Authors: Emily Nagoski
Art, used in the same way, can help. When mental health professionals suggest journaling or other expressive self-care, they don’t mean that the construction of sentences or the task of drawing is inherently therapeutic; rather, they’re encouraging you to find positive contexts to discharge your stress, through the creative process.
I’m inclined to add grooming and other body self-care to the list. Though I’m not familiar with any specific research on it, I’ve talked with lots of women for whom showering and the rituals, part social, part meditative, of painting their nails or doing their hair or putting on makeup—generally “getting ready” to go out (or stay in)—fully transition them from a stressed-out state of mind to a warm, social state of mind. These
anecdotes aren’t data, but I’m inclined to call them evidence and say, Yeah, spend time treating yourself with affection.
I have a pet theory that these rituals and behaviors are related to “self-kindness,” which I’ll be talking about in chapter 5, but to my knowledge no one has ever specifically measured it.
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Anyway, our fellow apes eat insects out of each other’s fur; maybe bath bombs and body glitter are the modern human equivalent.
Everybody has something that works—and everyone’s strategy is different. Whatever strategy you use, take deliberate steps to complete the cycle. Allow yourself to coast to the end without hitting the brake. Emotions are like tunnels: You have to walk all the way through the darkness to get to the light at the end. I say this so often my students sometimes roll their eyes: “Not the tunnel again.” Yes, the tunnel again. Because it’s true.
There’s a worksheet at the end of this chapter to help you think through effective strategies for reducing your stress.
While you’re figuring out what strategies help, pay attention to your patterns of self-inhibition, and identify places and people who create space for you to have Feels. Some of those patterns of self-inhibition are important and unchangeable—for example, carefully consider any plan that involves crying at work. But some of them will be self-defeating, and everyone needs at least one place in their life where they can just Have All The Feels without worrying about being judged or freaking people out. Find that place and those people.
A final caution: Too often, we mistake dealing with the stressors for dealing with the stress. A couple years ago the leaders of the campus Peer Sex Educators sat in my office, reporting how well their Sextravaganza events had gone. They had worked for months and their efforts were rewarded with a spectacular success, but they looked exhausted and stunned and said, “Sextravaganza is over! Why do we still feel exactly as stressed out as we did the day it started?!”
“Because you’ve dealt with the stressor,” I said, “but not the stress. Your bodies still think you’re being chased by the lion.”
Solution: Do things that communicate to your body, “You have escaped and survived!”
• Physical activity
• Sharing affection
• Primal scream or a good cry
• Progressive muscle relaxation or other sensorimotor meditation
• Body self-care, like grooming, massage, or doing your nails
The dance major chose physical activity, and the study of women and gender major organized a big group primal scream.
when sex becomes the lion
Beyond the day-to-day stressors of life are the deep wounds that life inflicts and sometimes does not provide opportunities to heal. Given the prevalence of trauma of all kinds, especially sexual trauma—a conservative estimate is that one in five women is sexually assaulted in her lifetime, and it could be more like one in three
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—it’s impossible to talk about women’s sexual health without spending some time discussing trauma. From child sexual abuse to sexual assault to all forms of interpersonal violence, women are disproportionately and systematically targeted, and thus they disproportionately bring to their sexual functioning the emotional, physical, and cognitive features of a trauma survivor. In other words, if women have more “issues” than men around sex, there’s good reason.
(If you’re a survivor and still working through your experience, you may prefer to skip ahead to the next section.)
Trauma results when a person has control over her body taken from her, she freezes, and then she can’t unlock. Whether the cause is a car accident or sexual violence, the survival mechanism kicks in: freeze, the petrified shutdown characterized by numbness and sometimes tonic immobility (paralysis) or a sense of disembodiment. Some people describe
it as “going into shock.” This is the life-threat stress response, activated when your brain decides you can’t escape a stressor, nor can you fight it. It’s reserved for the most dangerous and violent contexts.
Rape has been described by victim advocate and former police officer Tom Tremblay as “the most violent crime a person can survive.”
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Those who have not been sexually assaulted can perhaps most clearly understand the experience of a survivor by thinking of them as having survived an attempted murder that used sex as the weapon.
Sexual violence often doesn’t look like what we think of as “violence”—only rarely is there a gun or knife; often there isn’t even “aggression” as we typically think of it. There is coercion and the removal of the targeted person’s choice about what will happen next. Survivors don’t “fight” because the threat is too immediate and inescapable; their bodies choose “freeze” because it’s the stress response that maximizes the chances of staying alive . . . or of dying without pain.
Trauma isn’t always caused by one specific incident. It can also emerge in response to persistent distress or ongoing abuse, like a relationship where sex is unwanted, though it may be technically “consensual” because the targeted person says yes in order to avoid being hurt or feels trapped in the relationship or is otherwise coerced. In that context, a survivor’s body gradually learns that it can’t escape and it can’t fight; freeze becomes the default stress response because of the learned pattern of shutdown as the best way to guarantee survival.
Each person’s experience of survival is unique, but it often includes a kind of disengaged unreality. And afterward, that illusion of unreality gradually degrades, disintegrating under the weight of physical existence and burdened memory. The tentative recognition that this thing has actually happened incrementally unlocks the panic and rage that couldn’t find their way to the surface before, buried as they were under the overmastering mandate to survive.
But survival is not recovery; survival happens automatically, sometimes even against the survivor’s will. Recovery requires an environment of relative security and the ability to separate the physiology of freeze
from the experience of fear, so that the panic and the rage can discharge, completing their cycles at last.
