What's wrong with my libido after kids? Part 1

Welcome to the Sex After Kids podcast. A place for parents to come and learn together about the sometimes bumpy road back into the saddle of their sex life after adoption, birth, or joining a blended family. I'm your host, Sophia Ashley, Certified Sex Educator and Sex Coach, Mother and Stepmother, and your totally TMI guide to becoming BFFs with your body and initiating easy and connected and confident naked, sexy fun times. Here we are one part sign, sub-sex, one part mindfulness magic, and one part straight up real talk to help you find the spark in yourself and your relationship after kids. I'm so glad you're here. Hey friends, I like colony friends. Welcome back to the Sex After Kids pod. I have a question for you. What do birth control pills, sleepless nights, and how you balance chores in your relationship have in common? You guessed it! libido! In the next three episodes, like little mini-sodes, we are going to explore the new landscape of your sex life after kids. My goal is to help you solve the what the fuck is wrong with me, riddle, that you may have been battling, that I know a lot of you are battling. So many of us go from romping in the hay on the regular to zero, desire for sex, and we feel stumped and clueless as to what to happen or what to do about it. The truth is that there are a million and one reasons that your libido may have gone MIA or that your couple connection has shifted, and I find most people I talk to are either ignoring the issue or feel hopeless because they're overwhelmed and they don't know where to start. There's no direction. So let's take a few deep breaths before we dive in and just land in this moment together. Haking these little nervous system moments is so important for our libido and I just really want to try as much as my remember to model that in this podcast. So I want you to do a little visualization with me here for a moment. I want you to imagine a brick wall with me. It's got heavy red bricks that go as high as you can imagine and all the way to your left and all the way to your right and there is no way you are going around over or under this brick wall. Your partner is on one side of the wall facing their own bricks and you're on your own side and the connection and intimacy and sex that you want depend on you getting through this wall. I want you to imagine that each brick in this wall is a specific limiting thought, negative experience, memory or pain point that is getting in the way of you fully enjoying and surrendering to connection and pleasure with yourself and your partner after kids. So we could try to take a run at the wall. We could go grab a sledgehammer but in my experience it's easiest if we start to get away from the totality of the wall and look at each brick at a time and we can start to see little labels or names kind of appear on them and just like in Django we're going to find a woobly one and we're going to pull it out, toss it away and that's going to give us room to start making a hole in the wall that we can climb through. The thing that I want you to know here is like some bricks may never go away and new bricks may come with different ages and experience but as long as we know how to name the bricks and get some of them to wiggle and pull some of them out and toss them aside as long as we can make a hole big enough to get through we can get started on the path to more naked sexy on times. So these next few episodes are about helping you to put some labels on those bricks and maybe start to find a few wiggly ones right we want to pinpoint this problem instead of feeling like it's this big amorphous thing. So my thinking continues to evolve a little bit around this but where I'm at right now is there's essentially four different areas or different dimensions which kind of sounds like a star-truck episode which my husband's a big fan of. Hands up if you're a star-truck fan but it's for dimensions in which things can change in our life that affect sexuality after kids and those dimensions are the physical changes in your body and your partner's body the emotional changes in you and your partner the cultural messing that you've received and that changes once you've become apparent and the spiritual ones. So the cultural ones might be notes about gender and how we interact and spiritual connection would be a lot more with like how you connect to yourself as well as what kind of messages come to you from your spiritual deity your religion your spirituality that you're connected to. So what we're going to do in the next three little minisos is we're going to walk through each of these dimensions together and I'm going to just share some non exhaustive examples that can hopefully get you to start brainstorming about your own brick wall. Before we dive in a preamble let's trust the process here okay it's easy to start to fall into despair and overwhelm if we feel like there just are too many bricks in our wall. So just remember this is the first step and I promise that each and every brick is removable or work aroundable or smashed through a bowl and again we do not have to get rid of them all to make progress towards our goal okay so deep breaths try to keep a neutral and curious perspective as you start filling in your breaks. I want you to think interesting not oh my god I'm so broken all right