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What's Hardest About Sex Right Now: Your Answer Is a Map, Not a Verdict

Written by Andrea Leijon, Founder of Temple

There is something clarifying about the question 'what's hardest about sex for you right now?' It bypasses the performance of fine and goes directly to the edge — the place where you bump up against something that doesn't yet yield. The four most common answers form a remarkably precise map of where sexual shame concentrates in women: in the permission to want, in comfort with the body that carries the wanting, in the release of the control that manages the wanting, and in the ability to stay present while someone else meets the wanting. Each is a different terrain. Each has a different path through.

If allowing yourself to want sex without it feeling complicated is the hardest thing, you're living with desire shame at its most fundamental level. The wanting itself has become entangled with something — guilt, judgment, a sense of permission withheld. This often manifests not as absence of desire but as a muffling of it: the desire is there, but it arrives with a second-guesser attached. Brené Brown's work on shame identifies this pattern as one of the most corrosive forms, precisely because it reaches the wanting before any action has been taken. The shame isn't responding to something you did. It's responding to the fact that you feel. The work here is not about building more desire. It's about slowly disentangling wanting from the inherited judgment that follows it — learning, one small uncomplicated moment at a time, that desire is allowed.

If feeling comfortable in your body is the hardest thing — the sense that you can't relax when you're self-critical, that the body gets in the way of the experience — you're working with body shame that has become somatic: not just a belief but a physical pattern. The self-critical voice during sex doesn't stay in the mind. It creates tension in the body. Muscles brace. Attention narrows. The neurological mechanism is well-documented: Bessel van der Kolk's research shows that shame activates the same stress-response systems as threat. The body cannot simultaneously be in an alarm state and an arousal state. The arousal circuitry requires a degree of safety — not just psychological safety in the relational sense, but nervous system safety: a physiological state of sufficiency rather than threat. Getting to that state through the body, not just through thought, is where the work lives.

If letting go of control is the hardest thing — always monitoring, always managing, unable to give yourself over to the experience — you're living with performance shame that has become a habitual orientation toward intimacy itself. Control, in this context, is a protective strategy. If you are managing the experience, you are not fully in it; if you are not fully in it, you cannot be fully evaluated. The monitoring is a hedge. Stephen Porges's polyvagal framework explains what needs to happen neurologically for control to become available to release: the ventral vagal system — the social engagement system — needs to register sufficient safety for the organism to stop its defensive management. This is not about trying harder to let go. Trying is more control. It is about building, gradually, the conditions under which safety is registered and the monitoring can quiet on its own.

If receiving without rushing to give back is the hardest thing — staying in the moment when it's about you rather than immediately redirecting toward your partner — you're dealing with receiving shame in its most relational expression. This difficulty often runs so deep that it isn't even recognized as difficulty. It presents as consideration, as generosity, as care for your partner. The rush to give back is genuinely experienced as love. What it also is — and this is not a contradiction — is a protective movement away from the vulnerability of being fully attended to. The good news about this particular pattern is that it responds to something simpler than insight: practice. Not practice at receiving in a general sense, but micro-moments of receiving without giving back. A compliment held rather than deflected. A touch stayed in rather than returned. One second longer than feels comfortable. The nervous system learns through experience that receiving does not cost what it learned to fear it would.

Whatever you identified as hardest is not a flaw to be fixed. It's a starting point. One of the things that shaped how I built Temple's curriculum is the recognition that women already know something is hard — what they're missing is a framework for understanding why, and a sequence for working on it that starts with the foundation rather than the symptom. The Foundation course begins with nervous system safety precisely because it's the prerequisite for everything else. Desire, presence, control, receiving — all of it lives in the body first.

Sources: Brown, B. (2012). Daring Greatly. Gotham Books. · Nagoski, E. (2021). Come As You Are (rev. ed.). Simon & Schuster. · van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. Viking, Ch. 5. · Porges, S.W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory. Norton.