How Do I Stop Faking Orgasms?

Join me today as I walk through what's really underneath the tendency and temptation to fake orgasms, and how to stop. You'll learn the hidden costs of this habit to you and your relationship. You'll learn what it is actually all about and how to start creating the safety you need in order to have authentic pleasure, connection and communication. 

Get my free email newsletter with helpful tips, plus a free guide to Finding Your Deepest Turn-Ons, and learn how to work with me at https://laurajurgens.com.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to Sex Help for Smart People. I'm Dr. Laura Jurgens. I'm here to help you have better sex, intimacy and relationships. So let's get at it. Hey everyone. Welcome to episode 74. I am so glad you are here. Today we are talking about how do I stop faking orgasms? And if you are asking yourself this question.

[00:00:26] Or if you are wondering if your partner is asking themselves this question. One, I just wanna really congratulate you for having the desire to stop faking orgasms or to stop having orgasm faking as a part of your relationship. And I'm gonna talk about this today from the perspective of interactions that are not one night stands and.

[00:00:54] I don't recommend faking there either. I actually never recommend it because of the consequences to you. The faker can actually shut down your body over the long term. You can lose access to real responsiveness over time. It's not a great habit for a lot of reasons that I think will become clear as we talk today.

[00:01:14] But I think the biggest and most commonplace that it can be a really huge issue for people is when you are in a relationship or trying to build a relationship and you have been faking orgasms, or you are periodically tempted to fake your orgasm. I wanna walk you through how we work on this in my coaching practice.

[00:01:36] Because chances are you may need help, and I want you to know what that might look like if and when you're ready to get it. And now look, there's maybe a small chance, there's about maybe 1% of people I'm guessing on that, who just need to hear this, you know, 20 some minute, however long it's gonna be, podcast on why this is not a good idea.

[00:02:00] But 99% of people who are faking orgasms are gonna need some help to get outta that habit because there's kind of a bunch more going on here than we often recognize. And that's because I can absolutely guarantee you. Guaranteed. If you are faking orgasms, you are definitely people pleasing your partner.

[00:02:23] You are over caretaking your partner, people pleasing your partner, and that is injecting the dishonesty and some dissatisfaction really into your side of the relationship. If you're a hundred percent honest, you do not love faking orgasms, which is why you are here to ask the question, how do I stop? So there is dishonesty, there's dissatisfaction, and that is not helping your relationship at all.

[00:02:48] Even if you think it is, it is actually undermining for you not to be authentic and to feel like you can show up as exactly who you are with your exact needs, your desires. When those desires change and you wanna stop you to feel like you can be a hundred percent honest about it, and you to feel like you can get your needs, your sexual needs met, and your desires met really well, and that is really important and you deserve that.

[00:03:15] So that's, but that people pleasing dynamic is one of the reasons that this is not a super simple issue. It's not a super quick fix, and it's okay if it feels hard to change it. There's absolutely ways to change it, and we can totally help you take care of that and not ever fake an orgasm again. And incidentally, along the way, massively improve your sex life and your relationship.

[00:03:43] Yay, not incidentally, right? That's what we actually really want. So if you're faking orgasms, there is an underlying problem. Chances are there's a few underlying problems, and so we need to be really honest about that. One of them is that you need to feel safe enough emotionally that you're able to value honesty more than fear your partner's discomfort.

[00:04:07] I. And if you don't feel like you can do that, if you don't feel like you have the space and the emotional safety, to be honest, or to handle your partner's discomfort, if you need to say that you wanna stop or you need something different, we need to help you learn to feel safe enough to be honest. I mean, if you're working with me, if you're trying to do it on your own, you also need to learn how to feel safe enough to be honest.

[00:04:37] But you know, that could often use a little support. And part of supporting you in this is that I be absolutely honest with you because I wouldn't be doing you any favors by not telling you the truth. And that's one thing we need to learn here, right? If you are faking orgasms, is that you are not doing your relationship or your partner any favors.

[00:05:01] Even if you've been telling you yourself, you are. But the reality is that we, if we're faking orgasms, we need to own that. We're doing it for ourselves, not for them. You're doing it for you, not for them. It is to make you less uncomfortable about something. And it is actually, at the end of the day, a type of lying and a type of avoidance, usually of our partner's discomfort.

