It Was Never About the Sex

A client asked me today:

“How often do people come to you for a sex problem, but it turns out it’s not really about sex?”

I smiled.

“Every single time.”

You’d think my days are filled with conversations about positions, orgasms, vibrators.

But the truth?

Most days, I talk to people about grief.

About identity.

About loneliness.

About why their body no longer feels like home.

I talk to them about the guilt they feel when they say no—and the shame they feel when they say yes.

You see, when someone walks into my office and says:

“I’ve lost my libido…”

Or

“I think I have a sexual dysfunction.”

What we discover together is really this:

“I don’t feel safe in my body.”

“I’m carrying so much resentment I could bottle it.”

“My partner touches me and I go rigid—and I don’t know why.”

“I’ve learned to perform, not to feel.”

“Every time I try to soften, I hear my culture whisper: men don’t.”

So no, I rarely talk about “the act.”

I talk about power.

About identity.

About control.

About the part of you that wants to dominate—but also be held.

I talk about the desire that’s never been named because you were too busy being respectable.

About the self-silencing you inherited from a family, a culture, or a religion that only ever whispered about pleasure—if it spoke at all.

I talk about the relationship you’re in that looks perfect on paper but makes your nervous system shrink every time your partner walks in the room.

I talk about the loneliness of being touched but not felt.

And sometimes, just sometimes, I talk about sex.

But only after we’ve peeled back the layers.

After we’ve sat with shame long enough that it stops shouting and starts whispering what it actually wants.

After we’ve looked at desire not as a drive, but as a language your body has been trying to speak for years.

And perhaps most of all, I talk about permission.

Not the shallow kind—

but the kind that makes you ask:

What am I allowed to want?

What would it feel like to not apologise for it?

So yes, I’m a sexologist.

But more than that, I’m someone who will hand you the map back to the parts of yourself you thought you lost.

And yes—eventually, we’ll get to the sex.

But by then, you’ll realise:

It was never about the sex.

It was about you—returning to yourself.

Unapologetically. Gorgeously. Whole.