How To Fix A Relationship And Improve Sex In Your Relationship With Susan Bratton

The health of your romantic relationship can have an impact on your energy levels. Now, you might still wonder, what do relationships have to do with energy? Just think about it, when you spend time with that one person you are madly in love with, you are filled with joy and energy. At the same time, toxic relationships can easily lead to stress, anxiety, sleep loss, and ultimately, low energy. That raises the question, how to fix a relationship that isn’t going exactly the way you want? And how can you improve sex in your relationship (which leads to both people being happier)?

In this episode, I speak with Susan Bratton. Susan is a trusted hot sex advisor, considered the Dear Abby of sex, she is an author, and an award-winning speaker. Susan will share how you can change things around in your relationship with your partner, spice things up in the bedroom, and take your relationship to a whole new level of passion and understanding.

A QUICK WARNING before we get into the show. I do want to mention that there is an open discussion of lots of things related to sex and having more pleasure in bed. This is all done in the service of providing information to help improve your life. But if you’re somebody who feels these topics are taboo or they  make you uncomfortable in any way, maybe this is not the episode for you. I do want to just issue that warning beforehand.

Now, hopefully you’re still interested in listening to this because there’s a lot of golden information in this episode. Susan has a knack for making people feel really comfortable and accepted, talking about all kinds of things that even maybe they grew up feeling uncomfortable with or feeling ashamed/guilty of. Many people have  negative feelings around certain things related to relationships and sex where certain things are taboo or certain of their desires that make them feel ashamed and so on.

I think that if you’re one of those people, you’re really going to enjoy this episode and get a lot out of it. Also, I want to mention that I think sex and relationships is a topic that is hugely important in the overall context of our health and our energy levels and I think it’s a neglected topic.

I think that we often like to conceptualize our health as sort of just the biological reactions and biochemical reactions and our genes, you know, as a unique individual that’s sort of separate from everything else. And that’s just not the case. A big part of health are things like community, are things like our relationship with nature, are things like our relationship with other people and of course, intimate relationships. Sex is a big part of that as well.

So I brought Susan on to discuss how to have a better relationship, how to have better sex,  how to learn to be better in those contexts that I think are vital for  our health and happiness. So with that said, and with the disclaimers there, enjoy the episode…

In this podcast, we’ll cover:

• Do you know your relationship values? Why values are essential to a harmonious relationship
• How to fix a relationship and reignite your sex life
• One of the most important keys to a successful relationship, according to Susan
• The foundational step you need to do prior to arousal (ladies, this one is for you)
• How to give your partner multiple orgasms and the keys to multiple orgasms for him and her
• For men – how to get your wife or girlfriend to love having intimacy, physical intimacy with you
• How gender roles have changed (and how to find a new balance in modern day lifestyle)
• The 4 keys to reigniting romance in your relationship
• How to turn on your lady (guys, it’s not what you think)
• How to massively improve sex in your relationship and become a better lover

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How To Fix A Relationship And Improve Sex In Your Relationship With Susan Bratton – Transcript

 Ari Whitten: Hi Everyone, I’m Ari Whitten and welcome back to the Energy Blueprint Podcast. Today, I have a guaranteed super fun episode with one of my friends, somebody who’s been a previous podcast, episode guest who had a very, very racy and fun,  and well-received podcast, previously. And now I’m having her on for the second time.

Her name is Susan Bratton and she is a trusted hot sex advisor to millions. I was just telling her that,  she’s the only person that actually have their tagline, like in mine, in my memory that I actually know their title. So,  just a couple little bits about her background. She’s a champion and advocate for all who desire passionate relationships and she’s considered the Dear Abby of sex with her fresh approach and original ideas that have helped millions of people of all ages and across the gender spectrum transform sex into passion.

She’s an author, Award Winning Speaker and serial entrepreneur who teachers passionate lovemaking techniques to her fans around the world. She’s been featured in the New York Times and on CNBC and the today show as well as appearing on ABC, CBS, CW Fox, and NBC as a marriage magician. So with all of that said, welcome Susan. Such a pleasure to have you on.

Susan Bratton: I’m so happy to be back, Ari. How much fun is it to get to play with you more than once? I’m a lucky podcast guest.

Ari Whitten: Yeah. And on a personal note, it was really great to see you a few weeks ago,  at the mastermind that we were both at that I was attending as a guest and  I really, really enjoyed, you know, we got to spend some time together on the boat and  I got to just sit with you and talk relationships for I think like an hour and a half. And it was just..

Susan Bratton: We had a good chaw as they say.

Ari Whitten: Yes, yes. So you are a very wise woman and I’m very excited to get to share your wisdom with my audience. So this… the last podcast we talked about sexual energy, very much sex-focused, but also kind of talking about sort of, some of the more esoteric stuff when it comes to energy cultivation. This podcast is going to be less racy, but maybe we’ll say knowing you, I imagine that…

Susan Bratton: Don’t count on that, Ari.

Ari Whitten: So relationships.

Susan Bratton: YES!

Why knowing your values is essential for a harmonious relationship

Ari Whitten: You know, just before we started this podcast, I had kind of asked you if it was okay to talk about like, hey, why are so many relationships failing? Why is the divorce rate so high? And your response was kind of like, ah, I don’t really want to go there. I don’t want to go negative and trying to fix broken stuff. I want to work with people who already have somewhat healthy, somewhat healthy relationship who are looking to take things to the next level and inject more goodness into that and more strategies that can take it from average or decent or good to amazing. So I love that. I’m fully on board with that.

What do you think are some of the, the, and I guess we could do a, maybe a broad overview first and then dig into specifics, but what do you, what do you think are some of the biggest keys to unlocking the highest potential for what a relationship can be?

Susan Bratton: Number one would be something that I call relationship values. Understanding your values and your partner’s values, how they’re different and how you can get up every day and focus on what the other person wants out of their relationship with you. And they can do the same for you. That has been. I’ve sold almost 20, I think this month I’ll hit 20,000 copies sold of my book. It’s not even a book. It’s a workbook called ”relationship magic”. And,  I’ll make sure I give you our podcast listeners a discount link for you so you don’t have to pay full price. I’m getting on the foundation where you understand that you and your partner are totally different and that though you both want common things, you know, peace, love, joy, hot sex, et Cetera, that, that you also enter into the relationship with a different set of needs and a different set of feelings you want to feel.

So that’s one thing. And we can circle back to any of these. I’m going to just throw out some juicy little bombs for you and you can be like, let’s go chew on that one for a while. So number one is what’s the process of understanding what your relationship values are and how do you communicate them clearly to your partner so they know what the heck you want and they can just get up and give you that and they. And you can do that for them as well. That’s number one.

The second thing I think is I’m thinking about how there’s this thing called an attachment parenting and about half the people in the country are the, the data’s only American data, but I think it’s, it probably differs from culture to culture. But, how about half the people have been securely attachment parenting and the other half have not and how that kind of comes to roost in your grownup relationships and how you end up having to deal with that in a lot of the issues that you have. May a back to the fact that you weren’t securely attachment parenting, no fault of your parents, they didn’t know any better. I’m a big believer and forgive and forget and just move on and apparent yourself. Heal yourself, have your partner, heal you. So I think that’s a big opportunity. That is a very, it’s actually a pretty simple fix once you become aware of it. So I’ve got some ideas about that.

Another thing that I think is really important in a relationship in is the, the idea of the benefit of 110 percent truthiness and how you begin to have a practice of relating with your partner and why it’s both the most scary, most exhilarating and most connecting thing that a couple can do. You’re, you’re remembering these. I can tell…

Ari Whitten: I’m taking notes.

Susan Bratton: Yeah. Good. So you can come back…

Ari Whitten: So I can come back and remember to without having to ask you to repeat them.

Susan Bratton: I won’t remember, because I get into that flow state and then I don’t remember what I said. Thank God there are recordings.  so that’s another big one. Another really big one to me and this kind of flows from truthiness and its part of intimate connection is, probably my second most famous book and it’s only my second because it’s, it wasn’t out first, it was out second.

So it hasn’t had the time in the saddle for people to buy as many copies is called sexual soulmates. And my belief is that the soul mates or co-created in sexual soulmates or co-created and there are some things that you can understand about yourself and how you relate to your partner on an intimate level. That can be the make or break of staying connected and staying in a, a passionate relationship with your partner that keeps getting better and better or one that swirls down the toilet over time.

