Unresolved trauma stands firmly in the way of good sex. It makes people afraid to be present for intimacy and sexual connection. It can cause low sex drive, or unhealthy behaviors with sex. It keeps people from opening their eyes and waking up to the beautiful adventure that sex can be. It makes people check out.
Unresolved trauma is probably the number one obstacle to good sex (and a good life) that I see with my clients. Until beginning the work to heal trauma, there is only so far one can go in growing sexually and spiritually. Trauma is what keeps you stuck in the neural pathways that lead you to dysfunctional relationships and unhealthy patterns. We all have at least a little trauma, and it’s all relative. What rolls off the back of one person might deeply traumatize another. So we must gain the tools and support to become aware of, address, and heal unresolved trauma.
Meditation is what first put me in contact with my unresolved trauma. You can use the practices in this book to address your own trauma, but I also recommend getting other help. When it comes to physical, emotional, verbal, or sexual abuse from a partner or from childhood, you want all the help that you can get. You do not have to do this on your own. You deserve loving, mindful, and expert support as you heal.
In this chapter, I will be discussing sexual trauma. If you think reading this may be triggering to you at this time, skip it and come back to it later. This is an important topic, but being gentle with yourself is the priority. Stay in touch with your body and your mind as you read this section. Use FOCUS ON SELF to deconstruct your experience and POSITIVITY BOOST or REST AND RELAX to ground and care for yourself.
Fear is actually a very helpful emotion. Without evolving to fear the right things, we never would have made it out of the caves. We may have never made it into the caves to begin with. Fear signals us that there is a threat of danger, allowing us to act before we become roadkill at the hands of a texting driver. A healthy fear response is powerful and efficient.
When a potential threat is detected, the body reacts quickly, beginning with the sensory organs. Our eyes, ears, tongue, nose, and skin register information from our surroundings and send the messages back to our brain. The amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for memory, decision-making, and emotional reactions, is constantly on the lookout for danger. If the danger alarm goes off, the body is launched into a fight or flight response. The heart starts pounding wildly, and our breath gets shallow and quick while our body prepares to either defend itself or run like hell. This system really comes in handy when there is an actual threat. Unfortunately, this type of healthy fear is not the kind we generally experience.
Instead, our fear alarms often go off when we are not actually in physical danger. Do you ever notice your body snapping into a fight/flight/freeze response when your partner gets angry, frustrated, or critical with you? Maybe you start yelling, or jump in your car and head to a friend’s house, or just shut down, foggy brained and unable to communicate. How about when you make a mistake at your job? I remember feeling like my skin was on fire whenever I made even a small mistake at work. Experiences like this are not going to kill us, but if we are operating from a place of unhealthy fear, our bodies react as if they will.
Fear can activate other painful emotions. Anger, for instance, will often pop up to mask fear. Jealousy, anxiety, and guilt can be activated by fear as well. When we have experienced traumas, as most of us have, our fears become even more exaggerated. We live in a constant state of posttraumatic stress, always on high alert for danger. We get stuck in a spiral of fear, unable to find a way out.
The world around us sometimes seems to keep that spiral spinning. Turn on the radio, scroll through Facebook, or, god forbid, actually watch the news, and you will be inundated with scary stories. Those stories encourage your fear-based thoughts, and being afraid becomes a habit. We become trapped in a cycle of fear, and we suffer needlessly. Living a fear-based life is living a life of delusion.
Mindfulness gives us everything we need to begin to examine our relationship with fear. Fear is made up of thought and sensation, just like every other emotion. Mindfulness allows us to observe the symptoms of fear from a broader perspective, gaining insight into which fears are actually signaling danger and which are not. Conflicts no longer require all the trouble of a fear response when we can learn the difference between a real threat and some routine discomfort.
