"Are We Gonna Have Sex or What?"
Are we gonna have sex or what? This is the question that so many of us midlife women are asking. Desire has been lost in a haze of hormones, deadlines, sleep deprivation and relationship meltdown.
Let’s unpack what it will take to get you back to feeling pleasure again. And girlfriend… it’s not what you think!
Reclaiming desire is one part of your midlife reset. Watch a full masterclass on reclaiming better sleep, losing midlife weight and building strength.
Meet Dr. Julie Merriman, clinical therapist, author and podcast host. She has spent 25 years counselling high-achieving women over 50 on burnout, compassion fatigue, and nervous system depletion— including how this stress shows up as disconnection, shutdown, and loss of intimacy.
By the end of this post, you’ll understand that lacking desire is not a character flaw. You are not broken. This state of affairs is an adaptive nervous system response to decades of responsibility, care, and chronic demand. Let us help you start to unwind the mess right now.
Why Midlife Changes Everything About Desire
“Are We Gonna Have Sex or What?” is the title of Dr. Julie’s new book. This is a question that’s big on my mind. I’m actually going to turn 63 at the end of this week. I have always loved intimacy with my partner — it was a big part of who I am and who I was. Through my menopausal journey it’s been really challenging. Challenging to keep up the libido, to keep my parts functioning.
Hormones are an issue — at one time estrogen was flooding through our bodies. And estrogen plays a big role not only in reproduction but also in brain function, which I think we forget.
Here’s something most women don’t know: it doesn’t matter if you’re 25 or 65 — only about 10 to 15% of women experience spontaneous desire.
The rest of us — that’s 85 to 90% — depend on responsive desire, where we’re responding to our partner or responding to a context. As we age, it’s still there, but it might take a little longer to get her online. And our nervous system plays a huge role in this. Hormones are very important, but the full picture isn’t just hormones. You have to look at the person holistically.
The Superwoman Myth and the Fried Nervous System
Think about women over 50. A lot of us came up with the superwoman myth — you can have all the jobs, raise all the kids, take care of the house, and how dare you say you’re tired.
You have to stay thin and sexy, keep a perfect house, remember everyone’s birthday, get all the kids to the doctor’s appointments, and be ambitious at work.
And we were told, if you weren’t doing that, something was wrong with you. That was a myth — we cannot do all of that. But we arrive in midlife completely fried. Our nervous system has been in a pressure cooker for 20 or 30 years. There’s an allostatic load that builds — it’s not just one stress cycle, it’s decades of unfinished stress cycles.
When our nervous system is dysregulated — when we’re over-functioning and holding everyone’s emotional load — we cycle through three states. There’s the ventral state, where we’re regulated and social, and that’s where intimacy feels wonderful. There’s the sympathetic state, where we’re in fight or flight, which is where many of us live. And then there’s the vagal state, where we’re dissociated from our body entirely.
Our nervous system’s job is to keep us alive. So it tells our brain: you are in survival mode, and I’m taking pleasure off the table. We just need to get you through this day.
After 20 or 30 years of this, we’re living on adrenaline and cortisol.
And coffee.
It’s become quite habitual. I call it the habit brain running the show. Because when we’re going through those busy years, we didn’t even have time to think about it. Kids hanging off of us, gym, laundry — and then at night, husband winks at us and we’re like, no way, buddy. Resentment builds up. He got to go to hockey, or golf, or guys’ night out. All of that has been building for 20 or 30 years.
There’s a myth that we can’t pour from an empty cup — except we’ve done it for years, to the point that we’ve become the empty cup.
We bring forward from childhood the belief that our worth is tied to our performance. The idea of not doing, or even receiving, is deeply uncomfortable.
Dr Julie works with women where she’ll give them an assignment: just colour for 10 minutes this weekend. Something completely unproductive. And the client comes back and say, I nearly crawled out of my skin — I couldn’t just sit there without feeling guilty.
So yes, we have years of unmet needs, and of course it leads to resentment.
Chakras, the Vagus Nerve, and Sacred Resentment
It can be helpful to use chakra psychology alongside somatic psychology. If one has their neuroscientist hat on, one talks about the vagus nerve through neuroscience language. If one has a yoga instructor hat on, one talks about it through chakra language. They’re the same thing — our vagus nerve runs right through our chakra system. And for my clients, that framework is often more tangible than an anatomy chart.
What it reveals is this: for years, we’ve swallowed our truth to keep the peace — and that lives in the throat chakra. The unexpressed accumulates and moves down into the heart and solar plexus as resentment. I think of it as sacred resentment, because if we’ll slow down and listen to it, she has a lot to tell us about the needs we need met.
Until we make our body a safe place to live, desire cannot return. When we’re in a constant state of fight or flight, our body doesn’t feel safe. And pleasure really depends on a safe body to open up to. Sex is wonderful, but it’s a very vulnerable place to be.
