Sex and emotion: the missing education

There is something I find myself coming back to again and again in this work, because it seems to land for almost every man I sit with, regardless of age or background or what has brought him in.

We do not do any of it around sex.

We teach children how to manage their emotions. We give them words for anger. We help them understand that sadness can be sat with and moved through. We do this imperfectly, but we do it. We do not do any of it around sex. That territory gets left almost entirely blank. And then we wonder why so many men find it so difficult.

When you actually stop and take stock of what sex contains emotionally, it is one of the most complex landscapes a person can navigate. Vulnerability: the possibility of being truly seen, and the possibility of being found wanting. Anxiety before, during and sometimes after. A particular kind of hurt when something goes wrong sexually that does not quite map onto ordinary sadness. Desire that may or may not be welcome. The exposed, sometimes frightening feeling of wanting something very much.

Nobody teaches us to navigate any of that. What we get instead are scripts: what sex should look like, who it should be with, what it should mean. The emotional content gets stripped out. What remains is performance, procedure, assessment. No wonder so many men I work with find that sex, over time, stops feeling like something they are present in and starts feeling like something they are executing.

What fills the gap

When the emotional dimension of sexuality is never named or given language, something fills the space. In my clinical work, what I see again and again is that behaviours fill it. Not because the man lacks intelligence or insight, but because given no tools, he built what he could.

Many men describe having spent years doing exactly that: assembling a set of behaviours around sex that allowed them to stay functional in sexual situations without actually having to be present in them emotionally. A gay man who discovered early that apps gave him access to a sexual world without requiring him to be emotionally legible. A straight man who found that transactional encounters meant he could be sexual without risking the emotional exposure that came with intimacy. A man of any sexuality who learned that being very active sexually was one way to feel in control of something that otherwise felt out of control.

These are not pathological solutions. They are adaptive ones. They work, in their way, for quite a long time. The problem is not that anything has gone catastrophically wrong. It is that the gap they were filling has never actually been addressed. The behaviour has been doing more and more emotional work, for longer and longer, without any of the underlying territory being touched. At some point, the cost starts to exceed the relief. And the man does not know what to do with that, because no one ever taught him the underlying skill.

how we manage feelings and sex

The clinical term for this is how we manage feelings: the capacity to recognise what you are feeling, tolerate it without immediately acting on it, and choose how to respond. It is a skill. It is learned. And for the men I work with, it is almost universally underdeveloped in one specific territory: the emotional life of sex.

This is not a coincidence and it is not a character defect. Sex is discussed, in almost every cultural context, in primarily physical terms. The emotional dimension is treated as irrelevant or as a complication best avoided, or something that belongs with women and in the category of femininity. Men receive that message early and from many directions. They internalise it. And they bring that picture into their adult sexual lives.

What this means in practice is that being sexual involves a set of emotional states they have never been given language for and have no reliable way of managing. Vulnerability activates the alarm inside us. Anxiety sits underneath a great deal of sexual behaviour, particularly around performance, desirability and the fear of rejection. When those states become unmanageable, the behaviour adjusts. It shifts toward contexts that reduce the emotional exposure: more partners rather than fewer, transactional sex rather than relational, pornography rather than a person, drugs that remove the need to navigate the emotional content at all.

This is not weakness. It is exactly what I would expect to see when someone has never been given the tools the situation asks for.

This is not weakness. It is exactly what I would expect to see when someone has never been given the tools the situation asks for.

The specific silence for gay and bisexual men

For gay and bisexual men, this has an additional and more acute dimension. Straight sexuality had inadequate scripts. But it had some. For gay and bisexual men growing up in almost any era prior to the last decade, the scripts were either absent or actively hostile.

What this produced was something more profound than poor how we manage feelings skills around sex. It produced a sense that the emotional life of their sexuality was not just unaddressed but actively not allowed. The complexity of desire, the grief of early suppression, the particular fear and joy of coming out into a world that was not always safe: none of that had a sanctioned space. This is compounded, even by well-meaning parents, who often lack the experience or knowledge to respond to the myriad of feelings that might come up for a young person around this. A lack of response usually leads to the message that these feelings can't be tolerated, and need to be managed some other way.

The gay community and scene that many men eventually find offers something real and genuinely valuable: permission to be sexual, a space where desire is not wrong. That is not nothing, and I am not describing it as the problem. The problem is that permission to be sexual is not the same as emotional literacy about sex. A culture can expand the available behaviours considerably while leaving the how we manage feelings gap completely intact.

What the work actually involves

In the groups we run, the work on how we manage feelings begins early, because it provides the foundation for everything else.

The first task is simply helping men find the gap: the moment, however brief, between the emotional state and the behaviour. For many men, that gap has become so short, the transition so automatic, that it seems not to exist at all. But if it exists, even slightly, it can be worked with.

The second task is building the soothing system, which helps us calm down, feel safe, and feel connected: the internal capacity to regulate, to feel grounded, without needing a behaviour to achieve it. For many men, this is genuinely unfamiliar, not as a concept but as a bodily experience. They know intellectually what it might mean to calm themselves. They have very little felt sense of actually doing it.

Building that access, slowly and repeatedly, is central to the work. The missing lesson was not skipped in a single session. It cannot be replaced in one either. What the programme attempts is more gradual: the accumulation of small experiences of being able to hold an emotional state without immediately acting on it.

Over time, those experiences become the foundation of a different relationship to sex. Not sex without feeling, which is where many men started. But sex with feeling, and with the capacity to be present in it. For more on how the programme approaches this work, see the clinical essay What actually helps: values, sober sex and why the group matters. For a longer-form exploration of emotional silence around sex, my essay Psychosexual therapy with men: why talking about sex is the hardest part on drmichaelyates.co.uk addresses the particular difficulty of bringing sexuality into the consulting room at all.

If this describes something you recognise, information about applying to the programme is on the apply page.