The process of recovering from divorce or the ending of any intimate relationship can be an emotional, spiritual, and sexual roller coaster. For most women, it is a time of crisis, characterized by intense feelings, uncertainty, and change. Divorce can affect libido in several ways. Some divorced women feel that their libidos die with the demise of their relationships. Others experience divorce as a wake-up call for their libidos, an opportunity for revitalized sexual energy.
Many women find that for their libidos to thrive after divorce, some effort is required. That is, libido usually doesn’t just return naturally. This is because divorce is a long, emotionally and spiritually draining process. A woman’s body must mobilize for this process over many months. After a while, her body remains in a constant state of tension—always ready to protect her from assault. The longer she remains in this state, the further away her sex drive becomes.
Among other things, safety and calm are required ingredients for a thriving, healthy libido. These elements are generally in short supply after a divorce. As a result, recovering your emotional and spiritual balance is a necessary step in reclaiming your desire.
Here’s the good news: If you decide to rise to the challenge, your time of crisis can evolve into a personal and sexual renaissance. You can use the aftermath of divorce to explore and enhance your sexuality independent of your partner. Seize this opportunity to enjoy the power and pleasure of your own sexuality for yourself. Even horrible relationships can provide tremendous opportunities for growth. We’ve seen this happen time and time again. Our most profound growth never occurs out of the blue or when things are going smoothly in our lives. It is always—and we do mean always—the result of struggling. It is while searching our dark places that we find new light.
Not all women want their libidos back after their relationships end. For some, it is a part of their lives they’d rather leave behind. If you want to find your lost libido, set the intention to use this transition as a healing process. You must be determined to get something good for yourself now, because it will not always be an easy passage. Your mind must be set clearly on your goal—to experience yourself wanting and enjoying sex again, whether it be alone with yourself or with a partner.
The way a relationship ends has a lot to do with a woman’s recovery from it. In general, women who were not in control of the divorce decision have a more difficult time finding their lost libidos. Even if they believe that the divorce was necessary, the simple fact that the decision was not theirs makes all aspects of recovery more difficult. Sexuality is no exception to that rule.
Most divorced women, however, experience some of the same challenges. No matter how a relationship ends, the simple fact that it is over reminds us that all relationships are impermanent. This truth is a difficult one to digest under any circumstances. Divorce makes it impossible to ignore. Thus, many women find themselves in an existential crisis at this time—seeking meaning for their lives, their purpose on this earth, and reasons for the pain they endure. If you find yourself struggling with these questions, we urge you to explore the suggestions later in this chapter under “Reclaiming Desire through Balance.” Such questions can affect libido. It can be difficult to open up emotionally and sexually when you are conscious of the ultimate impermanence of your union.
In addition to the big-picture issues, many divorced women experience sexual challenges as well. As we’ve discussed, sexuality is sensitive and reactive—and a life change as drastic as divorce seldom leaves a woman’s sexuality unaffected. Many women need time to assimilate the changes before libido returns. For the moment, more-immediate concerns must take precedence. Go slowly and be gentle with yourself. Tackle your libido after you get your more pressing needs in order.
If the decision to divorce was in your control, you may be aware of feeling sexually free, just as you are probably feeling emotionally free. You may also find yourself hesitant to fall in love again. As a result, your libido may suffer. You may find it safer to “turn off” that part of yourself rather than risk getting intimately involved again. Though this approach works for some, we suggest you consider focusing on pleasing yourself sexually rather than shutting down your desire. Once you make the decision (consciously or subconsciously) to turn off your sexuality, it’s harder to jump-start again. How about masturbation as an alternative? To explore your options, we encourage you to review the section “Welcoming Back Your Libido” at the end of this chapter.
If the choice to end the relationship was your partner’s, your life probably seems out of control at the moment. You are overwhelmed by your feelings—but do your best to let them out rather than shut them down. Although your instinct may tell you to ignore them, this “solution” will only block your energy and make your libido less accessible. Inhibited emotions of any kind usually result in an inhibited libido as well. As we’ve previously discussed, this is because you can’t selectively choose which emotions to disconnect from. It’s an all-or-nothing proposition: Shutting down an uncomfortable feeling means that you shut down joy, happiness, desire, and all the positive feelings along with it. And right now, you need all the good feelings that you can access.
