The Last Place High Achievers Give Themselves Permission

You've solved harder problems than this. So why is this one still stuck?

This episode is for the high achievers who have done real work on themselves — the therapy, the books, the hard conversations — and still can't get traction when it comes to desire, intimacy, and their closest relationships. It's not because you haven't tried hard enough. It's because you've been using the wrong tools for the wrong system.

In this episode:

• Why capable, self-sufficient people are often the last to get help with intimacy — and why that costs them the most
• The cultural lie that you're supposed to just know how to do sex and relationships (and why it makes zero sense)
• Top-down vs. body-up: why cognitive tools and talk therapy can't reach what's actually stuck
• Why "trying harder" and "knowing more" can fool you into thinking they'll eventually work for everything
• What somatic, body-based work actually reaches — and what changes when you find the right tool for the real problem

Topics: high achievers, intimacy, somatic sex coaching, low libido, desire, nervous system, body shame, sex therapy, intimacy coach, relationship help

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 about the Pleasure Path Diagnostic here: https://laurajurgens.com/diagnostic/

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

Copyright notice: All content in this podcast is copyrighted and copying, scraping, data mining, or using the content to train AI is prohibited. 

Transcript

Welcome to Pleasure Uprising. I'm Dr. Laura Jurgens, intimacy coach, somatic practitioner, and your guide to getting out of your head and into your body, your desire, and your real capacity for connection. This show is for people who are done performing and ready to actually feel it. Let's go.

So, there's a specific kind of person who is the hardest for me to help, and it's not because they aren't suffering, or because they don't have insight, or because I couldn't help them if they actually came to me, but it's because they don't actually come forward for the help they need. Their entire identity is organized around not needing help, and so they don't knock on my door, and they don't let themselves actually come forward and say, "Hey, I need a specialist here." They are interestingly usually the most capable people in the room in a lot of other areas. They've built something amazing — a business, a career, a family, an empire sometimes — and they know how to solve problems. They've been solving them their whole lives, often since they were very young, and being good at solving problems became such a part of who they are that they have a hard time understanding when they need help and giving themselves permission to ask for it.

I want to talk about that, because I think a lot of us, even if we're not entirely there, are sometimes kind of stuck in the same place. If you're entirely there, you might not even be listening to this podcast. Those folks are the hardest to help because I never even get access to them, and every now and then a partner will bring them through this door, but they're so resistant to even the idea of needing help that they don't believe in doing it. I can't really work with that, because if you don't want any help, I can't give it.

But most people aren't 100% in that camp. There's a lot of us — and I was one of them — who had definitely a whole foot there. I had maybe staked out some area in that general vicinity. And the thing is, I think when it comes to sex and relationships, it's actually worse than it is in almost any other area for those people who have at least a foot over there, like I did.

When we in that camp realize that we need to work on things like relationships or our sex life — the intimate parts of our life — a lot of times we're still trying to do it with our heads, like we do everything else. We're like, okay, I'm going to read books, I'm going to research it online, I'm going to try to logic my way through conversations with my partner. Oh my gosh, does that backfire — ask me how I know. I'm not going to look anywhere inside my body. I'm going to be looking outward for an expert to tell me what to do, but I don't actually want to talk to somebody about it, because I think I can do it myself. And then we get frustrated when all that stuff doesn't work.

Today we're going to talk about all of this, and I have titled this episode "The Last Place That High Achievers Give Themselves Permission" for a reason, and I think that will become clear.

I left my relationship to my sexuality and intimacy as the last frontier of what I worked on in my growing and healing journey — or at least the last frontier of what I knew I needed to work on. I found some other things through the process of opening up the sexuality and intimacy piece that were incredibly valuable, things I wouldn't have even known about if I hadn't looked there. But I didn't go to sexuality and intimacy until it was staring me in the face, until everything else was sorted.

I had done all the work on burnout, on work-life balance, on my relationship to money, on my self-talk. I had stopped having to take antidepressants, which I was on for 15 years, because of all the coaching and healing work I had done. I'm so glad I did all that. But I really did leave my intimacy and my sexuality for last, and for a while, when I decided I needed to go there, I tried the head-based stuff — thinking about it, talking about it, these frustrated conversations with my partner. None of that was working. I finally went to somatic, body-up work, and it changed absolutely everything for me in the best possible way. It was the thing that unlocked all of me.

