#26 Discover Your Sexual Blueprint and Learn How To Enjoy Sex More With Xanet Pailet

On the show today we welcome Xanet Pailet, tantra educator, sex coach, and author of Living an Orgasmic Life.

Xanet is here tell us all about her work and how accessing your sexual blueprint and core erotic themes can guide you to a more fulfilling sex life and transform your whole world. We discuss Xanet’s own journey and the events in her life that led up to her current vocation before launching into some examples of the difficulties that people can have accessing and communicating their sexual needs.

We talk about lowered libido, sexless marriages, shame and how these relate to our early development and socialization.

Xanet gives great insight into simple ways to approach these sensitive subjects and shows just what a difference these measures can make.

We finish off the chat thinking about some pragmatic solutions to these issues and ways in which individuals and partners can make progress in this regard.

Highlights

• Some of Xanet’s personal and professional background.
• The experiences that contributed to her pursuing a career in sexual therapy.
• An anecdote showing the damage an unspoken desire can do to a relationship.
• Some of the reasons for sexless marriages and lowered libido.
• The issue of shame and socialization related to pleasure.
• An example of the crippling effects of shame on our bodies.
• Core Erotic Themes and our underlying sexual emotions.
• How to go about communicating sensitive needs or fantasies.
• Using games or apps to start the process of communication.
• Redefining sexuality and finding ways around tricky needs.
• Explaining Attachment Theory and it’s different formulations.
• And much more!

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Transcript

Sean Jameson: Today, I’m talking to Xanet Pailet, a certified tantra educator, sexological body worker and somatically trained sex coach who is working with a therapeutic field for over 25 years. She’s also written a book, a popular book Living an Orgasmic Life – Heal Yourself and Awaken Your Pleasure.

Xanet, thanks so much for coming on The Bad Girls Bible Podcast.

Xanet Pailet: Thanks Sean, I’m super happy to be here.

Sean Jameson: I’d love to start off with your background with a little bit about you and how you came to write Living an Orgasmic Life.

Xanet Pailet: Yeah, thanks. I have not always been a sex and intimacy coach, that might surprise you. But, I’m a healthcare lawyer by training and I spent most of my career in the legal healthcare field, running a variety of different organizations including having my own company.

I was also married for almost 26 years to very lovely man, I have two children but there was only one problem. The problem was that we were in a sexless marriage and that lasted for – I mean, really, it lasted for most of the marriage since we define sexless as having sex less and 10 times a year.

It was really about my own stuff but I didn’t realize that at the time that sex was really painful for me and I was very disconnected from my body and disconnected from my desire. It just made more sense not to have sex and then you know, eventually, our relationship started falling apart because that happens when you’re in a sexless marriage, you stop having intimacy, kissing, cuddling.

We separated in 2010 or 2011 and I met this guy on OkCupid in New York City because that’s where I was living at the time who had done a little bit of tantra and he introduced me to tantra and sacred sexuality and that was just a completely different way for me to experience my sexuality and that was my doorway to sexual awakening and healing and it was really powerful.

It made me, like, change my entire life, leave the practice of law, move to the West Coast and just really take a deep dive into human sexuality because I felt so passionate that sex was just a powerful doorway to personal growth and transformation and that there was so many people who were in the same boat as I was and had no idea what to do about it.

Sean Jameson: That’s awesome, that’s amazing. Did that transformation happen in just, you know, one day, one evening or was it sort of –

Xanet Pailet: No, I mean, it was a years long process, the actual night, the first night, he and I had a tantra activity, it’s actually the first chapter of my book, was very powerful for me and it was transformative in that it really started to allow me to look at sex through a different lens and also see the connection between sexuality and spirituality. And I just realized, wow, there’s something that I really need to have more of, I don’t know what it is, what this thing is but I need to have more of it in my life.

It really was – that night was very powerful but the actual transformation, the healing, the awakening happened over a several year period of time as I was doing my own deep work and training at the same time.

