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Essay on How to Establish a Healthy Sexual Relationship
Traditional measurements of quality of life include a social integration factor (like the number of friends contacted per month), but sexual health and sexual relations are not measured. Social integration does not measure relationship satisfaction. People can be socially integrated but still feel emotionally isolated. According to researchers Gill and Feinstein, quality of life as defined and experienced by the individual with a disability was extremely important -- sometimes more important than employment, income or functional measures.
Karen Hwang, M.Ed., studying disability and attachment in personal relationships, found people in a relationship were generally more satisfied in their lives than those who were not. Her findings underscored the importance of secure, intimate relationships to individual quality of life for people with disabilities. When measuring outcomes of quality of life assessments, a clear need exists to incorporate individual subjective ratings of the quality of intimate relationships, sexuality and spirituality in the lives of people with disabilities if they are to have practical relevance.
Another important element of quality of life ignored in traditional measurements is spirituality. A colleague recently told me he believed sexuality and spirituality were two different and unrelated things. He felt sex is of the flesh and spirituality is something else. I disagreed. My perspective was based in the philosophy, history, science, medicine, psychology and human experience of sex. This was grounding that led to a spiritual plain, for it is in the realm of the spirit that we feel love.
An important emergent theme from my research on pleasure and orgasm in people with spinal cord injuries was what I called connectedness. There was a need to be with a trusted sexual partner for safe sexual exploration and peak sexual experience, including pleasure and orgasm. The most pervasive reasons were the excitement gained from pleasing or satisfying a partner, feelings of connectedness or complementary sexual energies, and identifying sex with a sense of intimacy and as an expression of love rather than a pleasurable release.....
