Situational Retarded Ejaculation

If you weed out the small percentage of RE cases caused by the fairly obvious and dramatic reason like sexual abuse as a child, strict religious upbringing, organic disease, and fear of pregnancy or disease, you are left with a majority of cases for which the specialists
find themselves stymied as to what method of treatment will actually work.

I can not think of another male sexual dysfuntion where so little real
research and proven knowledge is so sorely lacking. This gives rise to a whole host of bizzare treatments and theories, many of which are to be found by typing "retarded ejaculation" into a search engine.

Perhaps sexual researches should start by looking at why a man DOES ejaculate into a vagina rather than why not. He does so because he is extremely aroused. Some retarded ejaculators will say they are extremely aroused too, but I think this self reporting may just be flawed. I believe that barring any of the above reasons for RE, a man who can't ejaculate inside a women is simply just not horny enough. Start there and you can then begin to discover the reasons for this. Deal with those reasons....everything from a preference for porn and masturbation to low self esteem and performance anxiety, and perhaps a course of treatment dealing with the causes of RE will lead to a cure.

All the postings here seem to be from professionals and one thing is clear- the causes and treatment of retarded ejaculation are numerous I'd like to hear from men who actually suffer from this dysfunction. Maybe some have found a way to live with it. I'd be particulalrly interested in married men who cannot ejaculate in their wive's prescence. How do they hold the marriage together?

I myself don't suffer from R.E. but as a sex and marriage counsellor in the Boston, I have treated about 25 men with this dysfunction over the years with varying success. 25 patients isn't really enough to draw any statistical conclusions but in my experience the causes of R.E. can be boiled down to six main ones. I write them in order of frequency in my practice:

1) masturbation and/or pornography addiction.

2) SSRI antidepressent side effects

3) lack of sexual attraction for the partner

4) childhood sexual abuse

5) strict religious upbringing or upbringing were it was taugh that sex was "dirty"

6) physiological problems: diabetes, nurological disease etc.

each cause requires a different treatment approach with numbers 1 and 3 being the most difficult to treat.

One interesting fact is that this malady was relatively rare until the arrival of easily accessed pornography on the internet. Therapists are also seeing more young men with R.E. due to heavy porn use.

Hi all,
I am a student doing a research paper on RE. I picked this topic becase I myself have this problem. Does anyone know of some sources of good publications on this? (peer reviewed journals, edited books) Information via the internet is not considered a valid source. So far all the books and journals just give at most a 1-3 page explaniation of RE, is there any studies of RE itself.

Thank you so much. I hope that by learning as much as I can about this problem I may be able to solve it for myself.

Ben

Ben: There isn't a lot out there but a very good article of the type you are looking for can be found here:

http://taylorandfrancis.metapress.com/

When you get to the site do a search for a paper called:

"Male psychogenic sexual dysfuntion: the role of masturbation"

Another fine, ahead of it's time piece on RE can be found in the book-

"Principals and Practice of Sex Therapy" The chapter on RE by DR Bernard Apfelbaum is called "Retarded Ejaculation: A Much Misunderstood Syndrome"

here's a link: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/de ... 4?v=glance

Perhaps you could post your research paper here when it's finished? Good luck.

Very interesting thread full of great info on a subject where information is scarce and what information there is can sometimes be quite bizzare...Chinese Herbs etc.

One point made a few times is that Masters and Jonhson's Sensate Focus therapy does not work well with R.E. patients. But no one has really explained why. If I may offer a theory.

One of the major steps...near the end of the theraputic "schedule" of SFT has the man masturbating to orgasm in front of his partner. I suppose the good Dr's thinking went something like "he can masturbate to orgasm alone so why not use that fact to treat his R.E."

Unfortunately, in my experience it is a precisely this stage where the therapy fails. Already feeling under the hot spotlight of being the sexually dysfunctional member of the "team" he now must ejaculate by his own hand in front of his "audience" (the partner)
Imagine the stress he will be under! If he has spent years masturbating alone you can see why this stage of Sensate Focus fails the patient.

