Sober Connected Sex After Incest

A listener sent in a question about navigating her first sexual relationship after becoming sober as well as healing from child sexual abuse. Remember, the more detail you share with me the more specific I can be in my response. Details are always changed to protect your identity.

Dear LaidOpen,

I am five years sober from using drugs, food, and drinking and have found my calling as a drug treatment counselor. I feel better than I have in a decade. I meditate, I’m eating healthy and I exercise. I also recently fell in love. 

The thing is, I hadn’t had sex with anyone in eight years before I met him. My focus has been on my relationship with myself and my spirit. But this guy, he’s different. Our connection feels like it could last. While I am totally scared and feel challenged, I am willing to do what it takes for it to work. I can feel myself on the verge of freaking out sometimes and I don’t want to. He is also in recovery from drugs, as well as sex addiction. We share these specific parts of our history that have me feel understood in a way I never have before. We were both raised as fundamentalist Christians and were incested. 

My brothers started molesting me when I was 2, so I didn’t have language for what was happening or how it felt. My boyfriend’s energy is so strong and gets really intense at times. I can feel how much he wants me, and I don’t know how to respond. 

I am sure I want to be with him. I also don’t know how to care for myself and give him what he wants. I’m afraid I’m going to fuck it all up by getting overwhelmed. Maybe it’s good that we live in different cities? He’s in New York and I’m in Boston. He wants us to live together and I don’t know if I need space. I’m not sure if being sexual is overriding something and retraumatizing. I’m just not sure what to do or what to listen for. There are moments when I freeze up during sex and don’t know what I need so I just let him finish. 

I’m not used to sober sex. It’s so different. I’m used to being tough, and now I feel so vulnerable and yet I also don’t know what I’m feeling. There is so much. I feel good and clear and stable right now, and I don’t want to lose that, but I don’t want to lose him either. 

Looking for guidance, 

Fierce and Sober

Dear Fierce and Sober,

You have done an incredible job of courageously facing yourself, building resilience, and listening. I know you are in new territory with this love and sober sex thing. I also know you listen for a living. You have skills here that you can trust. Your fear of rocking the otherwise stable boat, this new self-care-driven life, is warranted. No one can knock Humpty Dumpty off that wall like a new lover. It is way easier to feel like you have it all together when you are single. You are tested when in a relationship. Living in different cities may be a blessing in that it is a built-in boundary that gives you time and space to keep feeling the distinction between your body and his body, your needs/wants and his.

In addition to internal resources, I’m curious about what your external resources are. You didn’t specifically mention them. Do you have a therapist, go to meetings, have your own group you attend or do you have close friends? While I hope this podcast is helpful, it is not enough. Healing your own relationship to trust means receiving reliable, consistent support from the outside. This is an important thing to practice, especially after the betrayal that comes with child sexual abuse.

Definitely find somatic support in developing embodied boundaries and working through that freeze response. If you dissociate and let your partner finish when it isn’t something you want to engage in, it can register in your body as a reenactment of the assault from childhood. Even if he loves you and his intentions are good, often sexual abuse survivors freeze, dissociate, and go nonverbal (unable to assert boundaries), because that’s what their bodies did to protect them as children. And your body may not be able to separate what happened in childhood from feeling forced to have sex in the present. This can develop into hurt, resentment, and disconnection rather than a deeper connection to him.

I know for me, growing up in a violent and sexually abusive household I had the mantra “You don’t affect me, you don’t affect me”. In the past, I was the one on the massage table with the big Fujian massage therapist saying to me, “I’ve never used this much pressure on anyone, not even huge men.” “Bring it on motherfucker, “ was my attitude and it didn’t matter if deeper than deep tissue didn’t help my body not be bound up in knots. I took pride in how much I could take. This is called being counterphobic. Moving towards what scares you and overriding your own boundaries becomes a coping strategy to give a sense of control over out-of-control situations as a kid.  I eventually learned that gentle contact, basically an energetic presence, is what helps my body feel safe enough to unwind. Being gentle was what I needed to learn how to do with myself. This was and still is a huge part of reparenting myself.

People don’t realize that sexual abuse and developmental trauma of all kinds disconnect you from your body to the point that you don’t know when you need to pee, when you are actually hungry versus emotionally eating or starving yourself, or if you are tired. So relearning to listen and track how your body communicates on a subtle level is a process of patience and prioritizing a slow, shy, distrustful, scared part. This can be frustrating when present day adults parts are horny and eager to rip off their shirts and jump bare-hearted into a new relationship.

The good news is I don’t hear that impatience with you. I actually see you more as a new mom to be nervous she might drop the baby or not know how to decipher the range of cries and respond to the need in front of her in the perfect way. The fact that you are willing to turn back to yourself and attend to this baby being in the way that caring adults should have the first time around is excellent news. It speaks to your maturity and capacity to love yourself and another deeply.

I’m so sorry dear one, that this hurt happened to you with your brothers. So often when abuse happens at the hands of siblings there is added confusion and self-blame because younger kids go along with things because they want to be liked. They want to be included and they don’t understand enough to give consent. Preverbal trauma adds to the confusion because there are sensations and big emotions without language or concrete visual memory in a clear narrative. It can be hard to ask these very young parts what they need. The parts that are the least safe are often the gatekeepers and the ones with their foot on the break. We need to listen and get them on board before the rest of you can wholeheartedly move forward without it being a jerky ride.  

I’m grateful that this trauma did not destroy your connection to Spirit or that you mended it. Studies show that a relationship to Spirit can be an important source of resilience for people in healing from trauma. I actually believe trauma is a gateway to spiritual awakening and that there is support there for us, even while incidents are occurring that we can’t see. Everyone has access, but we are trained out of it, and when pressed up against the wall with no resources in our homes, in 3-D reality, we go somewhere else, into the cosmos, blackness, other space, and time. When you have that access and practice, you also develop a deeper knowing and intuition you can access whenever you need it. It is documented that soldiers in trenches, as well as rape victims when faced with a fear of death, call out for God and their mothers, call out for help beyond what is physically present.

Sometimes this access to the unseen shows up for people as “gifts” or powers, they know things they shouldn’t. Some would call it a strong intuition. I believe you can rely on this. It won’t always be accurate, but you can trust that if you are in a practice of asking yourself what you need and listening, information will come to you in the form of images or a quiet voice. You can trust your inner knowing. 

If I could wrap up a box full of self-trust, presence, support, and gentleness and gift it to you I would. Keep listening and respecting your own pace.

In support,  

LaidOPEN