Sex Therapy for Empowerment, Healing and Inspiration
There is no “right” time or way to have an orgasm..
Being in touch with your lovers body and enjoying the sensations without focussing on the end result can be liberating. Once we abandon these goal oriented ideas we can experience each moment with less pressure and performance anxiety. If an orgasm does not occur, sex can still be an enjoyable.
Let’s focus on the journey more than the destination.
This myth may exist because our society talks about male sexuality as more uncontainable and unstoppable. According to this myth male orgasm occurs effortlessly but the female orgasm is portrayed as illusive and something that takes a lot of hard work. Men who struggle to have orgasms and women who can masturbate themselves to an orgasm in a few minutes destroy this myth!
Like female ejaculation, female nocturnal orgasms were discovered, recorded then forgotten about back in history. Our sex education curriculum often only references m
ale orgasm (nocturnal or otherwise). I remember no mention of female orgasm at all at my school and I can take a safe guess that your school didn’t teach you anything about girls having wet dreams either!
Kinsey’s research found over 60 years ago that 37 per cent of women had night orgasms and recent research reveals that more women have nocturnal orgasms than we thought. Female orgasms while sleeping might be more common than recognised – studies have found some women underreported their nocturnal orgasms because of their own social and cultural beliefs.
This sex myth busters was published in a 2013 edition of Ciao magazine.
If you’d like to transform your ecstatic and orgasmic potential then get in touch today and book a confidential skype or in person session!
It’s myth busters time again! The idea that women have a lower sex drive than men is a BIG MYTH!
Several studies have shown that the partner least interested in sex can be equally the man or the woman.
A recent survey found 62 per cent of men turn down sex more frequently than their female partner, with a third admitting they had lost their sex drive. Doctors talk about the rising numbers of men with low libido that they treat; citing stress, illness, money worries, diabetes and obesity as well as lowering levels of testosterone as causes. Large studies done in America show that in every decade there’s a decrease in testosterone levels by as much as ten per cent.
History illuminates our changing sexual beliefs. In medieval times, women were believed to have the bigger sex drive and be more lustful than men. Women’s ability to bleed monthly, give birth and have multiple orgasms were cited as proof of their animalistic sexual urges that were seen to be more out of control than men. Women were thought to be more susceptible to material and fleshly experiences, and more likely to be inhabited by evil spirits.
(This appeared in a 2013 article busting sex myths in Ciao magazine.)
Please get in touch today if you or your partner struggle with low sex drive.
See Sex as fun and playful.
Sex doesn’t have to be serious and grim and it’s not the end of the world if something “embarrassing” happens. Just throw your head back and laugh! Be silly and have fun! It’s better to have tried something new and it didn’t work out than be stuck in a safe, predictable, boring sex routine.
Practice Sexual Communication.
Your partner isn’t a mind reader. If something feels good, say so “I like that” or make encouraging noises. Explain what you want, need and like.
Be Open and vulnerable.
Lower your defences, don’t take rejection personally and let go.
Surrender yourself to the feelings of pleasure-rather than just the pursuit of an orgasm.
Try viewing sex as more of an intimate connection than a performance sport. The more you focus on the feelings, the less you’ll “spectator” yourself and criticise your body, appearance or what you’re doing “wrong.”
Marvel at your own beauty and sexual potential!
Connect in with your own self love and self pleasure so that you can value and appreciate yourself as a sexual being. Understanding how to pleasure yourself means you can show your lover how you like to be pleasured, and can help improve your self esteem and body image. Isn’t it incredible the pleasure your body is capable of giving yourself and others? Don’t compare your body to the plastic, airbrushed media ideals. Body size fashion changes throughout the centuries depending what product or idea is being sold, so try not to let yourself get caught up in it. Embrace your body-flaws and all. If you feel sexy about yourself, sex is better!
Make Intimacy a Priority.
Turn off your iPhone, iPad, video game, TV and make time for your lover. Actively invest in your sex life by scheduling times for sex and a regular date night once a week just for you and your lover and no one else. In our busy, fast paced lives, sex often needs to be planned in advance. It can still be spontaneous and exciting, just make time for it.
