These 2 Clients Had Performance Anxiety. Now They Don't.

In this episode of The So Hard Podcast, I'm sharing two real stories from men I’ve worked with who overcame performance anxiety in different ways. The first client was thrown into seven months of sexual shutdown and overthinking after a single, devastating comment from his partner—made worse by his anxious attachment style. The second, an experienced man with a rich sexual history, found himself frozen when he finally met someone who truly mattered.

You'll hear how we unpacked the root causes of their anxiety, how attachment styles can intensify sexual fear. We'll dive deep into how nervous system healing is essential for lasting change, and how vulnerability, communication, and boundaries are the real superpowers in love and intimacy.

If you’re struggling with performance anxiety, erectile dysfunction, anxious thoughts, or just want a deeper understanding of the nervous system’s role in your sex life—this episode is for you.

🔗 Get access to my ERECT digital training, free nervous system resources, and more at https://beacons.ai/justinavictoria

Transcript

Welcome to the so hard podcast. I am Justina Victoria. I'm a psychosexual expert for men and couples, and today I'm going to share two different stories about clients I've worked with recently who came to me with performance anxiety and we talk a bit about how their performance anxiety um started for them and what we did to heal the performance anxiety and get them back to to normal. So client number one came to me after having performance anxiety for about seven months. And he did have an anxious attachment style, which always exacerbates anxiety. It really, really exacerbates anxiety. and overthinking and it can cause a lot of suffering. So how this happened was everything was good, never had performance anxiety in his whole life. One day him and his partner had sex and afterwards she was just like, yeah, I don't like that. And then started going into all these stories about all these other guys that she slept with in the past and how much better at it than they were. oh my god like this is this is one thing that drives me crazy. Like us women, we think that we're so self-aware and we're so much smarter than men and we're so much more emotionally intelligent. and then we come out with this stuff where it's like we have no idea the damage that we're doing to men when we're talking. Like we we just come out with this stuff that's like, we're trying to get a need met, but we're doing it in a way that is causing damage to somebody. Well, I don't really like saying the word damage because that kind of sounds like it's it's you know, unhealable or something. But we are doing temporary damage, let's say, to somebody's nervous system um when we speak in this way. So, yeah, so she goes into this whole long spiel about how whatever he's doing is not great and she's had all these other partners and this is what they did and it was so awesome. And he was literally in a traumatized state for about seven months after this conversation. They did not have any sex. He was terrified to have sex with her. He was just literally an anxious mess, totally disregulated. His brain was just on a loop of thinking about sex and thinking about sex and thinking about sex and so, um, you know, his system now viewed sex with her as a threat. And the reason for that is because, you know, a man is taught from a very, very young age that if you don't perform well sexually, then you don't have any worth in value. And we as women, we like we do care about sex, but like we're not going like, I'm choosing a partner based on how well he performs sexually. Like that's not like, and for everybody's different, right? So for some women, yeah, okay, that might be at the top of their list. But the majority of women out there, that's not top of our list. We're looking for somebody who we're compatible with, you know, somebody who's going to provide for us, protect us, make us feel safe and and loved and cared for and prioritized. Like, yeah, we want to have good sex, but um we're not looking for the best sexual performer. But men believe this. Men think that this is so important to women and this is the top number one thing that they're looking for. And so if you're not able to provide that, then you're in danger of losing your partner. And if you have an anxious attachment style, whether that's, you know, fullblown, anxious, preoccupied, or fearful of voidance, oh, my God, your nervous systems going to latch onto that and you're just going to be on a loop of d d--- like all day, all night, trying to solve the problem, trying to figure out how to get back to safety, but the issue is that most guys don't know how to get back to to their regular self. They don't know how to get back to their typical performance. I hate using this word performance, right? They their typical experience of sex. So what we did with him is we first educated him on the nervous system and to understand what was going on with him, educate him on his attachment style so that he can understand why his brain and nervous system took this situation and ran with it. And it blew up into a really, really huge threat for him that for seven months, he was in literal agony, literal suffering where his brain just would not shut off. He felt like he was being tortured by his mind over this subject. And then the fear, of course, of having sex and messing it up and what's going to happen, is she going to leave me on and on? So first we educated, right? We We sat down together and I taught him about the nervous system and why sometimes the nervous system will tag sex as a threat, which means that when we try to have sex or go to have sex with our partner, we start having a stress response instead of going into what some people might call rest and digest or what I call a ventral state, which is where we feel really relaxed and happy and common. There's no the body is not producing any level of stress hormones. So that's where we started. And then we talked about communication. In this situation, it is absolutely 100% not okay for his partner to talk about previous sexual experiences. and the reason it's not okay is because it doesn't feel good for him. For some people in relationships, their partner wants to know about all that stuff in their history. It's fun, it's exciting they like talking about it. For him, it doesn't do that. It makes him feel horrible. It causes him to overthink, it trips his nervous system into the stress response. and he doesn't like it and he doesn't want it. And with anxious attachment, typically have very, very poor boundaries. We don't say what we like, what we don't like. We essentially stuff our authenticity and our vulnerability down and we focus on what the other person needs so