Permission for Pleasure
A podcast to educate and equip women with the information and confidence they need to express, experience and enjoy their sexuality. Cindy Scharkey RN, BSN, brings her 35+ years of experience as a healthcare professional to open the doors to healthy conversations about sex. This is a community where you can listen and learn to give yourself permission for pleasure. Visit www.cindyscharkey.com for educational blogs and newsletter.
Permission for Pleasure
Want Better Sex? Ask Yourself These Questions
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Have you and your partner experienced conflict over mismatched sexual desire or frequency? Have you ever asked yourself: why sex matters to you? Cyndi Darnell joins me to talk about the healthy questions to ask yourself for better sexual self-understanding - which can lead to better sex! Learn the truth about mismatched sexual desire, the problems that result when couples equate frequency with quality, and ideas for creating a more satisfying sex life.
Cyndi Darnell is a clinical and somatic sexologist and author of Sex When You Don’t Feel Like It: The Truth About Mismatched Libido & Rediscovering Desire.
Learn more about Cyndi’s work
https://cyndidarnell.com/
Learn more about these topics:
Understanding Your Desire Style For Better Sex
Partner Sexual Desire Discrepancies
Sexual Scripts
Sexual Communication
ORDER my Book: Permission for Pleasure: Tending Your Sexual Garden
JOIN my Newsletter: Good Education for Good Sex
FOLLOW on Instagram @cindyscharkey
VISIT my website and blog
Same with anything that we do, frankly, in life, that we decide is valuable and important, we invest time and energy into learning how to be good at it. So by the time we are old enough to be able to really embrace the thing, whatever the thing is, we might make it a career, or we might make it a really valuable hobby, or it becomes a part of our lives in some way that's meaningful. But we don't give ourselves that permission res.
SPEAKER_00Welcome to Permission for Pleasure. I'm Cindy Sharkey, your host. Thanks for listening today, and also for sharing the podcast and being part of my community here. And if you're new, I want to let you know that I have a monthly newsletter. Good education for good sex. And I'd love to have you join me there. You can sign up at the link in the show notes. Today's conversation is with Cindy Darnell. And we're talking about her book titled Sex When You Don't Feel Like It. The Truth About Miss Mash Libido and Rediscovering Desire. Did you know that Miss Ash Desire is the number one common issue that couples have? We're going to talk about differences between love and desire. Also, is sex really natural, as well as focusing on the how and why sex matters to you rather than how to be better in bed. I hope you enjoy this conversation. Cindy, welcome to the show.
SPEAKER_01Thank you for having me. It's there, you know, there are a lot of Cindy's in the sex world. I don't know why there are so many of us. With different spellings, yeah, there's a lot. There's, well, there's you now, there's me, uh, Cindy Gallup, Cindy Meston. How many other? There's a few others, but they're the ones that spring to mind straight out of the gate. There's a lot of us, yeah. Wonderful.
SPEAKER_00Well, before we dive into the themes of your new book that we're going to talk about today, Cindy, I'd love for you just to sh to introduce yourself to the listeners, tell them who you are and your work in the world. Okay.
SPEAKER_01So my name is Cindy Darnell. I am originally from Australia, but I live in New York now in the US. Um I was a psychotherapist for many years. That was my initial grounding. And then I also trained as a sexologist, a clinical sexologist. And what I found was the psychotherapy world stayed away from sex. The clinical sexological world crossed over with the psychotherapy world, but they didn't want to go near somatic work because it was too edgy or woo-woo or weird or something. I'm not sure quite why, but there is a lot of gaps between these worlds. And then, you know, the somatics world, which does tend to be a bit more kind of esoteric and woo-woo, but increasingly is becoming a lot more grounded in science. So because I trained in all three disciplines over the last 20-something years, I sort of have just, you know, found myself positioned in the right place at the right time to be able to offer this blend because I can speak to clinicians, I can speak to clinical sexologists, and I can speak to somatic sexologists with an equal degree of authority because I know I've done the training for each of those and I've worked in each of the disciplines. And so now, you know, I call myself a sex therapist these days just because it's a catch-all word that people understand. They know more or less what that means. And, you know, I still draw on some of my skills and knowledge from having trained as a psychotherapist, though I am technically not a psychotherapist anymore. Um, I'm a sex therapist, but I do tend to work somatically more than just with talk therapy, because I think talk therapy alone, frankly, is not enough. And that's what I talk about in my book and why the blend of the clinical world and the somatic world need to come together, especially around things like pleasure, especially around things like desire. Because, you know, to just stay in one silo because of licensing rules or whatever are the reasons that people fight about who's right and who's wrong. At the clinical level, I mean, it's sort of nice for me now to not be part of that anymore because my clients are my boss and they are the people that I serve. So that works for me.
