How to Overcome Sexual Aversion

Introduction:Sexual compatibility is very important in most marriages. On rare occasion I find a couple happily married without any sex whatsoever, but in most cases, the quality of sex determines the quality of marriage. When a couple's sexual relationship begins to suffer, the marriage is usually suffering. But when a sexual relationship is thriving, the marriage is also thriving.

Usually it's the husband who has the greatest need for sex, but that isn't always the case. I am finding increasing numbers of wives who need sexual fulfillment more than their husbands. However, whether it's the husband or the wife with the greater need for sex, the one with lesser need is at risk for a sexual aversion.

In an effort to satisfy the spouse with the greater need for sex, the spouse with the lesser need often sacrifices his or her own emotional reactions. Instead of sex being an experience that they both enjoy together, sex becomes enjoyable only for the one with the greatest need. And it can become a nightmare for the other spouse. In all too many marriages, sacrifice leads to a sexual aversion, which, in turn, leads to no sex at all.

This column will help you overcome a sexual aversion if you suffer from it. But even if you don't, it may help prevent you or your spouse from becoming its victim.




Dear Dr. Harley,
I have been married for nine years, and have two children. I have no interest in having sex. In fact, the thought of it is repulsive to me. I shudder when my husband reaches over and touches me when we are in bed together. Earlier in our marriage I had sex with my husband because I knew it was important to him, even though I was not interested. Sex was not disgusting to me then, just not enjoyable. Over time, however, I began to refuse him more and more often, and the thought of having sex became more and more unpleasant.

I finally told my husband that I no longer would have sex with him, and asked him to please stop trying. I feel guilty about not meeting his need for sex, but I feel so much better. I can finally go to bed and relax. I feel like a terrible burden has been lifted from me. I feel safe. But I am afraid for my marriage. I don't believe we can go on like this forever. Do you have any advice?

C.R.



Dear C.R.
The reason that you and your husband fell in love with each other and were married is that you were successful in meeting some of each other's most important emotional needs. You deposited so many love units into each other's Love Banks that the love threshold was shattered, and you found each other irresistible.

But you were not necessarily meeting the same emotional needs. He may have met your need for conversation, and you may have met his needs for recreational companionship. He may not have needed to talk with you nearly as much as you needed to talk with him, but he may have spent hours at a time talking with you anyway. And you may have watched football with him on television, not because you enjoy violence on TV, but because you wanted to join him in his favorite recreational activities.

The reason you met your husband's emotional needs is that you loved him, and wanted to make him happy. He was willing to do the same for you. You were both in the state of intimacy (see my basic concept, Negotiating in the Three States of Marriage) and in that state of mind, you were both willing to do whatever it took to meet each other's emotional needs.

But, as is the case in many marriages, you are now no longer meeting those needs. And the source of your love for each other is being slowly but surely squeezed out. Your neglect of each other has probably already taken its toll, and you are probably no longer in love with each other.

It's common sense to believe that spouses should try to meet each other's emotional needs, regardless of what they happen to be. No one has ever seriously argued with me that we shouldn't meet important emotional needs in marriage. And yet, in most marriages, spouses usually stop meeting them. Sometimes it's intentional and sometimes it's unintentional. They usually know that they should be meeting each other's emotional needs, and yet they don't or can't do it.

The most common reason that spouses don't meet each other's needs is that they fall out of the state of intimacy and into the states of conflict or withdrawal. In either state of mind, people do not feel like making their spouses happy, because of the way they have been treated. Love Busters, such as angry outbursts, disrespectful judgments and selfish demands quickly destroy the state of intimacy.

If your husband were to be angry, disrespectful or demanding, would you want to watch football with him? If you treated him the same way, would he want to talk with you for hours? Not unless you each had the same needs yourselves. The only way you might meet those needs for each other is if you were doing it for yourselves. You might watch football with your husband because you simply wanted to see the game with someone, and he happened to be the only one around. He might talk with you for hours only if he needed to talk to someone, and you were there to talk with him. But if you didn't have the same needs, he'd be watching football all by himself and you'd be reading a book instead of talking to him.

