Continuing the previous Post, possible and avoided sexual partner is a psychodynamic diagnosis. Such diagnosis only makes sense if patterns of avoiding erotic desired situations, regardless of individuals’ sexual interests, are identified. In other words, someone is in a relationship with a possible sexual partner (psp) when it unconsciously helps them avoid highly desired situations/relationships, because they are very anxious. Avoided sexual partner (asp), in turn, is the one who triggers disproportionate anxiety that leads to relationship avoidance.
The clinical strategy, in cases of anguishes linked to avoided sexual partners, is to turn avoided conflicts conscious in order to make it possible for individuals to consciously decide whether they want or not to confront themselves with situations that used to bring anxiety, embarrassment and even panic. Conflicts in sexual identity development appear in blocks in masculine and feminine infantile models (father and mother ones) and can be summed up in the following emotional conditions:
1) The child doesn’t want to look like their father and/or doesn’t want to turn into a man like their father, that ends up as blocks in masculine traits associated with their father.
2) The child doesn’t want to look like their mother and/or doesn’t want to turn into a woman like their mother”[1], that ends up as blocks in feminine traits associated with their mother.
From the children’s point of view, these are situation in which:
- Their parents do not get along well,
- They feel abandoned by their parents,
- Their parents do not offer material and/or affective structure,
- Their parents offer material structure but are affectively absent or vice-versa,
- They have controlling parents or parents who put them in a position of having to choose between sides, even if not intentionally.
Most of the times there isn’t a clear-cut sensation. Sensations may slip from feelings of shame and lack of admiration to feelings of horror and rejection regarding mother’s and father’s feminine and masculine identity references, respectively. The children might build such a huge shield against these models that they become unable to attain the kind of men
[1] Dias, V.S. Sexual Identity Evolution, in Conjugal Bond in Psychodramatic Analysis.(2000). Ágora. São Paulo.
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