Annual Trip to Your Gynocologist
For most women, a visit to the gynecologist includes a vulnerable and unpleasant experience and necessity: A Pap smear to scrape cells from the back of the cervix is no picnic. However, this screening test is a matter of life and death in some instances. A visit with the OB/GYN is a gateway to prime the much-needed conversation: How is your sex life? Lack of intimacy in your relationship and issues regarding sexual well-being are challenging to reveal on the examination table while in the deeply intimate position of being probed by your OB/GYN.
Marital Distress
Michele Weiner-Davis, a relationship expert, asserts that the lack of intimacy is the real threat and the marriage or relationship is at risk for infidelity and divorce. Discovering distress in the bedroom among couple is then easier to uncover with the Gynecologist. Having a healthy and satisfied relationship is of great interest to your OB/GYN. Marital distress may have physical and emotional consequences similar to broken heart syndrome, also known as cardiomyopathy.
Suffer in Silence
Intimacy is treasured in the relationship, and when couples feel disconnected they experience emotional curtness, and couples experience enormous rejection, and intimate closeness dissolves. Relationship distress and divorce are associated with psychological health problems, anxiety, depression and a relatively small number of couples ever seek counseling or consider asking for a referral for a relationship therapist from their Gynecologist.
Stop Doing These Things
In “7 Things Your OB/GYN Wishes You’d Stop Doing In Your Relationship”, Carina Woolf quotes gynecologist Debra Wickman:
“Less attention to sexual health can be a form of denial, creating a disconnection between the psychological frame of everyday function, and the physical needs of her body. Sexual health is much more than physical demonstration, and needs to reflect the full expression of body, mind, emotion and connection — to self, partner, and life overall.”
Women often put their sexual needs on the back burner and deferring to the daily needs of their partner, kids, and employers. Wickerman says that it is essential for the relationship to foster self-esteem and overall satisfaction by nurturing a gratifying intimate relationship.
Be Vulnerable
When triaging martial distress my client’s intimacy assessment provides a window into the disconnection experienced in the relationship not only physically but emotionally, psychologically and spiritually. The next time you receive an annual reminder for an OB/GYN visit, it may serve as a big sigh of relief to have your vulnerable parts on full display, to get help, and to restore balance in your relationship.