From Self-criticism and Confusion to Sexual Wellness: Harness your Life-force Energy for Personal Growth and Leadership.

Written by Emma Harper on 20 May 2020.

If you have ever taken an interest in who you are as a sexual being and felt confused, you are not alone. Let me explain why this is normal, how you’ve been impacted by the culture we inhabit and how acknowledging the ways your relationship to your sexually got confused and distorted opens a gateway to your personal transformation

Our sexual behaviour is a reflection of our psychological, emotional, spiritual and physical wellbeing.

We live in an extremely complex and potentially stress-inducing world that serves to over-tax our biological system, take us out of contact with our bodies and constrain us in social structures that are not easily conducive to real intimacy.

We are rarely educated and supported to manage and process our own emotions or trauma. Often the only time we feel mobilised or justified to seek support is when our perceived dysfunctions reach a climax and either result in, or move us towards, the loss of a major attachment relationship. Alternatively the pain of our loneliness or relentless tirade of our self-criticism eventually drives a part of us to seek the possibility of change.

Our sexual behaviour is a reflection of our psychological, emotional, spiritual and physical wellbeing.

Many of us are led to believe something is wrong with us because we’re not holding down a relationship, not having or wanting sex, having too much sex, or with the wrong people. Perhaps the type of sex we’re having is not good enough, or frequent enough, or parts of our body aren’t complying with what other parts of ourselves or others are desiring. Others of us turn a blind eye to even thinking about sex and detach from the painful reality that this critical component of our wellbeing is missing.

I’m not suggesting that we all need to be sexually active, with other people, on a regular basis to be well. I am suggesting that we take our sexual behaviour seriously as an indicator of our overall wellbeing and state of psychological integration.

“I am suggesting that a life disconnected from your own sexuality and from the application and expression of your own creative life-force energy is a life that holds you back from fulfilling your potential for a meaningful contribution of your personal and unique gifts in the world”

This article is written with the intention that you might understand a little more the way your sexual system could be operating and use that to inform decisions about your life and who it is you want to become.

It is my hope that by more frank and open conversations about sexuality we might re-educate ourselves on the critical topics of sexual and interpersonal development and more of us might feel empowered to integrate this vital life-force into ourselves and into the co-creation of sustainability outcomes and solutions for our planet, natural environment and social systems.

An introduction to multiplicity of mind: Understanding the Psyche and Eros Energy

What if I told you that all your feelings, compulsions, fantasies, avoidances, enthusiasm, curiosities and frustrations about sex are a response to your environment, your upbringing, your culture and family of origin and your uniquely perfected personal survival strategy for life?

Contrary to the popular belief that each of us is a single, consistently acting personality, and towards, but different to, many Spiritual traditions which recognise the non-dual nature of our existence and the existence of a Central God-Self around which the ego cheekily tries to get in the way, I’d like to present a different perspective. This perspective is taken from the work of Richard C Schwartz, founder of the evidence-based therapy known as “Internal Family Systems” which is finally gaining the traction and awareness it deserves in this challenged world.

Find out more about IFS here: Internal Family Systems Institute

The Internal Family Systems perspective offers that each person/psyche is made up of multiple “parts” vying for control of the person (organism), in a semi-organised way , in response to the needs of the organism and its internal and external environment.

In a perfect world, each of these parts would perform certain essential social and physical functions for the individual in their life: different parts coming on line at different ages. The management of the whole system is guided by a loving and ever present “Self”, our individuated aspect of the greater spiritual “god-Self” that has incarnated through our unique physical body.

In reality, parts pick up “burdens” from life experiences, childhood developmental trauma, adult trauma or the ancestral line, that distort the healthy functioning of the individual. Burdened parts organise themselves to protect or hide vulnerable or unwanted parts of the personality (“exiles”), keeping them at bay with functional managerial aspects of the personality (“managers”) that seek to control the individual or those around them to prevent exposure of these vulnerable or unwanted parts to the outside world. When this control system fails and the exiled parts seek to emerge, more extreme aspects of the personality (“fire-fighters”) run in to numb or soothe or dissociate from the feelings, with little regard for the health of the individual or its relationships to others.

This distorted organisation creates a hierarchy of command where an individual experiences being at the whim of any number of parts of the system, all of which are frozen in time at an age younger than the individuals real age, and who carry extreme beliefs or emotions that cloud the lens of current reality. These parts then command control of the system, body and behaviours without any conscious awareness of the person they are commanding.

Most of us are living our lives day to day, organised and run by hard-working and often scared child aspects of ourselves who are trying to keep us safe in the best ways they know how.

You can imagine the implications of this for our relationships and our sexual expression!

What’s also important to understand is that each of our parts carries life-force energy (EROS) and is a vital part of a whole and complete system. When we are operating in consciousness, holistically, under the management of “Self”, we have access to lots of EROS energy, creativity, confidence, clarity and the capacity for connection. We can easily navigate the river of life with grace and courage in our choices.

However when we are fragmented, dissociated and split off from access to this internal source of leadership we are also unable to access this energy. The container for our life-force is leaky; lots of energy is spent suppressing vulnerable parts or repairing the damage from out of control fire-fighters. Manager work tireless to hold things together and we seek energy from others or give it away to others freely in exchange for feeling safe under their care and leadership.

A whole life can be lived on the drama of emotions and the games played out unconsciously in this internal world, and in relation to the internal world of others, without ever tapping into the true essence of your “Self” and its potential.

When we take care of our own systems we feel energised, creative, expressive, playful, calm, patient, and we might find an abundance of Eros energy seeking mobilisation, either towards creative projects and solutions or towards building connection and harmony with others and the natural world.

Why are we having Sex in the first place?

Aside from the obvious biological imperatives for procreation, Sex in our modern society serves a number of other key functions:

Sex is a way of feeling and expressing our POWER in a world where power often resides in the hands of the few.

Sex is a critical part of BONDING and ATTACHING in a key relationship, to a provider, or co-parent of a child, or to a person that supports our capacity to survive and thrive in the world, as well as expressing Love.

Sex gets us back in our BODIES and provides PLEASURE and PAIN RELIEF from the hormones and neurotransmitters released during physical touch and especially orgasm.

Sex MOVES ENERGY, mobilising our life-force and creativity, enabling processing of previously stuck emotions and supporting us to feel ourselves and our partners more deeply (when approached with consciousness and the avoidance of recreational drugs and alcohol).

Expressing our life-force through contact with our sexuality, whether in the act of sex or simply tapping into our erotic current whilst in nature or immersed in a piece of art or music, gets things moving, gets us back in our bodies, in present time and in connection with all of life and who we really are.

Understanding how different “Parts” of us can “Organise” around our Sexuality.

It’s important to realise that at our core “Self” we are inherently creative and available to connect with others, in the different ways that that expresses, and I’ll talk in the next sections a little about how our cultural environment and legacies distort our self perception. In addition, trauma and conditioning often result in further dissociation and force our parts to “hijack” aspects of our natural sexual expression for their own purposes.

Parts of our personality are driven by meeting our needs and keeping us safe, whether that’s in maintaining our relationships, holding down our jobs, taking care of our bodies or protecting ourselves from perceived threats in the outside world. Their intention is always positive, even if their behaviour is confusing, conflicting, or antisocial.

There are many parts of our personality that can mobilise or disconnect us from our sexual energy or sexual urges or ideas in perceived support of our survival.

For example, a part of us might intellectualise that it’s been a long time since we’ve had sex with a spouse and that it would be good practise to engage sexually to show them we care about them so thing keep running smoothly.

A part of us might tell us we want to have a casual, edgy sexual experience with someone we see sunbathing topless in the park, catalysing lusty fantasies of seducing strangers and feeling powerful or worthy of someone’s time and attention at a time when we, ourselves, are feeling isolated and disempowered.

Another part compulsively turns our attention to pornography in avoidance of the deep feelings of shame, and fears of rejection that arise when we consider sharing ourselves sexually with another person.

We might never feel sexual and instead find ourselves increasingly distracted by this project or that thing that needs doing as our system works hard to distract us from dangerous sexual feelings that have previously resulted in our emotional or physical pain or violation, keeping human intimacy at safe distance and preferring the company of real animals or other people in denial of their inherent animal urges.

Parts could be seducing, independent, loyal, pleasure-seeking, pain seeking, power-seeking, nurturing, objectivising, addictive, needy, loving, masochistic, accommodating or bullying, and they are all motivated by the same drive to survive.

