by Staci Haines
Being safe and feeling comfortable are not the same thing. You might be able to answer the above questions in a way that lets you know you are safe, but still find that you feel afraid and uncomfortable. Sexual healing does not always feel safe; in fact, it can feel downright scary.
While you didn’t have power as a child to act on your own behalf and take care of yourself, you do now. You get to decide whether or not a situation is safe for you and then decide what to do about it. When you are safe, you are able to make your own choices. You are empowered to take care of yourself.
Building a Sense of Internal Safety
When you have had little sense of true safety in your life, how do you go about building some? Once your external safety has been handled, safety becomes an inside job. You can develop a sense of internal safety, a way of feeling in your body that lets you know you are okay and that everything is all right. This ability to relax or let down your guard is often what was so damaged through sexual abuse. Even when your relationships and the world you have built around you are safe, you may feel like you are never really safe. Most trauma survivors experience this feeling of low-level, insistent, persistent danger.
Mentally I know that I am safe now. I mean, stuff happens in the world, I may
get shot or raped. But given that I am in a safe home and safe relationships and
have taken self-defense, my odds even of that are low. So why is it that I feel I
am always watching on some level? If I come off guard, I think that will be the
moment they have been waiting for to attack me. I’d rather get attacked when
I have my defenses up. I don’t think I could bear trusting again and being
attacked when I am relaxed.
Maggie
To build an internal sense of safety, let’s look to your body. What sensations do you feel there? Notice temperature, pressure, and movement. Notice sensation all over your body, front and back, inside and out, top and bottom. Do you feel warmth in your legs? Cool feet? Tension in your stomach? Tingling inside your head? Are you feeling blocked or rigid in your chest?
Now, look for a place in your body where you feel a sense of peace, strength, or well-being. Do you feel strength in the palms of your hands? A sense of well-being in your right hip? Where do you feel your body comfortably settling? A sense of openness or spaciousness? Look for the literal sensations. What are they?
If you are unable to find a place in your body where you experience comfort, find something you like outside of your body. Think of your favorite animal, a beautiful color, a person you love, a place in nature, or something you love to do, like singing, skiing, or surfing. Notice what happens in your body. Does a smile come across your face? A feeling of warmth spread across your chest or back? Maybe your hips relax and get warm. These sensations are the building blocks for your sense of internal well-being. You can call these your sensations of safety or pleasure, well-being, or resourcefulness. These are what we will use in building a strong internalized sense of safety.
Bring your attention back to these sensations again. Have they changed at all? Sensations in the body are alive and shifting all the time. Place your attention on your body and look openly at where you feel those resourceful sensations now. What are those sensations like? Are they moving?
Now practice making those sensations smaller. Can you shrink them down? And bigger. Can you expand that warmth or spaciousness? What is it like to sit and breathe with these resourceful sensations for thirty seconds? Try this now. I will ask you throughout the book to call forth these sensations of safety. The more you notice them, the more apparent and present they will become. Noticing these sensations does not make other sensations, feelings of fear and anger, or triggers go away; rather, it gives you a safe place to approach them from. By accessing these sensations again and again, you can build an internalized sense of safety or resourcefulness to return to when facing challenging moments in your healing—or even when you are having sex.
What’s Down This Road, Anyway?
Your sexual healing process will be affected by many factors, including the particular abuse you experienced, who the perpetrators were, and the quality of support available to you then and now. The information or misinformation you have received about sex will also come into play. Your cultural, class, and religious background will help frame the uniqueness of your journey. If you were raised Catholic, you will have a different set of issues to grapple with than someone raised in a non-religious household. Your experiences of social bias and oppression add to the mix.
The pain and uncertainty of incest felt very much like the insecurities of being a person of color, a woman, and gay in this culture. The result is disempowerment.
Lee
Expect to experience a gamut of emotions. Terror, rage, grief, and guilt will have their turns alongside new types of excitement, pleasure, and desire. Issues and emotions that you thought you had dealt with long ago may arise. At times you may feel like you are going backward. Do not be discouraged. This is normal in the sexual healing process. Because you are now healing the very arena in which you were abused, issues of boundaries, consent, dissociation, and triggers are necessarily a part of the work.
As I began to focus on being sexual and recovering this part of me, I found
myself dealing with being afraid of people again and not being able to sit still.
These seemed unrelated to my sexual healing at first, but they were just a new
layer of fears to work through in being more sexual.
Jeanie
I have worked a lot on being able to stay present and not disappear, and I have made a lot of progress. The hardest part of sexual healing is dealing with how I shut down. Staying present during sex is a whole new thing.
Terri
You can think of sexual healing as graduate-level recovery.
