Personal Stories of challenge and Change

I was too tired for sex

I came to see Dr. Shay after a friend of mine had said how helpful she was with her sexual problems. My big problem was that I was too tired for sex and had lost my sex drive. Dr. Shay said that this was one of the most common reasons clients visit sex therapist and a growing epidemic in our busy world. I was only twenty eight, with two small children and a challenging part time job as a nurse anesthetist. My husband was supportive and helped as much as he could but his busy accounting job kept him tied up most of the time as well. We had begun to grow apart and I felt like we were literally ‘ships passing in the night’.

The first thing Dr. Shay had me do was get a complete physical from my gynecologist and have my estrogen and testosterone levels checked. They were both normal. I was on no medications and had no physical problems I was aware of. But one problem did showed up; I was anemic. I’d been having fairly heavy periods and so my doctor started me on a multivitamin with Iron and told me what foods to eat that were high in Iron.

We then talked about my mental state of mind. I was slightly depressed but I didn’t meet the criteria for true Depression so Dr. Shay said we could attack this problem naturally. First, I hadn’t been getting 8 hours of sleep per night since I was a night owl and loved to be up and get things done after my husband and kids went to bed. She stressed the problem of sleep debt and how that can catch up with you and lower healthy brain chemicals. I began going to bed early enough to get at least 7-8 hours of sleep and began to feel better. I got used to some of the laundry not being folded and even worked up to sometimes going to bed with dishes in the sink (but not often). Then she brought up that dreaded word; EXERCISE! I’d never been athletic and hated the gym, or any kind of sport. Dr. Shay helped me see that just walking 20-30 minutes a day was all I needed to increase my Serotonin (God’s natural antidepressant), and give my body the benefits of health I’d been missing like improving bone health, relaxing, and decreasing heart risks. My husband and I started taking a walk every night and it gave us alone time to talk about the day which seemed to help me feel connected to him again.

Then we looked at the time-eaters that caused me to give my attention to the urgent and ignore the IMPORTANT! Some included talking on the phone to long, watching too much T.V., being over committed to church activities and my kid’s school activities, and tying to keep my house to ‘perfection’. We co-created a plan that helped me make phone calls shorter (set the timer for 10 minutes and hang up when it rings), only watching shows I truly LOVED, paring my church activities to one thing that I treasured and was my ‘passion’, (teaching Sunday School), only being room mother to one child’s class at a time, and hiring some help with the house two times a month.

Dr Shay educated me on the ‘Romance Plan’ she and her husband had created which included 15 minutes a day to be alone with each other and process our feelings and thoughts, date night every week (alone with no other couples or kids), going away together every quarter for an overnight stay in a motel, and even taking a weeks vacation alone without kids once a year.

She explained that men think about sex a lot more often than women and by never thinking about it I was truly not exercising a part of my brain that needed to be kept in good working order. She said, “What you don’t use, you lose”. So I started scheduling in time to daydream about a great sexual encounter we’d had in the past and reliving it every few days. Fantasizing about my husband made me begin to want to re-create that experience with him again and I started planning how I was going to seduce him on date night. By imagining sharing affection, sexual touch, and arousal with him it really did put me in the mood more often.

We also started praying for God to help our relationship become closer and my husband became aware of how much work I did and started helping more around the house.

Things aren’t PERFECT but I feel like I am back on track and with Dr. Shay’s help was able to redirect my course before the plane crashed!