November 2014 - Dr Michael Aaron

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Another Word on Loss of Sexual Desire

Another Word on Loss of Sexual Desire

Recently, I was interviewed in a Huffington Post article about the most common sexual issues that sex therapists see in their office. To see more on this article, you can click here. Anyway, since the interview response that they posted was a bit abridged, I wanted to spend a little more time exploring this difficulty since it is so prevalent.

When I work with individuals struggling with low libido, I first want to understand the context in which they are having this experience. For example, I would want to know answers to the following questions. What is the relationship status of the person– are they single, dating, in a committed relationship? If in a committed relationship, for how long? When did this problem begin? I would also want to rule out medical issues, so I will refer the individual to a physician for blood work to determine levels of testosterone and other hormones. Sometimes testosterone is a major player, but more often not. In my experience, with individuals low libido tends to be more emotional, rather than physical in nature, while with couples it is more often than not it stems from relational problems. For more info on the relational aspects of low libido difficulties within couples, you can check out my article “Three Main Reasons Behind Loss of Sexual Desire in Couples”, which was picked up and syndicated by numerous other websites.

As I indicated in my response to the HuffPost journalist, relational issues include stuff like resentment (which is basically a euphemism for anger) and lack of trust, along with other elements I didn’t mention such as inequitable power […]

By Michael Aaron|November 25th, 2014|Couples Therapy, Sex Therapy, Sexuality and Psychology|0 Comments

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New Documentary about Mind/Body Connection

New Documentary about Mind/Body Connection

I don’t often endorse projects that come to my attention, but I feel so strongly about the subject matter of this upcoming documentary film, that I felt a strong desire to share it on my site with my readers. The film, All the Rage sheds light on one of the pioneers of mind/body medicine, Dr. John Sarno. Dr. Sarno, who worked for many years in the rehabilitation center of NYU Medical Hospital treating individuals who had various structural and back injuries due to vehicular collisions, slips and falls, and various other accidents. At some point, he started noticing very interesting phenomena– some people who injured their back would get well rather quickly, while others never moved on past their back pain. In addition the severity of the pain had no correlation to the severity of the injury. And finally, there was absolutely no connection whatsoever between back pain and structural abnormalities discovered through x-ray imaging and MRIs. In other words, individuals with severe back pain would have nothing show up on an x-ray, while those with no pain at all would show multiple ruptured disks, and so on.

Dr. Sarno began to realize that most, if not all, of the chronic back pain that he was treating was not caused by structural abnormalities, but by other factors. Specifically, he noted that most of the chronic pain sufferers he treated shared many similar psychological commonalities. For example, they were more likely to be Type-A people, you know the type who are very perfectionistic and successful, but also very hard on themselves. He started realizing that perhaps the […]

By Michael Aaron|November 18th, 2014|Sex Therapy, Sexuality and Psychology|0 Comments

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New Study: “Unusual” Sexual Fantasies Not So Unusual

New Study: “Unusual” Sexual Fantasies Not So Unusual

Earlier I wrote about how the term sexual “deviance” has absolutely no scientific merit, and now just a few weeks later a new study comes out in the prestigious Journal of Sexual Medicine, which surveyed over 1500 respondent about their sexual fantasies, and determined that almost none of them are really that unusual.

Let’s take a closer look at the nuts and bolts of this survey. It breaks down the sexual fantasies into very specific details and separates participants by gender. Most interestingly, only two of the fantasies were found to be rare and men and women were found to differ significantly in the amount and content of their fantasies. The two more rare fantasies were having sex with a child younger than 12 (pedophilia) at roughly 1.5% (0.8% women and 1.8% men) and having sex with animals (zoophilia) (3%women and 2.2% men). Remember, these numbers reflect the people who were willing to disclose these kinds of fantasies– self reports like these are notorious for underreporting.

More unusual, but by no means rare fantasies included fantasies around urination (water sports) for both women (7%) and men (9%) and the following fantasies only for women: wearing clothes of the opposite gender (6.9%), forcing someone to have sex (10.8%), abusing a person who is drunk, asleep, or unconscious (10.8%), having sex with a prostitute (12.5%), and having sex with a women who has very small breasts (10.8%). NONE of these were found to be unusual at all for men. In general men had way more fantasies than women, and indicated a higher desire to experience them in real […]

By Michael Aaron|November 4th, 2014|Sex and Culture, Sexual Minorities, Sexuality and Psychology|0 Comments