You cum too early. You don’t cum at all. You want it, they don’t. They want it, you’re already asleep. Most people who walk into a sex therapist’s office bring a technical complaint; a malfunction to be diagnosed and fixed. What Antonia Faust, couples and sex therapist, has learned is that the real question is almost never about the symptom. It’s about what’s missing underneath.
“Sexual energy is life energy,” she says in her conversation with BERLINABLE publisher Giada Armani. Antonia speaks with the calm of someone who has watched this truth play out in therapy sessions for years. “If we’re cut off from it, it doesn’t just affect our sex lives. It affects everything.”
The Wrong Question
Here is the problem with how most of us think about sex: we’ve reduced it to a performance metric. Duration, frequency, technique, orgasm count. And when the numbers look wrong, we panic.
Antonia’s approach cuts in from a completely different angle. Before she gets anywhere near the bedroom, she asks…not what do you want to do, but what do you want to feel: Alive? Seen? Powerful? Present?
“Most people don’t actually know what they’re looking for in sex,” she explains. “They know something is missing. But they haven’t asked themselves what state they’re actually trying to reach.” This, she argues, is where the real work begins, and where most people never go. Because we’ve been taught to treat sexuality as a separate, technical department of life rather than an expression of who we are in our bodies.
Sexual Fantasies Are Emotional Maps
What the kink scene (unfairly dismissed by most) understands better than mainstream culture is this: sexual desire is rarely just about sex. Fantasies are metaphors.
“The people I’ve encountered in kink spaces often have a much deeper understanding of the needs that sit behind their desires,” Antonia says. “Who do I want to be in this moment? What do I want to experience that I can’t in everyday life? They’ve asked themselves questions that most people never even think to ask.”
This doesn’t mean everyone needs to be kinky. Not even close. But the kink world’s insistence on making the unconscious conscious (figuring out what you’re actually looking for before you go looking) is something she wishes more people would borrow. When someone understands what’s behind their desires, they stop limiting themselves. And they stop missing their own emotional needs while pretending those needs don’t exist.
The Shortcut Through the Body
For people who feel disconnected from their own sexual energy, e.g. flat, uninterested, going through motions, Antonia doesn’t start with exercises or homework assignments, but with embodiment.
The method is deceptively simple. Instead of intellectualizing your way toward desire (“I should want this,” “What’s wrong with me,” “Maybe if I tried…”), you work backwards from the physical. How would a person who feels alive actually move through a room? How do they breathe? How do they hold their body? How do they take up space?
“We can generate feeling through the body before the external circumstances are even there,” she says. This is the core of embodiment work; not performing an emotion, but finding its physical shape and entering it. “Fake it till you make it” sounds like a cliché. As a somatic practice, it works.
Antonia often uses archetypes, inviting people to picture someone they associate with the quality they’re trying to reach. “You immediately see how that person walks, how they make eye contact, how they move. There’s a frequency to it. And you can start to inhabit that frequency, even when it feels unfamiliar at first.”
On Shame: Don’t Fight It. Bring It Along
Giada mentions the problem that most people don’t talk about what they want in bed, because they’re ashamed. So how do you get past that?
Antonia’s answer is counterintuitive: you don’t get past it. You take it with you.
“Shame is your nervous system trying to protect you from social exclusion,” she explains. “The more you try to simply get rid of it, the louder it gets.” The shame around sex is not a personal failing, but a predictable result of how we’re all socialized. Sex as taboo, as something that happens behind closed doors and is never quite spoken of. We carry that, whether we like it or not.
The thing that actually heals shame isn’t willpower. It’s a new experience. Saying the thing you’re afraid to say, and seeing the world not end. Telling a partner what you want, and being met with curiosity instead of judgment. The body needs to learn, firsthand, that exposure doesn’t mean destruction.
Her practical suggestion: name the shame itself before you name the desire. “I find this hard to say. I’m worried you’ll think less of me. But I want to tell you anyway.” Putting light on the fear of speaking often makes speaking possible.
What Happens When You Never Learn This
The therapist’s analogy is useful here. Antonia doesn’t distinguish neatly between someone’s sex life and the rest of their life. Because in her experience, they’re the same thing, wearing different clothes.
The woman who is relentlessly high-performing at work, devoted to her tasks, always the best in the room, and completely unable to connect with a partner. The person who holds anger down until it erupts. The couple locked in a libido standoff, each blaming the other for a dynamic they’ve both created.
“When someone develops genuine self-efficacy in their sexuality (when they come into their power there) I see it carry over into the rest of life,” Antonia says. “I had a client who realized: I gave very clear directions in bed last night. Why wouldn’t I tell my boss that something isn’t working for me?”
Sexual energy isn’t separate from ambition, confidence, creativity, or presence. For most people, it’s the same reservoir.
Sexual Energy: The Bigger Picture
Toward the end of their conversation, Giada presses Antonia on the political dimension of all this. Because in her reading (informed by Foucault, Wilhelm Reich, a long history of bodies being governed) control over sexuality is never just personal. It is always also a mechanism of social control.
Antonia’s response is careful but honest. “I see the patterns,” she says. “Aggression, hatred, the devaluation of others … I see these as displacements. Needs that keep being frustrated, turning into something darker. If someone is genuinely at peace in their life and in relation to others, they don’t have a reason for that.”
She approaches this from an indirect angle: she helps individuals, and trusts that individuals make society. But she’s open to the larger framing. A world made of people who are present, embodied, capable of intimacy, not driven by compulsive compensation is a different world.
“Sexual energy is life energy,” she says again. “And when we’re cut off from it, it doesn’t serve us well. As people or as a society.”
What Antonia Faust Actually Does
Antonia Faust is a couples and sex therapist based in Dresden. She studied psychology and has completed advanced training in couples and sexual therapy. Her work draws on embodiment practices and shadow work alongside clinical methods, and she works with individuals and couples. You can find her on Instagram: @lustaufklaerung
