Personality Changing
Sexual avoidants can enhance their sexual desire and performance indirectly by overcoming inhibiting personality problems. To illustrate, obsessively high expectations associated with excessive resolute perfectionism relating to sexual performance lead to easy disappointment and ready retreat. Often a personality buffered by posttraumatic stress experiences performance inhibition based on anticipation of partner abuse originating in intrusive past accurate and/or retrospectively distorted memories of experienced sexual traumata.
Environmental Enhancing
Improving unfavorable, sexually negative surroundings is a simple, direct way to enhance desire and performance, for example, soundproofing a bedroom that is close to where the children sleep.
Emotional Charging
Strong and persistent stimulation involving nonsexual touching, such as massage, can act as an instrument both of immediate release and of release over time. That, along with regular sexual contacts without forcing things or expecting too much, can cumulatively relieve sexual strictures by ultimately breaking through self-induced, compulsively turned on inhibitory sexual “cold showers.”
Behavior Changing
Behavioral therapy can lead to performance improvement and enhanced enjoyment. For example, a therapist might suggest that a man treat his ejaculatio tarda by increasing his thrusting force and speed and reducing the frequency of his sexual encounters. For some men and women, monogamy without masturbation is a particularly powerful aphrodisiac achieved through focusing on one object, improving quality by reducing quantity. One man’s sexual performance improved markedly when he merely stopped encouraging himself to have intrusive, wild sexual fantasies about third parties and instead forced himself to focus entirely on sex with his wife.
Calm can be enhanced and anticipatory brooding and the anxiety associated with spectatoring reduced through the use of such relaxation techniques as Zen removal and specific breathing exercises, the details of which are beyond the scope of this text.
Cognitive Restructuring
Identifying and correcting cognitive distortions such as “no orgasm = no life” can help individuals stop their panicky viewing of each and every sexual encounter as the sole test of whether they are or are not a full man or woman who will or will not be punished, rejected, and exiled for their sexual thoughts, desires, and performance.
Medical Curing
Symptoms of sexual avoidance can often be relieved directly through the use of medical “magic bullets” such as drugs that treat erectile dysfunction, antidepressants that retard ejaculation, and sexual aids that enhance sexual pleasure (but should not become a substitute for the greater goal of attaining full sexual psychological adequacy without them).
Partner Involving: Remediation
Partners of sexual avoidants can be encouraged to aid the healing process. Instead of leaving it up to chance, partners should tell each other what they really want sexually, and do so without shame. The power of positivity—especially sexual altruism that makes not one’s own, but one’s partner’s comfort/pleasure/orgasm the main thing—can be helpful, especially if the other partner, becoming appreciative, develops new and more loving feelings that feed back to increase the first partner’s desire, ultimately enhancing both partners’ performance.
Partners should stop doing anything they might be doing to thwart each other’s sexual performance/enjoyment. They should avoid allowing themselves to become unattractive. They should not humiliate their partners by making hurtful jokes either about them or about their sexual performance, either directly or indirectly, privately or publicly, and instead, even when feeling negatively, try always to display at least a degree of positivity. They should not express disgust by asking their partners to shower before sex, or come across as disinterested or disdainful the way a patient recently did when he told his straight girlfriend how it was really dykes on bikes that most turned him on. In many of my patients, sex improved when one partner stopped creating the very distancing in the other that he or she complained of. A woman getting paranoid about her boyfriend devalued him by complaining that he was trying to get her pregnant just so that she would stay with him. Another, also becoming paranoid, accused her husband of having an affair when he was actually being faithful, and a third, instead of letting sexual encounters go at their own spontaneous, healthy rate, deaffirmed and invalidated his wife by constantly pushing her for sex even when he knew, but didn’t care, that she wasn’t interested because she was otherwise preoccupied.
Other Involving
It can be helpful to do what one can to stem the influence of parents, in-laws, coworkers, and uncomprehending members of society who make things worse by intruding into a relationship, for example, by making negative passing comments or giving bad advice. In one case, the bad advice consisted of telling a couple to “make the break” when it would have been better to stay, and in another, telling a couple to “stay with the known devil out of a fear of illness and old age” when it would have been better to go.
Options of Last Resort
The following options exist for resolving a situation where one or both partners are resolutely and incurably sexually avoidant:
• both agreeing to separate or file for divorce now
• both agreeing on an open marriage, staying together, and relating as friends without becoming enemies, enjoying the partner without being sexually demanding and threatening divorce, accepting the partner as is and living with things the way they are rather than responding negatively to diminished or nonperformance
• one agreeing to lovingly help the other find someone else more suitable
• saving oneself by bettering one’s life, say, by taking trips to no-where/anywhere just to get away
• staying faithful and becoming sexually avoidant/inactive oneself
• helping a partner by compromising and agreeing to have a certain amount of sex anyway, yielding even when one doesn’t really feel like it, even modifying one’s sexual preferences to give the partner what he or she wants to avoid being rejected
Sometimes partners who married sexual avoidants who performed in the beginning then never again have children and feel stuck in, and are actually trapped together for, a lifetime of child rearing. Partners have to decide how to raise children in this environment. That often involves making important decisions about therapy, including about whether, as individuals, they should make the rounds of personal therapists and work out their problems one on one, or go together visiting marriage therapists to work out their problems in couple therapy. Since there are few to no fixed rules on how to proceed, the answers so often depend on personal preference as well as on therapist availability and cost.
FOR THOSE WHO ARE PARENTS
Parents have a job to do to prevent sexual avoidance in their children by staying out of their children’s bedrooms. Figuratively or literally “looking through the peephole” can only cause the child’s sexuality to become not an exercise in having fun oneself and giving pleasure to others, but in spending one’s life avoiding displeasing and shocking mother and father.