July 19, 2019
Sex & Pleasure After Sexual Assault
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Julie Peters, author of Want: 8 Steps to Recovering Desire, Passion, and Pleasure After Sexual Assault, shares her insights regarding recovery and the return to desire, sexuality, trust, and pleasure after assault. Her approach is grounded in gratitude, mindfulness and pleasure and is relevant to survivors of all genders as well as the general population.
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Rough Transcript:
This is a computer-generated rough transcript, so please excuse any typos. This podcast is an informational conversation and is not a substitute for medical, health or other professional advice, diagnosis or treatment. Always seek the services of an appropriate professional should you have individual questions or concerns.
Sex & Pleasure After Sexual Assault
00:00:05 – 00:05:24
You’re listening to the SAX with Dr Jess podcast sacks and relationship advice. You can use tonight <music>. Welcome to the sex with Dr Jess podcast. I’m your co host Brandon wear and I’m just so Riley your friendly neighborhood sexologist before four we get started. I want to say a big. Thank you desire resorts and cruises for their ongoing support of our little podcast here you can find out more about desire and their clothing optional cruises and resorts at Desire Experience <music> joining us today is Julie Peters the author of want eight steps to recovering desire passion and pleasure after sexual assault. Thank you for being here. Thank you so much for having me. Can you tell us a little bit about your journey that led to in writing this book absolutely yes so I was assaulted quite a few years ago now in a sort of a date rape kind of context it with someone that <hes> that I knew really well entrusted a good friend and I just kind of went through this journey afterwards where I’ve found that my like my life had just sorta lost its color and it took me a long time to kind of recognize what was happening and that I had experienced trauma essentially really and one of the questions that I really had as I was going through that was like where is my sexual desire like what happened to my body. Why don’t I feel like I want to feel connected with anybody in that way and so you know I did some research late night google? What do you do like you’ve been assaulted and you know what is it and the best advice I could get at? The time was just don’t until you want to which I thought was really. I mean sure fair enough but like there’s so much more the Matt and so I kind of figure it out on my own and this book is really everything that I learned during that time using my yoga meditation practices and all kinds of other things to kind of find my way not only back to sexual desire but really to in new way of understanding outstanding my sexuality and a new way of feeling connected in my body and feeling like I was kind of having color not only again but sort of in new it’s interesting because after trauma we often talk about connecting to your body and has a yoga instructor and a Yoga Practitioner. You probably are very much connected to your body but that doesn’t always mean that it’s sexual or Roddick yeah absolutely and sort of depending on who you ask there are lots of spiritual traditions that really see sex as dangerous as sort of like an energy that could disrupt your spiritual path and one of the things that really helped me as I was kind of going on this journey was I’m learning about Tom Tra- as sort of a different perspective on that so you know a lot of the one of the ethical precepts of Yoga is Brahmachari which is usually translated celibacy not always but but <hes> from tantric perspective. It’s more like you know. Erotic energy is the energy of the universe. It’s the energy of creation. It’s sort of how we all got here and so it’s something <hes> not to fear but to really kind of work with and you know be ethical about for sure and channel into the right places but it’s really something that we want to honor now. Can you walk us through some of these eight steps to reconnecting sexually aft after Assault Yeah for sure so the eight steps <music> are sort of tongue in cheek because of course there are many steps that everybody is going to have a different journey when it comes to the stuff but I just kind of organize my thoughts into the stages that that I thought made the most sense for sort of what it was going through so the first step is is to survive and one of the things that I think is really really important for survivors to know is that however you deal with it is okay like especially in the beginning a lot of the time you know we’re in denial we SORTA shut down sometimes <hes> well. It’s very common with trauma for there to be addiction or like addictive behaviors and I think it’s really important not to feel shame about those things and just to really understand that you’re surviving right now. Like something happens that your body in your mind are not able to to fully integrate and understand so you need to deal with that however you need to deal with it and if that means coming out for a while that’s what it means but of course if we get stuck in survival than we can thrive and we can’t sort of move forward from there so the second step is is feel and the story that is telling my book is really just about getting some advice from someone to just lie down every day and breathe into your belly and so I would try that and Kinda lie there and just like what is doing here like what is this for this is so boring you know but then I would stand up and I’d start doing the dishes or whatever and I would just be crying like I would just have tears rolling down my face and I think that really taught me that my body and my mind or kind of on different paths when it comes comes to understanding what happened and just breathing into my belly was the first step in bringing my body sort of back online third step is rage.
