Low Sexual Desire in Relationships: Where Has the Passion Gone?

Sex is everywhere. In marketing, it sells everything from cars to chocolate. It brings audiences to the big screen and drives people’s fantasies.

In happy couples, sex is a good way of expressing love, acceptance, caring and desire for the other person. It can forge feelings of connection and partnership. It can be pleasurable and fun.

In unhappy couples it provokes feelings of rejection, mistrust, anxiety, loneliness, shame and disappointment.

If you are asking yourself where all the passion in your relationship has gone, then this article may help you to talk about it with your loved one and to start exploring possible causes and solutions.

1. Break away from cultural myths:

There is a cultural myth that real men do not experience low sexual desire. This myth is being put to the test, as growing numbers of men in the US express concern over their falling sex drive.

By contrast, women are the ones who are often accused of having low libidos. This has often led to clichéd accounts of women withholding sex in order to frustrate their male partners.

Popular myths can cause real problems when it comes to addressing concerns about sex. It places unrealistic expectations on both members of the couple. It can lead to disappointment or resentment, fuelling a negative cycle of blame and shame and spiraling down to even less desire and satisfaction.

In an attempt to sort fact out from fiction, I am often asked to comment on what is normal. The truth is that when it comes to desire, normality encompasses a broad range of experiences.

The most important thing is to forget about what you’ve been told. Find out whether or not you and your partner, are satisfied with your current sex life. This is the best place to start in defining the problem and looking for a solution.

2. Look at biological factors

Here are some factors, which can influence your body’s ability to feel desire. To assess them, it might help to consider when lack of libido started becoming an issue. It is always best to consult your doctor in case there are medical problems that need to be treated.

• Fatigue
• Increased alcohol intake
• Poor health
• Stress
• Lack of sleep
• Certain medications such as antidepressants,
• Depression
• Certain medical conditions such as endocrine disturbances

3. Get to know the sexual life of your couple

Talking about sex can be daunting. When there are so many cultural taboos around sexuality, many individuals fear that they will be rejected or ridiculed when they share their private thoughts.

However getting to know the sexual life of your couple is about getting to know how sex is experienced by both of you. There are many things to think about that could be relevant to your relationship. The following ideas, if sensitively explored, could be used to guide conversation.

• Have either of you had prior sexual experiences that have influenced how you or your partner, feel about sex today?
• Have either of you lost a child, had an abortion or miscarriage?
• Have there ever been problems with fertility?
• Have either of you ever worried about your body image?
• Has sex ever been painful?
• Have either of you ever experienced physical or sexual abuse?
• How do your ideas and beliefs about sex compare to one another?
• Are you able to know or talk about what turns you or your partner on?
• 
  

4. Check the emotional pulse in your relationship

This point is often overlooked but is extremely important. In fact the bedroom is often the arena where difficulties in the emotional life of a long-term relationship get expressed.

This is because intimacy requires complete trust. To be naked with your partner; to be honest about your sexual desires and needs; to fully express your sexuality; requires honesty about your emotions and acceptance of and sensitivity to your partner’s feelings.

So now is the time to sort out everything that has been piling up in the kitchen sink. That includes looking at any unexpressed anger, resentment or disappointment in your couple.http://freshpagetherapy.blogspot.com/2010/11/how-to-argue.html

5. Accept your differences.

The more open you are to hearing what your partner has to say, the more openness there will be in your couple. This is about accepting difference and that includes the differences that you both experience in desire.

There is often change in desire as couples mature. This can result from age-related factors which are experienced differently and at different times by men and women.

It can also result from the changes in body chemistry that are experienced as couples move from the passion of first encounters to a more stable and enduring sexual relationship. In fact, it is often at this stage that couples first notice a difference between themselves in terms of sexual appetite.

6. Focus on the solution

If your idea of sexual satisfaction is vastly different to your partner’s, then it may be helpful to start looking for some common ground. By focusing on what you want rather then what you don’t want, you move away from negative patterns of blame and shame and towards a level of intimacy built on sensitivity and respect.

And Finally

If you and your partner need support in exploring some of these issues then contact a qualified marital and family therapist http://therapists.psychologytoday.com/rms/prof_search.php. We are there to help.

Cognitive Behaviour Therapy: What is it and how does it work?

“The mind is its own place, and in it self can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”

~John Milton, Paradise Lost

Many of you reading this blog will hear a ring of truth in the quotation above. Perhaps you are plagued by negative thoughts that circle almost constantly in your head. Perhaps moments of creeping anxiety or even sheer panic make your life unliveable.

CBT (Cognitive Behaviour Therapy) was devised to get to the heart of each individual’s personal hell. It provides a method of changing the way we look at things and of changing our experience of life as a whole. I use it to work with anxiety where it has shown to be a useful approach.

Its central philosophy is that beliefs about ourselves, about others, or about life in general have a direct impact on what and how we feel and on how we behave. CBT describes how this can create a kind of a feedback loop, where a person’s beliefs and their physiological, emotional and behavioural responses all interact with each other in ways, which perpetuate and maintain the problem.

Imagine for example that you are walking into a bar one day and a man turns to look at you. What do you think?

“He’s noticed how I look.”

“What does that guy want with me?”

“This does not look like a safe bar.”

“That guy must be waiting for someone. He must have wondered if I was that person walking in”

On the surface, it’s impossible to judge which of the above thoughts might be true. However they each reveal something about our general outlook towards life, towards others or towards ourselves.

Supposing one were to think “He’s noticed how I look.” This thought may come from a variety of different outlooks. Someone, for example, who generally sees the world as an unfriendly place might be prepared for the possibility that others will laugh at him. If he then goes out and sees people looking at him, he might automatically think that they are judging him.

At this point there is often a physical response. The person might go red, they might feel a lump in their throat, a tightness in the chest, or feel short of breath. Their heart might pump harder. They might shake or sweat. They might experience stomach pains or a sense of unreality. This in turn emphasises the impression that others are looking and leads to feelings like, embarrassment, shame, anxiety, sadness or anger.

In response, he might start a fight or duck into a corner. He may attempt to deflect attention by having a loud conversation with the bar man. According to CBT, the way we behave in response to these events only goes to reinforce the beliefs that caused such a reaction in the first place.

It sparks a vicious cycle that can lead to spiralling negative thoughts and escalating psychological and physical discomfort.

Although we all have beliefs that guide our general outlook in life, we are rarely aware of them. This is because they are always acquired when we are very small and don’t have the language to question them.

So they get hardwired to a part of the brain, which operates automatically. CBT is about gaining control through finding these beliefs and making them conscious.

Cognitive behaviour therapists help their clients to examine their beliefs either through carefully devised questions or through behavioural experiments.

Behavioural experiments involve exposure to the events that elicit the discomfort. The theory goes that by facing up to our beliefs in a concrete way we reach parts of the brain that other therapies can’t reach rewiring our belief system and creating possibilities for long term positive change.