[00:05:30] The discomfort of us saying, we wanna stop, or we're not that into it. Or we need something different in order to reengage and be into it. And meanwhile, all of this, you are actually, your body is getting like thrown under the bus. And this is often the most common. People who fake orgasms are women, women.

[00:05:52] More commonly, much, much, much more commonly than men. Fake orgasms seem to be better at it, seem to do it a lot more. So even if you don't identify with the gender of women and you're more of a they them, or you identify as male and you are socialized as a woman, that may be contributing to why you're faking orgasms.

[00:06:10] But the vast majority of people faking orgasms are women. Typically more often heterosexual women because heterosexual women are statistically the least likely to be having actual real, authentic orgasms. That's also the case for bisexual women when they're partnered with men, but not when they're partnered with women.

[00:06:30] So some of my language today is generally gonna focus around women because it's so much more common. But if you are a man or if you are a non-binary person who is faking orgasms. I would love to hear from you and hear more about your experience and if it feels different, but the people I tend to encounter are women who are doing this, and I wanna say it's really common for women to betray their own bodies.

[00:06:57] In so many ways, even little tiny things like just not listening to your body when you need to get up to pee and thinking like, well, I gotta push through this work project instead. Or not feeding yourself when you need food because you think you need to be some sort of skinny ideal. All kinds of things that we've all done because of how women are socialized to treat our bodies as objects for the approval of other people rather than a beautiful.

[00:07:24] Soft animal that has been given to us to hold our entire experience of the world. When we fake an orgasm, we are betraying our body by basically giving it the message that our body's authentic desire and arousal, our body's authentic pleasure. Doesn't matter. What matters is our partner not having any discomfort or us getting outta the situation without having to be honest.

[00:07:50] So what matters is our partner or our mind, but our body doesn't matter. That's the message that we're giving our body in that situation, and it's such a bummer because if this is you, you absolutely deserve real, authentic pleasure, embodied physical pleasure, emotional pleasure of sexuality and the emotional safety to lean into that and really enjoy it.

[00:08:17] You absolutely deserve that. That is part of your birthright as a human being, as an animal on this planet. I don't really know what kind of plant like plants have sex, but what kind of pleasure they have in that. But you know, if they have it, great, good for them. I, everybody deserves the birthright to their embodied pleasure as the being that they are in this physical plane.

[00:08:43] And you absolutely deserve the safety to express when you'd like to stop or when something isn't working for you. And the key thing is that safety starts with you. We all gotta learn how to create it for ourselves and value it for ourselves first, because no one else can tell what we feel inside. We are the ones who can track that.

[00:09:06] And that is our job, right? Because right now what's happening, if you're faking an orgasm, you are getting, you are not getting what you need, but you're not getting it from yourself. As well as not getting it from your partner. And the big person to deal with that is you, right? Because you either don't yet know what you need, you don't yet feel comfortable asking for it, and you may not know how to ask or teach what you need to a partner in a way that they can understand well, and that works out for both of you.

[00:09:40] But the person who first needs to deal with it is you. And before you can do that, before you can really get all the yummy stuff that feels great in your body, you do have to start feeling some emotional safety and start practicing putting yourself out there in what feels like risky situations. But we have to, you know, a lot of what we do in my practice, like we often backtrack and figure out, okay, where did you lose the sense that it was okay for you to say no?

[00:10:10] Right. Where did you lose the, where did you gain this fear of saying, Hey, this isn't working for me. I need to stop. Right. And is it really coming from your partner or is it coming from something in your past? A lot of times it's coming from childhood attachment wounds, that kind of stuff. So that's why we deal with a lot of that in my practice.

[00:10:31] But I wanna give you just sort of an outline of what the steps are towards solving this. So that first step is really to pause and really figure out what's going on with the safety situation for you. Are you actually emotionally unsafe with this person or are you just imagining it based on your past or your family of origin?

[00:10:55] Right? And really getting a handle on that. And starting to have some reparative experiences with, for example, with me, where you get to say no to me a bunch of times. And we and you practice receipt, like hearing from me how much I celebrate that and how much I love it, right? And that I'm staying with you and I'm not abandoning you.

[00:11:18] So I do that with people a lot who have had no positive experiences of being able to express their no. And then we help you do it with your partner or with whoever it is that you're trying to be in a relationship with, whoever it is that you're dating and really practicing and even practicing with other people in your life.

