Last Longer In Bed Program - Case Study

So many men struggle alone in dealing with sexual issues, and more information needs to be available about how Clinical Evidence-based EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) can help.

I’m deeply grateful to Dave for his generosity of spirit in sharing his experience to increase awareness of this.

All names and some personal details have been changed. Apart from those essentials, this is a true and accurate account of the process, and the results Dave achieved with Clinical EFT and an earlier version of my ‘Last Longer In Bed’ program. This program has been enhanced and expanded since.

Laying The Foundation Session

The first in this series of 6 Zoom sessions with Dave was a 'Laying the Foundation' session.

In this, Dave, 44, married for 23 years, spoke of his long history with premature ejaculation.

He said that during lovemaking he would normally last no longer than a few seconds after penetration. That he'd never lasted longer than a minute. And that this had been an issue from his teenage years.

That even in self pleasure it would all be over in a couple of minutes, and that didn't feel enjoyable to him either.

Over time, he'd tried a few different ways to last longer. Including the well-known stop/start method a few times, but found it seemed to make him tense up more. He reported that he found no enjoyment in lovemaking while engaging with this.

Dave described how during intimacy with his wife, it was as though a switch tripped when he moved into intercourse. That he could feel his body become tense.

The thought that would flood his mind every time was “This will be more of the same”.

While this issue bothered him to no end, he had a solid and loving relationship with his wife. Dave is a very together guy, who enjoys great relationships with family and close friends, a great job, and hobbies he finds fulfilling.

He said that since our initial consultation the previous week, he'd been thinking about what he would like to get from our work together over the next 6 weeks, including today. What he'd come up with was...

I asked him how his wife felt about him doing this program. He said that while they had a great relationship, she wasn’t really that interested in physical intimacy, that his problem didn’t really bother her. But he was clear it bothered him a lot and he wanted to do something about it now for himself.

To be able to measure in a tangible way, the success, or not, of our work together, the goal Dave said he'd love to achieve over the next 5 sessions was to be able to last 3 - 5 minutes during intercourse without ejaculating.

He was excited about this possibility, believing that if he could do so he would be more relaxed and have way more enjoyment in both lovemaking and self pleasure also.

Dave was aware since our initial consultation that for him to have success with this program, he would need to commit to about 20 minutes practice a day.

I reminded him of how essential this was as he was going to be learning a whole new way to experience pleasure in his body. To reorient himself from focusing on ejaculating or not ejaculating, to being fully present to pleasure in every moment. And over time, to move into experiencing relaxed arousal rather than tension, as his default.

He confirmed he was committed to doing the practice and the EFT homework and was looking forward to getting started the following week.

In the final few minutes of the session, Dave mentioned that in recent years, sexual intimacy with his wife was an irregular occurrence. Something that maybe only happens once every 3 - 4 months.

SESSION 1:

Dave's revelation at the end of our ‘Laying the Foundation’ session indicated that the goal set then would need some adjustment!

In the short discussion that followed, Dave could see that was the case. So he decided that a successful outcome of these next 5 sessions, that would be measurable, would be for him to last at least 5 minutes in self pleasuring. And to feel that he was enjoying the experience.

So, from where he'd been for approximately the past 30 years, in only lasting a couple of minutes, he was seeking a 100% improvement in 5 weeks!

Would he do it?

Dave's level of confidence that he would do it, along with his high level of motivation helped him no end.

He described his level of confidence that he would do so as 75%.

And his level of motivation at the start was 95%.

It's often the case that when a man has struggled with this issue for decades, his level of confidence and motivation is nowhere near those levels. Especially if he's tried a number of different approaches already.

With the level of confidence and motivation Dave had at the start, combined with a goal that he was excited about achieving, and my level of confidence in the tools I would be using, I considered this was an achievable goal. One definitely worth shooting for!

In our first session I asked Dave what he noticed about what was going on in his body, and in his mind when self pleasuring.

He described how when his pleasure built he could feel his body getting tense.
He was aware of shallowly breathing into his chest.
Having hard fast stimulation on his penis.
That he'd tend to either be watching porn or engaging in fantasy in his mind.
When a man gains awareness of what he's doing that primes his body to ejaculate quickly, it can give him a massive boost of confidence at this early stage to realise…

Because this ‘Last Longer In Bed’ program works with a man's natural design and is a radical departure from anything Dave tried before, I spent some time during this session instructing him on how to do the daily practice, which would be the key to his success.

Note: There is no nudity in the online sessions I offer. The instruction regarding the daily pleasure practice is done using a prop.

