According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 1 in 3 women and 1 in 4 men experience sexual violence involving physical contact. Moreover, 1 in 4 women and 1 in 26 men have experienced completed or attempted rape, and 1 in 3 women and 1 in 9 men have experienced sexual harassment in public. There are significantly more staggering statistics on the prevalence and types of sexual violence people experience. In addition to the commonality of sexual violence, many people, especially women, experience sexual violence before the age of 18. The prevalence of sexual violence highlights a significant root of trauma that harms your sense of sexuality and intimacy. Thus, understanding the relationship between sexual violence and trauma is invaluable to reclaiming sexuality and intimacy in your life.
At The Guest House, we know self-defeating or self-destructive choices are often born from traumatic life events. When you are overwhelmed by trauma, it becomes easier to gravitate toward unhealthy thinking and coping strategies. In the short term, self-defeating behaviors can convince you that you are coping effectively. However, self-defeating behaviors only temporarily suppress and or ignore the harm trauma has caused you physically and psychologically. Moreover, leaning on maladaptive coping mechanisms can lead to more self-destructive patterns. Thus, we believe in providing holistic support to help you overcome self-defeating patterns. Overcoming patterns rooted in trauma can help you build a path toward reclaiming sexuality and intimacy.
Yet, you may question how sexuality and intimacy relate to your experiences with trauma. How can addressing trauma support reclaiming sexuality and intimacy? Moreover, the distress of your trauma can make it understandably difficult to want to explore or even recognize the impact trauma has had on you. Therefore, expanding your awareness and understanding of sexuality and intimacy can give you insight into yourself and how reclaiming sexuality and intimacy can support healing.
What Is Sexuality and Intimacy?
You may be familiar with the words sexuality and intimacy but unaware of their interconnected relationship. For example, many people confuse physical intimacy with sex or perceive them to be the same. In reality, sex is a physical act that can be connected to intimacy, while physical intimacy does not require sex. Physical intimacy can encompass a sense of closeness that can be sensual and or emotional. Thus, exploring sexuality and intimacy in greater depth can help you understand their role on your journey to reclaiming sexuality and intimacy in your life.
As noted by the National Institute on Aging (NIA), sexuality is the way you experience and express yourself sexually. Moreover, sexuality can include, feelings, desires, actions, and identity, along with different types of physical touch or stimulation. Whereas, intimacy is a feeling of closeness and connectedness in your relationships that can occur with or without a physical element. Furthermore, your sexuality is often affected by your emotional and physical state. Thus, how you feel physically can influence what you can do, and how you feel emotionally can influence what you want to do.
The influence of your physical and emotional feelings speaks to the importance of your well-being in sexuality and intimacy. Whether you experience sexual arousal, sexual desire, and or desire romantic partnerships, reclaiming sexuality and intimacy is valuable. Reclaiming sexuality and intimacy is valuable for your well-being as an individual and in your romantic relationships. According to the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, along with closeness and connectedness, intimacy also includes bonding.
Through intimacy like emotional intimacy, you can enhance the quality of your relationships and buffer daily stress to support satisfying romantic relationships. Therefore, challenges with sexuality and intimacy can impede your relationships, and your satisfaction in romantic relationships, and prevent you from developing meaningful relationships. Unaddressed trauma can get in the way of reclaiming sexuality and intimacy. By exploring in more depth the impact of trauma on your sexuality and intimacy, you can take steps that support reclaiming sexuality and intimacy.
Impact of Trauma on Reclaiming Sexuality and Intimacy
When people think of trauma related to sexuality and intimacy challenges, they often think of sexual trauma. Sexual trauma is pervasive and has particularly deep ties to the challenges of reclaiming sexuality and intimacy. However, difficulties with sexuality and intimacy can stem from many forms of trauma like emotional abuse, neglect, and the loss of a loved one. Different forms of trauma can have a profound impact on you and your relationships. Whether your trauma is rooted in sexual violence or another form of trauma, it can cause a significant amount of distress and impairment in your life and relationships. Listed below are some of the ways sexual violence and other forms of trauma have impeded reclaiming sexuality and intimacy:
Sexual Assault Can Contribute to Sexual Challenges
- Arousal dysfunction
- Sexual dysfunction
- Desire dysfunction
- Decreased sexual satisfaction
- Fear of sex
- Painful sex
- Difficulty achieving orgasm
- Reproductive health-related issues
- Decreased interest in sex and or celibacy
- Avoidance due to triggers
- Increased strain on intimate relationships
- More likely to engage in risky sexual behaviors
- Greater number of sexual partners
- Engagement in sex work
- Sex addiction
- Increased risk for substance misuse or abuse
- Higher risk of mental health challenges
- Depression
- Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
- Difficulties with emotional regulation
- Guilt
- Shame
- Self-directed anger
- Negative sexual self-concept
- Trauma stigma
- Sexual violence-related stigma
Trauma in Childhood and Adulthood Can Contribute to Fear of Intimacy
- Anxiety when closer relationships start to form
- Difficulty building and or maintaining short-term and long-term relationships
- Overwhelming desire to run away from your relationships
- Difficulty or inability to express your needs
- Engaging in relationship sabotage
