What to Do When Your Sex Life Is Gridlocked, Stuck or Shut Down
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When sex is a source of perpetual conflict in your relationship, it becomes a gridlock issue. You might have small breakthroughs here and there, but ultimately nothing you do changes the situation in the long-run.
Worse, you get stuck in what I call the “season’s effect.”
It has happened to all of us before.
You have that sticky area in your sex life.
Maybe it’s your partner wishing you initiated more, were more interested in sex, wanted them more.
Maybe it’s you wishing that you didn’t have to be pressured so much or be the one rejecting all the time.
Maybe it’s getting stuck over asking for what you need and not getting your partner to change their behavior.
Whatever your pattern, it’s laden with frustration and resentment.
You don’t feel heard or understood.
And it happens over and over.
Like you’re stuck in “Groundhog Day” — with no way out.
In relationships where this gridlock exists, it rears its ugly head in seasons. Like the seasons of nature, it comes and goes, almost predictably.
Things may be going smoothly, until you see a look in your partner’s eyes or feel a change of tone in their voice ... and you find yourself back in the land of frustration.
The storm approaches …
You feel the heat of your anger rise up in your chest.
One of you decides to give it one last push, to argue your point, and repeat your side of the argument. You’ve been preparing your case for ages, wishing that your partner will hear you this time.
Or you withdraw, like you've always done before, and wish that this wasn’t happening — again. You just want this problem to disappear.
But no luck. You’re back into the old pattern. The same old conversation you’ve had with your partner a thousand times before. The same words. The same frustrations. The same dead end.
Whatever your coping mechanism, you feel angry, disappointed, perhaps exasperated, and tired of the whole thing.
One of you might end up withdrawing in the garage or the bedroom, busying themselves to take the edge off. Or you might give your partner the cold shoulder for the rest of the day — or week, or month. Sometimes one (or both) of you plays victim and blame each other or make threats:
“You always do this.”
“You don’t care about me.”
“You’re always the innocent one here.”
At some point, when things cool down, one of you apologizes. Or both of you do. Or you bury this under the rug because it’s too difficult to face and deal with.
You want to break out of the gridlock so badly.
You want to be on your partner’s good side, to be understood, to be valued, to feel loved again ... like you were in the beginning.
You want your partner to see that you want to change and are trying hard, really hard.
You promise to make progress … to work on your sexual desire … to TRY HARDER.
You promise to initiate more, to be more flirtatious, to be interested in sex more.
You promise that things will change.
And so the good season begins ...
You feel there is change in the air.
The sun shines brighter, the birds sing louder.
You find that new book to read.
You commit to more date nights.
You reach out to touch each other more.
You are playful with each other.
And you maintain it for a couple of weeks.
You see small shifts, good shifts.
Like scheduling date nights and having fun at a concert.
You stick to scheduling sex for a few weeks and achieving the goal of having more of it.
There is more lightness in your relationship, less tension.
You feel good about yourselves, and optimistic too — like change is on the horizon.
“Maybe this is it,” you hope.
“We’re putting this awful pattern behind us.”
Until … you miss that scheduled sex night.
Or forget to passionately kiss your partner hello when they walk into the door, as you’re promised you would, because you’re distracted — and your partner rejects your tepid enthusiasm as simply “not enough progress” to change things around.
And you trigger the same response that began this cycle.
The skies darken, the mood changes; it’s back to darkness again.
Have you been here before, in the land of the changing seasons of emotional gridlock?
A place where you find yourselves in the same scenarios over and over.
In cycles of frustration and despair, then excitement and possibilities, then back to despair again.
It’s like “Groundhog Day,” with the same scenario, the same words, the same outcomes playing out over and over again. With no movement forward.
Each partner ends up feeling hurt, frustrated, and rejected.
As promises are not delivered on, the trust in each other continues to erode.
You feel further and further apart, your hearts closing to each other.
With each round, you feel more exhausted and hopeless.
You default into thoughts of despair:
“Does this mean that this is over?”
”Is divorce the answer?”
And your inner sense of confidence erodes too.
The burning feeling of shame eats you as you face another round of failed attempts.
“Why can’t I change?!” you think.
“What’s wrong with me?”
And your partner feels rejected, and pulls away, making this even harder.
You feel their anger and their rejection too. And it is all so painful.
And it happens over and over, as my clients will tell you.
