Sex After Sexual Abuse: How Abuse Impacts My Sex Life

Sex after sexual abuse: what's it like? Sexual abuse has a huge impact on my sex life. After two instances of sexual abuse, I felt that my sexuality no longer belonged to me. Twice my body was treated as an object to be used by my abusers as they saw fit, first during my childhood at the hands of a family member, then later by a stranger on a train. Though I didn't realize it at the time, I accepted that my sexuality belonged to the men I slept with and not to me. It took me a long time to confront this truth about the impact of sexual abuse on my sex life, and I still haven't deconstructed the many ways that these instances of abuse eventually brought me to my experiences with sex now. I decided to use this blog as a place to explore this. 

My Experiences with Sex After Sexual Abuse

Here's the reader's digest version of my experiences with sex after sexual abuse. 

Sexual abuse took away my feelings of agency over my body. Because my body was abused in this way at a young age, I came to the conclusion that my sexuality was about men, not about me. I made up stories about my experiences with sex that would please my partner -- stories largely influenced by porn -- and convinced myself of the truth of these stories. It didn't occur to me to take the time to discover what I actually enjoyed in bed because sex was about the other person, not me. 

Learn more about this in my video:

Next month, I'll dig into the details of my first experience with sexual abuse. 

I've never described in detail my early experiences with sexual abuse, in part because the memories are fuzzy and in part because it's uncomfortable for me, but I think it's time to try. In my next video post, I'll describe these early encounters, the effect these encounters had on my familial relationships and how it catapulted feelings of shame around sex. Looking ahead, I'll talk about my second experience with sexual abuse and my experiences with sex after sexual trauma.

It's not going to be easy to lay out my experiences with sex for all to see, so I'm going to do it one piece at a time. In the future, I'd like to explore the way it felt to have a stranger take advantage of me as a teenager, how shame seeped into my sex life and poisoned it, how sexual abuse affected my future relationships and what I'm now beginning to discover about my sexuality as an adult who has just begun to address my trauma. 

How has sexual abuse affected your sex life? Let me know in the comments.