Sexual Trauma: Healing the Sacred Wound
(Page 2)
Violation
All sexual trauma is about violation. It is about violation in the form of:
- Intrusion into our sacred space
- Rupture of personal, emotional, sexual, and energetic boundaries
- A shock to our delicate internal organs
- Feeling soiled, dirty, damaged
- Feeling deep unexplainable shame and guilt
- Not being able to form deep sustaining relationships
- At the core it is about being frozen, shut down, and/or being overwhelmed by emotions such as rage, hate, and terror
- Also at its core is not feeling connected with ones environment, to the human race and to one's self-it is about devastation
At one time in our lives we felt so overwhelmed that we split off from our bodies. We may have noticed that we have had diffing to experience your bodily sensations and emotional feelings in very tolerable doses...in other words, a little bit at a time.
For now, let us continue by shedding some light on one of the areas that has become most controversial is the subject of recovered traumatic memories. The science of traumatic memory is only in its infancy and the crucial concept of "body memory" is embryonic. Yet one of the fiercest and most highly politicized debates surrounds the subject of traumatic memory or, as some falsely call it, "false memory."
We shall see that memories are often neither true nor false but rather something more fluid and shifting. What is most important in healing trauma is not remembering per-se but rather "re-membering." The Egyptian goddess Isis did just this with the disembodied parts of her husband Osiris. After slaughtering and dismembering him, his enemies cut up his body into pieces and buried these parts around the countryside. Isis then searched for and dug them up from the cavernous places where his enemies had buried them. She then joined those dismembered pieces them together into a coherent organism; she "re-membered" him.
How does this apply to us? Well, healing ourselves involves gently coaxing our disembodied and disconnected parts back together and then to begin to feel and tolerate the sensations that once overwhelmed us so that we too can bring them together and be re-membered. When we learn to tune into the promptings of our bodies own inner language, we begin to "re-member" our wholeness. This is the Holy Grail of transforming traumatic experiences. In learning that we can move from fixity and fragmentation to flow and coherence, we may come to find that it is possible to let go of difficult feelings and images that long have haunted us.
When our bodies remain are in trauma we will have the compulsion to search for the "cause" of our distress, i.e., to search for some literal "memory" that will explain to us why we feel the way we do. We frantically seek attribution and find it often where it does not belong. We grasp at fragments of experience trying to explain them to ourselves by remembering. We look for justice and revenge rather that at just what is. This compulsion is a remnant of our biological "orienting responses." It really has little to do with healing in the way of the goddess Isis.
Let us be informed by a young contemporary named Eve from the movie titled Eve's Bayou, a complex portrayal of the child's need for affection and the sometimes blurry line between incest and "incestousness." At the end of the film she concludes that:
Memory is the selection of images; some elusive; others printed indelibly on the brain. Each image is like a thread...each thread woven together to make a tapestry of intricate textures. And the tapestry tells a story. And the story is our past... Like others before me, I have the gift of sight. But the truth changes color depending on the light. And tomorrow can be clearer than yesterday.
- From the film, Eves' Bayou; screen play by Kasi Lemmons
Difficult Sensations
Because we have experienced intolerable sensations and feelings in the past, our tendency is to actively avoid them. Mentally, we split off or "dissociate" these feelings; physically, our bodies tighten and brace against them. We seem to live under the assumption that if we feel those sensations and feelings they will overwhelm us forever. Then in an attempt to manage them we come to rely on medications, food, drugs and alcohol to make these sensations and feelings go away. We have lost confidence that we can learn to tolerate them without outside help. The fear of being consumed by these "terrible" feelings leads us to believe that only not feeling them will make them go away.
This assumption simply is not true. Fighting against and/or hiding from unpleasant or painful sensations and feelings, will generally makes things worse. The more they are avoided, the more energy is spent on keeping them at bay; energy that should have been used for feeling alive and open to new experiences. What is not felt remains unchanged or gains in inward pressure, which forces people to step up their methods of avoidance and defense. This is the sort of vicious cycles that trauma creates. Abandoned feelings call out for attention.
