Stella Resnick, Ph.D.is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Beverly Hills and the author of The Pleasure Zone: Why We Resist Good Feelings. She is a Past-President of the Western Region of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality and on the core faculty in the Somatic Psychology program of the Santa Barbara Graduate Institute. Stella’s specialty is in the area of relationships and sexuality. For many years, she has been training therapists in her synthesis of attachment research, somatic psychotherapy, and sexual self-discovery. She calls her work Embodied Process therapy and Embodied Sex therapy.
The interviewer: Arabella received her B.A. in Psychology from Stanford University, completed one-year’s M.A. coursework in clinical psychology, and spent many years in business management. A Buddhist student and practitioner for thirteen years, Arabella has written a book on Buddhist reform that is in its final editing stages.
For Information on Dr. Resnick’s Oct. 20-21 training, entitled: Embodied Process Therapy; An Integrated Approach to Body, Mind and Sexuality click here 
Arabella: How did you expand your personal Gestalt practice into a body-centered therapy?
Stella: I’ve been doing this right from the beginning—for over thirty years. (Laughs.) Having a body-centered focus was a natural progression from the kind of Gestalt that I had been trained in with Fritz Perls. I also worked with Laura Perls. They were both focused on the body, though in some ways Fritz was more so than Laura because he had been in analysis with Reich and was exposed to so much bodywork while he lived at Esalen. He was Rolfed by Ida while he was there, and there was a lot of bodywork going on and cross-fertilization among practitioners. I s pent many years at Esalen and lived there for a while. It was an exciting time to be exposed to it all. During those years I worked with Virginia Satir, Charlotte Selver, Stanley Keleman, Anna Halperin, John Pierrakos, Moshe Feldenkrais, and Milton Erickson, among others.
Another aspect of it is that I personally had some physical issues. I discovered that when I became anxious and stressed out that it affected my breathing and I couldn’t get a full breath. So I began breathwork right from the start. Besides Charlotte, I worked with Magda Proskauer in the Bay Area, went on to work with Leonard Orr and Sandra Ray in rebirthing and was in Reichian therapy with Phil Cucuruto. I also learned a great deal from practicing yoga and vipassana meditation. So, early on breath and body awareness were very much a part of how I did Gestalt.
Arabella: A phrase I’m seeing a lot in Somatic Psychology circles is “felt-sense.” What are the competing senses, and why do you so value the felt-sense specifically?
Stella: Besides the visual, there’s hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching (which includes being in touch internally). But we tend to overemphasize seeing. We think, “seeing is believing.” But there’s a lot of evidence to show that mental set determines what and how we see and distorts how we remember. When people disagree about an event, they may have witnessed the same thing but they perceived it through their own cognitive filters.
If you can focus people on becoming more aware of what’s going on internally and give them some methods for being accurate observers of present moment, felt-sense experience, then they have a closer connection with their own truth.
We’re fond of saying, “The body doesn’t lie.” It’s true. But the ability to be in touch with the body also depends on your filter. It’s important to learn to use the breath to come into the present moment and to blow off some of the tension that may influence our ability to observe. When we’re in the moment, and we’ve blown off some muscular tension that influences how we see, we can focus on what’s going on inside our body. At that point we can tune in to the intelligence of the heart, to the intelligence of the gut, to the true wisdom of the body! And when we do, the brain signals to us in imagery. We see a mental picture that corresponds to a feeling in the heart, in the gut, in the genitals, wherever. When we’re in touch with our wisdom in that way, we can respond with greater assurance because we’re more in touch with our intuitive self. Intuition involves an accurate responding to a situation with information we didn’t even know we had—until we tuned into the body and our heart and our gut told us.
Arabella: How does the “Embodied Sex therapy” you practice differ from more traditional approaches to sexual issues?
Stella: Well, first of all, I see sexuality to be a core aspect of the true self. That’s one of the earliest places where, as biological entities, we come into potential conflict with society in the form of our parents. It’s one of the first places where we learn to inhibit ourselves in order to get love and approval.
I see the sexual self as going beyond making love or having a good sexual relationship. I see it as something that is core to our self-determination, taking back our bodies and being true to our true self.
