How Yoni Massage Helped Me Stop Spectatoring
I used to be able to enjoy sex, but now I can’t help but engage in spectatoring. I can’t help but get distracted. I used to feel connected, and able to access all my pleasure. It was easy for me to be present and feel like sex felt good. My husband and I have been married for a long time though, and I feel like I have grown further and further disconnected from myself and from him in the bedroom.
I didn’t know what spectatoring was until I saw a description of it on the internet and realized that’s what I was doing. I was mentally disconnecting from my body during the act of sex and allowing my mind to wander and get distracted. I couldn’t help but think about all the things I needed to get done that day, or worrying about the things I forgot to take care of, or thinking about the myriad of other ways I could be spending my time other than having unsatisfying sex.
The truth is, I was really emotionally and energetically disconnected from my body, and sex with my husband had become nothing but going through the motions for me. Just a quick in and out, not much excitement to it, just letting him do his thing until he got off. I couldn’t remember the last time I had a powerful orgasm. In fact, I had fallen into the habit of faking orgasms with my husband just to make it easier for him to feel like his job had been done, and we could be done having sexy time.
My husband didn’t seem to be aware of how much of a problem this had become for me. He seemed to be satisfied with my faking, not really plugged in to what was really happening for me, happy to just accept what I was throwing at him so that he could get what he wanted. The whole thing felt very alienating to me. How could he not see that I wasn’t really all there? Or if he could see that, why was he okay with it?
My resentment started to build toward my husband. I felt like he should be more aware of what was really happening for me, and I felt abandoned by him in the way he did not really pay attention and see what was going on for me. It seemed to me like he must not really love me if he isn’t paying close enough attention to me to see how emotionally and energetically absent I am during sex.
Are you frustrated about spectatoring in bed?
It occurred to me that I could speak up about my experience, but I felt really awkward and ashamed given the fact that I had fallen into the habit of faking things with him. I thought he might feel betrayed by me if I revealed to him that I had been catering to his ego and his desires, rather than being honest and true about what I was experiencing or not experiencing.
When I went online and looked for resources surrounding spectatoring, I wasn’t able to find much. It seems like this problem is not widely recognized, though I would imagine that a lot of women struggle to be completely present during sex.
In some of the resources I did find, I learned that spectatoring, this level of disconnection from the body is likely related to trauma suffered in a woman’s past. I thought back to my early years of sexual exploration when I was a teenager. I used to have a lot more access to the sensations of pleasure in my body. It used to take very little to turn me on, and make me wet.
While I didn’t have any distinctive cases of sexual trauma in my past that I could point to, as I was reading, it did become clear to me that what I had been guilty of in the past was engaging in sex with someone, or things relating to sex, when I didn’t really genuinely want to. I realized that I had been guilty of using my sexuality to please my partner, at the sacrifice of my own comfort and pleasure.
When I was younger, I thought that if a man wanted to have sex with me and we were together that it was just my job to be available for him, and if I wasn’t then I wasn’t being a good partner. As I was reading, I realized that I had betrayed my own body during these circumstances when I had engaged in something without feeling my own desire for it. I just forced my body to endure things for someone else, and my way of dealing with it was to disconnect emotionally and energetically from my body.
Now, as a married woman, this act of shielding myself from my own physical experience had become an ingrained habit. Now, I’m not really able to turn off that habit, and it is depriving me of feeling any pleasure I would feel from the experience. It made me so sad to realize that I had essentially done this to myself, since I didn’t know how to feel into myself for my own desire, or lack thereof. I didn’t know that if I didn’t actually feel desire, that engaging in sex was essentially an act of betrayal against my own body.
It’s no wonder I was so disconnected. My body didn’t exactly trust me enough to relax and fully enjoy pleasure. Apparently, spectatoring is an issue that a lot of women have in the bedroom. See also our Sexual Containment article.
As I was doing my research, I stumbled across a website with videos that teach about yoni massage and about genuine pleasure exchange. I didn’t know yoni massage was, but apparently it could be utilized as a healing modality to attempt to reconnect to pleasure in the body.
These videos promised to walk us through a wide variety of pleasure techniques, and the reason why it can be such a healing experience for women like me in cases like this, is because one of the main focuses is on helping a woman fully relax in her body before receiving pleasure.
There was an article on this site that talked about how when a woman’s body fully relaxes, her entire body becomes a pleasure receptor, and she is able to experience so much more building of pleasure sensations in the body. Her pelvic nerve activates and suddenly it is like her entire body could be a clitoris. Reading about this made me feel a tingle of excitement in my body. It felt like I had found something that could actually make a difference for me in my pleasure experience.
I decided to go ahead and purchase the pleasure course, and I wanted to watch it without my husband first, to see if I was comfortable exposing him to it, and engaging in watching the videos together. I actually thought it could be pretty sexy to watch the videos together and follow along.
In the videos, the yoni massage therapist demonstrated an extremely wide variety of pleasure techniques, and explained all the ways that a woman’s body needs to be warmed up in order to experience maximum pleasure. He showed lots of slow, teasing techniques that really made me start to feel fired up between my legs.
Watching the women in the videos be driven by him toward a super powerful climax was extremely hot. I wanted to have an orgasm like that so badly. I couldn’t wait to share what I found with my husband so that we could practice with it, and maybe I could break my habit of spectatoring and bring myself more present.
I talked with him about it and got his permission to show him the first video. I could tell he was actually quite intrigued to explore a new realm of pleasure with me. It is likely that he had become quite bored with what we had been doing, but he hadn’t shared that with me.
As we watched the first video, I watched his eyes get big and he got excited. He started touching me and then I got excited. We started to experiment with what we were seeing on the screen, and the novelty of it all made it so much easier for me to be present. My husband kept reminding me to relax, and I eventually got to experience the first powerful orgasm I had in a really long time. It was a success!
Yoni massage has been an incredible tool for us in healing my relationship with spectatoring during sex. It helped me relax and brought me so much more present, and it taught my husband how to give me some pretty mind-blowing pleasure. His technique has improved ten-fold! Yoni massage has changed everything for us in the bedroom. I highly recommend diving into the video series – The Best She’s Ever Had! It saved our sex life!