Treating Psychological Impotence (Erectile Dysfunction)

hi I'm matter of uncommon knowledge and welcome to treating psychological impotence five confidence-building tips to help men regain sexual function and enjoyment so one thing can be many things sex can be just sex it can be a mechanical chore at the end of a day of tax returns and fixing the carburetor and arranging childcare or you know just something to tick off another chore or sex can be lovemaking you know it can be an act of deepening connection a gateway to a profound timeless unification of usually two people an intense merging of not only bodies

but also minds but not for Graham who's a client who came to see me or at least not when he came to see me at first so he was very forlorn and glum and despondent on his first session and he told me what had happened now I sort of assumed that perhaps you know sex had become you know just boring for him or routine or too familiar but he told me that he had had a great sex life but something very specific had changed everything for him there had been a slow build-up and then something

rather traumatic had caused him to have psychological impotence so I was keen to know what had happened because we always need to know the history you know what's been going on for the man and he described that he and his wife would had been desperately trying for a baby so sex had turned into a means to an end rather than something something to enjoy for its own sake and he said that they'd have sex penciled in specifically at his wife's most fertile times and they wanted three children they didn't have any children yet but eventually

his wife wanted three children and anyway he said that actually decorated their unborn or unconceived child's bedroom already you know his wife had chosen the color schemes and she'd chosen Disney wallpaper with Dumbo and Mickey Mouse you know perfect for a girl or a boy and I noticed Graham winced when he said wallpaper so I wondered what it was about the way the room was decorated that upset him so much and he said that his wife had been late and that they thought she was pregnant and they were very excited and you know because finally

the future occupant of the room that had already been decorated was on their way but he said it was a false alarm and I asked him what had happened and he said well they kept trying religiously as he put it and she was late again and again each time they thought that you know that time she was actually pregnant but they soon learned that it didn't mean anything and he said that our hopes were dashed and the issue was getting more and more depressed with every passing month and then something happened that you know broke

the camel's back and you know she was really late and she even felt pregnant and there was no reason for her not to get pregnant and had even been to the fertility clinic and everything had seemed to be you know in order and she really thought she'd be pregnant this time but again it wasn't to be but this time it was different you know this time he said that she sort of went crazy and she'd taken her test in a friend's bathroom and she came out absolutely sobbing he was there as well and he said

that she started hitting me and thumping my chest on the drive home she was she wouldn't stop screaming he said she was just so angry and then he said that when they got home she raced up the stairs and you know now his words were coming out in sobs he said that she started wrecking their future their unconceived child's bedroom she ripped down the Disney wallpaper and he said that he could still see Dumbo and Mickey Mouse torn to shreds and that was the image that kept coming back to him and after that she sort

of didn't mention it again and he said that we didn't even go into that avoided that bedroom and he said they still hadn't been in there and then when the time came to try for a baby again he said that he just couldn't you know just nothing that he felt it was all his fault and you know and then she'd get even angrier because you know they weren't trying to have his baby anymore but because he couldn't he couldn't get an erection and I thought about how I could help Graham and I also wondered whether

I should see the both of them okay and she did come along eventually now Graham and his wife are just one of the many cases of psychological impotence that I've treated over the years and here are some tips I found really useful so tip number one what is the cause which kind of sounds obvious you know it's been said that the quickest way to treats a sexual problem is to get a new partner and I'm not advocating that as a treatment but if there's any truth to that then it tells us that sexual problems exist

within a context and that context is of course the relationship psychological impotence needs first of all to be distinguished from physiological or physical impotence so or physically caused impotence I should say so medications such as antidepressants can inhibit erections as we know hypertension diabetes physical exhaustion too much alcohol and poor diet can all interfere with a man's sex life and that's not to say that pauses can't be intertwined you know they certainly can a physiological cause can lead to a psychological cause even after the illness has lifted if the anxiety around sex remains so we

need to make the distinction between physiological and psychological impotence and we can start by asking questions about general health but it's also important to find out whether the man ever has erections we know that during REM or rapid eye movement sleep or sometimes called dream sleep men without physiological impotence experienced erections as they sleep and that morning wood is often called often occurs because the minutes before awakening tend to contain more REM rich dream sleep than other parts of the sleep cycle so just before you wake up in the morning you tend to be doing

a lot of dreaming and a man will often not always wake up with an erection and that's an indication that physically he's okay so does the client ever wake up with an erection do they have erections at all and a word of advice here don't make this the very first question that you ask your client when they step in the door you know let nakai sit down first if they do sometimes have spontaneous erections and they really are no other kind then the cause is likely to be psychological not physiological because we know that their

body can produce erections and if that's the case we always need to look at the context of the erectile dysfunction and in fact often erectile dysfunction might just as well be called relationship dysfunction or work-life balance dysfunction tip number two when did it start happening okay so one guy I worked with told me he worked 13 hours a day and smoked 40 cigarettes every day and yet junk food like it was you know his life's mission and and when he went for a date with his girlfriend it usually involved both of them getting really drunk

to the point that he could barely remember the next day so his impotence which somehow was still only intermittent had him completely baffled but to me it was some as clear as day excessive alcohol and weight are not a recipe for erectile health have been continually stressed through work isn't either other men came to me because they had been sexually abused in the past and now associated sex with threat and shame and some had never been able to consummate a relationship they had never ever had sex another client had gotten married only to discover on

his wedding night that his new wife had hired a cool girl to help him gain the experience he was so obviously lacking she had put it and he hadn't managed to get an erection with either the cool girl or his wife ever since and he went from inexperienced to unable to experience so early sexual experiences can have profound consequences through the years and because of emotional conditioning some men feel emasculated in their relationship in some sense you know and it was impotence only adds to that feeling they may lack body confidence or just feel disconnected