And I’ve looked at what those big things are that really make the difference in that way. And it’s my belief that if you look back at attachment parenting and to secure attachment, a big part of it comes from how much you were held and also the emotional reactions that your parents had to the times when you were in pain and what they did about it.

Did they shut you down? Did they run away or did they hold you and experienced the trauma with you? And in the creation of being sexual soulmates, you have the opportunity to come together and heal those traumas and move into a level of openness, honesty, curiosity and discovery about yourselves as people who are constantly maturing and growing and becoming different and changing and having the experience of having that together. Enjoying that.

Having your partners back is key to a successful relationship

And then another thing that I think is really important to successful relationships is, I use my hands as a picture if I’m putting my palms together and I’m interlacing fingers. You think about that as being like two people coming together as one. And I think that that’s great in the initial early phases of a relationship. But if I opened my hands and I flipped them so that my, the backs of my hands are together, then what you’re looking at is two people with their backs having each other’s backs against all that life will throw at them and I think that that’s actually the transition that you need to make as you mature.

And I noticed that it happens a lot for people in their thirties and forties. They begin to realize that if they don’t have their partners back, if they’re not in it, like my husband and I call ourselves team sweetie, we’ve called ourselves that since we got married, but we weren’t always playing as the team with our backs together to the world. A lot of times we were waiting for that person to complete us or we were waiting for them to become the thing we wanted them to become or whatever it was. We were together, but we didn’t have each other against all else. And I think. Go ahead.

Ari Whitten: To quickly interject on that point, having seen you and your husband together, it’s very apparent this is the case. You know, like you can.

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Ari Whitten: It’s hard to describe you. I can just see how, how that is like he has your back all the time. He’s just, he, he’s there. He’s, he’s just enamored with you. He’s in love with you still after what? You guys have been married for 20 years or something?

Susan Bratton: 25.

Ari Whitten: Twenty-five years.

Susan Bratton:  Yeah.

Ari Whitten: I mean, he just, he just has your back 100 percent. You can, you can see it, you can feel it. It’s beautiful. Cool.

Susan Bratton: And for women often when, when I go back to the idea of relationship values, what are your relationship values? My top relationship value is security. I really need to be taken care of no matter what. A powerful Dynamo I am. What I realized is that I need my man to create the solid foundation upon which my femininity and creativity can flourish. And He loves nothing more than to be that solid foundation for me. We get from the masculine-feminine polarity of that connection in our relationship, but that works very well for us.

He loves to hold that base for my thrive and I love to take care of him and adore him and give him the affection that he wants so much and loves so much in the relationship. So that’s because we know what each other care the most about and we’re willing to say, yes, I need that from you. Please give that to me. Yes, I’d love to give that to you. Here you go.

So, I’ve talked about communication techniques. I’ve talked about a holding an attachment. I’ve talked about understanding that every person has different things they need out of a relationship. And I’ve talked about that maturation from where this wonderful unit to it’s us against the world. That’s a big sign of emotional maturity when you get to that level in your relationship where you’re like, nothing will tear us asunder no matter what life throws at us. We’ve got this together, we’ve got this. We’ve proven time and time again that we can weather anything and we’ll take care of that.

So I think those are some of the biggest things that can really help people. Now I can get into some more specifics about those or we can go wherever you want to go, but just off the top of my head, those were big.

How we have transitioned from the old gender roles to new ones

Ari Whitten: Okay. So one of the things that you talked about is kind of this security and you, and you mentioned that about you personally needing to be provided security. I’d love to dig into that a bit more. We have this traditional sort of masculine-feminine dynamic and the masculine is the provider, the provider of security, the provider have, you know, historically speaking, the traditional role is like financial provider or a hunter-gatherer times. It’s like I provide food, I provide shelter, I provide safety. I’m a protector, I’m a hunter, I’m a warrior. And so on, roles are changing though in the modern world and we are not hunter gatherers anymore and what, and, and women are often going out into a, of course in the workforce. And oftentimes there are lots of relationships where women are making more money than their male partners. And these traditional roles are getting mixed up and they have lost a lot of the clarity that has been there for centuries, for millennia. And I think my, my intuition is that it’s causing a lot of problems in relationships as women are looking to men and going, it’s not even clear to me anymore why I need you, you know what I mean?

So what, what do you think that this kind of transition that’s going on in the modern world and the loss of these traditional masculine-feminine roles is creating problems in relationships? And can you talk a bit about that from your perspective?

Susan Bratton: Yeah. I watched this a lot and I’m always very worried about saying the wrong thing and having people be mean to me.

Ari Whitten: We can just get, you can just pass on the whole question to a book.

Susan Bratton: Oh No, no, no, no, not at all. Because what I don’t want to do is make anyone feel bad about being the, the full compliment across the gender spectrum of what is inside them. I am an extremely feminine woman and I am an extremely masculine woman and I feel that I can hold all of those things and do that with grace and charm, and I think that men have, all of us have all kinds of the multitude inside us, right? Multitudes inside us. We are any one of those things at any time. So what I see is that there’s just a, a, a wider permission, permissible expression of gender spectrum available to people today than ever before. At the same time. So that’s. That’s like the horizontal perspective is okay in the world today. I can be as masculine as I wanted, as feminine as I want, and that is awesome.

At the same time, I am still in a female body and I am estrogen driven. You are still in a male body and you are still testosterone driven. And those two things make very different types of responses to environment. Estrogen is nervous and it thinks about a lot of things and therefore what you’ll find is that when, when women learn their relationship values, a lot of them, one of their top values is being safe. And secure though it manifests in many different ways. It could be financial security for some women, it doesn’t mean anything. They have enough money and they’re not worried about it. For other women, it’s very important for them that their children and they are cared for and provided for the financial basis. It runs the spectrum.

Where for most men, because their testosterone, which is full speed ahead, I don’t need no, I don’t need to pull over and get no stinking directions because I am a man and I know I have this huge belief in my potential to figure out what I need to do.

And because of that, you will not often find a man who’s top relationship values include security. You won’t. You won’t find it. And so even though we have the expressive ability to be gender spectrum in our personalities, at the core, we are animals run by bacteria that run our hormones, that make us do stuff that we have hardly any control over. Man. If we knew how little control we have over this meat space, we would be like, oh, we just think we have control over it. You know, so I would just say generally that there’s still a lot of room for the masculine-feminine to come together to bring our unique essential selves to a, to a polarity, to the magnetism that draws us together. And if you are not in the masculine, Feminine Gender Spectrum, if you are, you know,   a woman who identifies as a man or what, you know, whatever it is, if you’re not in that, there is still that hormonal piece that has its say.

And so, ultimately, I think the question is everyone is finding their own way in every moment and the more that you know, what is the more that you honor, what is inside you and that is right for you, which gets back to the truthiness and the juiciness of truth and relationships. Which gets back to the sexual soulmate pact, which is an agreement about intimacy. That means I don’t know what I’m going to one today. I’m a hormonal cyclical person. It depends on how much sleep I’ve had, food I’ve eaten, and where I am in my cycle as to how I want to interact with you today. And as long as I’m checking in on that and honoring that and just going with that and we agree that that’s just how we operate, it’s that agreement that makes it safe for us to speak up and ask for what we really want and need. And I think that in a relationship, the more that you can get clear on what it is and why your behavior is the way that it is, what is that behavior? That’s what’s the need that’s generating that behavior. Let’s unpack that and see if we can get you what you need in the way that you need it. So everybody’s happy. I think that’s a lot of what happens in relationships that makes them strange is that there isn’t enough honoring of the self and the self’s needs across that spectrum.

Ari Whitten: Beautifully said. I have a more specific question on the same general theme. I know some men who literally feel confused and inadequate if they are not the woman’s provider that a financial provider, that if the woman makes more than them, they’re confused and they feel inadequate in terms of their manhood and what they’re bringing to the relationship.

So I have, and also I think I’ve, I’ve seen this is I don’t know that I can say this with objective, like very clear empirical evidence. But it appears to me from my observations that I’ve seen a lot of women in those kinds of relationships end up being resentful towards the man and, um, and also take on a lot more masculine energy if they’re the ones who are making more money than their male partner. They ended up kind of over time, subtly becoming more of the, this is maybe politically incorrect to say, but more of the man in the relationship where they have more masculine energy, man typically become softer and more submissive and they tend to lose the sexual polarity and stop having sex with one another.