Of course that makes sense. Our eroticism, our sexuality — it's in our bodies. It's not just in our heads. Our brains are an important sex organ; they're just one piece of the puzzle. The whole rest of the puzzle is the whole body. It changed my life, my relationship, my sex life in these massive, beautiful ways, and also who I am as a person. I have become softer, more able to be in connection, a better friend, able to hold kind boundaries, a more joyful person, way more relaxed. I sleep better — all of that — in addition to having way better sex and a relationship that truly feels like a refuge. I'm so glad I did that.

But so many of us very highly competent people — and I will put myself in that category; when I first started this journey I was a science professor and I had worked really hard to get there — just like many high-achieving people, stayed stuck for way longer than we needed to, because we were deprioritizing the thing in our lives that actually brings the most fulfillment. All the research on happiness shows that our closest intimate relationships are the thing that brings the most happiness.

So there I was, feeling like I didn't know how to really access my own erotic self, trying to be in a long-term relationship with someone I loved dearly, but not really knowing how to connect with sexually, and not knowing how to talk about that, not really knowing how to do real intimacy. I don't think either of us knew what we didn't know — we just knew something was off, that it wasn't feeling good, that we had conflict. What I didn't know was that the foundation was my erotic relationship to myself, and that needed to be healed first before I could actually have a better erotic relationship and a better intimate, vulnerable relationship with my partner.

So I want to help you save some time, and some pain, and some stuckness by talking about what gets in our way as high achievers in giving ourselves permission to get the help that we need — and to address this specific arena of challenges: intimacy, romantic relationship, attachment, sexuality.

Part of it is this overwhelming message we get from our culture that is a straight-up lie. If you hear this and think you kind of believe it, I want to really encourage you to realize that this isn't yours. Just because you kind of believe it doesn't mean you chose this belief. It was given to you by the culture, and it goes something like this: I'm supposed to just know how to do sex and relationships — just know naturally, innately, magically.

This is a complete fallacy, a complete lie. It makes zero sense that you would just naturally magically know, but it makes total sense that a very sex-shaming, intimacy-avoidant culture would teach us and train us in this belief. We have a culture that teaches largely abstinence as the only sex education most people get — maybe a little STI prevention, maybe some birth control education if you're lucky — absolutely nothing about pleasure. Heaven forbid we even talk about women's arousal. People don't even know what that looks like, even women themselves. Nothing about how to be truly intimate, nothing about vulnerability.

And then people are left with porn, which is all fake. I have mixed feelings about porn — I think there's some positive, ethical porn out there — but it's still entertainment, and most of it is made for men. It is not sex education. When somebody like me says that out loud, you're like, of course, porn is not real sex. But your subconscious brain, when it gets no other information about sex and intimacy and all it sees is porn, is going to think that's how you're supposed to do it. It's no wonder everyone is running around with totally messed-up ideas about how to do real sex, and that's not our fault. Until I actually got deep training in sexuality, I didn't know how to do sex, and I was a smart, capable biology professor. Most people don't, and there's nothing wrong with you for that. You're not supposed to just know how to do it, especially when you're given all this false information and avoidance and shaming.

The same thing is true with relationships — we're taught and modeled really dysfunctional, codependent, passive-aggressive ways of relating in our culture and in most of our families. I had really bad parents, but most people who have well-intentioned parents — it's not their parents' fault either. This is just what they learned, and these are generational patterns that get passed down. And we're magically supposed to know just how to have secure relationships with clean, kind boundaries and open, vulnerable intimacy, when nobody's ever modeled that for us or practiced it with us before.

Let's be sure we don't accidentally swallow that cultural lie. It is not a belief that came from you. You were not born with it, and you are allowed to need to learn. A lot of it is actually unlearning — unlearning the cultural messages and the things that were passed down to you. Even high achievers in any other area of life still need that learning and unlearning.

Now, sometimes even super competent, high-achieving, "I can figure it out" type of people grow enough in other areas of life, and realize they do need specialist help in intimacy and relationships. That's what happened for me, and it's what happens for a lot of my highly competent, high-achieving clients.

