Why Treating Our Struggles as a Spiritual Deficit Gets in the Way of Our Healing
In my blog post last week, I named something I keep witnessing again and again, both in my work and in myself. That so many of us have been taught to respond to what feels uncomfortable by reaching for more knowledge, more rulings, more explanations, more understanding, as though enough of the right information could finally settle what we feel. And I named honestly that this has never actually worked. Knowing more about our sexual health has never, on its own, made anyone feel less afraid of their own body, or closer to their spouse, or more at peace with their sexual desire.
So if knowledge was never going to be the thing that met us, it is worth asking directly what actually is standing in the way. And the answer, at least in my experience sitting with people in this work, again and again, is discomfort itself. Sometimes that discomfort looks like confusion, not knowing what we feel or why. Sometimes it looks like anxiety, or shame, or anger that seems to come from nowhere. But underneath most of it, especially when it comes to our sexual health, is fear. Not a moral failing. Not a sign that our faith is weak or our character is flawed. Simply an emotion, doing what emotions do when they are left unmet for long enough.
Discomfort does something specific to us, and it is worth understanding exactly what
Discomfort is not an abstract concept. It is something that happens in the body before it ever becomes a thought.
Your chest tightens. Your breath shortens and quickens. Your stomach drops and ties itself into knots. Your body goes numb. Your mind either goes quiet, unable to find words for what is happening, or it goes loud, spinning through worst case scenarios faster than we can keep up with.
None of this is a character flaw. It is simply what discomfort does, whether it shows up as fear, confusion, anxiety, or anger, and it does this whether the danger in front of us is real or only remembered, whether it is happening right now or happened years ago and never fully left the body.
When it comes to our sexual health, this discomfort rarely announces itself plainly, and fear tends to be the form it takes most often. It shows up as a body that tenses the moment a spouse reaches for us, even when we love them and want to feel close to them. It shows up as a mind that goes blank when a doctor asks a simple question about our sexual health, not because we do not know the answer, but because something in us does not feel safe enough to say it out loud. It shows up as irritation that seems to come from nowhere, or a sudden exhaustion right when intimacy might otherwise begin, or a wave of confusion about what we even want anymore. Fear, in particular, constricts. It narrows what feels possible, what feels safe to say, what feels safe to want. And when it is present long enough, without ever being met, it starts to feel less like an emotion passing through us and more like simply who we are.
This is precisely why our sexual health so rarely gets addressed the way it deserves to be. Not because we lack information, and not because we lack sincerity in wanting to grow closer to God or to our spouse. But because this discomfort, and fear most of all, left unmet, quietly organizes how we relate to this whole area of our lives long before we ever consciously decide anything about it at all.
Because discomfort feels unbearable, we have learned to manage it rather than meet it
When an emotion feels this constricting, whatever form it takes, it makes sense that we would look for a way out of feeling it. And most of us were never taught how to actually stay with discomfort, fear especially. We were taught, instead, a handful of ways to manage it from a distance.
Sometimes this looks like avoidance. We simply do not bring it up. Not with our spouse, not with a friend, not even fully with ourselves. The conversation about why sexual intimacy has felt distant for months gets postponed again and again, not because it does not matter, but because even approaching it feels like standing too close to something that might undo us.
Sometimes it looks like ignoring what we feel entirely. A persistent lack of sexual desire gets quietly filed away as something that will probably resolve on its own, or as simply how things are now, rather than something worth paying attention to. We convince ourselves that if we do not look directly at it, it cannot ask anything more of us.
Sometimes it looks like justifying what has become disconnection. We tell ourselves that all marriages go through seasons like this, that this is simply what happens after enough years together, that wanting more than this might even be a little selfish. Some of this may be true in a given season. But often, underneath the reasonable sounding explanation, is fear quietly deciding what we are allowed to want.
And sometimes, as I named in the last post, it looks like spiritual bypassing. We reach for a reminder about sabr, or a teaching on gratitude, or a verse about tawwakul, and we use it not to hold what we feel with more compassion, but to skip past it entirely. The struggle gets reframed rather than actually felt, and we mistake that reframe for having dealt with it.
And sometimes it looks like staying busy. We fill our days so completely, with work, with the children, with the endless list of things that need doing, that we never actually arrive at a quiet moment where the discomfort would have room to surface. This can look like productivity, even like responsibility, and often it is genuinely both of those things. But underneath it, busyness can also become one more way of making sure we never have to stop long enough to feel what we are actually feeling.
None of these responses make anyone a bad Muslim, or a bad spouse, or a bad person. They are simply what happens when discomfort, and fear in particular, shows up in a nervous system, and a soul, that was never taught another way to hold it.
Even our language of working on the soul often stays above the heart
There has been real growth in how openly we talk about the soul as Muslims. More content now than ever before about working on your soul, about battling your nafs, about becoming the version of yourself your fitrah (innate goodness and spiritual potential) already knows you can be. Much of this comes from a sincere place, and there is real value in wanting to grow closer to God through disciplined effort.
But if you look closely at most of this content, it tends to stay in the same place the knowledge acquisition pattern from the last post stayed in. Behavioral. Cognitive. Focused on discipline, on habit, on correcting the thought or the action in front of us. Battle the nafs. Redirect the thought. Do the deed anyway, despite how you feel. These are not wrong instructions, and there is a place for striving against what is easy in favor of what is right. But this approach quietly assumes that the difficulty in front of us lives at the level of behavior and thought alone, and so that is the only level it ever tries to reach. Over time, it can also create a tense relationship with our own inner experience, where what we feel becomes something to overpower rather than something to understand, an obstacle to discipline rather than information worth listening to. Self accountability matters, and it is a real part of this work. But self accountability without compassion becomes just another form of battling ourselves, and it is worth asking honestly where the compassion is in an approach that only ever asks us to try harder against what we feel.
