Are you avoiding intimacy

This is a theme this month for many couples!
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Are you avoiding intimacy or sex with your partner and it is becoming a habit?

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Is your mind saying yes and then you make a plan, or a date, then your body is like hell no! Are you noticing yourself suddenly having a meeting that seems really important, or are you just forgetting your date time altogether?  Or are you just feeling like ‘not in the mood’ a lot?

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There are some simple things to try - 

* Talk honestly with your partner about how you are feeling

* Make a time together and then hold each other to it, and even if you do not feel like being intimate, at least spend the time together letting each other know how you feeling about intimacy

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Making a time to talk together, can take away a lot of the angst about performance and may help you relax and stick with your planned time together.

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Here is some information about why your mind and body are not in sync!

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It is often the unconscious mind that is at work, trust me!

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The reason is many faceted but put simply, our bodies remember all our previous intimate experiences, the good and the not so good. And we learned how to have intimate relationships by observing our caregivers or parents. I will give you an example.  If one or both of your parents did not enjoy sex or let you know that it was yuck or something definitely not to be talked about.  Or even if you felt like it was not Ok to feel sexual when you were a teenager, this can definitely have an affect on you

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Yes our intimate relationships have had an impact, and if many of them were not pleasurable and you felt anxious and not often in control of your yes or no when it came to intimacy, you may well have had intimacy that your body was not ready for, and again the body holds memories.

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Good questions to ask yourself are - what did I learn from my caregivers or parents?   How did they relate to each other?  Did they kiss or hug or hold hands?   Could you see they loved each other or were they angry and often irritated with each other? Did they argue a lot?

Having awareness of what was modelled to you can often be a signal to what could be going on in your own relationship.  It is filed away in your brain and body and can pop up in your own intimate relationships many years later!

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Most of us grew up with conflicting messages about how intimacy or sex should look like.  Even the schools we attended and the religion we were schooled in can definitely have an effect on how we feel about intimacy. 

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A great book to read is - Come As You Are by Emily Nagoski or you can watch Emily talking about how our brains work on the Netflix series called The Principles of Pleasure.

Another fascinating book is called The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel van der Kolk

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Information is always key and this can help you gain clarity to what could be going on.

Letting your partner know always is a wonderful place to start moving towards change!

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