Femme4Femme Intimacy; or Sex After Sexual Trauma
An Excerpt From My Book "Touch Me, I'm Sick"
Hello dear ones,
I’d been planning to share more from the final chapter of my book “Queer Wounds; or What We Owe Each Other,” but the writing is so tender, and I’m feeling too tender today to share it. So I’m giving myself permission to shift directions, and share another excerpt from chapter 4 “Femme4Femme Intimacy.” This writing is about learning how to have sex as someone with a lot of sexual trauma and attachment wounding.
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I come back into my bedroom and Emily is standing looking at the bed.
“Ummmm, so I just saw a cockroach,” they tell me.
“On the bed?”
“Yeah….”
We pull out our phones and shine our flashlights until we find it: underneath the mattress, clinging to the bed frame. I scan around me for something I can use to kill it before it scuttles off. It looks like my phone is the weapon of choice. Emily holds up the mattress and in one fell swoop, the roach is dead.
“Wow, I’m impressed,” they tell me when I come back into the room after cleaning the remains of the roach off of my phone.
“To be honest, I am too.” I’ve never been the one to kill bugs. But in this moment, I’m the service top in this relationship.
“Did that just kill the mood?” I ask, moving closer to them.
We’d just moved upstairs after making out on the couch. Tonight is take two. The first time we had sex, we just weren’t in synch. Mouths and hands moving too fast. And it didn’t help that I was dissociating. It wasn’t that the sex was bad. It was ugly sex. I could tell that some part of me was turned on even as another part of me fled the room.
As I walked home afterwards, the laugh track known as my shame spiral cues itself up, with one question on repeat: “Am I broken?” This was not the first time this question has plagued me, but I’ve been asking myself this question more frequently since a therapy session a few months back. I was trying to make sense of how, once again, I’d found myself in a platonic partnership when I’d been looking for someone I could fuck and talk about my feelings with.
“Maybe there’s a part of you that wants that, and another part of you that believes that’s not possible to have a relationship with emotional intimacy and sexual connection,” my therapist proposed.
My stomach dropped. I knew that she’d hit on something.
Since then we’ve been working with my different “parts.” Parts language became popularized by a method of therapy called Internal Family Systems (IFS), developed by Richard C. Schwartz. IFS has informed another modality of trauma therapy created by Janina Fisher called “a mindfulness of parts.” This parts work approach combines an understanding of structural dissociation with somatics, IFS, attachment theory, polyvagal theory, and neuroscience.
IFS depends on a metaphorical theory. Drawing on split brain theory and the structural dissociation model, Fisher explain how those of us who live in chronically traumatizing environments, where trauma remains unresolved, handle this stress through a splitting of our brains into the “going on with normal life” part and the “traumatized part of the personality.”
This splitting helps explain how I managed to get nearly straight As in high school, while being high each day, and then going home to perform the role of mom for my younger brother. While the traumatized part of me was living in chronic nervous system activation, this other part of me was totally unaware of my trauma, making sure that I did all of the things I needed to do to be seen as functional. This is what’s called primary splitting, and it’s facilitated by an underdeveloped corpus callosum, the nerve that runs between the left and right hemispheres of the brain and is responsible for facilitating conversation and collaboration between the two.
For some of us, primary splitting isn’t enough to keep us safe, and secondary splitting occurs. Here, the traumatized part of the personality splits into sub parts, each with their own personalities, behaviors, and beliefs. These parts are called fight, flight, freeze, attach-cry, and submit. This is the landscape of my structural dissociation.
I appreciate how Janina Fisher describes splitting as a utopian process in her book Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors:
To get up each morning and face death, abandonment, assaults, or imprisonment requires somehow disowning the horror and the fear left from the day before and the dread of what is to come. Disowning “the other one” inside is a survival response: the overwhelming feelings are no longer ours; that shame does not belong to us but to “[them]”; the white-hot rage and violent impulses certainly aren’t “me.” By disowning our traumatized parts and/or “not me” self-states, by disconnecting from them emotionally or losing consciousness of them via dissociation, we preserve our hearts and souls from growing as bitter as our circumstances. We hold out hope for the future and we keep going.
Fisher believes that we need to reframe so-called “self-destructive behaviors”: “unsafe behaviors historically labeled ‘self-destructive’ can be better understood as a desperate attempt to survive, a way to tolerate shame, rage, and fear, to inhibit flashbacks and nightmares, or to use endogenous and exogenous substances to regulate a traumatized nervous system.” Fisher’s depathologization trauma and dissociative splitting via utopian longing feels like a queer, crip, femme reimagining to me.
