I want to tell you about a woman I worked with recently. Not because her story is unusual. But because it's so common it could be almost any of you reading this right now.

She told me she emailed me three times before she actually booked a call. The first two times she wrote a message, hovered over send, and deleted it. The third time she hit send before she could think about it. Her exact words: "If I don't do this now I never will."

The woman on the other side of the call

Let's call her Sarah. (Not her real name, obviously.)

Sarah had been with her husband for eleven years. Two kids under seven… a good relationship by every visible measure. They laughed together. They co-parented well. They were a great team!

But she hadn't wanted sex in three years. And she'd spent most of that time quietly convinced something was fundamentally wrong with her.

Sound familiar? If you've been reading the last couple of weeks, you might recognise what was happening. Sarah was experiencing responsive desire (which we talked about last week), but she didn't know that yet. All she knew was that desire used to just show up, and now it didn't.

And she'd built an entire identity around that absence: I'm just not a sexual person anymore.

She told me on that first call that she'd never said any of this out loud before. Not to her friends, not to her GP. Not to her husband. She'd been carrying it completely alone for three years.

What she actually came in with

Here's what Sarah described to me in that first conversation. And I'm sharing this because I hear some version of it almost every single day.

She felt guilty. Constantly. Every time her husband touched her and she felt nothing. Every time she said "not tonight" and saw something in his face shift, just slightly, before he said "that's fine" and rolled over. She knew he was hurt. She knew they were drifting. And she felt completely responsible for it.

She felt confused. She still loved him. Still found him objectively attractive. Still wanted the relationship. But the wanting had just... stopped. And she couldn't explain why. She'd tried googling it. She'd tried reading articles. She'd even tried just pushing through it a few times, which made everything worse.

And she felt scared. Not of the problem itself. But of what it meant. That maybe they were past the point of fixing it. That maybe this was just what their relationship looked like now. That maybe she'd left it too long.

What we actually worked on

Here's what most people don't understand about this work. It's not about "getting your libido back." It's not about techniques or tips or tricks to feel more turned on.

What Sarah and I worked on was much simpler than that. And much deeper.

First, we worked on understanding. I explained responsive desire, just like I explained it to you last week. I watched the same thing happen that always happens. She went quiet. Her eyes filled up. She said, "Why has nobody ever told me this?"

Once she understood that she wasn't broken, that her desire hadn't vanished but was simply waiting for different conditions than the ones she'd been providing, everything shifted. Not overnight. But the shame started to lift almost immediately.

Then we worked on the relationship dynamic. The avoidance pattern she and her husband had fallen into. The way his initiating had become loaded with expectation and her declining had become loaded with guilt. The way they'd both stopped touching each other altogether because every touch felt like it was leading somewhere, and that somewhere had become too pressured for either of them.

We worked on rebuilding non-sexual intimacy first. Touch that wasn't going anywhere. Connection that didn't carry the weight of "is this going to lead to sex tonight?" This is something I do with almost every woman I work with, and it's often the thing that unlocks everything else.

And then, gradually, we worked on desire itself. Not forcing it. Not scheduling it. Creating the conditions for it to show up on its own terms.

What changed

I'm not going to tell you it was magical or instant. It wasn't. It was slow, honest, sometimes uncomfortable work.

But three months in, Sarah sent me a message that I've kept. She said:

"We had sex on Saturday and for the first time in years, I actually wanted to. I wasn't doing it for him. I wasn't doing it out of guilt. I just... wanted to. I forgot what that felt like."

Her husband had noticed too. Not just the sex. The way she'd started reaching for his hand again. The way she'd stopped flinching when he came up behind her in the kitchen. The way they'd started talking, properly talking, about things they'd been avoiding for years.

She told me the biggest change wasn't even the desire coming back. It was that she'd stopped feeling broken!

The thing she said that stayed with me

On our last session, Sarah said something I think about often. She said, "The scary part wasn't the work. The scary part was the three years I spent doing nothing. Because every month it got a little harder to imagine things could be different."

She nearly didn't send that email. She nearly stayed in the quiet. And if she had, I think she'd still be lying in bed at night wondering what was wrong with her.

"What she said"

"I spent three years thinking I was broken. It took three months to realise I never was."

If any of Sarah's story sounds like yours, I'd love to talk to you. I offer free 20-minute discovery calls. No pressure, no awkwardness, just an honest conversation about where you are and whether working together makes sense.

Most women tell me it's the first time they've ever spoken about this openly. And almost all of them say the same thing afterwards: "I wish I'd done this sooner."

Warmly, Lexy 🧡

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