Can You Really Learn Relationship Skills Through Pleasure? The Science Says Yes

What if getting better at relationships and intimacy could actually feel amazing? In this episode, we look at the evidence to challenge the assumption that learning relationship skills has to involve painful, difficult conversations or years of heavy therapy.

Drawing on science about how our brains learn best, we talk about why pleasure and play are actually superior teachers when it comes to intimacy. I'll break down the problems with traditional talk-only approaches and share how embodied, experiential practices create lasting change faster—and more enjoyably.

You'll learn why focusing only on problems keeps people stuck, how positive emotions enhance learning and memory, and why building confidence through practice (not just talking) transforms relationships. What if growth could feel good?

Perfect for anyone ready to stop making intimacy harder than it needs to be.

Get my free guide: Get Out of Your Head: A Starter Guide to Releasing the Pressure, Shame, and "Shoulds" Around Intimacy at https://laurajurgens.com/guide

Find out more about my offerings and read the blog: https://laurajurgens.com/

Go to my calendar to book a consultation here.  

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Transcript

0:00  
Welcome to Sex help for smart people. I'm Dr Laura Jurgens. I'm here to help you have better sex, intimacy and relationships, so let's get at it.

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Hey everyone. I am glad you are here. Welcome to Episode 82 we're gonna talk today about whether you can really learn relationship skills and intimacy skills through play fun and pleasure. And if you've been around here

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listening to this podcast with me for a little while, you know that I am really

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firm on one side of the answer here that I have a very firm yes to this, that learning through play and pleasure and fun is great, and I definitely fall on that side of the spectrum. But today I'm going to tell you why, and we're going to talk about what to do with that part of your mind that thinks that all learning has to be hard, or that thinks that you have to go to this like real painful downer therapy for years in order to solve any problems, or just you need to get out of a relationship to avoid having to do painful therapy for years. But basically, the part of you, if you have one, and many of you do that, has a real fear of the awkwardness, the difficulty, the challenge of opening up, the sort of Pandora's box of relationship challenges that you might be going through, or intimacy challenges, or challenges with Your own sexuality that you might be going through. And I want to speak to that part of you that is afraid that this is going to be hard, that you want change. You want to fix things for yourself. You want a more free, delicious, wonderful experience of your own sexuality in your life, whether you're partnered or not, but you're afraid that that process has to be hard and difficult. I used to think that getting better at intimacy meant having really serious, heavy conversations about all our relationship problems. That's what I thought I needed to do in order to solve relationship problems and solve intimacy challenges or like stuff that just like wasn't working for me sexually, I thought I just needed to have hard, horrible, awful, difficult conversations with my partner and so surprise, I didn't want to do it because it didn't sound Very fun. But I want to challenge that assumption. I have learned that what most people think, which is that learning relationship skills has to be hard work, like the worst kind of, like therapy experience, or, you know, just like difficult, like your worst days in high school or something. I really want to challenge that assumption. I promise today I'm going to flip that script on its head and show you why pleasure can actually be your best teacher. So the problem with traditional approaches in intimacy and relationships, especially because they are so close to our heart, because we are so intensely invested in them, and they are the absolute biggest predictor of our happiness in life. It makes sense that it feels fraught. It feels fraught with danger and scary to open up whatever we've been holding the lid on in terms of dissatisfaction or challenges or things that we kind of know are wrong or not working right, it's also the reason that it's so important to address. But the problem with traditional approaches is that they focus a lot on just the problem, and focusing and just talking about the problem tends to just make people feel bad and defensive and like they're doing something wrong. And the thing is, you aren't doing anything wrong, like you aren't wrong. You may not know how to do something. You may not maybe like what you're doing isn't working exactly for your partner, or what they're doing isn't working exactly for you, or if you're solo, maybe what you're doing with yourself isn't working exactly, or how you're approaching Dating isn't working exactly the way you want it to you may not be getting the outcomes you want, but that doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with you. Okay? So you may not like what you're doing might not be working, and we need to solve to help you find something that works better to get you what you want, but the traditional approach in therapy is really focusing on problems and really hashing and getting into the problems. Why the problems? Blah di, blah de, blah about the problems. So, of course, people don't want to do that. It doesn't feel good. You. To feel like they are the problem, right? And just talking only goes so far. And if you are, you know, human being with a pulse, and you are in a relationship that has challenges, or you have challenges with your own sexuality, chances are your intuition is telling you that just talking about it isn't really going to help that much, and you it's because you are right. You can people for years will just talk and talk over problems and not actually learn new ways of being or doing. So if you just talk in session and you don't actually put anything into practice, what happens is you go home and you wonder how to do it in reality, and you wonder if you even can, and you might wonder if you have a partner, if they even can do this thing that you've been talking about and you don't know how or how to start doing, because all you've been doing is talking about it. And the thing is, intimacy, relational skills and sexuality. It's all embodied. It's all in our bodies. It's in our hearts, it's in our genitalia, it's in our skin. It's in the way we look at each other. It's in how we touch each other. It's in the energy that we bring, whether that energy is anxious energy, which it is for a lot of people, and I tell you, that is really normal and common and a perfectly fine place to start. Anxious, energy, worried, energy, trying energy, or if it's calm, confident, relaxed, delicious, free energy, that feels really good. And by energy, you know, I just mean like, kind of your perspective and then how that's coming out in your nonverbal communication and how it feels in your body. I don't mean something totally abstract. We're just using that energy as the sort of shorthand for all those intangibles. But if we are just talking, then we know darn well that we're not going to be able to magically start doing so look, I am not anti therapy. I have been to a lot of therapists over the years. Some of them have been horrible and some of them have been fucking wonderful and very helpful. But when it comes to intimacy skills, when you want new results, you got to try something different. Can't do the same old stuff, and when we need to try something different, we often need support knowing what to try and how to try it, and taking steps that actually build our confidence along the way and help us actually do not just talk Okay, so that's why the traditional approach doesn't work. Your brain as a human, learns better through pleasure and play, and this is true of all animals. We learn better through pleasure and play. That is why mammal babies are all playing all the time, right? That is why they are engaging with each other. And there is pleasure there, right in play, in snuggles, in like romping, right? That is how we learn. And the science behind this, there is a ton of science to back up that actual pleasure and play are the best ways to approach learning. There's increased engagement and motivation when learning is enjoyable. The evidence shows there's better memory, encoding and retention when we have positive emotions that come from Play and pleasure. We also have a lot of evidence that reducing stress creates a better learning environment. So if you look at like, your typical sort of like maybe a therapy scenario, in which people are bringing a lot of really difficult topics to the table and just talking about them and kind of saying, Well, this is why I think my partner is wrong, and this is why I think my partner is wrong, it's creating a lot of stress, and nobody can learn in new skills or take in new information very well in that environment. So