More Foreplay!
In and out of the bedroom. Foreplay doesn’t just have to be what happens when you are naked just before sex, it can be everything you say to your partner during the day. It can be an all day exchange of sexy text messages telling each other everything you plan on doing to each other when you get home. It can be sexy words whispered into your lovers ears as you leave the house. It builds suspense, anticipation and excitement for explosive sex!
Embrace your sexual power.
We can be brought up with so much shame around sex! For instance, words like sex or genitals are bad, dirty and rude that one should be embarrassed about.. I’m always facinated by the Victorian ideals that still influence our ideas about sex. Try to imagine instead, that you were brought up with the idea that your sexuality is a natural and healthy part of yourself that can be manifested in a creative, loving and mindful way to enhance your life, creativity and relationships.
Get in touch today if you’d like to learn more about embracing your sexual power.
Relationships are not products.
What online dating apps, pick artists books and commitment trap programmes are doing to dating..
“We turn wimps and geeks into supercharged macho studs!!!”
Pick up artist products lure men through promising multitudes of sexual partners and the “‘cost-benefit’ analysis of casual sexual hook ups without the supposed “hassles” of relationships or commitment.
Relationships are depicted as games of instant gratification and women as exploitable commodities.
Women are sold equally gender stereotyped products guaranteeing; “You Really Can Capture His Heart And Make Him Love You Forever!” … This sells women the idea that men are naturally scared of relationships and need to be manipulated into a relationship!
However this promise to “capture love” sells a flawed premise.
You can’t capture love and you sure as hell can’t force anyone to love you. True love is freely given without games or manipulation. It is a gift not an obligation.
Online hook up apps can give the illusion that there’s a perfect person out there for us– when in reality a relationship is two imperfect people coming together to create a sanctuary of love in this rollercoaster world we live in.
Our culture has unreasonable expectations that the “perfect love” happens without work or effort and our true “soul mate” will naturally fulfil all our desires.
Think of all the work and effort that it takes to perfect the playing of a musical instrument.. Relationships are the same. We don’t just naturally wake up and know how to play the violin! We have to practice and practice and learn and grow and perfect our skills until we get better and better! At first when we pick up that violin it might sound like a cat scratching a tin roof! We benefit from the help of a music teacher, just like how I help my couples and single clients improve their relationship skills and over time we get better. We definitely don’t just find the perfect violin in a shop that means we don’t have to have lessons, read music or even practice anymore!
So much choice so why settle down?
Apps can bombard us with so much choice it can feel like a sacrifice to give up options and settle with just one. You know when you’re at the salad bar and there’s so many delicious options you worry that your choice isn’t right and perhaps you preferred the others? Or you keep browsing and taste testing, hoping to find the perfect one in a perpetual cycle of dissatisfaction? I’ve done this before! You’ll send yourself bananas on the eternal quest to find the perfect meal or the perfect partner.
Choice doesn’t necessarily equal good! Commitment phobic types can stay in this state for a very long time. Never settling down as soon as they notice their partner has flaws. Some of these types can put their partner up so high on a pedestal that they just can’t cope when they realise that this idealised vision is just a human with warts and all. But more about this type of love later.
“Consumer dating” encourages us to look at potential partners as disposable products. People are not products.
Mature love involves commitment, true intimacy and meeting anothers emotional, mental and physical needs. Those terrified of true intimacy can perpetually hide in the world of “hook ups” that can act as a protective defensive mechanism to being hurt.
My Partner Isn’t Perfect!
People can become so highly critical of their partners that they will never ever be satisfied. Sometimes once we know our partner is committed to us (the idealised honeymoon phase) we can start trying to change them into our version of the “perfect partner” who is better suited to our own selfish needs. This is the “power struggle” and second phase of the relationship, where you might obsess over all your differences with your partner whereas before you mainly noticed the similarities.
