Good Vibrations Magazine

Sex is simple and incredibly complex all at the same time. Sex is filled with contradictions, pleasure, pains, satisfaction, confusion, desire, and a wide variety of emotions. Sex is a natural and fundamental part of humans. Even those who decide to be celibate have had to decide how to express their sexuality.

Sex is also used for contradictory purposes. It can be used for pleasurable and life-giving ends or misused and abused to hurt others. The contradictions in sex are especially apparent for the many women and men who have experienced some form of non-consensual sex or sexual trauma and abuse. Sex can get mixed with abuse for survivors and become very difficult to untwine later. Sexual healing can also be one of the most powerful aspects of recovery after sexual trauma and reap the greatest rewards.

Sexual Trauma

Sexual trauma is all too common an experience for both women and men. Many people are sexually molested or abused as children and/or hurt by non-consensual sex or rape as adults. Even those who are not themselves survivors of sexual trauma often have been friends or partners with someone who is a survivor, and have been affected by the experience. Trauma is a deeply affecting experience for people. It shocks us mentally, emotionally and physiologically.

Being hurt sexually impacts people in a deep and fairly predictable way. The human body has built-in mechanisms to protect us from invasion and danger. We automatically respond to danger by preparing to fight, flee, or freeze to get away from the hurt or betrayal. Humans dissociate or “check out” to protect themselves from the impact of trauma. To dissociate is to move away from sensations, intensity, and the corresponding emotions of the trauma. This is an automatic (not conscious) response for survival. When endangered, we respond automatically to find safety. We can, however, get caught in these responses and spend most of our time checked out or in a state of alertness awaiting the next danger. All of these responses, if not processed through the body, can live on in your automatic responses for years. You may be able to “understand” the experience differently, but the body will still respond like you are under attack, often in the most intimate of times.

Building intimacy and a satisfying sex life on top of those responses does not usually prove to be a lot of fun. Sex is an embodied experience, one that calls us into our sensations and pleasure, and into a different state of vulnerability with another person. If you or your partner(s) are “checked out,” or the past sexual trauma is so mixed in with today that you can’t quite tell the difference, the situation can end up defeating the whole purpose of having sex.

Many survivors of sexual trauma experience a variety of sexual effects. These may include the sense of not being “present” during sex, flashbacks or emotions connected to the abuse arising during consensual sex, distrust of trustworthy partners, and not being able to tell the difference between your sex partner and your abuser. People can struggle with sexual compulsion or sexual shutdown as a means of coping with the trauma, and may be swept into unsafe sex practices, an inability to connect sex and intimacy, or a low capacity for pleasure. Some survivors feel hatred of their own sexuality or body. Many survivors experience some physical pleasure or are brought to orgasm during abuse. This further complicates feelings about the abuse and about sex. Many survivors feel that the abuse was their fault or that their body betrayed them if it responded sexually. But when a body is stimulated in certain way we respond whether that stimulation is consensual or not.

The Thing About Sex

The thing about sex is that sex is an embodied experience. The sensations, connection, pleasure and intensity of sex is something that we experience through our bodies. Plenty of people have dissociated sex, but good sex is an experience of being present with yourself and another. Sex is a positive and inherent part of who we are as humans. We are designed to experience pleasure in being sexual with ourselves and one another.

This aspect of being embodied is often where the trouble arises for survivors of sexual abuse. Being embodied is being connected to your own sensations, boundaries and emotions while being able to be connected to someone else. Since dissociating is the natural way the body survives sexual abuse, returning to your sensations and body can be fraught with history. Returning to the body often means facing, feeling, and working through the abuse stored there. It means addressing the impact of the abuse that can get triggered being present sexually with yourself and/or another.

Sex and intimacy can stir deep healing for people who have been hurt sexually. Although sometimes painful, sexual healing can be a powerful reckoning with your sensations, choices, boundaries and desires.

Steps to Healing Sexually

You can heal the impact of past sexual harm, and have a sex life that works for you. Following are steps to sexual recovery:

*Work with the sexual trauma and its effects on your body.
*Complete and transition out of the automatic responses that trauma can leave behind in the body. It is vital to work through the body in recovery. This can include various forms of somatic bodywork or somatic processes.
*Move from dissociation to living within your own sensations.
*Practice being inside of your own skin. Trauma teaches you to live outside of your experience and become “checked out.” You can learn to face the emotions and impact of the abuse while increasing your capacity for sensation, aliveness, and emotion.
*Build on your strengths, resiliency and courage. Survivors are an incredibly resilient group of human beings. To survive sexual abuse you have to be resilient. If you are alive, you are more powerful than what happened to you.
*Find the sensations and experiences in your body of strength, warmth, positive desire, courage, and dignity. What do they feel like? Build upon these by noticing them often and locating the corresponding sensations. Leverage your own resilience and strength for your sexual healing.
*Educate yourself about sex. For most of us, sex education arrived through our peers, who knew as little as we did about sex. Often for survivors of sexual abuse, education about sex came through the abuse. Educating yourself sexually through current books, tapes, and educational videos is a must. What is it that you enjoy sexually? How do you know that? What do you know about your own sexual anatomy? Your own desires? Educate yourself sexually so that you can discover and then self-define what you like and desire. If you do not know the options, it is hard to know what you want.
*Practice Pleasure. For sexual wellness you may need to rebuild your “tolerance” for pleasure and closeness with yourself and others. Self-pleasuring skills are as important as learning about pleasure with your partner. Abuse teaches you to tolerate suffering. Learning to allow and enjoy pleasure is an important step in healing sexually.
*Move toward and through sexual triggers. Many survivors of sexual trauma are triggered into past experiences, emotions or memories of the abuse during sex. Understandably many also try to avoid these triggers by avoiding the experiences that trigger them. The problem with trying to avoid sexual triggers is twofold. One, if you avoid more and more experiences that trigger you, your life, including your sex life, gets smaller and smaller and you have fewer choices. The triggers and abuse end up running your sexuality. Secondly, triggers often show you exactly where there is healing to be done. By pushing through triggers, you unpack or “thaw out” those areas that hold the trauma. Triggers can be moved through, so that what used to trigger you can no longer do so.

Healing sexually after sexual abuse gives you the opportunity to heal the very place of harm. You get to go into the center and reclaim the area as your own. Your pleasure, your expression, and your closeness with others become yours to define. You can discover your desires, your likes, your boundaries, and create a sex life of your own making.

“I think survivors (of sexual abuse) who have done their healing have some of the best sex lives around. We have to work through and deal with, heal and redefine sex for ourselves. We do all this healing work that most people really need to do, survivors or not.” From The Survivor’s Guide to Sex.