From a very basic biological point of view, there’s no point in procreating if lions are about to eat you.
It’s so fascinating that the chakras line up with where the vagus nerve is most active. The vagus nerve is a long-wandering nerve that activates our rest-and-digest response. It’s attached to the parasympathetic side of the autonomic nervous system — and it has branches in the groin, the gut, the heart, the throat, and the face.
I usually start with the root chakra, because that’s where safety lives. The root chakra runs from the sits bones down to the tips of the toes. Right above it is the sacral chakra — that’s where our sensuality, creativity, and emotions live. Those two need to be balanced and talking to each other. When we’ve been in a state of functional freeze with a dysregulated nervous system, those two areas are completely depleted.
And I want to name something about the self-care industry.
It can be very gaslighting to say, just go get a massage. Or just meditate. When you are in a dysregulated state, your frontal cortex isn’t available to settle into meditation — and then we feel like we’ve failed at that too. Which just dysregulates us a little more.
Defrosting — Practical Tools to Regulate and Re-Embody
Grounding, above everything else, is the place to start. I want clients to start with a walking meditation — going outside without a phone, just birds, leaves, vitamin D from the sun. Five to ten minutes. That’s it.
Because a walking meditation starts at the root chakra, and it begins the process of re-embodiment. We are floating heads of competence, completely disconnected from the fact that we have a body.
The next tool is shaking. Dr. Julie lives on a cattle ranch in Texas, and after a ride, her horse will shake from nose to tail. That’s the nervous system completing its cycle. So she has her clients do full body shakes, especially when something has activated them.
Then hip circles — so many women carry trauma, shame, and tension in the hips and the sacral area. Just gentle hip circles, placing a hand on the sacral chakra, inviting movement and groundedness.
From there, a full body scan — approaching your body with curiosity and self-compassion, noticing any physical sensation. We have told our bodies for years: shut up, I don’t have time for you. We have to invite the body back online.
People overlook these tools because they seem simplistic. They’re looking for complicated solutions because life feels so complicated. But baby steps, getting back to nature — these have always been part of the human experience. We’ve just sanitized them out because we’ve become floating heads.
And here’s what’s interesting — as my clients start to defrost, pain starts coming back online, because they’ve ignored it for so long. Dr. Julie had one woman who started a walking meditation and her feet began burning like they were on fire. Her doctor couldn’t find anything wrong — he thought it was a nervous system response. They worked on helping her hold space for the pain rather than immediately trying to make it go away. To sit with it, get curious, ask what wisdom might be there. And sure enough, over time it became minimal.
I see this in yoga classes all the time. People say yoga isn’t working for them because their shoulder or hip started to act up. And really, things are just waking up. Communication channels are opening. We have so many tools to bring the vagus nerve into activity, to invite natural healing — rather than running away again.
And in that healing, your desire lives. We bring things back online. Think about bracing — when we’re in a dysregulated state, we’re braced everywhere, including the pelvic floor. You’re starving your genitals of blood flow. Softening is very important. You cannot force desire back. She has to be invited back through a soft and connected place.
Reclaiming Pleasure — The Homecoming
We also have to be honest with our bodies. How much obligatory sex have we had through the years? How many orgasms have we faked, just to get to sleep?
Our body has been lied to for so many years. So we really need to help ourselves remap pleasure — just for us, first. Dr Julie always has her clients start with a pleasure map with themselves.
They get a new vibrator — but we can’t use it on our genitals for about a month. The first thing we do is run it in various places on the body to discover where pleasure actually lives, because we’ve completely lost track. It’s wonderful for the vagus nerve too. We need to find where pleasure lives for us now, without any rules and without pressure to perform.
As we age, things feel different, and that’s okay. Dr Julie had breast cancer a few years ago. She had a double mastectomy and reconstruction. An area that used to be highly pleasurable for her is very different now — but there are other areas that are very pleasurable. She has to start mapping that for herself, just for her.
Then, slowly, as you have that map, you can invite your partner in — but sex and intercourse are off the table for a good month. Just be together. Connect. Because desire is about connection. Intimacy is about connection.
Get Dr. Julie’s free somatic signature quiz at www.juliemerriman [http://www.juliemerriman/] phd.com/quiz. It gives you a good idea of what’s going on in your body and where you need to start.
I would really encourage all of our sisters to reclaim pleasure again. Don’t let decades of taking care of everybody else deprive you of something so fundamental to the human experience — pleasure and intimacy.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cherylgordonyt.substack.com [https://cherylgordonyt.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]
Comentarios
0Sé la primera persona en comentar
¡Regístrate ahora y únete a la comunidad de The Midlife Reset: Sleep, Strength & Joyful Living for Women 50+!