Exploring Sexual Healing: The Unspoken Journey of Survivors

I’ve been thinking more about sexual healing lately, after receiving an Amazon review who picked up on that aspect of what I spoke of in Resolve. I’ve been noticing something when I raise the topic with fellow survivors. We all seem to hold our breath for a moment, then breathe out a collective “same here.” Some will drop their shoulders and ease into a free, open conversation—but that is rare.

The majority of us don’t speak about it, even though our common experience was sexual abuse, or being sexualised too early. So why is it that when it comes to sexual healing, we stay silent?

Writing Through the Silence

I wrote about my experience of sexual healing as gingerly and vulnerably as I could in Resolve. Honestly, it felt so risky to write about it. It took me many drafts to get down what ended up in the final manuscript. It’s not the full story, of course—no memoir can ever share everything. And out of respect for my intimate relationship with my husband, I didn’t overshare. But I knew that if I had worries, thoughts, and feelings about intimacy, pleasure, and sexual experience, most, if not all, of the other survivors of sibling sexual abuse would too.

I wanted Resolve to shout across the world to other survivors the message that “You are not alone,” so this had to go in. Before or after the abuse, no one ever spoke to me about intimacy, pleasure, sex, safety, or even the idea of honouring my body as the beautiful vessel it is. I had to find my way alone. And until I disclosed to my husband at 25, even he didn’t know I had been sexually abused as a child. We’d been in an intimate relationship for a number of years by then.

A Journey to Seeing Myself Fully

The short course I took during my writing of Resolve, Alexandra Skoeld’s My Voice, My Body, My Pleasure, was about safety—safety for me, both outside and inside the bedroom. It helped me find my voice to talk about what I liked and didn’t like and then share that with my husband. For the first time in years, I saw myself as fully me.

I’ve got three adult daughters now, and in the space between being abused, being molested as a teen, numbing myself with alcohol as a coping mechanism, falling in love with my husband, and giving birth to our beautiful daughters, I never saw myself as a sexual being. I saw myself as “not good enough,” a failure, and as the only one experiencing these thoughts—oscillating between reactivity and numbness.

I’ve heard many survivors share that they (a) don’t have intimate partners; (b) don’t enjoy sex; (c) avoid sex altogether; (d) do it out of obligation; (e) would rather not do it at all; and (f) would never speak openly about it—not even with a partner, therapist, or friend—because no one needs to know. Aside from those rare open conversations I mentioned earlier, most survivors only speak small fragments, not full sentences. I pick up on those fragments, hoping the conversation might go deeper. But often, the fear of revealing an unsatisfactory sex life, either theirs or their partner’s, keeps survivors silent.

It makes my heart ache to know that the shame, guilt, and self-blame aren’t just about us and the abuse. They carry over into our most important relationships—like the one with our partner. So once again, perhaps it feels safer to put up with it rather than speak up. But what if we could feel safe enough to start speaking and healing this vital part of ourselves that was stolen by those who harmed us?

Be Mindful of What You Take In

If you are looking to read SSA survivor memoirs, aside from Resolve, one other that was written from a place of care and love and inspired hope for survivors and their allies, is 5Waves co-founder, Jane Epstein’s I Feel Real Guilty, available for pre-order right now and due out in early September.

May I recommend that you be gentle with yourself when reading these stories? I have read other memoirs that took up my one-hour appointment with Rose, the psychologist, to unpack how disturbing they were to me as a survivor and all that intuitively felt wrong about them. Thankfully, debriefing with a psychologist is also healthy in those cases. It helped me to sit with others’ unhealed darkness and feel for them whilst practising seeing them as the creators they are, whole but hurt human beings. I am consciously choosing not to venture into darkness much more now that my life is more freed from my past and growth-oriented.

Resources for Sexual Healing

Now, I want to focus on a new level of healing and self-love—to take care of me, the one who has healed. It’s still easy to stay busy and keep going, but what if we’ve reached a stage of healing that’s enough, and now living is what we need to do? Maybe all that’s left is to tweak a few areas that matter enough to keep working on.

Today, I downloaded audiobooks to listen to while I walk—another area that needs attention in my life: health and wellbeing. So I’ve combined the two missions—walking in nature and exploring sexual healing through books. I’ve done a lot of work to heal, and in the empowerment work I deliver, we often talk about how choosing to change and installing new habits isn’t a one-off lesson or a quick fix. It takes consistent and conscious practice.

I’m so grateful that Resolve gave me the gift of knowledge, helping me heal sooner than I might have otherwise. Writing helped me in ways I never anticipated.

An interesting exercise today was reviewing the resources on advocacy websites. When it came to recommended reading, there wasn’t much on sexual healing…why?

One book I remembered is Ghosts in the Bedroom: A Guide for Partners of Incest Survivors by K Graber (1991). I’ll be starting there. I’ve also created a Goodreads list called “Resources for S-Abuse Survivors,” where I’ve added a dozen or so titles I’ve either read or plan to read. Two that focus on sexuality and sexual healing are:

• Joyous Sexuality by Mic Hunter: This book is for those raised in families that were negative about sex, overvalued sex, or were sexually shut down. Dr. Hunter describes ten characteristics of these families and how adult relationships are negatively affected by these early experiences. He also discusses practical methods for making meaningful changes to improve sexuality and intimacy skills.
• The Sexual Healing Journey: A Guide for Survivors of Sexual Abuse by Wendy Maltz: This classic guide helps survivors improve their relationships and rediscover the joys of sexual intimacy. Wendy Maltz walks survivors step-by-step through the recovery process using groundbreaking exercises and techniques.

These resources were recommended by my favourite psychotherapist, Dr. Steven Levenkron, so they feel like a safe place to start. Alexandra’s short course also came with a wealth of reading and self-love lessons beyond what we covered together.

Healing Through Reflection and Action

As I shared in Resolve, I would learn something I needed to heal from, grieve it, let it hurt a lot—and then let it hurt some more. Eventually, I’d turn myself around, stand tall, and ask: What am I going to do about this? What can I learn from it? What do I want? Only I can choose to heal it. If it’s meaningful and important to me, I will take that step forward and begin exploring the path until I’m done.

Somehow, I feel this is going to be an important area of study for me now that I’ve moved beyond what I explored in Resolve. I won’t be sharing much about this on Instagram, though—I found that the one post I shared on sexuality, pleasure, and intimacy got flagged.

So stay posted—perhaps from September, I’ll bring together what I’ve learned and found helpful here in the blog, just like I did with Resolve.

Shared with love,

Alice