Ep. 33 Separating Fear From Pleasure & The Impacts of Sexual Trauma - Solo Episode

In this episode of the 'Healed Now What' podcast, Lisa Dawn navigates the profound and challenging topic of developmental sexual trauma. She shares her personal journey of healing from childhood sexual abuse and its impact on her body and intimate relationships. 

The episode offers insights into how such trauma affects mental and physical health, and provides practical exercises to help listeners reconnect with their bodies, establish boundaries, and increase capacity for intimacy and pleasure. 

Lisa emphasizes the importance of self-awareness and safe connections in the healing process.

Work with Lisa

00:00 Introduction and Topic Overview

04:08 Personal Journey and Early Experiences

06:46 Understanding Developmental Sexual Trauma

08:32 Impact on Adult Relationships

11:05 Healing and Somatic Practices

27:21 Practical Exercises for Healing

34:15 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Transcript

Lisa: 0:01

Greetings, my friends, and welcome to another episode of Healed Now What? A podcast where we discuss life, relationships, connection, and trauma through the lens of somatic and attachment psychology, nervous system health, relationships, and self discovery. I'm Lisa Dawn, and I'm on a mission to teach people how to transform their deepest wounds into their greatest strengths by first transforming the relationship they have with themselves. So whether you've had trauma, years of failed partnerships, or just want a better relationship with your body, I've got you covered. I am a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, Educator, Relationship Mentor, and Trauma Survivor. With a lifetime of experience helping not only myself, but countless others transform their lives by learning how to become the fullest versions of themselves. Learn more at www. somatic. com We do this through self awareness, connecting with their bodies and changing the way they perceive themselves and others. I have coached innumerous people how to heal their wounds and create lasting change so they can live a more joyous, passionate and fulfilling life. Thank you so much for tuning in and enjoy the show. Hey guys, Lisa Dawn here. Welcome back to another week of the Healed Now What podcast. So this week's topic is a big one. There was certainly a time when I was neither prepared. Or had enough self understanding to have spoken about this, but it is such an important and activating and extremely relevant and life changing topic for those of us who have experienced the life altering impacts of sexual trauma, developmental sexual trauma. So today we're going to talk about those things and how they impact us in our bodies and in all of our intimate relationships throughout our lives. So my hopes for sharing this with you is that perhaps you'll feel less alone. Less shame and more empowerment, potentially even more pleasure and comfort when it comes to relationships and pleasure and sex. But before we get into all of that, I wanted to start with a quote. Being able to feel safe with other people is probably the single most important aspect of mental health. Safe connections are fundamental to meaningful and satisfying lives. That quote is from Bessel van der Kolk. So let's take a moment with that, even just knowing the topic today. Let's just do a check in and see what it is like for you to be here. For some of you, Maybe this topic is expansive and inspires curiosity and for others, perhaps it will be terrifying and confusing. So just take a moment and see what your body is doing right now. What does your body do when you think about this topic? Does it feel numb? Perhaps a bit dissociated? Constricted? Or does it feel warm? Tingly, expansive, maybe even perhaps curious. And just notice, do you need more support? And if you do, how can you feel more supported right now? Just see how the body wants to learn and explore this right now. What might you need in this moment? Do you have an impulse to stand and listen? Do you need a blanket, some water, some tea? Do you need to hit the pause and come back to this episode another time? All of this is well and good. I'm just learning to listen, listen to our bodies in a way that is helpful and tends to our ability to take in information. So in my teenage years, early twenties, and even the first part of my thirties, I struggled hard with many things, but relating to my body. relating to men, the disconnect I felt between intimacy and sex, and just overall letting people in to get to know the real me. And that in and of itself was, a whole process. She is someone that I had to rediscover. I had this conflicting relationship with men. On the one hand, I wanted to be loved by them, supported by them, connected with them. And on the other hand, I was terrified of them. I didn't know what to do with the feelings that I felt towards them. And there was also a part of me that wanted to dominate them. I had a really non existent relationship to physical boundaries. And so I want to start by saying, to give some context, this was as a result of sexual abuse by my babysitter's older son. And this went on for quite some time and happened when I was very young. I was about five. And so this experience that I had with relationships and authority figures and sexuality was rooted in secrecy, in shame, and