What many people are not aware of is that when we focus, in a particular way on our uncomfortable sensations and feelings, for only a relatively short period of time, they shift and change. By learning to use our "felt sense," the capacity to increase body awareness, these feelings inevitably evolve into new ones; usually ones that enhance feelings of the "deep self." This basically is how we move from frozen fear to awakening and flow.
Causes
Whatever the cause, whether from molestation, rape, roughly administered gynecological examinations, abortions, or a cracked pelvis from an automobile accident, all such incidents can rob us of the vital capacity for pleasure and sexual gratification. They can all be equal opportunity destroyers!
The idea is not to dwell on the source of our "dysfunction," wherever it may have come from, but rather to do what we need to do to heal these wounds and reawaken our capacity for self-soothing, self-pleasure, and relaxation.
This does not mean that there are no significant differences among the sources of trauma. For example, being raped by a stranger certainly has different ramifications than incest, where the perpetrator was a person who was supposed to support, protect, and love us. When our supposed source of sanctuary was, instead, a source of danger, these injuries are betrayals of a sacred trust that undermine our basic sense of goodness and security. For this reason it often takes more time and work to heal such breaches of body, psyche, and spirit. Generally, guidance is needed from a well-trained and authentic therapist. But the more we invest in healing, the greater is the potential for transformation. In any case, what has happened to us is in the past. We cannot change that. Our only choice, now, is how we choose to deal with it now. This is pretty abstract, so let's see what this might mean in more practical terms.
When something happens to us, whether good or bad, we are molded by those experiences. Our bodies are impacted in a way that makes us experience the world as it was then-when we were first impacted. Genuine warmth and acceptance may be all around us, but because we learned to tighten our guts in the past, we experience only fear, alienation, separation, and threat. Because we perceive this to be real, we in one way or another will prove ourselves to be right to appease the ever-hungry ego.
This is the dilemma of trauma: We inadvertently create our external worlds to match what we feel internally. This is not the New Age idea that says that we create our universe with our beliefs and if we change our beliefs our outer world will automatically change. While not down-playing the importance of shifting belief systems, an indispensable step is missing. To change only our beliefs will be superficial at best and delusional and dangerous at worst. It is only by allowing our internal felt landscapes to change that authentic new beliefs can emerge. It is really not the other way around.
It can be a useful starting point to first identify the beliefs we have and then to notice what kinds of sensations and feelings are associated with them. As we continue to watch, we begin to see what keeps those feelings and sensations stuck (fixated) so that they cannot flow thus allowing new meanings to emerge and begin to replace those old limiting trauma/societal.
How do we begin to identify limiting beliefs? This can be difficult because we have a tendency to identify with the beliefs themselves, ie, we mistake them for reality rather than as merely old beliefs.
There is no question that sexual abuse and sexual trauma leave deep wounds that affect not only sexuality, but can compromise our basic identity and sense of self. And of the many faces of trauma, perhaps none is more debilitating than the feeling of shame and dirtiness. These feelings can cause us to “withdraw,” to hide, or to act out in ways such as promiscuity making us feel worse or even putting us in harm’s way.
The basic tool we have in healing trauma—of whatever kind—is to find a way to “feel through” these internal states so we can free the vast potential of energy that is locked in trauma and can assimilate these energies and feelings into our being and wholeness.
Dr. Peter Levine is the author of the best selling book “Waking the Tiger - Healing Trauma,” available in ten languages as well as three audio learning series for Sounds True: “Healing Trauma, Restoring the wisdom of the Body,” “It Won’t Hurt Forever, Guiding your Child through Trauma,” and “Healing Sexual Trauma-ransforming the Sacred Wound.”
To learn more about “Somatic Experiencing®'' (SE), the short-term naturalistic approach to the resolution and healing of trauma developed by Dr. Peter Levine, or to find a practitioner in your area who is trained in this technique, visit Dr. Levine’s web site: http://sn.im/orgasm-info-extatica
o
