This week’s column is From Sexual Trauma to Sexual Healing, and it’s one of my proudest moments in the world of large-scale sex education and being an interviewer. It’s all about Staci Haines being truly incredible, and having a chance to ask her my burning questions about sexual abuse and trauma, things I’ve always wanted full answers to. This is part of fighting the good fight for human sexuality and sex-positivity, and a huge piece of it is her new Cleis book Healing Sex. (And, zomgponies!!!! SF Gate now links to my website!) Read on:
With holiday cheer festooning all my favorite lube stores in the Castro with slippery mistletoe, I’m reminded that it’s the time of year many people see family. While some of us stay put with sweethearts and eggnog-flavored condoms, or look forward to seeing siblings, others are not so lucky — nowhere is this more evident than the glimpse into America’s rape and abuse statistics I’ve gotten in my time as a sex educator. When I recently got my hands on a copy of local author Staci Haines’ new book, “Healing Sex: A Mind-Body Approach to Healing Sexual Trauma,” it’s evident the statistics say everything: millions of individuals have been abused by family members.
Traditionally, when it comes to sex-positive education and the work to end sexual abuse, I’ve seen an unfortunate split in ideology — as with abuse itself, which tends to split individuals and families from the inside. All too often, I’ve observed the sex-positive movement not wanting to engage with the misuse of sex and violence or coercion, and instead concentrating on pleasure, desire, education and sexual empowerment. This makes perfect sense when larger cultural influences such as mainstream media and the U.S. Department of Justice continually seek to erroneously connect things like rape and porn viewership, or sexual trauma and the choice to become a sex worker. On the other hand, the sexual assault survival movement has historically either ignored sexual pleasure or even adult sexuality, or focused exclusively on the abuses. It’s tough to acknowledge both these two things — sexual trauma and a joyful sex life — without triggering accusations or hysteria, even knowing that sex-positivity and healing from assault are not mutually exclusive.
To this end, Staci Haines’ new book, as with her extensive work at Bay Area survivor resource Generation Five (which seeks to end the cycles of abuse within five generations with a sex-positive, somatic — mind/body — methodology), is a revolution. Haines provides a refreshing all-gender, all-orientations approach to healing from sexual trauma, explaining concretely the steps while encompassing a wide variety of traumas, and stresses the importance of including pleasurable sex and intimacy as an essential part of the healing process. I read the book and cannot recommend it highly enough for everyone who has survived, or has known a survivor, which is pretty much all of us.
(…) VB: What happens when someone who has survived sexual abuse or trauma experiences sex? What happens when someone is triggered?
SH: There are many ways that people who have experienced sexual trauma negotiate sex, intimacy and trust: we are trying to negotiate safety and connection. What is very difficult about sexual trauma is that it tends to put these two needs at odds with one another, as in, “I can be connected and not safe, or safe and disconnected.” Initially, some survivors have an aversion to sex altogether, avoiding it to avoid the pain there. While others can look for nonsexual needs to be met through sex, having sex with more people than they actually want to, or in ways they don’t want.
Anything can be a trigger for survivors, depending on their sexual trauma (…)
Link.
