Arousal Styles: Which of These 3 is Yours?

This episode covers the 3 main arousal styles. Only one is commonly depicted in media, but all are very normal and very common in reality. Most people have one dominant and possibly a secondary. Knowing your arousal style is part of discovering the manual to your own turn-ons and very helpful for communicating with your partner about what you like. 

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PS: If you are offended by some swearing, this podcast is not for you.

Transcript

Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode 17. We are talking today about arousal styles. There are three main ones, even though we only see one or sometimes two depicted in media, and those are the most familiar to us. We'll cover what they are and you can see which one you're most familiar with, dominant in, and if you have a secondary. It's helpful to know these because when you know your arousal style, you can first and foremost give yourself permission to lean into it and also let your partners know how you tend to operate. And it's part of discovering the manual to your own turn ons. So let's dive in.

Alrighty, everyone. I'm so glad you're here. I'm so glad I'm here. I just got back from an amazing and very intensive training in Los Angeles in NeuroAffective touch, and I'm so grateful for it. This is a modality focused on releasing trauma in the body and helping the body and mind get on the same team for healing, especially from early childhood wounds and attachment traumas that have a tendency to rear their heads in our relationships.

My own session with practitioners were so powerful, and the sessions I gave were too, and I'm just, I'm....you know, I'm in awe of our body's capacity for doing all the things. I mean, really all that like deep clenching and bracing. We don't even know we acquire in childhood, the body's way of protecting us.

It's wonderful to find that there's actually a great way to release it and have more ease emotionally and physically. So this allowed me to geek out with my biologist brain on how we were put together as organisms and how our very cells are really wired for resonance and touch. So just... yay for people bringing effective research based tools to healing. And I'm still glowing from this as you can probably tell and very grateful that I can bring it to my clients now. 

So, I'm back, and today what we're talking about is arousal styles. There are three main arousal styles, and I'll give you the overview, then break them down individually for you, so you'll be able to notice which you really resonate with, and and which give you that sort of, whoa, this is so not me feeling.

I'll also give you an idea of how to play with each one so you can lean in more to yours and we'll talk a little bit about what to do when you have a very different style than your partner. So usually people have one dominant and maybe one secondary, but not all three of these really turn everybody's crank.

And sometimes one even feels kind of icky. And when it's the one that's most commonly known and depicted in media, it can make us feel broken or wrong, but it's just because it's not our arousal style. It's just not the way we're wired. You can think of them as arousal orientations. None of them are wrong, they're just different.

And for each one, continued arousal is really supported by deepening in engagement with your particular orientation. The way that you connect to your sexuality. So, first up, I'm going to give you the overview, the three styles, and these were originally defined by Donald Mosher with some more technical names, but we'll call them today Romantic Connection, Roleplay, and Erotic Trance.

And all of these arousal types are ways of connecting to our deep selves, our partners, and a sense of real oneness just through different avenues. So the first one is romantic connection, and that's the one we most commonly see depicted in media, movies, TV, books, for sure. And first and foremost, I just want you to know that I'm covering this one first because it's most commonly recognized, not because it's actually the most common in the population.

I think they're all actually pretty common. And in my experience. I see a ton of people for whom romantic connection is not their jam. And that is just very normal. And in fact, it's not really my jam, but it is my partner's. So, it's something I'm very familiar with. But when I used to think I needed to do this, and this is sort of the way that people are supposed to, quote unquote, get aroused, it felt really bad.

I didn't realize there were some other options, and I was just trying to fit myself into the wrong, you know. peg, right? Like I was... like the wrong into the wrong hole. 

So romantic connection is an arousal style is where we feel engrossed in and aroused by the intensity of connection with our partner. Often through eye contact, words expressing connection and love, kissing, and a sense of romance or passion. that culminates in this deep experience of union or oneness. It's pretty easy to show on film and is the sort of stereotypical pathway we hear described in romance novels. It can be of the tender and sweet variety or the sort of passion flavor or sometimes both but there's always a current of intense togetherness.

And if this is your style as you get more and more into the connection, it might go something like this. You start with a just loving connection, recalling how you feel good around this person, orienting towards the experience of connecting with them in the moment, and then you might feel you get more and more captivated and absorbed in your partner towards this sense of deep union and resonance together.

If this speaks to you, that is wonderful. Embrace it. One thing you can play with if this is your style to expand your arousal and allow it to build more is Doing some eye gazing together while synchronizing your breath that can really heighten the feeling of connection So look in each other's eyes Get your breath to really sort of slowly attune to each other And do that for a while to really allow the deep sense of connection to build.

