'I Just Wanted to Be Normal': How Chronic Sexual Pain Shaped a Career

Dr. Sharon Urshelymi, a 41-year-old medical sociologist, editor of the book "Your Own Body: Medicine, Sex and Gender" with Prof. Yael Hashiloni-Dolev, says a diagnosis at age 20 set the course of her life and work. Married, a mother to a baby girl, and living in Kibbutz Dan, she says she was first diagnosed with what was then called vestibulitis, now known as vulvodynia, a chronic pain condition in the vulva or vagina, mainly during penetration.

Looking back, she says the warning signs started earlier, when tampons were painfully uncomfortable in her teens. After she began having sex and the pain kept returning, she understood that something was wrong. Diagnosis, she explains, usually comes only after other causes such as yeast infection or inflammation are ruled out, followed by a test that maps painful areas at the vaginal opening. Even then, many women go a long way before reaching clinicians who know the field.

Urshelymi rejects the idea that such pain is “just in the head.” She says the body and mind are not truly separate, and that fear, tension, social expectations, and ideas about “proper” sex quickly become part of the pain experience. For years she either stayed silent during sex, avoided it, or chose partners who could accept sexuality that did not focus only on penetration. “I wanted to be normal,” she says, adding that she was also angry that someone else defined what normal meant.

Her treatment, she says, was improvised because the field was less organized then, but pelvic-floor physical therapy became central, along with sex therapy. She says the therapy was not only about pain relief, but also about reducing anxiety, rebuilding confidence, and relearning her body. The pain eased around age 27, after most treatments had ended around age 24, and she says real change came when she learned to voice boundaries and listen to herself.

That experience became the basis for research, sex education, and activism. In 2019, with Dr. Michal Prins and support from the Briah Foundation, she helped launch “Reconnect,” a knowledge-and-action group of women with pain, which later led to Shlema, the Israeli vulvodynia organization. The group provides information, support groups, and connections between long-term sufferers and newly diagnosed women. Urshelymi says awareness has improved, more specialists now work in the field, and speaking about it openly is itself a major change. Her advice: “The body remembers everything. Don’t do something that hurts you.”