Asexuality
a meandering journey through sexual identity and the pervasiveness of unprocessed trauma.
I've been writing this article in my head for a long time because I felt it was really important to share. It's ended up going in unexpected directions because denial is engrained in survivors. I've learned a lot over the years because of therapists and books. I'll include a list of books at the end in case anyone else wants to benefit from them.
I'll briefly outline my purpose because if I don't,I know I'll get derailed somewhere and never finish this. I am a straight,non-binary “female at birth” mother of two adorable baby boys, and wife to a lesbian trans woman who figured herself out while I tried to understand myself. One of our babies was female at birth but grew into a precocious and rambunctious boy by his teen years. I was sexually molested by a father figure in my childhood. I spent the better part of a decade convinced I'm asexual and I might very well be, but I'm still figuring it out! I know I'm not sexually attracted to women and I have a wife who is currently the closest person to me who I'd even consider being intimate with. Since I'm not in a position to explore my own sexuality, I won't go beyond confirming I'm not a lesbian or interested in women. It's fine with me,I haven't needed sex at all for uncountable years now.
Ii know halting at a finish line this far back might seem unfinished to some, but I've always seen myself as a work in progress. I have an excellent imagination and am sure I will enter another race someday and cross the finish line that brings closure to the whole mess. I can accept that it won't be overnight and since it's not strictly necessary for me, I am going to take it slowly and walk to the finish at my own snail-like pace. After all, this is my life and it's made up of all my yesterdays and todays, and unknown numbers of tomorrows.I really won't know how it will go until I get there, and only Hallmark movies can find closure in 60 minutes (including commercials). That's probably enough fair warning for anyone reading this looking for answers that have confirmed endings. hey, maybe reading about a work in progress can help you figure out where to start and, though I'm unfinished, maybe you can put the rest of yourself together after seeing the pieces I've figured out so far. Take your time, be gentle with you. Patience is more important than anything else in life, even if you fucking hate patience as much as I do. Chocolate definitely helps.
Well, I got that out of the way but am not sure where to start now. Perhaps with the article I thought this would be? Some time after my second child was born, I lost all interest in physical intimacy (aka sex) and figured out i didn't have feelings for anyone that way. Immediately i latched on to childhood traumas, assuming I lost interest because my wife (husband at the time) decided we were done having children. Somehow believing I was so fixated on a childhood dream of having a dozen children and raising them in a big purple mansion with a whole McDonald's on one floor and an elevator, that I was able to overcome my asexuality long enough to get pregnant and have said dozen children. Once babies weren't an outcome of sex, I lost interest and turned the sex drive off. Asexuality came screaming back and made me physically repulsed by any activity that had led to sex in the past. My spouse was understandably upset and believed they had become so unattractive over the years that I couldn't admit I lost interest because it was them. I really didn't think that way! This was all my fault,somehow! So I started on a journey to prove I was the problem and just needed to get fixed to go back to normal,i.e. how things used to be. In the midst of therapy-filled days and reliving trauma to try and change my instinctual responses, (the recommended therapy process for overcoming sexual trauma), I felt myself reach a breaking point i couldn't get through no matter how many times we tried, and started researching other causes besides childhood trauma. Who knows, maybe I was just born this way? Honestly I was sure sex was pointless and unnecessary and I probably never wanted it anyway. Nevermind the horde of exes and the fingers on each hand that could count how many people I'd had sex with…. really, ignore that! I'm definitely not in denial! Look, asexuality is normal! aces have been around forever and were even responsible for a lot of the lfbtq+ work done in the community to help unlock sexual freedom for the world!ok? I'm normal and don't have anything to fix! So you're just gonna have to find someone else or live with no sex for the rest of your life! Our arguments turned into debates about me giving up on therapy and “fixing myself” rather than concluding that I’m asexual. For my wife, it was harder to accept me being Ace than it was to believe I’d get discouraged and give up on my sex life to avoid the pain of re-programming my responses Eventually we settled into a vaguely antagonistic relationship where my spouse resented me for marrying them and having children based on a lie that I was normal and