Leon and Naomi were stuck in what they call a “disappointment vortex”. Naomi was entering sex from an angry position because she was stressed as she didn’t feel that her needs outside of the bedroom were being taken care of. Her anger with him added to Leon’s frustration for not knowing how to fix it. Read their case study and success story here
Shannon and Greg loved and enjoyed each other, but these damaging cycles were creating more and more distance. Whatever Shannon tried to do never felt natural so she kept failing at it. Greg saw it as a personal rejection and pulled away. They were stuck in these patterns for most of their 25-year marriage, and committed to one last push at their relationship by working with me. Read their case study and success story here
Bill and Sandra’s relationship was built on alignment on almost all of the most important things — love, faith, family — except one. Sex was a constant struggle as Bill pursued bids of connection and intimacy from various angles and Sandra withdrew. Because Sandra didn’t initiate, he felt undesired, which he experiences as deep rejection. They were on the brink of divorce when they reached out to me. Read their case study and success story here
Alan and Grace lost years in bad couples therapy addressing the wrong problems and getting advice to get divorced. They had no idea that they were caught in these cycles that drove them further apart. After reestablishing closeness, their sex life flourished. Read their case study and success story here
The Anatomy of the Negative Cycle
Negative Cycles are exactly as the name implies: they repeat and with each round inflict more pain, hurt and distance. They show up in conflict around important things, such as child-rearing, money, time together, connection, love, relationship, and of course, sex.
According to Attachment Theory, there are three negative cycles that are based on the two roles that the partners play:
Pursuer / Withdrawer: The Pursuer’s method of getting what they need, especially when their partner is not responding, is by pursuing or pushing. They’re vocal, tenacious and insistent. When the Pursuer pushes, and pushes hard, the other partner withdraws because they feel pressured. The Withdrawer’s way of dealing with conflict is by avoiding, shutting down (often involuntarily) or appeasing, especially under pressure. The more the Pursuer pursues, the more the Withdrawer withdraws, the more that drives the Pursuer crazy and they pursue harder, the more the Withdrawer withdraws. The cycle continues.
Pursuer / Pursuer: When you have two Pursuers, you have two vocal, tenacious and insistent people — which also means you have two highly responsive people. Sometimes that can lead to explosive fights, but they’re short lived. More often however, two Pursuers can recognize each other’s pain quickly and get to resolution faster because they’re both highly responsive to each other's needs and pleas for connection.
Withdrawer / Withdrawer: When both partners are Withdrawers, they tend to avoid conflict and anxiety-producing situations such as sexual intimacy. There is typically peace and quiet in the relationship, but at the expense of connecting through intimacy and making their relationship evolve and grow.
These Negative Cycles don’t just get you stuck in solving the problem at hand. The bigger issue is that they create emotional distance that gets worse with the next round: each person feels isolated and alone in their experience and struggle, so they put more emotional walls up, which leads to feeling even more and more isolated and alone.
Sexual Negative Cycle
While these Negative Cycles impact every aspect of the relationship, in sex in particular, the gridlock is accentuated when the higher desire partner is also the Pursuer and the lower desire partner is the Withdrawer. The lower desire partner feels the pursuit emotionally and it hits even harder on the sexual level, feeling “broken” and “inadequate” compared to their higher-desire Pursuer partner. Without realizing this, couples actually add more fuel onto the raging fire by piling on things that “push” the low-desire Withdrawer to “want sex more.”
These sexual negative cycles prominently figure in a sexless marriage. They keep getting worse, affecting not only the couples sex life, but their level of trust and closeness, which further undermines their sex life. They need to be tackled first so that work can start on the sexual aspects of the marriage.
Reasons You Cannot Sustain Positive Efforts for More than a Few Weeks
1. You take small steps to fix a bleeding wound
You promise to work harder ...
You get the best book ...
Yet little things set you off back to square one.
That’s because …
You’re not just going through sexual gridlock.
You’re going through emotional gridlock — and that’s far harder to break.
The deep emotional disconnect is what has you bounce back and forth between good seasons and bad.
In fact, taking small steps such as another YouTube video create the illusion that you’re doing something, but simply steal time that works against your relationship.
The emotional rift underneath is bleeding out.
Waiting to reach out for personalized support actually delays the SOS that’s needed for your relationship. According to research by the foremost relationship researcher, John Gottman, couples wait eight years before seeking support. But in those eight years, you do a lot of damage.
