Sexual Trauma Therapy: Healing, Recovery & Intimacy

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Sexual abuse & sexual assault are incredibly common. To make matters worse, people are more likely to be assaulted by someone that they know. The betrayal by a friend, partner or acquaintance can be devastating. Emotional wounds are created that one believes will never heal. For many, it complicates our lives in multiple areas of life. This can range from the ability to regulate one’s emotions, how you present in a relationship, heightened insecurities or even flashbacks during times of intimacy.

Sexual trauma symptoms may seem insurmountable. Liaison., which specializes in sexual trauma and sex therapy, uses expertise in complex trauma, psychology & sexology to walk alongside people as they process sexual trauma. Clients have emerged to a space a more clarity than before and a heightened ability to embrace themselves again. Healing from sexual trauma is within your reach.

Healing sexual trauma

Talk therapy can be incredibly beneficial for those who have experienced sexual trauma. Sexual trauma therapy or sex therapy can help clients make sense of their histories and symptoms.

People experiencing symptoms of sexual trauma often say things like:

‘I feel anxious.”

“Sometimes I feel really angry and then I am completely numb. Am I crazy?”

“I am having awful nightmares regarding the rape/assault.”

“It must have been my fault.Wait, why am I thinking this way?”

That last statement is all too common and can be rooted in shame or guilt. These client are not going crazy. Far from it. Believe it or not, all of these symptoms are normal trauma reactions to an abnormal event. Liaison. considers one of the biggest parts of the job is to explain how trauma works and how it can affect you after sexual trauma or sexual assault. Psychoeducation can provide validation and normalization of trauma responses. Simply having the awareness that you are having a normal response in the face of trauma can be powerful.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness assists with emotional regulation and helps clients learn to tolerate distress while practicing acceptance. Mindfulness also aids clients to engage in healthier relationships. Mindfulness practice is nearly unmatched in helping clients hone in on how they feel, how to regulate their emotions even in heated or stressful situations and acquire a better understanding of their partners and others in their lives. The beauty of mindfulness is that it is free and can be practiced anytime, anywhere by anyone.

Trauma-focused therapy

In many trauma therapies, a person recounts and reconstructs the negative events in their lives. In the case of sexual trauma, sexual abuse or sexual assault therapy, this helps them make sense of how the sexual trauma has affected their lives. These therapies aid clients to develop coping skills for emotion regulation and significantly reduce trauma symptoms. At Liaison., the readiness of the client to progress is evaluate at every step. The aim is for the client to better understand their reactions to sexual trauma and how that entwines their own life story.

Difficulties with healing for sexual trauma and abuse 

Sometimes victims of sexual trauma or abuse are told to “let go” of their past or “get over it.” This is meaningless advice and can be countertherapeutic. This is part of your life story. With the help of sexual trauma therapy or sex therapy, your relationship with your life story evolves. Reaching a place of self-love, belonging, self-compassion and growth. Simply acknowledging the sexual trauma, processing your emotions about it and implementing effective interventions can allow a person to develop exponentially. It is worth understanding that even if you feel like you’ve dealt with the sexual trauma, it may reoccur with certain life stressors.

There is no definitive cure, per se, for sexual trauma. However, how you process the sexual trauma in therapy can be assisted by learning coping skills and understanding your story. When something traumatic happens again, there may be an increase in trauma reactions. However, this time but you’re more prepared. When it comes to sexual trauma therapy, slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

Dating a survivor of sexual trauma

If you’re a spouse or partner to someone who is working through the aftermath of sexual trauma or assault, you may feel powerless. However, this are areas within your control that may help.

• Learn about sexual trauma responses. Learning about trauma reactions and your partner’s triggers specifically. This can provide a place of refuge for your partner.

• Believe them & stand with them. If a partner tells you they were assaulted, believe them. Validate their feelings and the experience to provide support.

• Be mindful of your reactions. If your partner knows the perpetrator, you may naturally feel angry at that person. However, be careful about how you present that anger. Your partner might misinterpret and believe the anger is directed at them. Alternatively, if you fall apart in response to their news, they may blame themselves for burdening you and think, “I never should have told them.”

• Find support for yourself. If you’re in a relationship with someone that experienced sexual trauma, you need your own support system as well. This could be your own therapist as you help your partner work through their trauma.

• Consider sex therapy. Intimacy after sexual trauma can be confusing and convoluted. Working with a sex therapist either as a couple or individually can be of assistance.

• Be cautious about consent. When initiating physical touch, some partners may need you to liberally ask, “May I touch you here?” “Is this OK?” “Is this comfortable?” Communicate as openly as possible before, during and after sex.

• Sometimes simply listening to your partner is the most beneficial thing that you can do. If despite your best efforts something triggers your partner during sex, recognize it is not about you nor is it a rejection. Just listen as they express their feelings and emotions in the moment without judgment or an assumption that you need to “fix” everything with a statement.

