guys say to me, Oh, Susan Bratton, you little devil. I bought revive her drive and I thought I was going to fix my wife and you fixed me. Damn you girl, you sneaky little devil. And I’m like,
I’ve noticed you do that in your work and I love it.
well, and it’s funny because guys think she’s broken and she thinks she’s broken
Mm hmm.
broken and you’re not broken either.
You’re literally just working under a set of assumptions. That are a mismatch. And it’s once you get into her world and you understand her operating system, both the mind and the body, and you start working with her operating system, and you become the masculine sexual leader that she really needs from you.
Getting out of victimhood mentality, getting out of your anger, your rage, your shutdown, your cheating, your pride, Porn consumption. They’re like, wait, I’m not giving up porn. What other shows can I listen to today? I gotta, I gotta masturbate. God, you know, I’m not saying that. I’m just saying, I don’t, you won’t need to watch so much porn.
You won’t need to
Mm hmm.
much because you’ll actually be having lovemaking with your partner. And so it’s moving away from things that are not getting you where you want to go and moving towards the things that are.
Yeah. I love that.
so those are those are really the 4 and I want to go anywhere you want to go, but I did just want to, like, throw down that it’s a systematic series of small pieces of information that no one ever told you.
And
Mm hmm.
your mail logic, and that doesn’t work on your wife, obviously, because you’re not getting laid. Also, if you are a woman and your husband isn’t having sex with
Mm hmm.
that’s an entirely different question. And we could do another segment on that in the future, but this is about, this is for men whose wives don’t want to have sex with them.
How do you get her to want you for sex again? I just think they’re, they’re so different. We have to, we can only take one
I agree. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, right. Cause it certainly could be the reverse case, but we’re just not talking about that today. So, um, and I think what you said was so important that I’ve noticed too, like from working with men, I’ve learned, Like, oh my gosh, they’re trying so hard and then like, they’ll, they’ll tell me what they’re doing and I’m like, they’re doing all the wrong things and they’re, but they’re trying so hard and then they’re feeling like so discouraged and I’m like, but I kind of like know how they’re like girlfriend or wife is feeling and um, but it’s been good for me, I think, to see, so like for any women listening too, it’s like, it’s Don’t assume they’re not trying just because they’re not getting it exactly right either.
So I
Yeah. At number one, he can’t read her signals. So she could be giving off major come fuck me signals. And they often don’t, they can’t read them. And it’s just so funny. She can’t read his signals and he can’t read hers. It is crazy. But what are some of the things when you’re sitting, when you’re sitting with your clients and they’re telling you all the things they’re trying, what are they trying that’s backfiring on them?
well, I’m thinking of Some scenarios kind of like what you’re describing where like the guy might feel like frustrated angry Sometimes you they even feel like like how could you neglect me? In this way, like there’s like this,
even love me.
right, like if you like understood me or got me at all, like you would never let me suffer without sex, like you’re not even, you know, giving me a blowjob or something, you know, and they’re just, there’s this real like anger and feeling of neglect and frustration and the victimy thing and so then, you know, of course, it’s like, That’s not going to turn her on, you know, like if the goal is more sex, we’re, we’re moving in the wrong direction here, buddy.
Um, so yeah, so I mean, part of what I do too is like, how do we get out of the victim y state and like process the emotions and, you know, reframe things and, and learn, um, how do we create turn on? How do we create a mental shift so that there’s an openness to being sexual? So yeah, I’d love to hear though about the, maybe we just go through the steps in order, like the polarity, trust, surrender.
I’m curious about that.
Yeah. Yeah. And one of the things again, in men’s defense, he wants to give her incredible pleasure. turning himself inside out to do that. He just wants to make mama happy. And the second thing is that men are raised in a pecking order where if they’re not winning, they’re losers. So, it’s demoralizing for them,
Yes.
they’re not raised to be allowed to have emotion.
So, their emotion, which in the male brain is already a distant one. Sensation that is hard for them to put into words because it’s been so shut down and the only things they’re allowed to have in our culture are anger, victimhood, uh, things like that.
makes me so sad. It’s like men are humans too. And they also have emotions. Like, can we allow them that at least?
Exactly. And so, um, it is very, very hard to get to one of the hardest things in reviving her drive
mm
shifting out of your own. Yeah. Anger, feelings of abandonment, feelings of being unloved, untouched, unfucked, um, you know, like that is, that’s work.
that is yes. Absolutely. Like it’s not easy to get past that
And so the thing that I want to say to you as, as you’re listening to Heather and I today is that I’m sorry that it got this way. I’m sorry that our culture failed you. Our society failed you. I’m sorry that your wife. Isn’t ruthlessly sexually self expressed and
Mm hmm.
hard penis. 1st thing in the morning and giving herself an orgasm and on you and, you know, sticking her tongue down your throat and ravishing you and, you know, all of those things.
