In The United States. Forty Percent of men in their forties, 50 percent in their fifties, 60 percent in their sixties, 70 percent in their seventies. I don't think it needs to be this way. I also think that doesn't take into account that there is a growing number of young boys and men who are dealing with erectile dysfunction because of their relationship often led by their relationship with porn. A lot of couples just don't address it, and this is, like, where sex ends.
This is, like, where intimacy goes to die in their relationship. It's been said that masculinity is made out of mojo, money, and muscles. Well, I am sex and relationship coach Caitlin V. I have a YouTube channel with about 900,000 subscribers, and I am the host of Good Sex on HBO Max. There are many ways for you to feel confident in partnership. There are many ways for you to provide pleasure.
There are many ways for you to have a beautiful and expanded intimate relationship with your partner that do not require you to be hard. We we are so fortunate to have the bodies and the abilities and the capacities that we do today, but we are so misguided if we assume that we are gonna have them forever. If you are in your forties and you're getting hard most of the time, 90% of the time.
You may actually and so your ability to get and stay hard is related often to the circumstances in your life in which your body wants to so prepare yourself that that that and know that change Hey, everybody. Quick break on our episode to talk to you about our sponsor, My Libido Doc. One of the things that we truly believe is that great sex is available to everyone, but we just have to learn how.
So head over to our site to get your free copy of our ebook, five steps to mind blowing orgasms and romance. Get the quick and easy tips to turn your sex life around, rev up your engines, and fall in deeper love and passion with yourself and your partner. So if you just go to mysexdoc.com, you will find that e book there for download. Now back to our show. Hey everybody. Welcome back lovers, lovebirds. Welcome back everybody to another episode of The Lounge. I'm your host, libido expert, Doctor.
Diane, and I'm thrilled about our guest today. As you just heard about, Caitlin V is just a breath of so much knowledge, and we are focusing on ED and performance anxiety. We're not just focusing on the men today, we're also focusing on how their partners can show up and navigate this process with them, help support them, help stay connected during this, and so much more. So, thank you for being with us today, Caitlin. Thank you for bringing all of your expertise to our audience today.
My pleasure. You so having me. Okay. So let's start kind of picture. So when somebody is, say, just starting with knowing that something is not working correctly, when they're suspecting maybe it is a level of ED Mhmm. Where do people start? Where do the men start, and where do the partners start at the very beginning to kinda kick off the process of overcoming this and of bringing their personal and their sex life back into balance? Where do we start? Well, often they start with panic.
And and that's that's totally fair and reasonable, and and if you find yourself in that situation, just know that you are not alone. There are plenty of resources and lots of experts out there who are here to support you. I recommend that everyone start with a actual physical, from a qualified medical health professional to give them an idea of what's going on internally. So let me back up even one step further. There are several places or indications that something is up, right?
It could be that a man stops having erections when he is with his partner, when he's being sexual with another person. It could be that he starts having trouble getting hard when he's going to masturbate, when he's being sexual solo. And it could be that he notices a decline in his, overall, erection frequency, in the mornings, right? He's not getting morning wood, as regularly as he was before. So if you experience any of those three, it's an indication that something should be looked at.
We should we should be consulting with a professional and and making some changes. One important distinction I would make is that if you were only finding that you're not getting hard with a partner and you are getting hard when you're masturbating, or you are getting hard when you wake up in the morning, then it probably is not physical in nature. Right? Because your body is capable of getting an erection.
But if you are not getting hard solo or first thing in the morning, go straight to your doctor because a lack of erections and erectile dysfunction is one of the best and earliest signs of cardiovascular issues, of diabetes related issues, of something that is going to go far beyond what a coach or therapist is able to help you with and you've got to start there. In fact, not getting hard is one of the core reasons that men go to the doctor to begin with, right? Yeah, it's true.
So that's typically the that's the right place to start but that's not the right place to stop, right? Even if you find that it is purely a physiological reason that is preventing you from getting erect, it still is going to have an impact on your partner, it's still going have an impact on your relationship, on your dating life.
And so going to see a coach or a therapist or a sex expert of some kind after that is still a critical piece in taking care of yourself and planning for a future that's still gonna have a lot of pleasure and excitement and joy and connection in it. So then if a partner is involved, or like meaning like, okay, there is this erection that is working when it's masturbation, or the hard on's happening in the morning, and then they try to have sex with a partner, and that's when they're noticing it.