we all have a sex brick wall society has made it that way and by being willing to look at your brick wall and do some smashing and wiggling and changing of things you are expanding your experience not only for yourself but for your children right this is deep systems like intergenerational work here which means it's not always simple right. I also want to note that trauma and sexualized assault will come up in this conversation probably not very deeply but it will come up please be aware of that watch your own triggers take a pause if you need to take care of yourself in this process okay we all have some dark stuff around sex and if now is not the time to be processing that that is okay. All right rant over let's dive in so what is there to know but the physical body and what might have changed when it comes to your libido after children. First and foremost if you have a body that carried a child it has changed a lot we can look at that in two different ways. Number one there was a pregnancy and actually even before that if you went through any kind of infertility treatment um or sorry fertility treatment or IVF or anything like that there was all kinds of physical changes hormonal changes that would have happened through the attempt to get pregnant then there's the actual carrying of the baby which is going to put pressure on your pelvic floor your muscles your ligaments your literal bones move while you are carrying a baby and while you deliver a baby and then there's the delivery part where maybe you got an apesiatomy maybe you had a c-section maybe you had a small tear maybe you had a big tear maybe you had a big amount of trauma that happened during your delivery right but from a pelvic floor and sort of like physical perspective some stuff has happened to your downstairs business right now we have a lot of myths around this including the fact that after six weeks you're just ready to go when actually it can take one to three years for your physical body to fully kind of land in the new place that it's going to be and put itself back together i myself am still dealing with like sacroiliac joint and sacrum pain because like all that stuff moves yo when you have a baby so that can also mean that we end up with numbness pain or irritation when we have sex and it can also mean we're either more or less sensitive so some women are people with uterus as find that they orgasm more easily after baby and some find that there's more blocks or some find that certain you know moves in the lexicon they had with their partner are total turnoff now and some new surprises are found one example of that can be that a lot of women are like my boobs are a no-go zone now if i'm breastfeeding if I'm chest feeding, these are tools for food now, and so I don't view them as sexual playthings anymore. And some people with breasts will find that all kinds of fun and interesting things are happening with their breasts now that they have had a baby. So there's very physical, physical, real changes that have happened, which again, the main thing here is that can result in numbness, pain, and irritation, and that can obviously affect our sexual response. And then we can be more sensitive or less sensitive and things that used to work may not work anymore, right? This can mean pelvic floor challenges. This can mean leaking when you're jumping or running or just living your life, which can kind of be embarrassing and lead to some shame and weirdness. And I also want to note here that even if you had a C-section and you didn't deliver vaginally, you're still going to have had nine months of weight and changes on your pelvic floor, which can still have an impact on your sexual response and how your body responds to sexual stimulation, right? Even I had just the tiniest, tiniest tear, pretty much in the same place for both deliveries. So it was like a level one tear. I think they did a stitch the second time, but I probably barely needed it. And to this day, so I'm three years postpartum of my second baby, six years postpartum of my first, there's a tender spot on the one side of my vagina on the inside wall that depending on what's happening and where I'm at in my arousal, if my partner hits it, it hurts. And that can do with the emotions that are stored in there and we'll do a whole other episode on that as well as just like there's still actually a little bit of scar tissue and a little bit of tightness there. So even if you've had minimal tearing, it can still have an impact on your sexual response and feeling. And the important thing to know with a lot of stuff that we're going to talk about in today's episode, which is kind of the physical stuff, is a lot of this stuff is what's easily fixable with a practitioner, right? So for pelvic floor stuff, we just need to see a pelvic floor physio. We may need to see a gyno and have some surgery depending on what's happening, but typically we need to do some kegels, stretch out some scar tissue and return that sense sensation and like, formability back to our body, right? The other category of things that are happening here is breast feeding, right? Or chest feeding, if that's what we're doing, that's going to release all kinds of hormones, which can impact how lubricated your vagina gets. It can also create a lot of pain during arousal in your breasts or a lot of discomfort and weirdness when