Continuing the previous Post, blocks in sexuality caused by conflicts with social environment are functional blocks[1]. Such blocks are usually associated with moral and sexual repression, and their correspondent anguishes are linked to feelings of failure, inadequacy, and secrecy (underground/clandestine life). Their consequences are difficulties in enjoying sexual desire in many levels. Those anguishes, however, are more accessible in psychotherapeutic settings, once people are aware of their causes.
However, anguishes regarding sexual partners, despite being triggered by relationships, happen regardless of it. Something in the relationship sets off conflicts linked to blocks in one’s sexual identity and they are always associated with blocked feminine and masculine infantile models. How do these anguishes appear? In situations in which one’s sexual identity blocked part is demanded. Nevertheless, these situations are intuitively avoided. As time goes by, those memories are “erased” from consciousness and become latent content. Dias[2] also divides these anguishes into two main groups: The ones regarding possible sexual partners and the ones regarding avoided sexual partners.
Possible sexual partners (PSP) are the ones with whom it is possible to establish a sexual and erotic relationship with full sexual energy discharge. Anguishes in such relationships may trigger anxieties related to shyness, embarrassment, for instance, and comprehend all sorts of possible conflicts that are proportionate to challenges to establish a healthy and lasting relationship: charges, expectation, fear, dissatisfaction, guilt, shame, competition. They are, however, real anguishes.
Avoided sexual partners (ASP) are the ones who set off the blocked part of sexual identities. Therefore, they are the ones who trigger the sort of anxiety/agitation that come from not knowing how to behave, not due to lack of erotic interest or shyness, but because the partner activates the part of their sexual identities that hasn’t been developed. This way, avoided sexual partners are the ones with whom it is not possible to establish a sexual an erotic relationship with a full sexual discharge, not because of embarrassment or lack of desire, rather, due to an obstruction to a full structuration of their sexual identity[3]. In these relationships, anxiety is triggered by something that activates the sexual identity lacking part. This is a neurotic anguish related to blocks in their infantile identity models. Its clinical signals come from desired erotic situations or relationships that, instead of joy, trigger behaviors of avoidance that might rise from an embarrassing /disconcerting state and grow into to a huge constraint, and even panic. We refer to such process as phobic escalation.
To be continued in the next Post [1] For more details see Dias, Posts 2 e Post 9, in Blocks 4 Essay-Sexual Identity. In: www.ceciliapsicologa.org [2] Dias, V.S. Conjugal Bond Structural Diagnosis. (2000). Agora. SP [3] I’m using structuration and development as synonyms.
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