Libido Stress

[Bubbles]

Hey again Scarleteen.
(I was danny101 before but I changed my name )

I know that there's nothing wrong with having a high sex drive but... I feel like I just get annoyed by mine. I could masturbate and it would go away for a while, but then it would just be back again in an hour or less. Then I could try starving it out for a week but it would still be there the whole time, just making me even more frustrated.

I'm not really a huge fan of masturbation because it doesn't do much for me mentally (Or physically usually) and it kind of takes a long time so I get really annoyed by my libido never leaving me alone because it's not something I enjoy. Sometimes I try and incorporate... other stuff. "Erotic material"... just to speed the process along a bit, which leaves me incredibly embarassed because I just... feel so wrong having any of that in my life, regardless of whether it's pornographic video, written fiction, audio, or whatever else. It's hard to use my imagination for it since I don't even want to be doing it in the first place. I just... I just really hate my sex drive and wish there was a way to drastically lower it. Whenever I have to "Deal with it" I either feel dirty or ashamed if "external material" was involved, or bored and extremely impatient if it isn't, and then takes twice as long. Honestly I feel rubbish either way though, and kinda bored.

It doesn't consume my life or taint my relationships with others in any way (I mean technically I don't actually have any friends right now but it's never interfered with social interaction before). Ultimately masturbation only makes my sex drive calm down for a very, very short time and I don't enjoy it much. It feels like a chore, but if I don't then I don't get any peace at all. Sometimes I get lucky and it goes away for a day or two afterwards, which sadly is the most satisfying part of masturbation for me. Is there medication that gets rid of sex drive entirely or something? Or some other solution? I don't know what to do and I feel really stressed out about all this, and have for a while but never talked about it...

[Sam W]

Hi Bubbles,

I'm sorry to hear this is causing you so much stress and frustration. Before we dive into what you've written, can you say a little more about what makes you view your sex drive as high and why you feel like it's something you need to decrease or quiet? Is it that it's distracting, or is it more that it's causing you some kind of discomfort in terms of how you think about yourself (or something else entirely)?

[Bubbles]

Hey Sam.

That's a difficult question to answer. I don't think that sex is bad, and even though I'm gray-asexual I think I might like to try it some day if a partner asked me, but... yes, it definitely causes me discomfort about how I think about myself. I often feel varying degrees of guilt or shame or... at odds with my gray-asexuality. Makes me question it. I don't honestly get enjoyment out of it, so it feels like a distraction with these feelings hovering over me constantly. Also if any kind of 'erotic material' is involved (Especially porn, but everything else makes me feel this way too just to lesser extents) it makes me feel like a bad, immature, immoral, perverted, shallow, slimy person.

I view my sex drive as high because I get kind of (Moderately but never enthusiastically) turned-on really easily and also masturbate nearly every day, or more. Which I don't enjoy, and it sometimes upsets me because anything to do with sexuality reminds me how different I am with being on the asexual spectrum (Makes me feel alienated out of a large part of life) and also even if it doesn't distress me for once, it just doesn't feel that great physically in my experience (Orgasms are weak and the build-up feels borderline numb and frustrating... and my sex drive doesn't stay away for very long afterwards). Maybe there are other reasons for my discomfort that I haven't discovered yet too. Everything about my sex drive upsets me most days, for one reason or another.

[Sam W]

Got it. If it helps to know, there are some asexual people, gray-ace among them, who experience sexual attraction at various times. So feeling what you're feeling may not automatically invalidate your identity. If you haven't already, reading this article might help with some of those feelings: http://www.scarleteen.com/article/relat ... ity_primer

If masturbation isn't pleasurable for you, or is actively causing you distress, then a sound choice is going to be to take a step back from doing it for awhile. Can you give me a sense of if you know what happens with your arousal or thoughts about sex if you don't masturbate and sort of ride them out?

[Bubbles]

I'll read the article, thank you. I've never seen it before.

If I step back from it, nothing really changes. My thoughts and arousal just keep on distressing me until I usually give in, just to get a few hours of peace. Even after a week of avoiding it, nothing seems to improve. I don't want to have a sex drive anymore. Sexuality doesn't suit me.

[Sam W]

You're welcome! It's a newer article, which may be why you haven't run into it before.

Do you find other forms of distraction or otherwise ignoring those thoughts helps at all. Or, alternatively, does noticing the thought, acknowledging it's there, and then moving on instead of dwelling on it help?

When you say sexuality and having a sex drive don't suit you, is it solely that they don't feel in line with the way you've identified your sexual orientation? Or does it feel like there are other factors besides that?