you like lactate, when you're aroused, like all of a sudden the breasts just become this big focus. And that can be a sense of weirdness and awkwardness and discomfort for a lot of folks. And for other folks, it's not at all, right? But it is also important to remember that if you are breastfeeding, a lot of people don't know this that it can be harder for your vagina to lubricate and harder for arousal to come. That is a normal thing and we can either wait for our hormones to regulate after breast feeding or we can just know that and do things like lube and more for play and less intercourse and more creative things on the menu, right? In general, we're also looking at hormone fluctuation. So whether we're breast and chest feeding or not, our periods going to be finding its way again, we may or may not be stepping into paramanopause. You might be dealing with like just depletion of so a lot of people who are breast and chest feeding end up just like totally depleted of all like minerals and vitamins and things like that. You might end up with an auto immune illness like myself, which hashimotos, hypothyroiditis, thyroid syndrome, absolutely affects your libido. It affects your, what am I thinking about here? Sleep, it affects your energy levels. There we go. And that's going to have a whole interplay with my libido, right? So again, what we're talking about here is we're just trying to name which of the bricks are here for you? Do you have birth trauma? Did you have a C section? Did you have a tear? Do you have an auto immune disorder? Do you, are you at the age where you might be starting to go through paramanopause? Or are you postmenopausal? These are each little labels in your bricks. And once we start to see which bricks you have, we can figure out, oh, okay, I need to see a public floor for physio or I need to wait until I'm done breastfeeding on and on and on, right? Another example is medication and birth control pills. So it is very well advertised now, although not sorry, not very well advertised. There's a lot more discussion and conversation now about how birth control pills affect your libido and your mood and your body. And some people are very sensitive to this. Some people it doesn't matter at all. So if your libido has suddenly disappeared, maybe it's the birth control that you've started once you had babies. Maybe the birth control that you're on is impacting you differently now that you've had children. And then the other piece here is medication that you're on. It is notorious for the medical establishment to just simply omit telling people about the impacts of different medication on their sex drive. So if you didn't ask your doctor over at the, they may have not mentioned it or you may have not read it in your pharmaceutical information. A lot of antidepressants and SRSRIs and those kinds of things can affect your libido and sex drive. And if you're on a medication and you don't know, it can certainly be worthwhile to ask your doctor if there are any known side effects for libido and sexual desire. Somehow we've decided that that's like not an important side effect in particular for women. So we just don't bother to tell them. Yeah, I know, right? Stress and fatigue, friends. This is why I talk so much about that first year or those first three years. Like this is going to be a season where the goal isn't necessarily to get back to the hottest and heaviest sex of your life. And this is probably the biggest disservice that we do in particular to men, right? Is that we feed everyone this myth that six weeks post delivery. Once you get your vaginal checkup, your C-section scars healed, you are good to go. And the reality is that you might physically be ready, although very likely you are not physically ready at that point. But emotionally, you're probably not ready. And then also in the first one to three years, it is very likely you do not have the energy to want to have sex, right? So fatigue is huge. If you are exhausted, that can put you in that fight or flight place, which means your body is like not interested in that kind of stimulation. And if you're stressed out, especially if you're dealing with your first baby or complications or lots of babies or a spread baby or birth trauma or whatever, starting a new job, moving, you name it, all of those things are going to suppress libido. And so in particular in the early years, we need to be gentle with ourselves. If we're later on, this is just an acknowledgement. And we really want to make sure like this is going to be super relevant for both parents, right? So stress can affect libido in anybody's body. If we're adoptive parents, if we've adopted a newborn or if we've just welcomed some children to our family, we're not used to the family rhythm, then that's going to be a big part of things. If we have joined a blended family and maybe we didn't have kids and now we're getting used to a family rhythm, stress and fatigue, I've shared in my first episode was a big part of my partners, libido contrast with me. As I became a stepmom and also, you know, me just kind of adjusting to like family rhythm from being a single person, right? So stress and fatigue are not to be what's the word here like overwritten, like they're important and more important than we think about. And I like to touch here on sort of the difference stress. I mean, again, we