that they don't reject or abandon us. And that's essentially what he was doing in this situation. He wasn't like, hey, that thing that you did caused me serious mental distressed for seven months? And it threw me totally off my game. I've never had performance anxiety in my entire life. And that is not okay. It's not acceptable and I don't want to hear about your past. He was just allowing her to do whatever she wanted to do in an attempt to be like, yeah, I'm cool. I'm cool. I'm cool. Just just don't leave me. So we had to communicate. We had to set boundaries and we had to have because, you know, and he was dating and avoidant. So avoidants don't communicate. They don't talk about their feelings. They don't go into things. So we needed to bring this up. We needed to have a conversation about this. And he was really nervous. And this is this this is another thing that for anxious attachs feels really, really threatening is having transparency. Like we will create muddiness in a relationship on purpose because the less transparent things are, the further away we're getting from rejection and abandonment. We don't have to face anything that's difficult or hard for us, right? So we had to build him up. It took it took a good few weeks to build him up to get him to the point where he could have this conversation with her. So anyways, they had the conversation and this was the first stepping stone to helping bringing his system out of that stress response. and it was a good conversation and she understood and she was like, yeah, I get it. Like I won't I won't do that again, right? And then the next stepping stone was another conversation, another communication around, you know, if there's something that you need from me, I need you to just tell me what that is instead of comparing me to something else. Just tell me what you like. Tell me what you need from me and I'm happy to correct course for you. And she understood that. We moved forward again. Now he's building a bit of resilience. He's starting to get feedback, that communication, transparency, asking for what you need, setting boundaries. All of these things are safe. They're not going to make the relationship implode. They're not going to make somebody go running down the street, right? These are things that are actually creating strength within the relationship and within his nervous system. So by this time they were in a bit of a long-distance relationship and she was having surgeries and different things that she had to get through and and this was great because this provided us time to work on some of this stuff. And then once he once they kind of were reunited, then we could implement my formula. So I create formulas for my clients. um if they have performance anxiety, orgasm anxiety, if they have um erectile dysfunction, like anything that's going on with them, sexually I will create a formula for them to follow um that will rewire that response in their nervous system. So I gave him his little formula to use when they got back together and essentially what it did was help to turn that survival response off, that threat response that was coming on helped to turn that off so that he could have, you know, what we would call a successful sexual experience, which just means that he was able to have sex without going into a stress response. And he was just over the moon. He was so happy. He was like, oh my gosh, I feel like my normal self again. And for him, the root of the performance anxiety was being told that he wasn't good enough and then that flaring the anxious attachment, fearing that if he didn't get good enough, he was going to be rejected and abandoned, which is a lot of pressure to put on something that's meant to be fun. So I always compare sex to like eating chocolate cake or eating dessert, right? Like we just do that for fun. We we don't need the dessert. It's not going to break make or break our life. If we don't have the dessert, we do it because we're in the mood to do it. We're in we're in the mood to have sex. We we're in the mood to eat the chocolate cake. Like this is not a life or death scenario. But if we started believing that eating the chocolate cake was a test and the test was so important. And if we didn't get it right, some horrible consequence would happen, like we would be rejected or abandoned, right? While eating the chocolate cake would become seriously distorted. We would be really confused about oh my God, like what what hand do I normally hold the fork in and how many times do I chew before I swallow? And like we're totally disconnected from the experience of just eating their chocolate cake? And sex is meant to be one of if not the biggest regulator that we have for our nervous system. It's a button that we press that we can connect with another human being in in my opinion, it's like going back to where we came from. We come from oneness from wholeness. And then we come into this existence to experience separation and we're separated from everything. We experience this illusion of separation from everyone and everything. And sex is this experience of going back to oneness of going back to wholeness. Like you are literally inside of another person's body. and it is amazing and it's beautiful and it brings us, it reminds us of the wholeness that we come from. And that's why, you know, in some of, if you've ever listened to some of my other podcast episodes, you'll hear me say that um it's a sex can be a portal to higher consciousness or I will say like it is our ability to touch God or the universe or whatever you believe in. And so, um this is why I I believe that. This is why I feel that way is because we go from being two separate beings, when we have sex, we come together and become one and we experience wholeness. And sex is such, as long as we don't have a threat response attached to it, sex is such a regular it's it's the most regulating thing you can do for your nervous system. It produces oxytocin, which is our love hormone. It it literally kills off disease. It it down regulates the stress. Like it's it's just it's unbelievable for our systems. Like optimal wellbeing lives on the other side of that. So we get him back, right? He uses his formula. He sees that, you know, positive um outcome on the other side of that. And what was really cool was he worked really hard to to heal afterwards, heal his anxious attachment to communicate really effectively, to ask for what he needs and to say no to things. And he really changed who he was. He became very secure. And what was really cool about this was that, well, it's it's cool because he healed, but like over time, what happened was that he got stronger and stronger and then she just fell away. I mean, one day she just out of like things were great, things were going really, really well. And