Why Sex Feels Like Pressure Instead of Pleasure

Sex is everywhere. Yet meaningful conversations about intimacy are still wrapped in silence, shame, and confusion. Low desire, erectile struggles, or difficulty with orgasm get framed as personal failures when they should be framed as messages from the body shaped by culture, conditioning, anxiety, and emotional overwhelm. 

In this premiere episode of The RISE to Intimacy Podcast, I invite you to gain a deeper understanding of what actually gets in the way of desire. Drawing on my decade of experience as a sex and couples therapist, I unpack how social expectations quietly disconnect us from our bodies, how performance anxiety hijacks pleasure, and why emotional regulation and communication are the missing foundations for intimacy. 

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2:37 – A cultural myth that quietly shapes how desire shows up or shuts down in women

5:42 – An example of how men also face societal conditioning during their childhood

7:34 – The impact on romantic relationships between men and women as a result

8:33 – How performance anxiety can sneak into the bedroom

11:23 – How a lack of emotional regulation creates distance before sex even enters the picture

12:25 – What rebuilding desire actually requires 

Mentioned In Why Sex Feels Like Pressure Instead of Pleasure

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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.

So even though it’s 2025, sex is still very much a taboo topic. You’ve probably found yourself scrolling through Google or TikTok, going down a deep, dark rabbit hole of confusion, looking for some quick fixes on how to improve your sex life.

Maybe you’re asking questions like, “Is there something wrong with me if I don’t orgasm?” or “If I’m in my 20s or 30s and I’m struggling to get an erection, does that mean I need Viagra?” or simply, “How do I talk to my partner about sex?”

But when you’re scrolling through Google and TikTok, even if you’ve found an extensive blog or article discussing the topic you’re searching, typically, we need additional help to truly improve our sex life. There’s a few key things that exist as barriers for most of the clients that I see that, when they discover the real impact of them, they are surprised that they simply misunderstood or just dismissed it because these things are very easy to ignore, dismiss, or misunderstand the real impact of.

Mostly in this podcast, I want you to know that experiencing low sexual desire is not a flaw, and it doesn’t mean there’s a problem with you. Even struggling to get or maintain an erection does not mean that there’s a problem with you.

Yes, there might be a few things we need to check out, make sure everything physiologically is working really well. But if you’re coming to see me, you’re typically being impacted by a few key things that are barriers. So the first one is the impact of social conditioning.

The impact of social conditioning doesn’t just affect females or males. It impacts all genders. First, I’m going to talk about the impact on women.

Let me refer to a popular cultural myth. Yes, this might be a bit of a throwback to the early 2000s, or at least when I first heard of this phrase, which is “a lady in the streets and a freak in the sheets.”

Who is the lady in the streets? The lady in the streets is composed. She’s professional. She is respectable. She’s loyal and attractive. She is good arm candy.

The freak in the sheets is someone who is uninhibited. She is erotic. She is passionate. She feels very much free to express herself sexually.

Well, the problem here in wanting both a lady in the streets and a freak in the sheets is that those two states rarely coexist easily. We’re talking about the cultural split here between who women are expected to be and who they’re allowed to be.

See, from a young age, women are taught to be good girls. Be polite and nurturing, but not too emotional or you’re a drama queen. Don’t be too opinionated or you’re high maintenance. Be attractive, but not too attractive or you’re asking for it. Essentially, tune into everyone else’s needs and tune out your own.

So over time, the lady in the streets persona becomes a type of armor that we put on. It signals, “I’m safe, I’m respectable, and you can trust me.” But unfortunately, that same armor disconnects women from their own bodies and therefore their ability to experience pleasure, and certainly their ability to feel safe enough to express and experience pleasure.

So then, flipping the switch to the freak in the sheets, here comes first the lady in the streets who enters the home. She’s been wearing a power suit all day. She’s been a boss babe. She’s been doing all the things. She’s running the meeting. She’s running the errands. She’s checking items off her to-do list.

She comes home, and now she may be cleaning, doing laundry, taking care of kids, possibly doing the nighttime routine. But when her partner walks in, she is ready right then and there to take him, to rip all of his clothes off, and to have her way with him.

Hopefully, that shines a light on some of the disparity between those two personas.

Of course, men don’t escape the societal conditioning either. However, it’s a different set of rules. Men are told to be strong. Boys don’t cry. Suck it up. Be a real man.

A good example of when this starts, it can be from such an early age, is if you go to a playground and you see a little three-year-old boy fall and get a bloody knee. The parent’s response, and not every parent’s response, but the parent’s response is often something like standing up and staying at a bit of a distance or maybe walking over very slowly.

