How To Deal With Low Libido Part 7
When shame walks in the door lust flies out the window. Men with healthy body consciousness treat their natural desires as welcome guests. They open the door, take their coat, hand them a drink and welcome them into the living room where the fragrance of a gourmet meal wafts in from the kitchen. The message is clear: You are welcome. Mi casa es su casa.
Men with noticeably bad body esteem treat their natural desires as unwelcome guests who muddy the carpets and eat all the pretzels. They stand by the door and say, “Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?”
What’s causing this low libido?
I want you to consider something that may never have occurred to you: Your loss of libido is a coping strategy that your mind uses to protect itself from experiencing shame. What appears to you as a baffling lack of desire is actually a subconscious decision on your part to get rid of it so you don’t experience more hurt.
Basically, you have an internal conflict between your conscious desire (“I want to want to have sex”) and your subconscious unwillingness (“If I have sex he will see how fat I am, lose his erection and stop loving me. He’ll make fun of me or fantasize about skinnier men. I don’t want to see the disappointment in his face when he sees my thighs jiggle or my stomach pooch out. I WILL DIE OF EMBARRASSMENT”).
Really, it’s lousy self-talk when you’re making love.
Somewhere along the line, your subconscious decided the best way to protect you from more pain was to reduce or eliminate your desires .
Or rather, push them so far down that they seem undetectable. Remember, “subconscious” means below the level of conscious awareness. You’re not aware that you made the decision but you can certainly see the effects of it.
The solution? Bring your subconscious thoughts to awareness. Understand the decision your subconscious made in order to protect you. Start by reframing your thinking from “I want but I can’t” to “I want but I won’t.”
Can’t vs Won’t
This isn’t some pop psychology/build it and they will come nonsense. There’s a big difference between CAN’T (an inability) and WON’T (an unwillingness). I know it doesn’t make sense that you’d be unwilling to do what you desperately want, but you only have to look at the millions of men who struggle with an inability to ejaculate during intercourse to see a parallel. They want to ejaculate. Their penis is rock hard. They’re able to do it when they’re alone, but they just can’t do it when they’re having intercourse. They’re fighting your fight: A conscious desire subverted by a subconscious fear.
If you want your libido to “come back,” you have to consciously ‘undecide’ a subconsciously made decision. You have to stop believing the demonstrably false assumption that your partner is going to be repulsed by what he sees and stop loving you or mortify you with disappointment and ridicule.
You have to stop believing that sex is an opportunity to be shamed and start believing it’s a springboard to a stronger emotional connection with the man you love. You have to believe that sex doesn’t cut you up into a million pieces; that in fact, it makes you whole.