00:05:25 – 00:10:08
You gotTa feel that anger and that’s another one that like from a spiritual perspective anger anger is also seen as a dangerous energy. That’s often like oh you have to be calm and content all the time and never express your anger but you know if you’ve been sexually assaulted it’s an injustice and it’s totally reasonable to feel rage about that to feel angry and their on specific things that you can do with anger that or more generative of connection and Change <hes> rather than sort of violently having an outburst or something like that. I think that’s really important to give yourself permission to feel a range of emotions and we talk about that often in our relationship as well as like here on the podcast and so some people might feel anger. Some people might feel a different range of emotions. Did you run into that in your research. Oh yeah absolutely and I think for me. <hes> one of the central things that I am trying to express with this book is that all of your emotions are okay and really. I think that coming back to a full sexual expression or erotic expressionist may be the better way to phrase it because I really we think erotic energy is not just about sex. It’s it’s about how you engage with the world and how you experience pleasure and also to a degree how you experience how you might WanNa change like in your own life but also you know if you want to kind of like fight against injustice that sort of where that energy can come from as well so I think being able to access our sexual energy requires that we have access to our full range range of emotions and if we are numbing we’re not allowing ourselves to feel all of those things that we feel. We’re we’re cutting off that erotic energy and then we don’t want change. We don’t really care what happens to us. We’re not really going to move forward so we’ve got our first three steps and then next step is forgive and this one is kind of a tough one. I think a lot of survivors get really uncomfortable with the word forgiveness because it kind of implies that like you know you should let it go or forget it or you know. Let your perpetrator back into your life which is not what I mean by forgiveness. What I mean by forgiveness is really more so learning how to understand what happened to you with sexual assault a as a symptom of living in a misogynist culture among other things and also that the the perpetrator is a part of that system as well and usually perpetrators are hurting too I and so finding some compassion for that person which doesn’t mean you let them in? It doesn’t mean you talk to them. It doesn’t mean you give them anything you don’t have to interact with them in any way but you have compassionate and see them as just a human being kind of just like you and then that allows that person to no longer have power over you ’cause I think before we get to that point of forgiveness is in the way that I’m talking about it. We’re kind of stuck in that person always being a part of our nervous system a part of our psyche were there sort of Incan in control of something about us and when we can have that compassion it breaks that bond so it’s really kind of about letting go but in that chapter <hes> the way that I talk about coming to compassionate understanding someone as a human being a really talk a lot about patriarchy and misogyny and like how the systems that we all participate in contribute to violence against women and lots of other other issues that we have in our in our culture because again a lot of survivors when you have a sexual assault you feel like this happened just to me and it’s this private shame that I have to carry around. It’s a symptom of something much larger and it’s not just about that one experience experience or that one assault that happened to you. It’s really something much larger than that I did it happens to so many people <hes> so often that I think we often turn a blind eye because it’s on one hand. It’s so so common on on the other hand we don’t talk about it. Yep absolutely because we feel shrouded in shame. We often blame ourselves. Is that something you talk about letting go of the self blame that Offiah venise trauma yeah the self blame is huge and you know it’s really something that is it’s incredibly common for survivors of any kind of trauma to half that there is this real feeling of like because this like the fact of that this happened to me means it must be my fault like we have this weird kind of thing that we do in our heads where we just think the fact that it happened means.