straight. I became the villain in our love story. My spouse then started to struggle with her own identity because she felt like a sexual deviant with how she reacted to me being ace. Sexual urges somehow twisted within her and she finally realized she was a woman all along. So the journey we were on morphed into determining how much she needed to change to feel right in her own body..it’s not my story to tell so I'll leave off by explaining that my husband became my wife and started the paperwork and legwork for all that entailed for herself. We both talked about what would change and where the change left us,as a couple.something this drastic was bound to change us in unknown ways. Our biggest fears turned out to be the same:fear of losing each other. We'd already gone through a whole mindset restructuring when I confirmed my asexuality. In a way, I still feel like my wife's acceptance of herself as a woman was directly related to the relationship turning from a sexual one into a companionship. I still remember the intense relief I felt when sex was completely removed from the action list. I never had to endure that fear response again! yippee! I stopped being scared of my spouse almost immediately, but also didn’t want to experience anything that was the least bit related to attraction, so stopped reading romance novels and didn’t want to french kiss. touching was still a big fear for me. It honestly scared me to realize how deeply I was repulsed by attraction or even the hint of it. I dismissed it as part of asexuality. After all, gay people trying to be attracted to the oposite sex probably felt this way. so, I ignored the now unwanted parts of myself without a second glance. It’s probably pretty important to write about these little clues because my journey to finding asexuality was a massive ordeal that overshadowed my feelings and masked them to the point I couldn’t recognize anything else. like buying a new car fills your world with people also driving the car.. It was hard enough trying to accept asexuality as a possibility. I couldn't see any other car models. it felt like the answer to all my fears and worries. Maybe I had to crave out a little bit to make it fit, but the fit was snug and safe!
For my wife, whether or not I'm attracted to women,I have no interest in sex already, so becoming my wife wouldn't change much. We did find it amusing that for two 90s kids who grew up understanding lgbtq as “gay,bi, or lesbian” we couldn't understand ourselves until more people shared their identities with the world and defined themselves. Remembering all that I'd read and understood was entirely thanks to others. is something that drove me to ponder the content of this small window(i.e writing an article or blog) into our experience,in hopes that someone else could feel seen and accepted and safe to define themselves in a way that made them a member of a tribe rather than someone wrong and broken. We're all learning to understand ourselves by learning and watching others. It's how babies and toddlers eventually form their sense of self.Recently, IWell, I ended up writing a small letter to past me when my intent was to carry on past the (years-long) segment about how my wife and I ended up coming out as very different from what we could have ever imagined when we were kids.
I recently tried to explain my innate self confidence to a friend because confidence usually comes from actions being reinforced through repeated actions and the supportive response of trusted individuals. I had a tumultuous childhood that caused my psyche to build a hard block against truly trusting people. Especially people who seem supportive. So my confidence? For me, it's like comfy pyjamas. I'm confident because I behave from behind a comfortable wall where I have carefully stored the parts of me that I like. I’m not great at letting anyone past the wall but have it all decorated with forgivable and easy vulnerabilities so it looks like I’ve let people past my walls. Vulnerabilities I truly have, but presented in a way that can be easily placated with platitudes so it reduces the discomfort others feel about the trauma i endured. I recognize the behaviors I have that stem from the very hurt parts of myself, and understand I’ve only shared them superficially because looking at the whole picture is monumental and overwhelming and I don’t even want to look, why would anyone else? I'm trying to establish a friendship with someone who might be confused by some of my parts, but will clear up many of the quirks because of course survivors are quirky, and they realize it's not so bad and they are less uncomfortable. Connection flgoes nowhere if part are uncomfortable. So be yourself,but not too much.
I'm confident in being that walled person and maybe it's actually insanely chaotic beyond the wall, but that's ok, I know ADHD makes everything harder for me to process, but that's not stopping me from trying. If there's anything having a stroke has taught me, it's that acting with intent is what helps you regain the parts of yourself that were lost. Say it out loud when you do it. Make your brain engage.