Sean Jameson: Awesome. Well, I’d love to talk more about that but first, I’d love if you could just retell a story you just told me about one of the people you came across, it’s a couple. I don’t know if you have time, if you’d mind telling a story about a man who wanted to be dominated and wear women’s clothing. Just a fascinating story.

Xanet Pailet: Yeah. This couple reached out to me saying that they were having problems with their sex life and they wanted to come see me. Whenever I see a couple, I give them a little client intake form and I ask lots of questions, fantasies, you know, what are your desires. And I always tell that anything in an individual session or an individual email is confidential.

I got his form back and he was like, “I have a big secret that I need to be able to be able to talk to you about and I don’t want my wife to know about it.” I was like, “Okay.” He and I had a session and you know, this was a guy who was a CEO of a company, super powerful guy.

He said, “You know, I’ve always loved women’s clothing and I want to wear women’s underwear when I have sex with my wife.” He actually started doing that with her, he was like, “But it’s more than that. I have these fantasies about being dominated, I have these fantasies about putting on like women’s costumes,” and you know, having this very rich fantasy life and he was having very vanilla sex.

Yeah, it was really interesting, it was a long process that we worked through and eventually, he told her about it and they’d been married a long time and she was you know, it wasn’t just this reason but for this reason and other reasons, their relationship was in trouble. They ended up separating and actually, that was very successful.

Sometimes separation is the best answer. For her, it gave her the freedom to do what she wanted and for him, you know, he had so much shame around this desire that he felt so bad about it and she made him feel so bad about it that he actually ended up dating a new woman who was totally into it.

She was like, yeah, she went out and they went to like the lingerie store and picked out lingerie for him, it completely transformed his life, right? It normalized it. It made him feel like, “Wow, I’m normal. I can enjoy this, there are women who get off on this.” It was great.

Sean Jameson: That’s great, that’s a happy ending to a very specific thing he was looking for and he found it.

Xanet Pailet: Yeah, totally, yes.

Sean Jameson: Okay, I’d love to dive in with some kind of serious questions about how someone – basically, it’s a little bit about your book, you know, how people struggle sometimes with wanting sex and I guess I’d love to start off by asking you why do some women – some people not enjoy sex and they end up in sexless marriages. What are the reasons for that?

Maybe a listener is listening in and they’re wondering, I’d love to know why am I not having as much sex as I want and what are the reasons for that?

Xanet Pailet: Yeah, that’s a great question. Well, there’s not one reason, there’s a litany, right? Of different reasons that people stop having sex but let me talk about some of the most common ones. Yeah, I think that one of the most common reasons that women stop having sex or don’t want to have sex is that I don’t think – I think most women have never really had continuous great sex.

I know that’s a big statement to make but I think it’s really true. I feel like you know, sex in the beginning is great, there’s new relationship energy, there’s like almost anything. There’s nothing that you can do that’s really going to screw that up most of the time but once that dissipates, which happens fairly quickly, things start shifting and you know, very often, a woman is not aroused enough and if a woman is not aroused enough before intercourse, it’s hard for her to orgasm. It may not feel that comfortable or pleasant.

30% of women – this is a really high statistic, 30% of women have uncomfortable sex and put up with it, right? I feel like that’s a huge issue. Most women are just not ready for penetration. There’s not enough foreplay, there’s not enough teasing and their body, it’s like women’s body is really need to be aroused, most women. Especially as they get older and especially as they are in longer, long term relationships, right?

They really do need to get a lot more touch. We’re very different than men. Most women aren’t getting it. When I talk to couples, they’ll tell me like yeah, foreplay is like five minutes. Well, five minutes is like nothing, you know? Five minutes is like, I just want to sit with my partner for five minutes and have dirty talk, that’s nothing.

That’s a big issue. I think that’s one of the reasons that women stop wanting to have sex, it doesn’t feel good. They’re not getting to high enough levels of arousal for them to really have very strong, potent, orgasms. I think that’s a big piece. [inaudible]

Sean Jameson: Before we kind of address these issues, you know, are there any other, maybe something like shame, could that be an issue?

