Fixing a Sexless Relationship Starts with Emotional Regulation

When couples stop having sex, they usually assume it's about laziness, manipulation, or lack of attraction. But sexual disconnection is actually a signal that something deeper needs attention—usually safety, repair, and attunement. Your nervous system, emotional dysregulation, and unspoken resentment all play a part in creating sexless relationships.

In this episode of The RISE to Intimacy, I walk through the critical difference between consent and coercion, avoidance and control, protection and rejection. I explain how unresolved emotional dysregulation keeps couples stuck in cycles of shutdown and escalation, and why communication alone isn't enough without the ability to stay present in your body.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify

1:06 – ​​Why sexless relationships are about more than frequency

3:43 – The subtle difference between withholding and self-protection

6:53 – How safety (not desire) often determines sexual availability

9:36 – The unseen role emotional dysregulation plays in disconnection

12:18 – What must be restored before intimacy can return

Mentioned In Fixing a Sexless Relationship Starts with Emotional Regulation

Rise to Intimacy Free 30-Minute Consult

Leave a rating and review

Full Transcript

 Welcome to The RISE to Intimacy Podcast. I’m your host, Valerie McDonnell, and for over a decade, I’ve worked as a sex and couples therapist because intimacy used to feel really overwhelming for me. I felt a lot of pressure to perform, I was disconnected from my body, and I often felt like desire was out of reach for me.

But through my own trauma work, I stopped checking out of my body and started feeling connected to it again. I learned what it’s like to experience intimacy without fear, without shutting down, and without numbing out. Now I’m on a mission to help you do the same thing.

This podcast exists because trauma doesn’t get the last word. You can learn how to calm your body, change the story you’ve been carrying, and rebuild real connection, first with yourself and then with the people you love. Let’s begin.

Welcome to the Rise to Intimacy Podcast. I’m your host, Valerie McDonnell, licensed psychotherapist specializing in sex and couples therapy. Today we are talking about sexless relationships. From a sex therapist’s point of view, sexless relationships are really ones where couples come to see me and just say, “Hey, we haven’t been having sex for a while, and we don’t know how to essentially get back to the sex life we would like to have.”

Now, some couples I see have sex once a day, once a week, maybe once a month, but most of the couples I work with have had a sexual disconnection for a period of time, and their struggle really is either feeling pressure or there’s some avoidance. There might be some blaming happening, and they really just do not know how to reconnect and have the sex life that they used to have.

A couple describes their sex life as one that is enjoyable and fulfilling and pleasurable for both of them. However, anytime someone says sexless marriage or relationship to me, they usually are describing where there is no sex happening, and it hasn’t been happening for months at a time, and sometimes this can be years.

The impact of a sexless relationship is where we’re dealing with things like resentment and disconnection. Sometimes betrayals occur. Then this phenomenon of feeling like roommates with your partner. Then when sexual disconnection has been going on for some time, a typical pattern shows up, which looks like men feeling that their masculinity is threatened. They start questioning their worth and value because, in our society, we have sent that message to men that if you are a man who is having frequent sex or multiple partners, that you are successful when it comes to sex.

Whereas women get a much different message. For women, when they are in a sexless relationship, they’re typically feeling things like pressure to perform, which is actually a message women receive as they’re growing up, that we perform sex for our partner’s pleasure. It can take some time for a woman to realize, “Hey, we actually get to have some pleasure in this too, if we want it and if we know how to get it.” So women will start feeling pressure to perform. Sometimes that is the only way they can connect with their partner is through sex. Then this pattern really just keeps that dynamic alive.

When this pattern shows up, what can happen is where one person starts saying to me, “I feel like my partner has all the control in the relationship. I only get to have sex when they want to have sex. I feel like they are withholding sex or withdrawing sex from me as, like, punishment because I’m not cleaning the house the way they want, or I forgot to do this thing for the kids that they asked help with, or I just feel like they are complaining a lot about me not doing certain things that they would like me to do.” Now it feels like, as a result, my partner is withholding sex from me.

They start feeling very frustrated. They use words like control. We have to really take a step back from this and see, is this really control? Is this a form of sexual coercion? Or is this a person who is struggling to engage in consensual sex because their body doesn’t feel safe?

