Reclaiming Pleasure: How Sex Toys Can Support Sexual Healing
Guest contributor
Saskia Kalwinek
Written by: Saskia Kalwinek – Founder of Love Empowerment Clinic
I’m a Spiritual Holistic Sexologist dedicated to bringing together the mind and spirit and helping people create more fulfilling and meaningful intimate lives.
My work focuses on helping people improve the way they communicate, recognise and break unhealthy patterns carried from the past, explore and process childhood wounds, and let go of limiting beliefs. Through this work, I aim to support people in experiencing greater pleasure, happiness and fulfilment in their relationships and intimate lives.
I work with both individuals and couples, drawing on a range of therapeutic and holistic modalities, including Internal Family Systems Therapy, Art Therapy, CBT, mindfulness and Reiki, alongside other approaches tailored to each person’s needs.
I offer sessions both online and in person from my office in the CBD. In addition to individual and couples work, I facilitate retreats, workshops and events focused on relationships, intimacy, personal growth and spirituality. I am also a published author of books exploring dating, relationships and spirituality.
Visit Love Empowerment Clinic ↗As a sexual therapist, I often help people overcome sexual difficulties such as erectile dysfunction, vaginal pain during intercourse or low libido. Often, we start to discuss the use of toys and their significance for sexual health.
People are often concerned about the desensitisation caused by overuse of toys such as vibrators. It’s definitely a real thing and can happen if the toy is used incorrectly and with a poor mindset towards self-pleasure. In this article, I will talk about how to prevent desensitisation and, in turn, use toys in a way that can train your psychosexual bedroom skills and become a healing experience.
If you put the vibrator directly on the most sensitive parts, press the highest setting and masturbate with it regularly for prolonged periods of time, it can potentially contribute to desensitisation.
But have you considered a more mindful approach to self-pleasure?
Desensitisation happens not only through physical stimulation. People watching a lot of pornography or survivors of sexual abuse can also experience it.
So, what do those people have in common?
UNPROCESSED EMOTIONS
What if unlocking those blocked sensations, and achieving greater pleasure was about feeling more in your body in general?
Genitals are one of the biggest and most sensitive trauma and emotion processors that we have. So, let’s not treat them as just a source of pleasure and immediate gratification.
When you masturbate, try to feel it all. The pelvic area holds a lot of ancestral and repressed shame, disgust and guilt. Those emotions can also be linked with our past relationships, break-ups, traumas and insecurities.
When you masturbate, try to think of it as a loving ritual for your body, not just “getting off”.
Feel sensations not only in your genitals but all over your body. Maybe you don’t want to feel parts of your sadness, missing a past partner or feeling bad about your body? Feel it all without believing everything that the emotion tells you while you touch yourself.
Be loving and mindful about your touch, connect to your breath, and make sure that you breathe deeply and slowly into your stomach.
When you are using a vibrator, perhaps use it on the more external parts of the genitals and your body, such as the vaginal lips, thighs or butt. Later, you can slowly build your way in towards the more sensitive parts. Try to hold the vibrator further away, rather than pressing it so strongly against the skin.
When you just mindlessly “shove it in”, that is when the body tries to protect itself and starts to numb body parts so that you stop the activity. It picks up on too many emotions that are not being addressed. It feels used and oppressed instead of loved, peaceful, calm and erotic.
The same goes for the use of dilators in therapy for vaginal pain. In sexology, we call them “trainers”, not “dilators”, because they don’t actually try to dilate you; they try to train your muscles to relax and accommodate a penis inside.
To do that, you also need to train yourself and your mind to relax using breathing exercises and incorporate the trainers as part of your erotic flow.
Often, clients will perceive trainers as “just something that I need to push in”. Then, they might see some temporary effect, but they might start having even lower libido, desensitisation, the pain and contraction in the vagina might come back anyway when they stop using trainers.
That’s when they contact me, because nothing works.
I then explain that we can’t treat the body like a machine; we are not robots. If you don’t do foreplay with yourself, you don’t feel aroused or even just nice about this practice, your body will again perceive it as an intimate attack and start shutting off.
Be gentle. Don’t push. Work with your body and feelings, not against them. When you do that, your body will reciprocate with pleasure. But only if you are willing to feel all the other uncomfortable feelings underneath.
It’s OK to cry and process during those exercises! Vaginal contractions can be a result of pent-up trauma. To release trauma, we need to feel it all and purify with tears of understanding.