Xanet Pailet: Yeah, I was just going to say. The next issue that really impacts people’s ability to enjoy sex or want to have sex is shame, right? The feeling that there is something wrong with me, that you know, I’m not supposed to enjoy sex, there’s a lot of people both women and men who were socialized to believe that sex is not around pleasure. I mean, in our sex education –

Sean Jameson: It’s procreation.

Xanet Pailet: Procreation, right? We’re here, I don’t know what they’re doing in Dublin but here in the US, we have all these abstinence programs and even the sex-ed programs that we do have are not talking about sex for pleasure. Certainly not for pleasure of the women.

Maybe for pleasure of the man, right? That helps layer on all of the shame around, I’m not supposed to have pleasure, can I give you an example of this? This is a really potent example.

Sean Jameson: Yeah, please do.

Xanet Pailet: I was working with this woman in her late 20s, early 30s who came to see me because she couldn’t have an orgasm. And as we started working, I actually had her in my office and I was touching her arm just to try to see, you know, could she experience sensation, she couldn’t.

Every time that – I could tell, her body was starting to feel a little bit of pleasure like I could just sense that, right? She would just shut down and start crying. I asked her what was going on for her and she said that she was having this memory of being a little girl, she grew up in – I think it was in Iran and she was driving with her mom in the car.

She saw – I think this was in the States when this happened, she saw this woman and man on a motorcycle and you know that epic picture of the women with her hair flowing and holding on to this guy, right? It’s very sexy picture. She said something like that to her mom like, “Oh my God, you know, I want to do something like that.”

Her mother slapped her and said to her, “That woman’s a whore and if you do that, you’re going to be a whore too,” right? From a very early age, she was like eight or nine, nine or 10, I can’t remember, she got the message that sex is bad and pleasure is bad and if you feel pleasure, you’re going to be a whore. And that is something that’s very powerful and was just in her body.

Her body just could not – she could not allow herself to surrender to actually enjoy touch.

Sean Jameson: Wow, that’s pretty tragic. Was there a solution. Was there a solution for her, could she kind of overcome it?

Xanet Pailet: She did overcome it, she definitely overcame it. We worked through the shame like this is where the sexual blueprint came in. Her starting to understand where this idea that sex is bad and pleasure is bad came from. And you know, once you start to understand that this belief is not your own, it’s actually imposed on you by someone else. It’s much easier to release it and think about, okay, what is my own belief.

She was able to release that belief and she was able to, we worked together, yes, she actually ended up, I remember, she sent me a text from Israel one day and she was like, “My god, I had the best orgasm all by myself.”

Yeah, she was definitely able to work through it and you know, start to learn to relax into the pleasure, to enjoy the pleasure, to start touching her body, to de-shamify her vagina like all of that. Her genitals and she was able to start having orgasms and great sex.

Sean Jameson: Great. Nice to have a good resolution. What are the things then can prevent someone from enjoying or wanting sex?

Xanet Pailet: Well, I would say that another really big piece is that people’s desires are met most of the time because they’re not even sure what their desires are, right? So many women do not know what they want. This is one of the hardest things for women, especially if they’ve not explored their own body. They just don’t know what they want.

Sean Jameson: I think that’s going to be very reassuring to men that even women don’t know what they want.

Xanet Pailet: Yes. Men have it so hard. I feel so bad for men, right? Every woman has a different arousal pattern and then you know, men should not be responsible for a woman’s pleasure. This is one of the things that I teach all of my clients. No, you, the woman needs to be responsible for your own pleasure, you need to know your arousal pattern. It’s not fair to ask men to do that. And you also give up a lot of your own power and your own desire when you abrogate that to your partner.

That’s a big piece, not knowing what we want and then the other part related to this is it’s called a Core Erotic Theme. It’s actually, this term was coined by Jack Morin and he was just a wonderful sex educator and he came up with this book called the Erotic Mind.

Essentially, your core erotic theme is the underlying emotion that you go to sex for. This underlying emotion shows up in every fantasy that we’ve ever had and a lot of women say, I don’t have fantasies which is another issue because everyone has fantasies. We just don’t say, we don’t realize that it’s a fantasy, right?