[Bubbles]

I don't think I communicated the problem so well before actually, sorry. It's not so much that sexual thoughts and feelings are present all the time, but rather that they're there frequently, multiple times a day, and they make me uncomfortable. I can't explain why, but for some seemingly arbitrary reason, they just make me distressed or even upset. It's hard to ignore.

It doesn't suit me because sexuality is unfamiliar to me and I don't know how to be sexual (Even with light stuff like flirting) or how sexuality fits into my identity. I've been without friends for almost my entire life and have always been pretty much isolated and alone/lonely, and learned to survive that way as best as I can. The idea of being sexual with someone feels like it just doesn't... "fit" with the life I know. I really like the idea of intimacy, but in any kind of sexual situation, my personality doesn't have a response, so I usually just go blank. Even if it's an imagined scenario. I'd have to consciously "act" like someone else.

I hope that... sort of made sense. This is hard for me to talk about but I'm doing my best. Thanks for helping me.

[Sam W]

No worries, sometimes these things are hard to put into words, and I'd always rather have a user correct me than work from an assumption that's not quite accurate. What you're describing sounds like a pretty average amount of sexual thoughts, and I'm sorry they're making you feel uncomfortable. I think it's still a sound choice not to respond to these thoughts with masturbation for awhile, given that doing so seems to add to your discomfort. It does sound like learning to ignore them more easily might be helpful to you (and really it's something that most people learn to do in one way or another, since sexual thoughts often pop up at times where there is no way to act on them, like when you're at work or school, and people just have to ignore them or let them pass). Do you have things you enjoy doing that are pretty mentally engaging that you could try the next time these thoughts arise?

It's okay to not be sure how sexuality fits into your identity, or to have your understanding of how it does so change over time. With not being able picture yourself and how you'd act in a sexual scenario, sometimes it is really challenging to envision yourself in a situation that feels very outside of your experiences. Too, even for people who are able to picture themselves in those situations prior to ever actually being in them, how they think they'll act and how they actually end up acting can be very different. So, does it help at all to think of less as sexuality not fitting with how you are as a person, period, but rather as something where you don't have all the information on how it fits, and that's okay?

[Bubbles]

I feel kind of embarassed now if I came across that way; I can control it, I don't just like... act on those thoughts compulsively even if I'm in public or something, but yeah maybe it was too habitual. I've avoided it for almost a week now though so I'll carry on and see if anything changes.

I guess I have mentally engaging things I could do, but I've had chronic double depression for 7 years so I don't really enjoy anything or feel motivated. If I start doing something, I usually have to stop shortly before I run out of motivation so I guess it can be hard to distract myself from whatever is in my mind for long, including sexual thoughts. Sometimes I think I actually use masturbation as a self-harm method because of how it leaves me feeling upset or disturbed.

I see what you mean and it does help to look at sexuality as something I don't have all the information about how it fits with me as opposed to it not fitting at all, but it also feels like something I have absolutely *none* of the information about how it fits. How could I ever be comfortable with sexuality or with partnered sex, if I have no information at all of how this stuff fits into who I am, or if it even does? I may be on the ace-spectrum, but I still think I might like to be sexual with the right person, sometimes, if it was important to them. But even thinking about it now, I feel like I'm imagining someone else's life. I have nothing to give, and nothing to express. This might never change, but I think I want it to.

[Sam W]

So you know, it didn't come across that way, more that it sounded like you trying to get those desires to go quiet by doing something that wasn't helping much, even in the short term, and seemed to be making you uncomfortable to boot.

We may have touched on this in a previous thread, but are you currently seeing anyone for help with your depression? If you are, has the stuff we've been talking about in this thread ever come up with them?

With those fears about not knowing, or never knowing, it may help to take a step back and think about why not having that information feels so uncomfortable. Does it feel like there's this weird unknown and that in and of itself is scary? Like there's a piece of information everyone else has that you don't? Something else? Looking at those possible reasons might help you figure out ways to approach this fear.

[Bubbles]

Hi Sam.

Sorry for my communication blackout. My ability to function socially is waning.

Yes, I've been seeing psychologists for about 5 months now I think. I've talked about some of this stuff yeah, but I've got a lot of mental health issues to work through (They diagnosed 6 before I even brought up sexuality) and it's expected to take years. So far things haven't improved and my will to continue is slowly fading and I generally feel like I'm trapped in a whirling abyss where everything hurts me and I can't see where to go. I can't even remember what hope feels like. But anyway, I know Scarleteen isn't specialised for ongoing mental health issues so I won't press on that too much.