00:10:08 – 00:15:39
There’s something fundamentally assault -able about me or whatever it is that you think and it’s really not the case this and again you kind of have to come from that perspective of like you know. There are so many different reasons why you might have been in that situation that aren’t your faults and there’s so many ways that you might have responded to that situation situation again. Not your fault and really coming to a place of feeling like you don’t have to carry this shame this is there’s a survivor Paul. Go Martin who I always think of his phrase he talks about his. He has a podcast called the mental. On this happy hour and he talks about his experiences of being assaulted on that podcast and people ask him like how do you feel about being so open about this and he says that’s not my shame to carry and I just love that phrase because like of course why are the survivors carrying shame like it’s really the perpetrators shame to carry and that something the perpetrators should be trying to deal with and figure out how to hold and change within themselves which usually happens usually it’s the survivor who ends up having to do all this work and the perpetrators don’t even realize done something wrong sometimes in so when you talk about forgiveness is it forgiveness of self yeah forgiveness of self is huge absolutely and there are specific things that are patterns when it comes to survivors and one of them is something called ten befriend. Have you heard of that so this I think is really really important to know especially when it comes to violence against women in general and I’m not trying to imply that violence doesn’t happen to man it absolutely does us and that sort of another thing that we could talk about Dr Shelly Taylor started studying stressed in female mammals around the year two thousand and all the stress studies up until that point had been done on mill mammals and and so what they found was fighter flight which is sort of the common stress response that we have like. You’re dangerous situations. You try to fight or runaway what you found though is that because female mammals often have young children or they might be pregnant. I’ve been running away or fighting just isn’t going to be as effective also for most mammals females tend to be smaller. Maybe weaker so it’s just not the best strategy and so it’s still happens to female mammals but they have this other stress response. That’s called Tendon Befriend <hes> and so tendon befriend. The ten part is grabbed that baby don’t run away without the baby and befriend is try to find allies to help protect you because you can’t protect yourself and so how this plays out is the stress hormones amongst we get when we have fighter flight or adrenaline cortisol with tendon befriend it’s oxytocin which is the bonding hormone and so when you’re being assaulted by someone you already consider an ally which is like eighty to ninety percent of the time assaults happened with someone that you already know Oh and might even trust your tendency is not going to be to fight or run from that person. It’s going to be pleased. Placate you know give them whatever he wants so that he doesn’t hurt you further and I think this this might even play a into in a domestic abuse situation where you know the question is always like why did you stay. Why did you stay could be ten in befriend? It could be no. She was trying to keep her ally close like from an instinctual perspective not a conscious rational decision place but like your instincts are trying to help you to survive in the best way to do that is befriend the people that are close to you and if that person who is close to you is attacking you your instinct tells you to befriend that person and so I think all of that being said a lot of survivors self self blame and this is something I felt for sure like why did knife more widen nice struggle widen ice cream and learning about ten in befriend really helped me understand like oh because I was trying to survive of and maybe I just had a different response to that in that moment because of the relationship I already had with this person and maybe that’s okay and not something that I have to feel so much shame about right I mean there’s so much shame around not only trying to placate for our own safety which we do not only when we’re being assaulted but when we’re being harassed Roche the way will we will respond to people oftentimes isn’t particularly authentic. You Might WanNa tell them to screw off but you smile or you laugh or oh you make it into a joke for your own safety <hes> and then for doing that we continue to judge you yeah and so you’re being judged by others and so of course you judge yourself so moving on from forgiveness. What’s the next step? The next step is either eat or pleasure. I can’t remember which one comes first but we’ll talk about eat so kind of a funny thing to bring up with sexual assault but I found actually that food was a really really useful place to think about out reconnecting to my body experiencing pleasure and even consent from the perspective of like you know if I eat when I’m hungry I’m honoring my desires and if I stopped when I’m full honoring my internal signal Mela no and so for me having a have a history of Anorexia so I have eating disorder in my past and so again super common survivors a lot of people turn into food too you know numb the emotions or feel in control or whatever which was definitely part of what it was for me and so really healing.