from their partner they may misunderstand or feel misunderstood by the very person that's supposed to be close and intimate with and it's a myth that for men sex is always totally compartmentalized from the wider relationship or their emotional life you know that might be true for some men but certainly not most men and certainly for Graham it was pretty clear what the cause was and in fact as I suggested to him it might have been more surprising had he not been experiencing temporary as I put it impotence you know it'd be weird if it just

sort of carried on as normal so sex had ceased to be a spontaneous and fun or even intimate they've become a means to an end which was to produce another human being but when that end wasn't met Graham had been traumatized by his wife's intense anguish and felt totally to blame as if somehow he'd failed in protecting her from something he sobbed just to recall his wife ripping down the wallpaper in there as yet and conceived Charles bedroom so sex for him now was a ret rekt and/or racked I should say with a guilt performance

anxiety and embarrassment so three deal with the cause so that's easier said than done of course and in Graham's case one thing I could do for him straight away was to decondition what was for him quite a traumatic memory and that that of his wife tearing down the disney-themed wallpaper of their unconceived baby so he told me this horrible memory would resurface whenever he tried to have sex with his wife not surprisingly it was completely getting in the way of that and sometimes we'll also need to help the client deal with general stresses in their

lives so that they they are they have the spare capacity to be able to have an enjoy sex so we can reassure them that erections are supposed to vanish during times of stress okay developing an erection when faced with an angry mob or a bad-tempered tiger or a pack of wolves isn't particularly adaptive okay I'm sure no one's ever said that in the history of the English language before but it's true you don't want to be getting an erection when confronted by a hungry lion but my point is if there's a particular memory or series

of memories that play on your clients mind that's a good starting point and if you can decondition those memories you can really help your client so help your client take the emotional charge out of that memory so it no longer matches to current sexual situations so when he was trying to have sex all he could see was a damn wall paper being ripped off that off the bedroom wall so I used the rewind technique with Graham but it wasn't all we needed to do so number four step number four take the pressure off so Graham

talked a lot about performance and not achieving an erection and I was keen for him to step outside of that mindset for a while you know I talked in terms of letting it happen rather than achieving it you know letting things happen we often think in terms of we're often told that we have to you know really want something to attain it and this is a staple of motivational books and talks and in some arenas of life it's absolutely true but sometimes wanting something too much makes us paradoxically less likely to attain it you know

some things we just need to let happen and in the words of The Supremes you can't hurry love and nor can you force an erection which wasn't one of their songs okay but it's absolutely true some parts of experience happen outside of conscious will and we have to let them happen just provide the environment for that to happen and let it happen all by itself for example we're more likely to fall asleep when we try to stay awake than when we try to sleep even if we're tired our brain just doesn't were like that sleep

and directions and many other things besides our side effects or byproducts of the right balance of circumstances and worrying about outcomes blocks performance so sex needs to be relaxed spontaneous and fun and a chance to deepen intimacy and be totally absorbed in the immediate time and instead many men feel it's somehow test of their manhood but tests can be passed or failed and that's the problem and in Graham's case his own test was followed by his wife having a literal test as he were the she was pregnant a lot so being unable to get an

erection could have been Graham's unconscious Minds way of avoiding having his wife fail any more tests and a tried and tested way of treating performance anxiety related impotence is to suggest to a couple that they lie naked together and on no account have sex and we call this a paradoxical intervention now the pressure is off if the man is to complete the task successfully he needs to succeed in not having an erection so we're reframing the idea of achievement and I suggested Graham and his wife do this they were to do it outside of his

wife's most fertile time just to instigate intimacy okay physical endures intimacy but not sex at this point that's what I was keen to stress but not to get an erection or at least not for now and when I saw Graham the next time he told me that he'd happily failed the task and he and his wife were having better sex than they had for many years but of course I also did plenty of hypnotic rehearsal with Graham before that so tip number five use hypnosis for virility but also fertility so I'll avoid the obvious joke

about me having got lots of women pregnant through you through hypnosis but it is true hypnosis does seem to have a pedigree in helping women can see at least when they're there using IVF treatment they're much more likely to get pregnant if they use hypnosis alongside that so I did see Graham's wife not just for fertility but also to help her re-establish her sex life with her husband not as a means to an end but as a spontaneous act of love I suggested during hypnosis that she could greatly love the moments and the outcome of

those moments could take care of itself okay I suggested she'd forget about conceiving and really start to enjoy sex again and this in turn would further help her husband so with Graham in trance I Riva the FIDE earlier and happier memories of making love with his wife not producing babies with his wife but making love with her I suggested to him that his unconscious mind would look after his erections and he wouldn't even have to think about it and between taking the pressure off hypnotic Leary of Oakland great sex and deconditioning unpleasant memories that have

become tagged on to sex Graham and his wife began to enjoy sex again for its own sake okay and the ripped Disney wallpaper memory or flashback began to fade in Graham's mind so years passed and I forgot all about Graham as soon as you do you know things happened and I saw hundreds of other clients then one day I was in the town and I saw him in the street and he was pushing a pram and it took me a couple of seconds to place him and I don't tend to cop to clients and you

know unless they come up to me first I see them in the street but he he came up to me and proudly introduced his son who I noticed was wearing a Dumbo t-shirt okay so is almost as if we gone full circle in some way so I hope you found that useful and if you did please hit like and subscribe and if you want to hear when my next video is published hit the notification bell below I'm mark Terrell of uncommon knowledge and if you'd like to subscribe to my email newsletter you can find it

over at uncom slash blog that's UNK comm slash blog and thanks for watching [Music]