9:14  
the other things, your brain learns better through pleasure and play. We know that pleasure and play create enhanced creativity and more problem solving. We have more access to those parts of our brain when we are lower in stress and when we are engaging in play. The other thing that's so important, play and pleasure actually create confidence. They create confidence in doing things, not just thinking about them or talking about them in doing because you've actually already done it. And so, for example, people will come play with me and practice with me something like, for example, a consent conversation, like, if you are out day. Being and you want to get really good at being able to escalate a physical encounter with lots of consent that feels safe to your new partner, but also keeps it sexy and doesn't make it all weird. Like May I now touch your left breast. You know, we don't want it to be weird. We don't want it to be awkward. We want to get confidence in having that conversation, so we play with it. And we don't just like role play it all wooden and weird. We actually play with the conversation. We workshop it. We let it be shitty at first, we let it be really bad. We let it come out like the worst possible way you could ask for consent. And then we playfully work towards how to keep it sexy. We try things. We try making sure, trying on different approaches to making sure it feels authentic to the person, right to the client. So that's an example where doing it with me first lets somebody play with it in a low stakes environment. I'm not a real date. They don't have to worry about fucking up with me, right? I'm not gonna get offended if they say it in the wrong way, but we're gonna practice playing with it, and then we're gonna practice seeing like, Okay, well, yes, I did say that you could touch me on the shoulder, or I did say that, you know, so let's do it, and then let's see, like, what do we do next? Let's imagine that you're gonna ask to kiss me. And there's no kissing in my practice, but we can still play with asking for it, right? And getting kind of close and stuff so and like, looking in each other's eyes and seeing like Okay Is now the right time, like reading cues and things like that. So doing it with me means practicing in a low stakes relationship environment first. And if you're doing couples work with me, it means getting stepping stone play with your partner. We start really small, so that you get to see that both you and your partner actually can do something new, and that enables some new belief and gives a couple confidence that they can do something new without breaking their relationship, right, without somebody disconnecting, or somebody running away, or somebody getting mad, or something like that, right, that they can try something new in safety with somebody there me who's helping facilitate it in small doses. So everybody gets to build confidence in themselves and in their partner and in their connection. Can withstand trying something new. The last thing, last few things I want to say about the science is that, you know, we know that there's positive associations when we have play and fun and pleasure, that when learning feels good, people actually want to do more of it right, and it so it encourages further exploration. And I will say, you know, in my practice, I see clients transform so much faster when we make it fun and playful. And sometimes, yeah, we do sometimes have to talk about the hard stuff. That's okay, but we can also not take ourselves totally seriously the whole time. I mean, to be honest, I have a lot of past trauma, and I don't have to take that even that seriously. And I'm not saying I don't take other people's trauma seriously, but there's something really important and liberating about being able to freely talk about things with someone who truly believes that you can move past it, and that it doesn't define you. And so that's something also that I just want to say is really important, is being in a positive environment where somebody really believes in you and is willing to sort of titrate in or a little bit of play and fun, even when we're doing kind of heavier stuff that we can still like. I know that if you have survived long enough to show up in my office or show up on a zoom call with me through all your trauma, I have deep respect for your resilience, and I know that your past and your trauma doesn't define you and that you deserve playfulness and freedom and feeling sexy and feeling empowered and feeling confident. So we are still going to bring that, even if we have to touch on some real difficult things that have happened in order to kind of put them in context and move forward.

