Taken In Hand after abusive past?

You can heal from this but it will require very slow and careful desensitization. It may take 1-5 years. What may be difficult, given your desire for your husband to be in charge, is that your husband must allow you to be in detailed control of your sexual encounters.

You should not engage in a desensitization system without coaching from a psychologist or competent physician.

Do not proceed with any step until you have mastered the initial step, for at least a month.

1. I would first recommend no intercourse, at all, or any physical contact with your husband that makes you uncomfortable or brings back memories from the past or creates panic attacks.

2. You must be able to masturbate in private in your empty house and achieve orgasm without experiencing intrusive recollections of past abuse or having panic attacks. If you do not know how to achieve orgasm or how to do so without having intrusive recollections, write back and I will give you additional instructions.

3. If you are at this step, you should be able to masturbate by yourself without intrusive recollections. If you can do that, you should practice masturbating with the door open to your bedroom, but your husband not in the house. Each small step that you take in this step 3, should be mastered for a month before moving on (at least a month!). When you can do that, masturbate with your husband in the house, but at the other end of the house. Tell your husband how far you want him from the bedroom, while masturbating to orgasm.

4. After several months, masturbate with your husband standing outside the door, but without seeing him. The next step is somewhat harder, but possible. Tell your husband where to stand in the room and your husband face away from you. If you relapse and have a panic attack or intrusive recollection, have your husband move out of the room and practice for several weeks more without him in the room.

5. Always schedule something very fun and very relaxing after each time you masturbate. Do something which is very distracting to try to prevent yourself from thinking about the previous abuse. Leaving the house to see a pleasant movie is one thing that is good. Swimming, playing tennis, and doing something with a female friend who is fun; these are good distractions.

6. Once you are able to masturbate without intrusive recollections with your husband facing you in the room, then position your husband on the bed.

7. Ultimately, you want to be able to achieve orgasm, with your husband near you in bed.

8. Next, have your husband begin to touch you gently while you masturbate. You should feel comfortable with him touching you more and more as you masturbate to orgasm, without the intrusive recollections. If they come back, distract yourself and move a few steps backwards in the sequence. Find peaceful images that you can move your attention to when you do feel bothered by the intrusions. And then plan to quickly do something with a friend or do some other distraction.

9. At some point (perhaps 9-10 months into this), practice having your husband masturbate you himself and bring you to orgasm. Your husband should do it exactly as you tell him, increasing intensity or stopping completely at your discretion.

10. Tell your husband what your fantasies are (what your fantasies are about when your masturbate). Allow your husband to tell you your fantasies back to you or make variations, while you masturbate. If these are Taken-In-Hand fantasies, all the better. The important thing is that you be in actual control of what is happening sexually, even if you are fantasizing about not being in control, at least initially. As you grow more confident, relinquishing some sexual control to your husband is possible, as long as you do not feel "out of control". You will be able to tell whether you feel out of control if your panic attacks and intrusive memories return.

11. Perhaps a year or more into this, you can very gradually begin to touch your husband's penis and stimulate him.

12. At this point, your husband should know how to stimulate you with his hands and can gradually begin using his penis and hands to make sure you have an orgasm while you make sure that there are no intrusive memories occurring. He should stop immediately if there is and back away.

13. This obviously will be hard for your husband since he may have to go a year or more without sexual intercourse. But you have to absolutely control the tempo and your husband has to want to help you with this for it to work.

14. The emphasis should continue to be on your pleasure. Your husband should ask you what your fantasies are and you should tell them to your husband prior to encounters. This will help your husband to ultimately script pleasurable fantasies for you when he later is sexually touching you. Your husband may just penetrate you for a moment, while withdrawing and then masturbating you to orgasm. The process of proceeding more should be very gradual, without your husband trying to please himself inside you until you are extremely confident that you are able to not feel out of control during the sexual encounter (even if your fantasy is that your husband is in control of you).

15. Eventually, you will become more and more comfortable with your husband inside you. At that point, your husband will be able to orgasm in you while you also orgasm.

The fantasies can be completely of the Taken in Hand variety. But you must gain back control of your sexuality. Later (like years later), if you want to relinquish some physical control back to your husband in the sexual arena, that obviously is your prerogative and can be fun.

People panic and get intrusive memories when they are feeling out of control because of being horribly violated in the past and in fact being out of control in a bad way. When my patients have been willing to go extremely slowly (years) and work very closely together, sexual reintegration can occur. Sex can be fun and enjoyable as a couple. Your demons need not plague you forever.

By the way, certain meds can be taken before attempting masturbation to try to decrease the recollections of past abuse. These may not be the medicines that are commonly called anxiolytics, however. Some medicines do seem to decrease post-traumatic recollections and aid in retraining the mind. Believe me, though, meds by themselves are not the answer. I put the talk about medications at the bottom, because helping you to have more enjoyable sex requires behavioral interventions.

Now, if intrusive recollections plague you throughout the day, regardless of sexual encounters with your husband, medications often are beneficial and should be given BEFORE the above steps are taken.

Good Luck. And please do your desensitization efforts with the help of a competent psychologist or physician who has experience with this type of work.

Hi - first of all, my heart goes out to you. Sexual and physical child abuse can be soul shattering - it is as if pieces break off of you, and many different versions of you remain inside. Or, at least that was what it was like for me... and they all have voices, voices that never seem to shut up!