In most marriages, husbands and wives don't have the same emotional needs, or at least they are not prioritized the same. Your marriage is that way, too. Sex has probably always been a very low priority for you, and a very high priority for your husband. And you may have emotional needs that don't mean much to your husband, either. But when you were in the state of intimacy, you were willing to make love to him as often as he wanted, just to make him happy, even though sex wasn't what you needed. Your husband may also have been willing to meet your needs, even though it may not have done that much for him.

You'd probably still be making love with him today, and cheerfully, if you could have remained in the state of intimacy for the past nine years. But there's no marriage in existence that can achieve that kind of record, and sooner or later your husband was bound to make a mistake that drove you from the state of intimacy into conflict. He withdrew just enough love units for you to fall out of love, and at that moment, he wanted to make love.

You may remember the first time you tried to make love to your husband in the state of conflict, and you probably realized then that it was an experience you would not want to repeat. You never had enjoyed sex that much, but now you were trying to do it after your husband had hurt your feelings. You had taken your first step toward sexual aversion.


What Is an Aversive Reaction?
An aversion is a negative emotional reaction that's been conditioned to a behavior. In other words, if you have bad experiences doing something, you will learn to associate those bad experiences with the task. The very thought of it will eventually create anxiety and unhappiness, and then doing it will make matters even worse.

Some psychologists, for reasons known only to them, like to shock rats. They have shown that if you subject a poor rat to an electric shock every time it takes a drink of water, it will not necessarily stop drinking water. But the rat will become very nervous whenever it does.

Humans go through the same experience. If your boss yells at you occasionally when you go to the water cooler, you will find yourself very tense whenever you drink from it. Your boss's yelling, which gives you a negative emotional reaction, becomes conditioned to your drinking from the water cooler. It's not the drinking itself that's unpleasant, it's the association of drinking with your boss yelling that triggers your reaction.

Aversions can be created in association with anything we do. Unpleasant classroom experiences can create "school phobia," something many children have great difficulty overcoming. An automobile accident can leave people with a fear of driving. Even shopping for groceries can raise anxiety in people who have had a bad grocery shopping experience.

Aversions can also be created when spouses try to meet each other's emotional needs, if the effort is associated with an unpleasant experience. There can be an aversion to meet the needs of admiration, affection, physical attractiveness, domestic support, family commitment, financial support, honesty and openness, recreational companionship, conversation and sexual fulfillment. These aversions can be created in a number of ways, but the most common is when a frustrated spouse becomes abusive when a need is not met to his or her satisfaction.

When one spouse tries to earn enough money for the other and he or she becomes angry with a paycheck that's judged too small, an aversive reaction to earning a living can be created. When a spouse tries to be affectionate and is angrily rebuffed because it isn't done "right" for some reason, an aversion to affection can be created. When a spouse tries to join in recreational activities, but has a miserable time, an aversion to recreational companionship can be created.

In other words, whenever someone tries to meet an emotional need, and finds the experience particularly unpleasant, there's a great possibility that future efforts to meet that need will be associated with unpleasant feelings, an aversive reaction.

That's one of the reasons that it's so important to meet your spouse's needs in a way that you find enjoyable, and why I put so much emphasis on the Policy of Joint Agreement. If you ever develop an aversion to meeting one of your spouse's needs, you'll find it impossible to meet. You will first have to overcome the aversion before you will ever be able to meet the need again.


Sexual Aversion
Sex is a very common aversion in marriage. Suppose a husband is upset with the frequency and manner in which his wife makes love to him. Instead of solving the problem with thoughtfulness and understanding, he becomes verbally and physically abusive whenever sex isn't to his liking. He may not be abusive every time he makes love, and he may be very sensitive on almost every occasion. But whether his abuse is frequent or infrequent, his wife is likely to associate the unpleasantness of his abuse with the sex act itself. After a while, she finds the act extremely unpleasant, and tries to avoid it if she can. She has developed a sexual aversion.

C.R., you have probably developed your sexual aversion the way most women do, as a result of your husband pressuring you to have sex to him when you didn't feel like it. In most cases of sexual aversion, a husband is the source of these unpleasant experiences.

You probably began your marriage not knowing how to enjoy sex, and made love to your husband out of a spirit of generosity. You may not have known how to become sexually aroused or how to climax. But as long as you were in the state of intimacy, the experience was somewhat pleasant for you, because the sex act made you feel more emotionally connected to him.