If you tune in to yourself, you will find a variety of emotions lurking around your psyche. Anger, rejection, and fear will require your attention. If left unresolved, each of these will constrict you sexually and sabotage your libido. Unresolved feelings can live in your subconscious mind. They may make brief forays into consciousness, but if their primary address remains your subconscious, they will present a problem for you. As we’ve discussed, feelings in your subconscious exert control over your behavior. Everyone but you can see them. Feelings that live in your conscious mind do not have that ability. You have much more control over them—how you express them and how they impact your behavior. So, in finding your lost libido, start by letting those difficult feelings flow.
So what are you experiencing? You are angry—angry that your husband left you, angry that you married him in the first place, angry that your entire life must now change in so many ways. You may need to tighten your budget, and you may need to move. For this, and more, you rage.
Anger can be easier to access than other emotions because it feels powerful to express. You will find softer, more vulnerable emotions hiding underneath your anger. Rejection, abandonment, and betrayal are here. So is the grief you feel in losing the future you had expected, and in losing not only your husband but also members of his family and usually some mutual friends. This sadness is real and painful.
You may become mistrustful of men and of starting another relationship. You may doubt that you’re strong enough to deal with further rejection. You may feel sexually inadequate as well—fearful of how you’d even go about starting a new romantic relationship, let alone allowing one to develop without getting anxious about your future.
These emotions are typical of women recovering from divorce. Each woman also has her own unique circumstances and emotions that she must contend with. Give yourself the time and space you need to work through all of the pain. You don’t necessarily have to do anything with the emotions. Just let them flow so that they don’t stay in your body and psyche, blocking your sex drive. Finding your emotional footing again is necessary for your libido to return.
As if all these new emotions weren’t powerful enough, unresolved ones from the past are probably coming up as well. That’s what unprocessed feelings do—they hang out in your subconscious until something brings them to the surface. Old anger feeds into new anger; old grief into new grief. This is why you overreact to things—your response is the result of unresolved feelings reviving in the present. Your emotions can quickly become intense and confusing.
The bad news is that you can’t resolve them in this way. That is, you cannot channel old anger through new anger. Old anger will make itself known at any point, but unless you connect it to where it originally belonged, you won’t get relief. This means you must sort through the anger you are experiencing—how much of it belongs to your ex-husband and your present situation, and how much belongs to your past? What pieces of the rejection you are feeling were actually prompted by other important people in your life? Now is the time to figure this out, in order to free your libido. It may be easier and cleaner to blame all your current emotions on your ex, but that usually isn’t the reality. You will only hurt yourself by holding on to that notion, because you effectively prevent yourself from healing old hurt, so your libido will stay locked up behind it.
This holding-on process is largely responsible for the subjective sense of losing libido over time. It’s not that your libido fades, it’s that more and more unresolved feelings get stuffed in front of it. As a result, your libido becomes more elusive as the years go by. And difficult life events, such as divorce, result in an even more rapid accumulation of feelings, if you opt not to express them. The way out of all this is to delve into your emotions. You must go through them, not around them, to heal. Your body will thank you with gifts of libido and freed-up life energy.
When an important relationship ends, you inevitably reach a turning point. You must choose between personal growth or stagnation. There really is no other option. This can be terrifying because neither choice is pain-free. Not changing is the “safest” route, in that you don’t need to grow. You maintain your current understanding of yourself, and your behavior remains consistent. This allows you to place much of the blame on your former spouse, because you don’t need to examine the roles you played in your marriage. (We are not implying that the blame is yours; rather, the reality lies somewhere in between.) This is the least threatening option, although it is a ticket to stagnation. Over time, it yields more emotional pain. Think of stagnant water. From the outside, it looks calmer than a flowing stream, but it houses lots of bacteria under the surface.
Women who choose the status quo find themselves repeating the same mistakes in new relationships. You need only look around at divorced acquaintances for proof of this dynamic. Behavior patterns repeat themselves unless you mindfully and intentionally approach your psyche with a desire to learn more about who you are.
But self-exploration can be a pretty threatening option. It involves accessing your subconscious mind to discover more about what went wrong in your relationship. And who wants to go in there? You initially stored stuff in your subconscious because of the simple fact that you didn’t want to look at it. Now we are proposing that you actively pull it out again. Yuck. Remember, though, it is this work in your subconscious mind that will help you recapture emotional balance—that same emotional balance that is necessary for your libido to thrive.
