I have spent a lot of my life healing from the aftereffects of child sexual abuse and also sexual assault. Because of this, I believe it has led me to a deep interest and study of our culture's behaviors and views surrounding sex and sexuality.
Through my recovery process, I spent a lot of time in therapy and self-help groups to face my aversion to intimacy and issues of hypo-sexuality. The path has not been easy, nor linear. There came a point in my therapy process that I realized that talking alone was not going to heal me, and that no one could do the work for me, and that if I wanted to find a way out, I was going to have to journey through.
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward.” ~Steve Jobs
Connecting my dots backward, the greatest contributor to my healing and maturation process
began when I moved away from the belief that my body was a source of shame, pain and disconnection. The moment that I began to learn about and befriend my own body and pleasure was when I began to learn to communicate my own needs and desires with my partner.
This became a healing and life-affirming point in my sexual and relational journey.
Through many years of studying and taking workshops and training with sexual empowerment educators and coaches, I have found that it's not just sexual trauma survivors that feel confused and disconnected about their sexuality, that this is an all-too-common experience across the board for everyone.
I’m not unique here. Every human in their journey through life and living will struggle at some point with their sexuality. Looking back through my sexual history and journey, while I’m not grateful for all the unnecessary pain and trauma that I experienced, I’m grateful that my pain motivated me to seek beyond the conventional and to find experts that could safely guide me through these areas and to gain the education that I believe we all rightfully deserve and need.
Society doesn’t make this easy. We’ve been, and are taught, as a collective, that sex, and sexual behavior are shameful and not something to talk about, let alone to seek help for it. This messaging comes from religion, our abstinence-only sex education programs, and parents who are in the dark or feeling shame with their own sexuality that continues to pass the torch of ignorance and silence to their children.
It is important that we build a world based on sex-positive, comprehensive education echoed by parents and role models secure in their own sexuality. By creating a proactive, gender-balanced approach to this education, we may very well finally see decline in the alarming rates of both adult and childhood sexual abuse. This is a social issue. When we all begin to heal our discomfort with our sexuality we can then become allies for those that can’t yet advocate for themselves.
Over the coming weeks I will be dedicating follow up blog posts highlighting some of the most common issues that we see regarding sex and society today and the latest research and education to open the space for dialog.