Let Me Feel My Feelings

Sometimes I want to scream: "Please just let me feel my feelings!"

It is not helpful that every time I say or write something that is socially not the correct or appropriate response or not what you would expect (such as, for example, I feel violated when my husband approaches me and wants to have sex with me) so many commentators jump on me and tell me that either a) I should get a divorce or b) I have serious psychological issues.

It is entirely logical that someone whose experience with sex is that it is ALWAYS PAINFUL but who simultaneously craves and yearns for a loving intimate relationship that is sexual in a positive way feels miserable that the only way her husband can get release sometimes is via non-vaginal penetration. Every time my husband wants to get release in a sexual way, that reminds me of what I consider to be my failure as a woman and as a wife. Since I am currently being avoidant, I try to avoid feeling like a failure (that might also be a kind of coping mechanism). This leads me to not want to engage in sexual activities that are non-vaginal. I also feel used when my husband cums outside of me because it makes me think of myself as part of an I-it relationship (namely, as an object that excites pleasure) rather than an I-thou relationship (the two of us together engage in some sort of sexually blissful experience). Granted, my husband doesn't intend to treat me like an object and he does love me, but that doesn't change how I feel.

It seems sometimes like people who comment here are more uncomfortable with this whole situation than I or my husband am. I think you're uncomfortable with all the concepts involved- a non-traditional marriage/ relationship where sex is not playing the major role, the fact that sexual dysfunction exists in the first place, the fact that sometimes I feel violated even though my husband has good intentions etc. To this I say: Too bad that you feel uncomfortable, that this wouldn't be the relationship that you would want to be in and that for you this would end in divorce. My story doesn't have to end that way. Just because our life is somewhat tragic right now doesn't mean we have to exaggerate the tragedy by ending the marriage completely. 

Let me feel my feelings. Even if my feelings scare or bother you, even if they include wishing I was single or dreaming about other imaginary sexual partners. If my own husband isn't scared by my feelings, non-traditional or out-of-the-box as they might be, why do you need to be? Why do you need to judge? Everyone has ups and downs. I have good days where I love my husband and want to express that love sexually and I have other days where I am in the dumps and dreaming about never having sex again. People have to learn to let things be, to let people grow at their own pace, to let them feel their feelings. Obviously, you don't have to agree with all my decisions or points of view, but to be such Debbie Downers and spend your time informing me of the mental issues you think I have or deciding I ought to get a divorce- well, you should be ashamed of yourselves. What you should be doing is rooting for me and my husband to move on, get through this and become an even better and more loving couple together. We want to beat the odds and end up together. You should be praying that that happens for us too.

I was thinking how so many of you, if your kid said they were gay would be all like "Oh Lady Gaga Born This Way, Rah Rah Rah, Gay Pride Parade, Hurray' and you would let your kid feel his feelings, no matter what they were. Why are you kinder to someone who has discovered he's attracted to members of the same gender than you are to someone who is trying to figure out how to cope with something which is basically chronic pain in the sexual department? Would you tell a woman who was incontinent and peed herself when she laughed or had sex that it doesn't matter and she should just sleep with her husband anyway, even if she's really embarrassed because she might urinate? Wouldn't you comfort her and say you understand how ashamed she feels and how hard things must be for her? A lot of you are not getting this point: Just because there's something that to you seems to be the logical solution doesn't make it the right thing to say or the thing that the person on the other end of the conversation needs to hear. 

I want to get to the same place that you guys want me to get to, where I have sex with my husband and he's happy and it's not horribly painful for me. At the least, I want to be able to get him off without feeling upset or miserable. Telling me that I'm a bad wife, have psychological problems or should get a divorce isn't the way to get me to that goal.

Rivkah

So even though I knew it couldn't be helped, I had been feeling a little bit sad that a dilator, which is just a piece of plastic, broke my hymen rather than my husband. Obviously he is still my first and I gave that first experience as a gift to him, but I had been feeling a bit sad about it.

That was until I found the Midrash Aggadah Bereishit (Buber edition) Chapter 24. It's talking about when Rivkah saw Yitzchok and she fell off the camel.

סימן סד [ סד ] ותפל מעל הגמל . נפילה ממש, ובאותה נפילה איבדה בתוליה. הרהרה שראתה בעלה ולפיכך נפלה:

 סימן סז [ סז ] האהלה שרה אמו . שמצאה כשרה כאמו, ואמרו חז"ל כי על שרה שהיה ענן קשור על אוהלה, וכשהיתה מדלקת נירות בערב שבת, היו הנרות דולקות עד מוצאי שבת, וכן רבקה, וכסה הענן לאהל שרה, כשמתה שרה נסתלק הענן וכשבאתה רבקה חזר הענן, וכשם שהיתה שרה זהירה בשלשה מצות שהאשה חייבת בהם, נדה וחלה והדלקת הנר, כך היתה רבקה זהירה:

