Woman on Fire (10 page)

In retrospect, it is incredible to see how quickly things changed for me and how much opened up in my life from this one realization. I was able to look dispassionately at the past and recognize that there was nothing
wrong
with me the whole time—I just had had a bad experience and had been in shame about it. Once I let it go, things changed almost overnight. People whom I hadn't seen in a few months would do a double take and ask, “Wow, what have
you
been doing?” because my energy was so much more open, warm, and inviting. I noticed that I was able to laugh more and be more spontaneous in different areas of my life because I was no longer repressing a huge part of who I am. And very quickly, I met an incredible woman with whom I am now deeply in love. My family loves her and our relationship is celebrated by our community. So this realization about my queer shame, and releasing the story I carried about how being queer made me a burden, has been a profound part of my liberation as a sexual being and a whole person.

Let's examine some of the key things you might want to release in order to be sexually powerful, whole, and at home, as Naomi did.

As you begin to identify who you want to be and how you want to experience your sexuality, notice what beliefs you have held about who you are and about sexuality that seem out of alignment. They may be things you just accepted because they were a norm in your
community, like “Sex before marriage is bad,” or some version of “Good girls don't have that kind of sex/fantasy.” They may be beliefs that were ingrained in you or in your family because of religious values. Allowing yourself to develop a new set of beliefs and to stand confidently in them is making room for the people and beliefs that really feel right for you.

Many people are limited by who they think they should be sexually. You internalize messages about who to be sexually based on your gender, your age, your size, your body, your attractiveness, your identities or perceived identities, your race, your social status, and your family roles, among other things. Naomi thought she had to be (or play) heterosexual. You might think you have to be a sexual initiator, aggressor, or submissive, or play some other role. There is a constant pressure to conform to certain standards, whether you are in Christian Sunday school, the military officers' wives club, or an LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) community. How have you learned to pressure yourself to be sexually? What have you told yourself is not okay? What are your predetermined ideas about how you should behave as a sexual person?

No community is impervious to this pressure around sexual expression. Even in sex-positive communities sometimes there can be an unacknowledged pressure to be sexually active in particular ways because, you know, we all
love
sex so much. That's not okay either—and pressuring people about sex in any way is not sex-positive. How you want to be, how much or what kind of sex you want to have, and what territory you want to explore or set boundaries around is all up to you. There is no “right” way to be a sexual person.

Culturally, women learn that our sexuality is worth something, that our body is worth something, that our sex is worth something. For many women, self-worth becomes very tied up with how
sexually desirable we are—so we work hard to be desirable. Many women act out sexually, sometimes having sex with many partners, not because they really want to have sex, but because they want to feel loved and they want to feel worthy. They don't want to feel alone. The intimacy of someone's body and sexuality is a way to feel close, to feel they are being loved, even if it is merely a physical act. Ulterior needs keep many women giving sex when they don't want to. That kind of giving is actually coming from a place of shame rather than empowerment.

It's helpful to have some like-minded people along the way with whom you can share and talk about sexuality openly. You get to be you. Don't let others tell you who to be, sexually or otherwise. When you let go of what you think you “should” be, you get to grow into who you really are. And if that means having many sexual partners or some other abundant sexual expression, fantastic. Go for it.

As experienced by both me and Naomi, shame can deeply impact us sexually. Shame is a belief that we are somehow bad or unlovable, and it is often connected to an underlying fear of being left alone. It's likely that most of us will experience shame at some point, and it can work its way into your psyche and make it hard to be fully sexually expressed or free. Shame tends to feel heavy, and it thrives as the person who feels it isolates and doesn't tell anyone about it like Naomi did. She was alone in her shame, and that made her shame grow. It's when we tell others and receive compassion for our stories that we dissipate our feelings of shame.

Author and shame researcher Brené Brown talks about healing shame and what is required of us: “Shame cannot survive being spoken. It cannot survive empathy.” In fact, “shame depends on me buying into the belief that I am alone.”

Speak about it in the right contexts where you can receive empathy and compassion and feel the shame fall away. This happens
constantly in my weekend programs. Women speak the unspeakable stories, they talk about the things they never talk about, and at last get to lay down their shame and stories that have held them back for years. Witnessing this process is one of the most gratifying parts of my work.