But we’re going to get her there and it is possible to get her there. 2nd thing that I will say is that when you switch from. Upset to hope it really helps. The second thing that I would say is that in most relationships, not everyone can come. To have sessions with Heather and that’s because often one of the partners isn’t is unwilling to seek a therapist,
Mm hmm.
but therapists like Heather Shannon.
She’s so great. And she can do such good work on your behalf with your partner that if you can. afford to do it. And honestly, if you’re, if you’re going to live a shorter, less healthy, less happy life, if your life is going to be 10 years shorter and more miserable because you can’t get yourself to a therapist, then it seems , a foolish, Waste of your life, spend a little money and go to a therapist and get support through this because you can fix it and you can come out the other side.
Yeah.
But our culture has done you a grave disservice
Mm hmm.
not gotten the information you’ve gotten so far. sex advice. You haven’t gotten sex techniques. You haven’t gotten seduction skills. You haven’t learned how to lead with polarity. You haven’t understood why your woman needs trust or how to get her to surrender to her pleasure.
And so that’s what Heather and I do. And so that’s a big part of what I lay into Rivive Her Drive is there are some men who are like, We’re not a candidate for a therapist. I’m never going to drag my wife to therapy. She won’t even talk to me about this. So I’m going to have to use the stealth method. And that’s what Rivive Her Drive the DIY. Here’s the tool for you. Heather is the do it for me. Rivive Her Drive is the do it yourself. I’ll do it at home. I’ll follow the steps. I’ll give it a shot. I have the energy to figure it out and try to unwind this bullshit myself. And I just think it’ll be easier if my wife is not involved in that process.
And either of those are fair.
Yeah. And I’m gonna probably encourage them to do those things anyways, though, too, yeah.
you can do both.
Yeah, you can do both. Mm
my work is an accelerator on your work and
Mm hmm. Mm hmm.
the four elements of revival, let’s take number one, creating polarity, trust and surrender. One of the things that I have noticed is that a lot of men have given up their sexual and masculine, sexual masculine leadership for a number of reasons.
One being that every time he’s made her an offer for sex, she said no, and he’s
That’s huge. Yes. Huge.
He just gives up. The second thing is that he’ll try to do a bunch of honeydew stuff
Mm hmm.
so that she has more time to have sex with him, and then she still won’t have sex with him.
Mm hmm.
And the doing of the honeydew stuff is great when you’re having sex, when you’re both contributing equally and, you know, like I plan the menus and go to the grocery store and get the groceries and come home and put them away and chop them up and cook them and make them and feed you three meals a day.
And you load the dishes. and run the dishes, and I empty the dishes and start over again. Like, that’s a fair division of labor in my household. But if I have to get my hands wet in that dirty water, I’m like ADHD enough to freaking hate that. My husband’s like, I’ll just do all the dishes because I like the three squares, mama.
So if there’s a good division of labor that’s serving you both and you both feel like you’re contributing
Mm hmm.
your, your skills and your talents equally,
Mm
it’s not demoralizing, but it’s demoralizing when you’re doing what you feel is even more of your fair share just to get her. to want you. It’s never going to work.
That is never going to work. They are completely separate departments in the relationship category. One is chores and the other is sex. And it’s honey dues is bargaining for sex and bargaining doesn’t work and begging. Begging doesn’t work. Begging reduces your masculine sexual leadership, and it makes you feel pitiful
It’s terrible for everyone. And then like if you’re the female in the receiving end, it can feel just like pressuring and pestering, which is a huge turnoff.
Yep. So, the masculine sexual leadership is, I am your man. You are my woman. I will take care of you. I will get your door. I will keep the tires inflated in the car. I will kill all the bugs. I will take out the trash. I will replace all the batteries and everything. I will. And these are just my, these are, you know, these are my like division.
I’m not saying that your, your wife might really, really get
can customize these. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Mm hmm. Mm
, I will make the offers for sex. And they’re like, but she’s going to reject me. And I’m like, not, she is not going to reject you when you learn how to make her offers.
Okay.
And so I really want to make sure I get into how to make the offers in this segment, because you can get the whole Revive Her Drive program.
And I said, I was going to give it away at the end, but I just want to let you know, I don’t even want to wait because I want you, I don’t want you to think that I’m trying to sell you the program. I literally, before Heather and I got on our, our recording today, I said to her, I, I love her so much. She and I do a lot
Susan is so
very, very supportive of each other. I would do anything for Heather Shannon. And so I want to give you Revive Her Drive. So at the end of this recording, I’m going to give you my email address. And when you send me an email and say, I heard you on Heather Shannon’s Ask a Sex Therapist podcast for a free revive her drive.
