sometimes roll their eyes: “Not the tunnel again.” Yes, the tunnel again.
Because it’s true.
There’s a worksheet at the end of this chapter to help you think through effective strategies for reducing your stress.
While you’re figuring out what strategies help, pay attention to your patterns of self-inhibition, and identify places and people who create space for you to have Feels. Some of those patterns of self-inhibition are important and unchangeable—for example, carefully consider any plan that involves crying at work. But some of them will be self-defeating, and everyone needs at least one place in their life where they can just Have All The Feels without worrying about being judged or freaking people out. Find that place and those people.
A final caution: Too often, we mistake dealing with the stressors for dealing with the stress. A couple years ago the leaders of the campus Peer Sex Educators sat in my office, reporting how well their Sextravaganza events had gone. They had worked for months and their efforts were rewarded with a spectacular success, but they looked exhausted and stunned and said, “Sextravaganza is over! Why do we still feel exactly as stressed out as we did the day it started?!”
“Because you’ve dealt with the stressor,” I said, “but not the stress.
Your bodies still think you’re being chased by the lion.”
Solution: Do things that communicate to your body, “You have escaped
and survived!”
• Physical activity
• Sharing affection • Primal scream or a good cry • Progressive muscle relaxation or other sensorimotor meditation • Body self-care, like grooming, massage, or doing your nails The dance major chose physical activity, and the study of women and gender major organized a big group primal scream. when sex becomes the lion Beyond the day-to-day stressors of life are the deep wounds that life inflicts and sometimes does not provide opportunities to heal. Given the prevalence of trauma of all kinds, especially sexual trauma—a conservative estimate is that one in five women is sexually assaulted in her lifetime, and 9it could be more like one in three—it’s impossible to talk about women’s sexual health without spending some time discussing trauma. From child sexual abuse to sexual assault to all forms of interpersonal violence, women
are disproportionately and systematically targeted, and thus they disproportionately bring to their sexual functioning the emotional, physical, and cognitive features of a trauma survivor. In other words, if women have more “issues” than men around sex, there’s good reason. (If you’re a survivor and still working through your experience, you may prefer to skip ahead to the next section.) Trauma results when a person has control over her body taken from her, she freezes, and then she can’t unlock. Whether the cause is a car accident or sexual violence, the survival mechanism kicks in: freeze, the petrified shutdown characterized by numbness and sometimes tonic immobility (paralysis) or a sense of disembodiment. Some people describe it as “going into shock.” This is the life-threat stress response, activated when your brain decides you can’t escape a stressor, nor can you fight it. It’s reserved for the most dangerous and violent contexts.
Rape has been described by victim advocate and former police officer 10 Tom Tremblay as “the most violent crime a person can survive.”Those who have not been sexually assaulted can perhaps most clearly understand the experience of a survivor by thinking of them as having survived an attempted murder that used sex as the weapon.
Sexual violence often doesn’t look like what we think of as “violence”—only rarely is there a gun or knife; often there isn’t even “aggression” as we typically think of it. There is coercion and the removal of the targeted person’s choice about what will happen next. Survivors don’t “fight” because the threat is too immediate and inescapable; their bodies choose “freeze” because it’s the stress response that maximizes the chances of staying alive . . . or of dying without pain.
Trauma isn’t always caused by one specific incident. It can also emerge in response to persistent distress or ongoing abuse, like a relationship where sex is unwanted, though it may be technically “consensual” because the targeted person says yes in order to avoid being hurt or feels trapped in the relationship or is otherwise coerced. In that context, a survivor’s body gradually learns that it can’t escape and it can’t fight; freeze becomes the default stress response because of the learned pattern of shutdown as the best way to guarantee survival.
Each person’s experience of survival is unique, but it often includes a kind of disengaged unreality. And afterward, that illusion of unreality gradually degrades, disintegrating under the weight of physical existence
and burdened memory. The tentative recognition that this thing has actually happened incrementally unlocks the panic and rage that couldn’t find their way to the surface before, buried as they were under the overmastering mandate to survive.
But survival is not recovery; survival happens automatically, sometimes even against the survivor’s will. Recovery requires an environment of relative security and the ability to separate the physiology of freeze from the experience of fear, so that the panic and the rage can discharge, completing their cycles at last.
Neither Camilla nor Henry had a history of trauma themselves, but Henry—the nice guy, the gentleman—had a previous girlfriend who was sexually assaulted while they were dating.
We don’t talk about trauma survivorship enough, and we talk even less about cosurvivorship, the emotional work of supporting a survivor.
In the Western world, relatively few men—the research indicates only 11about 5 percent—perpetrate the overwhelming majority of assaults, but a lot of men have partners who have survived an assault. And yet we do almost nothing to teach men how to support survivors as intimate partners, or how to take care of themselves as cosurvivors.
Henry was barely aware of how his previous partner’s trauma affected his approach to sex until he and Camilla developed their plan of him “chasing” her. It felt awkward for him because he loved her enthusiastic desire more than anything else, but—remember the ticking pilot light—Camilla needed a lot of warming up before she could feel that enthusiastic desire.
How could he know she was into it? Is it really desire and consent if she “wants to want” sex, rather than plain old wanting sex?
Camilla helped him out by talking about the brakes and accelerator: “I don’t have a sensitive brake, I have a stubborn gas pedal. I’m a fully loaded moving van, accelerating from a dead stop at the bottom of a hill. But moving forward slowly isn’t the same as wanting to stop, right? All I need is something really awesome waiting for me at the top of the hill. And you already know I’ll tell you when something feels good. Surely you trust me to tell you if something hits the brakes.”
“Sure,” he said.
“Well, then.”