So, my two specific questions here are, what would you say to the man in that kind of relationship? What, what can he bring to the relationship if he’s not making more money than his, his female partner? And what would you say to the woman in that kind of relationship?

Susan Bratton: I would say that that couple is still this instead of this. And when you are a couple like this, you take all the things

Ari Whitten: just for people who are listening and watching

Susan Bratton: Thank you, if your hands are. If your palms are facing and you’re waiting to complete each other rather than your palms are against, you’ve got your backs, your problems are the back of your hands are together and it’s you facing out against the world as a unified unit. The people who are struggling with their egoic self-appreciation around their financial contribution or the woman who was feeling like the man is lesser because she’s making more money and he’s not providing. And so she’s disappointed in him and then she starts to henpeck him. And you know, all of those things start to devolve in the relationship. What hasn’t happened is that you two haven’t come together and said, okay, divide and conquer, like you do these things, great. I do these things great. Maybe maybe I bring in more money, but you’re the one that manages it better for us.

So that’s number one is how do you take all of your skills and talents, and connections, and attributes, and insights, and everything that you have as a couple and put it together to become a greater whole? That’s number one because then everybody’s bringing all their best stuff in to mesh together. And that’s what creates a stable platform for both of you.

The second piece of that is how do you keep the sexual polarity going? And… the best, the best way that a couple can keep their soul sexual polarity going is to check everything at the bedroom door and really have an agreement that, whatever happened out there, we’re going to work on making that all better. But inside, in our private lives, we’re going to have a sexual relationship where we nurture each other. We love each other, we stimulate each other, we pleasure each other.

Sometimes I’m giving to you, sometimes you’re giving to me. I’m allowing you to get good at loving and pleasuring me. I’m opening myself to you, taking me to higher and higher and higher pleasure levels were taking turns. Doing that for each other. We’re gaining and growing our skills together. We’re learning new techniques to pleasure each other. We’re trying on and indulging each other’s fantasies. We’re playing with new toys. We’re going to have sex in different locations. We’re trying new positions.

When you come together as beginners with a beginner’s mind in your sexuality, you learn a lot of new things and you have all kinds of exciting varieties of experiences together and it keeps you feeling like teenagers that keep enjoying new experiences and having new breakthroughs in your intimate life together and that works really, really well because you end up with natural polarity in the bedroom because your testosterone and she’s estrogen and you like to do different things to each other, so it almost works itself out when you can kind of have that, that agreement.

Ari Whitten: Beautiful. I want to go back to values.

Susan Bratton: Okay.

How to communicate your values to your partner and work together while honoring both

Ari Whitten: So that was the first thing that you talked about, so can you make this, this, this topic, practical as far as what does, what does this look like and on and on in like actual practical level as far as how do you get on the same page with the other person as far as your value systems and start start living there?

Susan Bratton: Yeah, it’s super easy, which is what I love about it. First thing you have to do that which you have to be really honest with what it is you actually want. It doesn’t work if you’re not honest with yourself. So let me give you a story of a Lauren and Rob. Lauren. Her number one relationship value. It turns out with security. I have a list in my book. You can figure out what your values are. You can look at your old relationships and say, what was it I didn’t like and what did I like? Oh, okay. My values were getting met. Oh my values were not getting that. You can kind of figure things out for yourself, but I’ll just give you some examples so you get to start to get an idea of it. A Lauren’s relationship. Values number one was security number two was freedom.

She was one of, she is one of these modern day women who are like, I want you to totally take care of me. I want to be able to do whatever I want. And Rob has a little more introverted than Lauren. And so she, she wants to go out and do more things than he does.  He just kind like goes along for the ride because she’s just fun, but he doesn’t want to hold her back because they didn’t want to always go with her. And so he gives her all the freedom and he still takes care of her because that meets her needs. A lot of modern women today, they feel like that’s a really good setup for them. That is not an unusual situation and it’s certainly not an untenable situation either.

Where for Rob, the, his number one, his passion, he really wants a lot of affection. It’s not necessarily that he wants sex three times a day or anything like that. It’s more that he wants to have kind of a sexy relationship with Lauren. He doesn’t want it to just all be transactional, platonic running the family, running the kids, Dah, Dah, Dah, Dah. He wants to have that private, special carve out time where they are very close, very intimate and they’re really good in bed together. He never wants anything to come between that.

And then his number two is honesty. He is the kind of guy who’s very uncomfortable when he doesn’t know all the information. He’s one of those really analytical kinds of guys and he likes to get all the data so he can be. He doesn’t have to worry about things. That’s what keeps him from worrying is knowing the real truth about things were for Lauren. What keeps her from worrying is being taken care of by Rob.

Now where they get really interesting is that, and I could give you the third and the fourth, it doesn’t really matter what they are, but what Lauren does is she makes sure she gets up every day and she comes in because Rob always gets up before her. He’s at his desk, he’s having a cup of coffee, getting ready to go to work. When she arises she comes and sits on his lap in the morning and gives him a kiss or she comes and she at least greets him or sometimes she just walks around the house without any clothes on so that he can see her naked, which he loves. She’s like, I don’t know. I want to do that, but I’m going to do it because it makes you happy.

Where what Rob does for Lauren is he makes sure that the burglar alarm is always set at their house, that the car tires are always good, that they always have their insurance premiums paid up. That bills are not paid late, that she’s got good health care. It’s those kinds of things that are the signals to her that she’s being taken care of and there are things that Rob naturally very good at. He just kind of can pay the bills on time or Lauren’s like, oh my God, it’s the 31st. I had no idea what today was, you know, so they found the ways to support each other with the things they don’t do well, but that they really need to have and they don’t worry. She doesn’t worry about paying the bills. She makes sure she gives Rob great sex a lot and they have a really good sex life because that’s what makes him the happiest. And so it’s that idea of knowing exactly what it is. Like if you said your number one relationship value is passion, but I didn’t know that what you wanted me to do was come and sit on your lap in the morning and give you a kiss.

How would I know? And so it’s not enough to say, well, these are my values. What you have to do is you have to say to your partner, and here’s how and what you can do so I know that my values are being serviced in the relationship and when you can get your partner to be, to give you a list of four things, four different values. That’s about all you can remember. That’s about all you can handle and that that gets you like 90 percent of the way there. So, for Rob, Lauren always tells them the truth. And this is one of the things we were talking about with regard to the truthiness being sexy being thing that binds you together. Telling the truth is really easy when you’re talking about someone else, but it’s very difficult to admit all the petty, nasty, greedy, crappy things you think.

It does not make you look good. But if you actually share all the things you’re thinking with your partner, and of course if it’s something negative about them, you’re always going to make it as sweet and painless as possible. Never want to hurt your feelings of your partner with your own truth.

But once you start really divulging what’s actually going on with you, then it starts to become a very interesting relationship, but walking on eggshells, the skirting around things, the elephants in the room begin to go away and all of a sudden you’ve got this interesting, fascinating relationship because you’re talking about stuff that’s like deep inside you and very interesting.

So, once Laura and understood that’s what made Rob feel secure? And she started opening up and like actually admitting to herself things she was thinking and then sharing them with Rob. It really made them both a lot more connected and happier and confident with each other and feeling secure in their love for each other. So those are some examples of relationship values and how you would explain to your partner what it was that you needed to feel those feelings.

Ari Whitten: I have a question that popped into my head as you were describing like specific things that you could say, hey, here’s what I, what I need. And I have kind of mixed feelings about that. One aspect is I think it’s smart and I think that it’s like, it makes a lot of sense. On the other hand I have in me like… I have a really negative reaction to anything that feels inauthentic.

So for me, like if somebody does something that I had asked them to do in, in that scenario, like let’s say they come to sit in my lap in the morning and give me a kiss, my mind immediately goes, is this real and is it an authentic expression of you wanting to do this to express your love and affection towards me? Or are you doing this just because I told you that I like it. So like in other words, the same action on an objective sort of measurable level, observable level could be there, but for me, if it’s not coming from a truly authentic place where that person just felt compelled to do that, that makes a difference to me.

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Ari Whitten: What would you say to me in this case about that?

