Category: sexual trauma

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Admissions, “apologies,” & other patriarchal nonsense (aka I am furious)

We have to constantly critique imperialist white supremacist patriarchal culture because it is normalized by mass media and rendered unproblematic. ~bell hooks, Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism

In late 2017 I watched celebrity male after celebrity male come forward and admit to having assaulted or harassed women or other men.  And with each admission and pseudo-apology, my eyes rolled a little bit harder and wider. I had the same response to Joe Biden’s recent string of non-apologies to Anita Hill as well as the women who have come forward stating he had hugged or touched them without their consent.

My initial response to all these “admissions” is No shit.  No shit that a man in power wielded that power to get sexual gratification from those who couldn’t, for any number of reasons, say no.  No shit that these men didn’t think this was “bad.”  No shit that it would appear that every man in the world has done this.

Just like, #yesallwomen have been sexually assaulted or harassed, #yesallmen have at least harassed, if not assaulted women or other men.

(I know there are a few men who read this.  Please don’t write me and tell me #notallmen or #notme.  Yes all men and yes you.  I’m not open for a discussion on this particular point. Complicity is as bad as an actual act as far as I’m concerned.)

I don’t find it surprising or shocking that all these men have done what we all know they have done.  I do find it surprising that other people are shocked by these admissions.

I don’t even find it particularly shocking that they are coming forward.  Because what a great publicity stunt. What a great way to get yourself, the perpetrator, centered instead of those you assaulted.  What a great way to make this, again, all about the men and their power. Or worse, they twist the narrative in such a way as trying to appear to be the actual victim, like Biden seems to be trying to do by saying he won’t apologize for his “intentions” or making quips about how “times have changed”. This is all a re-centering of the perpetrator and pushing the actual victims out to the margins. Again.

I do find it irritating that now that the men are coming forward and saying “oh yeah, I did that” that now women are finally being believed.  Because lord knows we need a man to corroborate our story in order for it to be true.  (Please note the dripping sarcasm there.)

I also find it to be telling that now that these men are either coming forward or admitting guilt to allegations against them that they are losing their jobs and careers.  Because let’s be real honest and clear here, everyone knew this shit was going on.  All the studio and theater executives were crystal clear that this behavior was happening and they normalized it, “looked the other way” (at best), encouraged it (at almost worst), and participated in it themselves (at worst).

There is the term “casting couch” for a reason, folks.

So that now these executives are firing male perpetrators tells me a couple things.  The first is these executives are very smart.  The second that in their smartness they realize that at least 50% of their revenue comes from women.  The third is that they realize those women who make up about 50% or more of their revenue are pissed and are speaking up and out more and more and more and are beginning to no longer tolerate this behavior.

Let’s not think for one moment that these executives are firing folks out of any sense of ethical or moral outrage.

They are following the money.  End of story.

And.

As I am watching as some of these men make pseudo-apologies, I am also watching to see what their next step is.  How are they going to behave moving forward.  What are they going to do to make reparations, not only to their own victims, but also to women everywhere?

Because talk is cheap.

And actions speak louder than words. (As a note, since this was originally written over a year ago, the actions of apology and reparations have been sorely lacking.)

Isabel Abbot wrote this on her Facebook page in November 2017
just so it is made plainly clear.
here in this space #notallmen will not be tolerated. 
victim blaming will be shown the door. 
defending perpetrators and praise for shitty apologies and hand wringing over critique of apologies because “what about redemption” is not worth my time and will be asked to leave.
expressing fear over a perceived witch hunt of even the good ones and claiming men can’t even have a hug or say a word without the threat of being misunderstood and accused of assault is not welcome and if it shows up here it will be called out quickly and completely.
what is happening now is the truth coming into the light. we burn it all down together, all the idols made of our father’s house and false power. nothing spared. this is where the life lives.
and here in this space, i will not qualify my critique of patriarchy and mysogyny with professing i do still love men. i don’t have time for that bullshit.
here, in my spaces, women and femmes are trusted,
and when women speak of their experiences of harm, i believe them and link arms in solidarity with them.
and we keep our eyes on them, keep the attention on their voices and narratives and truth and do not center the frantic scrambling to keep men and patriarchal power forever our focus.
here, we continue to center the margins and celebrate the righteous rising up of those who say no more.

