Alexander Lowen on how despair [and the fear of despair] limits the full expression of the body.

Despair is the opposite of joy, which in the adult is intimately connected with the fullness of sexual excitation and discharge. In most people sexual excitation and discharge is largely limited to the genital apparatus and does not involve the whole body. Sex is not consciously experienced as being an expression of love because the genital apparatus is not connected to the heart and its feelings. The separation of these two centres results from the inability of the respiratory wave to pass through the relative deadness and emptiness of the lower belly and pelvis due to the suppression of feeling in that part of the body. The result is that sex becomes a localised bonfire, not a passion that consumes the being and results in the experience of joyous fulfillment that can reach the height of ecstasy. The fear of despair blocks the full surrender to the body in crying, which is the only means of releasing the individual from his despair.