  The journey with sex therapy or sexual trauma therapy can produce positive changes. The changes are incremental, but over time they are monumental.

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3 Ways Mindfulness Accidentally Increases Attraction

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Are mindfulness and attraction two words you would have never placed in the same sentence? When people hear the word mindfulness, visions of airy-fairy, new-age hippies dancing in a circle come to mind. Well, I won’t say that this is far-fetched. However, the applications for mindfulness are broader than you might think. The applications can range from existential anxiety to seduction & relationships and of course, sex therapy. And before we get too far into this discussion, please note that attractiveness is not necessarily tied to physical beauty or income. Remember that person you dated years ago & you nearly lost your mind over them, but they were not rich, smart, attractive or even right for you in any way? Exactly. Stay with me….

What is Mindfulness?

You may wonder what mindfulness could have to do with sex therapy. In many cases, sexual difficulty can be correlated to a distracted mind. This can be especially the case after sexual trauma.

So what is mindfulness…. With mindfulness, we become focused on what is right in front of us, around us and within us with 100% of our being. Ok, that did sound airy-fairy. Let me try that again…. Mindfulness is having our thoughts focused in the present (not the past or the future). Better? Thanks. So what does this have to do with attraction?

Mindful Attraction

Have you ever met someone & when you talked to them, they made you feel as though you were the only thing in the world that mattered? The feeling of momentary importance they provided probably boosted your ego just a little bit. If you happen to be starved for real human connection due to circumstances (remember the pandemic?), that good feeling just elevated. You also may have felt that you would like to talk to them further or talk again sometime soon. You became attracted to them in some way, romantically or platonically. Either way, attraction on some level was the result. That person unconsciously or consciously tapped into the benefits of mindfulness. The key is that in order for them to provide you with those feelings, they had to have been completely dialed into what you were saying or feeling. This cannot be faked, at least not for long. They provided focused attention. And their interest was focused on you.

Now back to everyday life situations…

Everyone is incredibly focused on the daily grind known as adult life. They can’t talk because they have somewhere to be, something to do with little time in which to do it. When they are talking to you, it’s usually to either validate themselves or acquire something from you. There is absolutely nothing seductive or attractive about that. It may even repulse you. Why? That part of you, of everyone, that craves genuine human connection is left unsatisfied and disconnected. You are placed in a position of incessantly giving yourself to others. Giving by providing said validation to others or taking on commitments and being all things to everyone. But when someone’s interactions with you are centered on you without expectations, that focused attention is attractive simply because we lack it in other spheres of our lives. It feels rare and, hence, valuable. You just became attractive to others with little visible effort simply by providing focused attention and being genuinely interested in them. But how do you do that when you have so much going on or there is so much happening around you?

Enter mindfulness.

Remember mindfulness is essentially keeping your thoughts in the present and focused on what is currently happening. Well, if you are currently speaking with someone and you are being mindful, you are providing focused attention to what they are saying. When you do that, you are also likely providing good eye contact, posturing your body to show interest and listening more than speaking. These 3 attending behaviors are unconsciously interpreted as interest by the other person. Can you think of anyone that likes having someone interested in them? Only everyone in the world. If you can provide relaxed, but focused attention to someone, you become as indispensable as food and drink because they are likely not getting that anywhere else.

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SLOWING DOWN

When practicing mindfulness, the first thing that you are forced to do is SLOW DOWN. As your mindfulness practice progresses, you will find that the speed with which your thoughts pinball in your mind slows down. We see this in sex therapy with mindfulness and sensate focus. Once the thoughts (and even spoken words) slow down, you become better equipped to focus on individual thoughts or what is being said. Interestingly, with focused effort, the speed with which you move can slow down as well. As far as rules of seduction are concerned, slower movements are very attractive. The psychology behind that is that those that move slower can because they are in control of themselves, their lives, their schedules. People that rush are usually on someone else’s schedule or must answer to someone else. You will notice the same with people that speak quickly or fidget. Their anxiety makes people around them even more anxious. Attractive actions tend to be slower. Ever watch a seductive anything (burlesque show, the woman in the red dress in The Matrix walking down the street, Jessica Rabbit)? Their movements are always a touch slower than those around them. You will even notice it in movies prior to 1965. Before then, graceful movement was taught and required of actors and dancers. You may notice that their bodily movements were slower than what we notice in movies today, especially if the actor was playing the seducer, someone from high society or the powerful individual. Unless it was a fight scene or something exciting, the movements were often slower or at least more relaxed. It conveys a feeling of control. Being in control is a characteristic of power. Surprise! Power on ANY level unconsciously communicates the quality of being attractive.