This splitting into parts saved me, at a cost. I can see how my freeze part helped me dissociate during sex after I was raped. My attach-cry part needed whatever scraps of intimacy and connection it could get, and that included having sex with whatever random boy showed me a modicum of attention. My flight part also participated, always ensuring that we were high during sex. Together, they helped me access connection.
But in doing so, I learnt that it wasn’t possible to experience safety and connection at the same time. I’d always have to sacrifice one for the other. I can see how this splitting played out during my adolescence and into early adulthood. I was starved for connection, and sought it out from whoever might give it to me.
On the rare occasions where someone expressed their desire to be in a relationship with me, I’d find myself repulsed and would pull away. To my trauma brain, safety equaled only getting the scraps. Fisher notes how “The discussion of safety is another topic that can trigger parts’ survival responses. Some parts might feel confused or frightened by the word ‘safety,’ having been told they were ‘safe’ when they were not.” This response to intimacy is called disorganized attachment.
Children who develop disorganized attachment vacillate between anxious and avoidant because they learnt that their caregivers were not safe. Psychologist Mary Main termed this response “fright without solution.” Jessica Fern unpacks what Main means in her book Polysecure:
The disorganized attachment style is most commonly associated with trauma and it typically arises when a child experiences their attachment figure as scary, threatening or dangerous. When we are afraid, our attachment systems gets activated to seek proximity to and comfort from our attachment figure, but what happens when our attachment figure is the person causing the threat? This puts the child in a paradoxical situation where their caretaker, who is supposed to be the source of their comfort and the solution to their fears, is actually the source of their fear instead.
As these children grow into adults, the result is that the desire for proximity and closeness triggers fight, flight, freeze, and submission. Being too close feels dangerous as does being too far away.
I think about all of the relationships I had as a teenager and young adult. The few that weren’t abusive, that offered safety and connection, never lasted long. For my nervous system, anything that wasn’t, at the very least, cold and withholding, was experienced as too much.
I return to this question again: what is the origin of my attachment wounding?
Kathy Kain and Stephen Terrell, authors of Nurturing Resilience: Helping Clients Move Forward from Developmental Trauma explain how, when disorganized attachment was discovered, “the research ultimately concluded that unresolved trauma and loss in a parent’s life is the best predictor of disorganized attachment between parent and child.” They note that
Epigenetically, disorganized attachment can be passed on for generations. The parents’ limited capacity to regulate their responses can look like anger toward the infant/child–and may in fact manifest as anger toward the child-- while the child has no coping skills to help him tolerate the scary parent. He is instead constantly on the lookout or preparing for another outburst, attack, or scary moment, and is rarely able to let his guard down.
Describing the impact of disorganized attachment, Fisher writes: “Because closeness and safety are intertwined when we are dependent for survival on caregivers, the implicit message is: ‘It isn’t safe to depend. It isn’t safe to get too close or to love those closest to you.’” Subsisting on scraps of affection was the safest thing, and this belief has structured my intimate relationships for most of my life.
As a teenager, I quickly learnt that the surest way to get the fleeting and paltry offerings of connection that my attach part needed was to have sex. Again and again, my submit part ignored the cries of my fight part, helping me offer up my body to any person who’d take me. I sacrificed self-regard and safety to achieve this aim. From ages fourteen to twenty-four, my flight part ensured most of my sexual experiences happened while high, drunk, or some combination of the two. I’d rarely use protection, believing that the boys I slept with would return if I gave them the pleasure they desired. At the time, I believed that rape only occurred if you said no. I didn’t understand that consent ceased to exist when you were too high or drunk to really say yes.
And so intimacy and connection became inextricably linked to sex and drugs. If sex couldn’t happen without the absence of safety and self-regard, then neither could connection in any of its forms. If I wanted intimacy, if I wanted to feel like I belonged, then I needed to leave my boundaries and desires at the door. I became an absent-presence in these encounters. I’d dissociate during sex again and again, because to be present in the moment would be too much for my nervous system to handle. And so I came to learn that it wasn’t possible to have emotional intimacy, care, connection and sex. They were their own islands and I’d move between them, wanting but never believing that there was a place where I could have both.