I am weary of the idea that women are on some sort of witch hunt and that “good men” are going to be persecuted and that we need to think about the trauma that the perpetrator endured as a child and well, she didn’t actually say no or stop lines of bullshit.

Even “good men” are complicit.  Even “good men” have looked the other way.  Even “good men” have not spoken up.  Even “good men” have harassed and assaulted. Even “good men” benefit from the fear that rape culture instills in women and femmes.

Because this isn’t about “good men” or “bad men”.

This is about living in a culture that normalizes and justifies the objectification and dehumanization of women.  And all men benefit from this.

I am neutral about these men coming forward.  I question their motives in doing so.  I question the executives and their motives in firing these men.  I really don’t care that these men are finally admitting their guilt and complicity in our culture. I don’t care that some men find it “confusing” or feel like the “rules have changed”.

I do care that up until now women have not been believed.

I do care that women have been told “oh it wasn’t that bad” or asked “well, what did you do to encourage him.”

I do care that dress codes are still focused on sexualizing girls instead of having a conduct code that punishes boys for objectifying these girls or even better yet creating and teaching and modeling a culture of consent.

I do care that these men have gotten away with this behavior for hundreds and thousands of years.  And that, frankly, they will continue to get away with it, because the old boys club is real.

Not only do I care about these things, I am also furious and filled with rage.

I am furious that women have been gaslit for millennia.

I am furious that 1 in 3 women have been victims of some form of physical violence by an intimate partner within their lifetime.

I’m furious that 1 in 5 women in the United States has been raped in their lifetime.

I am furious that these numbers are likely much higher because these are only the numbers that are reported and the entire process of reporting this type of assault is rife with victim blaming and actually discourages victims from reporting.

I am furious that 72% of all murder-suicides involve an intimate partner; 94% of the victims of these murder suicides are female.

I am furious that 1 in 15 children are exposed to intimate partner violence each year, and 90% of these children are eyewitnesses to this violence.

I am furious that between 21-60% of victims of intimate partner violence lose their jobs due to reasons stemming from the abuse.

I am furious that between 2003 and 2008, 142 women were murdered in their workplace by their abuser, which is 78% of women killed in the workplace during this time frame.

I am furious that men think they have a right to touch or talk about a woman’s body without her permission.

I am furious that some people seem to think the men who are finally coming forward and admitting their guilt deserve cookies and medals and praise for being “so brave.”

I am furious that in my circles I need to differentiate between a sense of safeness within our bodies and actual physical safety out in the world.

I am furious that I have to remind the women in my circles NOT to do any of the exercises and practices I offer them when they are not in a physically safe environment.

I am furious at the amount of trauma that lives in our bodies, because of the culture we live in and the normalization of rape, objectification of women, and victim blaming and silencing.

I am furious that women earn less than men yet are often more competent and do better at their jobs.

I am furious that reproductive rights is even a topic of conversation, let alone that “heartbeat” laws are being passed across the US, the Roe vs. Wade will be challenged at the Supreme Court level within the next decade and that the current Supreme Court will likely reverse RvWade.

I am furious that those who would take away my reproductive rights, also would take away my ability to care for and feed a child (by cutting funding to social services that benefit women and children).

I am furious and repulsed by the excuse making for pedophiles that crops up periodically.

I am furious that we have all suffered in relative silence for far too long.

I am furious that we have not been believed and need men to corroborate our stories.

I am furious, about all this and so much more.

Remember:: Our rage is valid.

And please, don’t ever forget that.

/../

This was originally published as one of my weekly newsletters in November 2017 and has been edited for publication here.

If you would like to read my most recent essays, you can subscribe to my newsletter here.