Confidence is behaving from your comfort zone. It's soft and warm pyjamas with no expectations, just unapologetic acceptance.tell yourself “yea, this is me. So what? I like me!” Yea, like yourself right here and right now because you got you where you are, your self might have gone through some shitty experiences but that's all just a back story. You are here and now,not there and then and that person isn't who you are. It's who you used to be. You learned and changed. You evolved instead of being crushed underfoot. I know it's overwhelming to remember, and you're mourning for that old version of yourself. Maybe because you want to take away all the hurt so that the younger version of you can just exist without hurting. You can scream a billion “why?”s into the void, desperate to understand why someone you love so much could do something like that, and the void won't ever tell you. If the void told you why, what then? Would it be forgiveable? What reason is forgiveable in your opinion? That crying child who just wants to make sense of this experience and go back to feeling safe made it through more days and more experiences and is here now, still not knowing why. You need to find a new safe, because understanding wouldn't help. If you knew why,it would still have been something that happened to yo,u and that won't change. It's not ok. Nothing can make it ok because it's never been ok to do that to people. No matter why,they should not have done that at all,and because they did, that person is not a safe person, and you can protect yourself by not letting anyone else do something like that again. You aren't that person who was hurt anymore. You've grown and learned so much, and if someone tries to do that again, you'll be able to get yourself away because you're bigger and smarter than you were before. You are so smart, I bet you could recognize someone else going through that, and help them get away and get through the hurting part of knowing that someone you love and trust so much could hurt you,on purpose, for any reason at all. See? It's not who you are anymore. You're not even in that place anymore! Processing and getting over trauma isn't a simple experience. It needs a lot of comfort and safety. Maybe you will wake up tomorrow and feel just fine,but then break down in the middle of a store filled with people who want to help, that can happen,it probably won't help you go back to feeling better. All that you are and have experienced makes up your big and small pieces. You'll be all good one day and look back at this younger and hurting version of you and realize you've come so far despite being someone like that,who felt broken and worthless. You got up and took more steps to get where you are now, and you didn't even feel like it was hard, because you are so smart and capable and not shaped by your past. You probably left a lot of garbage back there too, and you don't even need it! You haven't noticed all the garbage you dropped on your way, have you? because that garbage was never yours. someone tried to make you carry it,but you let it go and didn't let it change you. That's because you have known who you are all along. You had some trouble recognizing yourself because you forgot to pay attention to you and kept glancing at a you who you stopped being a long time ago.
My childhood traumas are sexual in nature, which may be evident based on the eagerness with which I accepted asexuality. I have the kind of memory that makes re-living experiences incredibly vivid. An imagination so vast, I’ve given myself false memories because of one of my ADHD coping mechanisms. Iknow my brain is a special kind of something. frustrating, whatever else, it’s annoying and acts for me without even trying!I had no idea even though I DO KNOW thatbuilding a safe mental space is something many brains do when the brain wielder is experiencing traumatic events, like rape and physical harm.I understand even the memories of the trauma are often re-written within the safe place to protect the body.Knowing is fine and dandy, but controlling the how and when is the frustrating part. My Father killed himsellf when I was 18, shortly after I moved out of my parents’ house. I had a boyfriend at the time and he was there for me when my dad died, He supported me on countless levels. We did a lot of fun stuff together, but my memories from that time are like partially deconstructed lego, so I can remember pieces but have no idea where they fit as a whole.I assume the disjointed pieces are caused by my brain’s 3D space. I’ve always sensed myself as a formless sort of entity existing in a 3D space but not really there, just floating along with things happening around and to me but not really with me. I mostly feel like a third party in my own life.UUp until my father died, I defined myself and my life as a soap opera. sexually abused by the pastor of a church I grew up in, a pastor who proudly claimed to have changed my diapers(which my mom later explained I hadn’t worn by the time we joined the church), establishing himself as a father figure who had already devoted himself to raising me when I didn’t even know I was being raised. I actually have a very good memory of that period of my life, thank you! I always wanted a dad though, so I accepted his role as a father.My memories are mainly stored in a 3D space so if I want to recall them, I bring it up in my head by establishing the place in my head and then loading myself and the memory and playing it back. included in childhood