Dealing with personal sexual challenges

One problematic aspect of intimate relationships for men is the difficulty of achieving what they regard as a satisfactory level of performance during sexual intercourse. So let’s start with some simple, straightforward facts.

First of all, the majority of men ejaculate within three minutes of penetrating their partner. Second, the majority of women cannot reach orgasm during intercourse. Now, you might argue that more women would reach orgasm during sexual intercourse if their partners could continue making love for longer, and there is some truth in that, although data is hard to come by, for perhaps obvious reasons. Nonetheless, there’s still a fair number of women who require a long period of foreplay,  loving sensitivity and perhaps  oral or finger play with their clitoris before they can reach orgasm.

I think something many men don’t understand is that women take great pleasure from seeing their man enjoying pleasure during  sexual intercourse. So on the face of it, there isn’t really much reason to be ashamed or embarrassed about premature ejaculation (although if you’re ejaculating within seconds of penetration, this probably won’t make you feel so good about yourself). As long as you can provide your sexual partner with a satisfactory sexual experience, perhaps by oral or manual pleasuring of her vagina and/or clitoris, she’s not likely to be too upset about your own early orgasm. It is, in short, most likely you who believes you lack competence in lovemaking.

Nonetheless, this doesn’t really avoid the more painful issue here for men, which is that many men feel inadequate because they can’t make love for a long time, and they simply do not know how to control their ejaculation.  I think one of the reasons for this is that most men fundamentally don’t feel comfortable in their male power or their masculinity. You will probably know if this is true for you, if, when you look at other men and have a visceral response of jealousy or admiration, you see something about them that you interpret as an expression of full masculine power.

Often, of course, such impressions can be an illusion, and the man in question may be simply living in his inflated warrior archetype . Healthy male power is invested not only in a non inflated warrior archetype, but in a combination of the king and warrior archetypes, which you can read about in the book Finding The King Within. If you’re interested in simplicity, we can call this combination “male power”. When you feel that you lack it, one useful approach to establishing a greater sense of your own masculinity or male power is to engage with a shadow work facilitator to find out why your sense of masculinity or male power is so restricted. That way you can be empowered to embrace and enhance it using shadow work processes and tools and techniques.

However, while that kind of shadow work could well improve your capacity to feel confident in the world, there is another potentially much more embarrassing aspect of this, which is about approaching a shadow work facilitator specifically to deal with premature ejaculation.

You may wonder how this could be a useful approach. The answer is that much premature ejaculation, in my judgement, lies in fundamental sense of a lack of trust or safety or confidence in your relationship with “the feminine”. Many men who experience a less than adequate relationship with their mother in childhood will carry anxiety, even fear, about relationships with “the feminine” throughout life. My belief is that in some cases the level of anxiety or fear, or if you want to put it another way, the lack of trust that men have at a very primal and fundamental level in the feminine, manifests at its greatest during the most intimate and potentially connected aspects of our relationships with women, which is when we are making love to them.

So one approach that shadow work could bring to your challenge with premature ejaculation is to allow you to work on your relationship with the feminine at a very deep level. This could empower you to feel more confident, less anxious, and more trusting of the feminine. What this means, of course, in practice is that you don’t necessarily need to approach a shadow work facilitator to work specifically on premature ejaculation.

You could ask for help with “issues of male confidence around your power” and “lack of trust or lack of ability to open up to fully open up to the feminine”: propositions which could be much less embarrassing! And once you’ve worked with your shadow work facilitator for a period of time, you may well have established a relationship which is so trustworthy and trusting that you feel confident enough to bring up directly the subject of premature ejaculation as an issue to work on.

And at this point, you would be able perhaps to work with the part of you that is indeed lacking confidence during sexual intercourse and reaching orgasm too quickly. When you can work directly with that part, progress towards a satisfactory sexual “performance” (in your own eyes, that is!) will most likely be faster. Listen to a podcast about  shadow work and sex on this link.

Although that may sound like an intimidating prospect at this point, there would unquestionably be many fascinating insights and revelations if you were to do this. If you’re interested in taking this approach further, there’s a directory of shadow work facilitators here and another one here, and it may well be that you would like to undertake some workshops that would increase your sense of masculine power. And you can find those here and here.