Sexual Desire after Severe Brain Injury and Misinterpretations

 Sexual Desire after Severe Brain Injury: Lori-Part Sixteen 

We continued to talk about Lori’s sexual desire after severe brain injury and how easy it is or brain injury survivors to misinterpret their feelings.

If  you don’t mind talking about this further, let me ask you about a couple issues.  There is a very common problem, where it’s much easier to be a four‑year-old with your parents than your lover. 

Yes.

And it is a consistent area of conflict between spouses (or partners), when the brain-injured person is so much more dependent, so much less mature, than they remember being in the relationship.  And it’s much harder to be treated like a child by your lover than by your parents. 

Do you think that you felt some resentment towards him in that period because you weren’t having the kind of relationship you remembered and sexual desire after severe brain injury ? Do you think that contributed to your affair? 

Not in that way.  When you first ask, again, I just keep thinking how supportive he was to me physically and mentally getting better.

Did he start to treat you less as an object of sexual desire after severe brain injury and more just as a friend, was there a disconnection in the sexual chemistry because of all this? 

Well there was, and then there came a time when, well there was no interaction, and then there came a time when I wanted to have an interaction.  And when I had that affair, prior to that, I had met, I had ran into a nurse at the hospital that I was at who happened to be a friend of mine from high school.

And I met up with her and I told her that I was in day rehab and I had a brain injury, and we became friends and we saw each other outside the hospital.  And I told her that I wanted to start having sex again and could I, that I hadn’t even had my period yet, and so she kind of indirectly re-taught me about birth control.

And so then I was able to partake, and then I had the affair.  When I learned again about birth control I told my boyfriend and relationships developed.  But I remember being bothered by them, by the relationships, thinking this is, I didn’t feel like it was real.  I felt like it was pity kind of and that it, it just wasn’t right; there was, it just wasn’t; where the affair was voluntary and wanted.

So you felt more sexual desire after severe brain injury with the other man? 

Yeah.  Yeah.

Because you didn’t have this concern that he was just doing a pity? 

Right, right, and if I could take a second to say, that’s not me who I am today.

Next in Part Seventeen – Sexuality After Traumatic Brain Injury