The Survivor's Guide to Sex
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Dedication
illustrations
Introduction
chapter one - Safety, Somatics, and Sexual Healing
The Choice to Heal
Safety and Sexual Healing
What’s Down This Road, Anyway?
Somebody to Lean On: Self-Care and Support
Somatics: Including Your Body in Healing
Safer Sex
Getting Started
Sex Guide Exercises
chapter two - Desire and Pleasure
Discovering Your Pleasure and Desire
Desire Is in Your Body
Your Sexual Self-Education
The Complexity of Desire
Sex Guide Exercises
chapter three - Dissociation
Checking Out
Dissociation and You
The Road Back: Healing Dissociation
Sex Guide Exercises
chapter four - Self-Denial
Survival Is a Powerful Act
Sexual Aversion: Who Needs Sex, Anyway?
Sexual Compulsion: Sex As the Only Way
Healing Self-Denial
The End of Self-Denial
Sex Guide Exercises
chapter five - Sexual Response and Anatomy: Information Is Power
Where Did You Learn That?
So What Is That Thing? A Lesson in Sexual Anatomy
Sexual Response Cycle
Gynecological Issues
Your Body
Sex Guide Exercises
chapter six - Masturbation and Self-Healing
Self-Loving
A Bad Rap
Your Keystone to Healing
But I Don’t Want to Masturbate
Five Steps to Great Masturbation
How to Touch Yourself
A Masturbation Date
Sex Toys, Fantasies, and Porn
Compulsive Masturbation
Mutual Masturbation
Sex Guide Exercises
chapter seven - Consent and Boundaries: The “Yes,” “No,” and “Maybe” of Sex
What Is Consent?
Sexual Abuse and Unwanted Sex
Embodied Consent
Informed Consent
Knowing What You Want
Communicating Consent
“Yes,” “No,” and “Maybe” Vignettes
Negotiate Before You Play
Response from Others
Healthy Risks
Sex Guide Exercises
chapter eight - Partner Sex
The Good, the Bad, and…the Pleasurable?
Choosing Sexual Partners
Let’s Talk About Sex
How to Meet Sexual Partners
Flirting and Kissing
Go Out There and Have Fun!
Sex Guide Exercises
chapter nine - Oral Sex
Cunnilingus
The How-to’s of Cunnilingus
Fellatio
The How-to’s of Fellatio
Rimming
The How-to’s of Rimming
Safer Oral Sex
Sex Guide Exercises
chapter ten - Penetration
Vaginal Penetration
The How-to’s of Vaginal Penetration
Anal Penetration
The How-to’s of Anal Penetration
Safer Penetration
Penetration and Triggers
Sex Guide Exercises
chapter eleven - Embracing Triggers
What Is a Trigger?
Map to Recovery
Embracing Triggers: This Way Out
Trigger Plan and Tools
Tell It Like It Is: Communication and Triggers
Safewords
Troubling Desire
Healing Triggers Outside of Partner Sex
Taking a Break from Sex
Sex Guide Exercises
chapter twelve - The Emotions of Healing: You Gotta Feel Your Way Out of This
You Have to Feel It to Heal It
The Five Stages of Emotions
Emotional Centering
Emotional Sourcing
Emotional Healing
Being Witnessed in Your Emotions
Sex Guide Exercises
chapter thirteen - S/M, Role-Playing, and Fantasy
S/M 101: Consent, Power, Sensation
Exploring the Edges
S/M and Survivors
S/M as “Acting Out” Abuse
Vanilla Role-Playing
Fantasy
Sex Guide Exercises
chapter fourteen - Sex Toys and Accoutrements
Vibrators
Dildos and Harnesses
Anal Toys
Lubricants
S/M and Bondage Toys
Toys, Safer Sex, and Cleaning
Erotic Books and Videos
Phone Sex
Cyber Sex
Your Play Toys
Sex Guide Exercises
chapter fifteen - Spiritual Sexuality
Tantra
Yoni Massage
Sacred Masturbation and Ceremony
Learning More
Sex Guide Exercises
chapter sixteen - Intimacy and Self-Forgiveness
Combining Intimacy and Sex: Turning up the Heat
Self-Forgiveness
Self-Trust and Compassion
Do I Deserve Pleasure?
Self-Permission
Sex Guide Exercises
chapter seventeen - Partnering with Survivors of Sexual Abuse
It’s Not Your Fault
No Saviors, No Patients
Take Care of Yourself
Expand Your Sexual Repertoire
You Get to Change, Too
Survivors as Partners
Sex Guide Exercises
chapter eighteen - Your Powerful Sexual Self: Who Are You Becoming?
chapter nineteen - Bibliography and Resources
CHILDHOOD SEXUAL ABUSE
RELATIONSHIPS - Books
ADDICTION AND RECOVERY - Recovery Resources, Organizations, and Hotlines
SOMATIC HEALING
SEX-POSITIVE SEX INFORMATION
Index
About the Author
Copyright © 1999 by Staci Haines.
