Vibrators vs. Dilators

[Nicole Tammelleo, MA, LCSW]

I know for many vaginismus patients the thought of using a vibrator, seems completely impossible. The mere thought of using a sex toy brings feelings of anxiety and fear. However, after using some of the smaller sized dilators we find that many women will actually look forward to dilating if they start using an internal vibrator. Internal vibrators come in so many sizes and colors, and do all kinds of things like vibrate! Often we think of vibrators as large and even bigger than a penis, but that is not the case at all. After just doing some research on vibrators, I learned that you can get an internal vibrator that is not much bigger than a tampon, but can provide a lot more pleasure! So take a look on Amazon or any other favorite website, and see the literally hundreds of options that await you!

[recessivegenequeen]

As someone who has dilated for vaginismus treatment, I have to say that vibrators are SO much better, and even for women with partners, I recommend using a vibrator! They’re great for removing some of the psychological associations with your dilators. Dilators feel very medical and it often felt like “work time” whenever I pulled them out, so using a vibrator as well gave me much more fun associations with inserting objects that weren’t a penis inside me. And like Nicole says, they come in all different shapes and sizes!

[Heather34]

Hi Nicole. This is a great topic. Post-procedure, I used dilators in advance of intercourse and the more and more we did this, the more clinical it felt. We decided to try using a vibrator instead (Lelo Liv) and it helped us tremendously to make foreplay much more fun and enjoyable and also helped me to still feel ready for intercourse as I was dilating with the vibrator.

I also wanted to share one of the partner’s previous posts about their experience with using vibrators as a couple and how it helped so much in the transition from dilators to intercourse. He writes:

“Exactly 7 weeks after the procedure we were able to achieve full penetration for the first time (yay!). You probably recall that not long before that we were struggling with the fact that progress was limited on the intercourse attempts – even despite good progress with the dilators. The major hang-up at that time seemed to be continued, intense, anxiety over penetration attempts. This led to difficulties with her physically pushing away and closing off her legs (despite conscious attempts not to), and strong negative reactions that she expressed as pain – but I suspect may have possibly been more emotion and anxiety than literally pain (much like the q-tip vulvodynia test). I had an interesting idea to try to address some of this – albeit rather indirectly. I thought that she may be able to use a vibrator for clitoral stimulation to distract from the vaginal penetration – hopefully minimizing her adverse reaction. It actually worked! We went from struggling with tip only penetration to all the way in – instantly. It was still painful for her if there was much movement, but this was huge progress. Over the next several days we continued this process – only conducting one actual penetration per night, but we left it in longer each time and gently/gradually increased the amount of movement. From this point, improvement occurred very quickly. We have been continuing the same process since then and she continues to improve each time. After about a week, we were able to have intercourse pretty much normally (after using the vibrator to get initial penetration). She has been able to orgasm with and without the vibrator. Additionally, as soon as her next period came about she was able to use tampons with almost no trouble. She now just uses a little bit of lube on the tampon and gets it in with no problem. I see a marked difference in her level of anxiety surrounding intercourse and tampon use now.”