The New Male Sexuality (69 page)

This mental rehearsal takes only a few seconds and can be very helpful. You can do it anyplace. For example, if you and your partner are getting ready to do an exercise, you can close your eyes and do your mental rehearsal right there or you can go into another room and take a few seconds to do it there.

Mind Power D:
Every day, preferably just after awakening or just before retiring for the night, take a few seconds to imagine how good you’re going to feel once your erections are back on track.

Mind Power E:
Whenever the problem recurs, make every effort not to let it get you down. Instead of telling yourself that this is further proof you’ll never get it together, ask yourself what you can learn from this experience. Maybe you were too anxious, too tired, too much in a hurry, too little aroused. Then tell yourself something like this: “No reason to get upset. I learned that it doesn’t work to have sex when I’m this anxious and tired. Next time I’m this nervous, I’ll stop and just talk to Jeannie about what’s going on.”

Mind Power F:
This is the pep-talk exercise given in
Chapter 19
, on
this page
. Use it whenever you feel discouraged or think you failed in an exercise.

MEETING YOUR CONDITIONS

You should now turn to and reread
Chapter 6
to determine the conditions you need to have met for having more or better erections. Consider your desire, arousal, anxiety, mental and physical stimulation, time of day, the state of your relationship, your partner’s attitude and behavior, and anything else that seems relevant. Some men need for their partners to be more enthusiastic or aroused. Others need to be less preoccupied and more focused on matters at hand when they have sex.

There are only two important considerations about your conditions: finding out what they are and fulfilling them. You are who you are and you need what you need. Make sure you get it.

INCREASING AROUSAL

As I said in
Chapter 15
, arousal is basically what powers erections. If there’s nothing seriously wrong with you physically, if you are relatively relaxed, if your conditions are met, and if you are aroused, you will get good erections. Since arousal is crucial, you should read or reread
Chapter 15
before going on.

Pay particular attention to what I say about focusing on sensation in that chapter. One of the major ways of increasing arousal is to focus on physical sensation, to attend to and fully experience your partner’s touching, kissing, caressing, and stroking you. Another way of increasing arousal is to ensure that you get the kinds of stimulation that are most arousing to you.

REDUCING ANXIETY ABOUT PERFORMANCE

Since worrying about how your penis will perform is perhaps the major obstacle to good functioning, anything that reduces this worry is helpful. All the methods discussed above play a role in this endeavor, but there are several other things that can help as well.

Since intercourse is the act that causes the greatest anxiety for men with erection problems,
it’s best to agree not to have intercourse until you are confident of your erections
. Your partner needs to understand and accept this point. She also needs to agree that until that time she will satisfy you without intercourse and will allow you to do the same for her. Without agreement on these points, the chances of success after doing the exercises are drastically reduced.

If you have experience with any relaxation method—meditation, biofeedback, self-hypnosis, yoga, relaxation tapes—I suggest you resume that activity as soon as possible. If you’ve never done any of these things, you might want to invest in a good relaxation audiotape, many of which are available in bookstores, and listen for ten to fifteen minutes each day. Whatever method you use, your goal should be to be able to get relaxed quickly in almost any situation, without special equipment or postures.

JUST PLAY

One effective approach to resolving erection problems involves no exercises beyond those already given. To follow this approach, you do the steps above, and get together with your partner to play sexually as often as both of you desire. You can do whatever you want except have intercourse. When she’s stimulating you, you should focus on sensation and try to build excitement as high as possible. Arousal and pleasure, not erection, are the only goals. And that’s all there is to it.

This approach is so simple that some men have trouble with it. It seems too easy to them. It
is
simple and easy, but it’s also effective.

It will help to keep a few things in mind. One is that the goal really is pleasure and arousal. You will of course note how your penis is doing, but try not to get concerned if it’s not acting as you would like. It will in time. Be sure that all your conditions are met, that you have the best stimulation, and that you focus on the pleasurable physical stimulation.

If this approach doesn’t work, you may want to do some of the exercises given below.

Which Exercises You Should Do

Everyone should do the mind-power exercises and the two masturbation exercises that follow. If you think you don’t need to do the masturbation, it’s a good idea to do each of them once just to make sure you can easily and comfortably handle them. If you don’t want to masturbate, you can skip those exercises and start with the first partner exercise.

How Often to Do the Exercises

Good results can be achieved by doing the exercises anywhere from every other day to once or twice a week. Masters and Johnson noticed two things about penises that work against doing the exercises as often as you want. The first is what they called a refractory period, a time after ejaculation when your penis will not respond to stimulation no matter how skillfully done and no matter how long it lasts. For many teenagers the refractory period lasts only a few minutes. But it definitely increases with age. Some men in their fifties and sixties can’t get another erection until days after their last ejaculation. Masters and Johnson also noticed that many older men can’t regain an erection for a day or more after sex even if they don’t ejaculate. Take account of these facts in deciding how often to do the exercises.

It is essential that you do the exercises only when you are relaxed and feeling sexy, or believe you can get into a sexy mood with a little time and stimulation. Doing the exercises when feeling under pressure or with gritted teeth will not help at all.

What About Ejaculating While Doing the Exercises?

In general, the less you ejaculate, the more easily you will become aroused and perhaps erect the next time you do an exercise. This does not mean you should never ejaculate, only that it is in your interest not to ejaculate unless you really want to.

What About Having Intercourse While Doing the Exercises?