When we experience fear without processing it fully, it can become trauma. Trauma gets trapped in our bodies and can cause illness and emotional imbalance. We can begin to see the world and the people in it as out to get us. Everything is a possible catastrophe. The more trauma we have stuck in the body, the more scary and dangerous life can seem. We can become trapped in a constant state of high alert, our system on a hair trigger, always ready to react to a threat. A low-level panic can become the backdrop of everyday life. Living with unresolved trauma means living with posttraumatic stress. The symptoms of PTSD include flashbacks, nightmares, and hallucinations. A person with this condition may avoid people or places that remind them of the trauma, leading to isolation. PTSD can also cause sleep problems, outbursts of anger, and difficulty concentrating. Physically, PTSD can cause increased heartbeat and blood pressure, muscle tension, and diarrhea, as well as anxiety and depression. It was helpful for me to be able to label what was happening for me as PTSD. Before I had that concept, I just felt crazy. When trauma is triggered, the body will react as if death is imminent. The heart will furiously start pumping more blood to the major organs, preparing to preserve them. With less blood available, the arms and legs will become cold and tingly. The digestive system might freak out, causing vomiting or diarrhea. You might feel dizzy and confused. Fight/flight/freeze will kick in, and the ancient parts of the brain will be running the show.
There’s a saying I like that goes: If you want to know how your spiritual practice is going, get into a relationship! A number of years ago, I was feeling pretty enlightened. I had been spending a lot of time meditating, going on retreats, and teaching meditation. I was blissed out and couldn’t get attached to a single “problem.” Then I met this tall, handsome, charismatic guy and fell madly in love. We had an incredible sexual connection that delighted and confronted me with its intensity. He wasn’t “safe” —he wasn’t entirely devoted to me. He was strong, independent, and much sought after by a large group of beautiful women. That was all it took to reveal layers of trauma that had been just below the surface of my spiritual bliss. When I felt jealous or criticized in any way, I would launch into a full PTSD response. I would start to shake and get dizzy. My arms and legs would go cold as all the blood rushed to my major organs. My digestive system would go haywire and I’d have violent diarrhea followed by terrible constipation. My heart would beat so hard and fast that my chest would hurt. I would freeze up, and I wouldn’t be able to think, let alone speak.
During that time, I realized how much unresolved trauma I had stored in my body, and how I was replaying this trauma through my behaviors in romantic relationships. It was stunning to behold. I had been living my life with a massive emotional wound and I hadn’t even been aware of it. Up until starting that relationship, I had been able to avoid my backlog of trauma. I had used drugs, alcohol, and crazy relationships (causing more trauma) at first, and then later I used my meditation practice to focus on other things. The problem there was that I wasn’t actually accepting the trauma. Even though I was meditating, I was ignoring it.
I realized that I had been experiencing this sort of PTSD response on and off for as long as I could remember, especially in romantic relationships. But this time, the symptoms were unrelenting. All the spiritual and emotional work I had done over the previous years had made space for the trauma to release. Now that I could see it clearly, I decided it was time to heal this trauma once and for all. Thus, I began my year of recovery.
In less than a year of targeted work, the symptoms of PTSD had lessened greatly. I could still get a little shaky and foggy from time to time, but it was much less severe. I gained tools to stabilize myself when I felt a trauma response coming on. Sometimes I needed to end a conversation that was triggering me and take a hot shower. As I became more skilled, I was able to become aware of the trigger before it took hold of my body. This allowed me to stay present in a challenging situation, without getting shaky and needing to run to the bathroom.
My partner supported me by helping me recognize when I was unconsciously in a trauma mode. It wasn’t easy, but I’m incredibly grateful that the relationship gave me access to those parts of myself. On the other side of all the challenges, our relationship—and our sex—was even better.
Today, I never experience these symptoms of PTSD—a large percentage of my trauma has been resolved. From time to time I need to address a deeper layer of childhood trauma, but it doesn’t come up in such an overwhelming way now. I no longer find myself in a freeze mode and haven’t for years. Having many more years of meditation and insight to lean on gives me ease and clarity as I continue to heal.