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Grief, trauma, resilience

No one ever told me how sorrow traumatizes your heart, making you think it will never beat exactly the same way again. No one ever told me how grief feels like a wet sock in my mouth. One I’m forced to breathe through, thinking that with each breath I’ll come up short and suffocate. ~Sarah Noffke, Awoken

Grief is its own beast.  It comes and goes in waves, in blasts, in trickles.  In the early days of a loss or trauma, the grief can be erratic, unpredictable, and seemingly constant all at once.  With time, and processing, the sensations of grief become less pronounced; in some cases and ways we can predict when it will crop up.  And even with the growing ability to predict, it will still come out of nowhere, shocking us, and sometimes bringing us back down to our knees.

We can grieve many things.  The obvious death of someone we love(d). The death of a relationship, be it a sexually intimate one or a friendship.  The endings that come with changing jobs, or moving homes, or starting or graduating from school.  The endings that are also associated with beginnings – marriage, birth of a child.

We often don’t acknowledge all the things we need to grieve.  Especially when we are told that we should be happy all. the. time.  Especially when perhaps we are actually happy about the change. Like the birth of a child.

And yet, beginnings mean endings.  And those endings, even if joyous, carry some amount of grief.

When we start to look at the ways trauma affects us, and our grieving process, things can become even more complex.  Our grief can be around a mixture of events.  A new traumatic event can trigger any or all of our old ones.  Loss can also trigger those older traumatic experiences, whether the loss itself could be classified as traumatic or not.

Our nervous systems get hijacked. Our emotions seem to run rampant.  We can’t find a sense of ground or stability or perhaps even reality.

What also often happens with loss and traumatic events is a deep wanting for things to be different.  A resistance if you will to what now is.  This wanting different, this wanting events beyond our control (or even within our control) to not have happened, can be helpful.  It can be information for how to move forward.

It also has the potential of keeping us stuck in that wanting and not finding ways to, slowly, gently, delicately, take those next steps in moving forward.

I don’t like the word “acceptance.”  There is much that is implied in that word, that our culture has put on that word, that I do not like, that I believe is actually harmful.

In our current culture the idea of “acceptance” is used to silence.  If we would just accept that life is the way it is, then we’d shut the hell up about it.  We’d just accept and become compliant.  We’d just accept and stop feeling about it and going on about it already.

That’s not really what acceptance, in mindfulness terms, is supposed to be about.  And it’s definitely not what it is about for me.

Acceptance is about perhaps wanting things to be different, and also acknowledging that they aren’t.  It is wishing we would have done something different, or someone hadn’t done something to us, and also knowing that those events did in fact happen.  In this acknowledging and knowing, we can make decisions on how to proceed instead of remaining stuck in the wishing and wanting only.

Perhaps that means offering an apology and doing the work of repair and making amends.  Perhaps that means going into therapy.  Perhaps that means unraveling some of our own story and moving forward.  Perhaps that means setting boundaries.

Regardless of how we proceed, there is a moving forward.  A letting go in some ways, an embracing in others.  An acknowledgement that things are not what we may want them to be, and even so we will find a way to move forth.

This is what we also call resilience.

Those of us with any type of trauma history, and perhaps especially those with complex trauma, have often had our resilience taken from us.  That is part of the definition of trauma in fact, that inability to let go and move forward.  That stuckness.

This is not to say that those of us with trauma histories should just pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and get over it already.  Because we all know that doesn’t work.

Instead, to develop our resilience, we need to process our trauma.  We need to find ways to help release it from our bodies.  To soothe our nervous systems.  To connect to our boundaries and reclaim our bodies as our own.  To find ground and our sense of center.  To acknowledge and utilize our resources.  To come into our bodies and listen, deeply, to the stories they have to share and to allow them move out in such a way that while the story is never truly gone from our memory, it is no longer living in our body.

As we process the trauma that lives in our bodies, we build our resilience.  As we build resilience we are able to respond to new traumatic events in a different way, so that they do not impact us in the same, often debilitating, ways of past traumas.  As we process old trauma, we learn how to process new events.

