Pleasure Uprising: Desire, Attachment, and the Sex You Actually Want

What do you do when you’re always the one initiating sex, and you’ve started to dread reaching out?

This episode is for anyone who is tired of waiting for their partner to want sex, and it starts with the belief that keeps most people stuck: that the fix belongs entirely to the other person.

You are not imagining that something is wrong. A partner who avoids the subject doesn’t make the problem disappear, and this episode is not about letting anyone off the hook. It’s about the part that is yours to chang...

A listener wrote in asking how to bring her male partner into her emotional experience of the sexual violence in the news. Especially without having to teach him everything first. I think many of you may have a similar question. So I made you an episode.

When sexual violence dominates the headlines, a lot of us end up either carrying it alone or doing the emotional labor of explaining our own pain to the people closest to us, with sometimes disappointing results. I wanted to offer a real way through that doesn’t ask you to choose be...

When nothing has worked to fix your sex life, it’s easy to decide nothing will. You’ve tried a few things, they didn’t help, and so you stop trying. I understand why. But that conclusion is a belief, not a fact, and it’s the belief that keeps people stuck in their relationships and sex lives for years.

I recorded this episode on a walk around my neighborhood, up the steep hill I’d been begrudging and semi-avoiding for months. Somewhere on the climb I realized the hill wasn’t the problem. My negativity bias was. The sam...

This episode is about autism and sex, autism and intimacy, and the myths that keep autistic people from seeing what they bring to relationships. It's the first in a series on autism and relationships. 

A pattern I see in my work with autistic clients and their partners is that they come to me sure that the autism is the problem. It's usually not. There are usually just some specific needs to be addressed and some specific strengths to capitalize on. Plus, most autistic people I work with benefit from even stronger doses of what neurotypical people benefit f...

"I want to create a relationship with my body, my mind, pleasure and intimacy that is rooted in my values & freedom, without guilt or shame. I want to have sex with someone I'm not married to and not feel dirty or immoral the next day." 

That's what my client Amber wrote on her intake form in June. She rated herself a 1 out of 10. Ten weeks later, she rated herself a 10. In this episode, Amber and I talk about how she made that giant leap. 

This is a conversation about building sexual confidence after divorce and le...

If you want to last longer in bed, the stopwatch is probably not your biggest problem. Most men who orgasm faster than they want to are carrying performance anxiety, and it shows up as tension in the pelvic floor, tension in the whole body, and a habit of pulling away from the person they're with.

Here's the thing. When researchers asked women whose partners came quickly what distressed them most, the top answer was not how fast it happened. It was his lack of attention and his focus on his own performance. This episode is for men...

If you ask your partner "do you want to have sex?" and they say no almost every time, the problem might not be desire. Seriously. 

It's the question. Responsive desire doesn't show up to that question. It shows up in response to something tangible happening that enables desire. So if nothing has happened yet, there's nothing there to say yes to. That's not rejection. That's an honest answer to a question that can't be answered yet.

Responsive desire is also the most common form of desire in long-term relationships, and in most adults over 40, regardless o...

You know what you struggle with in bed, and you're probably pretty hard on yourself about it. But if I ask what you're good at, do you go blank? Focusing on our deficits is just what brains do, but it costs us more than we think.

You're not broken, and you are not starting from zero.

I spend a lot of time on this show talking about what gets in the way. Shame, performance, the stories you absorbed about your body. That work matters. But there's a flip side that gets overlooked: you almost certainly...

I used to break up with the good ones. The kind, available, clearly-into-me ones. Not because I got bored. Because it made my skin crawl. I knew it was bad for me, but I didn't fully understand why I felt that way until I learned to feel worthy, twenty years later.

This is the final episode in my series on attachment wounds and how they shape desire and relationship dynamics. Today's is the worth wound: the belief that love has to be earned. We talk about how this impacts relationships and, among other things, turns intimacy into...

She wanted more sex with her husband. She flirted. She invited him to bed. She was not subtle. And he had an entire set of moves for avoiding it. Staying up working late. Taking a very long shower and hoping she'd be asleep by the time he came to bed. Acting harried, a quick peck, roll over.

He almost never said no out loud. He told me directly that he was avoiding saying it because he didn't want to hurt her feelings. He thought that was the kind version.

