Shame has been handed down to us within our generational lines and then enforced through the culture we live in.
We feel ashamed for having sex, for holding desire, for engaging in self-pleasure because it's what we were taught to feel.
We feel ashamed for having sex because the bigger, more important, more devastating truth is that the choice isn't ever really ours, even if you said yes.
The choice is made using the false stories and narratives that were given to you through this life. Through the systems and the generational trauma, gaslighting, and conditioning.
The church tells you it's a sin. They say, "It's ok, we're all born with it, but you have to resist it to be worthy of god's love." So you're being told that you can't possibly live up to god's love because your desire is a part of you, but you need to kill yourself trying anyway.
Society tells you that to keep a man, you need to have sex, but don't have too much sex because then you're damaged goods and not wife material, which of course is touted as the ultimate goal, to be wife-material.
So your decisions become about everything but your own desire. Don't have sex with him too soon, or he'll think you're a slut, but don't wait too long, or he'll leave. And then even when you decide to protect yourself and set a boundary for only sleeping with someone who has committed to you, that's still about your trauma and your shame.
It's still about him. That's the thing. All of this is male-centered. Every decision you make using those stories is actually about the man you're sleeping with. This applies to any gender as well, but the main narrative that affects our decisions centers around straight men.
Decisions using those narratives are not about you and what you want. Decisions based on trauma are not as empowering as you wanted them to be, and they still leave you feeling hurt or ashamed. I learned that the hard way shortly after my divorce.
It wasn't until I released the shame and the narratives that I was telling myself that I was finally able to have sex from an empowered place and actually enjoy it.
Because here's the truth about sexual empowerment. You find it when you embrace your desire. You find it when you finally learn what turns you on and stop worrying about perception and about whether or not you're worthy or if you'll go to hell. When you stop worrying about whether or not you should wait for your soulmate because no one else is worthy of you. That's purity culture shining through the spiritual community.
That's the piece people are missing. Trying to make a decision based on anyone's worthiness is still a decision that's being made outside of your own desire, your own wants. Because his worthiness should only have to do with whether or not he turns you on and respects your boundaries. Not what society, the church, or the spiritual community says makes him worthy. And his worthiness as someone you are interested in sexually does not have to equal his worthiness as someone to spend your life with. That's more purity culture taking on a new tone. All of those narratives boil down to shame, and this last one is about the shame you feel about fucking the wrong person.
Nothing is going to happen to you when you sleep with someone who isn't your soulmate. Nothing is going to happen to you if you sleep with someone you don't see a future with. Nothing is going to happen even if you sleep with someone who hurts you, except that you'll learn something you needed to know or see something about yourself or the world you needed to see.
Sex is a part of life. It's a part of our spiritual journey, including the trauma. Including the pain of someone hurting you. Including fucking people who maybe don't deserve you.
But we don't need to carry the shame too.
It's never the decision that's making you feel bad. It's always the shame that was never yours to carry.
It's the numbness that eventually replaces the shame out of survival.
And I want to talk about how this affects sexual abuse survivors.
First, most survivors don't even consider it assault because of the way purity culture has centered sex around men and placed all the shame on women. It makes it impossible to feel it was anyone's fault that you feel violated but your own.
Second, if you are aware of your assault, you still feel ashamed even if you know it wasn't your fault because of this conditioning. Your brain knows, but your body doesn't, and this disconnect compounds your trauma. This disconnect is why one assault leads to a snowball effect of years, even decades, of more abuse, assaults, and trauma.
Sexual trauma makes you feel like you're stumbling through your life unable to hear your own voice, to know your own needs and desires. It feels like you can never make the right decision because every decision hurts somehow.
For all of us, survivors of assault or not, sex becomes a vicious cycle, an endless dilemma. You can't enjoy it because your body learned to numb itself to survive the shame, but you feel like you should be having sex so you do it anyway, until the numbness itself becomes its own wound. Until it becomes impossible to breathe. Impossible to think about sex without having a panic attack.
It doesn't have to be this way.
But healing from this trauma, both the assaults and the gaslighting, requires deconstructing. It requires going deep and facing the pain and removing the stories your pain has given you from your body. Clearing it off your somatic field and rewiring your internal belief system and subconscious thoughts.
Your sexuality is yours to own. It's yours to express however you want. It won't look like anyone else's because it's yours. Your desires. Your preferences. Your timetable. Your boundaries. Your self-expression in how you wear or don't wear your sexuality.
All of these are yours to own.
But as with everything in this world, you can't know your truth if you're holding on to the stories of others, if you're holding onto the shame that was never yours to carry, or if the numbness is threatening to pull you under.