Mental health and libido
Anyone who has dabbled with antidepressants is likely familiar with one of its more common side effects: a lowered sex drive. Many antidepressants are part of a drug family known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), which raise levels of serotonin in a person’s brain. At the same time, SSRIs can prevent the hormones that create sex drive from properly transmitting messages to the brain.
The sexual side effects of SSRIs differ between men and women. Women are more likely to experience delayed lubrication, blocked orgasms, or a simple lack of desire for sex. Men are more likely to experience a decreased libido, difficulty getting or maintaining an erection, or blocked orgasms. Unfortunately, this side effect can perpetuate feelings of isolation, inadequacy, and generally contribute to a lowered sense of self.
I know this firsthand because the most prominent side effect I experience from my medication is a lowered sex drive. It’s a startling reversal from my formerly overactive need for sexual stimulation (or at least the dopamine hit that comes from sex). Perhaps because the contrast is so great, I’ve been quite critical of my diminished libido. While I’ll never be able to control the chemical interactions that my medication creates in my brain, I do have control over my relationship to my sex drive.
To explore my feelings toward my libido, I combined two of my favourite practices: yin yoga and Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy techniques. yin yoga and Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy techniques. While this combination might not be suitable for everyone, I find the cued yin poses, which are held for longer than poses in other types of practices, help me stay grounded during IFS explorations, and stimulate parts of my body that hold trauma memories. I chose a yin yoga practice targeting the libido and focused inward to get in touch with my “parts” through IFS.
Regular readers will recall that IFS is an integrative approach to therapy developed by Richard C. Schwartz in the 1980s to treat trauma. I’ve gone in-depth on IFS before, but, as a refresher, fundamental to IFS is the understanding that our personality as a whole is made up of sub-personalities or “parts.” For example, when faced with a dilemma, you might find yourself pulled in two different directions simultaneously, like one “part” of you wants to take one action, while another “part” may want to do the opposite. As we go through life acquiring trauma and attachment injuries, our parts can shift from valuable states into roles that, though necessary to survive our experiences, can be destructive to us in the long-term when these “parts” become frozen in survival mode. These “parts” tend to take the following forms:
Exiles: Our most powerful of parts, exiles are those young, vulnerable parts of ourselves we learned to bury a long time ago because our vulnerability or vitality bothered our caretakers or peers (for a multitude of reasons) or because our vulnerable and lively parts were hurt and then triggered others. Exiles are the parts of us that tend to carry extreme beliefs, hold fears of being worthless or unlovable, and influence our ability to be intimate. Exiles also have the power to pull us into their despair, until we become their pain.
Managers: Managers are our preemptive protectors. They govern the way we interact with the world around us to try to prevent the exiles from flooding our awareness with painful and traumatic feelings.
Firefighters: These parts rush in to protect us when our exiles try to break through. They do so by distracting us with impulsive behaviours such as drug use, promiscuity, overeating, or violence.
The goal of IFS is to help these parts transform through “unburdening” or a removal or renegotiation of extreme beliefs that came into a person’s system as a result of trauma. When a part is unburdened, it transforms back into its naturally valuable state.
For my IFS exploration, I had to start by asking my manager part—the part that was responsible for my anxiety and critique around my libido—if it would step back. Before my manager would consent, it needed to show me its concerns: fears that if I wasn’t more sexually available, my partner may tire of me. I acknowledged the manager’s concerns, relayed to the part how in past relationships that fear was valid and once served a purpose, and brought the manager up-to-speed on my current circumstances. I showed the part that I’m currently in a supportive and loving long-term relationship. Once the manager realized I was an adult in dramatically different circumstances than the ones it was frozen in, the manager was able to step back so I could seek out my exile.
I utilized the physical sensations I was experiencing to travel deeper inside of myself until I found the exile my manager was protecting. When I found my exile, I could sense the part’s eagerness to show me something. I gave the exile permission to show me what it needed to.
