Sexual Performance Anxiety: 10 steps to beat it!. Larisa Pletneva
patients started thinking about sex that was to happen in the evening as early as the very morning. And all day long, while being at work, he would be flashing back to his previous inability to perform, thus programming himself to fail. Is your story the same?
Another aspect helping to distinguish SPA from an organic disorder (disease) is that it can be Situational, that is, erections fail not continually but in certain situations:
• drinking alcohol before sex;
• fear of the story to go public, if intercourse is illicit;
• no private place to stay in, fear that someone will see You having sex;
• a new partner;
• fear of your partner to conceive;
• simple physical fatigue.
And SPA can also be SELECTIVE, when erection is lost only when attempting to have sex with a certain girl, while everything goes and works well with other girls.
If it was an organic disorder, erections would be missing continually rather than occasionally.
And how do you behave?
Let’s go through the patterns of how people suffering from SPA behave. Regardless of which one You chose, the scheme of getting rid of it will be the same, but you must know absolutely everything about the problem to solve it.
Avoidance
You don’t talk about it, the topic is taboo even in a couple relationship. After experiencing a few failures, you’ve decided that sex is not your thing and you can get along just fine without it.
Devaluation
You think that sex is not the main thing in life at all, more important are the intellectual aspect and relationship, and romance.
Compensation
You throw yourself into sports, making career or money. You learn or have already learned techniques to make a woman orgasm, where the penis is not involved.
Imitation
In public, you behave like an alpha male, flirting openly, joking a lot about sex, telling how many girls you’ve had. You are the life and soul of any party, a man of her dreams, but you do not become intimate with girls, because you are supposedly a misogynist and “they are all immoral and there are no nice and honest ones today’.
Causes of SPA
It is impossible to pinpoint the cause of SPA developed in a certain person (male or female, it doesn’t matter), but there is a combination of such ones, some of which may refer to you.
Study all the causes carefully and try to identify those that may have triggered your problem.
Trait anxiety
This is neither good nor bad, it’s just that you were born hypersensitive. This means that you not only feel anxious about sex but also experience anxiety across many situations in general.
People featuring such traits tend to catastrophize any situation, “I can’t make it! I’m going to be late! She’ll fall out of love with me! I’ll fail! The airplane will crash!” And so on and so forth.
As part of family, inherently anxious people are kind and caring, trying to avoid quarrels and conflicts.
They are prone to hypercontrol and try to monitor everything going on around them, for “you never know what might happen’.
Furthermore, such worrywarts usually feature and experience:
• low self-esteem;
• fear of the unknown;
• decision-making problems;
• second-guessing;
• dependence on other people’s opinions;
• their thoughts being focused either on the future or the past, and rarely on the here and now;
• discomfort when interacting with the opposite sex;
• fear of being rebuffed, and then preferring not to want or seek for anything at all.
Unexperienced stages of psychosexual development
One of the main causes of most of the psychological sexual dysfunctions is getting stuck at one of the stages of psychosexual development or racing through them too quickly.
Be sure to study and recognize this cause!
There are three stages of psychosexual development:
Stage One: Platonic
You were then about 7 (the age may vary, give or take a year or two at most).
At this stage, you experienced/should have experienced your first crush on someone. Those were unrequited feelings, your love object could have been not only your agemate also some adult, such as a singer or actor, anyone at all.
Your experiences at this stage were a very important milestone, nature was thus preparing you for advancing to the next level of libido development and training you to build relationships with the opposite sex.
At the Platonic stage You should have realized what friendship is, that relationships can be based on deep affection without sexual context.
You learned then to understand others, listen to them, empathize, and to love without focusing on sex.
And supposed you passed this stage very quickly?
What are the perils?
The physiological aspect predominates over the emotional one in your relationship with the opposite sex.
You don’t understand why a long courtship is needed. You’re all about enjoying physical satisfaction. You don’t know how to build long-term deep relationships. You fall in love quickly and cool off before too long.
In general, early sexual activity that lacks psychoemotional context can be frustrating and turn into a powerful source of stress and neurasthenia.
Stage Two: Erotic
This stage falls within the adolescence period and spans the ages of about 10 to 15 years.
There is an emerging interest in physical intimacy (touching, kissing), erotic movies, romance literature, descriptions of dating scenes, and pornographic content.
It is the stage when You get acquainted with masturbation and petting.
The problems I most often see in my clients refer to this stage. In men, it usually passes very quickly and goes straight into the sexual one.
Women, on the contrary, usually get “stuck” there, which in adulthood can lead to sexual problems.
Parents and their attitudes play a major role in the Erotic stage be passed successfully. If they kept their girl on a leash, making her believe that sex is dirty, then the third stage – the libido one – is postponed in a girl (and sometimes in a boy) indefinitely.
And the opposite context is if you had your first sex with an older woman when you were 13—14; it means that you passed this stage like greased lightning, which results in the sexual aspect of relationship being the main thing for you and, if there is no sex, “such a relationship will be doomed to failure’. This is the point where your hyper-responsibility for having an erection arises.