Exploring Your Feelings – Is Emotional “Work” Really Needed?
Delayed ejaculation (DE), whether lifelong or acquired after you become sexually active, can be the result of bad sexual experiences in childhood or adolescence. Such negative or even traumatic experiences can significantly impact a man’s sexual development. As a result:
- sometimes delayed ejaculation occurs in all situations
- sometimes DE occurs in all situations
But whenever and however it starts, any problem with ejaculation can produce many emotional and practical difficulties for both the man and his sexual / relationship partner.
The most obvious of these will be the effects of not being able to father a child, but frustration for men and a sense of being unattractive or undesirable for women are also very common outcomes.
If Ejaculation Difficulties Are Mostly Psychological, How Are They Cured?
Various issues cause delayed ejaculation. But you may not even be aware of these things. They are unconscious and may lie hidden, denied or repressed in the subconscious mind. Not that a man who has DE will either look or be “unmasculine”. Indeed, many men who have this problem are very robust, outwardly masculine, and physically strong individuals. This is much more about the psychology of masculinity, and the extent to which man has fully stepped into his power, and is able to be and do everything a man is naturally meant to be and do….
Here’s more on the subject.
To fully develop a fundamental sense of masculinity, a boy must separate from his mother and identify with his father at some time between 2 and 4. Unfortunately, these days fathers are often not around, and even if they are, they probably don’t know what they need to do to ensure that their sons develop into men. They may not even have an adequate sense of masculinity themselves.
How Does A Boy Become A Man?
Often dads aren’t able to convey what it means to be an adult, masculine man and how that looks in relationships with women. (Often they don’t even know what that is themselves.) So a boy may “merge” with the feminine, or in other words, not separate completely from his mother. Or she may have some kind of inappropriate relationship with him. In either case, he may grow up as a man with an imperfect or undeveloped sense of his own masculinity.
You can see this in the way a man often wants to please women rather than to stand his ground and set firm boundaries with them. Men: how are your relationships with women? Are you a solid, boundaried man, or do you give way to women easily…?
Mutual Pleasuring
Sex should be all about wanting to take your pleasure as you come inside a woman – as well as pleasing her before or at the same time, or even afterwards. But men with DE have a strong tendency to want to please women. This becomes clear during sex when a man’s chief objective is to give a woman an orgasm or make her happy. Where is his pleasure in this?
Here, the man is taking on the responsibility for her sexual pleasure. He wouldn’t do that if he was truly in his own power. And to be in his own power, he needs to be psychologically separate and emotionally independent from his relationship partner.
Unconscious, Repressed Feelings And Emotions
The human mind being what it is, when we have unconscious and repressed memories, we don’t know they are there. But they can be triggered – and so can the pain that we felt at the time the original event happened. (It’s the emotional pain which causes the memory of a negative event to be banished into the unconscious.)
In fact, anything which reminds you of a traumatic event that happened when you were growing up may well trigger emotional reactions and sexual difficulties, including delayed ejaculation. This might be something a bad parent or another harmful adult did to you, or an unpleasant experience in childhood. What this means is that delayed ejaculation can be one way in which you react to painful experiences in your past – particularly in emotional, sexual and relationship interactions with women. This may involve feelings of shame, guilt, anxiety and anger.
Therapy – Yes Or No?
The main goal of psychotherapy is to help a man understand where his thoughts and feelings come from. Other goals are
- to encourage the open expression of feelings
- to help a man understand his lack of arousal in sexual situations
- and to get over the sense that he must sexually perform to a certain standard for the satisfaction of its partner.
- Therapy involves helping a man see things differently.
- And it also aims to change unhelpful, misleading or simply incorrect beliefs around the nature of sex and relationships between a man and woman.
In short, therapy is a way of digging out the false beliefs which are running your life and replacing them with ones that are more real. Some examples of false beliefs which contribute to delayed ejaculation might be these. “All women are untrustworthy”. “Women are only out for themselves”. “You can never trust a woman”. “Women just take and take and never give”. “Women are out to get men”. “It always ends badly when I’m with a Woman”. “She doesn’t really want me for who I am”. “It’s my job to make her come”. “I have to make sex good for her”. “I can’t take my pleasure until she’s satisfied”…. and on, and on, and on….