I want it. I want it. I want it. Uh, you can send me an email and Maurice, one of my customer care team members will set you up a custom VIP account and give you access, full access
Yeah. Like please do this, you guys. Like this is a very, very nice offer and people need these skills. So take advantage.
because I just realized if I’m talking about it, the whole thing is going to feel like a sales pitch until I remove
Yeah. Yeah.
So I just wanted to get that out of the way.
It’s not a sales pitch. Just be present
telling you about it. Exactly. Be present and listen. And so, um, I do want to get to the four keys to seduction, how to seduce a woman.
Um, but the, the, the, the When you start to learn that, and that’s when we get to the female psychology strategies of
Mm hmm.
her, what I want to say is that you have been offering sex the wrong way because you didn’t know what you didn’t know. We love you dearly, and we want you to do it the right way.
We’re going to tell you how to do it in this podcast, and then it’s going to start working for you. But it’s not going to start working until we tell you the rest of this stuff. So the second thing is, so the polarity is stop begging for sex, stop bargaining
Mm
stop trying to be perfect for sex. Sex is a separate category.
So let’s get you, let’s get you what you need to know over there and just show up for her as a man. And that part of that is you’re the initiator. She is not perfect. the initiator. Sure, she might have initiated sex like three times in her life, you know, when you first started dating or whatever. And you know, she was hot for you.
She was full of those love chemicals, but it is really, we’re not societally raised, culturally raised to be the initiator.
Mm hmm.
there are nature and nurture reasons why that’s the Uh, an aberration, not something that, about which you should have an expectation. It’s not a 50 50 situation. It’s a 99 1.
You’re 99%. So just like you always take out the trash, you always kill the bugs, you always trap the mice. You always do that. Always initiate and I’m going to teach you how and you’re going to start to like doing it because when you learn how to do it, it’s going to be fun. But first we got to fix some of the other problems with our recalcitrant little wife here.
And I want you. To get her loving hot sex with you because she’s going to live longer. She’s going to be happier. She’s going to be less nervous. She’s going to be less stressed. She’s going to sleep better. She’s going to be more pleasurable to be around. Like she’s just genuinely going to be a nicer woman because an unfucked woman is a high strong stressed out bitchy gal. And It’s, you can spot them. They’re the ones that go like this and knock their drinks over on the tables and, you know, they’re agitated. And I don’t want to live with somebody agitated. I don’t want to be that agitated woman. I want to be a well fucked woman.
There’s a, there’s a lot of benefits of sex. Like so many health benefits. Like you said, mood benefits. There’s. Many, many, many, though, again, we’re not taught about, so yeah. Mm
One of the things that I’m going to have you do is I’m going to start with having you hold her a lot. And you have been holding her in short. but not long enough for her to generate oxytocin. The oxytocin is going to calm her down. It’s going to help her get better sleep at night, and it’s also going to help her nervous system regulation.
And it’s going to make her like people more, not just you, but that’s going to be good.
That’s what I feel coming out of massages too. I’m like, I just like, like humanity better. So true.
And we’re so bifurcated in this world today. We’re split, our country’s split in, in, in two. It’s a sunder right now. And so we’re just dealing with a lot of stress. We need to be held for long time.
So you can’t even get her to let you hold her right now because she’s afraid you’re going to try to get sex from her and that’s the last thing she wants. So you can’t even get your hands
yes, that is very true that there’s like this assumption that it’s all or nothing. So even just breaking that assumption is huge. Mm hmm.
So trust and surrender. Ultimately, what we want you to do is get her to surrender to be her slutty, slutty self. We want her to love to get fucked. We want her to be hungry for you. We want her to learn how to cum 20 different ways. We want her to be thinking about the next time she’s having sex with you.
We want her to be waking up in the middle of the night with dirty fantasies about dirty stuff. She wants you to die. do to her. We want her to be working on her sex life bucket list and have like 10 things on there that she wants to get done with you. We want her to have you find her G spot. We want her to have you help her have female ejaculation, expanded orgasms, boobgasms.
We want her to have orgasms from giving you a blow job. We want her to use 73 different sex toys. We want her to have a lingerie drawer that’s overflowing and she’s got all these slutty shoes she’s prancing around the house in. We want her to have her bedside table completely littered with all kinds of good lubricants.
We want all, we want her to have like,
quite the picture. I like it. Yeah
I’m just, I’m really just telling you about my life.
It’s her you guys
I was your wife, so I know what is possible when a good man can have his woman trust him feel safe, and be willing to be vulnerable enough to surrender to her deep desires. Because we women are all the same. We are horny, slutty, sex crazed women when Culture hasn’t beat it out of us, abused it out of
it does
shamed us, shamed it out of us, which is what happened to your wife.
This is what happened to your wife. Our society ruined her sexuality, but you’re going to get it back for her. You’re going to
my god, that’s like so beautiful framing it that way.