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio or television reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Published in the United States by Cleis Press Inc., P.O. Box 14684,
San Francisco, California 94114.
Printed in the United States.
Cover design: Scott Idleman
Cover photographs: Melanie Friend
Text design: Karen Huff
Cleis Press logo art: Juana Alicia © 1986
First Edition.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Illustrations copyright © 1998, 1999 by Fish.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Haines, Staci.
The survivor’s guide to sex : how to have an empowered sex life after child sexual abuse / Staci Haines.—1st ed. p. cm.
ISBN 1-57344-079-5 (alk. paper)
1. Adult child sexual abuse victims—United States—Psychology. 2. Adult child sexual abuse victims—United States—Sexual Behavior. 3. Sex counseling—United States. 4. Sex instruction—United States. 5. Somatics I. Title
HV6570.2.H34 1999 362.76’4’0973—dc21 99-24107
CIP
Many thanks to the women who agreed to be interviewed for this book. Your stories are vital and courageous, and your creativity in re-inventing your lives is inspiring. Thank you also to the women and men I’ve the opportunity to work with in my somatic practice and workshops. I am honored to be a part of your lives.
Thank you to Felice Newman, Frédérique Delacoste, and Don Weise of Cleis Press... Felice, thank you, especially for your commitment to this book. Your dedication made it possible. Thank you to Genanne Walsh for compiling the sexuality bibliography, to Lauren Whittemore for help with the Resource, and to Fish for your fabulous illustrations. I want to thank Aurora Levins Morales for supporting me as a writer and engaging in hours of conversation, on everything from politics to sex and beyond.
To all the folks at Good Vibrations. Thank you for your work and our years together. And to my many friends in the sex positive community, especially to Carol Queen for our at times heated conversations, and Jackie Bruckman and Shar Rednour for who you are. I am grateful and delighted.
My relationships with friends, chosen family, community, and teachers are reflected in this writing.
Thanks to Serge Kahali King, NLP Austin, Loveworks, Lomi School, Suki Mathewes, Peggy Hammes, and Equity Institute, Jessica Murray, and Audre Lorde for your years of learning and dedication that you have so generously passed onto me.
A special thanks to Edie Swan for encouraging my thinking and writing. And many great thanks to Richard Strozzi Heckler and Rancho Strozzi Institute for learning in the field of somatics, your willingness to risk creating a new discourse, and not being afraid of much of anything you find in people.
Thanks to those of you who have walked this road close to me. Your love, courage, and willingness to hang in the unknown with me has made all of the difference. David Moerbe, Wendy Haines, Mary Kay Haines, Clare Huntington, and Ruby Gold. And to my gal, Denise Benson, thank you for all of your love, brazenness, and delight in the shadows.
To my friends, whom I adore, thank you for embracing the delights and the horrors, my wildness and seriousness as one big package. Thank you for being the brilliant people that you are. Akaya Windwood, Maria Gonzales Barron, Beverly Wagstaff, Jen Cohen, Terri Hague, Mary Beth Krouse, Gillian Harkins, Babette Bourgeois, Val Robb, Kim Miller, Kacie Stetson, Penny Rosenwasser, Anita Montero, Donna Diamond, George Harrison, and Ric Owen.
Thanks to my family, each of whom is attempting to courageously walk through the chaos, and do right by their lives and each other. Last, but certainly not least, thank you to Spirit, for everything.
Dedication
This book is dedicated to the girls that we were.
Welcome to the rest of your life, and the world you can create.
May it be filled with pleasure and wisdom.
illustrations
1. Safer-Sex Gear, page 19
2. Female Anatomy, page 67
3. Male Anatomy, page 72
4. Anal Anatomy, page 75
5. Vibrators, page 201
6. Dildos and Harnesses, page 204
7. Anal Toys, page 206
8. S/M Toys, page 209
Introduction
A Personal Journey
The Survivor’s Guide to Sex confronts a double taboo: women’s sexuality and child abuse, both subjects our culture would rather have us whisper about behind closed doors or, better yet, deny entirely. Yet for survivors, sex was the very site of attack. Children can be abused verbally, emotionally, physically, and through many forms of neglect. Why, then, sexual abuse? Why were we wounded in our most intimate places? I believe that sexual assault is an attempt to disempower, own, or destroy another. Alice Miller calls childhood sexual abuse “soul murder.” Many survivors would agree with her. I often felt that my perpetrators were reaching for my soul, trying to take something from me that was long lost in themselves.