Throughout this book, we have explored the theme of balance in your life and its relationship to a healthy libido. Maintaining balance is a lifetime commitment. Perhaps at no time is the need for balance more obvious than following the breakup of a marriage. Divorce has the impact of a hurricane on the landscape of your life. Nothing in its path is left unaffected. Both your mind and your body have been thrown into the turmoil; thus, a return to equilibrium involves efforts aimed at both emotional and physical healing.
Finding your emotional balance after divorce begins with the identification and expression of previously disowned parts of your personality. Throughout our lifetimes, we allow certain traits to fully express themselves. Any that we assess as undesirable could get relegated to our subconscious mind. This pattern of denying parts of our personalities can become exaggerated when we marry. In a sense, we can get lazy by attempting to use our partners to complete us. In uniting with them, we seek to make use of their assets as our own. In other words, we are at risk of ignoring in ourselves whatever traits—savory and unsavory—our partners exhibit freely. In this way, we lose touch with ourselves and all of who we are. It is a process that kills libido, because it results in emotional imbalance.
When a couple splits, this imbalance becomes even more apparent. Your partner leaves and seems to take with him part of who you are. Many women in this situation literally have the sensation of not knowing themselves any longer. Finding your emotional balance involves reclaiming all of your personality—the good and bad—some of which your spouse was quite agreeably expressing for you (as you were doing for him).
This process may become clearer if you think in terms of dichotomies. Taoists refer to balancing yet opposing energies as yin and yang; Jungian therapists call them anima and animus. These are essentially fancy ways of labeling feminine and masculine traits. Most marriages develop their own balance of energies—some of them expressed by the woman, others by the man. When a couple splits, real growth involves each partner finding wholeness. For many, it presents the first opportunity in their lives for such growth. It is a golden opportunity to discover yourself and live a life more true for you.
The priceless benefit of reclaiming your whole self is that you won’t need to find a man to complete you. Translated, this means that when you fall in love in the future, it will be about love first and need second. This is the recipe for a loving long-term relationship. We can almost guarantee that old relationship patterns won’t repeat themselves if you do this work. It is also essential for reclaiming your desire.
The process of discovering your whole self will require some good mothering. In essence, you are experiencing a growth spurt, perhaps your most significant one since adolescence. Such changes will involve growing pains. In order to tolerate the pain, you will need some good, solid nurturing. And because you are now an adult, the appropriate person to provide that nurturing is you. You need to become your own loving mother.
Just what will that entail? The basic ingredients of good mothering are honest guidance and feedback, coupled with huge amounts of warmth and love. This is your task—being honest with your self-appraisal and being generous with your noncritical selfacceptance. This is no easy process, because it’s about seeing your human weaknesses for what they are but loving yourself anyway.
Just one element without the other will only get you into trouble. For example, loving yourself without honest self-examination will result in narcissism. The alternative, identifying your faults without loving yourself, leads to low self-esteem at best, and outright masochism at worst. Either choice kills opportunities for healthy relationships. And either choice can negatively affect your sex life.
In the spirit of mothering yourself well, it’s time to take a realistic assessment of who you are and who you were in your relationship. What aspects of your personality did you allow your partner to express for you that you need to claim as your own? Was he the initiator and you the follower, such that you never had to take charge? If so, it’s time for you to start feeling your power instead of always acquiescing. Did you find him emotionally withholding? How do you experience your own withholding? As you reclaim your whole personality, you create the balance necessary for your libido to resurface.
Doreen came to therapy as she and her second husband, Daniel, were ending their marriage. She showed every symptom of depression, including low libido. But Doreen wasn’t concerned about wanting sex at that point. “I don’t trust myself with men at the moment,” she said. “I’m better off without a sex drive for a while.” She wanted to stop the pattern of marrying men who weren’t good for her.
Doreen described the similarities in both of her marriages. Both began as fantastic love affairs. Both men appeared kind and gentle. It all seemed so right in the beginning. But as Doreen described the evolution of her relationships, the darker dynamics became clear. Doreen was an overfunctioner—always on top of her game and taking care of business; nothing slid when she was around. She managed everything from paper towels and dog food to chlorine for the pool. But because people tend to polarize in marriages, as Doreen functioned more, her husbands functioned less. In this way, her marriages maintained a balance—unhealthy as it was.