Sexual guilt is pervasive. Many people feel very guilty about their sexual feelings, fantasies, and thoughts. Much of a person's sexual guilt in this regard comes from learned religious or cultural beliefs. What kind of sex you should want. What fantasies are not allowed, or are not right in the eyes of God. How you should feel about sex. Who you should be attracted to. Well, what if you like something else? Maybe your fantasies would be unpopular—but they are yours. If you have guilt about something you desire sexually and you decide to let the sexual fantasy come alive, you would probably question it because you had been told all your life it was wrong.

Clarify the voice that told you your desires or fantasies are wrong. Was it a voice from your peers, religious community, media, or parents? You could make a choice to not feel guilty about your own desire or fantasy. This is not easy for people who have been heavily programmed by guilt, but you've got to start deprogramming yourself, and it begins by finding your own voice and separating your desires from the desires other people have for you. If you have not upheld your own boundaries about other people's projections about sex, it might be time to actively work on communicating them.

The place where guilt can be useful—provided we do not get stuck there—is that guilt can sound an alert about a place where we are acting out of alignment. If we are feeling guilty about something we have done or not done that truly didn't feel right to us, then we know that our actions are not matching our beliefs, our identity, or our values for how we wish to live our lives and engage in
relationships. Identifying your guilt can help you course-correct and do it differently the next time. But you really have to take a hard look at the origins of guilt and see whether it's based on ideas you want to respond to or whether it's about someone else's expectations of you or issues that have nothing to do with you.

INQUIRY ABOUT GUILT

When you feel guilt coming up, ask yourself: “Is this something I need to examine or learn from, or is this useless guilt?” To determine which it is, think about whether the activity is harmful or limiting to you or another person. Does it violate your rights or your sense of freedom? Does it violate someone else's rights or their sense of freedom? If it does not, then it's useless guilt and a waste of energy. Let the guilty feelings go and get support if you need it to work through what is coming up for you.

Trauma harms our sexuality and is almost always disempowering. Many people experience some kind of sexual trauma in their lives. All trauma demands healing. When people experience childhood sexual abuse, where adults or older kids did not respect their bodies or boundaries from a young age, their ability to set boundaries is typically impeded. Poor boundary-setting abilities can impact how people approach sex (or avoid it) for the rest of their lives. Some children are severely hurt physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually by childhood sexual abuse. They may have had injuries to their sexual body; they may have been lied to and manipulated; they may have been taught to be quiet and keep secrets about their sexuality;
they may have been coerced into sexual relationships they had no emotional skills to manage or understand.

Many people who experience sexual trauma when they are young feel grief about not getting to have an innocent exploration of sex as a young person or feel like they missed out on an important sexual development process. Many ideas about who they are, their sense of self-worth, and the meaning of their sexuality as it relates to the abuse are tucked away into their subconscious, driving how they presently behave in relationships and sex. This scenario is especially profound if the trauma happened before the age of seven, when their conscious reasoning mind did not have the ability to question what it was being taught. When the trauma occurs to a child who does not have the ability to refute and fully understand it for what it is, their mind and spirit will tend to normalize it in order to make sense of it, including whatever they thought it meant about them. If they are supported enough or empowered enough to work on healing and deprogramming all those early messages, they can step into their own true empowerment. It takes self-determination, and it can take years, but no one is broken and everyone can heal.

For some people this is a deep wound, and they spend a big chunk of their life working on their sexual healing. It is common that people who have experienced sexual assault or abuse will also experience post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Working with a PTSD specialist can be really important.

The deep shame that can follow a sexual assault cuts to a person's core. Having their most vulnerable, personal part of themselves harmed, violated, and controlled can leave a person feeling unsafe, unloved, or unseen. Many times our culture and people who love us don't believe us, or blame us for our own sexual trauma because they don't know how to handle the pain and level of shame in that experience. The shaming message that is often internalized is “I have no value” or “I did something to deserve this.”

Sexual trauma can make it nearly impossible to trust others and often shuts down a person's sexuality entirely. If your association with sexual energy and activity is that negative, you can completely disconnect from your sexuality and be unable to see anything positive in it. Until you take the step to get help, you might put your sexuality on hold or behave in sexually inauthentic or even harmful ways. I believe we can fully heal and inhabit our sexuality even after great trauma. Humans are so resilient. We can choose to have a new relationship to trauma and other experiences. Sometimes it means releasing an intense identification with the victim part of our self (more on that in the next chapter) and reframing the experience. For instance, rather than viewing yourself as a “victim of sexual assault,” see yourself as “someone who has experienced sexual assault.”