So the partner's probably going to also notice in these scenarios, right? And I feel like so much of the time, this gets like shoved under the rug for conversation because, you know, it can be embarrassing. There can be a lot of, of like this almost emasculating type of feelings that can come up around this.
So at what point when there is that awareness of like, oh gosh, this is only happening with my partner, at what point do men start talking to their partner about it, and and what do you recommend there? It's difficult for both men and for women in different ways. Right?
And, you know, if you don't already have a baseline of great, vulnerable communication around sexual subjects with your partner, then this can feel like an enormous, insurmountable, like, burden that you are gonna have to deal with either alone or it's gonna require an up leveling of communication with you and your partner. And, yeah, it will, but I guarantee the results will be so worth it. Because if you can talk about this, you can talk about other things as well. Right?
Fantasies, desires, challenges, obstacles, etcetera. So when it comes to addressing these things, with a partner, yeah, you're totally right. A lot of couples just don't address it. And this is like where sex ends. This is like where intimacy goes to die in their relationship. One of the things that I like to point to though is if you are getting hard in the morning and when you're masturbating and you're not getting hard with a partner, that's an indication that something is in the way. Right?
We think about erections. I like to think about them as like a a a flow, like an energetic flow, a blood flow, a a flow of of health and well-being and vitality in your life and an indication that things are in flow. So if you're not getting hired with a partner, that's just an indication that things are not flowing there. Right? Often that's the result of maybe unspoken resentment. Right?
Maybe something happened in the relationship even years ago that is still bothering you and you haven't expressed, you haven't worked out between you and your partner, but for you know, your twenties, your thirties, into your forties, you were able to kind of put put that aside and still get hard and still be virile in that way, And now your body's not supporting you so much in the same way that it was.
And those things that are that are, you know, essentially plugging up the flow of love and energy and connection between the two of you are now also stemming the flow and the tide of your body being able to get and stay hard with your partner. And this is why I say it's also difficult for women too, right?
Because sometimes men especially will have something go on in the relationship and there will be resentment or they will, you know, they'll push it down in favor of staying strong and silent and stoic, right? And so they don't address it and then later they're not getting hard and the woman is like, do you not love me anymore? Are you not attracted to me anymore?
Because we were all raised that if a man is attracted to you, he'll just like spring up at a moment's notice and be able to stay hard and be able to ejaculate, you know, at the perfect time and all that. You know, it's a bill of goods. That's not actually how the bodies are designed to work, male or female. But it can be difficult for, a female partner who who isn't on the inside, can only guess from the outside, and can only support so much her man in figuring out what's going on, for him.
Yeah. I think there's so much truth in that. I think it's so easy as humans for us to just make up stories, right? The brain just fills in information for things that we don't understand. So, you know, it's like a really important point to say, okay, well, if man's not getting hard, it's so easy for the partner to be like, oh, it's gotta be me. Right. And we just fill in the gaps for things that we don't understand, and it's true for everything, you know, so.
And I think it's also a really good point to think that, hey, the more practice we get at having these hard conversations, and make them no big deal, the more we can talk about anything in- in life, you know, anything in life at all, and especially in the sex world, really helping with, actually talking about our needs, preferences, our fantasies, as you mentioned.
So, that's like the silver lining, I think, this, is like, can be that that ground that helps flip people into, I guess we have to talk about this now. Right. And remember, don't have to jump in. You don't have to like eat the whole elephant in one go. Right? Like, hey, have you noticed this thing? I've also noticed this thing. We talk about that thing. Okay. Let's talk about that thing. Okay. How do we wanna talk about that thing? Okay. Let's let's make some traction here. Let's do this here.
Let's schedule a conversation there, then let's schedule a follow-up conversation. You don't have to try to make up for a whole bunch of lost time in a single conversation. And if it is resentment related, bringing in a professional to act as a neutral third party to help you to have those communications and uncover what's been buried can be very helpful as well. Yeah. And I like what you're saying. It's almost like the rules of engagement. Right? Like, we're gonna have this conversation.
How would you like this conversation to go and set up the framework for those conversations versus just like, I'm gonna jump right in and maybe throw in some shock value to something I wasn't prepared for. Right? We do this all the time in communication. We assume that this is kind of like communication and sex actually have a lot in common in this way. We kind of assume that they should just work for us.