00:15:39 – 00:20:56
My relationship with food was a really lovely way to start to heal my relationship with my body and explore our pleasure and desire in a way that like it’s just me and my food like you know. I don’t have to do this with anybody else like it’s something that I’m practicing every single day and so yeah. I think it’s really beautiful to be able to do that and also to understand like what food has to do with stress because trauma is essentially a stress problem. It essentially means that there’s a constant low level or maybe high level depending on your trauma of stress in your body that your body kind of can’t sort out the stress cycle never completes when you’re kind of in the state of like being traumatized and so <hes> when we are stressed the energy in our bodies is going to our limbs. It’s again that fighter flight kind of thing where it’s like okay okay. I’m endanger. I’m hyper vigilant. I have to be ready for anything and a lot of survivors. That’s just like how you live every single day and when that’s happening all of that energy in your body is moving out of your digestive and reproductive organs organs right and so fighter the opposite of fighter flight is feed and breed so you know you can’t fully digest or procreate. If you’re under stress you have to feel safe right and so yeah for me. Playing with food was a really important part of my recovery and food insects have so much in common in terms yeah the chemical response and we tend to treat food a little bit more rationally than we treat sex <hes> yeah and I think that there’s a really interesting connection between food and intimacy that I talk about a little bit of my book and I think there’s something about <hes> like taking in food from the outside side world means that you are taking something that’s not yours and letting it enter inside of you and like from my accent perspective. I talk about this a little bit in the book but for me when I was anorexic I was a teen and I think part of it really came from like feeling really attacked or objectified by even just men on the street like that was a really common thing that I felt when I was really young probably started when I was ten or something that you start getting attention on the street. It felt very threatening felt really scary and rejecting food was away to reject my relationship with the outside world. It was a way of controlling what was inside of me and and I mean there was also the the piece of it around body image and that feeling like if I shrink down as small as I can possibly be then I will no longer be the object of the scary attention that I’m getting right so yeah. I think there’s something really to this <music> Food and love connection and just the association that we have as well with them. You know when we’re babies crying. Usually we get food so like we kind of get this association from a really really young age that food and love are connected and so for me the rejection of food was related to a rejection of certain type of attention and at and love like really relationship and so leading that in letting myself gain weight letting myself eat leading myself have that pleasure is really part of me being in relationship with my environment and then theoretically other people and so moving on from food to other types of pleasure <hes> yeah so pleasure is the next up and pleasure injury is a topic that I love to talk about partly because I think that what people often don’t acknowledge about pleasure is that genuine pleasure requires that we feel our bodies in the present right and when we have an experience of like for example like I think there’s a difference between sort of eating too much ice cream just as the example and having a really full mindful full eating experience just to go back to the metaphor him when we’re sort of overeating like something that sweet we’re not actually in pleasure were numbing and so then numbing feeling is like the the good feeling about that is the relief of not having to feel our our feelings right but when we let ourselves be really fully pleasant sorry present with pleasure with pleasure may come anger may come grief may come fear like they’re all kinds of emotions that might arise with that and so when we’re talking about sexual pleasure especially sexual pleasure that you’re sharing with another human being that is a field of a lot of potentially scary emotions that might come up and I think a lot of people have sex for numbing not for pleasure in this way of just being like let me get this over with Lemme perform this whatever it is but not allowing that full presence with the body and all of the emotions that live in there because if you’re numbing any emotion your numbing all of the emotions you can’t selectively feel and so really <unk> exploring and experiencing pleasure sexual and otherwise can be really confronting because you have to be in your body in order to feel pleasure and being in our bodies as complicated.