Through the cycles of rejection, frustration and hurt, couples end up emotionally disengaging from each other. The very heart of your romantic partnership — the ability to connect heart to heart and see and hear each other — crumbles.
When they emotionally disengage, they end up hardening positions against each other. And trust erodes.
Without trust, you get your guards up against each other. You “test” each other with every move. And naturally, when both people walk on eggshells, they eventually mess up, confirming that they cannot be trusted.
The longer the couple is stuck in their problem — and the harder they work to solve it without success — the less qualified they become to know the way out.
Emotional gridlock is natural and common; we all get stuck in it.
This does not mean the end of the relationship — if you get support in time that gets you the right tools to rebuild that trust.
2. You keep doing the same things and hoping that your partner will finally understand you
In other words, you keep putting out an electric fire with water and wondering why it keeps electrocuting you back. Ouch!
The thing is that resolving emotional gridlock and breaking through the Negative Cycles requires new skills — skills that are very different from the ones that you’re using today.
You cannot get out of sexual and emotional gridlock by doing the same thing that got you into gridlock to begin with.
That’s the definition of insanity.
Trying harder is not the answer.
You’ve been trying hard enough.
Putting more effort into what’s already not working will have you lose self-esteem, rather than gain it. It makes you feel further apart, rather than closer. It will erode trust, rather than build it.
Gridlock does not have to mean divorce or separation. It is an opportunity to bring new life to your relationship.
It requires learning the language of vulnerability.
Instead of analyzing your partner or discussing the problem, you name your hopelessness and fears.
Instead of criticism, you let your partner know what you really want.
Instead of pushing harder, you to back off and reveal your deepest longing or hurt.
Instead of avoiding, you walk towards your partner when you’re scared or hurt.
Successfully working through this kind of emotional gridlock requires the development and practice of new skills — the first of which is admitting that you’re stuck. You have various options of learning to break through the gridlock, one of which is seeking a relationship specialist who understands the Negative Cycle and can help you come closer together.
You have to reestablish trust and emotional connection in your relationship before you can deal with the sex gridlock. You have to find your way back to each other.
The emotional healing has to happen before you move to trying new things sexually. It has to take place before you ask each other one more time to do something differently. Until then, the gridlock will rear its ugly head when the season rolls around once again.
3. You focus on sex instead of sexual connection
Unless you’re looking to have going-through-the-motion sex, focusing on sexual things is not going help to create passionate and intimate connection. Foreplay is not enough either. To get to connection sex, you have to apply the different facets of Connection Sex to create sexual connection.
Sensual Connection: For women with responsive sexual desire, sensuality is the biggest and most primary path to physical arousal. Whether it’s long and relaxing back massage, a sensual body exploration, or a prolonged pussy massage, physical touch excites the body and allows it to come alive with tingles, aliveness, and engorgement that allows for pleasurable sex. Without more-than-adequate sensual touch, most women can only reach about 20% of the level of arousal that their body is capable of, often leading to painful sex.
Intimate Connection: Opening your hearts to each other is probably the most difficult aspect of intimacy. We think that it means means being lovey-dovey all the time, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s about letting your partner see into you (intimacy is into-you-me-see, after all) whatever is happening. It’s allowing them in when you’re enjoying yourself and not fearing for the consequences. It’s about putting down walls and not hiding parts of yourself in fear of rejection. It’s about asking for what you want, instead of just what you believe you’ll get. It’s being honest when something is not working and inviting them on board to help change that.
Emotional Connection: While most couples communicate plenty on practical matters throughout the day, the communication that really counts comes on the emotional level. Do you feel seen, heard, and understood? Part of my Connection Sex framework is what I can the Daily TOUCH™ practice. It’s about truly listening to each other and feeling heard by your partner. It’s about
Playful Connection: What is play? At its core, it’s a space where you do not have to think, strategize or show results. It is meant to be unstructured and fluid, organic and spontaneous. Every couple needs needs time to allow themselves to just be, to not have to produce or perform — in other words, to play. Incidentally, play includes physical, sensual, and intimate, because the best play is where you let your guard down and allow yourself to just be you.
These are especially important if you’re a woman who is also a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) whose “pre-sex” needs help you feel sexual and excited for sex.