Grief is part of this process. Both the process of grief that these things have happened, as well as the grief of change, of letting go and setting down old ways of being and creating space for new.

Grief, like trauma, lives in our bodies.  When we experience the death of a relationship, be that the other person actually died or we are no longer in contact with them, our bodies respond.  We physically miss them, whether we were sexually intimate or not. (There is science behind this).

So like trauma, the ways to process grief involves coming into our bodies, listening to them, finding ways to soothe them, learning where we end and another begins (i.e. boundaries and body reclaiming), connecting to ground and center and the present moment.

This process is not easy.  It is often not fun.  It is also often incredibly uncomfortable.  And in my personal opinion, it is so deeply worth it.

/../

This essay was originally written for my weekly newsletter in October 2017 and has been edited for publication here. If you’d like to read my most recent essays, you can subscribe here.

If you are interested in working with me individually, you can learn more here and request a free 30-minute consultation here.

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Learning to feel pleasure after trauma

…as a survivor and a bystander of family violence, desire was hard to trust. … So all of my erotic self was wrapped in ‘how do I associate with pleasure and desire without fear, without losing control, without being harmed?’ I really had to walk out of a space that allowed for me to unravel and unpack those things as separate so I could define my sexuality and my erotic self in relationship to something that did not have to be violent, to understand that desire to be loved and to love your family wasn’t always mired with violent pasts but could begin again with new, healing destinies.
…
…This is about structural violence too and about how I relate to myself through desire when I am deeply undesirable, I am expendable, and I am only here for labor or reproduction? And… then what is my erotic self in that, when you’re devoid of being able to define yourself outside of capitalism and white supremacy? ~Cara Page, in adrienne maree brown’s Pleasure Activism

There once was a time in my life when I considered myself to be relatively asexual. I mean, I liked to dress up and look sexy, but a truth was, I don’t know that I ever actually felt sexy and I definitely know that I didn’t really care one way or the other about the act of sex itself; it was nice and fun and all and also eh.

Looking back at the me of my teens, twenties, and even thirties, I can say that was pretty much my attitude towards any type of pleasure: I could dress the part, even enjoyed dressing the part to an extent, but when it came right down to it I had no interest or strong feelings about it either way. Wearing my clothes wasn’t exactly pleasurable, I didn’t really enjoy food or eating (though I did eat plenty), I generally hated my homes and didn’t take a lot of pleasure being in them. I would zone out on TV, not really paying attention or enjoying what I watching. I didn’t read a lot, and what I did I don’t know that I really paid attention either. 

I lived life through the motions. Not really being present, definitely not being in my body. I could “take or leave” pleasure, because frankly, I couldn’t actually feel it. I didn’t cry a lot, but I didn’t laugh a lot either. 

I don’t know how young I was the first time I left my body, and it was definitely by the age of four and may have been younger. Between the physical violence of my mother and the sexual abuse from various family members and friends, I learned very early on that being in my body was not safe, and was not a place I wanted to be. To be in my body was to be in pain, in fear, confused.

When we add to this being told for as long as I can remember by my father that he wished I was a boy, which was compounded over the years by our culture stating quite clearly that women and girls were less than, of course I didn’t want to be in my body. Of course I hated my body and being it.

Not being in my body meant that I could avoid pain, or so I thought. But what I didn’t understand then was that while I was doing all I could to not feel the painful sensations and emotions of my body and life experience, I was also missing out on any type of pleasure that came my way.

After the birth of my daughter, almost 12 years ago now, I started on a journey of being the mother, the parent, I always wished I had. This lead to me truly beginning my own trauma work, which eventually led me to somatic and body-centered mindfulness practices. I entered into this work, not to feel pleasure, or even to be in my body, or for any reason for myself. I entered into this work for my daughter, so she could have a different childhood and life than mine.

