Vaginismus and Painful Sex

Pain in the vagina/vulva can show up for all kinds of reasons.

So many women and female bodied people are experiencing pain in their pelvis, pain in the vagina, pain in the vulva or pain and discomfort in sex. The medical response to this is often to either numb your pleasure center out, or to try to force your way in with dilators or other objects at a pace your body isn’t ready for. The exercises and techniques we are given to access our pelvises again very oftentimes hurt, are hard to maintain, and never get us what we REALLY want—>to feel PLEASURE again in our vaginas.

Why does yoni pain occur?

  • Difficulties in pregnancy

  • Disempowerment or trauma experienced during labor

  • Insensitivity to the delicacy of healing in the postpartum

  • Years of having sex when you’re not fully aroused and lubricated

  • Sexual trauma

  • Pelvic trauma

  • Abdominal surgery

  • Difficulty in your intimate relationship(s)

  • Hostile or hateful relationship with your menstrual cycle

  • Perimenopause, menopause

  • Pelvic surgery

  • Community and cultural sexual trauma

  • Religious or moral beliefs about sex and sexuality

  • Challenges with body image

Common Treatments & Approaches

Pain in the vagina/vulva is typically managed through a combination of numbing, forceful or harsh manipulation of the muscles, tissues, and ligaments, or through exercises that over-strengthen the pelvic muscles to the point of hypertonicity (adding to the discomfort). Common treatments and approaches include:

  • pelvic floor physical therapy

  • lidocaine/numbing creams

  • dilators

  • years of Kegels/pelvic exercises

  • couples/sex therapy

  • cold compresses or gel packs

  • sitz bath

  • all kinds of lubricants

  • different positions

  • just been avoiding sex all together?

If you’ve tried these and they didn’t work, you’re not alone.

What Can You Do?

In the traditional model of solving vaginismus, vulvodynia, painful sex, we get caught up in treating our body as a problem that needs to be solved. We do this so potently and completely that we lose sight of what we are really striving for—to be able to enjoy being in our bodies again, to our absolute fullest.

What we REALLY want, is to be able to inhabit our bodies and our pelvises in a way that feels peaceful and pleasurable.

The pelvis is our center of gravity not just physically, but emotionally and spiritually. The yoni is our pleasure center, the center of our life force, it is where life is nurtured and born. Our pleasure shows us what is right and wrong, what is nourishing to us and what depletes us. It is in the pelvis that we access the compass of our bodies, and the guide of our pleasure.

“I think of the pelvis as the doorway between the upper and lower body. If this is blocked, it is difficult to be one whole piece or soma. Opening through the pelvis lets us rest our weight into gravity and the lower body, making it easier to find and feel the ground…The lower belly and pelvis are the center of gravity in our bodies.”
-Staci Haines in The Politics of Trauma

Self Paced Healing

The body opens to what nourishes it, and closes to that which does not serve us. The place this is most potently expressed is in the yoni. Many instances of vaginal pain occur because women have not learned how to read the language of desire constantly being expressed in their yonis. A foundational skill needed to find your way back to pleasure in your pelvis is to learn both the language of blossoming and contraction of your intimate space.

My postpartum healing services are perfectly tailored to teach you the fundamental body literacy skills necessary to move with the peak and troughs of the moving and morphing pelvis. In this course you will learn how to nourish the roots of your pelvis so that your body may open to pleasure.

This service is for the woman/female bodied person that is:

  • Frustrated after years working under the traditional medical model to solve vaginal pain, and has never gotten results.

  • Feels they’ve never exited the postpartum period in their pelvis.

  • Confused with their new genitals after pregnancy, and the new sensations they experience during sex.

  • Disheartened by the approach taken in gynecological or pelvic floor PT’s office.

  • Tender and unresolved in sexual or pelvic trauma.

  • Numb or hopeless about their lack of libido and desire for sex.

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My Body, My Pelvis: Empowered Gynecological Care

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