What do you do after the trauma of childbirth if it changes your relationship? (Photo: Sally Anscombe/Getty)

I applaud you for acknowledging something so personal, intimate and uncomfortable. It sounds to me like this birth was hugely traumatic for both of you. Your partner experienced intense pain, while it sounds emotionally intense for you as you found your world spinning out of control. A difficult birth can affect the whole family. The trauma is not limited to the person giving birth; if there is a partner, the helplessness, seeing the person you love suffer, often concerned they’re in danger, can feel overwhelming.

This trauma and image of your partner in pain is now associated, in your mind, with sex and pleasure. So no wonder it doesn’t feel like a very tempting proposition and you’re struggling to fancy your partner. The intimacy you once had might have changed into feelings of guilt or shame, fear or shock with which you haven’t yet made peace with. Some men I’ve worked with feel guilty and responsible for the pain that they’ve ‘caused’; it is very easy to feel a misplaced sense of responsibility for the hurt or pain of significant others. This isn’t logical, it’s emotional, and speaking about it with your partner, friends, a mens’ group or fathers’ group could be hugely helpful.

I’m guessing that so far you haven’t had a conversation with your partner. I suggest you do. If you don’t know, I’d ask her how she feels about sex after having given birth. I’d also explain clearly that you feel as much, if not more love for her than ever, but don’t know how to heal your trauma so you can enjoy sex again. Then it becomes shared and something that you tackle together. This isn’t your fault – and not a shameful secret.

We are so conditioned to think that if we don’t fancy our partner, there’s something wrong with the relationship. But while in some situations, sex can be a bellwether for a relationship, it’s not here: it’s not a symptom of a rocky relationship, but a symptom of a rocky birth experience. I want to reassure you just how common – and impermanent – your feelings most likely are.

Firstly, I’d ask you to think about life as a father. It sounds like you’ve bonded with your son, but how are you both coping? Parenthood can turn the hardiest relationship totally on its head, with severe sleep deprivation, crying and vomiting all taking centre stage. Even without a traumatic birth, I’ve not heard many women or men describe the newborn stage as a sexy one. Whether your partner is breastfeeding or not, her body remains in service of a baby. I’m always struck by Harvard evolutionary biologist David Haig’s research that found babies wake at night because they’re genetically programmed to try to prevent, or delay, their parents from making siblings, who – in survival terms – are competition for food, drink and safety.

On some level, do you feel like you’ve lost your partner? Do you feel like you no longer know how to relate to your partner and her body? That everything has changed? The transformation in your lifestyle, from couple to parents, is a huge one and takes adjusting to. If you’re missing your old life and partner as-she-was, that’s understandable and something you might need to grieve so you can fully accept life as it is now.

While this change might have started nine months earlier for your partner, who has carried your growing son through pregnancy and must have felt very aware of the changes happening to her physically, emotionally and hormonally – for you, it might have taken until your son arrived. Accepting your changed life, with its newfound responsibility and depth of love, is the first step to growing into your new role.

From here, take it one step at a time. Share your thoughts and feelings about sex with your partner. Take all the pressure of sex off the table, and reintroduce non-sexual touch to your lives: give your partner a foot massage, hold hands. It can be the smallest of gestures that starts to reignite desire.

If you can get any time to yourselves, book a hotel. If your son has active and willing grandparents, ask them to take care of the baby – and make space for you as a couple. Get to know yourselves and each other in your bodies as they are now, with no pressure at all. It might even be that you set the time aside not to have sex. There’s a tantric practice I’d recommend where the woman lays naked in whatever way is comfortable to her, rather than in a sexualised way, and the man simply observes her – he breathes, observes his thoughts – whether they be love, shame, fear, desire, guilt, repulsion, anger, lust – and lets them all pass.

I wonder how your partner is feeling about her body after having a baby? Be mindful that she might feel self conscious, even unattractive – which might make you feel unattracted to her. It might take her time to settle into her changed body. Maybe she doesn’t feel fanciable, or sexy. If this is the case, describing what you see as beautiful, accepting her body and yours, will help her as she regains her sense of self and moves into self-love and womanly beauty. Her healing may be physical as well as emotional.

More than anything though, it’s about the quality of time you can spend together, whether it’s in a hotel or going for a walk in the park without a stroller. Among the men I’ve worked with who stopped fancying their partners after experiencing them going through childbirth, some found that after a few weeks, or months they started associated sex with desire once again, one recent client found it took two years. More than anything, pressure-free time to recover from the intense experience of birth, followed up by the intense time of looking after a newborn, made the difference.

You have all the time in the world to heal from the trauma, while gaining greater depth of communication and intimacy in your relationship, and respect for your partner’s strength, as you move into the next phase of life as a man, a couple and a father in your family. So get out of your head and connect with yourself, your partner and your son. Love them and have some fun, knowing that it’s natural that your experiences have shaken you and temporarily you don’t see your partner in the same light.