- Jumping from one relationship to another
- Seeking relationships without commitment
Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) Contribute to Poor Sexual Health and Risky Sexual Behaviors
- ACEs can include emotional abuse, emotional neglect, physical abuse and or neglect, and sexual abuse
- Early initiation of sex
- Greater risk of unprotected sex
- More likely to experience sexually transmitted infections (STIs)
- Greater risk for lifetime STIs like HIV
- Increased risk for accidental teenage pregnancy
- More likely to become a teen parent
- Greater number of sexual partners
- May experience early puberty
- Sexual dysfunction
- Emotional dysregulation
- Low self-esteem and self-respect
- Increased sensitivity to criticism
- Difficulty standing up for yourself in relationships
- Emotional avoidance
- Difficulty forming trust in relationships both in childhood and adulthood
- Less interest in serious relationships
- Difficulty establishing close relationships
- Engage in more short-term relationships
- Experience higher rates of divorce
- Less likely to get married
- More frequent experiences will low-quality relationships
- Greater relationship dissatisfaction and conflict
- More likely to experience intimate partner violence (IPV)
The sexuality and intimacy challenges tied to different types of trauma speak to the need to address trauma. When trauma is left unaddressed, it can expand beyond difficulties with sexuality and intimacy to form sex-related addictions and disorders.
Understanding Sexual Addiction and Avoidance
The term sexual addiction or sex addiction often carries a great deal of stigma with it. People often perceive sex addiction as synonymous with individuals, typically men who are out of control, players, untrustworthy, and even dangerous. The stigma attached to sex addiction brings up feelings of guilt and shame for those experiencing the addiction. However, as with many stigmatized addictions and mental health disorders, sex addiction is misunderstood. Sex addiction is a real condition that causes a great deal of distress and can further complicate challenges with trauma and reclaiming sexuality and intimacy.
Increasing your awareness and understanding of sex addiction can help address your challenges to support reclaiming sexuality and intimacy in your life. According to the Journal of Behavioral Addictions, sex addiction is a repetitive and intense obsession with sexual fantasies, urges, and behaviors that are distressing and or impede your functioning. In addition, sex addiction can be placed in two categories: Paraphilic and nonparaphilic. Paraphilic sex addiction can typically be characterized as sexual behaviors that:
- Are deemed socially unacceptable or deviant
- Cause suffering to yourself or your partner
- Are sexual acts that involve children and or non-consenting partners
On the other hand, a nonparaphilic sex addiction features more commonly accepted sexual desires, yet the sexual acts are typically compulsive. A nonparaphilic sex addiction often includes compulsive sexual behaviors such as:
- Engaging in sex acts with multiple partners
- Masturbation
- The frequent use of pornography
- Sex and sexual acts in a consensual relationship
- A fixation with a seemingly unattainable partner
Moreover, sex addiction usually gravitates towards obsessive and compulsive behaviors that are fixated on a specific stimulus. Further, the source of obsessions and compulsions in sex addiction stems from an obsession with some features of sexuality. Yet, how does unaddressed trauma develop into a sex addiction? As noted in Current Addiction Reports, child sexual abuse is linked to sexual avoidance and sexual compulsivity or sex addiction. Moreover, sexual avoidance and sex addiction often co-occur to create a type of sexual ambivalence.
The relationship between sexual abuse in childhood and sex addiction or sexual ambivalence can be rooted in a few different factors:
- Early sexual abuse may impair certain areas of the brain’s functioning
- Impair emotional regulation
- Impede insight
- Deficits in interpersonal connection
- Child sexual abuse can lead to problematic sexual scripts
- Sexual script theory argues that sexual behavior follows a social script that highlights expectations for social and sexual behaviors between different groups like men and women
- Problematic sexual scripts from early sexual abuse shape beliefs about sex
- Beliefs about sex are then used as a guide for decision-making regarding sexual behaviors like risky sexual behaviors
- Sexual script theory argues that sexual behavior follows a social script that highlights expectations for social and sexual behaviors between different groups like men and women
- Risky sexual behaviors may be used as a coping strategy to regulate distress and alleviate trauma-related symptoms
Looking at the potential causes for sex addiction and avoidance showcases the impact trauma can have on well-being. Some of the ways greater dysfunction with sex addiction and avoidance can disrupt sexuality and intimacy include:
- A reduction in productivity in multiple areas of your life:
- Spending large amounts of time searching for and or viewing pornography
- Can strain relationships or prevent healthy relationship development
- Financial issues:
- Spending excessive amounts of money on your sexual obsession
- Can also strain romantic relationships
- Can create unhealthy perceptions of intimacy in your relationships
- Forming unhealthy and unrealistic expectations for sexual gratification with sexual partners
- Unhealthy perceptions can harm your ability to form healthy relationships
- Fracture intimacy and connections with others
- Your compulsive sexual behaviors can incite deception, and secrecy, and violate trust with your partners
The combination of challenges with factors like emotional regulation, distress, and self-defeating and self-destructive patterns impede building and engaging in tools that support reclaiming sexuality and intimacy. Despite the severity and distress of trauma and sex addiction, reclaiming sexuality and intimacy is indeed possible. With trauma-specific approaches to care, you can work with your clinician to address and dismantle the harm of trauma in multiple domains of your life.
