Sex
You can't tell anymore whether you don't want it or whether you've been refusing to want it for so long that it's gone quiet.
Sex isn’t on your radar. It hasn’t been for a long time. You can’t tell whether you’re asexual, whether something specific shut you down, or whether the years of not wanting it have made the wanting impossible to recover. The asexual community would welcome you. You’re not sure you belong there.
The question isn’t really about labels. The question is whether the absence is biological or something that happened.
The question hasn’t resolved.
Educational, not diagnostic. Not a substitute for clinical assessment.
© The Institute for Applied Strategic Therapy. All rights reserved.
Asexuality is a sexual orientation. Shutdown is a state your nervous system entered for a specific reason and could leave under different conditions. They look the same from the outside. They’re different things.
You very likely came up with experiences that could account for either: a household where sex was suppressed, a stretch of life where wanting felt unsafe, a relationship that taught your body to keep something held back, an early sexual experience that was unwanted or painful. Or you may have always been wired this way, and the experiences are correlation rather than cause.
The question of which one you are can’t be answered by introspection alone. Asexuality doesn’t change when you change what you do. Shutdown does.
For the broader sexual context, see I have a sexual problem . If the shutdown is tied to past sexual harm, see I was sexually abused . If your desire was there and is now gone with a specific partner, see I have low libido and I can’t get aroused with my partner .
You can’t tell which one you are while running the same patterns. Different patterns produce different information.
Strategic therapy runs the test by changing the conditions. The behaviours that have been keeping desire suppressed, if suppression is what’s running, get suspended in specific ways for a defined window. If shutdown is the answer, desire shows signs of returning under the new conditions. If it’s asexuality, nothing changes, and you have your answer that way too.
The label arrives last, after the experiment is done. Not before, by guessing.
Write to us and we'll get back to you personally. A qualified practitioner answers every inquiry, usually within two business days.
Message received. We'll be in touch at the address you provided.