Here’s the thing though, at the end of the day it doesn’t actually matter why I entered into this work. It doesn’t matter if it was for her or for me, if I had any intentions of actually being in my body or not, or feeling pleasure or not. I entered into the work, and the rest, as they say, is history.

While it is true that I experienced physical abuse as a child, and that definitely impacted my relationship with my body and being in it, I know that the sexual trauma I experienced, both in childhood and young adulthood, also has its impact, and perhaps a greater impact on my relationship with my sexuality and with pleasure (sexual and non) itself.

When we don’t feel safe within our own bodies, when “sex” is used as a weapon against us, especially at a very young age when our brains and neuropaths are beginning to develop, it only follows that we would have a very complex relationship with our sexuality and with pleasure.

Sexual trauma impacts us in many ways. It can cause anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation. It can have us live in a dissociate state, outside of our bodies, outside of the present moment. It can have us feeling unsafe in our bodies, in our surroundings, and in our relationships. Because of all this it can prevent us feeling happiness, joy, and pleasure. Which I now believe to be perhaps the most devastating impact of all.

Learning to come into our bodies is not easy and frankly I don’t even think it’s “fun.” It is hard work, requiring intention, patience, and self compassion.

And, in order for us to learn to experience pleasure, we need to come into our bodies. Pleasure, including happiness, including joy, including truly savoring the food we eat, feeling the softness of our clothes, sheets, blankets, smelling the complexities of flowers. Pleasure including being present in the moment, enjoying our loved ones and the beautiful experiences life has to offer us. And yes, pleasure including our sexuality and the acts of sex itself.

But coming into our bodies is only part of this work. An important and large part, yes, but only a part all the same.

There is a deeper aspect of pleasure that we seem to associate with only sex and our sexuality, and that is the pleasure of relationship: deep, vulnerable, honest, relationship. To have these types of relationships, be they sexual or not, we need to trust, ourselves and others. Trauma, and especially childhood trauma, destroys our ability to trust those we love, those who love us because as children those who were supposed to care for us, to protect us, betrayed us instead.

This betrayal is not an easy thing to undo. This betrayal prevents us from allowing ourselves to deeply love and be deeply loved. It stops us from trusting others with our darkest shadows as well as our brightest lights. It keeps us hiding, putting on the appearance of happiness or connection or joy while we are only going through the motions. It keeps us disconnected, feeling alone, and stuck in patterns and cycles that are ultimate harmful to ourselves.

Learning to come into our bodies, learning to trust the messages it is giving us as well as to trust that we can experience all the sensations and emotions in our bodies without harm coming to us, helps us learn to trust other aspects of ourselves which in turn helps us to learn to trust other people (and to learn to know who to trust and who not to).

Humans are social creatures. We are wired for connection, for belonging, for love. To experience the pleasure of being in an honest, vulnerable relationship may be one of the greatest experiences our lives as humans has to offer. It can also be one of the most terrifying experiences as we learn what it means to be ourselves, to be comfortable with who we are, to be present in time, space, and relationship, and to allow ourselves to be truly seen as we also learn to truly see others. 

That fear though, that is our trauma being in control and keeping us in those harmful patterns and cycles. Being brave isn’t easy, and in the end, I do believe it is worth it. 

…

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To learn about my six month Trauma Informed Embodiment™ for Sexual Trauma Survivors go here. The next cohort begins April 15.

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Loving or hating our bodies

I am not a Sunday morning inside four walls
with clean blood
and organized drawers.
I am the hurricane setting fire to the forests
at night when no one else is alive
or awake
however you choose to see it
and I live in my own flames
sometimes burning too bright and too wild
to make things last
or handle
myself or anyone else
and so I run.
run run run
far and wide
until my bones ache and lungs split
and it feels good.
Hear that people? It feels good
because I am the slave and ruler of my own body
and I wish to do with it exactly as I please 
~Charlotte Eriksson, You’re Doing Just Fine

There is a lot of talk about body love and body acceptance out in the social media world. It would seem that we are supposed to love our bodies no matter what, no matter how we feel they betray us, no matter what has been done to them.