Susan Bratton: What I would say is that… When your partner tells you things that you can do that will make you so happy to be with them, you get the joy of knowing confidently that you’re contributing to your partner’s happiness in the ways they really want. And you also get to experience the pleasure of doing it with them.

So I would imagine that coming in and sitting on your lap in the morning and giving you a kiss has to be fabulous for your wife. Because your so enchanting and sexy and adorable, and such a great guy…

Ari Whitten: Oh, tell me more. Just fill the rest of the interview with more compliment.

Susan Bratton: Okay. So, not only is she getting the joy of, of you experiencing, you experience her giving it to you: She’s experiencing the joy of having the experience with you.  you’re not going to be asking for anything weird. You’re going to… your… people. People want simple things. The wide variety of the things that, that, that people have in their top floor relationship values are all just really beautiful things. They’re not, you know, things you wouldn’t want to do, are things you want to do. And it’s just prioritizing what are the things that really move the needle for you, you know? So for my husband let us sit on his lap, I didn’t sit in his lap the first dozen years of our relationship. I didn’t, I don’t know why, but I’m very tall as you know, Ari and I always felt a little too big to be sitting in some dude’s lap.

Ari Whitten: Well, your husband is a big guy too.  That helps.

Susan Bratton: It does help. But… sitting in labs is just one of my life’s pleasures now… Especially now I’ve got a new book coming out. I want, I want to do a little segue. So number one is that I think you’re going to, you’ll find that people ask for the things they need and the things they need are actually beautiful. So I wouldn’t worry about it. And often if you ask for things and your partner gives them to you, then they become, they find the joy in them as well and they find the joy in your joy. And that gives them joy. So asking for what you need and being okay that you’re love wants to give it to you. And that they get, even if they didn’t get joy in it themselves, they got joy in giving it to you and that’s enough, but they would get joy in having it themselves too.

Ari Whitten: That’s a phenomenal answer. Well done.

The power of the Soulmate Embrace

Susan Bratton: Oh, thank you. I want to talk about a new book I have coming out. It’s called the soulmate embrace. It’s free. I’m giving. I give it away. And so I’ll give you a link to it. And it came from helping men. Primarily men rekindle the passion in their relationships after it had waned. I have a program that I published almost, oh my gosh, eight years ago now called ”revive her drive, how to get your wife or girlfriend to love having intimacy, physical intimacy with you again”.

And one of the things that I realized was that generally men are focused on trying to get intimacy instead of creating an intimate environment where that intimacy naturally wells up. And that for most men, their understanding of sexual arousal is, I’ve got to arouse her. I’ve got to twinkle this and push this knob and, you know, elevator button. And as much as you push that thing, it’s not going to go up, or…

Ari Whitten:  Are you trying to say that doesn’t work?

Susan Bratton: And so, what I realized is that is that men and women across the gender spectrum need to take a step back and spend time holding and being held and weather wherever you are on the gender spectrum you pick. Do you want to be the masculine or the feminine? Do you want to hold or be held? It works for everyone. But let’s just make it simple. It’s a man and a woman. And it’s about the fact that generally if I, if I netted out when a man holds a woman, he holds her for a minute and as soon as she relaxes, he lets go. Like the freaking job is done and it’s not done. That’s just the beginning. If you want someone to become aroused, you actually have to take them into a state of relaxation first. Because as you well know, Ari, our nervous system is a toggle from sympathetic to parasympathetic and do you can’t just be putting on the gas or what are we doing?

We’re putting on the brakes and so the idea that arousal is a stair step and that the first step of the stair on the ascension ladder is complete and total relaxation. This is why people are too stressed for sex, because no one’s ever taken them down to complete relaxation, and so the soul mate embrace is a step by step way to hold the feminine as the masculine. That essentially is where you hold her sacrum down in the lower back. You hold her around her shoulders or someplace that feels comfortable for her because body dynamics are a big, a big part of chemistry, and you hold her lying down on your bed, on your sofa. If you have to beds are best because they’re more expensive pillows around so you’re so she can completely relaxed in your arms. You can be completely relaxed and you just hold her and as you feel her relax, you just hold her a little more tightly.

You just pull her a little more towards you. You can let go a little and move your hands and hold her a little tighter, but that. The idea is that it’s going to take her nervous system, five, 10, 15 minutes to really let go and get out of her head and into her body.

Estrogen has a hard time not thinking about a million things, and so you’re grounding, her energy, you’re holding space for her, you’re bringing a masculine container of safety around which you envelop her. If she needs to speak to get something off your chest, you allow that to be spoken. You listen, respond if you need to, but sometimes women need to process things verbally to let them go, to get them out of our entire nervous system and as you’re holding her and she’s starting to relax more, you can begin to stroke her hair, stroke her face with the back of your finger on her cheek, kiss her on the forehead.

One guy told me, I’ve never kissed my wife on the eyelids when they were closed before. I never did that, and you told me to try that and now she walks up to me and closes her eyes and she wants me to kiss her on the eyelids. You will create a monster. You will create a snuggle monster. I guarantee you maybe it should be ”Soulmate embrace, guaranteed to create a snuggle monster”. That should be the subject of my book. Right?

So, once you begin to do that, as she begins to really relax, you will feed. You’ll actually feel her start to open to your presence in the moment. She things will go out of her mind, she’ll become grounded in her body, will start to breathe with you. And then when you breathe a woman, because you got bigger lungs than she does, you want to breathe less shallowly, but you want to guide her breathing.

You want to help her breathe deep more deeply than she has been, but not as deep as you can. So you’re actually breathing her and relaxing her and then you can look her in the eyes and tell her that you love her.

You can begin to stroke her body and long strokes at the kind of stroking that she likes. You know, does she like a tickle stroke? Does she like a smooth, flat hand? Does she want to be squeezed? That’s another really good thing is that squeezing squeezes out, emotion squeezing and letting go relaxes. So squeezing her and letting her go a little bit. It really kinda like get the stuff out of you.

And what’s so beautiful about it is that he gets so much pleasure out of creating that relaxation for her and she gets so much out of him holding that place of stability for her to relax into, that pretty soon she’s just completely relaxed, totally in love with you. She wants to kiss you or want you to kiss her. And I really think that a woman loves kissing on the collarbones. They love kissing up the neck. They like a little breath in their ear, a little nibbling of the lobe, the eyelids, the tip of the nose caressing the chin.

These things don’t get done when, when the masculine is focused on the arousal, but it’s these things that create the arousal, created her attraction for him again, that draws her to him that makes her want him to take her to the next level of pleasure. That’s the foundation. So that’s the ”Soulmate embrace”.

Why relaxation is a base for arousal

Ari Whitten: Gotcha. So one related question I have to this, you talked about the idea of kind of relaxation as a prerequisite for arousal.

Susan Bratton: A base for arousal.

Ari Whitten: I’ve experienced in my own life that when I’m extremely stressed and working my butt off and I don’t do proper self-care if I’m, and I’m not de-stressing with meditation or going into the Sauna…

If I just, I’m working so hard that I just don’t make any time for any of that stuff. The baseline level of stress and tension increases to a point where I, like, at the end of the day I don’t, I’m not interested in sex. I just wanted go to sleep and I just want to relax or I just want to lay there and do nothing and just watch TV to finally get a break.

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Ari Whitten: It’s interesting that…  So I guess what I’m saying is I’m wondering to what extent the individual self-care, not necessarily the, the other person is responsible for getting you relaxed and aroused, but what, what, to what degree do you think a person’s self-care as far as meditation or yoga or whatever distressing rituals they have?

And doing those on a regular basis to make sure that they are relaxed and operating in a fairly low baseline of stress intention to help facilitate all of this like you do it yourself, you, each individual works on themselves themselves to stay, to be operating in a fairly good state of relaxation and low tension.

And then I think that just kind of lubes the wheels a little bit and gets things going so that it’s much easier for your partner to actually get you in the mood. Is that accurate at all in your opinion?

Susan Bratton: We’re all responsible for ourselves and how we show up in our relationships, but we don’t always have the resources to do it well. And that’s where if our partner is very stressed out and they’re not available for us, this is particularly the time that they need to be held. The other thing that can happen is I’m a big believer in sensual and erotic massage. And I think that for a lot of couples, even thinking about,  making love is just like out of the question for one or the other of them for many, many, many, many reasons, but that does not mean that you stopped touching each other or stop being intimate.

