#338 3 Things High-Achievers With Low Libido Are Craving That’s Blocking Pleasure (Pt2)

You've spent your entire life in control. In the OR, in the boardroom, with your clients, in your home, in your relationship with your parents, probably in your friendships. Control keeps you competent. It makes you feel useful. It's your identity. If you're not overgiving and you're not providing, will people leave? Will the promotion not be yours? Are you not enough? That's the sneaky, scary stuff we don't want to say out loud; we're overfunctioning out of fear.

Control has kept us safe, or at least that's what it feels like. And now it's time to put it down, especially in the bedroom, because the way we do one thing is the way we do everything, and our situations in the bedroom clearly mirror how we handle things outside of it.

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This isn't really a libido problem

It shows up as a libido problem. Sometimes it shows up as depression or anxiety. Sometimes it shows up as weight that can't come off, chronic migraines, heavy periods. Our bodies are speaking to us. If we are always on, always controlling, always hypervigilant, you can meditate before bed or go to Pilates, but being in that hypervigilant stress state is problematic, and it gets especially problematic in perimenopause or postpartum, times when our bodies are already taxed.

I know I need to change this. I know I can't keep overfunctioning. I don't know how, and I'm not sure what I really want. That's the desire piece. When you've been so focused on performing, achieving, overgiving, you lose yourself. Our attention's outward, so we don't really know what we desire, and a lot of it's because we haven't given ourselves permission to want anything.

Letting go requires trust

Self-trust, trust of the other person, but mostly self-trust. And trust requires safety. Safety is something most high-achieving women have never been given permission to need. We're creating the safety for everyone else, but no one's creating it for us.

Most couples skip this part. They assume safety should just exist, but it doesn't; it has to be built. One of the fastest ways to build it is communication. Communication creates safety.

Here's an example of clear communication that makes my nervous system relax: "Tonight is about you. You don't have to do anything. I've got you." That decompresses my nervous system. I'm preparing for that encounter knowing I will be receiving.

Or, "I've got the kids, I'm taking care of bedtime, I've drawn you a bath." Getting a message like that on your way home from work- that's going to relax you; that's going to put you in the receiving state.

Now compare that to hearing, "Honey, can you pick up the cereal? I forgot it when I was at the grocery store." What's that doing? That's putting you right back in manager mode.

Ask a different question

If you cannot let go in the bedroom or in life, our go-to is, what's wrong with me? What do I need to do more or less of? How can I fix this? But the first question should actually be, is it safe to let go here? Many of the women I work with are in relationships where the conditions for safety genuinely do not exist yet, not because they haven't tried hard enough, not because the superwoman hasn't done therapy.

Safety doesn't mean the absence of conflict. We earn our crowns in the darkness, superwomen; that's when we truly heal. We trust ourselves to communicate our boundaries when they've been pressed, and we trust ourselves to take action and do something about it.

Some of us have internalized so many years of performing, earning, overfunctioning, that even when we do have a safe partner, it's still hard to access the receptive state, because our nervous systems have been trained out of it. That's not shame; that's conditioning, and conditioning can be unlearned or rewired.

Your action step

Write down three places in your life where you feel genuinely safe to have needs. And three places where you don't feel safe to have needs. If this brings up tears because you don't have any, it's okay. You are not alone.

The question isn't why can't I let go; the question is what's been getting in the way of my safety- internal safety and safety in relationships or in the workplace, outside you, inside you, both. That's where the real work begins, but we have to tell the truth about it first.

Pleasure is your birthright. You don't have to earn it. When we let go, when we've created the safety and done the work of believing we're worthy of pleasure, worthy of receiving just because, the bedroom stops being a place where we perform, manage, and endure, and we stop doing it everywhere else too.

You can book a Pleasure Path Assessment; we'll go through this, see exactly where you're stuck, and you'll get a map for the way forward. Book HERE

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And if you want to go deeper into super traits, over-functioning, and building a pleasure-centered relationship and life, the Pleasure-Centered Society on Substack is where that work lives. JOIN HERE

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