[00:11:38] So that you start feeling safe, having boundaries, and saying what's true for you, saying honestly what you want and what you need and what you desire and what you don't. Step number two is really scheduling and having a conversation, not when you're having sex, to talk to your partner about this problem admitting it.

[00:12:00] Admitting that you have been faking is actually really important to clear out the air for you so that you're not holding on to this sort of secret. And also to help your partner not feel crazy because chances are your partner has picked up something's wrong. Even if they believed your fakery, they've picked up something's wrong and they're feeling anxious underneath about it, and it actually clearing the air can really reassure your partner.

[00:12:27] Especially when you do it in a way that's not blaming them, it can reassure your partner and you wanna actually explicitly reassure your partner that you want to have mutually satisfying sex with them and explain to them what you need for that. Right? So you are going to need to teach them how to do that for you, and that is much easier if you have figured that out.

[00:12:51] And if you need help, that is also something we do, right? Help you figure out, okay, I want more foreplay, but what kind of foreplay? I want more flirting, but what kind of flirting really does it for me? What words do I love to hear? What energy and touch turns me on? Maybe we need to help you feel okay using a vibrator and asking them to use a vibrator with them in partner play and letting them know that you want them to support you and your needs and not be threatened by it, right?

[00:13:19] So that. Part that step, having this conversation or multiple conversations where you admit that this has been going on, you reassure your partner, you want mutually satisfying sex with them, and that you don't wanna continue faking, but that you're really gonna have to. You have their help to play in a way where you can be open and honest and figure out what works for you, explaining that you want the two of you to prioritize and discover your authentic pleasure together, right?

[00:13:52] Asking for patience and playfulness in that process where that gets you all on the same team, right? And. Really diminishes the likelihood that they're gonna start feeling like it was somehow their fault. You wanna take ownership for like, this is my pattern, I've been doing this right, and chances are you.

[00:14:13] Really may need help figuring out how to have that conversation without being blaming or aggressive or too vague for your partner to understand what they're supposed to do. And if you're vague, they're just gonna feel anxious. It's just the way it is. They're gonna be like, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do here.

[00:14:34] And so I'm, I, I don't know what to try. They're gonna get stuck 'cause they. They don't know what to try even because they're worried that you're gonna go back to your old pattern or they're gonna get it wrong, right? So we wanna be really specific. We wanna be really clear and we wanna be really non blaming.

[00:14:52] We'll figure out what it is that you need and then practice helping you know how to ask. Well, we start at the very beginning helping you learn to feel safe saying, Hey, I need to stop, or I need to give some feedback here so we can make an adjustment. Right. So please, if this is you, this is a very fixable issue.

[00:15:14] If you can orgasm with yourself, this is, this issue's gonna be fairly straightforward to fix once it, depending on how entrenched and trauma-based your people pleasing is, but it's always fixable. Just, you know, sort of depends on how. Deep that people pleasing goes how long it might take, but we can fix it if you can.

[00:15:34] Can't orgasm with yourself yet. If you haven't yet. Doesn't mean you can't ever just means you haven't yet. Then we work on that first before you do it with a partner and then we help. It's so much easier to learn how to orgasm if you've never orgasmed. It's so much easier to learn how to do it with yourself than it is to do it with a partner.

[00:15:54] So. These are all fixable, but please get help if you need it. Don't just continue faking orgasms. It is not good for your mind, your body, your soul, or your relationship, and I'm real good at helping with this. But I'm sure there's a bunch of other coaches out there who are too and who have their own process.

[00:16:14] So please reach out and do get help for this one. And this'll give you kind of a, hopefully this podcast gave you a roadmap for how to start and why to take it seriously. 'cause sometimes people joke about faking orgasms all the time, and it's just like, actually for me, I hear that and I'm just like, oh no, just don't do it.

[00:16:36] Right. It's a slippery slope to problems. And so you can really create some deeper issues for yourself if you're faking orgasms. And if you think it's no big deal, it's really, it is. It's a lying and it's an avoidance. So we wanna take it pretty seriously and see why we feel like we need to do that and not bring those kind of dynamics into our relationships if we can.

[00:17:00] Right. Alright, my friends. I will see you here next time. Hey, if you're curious about how you could have better sex and connections, go grab my free guide. Find Your Secret Turn-ons. It's right on my website, www.laurajurgens.com, and the link is in the show notes. I'll see you here next time.