Although I remembered my sexual abuse during sex, and remained sexually active throughout most of my process, I am seven years into my healing and just now getting into the real stuff of sex. I am now giving myself permission to really express myself sexually, learning to be in my body during sex, and getting a glimpse of what intimacy and sex combined could be like.
Danielle
Your healing process will most likely proceed at an uneven pace. You’ll find there will be times of intense focus and times of rest. Sometimes you just have to attend to other aspects of your life. You’ll develop a rhythm of moving into and then back out of the work of sexual healing.
Hot Spots in Healing
Along the way, you may have to grapple with some difficult contradictions. You may find that there are aspects of the abuse that were physically pleasurable to you. You may have come to orgasm during the abuse, or you may have loved the attention you received. Your perpetrators may have deliberately turned you on. You are not bad, wrong, or to blame. Sexual and sensual response is normal and healthy. Your body and sexuality did not betray you; your perpetrators did.
My orgasms have been very hard to come by. My abuser brought me to orgasm as part of his game. I have had to practice forgiving myself over and over again, just acknowledging that my body responded like any healthy body would.
Shandell
You may have engaged in nonconsensual sex play with other children. Sometimes children who are being abused act out the abuse on other children or even pets. This may have been sexually arousing or erotic to you, and you may carry feelings of guilt and shame. Facing each of these experiences is part of the healing and self-forgiveness required to free yourself.
My family would hang out with my younger cousins in the summer. The second year my dad was abusing me, I started touching my cousins. It’s like I was trying to work out on them what was happening to me.
Dede
You may enjoy some sexual acts now that were perpetrated on you as a child and dislike others. You may be simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by certain fantasies related to your abuse. Your sexual
desires, fantasies, and sexual responses are affected by the abuses you suffered as well as other personal, family, and social influences in your life. One of the most important factors in sexual healing is returning choice and consent to your sex life. Allowing yourself to discover what you like and enjoy sexually, and mending the self-blame and guilt that so often permeate desire, are both parts of the process of recovery.
I felt guilt for a long time about enjoying anal sex. I thought I was “acting out” the abuse because he raped me like that, and because it is unconventional, I think. Now I realize that I just like it. It feels good to me. I don’t think I am acting out by liking kissing, and he did that, too.
Marty
Somebody to Lean On: Self-Care and Support
You didn’t get hurt alone, and you can’t heal alone. Support is essential to any healing process. Isolation plays a key role in childhood sexual abuse. Most children never tell what is happening to them, and many who do tell are not believed or given adequate support. Adult survivors tend to continue to live in isolation. Coming out of isolation means coming into relationships. This, in and of itself, is a part of healing sexually.
Gaining support in your sexual healing breaks a double taboo. You will be talking not only about childhood sexual abuse but also about sex. While sex is overexposed in the media, we don’t often sit down and tell each other the truth about our sex lives. Most people, survivors or not, have healing to do in the area of sexuality. The upside of this is that most people are relieved to talk about sex and sexual healing once someone else raises the topic. They, too, are glad to explore what is so often left unexamined.
Support includes both self-care and a community to be held by. Let’s start with self-care.
Self-Care
Learning to care for yourself well is a lifelong journey. Your needs will change over time, and you will get better at it with practice. There are many different aspects of yourself to take care of: your body, your emotional and mental well-being, your financial life, your spiritual life, your family and relationships, your mission or meaning in life, your career, your sexuality, and your healing.
Here I am going to focus on the fundamentals of self-care. Attending to these fundamentals will give you a foundation to build upon during the challenging and exciting times of healing sexually.
EAT, DRINK, SLEEP, AND BE MERRY
Eating well can be a challenge for many survivors. Aim for two to three good meals a day, including plenty of fruits, vegetables, and protein. Drinking at least eight glasses of water a day will help your body flush out toxins that are released in the process of deep emotional work. Sleep regularly, seven to ten hours a night. And include pleasure in your life. What makes you smile or laugh? What brings that sense of warmth or comfort to your body? Perhaps you enjoy petting your cat, dancing, feeling the warmth of the sun, taking a luxurious hot bath… Do something pleasurable at least once per week. Notice your enjoyment.
LET YOUR BODY MOVE
Movement, including walking, biking, aerobic workouts, dancing, or running, can have a profound effect on your physical and emotional health. Movement oxygenates your body and increases your circulation. This helps in the process of healing and in relaxing. Whatever movement you choose, practice being “in” your body while you do it. Use this as a time to feel your breath and body sensations, rather than a time for checking out. This will assist you in being more embodied during all your activities, especially sex.
BREATHE
Breathing seems obvious, but it is not. Drop your breath lower in your body so that your diaphragm and chest move when you breathe. Notice when you are holding your breath, or breathing shallowly, and breathe deeply again.