It does feel a bit like it's information everyone else has that I don't, yeah. I know sexuality is complicated and a lot of people struggle with it but I'm aware of how behind I am and it makes me feel like a child, or a robot, or some other utterly non-sexual entity. My situation doesn't feel like it's really an unknown; it more so feels like it's something that I do know, and that I feel like I somehow know that I'll never really have functioning sexuality and never be in a relationship. I'm so used to things never getting better my whole life. No matter how hard I try to stay afloat, how much self-care I try, or how much I try to work on myself, it feels like I just keep sinking, and relationships and sexuality, as these things which enriches peoples' lives, seems so far away for me that I'll die before I ever even come close to having made the progress in that area that most people achieve before they're 20. It feels like it's something I'll... never be able to experience. Like I'm stuck in a completely different world and would be lucky to even survive, let alone experience things like relationships and sexuality.

[Sam W]

Hi Bubbles, good to see you again

Just as a quick aside, if you feel like things haven't been improving with therapy, I'd encourage you to vocalize that with your therapist (if you haven't already). Therapy can take some fine-tuning to get to a place where you notice things improving. Given your second paragraph, it does sound like these feelings about your sexuality are actually tied to some of the bigger things you're dealing with in terms of your mental health, so addressing them in that space may be a sound use of your time. And, if they feel like they've sort of risen to the top lately, that may be something to share with your therapist as well (again, if you haven't already done so).

Something helpful to think about might be: what would be needed to help you accept the fact that you're not as behind as you think you are? Because, from what we know about the patterns in young people's sexual and romantic relationships, you're completely within the average timeline (even if you weren't, there wouldn't be anything wrong with that). It's really, really common for young people to feel like they're behind in terms of relationships or figuring out things like their sexual orientation because they see everyone else "ahead" of them, when in fact that's not the case. And if you've got a brain that tends to lean towards the negative or sees things in a catastrophic light, it can be easy to extrapolate that mis-perception into feeling like you'll always be somehow behind.

[Bubbles]

I try to be open about everything with my therapist but from what I gather, they don't think my situation is something that will resolve quickly. She said my 6 mental illnesses could take around a year to treat, each, but probably longer, and we're not even that far yet. And medication didn't work, it just gave me side effects for 4 months. I've just got so many problems that it'll take patience, and I have patience, but my life is still ticking away and I'm missing a lot, and sometimes therapy progress feels so slow but I don't think it can really be sped up. Everyone always says that therapy is the solution to things like this, but I feel like I just can't heal fast enough to keep ahead of it. And therapy takes a lot of work too, which is tough. When I realise how much I've already missed out on in life from having these problems for like 8+ years, it makes me feel even more behind.

I could be 30 or 40 by the time my mental state is even close to good enough to be able to pursue relationships, if ever. Also I read that almost 90% of people have had sex by age 20 (I'm in no major hurry to have sex since I'm still uncomfortable with sexuality, but it's still a daunting statistic to me). By that statistic I'm behind. I don't even have a friend, that's how far behind I am. Having a friend feels like it's miles and miles and miles away, and sexuality and relationships seem like they'll never even exist in my life. I spend half my nights crying under my desk in my room or hugging my pillow, and my days just dreaming about not being alone and walking around like a zombie with no joy or enthusiasm. I mean how much more socially behind could I be? I know this will sound like standard self-hate, but I'm no good to anyone as I am. Even people in high school used to shun me, complain about how depressing I am, avoid me, and never invited me to anything. I don't understand where I went wrong in life but I don't want to be in this world anymore, I don't belong here.

I'm sorry for all that. Sometimes I wonder if I come on here just to have someone to talk to.

[Sam W]

Those are some really heavy feelings to be carrying around, and I'm glad you feel comfortable coming here to talk about them (for the record, you may notice us continuing to urge you to talk about things with your therapist because at a certain point we're not qualified to offer mental health services, but that doesn't mean you can't continue to come here for support or to ask questions).

To the points in your first paragraph, it's true that managing a mental illness (or illnesses) through therapy can take a long time, and that progress can be very slow and incremental. But, if you've been in therapy a while and you aren't noticing any changes, even tiny ones, then that's something to bring up with your therapist, because it means they may need to make in how you two are approaching treatment. For instance, have the two of you discussed ways to address issues stemming from your mental illness in everyday life in addition to the longer term treatment goals? The issues aren't going to get better overnight, but that doesn't mean the two of you can't come up with strategies to help you not spend half your nights feeling totally miserable, you know? Or, as another example, you two could talk about ways to push back against your brain's assertion that it will be decades before you're able to form close relationships.

As an aside, it can take sometimes take multiple tries to find a medication, or medication combination, that works for you. So if it's something you think you'd be interested in trying, you can ask your therapist (or the person who prescribed you the first medication) if they think there are other medications that could potentially benefit you.

With those feelings of loneliness, have you tried anything to address them on a really basic level, like going to something that allows you a low stakes situation in which to meet people?