# Need advice on helping him with performance anxiety



## Healing (May 30, 2008)

It's quite hard to put the advice I read into practice sometimes.

Hubby and I have been having a dry spell (long story is in a different thread). To cut a long story short, our sex life just fizzled out in the lead up to and after marriage.

We think that that was due to a few factors - routine, taking each other for granted, emotional distance. 

After the recent shake-up of his EA, we've worked hard on being closer emotionally and not taking each other for granted. Right now I feel we are closer emotionally than we ever were, and we'll keep working to make it better.

Our sex life is still worrying though. He's done some thinking and he thinks that its performance anxiety. There were a few times before that he says his body has failed him while we were doing the deed, and he feels that those experiences have kind of made him anxious all the time about it. And because he is so anxious about it, its hard for him to feel like having sex.

We tried to schedule sex, just "do it" like the article Chris posted. But it felt like he put so much pressure on himself that he just couldn't get in the mood.

On my end, I'm not sure I fully understand his anxiety, but I have honestly never felt angry or disappointed in this respect, all I want is intimacy, for us to have fun together, but he seems so uptight about it. Maybe he feels that I expect sex everytime I get intimate with him, which is completely not true, and I have told him that too.

I honestly don't NEED full blown sex all the time if he doesn't feel like it or if he doesn't feel like he can. But he gets so downcast when his body isn't cooperating that even though I want to try other things (trying not to go into too much detail here) other than intercourse, I'm afraid to even touch him because he looks like he just wants to be left alone.

He's only 31. Physically I believe there is nothing wrong with him, it seems like its a psychological issue that has gotten worse with time, to the point he is pretty much not interested in sex at all.

I'd like to see if any husbands here have any advice for me. What can I do to help him without patronising him or hurting his feelings/pride?


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## justean (May 28, 2008)

i dont think u r experiencing n e thing out of the ordinary. to be honest and i do know where u r coming from. i know what u mean by the imtimacy, i crave it myself. 
i do think you need to speak to him, do you both make moves on eachother. if u find its one way, then u have to gradually help him be introduced to your body or vice versa. 
i.e gentle caresses when walking past eachother. kissing. go for a walk holding hands. when u watch a film, move his hand to your body or you to him. give him a massage.
tell him how much hes wanted. loved etc. there might not be pressure, but im sure you get frustrated we all have needs to be touched , desired. 
you can talk your way through it, but you can enjoy eachother again. tell him how good he makes u feel when you make love. 
sometimes even when together, you have to start again within your own relationship. ask him what he wants. watch some porn together, ask him his fantasies. try new positions. simple to start of then build it up. do something that u dont really do on a normal basis, it might turn him on . 
im not the husband. but this certainly helps me.


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## Deejo (May 20, 2008)

Healing,

Is he open to even discussing his anxiety, or the content and dynamic of your sexual relationship in any fashion?


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## Healing (May 30, 2008)

Not really... he will just apologise mid way and say he doesn't think its gonna happen. He's always been rather shy about talking about sex and in this case, where he feels bad, its worse.

Obviously its something which is a sensitive topic for him, and he prob feels awful about it, which makes me afraid that over-analysing it and me asking too many questions/discussing it too much will just make matters worse by stressing him more, or even hurt his feelings and ego.

I read somewhere about trying to take the focus off intercourse/attaining an erection and just focusing on non-genital touching for a start. Supposedly, men seem to assume that an erection is a prerequisite for all sexual activity, which is not true. He is like that I think, he seems to feel like if he doesn't already have an erection he shouldn't start/do anything.

For me my confidence is kinda rattled by all this. I've gone through phases of wondering if something was wrong with how I looked or what I did etc, even now I'm not sure if I am doing the right things to help him. But I plan to try out what I read.

I guess to sum up the biggest worry for me is that while logically it would make sense to TALK about it, talking about it too much might make it even more clinical and stressful, making things worse.


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## MarkTwain (Aug 1, 2008)

Healing, I have had this in the past, even though I am sex mad!
It is actually quite easy to treat, but more detail would help.

There is something he can do to boost his hormone levels. He must limit his ejaculations to one per week for a while. This causes most men to get very horny. The horniness gets so extreme that it makes the anxiety recede into the background. 

You might think that by not having sex with you very often, he is already ejaculating less than once per week. I would be surprised at this. Find out if he is doing it solo.

The other thing he can do is pleasure you with his hands and mouth. You can do the same to him. What men with PA find is that if the stimulation goes on long enough, they eventually get it up - especially if there is no pressure. He may find he gets it up, then losses it then gets it up again. You need to make him feel totally secure.

Also, you need to be sure if it is performance anxiety or medical impotence. The easiest way to tell the difference is that PA sufferers still get night/morning erections. If he is able to masturbate, with an erection, then this also prove it is PA.

I reproduce below something I wrote about my own experience of this:


The best thing to do is to deal head on with the source of the anxiety. A huge number of men suffer what used to be called "psycogenic impotence", but is now called "performance anxiety". I have had bouts of this due to stress. I stumbled across a way to side step it, which is on one of my old posts here somewhere. But basically, some years ago I was stressed up to the eyeballs for weeks on end finishing a project. Towards the end, I got so busy, my wife and I were never together when we were both awake, so we did not have sex. After 3 weeks of no sex, we were in bed together and the opportunity arose, and I began to think, oh I bet I am going to have trouble getting it up again... But what happened was I was so full of hormones due to not having sex or ejaculations for so long that, another thought entered my head - "I don't give a damn if I feel anxious, I NEED sex", so I just let my wife rub me, and the next thing I knew we were f*****g like my life depended on it.

So what I learned from this is that, if you cut out the ejaculations for 2 or 3 weeks, you will have 2 things going on at once. The anxiety, and the horniness. And you can just let the horniness take you over and smile at your anxiety. Performance anxiety is actually FED by worrying about being able to perform, and the shame of being seen by your woman to be unable to get it up. So what's really going on is that you are taking yourself too seriously. And I speak from experience.

But wait, there is more!
I never quite understood how performance anxiety could keep my **** from getting hard until I read something like this (I think a doctor may have written it, but not sure) : 

The smooth muscle in the penis needs to relax in order to get an erection. Sexual Anxiety keeps it tense, and so it is much harder to get it hard.

[This next part is my pure speculation]
Whenever you feel an emotion, if you analyse it carefully, you will probably find that you really do "feel" emotions. We feel different emotions in different parts of the body. For some reason anxiety is often felt in the ****! So is horniness. When you get really horny from lack of sex/ejaculations, the two sensations - horniness and anxiety go into battle. If you are horny enough, anxiety will loose.


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## Kate0558 (May 13, 2011)

what about when his "needs" are no where near the frequency of mine. Meaning after about 2 or 3 weeks he'll prolly need it... but me i'm going crazy after a week.


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## Runs like Dog (Feb 25, 2011)

Tell him "A bad day of sex better than a great day at work."


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