That is a really handy foreplay trick if romantic connection is your arousal style. And you can do that at all times in a sexual engagement, right? You can really synchronize your breath, really do some deep eye gazing. And if you're both into that, it can work really well. So because this one is so commonly depicted in media, we do get the message though that it's the only way.

And so it's important for us to take a moment to really debunk that because it can harm people to think this is the only way. For many people romantic connection is super hot. It's just important to know that for many of us, it's actually not hot at all. And that doesn't mean we don't want to connect with our partners or do romantic stuff.

We may love that stuff over, say, a walk or a nice dinner or an evening out, but it just doesn't make us hot. It doesn't turn our cranks sexually. It doesn't arouse us or make us want to get it on. It just feels good to our hearts and it feels nice. And there's nothing wrong with that. But if we subscribe to this mistaken assumption that it quote unquote should arouse us, then we just feel bad and wrong for not being aroused, right?

So a lot of people will, Valentine's Day is such a good example of this, somebody's partner will go, you know, do all these beautiful gestures, romantic, candlelight dinner, blah dee blah and. The person on the other side will feel like, Oh my gosh, I should feel turned on by this. And I'm just not right.

And I want you to know there is nothing wrong with you for that. I was one of those people. And frankly, eye gazing during sex gives me the icks, which I used to make mean there was something wrong with me until I learned. It's just not my style. And the same thing happens for lots of my clients because we are shown this reality.

In the media, this option as the sort of only quote unquote normal option, which is absolutely not true at all. So, I save the romance and eye gazing for nice dinners, in depth conversations, heart connection, and then I want something else in the bedroom. And that's okay for you too, if that's you. But if romantic connection is your jam, then more power to you.

Wonderful. And there are ways to lean into that. So play with that eye gazing, breathing thing and let me know how that goes. Number two, is roleplay. And this is also occasionally shown in media, so it's not totally foreign to most people. If you are a roleplay dominant person, stepping into different characters or archetypes than you normally feel associated with your day to day identity feels really hot and spicy to you.

There is usually a bold sense of playfulness and energy you get from that, And you may like props and outfits and whole scenes set up or not. It may just be super hot to pretend you're somebody you don't usually let yourself be. And it could be anything from, you know, pirate queen, vampire, seductress, goddess, creator, destroyer, punisher, abductee, acolyte, missionary, sorcerer, you get the drift.

It could be anything. These roles and characters help you step into erotic emotions that feel good to you. And those could be anything, too. You know, entitled, demanding, ravished, manipulative, humiliated, validated, right? Check out episode 5, actually, on core desires and erotic emotions for more on that. So you may, if this is your jam, you may enjoy fantasies that have really scripted plots and you may find a sense of adventure and drama really arousing.

And sometimes, but not always, this takes the form of a tendency to kink and BDSM. One of my favorite BDSM mentors is Midori, and she teaches an amazing femdom class. She defines BDSM in this beautiful way as quote, Childhood joyous play with adult sexual privilege and cool toys. And she says it's like cops and robbers with fucking, right?

So I love that definition so much because it's so expansive and you don't have to want to do, you know, painful pokey things to enjoy role play or playing with power dynamics as part of your roles if you like that. While it may not be totally obvious. This is just another way of connecting to the partner, to our deep selves, and to oneness.

So for role play dominant people, the connection is first to a sort of meta awareness of possibilities for expansion of who we get to be as human beings. And then the connection to the partner comes through that expansion of identity and the freedom to step into other aspects of ourselves together.

It's really a play based sense of connection. Okay, so that's role play arousal style. And occasionally you'll see this in the media, often depicted in its darker forms which is fun sometimes but not always depicted in dark forms. There's a couple good examples. So the film Secretary is a really good one.

There's also a, so the stereotypical stuff In 50 Shades of Grey, I will say that is depicted with much less consent than is normative in the BDSM community. There's also a fun episode of Bones years ago where they went to a pony play event and I just loved how normalizing it was. So there's all kinds of flavors and occasionally this is depicted.

If this is you, if you relate to the things I'm saying, try a brainstorm to expand your repertoire of what's possible for you. And one of the best ways to do that is to use characters from mythology, history, cinema, religion, these sort of archetypical characters. And you can see which ones really appeal to you.

They may be associated with your own gender identity. They may be with a power dynamic identity. So either sort of a, top or bottom type of identity. Really think about the ones that you find most sexy. What are their traits? What are their characteristics? And see if you can step into those traits and characteristics.

You can either step into the whole character or you can create one that has your favorite sexy traits that are kind of common to the archetypes or characters that you find most intriguing. And you can try that character on. Whether you're in a sexy situation or even just walking down the street, you don't need any props.