That’s a very important part of getting what you want is getting the emotion that you actually want and understanding that Core Erotic Theme and where it comes from which is often either something that happened to you in childhood that you didn’t get, right? Here’s an opportunity to be able to get it in a more empowered way or to repair some negative experience again in a more positive way.

And really understanding like what’s underneath it. Is the emotion about – you know, emotion in the big emotion word, is it about being seen? Is the emotion about being worshiped is the emotion being about wanting to be taken, to be submissive? You know there is a lot of different emotions that under lie sex and really understanding that helps you figure out what you want and then helps you and your partner create that together.

Sean Jameson: So what would you advise a listener to do maybe to just know every time they do get arouse, what the underlying emotion is or?

Xanet Pailet: I mean yes, most people can’t figure that out, right? Most of the time it’s physiological. So this would be more like I would say notice when you’re watching movies or you’re watching television and there’s a sex scene or there is some sort of sensual scene. Notice what you’re feeling and what is actually happening in that moment. Start to be aware of outside queues of what is stirring inside of you.

For a lot of women it might be the romance movie, right? Like, “Oh what is it about that? What is it about the romance movie?” Maybe that is what they want, they need to be romanced more by their partner. What does that mean? What does romance look like for you? What are the words that you need to hear? Do you need to hear you’re beautiful? Do you need to hear how much I love you. You see what I am saying?

Sean Jameson: I do.

Xanet Pailet: You really need to get to it and you can take it apart, yeah.

Sean Jameson: Okay so let’s say then a listener figures this out by themselves over time, they start to realize what that kind of underlying emotion or Core Erotic Theme is and let’s say they don’t have perfect communication and they can but they struggle to talk and completely freely and completely openly with their partner but they want to address it.

How would you advise them to maybe start addressing it with their partner that they need something perhaps their partner to do?

Xanet Pailet: Yeah, so maybe they needed to start a little slower not go directly into, “Oh this is my fantasy,” that –

Sean Jameson: Yeah, how come you’re not doing this?

Xanet Pailet: To tell you though, right. Exactly. And any communication is hard because there is a lot of shame, right? This is one of the big issues. This is why couples come to see me because they can’t talk about their sex life and usually what is blocking their inability to communicate is their own shame around sex, right?

And that is hard to work through without having a therapist or a coach or somebody working with you but there are things that you can do. So very often having face to face conversations can be very triggering for people. So I have a number of suggestions that I make to my clients. One is like write it down. It sounds crazy but send your partner an email, right? Sometimes working through – or a text but I would say an email, sometimes working in a different communication mode can be really helpful, right? Just to start the conversation.

It is the way we – it is kind of our default.  I can’t say this in person but it is probably something I can say in a text message. I wouldn’t suggest a text message. I think an email is better so you can maybe write a whole sentence actually.

Sean Jameson: Fleshing out, yeah explain it with emojis perhaps.

Xanet Pailet: Exactly, right. Another exercise that I often will have couples do is I have them just each write down, write down five things that you would like to do to your partner and write down five things that you would like to be done to you. Simple, right? And then exchange the list and see if you can find the areas where like, “Oh he likes that and I like that, great! This is something we can talk about.” Right?

It just creates communication so it is a way to start talking about things with hopefully not as much charge around it but communication has to happen. There are also actually some really good – there’s some nice apps like game apps which at the top of my head I can’t tell you the name of them but I wrote a blog post about it.

Sean Jameson: There is one I know that I recommend called Mojo Upgrade.

Xanet Pailet: I don’t know that one.

Sean Jameson: Well it is like a survey both you and your partner take independently. It is a list of maybe 200 things that you might be into kinks, fetishes, games. And then you both select if you are interested or not interested and then you both answer and submit those, each partner and then you get given back a list of what you both said you want to try and everything else is discarded.

So if you are embarrassed by something else, nobody knows if you ever decided to choose that because there is such a huge list of things. You are bound to find three, four, five, 10 things to try with your partner.

