Sexual Trauma & Body Shame
Both very much can impact a person’s ability to be and stay in their body.
Perhaps my most favorite areas to help clients heal in: sexual trauma, body shame, and when they overlap.
Very different topics, but both very much can impact a person’s ability to be and stay in their body.
I recently listened to an incredible podcast episode (linked here) called Body Trust, Eating, and Sexuality (fun fact - the host, Patricia Rich, is someone I have done IFS consultation with, and she’s amazing. You may recognize her name from my previous IFS and Consent post).
In the episode, so many things stood out, and particularly this powerful quote by Marcella Cox:
“Our embodied journeys are directly related to our social location.”
What is “social location”? Social location describes a person’s identity in society based on their demographics (i.e. race, age, gender, social class, body size, sexual orientation, relationship status, geographical orientation), and how much privilege or oppression they experience, etc.
These factors directly impact how a person is perceived and treated in the world, how much power and opportunity they have access to, how “okay” they feel in their body, and how safe/unsafe they might feel being connected to their body, or generally “taking up space” in the world.
Again, these factors, along with sexual trauma and body shame, impact a person’s ability to be in their body.
With sexual trauma, folks often experience a range of PTSD symptoms, which often includes body shame. When I say “body shame”, I mean several things:
being critical or judgmental of your body size or shape
forcing your body to do things (i.e. sexually, feeling like you “should” do things, using exercise as “punishment”, etc.) when you don’t have internal consent (i.e. parts of you are on board with something, other parts of you don’t feel safe)
dieting/fatphobia/attempts to shrink your body
“agreeableness” because you don’t feel you have the right to bodily choice
feeling like your body is a burden to others
disordered eating (i.e. bingeing, purging, restricting, hyper focus on “clean” or “healthy” eating, rigid rules around food)
dissociation
feeling like your body is ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ or something to be ‘fixed’
Whether these things are a result of sexual trauma, social location, or messages picked up from family/diet culture/the world, there’s a discomfort with connecting to the body.
Pause for a breath.
Understandably, IFS protector parts take on roles with the intention of, in various ways, disconnecting from the body - to control it, to change it, to use it for power, to avoid it, to distract from it.
Because these protector parts often align with falsehoods of the dominant culture, it can take time for these parts to trust that there’s another way.
It’s possible to have an entirely different relationship to your body - one with compassion, respect, and attunement.
It can take time for these parts to feel safe to relax, and allow healing for the deeper wounds.
And not only heal the wounds, but continue on to embrace the space for more choice:
How do you want to connect with your body now?
What do power and choice feel like in your body?
What do you want your relationship with sex to look like?
What do you want your relationship with touch to look like?
How does your body let you know when there’s danger and when there’s safety?
Can you find safe experiences of taking up space? What does taking up space mean to you now?
How do you experience internal consent?
Another breath.
Perhaps your own body can relate to some of these things, or maybe a lot of these things. I have specialized training in helping folks heal in these areas, and it is one of the greatest privileges of my work to witness clients, feeling more connected to their bodies, and feeling more compassion toward their bodies.
Every body has a different social location. With this, I feel strongly about my work being queer-affirming, fat positive, anti-racism informed, and social justice-oriented, to be a safe space for people in all types of bodies. I also acknowledge that with my own body’s social location comes both oppression and a lot of privilege.
If any of this resonates, reach out to see if we might be a good fit. I’d love to help.
