by Staci Haines
7. Once the trigger is completely satisfied, or you have imagined that it is, sit quietly. Sit in the emptiness or wholeness. Don’t fill it with the next problem, or the next trigger; just sit quietly for a few moments. At this point, many triggers will transform in shape and size. Just notice whatever yours does and be with that. When you are ready, complete the exercise by thanking the creature and yourself.
8. Repeat this exercise with the same or different triggers as needed. Because of the depth of childhood sexual abuse, many triggers will need this feeding more than once. Repeated over time, this approach to healing triggers can be amazingly successful. With practice you can also begin to do this exercise in your own mind. It is a handy tool to carry with you.
I learned a version of this exercise from Tsultrim Allione at the Tara Mandala Retreat Center, as a part of the chod practice, a practice of Tibetan meditation. Please see the spirituality section of the Resources for contact information.
I found that to really progress in getting my sexuality back, I had to work on it outside of sex. I wrote about it, and I took it, reluctantly at first, to counseling. After awhile another survivor friend and I made up our own two-person group and talked just about sex and sexual healing. We learned new stuff together, did exercises, and gave ourselves homework. Her support made all the difference.
Stephanie
Taking a Break from Sex
It can be powerful for survivors to take a break from being sexual for a period of time, particularly if you feel that all you are really good for or loved for is sex. What would it be like to negotiate time off from sex? What would it be like to learn that people love and are attracted to your person rather than what you can do for them sexually?
Times to consider taking a break from sex include the following:
• When you find yourself consistently having sex to fulfill nonsexual needs for closeness and intimacy: If I just have sex with him or her I can be held. What about just asking to be held?
• When you are having sex repeatedly “for your partner” even though you don’t want to.
• When you have sex of any kind when you don’t want to.
• When you have sex when you are dissociated, checked out, or not really “there.”
• When sex is the only way that you can feel your body.
• When having sex is the thing that makes you feel worthy.
• When you have sex because you fear being left if you do not.
Having sex for any of these reasons communicates to your body that you are not safe, that you are being abused, that you are only good for sex. This is what childhood sexual abuse teaches you, and not what you want for your sex life now. Now you can communicate something different to yourself and your body. This means taking on different behaviors and different actions.
Having sex with your partner when you don’t want to, or having sex because it is the only reason you believe you are worthy or loved, is not the same as sexual abuse, nor are your sexual partners your perpetrators. But having this kind of sex does reinforce the belief that you have no say about sex and that you are not worth loving as a whole being. The pattern continues over and over again.
There was a point when I was compulsive about sex. I decided to declare a moratorium on sexual activity for four months. After two weeks, I thought I was going to die. I was actually convinced that the peak sexual experience of my life was scheduled for those two weeks and that I’d miss it. During this time out, I was able to discover that my arousal was tied to humiliation because of the abuse.
Aurora
You are now responsible for your well-being and for your body and sexuality. What do you want to be telling yourself? What new experiences and possibilities do you want your body to know?
If you are in a partnership and want to negotiate a time away from sex, talk with your partner about it. Talk about what you need and why. Explain what you think you will gain by not being sexual for a time. It helps to acknowledge that sex is an important part of any partnership, that you want to take care of this part of your own life, and that you want to take care of it in your relationship as well.
When negotiating a break from sex, agree upon a specific amount of time. It can be a month, two months, a year—whatever will work for you both.
What do you want to accomplish or work on during this time, individually and in your relationship? How can you be intimate with your partner while taking a break from sex? Talk about your partner’s sexual needs. How else can she or he express sexual energy? Masturbation, reading erotic stories, or even writing them are good options. Be creative.
I have found that this is not generally a good time to introduce an outside sexual partner into your relationship. It can confuse matters and stir up lots of other issues that will distract you from the work at hand. Taking a break from sex in your partnership can be a time to deepen your communication and trust. It can serve as a time to grow your relationship.
Once you have negotiated your time off from sex, set a date about halfway through to check in with each other. Also set a date at the end of the time out to talk and renegotiate, if needed. What have you gotten out of it? What have you learned? Are you ready to be sexual now? Do you want to be sexual? What will continue to move your healing forward?
My boyfriend and I arranged to take a break from sex for three months, and then extended it to six months. It was really hard for me to ask for this. I did-n’t know if he’d love me still if we weren’t having sex. We worked on our relationship a lot during this time, and I feel like it has made us stronger.
