All About Sexual Performance Anxiety & How To Overcome it with CBT, Therapy & Counselling

What is Sexual Performance Anxiety?

In many cases Sexual Performance Anxiety is a type of social anxiety or social phobia in-as-much as we can over-worry what other people think about us, and go on to let this affect us adversely.

People suffering from Sexual Performance Anxiety often become so stressed about “how good a lover” they are that the sheer anticipation of how well they feel they must perform creates a negative effect (we call this Coue’s Law of Reversed Effort) by having the body “do the opposite” to what they actually want to happen.

These feelings that we are “not quite good enough” can be amplified during the sexual act as we generally feel at our most vulnerable and literally “exposed” during these most intimate of moments.

People suffering from sexual performance anxiety also tend to find find that they get into a negative spiral of anxiety where just the thought of having sex can lead them to start to feel anxious, often resulting in avoidance and feelings of inadequacy & low self esteem.

What can Cause me to have Sexual Performance Anxiety?

As with almost all psychological conditions there can be many different factors that result in these feelings:-

Early Character Development – During our character forming years our early learning experiences and general nurturing surroundings can impact on how we act as adults, very “macho” environments can lead young men to worry about how good they have to be.

Early negative sexual experiences – if those first sexual encounters did not go too well they can lead to an overcompensation and the development of Anxiety about sexual performance.

CBT for Sexual Performance Anxiety

If you’re committed to overcoming your Sexual Performance Anxiety problems then we highly recommend following our Advanced Tranceformental CBT programme with Paul which is available as an Online Therapy as well as a self help CBT programme.

The Tranceformental programme is a highly successful & pragmatic psychotherapy course, run over 10 sessions, that will teach you everything you need to know to understand your problem, identify how unhelpful thinking and limiting beliefs might be reinforcing the issue, and then show you how to make any changes to your unhelpful thinking styles or maladaptive safety behaviours that you may have developed as part of your coping strategies.

Our Tranceformental CBT programme is an empirically supported approach used by mental health practitioners around the World.

Alternative Therapy Options for Sexual Performance Anxiety

Although our preferred form of psychotherapy for Sexual Performance Anxiety is Tranceformental CBT we also offer alternative psychotherapies for those who might prefer a different approach.

These include:

• Psychodynamic therapy which focuses more on emotional problems and relies on the Therapeutic Relationship to bring about change. Available with Paul.
• General Counselling which is less structured but still provides a safe and non-judgmental environment to discuss issues which is therapeutic in its own right.
• Hypnotherapy is an alternative form of therapy that can be applied to a very wide range of problems and is available with Joan.

Free Initial Consultations for Sexual Performance Anxiety

We offer all prospective clients an initial consultation to discuss your Sexual Performance Anxiety prior to commencing any treatment plans.

The consultation is free and lasts around 50 minutes.

During this consultation we will discuss the various options that are available to you and make a considered recommendation based on your individual personal circumstances.

Initial consultations are also available as part of our online therapy service.

At TranceForm Psychology we recognise the importance of the therapeutic relationship in helping people to bring about effective change, so its important to be able to ‘meet’ to discuss our change programmes BEFORE proceeding.

Our policy is to help people make a fully balanced & considered decision about undertaking work with us, including both the financial and personal implications.