Intimacy & Desire: Awaken the Passion in Your Relationship by David Schnarch

maintain their own sense of self squeeze the life out of the people around them—whether they know it, or like it, or not. Earlier we saw how Robert tried to control Sally when he couldn’t control himself. He badgered her with the idea she was sexually defective. He tried harder to turn her on to rescue his sinking reflected sense of self.
    The same holds true if you can’t calm your own anxieties. If you can’t regulate your own emotional temperature, you’ll regulate everyonearound you to keep yourself comfortable. Think of a parent who can’t control her temper or anxieties. Everyone else in the family has to act accordingly to keep her calm and stable.
    Your inability to hold on to yourself upsets your partner’s emotional balance. The more your reflected sense of self drives you, and the more you look to others, the more your partner will feel oppressed and controlled. The more you try to regulate yourself through your partner, the more you trigger her refusal to submit to tyranny, which is part of human nature. This is why
normal
people have sexual desire problems.
    This is why I no longer preach compromise, negotiation, and consideration. Instead, I help people hold on to themselves. I’ve learned there’s more than enough power and control to go around, when you empower and control
yourself
. When clients first realize this, as you are now, they stop bickering, and pay more attention to what’s going on.
•
Moments of Meeting
     
    Mind-mapping can create a powerful psychological encounter known as an “intersubjective state.” It happens when you stop using mind-mapping to figure out how to present yourself, and instead allow yourself to be known. When you let your mind be accurately mapped, your partner can map that you are doing this. It creates the intersubjective state—something like “I’m seeing you, and you are seeing me, and we know we are being seen by each other, because we are both letting this happen.”
    In
The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life
, Daniel Stern describes intersubjective states as socially based co-created experiences of great overlap in partners’ phenomenological consciousness. Each person has a similar experience. Each is acutely aware of the other’s experience, and aware that the other is aware of having a concordant experience. 91 Stern says we are capable of intersubjective states by the age of nine to twelve months old.
    Intersubjective experiences with a partner are special moments of intense interaction, engraved in your mind. You often think back to them after they are over. They are shared events, something you’ve gonethrough together, which impact you as an individual and briefly define you as part of a “unit.” Co-created experiences.
Moments of meeting
. Experts believe intersubjective states play a pivotal role in how your brain wires itself, and continually rewires itself, throughout your life.
    Here’s why
moments of meeting
are special: Not all mind-mapping (sometimes called tracking) creates a profound intersubjective experience. Trackers often
mask
the fact they’re tracking the people around them, to
minimize
the possibility of an intersubjective experience. Perhaps the sweetest and most profound aspect—if not the essence—of sex, intimacy, and eroticism is two people openly mind-mapping each other and allowing themselves to mapped.
    You may have moments of meeting every day with people you barely know. But moments of meeting between lovers during sex have a special place in human existence. The same is true between parents and children. It always involves two people mapping each other’s minds, and allowing their own mind to be mapped.
•
Sometimes the best in you uses mind-mapping
     
    The following week Robert and Sally reported that they’d played out their pattern again. Robert made sexual overtures, and Sally was willing but unenthusiastic. Robert exploded, and Sally backed down one more time. They had sex, but the