In the first piece in this series about stress and our sex lives, I talked to you about how everyday stress can turn your mojo into mush. Now I’m going to talk to you about three bigger types of stress that can present problems in your relationships.
These are performance anxiety, relationship issues, and PTSD. Let’s take a look at how they can impact your sex life.
Performance Anxiety and Sex
Simply put, performance anxiety is when you fear that your own physical performance in bed will fall below your hopes and expectations.
When it does, it can be humiliating. That causes shame. And that causes more stress which can send you into a downward spiral.
Performance anxiety has no gender, despite doctors’ only application to male-bodied people. Performance anxiety creeps up on anyone when their self-image or body image drops like a sack of lead. The worst part is it happens when we are literally naked and at our most vulnerable.
Common Causes of Performance Anxiety
Let’s talk about “performance anxiety”. Typically, it’s used to describe what happens when guys develop anxiety around failure to get or maintain an erection. If they have a poor self-image or shame about their genitals, even a random one-time experience of impotence makes them doubt themselves and fret that they are not real men anymore.
From my perspective, giving all men pills for normal life experience (times when the libido is lower than others) only re-instills the sense of being broken. Instead of teaching everyone that occasional dysfunction is normal and largely situational (depending on who you’re with, where you are, how much you drank, how much stress you’re feeling, etc. ), we silently let men wallow in self-doubt and think the worst of themselves for not being perfect machines.
Women have different causes of performance anxiety, with body-image ranking probably at the top. Women are encouraged to believe their bodies are flawed and require improvement by all the pop media advising them to change their natural looks and eradicate natural odors. The fear of not looking good enough can make them shy up in bed. Their body’s odors and secretions may embarrass them. All such insecurities create performance anxiety that erodes their ability to free themselves to enjoy sex.
Another common cause of performance anxiety is not being able to trust one’s partner. Infidelities, betrayals, jealousy all create tremendous emotional stress for humans. That stress can distort your sex life. It may harm your ability to trust not just the one you’re with now, but future partners as well.
Relationship Stress and Sex
Relationship stress is about all the things that hurt in our relationships. This includes the conflicts and arguments, fights both big and small, insults or imprecations, or the pressure partners place on us. Sex alone is not a solution to profound hurts.
In my experience, before you can heal someone’s sex life, you have to help them deal with their issues in the relationship. This may mean resolving some conflicts, making compromises on others, or just moving forward and not dwelling on the past. My approach is to work with partners to stabilize and strengthen their emotional bonds. After that, we can move towards rekindling their mutual appetite for intimacy.
For example, Anna and Blue wanted me to fix the problems in their sex life. Anna felt so hurt and emotionally abandoned by Blue that he felt like a stranger to her after 20 years of marriage. Blue felt she was controlling, withholding, and selfish. As they explained their problems, they begin to fight, insult each other, and bitterly disagree with everything the other one said. They couldn’t hear me above the sounds of their own anger.
It was quickly obvious that I would not be able to help them. Most people can’t have great sex with someone they can’t sit next to without screaming. They were unwilling to let go of their anger and beliefs that the other was 100% to blame for the problems in their marriage.
Relationship stress may not be as devastating for others, and we all know people who seem to get off on love/hate relationships. But when most private conversations with your partner are tinged by hostility or negativity, your sex life is likely to suffer the repercussions.
PTSD and Sex
Simply put, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is when horrible things happen to you. The events haunt you. They may alter your thought patterns, which usually means they alter your behaviors as well.
You wouldn’t think that a war-torn vet and a woman who grew up privileged and sheltered from the world are equally likely to have PTSD but they are. PTSD is, more or less, the human condition — bad things happen to all of us. The problem is, we’re apt to keep remembering those bad things. A lot of what we call normal human behavior is the result of painful experiences we live through as we grow up. If you add trauma to that picture, the pain may be great enough to significantly damage your sex life.
For the vet, it may be an injury or a haunting image of violence that makes it difficult for them to relax with others. For the woman of seeming privilege, verbal abuse or sexual trauma can distort her sexual responses until she works with a healer.
There are no “typical” cases of PTSD when it comes to sex because of the differences in the root causes of the trauma, along with individual differences in how people process stress. In other words, when bad things happen to good people, the stress can diminish their ability to enjoy good sex.
Move Beyond Stress, Enjoy Better Sex
In the next and final installment of this series, Stress Management for Better Sex, I will focus on the techniques that have helped my clients get their sex lives back on track.
Take good care of yourself. You matter.