ויש אומרים שלא מצאה בתולה שחשד באילעזר /באליעזר/, אמרה רבקה חלילה שלא שכב עמי אליעזר, אבל מפני הנפילה שנפלתי אבדתי בתולתי, ונקום ונלך למקום ההוא שנפלתי, ואולי יעשה ה' נס ותמצא שם דם בתולים, וכן עשו, הלכו ומצאו הדם על עץ אחד, והיתה מוכת עץ, והדם היה גבריאל שומרו שלא יאכל ממנו לא עוף ולא חיה, ולפי שחשד לאליעזר על חנם, והוא עשה שליחות אברהם באמונה, זכה שיכנס לגן עדן חי:

Basically what happened here according to a Rabbi I asked who explained it to me is that when Rivkah fell she was wounded and bled so when Yitzchok had relations with her, she had no signs of virginity. Suspicion fell on Eliezer (that maybe he had slept with her and that was why). But when they went back to the place where she fell and they saw the blood that supported the fact that she had hurt herself, all was well and everyone understood that Rivkah had always been pure after all.

So if Yitzchok can marry someone who lost her virginity falling off of a camel and wounding herself and she is one of our Imahos, then I can definitely have "lost my virginity" to a plastic dilator and still be in good company.

Misconceptions

I've been realizing (through the emails I've been getting and the comments to this blog) that there seem to be some misconceptions regarding sexual issues in general and vaginismus in particular. So I'm going to address some of those.

1. Just Relax- Why don't I "just relax" and have sex with my husband? This "just relaxing" taking the form either of taking pills, drinking alcohol or just placing myself in an intimate setting with delicious-smelling candles that makes me feel relaxed. Let me illustrate the answer with a mashal. Let's say someone stabbed you and you were bleeding. Would you say to your body "Just don't bleed?" It's not in your control. Your body is physically deciding to do something that you can't stop. You can try to fix it, of course, by putting a bandage on the cut, but just saying or even thinking really hard "Stop bleeding" doesn't help. And it gets even worse, of course, if you're a hemophiliac. So in my case, even though my mind is thinking really hard, "Just relax," my body doesn't want to. My body is scared and pain-avoidant and anxious and I'm going to have to train it not to see penetration as something scary. That's why I'm going to actually have to go through a process to train my body to relax.

2. Why don't you use lubricants?- Firstly, my husband and I DO use lubricants. We use KY Jelly and olive oil. Aside from this, my husband is great at foreplay and he has no problem getting me wet. I can be wet and wanting him and very lubricated but that doesn't mean we can have sex. Lubricants have nothing to do with having sex when it comes to an issue like vaginismus. Vaginismus, you see, is the vaginal muscles spasming and closing against the penis. When the penis tries to penetrate, it literally can't. I spasm really really tightly so that I kind of close myself off to him. He's lucky if he can even get two fingers inside of me, let alone a penis.

3. Religion causes sexual dysfunction. - Religion doesn't cause sexual dysfunction. Possibly growing up in a really strict house where sex is seen as a shameful thing and getting little to no education about sex at all can cause sexual dysfunction, but that doesn't have to be related to religion. My religious education was really open and broad and considered sex a great and wonderful thing but I'm still in this position. The reason women like me have vaginismus is still undetermined. What's clear, though, is that we see penetration as something that is painful and we are afraid of the pain and get very nervous, anxious and afraid which is why our bodies in a protective mechanism shut down and don't allow the penetration to take place. What we need to do is embrace that anxiety and figure out a way to work through it or past it, usually with the help of a sex therapist.

Talli Rosenbaum said something really interesting about vaginismus to me, in fact:

My approach is as follows: Women with vaginismus, like yourself, are confronted with a basic conflict between the cognitive and the emotional. Your cognitive side gives you a thousand reasons why you want to have intercourse. In fact you do really want to, are motivated to, can’t understand why you shouldn’t be able to. Yet, the emotional side experiences anxiety. This is the side you feel is your enemy. You don’t want that anxiety, that reaction. You want it to go away. My mindfulness based approach is not about choosing the cognitive over the emotional (not to mention, by the way, the physical…because the pain is real) It is about stopping to fight the anxiety that you try to repress until the moment of intercourse when it becomes so overwhelming that you are actually shaking. No matter what people tell you, it is not true that if you want it badly enough, you can do it. “Just Relax” are the two most useless things one can say to a women experiencing what you are going through.

If you want some example of non-Jewish women suffering from sexual dysfunction, you can watch the Tyra Banks Show episode on 'Sexless Marriages' or MTV special "I Can't Have Sex." I do not advise following the advice or actions of the participants on these shows without consulting your sex therapist; I'm posting it up solely so that you can see that plenty of women who aren't neccessarily religious have this issue.

Answers

Regarding my perspective on the modesty of writing this blog, let me put it like King Solomon might have: There's a time to be modest and a time not to be.

