Sex: After Trauma
w/ Kyra Flatow
Kyra was kidnapped and sexually assaulted by an ex-boyfriend her Junior year of High School. She was taken in the middle of the night and was transported to a field behind the local HS where she was assaulted in many ways. She was put back in the car and made the comment to him “I can’t believe I ever trusted you.” So, instead of taking her home, he took her to the dump, where she thought she was going to die.
Nobody in her hometown believed her. He was a preacher’s son and an athlete and on an athletic scholarship and nobody thought he would ever do such a thing. So, she didn’t know where to turn or who would believe her.
She didn’t see a therapist for any of this until nearly 10 years later and has been in therapy ever since. Every week in therapy is a new adventure uncovering new things about herself. If she had started therapy immediately following her trauma, she admits that she may not have gotten as much out of it.
She wasn’t believed, so she didn’t even believe herself.
We aren’t “dealing with things,” we’re working through things. She will never go back to her life the way it used to be. There is before the trauma and there is after the trauma and you can never go back to the time before, you can only work to make the life after the trauma the best that it can be.
What’s the new normal? How has this trauma shown up in Kyra’s life? She is very up front about how things have affected her. She is very open and honest about what has happened to her, at least at a high level, with prospective partners. So many of them can’t handle it and basically run away. She realizes that this is not about her, it’s about what they can or cannot handle. Kyra shares a couple of examples of times with partners that involve how her trauma has affected her sexual encounters.
She didn’t want to go to therapy because “broken people go to therapy.” She was willing to share her brokenness, but wanted to seem put together all the time on social media. This was because, according to her therapist, she needed to control the narrative. So, she had to bribe herself to go to therapy. She wasn’t there to talk about her trauma, she was just there to talk about whatever the problem was at the time. Of course, her problems seemed to point back to her trauma, so eventually she was able to talk about the things from her past and begin healing from these traumatic events.
She cared so much about the person that assaulted her, she didn’t tell the truth about what happened. The night it happened, her dad told her to write down everything that happened. So she went back and got a copy. When she looked back at what she wrote down, so much of what she remembers happening wasn’t in what she wrote down because she was still protecting him at the time.
“Good sex can’t happen until you learn to love yourself, and what you like and what your body likes.” Society teaches us that a man’s pleasure is the most important thing, but that’s just not true. Uncomfortable conversations are important to get the truth out there about sex. They’re hard to have, but they get better over time.
Kyra can be found on IG: @kflatow09