TREAT YOURSELF WITH DIGNITY
How do you talk to yourself? Do you handle yourself with care and respect? Imagine how you would speak to a young child or a friend who is feeling afraid. You would not yell at her or tell her how stupid she is. Rather, you would be comforting, offering support and guidance. How you treat yourself internally is as important as what you do on the outside.
GIVE YOURSELF LOTS OF ACKNOWLEDGMENT
No one ever died from over-acknowledgment. Actively acknowledge yourself for your steps in healing. Notice all the risks you are taking, and give yourself support and kudos.
MAKE TIME FOR SOLITUDE
Solitude is also important to self-care. Make time for yourself weekly. You can use the time to write in a journal, sit quietly, do art work, meditate, or whatever else serves your process.
INCORPORATE SPIRITUALITY IN YOUR LIFE
Many people also incorporate a spiritual practice or meditation into their lives. A spiritual practice can offer sustenance and a larger perspective to rest within. Meditation can be an excellent way to touch base with yourself, develop discipline, and learn to notice your own emotional processes. It is also a good way to learn to notice what is happening in your body, and to feel centered and at peace with yourself.
DEAL WITH ADDICTIONS: ALCOHOL, DRUGS, FOOD, SELF-DEPRIVATION
Many survivors have used food, alcohol, drugs, or self-deprivation as a means of coping with the sexual abuse. Many also use these substances to try to deal with sex. Some survivors cannot be sexual without getting high.
I couldn’t have sex unless I was drunk or high. I would feel too out of control and triggered. The alcohol and drugs numbed that all out and gave me a kind of confidence. I had a lot of sex that I wouldn’t really want to have today, though.
Lourdes
I used drugs and alcohol to cushion myself from my feelings about the abuse.
Alcohol helped me shut down. Alcohol helped me stay in sexually disappointing
relationships for such a long time.
Max
If you have problems with substance abuse, get help. There are numerous recovery organizations to help you overcome addiction, including innovative programs like Recovery Systems Inc., a nutrition-based recovery program that attends to the effects of substance abuse and trauma on our physiology. Look in your local phone book for Twelve-Step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous and Overeaters Anonymous, as well as programs that employ numerous other approaches to recovery. See the Resources for more information.
Community Support
Community support includes all those who offer you love, care, information, guidance, and acceptance along the way. Community support may include friends, partners, co-workers, counselors and therapists, online buddies, self-help groups, supportive family members, and community groups. A varied support system offers more flexibility and availability—and a backup if your best friend is not around.
Support can be found by gaining referrals in your area from national survivors’ organizations, speaking with friends and co-workers, checking newspapers and newsletters, visiting Internet chat rooms and joining newsgroups, or developing your own support group. Get creative in developing support.
I needed other women to talk to about my abuse and healing. I am a ritual abuse survivor, so this was especially terrifying, because of the stigma and because not a lot of people have very good information about it. After a lot of fear, I took a risk and started a ritual abuse peer support group. It is still scary, and it is exactly what I need.
Rose
Be clear with your support community about the focus of your healing. People can offer better support if they know what your journey and goals entail. Let your friends know that you are healing sexually now and what you may need from them. If you are uncertain at this time, you can inform them as you progress.
Sex-Positive Support
It has been challenging to find the community that can support me just as I am sexually. I found that my own exploration pushed a lot of people’s buttons. I didn’t want to be confined by my abuse or society’s ideas of how I should be sexually. I think this was scary to people. People lacked information and education.
Rebecca
Because most of information available about sex in our society is negative
and incomplete, it is likely that you are going to need to search out positive input about sex and your sexuality and preferences. Everyone can benefit from sex-positive information about human sexuality, the diversity of sexual expression, human sexual anatomy, and sexual development. It is likely that your support people, including most trained therapists, will also need sex-positive information.
The average physician receives less than twelve hours of sex education during her or his entire medical training. The average therapist, unless specializing in sexual “dysfunction,” receives less than nine hours. By comparison, San Francisco Sex Information requires that potential hotline volunteers complete fifty-six hours of basic training in human sexuality. This is a thorough training and still barely begins to cover the information, experiences, and dynamics of human sexuality. For the most part, sex-positive information is not institutionalized but must be sought out.
A sex-positive, nonjudgmental attitude will be your most valuable asset in sexual healing. Sex for survivors can be laden with contradictions, guilt, and self-blame. Because sex was used against you as an instrument of harm rather than of healing, it is important to learn about the positive and self-affirming expressions of sex. You need support for exploring your desires at the same time that you are discovering the contradictions in your sexuality. It helps to have friends, counselors, and other supporters who can handle your wildest fantasies right along with the worst pain of your sexual abuse. It can be very damaging to get negative judgments about your sexual exploring, and it can be profoundly healing to find encouragement and acceptance as you become more empowered sexually.