Love is a strong word, a powerful emotion. And frankly, I don’t know that I will ever love my body. In early February Ijeoma Oluo wrote on IG about whether she could accept the love of another if she didn’t love her own body (you can see her post here). The post came at a time that I really needed to read it, as I was going through a particularly bad patch of hating my body. 

I don’t know if it’s true that we are unable to truly accept the love of another if we don’t love our own bodies. I think there may be a bit of chicken and egg there, in that having someone love us, including loving our bodies, may help us to love our selves, including our bodies, a bit more. 

But what I do know is that there are definitely times in my life when I hate my body. I hate it’s shape and size, I hate its stretch marks and cellulite, I hate how its aging, I hate how it aches and hurts and doesn’t seem to be able to move in ways I want it to, in the ways it was once able to. It’s not every day. And there are also days that I love certain parts of my body, but never the whole all at once.

While part of my complex relationship with my own body is due to our societies emphasis on what bodies “should” look and move and be like, it is also true that part of my hatred and anger stems from the abuse my body has endured, and how it has responded to this abuse. 

I live with an “unspecified autoimmune disorder,” which means that I have several “markers” of various different autoimmune disorders, but not enough in any one particular one to state “Oh, you have X”. This translates to doctors sometimes don’t know what to do me, and any “treatment” I do is a lot of trial and error and mostly done on my own. This means that sometimes I have chronic pain, but sometimes I don’t. It means that I have a blood clotting disorder that I need to manage. It means my endocrine system needs a lot of support. And it means that what this managing and support looks like can literally need to change from day to day.

I know that my autoimmune issues stem from the abuse my body experienced, Iexperienced, as a child. I know that the sexual and physical and emotional abuse all have had their long lasting impacts. I know the whys and how my body is the way it is.

But that doesn’t mean I like it. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t infuriate me. That doesn’t mean there aren’t times when I hate that my body feels the need to be impacted, to respond, to cry out about the pain it has endured.

And.

My body has survived horrible things. It has kept me alive for over 47 years. It has birthed two babies. It has run two half marathons. It goes on hikes, it snuggles my children, It functions in all the ways it needs to to not only keep me alive, but also so I can raise my children, do my work, and now enjoy my life.

So. There we are. The both-and of it all. Yes there are times that I hate my body and there are times when I am in awe of and grateful for it. But love, I don’t know that I’ll ever get there, and who knows, maybe I will.

In doing my own work of processing the trauma from my childhood, I have been able to come back into my body, to learn to tolerate the uncomfortable times as well as the pleasurable ones.

Because when we are dissociated, when we are disconnected from our bodies and from the here and now, it is true we are able to avoid the discomfort our bodies often express, but it is equally true that we don’t experience the pleasures that we can also have.

Coming back into our bodies, sounds so straight forward. In some ways it is, but in others it’s not. We are each complex beings and our journeys to trauma processing and being able to tolerate all the sensations and emotions we experience can be complex too. There is forward and back. There is progress and regression. 

Coming back into our bodies is not the same as loving our bodies. We can be present in them and not love every part of them.

And.

With time, we can learn to be grateful for what our bodies have endured and still kept us alive. We can learn to be in awe of all our bodies have done and do. We might even begin to start to like certain aspects of our bodies, both its physicality and its functions.

And maybe, we learn to love our bodies as part of our whole Self, an integral and necessary part of who we are.

Maybe.

We’ll never know though until we begin the journey.

