Question for a psychologist:

Hello.

I have been married to my husband for 15 years. On this moment 5 children. I'm tired of my husband's misunderstanding and irritability. My mother raised me strictly and did not allow any liberties with the guys. Future husband He loved me, and I allowed myself to be loved. After 5 years of courtship, he finally married me to himself. Somehow things didn’t work out right away for us with intimacy. I was a virgin and was very afraid of my wedding night. I understood what was needed, but I couldn’t. Every night of the ball is torture for me. He tried to relax me with valerian, alcohol, and tried to take me by force. Everything happened after a month of trying. I was scared and in pain. After that, for 15 years I tried to find different excuses to avoid sex. He's tired of me always turning him down. Sometimes I step over myself and give in, but I understand that I don’t need it. I’m irritated by his touches, I try not to show it, and I wait for the end. Although, when the initiative comes from me, everything goes amazingly. But then I close again. I am happy when I have critical days, and I have the right to relax. Pregnancy, the birth of children, the period of breastfeeding - this is all that relieves me of marital debt. He instilled in me the idea that I was frigid. And I almost believed it. But about a year ago, almost before my husband’s eyes, I began an affair with his handsome friend. I cheated on my husband for the first (and hopefully last) time. My mind was blown away. There was passion and mutual desire. There could be no talk of any frigidity.

Maybe I can’t live without love? Against the background of the lack of intimacy, we began to alienate ourselves from each other and became more irritable. It turns out vicious circle. I cannot get closer to my husband after a quarrel or irritability. Usually spouses make up at night, but this is not about us. In my case, intimacy and love are synonyms. And if my husband allows himself insults and boorish attitude towards me, then I close myself off even more. Please, help. I understand that I am doing wrong, that I am selfish. How can I get over myself and overcome my complexes?

Psychologist Draga Natalia Igorevna answers the question.

Hello Tatiana!

Perhaps 37 years is not the most suitable age for such abstinence. Therefore, I really hope that my recommendations will be useful to you.

Let's start with the fact that female sexuality and attraction are primarily influenced by emotions. Accordingly, sexual problems women are solved by psychological solutions.

The husband’s “misunderstanding and irritability” will not have any beneficial effect on the situation.

To begin with, talk to him frankly, tell him that you love him and want to save the marriage, return it, or rather, bring passion into your relationship!

To do this, offer him a friendly form of communication for a while. This does not mean that you will live like strangers on the same territory, but be friends in the literal sense of the word.

During your "friendship", think about what attracted you to your lover?

Most likely appearance.

Start changing your husband's image. Sign up for a gym together and start running in the morning. Douse it with your loved ones men's perfume. Buy him new pajamas or a dressing gown, give him a new shirt or, conversely, a tracksuit.

It is clear that the transition from friendship to intimacy must be initiated by you! But only when you want it. And for this, think about what you want in sex? What turns you on? What have you never tried before?

I am more than sure that you have never watched erotic films or entered sex shops. It's time to start! When you have fantasies, don’t be shy, tell your husband about them.

Well, advice that may sound like mockery for a mother of 5 children is to avoid stress and fatigue.

Touch is a powerful tool with which you can control people's feelings.

Man has one of the most advanced visual apparatuses. He has the ability to hear. Basically, that's all you need for productive communication. However, we still need to touch someone with our hands.

Why do we still shake hands when we can just wave? Why do we pat ourselves on the knee when we talk about something interesting, promising, tempting? What is the point of touching the shoulder of a person whose behavior we are unhappy with? After all, it is quite possible to use a stern, loud voice, and the message of our discontent will be conveyed.

Why do we need to touch our interlocutor, why do we touch ourselves and what does touch give us in general - we will talk about this in our blog today.

Sex or not?

Let's consider a fairly standard situation. Two young human creatures of both sexes are talking. The essence of the conversation is to resolve some business issue. During the conversation, the young man periodically strokes his knee, and the girl strokes her shoulder with approximately the same frequency. From previous blogs of the “School of Nonverbalism” you already know that such stroking speaks of a feeling of sympathy for each other, and young people thus simply replace the impossible touch of their interlocutor with a possible touch of themselves.

Let's take another case. Two serious businessmen at a serious age are discussing a contract. And closer to the end of the negotiations, having reached mutually beneficial agreements, they begin to stroke their thighs. There shouldn't be any sexuality here. Men are deeply straight and same-sex relationships have no sexual context for them. There is no sexuality, but there is touching.