He said that in lovemaking his mind would be on what was going to happen - the inevitable loss of control, and being afraid of losing control, he would tend to tense up more.

I asked Dave if there was a recent time when he was intimate with his wife in which he experienced this, and what was he feeling thinking about that now?

He said he felt disappointed that he couldn’t be more present. That he was more worried about what was going to happen.

So we flowed into using EFT/Tapping (Emotional Freedom Techniques) to dissolve the emotion of disappointment that he was feeling about that experience.

On a scale of 0 to 10, 0 being not disappointed at all, to 10 being very disappointed, he said he was about an 8.

After one round of tapping on his disappointment, this dropped to a 3.

I asked Dave was there any specific part of what was happening then that he was focusing on that might be keeping that at a 3?

He described how he felt his body was tense and he could sense it happening, but didn't have the ability to do anything about it.

We did another round of tapping on this, after which he was relieved to feel he was a 0, saying the disappointment had evaporated.

Clinical EFT involves doing additional testing to test if the client can recall an experience without feeling the emotional charge they once used to. And through this we can see if there are other aspects to any event that still hold any emotion that may need to be worked on.

So I asked Dave to close his eyes and to vividly imagine himself back in that place with Mary, with all that was going on between them, and to notice if he felt any disappointment about that now?

He said no, he wasn't feeling any disappointment at all.

I then spent some time before we wrapped up, showing Dave how to do EFT/tapping for himself, and suggesting ways he may find helpful to use it in conjunction with the ‘Last Longer In Bed’ practice between now and our next session.

SESSION 2:

It had been 2 weeks since our previous session due to Dave being on holiday. He said that during this time he had been intimate with Mary and it was very enjoyable. He reported feeling much less tension and apprehension about it all.

He was finding that doing the practice was quite a departure from what he normally did in self pleasuring. Although he was finding it so far to be an enjoyable positive experience, he had some questions about it.

So we spent some time in this session going over those, which were specific to what he was discovering during the practice.

We also tapped on some aspects of what he experienced in doing the practice, and he left feeling more confident about it all now.

SESSION 3:

When Dave arrived to this session, he’d clearly turned a corner during the week.

He said that while the practice was a very different approach, he had enjoyed 4 or 5 self pleasuring sessions during the week without ejaculating at all. And that now he was enjoying self pleasuring without any artificial stimulation or porn.

He reported that he always had a sense of dread, and an uneasy feeling in the past. That he was always worried that his pleasure, whether alone or in lovemaking with his wife, would be short-lived.

In this session we did more tapping on the sense of disappointment he was in touch with at not being more present during intimacy another time. Although now, instead of his disappointment starting out at an 8, he said that it wasn't very strong, only about a 3.

However, despite tapping on a few different aspects of this occasion, the disappointment still remained at a 1-2. There was still something holding this emotion in place.

Then Dave had a memory come up of something that happened with him and his wife, over 20 years ago. He was remembering something harsh that his wife had said to him. And he felt sad on getting in touch with this. Describing his sadness as being at about 5, we did some tapping on this.

After one round he said that this was at a 0 and he wasn't feeling anything about that now.

So I asked if we could do a little additional testing on that, just to be sure it was gone.

This time I role-played his wife. I said to him what she had said to him, in a harsh voice, and Dave said there was still something there.

This is the value of additional testing, that if something isn't cleared, it brings up what's left so that the emotion from the event can be thoroughly processed.

Dave said that when he actually heard me say what his wife said to him in the manner I did, he felt the sadness in his chest was back at a 5.

So we did some more tapping on this, which brought it down to 0. We then did another round of additional testing on this experience, one which had haunted him for over two decades. This time, I observed his body visibly relax, as he said it was gone.

SESSION 4:

This session was a bit of a misfire in that Dave couldn’t make the appointment time we’d originally scheduled. So we rearranged for this time but then he had something urgent to attend to, so we only had about 15 minutes for this session.

Dave said he was very pleased with how the practice was going for him. He was finding it such a different approach, that it wasn't even the lasting longer thing that he was pleased about, but the fact that now he was really enjoying self pleasure in a way he hadn't before. He described how he was feeling present with himself, in his body. How he felt very relaxed in his experience, and this was helping him to relax in other areas of his life.

He'd read something I'd written about how premature ejaculation, which one may have from teenage years, may have its genesis in the fear of being caught masturbating in adolescence.

As the primary job of the subconscious mind is to ensure survival, to learn how to ejaculate as quickly as possible was a way to avoid any likely shaming or punishment should one get caught in the act.

And after a man has been doing this for years, if not decades, this becomes his default.