Doreen’s overfunctioning was extremely apparent to her and everyone around her. It was easy to respect that trait in her and pinpoint Daniel as the problem. Was he just plain lazy? Doreen recalled that he didn’t seem so when they first met.
Doreen used her therapy to understand what her overfunctioning was all about and to determine which traits in Daniel she was disowning in herself. These were the keys in preventing the same pattern from developing a third time in her life.
Doreen learned that Daniel’s underfunctioning was actually in response to her subconscious cues guiding him to do so. In essence, he was doing what she wanted him to do, which was let her take over. Doreen felt safe when she was in charge—if she was needed by those around her, they wouldn’t leave her. This safety was how she felt loved, until it reached an extreme point and turned into something negative. This is the danger when a marriage polarizes: Polarizing maintains balance for a while, but eventually neither of the partners likes functioning at extremes. That’s because it’s not who they really are. All of us carry aspects of every trait within us. And our souls really want to express all of them.
I (Dr. Brandon) asked Doreen to explore her unexpressed, underfunctioning side. At first, she denied its existence. But she was able to identify brief moments, like when she really wanted to stay in bed on a Saturday morning, or her secret desire to quit her public relations job and work at a pet shop. Why didn’t she gratify any of these needs? Guilt was the conclusion she came to. Doreen felt guilty when she nurtured herself. And just as she refused to meet her underfunctioning needs for herself, she subconsciously discouraged anyone else from gratifying them as well. Projecting all her underfunctioning needs onto Daniel, she could disdain him rather than herself.
I encouraged Doreen to give her underfunctioning side some attention. If she continued to ignore it, she’d have to use her next partner to hold that balance for her. Forcing nurturing on herself was not easy, but with time she learned to even enjoy it. As she recognized this previously disowned part of herself, her sex drive returned naturally. She was pleasantly surprised by its arrival, and she took it as a sign that she was ready to be in a romantic relationship again. With her newfound balance, she wouldn’t need to find a man to perform that function for her.
There are a variety of things you can do to help find your center. Emotional balance can be supported through experiences that serve to return you to yourself. For many people, nature has a grounding effect. Thus, as you engage in self-appraisal, we suggest that you simultaneously spend quiet time outdoors. Nature can function as a limitless energy source for the spirit. Imagine how you’d feel looking up at a magnificent snow-capped mountain, or watching waves crash onto a shoreline. It is no mistake that so many people vacation in nature; they innately know that these experiences enhance their spirit and vitality. Nature has a way of centering you—helping you sort through the static that keeps you from knowing yourself. But you don’t have to relegate these experiences to vacations only. Try long walks alone in the park on weekends. Spending mindful time in natural surroundings will facilitate your self-appraisal.
Likewise, breathwork offers several key benefits to facilitate the centering process. First and most obviously, mindful breathing is relaxing. And relaxation is imperative for your self-appraisal. No one has access to their subconscious if they can’t slow down enough to listen. Mindful breathing allows for stillness of both mind and body.
Second, breathing is an everyday activity. You breathe whether or not you are aware of it. Breathing mindfully allows subconscious material to flow into your conscious mind. This is one reason that some people find meditation difficult. Mindful breathing can give them access to feelings and thoughts they might rather ignore. In your self-appraisal process, use this entrée into your core to your advantage. Despite its simplicity, mindful breathing is a powerful tool for self-discovery.
Third, with mindful breathing, you learn to slow your body. This skill will come in handy when you resume a sexual relationship. Slowed movements increase intensity and lead to powerful sexual experiences.
To breathe mindfully, all that is required is a focus on your breath. The beauty of this technique is that it is free and available anytime you can be alone in a quiet location. Simply make yourself comfortable while maintaining a relatively straight spine. Sitting on the edge of a chair or cross-legged on a mat works well. Some people practice mindful breathing lying down, but that makes it exceptionally easy to fall asleep.
Bring your attention to one aspect of your breath, such as the sensation in your nostrils or the expansion of your belly as you inhale. Set the intention to focus on your breathing, maintaining a rhythm that is slow, steady, and deep. Observation of your breath is all that is required.
