I Only Wanted to Love My Body.. A Story about Sex, Shame and Survival
By: Joy Ellen Sauter
Tags: Life Lessons, Sexuality, Mental Health, Psychology, Sex

My journey to understand my own sexuality took a detour early in my life. I was abused when I was younger, between the ages of four to seven. My brain stored those memories so when my hormones kicked during puberty there was a possibility things might go awry.

What was natural and normal got tangled in a love affair with the trauma part of my brain. I have PTSD, so there were hormones and memories mingling with my fantasies and arousal hormones in a way that created intense turmoil and disruption.

My relationship with sex has evolved, curiously and wildly over the last 28 years of my life since I decided to make sex a part of it, or even before when I was curious and too embarrassed to ask my friends. The disruption happened early when feelings of arousal became clouded in shame and guilt. What was normal and natural felt like it should be contained or only felt under the microscope of personal torture.

Survival meant dissociating from the feelings of guilt and shame. These feelings were tremendously powerful and responded quite dramatically in my body. The Feelings of shame always started in my head. There, a painful sensation dripped down my brain, and suffocated my throat. Nausea then came up strong and deliberate. It echoed through my intestines as it trolled through my blood. The emotions overcame and paralyzed me physically and emotionally. My brain turned black, my body frozen. It felt like being sexually abused all over again.

My body and brain felt like they were going to atrophy and die. A subtle touch to my skin from someone else was painful.

The only way for my body to survive was to dissociate when shameful feelings started in my body, which meant a dissociation from sex entirely, and avoiding intimacy and connection from my sexual partners.

I was not able to feel vulnerable in any way. Vulnerability was frightening. Vulnerability created pain.

My abuser threatened to set me on fire if I told anyone. I grew more afraid of fire than sex, then more afraid of sex than fire. I grew up in a family that didn’t discuss, talk, or pretend sex was happening. I stayed silent about my abuse.

Compounding my confusion was my attraction to both men and women, or boys and girls as it may be in high school. My mother was into making me as feminine a woman as she could control. I don’t think this was out of fear, but her own narcissism and selfishness that my outward personality be as hetero normal as possible.

There was disruption in understanding my own sexuality. During puberty I became a horny teenager who couldn’t control my desires, couldn’t control my attractions, and couldn’t control my negative feelings about my desires and attractions. I was also expected to choose to live my adult life in a hetero normal nuclear family. Growing up there were very few alternative options made available to me.

So, my sex life got a little weird. At least, my sexual behavior got weird.

Read more about this topic:

I decided that I needed to lose my virginity to a man as a sort of ritual to move forward in my life. I was not interested in connection or intimacy. It was an emotionless decision. I was an introverted, shy, but incredibly as sure a thing as any high school boy could find. Except I wasn’t announcing it to the world. The boys needed to find me. Of course, my mother would freak if I announced it. I had to keep my horniness under control.

I almost had sex with a woman first, another girl in my grade. We were completely different outwardly, but we made the implied connection. She chickened out. I continued with my plan to finally see a penis in person.

I was apparently not giving out the right vibe, and I wasn’t the most pretty. At least I didn’t think I was pretty. I was a short and mousy brunette. I had a lazy eye which I felt kept potential suitors away. Still, I was motivated.

At home I had a hidden collection of erotica and porn. I really did. It would be another 10 years until I learned that most girls did, but I was too ashamed to say. I was trying to avoid shame.

I was readily available. I was also pretty matter of fact about it, if anybody asked me. No one asked me. For years. Then someone did. It was almost a business transaction, each of us using each other for our own personal ends. He asked me while news of the fall of the Soviet Union blared from the television behind him.

I was hoping it was going to happen right then, but he set up a time later in the week.

Everything went as planned, except I cried a steady three hours into my sweatshirt afterwards. I wasn’t expecting it. There I was all hiccups and snot and tears. I had a red face and scratchy throat for hours. I really thought I hadn’t felt anything. I really tried to push every ounce of feeling aside during the sexual experience, but I learned feelings have to go somewhere when they’re ignored.

Someone asked me again months later. A matter of fact offer for my vagina, no strings attached. No connection. The poor boy looked surprised when I casually replied, “Yeah, sure, when,” without any emotion. I agreed because the first time was clearly a fluke, but then it wasn’t. I cried harder and longer in an uncontrollable flop on the floor. It was even more confusing.

I went to college shortly after this experience and quickly became quite promiscuous with men. I wanted to rid myself of the sad and pitiful crying, and thought I could control my thwarted and weird sexual thinking by having a lot of sex with men. I didn’t have much self worth, and it’s easy to predict how I felt about myself might lead to promiscuous behavior. I wasn’t seeking out fulfillment of my worth, and I certainly never felt self assured by my behavior. I was seeking control and manipulation of my feelings, but my path led me to feel more guilty and embarrassed.