memories: reaching for a light blue terry cloth elephant that hovered right at the edge of my vision, grasping it, and pulling to taste it. an older memory: encountering a brown bag with wooden handles, on the floor in front of me. opening the bag only to discover a toy I hated and would throw as hard as I could. It was red and blue and rubbery but I had no idea how to play with it so threw it every time I saw it, but it always went back in this bag, so I soon hated the bag and would avoid it whenever possible. a bit later: my actual dad!!! I can see him opening the door of our mobile home and coming inside from the sunny outside, and being very excited because I’ been sooo bored but finally! something new was happening. He greeted me and I noticed his head was past a certain shelf in the bookcase near the front door. That shelf had a striped toy I wanted and mom wouldn’t give me, so I wanted this person to give it to me instead. An unknown amount of time later, after failing to get the striped toy( a glue stick if anyone is curious), my next memory is still in the brown kitchen but my parents are fighting, so I push a chair between them and climb up to reach their faces and try to get their attention. later, that chair is over by the stove now, and I’m following all the stes to scramble eggs! including the weird mixing motion with a fork..oh! that looks right I think they’re done! turn off the stove flames with the dial on the side, put the eggs on a plate, blow to cool down, and eat them! Mom said we are out of milk but I saw it in the fridge with the eggs!! Pour myself a glass.. yuuuuck why does it taste so awful? Is this what Mom means about bad milk? well that’s probably why she said we’re out… gross blech blech blech. I gotta tell mommy about the eggs!!! ohhh she just got out of the tub! I’ll tell her now! I don’t think she understood because I’m sure she’d be so proud of me if she knew! I even turned the stove off like she said to, and didn’t touch the fire! My memories from childhood are extremely vivid, so why were there so many gaps afterwards?I went through many conversations with my boyfriend, trying to figure out why there were such big gaps. He told me about myself, but everything he said felt like a stranger and I got upset. that’s not me! I wouldn’t do something so stupid. I got scared and wanted to run away, so ultimately decided to break up with him. I ended up getting married a short time later and having a baby. I firmly remembered my childhood dream of a dozen kids and a giant purple mansion.I wasn’t completely memory-less during the subsequent time-period, but my most vivid memories remained those from toddler age. The newer memories remained vaguely ungrounded in reality so were hard to recognize as mine. As for “waking up” from the sort-of fugue state, I don’t think it was like a jolt in a falling dream, it was very hazy like trying to wake up when the blankies are sooo warm and comfy, but getting more and more panicked by all the unfamiliarity and feeling like I was far from home. Nothing was what I wanted for myself and I got angry with my boyfriend because he never seemed to notice I wasn’t me anymore and never tried to shake me awake. He was entirely blameless and, if anything, incredibly selfless, but I was scared and upset so took it out on him.I remember going to my job and struggling to make sense of the world. My job was at a store my dad and I shopped at often and I realized it was comforting and felt safe. My co-workers listened to my strange explanation of memory problems and some even compared it to a failing disk drive. haha! it was true!I’ve been building a life since then, and storing plenty more memories.
Until one day…I woke up in bed with my wife after a good weekend celebrating mother’s day. I’d had some alcohol the night before so was extra lazy upon awakening. Also, holy fucktoads did my hed huuurt! A migraine?? why now? gotta take some pain meds and eat something with them…oh right we got donuts yesterday, I’ll eat one! and drink some caffeine to hopefully make the headache go away faster…OOOOOOI gotta peee, well that’s first, then dr. pepper and excedrin, then donut! let’s gooo…I tried to stand up and turned to tear off to the bathroom but suddenly I fell and couldn’t move at all, wtf? how did I forget how to walk? I expressed this concern aloud when my sleepy wife noticed I fell and asked if I was hurt when I fell,she wanted to know if I tripped or what..What happened? I had no idea and was starting to freak out because I couldn’t moveand my damn head wouldn’t stop hurting and I had to peeeeee aaaaah! After struggling to carry ou the instructions my wife was giving me for trying to get off the floor, she finally called an ambulance because she knew she couldn’t help me off the floor on her own. I fell asleep at some point and didn’t wake up again until a few days later, by the time my brain started storing memories again I was in an ambulance on my way to another medical facility where nurses promised me I’d get all better and be back to normal in no time. If you;ve ever imagined what it would be like to wake up in a hospital and hear someone asking if you know your name or what year it is..or the president’s name…It was unexpected. Intellectually I understood they wanted to know if I was all there, but the experience was very disorienting. I had no idea where or when I was so answered based on what I could kind of remember “I’m Laura, it’s 2025..president…a cheeto?”apparently the answers were right so they