This is called Psychodynamic Therapy. It can be a slow and gradual process, with insights coming over a long period of time. But it can be speeded up by using any technique which helps a man change his mental and emotional attitudes. Such techniques are described in this book on delayed ejaculation.
With ejaculation problems, there are many ways to approach a cure
Dealing with underlying feelings of aggression, hostility and other unconscious forces, such as guilt, excessive control and poor personal boundaries is a good start. The thoughts, feelings, emotions and beliefs behind delayed ejaculation can be explored.
These things can produce some interesting emotional conflicts – “I love her and I hate her” being a common one. Hostile or aggressive impulses, feelings of guilt, and rigid defense mechanisms can be explored and dealt with. Reframing approaches, or seeing things differently, from a grown up point of view, also called decontamination by Transactional Analysis therapists, are all about correcting false beliefs. This involves teasing out incorrect beliefs or simply providing new information to erroneous ways of thinking.
You and Your Partner – When You Can’t Ejaculate
Some men who have trouble ejaculating are somehow “withholding” something important from their partner and believe they should be more “giving”. Changing this attitude and emphasizing that it’s OK to be selfish during sex are both important ways to shift the block on ejaculation and help a man overcome his slow, slow progress towards arousal and ejaculation.
The Ideal Form Of Psychotherapy?
Most therapists would take a holistic approach to treatment for delayed ejaculation (also called male anorgasmia or male orgasmic disorder). For example, they might use guided stimulation techniques to help a man give up his excessive sense of self-control during intercourse. They might teach him techniques to increase the level of stimulation he receives during sex.
The therapist can help a man to understand that he does not need to be totally in control during sex, and that he can give up his urge to achieve orgasm at all costs. Of course, such an approach requires great sensitivity, flexibility and creativity. In this way he will soon be able to achieve orgasm. This is all about overcoming the inhibitions that stop him ejaculating.
Your Thinking Patterns and Troubles Ejaculating
Destructive or self-critical thinking isn’t too helpful, as you can imagine. Thoughts about failure, poor performance, and so on, may inhibit orgasm and cause low sexual arousal. Several therapeutic techniques are likely to be successful. Hostile or aggressive impulses, for example, may indicate strong feelings of guilt or of sexual shame, and these need to be changed for the better.
In this case, counseling or therapy may be aimed at improving the man’s insight into his fears, understanding past traumatic experiences, and understanding how they play out in his behavior in his current relationship.
Often, reframing may be used. A man may be encouraged to acknowledge his lack of desire for sexual intercourse and the question explored of how sexually aroused he is during intercourse. This approach requires both a readiness to change common beliefs about male sexuality in general and delayed ejaculation in particular.
For example, if a man focuses on his own needs during intercourse, he may be helped to feel his own need for additional stimulation to bring him to the point of ejaculation. He’ll come to understand how and why he currently stays at a low level of arousal, and how he blocks his own energy flow towards higher levels of arousal and eventually orgasm.
By understanding this, a man who is constantly trying to “achieve orgasm for his partner” becomes receptive to new ways of enjoying sex. Regrettably many a woman shares the male belief that the man has total responsibility for her orgasms, and therefore sees the man’s slow ejaculation as some kind of rejection.
So therapy needs to involve the partner. She will be more relaxed and less demanding when she understands that her man is trying too hard to achieve an orgasm for her. Two key techniques are multiple forms of stimulation and increasing the man’s awareness of his own orgasm triggers. Multiple stimulation might include the use of fantasy during partnered sex, or the stimulation of the man’s anus and testicles during intercourse by the woman.
Orgasm triggers are different between individuals. That means finding the things that make a man more sexually aroused – and so more likely to ejaculate – is important. It can be done during masturbation or sex play. However, it’s always important that the man does not initiate sexual intercourse until he is highly aroused.