9.15.19- Sex Talk with Dr. Vagdevi Meunier (Part 1)

Speaker 1: 

[inaudible].

Speaker 2: 

Welcome back to the armor men’s health hour with dr. mystery and Donnelly. Welcome back to the Alma men’s health hour. I’m dr mr your host here with my cohost Donna Lee. Good afternoon. Happy Sunday, everybody. Happy Sunday. Donna, you want to tell people how to get ahold of us? You can certainly reach out to us by phone or email. Our phone number’s five, one two two, three eight zero seven, six two. You can call us, um, during the week or you can send an email to armor men’s health@gmail.com. That’s armor men’s health ed, gmail.com. We’ve gotten some amazing emails every week. We get amazing emails, dr mystery, and we love those emails, so keep them coming today. I have a wonderful guest. Yes, that’s been a partner of ours in our practice for many years. Uh, this is a dr vag Davey. Um, when your woo woo, thanks for coming today, dr.

Speaker 2: 

peg Davey, she’s a, um, a licensed psychologist, a clinical assistant professor at the university of Texas at Austin, kind of our, um, inhouse queen of sex therapy. She has been the mentor of virtually all of the sex therapy students that we get through our office. And so thanks a lot for joining us today. You’re welcome. Thank you for inviting me. You know, as I’ve done practice and treated men with erectile dysfunction and couples with different problems and infertility issues and cancer, it amazes me that there’s not a psychologist in every urologist office. Thank you. I agree. Because it, there’s so much mental in what we deal with every single day, but more than that, there are some high level and confusing psychology issues that affect patients. Right. Absolutely. I tell a lot of my couples, you know, the biggest problem with sex is between your years and not between your legs.

Speaker 2: 

That’s right. And [inaudible] and that, that psychological kind of obstacles that people go through affects their decisions when it comes to cancer treatments, when it comes to whether or not to go through surgery for something, whether to start a medication, but for certainly it comes with the sex stuff. Right, exactly. And patients and couples have problems within their relationship all the time. And they go to a therapist for example. And uh, I gave a talk to their family therapists about five years ago and I, I had them raise their hand if they deal with sexual issues and only 10% did I know. Is that what you find too amongst most kind of like just kind of couples therapists?

Speaker 3: 

Absolutely. I think therapists are afraid to ask about sex, just like general medical professionals are also afraid to ask Spacek. Right. So somebody goes in for depression or anxiety, they see their GP and the GP never says to them, tell me about your sex life. Right. They just ask them about their mood and give them some medication and send them there on their way. But sex is such a huge part of what makes us feel good for sure. And so if we’re not having good, healthy sex in our lives, it’s going to affect everything else for sure. You’re going to feel so bummed out, you know?

Speaker 2: 

Absolutely. I mean, it’s, it’s ironic that so many men seek coupling behavior for sex. And then in a second, then no one, they have problems with it. They don’t really find somebody. And there’s some interesting research on that. So patients don’t bring it up with their doctors either. And the number one reason is they’re afraid it’s gonna embarrass the doctor. Oh wow. They’re not embarrassed. They’re afraid. It’s gonna embarrass you as the physician. So when I give talks to medical students, I always bring that up, make yourself, you know, very open to being asked these questions. And don’t be afraid if you don’t know the answer. Right. That’s right. That’s right.

Speaker 3: 

I used to teach sex therapy at Saint Edward’s university. I was one of the classes I taught and we would spend the first three weeks getting everybody comfortable, just saying all the words, you don’t work. You don’t want to be saying to a patient, right. How are you doing with your air actions? That’s right.

Speaker 2: 

You know, and, and, and when you’re asking like a and fertility couple about whether their ejaculate in the vagina, I mean, these aren’t like terms that they, that they’re aware of. And so we try to use colloquial terms that kind of, they understand. What I’d like to start talking about today first is about about couples. You know, you know when couples have trouble and they’re arguing or they’re having some, some issue and they, and you don’t talk about the sex stuff, I feel like that’s a big pink elephant in the room. That’s just being completely ignored. Right? That’s right. Exactly. And so when I’m, when I’m talking with counseling couples that are having trouble, but let’s say you have a couple that hasn’t been having sex for awhile. Breast cancer patients is a, is a great example. You know, as she’s going through therapy or going through reconstruction, oftentime intimacy is gone and so the sexual habit is lost. So I’d love for you to talk about sexual habits and, and what are some ways that we can break or expand upon sexual habits and, and what are some good ways to not get into negative sexual habits?

Speaker 3: 

Yeah, that’s a great question. You know, I could talk for an hour on this. I’m going to try to be brief. Basically the problem is that when we meet somebody and we fall in love with them and we have sex in the very beginning, we’re really open to having all kinds of different kinds of sex or we’re very adventurous, you know, I love you. You’re so cute and whatever you want to do, I’ll do right. And then in the beginning, first two, three months, Oh no, two weeks. Right. And so both partners are really willing to be adventurous and creative, and then they get together and you start to have sex with the same person 150 times. What do you do? Each of you begin to have a list of things that are okay to do. And what both people are doing is trying to manage their anxiety, their stress, how willing they are to do this, that the other thing.