Most sex therapy focuses on being able to do it. It’s performance-focused– being able to have an erection or an orgasm, or having sex a certain number of times a week. I see sexuality to be not just about performance but about experience. What is actually taking place inside your body? How do you feel about yourself as a sexual person? Can you relax? Can you tolerate pleasure? Being sexual involves not just your genitals, but your heart, your gut, every part of your being. So with clients who have sexual concerns, I’m focused not just on helping them have a better sexual performance, but to help them have a total body experience that involves how they feel about themselves and their partner but also about being able to take pleasure in an emotionally gratifying sexual connection.
Arabella: How do you ease your approach to sexuality with those who are less comfortable with sexuality, or who have been hurt by it?
Stella: I do see a lot of people who want to focus on sexual issues. But I don’t insist that when people come to me with an issue other than their sexuality, that they have to deal with their sexual selves. I think there’s a hierarchy of concerns that people bring into therapy. I consider it respectful to honor their concerns and not to tell them that what they’re concerned with is not really the issue; that it’s something else and that something else has to do with my own agenda. Yet no matter what a person is dealing with, I sometimes do, in a matter-of-fact way, make a comment about sex when it’s relevant because sexuality is a part of life.
Generally speaking, as people become more aware of their body and tension patterns, particularly when they are dealing with relationship issues, they start to see that their sexuality is an important part of their growth in their relationship. If they start to become more physically intimate, and want to open up their body energetically, that’s when we go into a kind of a second stage of their growth process which has to do with recognizing the larger ramifications of the issue and how working on it is embedded in the larger field of self-knowing and personal evolution.
Arabella: A tougher version of the last question pertains to one of your written statements: “As O’Shea (2000) has pointed out, the failure to deal with sexuality in psychotherapy likely has more to do with ‘fear and uncertainty’ among psychotherapists than it does with sexual issues being irrelevant to the clients and trainees with whom we work.” How can you ease the psychotherapeutic community into becoming comfortable addressing their clients’ sexuality within therapy?
Stella: Well, that’s really a wonderful question and a serious one. First of all, I think we need to train our clinicians better with regard to sexual issues. Clinicians typically do not get sufficient training when it comes to sexuality. Secondly, there isn’t a lot of cross-pollination between different members of the field. You have the field divided up into different approaches and specialties: psychoanalytic, Gestalt, bioenergetic, and a lot of different body approaches. Each group often has its own particular take on sexuality, and in many cases it’s an antiquated take based on old cultural biases.
For example, I recently got something in the mail from a training institute offering a program for clinicians that talks about perverse and non-perverse sexuality. What loaded terms! Well, the field of sexology abandoned the terms “perverse” or “perversion” to describe non-mainstream sexual practices over twenty years ago.
When sexologists talk about non-mainstream ways of being turned-on sexually or engaging in sex, we talk about paraphilias, which is less judgmental, and we think in terms of sexual diversity rather than deviance, unless the sexual behavior causes distress or is foisted upon another without mutual consent. So, I think it’s important that the various subsets of the field of psychotherapy get an education as to what is the cutting-edge research in the field of sexuality, sexology, and sex therapy. It’s time to learn about what is the contemporary thought on some of these big issues about sexual orientation and sexual preference.
Finally, I think it’s important for clinicians to get real training in sexuality just to have a greater ease talking about sex when a client raises sexual issues. I had a couple who came to see me after being in couple’s therapy with another therapist. The woman said that she didn’t want to bring up sex with the therapist until she felt comfortable and trusted her. When she did feel comfortable enough to raise a sexual issue that was troubling her, the therapist immediately responded – and this is how the client put it – “Oh, I don’t deal with sexual issues. I’ll refer you to somebody else.” My client said that the therapist’s tone of voice changed, she became really uptight, and the client “felt ashamed for having raised those issues and having disturbed her like that!” She went on to say, “It’s such a pleasure to be talking about all these issues and not to have any shame – to feel so completely comfortable with you, like I was talking about the most natural thing in the world because, of course, I am.”
Arabella: You wrote, “Traditional psychotherapy simply puts too much faith in verbal communication and conceptualization.” What do you perceive as the relationship between verbal and non-verbal communication?
Stella: People do want to be able to understand themselves, so there is a desire to be able to narrate their story in a way that makes sense to them. And we know from the attachment research that being able to narrate a cohesive story is an important part of becoming more secure. But it’s just not enough. Of course, the professional organizations – like the American Psychological Association –endorse Cognitive Behavioral Therapy as the evidence-based psychotherapy. Essentially, they say change your thinking and how you act and that will change how you feel. But, to me, that’s only half the picture.