00:20:57 – 00:25:21
I appreciate that in this program or in these eight eight steps you’ve separated sex from pleasure because you can have sex devoid of pleasure and I was there might be a drive to do that after assault to say I can still have sex. Let me do this to show that I can still do it. We respond that way after grief when we’re dealing with grief we respond when there’s been a big shift or transition in our lives and so we might have sex but it may not be for pleasure or connection yeah absolutely so how do you bridge pleasure and sex so that they are experienced simultaneously yeah so masturbation is I talk about something in my book called Masturbation Meditation. It’s just what I what I’m calling it and. And I think it’s really nice to practice pleasure on your own before you share it with somebody else because it is so much scarier when you do it with someone else but I think that a lot of the time people masturbate also to numb sometimes it can happen that way and there are different ways of approaching self pleasure and you can definitely do it for numbing reasons but you can also do it in this way that really allows for that full experience of pleasure in your body and so you know just explain it really briefly when I meditate just when I’m regular meditating the practice that I’m doing is I’m trying to just observe what’s happening and be kind to whatever that is so I’m trying to breathe relaxed my body and just notice what’s going on and work on not judging or getting too attached to the thoughts or trying to avoid any of the thoughts either I’m just trying to be with whatever is going on in my body body in my mind. I’m trying to be present so if you are masturbating with that in mind with a meditative intention you’re relaxing. You’re breathing into your belly. You’re paying attention to what arises this and the reason. I think this is so important because that’s something that I really discovered when I was kind of going through this it’s like I can’t masturbate like this. Is You know if I try memories. Come up from the assault right or or other kinds of emotions might come up that feel really uncomfortable for me because if I’m if I’m touching on pleasure I have to touch on everything else to and so I started meditating with it and I started just kind of okay. There’s a memory I’m noticing that that’s there and I’m just gonNA keep breathing and try to stay present and sure enough. The memory fades into the background and then there’s grief well like that’s a really intense emotion coming out of nowhere like okay. I’m GONNA keep going. I’M GONNA keep breathing into my belly. Keep relaxing thing and then the feeling subsides and I really started to have his experience of it with like Oh. I’m cleansing these emotions out of my body like there are things that I’m holding like in that genital area you know in the way that we sometimes hold things in our bodies related to stress. Ask totally makes sense and I’m actually moving them through when I let myself feel that way and when I let myself have pleasure and presence and just breathe and stay present it makes sense to me that you’re talking about self pleasure before pleasure with potential partner and you’ve described overcoming triggers and memories of an assault using mindfulness exactly is that was there anything else that worked for you when a trigger came up or when a memory came up during during a sexual experience well when I if I if it’s self pleasure. It’s exactly that it’s mindfulness. It’s just like stay present. Be Kind Stop. If if you need to stop don’t don’t feel like you have to have an orgasm may or may not happen just like keep breathing pelvic floor. Breathing is something that I think is really important for everybody like even if you haven’t been traumatized because you’re pelvic floor which is that little net of muscles that supports the genitals and the reproductive organs when you are under stress it is it will automatically contract that something that just it will tighten right up if you’re under stress and so when you’re under a lot of stress or when you become a habit of that that area’s just always holding and win it’s contracted.
00:25:21 – 00:30:06
The blood can’t get their fully. You can kind of have all sorts of other issues with that a lot of people. Everybody thinks they’re public floors to loose but a lot of us. It’s actually the opposite opposite it’s way too tight yeah Bijou for sure and so pelvic floor breathing just means consciously trying to relax into that area and kind of feeling that on the inhale the pelvic floor expands and descends a little bit when we’re relaxed and on the sale it lifts up in a relaxed way so it’s not engaging anything. It’s not contracting anything. It’s not key goals. It’s just letting your belly be really soft and leading the breath. Go down to at that place again. A lot of people during sexual arousal or orgasm will tense up everything contracts in that area and I find it incredibly interesting to try to do the opposite to try to actually relax when sexual pleasures happening when Orgasms mm-hmm is happening. Just keep letting the breath go down there the IT can make your orgasms way more powerful among other things but yeah pelvic floor breathing like even just in meditation you know if it doesn’t feel comfortable to do maceration meditation you can just do pelvic floor breathing and you got a lot of a lot of benefits from doing that as well and you own ocean and Crow Yoga Studio in Vancouver so in terms of releasing the pelvic floor. Are there any positions or movements that can help with that so for example I