And that’s why I really, really like to have a lot of sensual touch techniques, a lot of… everything from foot massages, especially for women. I think there’s something, and I don’t know what it is, but I think there’s something around… of course we were the worst shoes, but I’m also, I think there’s something hormonal that affects our feet in some way.

Some estrogen or prolactin or something that our feet need to be rubbed. And they do say that a woman’s feet,  the pleasure that she feels from a foot rub is located right next to the pleasure that she feels from her genitals being touched in the brain. Like the place where you feel sensation. They’re next to each other. And so learning how to give your husband a face massage where you lay back against the headboard of the bed. And he lays back against you on a pillow and you get some warm oil with some aromatherapy, some essential oils in it, and you just give him the most wonderful face rub while you watch ocean blue planet two together, you know, that’s a very calming, connecting, intimate thing that you can do to self-care each other. And then I also really like genital massage.

Genital massage to me is the foundation of good sexual intimacy that lasts for your whole life. It’s a, it keeps genital atrophy at bay. It keeps arousal and turns on going if the blood flow is fantastic when people are going through menopause and antra pause, um, it’s connected in a way genital touching is connected in a way that’s very vulnerable, but very pleasurable, and very close, and very intimate. And so one of the products that I have that I think is probably, I think this is the most beautiful product that I’ve ever created, is called ”The steamy sex ed video collection”. And in it, there’s erotic massage as well as sensual massage techniques like 30 or 40 of them on one of the videos for men than for women, and then a little bit more and,  because we’re never taught how to pleasure being able to watch together as a couple and look at those videos and say, oh, I’d like you to try it out on me.

Or we used to do that and we don’t do that anymore. We should do that again. Or even just a, like a genital massage for a man. If a woman doesn’t have a lot of experience, she doesn’t really know what feels good. She doesn’t know what she can touch or how to stroke it. And if you ask the guy he’ll be, he’ll know the three things he likes that, you know, take him over the edge, but he doesn’t really ever know how to describe just being pleasured that way. And so being able to watch and follow along and do the things and tell them what you’re doing and have them give you feedback. It builds the skills and confidence that allows a woman to really feel good about enjoying giving her partner pleasure to the point where it becomes incredibly pleasurable and a big turn on to her. And for many men, they don’t really know the anatomy of their partner’s vulva and so to be able to have the time to actually get in there with some nicely oiled hands, especially if they’ve got rough hands, put some gloves on, just some nitrile gloves from Nice and tight.

Put some oil on your hands and just get in there and play and discover and find ways to stimulate and touch and need and tickle and pat and tap and all those things and to learn all those techniques so that she can say, ”wow, what was that thing you did? What was that thing? What are you doing right now?” He’ll get more dexterous. Over time, his hands will become so deft at pleasuring her and that will help her actually become a more, a more orgasmic lover because he’s bringing all that blood to her genitals and I recommend when you watch tv, you’re giving each other touch of some kind because that, that really can bring that stress back down and increase the connection that you have together.

Ari Whitten: Noted Game of Thrones plus genital massage tonight.

Susan Bratton: Exactly. Hold on. I’m not sure. I haven’t watched Game of Thrones, but I think it’s pretty violent.

Ari Whitten: Well, unless you’re like a sadist or something. Probably not the best TV show to give genital massages too.

Susan Bratton: That’s why I recommended Blue Planet.

Ari Whitten: Yes, good choice.

Susan Bratton: It’s a gorgeous ocean. Did you see Blue Planet two yet?

Ari Whitten: I haven’t actually.

Susan Bratton: It’s stunning.

Ari Whitten: Is it?

Susan Bratton: Yeah, it’s the BBC with David Attenborough and they go all over the world and we talk about the world’s oceans and all the marine life in it. And the cinematography is exquisite. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. So that’s a really good one for genital massage Wednesday

Ari Whitten: Nice.. Yes, scheduled it

Susan Bratton:  I’ll put that in the calendar.

The 4 keys to revival

Ari Whitten: I want to get back to. Well actually there’s one little digression that I wanted to do something you mentioned briefly, you had a program called for men ”Revive her drive”.

What if, you know, I, I know a lot of relationships over time and tend to lose sexual polarity and you just maybe fall out of the routine of having sex and maybe become more oriented towards your children and the day to day activities of work and you know, and, and all this kind of stuff and all of the sudden week start going by without sex or maybe months or maybe in some cases, years. What, what do you think are some of the keys to helping couples start to, to reconnect and rekindle that sexual attraction and like start to have sex more frequently? Because I think you could probably, I would imagine there are like barriers that are almost created that like if weeks or months go by, it then becomes really hard to just grab your woman or your man in and hold them and start kissing them and start getting into that mood. You know what I mean? So what tips do you have to sort of break down that barrier?

Susan Bratton: There are four keys to revival. The first is to romance her again. She needs to be romanced to desire you sexually and for a lot of guys they’ve gotten into the try to get sex mode, but they’ve forgotten that she needs to be taken out on a hike, moving her body is moving her emotions. She needs to be rowed on a rowboat on the lake. She needs to be put in a Ferris wheel with a fairgrounds. She needs to have you step on it on a windy mountain road and feel the move and your convertible, you know, moving her emotions in a way that is not trying to get sex. Number one, re-creating the trust and reminding her why she fell in love with you and wanted you in the first place.

Number two, reawaken her body sensually not sexually. There’s nurturing touch, there’s sensual touch, there’s sexual touch, and too many men go immediately to sexual touch and it shuts her down. Women are a fire that needs a tinder and kindling and you build the little fire and then you add the fuel. Men, you know, they, they get immediately turned on, but she takes a long time to catch up.

So all those massages keep her pot simmering and the better you get at genital massage, the more she’s going to remember her desire and want to invite you in. So reawakening her sensually not sexually reminding her that she likes to be close to you, holding her, petting her, kissing her, those kinds of things without an agenda for sex because, if you try to get sex, it backfires. You can’t beg for it, you can’t bargain for it. You can’t do honeydews you tried all that. It doesn’t work. Because you have to start with the sensual and then becoming a man she wants to have sex with in the bedroom.

Re-engaging that polarity, taking charge, learning how to run the bedroom game, learning how to allow her to surrender. Having her surrender to you, which you can only do if you also understand how to give your woman orgasms. So one of the reasons why women stop having sex with their partners is that once the new relationship energy wears off and it becomes the day to day platonic world of raising the children, she actually can’t orgasm as well from you. And most men, they have a few techniques and they’ve been with a few women, even if they’ve been with many women, they’ve never been with one woman long enough to get to the end of their line of the few things they know how to do and they haven’t added to their own knowledge of how to pleasure a woman. And so part of what I teach in ”Revive her drive” is actually how a woman’s nervous system works, where to touch her, when to touch her, how to accelerate her arousal.

I teach them all the different kinds of orgasms. A woman can have different ways to stimulate her, um, and just really teach them how a woman’s body works so that most of the time what happens is, and they can do all these steps almost in order, right? So they start romancing her while they’re listening to the program and they,  begin having some central moments with her without trying to get sex and then they’re learning about sex techniques, but they get to the polarity piece. They get to the, how am I, the masculine sexual leader? And they say, Whoa, what I got out of reviving her drive was that it was nothing about her and it was everything about how I was showing up in the relationship and what I had to do was face my own misunderstanding of what I was doing. And once I corrected that, she started responding.

And so what happens is the minute you start romancing her, she starts responding. The minute that you give her sensual touch without expecting sex, she’ll respond. She doesn’t trust it right away. She doesn’t trust it because you’re always just trying to get in there as fast as you can. Right? And so she’s like, this isn’t very good for me. So. And a lot of women have pain with childbirth. They’ve gotten pelvic issues, they’re having hormonal problems that have been trauma, you know.

And so for many men, they end up stepping up and becoming her sexual healer, not just her masculine sexual leader, but the man that actually spends the time healing the cesarian scar running his thumb over that cesarian scar with some coconut oil for 18 months in a row whenever she asks, until that scars are gone and she feels good again, whatever it might be.

That’s one example of a million of examples of women who’ve had physical traumas that have held them back from their desire and their husband has said, I will heal you. I will be your sexual healer because I love you and I want you close to me.

