What Comes Between Arousal and Orgasm? The Science of the Absorbed State

A woman can be sexually aroused and still be unable to orgasm.

She may enjoy stimulation, feel excited, and even come close to orgasm. Her body may respond to sexual touch, yet orgasm remains inaccessible.

For women who experience difficulty between arousal and orgasm, this raises a deceptively simple question:

If I am already aroused, what is missing?

One possibility emerging from research on female sexual response is that we have paid too little attention to what happens between arousal and orgasm: a change in a woman’s state of consciousness.

In particular, could entering an absorbed or altered state help make orgasmic response more accessible?

What Happens Between Arousal and Orgasm?

Masters and Johnson’s foundational model of human sexual response described a progression through excitement, plateau, orgasm, and resolution (Masters & Johnson, 1966).

Their model transformed the scientific study of sexuality. Moreover, it remains foundational to how sexual response is understood and taught.

However, consider the transition between plateau and orgasm.

What changes allow a woman to move from being highly sexually aroused into orgasm?

For women who become aroused but struggle to orgasm, understanding this transition may be particularly important.

The Definition of Orgasm Gives Us a Clue

A major scientific review of women’s orgasm described orgasm as a variable, transient peak sensation of intense pleasure that creates an altered state of consciousness (Meston et al., 2004).

That description raises another question.

Does the altered state begin only after orgasm has occurred? Or could the transition toward an altered, absorbed, or otherwise orgasm-supportive state begin before orgasm, helping the response become accessible?

That possibility is one of the central hypotheses of the Orgasmic Learning framework I have been developing (Mulvehill, 2026).

What Is an Absorbed State?

An absorbed state is not necessarily mysterious or exotic. In fact, most of us experience absorption routinely.

For example, we become lost in music, engrossed in a movie, or deeply immersed in a daydream. Sometimes, we even lose track of time while doing something that completely captures our attention.

During these experiences, ordinary self-monitoring may recede as our attention becomes increasingly focused on what we are experiencing.

Decades ago, Swartz (1994) proposed that absorbed states may play an especially important role in female sexual response. Specifically, he hypothesized a relationship between psychological absorption, sexual arousal, and orgasm. He also suggested that absorption could function differently in women’s and men’s sexual responses.

Now consider how different an absorbed state may be from the internal experience reported by many women who have difficulty reaching orgasm.

Instead of becoming immersed in sensation, a woman may find herself monitoring her experience:

Why haven’t I orgasmed?

Am I taking too long?

Is my partner getting tired?

Is it going to happen?

Why can’t I let go?

These thoughts may pull attention away from sensation and toward self-evaluation.

In contrast, absorption involves becoming deeply immersed in the experience itself.

What Research Says About Absorption and Sexual Responsiveness

More than two decades after Swartz proposed his hypothesis, Costa and colleagues examined the relationship between altered states of consciousness and sexual responsiveness (Costa et al., 2016).

They found that altered states involving attentional absorption were strongly related to sexual responsiveness in women and, to a lesser degree, in men.

In addition, changes in body awareness and the perception of time and space were associated with sexual response.

Importantly, these findings do not establish that absorption causes orgasm.

Nevertheless, they provide empirical support for something women often describe intuitively: becoming deeply immersed in a sexual experience and losing ordinary awareness of time, surroundings, and self-monitoring may be relevant to female sexual responsiveness.

Perhaps “getting out of your head” is more scientifically interesting than it sounds.

Can Something Help a Woman Enter an Absorbed State?

If absorption matters, the next obvious question is:

What can help create it?

Two very different examples worth examining are cannabis and hypnotic induction. Both have been investigated in relation to altered conscious experience and are identified as potential Orgasmic Learning pathways.

However, their mechanisms, evidence bases, and clinical implications are not identical.

Cannabis and Psychological Absorption

Cannabis is a psychoactive substance that changes conscious experience.

For example, Fabian and Fishkin (1991) examined psychological absorption during marijuana use. They found that absorption increased during cannabis use and concluded that the cannabis-induced state can involve an alteration of consciousness characterized by an enhanced capacity for total attentional involvement.

Similarly, THC has been shown experimentally to alter time perception, another characteristic frequently associated with altered states of consciousness (Sewell et al., 2013).

A systematic review of cannabis and female orgasm function found that all nine studies examining cannabis use before sexual activity reported improvements in one or more aspects of female orgasmic function, including orgasm frequency, ease, intensity, quality, or multiorgasmic capacity (Mulvehill & Tishler, 2025).

Instead, the findings raise an important research question:

Could cannabis help some women orgasm partly because it helps them enter a different state?

That question is particularly meaningful to me personally.

I struggled with orgasm difficulty for more than 30 years, saw several sex therapists, and tried different treatments. Ultimately, cannabis helped me enter a state of absorption and access orgasm reliably for the first time in my life.

My experience does not establish what cannabis will do for other women. However, it helped shape the scientific questions I continue to investigate.

Hypnosis: A Very Different Path Into an Absorbed State

Hypnosis gives us another fascinating example. 

The American Psychological Association’s Division 30 definition describes hypnosis as a state of consciousness involving focused attention and reduced peripheral awareness, together with an enhanced capacity to respond to suggestion (Elkins et al., 2015).

Focused attention. Reduced peripheral awareness.

Those characteristics sound remarkably similar to absorption.

