The goal isn't to get the 'old you' back. It's to figure out who you are now.
A baby changes everything—including, oftentimes, your interest in sex. Still, the goal isn't to get the"old you" back. It's to figure out who you are now.Of all the alarming and deeply inexplicable aspects of becoming a new mother, the one I found most unnerving was the wayabout my sex life. For 35 blissful years, no one but me seemed remotely interested in the state of my libido.
As for the rest of us, the sex thing after kids is complicated because, as Swartz explains, “for many women, sex drive doesn’t just magically re-establish itself after birth. It often requires care and attention.” This in itself is a key to understanding that something much deeper is going on than a temporary loss of mojo.
It was only much later I realized this woman may have been trying to convey something far more nuanced: Intimacy and sexual desire are necessarily altered by the experience of motherhood and, while that’s entirely expected, it’s also important not to wall off that part of yourself completely. The fact is, desire and intimacy, once lost, can be difficult to re-establish, says Arantxa De Dios, a UK-based counsellor and hypnotherapist who works with new moms.
—which has decent awareness these days, finally—but birth trauma and maternal anxiety, both of which clearly have a dampening effect on desire.Therapy is often recommended for new moms wanting to want to have sex, because it can uncover issues that may have pre-dated your baby’s birth, as well as deal with new ones. De Dios, for one, recommends hypnotherapy since it works on the sub-conscious mind—ground zero for human desire. Hypnotherapy is controversial, but there is also evidence it works .
Many new moms put everyone else’s needs first. “They can no longer access their desire because they’ve gone so long not feeling entitled to it, they’ve almost forgotten how,” she says. A good portion of her clients even feel like it would be wrong to masturbate since they’re not having sex with their husbands.For many women, the whole notion of sexual desire changes after having a kid. So much of what turns us on as young women is crudely performative and socially conditioned.
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