And if we just go in there and we just start doing it, we'll just figure it out and everything is gonna be fine and nothing is required especially not learning or setting things up in advance of jumping in and doing it. And communication and sex are the same in that way. We can learn how to do both of them better and the more that we talk about how we want to enjoy them, the better that they will go and we'll have, you know it's hard to know what you don't know with sex or communication.
Fortunately, there are tons of resources and there are lots of experts available out there can help us to identify where there are skill gaps where we can improve, and can help us to develop the, the keen awareness that is required to do both of them very well. Yeah. And you're right. They're both areas too that we're not really taught how to do them.
We're just thrown into life and be like, okay, well, there's just this inherent belief that, yeah, we're just born with these skills or something, and and that's like couldn't be further from the truth. So, what about like another thing that really happens, and I know all the men that are listening to this and are struggling with this, probably relate to this around, like, like, the confidence that goes down, and, like, that performance anxiety around, like, oh, crap, it's happening again.
Here we go. And it's, you know, it's like almost like this self fulfilling prophecy of this vicious cycle that as soon as it happens once or even a few times, then I think it's like we can self create more of it. So, how do, how do men like begin to get out of that cycle that I think is inherent, you know, inherent part of this? Yeah. Well, and and it is so true that once you start your mind on the tract of this is how things are, I'm just pointing her, it's gonna happen again.
Like if you if you really let your mind run away with those things, you are setting up an environment in which you are way more likely to continue to deal with these things, you're almost like calling it in by allowing it to continue to persist in your mind and and it's like a weed that takes root in the garden of your mind. You have to be willing to pull it out. Even if it continues to come back, continue to yank it out and plant something else in there that is actually empowering.
That actually leaves you feeling that there's something that can be done about this. The confidence thing it's been said that masculinity is made out of mojo, money, and muscles. Right? That masculinity needs to be, like, constantly earned and created and proven, and some of the most common ways that men do that is through their physical body, through their ability to earn money, and through their the sex that they have with a partner.
And it's true for if any of those three things gets taken away from you, your ability to earn money, your ability to exercise and work out and feel powerful in your body, or your ability to perform in the bedroom, that you may be dealing with a crisis of confidence. Right? So my first piece of advice to whether you're dealing with this or not is to make sure that you have multiple sources of confidence in your life.
Make sure that you are not just reliant on on those three things that you have multiple identities and relationships and things that support you in a holistic way so that if you lose any one of the pillars of your life that you would not be left, you know, kind of just standing on stilts. Right?
You wanna make sure that you are supported in all the ways that, that are that are gonna leave you feeling like you have more to rest on and rely on, and your identity is not just your ability to make money and provide sex and orgasms. That said, we may be speaking too late. You may already have been dealing with this, confidence challenge in, in in losing your ability to maybe get and stay hard or having that be, less certain or less predictable over time.
And what I would say to you is there is a there are many ways for you to feel confident in partnership. There are many ways for you to provide pleasure. There are many ways for you to have a beautiful and expanded intimate relationship with your partner that do not require you to be hard. They don't require you to get off. They don't require you to perform in any particular way.
But it often when I say this to men, they, like, can't hear it right away because it it it doesn't confirm and conform to what they have known about themselves and about, you know, what they've been taught or or considered to be standard, like typical normal sexuality for for maybe their entire lives. And so they say to me like, look, Caitlin, it's easy for you to say. You don't have a cock. Right? But I will tell you that all of us are just temporarily abled at best. Right?
We we are so fortunate to have the bodies and the abilities and the capacities that we do today, but we are so misguided if we assume that we are gonna have them forever. And women understand this inherently because we cycle throughout the month and throughout our life, so we know that our bodies are gonna change. But men, the first time that your body changes in a significant way, especially if it has to do with your cock and your sexuality, can be earth shattering.
So prepare yourself and know that change is inevitable, your body is going to change, and then start to do the work of discerning where your confidence and groundedness and your self identity are coming from, and make sure that it's multiple sources, if you can before something changes in your body. And if it's already changed, then do that work now. I love this advice so much. And, you know, I think it also also is important to, like, normalize ED from a standpoint of this is so common. Right?