If I was able to do this, you can do it too. You are not your past. You are not your trauma. You may need to make recovery your full-time job for a while. It takes some serious effort to rewire your brain and rebuild your nervous system. You might have to sacrifice things that you’d rather not in order to heal. I had to and I’d do it again. Recovering from unresolved trauma is one of my biggest accomplishments. I went from a life of surviving to a life of thriving. This is possible for you too.
When we have trauma from physical or sexual abuse, a relationship can be like a minefield. All of our triggers are armed and ready to be pulled. Once you are thrust into a trauma response, it can become impossible to communicate or listen clearly. Sex can be filled with fear and shame when we have a history of sexual abuse. That trauma might keep us from being able to enjoy sex and intimacy at all.
Trauma might also keep us in unhealthy relationship patterns, essentially replaying the past with abusive partners. Trying to have a good sex life and a loving relationship while weighed down with trauma can feel like trying to run through Jell-O.
Recovering from sexual trauma is a brave undertaking, but a necessary one, to have the life you truly deserve. Relationships of all kinds are effected when there is unresolved sexual trauma. It can hurt just to get out of bed in the morning, let alone allow someone in emotionally and sexually. Some people can become very shut down sexually, unable to have sex with their partner. The intimacy becomes too triggering, and sexual anorexia feels like a better option. Others become hypersexual or fall into compulsive behavior.
My reaction to sexual trauma was to become hypersexual. From a young age, I was all about sexual exploration. Some of this came from early sexual trauma, and some came from the emotional incest that was going on in some of my primary relationships. Emotional incest is when a parent or guardian looks to a child for emotional support that should be provided by another adult. It can have the same effect, later in life, of actual physical incest. Emotional, or covert, incest is a tricky beast. It’s hard to point and say There! That’s it. There is usually a process of recognition. If you are a survivor of this type of abuse, you deserve to heal too.
I must also say that some of my sexual focus at an early age was just who I am. Years later, after a lot of healing, I still place a high value on sex. It’s one of the areas in life that I love to explore and engage. I find sex to be a source of spiritual and creative inspiration and expansion. Years ago, however, all the checked-out sex I was having was fueled by past trauma. I was greatly limited in my romantic relationships and sex life.
Meditation can help us to gently observe and explore the present-day symptoms as well as the past event. By gaining equanimity with the mental and physical experience of trauma, we can begin to release it. We can get to the bottom of our trauma and have an entirely new experience, free from that weight.
Shortly after I started up a daily meditation practice, I started to understand how much sexual trauma was affecting my life. I shared with a mentor that most of my partners throughout my life had been sexual abuse survivors. They were all of the sexual anorexic variety, a frustrating match to my hypersexuality. A mentor suggested that perhaps I was attracted to these people for a reason. Perhaps it was my own unresolved sexual trauma. I told her that I didn’t think that what happened to me was sexual abuse, per se. She told me that it didn’t matter and that I should start to work on healing myself as if I had sexual trauma.
That work is what led to me starting the first sexually awakened relationship of my life. That work also exposed my trauma fully, which was necessary to start the healing process.
At the beginning of my yearlong trauma recovery, I attended a ten-day meditation retreat. I had been to quite a few by then, but I was new enough into my recovery process to still be having intense experiences quite regularly.
A few days into the retreat, at night, while preparing for bed, I dropped into a state of “lucid waking.” I saw with absolute clarity that life was in fact just a dream. The constructs of the dream were thought and emotion. Just as you can become lucid in a dream during sleep, I became lucid in the dream of waking life. I saw that the mystery of what I really am, apart from attachment to thought and emotion, was much vaster and wilder than I had previously understood. It was a swift and vicious blow to the part of me that still hung on to the idea of being a solid and separate self.