Now the third situation. A fashionable business coach conducts team building training, known as team building. The training participants are employees of the same department, and there is a deep chasm in the relationship. At the very beginning of the training, the business coach asks everyone to hold hands and perform some exercises without breaking their hands. And this happens periodically during the lesson. As a result, relationships improve, and after some time the department shows the ability to work as one, cohesive team. Well, it wasn’t thanks to sexual energy that this happened?

From the above scenes we can draw some conclusions:

1. Touching is not always exclusively sexual.
2. Touching can not only facilitate sexual interaction, but also have a beneficial effect on basic business relationships.
3. Touch improves any type of relationship, both sexual and overtly asexual.

Why are we touching?

The challenges that the evolution of human communication has posed to touching ourselves and each other are numerous. But the most important of them are:

1. Demonstration of friendliness. The very fact of the invasion living space causes rejection of another person. But if this invasion is of a soft, cautious nature (which is very convenient to demonstrate with a light touch), then the participants in the contact are tuned to a positive attitude towards each other, even if they do not know each other.

2. Attracting attention. In a situation when everyone around is shouting or your subject is too concentrated on something of his own, touch helps to draw attention to himself, thus distinguishing himself from the surrounding information noise.

3. Restoring mental balance. Sometimes we need care and protection. In this case, touching someone we trust helps us feel the emotions we need.

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4. Gaining leadership. Touching helps in building a hierarchy of human relationships. With the help of certain gestures that serve to demonstrate status, we force someone to shut up, stop, or give in to our claims.​​​​​​

What happens to us when we are touched strangers? The fact is that we only allow the closest people for a short distance, for whom we have warm feelings (except for cases when we ourselves invade the living space of a hated enemy in order to strangle him). From these people we often receive both psychological and purely physical touches. And we are developing a peculiar conditioned reflex"safe person = touch."

When stranger invades our living space, we experience excitement and indignation about it. But only until the moment of touch. As soon as he touches us, our conditioned reflex forces us to change our attitude towards this person to a more positive one, because, again, “touch = safe person.”

This principle is often used in marketing. For example, in the catering industry. An experiment was conducted in one of the restaurants. One part of the waiters was supposed to lightly touch the client with their hand (the back of the hand) while serving clients. It was necessary to touch in the zone of neutral contacts - in the area of ​​the visitor’s hand or forearm. That is, the touch should have been clearly neutral, as if random.

The second group of waiters were not supposed to touch customers under any circumstances.

As a result, waiters from the first group received 20-30% more tips than waiters from the second group. In addition, customers rated the work of the waiters who interacted with them as more friendly and professional.

Why was this particular effect achieved? The answer is obvious. A conditioned reflex is triggered. We feel the touch of another person and automatically begin to treat him the same way we treat everyone who has the right to touch us like that. We humans are generally quite automatic creatures. Many processes occur in us completely independently of our consciousness. Cunning waiters often take advantage of this.

Seduction and power

However, our manipulations do not end at catering facilities alone. One of the most saturated branches of human communication with manipulative techniques is professional seduction.

Seduction professionals try to touch their “victim” for any reason in the first few seconds of communication. This reduces natural resistance, increases confidence, etc.

Sex in general is involved in communication over a short distance, so touching in sexual or role-playing relationships plays a leading role. Moreover, we can touch not only the object of our interest, but also ourselves. And this is one of the most accurate diagnostic tools. If a girl or guy, while communicating with a member of the opposite sex, strokes himself, then this only means that he wants to stroke not his own body, but the body of the person standing opposite.

Another important area of ​​application of touch is the area of ​​power struggle. The struggle for power does not always involve the use of force. Often a light touch is enough to silence the interlocutor or retreat from their positions. Women most often use these methods of struggle. Men are more likely to have a straightforward and forceful style of demonstrating their status. Men are chasing showiness. A woman prefers a more economical way to demonstrate who is boss in the house. Its trick is efficiency.

Sometimes you can witness a scene where a married couple sorts things out with a representative of some service department. The man screams and waves his arms until the real leader—his wife—steps in. She gently but commandingly places her hand on his shoulder (a gesture indicating her more high status in the system of their relationship) and the man wilts. Hands drop, shoulders drop, and mood also ceases to show signs of tone. A more senior individual arrived, and the leader’s yellow jersey moved to her, along with the authority to make the final decision. And all it took was one light touch.

How to Touch Effectively

From the above, one may get the impression that touch has a direct magical power and are able to act effectively in any situation and by anyone. This is wrong.