Studies show that breathwork practiced on a regular basis supports energy, sleep, digestion, and an overall sense of peacefulness. Breathwork seems to ground your psyche and your body. Many folks find that it raises spiritual awareness as well. Most of these benefits can also have an indirect positive impact on your sex drive. So what have you got to lose? Try mindful breathing once or twice a day for a few weeks. It is the repetition over time that assists your body in making beneficial adaptations and counteracting stress.
As you work to create emotional balance after divorce, you can simultaneously reawaken your libido in more-direct ways. In doing so, we encourage you to focus primarily on the lighter aspects of your sexual self. Your body probably needs to play for a while. Heavy relationship sex is probably not where you’re at, so your libido is unlikely to respond to that.
Being playful sexually means different things to different women. Some enjoy the sexual energy of silly but sexy movies or books. Others enjoy wearing novelty panties and bras, or maybe skipping panties altogether for an evening. You might prefer shower play, or closing your drapes and watching TV naked. Light and easy sensual fun can coax your libido out of hiding and remind you that sex doesn’t have to be serious business. Think of it as waking your libido with a slow morning stretch as opposed to a strong cup of coffee.
Masturbation is another way to coax your libido out of hiding in a playful way. Try to masturbate with the intention of spending pleasurable time with yourself as opposed to achieving orgasm. This will help keep the experience light rather than driven by a specific goal. Use regular masturbation both as a way to reclaim your desire and as a way to reduce stress while promoting relaxation. Let go of the notion that you should masturbate only when you are feeling turned on. Instead, consider it another way to spend quality time with yourself during the process of self-discovery.
Welcome back your libido with kindness. Find things to appreciate about your sexuality. It might be reluctant to return if the atmosphere is harsh and judgmental. How can you support your sex drive? Acknowledge those aspects of your sensuality and your body that you like. Are the shape and color of your nipples particularly striking since you gave birth? Do your toes look stunning with rich red nail polish? Close your eyes and run your hands over the soft curving shape of your hips. Admire your voice as you sing a love song. Make friends with your sexuality so that your libido feels welcome.
In keeping with a soft, gentle approach, acknowledge any sexual worries or frustrations that have developed through your divorce. The trauma of divorce can also exacerbate sexual fears that you’ve carried over the years. Take some time to sit with these discomforts so that you can help yourself heal. For example, if you always were sensitive about how long it takes you to climax during sex, this may become a greater concern as you prepare to involve a new man in your life. Maybe you are afraid of not being able to let go enough to climax at all. Or you are worried that your vagina may not lubricate as it once did.
The point is, most women harbor sexual fears. They tend to be so personal that they aren’t shared even with partners. Don’t let a divorce destroy your sexual self-esteem. Acknowledging and ac cepting your sexual fears can go a long way toward keeping them in perspective as you develop new romantic connections.
Preparing to date again is usually a nerve-racking experience for divorced women. Obviously, the longer you’ve been out of that scene, the more difficult the reentry process can be. Times have changed, and so have the rules for relating sexually.
The good news is that you are wiser this time around. Dating is no longer about behaving so that the boy will like you. It’s not about peer pressure or having sex because everyone else is doing it. You’ve learned the hard way that what matters is how you feel about your partner. So relax; dating is no longer about selling yourself. Enjoying yourself is the new name of the game.
If you find someone you’d like to have a physical relationship with, talking about sex before doing it is expected and generally appreciated. Condoms are the rule, not the exception. Carry some yourself so you’re not stuck without one. Make sure to check the expiration dates on the condoms you keep. If you want to start a conversation about sex, sexually transmitted diseases, and condoms, you don’t have to do it with a tremendous amount of finesse. You can state that it’s a difficult conversation, but that you need to know that the person doesn’t have anything you could catch. If you get a shocked reaction, think twice about whom you are choosing to sleep with.
The first time you make love again, it is likely to be an emotional experience. Tell your partner beforehand that you may be extra sensitive under the circumstances. If feelings bubble to the surface, try not to resist them. Relax and let them happen. It may be your body remembering, and grieving, just as you have grieved. Alternatively, your tears may be tears of gratitude that you can feel loved again in such an intimate way.