You Can Give Pleasure All Night. Receiving It Is the Skill Nobody Taught You.

You can pleasure your partner all night. And then they turn the attention toward you — and something shuts down. You reach to reciprocate. You check if they're getting tired. You've decided this means you're just not that sexual anymore.

Here's what's actually true: receiving isn't a personality trait you're missing. It's a nervous system skill you were never taught. Giving is doing — action, control, staying one step ahead — and you got thirty years of practice at it. Receiving is the opposite: stopping, surrendering, letting something happen you're not managing. This episode takes the shame off it, shows you why you can't receive a pleasure you can't feel, and gives you one deliciously naughty weekend practice with a single rule: you're not allowed to give anything back.

Your body isn't asking you to give more. It's begging you to finally receive. Press play.

What if the reason you've gone from feeling young, passionate, and desirable to feeling disconnected, broken, and like you're living with a roommate instead of a husband…has nothing to do with your age or your hormones?

What if it comes down to a hidden cycle no one talks about - one that keeps women after 50 stuck, waiting for a desire that never seems to return?

That's exactly why I created The Desire Reset Guide.

It's for women after 50, and it reveals the real reason you feel broken - plus 3 simple practices you do over 3 days to finally reconnect with your pleasure, your desire, and your partner. 👉 juliemerrimanphd.com/desire

Have you quietly wondered if you're broken…you're not. The science says so. Listen to Episode 29: Your Body Isn't Broken, The Truth About Desire After 50. 

New episodes Wednesdays & Fridays, 5am CST

This podcast is for women after 50 navigating low desire, sexual disconnection, and body changes who want nervous-system-informed insight into libido, aliveness, intimacy, and embodied pleasure so they can move from tamed to alive and unapologetically hungry.

 No part of this content may be used for AI or machine learning training.