No matter how they express and what their actual impact is in our lives they are ultimately attempting to meet our conscious and unconscious needs best in the ways they know how.

When sexual feelings are mobilised they are often powerful and even sometimes overwhelming, and quickly highlight lack of integration and balance in our system.

When one part gets its needs met by taking control of the system, rather than allowing “Self” to lead the system in a conscious way, the other parts react and respond to how that impacts their experience of the world, and they might have quite a different perspective.

We can end up feeling in internal conflict or disharmony, or find ourselves in disharmony with the outside world and in our relationships as a result of our behaviours.

Cultural Implications on Sexuality

Society has distorted our relationship with sex to the point where it’s quite normal to experience strong and conflicting impulses inside ourselves, in response to strong and conflicting messages from the outside world. There is also often little or no safe space to discuss these inner conflicts, especially when they impact relationships with our loved ones or risk our sense of security or belonging in a key community. Even many therapists are so engrained in the same cultural hang-ups that their capacity to offer safe space for integration of sexuality-affecting parts becomes constrained and contorted.

Sexuality gets pushed deeper and deeper underground, people hide away more and more of their true essence, counter-culture groups identified around sexuality and gender issues emerge to create safe havens for healing and personal expression and our society becomes increasingly polarised around what’s “right” and “wrong”, “morally acceptable” or ”socially repugnant”.

We add layer upon layer of shame and fear in each subsequent generation as we continue to perpetuate the myths that our essential nature is dangerous and abhorrent and needs to be more deeply and tightly controlled.

Some of us work to take these layers off, whilst others push away those who dare to embody parts that express sexuality in the ways that we are yet unable to accept and integrate in ourselves.

I’d like us to start to work together to unwind legacy and cultural burdens around sexuality and begin to liberate ourselves into our full potential so we can take this vital energy and re-orient it towards the systems changes our world so desperately needs.

The Burdens of Materialism, Patriarchy, and Individualism.

Richard Schwartz in the recent book “Internal Family Systems, Second Addition” identified 4 major cultural burdens in the United States of America. Patriarchy, Individualism, Materialism and Racism. Although there are nuances to the American experience as a result of its history of occupational establishment, many of these burdens are also familiar and playing out across a number of other major Western Cultures, including in the UK and beyond. We will look at a few of these here, and I’m leaving our Racism, not because it’s not important, and because as a white-middle class woman in the UK it’s been less apparent in my personal story and I feel less able to speak to it and do it any justice.

Materialism

A materialistic culture monetises everything, including the value of sexuality and sexual energy, and in so doing, turns the female body, from a sacred vessel for the creation of life, to a purchasable object for sexual gratification. It also places male value firmly in their capacity to acquire wealth, money and power and in their capacity to therefore acquire the best women, bypassing a support system for their vulnerability, emotionality and right to deep, intimate and loving connection with others.

We become obsessed with our bodies and how we look, whilst being unable to feel them. We sit for hours and days at desks or focussing on our digital devices, with all our energy concentrated in our heads and none in our Pelvis. We loose our capacity to sense and intuit, valuing thinking over feeling and orienting too large a proportion of our time and energy to navigating the complexities of the outside world and data/information/choice overloads, whilst simultaneously loosing the connection to our inner and natural landscapes: promoting disease, mental health degradation and environmental harm. Stress impacts our bodies and our sexuality and we tend towards shut down and avoidance, or addiction for self-soothing and pain relief.

Patriarchy

A Patriarchal culture requires both sexism and misogyny, in order to sustain itself. Cornell Philosophy Professor Kate Manne argues, in a recent interview on Vos on the 7th March this year, that “one way of looking it is as that we have these patriarchal social structures, bastions of male privilege where a dominant man might feel entitled to (and often receive) feminine care and attention from women. I think of misogyny and sexism as working hand in hand to uphold those social relations. Sexism is an ideology that says, “These arrangements just make sense. Women are just more caring, or nurturing, or empathetic“, which is only true if you prime people by getting them to identify with their gender. So sexism is the ideology that supports patriarchal social relations, but misogyny enforces it when there’s a threat of that system going away”

We enforce monogamy with social norms, fail to educate sexual awareness and health management regimes that facilitate alternative and more fluid sexual relational structures and accept that our preferred structure comes hand in hand with infidelity, prolific inherent rates of STI infection, divorce and a lack of personal ownership for one’s relationship to ones’ own life force. (Please note I am not advocating any life choice as better than any other, simply highlighting that a “one size fits all” strategy, doesn’t fit everyone and that monogamy, whilst looking like a cultural choice that empowers women, is actually one that actually disempowers women in favour of ensuring all men, including those with less power, still have access to females. Find out more about this controversial viewpoint in this video, courtesy of WomenLovePower founder Ayesha K. Faines: Why Monogamy is for broke men (Youtube)

Individualism

An individualistic culture can create unrealistic expectations and broken families, destroy social support structures and leave people isolated and expecting that life should be manageable on their own, when we are in fact designed to operative collectively and collaboratively.

It’s a natural arising in time where there are too many people and land, food and resources become stretched. The drive for increased personal power is a natural drive for survival and it comes at a cost to our capacity to share and to belong.

The “every man for himself” approach to life, especially when combined with strong drives for personal and economic growth” acts to destroy landscapes, dominate nature and permeate the lives of many with deep feelings of shame and inadequacy as they fail to reach the riches and status held by the few.

Dr Lissa Rankin, in her 2016 TEDx Fargo Talk (Watch here) drew attention to loneliness as the Number 1 Public Health Issue Doctors aren’t talking about. Loneliness is a pervasive issue in our society with far reaching health consequences, and perpetuated by the Cultural Burden of Individualism

By shaming the feminine side of ourselves that connects and works as a social creature, in favour of the masculine drive to provide and separate, we loose the skills essential for relational intimacy and then often fail to raise our children in the safe, loving connected, multi-gendered, multi-generational environments that support healthy integration of life-force energy and sexuality, which really starts to come on line for most children at around age 5, after a healthy developmental and individuation process preceding that.

How our culture contorts gendered sexual expression

We breed a culture of women who give themselves away sexually, undervalue themselves, over accommodate others at risk to their own physical health and psychological wellbeing, shut off their life-force energy, shame other women who, against the grain, manage to stay connected, and masculinise and desensitise their own bodies in order to stay safe and navigate an atmosphere that is literally toxic to their inherent nature.

Eating disorders and body dysmorphia are an epidemic. Medium levels of Anxiety and depression are considered a social norm. Diseases of excessive caregiving; cancers, arthritis, chronic pain, chronic fatigue, diabetes, become a standard for many women from middle age onwards.

Far too few women can be present in their bodies sufficiently to truly enjoy sex and orgasm and sexuality is a topic with the potential to flood the body with shame and cause dissociation in survivors of trauma, religious upbringings or co-dependent relationships. 

We breed a culture of men who struggle to feel and emote, who intellectualise themselves out of their bodies, whose potent sexual drives get suppressed and made-wrong until they explode out sideways, thus proving the fearful projections accurate, or who live in fear and contraction, who relate more easily to digital devices and pornography than to real women, whose bodies fail to function sexually due to stress and performance pressures and who are expected to know what to do with a woman’s body when she doesn’t even know what to do with it herself.

Suicide rates are high for young men and our men are dying of heart-attacks decades too young after a life-time of being cutting off from their vulnerability. Stress-induced illness is high. Levels of emotional intelligence are concerningly low and sex often happens through biologically driven imperatives between the brain and the penis with little engagement with the rest of the body and those parts the with capacity for real intimacy and connection. And of course I’m generalising.

Neither gender is taught to communicate with each other about the challenges arising due to the cultural distortions that are impacting our sexual experience and identity.

Either gender is prone to numbing with alcohol, recreational drugs, smoking, over-working, over-exercising, over eating, binge tv-watching, sex addiction, shopping, the list goes on.

We also do little to nothing to support those individuals who chose to step outside culture norms and drop traditional gender or sexual identities in an attempt to experience themselves as greater than the norms and identities enforced upon them. We become scared of those who question what we don’t question.

So how do we step into greater consciousness with our Relationship to our Sexuality?

Cultivating the path to Self leadership, that ultimately provides you the opportunity to break out of a sexual self experience and self perception filled with shame, confusion and potential a shut-down of the potency your own life-force, is a multi-pronged approach. I suggest below a few suggestions to start you on the path, knowing can trust yourself to follow any threads that speak directly to you.

