Your sexual story

Here we are... talking about sex. Not something I'm very good at doing, but...

I've been blogging through my reading of Adam Young's fine book  'Make Sense of Your Story: Engaging Your Past With Kindness Changes Everything.' Previously I have briefly covered chapter 4 (the Big Six things that determine our attachment style), chapter 5 (insecure attachment styles), and chapter 6 (two kinds of empathy). 

Today I want to very briefly touch on chapter 7 (What If You Engaged Your Sexual Story?). 

Young opens the chapter with this quote from Jay Stringer (from his book 'Unwanted'), which, in my humble opinion, packs quite the punch!:

"Sexual brokenness pinpoints the location of our past harm."

Another reference work he mentions is 'The Wounded Heart: Hope for Adult Victims of Childhood Sexual Abuse' by Dan Allender. I have not read it, but probably should at some point (being a victim of childhood sexual abuse myself). 

From here I'm merely going to list some of the points I underlined in the chapter:

p. 131 - "You are aroused by particular things in the present because of your experiences of being aroused in the past."

p. 132 - "If you are married, you likely fight with your spouse about sex and/or sex seems more complicated than it should be. What if these fights or complications are best understood as the inevitable conflict between your childhood story and your spouse's childhood story? And what if understanding your family of origin story can help you make sense of the madness in your marriage?"

p. 132 - "The primary way evil assaults your sexuality is through the introduction of sexual shame. Shame is the bodily sense that there is something wrong with us, and therefore we are undesirable to others..." 

p. 133 - He asks the reader to write a one-page narrative answering the following questions (there are a number of questions at the end of this chapter, and space to write out answers):

1. How did you first learn about sex and sexuality?
2. How have you experienced sexual harm?
3. What specifically do you feel sexual shame about?

*The bulk of the rest of the chapter is on Sexual Abuse,  and there's a bunch on Triangulation (which I feel like I can't explain very well).

p. 153 - extended quote - **

The second reason many of us are ambivalent about our desires is because if we are insecurely attached, we have a truckload of unmet desires in the basement of our hearts. And we've been carrying around these unmet longings for years and years. Avoidantly attached individuals often deal with these unmet desires for relational connection by shutting down the attachment circuitry in their brain -- that is, by shutting down the parts of their brain that want, that long, that yearn...

If you let yourself connect with your sexual desires, you risk reactivating that part of your brain that has been so deeply wounded -- that part of your brain that holds a storehouse of unmet desires. This is a deeply disappointed part of you. It is a desperate part of you. You don't want to get connected to your unmet longing. And so you shut down your 'Wanter.'

To say it another way, you don't let yourself have sexual desire for your partner. In marriage counseling, you'll say things like "I just don't have as much sexual desire as my partner." And sometimes this is true. However, oftentimes it would be more true to say, "I'm terrified of letting myself feel my sexual desire for my partner, and so I shut down any desire before it develops." In other words, "I don't want to want."

Once again, this is a super brief overview of the chapter. I wish I had a better handle on it... or didn't struggle with it so much myself...