What this approach so often misses is the qalb, the heart, which in our tradition is understood as the actual seat of our emotions, and the place where our experiences, including the ones that were difficult, overwhelming, or traumatic, leave their imprint. The heart is not simply the organ that pumps blood, and it is not only a poetic stand in for feelings in general. It is understood as the site where wounding actually lives, where fear and shame and grief settle in and shape how we move through the world, often long after the mind has moved on and decided the matter is closed. You can redirect a thought a hundred times and still find your body bracing the same way it always has, because the thought was never where the wound was held in the first place.
This is why so much of the discipline focused content around the soul, however sincere, tends to leave people feeling like they are still missing something. It asks the nafs to behave differently without ever turning toward the qalb to ask what it is actually carrying, and why. Real change asks something different of us. Not only correcting what we do or think, but turning with real compassion and curiosity toward the heart itself, toward what it has absorbed and held onto, often without our full awareness, for years.
And it is worth understanding honestly where that discomfort was learned in the first place, because very little of it was invented by any one of us alone.
Discomfort around our sexual health is rarely something we invented ourselves
Almost no one arrives at fear, or confusion, or shame around their sexual health by accident, or out of nowhere. It is, more often than not, something absorbed long before we had the language or the awareness to notice it happening.
For some of us, it started with how sexual health was, or was not, spoken about growing up. A house where the topic was met with silence, or visible discomfort, or a swift change of subject, teaches a child something powerful, even without a single word being said directly. It teaches that this part of ourselves is not safe to bring into the open, that curiosity here is somehow dangerous, long before anyone ever explains why.
For others, it is the weight of community and the fear of being seen or judged. Growing up watching how quickly people are talked about, how reputations are formed and repeated, teaches many of us to keep our questions and our struggles entirely private, even from the people closest to us, even from ourselves.
For some, this discomfort was shaped by an experience that had nothing to do with choice at all. A form of trauma, an early exposure to sexual content that a child was never equipped to make sense of, an experience that left the body learning fear, or shutting down entirely, before the mind ever had the words for what happened. These are not small factors, and they deserve to be named honestly rather than folded quietly into a general list.
And for many of us, it is some combination of all of it, home, community, society, and our own lived experience, layered on top of each other over years, until this discomfort no longer feels like something that happened to us. It starts to feel like it is simply who we are.
Naming this is not about assigning blame to any parent, any community, or any single moment. It is about understanding, with real compassion, that the fear, confusion, or shame so many of us carry around our sexual health was not something we chose. It was something we inherited, absorbed, and learned to manage long before we ever had the chance to meet it differently.
This is where the real cost becomes clear
Here is what actually happens when discomfort, and fear especially, goes unmet for long enough. It does not simply make one conversation harder, or one moment of intimacy more difficult. It shuts down the two things that are absolutely necessary if we are ever going to witness our sexual health, or any part of ourselves, as part of the whole soul rather than something separate to be managed. Compassion and curiosity.
Compassion is what allows us to meet a struggle without immediately deciding something is wrong with us for having it. Curiosity is what allows us to actually get close enough to a feeling to understand what it is asking of us, rather than rushing past it toward relief. Fear closes both of these almost instantly, and so does the confusion or shame that often rides alongside it. A body braced against fear has no room left for gentleness toward itself. A mind occupied with managing a threat, real or remembered, has no space left for genuine curiosity about what is actually happening underneath.
This is why sexual health so often gets treated as something separate from the rest of who we are, a problem to be solved rather than a part of the soul to be witnessed. Not because we do not care enough, and not because we are not trying. But because this discomfort, left unmet, makes compassion and curiosity feel entirely out of reach, and without them, there is no real witnessing available to us. There is only managing, coping, getting through it, again and again, without ever actually arriving anywhere different.
Where this leaves us
None of this means fear, or discomfort more broadly, is something to fix or eliminate before we can begin. It is not the enemy here, and this is not a call to overcome it through sheer willpower or more effort. It is simply the honest starting point. If compassion and curiosity are what we actually need in order to witness our sexual health as part of our whole soul, then the real work is learning how to meet what feels uncomfortable, fear most of all, with those same qualities, rather than continuing to manage it from a distance the way most of us were taught to.
Before moving further, it might help to sit honestly with a few questions.
When discomfort shows up around your sexual health, what does it actually feel like in your body, and where do you notice it first?
Does it tend to arrive as fear, as confusion, as shame, or as something else entirely?
Which of these responses, avoiding, ignoring, justifying, bypassing, or staying busy, feels most familiar to you, and when did you first learn to respond that way?
And if you trace that discomfort back far enough, what do you notice about where it may have first taken root, in your home, your community, or an experience that shaped you before you had the words for it?
There is one more piece of this that deserves its own space entirely. This discomfort, and the absence of compassion and curiosity it creates, touches all of us, but it shows up differently depending on who we are and what we have been taught to carry. In the final blog post of this series, we explore how Season One of Witnessing the Soul: Intimacy in Marriage fills these gaps.
Season One opens on September 4th.