1. Start paying more attention to multiplicity in your Sexual experiences: Allow yourself to begin to separate yourself from your sexual experience and track the parts of yourself that are playing out. Who is initiating or responding, who is involved in creating the experience, who is having a good time and who isn’t, who is feeling what afterwards, who isn’t getting heard, who is holding back. Start to experience yourself as multiple and get curious about your own system. Do you feel integrated? What’s working and not working for you in your capacity to express fully through your body. Can you even allow yourself that that could be possible? What would that look like?
2. Start listening to the quieter voices: Pick one or more parts of yourself that you notice, even a “1-liner” self-critical voice or part that says “I didn’t like that” that gets ignored and take a moment to sit down with them and give them a little more space to tell you about their experience or what they are afraid might happen if they didn’t speak up or act in the way they do. Approach with gentleness and curiosity only, never a desire to change or get rid of a part or it won’t open up to you. Remember its intentions are good, even if its behaviour is unhelpful. Get to know it. Update it on your current age. Build relationship. Understand what it needs. Give space to feel and work through your suppressed emotions and get support or educate yourself if you don’t know how to do that. IFS therapy (below) is a great step).
3. Get Therapeutic Support: If you step into the path of personal sexual development and are committed to growing your potential and/or improving your sexual experience then make sure you are not doing it alone. Relational ruptures cause our self-dissociation and relationships support our repair. It’s very hard to fix what we’ve been denying in ourselves by ourselves in the early stages of healing. A good IFS therapist (AIT is also great) will support you to build a relationship with yourself that facilitates healing and more long term resilience and self-sufficiency, which you’ll need on your path to greatness and self acceptance.
4. Pick the Right Partner: Be really discerning who you are having sex with and why. Sex builds attachment and attaching to someone who continually re-triggers your trauma or locks you into old relational patterns will not serve you. Look for someone who is available, responsive and emotionally attuned to you before committing. Know that when you have sex you’ll be under an Oxytocin high for several days which will have you not thinking straight about that person, and know that when you ejaculate or orgasm during sex you’re sharing and exchanging subtle body energy like thoughts and feelings and it will be harder to differentiate yourself from the other. Take care of yourself and sexually partner with people who care about you and who have proven trust, wherever possible. If you are finding yourself really struggling and in inner conflict with some part of your life it’s possible you’ve denied a part of you that wants to be seen and integrated and it’s important to discover if the relationships you’ve chosen for yourself can support that part of you when it returns. Sometimes we chose relationships that keep parts of us safely locked away. Be aware the implications of looking inwards on the relational structures we’ve built our lives around.

Where next?

Patricia Rich, Internal Family Systems (IFS) Trainer and Therapist describes Self-led sex as Spacious, Savouring, Sensual, Satisfying, Sensitive and Safe, and in my experience the more of this type of sex is experienced the more vulnerable parts come up to be seen and an inner dance of self leadership and growth unfolds.

I’ve still got a long personal journey with really deepening my understanding of Self-led sex and the potential for personal transformation and there may be many others out there who understand this much better than I do.

For now what I find really important is that we’re having conversations about these topics and taking the time to prioritise ourselves and our bodies and our sexual experiences as a vessel for transforming our culture and how we relate to the world.

Understanding the art form of how to pace the unfolding depth of intimacy and creativity possible in our lives and unpicking who we’ve been told we ought to be requires deep work, time, attention and lots of emotional and relational processing as we build resilience and inner harmony

Where the balance point lies where we can fully embrace our parts, including those that are still burdened and wounded whilst stepping into a full and expansive expression of ourselves in our lives I am still to feel fully in my body and look forward to the visceral experience of that level of embodied integration one day on this path.

In the meantime, I’m not advocating a large counter-culture movement around sexual liberation like we saw in the 60’s. Rebellion isn’t integration.

I am advocating self awareness, personal development, self compassion and the openness to the possibility that we can create massive change in the outside world by simple and profound changes in our internal energetic systems that serve to unlock our potential, our creativity, our capacity for sexual mobilisation, interpersonal connection and personal power.

I invite you to fall in love with all parts of yourself and come together to realise yourself as the change-maker that you are. 

With Care and Respect to all parts of you, those on the surface and those yet to be discovered

Emma K Harper

Bio

I am passionate about Healthy Sexual Expression, as a critical component of good overall health.

As an IFS informed Sex Educator, Psychosexual Somatics® Therapist and Sexual Empowerment Coach, I am a strong advocate for open and transparent conversations about sex. My work is to support conscious, sexual adults to re-educate themselves about sex and take their sexual and interpersonal development to the next level. Sexual aspects of ourselves become split off or blocked by shame and fear due to the nature of our culture or personal trauma and I champion the creation of spaces which support reintegration of these critical aspects of ourselves for a more connected life.

Learning healthier ways of intimate relating supports deeper inter and intra personal connection and safer sex for everyone. For a trauma-informed approach to healthy sexual relating, Discover your Sexuality, Integrity, Freedom at www.emmakharper.com

10% of my proceeds are fundraised on behalf of Treesisters.org: a feminine reforestation movement.

Friends link on Medium

//medium.com/@emmakharper/from-self-criticism-and-confusion-to-sexual-wellness-harness-your-life-force-energy-for-personal-939e9e5eba01?sk=7c37d849a934bcc9d0c7152c97abff98">https://medium.com/@emmakharper/from-self-criticism-and-confusion-to-sexual-wellness-harness-your-life-force-energy-for-personal-939e9e5eba01?sk=7c37d849a934bcc9d0c7152c97abff98>

5 things I learned about Sexual Empowerment by going to a Sex Party

Written by Emma Harper on 24 May 2019.

When I was 15 years old I was raped. Here’s what I’ve learned about why childhood spanking left me vulnerable to repeat sexual violations and what I’m now doing about it (part 3)

Written by Emma Harper on 29 April 2019.

If you haven’t yet read parts 1 and 2 yet please them here and here

Recap:  I’m 36 and starting to spot a pattern in my nervous system playing out in repeated experiences of unwanted sexual touch, including a full blown rape at age 15, which I had almost completely repressed.

I have distilled down what happens in the majority of the instances into 5 phases, tracking my nervous system:

1. Phase 1: Connection.
2. Phase 2: Move to action.
3. Phase 3: Unwanted Physical Touch.
4. Phase 4: Seduction.
5. Phase 5: Splitting.

I have tracked back the patterns in my nervous system to being spanked as a child of under 5 and hypothesized how that taught my body to freeze and dissociate when someone I have nice feelings towards gets too close and comes out of heart resonance with me, leaving me open to unwanted touch and unable to stay fully conscious and change the situation as it occurs.

And I have promised in this part that i will share with you:

• How these protective mechanisms I developed in my nervous system and personality show up in my day to day sexual behaviour and how I can use that as a trailhead to healing.
• What can be done to break the pattern and free oneself from a life of sexual violation, unwanted touch and even bad sex, once and for all.

Thank goodness, despite being vulnerable to sexual violation, with the tendency to freeze at the first sign of someone’s sexual interest, rather than move away, say something or prepare to fight, it’s not a daily occurrence to be in the line of unwanted sexual attention.

There is one place in normal life that my reaction pattern can cause a problem: Sex.

Imagine the set up...I’m in bed with a loved one and we’re fooling around with one another. Everything is good, until that moment where they disconnect. Perhaps they misread my body signals and start doing something I’m not enjoying, perhaps they start thinking about something sexual they’ve always wanted to try and whether I’d be up for it and move from our connected body intelligences to their head, perhaps they make a new move too quickly without checking in with me.

All of these can trigger a startle response in my system. My nervous system goes into sympathetic arousal and then boom, my pattern kicks in: freeze, loose vocal chords, mentally detach (go into thought), or dissociate.

They then continue to do whatever it is they’ve decided they want to do, without asking me, and potentially without any idea anything is wrong. Meanwhile...

My body is in panic, only I don’t know it because my protective mechanisms are distracting me, so I probably just stop feeling pleasure and maybe get stuck in mental loops.

What do I not do? Say something, ask for a pause, gently orient them away from me, negotiate an alternative. No, I go into tolerating whatever is happening. Gritting my teeth, thinking hard about what I want to be different and if it’s really a long way off what I’m wanting I’m totally out my body and soon enough my Seductress is back on line trying to take back control for me.

This is not helpful during Sex.

I have, what could be described as “poor vagal tone”. The Vagus nerve; the 10^th cranial nerve that runs pretty much the full length of the body, through many of the vital organs including heart, lungs and vagina, and controls many of the muscles of the face and hearing, is responsible for a whole host of system regulation and homeostasis functions, and also has a critical role in the function of social engagement.  