Good.
like the you guys get to be like the little heroes, you know,
The masculine sexual leader. You could call me daddy if you want to. Because I like a daddy. Not all women do. Some women
I like a daddy. Yeah.
God, I love a daddy. I like, I’ll take two. So, trust is a big issue where you have to hold your word and she has to realize that when you touch her, you’re not going to try to get sex.
Yeah. Mm
The hurrier you go, the behinder that you get. This is what they say in the Pennsylvania Dutch country where I grew up. You try to force it, make her, make her want sex, make her have orgasms, all that shit’s going to backfire on you. That’s not what you want to
could not agree more. Yeah.
And what’s also interesting is that you have to remember that you’re testosterone dominant.
You have, if you’re healthy, nighttime erections, you wake up with morning wood,
Mm
horny all the time, you masturbate every day or so, you think about sex all the time, just her boobs gives you a hard on. Like she has none of that. None of that. You could drop trow at a moment’s notice.
Yeah,
ready to go.
That’s your biologic wiring, your hormone profile, it’s, it’s ever, all of those things, plus the cultural okay for you to be a horned dog and be proud of it. For her, she lives in an estrogen body, estrogen dominant body. And she doesn’t have fast acting blood flow that gives her a quick boner like you do.
It takes her 20 or 30 minutes to be ready for penetrative sex. And that’s if she’s been having it frequently. Like I have frequent intercourse and it takes me 20 or 30 minutes and I’ve got like the juiciest yoni in the universe. So she’s going to take 30 or 40 minutes when she first gets started because the blood flow into the erectile tissue in her vulva, which is the same amount that’s in your penis.
Imagine all that squishy tissue that makes
mm hmm
That’s what’s in a little teardrop circled around her vagina.
Yeah, and nobody realizes that, that
it’s slow.
there’s erectile tissue in the vulva. Yeah.
And when you come at her trying to like spin her knobs and push her buttons to get her turned on, she’s not calmed down. Her arousal ladder, yours is like, BOOBS!
And hers is She’s got her mind on a million things, and she’s fighting the dragons of reality, and she doesn’t walk safely in this world, you guys. She’s prey.
Yeah.
Men are predators. And so she’s nervous. And high strung and you got to get her calm down before the re, she needs to be held and petted. She’s a kitty cat.
You’re a puppy
Yeah. Yeah.
so she needs the stroking and the calm and she’s finicky and she needs to be relaxed where you’re the dog. You’re just like, you’re jumping up and down. And so It’s very important for you to get into her world and hold her in your arms and let her get anything off her chest that she needs to get off her chest and just keep holding her and not try to get
I love that. Like, I had an ex boyfriend who just held me and let me like cry and feel my feelings and I was like, I don’t think I could feel closer to a human. This is so beautiful.
we need the release and often the let down getting things off our chest helps with the let down of the fluids running into our pelvic bowl to lubricate our vagina and to swell our clitoral structures. And if we’re stressed, we can’t get the engorgement and the blood flow and lubrication. So all the women who are in menopause saying, Oh my God, I, my libido is tanked.
I don’t have any wetness. I am so dry. Part of it is certainly a loss of estrogen, but a part of it is that she’s been penetrated too soon for 30 or 40 years and she’s just fucking sick of it.
yeah,
Like no one’s held her and let her use a toy and played with her boobs and let her get things off her chest and told her how gorgeous she is and sexy she is and encouraged her and, you know, given her a yoni massage and then let, you know, and then gone down on her and then had no expectation, filled her up with orgasms, filled her up so she’s overflowing with orgasms.
And then there’ll be a day where she will just, a switch will flip. She will realize she trusts you. You’re not going to push her. You’re not going to penetrate her too soon. You’ve shown that you’re patient. You’ve shown that you adore and worship her. You’ve made her feel better about her body because estrogen also gives her body image issues.
The reason we can juggle a million things and the reason we can’t ask our male partner to do something while he’s already doing something, he’s like, don’t talk to me, I’m busy. I’m like, you never hear that from a woman.
You, she’s always doing 1 million things because she has a reticular activation system that’s highly developed to look for trouble
hmm,
doesn’t walk safe in the world.
that’s really interesting. I’ve never thought about sort of the predator prey angle of it, but I mean, it does really fit. And I know that men tend to be more single track and women tend to have more diffuse focus. So yeah, it’s just science,
It is just science. And so once you understand that about her and you hold her in your arms and she begins to let down and the blood flow needs to come, sometimes tears will come. And as you’re discovering her G spot and pleasuring her, tears will come. There’s armoring
Mm hmm.
have to get through to get to the slutty woman that’s in there that started out before society ruined her sexuality.