Neither Camilla nor Henry had a history of trauma themselves, but Henry—the nice guy, the gentleman—had a previous girlfriend who was sexually assaulted while they were dating.
We don’t talk about trauma survivorship enough, and we talk even less about cosurvivorship, the emotional work of supporting a survivor. In the Western world, relatively few men—the research indicates only about 5 percent—perpetrate the overwhelming majority of assaults,
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but a
lot
of men have partners who have survived an assault. And yet we do almost nothing to teach men how to support survivors as intimate partners, or how to take care of themselves as cosurvivors.
Henry was barely aware of how his previous partner’s trauma affected his approach to sex until he and Camilla developed their plan of him “chasing” her. It felt awkward for him because he loved her enthusiastic desire more than anything else, but—remember the ticking pilot light—Camilla needed a lot of warming up before she could feel that enthusiastic desire.
How could he know she was into it? Is it really desire and consent if she “wants to want” sex, rather than plain old
wanting
sex?
Camilla helped him out by talking about the brakes and accelerator:
“I don’t have a sensitive brake, I have a stubborn gas pedal. I’m a fully loaded moving van, accelerating from a dead stop at the bottom of a hill. But moving forward slowly isn’t the same as wanting to stop, right? All I need is something really awesome waiting for me at the top of the hill. And you already know I’ll tell you when something feels good. Surely you trust me to tell you if something hits the brakes.”
“Sure,” he said.
“Well, then.”
And there was one of those silences—you know, where someone’s brain is turning over an idea like a puzzle piece, figuring out where it fits in the overall picture.
“Moving forward slowly isn’t the same as wanting to stop,” he repeated. “You have a slow hot-water heater, a ticking pilot light.”
“That’s right.”
“And you’ll tell me if you want to stop.”
“Darn skippy.”
Henry the gentleman, Henry the geek, nodded slowly. “I think I got it.”
(He gets it slightly wrong in chapter 6, but I promise there’s a happy ending.)
sex and the survivor
Sexual trauma survivorship impacts information processing for both the accelerator and the brake. Sensations, contexts, and ideas that used to be interpreted as sexually relevant may instead now be interpreted by your brain as threats, so that sexy contexts actually hit the brakes. And the chronically high levels of stress activity in a recovering survivor’s brain can block out sexual stimuli, categorizing them as low priority.
Sometimes, too, survivors find themselves locked in a pattern of sexual behavior. Their brains become compulsive about undoing the trauma, redoing it differently, or simply understanding it. Like biting on a cold sore or squeezing a pimple, the brain can’t leave the trauma alone, even though you know you’d heal faster if you could. The result is that the survivor has multiple partners, often following a habitual pattern, without feeling perfectly in control of the decision to have those partners.
If you’re a trauma survivor, chances are you’ve either done a bunch of emotional work to move through the trauma, or else you’ve got some work ahead of you. If your trauma is recent or feels unresolved (for example, if reading the previous section made your heart pound), you’ll probably benefit from a more intensive level of support than this book can offer. Therapy would probably be
great.
And there are books specifically about sex as a survivor, including
Healing Sex: A Mind-Body Approach to Healing Sexual Trauma
by Staci Haines and
The Sexual Healing Journey: A Guide for Survivors of Sexual Abuse
by Wendy Maltz.
If the trauma is not recent and is more or less resolved, it’s normal for you to experience residual effects on your sexual functioning, even when you are largely recovered. Sexual trauma tends to wrap tendrils around so many parts of your emotional experience that you find it unexpectedly, like a persistent invasive weed that has to be pulled and pulled again.
There are three broad approaches to coping with these residual bits of trauma. We might call them “top-down,” or a cognitive, thought-based approach; “bottom-up,” or a somatic, body-based approach; and “sideways,” a mindfulness-based approach.
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Top-Down: Processing the Trauma.
There are several different forms of cognitive-based therapy—cognitive behavioral therapy, cognitive processing therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy, etc. They all involve some degree of recognizing the meaning that you’ve created around the trauma and then challenging belief patterns within that meaning, or recognizing behavioral habits that you’ve trained yourself into since the trauma and challenging those patterns.
They require first that you become aware of the patterns, whether of thought or behavior, and then that you develop skills to replace those patterns with new ones. Allow yourself to feel those old feelings, but now, instead of engaging in the habitual self-defensive patterns, begin practicing new patterns. In the process of changing the patterns, the residual trauma will emerge. Know that you can feel all your Feels and still be safe. Know that you did everything you could in that moment to protect yourself; grant yourself forgiveness for the things you may still blame yourself for, recognizing that the trauma is the fault of the perpetrator alone. And imagine yourself as you are now, safe and whole, sitting quietly—or imagine yourself embracing yourself as you were then, offering yourself the comfort and security you needed then, with reassurance that you survived, that your life got better. This is your new pattern: Allow the feelings to move through you.
Bottom-Up: Processing Your Body.
If the idea of analyzing your
patterns of thought and behavior is unappealing to you, you may prefer a body-based therapy, such as sensorimotor therapy
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or Somatic Experiencing (SE).
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These approaches can stand alone as a powerful way to heal your relationship with your body and your sexuality post trauma, and they can also complement other approaches.
When I spoke with SE practitioner Kristen Chamberlin, she pointed out that body-based therapies move slowly into mainstream practice because we don’t have a cultural framework for the body’s natural processing of physiological stress (completing the cycle). As a culture, we don’t trust our bodies, so we override them, which makes us vulnerable to maladaptive coping strategies, as Olivia experienced.