At a very crude level, it has a number of different branches, intended to serve different roles in self-regulation. The main branch (the Ventral Vagus) is highly sophisticated and elegant, with tonnes of myelinated nerve fibres passing information from the body up to the brain and back to manage system regulation. The rear branch (the Dorsal Vagus), is more primal, and kicks in like an emergency switch when things get scary. It can have you play dead in the mouth of a tiger quicker than you can say “shit I’m in a Tigers mouth, how the heck did that happen?”.  (Thanks to Stephen Porges for Polyvagal theory, which is much more elegant than I’ve described here, and to Peter Levine for his excellent work on the body’s survival systems and responses).

My ventral vagus function trips out pretty quickly as a result of my childhood programming. I’ve become an expert at getting stressed quickly and playing dead.

 Instead of keeping my frontal cortex online and engaging in rational adult negotiation about things I become mute and resigned to unpleasant or even painful experiences from my frozen state .

Then from time to time I overlay all my deeply unconscious panic and terror with feelings of being super powerful and sexually adventurous/dominant as my Seductress comes back on line and puts me back in the driving seat (gotta love her).

Love = Occasional Pain. That’s my normal.

Messy.

And my capacity to not take care of myself during sex with this patterning extends into all sorts of other unhelpful and sometimes dangerous behaviours. I struggle to vocalise my “no” when a man puts his penis inside me before putting on a condom, If things are moving too fast for me I’ll actively support a man to enter me before my body is ready in order to feel in control of the point to entry, I will kiss or make a move on someone I’m not really that into just because they got too close and my seductress got activated.

Pretty much anything that is happening without my consent, towards or near my body, and I’m frozen like a rusted up robot, terrified of being badly hurt or abandoned, or doing my best to get a man to orgasm fast so the whole thing can be over.

My seductress aspect is confusing to me and to others and sometimes I can’t even tell if I’m in consent to what’s happening or not until afterwards.

The other day, the only way I could tell something was happening that I wasn’t fully on board for, despite having gone pretty slowly, was that I had no desire to make eye contact with my partner. I also didn’t have feelings of wanting to touch him back. My desire for touching is usually a sign that my heart is open and I want to channel my love for the person through my hands or mouth, although please note that giving can also come from a panic place that tries to avoid abandonment so that’s a more complex subject.  

I was only open to receiving his sexual touch with my eyes closed, from my disconnected internal trance state. If I came into actual eye contact or attempted heart connection I realised I felt too vulnerable and didn’t want to be there.

 Although I liked this person and wanted him to like me back, my body didn’t really want to be sexual with him and, as normal, my protective mechanisms had kicked in, I had frozen, then seduced him and now here I was allowing him to suck on my nipples whilst I pretended he wasn’t there and tried to stay focused on the pleasure in my body (a step forward from my normal mental looping and dissociation, and a representation of the good work I’ve been doing on my unhelpful sexual behaviours these last years).

I’ve learned that even going really slowly, my old protective patterns are so strong that they can take me over.

So how do I break out of these patterns?

For me it’s a little bit of a complicated process that I’m still trying to distill down into something repeatable and potent. I’m now using a combination of what I’ve learned through Sex Coaching, Psychosexual Somatics Therapy and then couple with Dick Schwartz’s work in Internal Family systems.

The early steps are taken largely from Internal Family Systems therapy, and require much more time and space to investigate fully. For those of you not familiar with the modality please get familiar. It is a ground-breaking therapy that one can do on oneself (in time) and incorporates shamanic soul retrieval into a recognised and clinically tested western psychotherapeutic approach. It has changed my life.

[What you need to know for this is that our personalities are made up of multiples “parts”, some of which got hurt and split off in the past and are no longer visible to us, called “exiles” (these are vulnerable, highly emotionally charged and totally unconscious) and then many parts take on the role of “protectors”, designed to control our environments or our behaviours so we don’t feel the unbearable pain our exiles are carrying ever again.]

The first step to healing is to start to consciously engage with the parts of us that come up to protect us in live sexual situations today.

I’ll summarise my approach below:

Step 1: Notice the problem or pattern or protection. What’s the issue? What behaviour today is causing a challenge in current time? Get clear what wants to change. (e.g. Why do I lie for hours during bad oral sex and not ask for it to be different?)

Step 2: Investigate and get to know that behaviour as a protector. Treat is as a unique personality aspect, ask any parts of you that are judging it or scared of it to step aside and ask questions to get to know it and what it’s protecting you from. Thank it. Understand what it would rather be doing. (e.g. What is this part of me that remains speechless trying to stop from happening? What’s the worst it thinks would happen if I spoke?)

Step 3: With permission of this protection, go and rescue the exiled part of yourself that it protects. Get to know that. Sit with it. Let it tell you it’s story and feel it’s pain. Again, ask any other feelings to step aside for this process. Take care of it in the way it wasn’t taken care of at the time. Bring it back with you to the present. Support it to unburden extreme thoughts, beliefs and emotions it has been carrying since the incident that caused it to go into hiding. Allow it to remember who is really is and integrate it’s unique qualities back into your body. (E.g. I have a part that is scared that if I speak the person might get angry, and then beneath that is a part that thinks if I make someone angry they will hit me or abandon me)

Step 4: Take extreme care of the recently re-integrated part. Tune into it every day and just listen until it begins to trust you. Get clear what it needs to feel safe. (Ask how it is feeling today. Sit with it as you imagine a future sexual scenario. What comes up for it? What is it afraid of? What does it need you to do?)

Step 5: Find your boundary and hold it. From your daily conversations with this part understand when it gets triggered and what it needs.  Negotiate on its behalf with other personality aspects. Get clear what is fine and what is too much for it sexual situations and honour its edges with the protective power of a ferocious mother bear.  (Imagine doing or saying the thing the part needs you to do or say, then see what comes up? Do other parts disagree? Hold an internal negotiation until there is an agreed boundary).

Step 6: Role Play upholding the boundary. It may be too much to hold the boundary that is needed for this part to fully integrate during sex or during a live life situation if it’s not a sexual boundary. Sexual charge floods the system, and for me, my Seductress can come on line really fast and hard when she feels she needs to (more work to be done there), so it’s good to practise speaking and holding your boundary with friends, or a mentor, in a role play where there is no actual chance of sexual engagement or of being caught in the energy of the old pattern before you have time to intervene consciously. (Literally practise speaking your boundary to a friend and then track your internal reaction. Get feedback from them on how they receive you and then go again until you can do it without a charge in your body, with a calm heart rate and even breath).

Step 7: Speak your boundary to the person you need to uphold it and ask for their support before sex. This is easy to do once the exiled part has a little faith in you. Then watch how the other person responds in that moment and then during sex. A good partner or friend or person will respect and support you. If they laugh at you, judge you, question you or break the boundary, I suggest you consider leaving. This is likely not a safe, healthy, integrated person with whom you can heal your most fragile parts. (It’s good to speak about what you’re discovering and needing with a partner firstly outside the bedroom, over a cup of tea and then again before sexual engagement. Save any debriefs until you’ve had time to settle and are back out the sexual situation and with some time having passed, even days).

Step 8: Rinse and repeat. Keep honouring the boundary or finding the new one and honouring that until more trust is built. It’s best to set boundaries a little tighter than what you think is an “edge” and then creep towards them over time with space between experiments for you to review and integrate what’s happening in your body. Accept that you won’t be perfect first time, or second, or third and very quickly you will incorporate new behaviours rapidly. (Once you start holding the boundary with sexual charge present in a live sexual situation you’ll find a rapid transformation of this new capacity in your sex and in your life and that it will extend much further than just in the bedroom.

Step 9: Continually recognise you progress and praise yourself for each small step

Step 10: When you notice you’ve done something automatically that is a new learned behaviour and that you’ve stayed in your body, celebrate! I mean really celebrate, that’s huge. Well done you.

Once we’ve released the parts of stuck in time in the past, we can slow down enough to rebuild new neural pathways and teach our bodies to trust our leadership again during sexual or physically intimate situations.

Again in Summary:

• Step 1: Identify Challenge
• Step 2: Understand Protector
• Step 3: Rescue Exile
• Step 4: Maintain communication
• Step 5: Find Boundary
• Step 6: Role play boundary
• Step 7: Speak boundary
• Step 8: Practise, practise, practise
• Step 9: Praise progress
• Step 10: Celebrate success

If you’ve experienced unwanted sexual touch or been a perceived victim of rape or violation I’m sorry that happened. You are not to blame. You also may or may not have been spanked, violated or otherwise knowingly traumatised as a child.

