In "Sans Rendez-vous", Tuesday, the sex therapist Catherine Blanc responds to Mélodie, who has had her breasts removed after cancer and no longer dares to make love with her husband.

According to the specialist, it is important that she relearn herself to love her body, and that she talks about it with her partner who is surely also afraid of doing wrong.

How can you regain self-confidence and give your body back to someone else when the disease has damaged it?

In Without appointment, Tuesday on Europe 1, the sexologist and psychoanalyst Catherine Blanc answers the question of a listener who, after cancer, underwent a total removal of both breasts.

She no longer dares to make love to her husband, for fear of his gaze, and asks for advice to overcome this difficulty.

>> Find sex questions every day at 3:50 p.m. on Europe 1 as well as in replay and podcast here

The question of Mélodie, 39 years old

I had breast cancer six months ago with both breasts removed and I no longer dare to have sex with my husband.

I am afraid of his gaze and especially afraid that he does not love me as before, because of my body.

Do you have any advice ?

Catherine Blanc's response

First of all, the first person who has to relearn how to love themselves is her.

Indeed, the fear that we have of the gaze of the other is the projection of our own difficulty in granting ourselves the right to continue to love ourselves and to mourn what we were for what we have become, to make us grow. and to welcome peacefully all the possibilities of this body, even though it has been traumatized.

Here, it is about the breasts, therefore an organ assimilated to femininity and potentially to the expression of male desire.

The whole difficulty is therefore to dare to present oneself quietly, proudly, in front of the one who loves you with this damaged body because we say to ourselves that we no longer have anything to excite him, by this received idea that a woman has to be exciting, when the relationship has to be and the excitement is internal to each individual.

It is beyond the body and the forms of the other.

Find natural sensations

Certainly, it is very difficult, because even when cosmetic surgery offers a remedy and does very beautiful things, the reality is that it is never a turning back. Some want to encourage by saying 'You'll see, it will be better than before, it was an opportunity to make you beautiful breasts': No, the story is not there, because it is not her breasts. It is therefore a difficult path, a path of appropriation of this body, but also of sensations. With the disease and the operation, the nervous system has inevitably been affected, severed, so it will have to be rebuilt. And obviously, finding natural sensations takes a long time. Six months is very little time.

The difficulty is therefore to offer oneself to the gaze of the other, to offer oneself to the hands of the other, and I believe that, more than ever, damaged places must be places affected, accepted.

So you have to touch yourself, let yourself be touched and accept that the sensations are no longer the same.

We must not seek to rediscover the past, but seek to welcome the hand that touches.

It is important for vascularity, for the nervous system, but also for psychology.

Should you talk about it with your spouse?

It is often difficult because there is a new problem: talking about it with your companion is talking about your injury.

However, it is potentially having the idea of ​​being a victim.

In addition, man also has a difficulty because he is afraid of doing harm and can also be afraid of what he touches, of what he encounters.

We will therefore have to go to the meeting peacefully.

They are two people who must take ownership of a situation which, even if it is on the body of one, it also has a psychological impact on the other.

Both can be scared and I think it's important to talk about it by saying 'Tell me if I hurt you, tell me if you feel'.

And above all, it is important not to expose yourself.

We're not in a doctor's office, we're not there to show the veteran's injury.

We are there to reclaim ourselves like wounded little animals, including the one that is not.