Performance Anxiety - Learn how to deal with - Personal experience

[SebiS]

My English is not as good but my experience is valuable so I hope will help you.
Because is a long post I split it in some parts.

How I got it:
I was hit by this type of anxiety 2 years ago.
I spent some time away from home and I felt in love with a woman.
Our progress was slow and when time for sex came I was quite anxious because I wanted everything to be perfect.
We went in a nice vacation and it was very nice but my sexual performance was not as I wanted.
I suffered of mild anxiety all my life and this time interfered more than I wanted with my sexual performances.
When I arrived home I wanted to test my sexual abilities with my wife and I just did not got an erection.

Scared to death:
After that the drama started. I went on Internet and I got scared.
Because of anxiety strike I was not able to properly analyze the information and I just saw a bunch of guys of all ages caught in a never ending sexual failure.
I was so affected that I was not even able to masturbate anymore. I was just too scared that I will loose my erection.
I cried for help and I found my life worthless.


Few months later:
I manage to survive for first wave and start searching for solution on the
Internet and discussing with a therapist.
I learned:

- I have to cut off intercourse for a while, and to use other sexual interactions
(fingers, tongue and so on)
- I have to think at her and not at my penis
- I have to use an unnoticed gesture as an anchor. When I feel the anxiety I will use my secret gesture
- I will tell to my partner/wife that I have a pain in my penis and that why I went soft
- I need to behave much better with my wife in other ways in order to compensate for ED.

I can write down more points but at the end I felt bad.
My wife was OK initially but then we both got tired about only oral sex and our relation badly deteriorated.

Moving outside marriage:
I went to professionals doing erotic massage, tantric massage, kinky and so on.
Those approaches were OK and I manage to have erections, but the scary part, intercourse, was just not there.

Finding the solution:
Then I just found a sex worker, a very smart and experienced woman that started a real therapy for me.
I schedule a meeting with her and we spend some time talking about the problem.
Then she put me to remove my clothes and told me.
"Before starting I have to tell you that I expect nothing from your side. I understand you have ED and also I am not impressed about your penis size", she said.
Instantly I got deflated. I thought that I knocked at the wrong door. I was quite embarrassed.
"When was last time you had sex, piv, penis in vagina?" she asked.
"I told you, one year ago.", I said.
"Why do you think that you will be successful today?", she continued
"Maybe is better not to try it, only to be able to achieve and maintain an erection for a while", I said.
"Why do you need your erection while you are not able to fuck?" she told me.
I just felt that I am in a corner and the walls from that room will fall over me.
"We will play and we will see but each time I think that you are ready for piv, than you will try to put your penis in my vagina even if you have 99% chances to fail", she said.

I am not a writer and I am not native so I know my English is not good but I want that you to understand how I started to fight against my fears.
She was right, initially I had failure after failure but she was so good.
She just knows what to say and how to play.
She explored my body and fount every erotic spot. It was a fight between my performance anxiety and an orgy of erotic stimuli.



Where I am now:
I am not cure. My performance anxiety is still there but I am able to deal with it. I still fail but a failure does not put me down anymore.
I resumed sexual life with my wife. If it happened to have an anxiety strike and loose my erection, we stop intercourse, play for a while and when erection is back I just resume it.
That sexual worker teaches me something else. How to maintain an erection even if I am looking or thinking at my penis and not at the girl/wife.
This is another cliché, if you are thinking at your penis and not at your partner then you will loose your erection.
Similarly was with the condom. At the beginning it was a lot of on and off operated only by her but later I was able to put my condom and keep my erection.

Complete heal?
Based on my experience I do not say performance anxiety is fully curable but you can learn not to be worried about. Less worried you are, better are your chances for a successful sexual encounter.
You need to open completely to your partner (girlfriend/wife/sexual worker)
You should not avoid intercourse and you should learn to accept failures.
You should be less affected by nasty, cruel words and accept you have ED even if it is psychological.
And the most important, do not hide your head in the sand. That is an expression from my country and I think the meaning is clear.

One last thing:
You will always find a guy around here that was not successful in his attempt to deal with performance anxiety. This could worry you as I was worry that a friend of mine, my age, had a stroke and died last summer. But I am not him. If he had a stroke that does not mean I will have one. If a guy here said in a forum that he was not able to cure his performance anxiety that does not mean that you won’t be able to handle and solved this problem.

[SebiS]

I have no answer but many people read my post so I hope that could provide some sort of help.
Also I am not an adviser here but a patient that share his own experience in order to resonate with other people having similar issues.

I just saw first picture from ED forum. One guy looking quite depressed siting at the edge of the bad with his back turn to her.
That is a great image to show that ED is in many cases not pure physical but also psychological. Fear of failure made a nest in our head because of preview negative experiences.

At least myself I am very affected by this. For example 6 days ago I had a good sex and my confidence increased but 2 days ago it was very hot in the room, sweating a lot, and then I change the position from her on top with me on top and I just manage to fail again.

Even I do not want each failure bring my moral down and anticipated the next one .
This is a vicious cycle and this is bad part.
Where is the good part?
The good part is that I choose not to bury my head in sand, to run from attempting to do sex as many people with sexual anxiety are doing.
Is just a problem I have and I know I will do it again.

[zezeze]

So you basically had to cheat your wife and use a prostitute? Probably not the most ideal path to cure... Ed meds did not help you at all?

[SebiS]

So you basically had to cheat your wife and use a prostitute? Probably not the most ideal path to cure... Ed meds did not help you at all?

I decided not to take meds for this problem as I decided not to take any meds for anxiety and depression.
Meds just mask the problem and do not solve it while everything is in your mind.
Sometimes I am aware and anxious about automatic body functions as blinking, swallowing or breathing. Try to focus on your breath and "forget" to give back automate control, or on your blinking. Is this quite annoying, isn't it?
This is similar with your erection on focusing on it have negative effect over sexual performances. Still, if you accept the problem you can learn to think at it without losing it.
It is about conditioning your thoughts but you need practice.

Regarding moral aspects I agree with you, is much better to have full capacity and understanding from your wife, but for difficult cases you need someone more experienced.
Other situation is to give up sex. I read a complex study with individual males suffering from sexual anxiety that stop having sex. In that study it said that it was OK because now they help more their wives in house activities and some are even happier.
I just do not buy all this nonsense.
If you have an important problem that scare you to death, you have to confront that problem not to find ways to avoid it.

[zezeze]

Well all these sound very extreme solutions. However ed meds do not just mask the problem, with many they actually help gaining the confidence to get over the anxiety and therefore are great help. Of course the dangerous downside is to develop dependency on them.

[SebiS]

Thank you zezeze I will think about this solution at one moment in time.
Still in my head will be the fact that I am performing because of med and not because I was able to properly manage my situation.

My advise remain to have someone, fantastic to be your life partner, that is supporting you to overcome the problem.