For touch to bear fruit, several conditions are necessary:

1. Appearance. A person touching us should not cause us disgust or rejection, we should not feel fear towards him. In general, it should look either good or at least neutral. Otherwise, the strength of the emotion that we might feel for him will change sign to the opposite.
2. The nature of touch. The touch should not be “forceful” in nature. It should be easy. A strong touch is perceived as pressure. And here a physical law comes into play in our psyche - the force of action is equal to the force of reaction. The duration of the touch also matters. Too much contact will result in loss of effect.
3. Touch speed. Sharp, quick touches lead to a negative reaction. The smoother the touch, the greater the effect it can achieve. There is a legend that in a geisha school in medieval Japan, little girls learned to touch water without causing ripples on its surface. Such a touch was considered both a standard of state of mind and a sign of the ability to exert maximum influence on the client with a minimum of contact.
4. Place of touch. Touch a stranger or unfamiliar person only in a socially acceptable area. This is mainly the arm area in the area of ​​the hands or forearms. Extremely rarely - above the elbow. It is advisable that the touch be made from the front. Of course, there are options when an unfamiliar waitress touches her chest to a man’s shoulder when taking an order or when changing dishes. But his companion is unlikely to like such a touch.
5. Circumstances of touch. The calmer the environment in which the touch occurs, the greater the effect it will have. In an aggressive environment and in a state of excitement, we are unlikely to notice that someone has touched us. Well, except when our spouse controls us. But here the habit of obedience comes into force, developed and consolidated by years of joint marital battles for supremacy.

Touch allows us to improve relationships with other people, win them over, and create conditions for productive conversation.

Touch serves as a marker of an established relationship. If sparks of passion or at least goodwill constantly jump between spouses, then it will definitely find manifestation in touch.

Touch can reduce the effects of stress. It’s amazing how easy it is, it turns out, to disconnect from the hassle at work, everyday difficulties, sorrows and sadness - you just need your loved one to touch us.

Touch also allows us to manipulate and control other people. Subtle and true or rude and unprincipled. Touching serves as a reliable tool for achieving selfish interest in human communication.

Homework

To learn how to use touch and achieve more in the process of communication, I suggest doing some homework.

1. Easy level. Try asking your colleague for something by touching him with your hand (using the recommendations given above). For example, you touch him and say: "Could you...". Try a similar experiment with different people and evaluate which of them, while fulfilling your request, smiled, which frowned, which, after fulfilling the request, demonstrated a readiness to do something else for you. If you have a pronounced off-scale sexual attractiveness, then try to perform this exercise on colleagues of the same sex, since the opposite sex will do everything for you.
2. Average level. There are probably people around you who don’t really like you. Try talking to them about something that concerns both of you, using touch before you start the conversation. Just don’t try to talk to those who openly dislike you. Otherwise, the touch may turn against you.
3. Extreme. If you are in a quarrel with your loved one, colleague, friend, use touch during a showdown. Only in no case at the beginning of the conversation, but closer to its middle, when you have already listened to your interlocutor (without interrupting him even once, if possible), but have not yet expressed your arguments to him.

Touching helps you control and manipulate another person’s attitude towards you. Communication is always a conflict of interest. Even if you are talking with your mother, friend, colleague or partner, the conversation still follows a script and on a topic that is closer to only one of you. Therefore, in communication, one is always the leader, and the second is the follower. So if you are trying to manage your interlocutor, do it correctly and effectively.

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Fear of touch is a very common pathology. According to statistical research, a huge number of residents of megacities suffer from one form or another of this disorder. Of course, this phobia negatively affects a person’s life, significantly worsening its quality, making social and sometimes romantic contacts impossible.

It is not surprising that many people are interested in additional information about this pathology. What is the fear of touch called? What symptoms should you pay attention to? What is the reason for the development of this phobia? Are there effective methods therapy? Does drug treatment help in this case? The answers to these questions will be useful to many readers.

Fear of touching: phobia and its features

Haptophobia is a person's pathological fear of being touched by people. In science, other terms are used to denote this condition - these are aphephobia, haphophobia, thixophobia.

This disorder is diagnosed in many residents of megacities. As a rule, the disease begins with unpleasant sensations during physical contact. And if at first the fear of the touch of strangers only slightly complicates the patient’s life, then as the pathology progresses the problems become more pronounced. Immunity and even disgust appears when in contact with relatives, family members, and close people. Unpleasant sensations turn into obsessive fear, which makes any social interaction impossible.

