There Is Nothing Wrong With You
Why your body doesn't always respond the way you want during sex
There is nothing wrong with you.
When sex stops feeling good, or has never quite been the experience some part of you knows is possible, this is one of the first places the mind goes. That your body is somehow broken. Inadequate. Just not good at this.
Perhaps you aren't feeling much sensation, or you experience pain with penetration. Maybe you struggle to climax, or have never had an orgasm. Or maybe you have trouble getting erect, staying erect, or you ejaculate faster than you'd like.
Sometimes there is a physiological issue that deserves medical attention. More often, two things are happening underneath. Your nervous system has moved into a survival state. And you are carrying inherited stories about what sex is supposed to be.
These two feed each other.
The Nervous System Asks: Am I safe right now?
Your nervous system is asking this one question all the time, underneath your awareness.
When the answer is yes, you are in what's called social engagement: safe, open, present and receptive. Oxytocin flows. The oxygenation of your blood increases, making your body's tissues more sensitive. You can be fully in your body and in the present moment. Physiologically and neurologically, this is the state where your body is most receptive to pleasure and connection.
The moment the answer shifts to no, or even maybe, your nervous system moves into fight, flight, freeze or fawn. These are survival states. Your nervous system is doing exactly what it was designed to do to keep you safe.
In fight, you might feel irritated, frustrated or angry. In flight, worried or afraid. Your heart rate climbs, your defensive responses sharpen, and your capacity to relate drops. In freeze, you might go numb or distant, disappearing into your mind or hovering above your body.
You can still experience pleasure in an activated nervous system state, even climax in some cases. But you will not have access to your full capacity for pleasure and connection.
Fawning: the survival state that looks like consent
Fawning can be the trickiest nervous system state to detect.
On the surface, it can appear that everything is consensual, but the body is in a survival response. You might feel anxious to please, tracking your partner's every reaction while losing track of your own. For the person fawning, their decisions, actions and performance are in response to a perceived threat.
That perceived threat could be fear of disappointing their lover or fear of making them angry. At its core, it's a fear of losing the connection. The threat can move beyond the interpersonal, and be about larger forces like gender roles and a sense of belonging.
It might look like pressuring yourself to get erect or lubricated so you appear capable and desirable, when your body simply isn't in the mood. It might look like allowing penetration before your body is fully aroused, because you don't feel you have the right to slow things down or say no.
Often it starts with not wanting to ruin the moment. Instead of pausing to speak about why your body isn't a full yes, or what it would need to become one, you go along to keep the peace.
Meanwhile, your body feels abandoned.
For some, the inability to communicate the body's desire to pause or stop is an automatic nervous system response. Over time, going against your body's wishes desensitizes your tissues, sensation, arousal and pleasure.
What moves us out of safety
The shift into a survival state can be triggered from a few different directions.
Inner critic. Am I good enough? Am I too much? Am I unattractive? These thoughts activate the body and can trigger a survival state right in the middle of intimacy.
Relational triggers. Something unresolved. A rupture from earlier in the week that never got repaired, a resentment still lingering. Your body wisely refuses to open and surrender into love and pleasure until trust is restored.
Life stressors. Work deadlines. A sick child. Money stress. The life stressors that your mind and body carry into the room, keeping you from being embodied, relaxed and receptive to pleasure.
Body memory. A touch, smell, or sound that reminds you of a past assault, and suddenly your nervous system isn't in this room anymore. It's back wherever that association was formed. Your body remembers faster than your mind can explain, in ways that keep you safe, hypervigilant, and unavailable to pleasure and connection.
The stories we inherited
Your nervous system is half the picture. The other half is what you were taught.
Most of us were shaped by a culture that taught us sex is something to perform, to provide, to endure.
It arrived through religious and cultural conditioning, through the rules of the homes we grew up in, through the media and porn. What's proper and what's shameful. What's dishonorable and what's respectable. Who is supposed to want, and who is supposed to give. What desire and orgasm are supposed to look like.
Look up sex in the dictionary and you'll find genital contact, penetration, orgasm. A definition built around anatomy and outcome, centering the penis. Pleasure doesn't appear anywhere in it.
In movies, people go from kissing to penetration within moments. In mainstream porn, everything is centered around jackhammer pounding, a moaning woman, and a money shot.
Climax is the destination and goal, and every encounter gets graded on whether you arrived and how well you performed getting there. Did we do it? How long did it last? Did you cum?
When you carry a script and set of rules into bed, it creates an enormous amount of pressure, and keeps you in your head. You're living in the future, trying to get somewhere, instead of being present, in the body, and experiencing the vast terrain of ways pleasure, desire, and sex can look and feel.
This is where cultural conditioning and the nervous system meet. The script tells you where you're supposed to be going, and fawning is how your body gets dragged there.
Perhaps you perform enthusiasm and desire while feeling numb. You don't speak up when slowing down would feel better. Or when you are experiencing some pain.
You follow techniques you saw on a screen instead of feeling into your body and asking: What pace and pressure do I want right now? What feels good to both of us?
Perhaps you don't even know what slower sex would feel like. Many penis owners who experience premature ejaculation benefit immensely simply from slowing down, and often resist slowing down for fear of losing their erection.
Others resist slowing down because they don't feel much when they do. When the body has gone numb, it takes time to re-sensitize. Slow, present sex is the fastest, most effective way back to sensation. The early stretch can be frustrating, even disheartening. Stay with it. Feeling returns. More feeling and sensation than you could have ever imagined.
The solution: Taking the goal off the table
The invitation is a shift away from sex as goal-driven and technique-based, toward an understanding and experience of sex rooted in pleasure and connection.
The question moves from Am I getting this right? Did you have an orgasm? Did I stay hard the whole time? to:
What wants to happen between us?
Where is there mutual pleasure and connection?
What feels good for both of us, moment to moment?
When you take the goal off the table, an entire world opens up. Imagine sex as a pleasurable, energetic exchange where you come together with the intention of presence, and connection, and an open heart. Where foreplay isn’t something that leads to sex, foreplay is a form of sex.
Where it's okay for the body to move between various states of arousal. To go slow, then speed up, then slow down again. Where it's okay for the penis to be soft or erect. It's okay for the body to be however it is, as it is.
I see it over and over: when people who struggle to orgasm, or to get or stay erect, remove the goal and the pressure entirely, the orgasms often come. The erections often come. They arrive when you accept your body as it is, and listen to your body's authentic truth and desire, moment-to-moment.
This article arose out of a conversation I had with my creative and life partner Rahi Chun. We work with couples together through an online course, immersive retreats, and private customized sessions through Divine Union for Lovers.
What’s Next?
If something in this piece felt familiar, the next step is practice. Your body learns by doing, and that takes repetition.
My free guide, Your Guide to Sex Magic, is a solo ritual built for exactly this. It invites you to slow down, release the goal of orgasm, and stay with whatever arises: pleasure, numbness, grief, the urge to rush. It includes the Eight Pillars of Intimacy™ as your compass, and guidance for meeting freeze and numbness when they come. Practicing alone, with no one to perform for, is often the clearest way to start hearing your body's yes and no again.
Download Your Free Ritual Guide
If you'd like support with someone beside you, I work one-on-one through Eros Alchemy containers. Together we tend to your nervous system, the stories you inherited, and your body's way back to sensation and pleasure.
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