It was so much worse than...

Picture someone who says yes to almost everything. They're helpful, they're loyal, they always show up. And yet there's always some reluctance. A headache. A tiredness. They take forever to get out the door. Underneath all that yes is a wagon load of resentment about being asked in the first place.

This shows up in bed exactly the way it shows up everywhere else. They think they want intimacy. They say they want it, and they probably mean it. But when the moment comes, their body does something else. If you ask what changed, they may genuinely...

A man came to me because his marriage was close enough to over that they'd both used the word divorce. Underneath the resentment and the withdrawal and the fights about everything else was this: his erections came and went. Sometimes they softened partway through. Sometimes they didn't show up.

That is normal. It happens to men at every age. But he was so ashamed of it that he avoided sex with his wife for ten years. She had guessed, and she had told him more than once that it did not matter to her. He did not...

I used to chase accomplishment hard, and I dismissed soft skills and people skills entirely — mostly because I had no idea how to do them. I'd put on this dissociated charm self when I met new people, which wasn't connection at all. It was a disarming move. If I could charm you first, you couldn't get to me. Underneath all of it was a deep fear of being publicly rejected.

A close colleague of mine has the same wound and it looked nothing like that from the outside. Hers came out as passive aggression, eye rolls, indirect ju...

Around 40, I realized I felt disgust about my own genitals. I'd been carrying middle school bullies' words about female bodies in my head for more than thirty years without ever once questioning them, and it wasn't until I started trying to reclaim my own sexuality that it smacked me in the face. It's very hard to feel pleasure in a part of your body you feel bad about.

If any of that lands, you are in extremely good company, and I want you to know it is not personal, not yours alone, and not permanent.

...

One partner wants sex constantly and can't understand why they're being refused. The other has quietly stopped wanting it at all and feels like they're constantly being pestered. Most people assume these two have opposite problems. Often times, they don't. They have the same challenge underneath, but they are coping in different ways.

We're going beyond the standard "anxious or avoidant" here. Most of us learned early on whether care was something we could count on, and when the answer was unreliable, we did what smart, adaptive human children do: we picked a coping strategy and got...

Body shame is pervasive, especially for women but increasingly for everyone, and it gets in the way of much more than how we feel in a swimsuit. It gets in the way of presence, pleasure, and our capacity for real connection. This is the first episode in a series I'm doing on body shame. If you've ever been so in your head about how you look that you couldn't stay present with a partner, or with yourself, this one is for you.

I walk through where body shame actually comes from (spoiler: it's not truth, or you...

Part 2 of the Attachment Wounds & Erotic Emotions Series

Maybe you have a tendency to intellectualize or spiritualize your experience, but not always fully feel it. Or maybe you can only really arrive in your body when something intense is happening. This episode is about how that happens, how it shapes your erotic needs and the way you show up in intimacy, and what to do about it, if you choose. 

The safety wound is the earliest developmental wound we're covering in this series. It shows up in desires, in relationship, and in sex, plus in e...

That thing that turns you on but you've never quite been able to explain? Or the relationship dynamic you keep recreating? Those aren't random. And they aren't fully explained by your attachment style.

This is the introduction episode for a series on attachment wounds and erotic desires. Before we get into the specific wound patterns, I'm laying the foundation — what attachment styles actually are, where they fall short, and how to understand attachment patterns beyond the standard (avoidant, anxious, disorganized or secure) boxes. We'll talk about how our childhood experiences and specific attachment wounds tend to lead to...

If you're searching for how to be a better lover, chances are you're encountering a lot of opinions that aren't rooted in fact. Most of us absorbed a version of what makes a great lover without ever being taught it — from movies, porn, romance novels, and a culture that never corrects those images with reality. The result is a subconscious checklist that includes perfect technique, the right body, spontaneous chemistry, and orgasms that look like movie scenes. And most of us are quietly measuring ourselves and our partners against it.

Here's what the research actually says: none of...

You love your partner. You're pretty sure you're still attracted to them. So why does your body say no — and why does it feel so connected to the fact that you've reminded them three times this week to do one thing?