And so,  it’s really those four steps and a big part of it is your own, you’re how to manage yourself in the relationship. And once you learn those things and you put them in and you start to get these bedrooms skills and communication skills, and your wife starts to become, you know, like really excited about sex again with you, then you have to be careful not to shut her down. You have to be careful not to shame her for her desire because when you open a woman to her desire, she is a very, women are extremely wild and sexual and highly orgasmic and have big sexual appetites that scare men and so you have to be careful on the other end of that, but that could be coming and you have to be able to be solid and contain that and say, I can handle it. What else do you have? Give me some more baby.

Ari Whitten: So Bring it on.

Susan Bratton: Bring it on.

How you were raised can influence your relationship

Ari Whitten: So, so let’s go back to. Well, first of all, actually, let me just say that I love what you just said. Beautiful. I want to go back to attachment parenting and you know, you just touched on this very briefly as you were listing all these things off. But tell me more about how the parenting styles that you were brought up in as a child relates to your current relationships as an adult.

Susan Bratton: Yeah, I would, I would say that if you’re securely attachment parented, you are pretty easy to get along with. You are loving, hugging, cuddly, easy, not triggered very much on things in your relationship, and if you’re not, you’re the opposite of that.  Things feel unsafe. You feel unhealed. There are often core wounds. I’m unlovable, I’m not enough. I will do it wrong that occur.

They can all be overcome by yourself with a good partner and a good therapist. And the person that I think is the absolute best in the world and who’s written some really readable, marvelous books is Dr Susan Campbell. I’d highly, I’d be happy to introduce you to her and have her come on your show…

Ari Whitten: Yeah, I would love that.

Susan Bratton: Because she has done. Remember that I’m not a therapist. I’m a sex… I’m like the ”Dear Abby2 of sex. And so I don’t delve into core wounds. What I do is teach you anatomy, passionate lovemaking techniques, bedroom, communication skills. I’m in this area. I don’t, I can’t fix all the things that happened back here, but I can send you in the right direction. I can identify issues and send you in the right direction. And Susan is marvelous. She’s written a book called getting real, which is about the 10 truth-telling skills and what was her ”five minute relationship repair” was her latest book and it’s about understanding your core wound and what it is so that you become aware of it and you can see when it’s getting triggered so that you can begin to unwind that and it’s marvelous work.

Ari Whitten: Beautiful. So what? So, so the, the, the big sort of answer to if you were not raised in an with attachment style parenting is you tend to have those kind of core wounds and be triggered very easily and basically you’d recommend for people to, to read Susan Campbell’s work and, and hopefully work with a therapist as well.

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Ari Whitten: Beautiful.

Susan Bratton: Yeah, because you can unwind that stuff.

Ari Whitten: Okay.

Susan Bratton: Yeah, you can really, you can, you can unwind so much and even if you can’t get rid of it all out of your body and your reactions to things in life, you can become aware of that. It’s your reaction. Then you can manage your reaction

Ari Whitten: Okay. So I don’t know how much more time you have. Do you have another maybe 15 minutes or.

Susan Bratton: Sure. You want to go wild today, huh?

How soulmates are co-created

Ari Whitten: I do. There’s so much I wanted to ask you about. And this has been great stuff so far and I’m realizing like an hour’s flown by already. So I want to be respectful of your time, but also I’d love to have you on more and gets more and more juicy questions. Soulmates are co-created. That’s something you said earlier. Elaborate on that. What, what does that mean that soulmates a cocreated and how can we start to engage in a process on a practical level to actually make that happen?

Susan Bratton:  Well let me just tell you briefly the six essentials to connected sex. The six things that I think are what help couples become soulmates for each other. And I’m going to grab my books so I get them in. So I remember them all the right way. I mean, here’s the thing about sexuality. It is a vast subject. I mean, I help people from 19 to 90 across the gender spectrum all around the world from every culture. And I have to know about everything from anatomy to STI, as you know, there’s a new STI, they’re just discovering to consent to dating advice, how to talk to girls, how to get your wife to have sex with you again, or your husband has sex with you. I’m like, there’s so much to sex. And so just remembering what every single thing is that I ever wrote.

I’ve been writing for a decade. I’ve written thousands and thousands of articles. I have hundreds of videos and many, many ebooks and programs. But I spent the decade thinking what? Giving people and then hearing, how it worked. Okay.  okay, I tried this on. Here’s what happened. Okay, I tried this and here’s what happened. Now what do I do now? What do I do now? What do I do?

And I would coach people,  you know, and I get, I get questions, everything from, you know, secret fantasies that people have that they feel terrible about, that they feel shame about to, you know, how do I find the vagina hole? I get everything.

Ari Whitten: Have you really gotten that question?

Susan Bratton: Yeah. Last week. Actually it was, how big is a vagina hole was how big is the vagina hole?

Ari Whitten: It varies.

Susan Bratton: Stretchy, is the right answer. Stretchy.

Ari Whitten: Big enough to get a baby out.

Susan Bratton: it’s amazing, isn’t it? The first thing is, and this is something that people struggle with, is actually being present with each other instead of off in your minds. And men get a stroke. They are strategizers because they deep down they want to give a woman incredible pleasure. Again, I’m going man, woman here, but it’s gender spectrum, but it’s a man-woman than they. It gets confusing. So he wants to give her incredible pleasure because he’s driven to be the superior lover. So he gets invited back in because he’s competitive. It’s competitive for him. And so he’s thinking about what he’s gonna do. He’s always one step ahead and trying to hold the frame and all be the masculine leader and you know, have her surrender to him and all that stuff while still staying connected to her. So it’s no mean feat, but there are ways to do it.

The second thing is for her to get out of her mind and into her body. And so when you have authentic presence and connection, when you are, when there is no plan, but you’re seeing what’s coming up and what would bring you the most joy in the moment together and you’re playing with that, that’s when things get very sexy. When she feels and he feels completely uninhibited by any, there will be no shame and you’re just saying, oh, you show really good to me right now. Could we do this or lie down there? I want to get on top of you. When you play with my boobies, whatever it is, that being in the present moment where time falls away, where you are lost in each other, where the only thing that’s happening is that second by second moment by moment interplay between two lovers were the two of you are lost in a conjoined trance that is so beautiful that you feel connected to God or to Gaia or to life force.

That it’s like being an orgasmic meditation together. You do that together. That’s where we all want to go. We want to go back to the garden together and so presence is what gets you there. Connected presence, so that’s number one and that’s a learned skill. It’s like meditation. It comes with practice. It comes with surrender, comes with trust, comes with bringing your attention back to your lover when you’ve drifted away. And all of that. So that’s number one. Number two is creating a lover space. Carving out time to make love, putting it on the calendar, having a commitment to your intimacy. It’s creating the environment for complete surrender. It could be making it warmer or colder. Adjusting the lighting. What kind of playlists do you want to listen to? Are you into Grindy Dub temple today? Or do you want to listen to a Buddhist Spa Music?

You know, like what’s gonna? What’s gonna Transport you in your lovemaking. You have a pitcher of water by the bed so you can refresh yourselves from your hot sex together, are the sheets lean is the, all of those things. Taking care of your body. What’s the contraception? What’s the STI conversation? What’s the boundary conversation? What sexual agreements do you have? If you’re not a partnership that where you’ve kind of got that handled already. Those are really important things and then that allows for complete relaxation because too often people feel like, oh, sex should just be this spontaneous chemistry that happens. Then we’re going to just like fall passionately into bad and then you know, we’re going to do these things and it’s going to be awesome.

Well, if she can’t lie back on pillows, I have this thing called the cunnilingus pillow plan, which is essentially how you can drape her body over pillows so that she’s lifted up completely relaxed and you can go down on her for as long as you two want and she can have as many orgasms as she wants because she’s completely comfortable and so that’s a part of lovers space is what Lubes are you using? I hope they’re organic nontoxic nut oils because I’m a nerd and I like really healthy stuff. So do you have all those things laid in? And then the sexual soulmate pact, which I talked to you about a little more a little earlier, which is we have an agreement that I’m going to always tell you exactly how I’m feeling and what I need in the moment, and you’re going to be like, give it to me, lay it on me. And this goes both directions because I want to know what you want. I want to know where you are. I don’t take it personally. You’re a crazy little animal. So just tell me what she needs and tell me what he wants. And that gets really juicy, really fast. And it opens up all kinds of fun, variety and experimentation and fantasy play and the kinds of things that add a dimensional layer of pleasure to lovemaking.