Yep. Yep.
you can do this. I’ve helped thousands and thousands and thousands of men do this. It is possible, trust me, you can do it. She wants it! To be that woman. She just doesn’t know how to get there. So these are really the creating polarity, the trust and surrender and why they’re so important
Mm hmm.
to tell her 1473 times. beautiful to you. You love everything about her. You picked her because she’s sexy to you and that she’s too hard on herself. That she needs to understand that sex is a mindfulness practice. She needs to keep bringing herself back to heart connection instead of judgment and that over time she’ll get better at it until that judgment is gone.
And she starts to realize that sex is not about how you look. It’s about the love you make. And when she starts making love with you, she’ll stop thinking that her body is imperfect and she’ll start appreciating her body. I remember one of the things that my husband did for me that was so precious.
And I look forward to you meeting Tim sometime
Me too. Mm
he is a prince among men. I, I owe my whole life to him in so many
Oh.
And he, at one point, we were doing yoni massages very early on in the, you know, reviving of my drive.
Uh huh.
And by the way, a Yoni, Y O N I, is a tantric lovemaking term for , the female genital system.
So it’s not just the vagina, which is the inside, it’s not, which is very patriarchal. And it’s not just the vulva, which is kind of an external, the medical term for the labia and the
Right. Right.
a vulva. It’s all of that. And it’s the spiritual connection. It’s her, the seat of her power, her passion, her vitality.
It is her connection to herself, to her love for you, to, to source, to Gaia, to all living things, to the power of the universe, it is her drive, her motivation, it is her intuition. It is her desire. It is everything. And so that’s why I like the word Yoni. And a Yoni massage is basically just a manual massage of her mons, outer labia, inner labia, vestibule, clitoral structures inside her vagina, perineal area, all of the parts, G spot, A spot, cervix, perineal spot, you know, like there’s a million spots to discover.
And they start out and your wife has, if you touched every little location of all that stuff I just named. And you said, what do you feel? She would say one of four things. I feel pain, I feel shame,
Mm hmm.
numb, or it feels pleasurable. And the pain, shame, and numb will well outweigh the pleasure spots, but have no fear.
You’re going to transform them all one by one into all pleasure with your hands. Because what are your hands? Your hands are the most articulate part of your body.
Mm hmm.
most sensation. These, this is your clitoral tip right here.
Mm
so you can really feel, so you got to get your wife to the point where she’s willing to let You touch her.
And that’s, I can’t go into everything on one podcast episode. It’s in Rivive Her Drive and I’m giving it to you, but all the things you can do, all things you can say. And the way that I built Rivive Her Drive is I kind of built it like a construction project.
Okay.
Because every relationship is a snowflake. It’s totally different than any other relationship.
So you’re dealing with all the past, all the history, all the everything, all your dynamics, all your crazy personality bullshit, all your ADHD bullshit, you know, whatever you’re dealing with. And, uh, and how much sleep you got, how much sugar you ate, you know, did you work out, how stressed at work, you know, like all the, all the
Very holistic. Yeah.
But I built the structure for you. And I give you All of the selections. How would you like what flooring would you like? How would you like to decorate the walls? What windows and doors would you choose? What countertops would you choose? And within Rivive Her Drive, I give you the structure
Mm hmm.
and then I give you myriad options and you’re going to be like, That’s what I’m going to try with my wife,
There you go. Yeah.
might respond to that one because I don’t know your dynamics and I don’t know what you can get away with in the early stages and what you can’t, what’s going to, what you’re going to get a slap down for and so you’ll know and so you’ll be able to pick from a myriad of things.
And this is the story I want to tell about Tim, he was giving me yoni massages, see I came back, he was giving me yoni massages. He was giving me yoni massages. And my brain’s still working!
I know. I’ve got ADHD as well. So I’m with you still.
Um, he was giving me a lot of yoni massages. They were really working. They were transforming all the shame and the pain and the shutdown into
Mm
was activating, cross training my yoni. He was bringing me pleasure. He was expanding it. My engorgement was improving. My comfort with myself was improving.
My turn on was improving. I was willing to sit down, lie down, butterfly my legs open, and let him give me yoni massages. As on demand and I knew he wasn’t going to try to get sex with me he was He was putting in effort because I had been having sex with him for 12 years and not having orgasms and I felt like basically I stopped wanting sex with him because I felt like I was just a masturbatory sock.
Just like going through. Oh, that sounds terrible.
so I wanted to learn how to have orgasms from intercourse. I wanted to learn how to have different kinds of orgasms. I wanted to become more orgasmic. And so that’s what we were doing. We were actually doing a practice called the expanded orgasm practice. Which is a clitoral stroking technique,
Mm hmm.
a lot of vulva and vaginal massage as
Mm hmm.
all that tissue.
And so one day he said to me, I’ve brought a mirror to the Yoni massage.