Eventually your husband did something that made you feel less than generous. He hurt your feelings. It may have been something he said to you that was angry or judgmental. But you made love to him anyway, out of obligation. That experience was downright unpleasant, because you had absolutely no interest in being emotionally connected to him at the time. You probably wanted him to get it over as quickly as possible. Your husband may have had no way of knowing that you were suffering, because you didn't want to confront your husband with your resentment.

From that point on, your sexual experiences became predictably unpleasant. You made love because he expected it, not because you were willing, and you did whatever you could to avoid it or to make it brief. Whenever he would reach over an touch you at night, you knew that the nightmare was about to begin again. You eventually hated his touch. You may have told him how much it bothered you, but he would do it anyway. There was no way to stop him. Eventually, you developed an aversion to sex.

The same thing would have happened if you had tried to watch football with your husband. In the state of intimacy, you would have enjoyed the experience, because you felt emotionally bonded to him. But if he had hurt your feelings, and then expected you to watch football with him, it would have put you on the path of a football aversion.

If you had felt obligated to watch football with him, week after week, with no natural interest of you own, and no feeling of intimacy, it would have felt like torture to you. Eventually you would have felt disgust and revulsion whenever football was mentioned.

Had you started your marriage with an agreement that you would only make love to your husband when, and in a way that, you would enjoy it and respond sexually, you would never have had an aversion. Your sexual interest would have increased over the years.

Unlike football, you are wired physiologically to enjoy sex. If you had made love to your husband on your terms and for your pleasure, it would only have been a matter of time before all the connections would have been discovered. Then, you may have come to need sex more than he does.

But because you did not understand how important your emotional reaction was, you not only didn't try to enjoy the experience sexually, but you also put yourself though emotional pain in your effort to meet your husband's need for sex. Your effort to meet his need unconditionally did you in, and now you're not meeting it at all.

Sexual aversion is usually poorly understood by those who have it. These people commonly report that engaging in sex is unpleasant, something they want to avoid. They may find that sexual arousal, and even a climax is also unpleasant. There isn't anything they like about it, and some actually experience a panic attack in the sex act itself. When they're asked to explain why they feel the way they do, few have a clear understanding of their reaction. They often blame themselves.

Their ignorance comes from a poor understanding of where their feelings come from. People often have the mistaken belief that they can decide to feel any way they want. They can decide to feel depressed or they can decide to feel cheerful. But those who suffer from chronic depression usually know it's not that simple. And when people have a sexual aversion, they cannot simply decide to feel good about sex.

Emotional reactions are not based on our decisions and an emotional aversion is no exception. An aversion is an unconscious, physiological association of a particular behavior with an extremely unpleasant emotional experience. Those who have that association have no control over the aversive reaction that is inevitable.

So when a person has had repeatedly unpleasant experiences making love, and the association of those experiences with sexual behavior has led to an aversion, they experience emotional pain whenever lovemaking is anticipated or attempted.

As in your case, sexual aversion is a disaster of major proportions for couples. Sex is a need that should be met in marriage, but if a spouse has an aversion to meeting it, it becomes almost impossible as long as the aversion exists.

To avoid aversions in the first place, keep unpleasant experiences to a minimum. That's why I am so adamant about couples learning to follow the Policy of Joint Agreement (never do anything without an enthusiastic agreement between you and your spouse). If they apply the policy to their sexual relationships, making love would never be unpleasant for either partner. Not only does it help them create a lifestyle of compatibility, but it also eliminates the possibility of any aversion to meeting each other's needs.


Overcoming Aversion to Sex
The symptoms of aversion to sex are fear of engaging in sex, trying to make the sex act as short as possible, finding that you need to build up your confidence and resolve before sex just to get through it, thinking of excuses to avoid or postpone sex, and feeling ill just prior to sex and somewhat depressed afterward. Some people actually experience panic attacks while engaged in sex. Your symptom of revulsion at the very thought of having sex is also a typical symptom.

However, one symptom that is not due to sexual aversion is vaginal pain. It can cause a sexual aversion, but it is not a symptom of aversion itself. If you experience vaginal pain or discomfort when you make love, it is probably due to an infection or a reflex called vaginismus. I cover that subject in my column, (How to Overcome Pain During Intercourse).