I think it's so easy to feel like we're isolated on this island when anything for women or men, when anything happens in the sex space because people aren't talking about it. But if men live long enough, almost a hundred percent of them are going to have some level of ED, you know, come up in their life. It's like that normal. So I think just normalizing it too, and just like making it non taboo is so important. We should I Go ahead, We should also qualify what we mean by ED.
Yeah. Because it depends on who you ask, what percentage of the time that you go to get hard, if you do not get hard, qualifies as erectile dysfunction. Like, you know, are you getting hard 75 of the time that you go to get hard? Are you getting hard 90% of the time that you go to get hard? Are you getting hard 50% of the time that you wanna get hard?
So not all of these will qualify for erectile dysfunction, and it depends on, you know, whose definition you're going based off of, like, the Masters and Johnson definition, which is, far more forgiving than more current, more contemporary definitions of erectile dysfunction. But, like, you are in your forties and you're getting hard most of the time, eighty, ninety percent of the time, you may actually not really qualify as someone who has erectile dysfunction.
The stats are pretty damning in The United States. Forty Percent of men in their forties, 50 percent in their fifties, 60 percent in their sixties, 70 percent in their seventies. I don't think it needs to be this way. I also think that doesn't take into account that there is a growing number of young boys and men who are dealing with erectile dysfunction because of their relationship often led by their relationship with porn. Hey, everybody.
Quick break on our episode to talk to you about our sponsor, My Libido Doc. One of the things that we truly believe is that great sex is available to everyone, but we just have to learn how. So head over to our site to get your free copy of our ebook, five steps to mind blowing orgasms and romance. Get the quick and easy tips to turn your sex life around, rev up your engines, and fall in deeper love and passion with yourself and your partner.
So if you just go to mysexdoc.com, you will find that ebook there for download. Now back to our show. But it doesn't have to be this way. You do not have to be a statistic along those lines. And also, if you are dealing with this, you're you're not alone. You're actually in the majority. It's just that maybe these things aren't being discussed by the men closest to you. So then I'm curious because I I talk about the same thing when it comes to the topic of low libido, right?
So if we look at low libido in the medical definition of hypoactive sexual desire disorder, and how we define that for somebody to get that diagnosis is so subjective. It's basically saying, you know, reporting that you have a low sex drive for six months. Well, low according to who?
So, my question for you is like similar then in like the ED world, like, with stats that are all over the place, right, and it not being clear from that standpoint around like, okay, well, truly, what are the percentages? How often do I have to have a hard on in order to be classified as ED? What do you recommend men look out for from a standpoint of like, oh, this is, you know, this is not happening, like, hardly at all. It's just this random, you know, fluke here or there.
Like, where is that line where men should say, this is actually a problem. I should talk to my doctor. I should talk to my partner. I should look into this. Where where is that line? I would say when it happens, not the first time it happens. Right? Because you are human and not a machine, and your body is going to be have its ups and downs and ebbs and flows.
But if it becomes a continual pattern of not being able to get hard when you regularly expect to be able to get hard, including, very importantly, masturbation and in the morning. Now you don't have to wake up with an erection every single morning. You have to be best case scenario, you are getting hard throughout your sleep. Sometimes just like you wake up in the middle of the dream. Right? Sometimes you the dream completes before you wake up. Same with erections.
Sometimes you wake up in the middle of the erections. Sometimes the erection was fifteen minutes ago, now you're conscious. But if you find that over time, you are not getting erections when you expect them to, And with a partner, if it is becoming an issue for you, that, I think that is a good enough reason to go and start working on addressing it. And that doesn't mean addressing it with a prescription. Right? Prescriptions are great.
Little blue pills is very powerful, very, very potent and important piece of medical technology. Very glad that it exists. But I also think that a lot of doctors turn to that immediately, instead of doing any of the deeper work and and asking, like, you know, first of all, what is going on on a physiological level, but also what's going on in emotional and mental and even a spiritual level. Are you very stressed at work? Did you just lose a parent? Are you caregiving a sick child?
Like, these are reasons that your body isn't getting hard, and these are very valid reasons for your body not to get hard. I mean, remember your ability to get an erection, an erection is nothing more than a bridge for your DNA. Right? And so your ability to get and stay hard is related often to the circumstances in your life in which your body wants to procreate.