Women’s sexuality is the other piece of the double taboo. What is so threatening about a sexually empowered woman? A sexually empowered woman is a woman who is embodied, whose sexual expression is a part of herself, and whose sex life is self-defined. A sexually empowered woman is able to make choices for herself; she is able to express consent and maintain boundaries that serve her. She can ask for what she wants. She becomes self-referential, meaning she trusts her own experience and intelligence over external messages. Incest is the ultimate training in not trusting one’s self. Becoming sexually empowered restores that self-trust.
The wounds of children victimized by sexual abuse are so profoundly deep that most of us find ourselves turning away in denial or blaming the victims themselves. Yet one in three girls, and one in six boys, are victims of childhood sexual abuse. Few of us can face this cultural dis-ease. Whom might you see if you looked? Someone in your own family? Your favorite soccer coach, your child’s music teacher, or your next-door neighbor?
I came to sex education and sexual healing through a very personal route. As is true for many women, my own healing began while I was having sex with a boyfriend. This was my moment of clarity, when I faced the fact that I had been sexually abused by my father and several “family friends” for much of my youth. I had no idea what was going on—I only knew that some internal boulder had rolled away from the mouth of the cave, and my history came pouring out.
Thus my healing journey began. I spent two years running from recovery before I finally surrendered to my healing. Before I finally faced the abuse, I experienced insomnia, an inability to eat, and a thick brick wall of depression that separated me from the world. The years that followed were horrible and miraculous. I found healing, devastation, loss, confrontation, a family falling apart and weaving (partly) together again. If you are healing from childhood sexual assault, you know exactly what I am talking about. You have stories of your own.
During the years of abuse, my survival depended upon a strong spiritual connection, a natural talent for dissociating, and being a high achiever. When I began studying the effects of trauma on children’s lives, I found that survivors usually fall into the under- or overachiever camps. We are the really good kids or the really bad kids. Discovering this was a relief for me. As is true for many survivors, no one ever asked me what was up, because I was doing so well.
Actually, my second-grade teacher did ask me why I was going to the bathroom so frequently. I had chronic vaginal and yeast infections. I didn’t know what was causing the itching and pain, so I would go to the bathroom a lot to check. Eventually, she pulled me aside and asked what was going on. When I didn’t say anything, she asked me to go home and talk with my mom about what was happening. That was the wrong place to turn for help. Ashamed, I told my mom over dinner. She said it was just discharge and that all the women in our family had it (which speaks volumes about my family).
By junior high I was a master at dissociation. I would sit in science class and stare at my own arm. It seemed utterly bizarre to me that this was my arm. How could it be my arm? What was my arm, anyway? Except for athletics—where it was safe to feel my physical self—I did not relate to being in my body.
My tactic was to control my emotions and feelings, including sexual ones. In high school, I couldn’t comprehend the whole “blue balls” thing the boys complained about. I could turn my sexual interest on and off again, easy as that. I wondered why others couldn’t do that, too. As a kid, I didn’t masturbate, and neighborhood games of truth-or-dare brought on huge attacks of shame if they involved anything even remotely sexual.
While I controlled my sexual feelings and desire, my sister’s survival tactics were the opposite. Instead of controlling sex, she was out exploring with all the neighborhood kids. She says she was considered very sophisticated about sex in our neighborhood.
Once I began having consensual sex in high school, I organized my intimate life in the classic survivor split: My best friend was a guy with whom I shared my emotional life, my secrets, and my philosophical reflections. My boyfriend, with whom I explored sex,
was someone else. I could hardly speak a word to him. I actually did love him but was terrified to share myself with him. I could not endure emotional intimacy and sex at the same time. I froze.
I was uninterested in other girls, who seemed weak and sissy-like to me. I hated pink. All my friends were boys. I didn’t want to be a man, but I certainly was not going to be a woman. I identified as androgynous. It wasn’t until I was exposed to feminism in college, and discovered powerful female role models, that I began calling myself a woman.
Somatic Healing
Much of my healing took place while I was a student at Oberlin College. It was a gift to find myself in the center of such a politicized and socially aware community. I knew that I was not alone in surviving abuse. When I couldn’t heal for myself, I healed to make a difference for the future. Brave women before me had survived sexual assault and had made my life easier by their choices. I wanted to be a part of that chain of hope for others. Having that larger social context in which to see my abuse was very empowering. I organized the first incest survivors’ group on campus and formed a student activist group to deal with the college’s inadequate response to rape on campus. I advocated for government financial support for incest survivors and won grants to fund survivors’ recovery resources.