At the moment I’m going through a lot, though I feel a lot is a bit of an understatement. I’ve restarted therapy, proper therapy. After therapy sessions, you finish with a relieved sigh, and then promptly go home to clean yourself afterwards. The therapy sessions that make you feel like an hour in the gym would be preferable, and the therapy sessions that wring you out the opposite way to dry.
Some of you know what I’m talking about, for those that don’t I suggest you try it. That’s only somewhat sarcastic, therapy is good for the soul, say the therapists. I digress, I’m going through a lot. We’re digging up bits of my past – both childhood and adulthood, I didn’t know I had. Not to mention going through the current complications that come with being essentially housebound (unless someone takes me out), and we’re doing all this whilst I battle graphic nightmares due to withdrawing from Gabapentin. A substance the doctors pushed on me because they didn’t know what else to do. Fun times!
So, I’m going through a lot. Mentally, and physically. Sexually, it’s a whole other matter because of that pesky childhood, and past me, things I mentioned earlier are all mixed in with some pretty rough times. Suffice it to say I’ve had a rocky 20 years or so, and I’m going to go all soppy and say ‘until I met my partner, but it’s true’. He’s teaching me some valuable lessons like you can say no to your parents – who’d have thought!
Therapy brings all the icky sticky things in my head where they run their own one-man show on a small stage with all my trauma. They’re all vying for my attention. My once neat and tidy noggin’ is now a cacophony of tragic operas, bad solo ballads, and off-key musicals. It’s quite something.
My brain is so full that it’s spilling out all over my sex life, and my job of testing sex toys. Parts of my brain scream ‘how can you fuck yourself silly when you’re processing this tragic and graphic memory we shall now bring to the forefront of your mind when you’ve only just managed to let it fade into the background’. My brain is a bitch like that.
All this mess is bad, and it’s definitely going to take a while to wade through all the sludge, and slime to tidy it all away. I just don’t know how quickly it’s going to happen. So, in the meantime, I have to figure out what this means for my sex life … or lack of.
Whilst Eroticon was wonderful for reigniting my sex drive, I now have that extra little problem of having an active brain and a sex drive, do you see where I’m going with this? As soon as I try to shut my brain off with a naked partner or a vibrator that’s seemingly not living up to the glowing review I wrote about it – I’m looking at you Zumio, my brain throws an intrusive thought right into the forefront of my head.
This is a lot of exposition to say that therapy is screwing with my sex life, and I don’t like it. I want to take back control of my sex life, and whilst I can’t say ‘screw you’ to my therapist – though admittedly at times I have done so in jest (it’s a slightly unconventional relationship, but it works), it’s not practical now I’ve essentially released a dozen wild flying monkeys in my brain.
I want to lie back, and not think of England, but think of all the sensations My body is experiencing. I want to savour the erotic thoughts that flit through my brain instead of them getting pushed aside by traumatic memory x, y, and z.
In all the frustration I’ve very helpfully directed towards my therapist (he said to so it’s all okay), I’ve come up with a plan, of sorts. A way to deal with just how much therapy impacts my sex life.
I figured there might be a few people out there who experience the same, so since this post is a little lengthy, I’ve popped the more helpful points in a separate post just in case you don’t read me wax lyrical about the trials and tribulations of therapy. Though, if you’re this far down the page you’ve most likely already read through it all, well done! You made it this far. Unfortunately, I can’t offer you a magic spell to erase what you’ve just read from your memory, I can only blame the use of superfluous words on my intake of caffeine today.
In somewhat seriousness, therapy seems almost designed to fuck with your brain. It tears you apart in under an hour, and you have to figure out how to put yourself together again in the back of a taxi cab whilst the driver prattles on about the weather. This happens week after week until you don’t know which way is up anymore. Eventually, you might begrudgingly realise all that tearing apart has helped, but refuse to listen to your therapist be smug about it – not that he actually is, but mentally you have a different picture. Things that once were unspoken become voiced, and over time you realise bits of you are slowly healing.
What they don’t advertise during therapy is that your sex life gets caught in the crossfire of all these flying monkeys. There’s a warning somewhere in the mass that is a medication booklet, but there’s nothing when it comes to therapy.
