No Sexual Desire? How Your Unconscious Patterns Are Ruining Your Sex Life

No sexual desire? Maybe you’ve started calling it “low libido,” like it’s a fixed fact about your body. But desire doesn’t disappear the way a light switches off. It gets suppressed so early, ignored so often, that absence starts to feel like the truth instead of the cover story.

Nobody taught you to want something for yourself. They taught you what you owed. No wonder it feels like nothing’s there.

I got into this on a recent episode of Erotic Devotion with Darshana Avila, a trauma-informed somatic educator who’s spent over a decade helping people find their way back into their own bodies. 

Her perspective cracked something wide open for a lot of listeners. 

I think it will for you too.

No Sexual Desire Is Usually an Unmapped Groove

Picture a national park with a boardwalk: clean, marked, easy to walk. That’s the sex you already know how to have: the position, the script, the version of intimacy your body has walked a thousand times because it’s familiar, and familiar feels safe.

Now picture stepping off that boardwalk. 

No trail, no signage, just you stepping into unfamiliar territory. Force your way through, hacking and overriding every signal to push forward, and your nervous system reads that as danger. Slow down and test the edge instead, half a step at a time, and that same unmapped ground can open beautifully, even pleasurably. How you enter it decides what it becomes.

Your brain is wired for efficiency, and whatever route you take most often becomes the one it defaults to—whether or not that route is actually yours. So when you say you have no desire, the real story is usually smaller and more specific than that. You have one well-worn path, and everything outside it hasn’t been walked enough times to feel safe, let alone wanted.

Which means the groove isn’t fixed. 

It can be widened, slowly, on purpose, with your own two hands.

What You Were Taught to Call Desire

Somewhere along the way, a lot of women were handed a script that had nothing to do with wanting. 

Show up. Perform. Keep the peace. Let him drive, let her stay quiet, smile at the right moments, and call whatever’s left over love. 

Darshana used the phrase “conjugal duty” on the show, and even typing it makes my jaw tighten. A marriage license was never consent. A ring was never a yes. If you’ve spent years having sex to keep the peace instead of because you actually wanted it, your body eventually stopped bothering to flag the difference. 

That’s a body doing exactly what it learned: wanting wasn’t safe or welcome, so it went quiet to protect you.

This shows up the most in women raised inside high-control religious environments, where purity culture taught that your body’s job was to be guarded, not felt. It shows up just as often in women who are overwhelmed, confused, resentful, or who’ve spent so long ignoring their own bodies that they never learned their own pathways into desire and arousal to begin with.

You don’t need a church background for any of this to take root. People-pleasing does the same damage on its own, and so does simply never being taught to notice what your body wants in the first place. This is one of the most common shapes women’s desire takes when it’s been trained instead of trusted.

“Checking Out” During Sex?

You might find yourself checking out during sex or tolerating sex because you’re afraid of hurting someone’s feelings. Or maybe you feel like something is wrong with your body. You might even genuinely want to show love and appreciation for your partner… but feel stuck. 

If that’s the case, it’s time to rewrite the script and create a new trail into your garden. One that you and your partner can actually enjoy together.

📖 RELATED: If this script sounds familiar, I broke down 21 Signs of “Good Girl” Consciousness, the full pattern, not just the desire piece of it.

Eros Was Never Only About Sex

In the Black feminist tradition, eros is described as life force: creativity, vitality, the electricity underneath everything you make and everything you’re drawn toward—sex included, but never limited to it. 

At this point, spirituality and sexuality stop being separate conversations and start being the same one—the same current that shows up in sacred sexuality practices, in ceremony, in a body finally telling the truth.

This reframe matters because it explains why “no sexual desire” so rarely travels alone. The same groove that flattens your erotic life usually flattens your creative life, your spontaneity, and your ability to grieve, heal, and transform. 

Rebuild access to one, and you can start finding your way back to the others.

📖 RELATED: I go deeper on this exact concept in Why Do I Feel Disconnected From My Body?, on treating the erotic as separate from spirit instead of an expression of it.

The Practice Is Titration, Not a Sudden Breakthrough

Darshana brought us back to orienting, one of the most basic tools in the somatic toolkit. If you’re new to the embodiment practices, here’s what orienting looks like:

→ Pause. 

→ Slow your breath. 

→ Notice the environment around you, outside of you. See the light in the room. Look behind you. Notice the specific objects, colors and surroundings. 

→ Then notice the environment inside of you. Notice your sensations. Really feel what all of your senses are saying in this moment. Feel any tension or softness in your body, heat and cold, desires or withdrawal.

→ Do all of this before you say yes or no to anything.

It sounds too small to matter. But really, it’s the whole foundation.

From there, the real work is titration. Small, repeatable experiments at the edge of what’s familiar, then back to home base. Not the new position held the whole time, thirty seconds of it. Not the whole confession about what turns you on: one sentence of it—one small, right-size ask.

You stay long enough for your body to taste a new possibility. Then retreat back to rest and familiarity to let it integrate.

Do that enough times and thirty seconds becomes a minute. An inch becomes an inch and a half. This is how new grooves get laid down: not drama, catharsis then collapse. It’s gentle, intentional practice.

This is what that practice actually sounds like, from someone who kept going.

Eros was never only about sex or women’s desire (but it certainly includes and unlocks them). 

It’s life force. It’s relation. It’s the current underneath all that brings you alive. It doesn’t come back all at once. It comes back in inches.

An inch is still ground.

This Equinox season, I’m opening something new and intimate: Candlefire, a private audio feed of fireside chats on sex, relationships, devotion and creativity, the closest thing to a late night call with your most honest friend. No workbook, no class format, just a voice in your ear while you’re doing the dishes or driving home.

It’s free, and the first episode is waiting the moment you sign up.

🕯️Come sit by the fire: Candlefire →