A lot of men and their partners experience the anxiety, frustration, hopelessness and shame that goes with PE.
What you may not know is that those feelings are part of the glue that keeps the PE in place!
You’ll probably find it easy to imagine this common PE cycle:
- You come too quickly and you feel embarrassed or ashamed.
- The next time you’re about to have sex you worry about it happening again and you get more and more anxious and worried about it.
- Behind the scenes your body is racking up adrenaline and cortisol (the stress hormone), further increasing your anxiety and performance anxiety and before you know it you’ve come quickly again.
- It’s the perfect set-up to ensure it happens again, and again, and again.
- The longer it continues the more hopeless your situation seems, the more you expect it to happen again (adding yet more glue to the situation) – and yep, you guessed it, the more it actually happens.
It’s a perfect self-fulfilling prophesy if there ever was one!
If you have an understanding partner that’s wonderful and be deeply grateful! Not all partners are all that understanding or patient and if someone has expressed their disappointment or frustration about your PE to you this would have been more oil on the fire and here’s why.
As a man (more so than for women) a big part of your identify is tied up in your sexual performance and being found lacking in the sexual performance department is usually a sgnificant blow to your sense of self, undermining your sexual confidence; while the cycle continues it is very difficult to regain this confidence yet doing so is a huge part of getting back on track.
Willpower or will is rarely enough to feel confident.
Here’s s summary of the different aspects that contribute to PE
- Anxiety or fear – being anxious that PE will happen again is almost guaranteed to make it happen again, which (when it does) adds to the fear and anxiety that it will happen again, and so on. Once it gets to the point that you expect, or ‘know’ that it will happen again, you get to be right time after time after time –
- Hopelessness and despair – the longer you experience PE the more natural it is to feel hopelessness and despair
- Embarrassment, blame and shame – blame from a sexual partner or self-blame leads to feeling ashamed or inadequate; your confidence drops, which fuels your anxiety about future sexual relationships – and you’ve already seen how fear contributes to the PE cycle
- Guilt – men who experience PE often feel guilty because if they feel that they aren’t able to please their partners in the way that they want to
Some practical techniques (like slowing down your breathing, consciously relaxing your muscles and frequently taking breaks from stimulation) can help. And there are chemical sprays to numb the glans (penis head) or frenulum (the very sensitive part at the bottom of the glans).
The problem is that these are not permanent solutions because they do not get to the root cause of the problem but just address the symptom. They also do nothing to boost your sexual confidence and may even add to shame or anxiety – especially if your partner is unaware that you are using these techniques or sprays.
The root cause of the overwhelming majority of sexual dysfunctions is emotional, which means that you can resolve PE by releasing the underlying emotions that keeps tripping you up.
To clear out these emotions can be simpler that you may expect and once you’ve cleared them out you’re ready to go and enjoy the sex life you want without willpower, secret techniques or chemicals.
Overcoming PE
When it comes to resolving PE, men usually fall into 3 groups:
- Clearing up the feelings about the the PE (anxiety, guilt, shame, blame and so on) often the PE dissolves by itself.
- It may be that there was a specific event that caused the PE to start in the first place; once that s cleared up, it’s bye-bye to PE and hello to a great sex-life.
- In some cases there are deeper emotional issues that once resolved, totally collapses the whole PE dynamic, leaving you free to enjoy your sex life in the way that you want to.
There is no way of knowing in which group you are until you start applying the Energy Psychology tecchniques taught here at The Passion Project.
The good news is that, whichever group you’re in, you can start helping yourself right now – check out the solution here.