How to recognize a haptophobe?

In fact, people suffering from such a phobia have very characteristic behavior. Any physical contact causes the patient emotional discomfort, a feeling of fear and disgust. This is often reflected in their reaction, for example, a person may pull away or suddenly pull their hand away when shaking hands. Facial expressions also change.

A haptophobe is a person who prefers solitude. Going to a party or any other place where there is a possibility of physical contact requires long-term mental preparation. Such people rarely appear in busy places, since there is always a risk of accidental touching in a crowd. In the absence of therapy, discomfort also appears during contact with loved ones, for example, children, spouse. Naturally, such behavior greatly complicates social life person, often the patient ends up completely alone.

Physical symptoms of mental disorder

Closedness, secrecy, a tendency to loneliness and a reluctance to leave the comfort zone are not all signs of pathology. Patients note that the phobia is accompanied by quite tangible physical impairments. Physical contact often causes the following symptoms:

• feeling of disgust and disgust upon contact;
• severe dizziness, nausea, which often ends with vomiting;
• sudden weakness, tremors of the limbs;
• a feeling of unreality of what is happening, distortion of perception;
• panic attack accompanied by difficulty breathing (patients begin to choke).

If a person can somehow try to hide emotional experiences, then it is almost impossible to cope with the physical manifestations of a phobia.

The role of personality characteristics in the development of pathology

Of course, fear of touch can be caused by personality developmental characteristics. For example, some people value personal space above all else—they cannot tolerate familiarity, physical contact, or communication with strangers.

Nationalist beliefs cannot be written off either. For example, a person may be uncomfortable with the touch of a person of a different nationality or race. Risk factors include increased disgust, pathological pedantry and the desire for cleanliness. Fear of touching often develops in people with asexuality.

All of the above personal characteristics are not pathologies in themselves, but in some cases they can develop into real phobias, which are much more difficult to control.

Fear of touch: reasons

In fact, the reasons for the development of this phobia can be extremely diverse. There are several of the most common risk factors.

• According to statistics, people with autism spectrum disorders and intellectual development disorders often react inappropriately to physical contact.
• The phobia may be associated with violations by nervous system(psychasthenia, neurosis obsessive states), various personality disorders (obsessive-compulsive disorder).
• Fear of touch often develops as a result of physical or physical trauma suffered in childhood. sexual violence. There are cases where haptophobia developed in people whose childhood was spent under total control by their parents.
• The specifics of the work also matter. For example, medical workers, firefighters and workers of some other processions regularly have to deal with sick and injured people. Often such contacts cause disgust, and this feeling is then transferred to the touch of loved ones.

What other phobias can this pathology be associated with?

In fact, fear of touch is often associated with other phobias. For example, sometimes patients' fear of contact is associated with asexuality. Any touch is perceived by a person as something sexual, and since there is no sexual desire and satisfaction from sexual intercourse, the contact itself only causes disgust.

Haptophobia is often associated with a fear of being in crowds, sensitivity to noise and other environmental factors. There is often a pathological fear of catching an infection.

Diagnostic measures

Fear of touch is a pathology that can be diagnosed by an experienced psychotherapist. During the session, the doctor is obliged to collect the most complete medical history of the patient, study the characteristics of his behavior, the presence of certain symptoms, and identify situations that provoke the appearance of physical manifestations of the phobia.

Of course, the process does not end there. Diagnostics smoothly flows into treatment, since for successful therapy it is extremely important to accurately determine the causes of fear, be it psychological trauma which happened in early childhood, or hormonal imbalances.

When is drug treatment necessary?

As already mentioned, this particular phobia can be the result of hormonal disorders in the human body. Fear of people's touch is sometimes associated with a decrease in the level of thyroid hormones and a decrease in the amount of synthesized sex hormones. In such cases, hormone replacement therapy is indicated.

In addition, fear of touch is often associated with neuroses and various forms of psychoasthenia. In such cases, it may be advisable to take sedative medications, as well as antipsychotics. If, along with haptophobia, the patient has a tendency to depression, then the use of antidepressants would be justified.

Psychotherapy and its features

Drug therapy can only relieve some symptoms and prevent the development of possible complications, thereby easing the patient's condition. But the fear of people’s touch is a pathology that develops and progresses over the years. To completely eliminate it, you need time and constant sessions with a psychologist.

