Healing from religious trauma includes reclaiming sexual pleasure

Apr 1

For those of you who have not read my dissertation (which, let’s be honest, is probably 99.99% of you!) It's an autopsychographic study of the experience of living in a healing body after sexualized violence and trauma. In layman’s terms, I studied the process of healing after experiencing sexual trauma. What was so interesting in the research and data I scoured is that while it is common for most people to believe that healing from sexual trauma means that survivors need to learn how to feel safe to have sex again (which it is!), there were so many other themes and areas of healing that took precedence over what we might call sexual healing. Even more interesting was the recognition that sexual healing almost always only occurred after many other dimensions of a person’s life had received healing-attention.

And, as if that wasn’t surprising enough, I also found significant research that recognized that reclaiming safer, embodied sex and sexual pleasure was a part of healing from most trauma–even if the origination of the trauma had nothing to do with sex or sexualized violence!

April is sexual assault awareness month. While I am deeply committed to bringing awareness to this area, I think it is important to expand on this from what we might colloquially think of as it pertains to sexualized violence and include the ways that sexualized violence occurs in, perhaps, less obvious ways, and bring awareness to those areas as well.

I believe that for individuals who are recovering from religious trauma and the impact of high control religions and systems, reclaiming your sexual pleasure and learning to embrace your innate sexuality is an essential tenet of healing.

As most of you know, I grew up in what we now call purity culture. Though far more nuanced and complex than what I can describe in a few sentences, purity culture emphasizes a person’s worth as tied to their virginity and ultimately makes women responsible to ensure that men stay pure. Men, in this culture, are considered ferociously sexual to the point of being out-of-control while women are considered to be virtually asexual but must engage in obligatory sex with their husbands in order to keep them from sins of lust, adultery, and using pornography. Ultimately what underlays purity culture is racial purity (that is, wanting to create a prototype of the “right” kind of people who should marry and have children, while billing it as “God-ordained”), but it seeps into areas of modesty, gender roles, strict rules for physical intimacy prior to marriage, how to engage in relationships, and much more.

While purity culture with an evangelical christian foundation may be the most heard of in the United States, there are many other denominations, churches, and religions that promote similar, if not, identical practices and beliefs.

In most of these religions and high control groups, the area of sexuality is both reductionistic and inflated. Sexuality is reduced to simply sexual activity that people engage in together (and almost always has very strict parameters around what is acceptable with this engagement). Sexuality is also inflated in that engaging in sexual activities that are outside of the rigid standards and rules earns greater punishments, severe consequences, and can often be the impetus for disconnection, distrust, and the questioning of one’s salvation or place within the group.

I remember, growing up, one of the Bible verses used to promote the severity of sexual sins warned that sexual sins were in a special category because of how they impacted your own body (1 Corinthians 6:18). Not only that, sexual sins almost always included at least one other person, which meant that engaging in sexual sin meant that you were also causing someone else to participate in sinning as well.

When this (and other harmful teachings) is foundational to how you learn about your sexual self, healing requires much more than simply having sex. Sure, that can be fun, but ultimately, for most people, healing from the harmful teachings of purity culture includes much more.

In posts on social media this month, I’ll be discussing how purity culture can be a form of sexual abuse; others have said it is a form of neglect, brainwashing, control, and more. With that, I will discuss various symptoms and impacts of these teachings and how they live in your body. For this blogpost I will say: it is possible to suffer sexual consequences resulting from trauma even if you have not been sexually violated, harmed, or assaulted. Research backs this up…and so do the people sitting in my office.

Reclaiming sexual pleasure after purity culture and being able to live in a healing body after high control religion often includes understanding how the rules, dogma, and practices around sex and sexuality impacted you on multiple levels. The cognitive level, that is understanding, and in many cases, rejecting beliefs is a great starting point, but doesn’t address how those messages live in your body and manifest in your relationships. Rejecting purity culture beliefs also doesn’t guarantee automatic access to pleasure–or the capacity to experience pleasure without having an adverse physiological response.

This is why we start slow and work at a pace that is tolerable for our body and nervous system instead of jumping into things that may feel overwhelming, scary, or too much. This may mean that we first need to identify non-sexual things that give us pleasure. Are there sights, sounds, or smells that bring a smile to your face or help you feel a bit lighter?

I love the smell of fresh cut grass; after my yard is mowed I like to sit on my back patio and inhale the smell. A smile creeps on to my face and I notice that my breath goes deeper into my body. There is a feeling of peace that washes over me–this is pleasure for me.

There are many other things, people, and experiences that bring about pleasure for me; what’s important is that I’ve learned how to take these things in so that my body begins to feel comfortable enough to experience pleasure, relief, enjoyment–all things that were inaccessible to me within religion. This, in turn, has expanded my capacity for pleasure which can then transfer into areas such as sexual pleasure.

And lest you think I am talking only about pleasure derived from sexual experiences, it’s important to note that our sexuality is inherently us. We are born as sexual beings–from the moment we were born. This informs the way we navigate through the world, how we see others, how we view various social, cultural, and relational issues, and yes, how we engage with others in romantic and sexual ways. Reclaiming pleasure, then, means we reclaim delight and pleasure in our sexual selves: how our outward expressions, what we stand for, and who we are in relationship with (for example) are a reflection of our sexuality.

Reclaiming our sexuality and sexual pleasure is an essential part of healing from religious trauma and helps us shed the layers of control that were once wielded over us that had us navigating the world as a fragmented person. Embracing our innate sexual selves allows for wholeness and connection, deeper relationships, connection to the world, and most of all, connection to our selves.