After doing a lot of work in therapy for the past few years, I really want to distance myself from
using sex as a distraction and instead have it be a way to connect with my partner.
Having people be sexually inappropriate to me as a child has prevented me from reaching sexual milestones organically. I met my current partner through a sex work site and our relationship has developed further over the past five years. I have never had an issue with orgasming during sex until recently after asking him to stop saying something during sex that I only ever tolerated to please men and that I now associate with a period of my life where I didn’t have healthy emotional outlets. I feel like I’m having to build the concept of my sexuality from scratch, and it’s so hard because I hate foreplay, I feel selfish and controlling if I want to initiate sex, and I get bored if I’m not experiencing pain or mental stimulation during sex. I keep trying to do things the right way like speaking up if I get torn/injured, being present with my partner instead of just trying to reach an orgasm, but it’s really difficult. The last few years I’ve been forcing myself to have sex regularly because if I don’t, I start to get nightmares reliving certain experiences I did when I was younger. But now that the therapy I’m doing is making those experiences easier to process, I’ve been trying to have sex for love but it’s too foreign to me. My partner is being more patient with me about this than I deserve, the last time I tried to tell him all of this it made him sad because he felt like I was pretending to enjoy sex with him when we first met, and he has had to make a lot of adjustments so that I don’t get hurt during sex that I worry stop him from enjoying himself fully. The last time we tried to have sex I got a panic attack, and I don’t know how to start fixing any of this.