Initiating sex and saying yes to sex actually is tied to your body’s sense of safety. For many people, especially if you have experienced trauma, that safety is relational and it’s contextual. It is not just physical. Your partner’s body might not feel open to sex until their nervous system feels safe. It has to feel safe emotionally, relationally, and sometimes hormonally, really, honestly.

That doesn’t mean that person is holding power over you or trying to hold power over you. If that’s the case, it means their nervous system is responding to the environment between the two of you. So when someone says no in this situation, if their body doesn’t feel safe to say yes, if their partner initiates, or they don’t feel safe enough to initiate sex, that’s not their body rejecting their partner. It’s their body protecting them.

This is a very important and crucial difference between whether or not someone is attempting to engage in consent in a way that feels comfortable and safe for them, or whether or not someone is actually weaponizing sex and therefore engaging in sexual coercion. We have to address both of those aspects. We can’t just look at someone saying no to sex as a form of manipulation and control.

Now, can it be a form of manipulation and control? Absolutely. Do I work with couples where I’ve seen this occur? Certainly. However, looking at all couples that I work with with a trauma-informed lens means ensuring that I understand the why behind a yes or a no.

Because in healthy relationships, both partners have autonomy, meaning each person gets to decide when and how they engage sexually. Whereas control, on the other hand, or coercion, happens when one person’s boundaries or their preferences consistently silence or override their partner’s needs.

So while we all have a right to establish and maintain boundaries, if you are using sex to either punish or manipulate or dominate, that is a form of sexual coercion. It is absolutely damaging and causes someone to feel a lot of pressure around sex. Pressure around sex does not lead to increased sexual desire.

What often might look like withholding is actually avoidance rooted in hurt or exhaustion or fear. Then the goal of therapy becomes restoring a mutual influence, not assigning blame. Trying to discover the whys behind someone giving a no and the why behind someone giving a yes. We want to understand both of those dynamics.

So some questions you can ask to figure this out are, “Does your partner say no because they feel emotionally disconnected?” “Does your partner stop initiating because they’re afraid of rejection?” “Does resentment build because emotional bids for connection are ignored until sex is on the table?” And “Is your partner anxious or shut down or dysregulated, and therefore you interpret that as disinterest?”

These questions can help you get curious and discover if this disconnection, and if you are getting a no and therefore feeling rejected around sex, if this is because of avoidance, which can be mutual or misattunement, or if there is some type of manipulation or control happening.

If the answer is yes to any of those questions for you or your partner, there are several steps you can take to start fixing the sexual disconnection between the two of you and rebuilding a sex life that you both find desirable and pleasurable. This is the work I do all the time when I see couples and even individuals.

One of the biggest things that we would work on would be this emotional dysregulation. Essentially, when you struggle to remain calm and present and soothe yourself in the moment of distress or conflict, this is what I consider to be the biggest issue that causes disconnection, whether it’s emotionally or physically, with most of the couples that I work with.

In fact, I really think that we should start teaching the skills around emotional regulation when kids are as young as three years old. If we all just learned how to regulate our bodies, how to soothe ourselves so that we can actually hear information that someone is giving us, and we can therefore take it in and analyze it, and we can do things like acknowledge that somebody else has a different perspective than us, even if they just had the same experience as us, this is a big issue for a lot of people.

We tend to think that if we have a different perspective and therefore if we feel very differently about an experience, that one person is right and one person is wrong, and that’s simply not true. All of us are having experiences with multiple other people at any given time, and based on our histories, we’re going to interpret the experience in one way. It might be very different from somebody else’s, and therefore we’re going to feel very differently.

For example, if I was bitten by a large dog when I was five years old, and you and I are taking a walk in the neighborhood and we both see a large dog at the end of the road, no collar, no leash, we don’t see an owner nearby, and you turn to me because you love big dogs.

You’ve always grown up with big dogs, and you find them awesome and very nurturing and just like a kind of a big teddy bear. You’re like, “Hey, let’s go. Let’s go pet this dog.” I look at you, and I’m like, “No, let’s turn around and go the other way.” Now we both just had the same experience, exact same experience. But based on our histories, we interpreted it very differently. Whereas you might be feeling excited and nostalgic, I might be feeling scared and anxious. So that doesn’t mean one of us is right and one of us is wrong. It just means that the way we interpret and therefore feel about an experience we just had typically is based on our past experiences. That’s how we learn.

