Welcome to UnF*ck Your Brain. I’m your host, Kara Loewentheil, Master Certified Coach and founder of The School of New Feminist Thought. I’m here to help you turn down your anxiety, turn up your confidence, and create a life on your own terms, one that you’re truly excited to live. Let’s go. 

Welcome to this week’s coaching hotline episode where I answer real questions from real listeners and coach you from afar. If you want to submit your question for consideration, go to unfuckyourbrain.com/coachinghotline, all one word, or text your email to +1-347-997-1784 and when you get prompted for the code word, it’s coaching hotline, all one word. Let’s get into this week’s questions. 

This is the question. “For some reason, I have no desire to have sex. I’m working on my body image with all the tools that Kara teaches and it’s not that. Now it’s gotten to the point where even when my husband holds or kisses me, I experience fear and even downright paranoia that it will lead to sex, and I just want to break free of the contact. Any sex we have is out of obligation and care for him, so he feels attracted because I am attracted to him, and I have to really rev up the thought work to get up the motivation to do it. I just have no libido anymore and it’s really upsetting when you consider we want to try to start a family soon.” 

Okay, so, the first place we have to work on this is the part where number one, you believe you have no libido and number two, you find it really upsetting. It’s like the models are stacked in layers. We got to start with the top model. Let’s start with the idea that you don’t have any libido. Let’s pretend that’s a circumstance. It’s for sure a thought, right? But let’s say that’s a circumstance. I have no libido. And then your thought is that’s really upsetting. You have to start with that thought. You think this is a problem. You think it’s a problem that you don’t want to have sex. And then you’re telling yourself, it’s really a problem because we want to try to start a family soon. 

Number one, people for sure started families even when they weren’t into sex. You can have sex for a purpose if that’s all you want to do. So you just got to notice that you have the story about it and you got to work on that piece of it first. So what that you don’t want to have sex? Why is that a problem? 

Now, you’re going to give me a whole bunch of thoughts about why it’s a problem, because it upsets him, because of intimacy, because we want to have a family, because I want to be normal, right? Whatever your thoughts are, those are all thoughts. There are people in the world who don’t have any libido and who feel totally fine about it. And some of those people might identify as asexual and some of those people would just say I’ve been married for 40 years and some of those people would just say whatever. 

Even if it were truly a circumstance that couldn’t be changed that you don’t have a libido, that does not have to be upsetting to you, whether or not you want to start a family. So we have to start there because what’s going on here is that you’re not questioning the thoughts and feelings you have about this and you want to jump to solving it by changing your libido. And this is so common with all of you guys. You have a thought and feeling about something and then you just want to use thought work to change the underlying something. It’s almost like you’re just trying to use thought work to change a circumstance. 

When you are dealing with what you are making something mean like this, it’s better to assume for the first model that it is a circumstance. It’s like I answered a question in a previous week or it’s coming up in another week about somebody who said she felt numb when she practices thoughts and then she has all these thoughts about that. And I was saying, okay, put numb when practicing thoughts in the circumstance line for now. What are all your thoughts about that, right? Same thing here. Put no libido in the circumstance line at first and deal with all your thoughts about it. 

Rather than you’re trying to change the libido with your thoughts, which I do think you can do, but we can’t do it while we’re just trying to change it so we won’t be upset anymore. Because it gives you this franticness about it. It’s urgent and it’s an emergency. Oh, I’m really upset I don’t have a libido, so I need to change the libido so I won’t be upset anymore. That’s not how it works. If you just swap in my boss or traffic for libido, you’ll see, right? Oh, there’s a lot of traffic and it’s just really upsetting. So what I need to do is change the traffic. No, we need to change the thoughts and feelings you’re having that are making you upset about the traffic existing. 

Once you do that, then we can see if your thoughts impact traffic at all. Right? Can we change traffic with your thoughts? Your libido is more changeable with your thoughts than traffic, so you can do that work, but you got to do that first level of work first. Because right now you’re creating all this resistance. Once you resolve that, then you can do some work on your libido. And again, this is a case where if you used to have a very high libido and all of a sudden it’s zero or it went down very fast, I would go get your hormones checked. 

But you also can start working on what are those thoughts? It sounds like it’s not about your body image, but it just may be about you not creating desire for your partner, right? It’s very common that people have a lot of automatic desire, like they have unconscious thoughts that create desire when they first meet someone, and then over time that goes down and we have to learn to create and recreate desire on purpose.  

And so you’ve gotten yourself in a whole thought loop where you believe you don’t have a libido, you believe you don’t want to have sex, and then you get freaked out if your husband even touches you, right? There’s so many thoughts to unpack there, but we got to start with the thoughts about why it’s a problem that you don’t have a libido, and then you’ll be able to unpack the rest of that. So that’s where I would start. 