To begin with, specialists, as a rule, draw up a diagram individual lessons. The main goal of such sessions is to determine the root cause of the phobia. For example, sometimes a person needs to remember, realize and experience childhood trauma, get rid of feelings of guilt and wrong attitudes.

It will be useful in the future group classes. Working with a group of people helps the patient to grow above himself and develop new skills social communication and perception, adapt to being in society. If this gives positive results, then the doctor decides to carry out some kind of “ shock therapy“- the patient must spend some time in a crowd of people, cope with his own sensations from touches and contacts.

Fear of other people's touches is a serious problem. However, with a properly designed treatment regimen, permanent job Doctor and patient have a chance to get rid of the phobia or at least make its manifestations more controllable.

Tell me what to do? Whenever I touch my wife, she becomes uncomfortable. She cannot explain why she feels uncomfortable. I get terribly upset and we end up arguing. She says that I don't understand her. And I can’t understand what the reason is. The fact is that we are still a very young couple, I’m 28 and she’s 25. We’ve talked more than once about this, but we can’t come to a common denominator. Once my wife said that perhaps this was an offense against me because of the child, we have a 5-year-old boy. The fact is that I grew up without parents and there was no place to wait for help, and when I returned from the army, my wife became pregnant, having learned about this, I told her to have an abortion, it’s just that at that moment I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to financially cope with this situation. After talking with her parents, we decided to have a child and got married. But immediately after giving birth, problems with intimacy began, and then irritation towards me began to develop. I don’t want to think about bad things, I love my family and want to solve this problem.

Answers from psychologists

Roman, hello.

Attempts to explain Why , as a rule, only lead to distance from solving the problem. The wife's reaction is spontaneous, and logic is powerless here. There can be many reasons, and the real reasons are usually hidden from ourselves. Probably, a secondary benefit has already arisen for the wife to behave in this way, and you yourself create the conditions for this benefit through your behavior.

The solution could be like this:

1. Family counseling for couples
2. Individual counseling for each of you separately in parallel, since you are not yet ready to reveal something to each other (too deep, too scary).
3. Combination of family counseling and individual counseling based on specific requests.
4. Counseling you because you made the request “help my wife” is an important signal that something is wrong with you.
5. Counseling the wife, if she wants it herself.

Any form of counseling involves not one meeting, but a course of about 10 sessions, since the solution to your issue is very intimate and to resolve it it is important to achieve high degree trust with a psychologist.

In any case, you need to start somewhere, since you already understand that everything will not work out on its own.

Since I live and work in St. Petersburg, I can offer consulting via Skype. you will need a camera and good sound, an hour of time a week and the desire to sincerely work and solve the problem.

Hello Roman!

I want to solve this problem.

To solve this problem, you should seek a face-to-face consultation in the city or via Skype!

It would be great if mutual consent go to family counseling, and if your spouse doesn’t want to, then work on your own.

Alekseychuk Yulia Viktorovna, psychologist Yeisk

Hello Roman! I respect your desire to improve your relationship with your wife. The situation in your family repeats many others that have developed in a certain sequence of construction family life couples: MEETINGS, PREGNANCY, WEDDING. Of course, problems also happen in families created under other circumstances.

I think that you know, or at least guess, why your wife finds your touch unpleasant. But it’s scary to admit this to yourself. And that's why it's scary to go to a psychologist.

But if you wrote here, then you want help now. Without knowing you and your wife, the opinions of the opposite side, it is very difficult to help and only general recommendations are appropriate here.

Perhaps there is some truth in what the wife said:

Once my wife said that perhaps it was an offense against me because of the child...

Ask her for forgiveness for your cowardice at that moment

At that moment I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to cope with this situation financially.

and forgive yourself for this. You are just people, and you can experience different feelings. You can make mistakes precisely because you are human.

Manifest Now more attention to his wife in the form that pleases her. Maybe it's flowers for no reason, a walk, a trip to the cinema, or something else that will help you INTERACT.

And, of course, you need face-to-face work with a psychologist. Creating a family is just the beginning, and then there is constant and difficult work to BUILD it (like a home) by both spouses!!!

I sincerely wish you both wisdom and patience!!! You can do it if you work together. Do not give up. take action.

Sincerely, Natalia Borisovna!!!

Natalia Borisovna Zhurbenko, psychologist, Yeisk

Hello Roman.

The reasons for sexual coldness can be different, both physiological and psychological. First you should undergo a medical examination, then look for a psychological reason.

maybe this is resentment towards me because of the child

Quite possible. Then you should get rid of this resentment. You can do this either independently or with