SPEAKER_00Yes, beautiful. And the title of your book is Sex When You Don't Feel Like It: The Truth About Mismatched Libido and Rediscovering Desire.
SPEAKER_01That's right.
SPEAKER_00Well, that'll get people's attention, right? Because you and I know that mismatched desire is one of the number one reasons, you know, couples have issues.
SPEAKER_01It's the number one reason I think that couples seek out a sex therapist, or even a couple's therapist, they will be about that. And if it's not that at the onset, it that will come up within three or four sessions of working with a couple because people have no skills around how to talk about this, how to navigate this, myself included. This happened to me when I was in a relationship 15, 18 or so years ago. The person I was with, you know, he and I had a mismatch, and I thought, at the time, I thought that meant the end of the relationship. I know better now. The relationship did end, not because of that, for other reasons. But certainly my lack of knowledge then uh made things worse, definitely. And I think a lot of people suffer under the weight of a lack of knowledge. That's the truth. Because it's very easy to blame, you know. I say, well, you you're the problem, you know, other partner if you only just, you know, and then they'll respond with well, if you just, and that is really unhelpful. That's in part, that's why I did I started to do the research for this book, because I just thought there has got to be another way. Like, this can't be something here, does not make sense. This this cannot be how relationships function, and we all just accept that that's normal.
SPEAKER_00Well, I love the way you phrased it in the book. You said there's a problem, but nothing's wrong. Tell me more about that.
SPEAKER_01I mean, the the idea comes really from uh a school of thought of, you know, from narrative therapy, which is a type of uh talk-based therapy, which is about reframing our struggles not as shortcomings in the individual, but as shortcomings in the way that we conceptualize the problem from the outset. So this is very sort of wordy. What I mean is we don't say that I am the problem or that you are the problem. What we say is the problem is the problem. And what that does for couples is it allows them to form a united front against the problem rather than battling with each other about what's wrong with you, what's wrong with me, it's your menopause, it's your penis, it's your guess what? It's none of those things. If your little team can be a team, and you recognize that the problem is, huh, this is our relationship to the erotic. And then I go on to say sex is not a problem to be solved, it's a quest to be seen because our relationship with the erotic is constantly in flux. It is not a static thing, it changes, it's like water. It moves, it it flows, it there's a lot of it sometimes, and sometimes it recedes completely, sometimes it dries up, sometimes it's really hot, sometimes it's frozen. This is the nature of sexuality. It is it is fluid, literally. It is constantly in motion. And when we get stuck expecting that sex is going to be, you know, like this in a certain way, in a certain this is how I it has to be like this, or I can't do it, you know. It shuts down curiosity, it shuts down playfulness, it shuts down possibility, it shuts down any kind of joy. And then we end up with couples where one person, often in a straight couple, often the woman who's like, I don't want to do this anymore. And then the husband or the boyfriend's like, What's wrong with you? She's like, come on. This is how they end up on the couches of therapists and coaches and stuff around the world.
SPEAKER_00Very common scenario. And you say in there, you know, poor, I loved how you worded it, poor sexual routines are at the center, you know, of most of the problems around sex. Speak speak to that a little bit, would you? Well, what do you what do you mean by sexual routines?
SPEAKER_01So a lot of us, you know, we we get into a habit with sex. You know, in the beginning, we might be genuinely interested in what the other one likes. We might be genuinely interested in what we like. And then we think, okay, well, I like this, or I used to like this, so I'll just do a lot of that, and uh, and that that will be good, you know. But the trouble with that is it's like eating your favorite meal every day. If you eat the same thing every day, even if it is your favorite meal, like you know, your favorite pizza, and you're like, yeah, I could eat pizza every day for the rest of my life, and then you do, it's not that you no longer like the pizza, you put it in your mouth and you still like it. It's not that it tastes bad, it's just that you don't want it anymore because you've had it. And this, you know, we I learned about this through through brain research. Not wanting something is not the same as not liking something. We can want things we don't like, we can like things we don't want, like with the pizza. And the trouble with the sexual routines is that when we start having too much of the same thing, when we become sort of acclimated to a thing, whatever the thing is, you know, well, you know, it's Sunday night, you know what that means. We we almost, it's almost like our nervous systems brace themselves for this onslaught of, oh gosh, here we go again. And that's not to say that the sex is bad necessarily. It's just that that routine, our nervous system is like, please don't make me do this again. I'm not enjoying it anymore. And this is where people have to navigate these conversations, but it's a very delicate conversation because, again, traditionally, if we say to our partners, I don't want that anymore, partners will get offended. What do you mean you don't want that anymore?