in so many things that didn't feel like love, that didn't feel like support. Then Growing into my teens and early adulthood, there was this seductive nature of becoming a woman with some pretty major traumatic relational wounds. I was going out into the world cut off from my emotions and my ability to forge intimate relationships. I was no longer this helpless child, but a woman who could use charm. and manipulation to get her needs met. And I'm not saying I was doing these things consciously, but there was this pull towards sexual innuendo and thrill that was kind of always just bubbling underneath the surface. And so I just, there's a few things to understand about Childhood sexual abuse before we move forward with this topic. Developmental sexual trauma is when sexual experiences overwhelmed or threatened our body throughout our developmental years. Another thing that is important to understand that by nature children are not sexual. They can feel pleasure in their genitals just like the rest of us, but without sexual context because, well, it's just a place that feels good. This is important to realize because if a child was sexually traumatized, we as adults can assume they were sexual. But this is so far from the truth and this is confusing for children because it feels good and at the same time we know something feels weird and we end up feeling wrong, violated, shamed, we're developing, we're figuring life out through our relationships. So what this meant for me was that I had a nervous system that was wired for threat from an early age. I was held back in grade one because of some learning difficulties. I was full of cortisol and adrenaline, which made it really hard to take in and learn new information. So I, I really struggled with studying, with learning language. I was sick a lot of the time and had many chronic health issues. In my adult relationships, there were boundary issues in every direction. I actually didn't realize that I could tell someone no, when it came to physical touch. Now, that seems a strange thing not to know, but it just never even crossed my mind that I had the autonomy to say no. My body was just something I didn't know how to relate to or be with. Maybe some of you listeners can relate. So let's just do a little check in as this topic can be extremely triggering. Let's just take a moment to feel your feet on the ground. and perhaps look around your space. You can even hold your own hands and gently squeeze your fingers and just notice that you're here now. In this moment, you are here with me and for this next 20 to 30 minutes, you are in my care. Just notice how that feels for you. Perhaps you become more aware of your surroundings. and even your breath. Now, a huge factor in sexual abuse and trauma is that there is typically some kind of immobilization happening. So in other words, your body had an urge to flee or fight and couldn't. So now in this moment, just check in and see if your body wants to move in any kind of way. Perhaps that looks like a stretch with your arms just going overhead. Maybe that is pushing your legs and your feet into the floor. Maybe that looks like standing up and just shaking out. Just reminding ourselves that we're not frozen. We can move. We're not restrained. Just take a moment. Also, the invitation is to take care of yourself. Now that you've had a moment to learn about today's topic, to hear a bit of my story and to move just a bit, maybe do a little check in to see if you have the capacity to listen to this right now. And knowing that you can change your mind at any time if you start to become tired or spacey or begin to feel a bit overwhelmed. You can see if your body is asking for something and honor that even if it means coming back to this episode another day. Hmm. So let's break this down a bit more. This information was so helpful for me when I learned it so perhaps it will strike a chord with you too. Let's define sexual trauma from the lens to which I am speaking. So we are talking about anything that is sexual that overwhelms your body. This becomes trauma. My body got too overwhelmed and didn't have the time, space, or support to metabolize, digest, and integrate that overwhelm. Now, we tend to think of sexual trauma as, you know, the big T's. Assault, violation, molestation, or abuse. But there are also things like being exposed to porn. at a young age, being shamed for our sexual orientation, there's religious shaming, there are all kinds of things. And something else that can tie into this is sexual fawning. So having experiences with sexual fawning where You're basically doing what someone else wants to do, not because they're scary or nasty or taking advantage of you or that you're being forced into it, but because you love them and want to make them happy. This also creates sexual trauma. So when I was learning and beginning the journey of healing from sexual abuse, anytime my partner would try to initiate foreplay or sex, I would feel disgust bubbling up. Now, I knew I loved this person and I wanted this person, but my body was reliving a past experience in the present moment. So when that disgust would bubble and rise, my body would constrict. And so much of the time I would just push through because I loved my partner and I wanted to make them happy. I wanted to please them. All the while, while I was doing that, I