Rather than obsessing on everything that is wrong with your partner, try focussing on how you can improve yourself and what you bring to the relationship. A relationship is the combined work of two people together. It’s not a passive process of ordering what you want from a menu, scrutinising it for flaws and returning it for a replacement when flaws are detected or boredom sets in.
I see clients who begin relationships preoccupied with; “What can I do for my lover?” which transforms over time into: “What am I getting out of this person and this relationship?”
Remember to accept difference, embrace compromise and work on unconditionally loving your partner as a complete package-flaws and all.
This article appeared in CIAO magazine and was designed for people in non abusive relationships. If you are worried you are in an abusive relationship then please get in touch..
“We could never learn to be brave and patient if there were only joy in the world.”
Helen Keller
What are you learning from the challenges and hardships in your life right now?
I’m learning huge lessons in patience, compassion and acceptance.
A crisis has the potential to be a gift aswell as a diaster.
I can see that to be happy it is so important to continually live in the present and keep refining those skills all the time.
I love swimming in the ocean so it makes sense to explain it like this. When a huge wave comes at us in life we have two choices. We can struggle against it and be dumped and submerged- often ending up bruised on the ocean floor with lungs bursting for air- or we can accept that it’s coming and try to go with it.
A good surfer knows that when a huge dumper wave has got you in its grips you will lose too much energy and oxygen if you wildly thrash about and try and resist it. You could end up drowning or end up far out to sea. You have to let yourself go and let the wave take you until it passes over. This means you’ll make it back to the surface with enough air in your lungs.
Sometimes in life really big things come at you and you have to accept that’s what’s happening and let it pass. Being reactive and struggling angrily against it won’t help and will exhaust you even more. When we are faced with relationship struggles we can easily try and flail in that big wave rather than taking a moment to just breathe and feel. Just tuning into our breathing can help immensely.
A towering wave can make us feel powerless and paralysed with fear and anxiety. Learning to control and release those feelings can help us cope with the “big waves” of life, in a similar way a surfer tunes into their natural instinct and intuition to the rhythm and flow of the ocean. Experiencing trauma and abuse can keep us imprisoned in a reactive and fear based mindset. Learning to change this can benefit all aspects of our lives, including our intimate relationships.
What about you?
I wanted to reach out and let you know there’s always help.
Get in touch if you’d like to learn more about how be empowered by life’s challenges rather than swamped by them or if you want to live free of being a prisoner of anxiety, fear or trauma. I would love to hear from you!
I see my clients via skype, phone or in my therapy rooms in the Sydney CBD. Concession rates available.
https://creativesexpression.com/book-a-session/
Catherine O Dowd
Last night I ran my first transpersonal art therapy group. I felt honoured to have an incredible bunch of curious, brave and present men and women and I’m so excited about the next month of Wednesday workshops! We spent two hours together and I guided the group through various processes that take us deep in our unconscious minds. My participants were leaving their rational minds and the world of their ego and journeying deep within their inner world of intuition and inner wisdom. The images that came to them whilst deep in a guided meditation or that tumbled out onto their art paper came from their unconscious. Journeying into the unconscious in a supported and therapeutic setting is a powerful experience. It’s like dreaming whilst awake and the images we receive can tell us so much about what we need to know. Carl Jung might say these images came from deep within their soul. 
Carl Jung said we lived in a time of radical materialism where the only the material aspects of life are acknowledged;
“Under the influence of scientific materialism, everything that could not be seen with the eyes or touched with the hands was held in doubt; such things were even laughed at because of their supposed affinity with metaphysics. Nothing was considered “scientific” or admitted to be true unless it could be perceived by the senses or traced back to physical causes.”
You can see how modern day psychology sees the world through this material and rational paradigm without a thought to the care of the soul. The word psychology originates from the word ‘psyche’ which means the human soul or spirit. Psychology originally meant the care of the human soul. Jung talks about how we have created a new “soul-less” psychology.
“It was universally believed in the Middle Ages as well as in the Greco-Roman world that the soul is a substance. Indeed, mankind as a whole has held this belief from its earliest beginnings, and it was left for the second half of the nineteenth century to develop a “psychology without the soul.”