You may, however, have behaviours that aren’t best serving you when unwanted things happen, and those you have the power to change, if you want to. It’s also been really helpful for me to take myself out of the role of victim (past and current) and start to understand how my behaviours play a part in the unfolding of the events that I experience.

From curiosity comes wisdom and with wisdom comes the agency to do things differently.

It’s also critical at this point for me to say that there are times during scary incidents where nothing you can do will make a difference and freezing, dissociation, seducing, playing dead, fighting, whatever your strategy is, it’s all perfect. Use it. Just get through and then get support on the other side of it. As I said before, sometimes bad things happen to good people.

Thanks for taking the time to read about my story and my learnings. I hope these series of articles find their way into the hands of people who can benefit from my experience and find some peace amongst some challenging memories or feelings.

With Love

Emma

Emma K Harper

Psychosexual Somatics® Therapist, Speaker, Teacher, Writer, Dancer, Musician. 

Discover Your Sexuality, Integrity, Freedom @ www.emmakharper.com

"The wound is the place where the light enters you".  Rumi

If you are suffering from sexual, relational, or emotional challenges as a result of early childhood or adult trauma, or simply looking for more support in developing your sexual expression and allowing your sexuality in as a healthy, integrated part of your life, please find me at www.emmakharper.com

Or if you live in the South East, or London, Join me this June for the trauma informed 2019 Women’s Sexual Expression Programme: An intimate circle of up to 10 women journeying with their sexuality to reclaim the type of sex they want to be having, with the people they want to have it with, when they want it.

https://www.facebook.com/events/2343417825947479/

https://www.emmakharper.com/services/2019-women-s-sexual-expression-programme

And if reading this brings up painful personal material for you, please remember to speak with a friend or loved one or reach out for professional help. You are not alone. Bad things happen to good people and we’re all just doing our best in a very complicated and challenging world.

When I was 15 years old I was raped. Here’s what I’ve learned about why childhood spanking left me vulnerable to repeat sexual violations and what I’m now doing about it (part 2)

Written by Emma Harper on 29 April 2019.

If you haven’t yet read part 1 read it here

Recap:  I’m 36 and starting to spot a pattern in my nervous system in response to repeated experiences of sexual violation, including a full blown rape at age 15, which I had almost completely repressed.

I have distilled down what happens in the majority of the violations into 5 phases:

1. Phase 1: Connection.
2. Phase 2: Move to action.
3. Phase 3: Unwanted Physical Touch.
4. Phase 4: Seduction.
5. Phase 5: Splitting.

And I have promised in this part that i will share with you:

• What’s happening in my nervous system and body in each of the 5 phases to allow the violation to happen.
• How I believe that childhood spanking established the pattern in my nervous system and adult behaviours that set me up to be vulnerable to sexual violation.

Let’s see how we go

Please note, in my experiences the context here is normally that it is with someone I, to some degree, know and trust, not a stranger, as is true in the majority of instances of sexual violation. It’s less common to get attacked by a stranger, and very common by someone we consider safe. That’s how they get close. This is will not be everyone’s experience, and also this pattern below is a generalisation. Depending on my level of maturing and the level of threat the nuances of each situation are slightly different.

Phase 1: Connection

My experience:    I am enjoying an experience together with someone and having some level of connection, intellectual or even physical contact.

 I feel:   Safe. Open and hopeful, alive and energised, confident and attractive.

In my body:   I can maintain eye contact and speech, have good posture, a calm heart rate and am fully fluid and mobile.

I think: “This is great. What a lovely person. I’m really enjoying hanging out with them”, and possibly “I’m quite attracted to this person”.

What’s happening:   We’re connecting. Our bodies are starting to mirror; our hearts are perhaps starting to beat together a little, mirror neurons are firing. We are energetically, intellectually or even physically stimulated. There is a current starting to flow. Desire could be present on one or more sides.

Phase 2: Move to action

My experience:    Something changes energetically. Perhaps the other person gets a read that I might be available sexually. They move closer, into my energetic field, inside my boundaries. The sexual charge in the field becomes palpable.

I feel:    Confused, scared, early stages of overwhelm. I no longer feel my connection to them as I did.

In my body:   I freeze. My vocal chords shut down. My heart starts to race. I clench my jaw, my pelvis and maybe later my fists. I hold my breath.

I think:   “I’m confused. What’s happening? Something is wrong. I feel scared”. Then: “Don’t be silly. Nothing is wrong. This is a nice person. They are not going to hurt you. Everything is ok.”

What’s really happening:   There is an energetic disconnection from one another at the point the person makes a decision to move in towards me that is not met by my desire energetically. They say nothing verbally and may be looking for a verbal or non verbal response from me to confirm or deny if this is ok. At the point the boundary gets breached (by too close proximity) my body goes into Sympathetic arousal, my Amygdala fires off warning signals and my body prepares for flight, fight or freeze. In this case it opts for freeze due to my wiring and because this is person is bigger and stronger than me and already very close.

Note: The issue here could be intent, and could also just be pace. There is a lack of discussion, checking-in, consent to progress. At this point if there was a slowing down and a chance for verbalisation I could keep my social engagement system on line and let the other person know I don’t want to proceed. The pace of movement has prevented my front cortex and speech capacities staying online.

Phase 3: Unwanted Physical Touch

My experience:    The person, having not received or heard any easily discernable signs of my distress, and not being well trained in nervous system physiology or empathy (our culture doesn’t support that, especially in our male acculturation process), or simply ignoring my lack of complaint or active enthusiasm, proceeds to make a physical move and touch some part of my body that is arousing to them.

I feel:     Shock, angry, powerless, terrified, confused.

In my body: I’m not in my body at this point. I dissociate and I’m gone. I’m probably barely breathing and my pulse is weak.

I think:    “I can’t believe this is happening.......” then nothing as I’m gone”

What’s happening: By not being consulted, given choice and kept an equal in the move to sexual interaction I experience an intense loss of power and agency. My body goes into panic and, unable to deal with the intensity of fear in my system, I lose a degree of consciousness and dissociate. In less extreme cases I might just go into mental detachment and start thinking about something...anything to distract myself from what’s happening to my body.

So far so good?

So this is where it gets really interesting. In many of these instances, including my rape, there is a phase 4. Phase 4 happens when the system is desperately trying to regain a sense of control. I noticed it became more likely, or more strongly felt, later in life as I got older, physically stronger and actually more resilient and able to defend myself more.

Phase 4 : Seduction.

My experience:   I suddenly feel a surge of power and beginning to initiate sexual activity with my “attacker”. I might kiss them back or begin kissing them if kissing isn’t happening. I make moves towards them. Touching them, grabbing them and become feisty or seemingly playful. At this point they are now confident we are in consent. We are still not in consent.

I feel:   Highly aroused, powerful, dominant, joyful, excited, still underlying terrified, although I’m no longer consistently in touch with that feeling.

In my body: I feel a strong surge of energy, my heart is now racing, blood comes to my genitals and face, I have strength in my muscles and my hands. I might now be able to manage a sort of detached eye contact, just sufficient to keep their attention and let them know how powerful I am, and I still don’t have much access to my speech. I’m starting to breathe again and it’s shallow.

I think: “This is so hot, just go with it, this might not be someone you’re attracted to and you are in this moment so just enjoy it”. Or “I’m so attractive. Look how turned on they are by me. I feel powerful”.

What’s happening: A strong protective aspect of me has taken over my system. I am at this point not able to consciously control my body or my speech, except in moments of lucidity, where the terrified part of me I have overridden might be able to pipe up with “get off me” or “I don’t want this”, which is often met with laughter, the other thinking I’m playing because it’s not the consistent message they are receiving from my body at this point. There is an internal vying for control of my nervous system by different protective parts of my psyche. Anger energy discharges itself silently in the physical wrestling motions I am making with the other.

You might at this point be feeling some uncomfortable feelings as you’re reading. If you are, please stop for a moment and take a few minutes to breath, shake off your body and come back to yourself. Come back later if that’s what your system needs right now. It’s complex and Icky stuff.

So once I’m safely out the energy of this person, using some suite of skills to end the encounter and eventually make a break for freedom (this can include supporting the person to orgasm to they feel complete, some distraction or diversion technique or an eventual opportunity to fight or flee) we move onto phase 5.

