Learning About Your Sexual Self
This is part 2 of our sexuality and sex therapy blog series. In today’s section, we will be furthering the discussion on the psychological aspect of our sexual self from the bio-psycho-social. Our psychological self refers to our inner workings and belief system regarding sexuality.
Our sexual self derives from all of the messages we have received about sex and sexuality throughout our history. This could be from family, friends, partners, and experiences. How was intimacy taught to you? How was sex taught to you? From society to sex education in school, it has been a part of every cycle in our lives. We compile these beliefs and they become part of our sexual being.
WHAT IS AN AROUSAL TEMPLATE?
Part of the psychological self includes what sex therapists call the arousal template. This can be described as what turns you on, the things that excite you. This can range from specific fetishes to body parts, or range to an entire person. The interesting thing about arousal templates is that they are consistent over their lifetime. This means that new stimuli can be added over time, new arousal triggers, but not taken away from. It is very difficult to completely eliminate things within your template as compared to adding to it and making it broader for a client. This is where sex therapy or individual therapy can help to condition ourselves to broaden or expand our sexual self.
SEX THERAPISTS ARE TRAUMA THERAPISTS
Very often trauma can affect our sexual relationships as well. Working through trauma with a trauma therapist in Orlando will specify the ways in which the trauma affected you, sex therapy opens up the dialogue of sexuality and our sexual self.
A sex therapist leading a training once said sex is meant to be life-enhancing, and everyone has the right to a positive sexual relationship with themselves and their partner. If you’d like to improve your relationship with sex or sexuality, talking to a sex therapist or individual therapist in Orlando is a great place to start. Reflect on your innermost beliefs, correlations, and factors toward sexuality as a first step.
Believe in yourself!
