For Minnesota Monthly’s Jan/Feb sex feature, we talked with Minnesota certified sex therapist Lyndsey Fraser about the most common issues she sees in her sex therapy practice, generational shifts in attitudes on sexuality, and more. Then we asked a couple who works with Fraser about their own personal experience. What have they gotten out of therapy, and what advice can they share?
Illustration by Lisa Seitz
Why did you seek help from sex therapist Lyndsey Fraser? [Side note: Read Fraser’s perspective here!]
Husband: I would say the key challenge for us was communication. Our communication styles are very different. This challenge made everything in our relationship more difficult. We started seeing Lyndsey when our oldest child was 1. With a young kid, very different communication styles, and a bunch of stuff that accumulated throughout each of our lives, things were getting really hard for us.
On top of that, sex had been painful for my wife since the beginning of our relationship. It essentially rendered that form of connection off the table for us. I was feeling disconnected from her and like I had no options because we couldn’t really communicate about anything very effectively.
Wife: This was about 10 years ago. I was completely overwhelmed as a new mother. We both came from homes with divorced parents so we did not have many models of a healthy marriage. I instantly shut down and felt shame for any request my husband would make, which made basic communication about tough stuff feel impossible. We were not meeting each other’s needs and were not able to effectively communicate how the other person could meet our needs.
We stopped working with her for a few years after those first initial years. We reached out again after a few bumps in the road led us to be stuck again. She helped us through that tough time and it’s comforting to know we can always pick up with her right where we left off and she knows the whole story.
What is your background and have you used a sex therapist before?
Husband: We had tried other therapists before but neither of them were sex therapists. The therapists were not very effective for us mostly because I think my wife hated it.
As for our background, we both grew up in very conservative Christian homes where we were taught that sex was very bad and to be avoided at all costs. And then you’re supposed to get married and suddenly sex is good after you have been told it is bad for your whole life. There was a lot of baggage from our families of origin to get through in order to actually be able to talk about sex in a healthy, positive way.
Lyndsey has a way of talking about sex (intertwined with the larger relationship) that helps me feel like it is a completely normal thing to talk about. She is pretty nonplussed about whatever we bring up in her office in a way that allows me to feel relaxed when talking about things that would normally make me feel awkward or anxious.
Illustration by Lisa Seitz
What were you advised and how did it help?
Husband: Lyndsey helped us understand a pursuer-distancer pattern in our relationship. The more I would pursue a conversation with my wife, the more she would distance herself from me and the conversation. I had to learn to give her a lot of space in order for her to be ready to have a conversation. She had to learn to fill that space with the conversation. There were lots of fits and starts in the pacing of this. How much space is the right amount? This dance continues but Lyndsey has helped us have the tools to talk through it.
I think perseverance is probably the biggest lesson I learned over these last 10 years. We just keep showing up and trying to have the conversation. Eventually we saw progress but it was years of hard work to see that progress.
Wife: Lyndsey led us to discover more about our family of origin’s unhelpful patterns that made it difficult to move past when we worked on our relationship with each other. She gave us helpful books to read and exercises to work on. She pushed us to learn what drives us and our partner. She shared stories from her own life to help me see what is “normal” or happens in other relationships.
As our children got older, we started to notice extreme behaviors that led to an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) diagnosis for one of our children, followed quickly by my own personal OCD diagnosis. After seeking treatment from another therapist who focuses on Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), the gold standard treatment for OCD, which Lyndsey was not trained on, I started to dig out from under my high-functioning, yet severe anxiety. I ultimately decided to try taking medication to help with the anxiety and OCD, which made the biggest improvement for me. One year in with a fairly small Prozac prescription, I feel like I have had a new brain for a whole year now. It has helped me in so many ways with daily living but it also has allowed me to listen to and speak with my husband without the shame voice overpowering every conversation in my head.
A session with Lyndsey is a place to take difficult conversations where we get a bit stuck on our own. I often think, “What would Lyndsey say?” that could help us get through a tough talk. It is so helpful to have a third person to hear both sides and point out what each of us is missing or not realizing. Clearly when we’re not saying it the way our partner can hear, we need her voice to say it a little differently. Then the little lightbulb goes off and we can finally see it from the other one’s perspective.
What advice do you have for our readers?
Husband: The idea of seeing a sex therapist sounds kind of strange to me. I actually never really thought about Lyndsey as a sex therapist. She was just always our marriage therapist. I feel like this is on purpose. There were at least a couple reasons sex was dysfunctional for us. If Lyndsey just focused solely on how to have better sex, we would have failed. Instead, she focused on how to improve our communication, how to hear each other better, how to understand our families of origin better, how to see the way our own trauma shows up in a conversation better, how to give more space (or less space) better. The list could go on forever. She also talked about and gave practical sex advice along the way but that’s not the stuff that actually unlocked better sex for us. It was all the work on all the other stuff that eventually made sex (and our relationship) work much better.
My advice is to work on getting the relationship to work in healthy ways and it will make the sex part easier. That’s the journey we are on.
Wife: Everyone should see a therapist throughout their lives. Yes, everyone. It might take a long time and it can be extremely hard, triggering work but becoming a self-aware human is always worth it. Understanding yourself better helps you in all relationships and aspects of your life, not just a marriage, which is the most difficult, complicated, beautiful, vulnerable, intimate relationship! Also, it might take several different therapists with different specialties to make the biggest impact. Keep trying. Taking the first step of reaching out and meeting a therapist is the biggest hurdle to get over. Just push yourself to get it done, then if it’s not the right fit, try someone else.
This Q&A appears in our Jan/Feb issue as part of a longer feature on sex. Find it on newsstands now.