It is connected. The slow creep of feeling like your partner's parent is one of the most consistent desire-killers I see in my practice. In this episode I'm breaking down the three forms it takes, where each one comes from, and what actually moves the needle — whether you're the one carrying the household or the one wond...

Most people who are experimenting with power play and BDSM aren't doing anything extreme. They're just two people who trust each other, trying to "spice it up." But skipping the negotiation conversation because it feels like it has to be a mood killer is a rookie move that can lead to real problems. 

I'm not talking bruises here, I'm talking about emotional distance, shut down, and loss of libido. 

This episode is built around a real couple — smart, communicative, good at relationships — who did years of power play without ever having a proper negotiation conversation, becaus...

Sexual self-abandonment is what happens when we stop having sex for ourselves. We may or may not actually stop having sex -- we might be doing it for someone else. For their desire, on their timeline, their idea of what sex should look like, while our own wants, our own pace, our own boundaries quietly went missing somewhere along the way.

That's what this episode is about. How we get there — there are three really common pathways, and I've lived through all three myself — and more importantly, how to find your way back to your own body, your...

It's Pride Month, and I am celebrating with my dear friend and fellow feminist relationship coach Maggie Reyes by doing something I've been wanting to do anyway: sit down and talk about Heated Rivalry — the show, the books, why we love them, and what they actually teach us about real relationships.

Beware: There be spoilers ahead, matey. 

This is a fun one, and it goes deeper than fangirling. Maggie and I both coach on many of the dynamics this show depicts — vulnerability, shame, the cost of hiding your real desires, and what happens when someone final...

If you've been wondering whether your sex life can actually be different, this is the evidence.

This episode is like the before and after photos you've been needing that real people get real change. 

We're going into details about specific goals and what actually changes when people do real, structured work on desire, intimacy, and connection. Not inspiration. Not theory. Real people, real goals, real numbers — tracked from start to finish. 

In this episode:

You've solved harder problems than this. So why is this one still stuck?

This episode is for the high achievers who have done real work on themselves — the therapy, the books, the hard conversations — and still can't get traction when it comes to desire, intimacy, and their closest relationships. It's not because you haven't tried hard enough. It's because you've been using the wrong tools for the wrong system.

In this episode:

Most people who feel disconnected from their desire, their body, or their partner aren't broken. They're just exiled — from themselves. And nobody ever taught them the way back.

This episode is about what it actually feels like when you find it. The felt sense of coming home to your own body's sexuality — as a resource, a grounding force, and the place from which real confidence, real connection, and real intimacy become possible.

I was skeptical this even existed. Then my teacher demonstrated it on me with nothing but eye contact — and my body responded before my bra...

You don't have to join a compound to end up in a high-control group. Sometimes it starts with a neo-tantra festival. A weekend workshop. A community that feels like finally, finally, you found your people.

Anke Richter is an international cult journalist, author of the bestseller Cult Trip (HarperCollins), and founder of Decult — the first cult awareness conference in Australasia. She spent six years inside ISTA (International School of Temple Arts) before becoming one of its most informed critics. She's also researched Centrepoint, Osho/Rajneeshpuram, and OneTaste firsthand.

This is Part 2 of a series. Start wi...

If you've ever left a sacred sexuality workshop feeling worse about yourself than when you walked in — or heard a friend blame herself for not being "receptive enough" — this episode is for you.

Sexual polarity teachings are everywhere right now. They promise to unlock your feminine energy, reignite desire, and deepen connection. Sounds great. The reality is different. They're built on a foundation of made-up science, cultural theft, and a paper trail that leads somewhere deeply problematic. They are also actively causing harm. 

In this episode I'm mapping exactly where this ideology came from, who's profi...

You've done the work. Real work. Therapy, couples counseling, the conversations, the books. You understand yourself better than you ever have — and you still feel the same way in your body.

That's not a sign you're beyond help. It's a sign you've been using the wrong tools.

This episode explains why the things most people reach for — talk therapy, mindset work, even good communication — don't reach desire and embodied intimacy, and what kind of support actually does. Whether you're partnered or not, high-desire or low — if you want a more satisfying sex life, this episode is for y...

If you've been trying to figure out how to want sex more and nothing is working — this episode is going to explain why. And it's probably not the answer you've heard before.

