How Depression has effected Vaginismus for me

I’ve noticed that I’ve had to put working on vaginismus on hold for quite some time because I needed to manage my depression. My therapist and psychiatrist said that, “Since your depression is fatal, we need to focus all of our attention on that first.”

So, that’s what I’ve been doing. Unfortunately, the outcome of that has turned into me not even understanding or remembering what intimacy is. I don’t remember the feeling of romance and intimacy just sounds gross to me. I’ve pushed it back so far in my subconscious that I’m afraid I won’t be able to get it to resurface. I honestly can’t even envision it resurfacing. 

It makes me feel selfish, guilty and even more depressed. I thought that I would have overcome vaginismus by the time I’m 30 years old, but instead I’ve lost what little feeling I had left. 

I was told by doctors that it will be a wasted effort to get my endometrioses surgery at this point, even though I’m in pain, because I have to have sex to see if it helped my vaginismus at all. Clearly, I can’t even comprehend that. Since intimacy feels gross to me, you can only imagine what goes on in my head when I think about sex. My brain basically just explodes because I don’t understand it anymore. Therefore, I can’t even get Botox for vaginismus because I need to find out if the endo surgery helped me at all. 

Anyways, it’s been a mess. I’ve been trying everything in my power to help my depression, like saying to myself over and over again, “I will be happy,” listing three things I did every day that I’m proud of, and even listening to affirmations. I’ve tried meditations, aromatherapy, more deep breathing exercises, getting rid of Facebook, only following basic accounts on Instagram, drawing more, exercising more, and opening up more to try new things (ex. Kpop; Kdramas). The biggest “self-intervention” I’ve done is learning a whole new language. 

On the bright side, learning a language has always been on my bucket list and I have dabbled with new styles and mediums of drawing.

The Facebook group I’ve created for vaginismus is pretty much running itself. I only pop on occasionally to accept people and approve posts. I find it’s too stressful to read everyone’s story. I don’t know if that makes me selfish, but I’m just trying not to trigger my depression even more. 

In terms of medication, I switched psychiatrist months ago (thank god) and have been put on a new medication to try and help my depression. The new psychiatrist is much more personable and actually listens to what I have to say. She was actually appalled by what the previous doctor prescribed me. In fact, she was very upset he put me on Klonopin and that I’ve been on it now for about 3 years or more. She said that we will have to tackle that beast later because taking me off of it might do more harm than good. Currently, I’m on 3 psychotropic medications and then Metformin, since the medications he gave me caused me to gain so much weight. It’s nice that I’m back to what I was, but I’m incredibly frustrated that he went against my wishes and put me on medication that caused weight gain. I can’t even look at my wedding photos because of how much weight it caused me to gain. Not the greatest for someone who already has body dysmorphia issues.

In all honestly, my time has purely been devoted to keeping my head above water. I do feel lonely, which is one of the reasons I came on here. However, I don’t have anything relating to vaginismus that I can talk about at the moment or in the foreseeable future, which is what my blog was all about. Talking about vaginismus makes me sad and uncomfortable, so even if I did have something to write relating to the topic, I don’t think I could.

Depression and vaginismus are very much tied together, but how has one effected the other for you?