Psychological Causes Of Men’s Difficulties With Ejaculation
Men with delayed ejaculation (DE) are often rather detached from their feelings, both sexual and non-sexual, and their sexual desires.(This is not so true in cases of premature ejaculation, where a man often has too great an awareness of his own feelings of sexual desire and arousal!)
And another common theme is that many men with difficulty ejaculating refuse to acknowledge any connection between their emotional history and their current sexual difficulties.
To put this into context, consider how society thinks about male sexuality. For example, there is a widespread belief in society that male sexual expression is almost automatic. How so? Well, see available naked woman, get erect, insert, thrust, ejaculate. And of course, life may not really be like that. Men have emotional needs too. Even often men try to defend against feeling them – and against feeling their vulnerability.
And in particular, a lot of guys who have delayed ejaculation seem to have trouble forming intimate and satisfying relationships. When you look at their sexual history, they may turn out to be a bit sexually naive or inexperienced, too.
Why would this be so? Well, any kind of male upbringing which emphasizes “toughening up” or battling against “weakness” of any kind will tend to cause a man to deny his emotions, his inner emotional processes, his vulnerability, and hisemotional and physical needs .
And during adolescence, the pressure of a boy’s peer group is often about gaining sexual experience. Together with a lack of traditional rites of passage this can result in difficulty in understanding his role as a sexual being in the adult world.
The most significant problem, therefore, faced by men with delayed ejaculation is the loss of a sense of their own internal erotic world, or an understanding of it. Think for a moment how we all have an “everyday” reality as well as a “sexual” reality.
Sexual Reality
Our sexual reality is almost a different state of being; it’s certainly a different state of mind. It’s one that allows us to engage in sexual activity with a partner without paying too much attention to the reality of everyday life.
Of course, sexual reality may intrude upon everyday reality in the form of sexual fantasy or sexual thoughts. However, it’s generally true to say that most sexually functioning adults are able to differentiate between their everyday reality and their erotic reality with a reasonable degree of clarity.
This model of the way human beings think is more or less accurate. It makes it easier to understand how men with delayed ejaculation end up with apparently so little insight into their own challenges.
Most of us can enter our own erotic world during sexual activity fairly easily. But men who have trouble ejaculating during sex with their girlfriend or wife appear to have great difficulty in crossing this boundary and entering into an erotic world of their own. They handle sexuality as a form of everyday reality. This has several possible consequences:
1) A man may have an internal erotic world which is impoverished. This doesn’t function particularly well as a way of creating sexual excitement. All sexual stimulation has to be delivered externally.
2) In some men this problem goes even further. It appears that no matter how much sexual stimulation is applied externally, it somehow never gets translated into sexual arousal internally.
Other men seem to have inhibition around becoming sexually aroused because of sexual shame or humiliation during childhood.
Some men may have difficulty in becoming sexually aroused because of associations between male sexuality and violence against women or sexual abuse. This could arise either from witnessing a father or other significant male adult who was sexually abusive. Or it could come simply from internalizing a cultural perception of men as sexual predators.
Every time that male sexuality is described as a problem, every man suffers to some degree. He internalizes a degree of shame and guilt into his construct of masculinity. The truth is healthy male sexuality can be glorious and rich for both men and women. , e
In the most extreme case, men can become frozen sexually. They may be unable to respond to sexual stimulation in a healthy way. And sexuality and aggression are closely linked, so men who have difficulties with aggression may find that their sexuality becomes stunted as well. Those who cannot ejaculate in a timely way may wish to see our unique treatment program.
Autosexuality
In some cases a kind of autosexual orientation emerges to avoid the pain of this reality. A man maintains his sexuality as a purely private thing. He satisfies himself with fantasy, pornography or online sex. These are all emotionally disconnected forms of sexual expression. At this point you can probably begin to see how complicated the origin of delayed ejaculation can be!
In short, many men who experience difficulty ejaculating when they are having intercourse with their partner or girlfriend simply don’t know how to express their sexuality in a healthy way. Many of them are unable to make what are essentially normal requests of their sexual partners for normal erotic stimulation.
In such cases, sex can become a mechanical task rather than an emotional interaction that results in shared pleasure. But like many other automatic reflexes – urination and breathing come to mind here – some experts have suggested that ejaculation can be consciously inhibited. One of the interesting and significant things about male ejaculation is that it is normally an unconscious, autonomic reflex response. This would mean that delayed ejaculation might be the result of emotional inhibition of the ejaculatory response.
In other words, a man might be trying to avoid the anxiety associated with sex, orgasm and ejaculation by holding back his sexual climax. Such issues are easily dealt with in the techniques and processes of . This is a therapeutic technique which investigates the causes of overt behaviors in the covert world of the unconscious (and seeks to heal them, of course).
Another possible cause of delayed ejaculation is fear of an unwanted pregnancy. So are memories of past sexual trauma, or the fear of sexually transmitted diseases. Another possibility is that this dysfunction originates in either a lack of sexual stimulation, or inhibition about getting one’s own sexual needs met, or a lack of appropriate sexual experience, or some kind of deep-rooted emotional conflict. No matter what the cause of a man’s difficulty ejaculating, the common factor in its expression is the same. All men who cannot ejaculate during sex find that their ability to ejaculate intravaginally is more or less totally inhibited.
Emotional Conflicts.
A man whose psychosexual development hasn’t progressed normally for some reason may have DE. Such causes include distorted relationship with his mother or an inadequate transition into his own masculinity during adolescence. And finally, perhaps some men cannot ejaculate because they fear the loss of self that occurs in the moment of orgasm.
Video – An interesting viewpoint
Most of all, of course, we think of delayed ejaculation as somehow representing a fear of letting go, a fear of loss of control. This may be caused by sexual embarrassment or shame, guilt, or conflict. And there may be a fear of loss of control or not being masculine, or indeed, many other issues. It’s also possible that a deep, unconscious level of hostility or rage towards women is responsible for a man’s inability to ejaculate. This may be disguised by an overly caring and gentle attitude towards women.
For other men with problems reaching orgasm, sexual excitement may be dependent on specific paraphilic stimuli. Sexual arousal that comes from, say, fantasy may be sufficient to achieve an erection but it may not be sufficient to drive a man’s level of arousal high enough to cause ejaculation.
The same is true of acting out with role play, specific items of clothing, sex toys and such practices as BDSM. It’s also been suggested that ejaculatory dysfunction is a psychosomatic problem. But, unfortunately, ideas like the ones listed above which might explain men’s difficulty in ejaculating during intercourse with wives, partners and girlfriends can’t be proved scientifically.