was reinforcing this pattern of trauma. and creating sexual trauma within. So I just wanted to name that, that even though sometimes we're in these long term committed relationships, that doesn't mean that sex is a given. That doesn't mean that our bodies feel safe all the time. My body got scared and embarrassed when it came to foreplay. I suddenly went from a woman to this still timid little girl. And it was so confusing. I wanted to skip over all the intimacy and all the foreplay and just get straight to the main event. I wanted it to be over with. And I want to say that nobody chooses sexual trauma. It's something that has happened to our body. Nobody chooses how they sexually develop. And alongside that, sex is inherently activating. Okay, we need all kinds of things to make this thing go. We need adrenaline. We become engorged. The body has to go through an activation of arousal, which means everything is heightened. So pleasure is activating and this is why we need the nuance. When we're talking about sexual trauma, there is an activation that is associated with fear and overwhelm that can also mimic pleasure. And when this is over coupled in the body or associated in the body as fear and terror, some pretty interesting things can happen. So for me When I would have an orgasm, I would immediately go into a freeze response and then feel shut down, depressed for days, sometimes weeks after. Back then, I didn't have an understanding of what was physically happening inside of me. I thought I was just having some kind of like awakening or tantric experience. For those of you wishing to dive into the world of somatic healing and get a taste of what it's like to discover the wisdom of your body, I'm offering a hundred dollars off my signature course, reclaiming resilience to the listeners of this episode. It is a self paced five week course that teaches you how to be with big emotions and sensations. It expands your capacity for more joy. More love and more pleasure while you also learn how to access your boundaries, intuition, and build safety within your body. Essentially, you'll be learning how to harness the power of your nervous system and welcome in more clarity, authentic communication, and fulfilling relationships. In the program, we are changing the way that we perceive ourselves, our patterns and our limiting beliefs, as well as finding our unique voice. Use the code ALLCAPSFEELGOOD at checkout. And for those of you who are seeking one on one support, I also offer coaching and therapy packages and one on one sessions. I'll pop all of that information in the show notes. And now let's get back to the show. When our systems are already highly activated, arousal and orgasm can just be too much for our bodies to handle. So in my own example, I had all of this stored abuse, abuse in my body and my body was reacting. My body was flooded again with adrenaline and it was remembering that this is a secret, this is shameful. And now every time after that, there's this reminder that when there's arousal, there's association with secrecy and shame. There's a reminder of thrill. A reminder of something is wrong with me. Overcouplings and associations are reminders. And again, I want to reiterate that pleasure is activating. And activation can mimic pleasure when fear is present. Fear and panic can be confused with turn on. So the parts of your body that were designed for pleasure were overwhelmed and violated. And when something traumatic occurs sexually, there is this overcoupling. and then we tend to live from that association or over coupling. And what I mean by that is that we are attracted to things, people, and situations that reenact that response because the body's trying to heal. Well, how can we heal things by calling them forward? So this thing wants to leave your body, so triggering it brings it up, but because sometimes we're not aware of it or don't have the tools, it never actually gets healed. digested or integrated or metabolized as I spoke to you earlier. It gets triggered and then we feel like this huge, huge source of energy in our bodies. and we do things. We do drugs, we watch porn, we watch TV, we dissociate, we find a way to avoid that hefty charge without realizing the charge is just leftover energy from a situation that we weren't able to process. So we end up moving towards things that create excitement. That tension, that thrill, the body has now associated that with sex. So the body's like, Oh, all of these things are taking me to relating to someone else, to belonging, but they're also traumatizing our bodies more. So what ends up happening innocently is that we move towards sexual experiences that include. Not always, but some of the time, these experiences can include terror, fear, and panic without consciously knowing we are doing it. And this is what I did for so many years. For me, this looked like hooking up with people in dangerous situations, choosing partners that had every red flag in the book and still going for it. My body had associated thrill, fear, panic with sex, arousal, relating, and belonging. So, yeah. When we are developing and experiencing a relational sexual trauma, like a molestation, something non consensual, the parts of our body designed for pleasure were also overwhelmed, violated, and terrified. I know I'm repeating this because it's just so important how these