More recently, Pfaus and colleagues examined hypnotically induced orgasm in five healthy premenopausal women (Pfaus et al., 2025). The women were fully clothed and received no direct genital stimulation. Following hypnotic induction of orgasm, plasma prolactin increased to an average of 147% of baseline, and the researchers observed characteristic pelvic-floor and abdominal contractions associated with orgasm (Pfaus et al., 2025).

These findings build on more than 50 years of clinical literature describing hypnosis as a potential treatment pathway for women with orgasm difficulties (Chernenkoff, 1972; Richardson, 1968).

The research demonstrates something important:

Orgasmic response can be accessed through a profoundly top-down pathway involving focused attention and altered conscious experience, without direct genital stimulation.

Cannabis and hypnosis are very different interventions. Nevertheless, both can influence attention and conscious experience.

That convergence deserves further scientific investigation.

Why Absorbed States Matter for Female Orgasm Difficulty?

Beyond sexual-response research, a broader scientific literature examines the therapeutic significance of altered states of consciousness.

For example, Mishara and Schwartz (2011) described deliberately induced altered states as “paradoxically healing.” Their work examined how changes in consciousness may create different conditions for psychological and neurobiological processing.

Their work was not about female orgasmic difficulty. However, it raises a broader possibility relevant to Orgasmic Learning: altered states may create treatment-enabling conditions in which perception, emotional processing, regulation, and learning occur differently.

Could an absorbed or altered state similarly create conditions in which a previously inaccessible orgasmic response becomes possible?

That remains a research question.

A Proposed Missing Step

The conventional sequence is often understood simply as:

Arousal → Orgasm

I propose that for some women, particularly women who experience orgasm difficulty, another process may need to be considered:

Arousal → State Transition → Orgasmic Access → Orgasm

The proposed state transition may involve movement away from ordinary self-monitoring and toward an absorbed, altered, or otherwise orgasm-supportive condition characterized by greater immersion in sensation, altered attention, increased sensory salience, or reduced cognitive interference (Mulvehill, 2026).

This does not mean that every woman must enter one identifiable altered state before every orgasm.

Science has not established that.

Rather, the emerging evidence gives us reason to investigate whether the ability to transition into an absorbed or orgasm-supportive state may be particularly important for some women whose bodies become aroused but whose orgasms remain inaccessible.

A Different Question for Women With Orgasm Difficulty

Perhaps we have spent too much time asking women with orgasm difficulty:

Are you aroused enough?

Yet a woman may already be sexually aroused, enjoy stimulation, and experience physical pleasure without being able to reach orgasm.

Therefore, a different question may be:

What helps you become absorbed enough in your experience for orgasm to become accessible?

Or, even more simply:

Can you enter the state in which your orgasm becomes accessible?

Understanding what happens between arousal and orgasm may help researchers explore new ways of approaching female orgasm difficulty.

Ultimately, this may be one of the missing questions in female orgasm research.

References

Elkins, G. R., Barabasz, A. F., Council, J. R., & Spiegel, D. (2015). Advancing research and practice: The revised APA Division 30 definition of hypnosis. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 63(1), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1080/00207144.2014.961870

Fabian, W. D., Jr., & Fishkin, S. M. (1991). Psychological absorption: Affect investment in marijuana intoxication. The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 179(1), 39–43. https://doi.org/10.1097/00005053-199101000-00008  

Masters, W. H., & Johnson, V. E. (1966). Human sexual response. Little, Brown and Company.

Meston, C. M., Levin, R. J., Sipski, M. L., Hull, E. M., & Heiman, J. R. (2004). Women’s orgasm. Annual Review of Sex Research, 15(1), 173–257. https://doi.org/10.1080/10532528.2004.10559820

Mishara, A. L., & Schwartz, M. A. (2011). Altered states of consciousness as paradoxically healing: An embodied social neuroscience perspective. In E. Cardeña & M. Winkelman (Eds.), Altering consciousness: Multidisciplinary perspectives (Vol. 2, pp. 327–353). Praeger.

Mulvehill, S. (2026). Orgasmic learning as a treatment framework for female orgasmic disorder/difficulty: A review using Perelman’s Sexual Tipping Point® model https://doi.org/10.1007/s11930-026-00428-w.

Mulvehill, S., & Tishler, J. (2025). Cannabis for female orgasmic disorder/difficulty: A systematic review. Sexual Medicine, 13(4), qfaf061. https://doi.org/10.1093/sexmed/qfaf061

Pfaus, J. G., Nerenberg, A., Sonshine, M., Kosařová, A., Nováková, M., & Novák, J. (2025). Hypnotic induction of orgasm increases plasma prolactin in women. The Journal of Sexual Medicine, 22(Supplement_1), qdaf068.054. https://doi.org/10.1093/jsxmed/qdaf068.054

Sewell, R. A., Schnakenberg, A., Elander, J., Radhakrishnan, R., Williams, A., Skosnik, P. D., Pittman, B., Ranganathan, M., & D’Souza, D. C. (2013). Acute effects of THC on time perception in frequent and infrequent cannabis users. Psychopharmacology, 226(2), 401–413. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00213-012-2915-6

Swartz, L. H. (1994). Absorbed states play different roles in female and male sexual response: Hypotheses for testing. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 20(3), 244–253. https://doi.org/10.1080/00926239408403434