Xanet Pailet: Yeah, yeah that sounds very similar to one of the ones I was going to recommend. I cannot remember the name. But yes, an app like that would be great, right? So that it does neutralizes it, it shows the area as where there’s commonalities. So at least it sets the place to start, right? At least there is a place to start.

So yeah, so there are some good apps that are sort of fun little games that some of which have been created by sex educators that are really helpful. Just to break the ice and start making it fun because sex is supposed to be fun, not work.

Sean Jameson: Yeah, absolutely. I completely agree because this game, you could say it is a little bit goofy you know? I guess it wasn’t designed by a qualified researcher but it does get people talking and yeah, it keeps it fun.

Xanet Pailet: It probably was, I mean it is a great idea, right? Those are really good concepts to get people talking and to find the areas where there are things that you would both like which might surprise you, right? That happens all the time when I work with couples and they’re like, “Oh you like that? Yeah, I like that too. Great, awesome we have a whole new activity that we can do.” You know? And that is half the struggle right there.

To be in a long term monogamous relationship which is a whole other conversation, right? But to be in a long term monogamous relationship, in order to keep things going, you have to create [inaudible], you’ve got to change things up. When we do the same thing over and over again just like if we ate the same dinner over and over again, it would just get boring and you get to the point like, “Oh my god, if I have that dish one more time I am going to kill myself.” Kind of thing.

It is the same thing with sex like, “Oh my god if we do this missionary position thing one more time and you go down on me and this is our routine,” like –

Sean Jameson: And we turn the lights off every damn time.

Xanet Pailet: Right and we turn the lights off every damn time, I am just bored and I want to do something else. I’d rather check my Facebook Messenger or whatever, right? And that is really important for couples to keep the energy flowing is to get creative and change it up. There’s so many opportunities to do that but so many people just don’t know about it, don’t take any advantage of that.

Sean Jameson: So I totally understand how people can lose their sex drive and when the novelty wears off but then sometimes there’s health issues and menopause or someone has diabetes. Maybe someone has depression and they’re taking SSRIs.

Do you have any thoughts on that on how to address those sort of health issues as oppose to just playing novelty which is reasonably easy fix and on what couples can do to find a solution I guess?

Xanet Pailet: Yeah, so here’s what I think. I have a much wider definition of sex than penis-vagina intercourse, right? To me that is not what sex is, to me sex is anything that creates any type of erotic charge between a couple. And redefining sex helps take the pressure off of performance, which is a huge issue for women and men regardless of their health condition, right? It is just a huge issue. So there is lots of ways like you can have hot, delicious sex even if there’s a health condition.

You can have intimacy. There can be cuddling, you can explore tantra which is a great practice especially if intercourse is problematic or more traditional sexual activity is problematic, right? So there is a lot of different ways in which you can create the connection because it is not just about the act and especially for women. For women, it is really about the emotional connection. How connected do I feel to my partner because if women don’t feel connected they don’t want to have sex, period.

And that is a big reason why there’s a loss of desire, as well, that there’s all of these emotional stuff. There is anger, there is resentment, that’s built up for a variety of different reasons that completely holds us back from our desire.

Sean Jameson: Absolutely, yeah. Absolutely.

Xanet Pailet: So you know I spend a lot of time teaching people how do you touch, how do you enjoy touch, how do you touch for your own pleasure, how do you create the sexual tension that we need for good sex? How do you slow everything down? How do you tease your partner slowly, right? All of these modalities, all of these ways to express, our sexual desire, our intimacy, our affection is available regardless of the functioning of your penis and the functioning of your vagina.

And I think that is what people really need to understand and to realize is that they really need to look at sex in a much, much wider spectrum than what we currently talk about it as.

Sean Jameson: So what do you think the role of attachment theory plays in people’s intimate life?

Xanet Pailet: Yeah, so attachment theory is a really important part of intimacy and attachment happens –

Sean Jameson: Do you mind if we just back up a little bit for those listening that don’t know what attachment theory is, could you explain it to them?

Xanet Pailet: Yeah, I was just about to do that.