14:36  
Okay, so that's kind of the science. And then you know what I've seen in my practice? My practice is really based on something called the somatica method, and I combine that with other certifications that I have as well, and other trainings that I have in trauma and cognitive behavioral approaches and things like that. But the somatica method is really the core. And it, what it is, is it's a combination of real, you know, yes, talk based coaching and experiential practices that are rooted in pleasure and play. And it works differently because of that. What is an embodied process, not just cognitive learning, and we create new neural pathways in the body and the brain through actual new experiences, through reparative experiences, and through novel experiences, you get to learn new things by having new experiences. So the magic ingredients are like pleasure, fun, intimacy, right? Releasing shame. Instead of dwelling in it, we actually just want to acknowledge it and see, you know what it's done that has been kind of getting in our way, and then remove it and release it. We build skill through two way practice. So I'm also vulnerable. I'm not sitting there like this sort of like wooden cardboard cutout, pretending that I don't have human emotions, right? And that's something that is sometimes really frustrating for people who are in a traditional psychoanalytic talk therapy type of have had that in their past, right? Where it's you actually in an building intimacy. Need to practice with someone who's willing to be open and vulnerable with you, right? And we have, in my practice, the other thing that's really important about the somatica method that I use is that we have a well boundaried relationship and intimacy lab. So what I mean by that is we have clothes on touch practice. There's no kissing, there's no genital contact, but there is touch involved, because we need that. That is part of human connection, and we need that to practice and play. We only do it incredibly consensually, and it is always optional, but it is a really profound way of playing and practicing, and I'll give you a few examples in a minute. But the importance here is that the body gets a new blueprint. Your nervous system learns to relax around intimacy. Instead of being anxious around intimacy, it learns to relax even when you're coming up against a growing edge of yours. That is really important. Okay, so in practice, a few concrete examples. So one example would be like a disinhibition exercise. I have a number, I have a little portfolio of disinhibition exercises that I love to do. And, you know, one is playing with just being in our animal bodies, like playing with sort of non visual sensations, the touch of the you know, touching into the rug and touching our skin and touching, like feeling the touch of the air on our skin, Feeling into scent, feeling really into the sensations of our senses, being in our animal bodies, and seeing how it feels to start disinhibiting those together, allowing ourselves to actually be animals together. And there's a whole sort of like animal game that we play that's really fun, but that's one example of disinhibiting the sort of like getting out of the head into the body and allowing that to be okay and safe and at your own body's pace. Another example is like a discovery touches where we would play with finding the pressure, the pace, the energy or the intent behind touch that feels most delicious to your body in places that you feel open to being touched. So that could be the arm, that could be your neck, that you know, whatever, but within the boundaries of the somatic method, in my practice, finding the things that feel most delicious to your body, and really being with someone who's willing to take the time and the patience to do that, and also to let you find the touch touches that feel nicest to your body. As the toucher, what kind of pleasure can you take, and can you take that in without worrying or being all up in your head about trying to get validation from the other person? So those are some discovery touches that we might play with. Another example is an erotic breath exercise that I do with every client, because it is so profoundly powerful. It's really simple, but it's using your breath to connect with your own sexual energy and your sort of erotic center. And it results it's really simple, it actually also increases blood flow to the genitals, which is. Really great, and it results in a sort of deep sense of grounding for most people. People almost always report that they feel both energized and peaceful, and so it's this wonderful tool that you can use takes five minutes. You can drop into it throughout the day and in masturbation and partner sex. It's just really powerful. It's really powerful, even when you're just giving a, you know, a public talk or something like that, really makes people feel very charismatic. But those are just some examples, a few examples of engaging in pleasurable activities. All of these are really pleasurable. I've never had someone be like the container I create for them is so low key and fun that nobody ever runs screaming from these. So they're really pleasurable activities that also serve to retrain your body into relaxing, into pleasure while you're building your confidence with erotic connection with yourself and with someone else, whether that be practicing with me or a partner. And so this really, this really matters in breaking cycles and habits that people have in their intimate relationships that aren't serving them anymore. You need to try something new to get new results right, and it keeps people it helps people stop avoiding intimacy because it just feels hard or complicated or they don't know what to do. We help people know what to do and what to at least try in a playful way. It also builds actual skills. So instead of just talking about connection, we're actually practicing with what feels connecting. It creates sustainable change. So when stuff feels good, we keep doing it right, and we don't have to worry about going back to old habits, because when something feels fun and yummy, we are going to stick with it. Our body is intrinsically motivated to stay with it. You don't have to worry about regressing. And then the other wonderful thing is it really creates a lot of permission. You get to enjoy the process of growth and becoming confident and better at intimate connection. And it is really magical to see people kind of blossom into feeling great and like on top of the world about it. So my challenge for you is just to consider the question, what if getting better at intimacy could actually feel amazing, like the actual process of getting better at intimacy could feel amazing to you, and I want to invite you to notice where you might have made growth in a relationship, relationship skills or intimacy skills, harder than they need to be or heavier than they need to be. Have you made it out in your head that this has to be hard if you have challenges? Have you made it out in your head that it has to be hard to fix up, and I want to challenge that and say it could actually feel amazing even during the process. So my goal for you, you know, my goal for you, is that you deserve the all of the aliveness you deserve, all of the connection and joy in yourself in your own life, force in your own existence, and part of that is your intimacy with yourself, your connection and approval of yourself in every aspect of you, and your connection and intimacy with others. And I really want you to help maximize that so that you get all the juicy yumminess that life has to offer for you. So here's the thing, I have actually been completely full with clients for most of the year, pretty much all the year, because,