We have moved so far away from soul informed psychology that we hardly understand what a soul is anymore. The soul is not as complicated as New Age theories would have us believe. The soul is the archetypal life of the imagination and can be glimpsed when stepping outside of the materialistic perceptions of the world. Jung spoke of everything that happens in the physical and material world first originates from the soul. Healing occurs in the soul and then manifests in the body. 
In last night’s guided art therapy group my clients were using creativity to delve deeply into their unconscious to bring back archetypal truths and symbols from different levels of their psyche. Jung said that the transpersonal unconscious has at its disposal “all the subliminal psychic contents, all those things which have been forgotten and overlooked, as well as all the experience of uncounted centuries laid down in it’s archetypal organs.”
Creativity and hypnosis like exercises can access these hidden parts of us that hold the insights we so desperately seek. A good way to understand it is to imagine yourself standing at a well. When you are standing at the well you are in your conscious mind. However most of our decisions are not made from our conscious mind. Freud said we made most of our decisions from unconscious urges and recent scientific studies have confirmed that. Deep down in the well is the river of your unconsious mind or your inner world; the world of your dreams, nightmares, your deepest fears, memories, repressed emotions and desires.. Accessing this part of our life is life changing and can “unblock” unhealthy patterns we have been repeating for years.
My next workshop is on this Wednesday the 15th of April.. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.. balancing our sexual and creative energy with our dark destructive and self sabotaging death drive!”
Fill out the contact form here to book your place. Places are limited to ten so hurry to avoid disappointment.
I look forward to seeing you soon!
Check out this new video made in America for college students. Latest research has found that one in five women may be sexually assaulted during college years and 40% of men admit to using coercive methods.
Consent is permission for something to happen or agreement to do something.
Consent to sex is when you freely and voluntary agree to engage in sexual activity. This means communicating yes on your own terms.
What is not consent; silence, being passed out, fear or being made to feel too scared to say no.
You’ve probably heard, “no means no” before. Just relying on hearing the word “no” isn’t enough because there are many other ways to communicate no. A person doesn’t have to scream, kick you away or run off to communicate ‘no.’ It can also be freezing up, rolling away, silence or saying they’re too tired, tensing up, not moving, stiffening of muscles. Sometimes people don’t feel like they can say no even though they want to.
One of the best ways to know for sure that someone is consenting is to ask questions like;
If you find yourself in a sexual situation that you’re not sure about and you don’t know how or don’t feel safe to say no, then trying saying;
You have not consented to sex if;
Coercion is used in manipulating people to have sex until they give in. Coercing someone into sex is sexual assault. Examples of coercion are;
Coercion is when the person is not given the space to freely say “no.”
Our society often doesn’t take consent seriously, just look at phrases like “playing hard to get.” If there’s no clear consent then it is sexual assault or rape.
If someone is kissing you or has gone back to your house it doesn’t mean they have consented to intercourse and they can change their mind at any time.
Under Australian law consent to sexual activity must be ‘free and voluntary’. There are certain instances where there is no consent to sexual activity, or where consent is vitiated. These are;
Consent is hot! Consensual sex is dam sexy! Understanding consent is important when we want to enjoy great sex and healthy relationships.
If any of this blog has brought up issues for you, please get in touch here for a chat.
I look forward to hearing from you,Blessings,
Cat
Sexual bullying makes me sick. That is, any sort of bullying or shaming about someone’s gender or sexuality. Research shows that girls are disproportionately the victims and the bullying is usually about their sexuality and fueled by sexual double standards. You know the sort of sexual double standards I’m talking about; men can wear revealing clothes, have many sexual partners, be sexual whereas if women do the same they are met with more condemnation and judgement.
Cyber bullying is the intentional and repeated behaviour performed through electronic media for the purpose of harming others. Modern technology makes it easier to intimidate, shame and harass someone.
Also known as electronic harassment or online aggression, cyber bullying is becoming a bigger problem as the internet plays an increasing role in our lives. Social media and google are our new reputation emblems and being publicly shamed can lead to depression and suicide.