I became sort of a joke, in part, and that didn’t feel good.

I also started to put myself into dangerous situations that left me vulnerable to violence and abuse. The act of dissociation can be effective only in the short term. The “feelings had to go somewhere” analogy meant I was seeking some other feeling as compensation for the way I disconnected. I wanted to feel alive. The feeling of danger gave me more of a false sense of control.

I also wanted people to visually see how traumatized I had become, and how much help I needed to be whole. I didn’t know how to ask, and I didn’t really want it. I just wanted to wear my damage like a flag.

I was raped, multiple times. Stalked, abused, and treated with the violence I sought. That realization of vulnerability regardless just because I was physically small was earth shattering. I sought to be less vulnerable by pretending violence didn’t bother me.

All in an attempt to feel normal, I became more broken.

I wanted to love and respect my body, but I just couldn’t make it possible.

When I was twenty, I fell in love with a woman. I mean, I fell in love so ridiculously hard. It was more than lust as we became friends. She had amazing blonde hair. It was this intense love I couldn’t control. A feeling my body didn’t know how to handle. It wasn’t reciprocated, and I fell harder. Guilt, shame, love, desire, attraction, lust, disappointment, sadness, and longing in a dust bowl of intensity I could not handle. I felt all the emotions I was trying to avoid. I started cutting myself for relief, and tried to commit suicide.

I still think about her often.

Yeah, I did that… May I remind you that my personal sexuality is disrupted and traumatized. My brain is broken in the ways I think about and process difficult emotions.

I flew harder into unchained, intense and crazy relationships with both men and women. I needed to feel alive, but also detached. A delicate balance manipulated by choosing sexual partners that fulfilled that destiny. I started drinking heavily to try and manage the feelings I did experience. I used people and let myself be used. I had surreal experiences.

Mostly, I had experiences that deeply embarrassed me. A self fulfilling prophecy of shame and guilt, by trying to avoid shame and guilt.

You don’t have to physically cut yourself with a razor blade to deeply wound your body and soul in irreparable ways. You can’t cry because you’ll never stop crying.

My trauma was never going to magically disappear, and it was keeping me from loving myself, and loving my life.

I was in quicksand, barely hanging on. I denied real sexual pleasure and connection for the high and lows of addiction to avoid real feelings and connection.

Two things happened that shaped the end of this cycle. I was violently raped. I did not think I was in a dangerous situation, but it happened. It left me feeling tremendously hollow inside for about a year. Then, filled with so much emotion I couldn’t move my body. It was a culmination of shame and guilt finding its way to the surface of my skin from deep inside. I thought my sex life was over, but it was just beginning.

Then, I got married. Yeah, I did that… I really didn’t think that was going to happen.

My partner expected me to engage in sex in an intimate and connected way. I had to be vulnerable, and loving, and tender, and kind. Shame and guilt just spilled out of me instead. Out of every pore of my skin, unwillingly, uncontrollably and unstoppable.

He was blindsided.

My solution was to stop having sex. I hid my body in clothes meant for him to find me unattractive. I considered divorce. I just could not have sex anymore. That is all. The end.

“Seriously, not going to have any more sex,” I said. I thought it was the end of my sex life.

Except, eventually, I got horny.

It was only the beginning.

I discovered that my sexuality is the version of confidence and self love that I project to the world. It’s about love, connection and vulnerability. None of which I knew how to bring into the narrative of sex. I only could tell the story with guilt and shame.

I felt vulnerable when people stared at my 32G chest, but I would look at that, too. They’re kind of distracting.

I mistook the idea of male gaze as something to avoid. Rather, it’s something to own. Guilt and shame just also happened to be a part of my sexuality, but they don’t have to be the only parts. I can choose to invite positive feelings into the narrative.

My feelings can’t kill me- even the negative ones. They’ve tried unsuccessfully to ruin a perfectly badass body for the world by suggesting I hide it.

So, to new beginnings!

I haven’t dried up, yet, and when that happens they make lube.

Joy Ellen Sauter is a full time writer currently living in Seattle, Washington, with her partner, two teenage boys, and two dogs. She studied American History at Shippensburg Univeristy, and Penn State. She writes about Mental Health, Sexuality, Parenting a Special Needs Child, and Popular Culture/History. She fully adults, but is always trying to get a nap. She misses Philadelphia soft pretzels and her dad more than sunshine. She is writing her first novel.