Speaker 3: 

So over time, they both begin to shorten that list. They cross things off that list. Well, I can’t have blowjobs anymore, so I’m just not even gonna ask about that. And noon certainly can’t do anal, you know, nobody’s gonna. Uh, my wife is not gonna let me do that. Or my husband isn’t to want to do that, whatever. So they cross things off their list. Now five years later, you’re having sex with the same person. Now it’s a thousand times that you’ve had sex, hopefully. And your list has gotten so short that there’s only three or four things you do. So what happens with that is it’s to have healthy, creative, exhilarating sex. If there’s a rhythm and a pattern in the script,

Speaker 2: 

yeah, anything’s going to be [inaudible]

Speaker 3: 

and I think it’s going to be boring. So what they’ve done is they’ve, uh, highlighted or, or work towards anxiety management, trying to reduce anxiety and stress and reduce the list in order to achieve that. And then they begin to have erectile problems, arousal problems, orgasmic problems, and they’re embarrassed, but they’re beginning to look at the plumbing. They’re saying, what’s wrong with your plumbing? That you can’t have an orgasm? It’s not the plumbing. It’s the fact that your orgasmic threshold may have gone up because there’s only three things you’re doing, right?

Speaker 2: 

So, so in that comes some of the advice of like, well, maybe you just need a new girlfriend, right? Or a new boyfriend. This idea that you just need something else to get you excited again

Speaker 3: 

is a lot of misinformation about, Oh, because sex is boring. You should live in it up with a brand new person. Instead of thinking maybe what we’re trying to do in bed is what is not working and we can live in it up. I simply increasing that list going from anxiety, reduction to anxiety tolerance. When you begin to say, okay, I’ve had sex with you 250 times and it’s gotten very boring, so we’re gonna try something new, it’s going to create a little anxiety. But along with anxiety comes adrenaline. So the thrill of doing something new, pushing the boundaries, really experimenting is going to bring back a little erotic energy into the relationship.

Speaker 2: 

I love it. And you know, really just Aleve in just a small conversation between a couple. It doesn’t have to be a deep one about how, man, you don’t excite me in bed anymore. I think that, you know, really approaching it by, you know, let’s try something new. I love giving couples homework assignments, you know, I love that. I love this idea, especially when a couple hasn’t had sex for a long time due to some medical reason or something like that. Uh, I love trying to introduce small little activities that they do. And I think that having a sex therapist, you know, may may help some couples do that, right? Yeah,

Speaker 3: 

exactly. And a lot of them are really afraid to look for a sex therapist or go find a sex therapist. They’re afraid of being belittled or mocked or they’re afraid of, sometimes they’re afraid that they’re going to talk to a sex therapist and a sex therapist is going to want them to do really weird kinky things in bed. And the fact is most

Speaker 2: 

that it’s not going happen

Speaker 3: 

depends on the kinds of sex ever. There are weird kinky kinds of things you can do in bed. Yeah. But you know, most couples out there are trying to do something that’s more traditional, more vanilla. And I say, you can have awesome vanilla SAC if you know how to bring that erotic energy back in. And let me tell you, can I say one thing to men out there? Yeah. Men have to learn how to transfer their arousal patterning from visual stimuli to tactile stimuli. So what they do early, and this is not their fault, our society teaches men how to get a hard on from looking at something. So if you look hot, I’m going to get an erection. The problem is I’m not going to look hot as your wife for a hundred years, right? I’m going to lose it after. What am I learning today to find it?

Speaker 3: 

Honey, you look wonderful. I’m talking to my wife. So at some point, both of us, and it’s not just me, it’s not just the wife, it’s also the husband. We don’t look so hot. If we had a mirror on the top of the ceiling and we were watching ourselves having sex while I was on flat, we’re good. So what do we have to do? We have to go from learning how to get aroused from looking at things. This is why they, you start using porn to really learning how to get aroused from feeling thing. And we’re going to talk a little bit about porn, uh, right after this break. Donna, why don’t you take us out? I asked him, I’d like to take this moment to apologize

Speaker 4: 

my husband for all of this other, we didn’t have it. You can reach us at five 122-THREE-8076TY-52 hundred 50 times. I know I’m leaving with our email addresses. Armor, men’s health at G, mail.com that’s armor men’s health@general.com. Our website is karma health dot Tom and call us again during the week, (512) 238-0762 and thank you guys so much and we will be right back from twins commercial. Dr mystery wants to hear from you. Email questions to armor men’s health@gmail.com we’ll be right back with the armor men’s health hour.