Within a few minutes of this awakening, I was struck with an overwhelming sense of dread and terror. I felt as if I would be killed at any moment. Then I began to see visions of demons and monsters tearing my flesh off the bone. Terrified, I jumped onto my single bed and drew my knees to my chest, curling into a ball. I could sense something evil and deadly under the bed, and also in the closet to my right. Along with that, I felt the very strong presence of something or someone just behind me, looking over my shoulder (I later learned that this was actually a type of out-of-body experience). I had never in my memory felt fear like this.
I was way too overwhelmed to even try to meditate. Instead, I turned on my phone (a big no no on retreat) and I texted a good friend in my meditation community. He texted a few loving words back, and while I was still incredibly afraid, his words allowed a crack of light into my waking nightmare. Eventually, I fell asleep, knees to my chest all night long.
The next morning, I was still terrified of whatever was under my bed and possibly in my closet. I got dressed and ran from my room to the meditation hall as quickly as I could. What I couldn’t run from was the feeling of someone just behind me. It followed me all day and into my room that evening.
I was not actually going insane, though it did feel that way. There was a small percentage of me that knew I wouldn’t be killed by monsters. I had at least a pinky toe still hanging on to sanity. At the time, I was somewhat familiar with these types of “peak” meditation experiences. I’d already had some really terrifying hallucinations, as well as some incredibly pleasurable blissed-out visions. I knew how to work with these because I had trusted teachers. Most people I have come across have not had such extreme experiences with meditation, but it does happen. When you have a history of trauma or psychedelic drug use, it becomes more likely that something like this could occur.
After a full day of meditation, I was ready to use my mindfulness tools to deal with this situation. I walked in to my room, closed the door, and said, Okay. I’m ready to face you. I placed a chair facing the bed, with the back to the closet. I sat down with my feet mere inches from the bed. The terror began to rise in my gut. I began to employ FOCUS ON SELF, tracking the fear by observing the thoughts and emotions that were arising.
As I sat with the fear, it all became a little less overwhelming. Eventually, I began to see a little girl under the bed. It was me as a three-year-old. It hit me that all of the horrifying images were a form of resistance to what this little girl wanted to tell me. When she realized that she had been seen, she began to turn her face inside out, grow fangs, and growl like a small, dangerous beast. I said to her, I know who you are. You don’t need to be afraid of me. She slowly crawled from under the bed. She said, I have something to tell you. I took her on to my lap and said she could tell me anything.
She began to tell me about something that happened to her, to me, when I was three. It was something I had some memory of but had always brushed off as not that big of a deal. When I was three, I was playing with my friend and some older boys she was related to. I remember I was sitting on top of a big spool, something that would have been used for heavy duty wires. One of the boys asked me if I dared him to put his penis in my vagina. I was confused, I didn’t know what he meant. I remember looking over to my friend and she seemed afraid and was shaking her head, no. I had no memory after that. When I was older, my mom told me that I had told her my vagina hurt from the boys. She questioned me about what I meant, and eventually my father had had a talk with them.
Three-year-old me told me, with many tears, that the boys had hurt her. That she was afraid. That they had taken turns. I was horrified and heartbroken to hear her tell me this story, to see her relive the pain and fear that she had experienced. I held her tight in my arms, cried with her, and told her that I loved her so much. I told her I would protect her and keep her safe always. She smiled and let me comfort her. And then, just as fast as this crazy experience started, it ended. She was gone. It was over and a great healing had taken place.
My ability to use meditation, even in a wild situation like that, allowed me to turn what could have just been an awful experience into a transformative one. The trauma of that sexual abuse had been stored inside of me for so many years, affecting my life in big and small ways. It was no surprise that I had been so checked out with sex. Or that I had a history of dating other people with sexual abuse in their past. I had always thought, Oh, that was nothing. Some people had REAL sexual abuse. Each time I downplayed that scary experience to myself, I negated that little three-year-old’s fear, shame, and sadness. I am so grateful that my meditation practice allowed me to see, hear, and heal that part of me.