Internet and phones become a weapon for bullies to harass women about their appearance, sexuality and their real or imagined sexual activity and to harass men for their perceived sexual orientation and masculinity. Bullies embrace the internet as a space of criticism and judgement and act like the “sex and moral police.” Bullies actions are more like a mirror that reflects their own internal problems and insecurities than revealing anything about the victim.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth are more than three times as likely to experience harassment online than non LGBT youths. LGBT kids are four times more likely to attempt suicide than non LGBT adolescents. Research shows that adults are just as susceptible to the negative mental health effects of cybercbullying and that victims of cyber bullying have worse anxiety and depression outcomes than victims of traditional bullying.
A new study of university students found that women who have experienced cyber bullying have increased rates of depression by six fold. Young adults are twice as likely to attempted suicide if they’ve experienced cyber bullying than those who have not and the effects can last for decades after the bullying took place.
The most common cyber bullying tactics reported were; online unwanted sexual advances, harassing by text and posting degrading comments publicly on social media.
“Bullycide” is a new term for when people commit suicide as a result of bullying and it’s happening to adults and kids.
The study found that cyber bullies were more likely to have very low self esteem and have problems with alcohol use. Their existing mental health problems manifest outwardly as aggressive online behaviour.
I want to see kindness, compassion and acceptance go viral. Let’s embrace the power of technology to promote respect for each other, our bodies, our sexual expression and our sexual orientation. Let’s harness our creativity to take a stand against bullying.
I’m starting an education campaign against sexual bullying. Please email me with your bullying story or how you stood up to sexual bullying and I will publish it on my website. I will have a new page up soon in support of this campaign.
I want you to have your story heard. There’s too much pain and blaming of victims taking place. Telling your story can inspire and strengthen others. Let’s transform the toxicity of sexual bullying into an atmosphere of respect and love.
Email me with your story on this link and get in touch if you’re struggling with cyber bullying or sexual shaming. You are not alone and it does hurt and I can help.
I would be honoured to help you.
Happy Mardi Gras Sydney!
What a wonderful night of pride, self expression and celebration!
It’s been named as one of the world’s top ten costume parades in the world and has become an international icon. It all started in such a grassroots way when back in 1978 when a group of a few hundred protesters marched down Oxford Street. It was part of the support for the Stonewall riots in America and part of the protest about Mary Lighthouse coming to Australia to speak. They had one float and some were dressed up in costumes. Police arested over 50 people and threw them into gaol were they were beaten up.
It was a pretty amazing civil rights victory because in 1979 the NSW Summary Offences Act was repealed. What this meant was that protesters didn’t have to get an official permit to hold a public protest anymore, all they needed to do was tell the police about it. In 1979 almost three thousand people marched and the parade kept getting bigger every single year.
A new Australian study has shown that The Sydney Mardi Gras has actually helped battle homophobia within families, helped people “come out” and feel happy with their sexual identity. Just the occurence of the parade helped people even if they’d never been to Sydney, to the parade or if they lived all over Australia… It’s more about what the Mardi Gras stands for in a time when many of our citizens can still recall when homosexuality was illegal. I found the pre interesting to see how the parade has such a positive influence on the public consciousness no matter where you live.
More than 80 LGBTI people between 20-93 years of age were interviewed all across Australia. Some of the interviewees said that the watching the Mardi Gras on television gave them the courage to come out. If they were living in a small country town with a homophobic family, seeing the parade on tv together made it an easier topic to talk about and helped break down taboos and stereotypes about homosexuality.
Dr Shirleene Robinson of Macquarie University said;
“From people in retirement homes in Launceston to cattle properties on the outskirts of Adelaide, there is something to do with Mardi Gras’ scale, what it represents and the way people saw it growing up. It is political, it is commercial, it is community and it’s really important to the Australian idea of being lesbian and gay.”
Watching such a huge and fun celebration of love, sexuality and acceptance on tv can help younger kids in turmoil that are coming to grips with their sexuality.
To everyone going to the parade I hope you all have a wonderful time! Play safe and look out for each other! Happy Mardi Gras!