Whenever I’m working with a couple and I start teaching them about communication, the first step for me is to get them to be able to both acknowledge and validate their partner’s experience. A lot of people get tripped up here, but once we can acknowledge and validate, we need to move into conflict resolution. In the moments when we are engaging in a hot topic that could possibly lead to conflict, we often get tripped up in this part of acknowledgement and validation.

Things happen like you hear your partner say, “Hey, it really felt shitty when you didn’t text me the other night when you landed. Like you said you would. I was worried that maybe something happened to you.” If your response there then is, “Oh, well, you know, I didn’t have Wi-Fi, and it took me a while to get to the hotel,” and a lot of explaining your point of view, right then and there we are getting off of the most important thing that should happen first, which is, let me acknowledge that my partner’s experience of this led to them feeling anxious or angry.

Let me join them in that first, because when I immediately move into explaining why that happened on my end, then I have not taken that time to join them and connect with them. They can often feel like, “Oh, my partner never sees and hears me. They’re never really listening to me.” So the acknowledgement and validation piece is very important.

During those times, we need to also engage in emotional regulation because when we don’t, what tends to happen is somebody starts shutting down or somebody starts escalating, gets very loud, and starts yelling. Then we trigger each other. Then the person that’s escalated keeps going, going, going. The person that’s shutting down continues to shut down. Then certainly neither one of those people are hearing each other. Therefore, they cannot start trying to resolve an issue because they have moved out of the logical brain and gone into the primal brain, which only wants to protect us at that moment.

If you are coming to see me or another therapist, we really have to work on communication in a way that addresses emotional regulation. If we try to teach communication but we don’t address the emotional regulation piece, many people stay disconnected, or they might get a little bit better, but then when they are home alone, they’re often getting tripped up again in the same pattern of dysregulation that leads to each person becoming triggered and therefore us never really hearing the point and being able to join our partner in the pain they’re experiencing.

But because nobody ever teaches us emotional regulation, we will stay so disconnected as couples because of the fear of my partner’s response. That fear of my partner’s response is also my fear that whatever they say or however they react will be so overwhelming for me that I don’t know how to then stay within that conversation and move to resolution. Or then I, instead of getting my needs met in terms of my partner hearing something that I didn’t like or didn’t feel good to me and therefore hopefully us figuring out a way to not repeat that, to have that happen again, instead of that happening, I’m going to have to tend to try to make my partner feel better, or I’m going to be stuck in guilt or shame because I made them feel bad. That in itself, again, that is a challenge around emotional regulation.

So much of what I do in couples therapy and sex therapy addresses the emotional regulation piece because when we don’t do that, then we don’t know how to overcome sexual disconnection due to resentment, or fear of rejection, or because of performance anxiety, or because I am afraid that if I become vulnerable that I will be shamed. If sex isn’t successful, that’s what I hear a lot, which we have to define. What does that really mean?

So emotional regulation is a big piece of this. I know we started with this conversation around sexless relationships and then the idea of whether or not if our partner is giving us a no around sex has to do with control or consent in terms of the body wanting to maintain safety, using a no to protect oneself, which can often be misinterpreted as control or coercion.

So we talked about that some, and then I moved into this place of discussing the importance of emotional regulation because we cannot address anything around consent or control or really safety to move back into a sexual place with our partner without learning about emotional regulation.

That is a big part of what I teach in what I call the RISE Model, which is just a framework I use with all couples that I see. It’s a step-by-step process. If you want to learn more about that, head over to my website at risetointimacy.com. You can book a consultation there with me. I appreciate all of you so much for listening. Don’t forget, sex therapy isn’t for people who are broken. It’s for people who are brave enough to look beneath the surface.

Thanks for listening to The RISE to Intimacy Podcast. If today’s episode resonated with you, know that healing is possible and you don’t have to do it alone. If you’re enjoying the show, please leave a rating and review for us at ratethispodcast.com/rise. It really helps others find us.

I’m so grateful for all your support. You can learn more about my coaching packages for individuals and couples at risetointimacy.com. Remember, sex therapy isn’t for people who are broken. It’s for people brave enough to look beneath the surface.