Phase 5: Splitting

My experience:  I’m trying to make sense of what happened. My brain does whatever it needs to do to tell itself/me a story that I can handle, where those terrifying feelings are kept at bay. I tell one or a few people a shallow version of the story, where I leave out the details I feel shameful about, toy with reporting the person and usually don’t follow it through, cry a little, maybe get professional support for a bit if I’m unable to function at work after the incident, and then box it away forever.

I might go through a period of feeling very self-protective and non sexual, followed by a period of hyper-sexualisation where I try to regain some internal feelings of being powerful, which may or may not actually get acted out.

I feel: Shame. Confusion. Lonely. Angry. Scared. Vulnerable.

In my body: I’m rigid. My breath is shallow. I’m very cognitive, with looping thoughts and unanswered questions. I might start overeating or over-thinking as a coping mechanism. Later down the line I might feel arousal energy, and it’s not so much from my genitals as from my power centre.

I think: “Who should I tell? Should I report this person? People need to know what they are capable of”, then “No, I asked for this, I confused them, I don’t want any more trouble for me or anyone else. Let’s just forget about it”, “something is wrong with me that this happens to me” or “I’m just a fucked up highly sexual person” or “maybe I wanted this with this person”?

What’s happening: I am exiling the part of me that was scared. I am building/allowing in a suite of protective personality aspects that can stop me from ever again feeling those feelings of being totally overpowered. I am giving them permission to take over my body and run my life for me whenever this vulnerable part of me feels activated as it has lost trust in me to take care of it. I am ensuring that I stay now a little bit less in my body, where my truth lies. I’m cutting myself off from my pain.

Each violation I experience, unless I break my response pattern to what’s happening, strengthens the capacity of my protective parts to take over my system. They just get better and better at their job of taking my out my body.

Still with me?

What would be healthiest after such a trauma would be to go to a friend, parent, partner or professional who works with trauma and the body, feel fully all the feelings, shake, complete the thwarted defence response and disperse the stuck energy from the system in real time. Seeking help is such a critical step, as is giving the terrified part of oneself space to be seen and heard. It’s so important to rebuild trust in your own system after a violation.

For me I often managed to tell one or a few people something and never fully allowed myself to collapse, be held, and supported back to my wholeness.

Due to the overwhelming shame and the actual physical limitations of my body to handle the full strength of the energetic charge of the emotions of terror and rage, only as I have aged have I been able to step back objectively from the situation and really feel and speak from my truth

So this is the pattern. What’s interesting is understanding where it got set.

Where in my personal history did I learn to Flirt, Freeze, Dissociate, Seduce, Lie to myself and lock away the memory?

For the last few years I’ve trawled my experiences during my healing journey and sexual healing journey with an eye open for early childhood sexual violation and I haven’t found it.

I’ve found and felt waves of extreme fear and violation, senses of impending danger, intense triggers arising in inexplicable situations. I’ve grilled my mother, had an energy healer tell me something happened with my dad when I was 4 (which I discounted because I know, love and trust my father), and spent hours in my body just listening to all the untold stories it wants to tell me.

I’ve looked everywhere and can’t find a trace of having been sexually violated as a young child.

Of course it’s possible I was and that I’m just not ready to handle knowing it yet and the memory is still repressed.

Sadly many people have experienced childhood sexual violation. It’s very common; especially by family members, parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, family friends. It’s often the people we most trust.

And for me I don’t think that was the cause.

I now believe aggressive and heart-disconnected episodes of Spanking wired me to be vulnerable for sexual violation.

Yep. That’s it. Spanking.

In my childhood my mother had low emotional range of resiliency, which, being a young mother of 3 kids raised in an emotionally neglectful family is no surprise, and an adhoc tendency for  becoming overwhelmed and displaying violent outbursts, coupled with a heavy dissociation that wipes them from her memory and prevents acknowledgement of the situation or an apology.

My dad was reasonably emotionally stable (or just not really very emotional, except in extreme moments of repression over-spilling into rage) and would occasionally come home and be asked to enforce less rage-induced discipline on those “naughty” (normal) children who had been too loud, playful or quarrelsome for my mother during the day. My mother often didn’t have the energy (or heart) to hit us once her overwhelm had passed if she hadn’t done so at the time, later perhaps feeling loving and connected to us again and yet holding a belief about the importance of physical punishment as an integral part of good parenting . So sometimes I would find myself being hit by my loving dad as he got home from work, hours after some trigger from my mother that had scared me.

When I really needed at that time was my dad to help calm and regulate my nervous system from the hyper vigilant and activated state I was left in after my mum’s outburst, and instead, without asking me what happened, or giving me any agency over what was coming, he would dutifully hit me. 

I’m fairly sure any sentient human needs to leave their heart to hit a defenceless child stood in front of them as they return home from work. I imagine there was a powerful story running about showing a united front as parents. Sadly childhood isn’t meant to be a battlefield.

This pattern of parenting, having hands laid on me by dissociated, disconnected or raging parents, showered my childhood with moments of unpredictable and inescapable confusion, fear, distress and emotional isolation.

So how does that contribute to my propensity to get sexually violated as an adult?

Curious?                

It’s actually pretty simple, and although this specific set of circumstances is unique to me, we all have our own traumas and our own patterning as a result, so there might be something that speaks to your experience.

So imagine that every child is born pretty perfect and totally unique, mostly functional, totally dependent and a bit of blank canvas. They are then immediately thrown into an environment that then serves to shape and build on their personality. Our personality is essentially the external manifestation of behaviours our nervous system learned in response to different stimuli, and is designed, with amazing efficiency, for survival in the unique social and physical environment in which we grew up. This formation and pattern setting happens especially over the first 5 to 8 years of life and extends a little further through adolescence and early sexual experiences at second puberty when our key teenage reproductive hormones kick in.

 Note: first puberty happens at around 5 years old when the first Eros energy and aliveness start to come online and flood the body, (cue rubbing a teddy bear on the parts that feel nice between your legs or flirting with mum or dad for practise.)

So as a child of 4 or 5 years old I learned all the ways to avoid getting physically hurt when my mum lost her capacity to ground herself and I learned the hard way to stop crying very quickly or else things got worse and that running and hiding only got me so far; I quickly learned the best approach was to freeze and dissociate. One of my sisters learned to fight and run. Another became phenomenal at “tending and befriending” a soon-to-blow mum and pacifying her back to sanity. We each had different experiences in our development and we each found our way through.

I learned not to speak up, fight back or try and run away when I’m attacked. I learned to cope by freezing and dissociation.

With my dad the dynamic was different. He rarely hit me in rage and what he did was to emotionally disconnect from me in order to carry out the punishment. My “good girl” behaviour and clever talk got me no-where with my loving dad. I think this was more painful and confusing for me than the erractic nature of my mother’s behaviour. My dad was my safe place. Until he wasn’t.

Being pinned down, having my pants pulled down and being repeatedly hit and hurt, whilst being told I was “bad” by the people I loved the most, with no apology, taught me something was wrong with me and that my feelings don’t matter, wired me with feelings of shame, set me up to tolerate acts of cruelty from loved ones, and ensure I knew that there was no support available so not to bother asking for it.

I imagine, that had always understood why I was in trouble, I might have felt differently. If I had had time to speak my truth I might have felt more empowered. The time my dad hit me on demand without so much as asking why, after my mum had had a bad day, raged around the house over nothing and already scared me and my sister half to death, broke my heart. I lot a piece of myself that day. I was 4 years old.

And what about the seduction and splitting?

Well the seduction came later and is actually more advanced form of self protection; a higher cognitive functioning behaviour than the flight or fight response, and part of the same system. It utilises the social engagement system to make a threatening situation feel safer by tending to the other person to stop them from going into escalating levels of attack, plus it placates the powerless feeling in the body by regaining a sense of personal power and allowing some energy to mobilse. I suspect it might be an instinctual response for women, for whom physical strength is normally not their primary asset and who can more easily turn to forms of manipulation to exert power.

Splitting/Exiling occurs when the what you’ve just learned or experienced teaches you that some part of you is not wanted or safe in the world and the associated fear of the implications of that underlying truth is too intense for the body to handle, so it’s suppressed.

It would have been impossible as a child to hold as true the reality of the memory of how abandoned by and terrified of my parents I was. So I hid it in my psyche.

 And I made up some other story. In this case I made my dad into my hero who couldn’t do wrong and my mum as the villain who I needed to escape from to be safe. It felt like a game. At least that way I didn’t feel completely alone. And the anger I sometimes felt towards my mum helped me stay feeling powerful rather than terrified and vulnerable.