because she's an avoidant, they can't handle that. An avoidant is like, I don't understand why things are going well all the time. It's just not what they're used to. And um she got tripped up, didn't do any of the work and just decided to break things off. And I was so proud of him because in anxiousature typically cannot deal with a breakup. They'll do anything that they can to get out of the breakup. And he was just like, yeah, okay. I accept this. That was another thing we worked on with anxious attachment of a really difficult time accepting and allowing life to be as it is. And we did a lot of work on that with him. So once this moment came where she decided that she was going to exit the relationship for no reason, um she did not give a reason, which as most of waitants do, they typically leave their partner with lack of closure. um she walked away and he was just like, okay, I'm going to take a week to cry. And yeah, we're good to go. And I was really proud of him. Like he processed it so well. He allowed it, he accepted it. He felt what he needed to feel and he did not take on board any new belief systems. His anxious attachment didn't flare up. Like you can see that in the thing that his attachment style believed was the worst possible scenario for him to ever be. I mean, he spent seven months in agony in fear and suffering because of the possibility that she could leave him. We healed that, we healed the whole stuff around his sexuality. We healed his attachment style, and then when the day came of the worst scenario, it was like, yeah, this sucks, but like I'm okay. I accept this. I'm allowing it and I'm going to move on with my life. And he did and he's doing phenomenally well. He's dating. He's he's doing really, really, really well. So the second client I want to share with you around performance anxiety is a client who came to me and had tons of sexual experiences in his life. He was really into kink. He was really like he's he's done he was like he worked in a dungeon, like he had tons of sexual experiences way more than an average human being. and he met a woman, fell in love with her. They've been together for about a year and a half and they're engaged now. And all of a sudden he just started having performance anxiety out of nowhere. And this is so typical. This is such a typical thing I see, I've seen for so many years now, where performance anxiety just comes online because somebody really matters to them. Somebody is really important to them and they don't want to fuck it up. So in the last case, we looked at a client who was just moving along and everything was great and then their partner was like, you suck at sex and I've had way better than you. And he got the message that he wasn't good enough, which caused the performance anxiety to come online. In this scenario, he's having a great relationship. Everything's wonderful, but all of a sudden he's having performance anxiety. And with this situation, it's like, wow, the importance of this person in my life is so high that that is what is causing me performance anxiety, right? So that's what can throw a client off and that's something that happens a lot where they meet somebody who is so important to them and they just love them so much and they just want to be good enough for them. And they can't have sex. They just can't do it. So with him, it was a little bit different because he had done so much work already around his sexuality. He used to do a lot of meditative practices and things like that. So we were able to jump right in and I gave him my formula for intrusive thinking. He had a lot of intrusive thinking and worrying about whether or not he was good enough for his partner and and how he can keep her around and stuff like that. And he didn't like, yeah, these would be classed as like anxious thoughts, you know, anxious attach her thoughts, but he didn't have he doesn't have anxious attachment, not like the other client I was I was describing. He feels very secure in his relationship, but his nervous system just got tripped up out of nowhere. At some point, he had a thought like, what if I don't perform well enough for her? And that was it. Nervous system was like, uh-oh, this is a threat. We're freaking out. So with him, we focused more on shifting away from any thoughts that have to do with this. So I taught him how to do that. And then we focused back on his pleasure because he thing he was getting most tripped up on was focusing on her and like what she needs and how to pleasure her and how to keep her interested in him and all that, right? And that was tripping him up. So we refocused him. I gave him a formula to refocus back on his own pleasure during sex. And that was it. I mean, it literally took a week and he was back to normal. We did one session and he was back to normal. And then after that we really focused on other things in the relationship, strengthening different areas, communicating certain things, taking things to the next level. And it was really cool. And so you can see, like, for some people, it takes a bit longer. There's more to unpack, there's more to heal, there's more to unravel. And other people, it's like they've done a lot of work and they're just looking they're just missing that one thing that one thing is going under the radar for them. They don't know what it is and they need somebody who has expertise and is on the outside to go, oh, here's the thing do this and you'll be fine. And he did. And so we had um six sessions, I think. And after the first two, I mean, the performance anxiety was a non-issue. We didn't even talk about that anymore because that was just totally resolved. Um And again, I taught I taught him about the nervous system. He understood all of that. um but he just needed a little a little tweak. And that's that's a lot of clients that come into me. They think that their problem is really, really big because they're having a big stress response. But a lot of times it's just a little tweak that we need to make that can result in, you know, uh the outcome that they want. So thank you so much for listening. I hope you found this interesting. If you have performance anxiety or erectile dysfunction, relationship issues, attachment sal issues, um anxiety, PTSD, depression, OCD. These are all things that I work with, um trauma. I work with all of these things, and I do offer one-to-one coaching. I have my erect digital training, which is for erectile dysfunction and performance anxiety. And you can get all the info about my work and what I do at the link below. I do have some free programs there. I have one for elevated masturbation. I have um my free pussy massage uh tutorial as well. um yeah, take a take a look at the link below and see if anything resonates with you and I'll catch you guys in the next one.