One thing sexual and physical, and emotional abuse does to all of us, I think, is that it changes our beliefs about ourselves, others, and the world in general. When these things happen, we make 'decisions' about things, even when we do not realize it. It screws up our brains, literally - forcing our 'fight or flight' centers to be much too delicate, our amygdala is over-engaged, causing panic attacks and occasionally night terrors... (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amygdala_)

And, often, we are so young we believe what our abusers tell us about ourselves. We are young, we depend on them for our survival - so something in us must believe them, they MUST be right (or we might die...)

Personally, I never found 'talk therapy' with normal shrinks to be of much use. We would drag out these painful memories, like foul stinking corpses, examine them - and put them back away again, still unhealed.

It was not until I found teachers who dealt with subjects of the spirit and soul that I was able to heal - because these things really hurt at the soul level. If you can, and when you are ready - try and find a teacher, a spiritual mentor whose concentration is not on b-mod and talk and psychoanalysis - but on healing those fractured parts of your soul; helping you uncover the decisions you made when you were being assaulted, and helping you to replace those beliefs with healthy, functional beliefs.

However, don't dishonor those beliefs - they kept you safe. They just don't work now that you ARE safe. Those broken pieces of yourself that speak in your head and tell you to be afraid? They are trying to help, to keep you safe. Talk back to those voices, in thanks and compassion. Be unwaveringly friendly and loving towards yourself - nurture yourself the way you would have liked to have been nurtured when you were young.

My first spiritual mentors specialized in child sexual abuse. They re-parented me, and gave me models of how parents should be, and how to parent myself. They also introduced me to Tibetan Buddhist ideas, and Pema Chodron, whose writings taught me compassion for myself. My next mentor introduced me to the idea of the shattered self, and re-integrating those broken 'children' in my mind to help me become whole. My third teacher works extensively with "The Four Agreements" - and he has taught me how to change old beliefs and decisions that have made me unhappy much of my life.

Some books have been useful along this journey -
http://coretransformation.org/

Anything by Pema Chodron
http://www.shambhala.org/teachers/pema/

Thomas Moore - Care of the Soul and Dark Night of the Soul

Anything by Don Miguel Ruiz (though I really needed my teacher to help me with putting this into action)

My current teacher's site is http://pathwaytohappiness.com/
Honestly, working with Gary has probably caused the swiftest and most useful changes in my happiness.... however, it could be that it wouldn't have been so fast without the work I'd already done - in any case, he's worth speaking to.

Finally, please remember - all of these things, even the darkest, have gifts of their own - and even though you've been hurt, these events have probably given you a gift of deep empathy, the ability to read peoples thoughts carefully, and a sense of compassion you may not have otherwise had.

Best to you and good luck on your journey!

Please take a look at The Courage to Heal. Combined with The Courage to Heal Workbook, it is a powerful tool to reconnect with lost parts of yourself.

Now, you mention the abuse occurred only 10 years ago; that is not that much time, actually, to deal with the emotional repercussions. However, as a person who has lived through sexual abuse as a child (as well as having to function with alcoholic parents) so I do know how difficult intimacy can be. Sex might be manageable, but true intimacy takes time. I am now 51, and I have had a lifetime to get past the abuse; you have not.

If I'd only had 10 years to absorb the body-blows, blows to the ego, destruction of one's view of self, reframing of the self in relation to the abuse, and the abuser, the doubts and questions (Did I do something wrong? Why did this happen to me? Did I cause this? Is this my fault? Do I deserve this?) as well as the sense of being unclean and feeling ostracized from the rest of society, all of whom are perceived as being somehow better than you for never having had this kind of thing happen—well, you have an idea of how much there is to integrate psychically before you're in any way ready to move on.

I went through group therapy during a part of my marriage when sex was already an issue, and being in group made sex almost impossible. It's my contention that you can only focus on so many things at once. Psychologically and emotionally, you can't expend endless energy without paying the price. For abuse survivors, I believe we have to ask ourselves, what do I have to have in my life now, to thrive, if not actually feel happiness... and if that thing is physical intimacy, then there is a wall to be gotten over.

I do remember times when I just lay there and sort of sobbed, either internally or where my husband at the time could see it. He knew what I was dealing with, but we both wanted and needed the physical intimacy. It is not something I can live without, and I was damned if I was going to let what happened to me destroy this one piece of joy. So... I fought back. I just learned over time to ignore the voices in my head, and proceed as if I were okay. Eventually I retrained my mind, and now I am truly fine. Sex doesn't get to me, I have none of what I used to call "subduction zones," which would come up and haunt me from time to time... dragging me down with them into the abyss.

I used to feel suicidal a lot, but now, I have found other ways to cope. I think it really helps that my parents are dead. They were my emotional, and in the case of my biological father, physical, abusers. So it's easier. But even so, I have suffered from some nightmares. And, I have to be honest and say, my marriage died, and part of the reason had to do, not with the abuse, but with the fact that I chose someone I could not feel close to, partially as a way of preventing intimacy, so that by the time I had become able to be intimate with someone, which took many, many years, I no longer wanted to be intimate with that particular person.

Anyway: long-winded, but these things are complex. Best of luck.