All right, y’all, I know you’re as tired as I am of having the top podcasts in wellness or health and fitness categories be a bunch of dudes who don’t know anything about socialization and who are not taking women’s lived experiences into account. So if you are looking for ways to support the show and more importantly, make sure the show gets to more people, please leave us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. And bonus points if you include a few lines about the way you use thought work and self-coaching or anything you’ve learned from the podcast in your daily life. 

Those reviews are what teach the algorithms to show us to more new people. It helps us get new listeners all over the world. And I’ll be reading one story from a recent review in each of these question and answer episodes. 

Here’s this week’s podcast review from Brusselin. And that makes me think of brussel sprouts, which I also love. It says, “Life-Changer. This podcast has helped me stop outsourcing responsibility for the way I feel and show up in the world. My anxiety has significantly decreased and I experience life with so much more optimism.” Really, what more else is there that needs to be said? That’s the whole game, folks. 

Okay, next question. “Hi Kara, I remember you saying once that since learning to manage your mind, you don’t find social events exhausting and that you don’t believe in labeling ourselves as introverts or extroverts. I still struggle at social events where I don’t know anyone, mostly because I find it exhausting to engage in small talk with people. I usually find it boring and can’t wait to go home and read a book. If I were on my own, I would just limit the amount of gatherings I go to. But my partner is really sociable and likes when I go to events with him. This causes a lot of conflict because I want to go home earlier than he does, and then I start to have negative thoughts like he deserves someone who’s more sociable, and I end up just feeling bad. I’m guessing I find social events exhausting because of my thoughts, but why? Even if I don’t care what people think of me, I can still find social events boring. I admit some situations I’m wondering if people find me boring or dumb.” 

Okay, so, this is going to blow your mind, listen up. Boring is a thought. When you feel bored, you are creating that with your own thoughts. And your thoughts are, this is boring. Right? And so your result is you’re bored. 

I still feel I’m a little more of an introvert than I would I don’t believe in having intense labels, but probably I’m a little more introvert than I am extroverted, but I totally find small talk fascinating because it’s just people telling you their thoughts, which is I’m always fascinated to hear what are people thinking. So I don’t find social events to be a struggle. Now, I might be a little tired afterwards because I am a little more towards the introversion side. But I can also find them energizing. I have two different modes of I’m here talking a lot and entertaining and that can be kind of energizing and then there’s a more receptive mode where I’m drawing you out and making quote unquote small talk and I’m listening to you talk and that one I can be a little tired after sometimes, but in neither case do I find it boring, is it a struggle, do I need to have conflict with a partner about it, right? 

So you need to understand that you’re boring yourself with your thoughts. But you also have to decide if this is something you want to change. I think part of what’s going on here is that you think you should go to the events with him and you’re trying to make him happy and control his feelings and so in the process, you’re ignoring your own feeling, your own thought which is that you don’t want to go, and then you end up having this conflict around it. 

So I really think you have two different sets of work to do here. You got to decide if you actually want to change this and stop trying to cause your partner’s feelings, and work on feeling totally fine about saying, “Honey, I don’t want to go tonight,” or, “I’m going to go but I’m going to leave after an hour, we should take separate cars,” or whatever else. There’s a million ways to solve the concrete problem of a partner wanting to stay at a party longer than you do, but you can’t see those right now because you’re all in your drama about this and you think you need to go because it makes him happy but then you don’t want to go and then you think, oh, he should have someone more sociable, there’s something wrong with me, this is boring, right? All of that. 

So what I would do is just get really curious with yourself. The next time this comes up, just be an observer of your own mind. Just notice what you’re thinking at the party and I think you will find that when you’re thinking it’s boring, you’re bored. When you think it’s exhausting, you feel exhausted. When you think it’s a struggle, it feels like a struggle. 

But I also want you to do some thinking about whether you actually care about this and want to change it or not. You could choose to believe I’m an introvert, I have social anxiety, I just don’t want to go to these things and then manage your mind about how your partner might be upset about that. Without making it mean oh, he deserves someone else. No, he deserves you. You deserve him. You guys can deserve each other even if you don’t like to go to the same amount of social events. 

So you got to take away some of this weight you’re putting on it and then you’ll be able to see more clearly if it’s worth changing or not and if you want to change it. And if you do, then you’ll be able to start paying attention to how you’re creating your own experience at these parties with your thoughts. So multiple levels of the work. 

All right, my dears, those are your bonus questions for this week. I’ll talk to you next week.