That was the beginning of my total dedication to healing my unresolved trauma. That experience with the older boys was just one of the traumas of my life. I grew up in a family that had a long history of trauma. While my parents did their best to break the cycle, they had limited tools and their own unresolved trauma to contend with. By the time I was fourteen, my mom couldn’t deal with me and my dad had become my drinking buddy. I was essentially on my own and ended up in countless unsafe and traumatic situations throughout my teens and twenties. After getting sober and starting up a daily meditation practice, I began to unwind all those years of suffering. Traumas like the one I just described began to surface and ask to be healed. There were many tools I used in addition to my meditation practice. I suggest that anyone working through trauma have tons of support, as well as professional help. Therapists, bodyworkers, meditation coaches, and support groups are all good options. One of the most powerful tools for me was Somatic Experiencing.
As I mentioned in Chapter Three, Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a type of therapy developed by Peter Levine,1 created especially for recovery from trauma. It is gentle, yet quite effective, and can be combined with other forms of therapy as well. Lee Ann Teany, MA, MFT, has this to add about SE work:
For someone dealing with trauma of any kind, including sexual trauma, the tools of Somatic Experiencing can offer a gentle yet effective modality for healing. I have seen clients go from a constant state of hypervigilance and fight/flight/freeze to a much calmer and more integrated way of living in a relatively short amount of time. To be able to find safety in a body that was traumatized is an important part of SE work. For something as sensitive as sexual trauma, SE is a noninvasive and organic option for recovery.
My SE therapist was like a midwife for my recovery from past trauma. We slowly worked through the layers using the principles of SE. The most important principles for me were resourcing and titration.
Resourcing is the practice of finding a place in your body that feels good or pleasantly grounded and hanging out there while the activation of trauma works its way through. In this way, you are not ignoring the trauma response, but you are also not being overwhelmed by it. You can do a version of this for yourself by practicing REST AND RELAX or POSITIVITY BOOST when you are working through challenging thoughts and emotions.
Titration is another strategy for managing trauma work. In titration, the therapist helps you to experience only small amounts of the trauma activation, so as not to trigger your PTSD response. Here is a meditation inspired by resourcing and titration that can be done alone. It is helpful, however, to have a guide and/or support system when approaching trauma.
After a number of years with a hardcore meditation practice, the slow and gentle work of SE was like a soothing salve. At first I thought it was too slow, too gentle, but it didn’t take long until I recognized it was a much better option than powering through. The gentle pace of SE actually makes it a perfect tool for exploring trauma, sexual or otherwise.
Additionally, I did many sessions with bodyworkers, yoga teachers, various healers, and even acting and voice coaches. All of this work, along with my daily meditation practice, proved to be useful for my recovery from trauma. Eventually, though, I needed to let go of all the outward searching for healing and simply allow the healing to happen. You want to be careful that you are not running from one healing method to another, always expecting this one to “fix” you. Use trauma recovery modalities as tools, or stepping stones, not as the be-all and end-all. For some people, medication may be helpful during this time as well. That won’t “fix” you either, but medication can be a ladder up from the depression and anxiety that comes from trauma. And yes, you can be spiritual and also be on antianxiety or antidepressant medication.
Getting support is vital, but ultimately you hold the keys to your own recovery. You don’t need to be fixed. You are not broken. You are perfect just as you are in this moment. Let that belief be the foundation of your healing work. Surround yourself with people who see you as a whole person, capable and joyful, ready to learn. Know that you are enough and then get to work. As Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki says, “All of you are perfect just as you are and you could use a little improvement.”
I mentioned that right before my experience on the meditation retreat began, I was struck with a deep awakening. I fully recognized the dream-like nature of my waking life. I became lucid, so to speak. Terror and overwhelming fear of death is not uncommon in these types of awakening experiences. This is a fear of “ego death.” There are parts of self that do not want to wake up, or better put, do not want to die.
Waking up means letting go of the way you have always experienced yourself, others, and the world. The cost of waking up is everything. As much as you may be on a spiritual path seeking “enlightenment,” there are deep parts of you that have no interest in paying the price. These aspects of self will do whatever they can to keep you from waking up.