My former client — let's call her Lisa — was very highly competent. She's a doctor. She owned her own practice. She was also a trained life coach who taught mindset work to other doctors. She knew the cognitive tools in and out. She had applied them to herself with care and rigor. She did the work. And yet for years nothing moved on the body shame, the struggle to be aroused, the sense that her sexuality was absent or shameful. She came to me feeling like her body was wrong — that it didn't look good enough, didn't behave the way she wanted it to, that it was somehow deficient.

It wasn't because she wasn't smart. It wasn't because she hadn't tried. She had tried everything she knew to try. She just didn't yet know that the problem wasn't in the place she was looking. And this all got solved — I give her enormous credit for being wise enough to reach out and seek new tools. But I also know how hard it is.

A lot of times people won't come forward until they get so desperate they just can't tolerate it anymore. I want to see you before that. It's going to take you less time, less money, and less effort to solve things if you haven't gotten totally desperate and worn out first. So I want to encourage everyone here by addressing some of the blocks for high achievers in reaching out for specialist help — whether you work with me or somebody else.

One of them is what I think of as an identity problem. For high achievers, it gets built something like this: we learn early that effort and intelligence gain approval and solve problems. We get rewarded for being self-sufficient, capable, hardworking, smart — for figuring it out. And asking for help starts to feel like announcing failure, instead of what it actually is in the real world, which is gathering resources.

Getting help from people who are good at something you need — in our culture we can exchange money for that — that's just smart. But instead, asking for help starts to feel like "I can't do it." It can work really well to be super self-sufficient in some parts of life. But the problem is it creates a very specific blind spot: the assumption that trying harder or knowing more will eventually break through any wall. And that's not true.

In cognitive work — therapy, mindset coaching, journaling — sometimes trying harder does succeed, and it can fool us into thinking it works for everything. That work is top-down: you're using your thinking mind to change your thoughts, challenge your beliefs, reframe meanings. You can get results, and it can fool you into thinking that tool works for absolutely everything. I've seen coaches, and even some CBT-type therapists, who mistakenly think it works for everything because it's the one tool they have.

But this body stuff — intimacy, relationships — this is embodied work. This is nervous system work. Your history, your body's specific physical responses — these are part of it. And so Lisa could articulate exactly why her shame was irrational. She knew the theology she grew up with was wrong. She could challenge every belief. She intellectually understood that there was nothing wrong with her body or her desires. And yet she could not get her body to feel free of shame. She could not stop generating a lot of the irrational thoughts and feelings.

That is reasonable and normal, because what she knows and what she feels are totally different systems. This was not a willpower problem. It wasn't an "I haven't tried hard enough" problem. Lisa was having a different problem entirely — and it was the one I was having, too.

So: body-up versus top-down. There are two directions that information travels in your nervous system.

Top-down: your thoughts, your beliefs, your conscious intentions. This is where cognitive work operates. Genuinely useful — I've used it for a ton of stuff. But it is not sufficient on its own for intimacy and relational dynamics.

Body-up: your body's accumulated experience patterns that formed before you had language for them, or that happened so often they went subconscious. Sometimes this is before we have any conscious memory. There was enough repetition that patterns of relational dynamics, patterns of unsafety — we learn those in our body, and they become entrenched and ingrained. Like autopilot.

These patterns are not accessible through thinking about them. You can intellectually think something completely different. And I have clients where this is really obvious around body shame — they'll say, I don't believe theoretically that I should feel ashamed of the size of my body, I don't believe that other people are bad because of the size of their body, but I can't stop feeling that way. That tells you this is a nervous system issue.

Things like touch aversion, feeling uncomfortable, racing thoughts when you're in an intimate moment, anxiety, tightening, shutting down, going numb, getting the ick, avoidance — that's not beliefs talking. That's a nervous system talking. And it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do — protecting you based on years of embodied experience of a lack of safety. That kind of thing has to be worked through the body, not around it with your brain.

It's not that your brain has no part in this — your brain is actually part of your body. And it is a powerful sex organ. One of my high-achieving clients, Laura M — and you can see her video testimonial on my website under the "What clients say" tab — said, "The brain is your most powerful sex organ." She's right. When your brain is actually on your side, it becomes a very potent erotic tool. It's where our imagination lives. It's where we give ourselves permission to want what we want. It's where fantasy can generate desire. It's where we can get creative with our eroticism. But we have to do the body work first to feel safe enough to even have our brain be on our side.