Many men with erection problems develop an understandable but destructive habit. As soon as they notice they have an erection—whether they are engaged in love play or not, whether they are doing an exercise or not—they automatically try to stick it in their partners before it goes away. Although this sometimes results in a few thrusts or minutes of intercourse, it usually doesn’t because the mind/body tends to interpret the frantic effort to stick it in as anxiety, which it is. This stick-it-in-before-you-lose-it practice causes all sorts of problems. It usually results in lost erections, which makes the man feel more hopeless, and it reinforces the idea that he has a serious problem. It does nothing to alleviate the anxiety that is a large part of the problem to begin with. And it often makes the man’s partner upset or angry, because in entering her so frantically he may not notice that she’s not ready or interested at the moment.

WHAT IF YOU DON’T HAVE A REGULAR SEX PARTNER?

If you don’t have a partner with whom to do the couples exercises, you should attend to the steps given above and do the two masturbation exercises below. When you do get into a relationship, follow the advice about getting into sex very slowly, as per the discussion in
Chapter 17
. Also consider the discussion in that chapter about telling your partner about your problem. Then, as you desire it, just play as discussed on
this page
. If it seems necessary, you can also do the partner exercises in this chapter with your new friend. An alternative is to go through surrogate partner therapy.

MASTURBATION EXERCISES FOR BETTER ERECTIONS

If you’re willing to masturbate, I recommend doing these masturbation exercises before you begin working with your partner. If you’re not willing to masturbate and have a partner, you can begin with the first partner exercise.

EXERCISE 22-1: PLEASURING YOUR SOFT PENIS

The goal is to get comfortable with touching your soft penis and learn what kinds of sensations that produces. Put some lubricant on one or both of your hands and touch your penis for about fifteen minutes in ways that feel arousing. Try different kinds of touches and strokes. You want to focus on the sensations and feel as sexy as possible, but you don’t need an erection. In fact, an erection will only get in the way. Don’t try not to get hard, just follow the instructions already given. If you find your penis getting hard, just pay attention to the sensations as it does so. But when it’s reached what you consider to be about 50 to 80 percent of fullness and rigidity, stop touching it. Enjoy looking at it and let it go down. The session is over for you
.

Repeat this exercise two or three times, until you feel comfortable touching your nonerect penis and feel that you’ve improved your ability to focus on the sensations in your penis
.

EXERCISE 22-2: LOSING AND REGAINING ERECTIONS

Stroke your penis with a lubricated hand and focus either on the sensations produced or on an exciting fantasy. When you have an erection, enjoy it for a moment and then stop stimulation. Take your hand away from your penis and let your erection subside completely, which may take from a few seconds to a few minutes. When your penis is soft, resume stimulation and focus on sensation or fantasy. Most of the time your erection will return, in which case you should again stop and let it get soft. Two complete cycles of this sequence—stimulation, erection, stopping, losing erection, stimulation—are sufficient for one session
.

If your erection does not return within a few minutes after resuming stimulation, ask if there is anything you can do to get into a more relaxed and more arousing frame of mind. Taking a few deep breaths or looking at some stimulating pictures may help. If the changes you make result in erection, just continue
with the exercise. If not, call it quits for now and return to the exercise another time. Whatever you do, don’t try to force an erection
.

This exercise should be repeated as many times as necessary, with at least one day’s rest between repetitions, until you are reasonably confident that an erection can often be regained by proper mental and physical stimulation
.

PARTNER EXERCISES

Before starting on the partner exercises, it’s a good idea to do Step A of
Exercise 14-1
(nongenital body rubs) in
Chapter 14
. This will give you some useful experience before you get to genital stimulation in the following exercises.

Exercises 22-3
and
22-4
may surprise you, because in both of them you are asked not to have an erection. You may wonder why, after all the travail not having erections has caused you, I would be asking you to again not have an erection. My answer is simple. After working with hundreds of men with erection problems, I realized that two of their greatest fears are their partner’s touching their soft penis (“She’ll notice I’m still not hard”) and losing an erection (“Here we go again”). As long as these fears are un-addressed, they remain in the background or foreground and get in the way of serious progress. Once they are addressed, on the other hand, the other exercises tend to be much easier and proceed more smoothly.
Exercises 22-3
and
22-4
are ways of directly dealing with these fears and putting them to rest. Despite what I’ve said, after reading them you may be tempted to skip them. Do what’s necessary to resist this temptation.

EXERCISE 22-3: NOT GETTING OR LOSING YOUR ERECTION

You are to do two things: reenact your old erection problem and handle it differently than you usually did. If your problem was that you did not get an erection while your partner stimulated you, then have her stimulate you and see to it that you don’t get an erection. If your problem was getting soft during intercourse, then have intercourse and make your erection go away. Whatever the old problem, re-create it
.

There are many ways to not get or to lose an erection. Distracting yourself from the pleasurable stimulation by worrying about a myriad of things can
help—anything from whether you’ll get or keep hard, to whether the kids are listening, to how much money the IRS will want from you this year—is probably the best way
.

After you’ve managed not to get hard or to lose your erection, deal with the situation in ways that are enhancing to both you and your partner. Acknowledge what’s happened but don’t apologize. Instead, offer something that sounds good. Here is an example: “I don’t think I can get hard again, but I’d love to love you. Anything interest you?” When the two of you agree on something, do it. It can be sexual or not. The only important thing is that you both feel good about yourselves, each other, and what you do
.

Repeat this exercise as many times as necessary for you to feel comfortable about losing your erection and dealing with the situation after that. Some men find one or two repetitions sufficient; others can benefit from many more
.