My
husband and I have not had sex in a year and a half. We've had sex
maybe 10 times in the last five years. I am a sexual trauma survivor.
These two things are directly related, but it's taken me years to make
the connection.
Our sex life wasn't always like this. For the
first six months of our relationship, we had sex all the time.
Passionate, mind-blowing sex, in fact. Knock-your-socks off sex. So you
can imagine my husband's confusion when I suddenly seemed to lose
interest.
It was
around the time we moved in together, and I didn't know what was wrong.
We thought it was hormonal, and I switched birth controls. We thought it
was related to some major life changes, so we waited it out. We thought
it was a difference in libido, so we tried things like taking sex off
the table for a month. We tried hooking up but not having intercourse. I
started going to therapy. The problem only got worse.
My husband
began to feel like I wasn't attracted to him anymore. He stopped trying
to initiate things. He grew resentful. We talked about options like
opening our marriage. We had a lot of conversations about the fact that
this wasn't fair or what he wanted in a relationship. Since I have also
been interested in women, he questioned whether I was attracted to men
at all.
Meanwhile, I felt despondent. I felt detached and numb. I
knew I was attracted to my husband, because I felt it. But I didn't want
to have sex. I wanted to kiss and cuddle without it leading to anything
else. Sometimes I'd give in to some form of sexual activity, but I
always felt empty and used afterward. There was always an elephant in
the room. It felt like it was between us when we got into bed at night.
What's funny is that I'm a certified
rape crisis
counselor. I can talk about the effects of sexual trauma on sex until
I'm blue in the face. But I couldn't internalize it and apply it to my
own life. I was sure that there was a different problem. I
swore that my trauma hadn't affected me to that level. And for years, I used sex as a coping mechanism.
In
the years leading up to meeting my husband, I found myself joining the
"sex-positive" movement. I wore it like a badge of liberation. I was
determined to take back my body. I found
BDSM and kink,
and I jumped in with abandon. I thought I was free. It's only now, with
clear vision, that I can look back and see that I was not in an
emotionally healthy
place to be making these kinds of decisions. At the time, I viewed a
lot of these activities as consensual but I recognize now that I was not
emotionally healthy enough to be consenting. It is absolutely possible
to participate in fully consensual BDSM. But for me, at that time, I
wasn't capable of it and I didn't realize it. And the result of this is
that it traumatized me more.
That all came to a head for me when
my husband and I moved in together. What I know now, that I didn't know
then, is that all of this is normal. What I know now, that I couldn't
internalize then, is that I was coping in the best way I knew how. And
it's
because of the safety that I finally felt with my husband
and in our relationship that the symptoms of my trauma finally shone
through. And now I'm left undoing not only the harm that other people
have done to me, but the harm I caused myself under the guise of sexual
liberation.
Today, my husband and I are seeing a wonderful
counselor. What we've learned, together, is that it's normal for sex to
be great at the beginning and to taper off when the survivor begins to
feel "safe." My dissociation and numbness around sex are also normal. It
was hard for him to understand at first, because dissociation doesn't
look
traumatic to someone witnessing it; it just looks like lack of
enthusiasm. Which is why, for so long, my husband thought I just wasn't
into sex with him. As we, and I, start to work through this stuff, I get
triggered. It gets hard. It gets uncomfortable. But I choose to think
of it as progress, as a sign that I'm beginning to move through the
numbing phase and onto the healing phase.
We both know that we
have a long road ahead of us. We know that we won't go back to having
wonderful, consistent sex tomorrow, or even next week. But now that
we're both on the same page and the problem is clear, we feel a freedom
and a closeness that we haven't felt in a long time. The fact that we're
tackling this together brings us an intimacy that we lost when we
stopped having
sex. And while having regular date nights and finding activities to do together doesn't bring
quite
the same intimacy that sex does, we're taking steps in the direction of
healing and we both finally feel hopeful that one day, we'll have sex
again.
Labels: lifestyle