September 10, 2006
Hello Dr. Dailey - I have had a sudden change in my sexual appetite over the last few months. My husband and I had always had a great sex life, until about 5 years ago when my mother (age 55) with diagnosed with a brain tumor and was given about a year to live. Needless to say, my sexual appetite disappeared. A few years later my father was diagnosed with the same type of brain tumor and was given 5 months to live. I was very depressed and, of course, still had no sexual appetite. My husband travels a great deal for business, so the lack of desire for sex didn't seem to matter. Just before my birthday this year I started to feel VERY good. I was no longer depressed - I felt almost too good. I couldn't seem to control the intensity of my desire - I wanted to have sex many times a day. My husband has been home more and I can't seem to get enough, though he is not able to keep up with me. My mind is seriously preoccupied with sex. My fantasies have changed to reflect a little violence and choking. That's new. My questions for you are, could this be a form of the anger a person could feel while in grief? Or could this be a hormonal imbalance or even a symptom of another medical condition?A: As you have discovered, sexual desire can be a complex, sometimes unpredictable, capricious and delicious part of our human sexual experience. Your loss of desire over the past several years is relatively easy to understand. Loss and grief and the often accompanying depression are notorious for having a negative impact on desire. The frequent travel of your husband and his frequent absence probably made your loss of desire less problematic relationally, since there was probably less opportunity for conflict that might arise from your loss of appetite and his continuing sexual interest in you. It sounds like the resolving grief process resulted in a lifting of the depressive cloud you had been under for so long. With that lowered depression came an opportunity for you to claim your natural desire for sexual experience and sexual interaction. With your husband's being home more the opportunity for sexual expression was much more easily acted upon. I strongly doubt whether your desire has much to do with anger and grief. It strikes me that although you had two fairly significant losses, that your grief response and process was quite normal, including a period of depression. That's not uncommon at all and loss of desire is a frequent consequence. If you continue to have a concern here, you might seek a consultation with a loss and grief specialist. Your guess about hormonal imbalance could be a possibility, but I rather doubt it. Your concern here can be relatively easily resolved by seeking a medical consultation to check to see where you are at hormonally and also check out any other physiological issues that might be operating. Nothing in the description of your experience would lead me to suspect the above causes. A third possibility is that you have just returned to the desire level that is normal for you. Sexual desire is usually not a fixed constant, but something that varies over time, usually within a fairly predictable range. I would guess that you have always varied in desire at a relatively high level and that right now you are at the high end of that variable range. Resolving your loss/grief journey, coming out of your depressive cloud, and having a more available sexual partner may feel like you just can't get enough. My guess is that as a bit of time passes you will feel more of the natural variation that is typical of your sexual desire (yet maybe always on the relatively higher end of this spectrum), and it will start to level off a bit so that it does not feel as if you can't "control the intensity." If after six to twelve months this does not happen then you may want to seek consultation with a sex therapist to review your situation. Absent any gross physiological issues, my comment is: "Welcome back to the sexual world you left" in the face of so much loss, grief and depression.
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HabitualSinner (anonymous) says...
Fantasies are just that, fantasies.... Dreams, desires, wants. All of the things that you didn't have for those years are now manifesting themselves in your mind. I say congrats to you, a lot of people never seem to come out of their respective funks. I say let your husband in on some of these fantasies and see if you two can try one or more, who knows, you might like it.
Of course taking the advice of a guy with the screen name "HabitualSinner" may not be the best idea. Plus I lack any background, at least as far as Dr.Dailey has. But, hey who knows?
September 12, 2006 at 4:29 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )