Woman on Fire by Amy Jo Goddard Page B

spiritually by childhood sexual abuse. They may have had injuries to their sexual body; they may have been lied to and manipulated; they may have been taught to be quiet and keep secrets about their sexuality;they may have been coerced into sexual relationships they had no emotional skills to manage or understand.
    Many people who experience sexual trauma when they are young feel grief about not getting to have an innocent exploration of sex as a young person or feel like they missed out on an important sexual development process. Many ideas about who they are, their sense of self-worth, and the meaning of their sexuality as it relates to the abuse are tucked away into their subconscious, driving how they presently behave in relationships and sex. This scenario is especially profound if the trauma happened before the age of seven, when their conscious reasoning mind did not have the ability to question what it was being taught. When the trauma occurs to a child who does not have the ability to refute and fully understand it for what it is, their mind and spirit will tend to normalize it in order to make sense of it, including whatever they thought it meant about them. If they are supported enough or empowered enough to work on healing and deprogramming all those early messages, they can step into their own true empowerment. It takes self-determination, and it can take years, but no one is broken and everyone can heal.
    For some people this is a deep wound, and they spend a big chunk of their life working on their sexual healing. It is common that people who have experienced sexual assault or abuse will also experience post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Working with a PTSD specialist can be really important.
    The deep shame that can follow a sexual assault cuts to a person’s core. Having their most vulnerable, personal part of themselves harmed, violated, and controlled can leave a person feeling unsafe, unloved, or unseen. Many times our culture and people who love us don’t believe us, or blame us for our own sexual trauma because they don’t know how to handle the pain and level of shame in that experience. The shaming message that is often internalized is “I have no value” or “I did something to deserve this.”
    Sexual trauma can make it nearly impossible to trust others and often shuts down a person’s sexuality entirely. If your association with sexual energy and activity is that negative, you can completely disconnect from your sexuality and be unable to see anything positive in it. Until you take the step to get help, you might put your sexuality on hold or behave in sexually inauthentic or even harmful ways. I believe we can fully heal and inhabit our sexuality even after great trauma. Humans are so resilient. We can choose to have a new relationship to trauma and other experiences. Sometimes it means releasing an intense identification with the victim part of our self (more on that in the next chapter) and reframing the experience. For instance, rather than viewing yourself as a “victim of sexual assault,” see yourself as “someone who has experienced sexual assault.”

    â€œTRIGGERS” DURING SEX
    You can get activated or triggered when you get touched a certain way, spoken to a certain way, are in a sexual position that takes you back psychologically to an abusive experience, or have some kind of flashback that takes you out of your present experience and into past trauma. You can also be activated about your health status, a disability, body image, or another important aspect of your sexuality that you have struggled with. The response to an activating experience can often be to end sex altogether. Sometimes that’s what you need to do. Yet sometimes it’s possible to move past it, or to stop to process something, change positions, or make some other kind of adjustment and keep going. If you feel like you don’t really like sex at all, the