remember when I went to the pelvic. The floor therapist because I have a hypersonic helped pelvic floor they asked me to do squats and girls. Do you have any recommendations for releasing the pelvic floor as opposed to just contracting it. I think the breathing is probably the best thing to do and and <hes> a really good position to do the breathing in his lying on your back with your knees bent okay which can help release the so as as well which is sometimes related to pelvic tension and just really trying to focus on leading the belly really big on the hill deflate softly on the exile. I think when you have a really tight pelvic floor it can be really hard to do any yoga poses that really release it because it’s such an unconscious thing that we’re doing all the time especially if you’re doing like a Vanessa flow or something like that more active sort of yoga practice with specifically ugi breathing which is the breath it we use in a flow based practice usually means <hes> Lula bundy’s like always have your public floor engaged always always always and so one of the things that I’ve been doing my practice is not so much specific poses but just really consciously being aware when am I engaging my pelvic floor. When do I want it to be engaged? How howling my contracting my core when I’m doing specific core exercises and when I don’t need to be doing that can I breathe down into my belly? Let the breath go down relax. You know all of that kind of stuff so stretching and stuff can help but again another reason that I like the the masturbation meditation practices that Yoga can stretch my shoulders my hips my back like all these places where I hold stress but there aren’t really poses like for your vagina you know so. It’s like it’s for me. This masturbation meditation is a little bit like it’s Yoga for my China. It’s a new market vaginal start teaching works on that you talked about using mindfulness to bring yourself soft back to the moment when you’re masturbating in order to overcome some of the triggers or upsetting memories and what about when you’re with a partner now first of all we know there’s no pressure as you mentioned. You don’t have to have an orgasm you can stop. It’s not the last time you’ll ever masturbate but with a partner if you are dealing with these traumatic memories. How do you approach that? How did you approach that? <hes> yeah yeah so sex is the next step in the journey and it’s really for me. It was about sex but also about dating and how do I choose who I’m going to share this with especially because the person who assaulted me with a close friend who I really trusted. I kind of got mixed up with like okay. How do we trust my instincts here? Like how do I do this and so for me. A lot of it was not necessarily what’s happening in the bedroom but getting to know someone in a way where I’m looking out for certain red flags and also green flags looking out for indications that this person might be somebody that can trust <hes> and so you know there are a lot of places where consent is being where consent can can come into the equation that have nothing to do a Saxon. I think we rarely talk about this but you know in general. Do you respect the person that you’re with if someone wants to do something different than what you WanNa do who’s in control of that situation.
00:30:06 – 00:35:27
How do you have that conversation you know like do you WanNa go for dinner at this place with that place like consigned can be practiced even in those kinds of conversations and so a lot of it for me was really kind of watching how does this person interact with me and for sure like if something happened where we would start <hes> even just making out or whatever having some kind of sexual suggestion of something you you know is this is this person listening with their body and if I say no or if I tend supper pull away? How does this person respond to that and I actually have three rules for mindful sex so I the best if you like the first one of course is be present and this is again more complicated than we often? Give credit for it’s like are you in your body. Are you aware of what your desires are and one of the things that I talk about in the book is that we often think of sexual assault really as a women’s issue but it’s an everyone issue and their specific things to do with men that I think we need to talk about more and one of them is the way that men are taught that their sexual desire is like voracious and violent must be satisfied or else like bill explode or something and so a lot of men kind of get this message of like okay. I have to be like this. You know really sexual person and I have to have sex with as many people well as possible and I have to be really good at pleasing women and I have to do all of this performance stuff and a lot of men aren’t even pausing to think. Does this feel good for me like there’s not necessarily a lot of pause and like how do I feel so right now. What do I want like? There’s not a lot of space in our culture for men to say no. I don’t feel comfortable with that or I don’t want that a yeah. There seems to be a scarcity mentality to for men that you need to go for when you can get it because they may not always be available and not only he does that eliminate or race sexual agency and desire for women but it puts men in a position in the heterosexual context where they’re supposed to always want it and if they don’t want it what if they don’t want it. Is it possible that you’re on this date. You’re attracted to this. This person and you don’t actually want to have sex yet and you need to be able to give