Ep.126: Sex and Anxiety
Your Anxiety Toolkit - Anxiety & OCD Strategies for Everyday
Kimberley Quinlan, LMFT | Anxiety & OCD Specialist
4.9 • 802 Ratings
🗓️ 6 November 2019
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Welcome to another episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast. This topic has been a long time coming, and highly requested. This week’s podcast is all about anxiety and sex. In this podcast, we talk about how anxiety and sex can become two peas in a pod and how anxiety can present itself in many different ways. While I am not a sex therapist, I do have a lot of experience talking with my clients about anxiety and sex.
The truth is, there are many ways anxiety shows up during sex, or sex shows up in our anxiety. This is true for many people and this can become very confusing. People often report anxiety impacting sex in many ways. This might include loss of arousal, loss of libido or interest in sex, intrusive thoughts during sexual intercourse, hyper-awareness of sexual-related sensations and many more.
In this week’s episode, we address the following topics
• Social Anxiety: In social anxiety, people are afraid of being judged by their sexual partner and will often avoid sexual interactions in fear of being judged. For people struggling with social anxiety and sex, they must accept the risk of being judged and work to find a partner who respects them and their fears. Finding safety in a partner can help immensely.
• Performance anxiety: This involves the fear of not being able to perform well (or perfectly) in sexual interactions. This is very common and often involves setting realistic expectations for ourselves.
• OCD: There are many ways that OCD can create anxiety around sexual intimacy. This is most common for those who have sexual orientation obsessions, relationship obsessions, or pedophilia obsessions
• Panic Disorder: Symptoms of panic can often come on during all stages of intimacy, not just anticipatory anxiety
• Trauma: Trauma is a very important component to address. We encourage people who have trauma in this area to seek professional mental health care and work through these issues with a safe and caring clinician.
Find a Sex Therapist:
https://www.aasect.org/aasect-requirements-sex-therapist-certification
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Your Anxiety Toolkit, episode number 126. |
| 0:10.8 | Welcome to Your Anxiety Toolkit. I'm your host, Kimberly Quinlan. This podcast is |
| 0:16.9 | fueled by three main goals. The first goal is to provide you with some extra tools to help you manage your anxiety. |
| 0:23.6 | Second goal, to inspire you. |
| 0:26.6 | Anxiety doesn't get to decide how you live your life. |
| 0:29.6 | And number three, and I leave the best for last, |
| 0:32.6 | is to provide you with one big, fat virtual hug, |
| 0:36.6 | because experiencing anxiety ain't easy. |
| 0:40.0 | If that sounds good to you, let's go. |
| 0:46.9 | Well, welcome back. |
| 0:49.1 | It is episode 126. |
| 0:52.0 | Holy smokes, that's like a big mouthful when I said it. And I'm happy to be here |
| 0:58.1 | with you. It is a late evening. I don't know why, but I have gotten into this bad rhythm of |
| 1:04.7 | waiting until the very end of the day to record the podcast with you, usually because I have to think about it. And by the middle of |
| 1:13.8 | the day, I'm like, no, no, I want to think about it a little bit more, but I really need to be |
| 1:17.7 | better about making it a little earlier, mainly just for my own self-care. But, hey, I'm here with you, |
| 1:25.3 | and it's kind of nice. It's really quiet, and it's starting to get cold here in Southern California, |
| 1:33.1 | and my house is still, which is so rare with my children. |
| 1:39.1 | So I'm happy to be here with you. |
| 1:41.1 | Happy to share this time, and it's ironic because this week's episode is all about |
| 1:49.9 | what happens when everything goes quiet and we enter into the bedroom. Yes, you heard it straight |
| 1:59.4 | from me. We are talking about sex today. Yes, we are. And the |
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