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(38) Anxiety

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How To Conquer Performance Anxiety

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What is sexual anxiety?

Not surprisingly, sexual relations are a common medium through which people experience and express anxiety. Avoidance of sexual activity is one of the most common manifestations of sexual anxiety. Patients who do so may have a particular phobia of sexual intercourse and try to keep themselves safe from dangers they imagine will occur in a sexual situation.

Sexual intercourse in general and orgasm in particular, involve a loss of bodily control. Fears of overwhelming excitement or of fusion with a lover may lead to fantasies of lost control and destruction. In French, the nickname for orgasm is le petit mort (the small death).

Another sexual anxiety is a fear of intense sexual gratification or sexual success. A patient might begin a happy sexual relationship. As the partners become more emotionally close, they may start to imagine their worlds imploding. This anxiety can take the form of fear of contracting a sexually transmitted disease, unwanted pregnancy with their partner (despite using standard methods of birth control), or feelings of newly discovered defectiveness in the partner.

This sexual anxiety can often be understood in the context of one’s family history. It is not uncommon for people who grow up in homes where sex and sexuality were not spoken about directly to fear intercourse. A child who grows up without a role model for the comfortable handling of sexual desire and behavior is left alone to figure out how to navigate this new experience.

Thus the joy of sex can feel something like getting in over one’s head. A child with a history of sexual abuse or with a parental history of sexual abuse can seldom engage in sexual experiences without some degree of wariness, at least on an unconscious anxiety level. Or, someone deeply attached in his or her relationship with a parent (daughter-mother, son-mother, daughter-father, and son-father) can associate sexual activity with one’s partner as permanently leaving one’s parents.

Feelings of sexual joy can feel illegal, dangerous, and liberating, thereby causing partners to create all manner of havoc for themselves in their minds as they relate sexually.

Some sexual anxiety presents symptomatically as an inability to perform. Women can experience vaginismus (or clamping of the vaginal musculature, thus preventing entry of the penis). Other women experience anorgasmia, or the inability to achieve orgasm. Likewise, men may be unable to sustain an erection, may maintain an erection but be unable to ejaculate, or may ejaculate prematurely.

These anxieties about intimate human relationships involving loss of control become magnified when sexual activity begins. With a skilled professional, these interpersonal struggles and/or sexual anxieties can be treated with success.

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