Okay.
says, I want you to look at yourself in the mirror. I want you to look at your, your vagina is what we used to call it way back then, or Yoni. And, um, I want you to see how beautiful she is. And I don’t think I had ever looked at my.
It was 42
What a journey you’ve been on.
looked at my vulva
I love how did he come up with this shit, also? Like, how did he as, like, a middle aged guy just decide, like, I’m gonna have I mean
Well, we took a lot of sex workshops. We took a lot of therapy, a lot of sex workshops, a lot of personal development, and we started being radically honest with each other, which is what it took to kind of transform all that. I had to work through all my sexual trauma with a therapist, and then we went to sex workshops and we learned a lot of like tantric love making techniques and things.
And so it empowered him to think about that. And um, he showed me and he is like, this is your mons. These are your outer labia. These are your inner labia. This
It, like, makes me want to cry a little bit, that he’s just, like, holding space for you on that
Oh my God. I, you know what I, the book I should write is all of the incredibly beautiful things that my husband has done to sexually and professionally empower me to be the woman that I’ve become.
I
Oh my
do it without him. He’s the wind beneath my wings. And. So he showed me all of the parts and showed me how pretty they were. And I was like, that’s so interesting. Now he’ll be giving me a yoni massage and he’ll be like, you know, your pussy is so beautiful and it feels so good to me under my hands and I can see it’s, it’s beautiful.
Starting to get engorged and I’ll be like, Oh, take a picture. Let me see now. I mean, no one can touch my photos on my phone because you within a second of scrolling, you’re going to see my Yoni. You’re going to see my fully engorged, very slippery looking Yoni. So, but that’s great because you know, I was the girl that wasn’t avoiding him for sex.
I was, he was the guy that had, you know, the spreadsheet of all the excuses in the world. We were about to be divorced. You know, he was having a relationship with a woman outside the marriage because he was trying to get his needs met. We reeled all that in and we started having the best sex of our lives and
God, that’s
to teach this to everybody.
And you have been. Yeah.
It was really the steps we took to go from all that trauma, damage, shutdown, history, fear, ignorance, you know, lack of knowledge creates fear. And we don’t teach people about sex, so we’re afraid of it. And that’s was my first program that I wrote was how we, what were the steps that we did to rekindle it?
The overcoming resistance and escalation and the female psychology strategies, the nexus of that, the core of that is the four keys to seduction. This comes from the seduction trilogy, which is kind of the next level up once you’re starting to revive her drive. But I want to teach you the first step and that is small offers.
Mm.
What’s happened and why you keep getting turned down for sex. is that you, you say, Hey, you know, do you want to have a date? Do you want to have sex? Do you want to get to, you know, whatever your code words are for it?
Mm hmm.
yours are. Um, and she says, no, I don’t know. Maybe. And then it doesn’t happen.
Mm hmm.
there. And then she’s like, maybe we can have sex later, but then she doesn’t lift a finger to make it happen.
That happens a
And the problem is that she is well intentioned, but again, she doesn’t like to initiate. She needs you to get her going. And because she’s not, I mean, I wish she could just look at your penis and get ready to go, but she, she, she can’t, it doesn’t work that way for her.
She’s first of all, not very visual that way. That’s why really women don’t watch a lot of porn compared to men that are by far the consumers of
More visual. Yeah.
are like, I don’t want, I don’t really want to look at that shit. Like I like audio erotica.
Right.
erotica, you know, we’re, we’re different.
And so, when you make her an offer for sex, it’s way too big an offer. She’s like a no because she’s not there. She’s not relaxed. She’s
Mm hmm.
her.
Mm hmm.
a yoni massage. You haven’t given her 1 million yoni massages and told her 1 million times she looks good to you, which is what you have to do.
Okay. Yeah.
kid 1, 572, 000 times the same thing. And eventually when they’re 25 or 30, they actually do that now without you telling them. But you had to tell them , their whole life over and over and over. And the parents who didn’t had poorly behaved kids and the parents who actually did the work to keep reinforcing the good behavior,
Mm hmm.
It’s exhausting to repeat yourself are the ones whose kids turned out to be damn good kids. And it’s the same with your wife. So you have to think about your wife as kind of you’re, you’re training her. This is a sexy wife training program. And when you’re doing that, you’re telling her a million times that she looks beautiful and all of those kinds of things.
It’s very important. The second thing that you need to do is you need to make her small offers. So she gets home and you’re like, Hey babe, would you like to lie on the couch and put your feet up in my lap? And I’ll give you a foot rub while you have a glass of Chardonnay. Or would you like to go lie down in the bedroom and I’ll give you a back rub.
Or, would you like to go sit in the hot tub for a few minutes before we make dinner together? Or go take a sauna together in the sauna? Or anything that’s small that’s going to get her out of her fear head, her anxiety head, her multitasking head, and get her to slow down and connect with you.