The other half of the picture is somatic-experiential. That means that we not only want to be able to conceptualize our stories but we want to be able to feel it in our hearts, in our guts, in our bones, in our muscles – and to recognize that the story and memories (implicit and explicit memories) are locked in our bodies. We operate a lot automatically by conditioned reflex – particularly when we’re in a state of tension, distress, alarm. So, if we want to be able to take voluntary control over some of those involuntary habits, the breath is the first place where we can do that. The breath is an involuntary behavior that can be subject to voluntary control. So if we want to have more choice in a situation where the tendency is to respond automatically, the first choice to make is to start taking deep slow breaths and pay attention.
Like CBT, Somatic psychotherapy is also an evidence-based therapy. Cutting-edge brain neuroimaging and developmental neuroscience completely support body-based psychotherapy. To me, comprehensive psychotherapy— the full picture—is cognitive, behavioral, somatic, and experiential. Now you’re covering all the bases.
Arabella: You have asserted “playing together” is “an essential for anything erotic to happen.” How do you elicit play from clients and teach them to elicit play from one another?
Stella: Well, I’m playful. I don’t miss an opportunity to help clients take a step back and be amused at the situation or to interject some lightness where there’s heaviness. I’ll even use that term as a way of focusing in; I’ll say, “Wonderful, I think this is something we can work more deeply on. “Let’s play with it.”
Now, what do we mean by play? People tend to think of play as something that’s frivolous and to be contrasted with work, which is more meaningful. There’s the serious, important stuff and then – because you’ve worked hard – you get to play. What play really is, is doing something for the sake of enjoying it. You do it for the pleasure of doing it. Even if it’s work, you can still do it in the spirit of play. So, how do you find an enjoyable way of doing something? You do it by relaxing, being present in the moment, being interactive and receptive at the same time, seeing the humor in it, seeing the larger picture of it, being curious and creative with it. If you deal with issues that way in the therapeutic situation, in the spirit of openness and sharing the pleasure of discovery, people can take those resources outside of the therapy session.
Arabella: You also speak of “pleasure-resistance” as a widespread problem in our culture. How can we address this problem as a society?
Stella: I think we need to elect different people into office. (Both laugh.) Well, you see pleasure-resistance is one of the major ways in which our society conditions us to be obedient by withholding joy and pleasure and doling it out as a reward for hard work and toeing the line. As children, we learn to push down our good feelings in order to be loved. And when we do that, we can actually develop a fear of feeling too good—what Reich called pleasure-anxiety. On an unconscious level there a fear of slippage—the slippery slope so many people worry about. If you enjoy yourself too much you will be immoderate, and you’re going to pay for it. Something bad will happen to you or you’ll feel guilty. But pleasurable experiences enhance the immune system and contribute to our physical, as well as emotional, health. The more capable we are of embracing good feelings, of allowing energy to flow through the body, of being energized and excited and enthusiastic the more likely we are to resist or recover more quickly from illness. People don’t even have a lot of words for positive feelings! Many of our client’s vocabulary when it comes to emotions is limited to: tense, uptight, anxious, angry, and depressed. When people aren’t feeling bad, and I ask, “what are you feeling?” they often say, “I feel okay.” Well, okay is not descriptive. I ask them to come up with some positive words for their positive feelings, like energetic, relaxed, curious, happy, enthusiastic, courageous, or excited.
Arabella: I’d like to throw in a commentary-based question because I’m fascinated by this issue. You mentioned in your article the research that shows significant gender differences in sexuality: that male sexual desire is more genitally focused while female sexual desire is more contextual (or relational.) Rather than judging these differences – it seems that appreciating them, and sharing in growth in the other’s perspective would be an appropriate response. How universal are these differences (are they cross-cultural) and how do you think that we should work with, or view, them?