yourself as a man permission to also say no yeah absolutely and women also need to get that to like again in a heterosexual context but we all need to be practicing consent it’s not. Not just about men honoring women’s desires. It’s also about women honoring like does he want this is he into it like a lot of women. I think just haven’t even considered that like it hasn’t even been thought and just as a sort of a vague general statistic one in four women <music> are assaulted in some way for minutes one in six and that’s just reported cases like I think a lot of men don’t even ever say that. Something happened that they didn’t want because that’s not socially acceptable for men to say they don’t want something. I don’t think they even realize it themselves. Selves I think I you know I hear men come to me with trauma but they don’t describe it rags trauma because they have been told that they should be an feel lucky yet at this person wanted them in also including intergenerational national and family in sexual assault when a older woman in the family has assaulted them they don’t see it as assault and even those who do report are often shamed her not enjoying it for not feeling Ling Fortunate enough to have run into this sexual experience mentors and we see it in popular culture young singers or pop culture stars talking about how they lost their virginity when they were eleven years old to an eighteen year old babysitter right and so so young men are hearing will this is what you should want when in fact an eighteen year old woman having sex with an eleven year old boy is assault yeah and traumatizing and so they don’t get the opportunity to work through that trump yet absolutely and there are fewer resources for men as well there are quite a few resources for women in terms of like you know shelters and crisis lines and organizations that that do a lot to support women which is awesome and there are a few for men. One of them is called one in six but it’s a a lot harder for a man to reach out to those things I think it can be this sense of shame even more so than women feel to like walk into you know an organization that that is based on that in kind of say like you know my eighteen year old babysitter assaulted me because yeah it’s supposed to be like a cool fun thing that that you experienced but it’s of course not going to be that way for every every man who has that of course an eleven year old or twelve year old these are just these children Yep Yep absolutely so when you’re with a partner do you in your experience and I know everybody’s journey is going to be highly individual. Do you talk about your assault before you engage in sexual relationship. I do yeah I do. I know not everybody is comfortable with that but I find it really useful for someone to know that because sometimes I do get scared especially like there’s nothing that makes me more anxious than dating like it really is something because of this experience like going out on a first date like I might throw up you know like it really really scares me but I find if I talk about it.
00:35:27 – 00:40:12
That helps me a lot like if I just let the person know what’s what’s going on and then I also can gauge. How do they respond to that conversation you know do they listen and understand? Do they. Say I’m so sorry that happened to you. You know what can do to make you feel more comfortable or do they get all weird and you know <hes> shutdown and not WanNa talk about it like that’s a lot of really really good information for me for whether or not I should be engaging with that person and beyond the first date if it’s your first time having sex is is it something you remind them of or want them to be aware of in any specific way not not necessarily <hes> it depends on what happens. I do feel like I have to be able to talk about it if I need to. If something comes up I do have to feel like I can stop if I need to something that happens happens to me. Sometimes is like I’ll cry after and sometimes that’s because like it just hit some grief somewhere and you know just another one of the complications of pleasure sometimes having really a pleasurable intimate beautiful sex can bring up so much grief for what you didn’t have before and for how long you didn’t have that like it really can bring up that feeling as well and so if that happened that doesn’t happen to me super often but like if it does I need to be able to say like having some emotions like can you hold me right now or whatever and they need to make sure that that person can do that for me <hes> and the I just said the first but I’ll tell you third rule of mindful sex is listening with the body and so this means that again both people are present in their our bodies and how they feel but also that there you’re paying attention not only to like verbally saying yes or no but what is my body doing are you. Are you watching for whether I’m tensing up or not and what my breath is doing and how my body bodies either leaning into yours or pulling away or like. Am I fully engaging in this or have I sort of disconnected. I’m because there’s a lot of information that you’re getting sexually from another person’s body that is it can be a little bit like so conscious or unconscious sometimes times and I think if we just only focus on consent as being did usually she say yes or no. We’re missing a lot of signals that are coming from from another place and also I think it’s a really important to acknowledge that women men have been conditioned to say S. two men whether they want what’s happening or not so sometimes even if there is a verbal yes