Healing Sexual Trauma in Relationships

Yolanda G Brooks

Resilience: The capacity to face, confront, and recover from difficulties. A natural human trait that many of us forget we have.

The world we find ourselves in has become increasingly confusing with the voices that shout loud, tell us how it is, what we can and cannot expect, how to fix this and that. So much so that we have forgotten that we are creatures of creativity, problem-solving and self-determination.

I want to remind you how amazing you are, and that you already have all the answers you need to regain that sense of control of your life, your mind and your body.

It’s Rarely Just One Event Trauma

is our response to an experience that caused feelings fear, shame, sadness or anger; emotions that had nowhere to go, and so get stuck in the body. You had to one to tell, no one to help you; nowhere to run to, even if you could escape. You didn’t feel safe.

That’s the crux – those responses become stuck in your psyche and in your body, ready to send you back into that memory at a moment’s notice. Our bodies and minds are confused, stuck in a feedback loop of thought, emotion and sensation, that we just haven’t figured out yet

Why Does Sexual Trauma Go So Deep?

We are naturally sexual beings – it’s how we procreate. But more than that, sexuality is part of identity.

Exposure to an experience too early or in a traumatic way causes our survival instincts to kick in. For many of us, we disconnect from our bodies. We don’t want to feel that shame or helplessness, so we cut ourselves off and see our bodies as the cause of our pain. And other people become a source of fear – we don’t understand their motives, and we don’t understand our reactions to them. Relationships become difficult.

Why are Relationships the Place to Heal?

Trauma happens in relationships, and can only be healed in relationships. Traumas happen from the moment of birth – none of us will escape - and can even be traced back to events before our birth. The stress hormones that our mothers release surround us and we become ‘addicted’ to them as our normal state of being.

We deal with so many relationships, and so many interactions, that there are thousands of opportunities for miscommunication and subconscious reactions to add to the mix of what we already don’t understand about ourselves and the world. It is a big and scary place, no matter how happy our childhood.

There is a lot of work we can do for ourselves, or with a specialist therapist. But the real healing happens when we are able to fully know and trust another person with every aspect of our safety and when we develop the ability to know and trust ourselves in how we relate to another person