SPEAKER_00You used to love it, yeah.
SPEAKER_01You used to love it, and then it'll be like, I don't know what's wrong with me. Why don't I love it anymore? And it's like, well, because you've been eating the pizza every day.
SPEAKER_00That's a great word picture, you know, for for people to hear because there's just so little education, like we said, and then what happens is there's this just this constant idea from people that there something's wrong with them, that sex doesn't fit in the script that that that they've heard that is so small, so limiting. That's a good way to think about the pizza, okay. I'm gonna remember that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, because again, we get it confused when we think about liking and wanting, and we think that they're the same thing. That if I like something, why don't I want it? And it's really possible to really like something and not want it. It's possible to love somebody with all your heart and not want to have sex with them, and that doesn't mean there's a problem in the relationship, it doesn't mean that anybody is broken. It definitely means something needs to be addressed, for sure, but don't jump to conclusions based on a lack of knowledge.
SPEAKER_00Well, and you really addressed this in the book about the difference between love and desire, and they're not the same thing, right? And then what happens when we lump those two together and people confuse, they confuse that, you know. They're confused, like you said, about their their feelings of love they have, but then not desire. And I have not seen that written out quite the way you did. So I think it's really helpful for people to have language around that.
SPEAKER_01I mean, the reason that I went into it in the depth that I go into it is because I I think it's so fundamentally important that we pass these two things out. Because, again, the cultural narrative that we have all absorbed, and I think that this is true, it's it's certainly very true in Western culture, let's say. So we've all grown up with this idea that love and sex are the same, and you know, we see that this comes from, you know, in the initial stages, it comes from fairy stories, you know, from Disney narratives, from the idea that, you know, you meet the one and it's fabulous, and and when you meet the one, it's all gonna work out. And then we get the extra layer, particularly in very religious cultures, very religious communities, that you save yourself for the one. So sex can only happen with somebody that you love. Bingo, there we go, is this blend of love and sex must be the same, particularly for women. Men have a little bit more room to experiment and colour outside the lines with that, but women, by and large, still in 2022, we don't really have that much room to colour outside the lines. The expectation is love and sex must go together. And so, because we have heard this, we enter into our teenage years and then our early adult years, we start dating, we start having relationships, we start fusing this idea of love and sex being together. And so, even if we internally don't experience them as going together, we force them in together because we think if I don't squish them together, I risk being called a slut, I risk being socially ostracized, I risk being kicked out of my family, I risk being kicked out of my church. The risks of not towing the line are so great that I will do whatever it takes to maintain the story, including disconnecting from myself, including becoming disembodied, solely to maintain the story that love and sex have to be the same. And if I just am a good girl, I will get through this life and everything will be okay. I'm not here to say that that's a bad choice, but if you think that that is going to create a fulfilling sex life for you, you are going to really come up against it, and you can be a good woman, a good girlfriend, a good wife, a good mother, a good community member, and have a robust, erotic life. Those two things are not mutually exclusive, but you have to be willing to make room for the fact that a lot of this stuff might make some of the people around you uncomfortable.
SPEAKER_00And that is a very familiar refrain, you know, working with women all these years, you know, and then they get into a partnered relationship and you know think that if they lose, don't feel desire or don't desire sex, then the relationship's over. And so we will circle full circle with that because that's where we started, and that that simply isn't the case. So I loved your education around that in the book, and you go into it much further than this, but I think it's a good um a good theme to bring up uh and remind people of the real truth of of how desire works. I'm gonna pivot a little bit and you talk about five of the top myths that you see. Let's talk about those a little bit.
SPEAKER_01I want to hear from you actually. Um, and how did those myths resonate with you?
SPEAKER_00Well, it's just very interesting because one of them is your discussion about the myth that sex is natural. And then last night I had uh ask me anything on IG Live, and I had a question that was exactly around this theme of is um is it normal to take time for sex to feel natural and not not complicated? And I thought, I just had read your whole book about this, and I thought I want to talk to you about this on this this episode because there's just and you said people look at you like you're telling them there's no Santa Claus or what was funny.
SPEAKER_01There's no truth fairy and there's no Easter bunny.