You can just walk like them, talk like them, flirt like them, right? If your character is this, like, warrior queen, How would she walk? How would she talk? How would she flirt? Right? And you can let your partner know you'd like to play with it and even say things like, well, if I'm a warrior queen, who are you?

If I'm this goddess, who are you? So see, you know, If your partner wants to play that way, that could be really fun. So that's one tool in your toolbox. If you are a role play arousal style. The third one is erotic trance. This style is basically not shown at all in media and probably cause it's just really hard to show, but also because people are not as aware of, you know, real sexuality in our culture as would be more helpful and healthy.

Erotic trance is an incredibly common arousal style. But it's very inward focused and so it's kind of hard to see or like depict in TV. You wouldn't know what's going on on the inside of this person necessarily. It's not obvious. But it's really profound and really beautiful. I mean, all of them are. So if you're an erotic trans style person, you may notice that you really want to go inward during sexy times.

You may want to close your eyes. even have a pillow or eye mask over them to give you like that real deep sense of dark. You may want to really sink into your own experience of pleasure. That helps you get aroused and the permission from your lover to for you to really go inward and just be in the experience feels delicious and connecting to you.

You may worry that you are withdrawing or not being quote unquote present enough, but in actuality you feel more present and aroused when you let yourself really go inward and feel the sensations in the moment. Many of us with this style, because we don't know about the style in the first place, think we're doing something wrong or disconnecting from our partners too much.

But actually this is just really a normal common style and it is still very connecting. In fact, we feel the energy between us and our partner much more deeply and are able to really build it into deep arousal and connection when we are allowed and even encouraged to. by ourselves and our partners to go inward.

We connect to ourself, our partner, and that sense of oneness through the visceral experience of the body's energy and sensation. And that often means we need to shut out other sensory inputs, like sight, light, other distractions, so we can be super present with our experience. People who are in an erotic trance arousal style, dominant type of people, including me, we are often pretty energetically sensitive people, even if we haven't really acknowledged that, but we can often get overwhelmed by other inputs that take us out of our bodies.

And partners can really connect with us by holding space for our bodies. inward process. When we come out of the erotic trance, often after an orgasm, we are usually very available for more romantic or other types of playful styles of connection. And we may have romance or role play as a secondary, so we can kind of play in those spaces.

But to get fully aroused, we need that time, space, and permission to go deeper. inward. If you are an erotic trans style person, your partner may need reassurance, if they're not an erotic trans style person, they may need reassurance that you are present. And we can offer that often before or after we get kind of hot and heavy, but not so much in that moment because we are in this pure, lovely sensation and it's really hard to get pulled out.

If this resonates for you, a way to play with it is to really practice. Fully allowing yourself to go inward, allowing yourself to restrict any sensory input that you need to, close your eyes if that feels good to you, feel energy moving in your body, feel the life energy of your partner, feel your own life force and theirs, even feel, let yourself feel the energy of the world moving through you.

One way you can do that, just sort of in your life, day to day, is try feeling the movement of air on your skin and that even the energy of photons in sunlight as they hit your skin. So if you turn your face up to the sunlight and you can really feel into the sensation, it might even feel erotic to you.

It does to many people who are kind of more in the erotic trance style. And I didn't even know to explore that until I learned I was, until I learned about erotic trance as an arousal style and that It resonated a lot with me. So there's all kinds of ways, if you are more of an erotic trans person, you might find pleasure in day to day just sensations.

For all of these styles, have conversations with your partners about your styles. You know, just get curious with yourselves and each other, which one feels dominant for you. Do you have a secondary? How does the third one feel? Is it, is it okay? Or meh? Or kind of a total turnoff? And you know, even if it's a turnoff for you, usually there's a way to play with it for your partner if it is their dominant style.

So for example, I am super erotic transy and my secondary is role play, but my partner is really romantic connection dominant. But now that we know these things, My trancing can actually feel really lovely and connecting for him because he knows I'm super present and then we do the more romantic stuff either earlier on in foreplay or we switch before we switch to a more transy style for me and then we might do more like eye gazing and breathing in aftercare, which feels good to me, but it just doesn't work for me.

in sort of hotter and heavier moments because it just pulls me out of my body. So There are ways to bridge any gaps if you get creative and open, and I often help partners and couples do that if they get stuck. So I know there's lots of ways to bridge gaps. All right, my lovely, sexy friends, I hope this has been helpful.

Enjoy yourselves, and I will see you here next week. If this podcast was helpful for you, please subscribe. Please consider going to Apple Podcasts or Spotify and leaving a five star review. Not only do I really appreciate your time doing that, but five star reviews really boost the show visibility, which helps people just like you who need it, be able to find it.

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