“You are a Survivor, My Darling:” The messiness of Healing after Sexual Abuse

By Laura LeMoon

*please note this content may triggering to those who have experienced sexual violence and mental health struggles

I’m not going to lie to you, I’m getting fucked later tonight by a married man. I know what you’re thinking – that I’m a horrible person, right? As I write this I’m vacillating between shadow and light; good and bad, right and wrong, healthy and sick. I’m a sexual trauma survivor. A lifetime of sexual trauma survivor - not one incident, not two or three or ten or even fifty but hundreds of times being assaulted and abused by countless numbers of a people on a continuous basis since I was a toddler. Nope, that’s not an exaggeration. Ironically, all of the consensual sex I have had has been with clients while working as an escort, meanwhile every single solitary boyfriend I have had has raped me - usually on an ongoing basis. Why am I going into all this detail, you might ask? Good question.

Healing is messy as fuck. Trauma has been-without a doubt, the single most prominent contributor to all of current my self-destructive behaviors. I recently took a four year break from sex, both of the escorting kind and the regular kind, precisely in order to address my trauma head-on and to heal. Everyone always says “you can’t love another until you love yourself,” and whatever other variations of that. I took four solid years to heal and didn’t date anyone, didn’t have sex, didn’t even kiss or hold hands with anyone. I took sex, sexual intimacy and sexual relationships completely out of the equation and worked like a motherfucker in weekly therapy, regular meetings with energy healers, psychics, shamans and tarot card readers, I spent countless hours writing in journals, doing yoga, meditation, finding a daily spiritual practice, etc. Well, I feel almost as lost today about sex as I did four years ago, and it’s not for lack of dedication to my own healing. I had sex for the first time in four years last month, which quickly lead to me being obsessed with sex 24/7, having anonymous, condomless sex with men I don’t know with the express purpose of contracting STD’s, as well as having sex with married men, sex in public, pregnancy risk sex (it is just what it sounds like), and just generally feeling like I have no intrinsic value as a human, and especially as a woman, unless a man is having sex with me.

In addition to C-PTSD (Complex PTSD), I have also been diagnosed with Bipolar I disorder, which contributes a lot to my sexually compulsive behaviors – especially while I’m manic. This combination makes for a lot of uphill battles for me, even when I am able to get all of the medical care I could ever need. What does it mean/look like/smell like/taste like/ for me to have sex in a healthy way? I literally have no models of that which I can think of. Yes, one can easily proselytize about “healthy intimacy” in flat platitudes about “boundaries, shared consent, mutual respect,” blah blah blah and all that other crap we might have learned on Sesame Street or Care Bears…but what does that look like, most specifically for me? And furthermore, what if this is the best I can do? Even after four years of intense spiritual work, sex still doesn’t turn me on unless it’s violent, degrading and abusive. I don’t know how to change that in terms of doing anything I’m not already doing. Yes, I’m doing meditation, I’m finding spirituality, I’m taking my meds, I’m going to therapy… And it isn’t enough. What if I’m never “fixed?” What if I’m never “back to normal?” Maybe I just have to accept that these are my struggles and I’m not having them because it’s punishment for doing something wrong or it’s punishment for BEING someone wrong. One of the things that has helped me cope with abuse, which I learned in childhood was the victim role and the sick role. Because my house was a constant shit show of “who is more fucked up “and who can get the most attention by being the most fucked up, I learned that being “fucked up” is the way to get my basic needs met. Years ago during a time when my bipolar mania was especially bad, my express goal in life was to become a “crackwhore” (which I did). Yes, you read that right. Is that a stupid, nonsensical thing to want to be? Sure. But it’s not a matter of smart or stupid, logic and reason. It’s a matter of trauma conditioning and feeling like this was more comfortable and familiar to more than, say, trying to go become a biomedical engineer, or trying to write a New York Times bestselling novel. I could be bad because I was bad.

As I sit here, trying to decide what I’m going to do tonight, I can say that I honestly don’t know. Even if I can fight the urge tonight, this has been a nearly lifelong battle. I was sexually abused beginning at three years old. I was born with a biochemical brain illness called bipolar. I’ve never had a chance to experience what “healthy” is. I’ve been adapting and then re-adapting again and again to external trauma for my whole life until I’m like this knotted up old tree. The hardest thing for assault survivors like me is making the decision everyday – on a daily fucking basis – to strive towards healthy sexuality. We could spend all night and many, many pages debating whether fucking married men or not using condoms or having anonymous sex in an alleyway, or any of the other shit I’ve been engaging in is healthy or not and we’re still not going to hit upon an answer. For sexual assault survivors, the degree to which we judge sexual behavior has to be looked at in terms of what is healthy for said person who has been through XYZ and is a survivor of XYZ.

This issue I have with sexual balance, with trying to have a healthy relationship to sex isn’t going away tonight or next week or next year. It’s something that, like a missing limb, I’m going to have to learn to work around because I will never completely get back what I lost as a result of being victimized, but that shouldn’t even be the goal anyways. I don’t have a storybook ending wrapped up in a nice tidy bow for you today. I don’t have answers. I don’t know what I’m going to do when I shut this laptop and go about with the rest of my evening and it’s just me and that empty longing. But what I know is that I won’t give up on my commitment to my healing, to keep praying and meditating and writing and taking my medication and going to therapy and just trying. I was never given a choice about whether or not I wanted to be a sexual assault victim, but today, right here and now, those are the choices I DO have.

You are a Survivor (excerpt)

By Nikita Gill

You are a survivor, my darling, and
I salute you for everything you have been through,
And for making the universe so proud,
So very proud of what you have become.

Laura LeMoon is a sex worker and activist. Her writing and social justice work can be seen in Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, Associated Press, The Huffington Post, BuzzFeed News and more. She has worked for the United Nations as a Peer Advisor on international public policy issues related to sex work, HIV and drug use. She lives in Seattle with her rescue pup, Coco Bean.