How I Reclaimed My Sexuality After Trauma
- Hannah Shewan Stevens
- 31 minutes ago
- 5 min read
This piece is part of our series for Sexual Health Awareness Week.
Trigger Warning: This piece discusses themes relating to sexual abuse and violence which some readers may find distressing.
Sexual violence invades countless lives each year, all around the world. For me, it crashed into my life numerous times in the form of childhood sexual abuse and repeated sexual assaults in my teen and adult years.
The result? A diagnosis of complex PTSD, a type of post-traumatic stress disorder that typically occurs in people who have experienced prolonged or repeated instances of trauma, such as abuse. The trauma and the symptoms of c-PTSD sent shockwave after shockwave of impact through my life as I grew up wrestling with the consequences of my childhood.
We know sexual trauma has countless effects on a person’s mental wellbeing, but oftentimes, discomfort gets in the way of talking about rebuilding our sexual wellness once the trauma is in the past.
In my mid-20s, I recognised the devastation my lack of sexual self-care had inflicted on my life, and I set about disentangling my pleasure from my trauma. Now, at age 31, I have reclaimed my sexuality by forging a foundation of sexual wellness, and as a journalist I am able to share my story.
However, to go forward, I had to go backwards first.
The Impact of c-PTSD
Experiencing trauma at any age is, well, traumatic. Trauma rewires how our brains work, meaning it’s particularly life-changing when it happens at a young age. So, when I was a child and went through the unimaginable, my brain coped by dissociating. Because the abuse occurred repeatedly over a long period, dissociation became my norm, as did the blurring of boundaries.
Though the abuse stopped before I properly hit puberty, the overlap and the confused trauma its end triggered, led to a merry-go-round of c-PTSD symptoms that would go undiagnosed until my early twenties.
The effects ranged from flashbacks and night terrors to dissociation and depression. However, it was the effect on my sexuality that would trigger the longest-lasting impact.
Due to the abuse, I did not understand consent, nor know that I was even allowed to say no. I treated my body like a tool for others’ amusement – that’s how I’d been introduced to sexual contact after all.
So, when the hormones came-a-raging, my dissociative self pursued a series of promiscuous encounters that compounded the trauma, making me feel less safe in my own body with every touch I invited in.
Though my dalliances fluctuated depending on my mental health, my carelessness was consistent. The abuse had made me incapable of caring about what happened to my body.
Changing course
Dissociation had saved me as a child, preventing me from living in the moment of my abuse, but it stopped me from living in reality as an adult, especially during sex.
When I met my first love at 17, I fell head over heels, yet I couldn’t connect with him physically. I wasn’t in the room. As soon as the energy would switch from casual kissing to passionate foreplay, the dissociation autopilot would switch on. I could physically feel everything, but my emotional brain would shut down.
When he noticed, I finally noticed. I couldn’t see it before because that had been the norm, always. I didn’t know sex could be or was meant to be anything else.
At first, I resisted. We were both still climaxing, we had fun, so what was the issue? He had to explain it to me like a parent reading a fable to teach a hard lesson without spooking the child.
“When people love each other, sex can be more than just physical. There’s a love connection, an intimacy that comes with it, which makes it even more special and pleasurable.”
My cynical, traumatised brain couldn’t see the point of connecting sex and love, and yeah, that thought was a red flag. So, I listened to my first love because using my body like a pleasure tool while I dissociated into the heavens wasn’t healthy for anyone.
The journey wouldn’t be linear, though, not by any means. I’m still not sure when it ends, actually. I do know that my revitalisation of my sexual wellness started by blowing up everything I ever thought I knew about sex.
Building the blocks
Finding a way back to healthy sexuality can be like navigating a battlefield; you have to get to the other side, but you don’t know where the landmines are or if your allies will stay by your side. While it’s not an easy thing to do, I am building something beautiful, something I defined without the interference of trauma’s sticky residues.
After reviewing what I thought I knew about sex, I threw all of that away and tried to start from nothing, like a child learning about the birds and the bees for the first time.
I found sex education curriculum classes online and devoured every word. I absorbed videos from online sex ed influencers and practised the basics of consent to master my "no," starting outside the bedroom first before working my way up to stopping the moment anything made me uncomfortable (still working on a 100% success rate for this one!).
When my first love and I’s relationship dissolved, familiar patterns started flirting their way out of the darkness again, but I cut them off this time. I developed fun, mutually beneficial relationships instead of ones where I was purely focused on their pleasure.
I also worked on prioritising self-pleasure to understand what I liked the most, to learn how to intertwine my solo pleasure with another person’s, without losing myself. What had the most impact, though, was learning how to have sex in the present without losing myself in dissociation.
Using meditative and mindfulness techniques, I learned how to stay grounded in my body outside of the bedroom first and then, over the years, I perfected staying in the room with my partner mentally.
With a lot of trial and error, I’ve finally learned how to have sex for fun and feel love and intimacy through and during sex. A small thing for most, the achievement of a lifetime for someone like me who thought that sex would eternally be a mechanical act.
Forever ongoing
I am an imperfect being like the rest of us, so I am yet to perfect the redesign and rebuild of my sexual wellness, but I’m happy with what I’ve crafted so far.
I know my wants. I know my desires. I know my boundaries. I use my "no" and my voice. I feel during sex; in every way I want to. I am capable of intimacy and of love and of having sex without surrendering to dissociation.
I slip up too. Sometimes I make reckless decisions. At others, I snap into my old dissociative state for a brief moment, or something triggers a flashback that steals my breath. I’ve experienced other instances of sexual assault since childhood, too, throughout my teen years and into my mid-twenties.
However, the foundation I rebuilt, step by excruciating step, is solid and has withstood multiple attacks on its stability. I have also routed out the worst of my complex PTSD symptoms, with only intermittent recurrences invading my peace now.
I’m sure I’ll slip up again, somehow, in the future and forget to prioritise my sexual wellness. That’s okay, though, because I have the skills to protect my sexual wellness and I can rebuild again if I need to.