there might be a physical no happening and I think that both people need to be able to really listen with their bodies with their own bodies listening to the other person’s person’s body paying attention to breath tension movement all of that kind of stuff and just staying present with the experience because you can feel like if somebody disconnects from you sexually if your present in your body you can feel it right away. I know that the idea of all of this awareness this emotional intelligence that you’re talking about needing to have do you. Do you find that people are just because you bring it up at the beginning before you date someone before you see someone that you can gauge whether or not they’re going to be receptive to this idea because I would imagine that not having this conversation and then being frustrated with the person that you’re seeing would just force you back into one of these steps in working through the process again so obviously to each their own but there is a lot going on that you have to be aware. Are you angry. Do Do you find your frustrated that you now have to be aware of. All of these extra steps that you have to take thank you for that that question. That’s such a good question. No not angry I love it. I think it’s awesome and one of the things that I really try to express through the book and through the last chapter the last step is love and it’s really about mindful loving as well and like really being able to access true connection inequality in a relationship which is really hard. You know it’s not easy to do that but one of the things that I really want survivors to know. Is that like yes the recovery process is hard. There are a lot of steps it’s difficult and it can bring up a lot of emotions but on the other side of it there is more pleasure. There’s more joy there’s more connection. <hes> I would not go back to the way my life was before all of us like you know before the assault and I kind of gained all this awareness of what was happening with my body and everything in my previous life.
00:40:12 – 00:43:30
I wasn’t really having that great of sex before because I was performing with everybody else. I wasn’t totally present in my body. You know I wasn’t really having those deeply pleasurable experiences but now yes it takes a bit more work to like meet the people who are willing to enter into that zone with me but <hes> when I can it is awesome you know if feels really really good and much better at sort of choosing people who can share that with me and the other piece of it is and I might just be sort of lucky in this way but I feel like the well. This is kind of mixed but I feel like I’ve had quite a few sexual partners over the last little while who they’re they’re so receptive to when I’m for lack of a better word teaching them about how this process can be and I remember having <music> an experience with a guy and we were kind of getting into it and he said like what do you want me to do. I’ll do anything what’s your fantasy and I said Oh i WanNa get to know who you are as a human being and I said something like that have this this experience with you in the president and he was like Oh okay and like a completely changed his experience he was right into it. You know loved it and it was a a really beautiful experience for both of us because I kind of sad like no. We’re not doing performance fantasy. We’re doing you and me present as human beings right here and it’s way more fun but you have to be of course willing to to go there because it can be kind of confronting but I find like people are into it and it sounds to me like these steps of course they’re not linear of course there are different permutations for every single person. They’re valuable for everyone of you’re using them post-assault deal with trauma but these are valuable approaches whether it’s survival feeling rage forgiveness a range of emotions pleasure sure eating sex and love relevant to every single person and I appreciate your perspective that you wouldn’t go back to the way things were yeah absolutely yeah. I mean you know the the book is of course <hes> oriented around on sexual assault which is a really really really common experience but even if you haven’t been sexually assaulted trauma in general I mean it’s pretty rare to have someone who has an experienced some level of trauma and again we live within these systems that are patriarchal misogynistic capitalist capitalist white supremacist. We’re living in these systems that work to keep us disempowered and not present in our bodies and so doing this work whether you’ve been assaulted or not is going to be valuable because it kind of opens your eyes to like the wisdom in your body the incredible uh-huh pleasure that you can experience in your body and the very deep ways that you can connect with other human beings if you’re willing to see them as another human being just like you and really opening up to that rather than seeing. This person is like Oh you play this role in my life. This is how this is supposed to go down. Here’s here’s how we perform this act and it’s really beautiful to be able to do that. I think most thank you thank you so much for sharing your story in your wisdom and your insights and your journey because I think so many people will learn from your journey. People can find out more are at J._C._p.. Dot C._A.. And want eight steps to recovering desire passion and pleasure after sexual assault is available on Amazon. Yeah absolutely thank you so much. Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. This is the sex with Dr. Just podcast will be back next.
