Restore the Joy of Touching

It can be difficult to enjoy tactile pleasure without feeling a certain kind of pressure building inside your body. And, let's be clear, I'm not talking about the erotic buildup that precedes orgasm.

For many people who experience difficulty being touchy-feely, this pressure might sound familiar. If you've ever found yourself growing tense during an otherwise pleasant and intimate experience, you might want to know more about the concept of sensate focus.

What is sensate focus?

"Non-demand pleasuring" is the name of the game in sensate focus, according to Lawrence Siegel, M.A., C.S.E., a clinical sexologist in Boynton Beach, Florida. He has found the sex therapy technique to be helpful when working with couples and individuals who have dealt with issues surrounding touch and pleasure.

"One of the most difficult things for people to do, and for some people, it's almost impossible...is to just passively experience and enjoy touch," Siegel said.

Siegel explained that people often feel compelled to think of sexual acts as inherently reciprocal. Therefore, enjoying pleasurable touch is often challenging for people because they are mentally distracted by an unspoken, and not necessarily shared, sense of obligation. He said it's difficult, but important, for people to be able to just receive.

"That's really the goal behind sensate focus: to just learn how to be in your body to experience receiving touch," he said. "Not having to do anything—that's the 'non-demand.' There's no goal here."

Carol Ellison, Ph.D., is a California-based clinical psychologist, lecturer, and author specializing in sexuality, intimacy and sexual development. She describes sensate touch similarly but also emphasizes that it involves both applying and receiving touch.

"Sensate focus is essentially taking smaller aspects of what could be a sexual experience and focusing in a mindful way on perhaps one aspect of touching—maybe without trying to stimulate sexual arousal, but rather just to experience the touch," Ellison said. "So, in some ways, this puts a structure around touching so that one can experience just creatively and spontaneously within that structure."

Putting theory into practice

Sensate focus isn't about sex, but there's a good chance it will improve how couples and individuals experience sexual pleasure.

In fact, Siegel usually assigns sensate focus to couples along with the caveat of a ban on intercourse during the time they're doing touch exercises. Couples often take this warning with a laugh since the lack of sex is frequently a primary reason for participating in therapy in the first place.

"Almost every time I say, 'This week, you're not allowed to have it,' they come right back the next week with that sheepish grin," Siegel said.

Whether it's reverse psychology—the intense desire to have what's not allowed—or a different interpretation of the sensate touch exercise itself, the desired end result is achieved: better sex, regardless of whether it's in spite of or due to the instructions of the therapist.

Ellison explained that it's all about reimagining the rules of engagement for touch and physical pleasure.

"It might be that breasts and genitals are off-limits on this particular occasion, and the one who's receiving the touch gives feedback only to keep the other one from hurting them or causing something that they [the recipient] are not enjoying," Ellison said.

The specific application varies and can vary wildly from couple to couple or even among individuals. The idea is simply to put the emphasis on a tactile experience, without any expectations or objectives looming over the people involved.

Saving space for sacred sensation

It can be very difficult to form adult relationships and bonds that facilitate interpersonal closeness on a physically affectionate level. When we discover such a relationship and the tactile familiarity eventually becomes lost in some way or another, this can feel like a devastating blow to the relationship and the hearts of the people who make up that relationship.

So much of our communication, sexual and otherwise, is nonverbal. Our interpersonal touch should be playful in addition to being safe—at least, as playful as we would like it to be at a given time.

But playfulness can feel like a lot of work sometimes. Sensate focus is an idea people can incorporate into their relationships or personal practices to put the enjoyment back into the acts of touching and being touched.

"It is often helpful for couples who are caught up in the performance of sex to change the rules somewhat and take away the goals—or change what the goals might be," Ellison said. "Maybe it's just to have the experience of exploring your partner's body with your hand and feeling the textures and feeling the changing temperature."

The human body is, in many ways, like a toy or tool for which we've never been properly trained. Even our favorite experiences can become perfunctory over time when placed in the rigors and general contexts of everyday life. So, if we are able, it's important to preserve or restore the joy that comes from touching and being touched by someone close to our heart.