Sexual abuse and its effect on Intimacy!

Sexual abuse among women in their childhood, is defined by any genital contact or intercourse with a child, usually from the age of 4 to 12!

Any sexual relation later on, can be easily a painful reminder to their trauma, and painful feelings arise every time the person becomes intimate.

Women who grew up repressing those traumatic memories of the assault without healing. Grow up to either relate sex only with feelings of anger, fear guilt and aversion…so they avoid sex altogether or perceive it as obligation that they despise. Or, they get their satisfaction only in a context that is mainly a recreation of a fantasy related to their traumatic experience (i.e. fantasy of rape, parental incest…mature partners etc)

Some women with childhood traumas tend to feel completely numb during sex, they experience an almost out of body experience during intimacy, and actually feel dissociated; like they become an outsider observing themselves from top.

This “dissociation” interferes with pleasure and orgasm. Usually followed by a great deal of guilt and shameful feelings. They are unable to orgasm in an emotional relationship…unable to have a genuine sex built on love. It’s the feelings of shame, anger, fear associated with sex that can interfere with pleasure and general well-being.

Women who have been through a sexual assault are not necessarily unable to orgasm. In fact, they can be able to enjoy sex and orgasm, but most likely they enjoy it by fantasizing being victimized in the same way they experienced during the sexual assault.

That is, because the assault was primarily their first and only sexual reference, which has caused their subconscious to associate any “sexual” feeling to this very first experience.

They perceive sex from only one lens; that is, the assault and all the feelings associated with that memory.

The problem with repressed memories is that they usually manifest themselves later in life in confusing and negative ways. Healing is essential for anyone who experienced sexual traumas, because it helps people break the associations between sex/sexuality to any negative feelings.  

And most importantly, it helps expand the pleasure in sex so that person is able to enjoy and orgasm in variety of contexts, not just a fantasy related to their traumatic incident.