Centering Pleasure

Every sex therapist I know is obsessed with Emily Nagoski and with good reason. She is brilliant. Her book Come as You Are introduced us to brakes and accelerators which has changed the way I talk to clients about their pleasure. Her newest book, Come Together, is all about centering pleasure in long-term relationships. It is full of gems like sex imperatives, incremental change and emotional floorplans.

Emotional floorplans are like house plans where each emotion has its own room—anger, care, lust, panic+grief, play, seeking and utility. In conceptualizing your own floorplan, consider what feelings are near to each other. If you’re feeling angry, how far are you from play? Is it on a different floor? What feelings do you have to go through in order to get to lust? For some people, lust is on its own floor far away from these other feelings. For others, it’s close to care or play.

One of the presenting issues for sex therapy is desire discrepancy—one partner wants more sex than the other one. Nagoski is so helpful in creating opportunities to discuss this complex issue. I’m definitely adding the floorplan to my toolbox.