A lot of people struggling with low desire or low libido have already done the reading. They understand the concepts. Their body still hasn't gotten the memo. That's not a character flaw. It's the wrong sequence.

In this episode, I cover:

Most people carry sexual shame so quietly and for so long that it starts to feel like a character trait rather than something that was handed to them. It isn't. Every flavor of shame — about wanting too much, too little, taking too long, not taking long enough, about your body, your history, your desires, your "low libido" — came from somewhere specific. And that somewhere is not you.

In this episode, I go through the full inventory of sexual shame I see in my somatic intimacy coaching practice, explain exactly where it came from (the culture, not your char...

Have you ever followed the "right" advice and ended up further from yourself?

That's what this episode is about — and it's also why we're now Pleasure Uprising: Desire, Attachment, and the Sex You Actually Want. The evolution of this show mirrors what happens in my practice all the time: when you stop trying to fit yourself into the frame someone else handed you, something truer emerges.

In this episode:

When a woman asks a male partner to "be more assertive in bed," those words are typically landing differently than she intends — and differently than he's hearing them. This is a gendered language problem, and it's causing real confusion, frustration, and disappointment in real relationships.

There is a real vocabulary mismatch about "dominance" and "assertiveness" rooted in how men and women are socialized differently as children around anger, aggression, and sexuality — and once you see it, you can't unsee it.

In this episode, you'll learn:

You've heard it a thousand times: "keep the spark alive, get back to how it used to be, recreate that honeymoon phase magic." But what if that's the wrong goal entirely?

Here's what nobody tells you: the honeymoon phase was a drug state — literally. A neurochemical cocktail of dopamine, norepinephrine, and nerve growth factor that made you want constantly, but didn't actually deliver the goods. Research shows that only 49% of women climax in new or casual encounters, compared to 70% in long-term committed relationships. You were having more sex, more urgently — and less actual satisfaction.

In...

BONUS: Teaching embodied consent at home—for your kids AND your relationship.

This special Podcasthon 2026 episode benefits Freedom Network USA, the largest coalition working on human trafficking in the United States. Prevention of sexual violence starts in families— and most of us were never taught how to practice true embodied consent ourselves.

In this episode, you'll learn:

Does your partner's touch make your skin crawl? You're not broken—and this is fixable.

Touch aversion is when affectionate or sexual touch from your partner feels wrong in your body— irritating, threatening, or like you need to escape. This can happen even with light, loving touch. 

This isn't about attraction. It's a nervous system response— and it's more common than you think.

In this episode, you'll learn:

Treat others the way you want to be treated? Great rule. Terrible sex advice.

In this episode I'm breaking down the principle that actually works — go at the pace of the slowest body in the room, with open curiosity — and why applying the wrong golden rule is one of the most common ways couples accidentally shut down desire without even realizing it.

I talk about what going slow actually asks of the faster-arousing partner (hint: it's not a sacrifice — it's new, but delicious), why the slower-arousing partner needs to develop real self-knowledge first, and what that a...

Ever notice how sometimes the answer isn't more information — it's actually doing something with what you already know?

Like when your car is broken, you don't actually need more information from the mechanic after a certain point. You need someone to get under the hood and DO the work. 

I recorded this episode because I kept seeing the same pattern: people who've been reading books, listening to podcasts, and taking courses about their desire gap for years — but nothing in their relationship has actually changed.

If that's you (or someone you love...

You've read the books. Maybe you've done therapy. You've tried scheduled sex, date nights, "just doing it." And you're still stuck.

Here's why: you've been trying to fix a layout problem with decorative solutions.

In this episode, I break down the kitchen remodel analogy— why desire gaps need something very different than what most people try. You need a comprehensive, body-based approach, not another book, toy, date night, or conversation about the problem. I'll walk you through what most of you have tried, why it hasn't worked (not your fault), why it...

If you're ready to work on your desire gap but your partner won't go to therapy or coaching, this episode is for you.

The answer to "can I actually fix this alone?" is yes — and today I break down exactly how individual work changes the entire relationship dynamic, even when only one person is ready to start.

Drawing on systems theory and real client stories, we'll cover why waiting for your partner to be ready is costing you — and why going first is often the most powerful move you can make. You'll hear two real stor...