Yeah.
And when you do that, then you can start to open up.
Ramp the offers. Would you like to go into the bedroom and I’ll give you a yoni massage? Or would you like to lean back against me and I’ll play with your boobs and nipples while you use your vibrator on yourself, and I’ll tell you a sexy story.
Mm hmm.
Or would you like to go take a shower together and then I’ll eat your pussy?
Yeah. These are nice offers. I just feel like more of these offers should exist in general.
Yep. And the more that you use the other keys to seduction, which are vision, do you have a big picture of what are all the fun possibilities that you can do
Mm hmm.
and vulnerability? You know, I’m really feeling like I want to be close to you. We don’t necessarily have to have. quote unquote sex, but I want to hold you.
I want to be close to you. I need connection. I would love it if we went into the bedroom and you just pet my head and gave me a face rub and we just chilled together. Would you be up for that? Sometimes it’s even just asking what you would like to have.
Mm hmm.
And then from there, so you’ve got vision, you’ve got vulnerability, you’ve got small offers, and you’ve got something called erotic vigilance.
Erotic vigilance is basically this notion that, and by the way, this is the work of one of my mentors, Dr. Patty Taylor, and she’s really the woman who got me going down the path of orgasmic excitation. Exploration. She wrote her PhD on female orgasm and she was one of my mentors. She taught me the expanded orgasm practice
Mm hmm.
her work.
One of them being the seduction trilogy, which is where these four keys to seduction come from. Do you revive or drive first and then you can graduate to this, but I’m just kind of giving you some like insider stuff. And the seduction trilogy is nice because when you learn about erotic vigilance, you really get a sense of, is she in flight fight?
Feed, you know, where is she? Is she on the rocks or is she chill? What kind of an offer will be right sized for her? Sometimes the offers are pretty sexual, like the, you know, nipple play with a vibrator, or I’ll go down on you and you can just lie there and be the pillow princess that you are. And, um, I pride myself on being such a pillow princess.
I love to
Really
and come and come and come and come and come. I’m so good at that. But, um, yeah, but, um, I think that once you begin to make small offers and there’s no expectation for sex, she doesn’t feel like you’re trying to get something from her. And
mm hmm
like you’re trying to make her come.
You’re not trying, all of the, Like, reticular activation system is disarmed,
Mm hmm.
back to, what did I start with, creating polarity? Trust and
right, right,
till she trusts you. And if you’ve been making her offers for sex that she’s been turning down, too big an offer for 10 years, And she never, like, she’s not gonna say yes, stop doing that, that’s not working.
Now you’ve given up on that and you’re not getting anywhere. This is where you restart. Holding her small offers, bids for pleasure, things that chill her out.
Yep. I think everything you’re saying, you know, there’s been so much discussion out there about like toxic masculinity. It’s like, this is healthy masculinity. This is like a leadership. This is initiative. But this is also attunement and vulnerability and nurturing. You know, it’s just like this beautiful whole package.
Yeah, this is, this is a man who gets laid a lot.
yeah, this guy’s doing real
This guy’s gonna, and this is the thing. Once you stop trying to get sex and you start giving pleasure,
Mm hmm.
you disarm and destroy all of those limiting beliefs that she has by educating her because, you know, you’re oriented toward learning sex techniques.
She’s not really because no one’s ever even told her. that that’s something that’s possible for her. She doesn’t know anything about sex. She really has very little experience and you have barely much more than she does because you haven’t had the opportunities to learn all these things. And so one of the other big things, and I’ll kind of close it off with this, is that where you’ll ultimately get is to having a sex life bucket list together where you begin to learn new things together.
Yeah, I want to find your G spot. Yeah, I want to learn how to have an experience.
Yeah.
I want to, I want to get one of those inflatable sex toys or heated sex toys or, you know, all these new things that are coming out and, and try that. Oh yeah, let’s try a cock ring and I’ll try to ride you cowgirl and grind on you and give myself
So many options.
So many options. Never ending. Trust me when I tell you that at 63 I’m having the best sex of my life and I have new hot ideas of things I constantly want to try and it never ends. And I’ll be doing this when I’m 83 and hopefully 93 and maybe even 103. That is my plan because that’s how I’m going to last to 103 having hot sex is having hot sex because couples who have intimate connection and they say sex in the studies and then people are like, Thinking it’s intercourse.
And then the women are like, ah, count me out. I’ll just die early. And so what you really want to do is you want to, you want to be like, yes, in pleasure, intimate connection, oxytocin generation, orgasmic pleasure, and you’ll net more intercourse by doing this slow route to get back Into her, you know, enlivening her pleasure and getting her confident about herself and, and, and you’ll learn new things together and, and then that’ll bring more new relationship energy because here’s the equation.
