How to Deal with the Impact of Vaginismus on Our Lives While We Are Comparing Ourselves to Others Often

Living with vaginismus has such a massive impact on us.

We adapt many behaviors automatically, without knowing: Comparing ourselves to others is one of those!

The bad news is if we don’t become aware of these behaviors and what they are leading to, vaginismus can easily be our suffering for years.

The good news is if we can notice them mindfully and friendly, we can grow from this while healing our vaginismus.

It’s hard to see it from this perspective while living with it, I know, but I’m telling you as a woman who has been there, that vaginismus can be an opportunity to learn more about ourselves and grow as we heal.

But before we get to that, are you new here? Then you’ll have to check out these other helpful blogs that I’ve written to help you overcome your condition.

How‌ ‌to‌ ‌Take‌ ‌Better‌ ‌Care‌ ‌of‌ ‌Ourselves‌ ‌While‌ ‌Healing‌ ‌Our‌ ‌Vaginismus‌
Why Do I Have Vaginismus Even If I’ve Never Been Sexually Abused Before?
How to Free Ourselves From Feeling Stuck While Living With Vaginismus
Why Do We Need To Be Mindful To Heal Our Vaginismus?

And of course, you should join our EXCLUSIVE Facebook Community “Yes We Can Cure Vaginismus Together” by clicking here!

Oh and, you can download here your FREE Vaginismus Cure Guide based on my personal experience and research!

Let’s go on, dear!

Our minds are amazing. They are adaptable, strong, and trainable no matter what your age is!

What I mean from “training” is to repeat what we learn over and over again, dear!

And it’s already happening EVERY SINGLE DAY, with or without us knowing.

Our thoughts, emotions, and bodies are all our personal tools to train our minds.

Most of the time, we don’t realize the impact repeating our behavior has on our lives!

When I was living with vaginismus, which was for a very long time, I would compare myself to others often, not only women but men as well.

And without exception, I’d always end up feeling like a failure at the end!

Whenever I was feeling like a failure, I would end up comparing myself to others eventually.

That was what I was repeating, it became my habit: comparing myself and feeling like a failure were associated with one another very strongly!

Both of them were triggering the other.

Let me give an example from the time I had vaginismus:

I started to really like someone.

Then I started worrying about how to deal with the consequences of vaginismus, and those usual questions came up:

How am I going to tell him that I have vaginismus:
- Say I tell him that I haven’t had penetrative sex before till this age. Will he
  - laugh at me?
  - judge me?
  - feel sorry for me?
How am I going to behave like a woman while I don’t even feel like a woman?
This is already overwhelming. How am I going to deal with all the other emotional burdens on my shoulders in this relationship?

Then, I didn’t or let me correct; I COULDN’T give this man a chance, so I gave up!

And then I felt like a failure!

Here is the frustrating part:

Part #1: I started to compare myself to other women who had healthy sex lives orwere married or had babies already!

Part #2: I kept repeating unhealthy behavior, without realizing as I kept scrolling through social media, which allowed me to compare myself to many more women.

Part #3: Eventually, I felt like even more of an incredible failure!

But here is the thing: feeling like a failure made me compare myself more!

Until when?

Until:

–>I got overwhelmed by this cycle!

–>I victimized myself and cried for it for hours!

–>I questioned my existence!

Can you see the cycle here, and how I WAS FEEDING AND LEADING this cycle?

It’s important to know, though, because healing is ABOUT US: it’s about knowing our thought patterns, and our habitualized behavior, so that we can transform this pattern for the better.

You might be asking now, how we are going to stop comparing ourselves to others when we are living with vaginismus!

We won’t try to STOP anything here, dear. That’s not the intention.

Instead, we’ll put a deliberate effort into the steps that I’ll summarize now, and transformation will occur naturally.

Step #1: NOTICING our arising thoughts, our emotions without being hard on ourselves whenever we encounter any difficulty with our vaginismus

Noticing in itself is a practice, dear. But most importantly, not being hard on ourselves; being non-judgmental, friendly, and honest to ourselves and then noticing them. It might seem simple, but it’s NOT EASY at all!

That’s why we practice mindfulness; to cultivate the skill sets which will help us to notice ourselves!

In the example that I shared with you, what I became aware of was:

🡪How arising questions were increasingly worrying for me, led me to end up thinking I was a failure.

When we say we need to notice them non-judgmentally or more friendly is that we need to stop blaming ourselves for these thoughts or emotions, dear.

That’s what most of us do: blaming ourselves for many different things, right? Blaming for:

having vaginismus,
thinking, feeling or behaving in such ways,
even just being ourselves!

Look at how vaginismus becomes more than a condition for us!

Step #2: BECOMING AWARE of what we had intended to do after being triggered by anything related to our vaginismus

Noticing our usual behavior is such a huge breakthrough in this cycle, dear!

What we need to do whenever we notice the repetition of a specific behavior is to “PAUSE”!

Giving some time for ourselves to acknowledge what we had intended to do at the very moment is the key here.

See what kind of feelings and thoughts are associated with this behavior:

Is it, isolating yourself and willing to be in bed for hours on end as you pity yourself?
or spending much more time on social media and looking at specific women’s history sections to compare yourself and to prove how you don’t have the same opportunities in your life so that you are pathetic, small, or not enough!
or getting lost in your memories, going over your shame and guilt and lowering your emotional state?

In any scenario, if we are not aware of these cycles enough, getting lost in these habitualized behaviors over and over again and letting this behavior turn to a HABIT is inevitable, dear.

Step #3: Investigating whether our thoughts are real or not

Coming back to the main trigger and genuinely noticing if what we are thinking are the facts or not is what we need to do here.

So we need to see the facts as observing what happened without any commentary.

Let’s investigate my example, for instance.

What happened at the beginning was when I wanted to feel closer to a man, that was my trigger.

Then these happened in order below:

Some questions arose, and fear-worry accompanied them.
Feeling like a failure,
Willing to compare myself to others,
ended up feeling less, incomplete, not enough at all!

So that is the sequence of the experience: no commentary, no judgment at all!

Here is what we need to do next: Reality Check.

Are those questions coming from the fact?

A reality check helps us understand whether this experience is being felt through the projection of a future that has not been felt yet.

What do you choose dear: getting lost in a victimizing pattern and pitying yourself or seeing things as they are and helping yourself with taking yourself forward in your healing journey?

”As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.” Henry David Thoreau

You can download my free vaginismus cure guide from here if you haven’t yet.

If you found this article helpful, then come and join our free online community Yes We Can Cure Vaginismus Together, if you haven’t yet.

I talk more about these topics and in more detail.

Let’s meet there. Let’s grow together.

E-mail: petek@yeswecancure.com