The next thing is polarity. It’s the idea that sometimes a woman wants to be taken. She wants to be ravished. She wants her hands held down while you’re on top of her kissing her. She wants whatever she wants. She wants you to pick her up and move over to the bed and put her down and take her clothes off.  she wants to dress up in lingerie and sexy shoes and prance around for you and do a little striptease. Whatever your polarity roleplay looks like, whatever it, whatever works for you. Those are common things because people like them, they’re not what everybody wants, but there were lots of people want permission to,  to create that polarity is really, really fun. Like, hats off, check everything at the bedroom door. Let’s get down to it. That’s how some girl, boy, fun or masculine, feminine, Fun, whatever that looks like in your relationship.

The next one is embodied sexuality. And what I mean by that is taking the time to look at each other’s eyes, to connect, taking the time to breathe together, to hold hands on hearts, to do soulmate embraces, to really slow down and it’s part of presence, but it’s part of presence that connects your bodies, your limbic systems. It’s that part soulmates. Look each other in the eyes. Soulmates, breathe together. Soulmates connect in a very language, sensual, pleasurable way. Soulmates don’t just have sex, they make love. They make passionate love with each other. They feel and get pleasure from touching their partner. They don’t touch just to give pleasure, they get pleasure from it. These are some of the kinds of things that make sex soulmate sex.

And then the last is something I call erotic play dates and that is especially for not really, I was gonna say especially for longterm partners, but no, it’s for everybody.  It’s for the first time you’ve made love. It’s for the 300000th time you’ve made love. It’s always learning new things together. The couple that plays together stays together.  when you grow and try, when you try new things and grow together, it keeps it zesty. It’s, it’s you together, you’ve got each other’s backs, you’re to try some new things. If you didn’t like it, you tried. At least you got to try it. And so that’s where the novelty, the variety, the education. I’m going to learn genital massage. I’m going to learn how to give her g-spot orgasms. I’m going to try anal sex. I’m going to learn how to give the best blow jobs in the world. I’m going to do whatever you can go on and on and on and all. I want to dress up. I want to do role play. I want to be a Catholic school girl. Get a spanking, whatever it might be. I hope that’s not too racy for your show.

Ari Whitten: No, it’s great. There’s a spectrum of people watching and listening to this. You made it this far. Anybody who’s easily offended probably turned it off in the first five minutes or didn’t listen to it all. So that’s, that’s the case. I just accept that some people are going to be offended, but I think the benefits of speaking on these topics openly outweighs the loss of anybody who’s easily offended. And so I’m willing to accept that, the repercussions of that. So carry on with all the good stuff.

Susan Bratton: Now, back to that Catholic school girl and her…

Ari Whitten: Exactly, yes! Tell me more about that Catholic schoolgirl outfit!

Susan Bratton: Indulging each other’s fantasies. A lot of times, you know, your fantasies are your subconscious mind’s way of dealing with your sexual desire, your shame about your sexual desire. And a lot of fantasies come from your prepubescent and pubescent time. Things you’ve seen that you’ve transmuted into a fantasy and most of them are like pretty silly stuff. Pretty goofy stuff and pretty easy to indulge. And so…

Ari Whitten: Just real quick on a personal note, I had a big crush on to, to crushes on Disney characters as a little kid, Princess Jasmine and Pocahontas.

Susan Bratton: I agree. I mean, I think they’re both incredibly sexy.

Ari Whitten: Yeah. I have a thing for that little bit darker skin kind of exotic looks so…

Susan Bratton: well. There you go. So maybe your wife can indulge you in a little bit of a. maybe you can ”poke a hontas”.

Ari Whitten: Well I, I, you know, even without her outfit, I actually, you know, I found a girl who looks pretty similar to that.

Susan Bratton: Like Pocahontas. I love it. That’s so cute. Yep. You’ve got to type.

Ari Whitten: So it’s, it’s me just living out my childhood fantasies about Disney characters.

Susan Bratton: Aren’t we all? Yeah. So that’s the neat thing about erotic play dates is that one of the things about your sexuality is that if you put attention on it, if it’s something that’s important to you, there are people who I call sexual seekers and they are still listening. You are still listening, you are a sexual seeker and there are people who are who are not. And everybody has their priorities and they have different things before sexual seekers, they tend to want to have great sex their whole life long and they… We mature. We mature sexually, so if you indulge some fantasies and you try some things for your partner, you might find you love them. You might find out I didn’t do anything for me, but they had a great time and that makes me happy, but if you go back and forth and it’s like, you know what my fantasy is now, here’s what I would really like to do. I can’t stop thinking about this. Could we do it?

And you do those things. You’ll find that they change over time. You mature sexually as you mature physically and as a person and your whole life. But the great thing about sex is that it keeps getting better. There is no end to it. You can increase your orgasmic capacity, your ability to withhold, to withstand pleasurable sensation and hold it and enjoy it.

You have the capacity to grow, to grow more deeply in love with your partner, to be more turned on by them than ever. Even if your bodies’ age, you can be more turned on by your partner today than you were 25 years ago when you married them because you have this richness of experience together. This growth together in this turn on together and the knowledge of each other’s bodies together. So that’s where I live. I hung out in that place of I’ve got a headlamp and I’m going out into the uncharted territory of pleasure and I’m reporting back what the map looks like so you can come to that place too. That’s kind of my job. My, my research is quite good. My, you know, the research I have to do for my job. It’s not the worst thing. Yeah.

How to improve sex in your relationship – how to get and give great orgasms to your partner

Ari Whitten: And sometimes you, you probably were headlamp into bed because your husband, Tim, I think has a fantasy for spelunking. Turns him on when you, when you wear the headlamp for tape exploration. My last question for you is on orgasms.

Susan Bratton: Yay, now we’re talking. [Inaudible] orgasm person.

Ari Whitten: So I know that you could talk on this subject for probably 10 hours. Give me your top three tips. No, I would love if you could just talk maybe one or two tips that you found for maybe one for men, maybe one for women that will help them kind of introduce something new into the sexual dynamic of their relationship.

Susan Bratton: Okay. Let’s see,  for men, I think I would talk about male, multiple orgasms. And what I would tell you is that men are, I believe men are as orgasmic as women, and I, and I am humbled at the infinite orgasmic capacity of women and I think that it’s, we’ve barely scratched the surface with men and in, you know, 50 years men’s day will come.

But what I can tell you and why I believe that is that, um, the, I think that men have just been culturally, cheated out of pleasure. And that one in four men suffers premature ejaculation. And,  my friend Sheri Winston, who was a wonderful sex educator, she says she hates that term. She doesn’t even want anybody to say there’s such a thing. Some guys just come faster than others, but there are a lot of techniques that you can do as a man to feel pleasure without worrying that it’s going to cause you to a ejaculate.

Ari Whitten: I saw an Austin Powers, he just thinks of Margaret Thatcher naked on a cold day. It worked for him,

Susan Bratton: But you can’t stay present if you’re up in your head. Body-Based, a breathing muscle control, pelvic relaxation, learning,  where your point of no return is edging to arousal and backing off, being able to throttle your arousal in that way, but also then breathing that sexual energy up into your body and spreading it through your body. These all are rooted in Taoist tradition, but updated for today’s modern man. Um, I am lucky enough to publish your program. I’d be amazing. Tantra teacher, global train the trainer, Tantra teacher, Jim Benson called ”multiorgasmic lover for men”. I’ll give it to you if you want it, which explains to them that your ejaculation and orgasm are separate functions in your body. You happen to ejaculate when you have an orgasm, but you don’t need to. And so then he teaches you how to separate those things so you can become a multiorgasmic man. Interestingly enough,

Ari Whitten: I’ll just say on a personal note that I started exploring this when I was in my mid-twenties with Mantak Chia’s work. Yeah, I think he’s got a book called the multiorgasmic mail, if I remember correctly. I thought the whole thing was nuts and, and nonsense. When I first started exploring, but I can say based on my own personal experience and many people I know that it is very, very real

Susan Bratton: well, Montauk, Taoist traditions are focused on semen retention and there is a bell curve of the population for whom ejaculation depresses them and depletes them. And I think that semen retention is good for them, but for most men are biologically wired to want to cycle their semen through to keep it topped off and fresh. And so people are wired in different ways. So what I like about Jim’s program, he teaches something called the Me breath that, once you understand how to begin to separate ejaculation and orgasm, you can ejaculate when you want to. We call it ejaculatory choice. You can come when you want it, but you can have lots of orgasms. And when you start having full body orgasms when you’re with a woman and she sees that she is creating this incredible feeling for you, it’s, we call it the tuning fork effect.

