One partner wants sex constantly and can't understand why they're being refused. The other has quietly stopped wanting it at all and feels like they're constantly being pestered. Most people assume these two have opposite problems. Often times, they don't. They have the same challenge underneath, but they are coping in different ways.

We're going beyond the standard "anxious or avoidant" here. Most of us learned early on whether care was something we could count on, and when the answer was unreliable, we did what smart, adaptive human children do: we picked a coping strategy and got very good at it. There are two main choices children make — pursue harder, or stop needing.

Those two roads lead to very different adults, very different ways of existing in relationships, and very specific erotic desires. This episode will help you understand the challenges, drawbacks, opportunities, and desires that come from each path, and how to work with those to have better connections, easier relationships, and a more satisfying sex life.

This is episode three of the attachment wounds and erotic emotions series, and the second one on specific wounds.

In this episode:

• Where the dependency wound comes from, including causes that have nothing to do with bad parenting and everything to do with circumstances that made consistent attunement hard
• The two survival strategies it creates, and what each one actually feels like from the inside
• Why the under-dependent's deepest erotic craving is often identical to the over-dependent's, just buried under years of pretending it isn't there
• How both patterns land on a partner, in and out of bed
• Why over-dependents and under-dependents are drawn to each other, and why that match can go sideways fast
• What movement actually looks like for each, including the single most important thing an under-dependent can do before they quietly shut someone out for good

Your needs are real. Both sides of this wound are just different ways of coping with the same early experience, and you can learn to count on care being there.

Topics: dependency wound, attachment wound, anxious avoidant attachment, my partner never wants sex, sex feels like obligation, mismatched libido couples, desire discrepancy, over-dependent, under-dependent, erotic emotions, somatic sex coach, intimacy coach Asheville

Send Laura Fan Mail

Get my free guide: Get Out of Your Head: A Starter Guide to Releasing the Pressure, Shame, and "Shoulds" Around Intimacy at https://laurajurgens.com/guide

More links:
Substack at https://laurajurgens.substack.com/

Wheel of Erotic emotions, go to: https://laurajurgens.com/wheel

Copyright notice: All content in this podcast is copyrighted and copying, scraping, data mining, or using the content to train AI is prohibited.