Hannah
Many survivors never negotiate a break from sex because they are afraid of their partner’s response. They continue to have sex out of fear. But most partners respond positively to this request. They are glad to be proactive about sex and learn a lot themselves during this time. If your partner is unwilling to take a break, you can be thankful for such clarity. This is important information to know about your partner. You can consider whether you are compatible as partners through this healing process. You may not be. This can be very painful—but do you really want to be sexual with someone who cannot support you right now?
A break from partner sex can be a time to explore your sexuality on your own. Through masturbation, you can work with your triggers and establish a different relationship with your own body and sexuality. You may also want to take a break from sex with yourself. If so, follow the same model as when negotiating a break with a sexual partner. What do you want to accomplish during this time? What do you want to work on? How can you be intimate with yourself? If you take a break, be conscious about it. Set a date to check in with yourself about being sexual again.
When I took a break from having sex with other people, I really took charge of my own sexuality. I learned how to respect myself enough to say “no,” and then I said “yes” to sex with myself. I learned about sex with my own timing and agenda.
Anita
This work asks you to be both gentle and courageous. See yourself as powerful and capable of healing sexually. Sexual healing can be hard and scary work at times, but the benefits of getting your body and sexuality back are profound.
Sex Guide Exercises
1. What triggers you? What acts, states of mind, or feelings can trigger you? Be specific. What happens in your body when you are triggered? What repeating images, sounds, or memories emerge when you are triggered?
2. What actions can you take proactively to work with your sexual triggers outside of a sexual setting?
3. Prepare a Trigger Plan on your own or with a partner. Share this with your partner, a friend, or a counselor. Add your own ideas to the Many Choices list for dealing with triggers.
chapter twelve
The Emotions of Healing: You Gotta Feel Your Way Out of This
Once I let myself feel guilty, lonely, and angry during sex, I began to deal with all of the ways incest had affected my sexuality.
Carla
&nb
sp; Many survivors are afraid to feel. You may be afraid that if you let yourself feel the depth of your loss, you will never stop crying. Or that if you let yourself feel the extent of your rage, you will hurt yourself or someone, else. But I have never seen anyone caught in an emotion forever—once they were willing to feel it. Usually the fear of the emotion is worse than actually feeling it.
Emotions are your travel buddies on the road to sexual healing. You can’t heal if you can’t feel. You certainly can’t enjoy the pleasures of intimate sex if you cannot access all of your emotions.
Most of us survived the abuse by tuning out our emotions. Through dissociation, we escaped the emotions that were too unbearable to feel at the time. These unfelt emotions, or unprocessed trauma, are stored in our bodies, minds, and spirits, awaiting healing. Every survivor I’ve known has, at some point, wished this pain would magically disappear, but that doesn’t seem to be how it works. Feeling and healing emotionally is the ticket out.
I thought that having sex meant that I was supposed to feel happy all the time and satisfied, but I often felt pissed off and lonely after sex. I figured I must be doing something wrong.
Cindy
You may think feeling bad means you aren’t making progress in your healing. This is a mistake. We all hope that healing will feel good; but mostly, it doesn’t. Healing can feel more like dying—dying and being transformed, and then finding yourself changed for the better, with a life of your own.
You Have to Feel It to Heal It
Emotions are our responses to life. As we move through our lives, we experience the richness of love and delight, the emptiness of loss, and the fire of dedication and anger. Emotions are felt as bodily sensations. Here is another area of healing in which embodiment pays off. As you become more aware of the sensations in your body, you will gain access to the subtleties and intricacies of your emotions.
You want to build an emotional flexibility that lets you move easily from one emotional state to another, from sadness to longing and desire, from irritation to joy and pleasure, and so on. Each new emotion helps you build your emotional range. The greater your range, the easier it will be for you to shift from one emotion to the next. You will be less likely to feel stuck in an emotional rut, experiencing the same emotion, such as fear, over and over until it has a stranglehold on your life.
The Variety of Emotions and Moods
What is your emotional range? How do these emotions show up as sensations in your body? enthusiasm excitement sadness grief joy peace ease loss anger irritation settledness groundedness confusion anticipation surprise fear terror ambition love feeling loved spiritual longing sexiness boredom
Emotions occur naturally and automatically, and they are designed for expression and healing. Unfelt or “held” emotions will remain in your system until they are acknowledged. If they are never attended to, they can run amok, affecting your physical, mental, and spiritual health. Unprocessed traumatic experiences and emotions color the lenses through which you view your reality. For instance, many adult survivors feel profoundly powerless long after they really are no longer powerless.
I see our emotions as self-healing mechanisms that help us maintain our mental and spiritual health. Grief and anger are natural responses to hurt and trauma, serving as healing agents to mend our wounds. When we are able to feel the depths of these emotions, we experience transformation and release. That metamorphosis and return to empowerment is what we mean by healing.