Sean Jameson: Oh sorry.

Xanet Pailet: It’s okay, I read your mind. So attachment theory happens – let me talk about attachment. Attachment is very important developmental milestone that happens between an infant and their caregiver in the very, very early years of life, from utero to 18 months. Actually people would say even in utero there’s attachment that’s happening or not happening and attachment theory was actually created in the 1940s or the 1950s by John Bowlby. A psychologist.

But basically, they look at how the caregiver takes care of and responds to an infant and there is essentially three, maybe four different types of attachment. The first one is secure attachment and in a securely attached situation, the caregiver takes care of all of the child’s needs. They’re very well attuned to the child’s needs. It cries, it gets picked up, right? So that child grows up knowing that their needs will be met. That’s secure attachment.

Sean Jameson: Okay, sounds healthy.

Xanet Pailet: Okay and healthy, right. Yes and about 50% supposedly about 50% of the population are securely attached. Then there is anxious attachment. So in an anxious attached situation, the caregiver is not as responsive. So the child doesn’t know like sometimes their needs are met and sometimes their needs are not met, right? So the child doesn’t know, “Am I going to get picked up if I cry or am I not going to get picked up as I cry?” And that creates a lot of anxiety for a child.

I don’t know if my needs are going to get met or not. That creates a lot of anxiety and the third type of attachment is avoidance and typically, babies with avoidant attachment styles are with caregivers who are abusive or who are smothering them. You know how some parents just smother their children?

Sean Jameson: Oh you can’t leave the house because the germs will get you.

Xanet Pailet: Right, exactly or entanglement. You know those babies will avoid. They do not want to intimately connect with somebody. So these are the childhood attachments and this transfers to adult attachment styles. It’s like everything we learned in childhood transfers to how we relate to people as we grow older and so all of those attachment styles show up in intimate relationships in later life and there are things that could happen.

You could be securely attached and then like for me, I was securely attached and then my dad died, when I was not even three years old and he was one of my primary nurturer and that just totally screwed me up. And then I became more avoidant. So these are very important styles. There are certain patterns like anxious people tend to be attracted to avoidant people because sometimes what we are doing is, we do this, we re-pattern what we know.

So you know my caregiver was always a little bit avoidant, so I am going to as an anxious person, I am going to approach somebody who is also avoidant. I mean this is just what we do.

Sean Jameson: So would the cliché here be the avoidant person would be someone who might not return your calls, kind of thing?

Xanet Pailet: Yeah, so the avoidant person is somebody who craves intimacy but is afraid of being hurt and it has a lot of abandonment wounds and so they’d rather just be by themselves, like their independent, are highly independent, right? “I can take care of myself. I don’t need you.” That is a traditional avoidant person and an anxious person is the person who is like, “Oh my god you didn’t call me yesterday,” like, “Oh my god do you still like me?” Right?

Always waiting for that other shoe to drop. So there is where the anxiety shows up. So yeah and these play out in our dating and in who we choose as a partner and then how we relate to each other when we get triggered.

Sean Jameson: That’s awesome. Xanet, I think this is a great place to leave the podcast. Thanks so much for coming on the show.

Xanet Pailet: You’re welcome, thanks for having me.

Sean Jameson: So if someone wants to get in touch with you and maybe even schedule a session with you, what is the best way for them to do that?

Xanet Pailet: Yes, so you should go to my website. And you can find – I have a free relationship and intimacy blueprint guide there, contact information for me, information about buying my book which is also available on Amazon, Living an Orgasmic Life. And that’s the best way to get in contact with me and I do know you’re Dublin, Sean and the podcast goes all over the world. So I work with clients all over the world. Most of my coaching is done virtually now.

Sean Jameson: Awesome, perfect. So for them to reach you is there may be a contact form on the side where to find your contact details there?

Xanet Pailet: Yes, there is a thing that says contact me and then I am very responsive. You can just send me an email and I will email you right back.

Sean Jameson: Awesome, Xanet thank you.

Xanet Pailet: Thank you Sean.