Best Sex Therapist in Los Angeles
“We are not mad. We are human.We want to love, and someone must forgive us for the paths we take to love, for the paths are many and dark, and we are ardent and cruel in our journey.” ~ Leonard Cohen
“Did you hear the joke about Jewish women? They don’t believe in sex AFTER marriage!”
“For a long time a woman’s only power was to say ‘No.’” ~ Esther Perel
“Women need a reason to have sex. Men just need a place.”~ City Slickers
There’s a scene in “Blazing Saddles” where the sheriff holds a gun to his own head and takes himself hostage so that the townspeople do not kill him.
Over the course of my ten years of practicing psychotherapy, this scene is an apt analogy for what I believe occurs in many marriages: individuals either consciously or subconsciously WITHHOLD affection in order to terrorize their partners into capitulating to meet their supposed “needs” or desires — their “demands.” (Please note that I am an ardent feminist and believe — contrary to the quotes above that men can also say “no” and need a reason to have sex. I have witnessed men shutter the nookie factory just as many times as I have witnessed women shutter the nookie factory.)
Hence, for me, the Best Sex Therapist — particularly in Los Angeles where many relationships are transactional — is former FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss. In particular, I turn all of my couples onto his Masterclass and teach them what Mister Voss calls “tactical empathy” or what psychotherapists refer to as reflective or active listening:
“So if I hear you correctly… you feel that…”
Mister Voss objects to the “I hear” part of reflective listening when negotiating with hostage but I believe it is essential in VALIDATING your partner’s emotional experience. Throughout our daily lives when our listeners are multitasking and not matching our facial affects, they are unintentionally invalidating our emotional experiences.
As I state in my book “How To Survive Your Childhood Now That You’re An Adult,” “Mirror neurons do not fire via text message.”
In the late 1960s, UCLA Dr. Albert Meharabian found that 93% of communication is non-verbal:
7% happens in spoken words
38% happens through voice tone
55% happens via general body language
Which is why I teach couples the NLP techniques of mirroring and matching so that they can sync up, attune, and resonate with each other — and actively VALIDATE their partner’s emotional experience, whatever that may be.
“Right and wrong are on the other side of the front door: you can pick them up on the way out,” I tell couples. “I’m not a judge and you are not attorneys trying a case. Both of you are entitled to whatever emotional experiences you are having and I’m going to teach you how to VALIDATE each other’s feelings — even if you cannot understand them or blatantly disagree with them.”
So when I find that either person is or both people are withholding physical affection, I treat the situation as a hostage negotiation and coach both parties into actively hearing each other and reflecting back what they hear as accurately as possible both verbally and non-verbally.
As Krishnamurti said, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” And the ways we communicate through DM, IM, email and texting have profound ramifications and are rife with misinterpretation. In his Masterclass, Mister Voss states that most emails are read negatively. I concur and believe that written sarcasm and irony often land poorly while the intention was friendly or even loving. We have become pawns of technology and I have witnessed it destroy hundreds of loving relationships.
So if you are in a couple and your sex life is not what you want it to be, I would refer you to the person who I consider to be the Best Sex Therapist working today: former FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss. Allow him to teach you tactical empathy and I believe that making your partner feel heard and validating his or her emotions will inspire him or her to release the affection that he or she has been holding hostage from you.
