Helping you put vaginismus in the past, for good
A lot of women who have vaginismus experience the symptoms long before finding out there is a special term for this condition, or as Katrin encourages us to call it, this body response. You might have heard the term in your 20s for the first time. You may have had anywhere from zero to multiple …
Two operations later, countless tearful examinations, and many late nights spent exhausting the Google search engine in the hope of answers – I wonder why it is that it took a decade for my pain to be believed. A whole decade for my lived trauma to be taken seriously by health professionals… Living with Vaginismus as a …
Vaginismus is a painful body response causing an involuntary constriction of the muscles of the vagina, making sex painful. Given the taboo on this subject, many women suffer in silence. Discovering that I had vaginismus I wouldn’t have thought of giving up the comfort of sanitary napkins until I learned the benefits of tampons and …
Hookup culture! What a wild ride it’s been. There are aspects that I struggle with, in the most general sense, adding vaginismus to the mix only makes it more complicated. On the other hand, I am a singleton who wants to have a sex life. So how have I embraced this contradiction? Hookup culture is …
“Have a glass of wine to loosen yourself up a bit?” These words were said to me by a doctor a few weeks before I turned 30. I’d been sexually active for 14 years and the truth is that sex was a mystery to me. I had had sex. Lots of sex. But for the …
Many thanks to Victor Yrigoyen for the illustrations. Check out his website and Instagram. “For many, the psychological impact of vaginismus can be even more agonizing than the physical pain. The stigma of “virginity,” combined with the lacking mention of vaginismus in public dialogue, society’s insistence that “men need sex,” and the social pressure on women to have …
Vaginismus is usually defined as pain related to a psychological reaction in which the woman associates sexual activity with pain and fear. There’s a so-called phobia of any penetration or in some cases, anything going near the vagina. Just the thought of penetration, or any attempted penetration, gives involuntary muscle spasms around the vaginal opening. …
When I was in primary school, around 10 years old we started to do some sex education lessons… In the first of these they showed us a cartoon video, in the video it showed a diagram of female anatomy and then the insertion of a tampon and how this looks from the inside. I remember …
On a seemingly ordinary day I woke up in my Connecticut apartment to an extreme burning and pain in my female organs… It literally felt like someone was taking a knife and shoving it up and down — a hot, hot knife to be exact. Naturally, I panicked, texted my boss and told her I …
I struggled with vaginismus for as long as I can remember and did not find out about the existence of this condition until a couple of years ago. Growing up in a very religious and conservative family, I was never really encouraged to explore my body. I started worrying when I got my period and …