Any of the symptoms of sexual aversion will interfere with your ability to meet your husband's need. How can you meet his need for sex if you have even one of these reactions? You can't. You must completely overcome the aversion if you ever hope to enjoy a sexual experience with your husband. And then be certain that the conditions that led to your aversion are never repeated.

Remember how you developed the aversion in the first place? You associated a certain behavior, having sex, with an unpleasant emotional reaction to something your husband did to you. Eventually the unpleasant reaction was triggered whenever you even thought about having sex with your husband, and certainly whenever you made love.

To overcome the aversion, you must break the association of sex with your husband from the unpleasant emotional reaction. The easiest way to do that is to associate sex with the state of relaxation.

Those without a sexual aversion may suggest that you take the direct route: Try to relax next time you make love. However, you and anyone else experiencing this hardship knows that the direct route is usually impossible to follow. The very thought of having sex with your husband probably puts you in a state of near-panic

Over and over and over in HNHN it's all about how a woman might not know how to be aroused or climax, she might not actually want to make love, women ignore the male need for SF. It felt very... man-centered?

I'd have to go back to the first CD, but the gist of it was that women often dislike sex because they have never learned to enjoy sex because they don't truly know their anatomy and response steps and thus they refuse sex and distance their husbands that way and that's how soooo many marriages go to A's

There are many women who have a greater desire for sex than their husbands. One of my clients wanted her husband to make love to her 3 times every day before she was satisfied. She would keep him awake at night until their third time. Other female clients have wanted to make love for hours or even days at a time. One female client wanted to make love to her husband all weekend, every weekend.
A woman's capacity to enjoy sex is far greater than a man's. While men are usually more aggressive about sex, they usually do not want it as often as women who have learned to enjoy it. When a man makes love, his sex drive usually declines immediately afterward, sometimes for a week or more. But when a woman makes love, it can actually increase her sexual interest.

But sex drive alone is not usually what motivates these women--it is their desire to be loved and accepted. Sex makes them feel desirable, and more secure in their relationship. Some of these women have tried to find men outside their marriage who would satisfy their sexual need. But in each case, there were disastrous consequences. Sex wasn't what they really needed--it was only the feeling of being loved that would satisfy them.

From the sound of your letter, you and your husband have a loving and affectionate relationship. He is undoubtedly interested in you sexually, but does not equate sex with being accepted. So for him, his sex drive is all that motivates him to make love, and that happens, for most men, about two or three times a week. In his case, it may be even less often.

One solution to your problem is to make love once a day, at a time that he has the most energy, say in the morning. Another, is to compromise: If he makes love to you every other day, he can pick the time and place, but if two days goes by without sex, at 7:30 the next morning you've got an appointment!

I think it is your need for approval and acceptance that compels you to make love as often as you can. Another important factor is that, unlike half of the married women, you have learned to enjoy sex, which makes each experience a great and inexpensive form of recreation. Don't feel that your sexual interest should be reduced, or that you should let your husband off the hook. Work out a compromise with him that gives you the sex you want in a form he enjoys. Sex is a great way to keep a marriage passionate and fun.

The more there is to resent, the more difficult it is to overcome resentment.

Both B.A. and S.K. think about their husband's affair when they try to make love, and it prevents them from having a fulfilling sexual experience. And they both learned about the affairs within the past few months. But there's quite a bit of difference between them. B.A. has only one affair to think about, while S.K. has six of them, many with her closest friends. As a result, other things being equal, I would expect B.A.'s resentment to fade much more quickly than S.K.'s resentment.

The resentment of B.A. and S.K. is a normal emotional reaction to the pain they suffered. The pain was directly associated with their husbands, so now, every time they make love, and lower their emotional defenses, they feel that pain all over again.

But emotional associations fade over time as long as there are no further associations with new painful events. In both cases, their husbands have not had an affair after the revelation, and so I would predict that if they have a normal recovery, where they learn to meet each other's needs, avoid Love Busters and learn to apply the Policy of Joint Agreement and the Policy of Radical Honesty to their decisions, the resentment would fade away.

GG-

Oy and here again, another thing that puts me as "man like." I sure hope they get to that conclusion one day that we're not abnormal

GG-

Oy and here again, another thing that puts me as "man like." I sure hope they get to that conclusion one day that we're not abnormal