The equation is that trust and safety plus
Mm hmm.
novelty and variety equals desire.
Yeah,
that
could not agree more. I could not agree more with you, and I think everything you’ve said today, my personal experience, like I’ve actually said, the safer I feel, the sluttier I will be with you, to people,
Right.
because obviously you’ve got to play with that. You can’t just be like boring safe all the time.
They’re like, that’s where the variety comes in as well.
to have variety and novelty.
Yeah. Yeah. But it’s, it’s true. And I think that that’s a missing component. And that, you know, that’s something I focus on with people a lot too. And, and like the concept of safety, I think is also something people have a hard time understanding.
Like it’s not just physical safety, you know,
It’s, you’re not going to contract if she farts when she comes. You’re not going to contract if she wants you to spank her. You’re not going to collapse if she says, that doesn’t feel good. and you take it personally. She’s different every day. You’re different every day. Something that felt good yesterday isn’t going to feel good today.
Sometimes we’re a kitty cat. Sometimes we’re a lioness. You gotta, you’ve gotta stand solid in your masculine sexual leadership and know you’re there to co create pleasure with her and there’s nothing she could say to you that’s going to destabilize you, that you want to know at all. It’s actually power.
for
Mm hmm.
get her starting to talk to you about what exactly she wants, her dirty little fantasies, things that, you know, when you encourage her to masturbate, when you’re, you know, really supporting her
hmm.
she’s going to blossom like you wouldn’t believe. She’s going to be an entirely, you’re going to have a new wife with a whole new life when you, when you revive her drive.
It’s amazing. Well, thank you for your beautiful wisdom, as always. Um, this, this was really helpful. I know this is going to help so many people. Um, and, uh, And if people want to connect with you and if they’re interested in the Revive Her Drive program, where do they find you?
Yeah, send an email to Su***@be********.com and it’ll come right to my inbox. That’s my personal email address. And then Maurice, I’ll send, I’ll forward your email to Maurice and she’ll reply. She’ll set you up with a VI, with VIP access to revive her drive. And um, yeah. Remind her to give you the Rivive Her Drive Mastery access as well, because once you get the basic components, you’re going to want the, there’s like a, a mastery series that comes after it.
And you’re going to want those too. You don’t do that all at once, but what I do recommend is that you, you, there’s, there’s audios, there’s eBooks, there’s a quick start guide. I recommend that you actually read the quick start guide and the eBooks to get kind of the big picture. So you can see the whole.
House construction and then their MP3s. You listen to them. Just listen, listen, listen, and then read, you know, read the transcripts. If you’re a transcript reader and you’ll pick up on what I’m saying, that’s where you’re going to get the tile options, the flooring options, you know, so you can take it all in.
Don’t share it with her. She doesn’t need to know you’re doing it. It’s not going to help at all if you’re like, hey, honey, I got this program, I’m going to try to revive your drive. She’s like, the hell you are! You old bastard, the hell you are! So, that’s not going to work. So, this is just for you. Now, if you’re a woman and you’ve listened to this whole thing and you’re like, I really want my husband to do all this stuff because I thought my libido was broken.
I thought I couldn’t have orgasm intercourse. Now, Susan Bratton’s telling me that it’s not me, and there’s nothing wrong with me, and I’m not broken. I just haven’t been getting what I need. Hallelujah! How do I get this from my husband? Send Maurice, send me an email, I’ll have Maurice give it to you, and you can give it to your husband.
But, let him do it for you. Let him do it. You don’t need to direct him.
Beautiful. What are good channels for people to follow you on these days?
Oh gosh, you, um, if you want to be on my email newsletter, it’s at betterlover. com.
Mm hmm,
two days a week with tons of free advice like this. Um, all kinds of wonderful things. Um, you can follow me on Instagram. Uh, it’s, you have to write my name smushed together, Susan Bratton, all one word defined me because there’s a lot of, because I write about sexuality, I’m what is called shadow band on Instagram.
And
I’ve given up on Instagram
hard to get my thing to pop up, but I post there all the time and you’ll still see everything
we’ll, we’ll link to you directly, we’ll put it in the show notes on YouTube and the, the podcast platforms, um, Okay. So that, that sounds great. Thank you so much for again, for being here, Susan, this is amazing. And, um, yeah, we’ll catch you guys next time for another episode.
Bye everybody.
Bye!
Thank you for listening to the Ask a Sex Therapist podcast. Got a question about spicing things up in the bedroom? Find the answers you’re looking for in my Dirty Talk Guide, a free resource for my podcast listeners. Grab yours now at heathershannon. co forward slash dirty talk. Again, that’s heathershannon.
co forward slash dirty talk. And be sure to tell your partner or friends because everyone has something they would like to ask a sex therapist.