things get grouped together inside of us. So again, the places that naturally feel pleasure and are meant to feel a sense of touch, closeness, and belonging at the same time felt a violation, a shame, and a disgust, and then a recoil, both happened at the same time. So what we need to do and what we do do in this somatic work and this attachment work is to separate, begin to separate and pull apart these things so they're no longer coupled together or associated with one another. So again, in, as I mentioned earlier in adulthood, I like the thrill of hookups and secrecy, but I also didn't realize that I was super dysregulated because dysregulation had become so familiar after a lifetime of learning and relearning this pattern. And on another note, a great way to tell if our. Sexual experiences, kinks, or fetishes are a form of reenactment of trauma or liberating us from it is this. When we are having a sexual intimate relationship with someone, do we feel more connected to ourselves after or do we feel more disconnected and dissociated from ourselves and our partner afterwards? Huge, huge question to ask. For me, it was frozen, numb, and dissociated. Which For the better part of my life allowed me to be emotional and emotionally unavailable and sexually promiscuous for many years and of course deep down all I wanted was connection and belonging but Somewhere along the way I had to shut down that part of me because it was all so terrifying I just didn't understand it was this double bind of wanting to connect and also Not feeling my autonomy And this put me in precarious situations, parties, dangerous circumstances, living life on the edge with many addictions. So much of that was unconscious. It wasn't. consciously trying to be malicious. I just didn't know my own value and worth and therefore couldn't see others value and worth. I also didn't know how to let people get to know me because I was so busy fawning both sexually and in many of my close relationships. And if you're like me, And have been people pleasing or fawning for a long time, almost every relationship felt like a boundary violation. We're constantly telling other people the opposite of how we really feel. So, they think they're becoming intimate. with one kind of person, but really they don't know us at all. So every time we pretend to enjoy something or someone we don't, our body is impacted, which is why boundary work, pleasure work, attachment work, and somatic work go hand in hand when doing sexual trauma healing. I wanted to do this, but did something else instead. And the thing about boundary ruptures is that they can be repaired and we can come out on the other end fully intact, fully as ourselves. So worth the journey to rebuild these, these boundaries, to repair our connection with ourselves and others. And again, I want to stress that these things that happened are not who we are, but what happened to our body. And they change the way we react or respond to sex and relating to others. So how do we begin the process of building the capacity to be intimate with others? How to build the capacity for experiencing more pleasure? We can just begin to notice when our body is showing us a boundary, especially when it comes to sex and intimacy with people we love. So I'll give a few examples of this, and it's even more lovely if you're partnered with someone and can involve them in the process. If you're not partnered, you can also do this when you're self pleasuring or have vulnerability arise within intimate friendships. We can do this before, during, and after this process to build our capacity to tolerate the activation that may be making pleasure and connection difficult. And again, this can also be done just by thinking about being intimate and noticing what arises. The joy of this work is that to the body, time is nonlinear. It doesn't know whether things are happening now or in the past or in the future. And another thing before I give these, these practices is that something that can make this work more overwhelming as with any kind of healing is approaching it thinking we are broken or that we need to be fixed. This actually dissociates us more and makes accessing these parts hard because there is nothing that feels safe and comforting about being judged. So the shame and the guilt and the judgment. is more than the body can hold, especially if it's already overwhelmed. So we don't want to add more of that in. We want to recognize that our body is and has been working perfectly in order to do the best it can as a result of being sexually traumatized. What we want to realize that when we do this work, no matter the outcome, there is a place within us that is finally coming up to be seen. And our only task is to witness it. and find the support that enables us to be with it. Okay, so on to the practice. First things first, something really important to establish with your partner if you know you have a history of sexual abuse or suspect it is to have a conversation that you are working on re establishing your body's boundaries with sexual encounters. This also means that sex may or may not be part of the equation while you are discovering what you and your body need when it comes to intimacy. This is about choice. And so this could sound something like I'm wanting to explore what is going on with my body so, and the ways that I experience