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well, because, mostly because I keep getting lots of referrals from people who are absolutely transformed and they're really excited and joyous, and they share it with people, and those people see their excitement and their joy, and they come work with me too. So I get a lot of referrals. That's mostly where I get my clients from, and honestly, it makes me really happy, because people are actually solving their problems and graduating from our work together. And then I get new people in, and it's just wonderful. I love it, but I do have two spots that just opened up for end of summer clients. Because I have had some recent graduations. My clients got what they came for. They're off living their amazing, sexy, connected lives, which is exactly what I want for you, too. And so I have this little point in time where I'm not full up, and I want to say, if any of this resonated with you and you're thinking, Okay, I'm ready to stop making intimacy harder than it needs to be, I would love to talk with you. I do free consultations where we can figure out if working together makes sense for both of us. And just so you know. Know I have raised my rates, but if you are a podcast listener and you mention that when you book your consultation, I will honor the prior pricing for you, not because this is like $300 off of a 12 session package. So it's like a free session and a half. It is because I have these two spots open. I want to fill them, and because I want to prioritize you as podcast listeners in filling them, because I know that you are here, listening and learning, and I know that a lot of you are out there are ready to do this work. And I really want to value and appreciate that the consultation link is in the show notes and or you can find it at my website, Laura jurgens.com you just click on the book a consult. And honestly, even if we don't end up working together, the consultation itself usually gives people some really helpful clarity about what they actually want to focus on. So you are welcome to book a consultation, and I will see you next week for another episode. Thanks for being here.

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Hey, if you're curious about how you could have better sex and connections, go grab my free guide. Find your secret turn arms. It's right on my website, www.laurajurgens.com

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and the link is in the show notes. I'll see you here next time