Vaginismus doesn't in itself upset me. It's frustrates, saddens and confuses me, but it doesn't make me want to cry my eyes out. What upsets me is feeling defective. A defective human, a defective woman and most importantly a defective girlfriend. Like many other types of sexual dysfunction (for example, impotence in men), vaginismus rocks the very core of your identity and seriously challenges your self-worth.
I've had a 'broken vagina' pretty much from the first time I started to experiment with it and as time went on, I couldn't help, but feel wildly different to women who can have sex with ease and don't contend with the possibility that their vagina could one day stop them from having children. It's easy to go from thinking there's something wrong to thinking there's something wrong with you. That you're a bad replica of a woman. And that's a pretty dark road to follow...
That being said, is it possible to stop vaginismus battering our self-esteem?
I think so. My boyfriend recently told me, fairly flippantly, that I am 'more than just a vagina' and I had an epiphany: when I feel down, it's usually because I've identified myself with my problem. I've let my sexual dysfunction fuse with my sense of self to the point where it's made me dysfunctional.
The Solution
There really is no simple solution to building up self-worth after it has been shattered systematically over time, BUT a starting point might be realising that your vagina is a drop in the ocean of who you are. Yes, it stops you (and your partner) having the sex life you both desire, but it doesn't make you any less loving, any less kind or any less feminine. In other words, vaginismus (just like any other physical ailment) doesn't make you any less of a woman. We are who we are, we are who we want to be and we may be bruised, but we're most definitely not broken.