/…/

The next cohort of Trauma Informed Embodiment™ for Sexual Trauma Survivorswill begin on April 14 and registration is currently open. This six month program is part support group, part practical coping and embodiment skills, and part psycho-education. During our time together we will utilize the first phase of the Trauma Informed Embodiment™ approach I have developed. There is a sliding scale fee, and alternate payment plans are also available. To learn more go to http://gwynnraimondi.com/tieforsexualtrauma

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Complex Sexual Trauma

No amount of me trying to explain myself was doing any good. I didn’t even know what was going on inside of me, so how could I have explained it to them? ~Sierra D. Waters, Debbie

Over the last few years the term “complex trauma” has been used to describe the difference between the trauma experienced and lived with when it is chronic and typically happens during childhood, compared to “regular trauma” which refers to singular events which typically occur in adulthood. The corresponding diagnosis terms are “c-PTSD” or “CPTSD” and “PTSD”, where the “c” or “C” stands for complex and the PTSD is post traumatic stress disorder.

The DSM V ( Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition) does not list C-PTSD as an official disorder, however within the trauma community we have adopted this diagnosis and term and have been working to better define the difference of impact between chronic and singular traumatic events as well as the difference of the impact as to when in a person’s life the event(s) occur.

This work is tied to the ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences study) criteria for chronic stress, and in our work of defining these impacts we must acknowledge and be grateful for the work of Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, in bringing the ACEs to the forefront of the medical community and truly starting the conversation about being “trauma informed” outside the mental health community.

In our sussing out the differences between CPTSD and PTSD, we (the trauma community) have lumped all childhood traumatic experiences together – be they physical, emotional, psychological, or sexual abuse, neglect, poverty, domestic or intimate partner violence, etc. And while all of the items (as well as others, like experiencing racism, homophobia, etc) on the ACEs can and often do have traumatic impacts, I also believe it is important for us to begin to look at the ways each type of trauma has its own unique impacts.

As many of you know over the last couple of years I have begun to move my own professional focus to sexual trauma, and the majority of my clients have experienced chronic childhood sexual trauma. Exploring the unique and life changing impacts this type of trauma brings with it is part of my life’s work and helping us all have a better understand of these impacts for ourselves as survivors as well as for our friends, partners and loved ones, I believe is vital for our individual and collective growth and healing.

Complex trauma of any kind affects our abilities to have deep, emotionally intimate relationships. Sexual complex trauma can also affect our ability to have sexually intimate relationships. With many types of complex trauma we tend to be dissociated from our bodies and the present moment. This means that often when being sexually intimate we aren’t really “there,” and can only feel the (presumably) pleasurable sensations of physical intimacy as if through a “thick gauze”. It is also true for those who have experienced sexual trauma that the act of sex itself can be triggering, regardless of how consensual the present act is, and can send us into a state of fight, flight, or freeze.

There have also been studies where cancers of the female reproductive system (i.e. cervical, uterine, ovarian, etc cancers) seem to correlate with women who have experienced sexual trauma, as in there is a higher percentage of these cancers in women who have experienced sexual trauma, than those who have not.

An additional impact of sexual trauma that isn’t often talked about is the idea of feeling or being “tainted” in some way. Socially speaking there is a stigma associated with sexual trauma as well as victim blaming, even when the trauma occurs in childhood. This added social attitude only works to exacerbate the shame of those who have experienced sexual trauma, which then reverberates through and adds to the other emotional, psychological, and physical impacts of childhood trauma.

This social attitude, and its impacts, can be a particularly daunting thing for survivors to face and attempt to overcome. This attitude is tied directly to our misogynist culture which holds a woman’s sexuality and sexual experiences in a balance of what is “acceptable” and what is “not”.

I do not want to give the impression that I am somehow creating a “hierarchy” of types of complex trauma. And I feel it is important that we do acknowledge and discuss the differences in experiences of the different types of trauma and how the impacts vary. In doing this we are able to help those who experienced complex sexual trauma see how they are not alone in how they experience these impacts and can aid in our individual trauma processing journeys. 

/…/

Registration for the next cohort of Trauma Informed Embodiment™ for Sexual Trauma Survivors is now open. This six month program is for women (CIS and Trans) and those AFAB who experienced childhood sexual trauma. It is part support group, part practical coping and embodiment skills, and part psycho-education. There is a sliding scale fee, and alternate payment plans are also available. To learn more go to http://gwynnraimondi.com/tieforsexualtrauma