Yeah. You know, we we we are so focused on what erections mean today in our, like, modern world, and not what they meant for the four hundred thousand years of homo sapiens sapiens bleeding up to today. Yeah. It's such a good point. It's such a good point. I think what I hear in that too is an element of, if you're feeling like this is a problem, if it's like impacting your life and this is coming up over and over again, well, yeah, you know, find out and get medical help.
And even with our little blue pills, I think there's an element of, back to your original point of talk to your doctor, figure out what's going on. Could this be a cardiovascular disease? Even if we're taking a little blue pill to help with the erection and do that acutely, it's still not lending us to understand physiologically what is out of balance and potentially could be a bigger problem than just what's going on with the cock. Right.
And we see and and the and Vagra Cialis, the PDE five inhibitors, they don't work for everyone. They are not stronger than your mind, right? So a lot of the times I, I work with men who are like, well yeah, I have a lot of resentment for my wife, but I don't understand why Vagra doesn't work. It's like, because sex dreads in your brain. None of these pills give you an erection. That's not how they work, right? They're a PDE five inhibitor.
PDE five is what breaks down blood that is already in an erection. In other words, what they do is they stop an erection from going away. They do not start an erection. A lot of people have that experience. I think that's just like the placebo effect. They feel like it's easier to get hard. No. No. No. It's just easier for blood to stay. Right? So if your mind isn't willing to put blood in your cock to begin with, you're not gonna get an erection to begin with. Right?
The the and of course you can build up a tolerance to them over time. Some men experience a lot of the side effects. They're they're not well received by all bodies, right? It's they're not they're not a They're not a cure, right?
They are an option, and I think that they are a lovely option, but we want you to be able to use those as infrequently and as late in life as possible so that you can use them for the length of and the duration of time that you actually, like, your body can really use them. And up until that point, we want you to be able to kind of experience erections and ejaculations and the whole thing on your own.
And I've also seen them to, like, create problems in partnership sometimes with women feeling like, okay, well, the pill was used, we have to have sex, and now I'm committed to it, but not now I can't listen to my own body, and now I feel the pressure, and it can create this You know, there's like a point to them, but it can also create this intensity that way and have the impact on, you know, female counterparts.
So so now, other things like P Shot and GainsWave and all these other types of, you know, tech that I'm sure people are reading about? Mhmm. Do you advise those things, or what are your feeling on some of those other those other techno technologies? I think, you know, it really depends on the person who I'm speaking to. I have had clients who had really great results with GAINSWave.
I've had clients who married PRP with their GAINSWave treatments, and saw increased veininess or what they experienced is increased hardness in their erections. For me, are treatments that are best left to men as they age.
I think that men who are initially experiencing like a slight decrease in tragidity and hardness, like this don't you don't necessarily need to just jump to, a lot of intense and expensive medical options unless you have the disposable income to, like, mess around with those things. But I think that there's a sort of a movement culturally in The United States right now, and we just saw, you know, the largest medical malpractice suit ever awarded.
Biggest number ever awarded was against New Male, Men's Health Clinic, when they, you know, injected a man with a Trimix or something similar to that and gave him a sixty hour injection, which caused his penis to become entirely scar tissue, and he was awarded, you know, upwards of 420, 4 hundred 50 million dollars. But they're running this scam on a lot of people. Right?
And they they these these companies benefit from the lack of vulnerable and open conversation that men have about these things.
And so they come in and they promise medical treatments to support the things that you feel insecure about in order that you might be more confident, and so you're spending money in secrecy often trying to buy confidence instead of you know doing the the less sexy and more long term work of working with someone like me who's a coach or doing your research on YouTube or reading you know or like the the doing the deeper internal work, the reflecting, having
the hard conversations, like, totally less sexy, takes longer, is free a lot of the time we're working with a coach, not free, but like a lot of those resources, like the self reflection part is totally free. Learning how to communicate better, you can pretty much do for free. That's what's actually gonna give you long lasting results and permanent results, at least until, like, your physical body gives out, and I think it's worthwhile to explore those first.
Yeah. It sounds like there's, in your opinion, some level of benefit in certain situations, but tread carefully and cautiously and ask questions, and don't just jump in because somebody is promising you this thing that may not need anything that is as, you know, intense as some of these other treatments. Yeah. One of my favorite things about working with men in particular is that, like, they're usually very eager to do the work.
