To go a step further, couples might also try a variation in which they take turns saying, “I love myself just the way I am,” and then say the next thought that comes into their mind. This will allow them to trace back to its source the judgment that was being projected onto the lover.

*113/196/1*

“For me? Really?” “That’s right.”

She tries it on and primps before a mirror. “So you think you can buy my love?”

“A bandit doesn’t have to buy anything. He steals it.” He takes her into his arms and steals a kiss. “Please,” she murmurs. “Be gentle.”

He undresses her and himself, then makes love to her in a more authoritarian way than ever before. He can do this by using a different variation of foreplay (perhaps doing something she has requested but he has heretofore felt squeamish about), insisting on a different position, or just being a little more forceful. Afterwards, the couple will find that this game has either invigorated their sex life or has brought up feelings that stand in the way of a better sex life. Even in cases where the game at first seems corny and either the wife or husband abandons it, good results can eventuate. The game will put the husband in touch with both his fear of self-assertion and his need for his wife’s approval. It will put the wife in touch with her fear and loathing of sex and her deep-seated need to be swept away so that she doesn’t have to feel guilty about doing something “dirty.”

*88/196/1*

When two people like my patient get together, you generally have two people who have suffered from some kind of traumatic loss or some kind of emotional abuse. Naturally, they then displace their depression onto their primary relationship. Having been made to feel unworthy, they make their spouse feel unworthy; having not been soothed adequately, they have no sympathy for their spouse; having been emotionally abused, they emotionally abuse their spouse; having been deprived of attention, they are themselves depriving.

The games in this chapter are designed to deal with the negation that such people continually act out.

*63/196/1*

The agent repeats these instructions several times, so that the effect borders on the hypnotic, and asks both husband and wife separately to repeat the instructions verbatim. Only when they are able to do so does the agent leave.

The couple find themselves thrown off-balance in many ways. They are lost physically, stuck in a strange environment without any idea of where it is located. They also are in a no win situation psychologically, because if they do not have sex in three new ways, they’ll lose not only their money but also the game—yet if they do have that sex, they will be forced to do something they have been studiously avoiding precisely because it is anxiety provoking. They are literally deserted, with nobody to turn to—except each other.

*38/196/1*

The games in this book are designed for use as an aid to becoming unblocked sexually and emotionally. They can be used in conjunction with therapy or with the assistance of a doctor. They can be used by therapeutically sophisticated couples for a self-directed form of sexual therapy. Or they can simply be used for fun.

*13/196/1*

Though not directly comparable to the data from the Hunt study, the median frequency is calculated at 8.5 times per month, or about twice a week. This is nearly identical with the medians which Hunt obtained for the twenty-five to thirty-four and thirty-five to forty-four age groups. Since three out of four women in the Redbook sample were under thirty-five, the frequencies for the two groups appear to be very similar.

Obviously median frequencies are only one kind of indication of how often married people have intercourse. Individual variation, as one would expect, was considerable in all the studies. For example, even in Kinsey’s younger groups, a few individuals had marital coitus less often than once in two weeks, while in every age group, from the youngest to age forty, some persons were having marital coitus on an average of four times a day, seven days a week (Kinsey and others).

Neither Kinsey nor Hunt found a relationship between frequency of coitus in marriage and either education or occupational status. Religion, however, was related to frequency in both studies. Kinsey and others reported that less religious husbands had intercourse 20% to 30% more often than did religious mates; such an effect was not found for women, however, leading Kinsey and others to remark that the wife’s coital rate was more likely to be tied to her husband’s desires than to her level of devotion. Hunt found the opposite effect: churchgoing females reported a lower frequency of marital coitus than did churchgoing males or non-churchgoing males and females. Hunt thought that this, too, might reflect the greater influence that wives now have over marital sexual activity. The frequency of sex for married women now might reflect more closely their own wishes than their husbands’ desires.

Although intercourse with the spouse is the chief sexual outlet for married people, it falls far short of being their only outlet. Kinsey and others found an interesting relationship between social level and percent of the total outlet which the married male derived from intercourse with his spouse. For the lower group, marital intercourse accounted for 80% of the outlet during the early years of marriage, increasing to 90% by age fifty. College-educated males on the other hand derived 85% of their total outlet from their wives during the early years, but only 62% by age fifty-five. Kinsey thought that one explanation for this dramatic decline was an increasing dissatisfaction “with the relations which are had with restrained upper level wives”.

Wives, likewise, derived only part of their sexual outlet from marital coitus. The maximum part of the sexual outlet derived from marital intercourse was 89%, reached between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-five, after which the percentage steadily dropped. By age sixty, only 72% of the total outlet of the married women was derived from marital coitus (Kinsey and others).

A recent study (Edwards and Booth) provides evidence that marital intercourse tends to be discontinuous for a sizeable segment of the population. Their stratified probability sample consisted of 144 men and 221 women who had been married between one and twenty years. As part of a two-hour interview, subjects were asked whether intercourse had ever stopped for any reason other than pregnancy, and if so, why and for how long. One-third of the respondents indicated that they had experienced such a cessation, the median length of which was eight weeks. Significant differences emerged between the men and women reporting such cessation: for the men, social background factors such as recent emigration from Europe, being non-Catholic, and lack of employment for the wife were important; for the women, avoidance of intercourse was related to factors in the marriage: perception of the husband as dominant, as not affectionate, or as threatening to leave home. The only common factor for the two sexes was perception of a lack of privacy. Self-reported causes, however, were the same for both men and women: surgery, illness, marital discord, and type of birth control used were some of them. The incidence of discontinuity in marital sex for this sample suggests that the phenomenon is by no means uncommon and enhances, as the authors point out, the sense of intercourse as a symbolic communication between spouses who are otherwise distant from each other’s true feelings.

*75/187/5*

Epidural anesthesia is like having an IV tube hooked up to your back, instead of to a vein in your arm. A local anesthetic enters the body through a tiny plastic tube, inserted between the vertebrae of your spine near the small of your back. The epidural anesthetic (often used to provide pain relief in pregnant women during labor) bathes the area outside the membrane lining the spinal cord, temporarily numbing the nerves in your lower body. Unlike spinal anesthesia, which comes in one dose, epidural anesthesia can be given continuously. The area of numbness can be adjusted; so can the degree of pain relief. After surgery, this tube can also be used to administer pain relief for the first few days. One point about epidural anesthesia: It reduces the likelihood of blood clots in the legs, perhaps by boosting blood circulation in the legs during surgery.

*108\201\8*

Prostate cancer grows relatively slowly. It can stay localized, or confined to the prostate, indefinitely—so a man can die with prostate cancer, and not of it. But once it escapes the prostate, cancer’s growth is relentless. It can no longer be cured. And once it has spread to bone, a man’s average life expectancy is about three years.

In studies of watchful waiting in men with small, moderately well-differentiated cancers (Gleason scores from 5 to 7) that appear to be localized to the prostate, this is what happens over time: In ten years, 40 percent of these men will have cancer that has spread to the bone; by fifteen years, 70 percent of these men will have cancer spread to bone.

What does this mean to you? Once again, we go back to your age, general health, and stage of cancer.

*100\201\8*

*92\201\8*

In Sweden, half of the men who are diagnosed as having localized prostate cancer die from it, and 69 percent of men who live longer than 10 years also die of the disease.)

These statistics are particularly distressing to think about when you consider this: Today, when localized prostate cancer is diagnosed in men who have a lifespan longer than ten years, the decision not to offer these men potentially curable therapy may be a death sentence. Because in most patients, the disease is going to progress.

*84\201\8*