Transcript

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In this episode, why you can give pleasure all night but freeze the second it's your turn is gonna be looked at. Y'all, it's not selfish and it's not that you're lost interest. It's a nervous system that was trained to give and never taught to let go. Today, we teach it. Sexy after 50. Improve sex and intimacy by healing your nervous system so you finally feel turned on and confident. We're waking up but never left. Desire and fire. I'm Dr. Jules. Let's get to it. Okay, I am so honored y'all are here. Thank you. Welcome. Now, three reasons to hang with me until the very end of this episode. First, you're gonna learn why receiving is a completely different nervous system skill than giving, and why nobody ever taught you the second one so you can finally take the shame off of it. Two, you'll hear the one piece of research that explains why letting yourself be pleasured requires you to stop controlling and why control has felt safer your whole life. And three, you'll get a weekend practice that's a little bit bossy, a little bit naughty, and built to make receiving the only thing on the menu. Sounds good? Hang with me. Okay, so first I want you to meet a client of mine who has given me permission to speak of this. Um, her name is Renata. Maybe that's her name or not, but that's the name for right now. And I've got composite, a composite of Renata. Details have been changed. But girl, you may hear yourself in her. So Renata is 56, and she described herself to me um, well, a little proudly as a giver. In bed, she said she was confident, she knew her husband's body, read every cue, could pleasure him beautifully. That part she said, I've got. And then her voice dropped. But the second he return, well, the second he turns it around on me, I go somewhere else. I just start narrating. Is he tired? Is his arm cramping? Am I taking too long? Should I just reach over and I do. I reach over, I take the attention off myself as fast as I possibly can. And afterward, I feel like a fraud because I can give all night and I can't receive for two minutes. See, she decided this meant that she just wasn't very sexual anymore, that the wanting had dried up. And here's what I told her, and what I want to tell you. Renata wasn't broken, and she wasn't selfish. She was fluent in one nervous system skill and had never once been taught the other. Of course, giving felt like home. It was the only room she'd ever been allowed to live in. If that sounds familiar, just take a big deep breath, maybe a little butterfly pat and patting, and let's go keep going. So I want to start with the thing that takes the shame off immediately. See, girl, you're not bad at receiving because you're selfish or repressed or broken. You're excellent at giving and shaky at receiving because those two different nervous system skills are, in fact, very different. And you got 30 years of intense practice in one and almost none in the other. Giving is doing, it's action, effort, control, staying one step ahead of what everyone needs. Receiving is the exact opposite. It's stopping, it's softening, it's surrendering the controls, letting something happen to you that you are not managing. And for a woman who has spent her whole life as the one who handles it, that surrender does not feel like relief. It can feel like danger. So in chakra psychology, which I use not as mysticism, but as a map of where experience settles in the body, this is your solar plexus center, the seat of will and control and doing. And for most women over 50, the solar plexus is enormously, I mean enormously overdeveloped, because you were rewarded for your entire life for being capable, for anticipating, for staying on top of everything. And here's the trap. When your partner feels, well, when your partner, let's say, turns the attention toward you, receiving asks you to put the solar plexus down and to stop doing. And your overdeveloped doing center does not want to sit down. So it keeps working. That's right, even in bed. You reach to reciprocate, you check if he's getting tired, you manage his experience of pleasuring you, you are giving again, even while being given to, because giving is the only mode your nervous system fully trusts. Receiving is not a personality trait that you're missing, okay? It's a muscle you are never allowed to build. And you know what? A muscle can be built. That's why we go to the gym all the time. So I want to go into just a little bit of science because y'all know I love research. I kind of lightened it up a little bit in this episode. I'm testing my podcast coach, I thought maybe I was going too heavy on the research. If you like the research or want more, please shoot me an email. I'm kind of shooting at the dark here. But anyway, back to what back to the story. I've got a little research for you. And it's the only study I'm going to lean on today because it's the one that I think really does explain everything. See, there's a capacity researchers call interception, which we've talked about on the podcast. And this is your ability to sense the inside of your own body. You're we are so busy going outside, our inside interception gets kind of um wonky. This is your heartbeat, your breath, subtle signals of sensation and pleasure rising in you. And the crucial finding is this interception is a trainable skill. It can be strong or weak, depending on where your attention has been living. So I want you to think about where your attention has lived for the last, oh, I don't know, 30 years. Outward. On everyone else. You're reading the room, you're tracking his mood, you're scanning what the kids need, you're monitoring what has to happen next. That outward aimed attention is a skill, too. And you're a black belt in that skill. But receiving pleasure requires the very opposite aim. Attention has to be turned inward. The ability to actually feel what's happening in your own body as it happens. You cannot receive a pleasure, you cannot feel. Hear that? You cannot receive pleasure, you cannot feel. And a woman whose attention has pointed outward her entire adult life has quietly gone a little numb to the inside. So when your partner does something that should feel wonderful, the sensation is happening, but you're not home to receive it because your attention is still out on patrol. Girl, this is your sacral center, the home of sensation and receiving. It can only fill up when your attention is actually inside your body to catch what's arriving. This is why receiving sometimes feels like nothing. Not because nothing is happening, because you're not in the room where it's happening. The fix isn't more stimulation, it's coming back inside to feel the stimulation that's already there. So one more piece before your practice. And this one, I think, reframes this whole struggle. Being on the receiving end of care is biologically one of the most soothing things a human body can experience. When someone we trust attends to us, the body's threat response quiets and the nervous system settles. So why, Pray tell, why does receiving feel so hard? Well, because it requires you to first stop bracing. Right now, squeeze those shoulders, drop. That's bracing. We're letting it relax out. But you've got to stop bracing. And y'all, bracing has been your baseline for so long you don't even feel it when you're