Lisa knew mindset tools so well, but she needed someone who could tell the difference between a thought she could reframe and a body pattern that we needed to move through — and give her reparative experiences around so her body could start relaxing. She couldn't even find the judgments she had on her own, because they were so subconscious and accepted that they had become ingrained in her body. We needed body-based exercises to start uncovering those, and to help her start de-shaming her own desires. Her desires were buried under so much shame that she couldn't even find them with her mind.

So when you go to find a specialist — if you decide you need help with intimacy and relationships and you're willing to get some — let's also look at giving yourself permission to really do it.

Nobody looks at a CEO who has an executive coach and also a running coach and thinks she's not good enough to figure out how to run on her own. Most of us don't think, "Oh, she's got a running coach — she can't figure out how to run on her own." It's obvious to all of us that she's actually smart enough and resourced enough to go get the right specialist for the right domain. That's not weakness. That's how serious people operate. She's decided she has goals, she wants to hit them, and she's going to get the help she needs. That is boss.

Somatic sex coaching, body-based intimacy work — that's a specialist tool. It doesn't have to replace the therapy or mindset coaching you might have already done. That work is real and it built something. But sometimes you have to pick up a different tool for a different problem, for a different system that the other approaches weren't designed to reach.

And I think sometimes as high achievers we forget to ask ourselves the right questions. We're calculating costs professionally all the time. What's the ROI? What's the opportunity cost? What's the sunk cost? We do that in a business framework, but we often aren't applying it to our intimate life, because we've been taught that intimate life is some private, figure-it-out-yourself domain — which, as we've established, is totally crazy.

So let's apply it. What is the cost of staying in the wrong situation? What is the cost of not learning what lights you up? What is the return on investment of having an amazing relationship that feels like a refuge, and an erotic life that brings you energy and joy and playfulness? And if you stay stuck in a situation that isn't great — what is that costing you? How long have you been aware that something isn't working? What has that cost you in terms of connection, resentment, the low-level background drain of a relationship that doesn't feel great?

If your closest relationships are the highest bang for your buck in terms of happiness, that might be a place you decide you want to invest. It doesn't have to be today. But whenever you're ready — or ready enough — it might be worth thinking about.

Lisa, at the end of our work together, said this: "If you think about the amount of money that people spend to feel sexy — buying things, trying to change your body, covering up your body — and then compare that to investing in a coach who can help you access what's actually been getting in your way, it just makes sense." She found the right tool for the actual problem. That's what I want for everybody.

Okay — so if you are someone like me who likes to truly understand your options, I have something new I want to share before I close out. It's a low-stakes starting point I created called the Pleasure Path Diagnostic. It is a deep-dive questionnaire on your specific situation. I've made most of it multiple choice — I've taken the most common patterns I see, I've put descriptions in there, and you just get to choose: does that feel like me, or does this feel like me? You don't have to write essays.

It's a really deep dive into your specific situation — your body, your relationship history, your attachment history, and any relational dynamics you have going on. And it's followed by a 45-minute call with me, where I've already reviewed your specific answers and we get right into figuring out exactly what's happening for you, and mapping out what tools you would need to address those. So you leave knowing exactly what kind of things you would need to do to move the needle — tailored specifically to you.

There's no pitch on this call. I'm not going to sell you anything. I will leave it to you to decide if you want to ask me about working with me or what steps you would take. You can take those steps on your own, with another practitioner — zero pressure, because that's not how I roll. It's $147 for now. I don't know how long it'll be at that price, because I honestly haven't decided. There's a link in the show notes if you're interested, and I do still have some spots open. If you want a personalized map for how you're going to change your situation with zero obligation, go grab it.

Alright, my dears. I will see you here next week.

Hey, before you go — if you enjoyed this show, I want to invite you to check out one of my favorite things I've ever created. It's a free guide called Get Out of Your Head: A Starter Guide to Releasing the Pressure, Shame, and Shoulds Around Intimacy. It has four reflection exercises that go deeper than anything you'll find in a typical freebie, and most people feel a shift just after part one. Go grab it at laurajurgens.com/guide — the link is in the show notes. And if you're ready to find out what your specific path looks like, I'd love to talk to you. Booking info is also in the show notes. I will see you here next week.