74: Breaking The Cycle of Sexual Avoidance with Karine Bedard

Do you want a connected love life, but feel unwanted, insecure, and alone because your spouse pushes your physical touch away? In this episode, Katie Ziskind was a guest on the "Breaking Free Authentically" podcast with Karine Bedard. Katie Ziskind specializes in coaching disconnected couples who want to stay together and want to work together after high conflict fights, anger issues, affairs, sexual avoidance, and sexual rejection to develop a foundation of emotional connection, trust, and love. She supports couples who struggle with infidelity and need an affair recovery specialist that takes them through specific steps to attune to each other. Intimacy is all about being emotionally vulnerable to build a closer relationship. We don’t learn emotional expression skills growing up. She says, "I help couples grow together through life transitions and stressors like infertility, becoming new parents, having a child with special needs, loss and grief, dealing with chronic pain, alcoholism, becoming empty nesters, and do so while reducing criticism, hurt, and conflict. I help couples feel safe and excited emotionally and build a strong bond, and grow together. I help couples gain sex positive skills to understand foreplay, sexual pleasure, rebuild sexual desire, connect to their sexual, erotic playful side. I give you a safe place to talk about how your strict, conservative, religious upbringing has lead to feelings of shame, guilt, fear, avoidance, lack of satisfaction, and anxiety around sex and shift into reconnecting to sexual pleasure. I help couples get familiar and comfortable talking about emotions, needs, expectations emotionally and gain sex positive education. I have a podcast available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify called, “All Things Love and Intimacy.” I am Gottman level 2 trained, Certified Sex Therapy Informed Professional (CSTIP), and couples specialist." Today we discuss the difference between male and female arousal tendencies. Did you know that female bodies need 45 - 90 min of foreplay for full arousal while male bodies need only 4 - 8 minutes to reach full engorgement? Well, most people are not aware of this. This week we have a conversation about spontanious versus responsive arousal and sex drives. Sexual avoidance happens when there is a mismatch in sex drives and a lack of emotional intimacy. How to we end the cycle of Sexual Avoidance and to bring back Sexual Intimacy? Well, we need a balance between emotional intimacy and physical intimacy. It's so important to create safety in a relationship and today we give you some strategies that can help bring back that spark. Katie Ziskind is a sex positive, LGBTQIA+, queer affirming relationship coach, certified sex therapy informed professional, and Gottman level two trained marriage specialist. The “All Things Love and Intimacy” podcast is intended to help you feel more comfortable talking about emotional expression, gain emotional intimacy skills, and feel confident talking about your sexual needs, sexual expectations, erotic desires, and fantasies with your partner or partners. Katie Ziskind loves helping couples break cycles of emotional distance and sexual avoidance, and develop emotional connection and rebuild sexual desire and sexual intimacy. She would love to help you in sex positive, relationship coaching sessions.  You can build an emotionally secure, loving, playful, and passionate bond and healthy sex life by working with her at WisdomWithinCt.com. This episode is no replacement for seeking professional help.