Only now, because that behavior is producing the exact opposite result to what a man, and his partner wants, it gets labeled as a sexual dysfunction. When it's often the remnants of a survival mechanism that served a purpose at one time. That a man just never learned to turn off when it was no longer needed.

Dave mentioned before about how he had 4 younger siblings. That when he was a teenager he was always on edge when masturbating. That the whole experience was rushed. And it was all about how quickly he could get satisfaction.

We had no more time for anything else in this session but Dave said he would like to do some work on those experiences next week.

SESSION 5:

Dave began by saying that his practice was still going very well. That he was keen to work in this session on some of the times in his early years that may still be affecting him today.

The experience he was most in touch with at the moment was a time when he was in touch with the need to see how quickly he could ejaculate and experience the pleasure of that.

He was feeling a sense of irony about this, which he said he was holding in his stomach.

After a couple of rounds of this, in which this sense dropped from a 6 to a 1, he said it had felt like he’d been holding something in his stomach, which he could feel through the tapping was being released.

We then moved to another time, in which he was feeling some embarrassment around when he thought about it now. This was when someone actually walked in on him when he was masturbating when he was younger.

With just one round of tapping his embarrassment went from a 7 to a 0.

We did some additional testing on this. I asked him to close his eyes and vividly imagine himself in that situation and someone walking in. Was there any embarrassment or any other negative feeling about that now?

He said no, that was all gone, that he now had a sense of it being just the innocence of youth.

Next he said he'd like to work on something that happened a little while later. When he was caught in bed with an ex-girlfriend by her parents, when he was a teenager. He was still feeling some shame around that, although he said the shame wasn't very high, about 3 or 4.

So we did some tapping on this, and brought it down to a 1. So I asked him what he thought was left of this that was keeping it at a 1? Was there anything that stood out for him about that experience, that when he thought about that specific part, he might be feeling shame about now?

He said what he was focusing on was the parting comment that this girl's father made to him as he was leaving. That as he focused on that he was feeling the shame more, that it was now at a 4. After one round of tapping this dropped to 0.

To do some additional testing on this, again we did a role play in which I played the father of this girl, saying to him what this man had once said. I asked Dave what he was feeling about that now?

He said he felt the shame was just gone, it wasn't there anymore, and there was no other negative feeling about that time now.

In dealing with any long-standing issue, this 5th session with Dave is an example of how through the arc of a number of EFT sessions, the work can be a bit like peeling back layers of an onion. To do so gently and safely requires a number of sessions.

Because it's only when sufficient trust and rapport has been built between client and practitioner that the client can feel safe enough to go into territory that holds the shame and the embarrassment that may have been holding them back for decades. That’s holding them back today.

At the end of this session Dave spoke about how he was finding now that lasting longer wasn't even an issue for him anymore. The benefit of the work he’d done went way beyond not ejaculating. That now he was having a whole different experience, in which he was using no porn, no artificial stimulation, and yet he was enjoying pleasure in each moment of self pleasuring now.

That he was enjoying being in states of relaxed arousal, being in his body, and experiencing pleasure in every moment without worrying about ejaculation. So even if it's a while before Dave experiences intimacy with his wife again, chances are that because he's made such a change within himself, and relaxed arousal has now become his default, it may be difficult for him to show up to the experience as he once did.

And as he continues to do his own EFT self-tapping, he can use this to calm his nervous system before intimacy if necessary.

Conclusion:

A week after his 5th session, I conducted a short interview with Dave.

He said that during self pleasure it was always previously about the end result. That he was hoping to experience satisfaction and enjoyment from ejaculation, but that was not always the case. And that was a different sort of experience to the one he's enjoying now.

Now he has more awareness about experiencing and enjoying his own body more. That he doesn't feel the need to ejaculate as he once did. That self pleasuring now can sometimes be a mindful, meditative experience, one that can help him to relax and down-regulate. That not having to ejaculate is a different form of pleasure, one that leaves him more in touch with himself.

He feels he has a much healthier relationship with himself now. That he's no longer engaging with porn on a regular basis, that's made quite a difference too. And any sense of guilt associated with watching porn is gone.

Dave spoke about how doing this work has helped to remove the apprehension he had about being intimate with his wife. He says now that he has EFT and the ‘Last Longer In Bed’ practice, he will continue to use these tools.

In terms of how this work has improved his relationship overall, Dave said that he's had quite a mindshift. Now, he's not putting the same weight on having intimacy with his wife in the way that he once was. That the pressure he was putting on himself for that is gone.

He said now there's a sense of spaciousness between him and his wife. Everything between them feels easier now. That the benefit of the work he did in these 6 weeks went way beyond the initial goal he'd set.