sex and pleasure. I want to find a new way of doing this, a new way that feels beautiful and connecting and intimate. And so you can be totally honest with the person in your life as long as that person is a safe person for you. So at the beginning of any kind of intimacy. self pleasure or sex, just check in and see if there are any areas of your body that feel constricted, tense, or if there are feelings that arise of disgust. So basically, if there are other things present other than connection, desire, and intimacy, we want to get curious about and tend to the areas that may not have the capacity for foreplay or sex. And this may not be our whole body, but it could potentially just be parts of it. So before you're about to begin this adventure, you're just tuning in for a moment to see if there are any areas of discomfort. And if you locate them within you, if it feels okay, just place a hand on the part of you that feels unsafe, tense, constricted. If you have a partner, you can ask for some supportive touch. And just notice what happens as you witness this place within you. You can send your attention to that area or even just see your breath going to that place. You can add in some words of connection. It could be silent or out loud. Maybe, I am here. I've got you. I'm paying attention to you now. How does it feel for you that I'm here for you right now? And your only job right now is to notice what happens. And once you've spent just a moment or two noticing what comes up with the statement and the supportive touch, now identify something that feels pleasant. So this could be anything, whether it's something that feels the opposite in your body. So it could be a body part. Oh, my hand feels good right now, or my foot feels good right now. Or it could be also something external that brings you pleasure to look at, or even a smell of something. So you can even prep the space before you go into it. If there's a scent that you really like, keep it close. If there's something that a painting or a plant you really like, perhaps that's in the space with you as well. So once you've identified something that feels pleasant, You're going to check back in with the area of your body that felt tense and just see if anything has shifted or changed. And that's it. So you're just doing this practice. Before, during, and after when you remember to do it. And this may result in moving forward into foreplay or even sex, or you may decide that that was all your body could handle that day. And each time that you do this, you are tending to your body's needs. You're building capacity for pleasure and separating it from fear. So another way to build capacity for safe touch is to ask your partner. to just touch your extremities. So we're talking feet, hands, arms, legs. This could look like just holding them. This could be a gentle massage and really taking the time to see how your body is reacting to touch in those areas. See if you can feel pleasure or is something else coming up. Feel how the touch feels and ask your body if it wants more touch in other areas. You can even ask for a hug or hug yourself. Another great way to create some space is If hard things are coming up and a boundary is to put a pillow between you and your person and just pull it in close and squeeze it. Notice what happens as you create this space. Another thing that I want to acknowledge is We really have to honor our capacity for this work. If doing any of these practices, even just thinking about doing these practices feels too overwhelming, activating, or scary, just know that these are great invitations and reasons to reach out for help or assistance in a therapeutic setting. We are wired for belonging and being chosen. And that is confusing when it's combined with the feeling of fear and overwhelm. So again, what we're trying to do with these practices is disconnect those two states from each other. Okay, my friends. I just invite you before we leave each other and this episode to just, again, feel your feet on the floor, maybe look around your space, if it feels okay, perhaps even just giving yourself a big hug for being here. And I want to leave you with this quote, it's called Befriending the Body. Trauma victims cannot recover until they become familiar with and befriend the sensations in their bodies. Being frightened means that you live in a body that is always on guard. Angry people live in angry bodies. The bodies of child abuse victims are tense and defensive. until they find a way to relax and feel safe. In order to change, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way that their bodies interact with the world around them. Physical self awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past. So as always, thank you so much for tuning in and I look forward to being with you again next week. Bye for now. As always, thank you so much for listening. Life is busy. So it means even more that you're carving out time in your day to be here. Listen, we've got so many great episodes coming up, so please make sure you subscribe to follow along on Apple podcasts or Spotify. And for those of you who like to watch your podcasts, we are now uploading them to YouTube. And if you appreciate these episodes, please do us a favor and leave a rating or a review and share it with anyone you think could benefit. See you again next Wednesday.