Typically, the message received by the child is something like, “You’re okay, buddy. Brush it off. Go play. You’re fine.”

So in that moment, that little boy receives a very specific message, "When I experience pain, even if it’s pain that you can see, I don’t get help. I have to help myself. I have to just keep that on the inside and deal with it and move on with life."

Whereas the experience of the little three-year-old girl on the playground who falls and scrapes her knee, those parents typically go over to her. They typically pick her up, give her a hug. They ask her, “Are you okay, honey? Are you okay? Let me see. Let me kiss it. Let mommy or daddy put a Band-Aid on and kiss your boo-boo. Are you okay to go back and play?”

In that moment, that little girl receives a much opposite message than that little boy did. The little girl receives a message that says, "When I’m in pain, I get help. When I’m in pain, I get support. That feels good. I’m taken care of."

Then the impact here, as the little boy and little girl grow up, is that if they get into a romantic relationship with each other, the way the little girl typically wants to build a connection that ultimately will lead into a physical connection is through talking about how she feels, is by getting support when she’s hurt or when she’s in pain.

But then when she looks to her male partner for that support, for that nurturing and that caretaking, he has no idea how to do it. He also doesn’t know he has permission to ask her for help around that.

Then those two people cannot communicate. If you can’t communicate in a way that doesn’t always escalate into a conflict, then it’s very hard to nurture an emotional connection and certainly to nurture physical intimacy.

Besides social conditioning, another big barrier to intimacy for couples is performance anxiety. Performance anxiety around sex can also first start at a young age.

A good example of this is the kid who gets caught masturbating. Then the parent’s reaction to that, and it’s not always a parent, sometimes it might be a friend, sometimes it might be another adult, but mostly it might be a parent or friend, let’s say. The response around that can cause shame in that child.

If that child is told, “Oh my gosh, we don’t do that,” or “You don’t do that,” or “You only do that behind closed doors,” then again, that child is receiving a message around sex that says there’s things around sex that are not okay, that I hide and that I keep to myself. That person then becomes someone who does not go throughout life nurturing the part of themselves that has the ability to be sexually expressive because that wasn’t safe before, or because they were told it was wrong, or they felt like a bad person.

However, performance anxiety doesn’t always start out in childhood. It can also happen because of some experience we have with a sexual partner. It can also happen because one time we had trouble with getting an erection and our partner was very confused by it and questioned if we were attracted to them. That’s actually pretty common.

Side note, it’s almost never because the person is not attracted to you. So I know that is something that many women who see me feel, like, “My partner doesn’t desire me because they don’t easily get or maintain an erection.” But if you’re seeing me for erectile dysfunction, it is due, and it’s always due, to performance anxiety.

Yes, could that be from past traumas? Yes, it could. Could it be from growing up in a family that never talked about sex, or that when they did talk about sex, only talked about it with an abstinence-only perspective? Yes, it could.

There are many reasons performance anxiety occurs, but when anxiety does occur in the sexual context, that is a big prohibiting factor for sexual desire, not just for men, also for women. For women, it typically shows up like an inability to experience orgasm. Again, for men, yes, there’s very much also a physiological response with struggling to get an erection.

We got social conditioning. We got performance anxiety. The third thing, and it’s such an important thing, and it’s something I teach all my clients who come see me, it’s a two-for-one, which is emotional regulation, and that goes along with communication.

So most people, when they come and see me and say, “We don’t know how to communicate,” or “Whenever we try to talk about things, we fight,” when it comes down to it, they are experiencing trouble with regulating their emotions. When they cannot do that well, they consistently get stuck in a cyclical pattern of communicating that feels like a land to nowhere.

So the inability to emotionally regulate, and that means soothe yourself in the moment of distress or discomfort, the inability to do that becomes a really big barrier to sexual intimacy and even emotional intimacy.

So if you’re having challenges with any of those barriers, know that what it takes to rebuild desire with your partner is patience and a sense of curiosity and flexibility, and very importantly, trust. Trust that we will still be accepted if we reveal our vulnerabilities to our partner. But it doesn’t require a new partner altogether. It just requires a new way of connecting with your partner.

So if you’re interested in learning how to rekindle your sexual desire and build a new sexual template with your partner, head over to my website, risetointimacy.com, and there you can click Free Consult to have a 30-minute consultation with me.

Please join me in episode two, where I’ll share more about who I am, why I do this work, and what makes my approach different. Thank you so much for listening. Remember, sex therapy isn’t for people who are broken. It’s for people 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.