could go through a lot of pieces here, but there's a difference between the stress of like general every day, overwhelmed of like, you know, you've got a major project at work or you've got a parent that's sick or that kind of thing. And then there's the stress of just being in sensory overwhelm, which they both have the same effect, but sensory overwhelm would be my two children are fighting all of the time, hitting each other, screaming really loud. And so most of my evenings are too many people touching me, too many loud voices in my ears, too many big emotions. And when I decompress after that by 10 p.m. the last thing I want to do is like manage another person's feelings because I've been referring to people all day. So it's important to to kind of note the two different pieces there. And then the last piece I've kind of touched on this a little bit, not the last one, but like, yeah, things that used to feel good don't feel good anymore. Things that didn't feel good, do feel good now. It's easier to come. It's harder to come. And last but certainly not least would be the impacts of disability, whether that's chronic pain, whether that's physical disability, whether that's neurodivergence. And it's not something that we talk about a lot. I've had a few clients with ADHD and it's something I'm trying to look more into. But ADHD focus or lack their up or the need for novelty or like those kinds of things can make sex hard sometimes as someone who lives with chronic pain. When I'm hurting a lot, my brain isn't survival mode. And the last thing that I want to do is have sex, even if that sex could be supportive for me, or if I'm navigating new chronic pain, trying to find a new disability, trying to find positions that work for me and situations that work well for me can feel overwhelming. And so it's easier to just not bother, right? So to sum up in the physical dimension, what we are looking at here is anything that's suppressing our libido or things that are contributing to pain, numbness, and irritation, which can hamper or change the sexual experience that we have. Whole parts of our body may respond differently to sexual stimulation now. So most of this bricks in the category that we're talking about are fixed with the help of the healthcare practitioner or they go away with time. Hello, sleep. Now that my kiddo has turned three or we can accommodate them, right? So once I know that's, oh, I'm a person with ADHD and oh, who knew that ADHD had an impact on my libido and what I crave sexually. Oh, now I can explore that a little bit more. Oh, now I can figure out what works for my ADHD brain when it comes to sex and what doesn't, right? Or oh, Sophia has a little libido because of her Hashimoto's. Now that we know that we can accommodate by not expecting her to be magically turned on all the time and instead creating a libido party, sorry, creating a party that her libido wants to come to or maybe focusing more on central touch and other like nervous system support tools to help her ease into sex, right? Bottom line here today is that we're starting to put labels on the bricks. We're starting to demystify what might be going on for you so that we can figure out which bricks we can start to wobble. Once we do that, we can get a hole through the wall to hold our hands, our partner's hand, and then we can break the wall even bigger and then so big that we might actually be able to even climb through and have a good time, right? So, want you to pause, reflect, do you have one or two or medillian potential bricks in your wall? Has your partner listened to any episode of this episode and do they have any on their list, right? I certainly have Hashimoto's. I have a little bit of residual from a terror that I have. I am just coming out of and still deal with a lot of fatigue and not a lot of time and stress is pretty much an ongoing one for everybody. I don't think medications are thing for me yet, although to be fair, I have not explored what the libido suppressing capacity is for the medication that I am on for my Hashimoto, so that's something that I could explore. So, I have at least five bricks from this conversation today and I'm sure many of you do as well. But this is about demystifying where we're at and starting to, if we keep with the bricks analogy, we want to start to pave the illabric road back to each other. I hope there was something here for you. If you heard something new that you hadn't considered before or there was an aha moment, I'd love to see it in the comments. Like, follow, share it with a friend. If you think there's something here for them and I will talk to you soon. Bye. This is the part where we do the embed, right? Okay friends, let's take a mindfulist minute here. One big deep breath in through the nose and one big deep full body sigh out the mouth. Boala. Your nervous system says, "Mercy." Thanks so much for being here today. I hope your head and your heart have something new to consider. No husbands were harmed in the making of this podcast and a big thank you to my husband for his sound help and original music compositions. Love you babe. You can catch us on Instagram at the HappyVee project for tools, tips and anecdotes. You can join the newsletter for weekly-ish dispatches from my bedroom and head to the HappyVee project to learn how you can work with me. Catch you next time.