That part of me that believed I inflicted this punishment on myself because I was wrong in some ways relished the chance to jump up and share it’s beliefs with me every time I got violated in the future. I would be flooded with shame until I found a way to stuff it back down again by going into my old patterns of internalising, justifying and then splitting off the memory.

There is much more depth and complexity to this psychological analysis and it’s enough of an overview for this article to put the message across.

Thanks for reading this far.

There is one more piece to follow in part 3.

In part 3 you will learn:

• How these protective mechanisms I developed in my nervous system and personality show up in my day to day sexual behaviour and how I can use that as a trailhead to healing.
• What can be done to break the pattern and free oneself from a life of sexual violation and even bad sex, once and for all.

If you are suffering from sexual, relational, or emotional challenges as a result of early childhood or adult trauma, or simply looking for more support in developing your sexual expression and allowing your sexuality in as a healthy, integrated part of your life, please find me at www.emmakharper.com

Or if you live in the South East, or London, Join me this June for the trauma informed 2019 Women’s Sexual Expression Programme: An intimate circle of up to 10 women journeying with their sexuality to reclaim the type of sex they want to be having, with the people they want to have it with, when they want it.

https://www.facebook.com/events/2343417825947479/

https://www.emmakharper.com/services/2019-women-s-sexual-expression-programme

And if reading this brings up painful personal material for you, please remember to speak with a friend or loved one or reach out for professional help. You are not alone. Bad things happen to good people and we’re all just doing our best in a very complicated and challenging world.

With Love

Emma

Emma K Harper

Psychosexual Somatics® Therapist, Speaker, Teacher, Writer, Dancer, Musician. 

Discover Your Sexuality, Integrity, Freedom @ www.emmakharper.com

When I was 15 years old I was raped. Here’s what I’ve learned about why childhood spanking left me vulnerable to repeat sexual violations and what I’m now doing about it.

Written by Emma Harper on 29 April 2019.

Picture this: I’m 15 years old, at a friend’s house party, dancing and having a good time, having a few drinks and chilling with friends, when my (very new) boyfriend of the time, who had asked me to be his girlfriend just a few days earlier, suggests we go outside and then propositions me for sex.

We had attempted sex around 9 months earlier, shortly after I lost my virginity to a man who, the next day, got back with his former girlfriend (a girl in my class at school who was loved by my friendship group and therefore left me in confusion and shame, unable to share about this critical moment in my sexual maturation with my friends).

The attempted sex was a total failure. After some brief moments of feeling very sexually powerful, like the most sexually mature girl I knew who wanted to share her new-found skills with anyone who would appreciate them, I confidently led him out to the woods and lay myself down on the floor beckoning or him to come and lie with me. The whole event ended up in a chaffed vaginal entrance, multiple cuts and scratches on my bum, a lot of frustration, almost no arousal and certainly no penetration. That was a good lesson for me in the need for body-based turn-on, vaginal lubrication and more than just my uninformed and burdened teenage minds approval for intercourse.

Wind forward 9 months and, on this day, here I am with one of the coolest guys in school, flattered he has asked me out and realising I don’t want to have sex with him; I want to dance.

I say “No thanks”, go back into the party and get back to socialising and dancing.

“No” is a complete sentence. That should have been all that was needed.

At some point later his best friend comes to find me and the rest gets hazy. I remember being taken back outside, round the corner of the house and at some point realising my “boyfriend” is still there brandishing a condom. I remember feeling very scared and trying to get away and then I remember his friend blocking me and preventing me from doing so. I don’t remember this guy’s name, and I remember vividly (now I’ve recovered more of the repressed memory) that he was very tall, with dark hair.

After I’m securely up against the wall and in the clutches of my “boyfriend” the friend turns away to give us our privacy and make sure no-one catches us.

With all the strength I can muster in that moment, I say “No” again and try to escape. I can’t. He ignores me.

The fact I managed to say “no”, and can remember it, was a thin thread keeping me connected to the truth that I was raped, when the psychological coping mechanism that followed had me hide the full truth from myself for the next 20 years.

After a brief flood of terror, some part of me makes peace with the fact that the only way I’m going to come out of this in one piece is to have sex with him. At that point, or probably just before, I promptly dissociate and leave my body. The rest is a blur. 

I don’t remember how I left or how I get home.

I don’t remember what state I was in, if I was crying or not, if I spoken to anyone or not.

I just remember overwhelming feelings of shame.

Part of me that convinced myself it was somehow consensual, or at least that I deserved it. That as his girlfriend I had given him the rights to my body or led him on.

I told myself that I had been a slut and had sex with him too soon in our relationship. I felt very confused about what just happened and I didn’t want anyone to know about it.

I’ve later discovered this internalising of a “fake consent” story which validates assumed consent, without actually getting consent, is a coping mechanism for feelings of being completely overpowered and deeply out of control.

He broke up with me at school that week and promptly started dating a really cool girl who I had always felt threatened and borderline bullied by. I felt simultaneously used and relieved.

I kept my mouth shut.

Today I am 36, currently single, and recovering from a relationship break-up that was surprisingly heartbreaking for me given that I did the leaving and had only known him, long distance, for 6 months. It catapulted me, rather against my wishes, into the next level of my personal work, unravelling my childhood attachment wounds and looking into many of those deep, dark places that I’ve been avoiding for 30 years.

What I’ve found in this journey into the most vulnerable and hurt parts of myself has been quite remarkable.

At 36 I can recognise and get curious about a pattern of repetitive physical violation.

I’m not sure when it first started, it’s just been a normal part of my experience of being me, which I put down for many years to simply being female. These experiences were, no doubt, a great motivation for my journey into Martial Arts and Self defence, and yet, on reflection, awful.

I’ve had a number of unwanted hands on me or in me episodes that I’ve experienced since age 14. You can add to this list countless experiences of being exposed to, leered at, cat called and a really creepy moment in the swimming pool changing rooms where I looked down to find a man having slid under the cubical wall, lying on his back on the floor with his head looking up my towel as I got dressed after my swim.

Some examples:

• Passing out at a party, age 14, and having a group of men apparently touching me and laughing at me. I found out subsequently from a “friend” (who did nothing to stop the episode).
• Having a guy I’m dancing with shove a finger inside me unexpectedly on the dance floor.
• A co-worker at a temp job luring me into the store room and then grabbing my breasts.
• Being pushed up against the wall by a sexually hungry University Professor at an end of term dinner. I was rescued by a friend before it escalated further.
• Being unexpectedly kissed by a tour guide with such ferocity that I strained my neck.
• Sharing my huge king sized bed with a partnered male friend who “desperately needed a place to stay” on a night where my house was overfull with visitors and waking up in the night to find him on top of me and taking off my pants.
• A potential supplier at work taking me out to dinner and then to his place nearby for a cup of tea, trying to kiss me and then pinning the door shut and grabbing me when I say no and try to leave.
• A massage therapist friend offering me a massage and then unexpectedly taking off his clothes and shoving his cock in my mouth half way through.
• A personal trainer sneaking a finger into me during a “post-workout hip release massage” in the staff office.

I want at this point to speak to something here before I continue, because you could at this point get confused, judgement or distressed and distracted from the point of this article in a response to your own emotional reactions and potential triggers here.

I am not accusing anyone of being a perpetrator or making myself into a victim. That’s not helpful.

I have made some bad decisions, been naive, ambiguous, confused and sometimes just a bit silly or overly intoxicated. People have also violently and less violently overstepped physical, emotional, legal or professional boundaries, as I know I’ve done myself from time to time, always in good intention. I’m no angel.

None of that is the point.  

In each of these scenarios I could find reasons to explain and justify why the person did what they did and my role in that. What I’m interested in is why I became the sort of woman who gets into these situations and whose physical bodily boundaries get repeatedly crossed.

I’m interested in unravelling my experience in order that I can change it and continue to support others who have their boundaries crossed, to change their experiences.

When I distil down what happens in the majority of these scenarios (where I’m awake) it looks broadly like this:

1. Phase 1: Connection.
2. Phase 2: Move to action.
3. Phase 3: Unwanted Physical Touch.
4. Phase 4: Seduction.
5. Phase 5: Splitting.

In each of these phases there are distinct physiological and neurological changes that are occurring whilst my nervous system copes with the violation. Moving through the 5 stages I move from safety and connection, through confusion, into overwhelm (eventually loosing conscious control of my body), try to regain feelings of control and then eventually find a way to settle my system through strengthening protection personality aspects and splitting off intolerable feelings.