UNDIVIDED ATTENTION

The second thing that you will find is that you begin to focus on what is happening in the moment and nothing else. When your thoughts venture to the past or future, you gently refocus back to the present. You refocus back to whomever is speaking. Again, your ability provide positive focused attention is valuable and desired because most people are not receiving it in other areas of life.

NON-JUDGMENT

The third thing that mindfulness implores is non-judgment. By the way, faking this is not really an option. You are after genuine connection. If you are able to listen to someone talk about how they commenced in some egregious or highly embarrassing activity and not convey judgement, then you increase their comfort in expressing vulnerability. You have just provided acceptance of who they are. Every human being needs acceptance on some level. Maybe they receive acceptance from their family or small group of friends or from their church. If they don’t have that, it still needs to come from somewhere. Either way, some level of acceptance is necessary for most of us. As you progress in your mindfulness practice, you will find that you become better at suspending judgment of your thoughts and other people. When people do not feel judged and you are the one not judging them, you just became attractive in some way that they may not be able to pinpoint. But the attraction is there nonetheless.

Now think back to that person that you dated a few years ago that was “OK”, but still had you losing your mind. I wonder if, in the beginning, they did one of these things and created a spark of attraction. Obviously, there are even more aspects of mindfulness that are attractive, but these three are quite powerful.

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I am almost certain that the leaders within the mindfulness movement were not considering attraction. However, I believe that if we are more mindful in our interactions with others, our interactions would become more meaningful. Imagine how much better your conversations would be if the person with whom you were speaking actually listened to you, were not preoccupied with other things and did not judge you. You are actually able to get to know this person authentically because you are present with 100% of your being.

Now that, my friends, leads to a meaningful interaction.

Adult manifestations of childhood sexual abuse

Have you ever had a friend that made the absolute worst decisions when it came to a mate or partner? On top of that, she seems to date similar versions of a bad guy over and over? She continually dates people that use her, abuse her, disregard her and she seems to go back for more? Maybe you even thought of her as promiscuous?

What if she behaves this way for reasons that she does not even understand herself?

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The key to understanding may be more complex.

She may very well have been a victim of childhood sexual abuse (CSA). Interestingly, she is likely not actually choosing those men. They are likely choosing her and she acquiesces because they showed interest and were “assertive, but nice”…like the perpetrator from childhood.

To provide a little perspective, the following are a few

Common Characteristics of Adults that have experienced Childhood Sexual Abuse:

1) decreased ability to gauge the threatening or harmful nature of individuals

2) diminished ability to set boundaries

3) heightened need for love and acceptance

4) tendency to acquiesce to the desires of others

5) tendency to silence their own thoughts and needs

6) earlier age of first voluntary sexual experience

7) sex may be used transactionally in the hope of love & affection

8) unaware that they have the right to decline unwanted sex

9) excessive need to please others

10) sexual compulsivity to unconsciously relive the trauma or seek acceptance

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With these characteristics in mind, the resulting trauma behaviors start to become understandable.

Most people seek sex therapy due to some form of sexual dysfunction. Maybe they have a lack of sexual desire with their spouse. Maybe they experience erectile dysfunction and there is no medical reason. Maybe they have an abhorrence of being touched, even by their spouse. Maybe they have flashbacks during intercourse.

Of the individuals that seek sex therapy, 56% of women and 34% of men have a history of CSA. That is a lot of people suffering in silence.

As a child, everyone that you trust is close to you (mom, dad, siblings, cousins). But because life is busy for many individuals in the house, the child may not receive the attention that they may need or desire. However, someone begins to show said child attention and even something that seems akin to love, albeit inappropriate. In the situation of childhood sexual abuse (CSA), oftentimes someone that you trust and love is eroding your boundaries. While they are hurting you, they are expressing what the child learns is a version of “love and attention.”

Fast-forward to adulthood. Being with someone that erodes your boundaries & disrespects you all while expressing their love is ….normal. As odd as it may seem, this is the norm that has been set since childhood. Therefore, it does not seem strange, but familiar. We gravitate towards what is familiar.

The odds are high that those individuals that mean kids called promiscuous in school may very well have been sexually abused as a young children. It would be rather simplistic to simply view this person as promiscuous. Often, this person is simply seeking love from those that they are unable to identify as threats or people with no regard for them. And why not, this precedent was set for at the age of learning how to behave with loved ones and learning how to attain love.

One could spend an entire lifetime bouncing from one antagonistic relationship to the next never connecting the prior abuse as a causal factor.

It does not have to be that way forever. That same child, now an adult, can learn to understand why they choose certain mates and begin to choose differently. That woman can learn to view herself as someone to be genuinely loved. That woman can learn to quickly dismiss those that do not have her best interests at heart. That woman can elevate her self-worth and love for herself.

The changes can be incremental, but the effect is monumental.