“But if we are abused or ignored in childhood, or grow up in a family where sexuality is treated with disgust, our inner map contains a different message. Our sense of our self is marked by contempt and humiliation, and we are more likely to think “he (or she) has my number” and fail to protest if we are mistreated.”
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk

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I’ve never thought of myself as a survivor of abuse. My parents, and people who know them, would object to the idea that I grew up in a family where sexuality was treated with disgust. And “disgust” is not quite the right word. But healthy sexuality was certainly not something anyone in my family, or anyone in my church, was interested in talking about. Sex was something frightening, something that could sneak up on me without warning if I got too close to a boy at a high school dance, if I was sleeping in a tent with a boy on a camping trip at college, if I let myself succumb to temptation. And if it did, that was a tragedy, a disaster, a terrible sin.

Nothing I was taught prepared me to react when the first boy I kissed laid on top of me in a field and I wanted him to get off. I didn’t have the words to say, “I wanted this before, but I don’t want it anymore.” I didn’t have the words to negotiate even something as innocent as teenage makeouts, because the only framing I had for them was “temptation.”

So I lost my voice. This would have surprised my parents, my friends, my church. I am not in the habit of keeping quiet about violence.

Except when it’s me getting hurt, and when the weapon is sex.

I wish I could say it got better: it didn’t. It got worse.

I drifted away from church in college. I explored my own sexuality. I had sex.

I had sex because I wanted to. But the ways in which I had sex were often coercive. I found myself in a relationship that was emotionally and sexually abusive.

And, later, I was raped. In a situation where I had initially consented, then withdrew consent, and that withdrawal was not respected. I was hurt, physically and emotionally, and I didn’t have the words to describe what had happened for years, because I had given in, I had consented, and so it was my fault.

It’s hard to protest if, somewhere under your liberated-radical-woman cerebral cortex, there’s a decade of lessons that sex outside of marriage is wrong. That you are doing something illicit, something you should be ashamed of. It’s hard to say “this feels wrong” if you’re not allowed to say “this feels good.”

I don’t have any answers. I’m only just beginning to process what’s happened, to piece together a sexuality that’s of my own making, to identify my own desires. But I ache for all the little girls who are being told, with the best of intentions, to avoid temptation, without also being told that they are allowed to want. That sexual desire is a normal part of being a human being, that it isn’t wrong, that they can decide what they want to do about that, and with whom. And that they will be worthy of love and worthy of God, no matter what they choose.