doing it anymore. Your root center governs safety, and it will not let you surrender control until it believes you're safe to do so. And receiving is surrender. Letting someone do something to you that you're not steering, that's a profound act of trust. And trust lives in the root. This is why just relax has never in the history of women worked. It's just not good advice. You cannot relax your way past a root center that's still scanning for threat. You have to convince the root through actual experience that letting go in this moment does not get you hurt. And here's the part that reframes, I think, everything. For many women, a core engine of desire is the experience of being wanted, being the one who has desired and received, not the one doing the work, the one being adored. So when you can't receive, you're not just missing pleasure, you're cut off from one of the deepest sources of your very own desire. The electric experience of being the object of someone's want. See, your heart center is what opens to let that in. Letting yourself be desired, be received, be adored without immediately deflecting or reciprocating, that exact vulnerability is what reawakens desire from the inside out. You do not have to earn pleasure by giving. You are allowed to simply be the one who receives. Two to three minutes done a few times this week on your own. You're rebuilding the interception muscle so that there's someone home to receive. Let your shoulders drop, unclinch that jaw, a direct signal to your nervous system that, girl, you are off duty. And I need you to take five slow breaths. And here's the whole practice: instead of aiming your attention outward the way it's lived for 30 years, you aim it inward. Feel the actual warmth of your palm on your skin, the rise of your belly, the temperature of the air. You're not trying to feel aroused. You're practicing the one skill that makes receiving possible. Turning the attention from outward patrol to inward sensation. On each exhale, ask your body, not your mind, because your mind, she is there wanting to tell you some things. You're asking your body. What do I feel right now? Just catch whatever's already arriving. That's you moving back into a house you shut half the rooms in. That's your sacral chakra filling up because someone finally came home to it and you're opening all those doors in that house. All right, don't leave me. I have another really cool activity for you. Just a real quick pause. If this is landing, if you're realizing you never actually learned how to receive, the fastest way to start rebuilding that muscle is my free guide, desire reset guide. Girl, I give you three short practices over three days that walk your attention back inside your own body out of protection mode and into sensation. It's free over on my website, juliemarrimanph.com, also linked in the show notes. It's the perfect on-ramp to today's practice. Okay, back to it. I want to give you the couples practice. And I want you to lean into how naughty it's going to feel. Because that feeling, girl, that's the point. It's called dun dun dun, the selfish half hour. And here is exactly one rule: you are not allowed to give anything back. And yeah, I'd love to process that with you. So email me if you want a quick appointment on how that landed for you. But all you need to do is set aside 30 minutes with your partner this weekend. Tell them in advance, this is your turn, and their only job is to pleasure you while you, my friend, do absolutely nothing in return. Maybe here's where you get out, your um, you know, you uh bond yourself a little bit. You don't have to. I'm just, you know, if you can't move your arms or feet, uh, that might help in the receiving, or maybe you're not there yet. That's okay. We're just practicing receiving. Here's the rule that makes it work. And it makes it deliciously uncomfortable. Your hands stay off them. There's no reaching to reciprocate, no checking if they're bored, no managing their experience. Stop it. If you catch yourself starting to give, you stop. You put your hands back at your sides or above your head, and you return to your one job, receiving. For a woman like you, being told you're not allowed to give back might be the most uncomfortable, the most necessary instruction you've heard all year. You start with the coming home breaths. Two minutes, attention turned inward, then let your partner begin. And here's your active practice while you receive. You say what feels good out loud, slower. There, more of that. He cannot read your mind. Your partner cannot read your mind. You must use your voice. This isn't only dirty talk, though it can absolutely be that. It's you reclaiming the right to direct pleasure toward yourself. This is the most sacral chakra reclaiming thing you can do. It's also helping your solar plexus, it's helping your root chakra, it's helping all your chakras because you're using your power to serve your own body instead of everyone else's. Girl, every minute you stay there without reciprocating, you teach your nervous system three things at once. It's safe to let go. You're allowed to be the one adored. Your pleasure does not have to be earned by giving. So I'm gonna tell you, Renata tried this, and she told me the hardest part was the first five minutes, hands twitching, wanting to reach over, and then she said something her chest just released and let go. And for the first time in years, she just floated. I forgot to be useful, and it was the sexiest I've felt in a decade. 30 naughty, selfish minutes. Take them you've given for 30 years. Your body is not asking you to give more, it's begging you to finally receive. Okay, one more thing before I land this plane. Everything we're doing today, coming home to your body, learning to receive, letting pleasure actually land, all of this is in my book, Are We Gonna Have Sex or What? I highly encourage you to hop over to my website, grab your copy. It is worth the effort. Okay, we're gonna land the three things I want you to carry out. One, giving and receiving are two different nervous system skills. You've got 30 years of practicing at giving and almost none at receiving. So, of course, one feels easy, one feels impossible. That's training, girl, not a flaw. Two, you can't receive a pleasure you can't feel. Your attention lived outward for so long, it went a little numb to the inside. And receiving requires coming back home to feel what's already arriving. And three, receiving is surrender, and surrender absolutely requires safety. Being adored, being the one received is one of the deepest engines of your own desire. And you do not have to earn a single moment of pleasure by giving something back. Let that sink in. I want that for you. Girl, you're not selfish for wanting to receive. You're a woman whose body has been waiting decades for permission to stop working and start feeling. This weekend, take the selfish half hour, put your hands at your sides, and find out what lands when you finally let it. Tap the show notes to download, reignite your fire and desire, your free 72-hour erotic reboot. Unlock the arousal pathway buried in your nervous system. Reclaim the raw hunger you were taught to suppress. And rewire your body to crave pleasure again. Not because you're broken, but because you're ready to burn. Move from invisible to incredible. I'm Dr. Jules, Keep Burning.