And there was one of those silences—you know, where someone’s brain is turning over an idea like a puzzle piece, figuring out where it fits in the overall picture.
“Moving forward slowly isn’t the same as wanting to stop,” he repeated. “You have a slow hot-water heater, a ticking pilot light.”
“That’s right.”
“And you’ll tell me if you want to stop.”
“Darn skippy.”
Henry the gentleman, Henry the geek, nodded slowly. “I think I got it.” (He gets it slightly wrong in chapter 6, but I promise there’s a
happy ending.) sex and the survivor Sexual trauma survivorship impacts information processing for both the accelerator and the brake. Sensations, contexts, and ideas that used to be interpreted as sexually relevant may instead now be interpreted by your brain as threats, so that sexy contexts actually hit the brakes. And the chronically high levels of stress activity in a recovering survivor’s brain can block out sexual stimuli, categorizing them as low priority.
Sometimes, too, survivors find themselves locked in a pattern of sexual behavior. Their brains become compulsive about undoing the trauma, redoing it differently, or simply understanding it. Like biting on a cold sore or squeezing a pimple, the brain can’t leave the trauma alone, even though you know you’d heal faster if you could. The result is that the survivor has multiple partners, often following a habitual pattern, without feeling perfectly in control of the decision to have those partners.
If you’re a trauma survivor, chances are you’ve either done a bunch of emotional work to move through the trauma, or else you’ve got some work ahead of you. If your trauma is recent or feels unresolved (for example, if reading the previous section made your heart pound), you’ll probably benefit from a more intensive level of support than this book can offer.
Therapy would probably be great. And there are books specifically about sex as a survivor, including Healing Sex: A Mind-Body Approach to Healing Sexual Trauma by Staci Haines and The Sexual Healing Journey: A Guide for Survivors of Sexual Abuse by Wendy Maltz.
If the trauma is not recent and is more or less resolved, it’s normal for you to experience residual effects on your sexual functioning, even when
you are largely recovered. Sexual trauma tends to wrap tendrils around so many parts of your emotional experience that you find it unexpectedly, like a persistent invasive weed that has to be pulled and pulled again.
There are three broad approaches to coping with these residual bits of trauma. We might call them “top-down,” or a cognitive, thought-based approach; “bottom-up,” or a somatic, body-based approach; and 12“sideways,” a mindfulness-based approach.
Top-Down: Processing the Trauma. There are several different forms of cognitive-based therapy—cognitive behavioral therapy, cognitive processing therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy, etc. They all involve some degree of recognizing the meaning that you’ve created around the trauma and then challenging belief patterns within that meaning, or recognizing behavioral habits that you’ve trained yourself into since the trauma and challenging those patterns.
They require first that you become aware of the patterns, whether of thought or behavior, and then that you develop skills to replace those patterns with new ones. Allow yourself to feel those old feelings, but now, instead of engaging in the habitual self-defensive patterns, begin practicing new patterns. In the process of changing the patterns, the residual trauma will emerge. Know that you can feel all your Feels and still be safe. Know that you did everything you could in that moment to protect yourself; grant yourself forgiveness for the things you may still blame yourself for, recognizing that the trauma is the fault of the perpetrator alone. And imagine yourself as you are now, safe and whole, sitting quietly—or imagine yourself embracing yourself as you were then, offering yourself the comfort and security you needed then, with reassurance that you survived, that your life got better. This is your new pattern: Allow the feelings to move through you.
Bottom-Up: Processing Your Body. If the idea of analyzing your patterns of thought and behavior is unappealing to you, you may prefer a 13 body-based therapy, such as sensorimotor therapyor Somatic 14 Experiencing (SE).These approaches can stand alone as a powerful way to heal your relationship with your body and your sexuality post trauma, and they can also complement other approaches.
When I spoke with SE practitioner Kristen Chamberlin, she pointed out that body-based therapies move slowly into mainstream practice because we don’t have a cultural framework for the body’s natural processing of
physiological stress (completing the cycle). As a culture, we don’t trust our bodies, so we override them, which makes us vulnerable to maladaptive coping strategies, as Olivia experienced.
In Chamberlin’s practice, she said, the question is, “How do we work with the organic intelligence of the body to heal? Instead of managing what comes up from the body, we work with it, trusting its purpose and direction, while holding a very particular, healing framework. The result is that physiological stress can change and release.” This is good news, since so many roadblocks in our sexual relationships are symptoms of unprocessed physiological stress. When we release the old, incomplete stress responses, we make space for new movement where we once felt stuck.
And when you find the stuckness, simply grant it kind, patient, gentle attention. The stuckness will change in the warmth of your attention, it will melt like snow under the sun. Let it. Emotions are physiological cascades that want to complete their cycles, and they will complete those cycles when you allow them to; they want to be travelers, not residents. They want to move on. Let them. You may tremble or shake or cry or curl up in a ball.
You may notice your body doing these things without your volition. Your body knows what to do, and it will do it as long as you sit calmly with it, as you would sit calmly beside a sick or grieving child.
Sideways: Mindfulness. Perhaps the gentlest approach is the most indirect. Without ever addressing the trauma directly, you can simply begin practicing mindfulness, and gradually the trauma will work its way out, like shrapnel from an old wound. There are spectacular books on the practice of mindfulness. One of my favorites is The Mindful Way through Depression by Mark Williams, John Teasdale, Zindel Segal, and Jon Kabat-Zinn. Don’t let the “through depression” part throw you; it’s a practical guide to managing any uncomfortable emotional experience.
Here’s the short version of how to practice mindfuless: 1. Start with two minutes. For two minutes a day, direct your attention to your breath: the way the air comes into your body and your chest and belly expand, and the way the breath leaves your body and your chest and belly deflate.
2. The first thing that will happen is your mind will wander to something else. That’s normal. That’s healthy. That’s actually the point. Notice that your mind wandered, let those extraneous thoughts go—you can return to them as soon as the two minutes are up—and allow your attention to return to your breath.
3. Noticing that your mind wandered and then returning your attention to your breath is the real work of mindfulness. It’s not so much about paying attention to your breath as it is about noticing what you’re paying attention to without judgment, and making a choice about whether you want to pay attention to it. What you’re “mindful” of is both your breath and your