You are resonating to see with this orgasmic pleasure that then is cascading over into her. And she’s orgasming. And pretty soon you just can’t tell where one starts and the other ends, it’s just, that’s when you get into that conjoined trance connection of incredible pleasure together. That’s that learned skill that becomes the soul mate connections, sexual soulmate connection. So that’s one thing I would say about male orgasm is, but I think it’s a great untapped energetic potential. And,  I’d like to do my best to have men learn more about how to become multiorgasmic. Many of them do it to give their partner incredible pleasure. They don’t even do it for themselves. I’d like to see men take more pleasure themselves for female orgasm. Where do I go with that?

Ari Whitten: Give me your top 93 tips.

Susan Bratton: But you know what I’m doing right now. I’ll just tell you what I’m doing right now.  so I’ve always like, well, how much work can I call, you know, like I just want to see like where’s the upper limit? And I have not found it. I mean hours to recover because I’ve had so many orgasms. What I’ve been doing lately is I’ve been… I’ve been updating a program I have called female liquid orgasm. It’s about female ejaculation and g-spot orgasms and one of the things I’ve been doing is updates updating the toy guide and I’ve always had this kind of like ”holier than thou” kind of looking down my nose at sex toys because I have always been one of those people who has believed that, all you need is within you. Now passionate lovemaking is two people together. I don’t want to stick a piece of plastic in the intermix, but I haven’t been using. Tim and I have been systematically trying a half dozen of them have really high quality, nontoxic sex toys that are focused on g-spot and female ejaculation. And I could just kick myself. That’s me kicking myself because I just squandered like most of my life not having left a lot of pleasure on the table… They are amazeballs!

First of, all guys hands get tired with a lot of g spot stroking. Women can take once they’re warmed up, a lot of pressure and a lot of sensation. But guys always start too hard because they watch porn and they see what they do to porn stars. And your wife and girlfriend aren’t a porn star. They’re not using their Yoni the way that these women are. And so then the women are like, oh no, I don’t like that, don’t do it. It’s too much. The delicacy of awakening a woman’s g-area. It’s not a spot. It is a whole area. And it’s basically the whole roof of her vagina all the way back. Like, you know, people are like, I’m like, just get on up in there. Who cares what the stuff is called? Get the whole thing. Go in and these toys can do that because your fingers in your arms, your fingers aren’t long enough in your arms. Get tired. Even your big biceps, which is why the girls like you, they’re secretly thinking, oh, I bet Ari’s really good a g-spot stimulation.

Ari Whitten: That’s what it is. I’ve always wondered what it was.

Susan Bratton: Now you know. Anyway, the tools, they really give a guy and guys, you guys are great tools also, which is awesome. So you really can get in there and if you know what to do, use them well, which is a big part of what I’m doing is I’m exploring what would I tell a couple about how to incorporate these toys into their lovemaking play such that he’s not going to hurt her and she’s going to get pleasure out of it and he’s going to take her to the next level because you can do it to yourself and there is the whole category of Solo play with these toys. It helps with solo play and exploration, which is wonderful, but you can’t surrender to yourself. So it’s really nice to have a partner that knows what they’re doing. So I’ve been spending a lot of time in that world of a g-spot pleasuring and female ejaculation

Ari Whitten: And you’re right that doing research for your line of work must really be tough.

Susan Bratton: Hi. No, it takes a lot of time, honestly.

Ari Whitten: A lot of time doing something that seems to be pretty good thing to be doing.

Susan Bratton: Yeah, I think so too. Yeah, I like that. In Yoga and hiking, that’s what I do. Swimming in the ocean. I love that. But anyway, so yeah, I would encourage more women and their partners to do more g spot awakening, pleasuring, healing. It’s a big part of sexual healing. It holds a lot of our buried emotion and it has to come out and once it comes out it’s out, which is nice. And it’s a very. I always talk about female ejaculation as being like a good cry and an orgasm had a baby because it’s just a real release, like when you cry and you feel better. It’s the same with a female ejaculation.

And by the way, like men, the ejaculation and the orgasm are separate. You can relate without an orgasm or you can have an orgasm without ejaculating and over time you can just ejaculate or not if you don’t want to. You’re in control of your body. Some women are like, what happens if I like a dark, like, well, first of all he’s going to love it because men like those signals of surrender, they will lose signals of just like an abashed pleasure if they understand what it is. But,  generally that’s what I’ve been playing with. If you will.

Ari Whitten: Beautiful. Well Susan, this has been racy.

Susan Bratton: It’s been a long.

Ari Whitten: It’s been raised and it’s been very fun. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom. You know, relationships are such an important part of health and energy levels and I mean I’ve been in, in my younger years, part of in relationships that were toxic, that were problematic and my God does it just screw you up on every level to not have healthy relationships and to not be on the same page with your partner and do not have a good sexual connection and do not have the same value systems. I mean, everything that you shared is just so, so important. Such an important part of health and having good energy levels and I’m really thankful that you came on the show for a second time to share your wisdom with my audience. So thank you so much.

Susan Bratton: My pleasure. I really enjoy,  all of the great questions that you asked me. Thank you for loving me so much and for all the appreciation that you give me.

Ari Whitten: Oh, I do. Susan, you’re, I think my most fun. I won’t tell all the other podcasts. I think you’re the most fun podcast guests that I’ve ever had on the show. So yeah, this has been a blast. And of course to you in person is always super Fun as well. So you’ve mentioned a few different products of yours. I want to come back to that too close, so people who want to learn more from you can get those resources. We’re going to put links to all those things on the podcast page, the energy blueprint.com forward slash relationships, but the products again, you have a…

Susan Bratton: about ”Sexual Soulmate Pact”, ”Relationship Magic”, ”the steamy sex Ed, video collection”, ”female liquid orgasm”, ”Multi-Orgasmic Lover For Men”, ”soulmate embrace”. I think that’s the sixth I talked about. We talked about a lot of stuff. I was only going to remember three of those. Yeah. I’ll give you links for everything.

Ari Whitten: Great. So just real quick to talk about relationship magic and, and what’s in that. Yeah.

Susan Bratton: Just go to my relationshipmagic.com and get that one at the discount. I’ll make sure you get a link for that. That’s the one that teaches you your top four relationship values and helps you learn your partners and how you need to do it so they understand and feel that they’re getting those things, not just from a conceptual perspective, but like the list of like, here’s how I feel that you’re making me secure, here’s how I feel that we’re in a passionate relationship, that kind of thing. Here’s how I feel like I’ve got freedom to do what I want.

Ari Whitten: Great. And then I know at least one of those books is something that you’re giving away for free. Right?

Susan Bratton: I’m going to give you the soulmate embrace and the sexual soulmate pact for free.

Ari Whitten: Beautiful. Okay, so we’re going to have those on the podcast page to the energyblueprint.com/relationships. Susan, thank you so much again.

How To Fix A Relationship And Improve Sex In Your Relationship With Susan Bratton – Show Notes

Why knowing your values is essential for a harmonious relationship (4:55)
Having your partners back is key to a successful relationship  (10:41)
How we have transitioned from the old gender roles to new ones  (14:22)
How to communicate your values to your partner and work together while honoring both (26:30)
The power of the Soulmate Embrace (37:10)
Why relaxation is a base for arousal (44:22)
The 4 keys to revival (52:18)
How you were raised can influence your relationship (59:59)
How soulmates are co-created (1:03:24)
How to improve sex in your relationship – how to get and give great orgasms to your partner (1:18:41)

Links

Get ”Soulmate Embrace” Here
Get ”Female Liquid Orgasm” Here
Get the ”Sexual Soulmate Pact” Here
Get the ”Multi-Orgasmic Lover For Men” Here
Get the Steamy Sex Ed ”Top 10 Fantasy Sex Techniques Video” Here
Get the Steamy Sex Ed ”10X Your Oral Sex” Here
Get the Steamy Sex Ed ”How To Be Instantly Hotter and Sexier In Bed” Here