Q&A: Moving Past Old Hurts in a Long-Term Relationship
Healing emotional injuries can help heal your sexual connection
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Here's another excellent question from a reader:
Q: How does a couple move past old hurts that they've given to each other that impact their ability to have fun sex with each other? Apologies have been made and accepted in regular life, but in the bedroom the old hurts shut down the ability to become aroused or enjoy acts that used to be mutually fun. How can we work through old hurt in the relationship that has been intellectually addressed and settled but the emotional pain still lingers and pops up as a wall during sex?
A: Couples therapy, particularly couples sex therapy.
Thanks for joining me this week for the Confidence & Joy Bulletin.
I should probably say more than that, huh?
Okay. So the clue is right there in the question: The old hurts have been “intellectually addressed and settled.” “Apologies have been made and accepted in regular life.” But then you carry your bodies into an erotic space, and those problems are still there. Sex is bodies and emotions, not intellect alone.
And emotional injuries are a lot like physical injuries. They take time and care to heal cleanly. You can’t intellectually decide that the injury has healed, forgive the person who hurt you, and then not experience pain. You need time and care. And if you keep on trying to move through the world as if you’re not injured, you’re not in pain, chances are you’ll make the injury worse.
And look, some injuries are worse than others; some can be healed so that you return to something very much like your pre-injury relationship, and some can be healed but you’re left with the relationship permanently changed. Some injuries are a scratch, and they heal without a trace. Some injuries are a torn ligament, requiring surgery and physical therapy, but you return to similar use of that limb, though it may feel different, and you may be hesitant around the old wound. And some injuries are like the total loss of a limb. You can heal, you can live your life together, but it’s different forever.
And then there are injuries that are mortal wounds. The relationship can’t survive.
But also, any wound left untended can eventually grow septic enough to kill the relationship.
I think that’s where you are. You can like each other in your day to day lives, but this lump of hurt still lives under the surface. When you go to bed together, the hurt is there still, because you haven’t finished healing. If apologies have been made and accepted but they still pop up during sex, you’re not finished healing. You’ve done the intellectual work but not the emotional and physical work. You can continue that work two ways (also other ways, but these are two crucial ones):
THERAPY. A therapist will help you in two ways. First, they’ll offer a neutral space to process the lingering feelings, to hold each other’s pain with kindness and compassion, so that you can find your way to deeply embodied forgiveness, true healing, rather than just “We have decided that the injury was an accident or is otherwise forgivable and therefore we’re done healing.” Second, they’ll teach skills to make it easier to deal with the situation when it emerges.
Or: Work on it in the here-and-now, when it shuts down pleasure. I would consider this an “advanced technique,” suitable for partners who have already done a lot of work unburdening themselves and each other from the shame all of us learn about sex and the ways sex is “supposed” to work. If both partners are willing and able to (1) notice that a wall has gone up, (2) pause what you were doing (or trying to do) and deal with the wall of feelings, and (3) return to the erotic connection, rather than getting stuck in those difficult feelings.
Let me add that people who have already done a lot of work can do this here-and-now processing in a way that sustains an erotic, embodied, intensely intimate connection. If you can both love and lust in the midst of your pain; if you can both integrate each person’s full emotional spectrum into what you experience as beautiful, attractive, and sexy about each other; if you can hold each other’s emotional pain as you hold each other’s ecstasy, you can untangle old emotional knots through erotic expression. If you can imagine doing that, you don’t need me to explain further. If you can’t, then this isn’t for you.
Let me also add that this is a normal part of a long-term relationship. The first therapist I ever had would talk about “cleaning out the pipes” in a relationship, rinsing away the gunk that builds up from the various hurts, big and small, that accumulate over the years. My first clinical supervisor would suggest that clients in sex therapy revisit their therapeutic homework every year, to re-explore how their sexual connection has changed over the year and to address any problems while they’re still small.
Sex in a long-term relationship has this unique situation of a constantly changing context, day after day, year after year, decade after decade. Not only will the context change, but also each person’s needs for creating a great context will change. Here’s another metaphor: If great sex were an X on a treasure map, then not only do you keep moving to different places around the map, closer and further from the X, also the X keeps moving.
Does this sound familiar: Just because you’ve dealt with the problem, doesn’t mean you’ve dealt with all the feelings activated by the problem.
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