By understanding my responsive personality aspects and unconscious coping mechanisms I can unlock a gateway to my own healing and break the pattern.

In Part 2, I will share with you:

• What’s happening in my nervous system and body in each of the 5 phases to allow the violation to happen.
• How I believe that childhood spanking established the pattern in my nervous system and adult behaviours that set me up to be vulnerable to sexual violation.

In Part 3, I will share with you:

• How these protective mechanisms I developed in my nervous system and personality show up in my day to day sexual behaviour and how I can use that as a trailhead to healing.
• What can be done to break the pattern and free oneself from a life of sexual violation and even bad sex, once and for all.

Thanks for reading this far.

If you are suffering from sexual, relational, or emotional challenges as a result of early childhood or adult trauma, or simply looking for more support in developing your sexual expression and allowing your sexuality in as a healthy, integrated part of your life, please find me at www.emmakharper.com

Or if you live in the South East, or London, Join me this June for the trauma-informed 2019 Women’s Sexual Expression Programme: An intimate circle of up to 10 women journeying with their sexuality to reclaim the type of sex they want to be having, with the people they want to have it with, when they want it.

https://www.facebook.com/events/2343417825947479/

https://www.emmakharper.com/services/2019-women-s-sexual-expression-programme

And if reading this brings up painful personal material for you, please remember to speak with a friend or loved one or reach out for professional help. You are not alone. Bad things happen to good people and we’re all just doing our best in a very complicated and challenging world.

With Love

Emma

Emma K Harper

Psychosexual Somatics® Therapist, Speaker, Teacher, Writer, Dancer, Musician. 

Discover Your Sexuality, Integrity, Freedom @ www.emmakharper.com

"The wound is the place where the light enters you".  Rumi

Sexuality as a lens for personal transformation

Written by Emma Harper on 02 November 2018.

… and celebrating my first Vaginal Orgasm

I’m 36 now, and I’ve spent a lot of my life having really average sex.

It started as a young teenager with lots of fun experimentation, some of which was really empowering and most of which was often pretty dumb or dangerous.

I had a lot of sex outside, and ended up with more sand up my vagina and enormous unexplainable scratches than I care to remember.

Once I get chased by a herd of angry cows before I had time to do my trousers up.

In the years to follow I settled into a long term relationship and a sexual life that started to resemble Groundhog Day. It happened on his terms, at his timing, for his pleasure. Same old, same old.

On a good day I’d have the courage to ask for my partners support to suck my nipple after he’d emptied himself into me so that I might use the vibrator he had bought me to bring myself to climax and pretend we were still intimately engaging. He’d get pretty bored of that after about 2 mins and go back to watching T.V. or playing something on his phone.

Sex for me became about a desperate attempt to connect with my partner and a failing tool for me in trying to connect with the needs of my body for touch and intimacy.

By the end of our relationship I’d become so afraid of initiating intimacy and getting rejected in the process that I had completely stopped expressing my needs…and at this point this passive behaviour had also started to seep outside the bedroom. Having once been a strong confident young woman, i was becoming a pushover.

My partner I had once told me that I wasn’t allowed to kiss him anymore because my kisses were too sloppy and sexual and he didn’t like me hitting on him. Oral sex had been side-lined years earlier. I had to save all my expressions of personal empowerment for my Corporate job, where at times I would notice I could be a bit of a bitch.

In one relationship-crushing move, I eventually went 30 days without initiating even hugs, touch and quality time with my partner to see if he had any interest in connecting with me physically at all. Turns out he didn’t. After a lot of uncomfortable feelings and a short affair, our 15 year relationship was over.

It wasn’t until my Mid 30’s, in the middle of deep spiritual inquiry, that I began to notice that the major experiences of transformation and growth in my life happened around, not prolonged stints of Meditation, or Shamanic Ceremonies, but the real life experiences of sexuality and intimacy I was experiencing with other humans.

This got me Interested.

I now believe, and have experienced, that when we stop and look at our sexuality and how we relate intimately to others we open a gateway to personal transformation.

Just as my healthy self esteem and access to aliveness had been eroded by the continuing marginalisation of my sexual self in my long term relationship, and as happens to many of us in unhealthy co-dependent relationships or abusive work environments, we can all reverse that trend and reclaim ourselves exponentially by consciously making shifts to how we show up in the bedroom.

When we progress ourselves enough to show up with new behaviours during sex and under the influence of our own sexual energy, those behaviours get deeply imprinted into our neurology and bodies in a way where they become more easily accessible and repeatable in the future. We develop the capacity to rapidly change ourselves and our worlds.

For example, I have had a pattern my whole life where I just let people talk at me, walk all over me and do things to me that I don’t like. Often I don’t even notice what is happening until I feel stressed or distressed afterwards or find myself resentful towards, or not wanting to see a person again.

In one session with my sex coach we worked on the concept of a “pause”. This simply involved building my capacity to identify when something wasn’t working for me and to actually speak “pause” to create space for myself to think and feel about what was happening and to ask for something to change to that would bring me back into presence and connection and out of overwhelm.

After a series of talk exercises, we tried it during a sexual exercise where I was receiving conscious touch from him on my body, and eventually on my genitals during a state of arousal.

Within a day of that session, I was clumsily saying “pause” at my poor sex coach every time he opened his mouth to ask anything of me that was more challenging than to pass the salt.

Within a week I was firing off “pauses” left right and centre at anyone and everyone who would tolerate my bemused attempts at reclaiming ownership for my life and happiness.

Within a month in normal social situations, I was able to notice when something was off for me, find a way to interrupt the situation with kindness and come back into balance and connection with the person I was relating with without a sense of discomfort or self judgment.

The next time I had sex, when my new partner was working really hard to try and give me pleasure and it wasn’t working for me, I was able to gently stop him, calm him down and find a space where we could both relax and start to more genuinely enjoy sex with each other on a more vulnerable and connected level.

Soon I was taking back control of my piano lessons from my enthusiastic overambitious Piano Teacher, re-evaluating my friendships, setting boundaries, taking breaks when I got stressed out in exercise classes and stopping those people in my life who had a tendency to talk at me like I was a brick wall from using me as free therapy at my expense.

I have never experienced such rapid, consistent and sustained transformation in my life through any other area of healing or personal development work, and trust me I’ve tried it all.

From Ayahuasca to Osteopathy and from Psychotherapy to Yoga (I couldn’t find an alternative therapy I’ve tried beginning with Z), working with my sexuality has been by far the most profound evolutionary experiences I've ever had.

I’m totally sold on Sex as an evolutionary tool.

Not less than 6 months down the line and my capacity to take care of myself and create more deeply connected and authentic relationships led to a series of the most intimate and transformative sexual encounters I have ever experienced…..

…and one of the Holy Grail’s of female sexuality

…my first Vaginal Orgasm! (Thanks Tom)

Although I’ve studied the energetic and spiritual magic of the Female Vaginal Orgasm at depth, I’m still new to it and still new to understanding It’s capacity to transform and transmute my life.

What I do know is this:

I’ve been working on my sexuality deeply and pro-actively for around 3 years now and through this medium I have developed capacities for self love, self-respect, personal power, autonomy, authenticity, empathy and pleasure that I never thought were possible.

I don’t work with sexuality because I think everyone deserves to be squirting and climaxing all over the kitchen, although great for those who can, I work with sexuality because it changes lives for the better and has the capacity for creating a more connected and loving world.

I encourage everyone to take your sexuality seriously and how you allow others to treat you in sexual situations as an indicator for how you are relating with others in all aspects of your life.

If you are not being tended to like a loved child / favourite pet / your partners most desired super hot celeb crush, stop blaming your partner, start looking at the mirror that your sex life is offering you right now and take this opportunity to take a stand for your own self worth.

You deserve to be loved, adored and ravished by life. Accept nothing less.

Join the Sexual Revolution.

Discover your Sexuality, Integrity, Freedom.

Improve your capacity to receive more sexual attention and pleasure

Written by Emma Harper on 21 September 2018.

Robert was a male in his 50’s who took pride in his capacity to give generously to his partners. He was skilled at oral sex and how to touch a female body and could spend hours “at the temple” massaging, worshipping and making love to his partners every last square inch.

Continue Reading

Reflections on Abuse

Written by Emma on 01 May 2018.

How I became a Psychosexual Somatics® Therapist

Written by Emma on 30 April 2018.

I didn't land in this career by accident. I've always found it fascinating what it means to be a Human.

Continue Reading