Yeah. Like, they're very and I, you know, this is true for women too, but men have they have a distinct flavor. They're often like, yeah, throw me in coach, I'll figure it out, I'll do anything like, you know, I'll try it, I'll read the book, I'll watch the videos, I'll watch the course, whatever it is.
And that is why I know that they fall victim to these sort of empty promises out of shame, out of a desire to keep, to keep up appearances out of a fear that they can't be vulnerable or, you know, reveals that they're not really machines to their lovers and partners. And that's how companies can end up taking advantage of you before or, you know, selling you things that you don't really need or want that don't actually support your long term health and your longevity. Yeah. And such good advice.
And we're gonna talk about so you guys, we're gonna film part two here in a second, and we're gonna tell you how to access part two. In part two, we're gonna talk about support for the women, and how women can support their partners during this.
But I wanna make sure before we wrap up and tell everybody how to get part two, that we talk about your work and your course on Hard As You Want, because it sounds like like that's a really great place for people to start, and for men to start to begin to repattern this. So what does that course involve? What does it entail? What do people learn? Can you tell us about it? So after almost a decade of working with men on this, I decided to put my methodology into a video course.
And that course is called Hard As You Want. It is like very much a masterpiece, you know, kind of the capstone for all of this work. And I'm actually working on a book right now that is based on the Heart as You Want course, but you can watch it in video format. And what it does is it takes you through the different layers that make up your erection and your erection health. So we start with the physical layer.
I do I give you all the background information that you need, a cheat sheet to take to your doctor to make sure that you are testing all of the because it's like, what's the difference between testosterone and free testosterone and sex hormone binding hemoglobin? Like, there's a lot. So it walks you through what to do on a physiological level, and then we go through the emotional body.
So it walks you through what to do on a physiological level, and then we go through the emotional body, the mental body, the relationship, even all the way up to the spiritual body. And along the way, there are guided exercises, and there's homework, things for you to take home and print out and keep track of, so it makes it very very easy for you to not just identify what the cause of your erectile dysfunction or erectile flow issue is, but also what to do about it.
And the reason that this is so important is when I sat down to write the course, I sat down and wrote a list of every single reason that a man had ever come to me with erectile dysfunction, like what the underlying situation was, and I came up with 45 different causes that I had seen in my years coaching of ED, which is more than just, you know, what we've discussed here.
And and and when I broke it down into, like, physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, relational, social, and spiritual, and kind of put those in a hierarchy, and made it a lot easier for men to really pinpoint what was going on. Okay. Amazing. I am so excited to get everybody in this course, and it sounds just completely thorough, and you really have thought through every aspect of how to to help relieve this, down to how to be an advocate.
I think so many people with their doctors are just not asking, they don't know the questions to ask, So the ability to advocate and to teach people how to advocate to get the right test to ask those questions is just so wonderful. So thank you so much for bringing that information. We're gonna put that in the show notes, you guys. The libido club information is where you will find part two with Caitlyn. I'm so excited about part two, you guys.
So you'll find information about that in the show notes. And is there anything else that you want to leave us with today? Any final concluding thoughts that you have? Yeah. I wanna say that it's it's not all hard work. No pun intended. The results that you will get from approaching erections, ejaculation head on, the results that you can really get, they I want you to think about them more like an on ramp onto a freeway. For some people, that on ramp is a relationship that is sexless.
For some people, it's losing some form of their ability through injury early on in life. But all of these on ramps lead to the same freeway. And this is a freeway where you can experience more pleasure, more self expression, more satisfaction, more closeness, more security in the relationships that matter most to you.
And even if it occurs to you at first, like, it's gonna be difficult, and I'm not saying that it will never be difficult, but it actually can be really fun, and the results can really speak for themselves. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for being here with us today, and for this wealth of knowledge, and thank you everybody for listening. Remember, please don't keep us a secret. Please share this with anybody that you think needs this information. We gotta get this information out there.
It's just so necessary to stop making this so taboo. So thank you everybody for listening. Thank you for Caitlin for being here, and we will see you guys soon on another episode of The Lounge. Take care. Thank you for listening to the Libido Lounge. Please don't keep me a secret. Please share this with your friends. You can find me on YouTube, on Instagram, as well as how to work with me at MyLibidoDoc.com