I can only half understand Masters and Johnson's thinking but I am
puzzeled as to why they never considered the fact (to my knowledge) that if the man cannot ejaculate inside the partner, why should he be able to ejaculate outside? Indeed a large percentage of men with inhibited ejaculation are unable to reach orgasm unless they are alone.

Perhaps M&J thought all the soft caresses and erotic explorations of the beginning stages of the SFT, not to mention the attempt to get the poor man to suffer "blueballs" by getting him highly aroused to the point where he just HAD to ejaculate no matter what.

And what about the patient who's R.E. is situational like the patient described at the beginning of this thread? A high percentage of R.E. men suffer this dysfunction only with certain partners.

Perhaps M&J thoguht that Sensate Focus would relax the patient enough to bypass whatever was causing the R.E. but the trouble was they didn't understand that the problem has a variety of mostly psychological causes and "being tense" or "holding back" is NOT the primary cause of R.E. (on the contrary, there are just other syptoms) it goes much, much deeper than that and the failure of Sensate Focus therapy for Retarded Ejaculation is proof of that.

I wouldn't be too hard on Masters and Johnson. They were ahead of there time, in their time. And sensate focus does work for a myriad of other sexual dysfunctions. True it has limited success with inhibited male orgasm, but their track record is still pretty good and much of the sexual research going on now is based on their groundbreaking efforts.

On another note I find it interesting that if a woman doesn't have an orgasm duriing intercourse it is not a big deal (except maybe to her)
but if a man can't ejaculate it puts the whole relationship in jeopardy.
The thing is there are hundreds of books, web sites and magazine articles about women's orgasm, but anyone who is trying to seek information on retarded ejaculation will find little more than the DSM IV description...over and over and over! What a pity.

mr b.

If anyone from this forum is interested in writing an article on RE we would love to post it. I personally would love to present some real solid information about RE on our other site (http://www.mental-health-matters.com). Mental Health Matters has a much larger audience and the article would be found by more people.

Another article on RE. This is a course of treatment. Don't know how much successful it is as I didn't read the article. It's from the Journal of Sexual and Marital Therapy from fall 1990. here's the abstract and it's link:

Play therapy with the sexual workhorse: successful treatment with twelve cases of inhibited ejaculation.

Shaw J.

This paper explores play as treatment for inhibited ejaculation (IE), based on success with 12 heterosexual and homosexual men. The focus is on men able to ejaculate with their own touch but not with partner touch or penile containment. A definition of IE includes: compulsive need to please partner, response anxiety, nonsexual automatic erections, and the penis's refusal to be commanded interpersonally. Treatment options with individuals and/or couples begin with reframing the symptom as compulsive giving and are not directed at forcing ejaculation. Playing, interfering with erroneous beliefs about sexual arousal, and avoiding helping the workhorse work harder are the trust of this paper.

PMID: 2246793 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/quer ... t=Abstract

From reading this topic, I find I have a somewhat different take on my situation, but it seems to follow somewhat the previous explanations. Im in my 20's, have a girlfriend I love very much, but still can't "complete the act" during normal vaginal intercourse. I shouldn't say never, but very, very rarely. I, however, have little to no problems with oral sex. It still takes longer than other guys but at least I can finish. I don't feel much in the way of performance anxiety, but I do find myself overly concerned about her satisfaction before mine. I have had several sexual partners throughout college and high school and always the same situation. Even during one-night stands ejaculation was rare. This seems to contradict my thoughts of so-called performance anxiety because, while it may sound bad, I really didn't care what these girls thought. As far as mastubation goes, I did somewhat frequently while single, but now my girlfriend satisfies me mostly. The only exception is when I have "blue balls" the next morning. Other than that, I'm in good health, don't take any meds, don't have a particular affection towards porn, and my girlfriend has never really raised the issue. I'm a (at least self-described) well adjusted guy with no particular snagging points towards sex (ie religion, past abuse, fear of pregancy, etc.) My only concern is I realize this isn't entirely normal, and I'm more curious than anything. I'm sure my girlfriend probably has noticed, but she hasn't really addressed it head-on (no pun intended).