Stella: The evidence is that it’s cross-cultural – though it may relate to a variety of factors that are not just biological but social as well…how males and females are conditioned in societies. But even in same-sex relationships, there are still differences that are similar to these kinds of gender differences. One person is more genitally focused while the other can’t be responsive if there are unresolved relationship issues. We know that testosterone is the hormone of desire for both sexes. So, if we’re talking about heterosexual couples, we may find that men, who naturally have more testosterone than women, more often carry the responsibility of maintaining the sexual relationship with their spouses. On the other hand, lately I’ve encountered a number of women who complain that their men are not interested in having sex as much as they are. Who are these women and men? Perhaps, these women are producing more testosterone because they are taking more risks with their lives. Anybody who is more enthusiastic about his or her life is generally going to be secreting more dopamine, which tends to release more testosterone into the bloodstream. Maybe the man just has a lower sex drive. Maybe he’s angry and not talking about it, or he isn’t speaking up about his sexual preferences. So, even though there are those biologically based gender differences, there are also a lot of individual differences when it comes to sex.
Arabella: What makes SBGI an appropriate venue for teaching the issues and views we’ve been discussing?
Stella: SBGI is the absolutely perfect place for me to be teaching these views. Like myself, SBGI has an evolutionary perspective. Starting with pre- and perinatal psychology, SBGI sees the connection between what happens at conception, to the developing fetus, to the developing infant, through childhood, adolescence, youth, middle age, and old age. An evolutionary perspective is one that covers the entire life cycle of the human being and relates to all of these internal events that take place—in the interactions between our physiology, our psychology, how we adapt to stress and how this impacts moment-by-moment experience. SBGI has been a fertile setting for my work. The enthusiasm in my classes has been very supportive and reassuring to me and I feel more supported at SBGI than I have felt in any other institute that I’ve been involved with. SBGI also is an intellectual community and a nexus of like-minded practitioners to share work and ideas through faculty seminars and opportunities to meet once another. The collegial connection I’ve experienced at SBGI has been a great blessing for me.
Arabella: And now the final question: You write about the creative experiment as “an important method for accessing an individual’s intrinsic resources.” Could you leave our readers with one exploration of their sexuality – within or outside partnership – from which they might learn?
Stella: Well, everything begins with conscious breath. So, the first thing is to take a deep breath and feel the breath as beginning in the belly, and moving up the torso as you inhale, widening the ribcage, and lifting the chest. When you get to the top of your breath, blow out through slightly puckered lips, all the way down to the bottom of the exhale and use your abdominal muscles to press the belly in and push the last bit of air out of the lungs.
To feel your sexuality, to feel turned on – particularly genitally – you need to relax the belly because if the belly is tight, no blood is going to get down there, and without vascular engorgement you can’t get turned on. Feel the energy flowing down into the pelvic area, into the genitals, thighs, and buttocks so that the entire pelvis and pelvic floor can become energized.
If you want to get in touch with your sexuality get a mental image – and take whatever image comes to mind – of a time of great sexual pleasure, what you might consider a peak sexual experience. Just get a mental picture of that, and allow that picture to play on your inner screen as you breathe into your pelvic area – as you allow yourself, with every breath, to let go and feel the energy streaming down into that area. And as you’re doing that, feel how grateful you are for having had such a lovely experience, that you can revisit it. See if you can feel that gratitude in your heart. Feel that energy, now going up the torso, into a relaxed and open heart. As you image this lovely experience say to yourself, “Thank you. Thank you.” And now take a quick inhale and exhale through your mouth in a few deep sighs and feel how glad you are to be alive at such a vital time on our planet.
Arabella: I’ll leave it there – thank you Stella.
Stella: I want to add one comment. For so long in the field of sexuality, the focus has been on sexual problems and dysfunctions. But nowadays, the focus is shifting and we’re now more interested in what we can do to define and foster sexual health. In the field of somatics, I think we can do something similar and explore a greater focus on somatic health. We might think about somatic health as a daily practice of being tuned into ourselves – periodically dipping into our ongoing feeling process. When we feel tense and uptight we can take some deep breaths and blow out some tension. There are a variety of ways we can practice what I call practical somatics: everyday processes that take so little time but that contribute to our somatic health. As therapists, one of the best things that we can do for our clients is to help them develop daily practices that contribute to their well-being so that their major opportunities for healing don’t just take place during the therapy session, but also during their everyday lives. Thank you too, Arabella, I really enjoyed doing this interview with you.
For Information on Dr. Resnick’s Oct. 20-21 training, entitled: Embodied Process Therapy; An Integrated Approach to Body, Mind and Sexuality click here
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