The first image that came up was my very first sexual encounter. I was 13 years old and on a rare vacation with my immediate family (paid for by my grandparents). Each afternoon, I would leave the beach area at the resort to head up to my room to watch Passions (a terrible soap opera). A staff member noticed my routine. He started appearing in the elevator each afternoon to make small talk as I made my way up to the top floor. I told him my age. He was in his twenties. One afternoon, during the elevator ride, he sexually assaulted me. Humiliated and convinced I would be in trouble for walking around in only a bathing suit, I ran from the resort and hid in some bushes to cry until my stepdad found me. Though the staff member was fired, my family didn’t press charges. Instead, they tried to parlay my experience into free comps from the hotel (it didn’t work).
From there, my exile took me through a carousel of memories: every sexual humiliation, depersonalizing encounter, less-than-consensual experience, and outright rape. Nearly every experience I was shown involved a male. To stop myself from becoming overwhelmed by the grief and pain my exile was showing me, I kept checking in with my physical body as it moved through hip-opening poses.
Once my exile had shown me everything she needed to, the memories faded away and the image of my part rematerialized. The exile didn’t say anything. She just looked at me. I didn’t need her to say anything though.
My part had shown me just how much sexual trauma I experienced before I found my current partner. Her meaning was clear: I needed time to heal. Now that I had found a partner who I knew loved and supported me regardless of the strength of my libido, I finally had the space to do it. This realization, which my manager had been watching, helped that part soften and unburden even more. And, by just giving my exile the opportunity to be heard and understood, I was able to lessen the pain it carried freeing it up to do the work of returning to its valuable state.
For the rest of my yoga practice, I focused on cultivating gratitude toward my current partner. Through no fault of his own, he’s biologically male. It felt necessary to reaffirm to my exile how different he was from the men at the source of my sexual trauma. It also seemed like a very useful exercise to revisit during COVID-19 lockdowns. My partner and I are living and working in a one-bedroom apartment in Toronto and being in each other’s space all the time makes it easy to take the other person for granted.
I share this IFS exploration to help others who are struggling with their relationship to their sex drive and because I’m hard-pressed to find among my friends and family members, females especially, a person who hasn’t experienced some kind of sexual trauma that could be at least partially responsible for a poor relationship with their libido. I expect that these people don’t spend much time meditating on the pain of their experiences, lest it completely bowl them over. My hope is that by providing this exercise, more people with experiences similar to mine will be able to shift their understanding of their sexuality and unburden any parts that might be carrying around extreme beliefs.
Mad History
This issue: Deep sleep therapy
In theory, sleeping away all the symptoms of mental illness seems like a literal dream; however, when it was actually put to the test, the results proved fatal. Deep sleep therapy, a psychiatric treatment in which drugs are used to keep a patient unconscious for days or weeks, was first experimented with at the turn of the 20th century. Neil Macleod, a Scottish physician, used bromide to sedate his patients, one of whom died during treatment. His method wasn’t adopted by many other physicians because it was considered too reckless.
By the 1920s, Jakob Kleisi, a Swiss psychiatrist popularized sleep therapy using a combination of barbiturates to treat schizophrenia in patients. Despite the relatively high mortality rate, the method was accepted by many European psychiatrists. By the 1950s and 60s, it was adopted by leading psychiatrists from the United Kingdom and Canada, including a fellow who would later be involved in the CIA’s MKULTRA project.
Deep sleep therapy was also practiced in Australia by Harry Bailey between 1962 and 1970. Twenty-five patients died under his care in Chelmsford Private Hospital in New South Wales until a series of articles in the early 1980s exposed abuses at the hospital and Bailey died by suicide. Though deep sleep therapy has fallen out of practice, sedating agitated people with mental illness can still be found in every Western hospital.
Recommended Reading
Somatic Internal Family Systems Therapy: Awareness, Breath, Resonance, Movement, and Touch in Practice
By: Susan McConnell
For anyone interested in taking their IFS work to a more physical level by incorporating the body, I’m going to recommend Susan McConnell’s recent book, Somatic Internal Family Systems Therapy. Though the book is geared toward mental health practitioners, it provides concrete and accessible examples of how to utilize physical sensations to incorporate body work into traditional IFS practices.
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