Chances are you’ve wondered how you can feel contradictory emotions, such as sadness and relief or anger and compassion, at the same time. I’ve worked with many survivors who insist, “My feelings don’t make sense!” But emotions follow their own set of rules. Emotional logic and cognitive logic operate quite differently; our emotional systems are vast enough to hold contradictions that don’t make sense to our way of thinking. You may feel both love and hate for your perpetrator—most survivors do. You may feel terrified of facing the feelings left over from your abuse, yet long to do so. These contradictions are natural to the logic of emotions. The trick is making room in our minds for the possibility of these contradictions.
The Five Stages of Emotions
Emotions and emotional expression follow a predictable cycle. The cycle of emotions can be like a wave building to fullness and crashing on the beach, then reintegrating into the ocean only to come to shore once more.
I’ve broken this process down into five stages:
First, the emotion shows up as a sensation or feeling. The emotion may be a response to either a current or a past experience. Of course, emotions from the past will emerge as you heal.
Then you have a choice. You can turn away from the emotion or you can open toward it. There are times when putting an emotion on hold is a good way of taking care of yourself. Holding emotions down doesn’t work as a way of life, however. The longer you brace against emotions, particularly those wrought by abuse, the longer those emotions will run your life.
The Five Stages of Emotions
1. Sensations and emotions emerge.
2. As you attend to or turn toward the emotions, they intensify and increase.
3. Emotions grow to a point of fullness, like water about to spill over the top of a bowl.
4. Emotions release or are expressed bodily.
5. Intentionally complete the cycle. Draw upon your internal emotional resources.
Instead of turning way from the emotions, you can choose to welcome them. In stage two of the cycle, you attend to the emotion, feeling your way into the sensation. When you do this, the emotion tends to intensify and reveal itself. This stage can often be the scariest. Just as in healing from dissociation, feeling your emotions means learning to tolerate these sensations in your body.
Stage three brings the emotion to fullness. The emotion grows in its charge and sensation. You may feel like you are about to cry. Your chest may overflow with joy and pleasure. You may want nothing more than to throw a major tantrum.
Stage four brings release. Depending upon the emotion, you may experience this release as gentle or very intense. You may sweat or blush, sob, shake, tremble, kick, laugh, yell, or become overheated or chilled. This expression is the release of the emotion. Surprisingly, the full expression of even the most intense and scary emotions usually lasts only twenty minutes at most.
After the full expression of the emotion, you may find relief, peace, renewed energy, and a sense of healing or transformation. This is the completion of the cycle, or what some people call integration. Take time to be with yourself. Breathe. Check in with your internal sense of safety and well-being (see chapter 1). Notice that you are alright, that you were not harmed in the process of healing. Acknowledge that you are complete with this piece of your healing; it can be helpful to say this out loud. Bring intentionality to this part of the process.
Orgasms follow this same cycle. Surprised?
Pay attention to the completion stage. Sometimes you may find yourself pouring out emotion with no experience of change or integration. You could be recycling the trauma rather than healing it. I do not encounter this often—most people who are not ready for healing try to repress emotions related to the abuse. But if this is happening to you, ask yourself, “What would it take to complete this feeling?” If you don’t know the answer, make one up. Imagine you know what completion would feel like. Try it on for size.
Once you face, feel, release, and complete traumatic emotions, you will be free to build intimate, sexual relationships. Instead of being weighed down by the burden of your past, you’ll need carry with you only enough faith and courage to meet the fears and risks love requires of us all.
Take a moment to consider which stages in the cycle of emotions you are good at and which you need to practice. Are you able to express your emotions, or do you tend to hold or repress them? Can you complete a cycle of emotion and move to integration? Where can you use more support or learning?
Emotional Centering
Sensations are the basis of emotions. Think about your favorite color or piece of music, or a place you where you experience peace or beauty. Notice what happens to your sensations. Your chest might relax and open, your belly settle, or your legs feel a pleasant streaming. How do you know when you are happy or upset? Where in your body do you feel that?
Noticing your emotions as sensations enables you to become emotionally flexible, moving more easily between emotional states and having room enough internally to both experience and interpret your emotions as they happen.
This is also what is meant by being emotionally centered. When you are emotionally centered, you are able to hang with your emotions, to notice them, feel them, and attend to them, yet not have them run you. Being emotionally centered allows you to fully experience your feelings and take care of yourself at the same time. With practice, you can learn how to have your emotions fully and make your own choices about them. Developing this kind of emotional center is a skill you will use in bringing intimacy and sex together. You will also use it in your sexual healing process.