Niamh was in love … but things were going badly wrong in the bedroom. Sex and penetration became a misery. Niamh had Vaginismus – a reflex spasming of her vagina. It made sex painful, gynae exams agony and even stopped her using tampons. You know the way you blink and startle as something comes too near your eye? You simply can’t control a reflex.

Niamh tried vaginal acceptance training, vaginal dilators, vibrators and dildos, all kinds of lubricants and sex games to distract her, a group-facilitated desensitisation programme complete with mirrors and the obligatory dilators, each one larger than the previous one. She was supposed to teach her vagina to be grateful for attention!

‘Nothing worked, if anything I felt worse and I had absolutely no control over it. I felt such a failure and a fraud. Everything would be grand up to the moment of penetration and then – that was it. Eventually I figured it was some sort of mental block with me. My boyfriends, and there were quite a few, hardly noticed because I became really good at sex, a proper sexual athlete,’ explained Niamh. ‘ Lately though, I worried how it might affect me having kids.’

This story is familiar to me … women can have problems after a traumatic birth or nasty episiotomy scar. Talking about when sex is painful is a taboo subject, even in the most frank discussions. It can happen any woman at some stage in her life. It can happen as hormones fluctuate in pregnancy, after any kind of birth, during breast-feeding, at menopause. Vaginismus can flag something seriously wrong, like an infection, endometriosis, ovarian cyst, tumour or a uterine prolapse but sometimes there is no medical cause.

Hypnotherapy worked for Niamh: ‘The relief is amazing. It has been a real turning point for me, and our relationship. I’m finally free to enjoy sex as I knew I could. I feel like a normal woman.’

When sex is painful and you’ve had a clean bill of health from your doctor why not explore your options and discover how your mind can set you free from painful sex.

A client sent me an email just after I had written this post … ”we are now expecting our first baby. We are really delighted to be able to have a full normal sex life now. I just wanted to thank you for what you did. I found your hypnotherapy sessions totally brilliant.”