Reclaiming Sexuality and Intimacy With Trauma-Specific Approaches
According to “Trauma-Specific Treatment and Prevention of IPV” from the American Psychological Association (APA), trauma is life-altering and pervasive in its impact. The presence of trauma can be a profound hindrance in your relationships and treatment. Thus, feeling doubtful and or overwhelmed by your challenges with sexuality and intimacy is understandable. However, healing and reclaiming sexuality and intimacy is possible. As stated in the International Journal of Sexual Health, trauma-specific approaches can offer an organizational change process to support healing. The use of trauma-specific approaches:
- Recognizes that trauma impacts all individuals and communities involved
- Supports belief in your resilience and the resilience of the community
- Is proactive in the use of evidence-based practices
Thus, trauma-specific approaches support the actualization that trauma does not define who you are. You are provided a toolbox to utilize and build on skills that help you manage stressors and lean on resilience and protective factors to reduce negative outcomes. For example, Frontiers in Psychology presents using tools like the PLISSIT model to help discuss sexuality. Listed below are some of the ways holistic trauma-specific approaches can be used to support reclaiming sexuality and intimacy:
- Avoiding re-traumatization:
- Does not focus on talking about sexuality
- Support establishing safety first
- Recognizing patience in timing:
- Talking about sexuality and intimacy is done at a pace that is safe for you
- Using the PLISSIT model:
- Permission (P): Giving yourself permission to be sexual
- Limited information (LI): Your clinician shares knowledge related to the challenges you are experiencing
- Specific suggestions (SS): May include sexological counseling and basic sex therapy
- Intensive therapy (IT): A minority of clients may need specialized psychotherapeutic or medical skills
- Creating a safe space:
- Feeling safe in your environment
- Learning how to build clear agreements and boundaries
- Finding support in individual therapy:
- For couples and individuals
- Engaging in sensory work:
- Encourages you to become more aware of your senses
- Incorporates culture watching
- Raises awareness of your feelings about sexuality and other people’s sexuality
- Highlights the existence of sexuality and sensuality in you and the world
Each individual is different and may need different things to support reclaiming sexuality and intimacy. However, with professional support, you can feel empowered reclaiming sexuality and intimacy in a way that is healing for you.
Empowered Healing: Reclaiming Sexuality and Intimacy at The Guest House
At The Guest House, we recognize that challenges with sexuality and intimacy are serious disorders. Through recognition of the realness and seriousness of your challenges, we can support you in dismantling self-stigma to address your trauma. We know intimacy disorders often stem from sexual violence and early childhood trauma like sexual abuse and physical and emotional neglect. Thus, by addressing your traumatic experiences, you can start building adaptive tools to support healthier emotional, romantic, and sexual connections with yourself and others.
The value of reclaiming sexuality and intimacy is not only beneficial for sexual engagement in your life but also for closeness and connectedness in all your relationships. By taking steps to learn how to dismantle self-defeating patterns to overcome the trauma in your life, you can rediscover yourself, happiness, and meaningful connections with others. At The Guest House, we provide a safe and judgment-free space where you can explore sexuality and intimacy at your own pace. Here, we provide a holistic and trauma-specific approach to care with a wide range of therapeutic modalities to meet you where you are.
With our diverse array of therapies and modalities, you can work in collaboration with your clinicians to build a treatment plan that makes sense for you and your specific needs. While reaching out for support with trauma and or challenges with sexuality and intimacy can feel daunting, it is worth it. Seeking support is the first step toward building the foundational pieces necessary to support a meaningful and fulfilling life in recovery. You deserve a life where sexuality and intimacy enhance rather than hinder your experiences in the world. With support, you can explore, reflect, and deepen your understanding of yourself to truly heal in mind, body, and spirit.
Challenges with sexuality, intimacy, and sex addiction can leave you feeling overwhelmed by guilt and shame. However, your challenges are not rooted in you being a problem or broken. Rather sexuality and intimacy challenges are rooted in unaddressed trauma like sexual violence and ACEs like sexual abuse and emotional neglect. When trauma is left unaddressed, it becomes entangled in self-defeating thinking and behavior patterns that harm well-being. However, with support reclaiming sexuality and intimacy can help restore your connection to the self and others for long-term healing. At The Guest House, we are committed to offering a wide range of holistic and therapeutic modalities to heal you in mind, body, and spirit. Call us at (855) 483-7800 today.