Some of the resistance to waking up can come in the form of intense terror. The ego doesn’t die easily. When you are approaching a big shift in your perspective of the self, or shall we say the death of the sense of a separate self, terror can arise. Through meditation, you can begin to see that the self is not a solid thing. You can see it rather as a constantly moving activity of thoughts and emotions, none of which signify a whole. There is not one thing, one entity, to call Me.
When you have spent a lifetime thinking that you are a solid and constant thing, this realization can be terrifying. It can put into question everything you think you know. It’s called waking up. The ego (the parts of you attached to the idea of a solid self) doesn’t want to jump into uncertainty. It wants to be solid and sure. Terror on the cushion is not always just resistance to waking up, however. For some (including me), it can also be a result of unresolved trauma. The fear of ego death can trigger the trauma, and the two get tangled up to form a massive ball of terror. This makes it nearly impossible to let go into the awakening—it’s just too terrifying. In this way, unresolved trauma can stand in the way of awakening.
As a child and teenager I was in many violent and dangerous situations. All of that trauma was stored up inside of me. There were times when I could have actually died. My dad’s drunk driving alone could have killed me. That fear, while different from the fear of ego death, feels very similar to the human system. So when faced with a big awakening, like the one that preceded the “little girl under the bed” experience, all that trauma was unearthed. Instead of being able to free fall into the lucid waking I was being introduced to, I had to instead negotiate the trauma.
This was one of the big reasons I dedicated myself to healing my trauma. The next time I was given a portal to a new kind of consciousness, I wanted to be free and clear. I wanted to be ready. This proved to be a fruitful endeavor. My awakening expanded with ease as I healed the wounded parts of me. When my meditation practice invited me deeper into the beautiful mystery of reality, I was able to answer the call.
Healing your trauma doesn’t just improve your sex life and relationships. This work on self gives you the keys to the kingdom. As you heal, your capacity to awaken expands exponentially. You are birthed into a new kind of existence.
Sex, free from the shackles of unresolved trauma, is an entirely new kind of sex. It’s a whole new world. Your sex life will grow in ways you could never have imagined. When I was weighted down with the traumas of my life, it was like being stuck in a room. In that room there was only so much intimacy and connection I could have with my partners. I also couldn’t have partners that were truly awake to the outside. We needed to live in the same paradigm, the same room, for it to work. Yes, there was still fun and love to be had, but there was a cap on the fun and on the sexual evolution.
Meditation gave me a glimpse of what was outside my trauma-walled room. My practice opened my eyes. As I began to wake up, that wakefulness spread like ivy over my entire life. Being the sexual gal that I am, my sex life was illuminated as well. It was clear to me that in order to allow the awakening to continue to blossom, I needed to heal the trauma. I needed to step out of that room and into the wild, exquisite world of sex without unresolved trauma. And I did. And it is wonderful out here.
When you are no longer engaging sexually from a place of trauma, the shame, fear, and insecurity fall away. You find that it’s easy to let go and enjoy sex. You no longer need a few drinks to take the edge off. Your choice of partners expands to include people who you may have never even noticed before. Your sexuality flows through you into your creative life, and you take on a glow. You start to fall in love with life and all the sensual pleasures that it offers. But you are not attached or addicted. Instead, you are gently moving with the natural flow of your authentic sexuality.
There may still be periods when you don’t feel all that sexual. There may also be bursts of time when all you want to do is fuck! Keep your meditation practice close throughout the journey. Every step along the way, there are opportunities for deeper insight and more awakening. Your practice will keep you connected to the present moment, helping you detach from the past with ease and skill. Practice mindful sex and avoid drunken sex or sex with people you don’t feel totally safe with. By offering yourself this love and mindfulness, you are showing the wounded parts that it’s safe to soften and to heal. Trauma is not a life sentence. Your meditation practice, along with the other support that is right for you, will lead you to a new way of living and loving.