SPEAKER_00Right, but I'd love to hear you speak to that a little bit because I think people don't consider this mantra that that and and that they believe deep down that sex is natural, and so then when it's complicated or difficult or they don't have education to help themselves, they are so sure they're not normal. Again, this theme, you know, again, again, again.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, exactly. People want to believe that sex is natural, and I think that a lot of this rides on the back of the you know, sex and love go together. When you meet the one, you'll have the feelings, and the feelings will allow you to be able to just, you know, fall into bed with them, and you know, they will know how to touch you just the right way, and they will just, if they're the right person, they'll just magically know everything you want without you even having to tell them anything, and then you'll be finished, and you'll be, you know, all this stuff, right? And we see this over and over. We again like we see this in Disney, we see this in rom-coms, really. Like we see this in rom-coms, you know. It's kind of, you know, boy meets girl, he is just, you know, this kind of bumbling idiot, and she's like, Don't don't come near me. I'm saving myself, or some version of that. Um, and then he will pursue her and pursue her, and eventually she acquiesces, and then it turns out that he is fabulous and she was being ridiculous. Uh, and then they have sex, and it's probably okay, or maybe it's good for him, he's thrilled. And for her, you they don't even talk about whether it was good for her, actually, in a lot of these movies. It ends up being just focused entirely on he got the prize, her prize is being won. That's what she should be content with being the desired, not the desiring, right? They get married, and then what eventually happens is the novelty of the thrill of the chase wears off, and she becomes tired and exhausted and frustrated with him. He also becomes tired and exhausted and frustrated with having to initiate, because what we know from the research is that men also want to be desired. They want for women to come to them, they want women to say, you're hot and gorgeous and sexy, and I want you so much, and all of these kinds of things. They want that too. The trouble with this sex is natural idea is that when we just follow this script of what we've been told is natural, that you find the one, it all just works when you finally get it together, and you know, men are horny all the time, women have to be, you know, effectively coerced into sex, and then when they do finally give themselves over, they are very happy to be in service, men are very happy to be serviced, and that's the story, and that's natural because that's the order of things. Now, for a lot of us, that is not true. The other part that is also not true is the actual machinations of pleasure. How to touch somebody, how to kiss them, how to how we like to give and receive touch. All of these things, we are not born with the innate knowledge of how to give somebody an erotic massage. We're just not. In the same way that we are not born knowing how to play guitar or how to paint or how to cook an amazing meal. We may have, you know, an inclination. You know, there might be some like a three-year-old who picks up a guitar and they can play whatever pretty quickly. They have some sort of inbuilt knowledge. Sure, those people exist, absolutely. But even still, those ones who will pick up a guitar at three, they will only be able to hone their craft if they have classes and lessons and they go and learn from somebody and they practice and they do the stuff that they need to do. So by the time they're 12, 13, 16, whatever, they can play in a band and they're amazing at it by that stage. But that's because they've spent those formative years learning how to do the thing. Same with cooking, same with painting, same with sports, same with anything that we do, frankly, in life that we decide is valuable and important. We invest time and energy into learning how to be good at it. So by the time we are old enough to be able to really embrace the thing, whatever the thing is, we might make it a career, or we might make it a really valuable hobby, or it becomes a part of our lives in some way that's meaningful. But we don't give ourselves that permission with sex because we are told straight out of the gate sex is natural, there's nothing to learn, you don't need to concentrate on it. When you're with the right person, it's all just gonna work out. Just trust everything's gonna be fine. Guess what? It's not gonna be fine. It's going to be really bad if you don't take the time to learn how to navigate this because this stuff is difficult for a lot of us. And it's not the, you know, how to give a blowjob part, that's not so difficult. But how do you talk about that with a partner? How do you have a complicated emotional conversation? You're telling me that's easy. I have never met a person who finds that easy. Everybody is challenged by vulnerability. Everybody is challenged by opening their heart and speaking their truth. And we have the gall, the audacity to call those soft skills. There's nothing soft about that. These are some of the toughest lessons you're going to learn in your life.