I believe with matters of emotional and physical health and wellness there is no time to be modest. This is a time to act, to educate, to inform and hopefully to save lives and people's marriages. People need to know this condition and situation exists and that there are folks out there who can treat it and they are not alone in it.

Regarding a lot of the well-meaning comments asking why I don't:

-Get really drunk and let my husband penetrate me
-Take muscle relaxants or anti-anxiety medication
-Have a hymenectomy (my hymen broken)

It's kind of like a mother  having her first child. She wants to have her baby naturally with a vaginal delivery. Now, if things go really wrong she might end up having a C-Section and that can be good and happy for everyone. And sure, she might have an epidural along the way as well. But she really wants to have the baby naturally if she can mostly because she wants to feel normal.

I want to feel normal. I would prefer to think my husband and I could make love when I'm not hopped up on alcohol (in that case it's also a sin; you can't have sex when your partner is drunk in Judaism) drugs, medicine or having to have some other person intervene and break the tissue.  I'm not saying I won't do these things if they become necessary. But I'd rather do dilators first, if I can/ something more natural and then move along to the more extreme remedies as we go along. I also don't want to become dependent on something (like anxiety medication) when the issue of spasming is something I can learn to control either on my own or the help of a physical therapist.

Maybe I'll change my mind but this is how I feel right now. Everyone is entitled to hold on to a little piece of normality.

Attempt

So we attempted intercourse and we failed.

First we tried the knee-chest position. Then I tried resting my legs on his shoulders. Then I tried the woman-on-top position where I can lower myself down on him.

I'm not sure why I thought this would work and I would be able to say: Yippee! Did it! It didn't work. I was in excruciating pain as always, my husband described the sensation on his end as though I had pretty much clamped up down below and in fact my entire body started to shake in pain and fear. You heard that right. Literally my entire body in uncontrollable shaking and spasms.

This is aside from the fact that it's one thing to get paper cuts on your thumb or finger but when you get the equivalent of paper cuts down below, it hurts. And that happened. I'm not sure how but probably something to do with all that pushing. So now I have minute pinpricks of blood that show up on Kleenex.

I'm not sure what my next step is. Probably dilators, although I'm not sure if I'll just buy them on my own and try to work with them or do them under a doctor's supervision.

I read Talli Rosenbaum's "When Sex is Scary" entry today and felt a little better. Of course, that didn't prevent me from crying hopelessly in my bed with my husband's arms wrapped around me wailing that he will leave me, that he won't love me anymore, that I will never have children and that this is hopeless. And that I don't know if I can love anyone anymore because this is so draining.

On the positive side of things, one person wrote a comment I didn't publish informing me that if I have vaginismus that is Hashem's (well, or his version of Hashem's) way of saying that I should be a nun or celibate all my life. That made me smile a bit because it was so absurd. Weakly. But still, watery smiles are better than nothing.

Love

It probably doesn't make sense to most people why my husband would stay with me given this situation. I mean, isn't sex the only thing men think about? That's what our society wants us to think anyway. So how is my husband dealing with this?

Well, for one thing he's super understanding. And he's cute when he sneezes because there is cat fuzz all over the couch. But better than that he's in love with me. The kind of buy-flowers-for-no-reason, celebrate my being in his life, cover me in kisses deep sort of we'll-get-through-anything love. And I'm grateful of course but more than that this is making me fall more in love with him. Through the haze of guilt that's in my head because of course I feel bad for him that he doesn't get to have sex I realize how much he loves me that he is so careful not to blame me or hurt me (I mean aside from times when we both get into fights and lose our cool).

And I love him. I love when we wake up in the morning and his hair is all tousled and he blinks his eyes and adjusts to daylight. He looks so sleepy and adorable. I love how we debate politics until we both fall asleep from exhaustion. I love his willingness to put up with my owning a cat. I love our banter when we go to brush our teeth. I love how he does not judge me for my ADD. I even love when he gets upset and corrects me when I've been ignoring his feelings and have been being selfish. I love when he tells me about his day at work. I love the weirdness that is our normelcy in the middle of all this, like when we cuddle up to watch a comedy together and laugh. I love our ridiculousness when we are grocery shopping and start defending different foods in a  battle of cottage cheese against the tacos.

I love how he knows exactly when I need my dose of Ke$ha so he blasts his iPod and tells me to just let the crazy out and work off the steam on our elliptical machine. I love him taking a towel that's warm and dry and wrapping me in it when I come out of the shower.

I love that he'll sit through the "Water for Elephants" movie even though he has no interest in Twilight stars, elephants or Reese Witherspoon. I love that we'll go get fro-yo at 10 at night just because it makes me happy.

My husband's got this whole sugary side you guys don't know about it. I'm the only one who gets to see it and it's one of the things making sure we get through this while staying sane.

So darling, to take Enrique's line:

Tonight I'm loving you.