SPEAKER_00I guess my hope is always to keep opening this conversation so that people will do so for themselves and investigate what they took in and what's all sitting in their soil and what doesn't hold true for them and what they don't know and want to learn. I just think it's encouraging for people to hear that it's complicated. I mean, it is complicated and it takes some learning and actually learning over and over and over. I think people will have to check out your book if they want to hear your other your other top myths because I do want to hear you speak to your focus of asking people to ask themselves how and why sex matters rather than how to be better in bed. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01So I came to the realization that in order to experience satisfaction from sex, and I mean satisfaction because it, and I use that word because it's very subjective, right? What is satisfying for one person is not necessarily going to be satisfying for another person, and that's okay. And that's why a lot of these sort of generic how to be amazing in bed type books, they're fine, I guess. There's nothing wrong with them. But if you have a bazillion of those on your shelf and you still don't feel confident sexually, or you still find that sex is a bit of a bore or a bit of a chore, it's probably because going through the motions of what somebody else thinks is good is not meaningful to you. Part of the work of having satisfying sex is to be able to be with yourself enough to know why sex matters to you, if indeed it does. And if you decide that sex doesn't matter and you are perfectly fine with never having sex again, and you know, you're quite content to spend the rest of your days just you know eating sandwiches and looking out the window, and you're genuinely okay with that, I would say awesome, good for you, that is wonderful. And if you're like, well, I don't want it as much as I used to, but I want to want it again a little bit. This book is specifically for you because it's about you navigating back to that place of well, why do you want things to be different? Tell me why you want things to be different. Because they don't have to be. You can stay exactly as you are and be perfectly content. For some people, that is okay, and that's fine. But for those who decide that honestly, if I really drop into my heart of hearts, I'm not okay with things being like this. I do want them to be different. Then we start by asking ourselves, why? Why do we want them to be different? What will become possible if things are different for me? Then we move into well, how did how did sex used to make me feel? How would I like it to make me feel again? These sorts of ideas, these sorts of feelings create the beginning of what I call the erotic template. And each of us has an erotic template, and it's different for each person in the same way that a fingerprint is different for each person. You know, we all have fingerprints, but each one is slightly different. And if we don't know what our erotic template consists of, it feels very difficult to talk about it with another person. Because if another person says, you know, what kind of sex do you like? And you're feeling like a rabbit in the headlights, like, uh I don't know, or you say, I don't like any sex because all the sex you've had to date has been, you know, bad or mediocre at best. It is a very difficult question for you to answer. And so that's why the book is specifically about helping you scaffold these conversations with yourself. You don't even have to have a partner to do most of what the book says. This is a book about you building an erotic relationship with yourself to help you understand your erotic template on your terms. And then if you are in a partnership, you can share it with your partner. Your partner can do it alongside you, you can do it in tandem, or if it's just you and you can just do it by yourself. And then if you decide you want to start dating again in the future or whatever, at least you've got some stuff to put in your back pocket to be able to talk about on your maybe third date.
SPEAKER_00You know, I resonate with this idea of you know what do we want to investigate and put into it and invest into it, like you're describing, in order to have a fulfilling, meaningful uh experiences. I I just that's a beautiful way to to frame it out.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. Because it takes the it takes the the quest, you know, and I was talking about the sex is a quest to be seized, it takes the quest away from it being something that's out there in this magical, you know, never never land, to something that is embodied and it's within us. The knowledge, it's you know what you want. I believe that all of us know what we want. We just have to give ourselves permission to open the door.
SPEAKER_00Well, on that note, Cindy, you know, this podcast is called Permission for Pleasure, and you're talking about a lot of ideas around permission, and it seems to be a theme with the women that I serve and who listen on the show, yeah, and that we're learning to give ourselves more permission. So I appreciate your language around that and this expansive work that you have put out uh for people. It's really quite there's just so much there. So thank you for being on the show on this podcast. We like to share something that just delights us day to day that brings us pleasure. You just went on a vacation, so I'm already picturing all of that. But but me, perhaps you have something else you want to share.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, I get joy from my dog. He is my he's my joy, and every day, you know, he wakes me up at six o'clock, which I don't love. But um just I'm just so grateful that he is healthy and well, and that he is agile enough to climb up onto the bed because there was a period of time where he was not well enough to do that, and I thought he was not gonna live, you know. So, what brings me joy is having him in my life and just being so grateful that he's there because he's just such a little thing, and and he just reminds me that life is short and we've got to, you know, dig into the joy.
SPEAKER_00That's beautiful. Well, tell people how they can find you and your work, Cindy.
SPEAKER_01So the best place is my website, which is just my name, Cindydarnell.com, C-Y-N-D-I-D-A-R-M-E-L-L dot com. I offer consultations to individuals and couples around the world. Um, I'm all my work is on Zoom these days. Uh I have a bunch of online classes. I have a newsletter that you can be part of. I'm on social media. Uh I'm on Instagram often, uh, Facebook a little less often. And I've just sort of started flirting with TikTok, but I think I'm not very good at it. So we'll see what happens then.
SPEAKER_00I feel you on that. Oh dear. Well, thanks again for being with us and community. We ended this conversation talking again about permission. I hope you heard something today that helps you give yourself more permission for pleasure.