asked if I knew my whole name. I realize now they wanted to know if I remembered my wife.Nobody could pronounce my maiden name so they wouldn’t even know if it was right!!! lololol. ok…so after establishing the soundness of my brain, they explained I’d had a stroke and biologically everything was fine, I was healthy under the circumstances, did I want to go to the bathroom? peeing was my last real memory along with the headaches,o the nurses helped me to the bathroom after warning me I couldn’t walk and despite asking for excedrin they gave me tylenol and lemon-lime soda rather than dr. pepper. My first breakfast was eggs and fruit and pancakes with decaf coffee and milk, and the nurses helped me create my coffee-flavored milk for breakfast and I didn’t realize it was decaf until I saw a printout of the meal order and noticed the eggs were also modified. ugh low fat milk made sense now…so was it margarine on the pancakes then?? ewwww gross! I’m no lipophobe! full fat ot gtfo. I subscribed to Dr. Michael Eades’ health newsletter and understood the dangers of low fat foods was that they replaced fat with obscene quantities of sugar. I was later able to get the dietary restriction lifted by my doctor and stopped being afraid of my eggs…eggs are an excellent brain food, and the doctors explained most of my current limitations were caused by brain damage, so I needed real eggs! not modified….I’ve recovered my ability to walk now, and eating turned out to be fine along with speech and cognizance. I could write, draw, and I tested late at night, orgasms still worked…so then just Lefty needs to come back and it’ll be like the stroke never happened. but! since they couldn’t blame my physical health as a definitive cause of the stroke, it seemed to be like the time I got shingles only worse. something stressed me out to such a degreemy blood vessels ballooned and burst. I gota figure out how to prevent this bt de-stressing. how do you de-stress when you don’t know you’re stressed? I’ll have to build de-stressing activities into my habits. I wonder if any of the stress is related to my childhood and dad dying? probably..plus…all these other experiemces that would be stressful for anyone.. I actually have a pretty big pile of stressors now that I stop and think. I should process all of this so I can recognize stress better. to overthink it into a pile of data I can process into a spreadsheet…It seems stress, hich is directly tied to “fight or flight” behavior, just sits there if you never do anything with it. well damn, I need to write a journal so I can
start pin pointing my big stressors. While in rehab, my therapists learned I had ADHD and asked my wife to bring my meds in because it was interfering with recovery.They did start working with my scripting process though, and I think that really helped recover walking much faster.Even my speech therapist would describ the feeling ofusin certain mouth muscles to help me work them out. Knowing how it was supposed to work helped tremendously. I was a bit amused when the speech therapist was testing my reasoning skills, because she had me repeat the days of the week in order and reverse order, so I ended up doping all the exercises in both Spamish an English, she also had me repeat the months in a year I did get a bit lost reciting the alphabet backwards. She would give me a list of words to remember, then out of nowhere ask me to recite the words. She said remembering one was enough, and I had a moment of pani c wondering if I would have ever remembered something like that before the stroke.. I could and can, with my weird spacial memory space. The words were cathedral, velvet,pew, andblue, I remembered picturing a cathedral with pews roped off by blue velvet lines, like…in a cathedral…lol. I guess that’s how I end up remembering all the random stuff at work. how neat! to recite the alphabet backwards, I remembered the alphabet borders from kindergarten, around the green chalkboard they called a blackboard saying “it used to be black” still makes no sense. It's clearly green now!!!!!! So my memory is pretty useful!
then why did my dad’s death give me so many memory problems????
While in rehab, I overheard someone mention a book “The body keeps the score” so decided to look into it, especially since I was in the midst of procrastinating this very essay/blog.article. I’m glad I took the time to because it’s a very good book and helped me feel less afraid of what I might discover by writing about my Asexual journey. While recovering in both the hospital and since then, at home, my dreams have been incredibly chaotic. At one point I woke up convinced I was on a farm and vampire phlebotomists were hurting my (our) chickens. I assume it was related to cholesterol free eggs anf having my blood drawn for more labwork. I had an IV in my arm that ended up getting bruised because they put the blood pressure cuff over it, which hurt pretty terribly (frowny ouchie face). I also kept wanting to pet my cats. I thought Lefty would recover to give the cats scritches, The nurses would ask half asleep me if I needed anything and I must have said kitty at some point because they were always telling me the cats weren’t allowed to visit.I had an extremely chaotic vivid dream of waking up and I was at home but the hospital had moved into my house. I kept calling thekities to come visit (in the dream) but nurses would appear from nowhere and repeat, no cats allowed, I remember bein 1000% convinced that I had four children.My wife asked how oldthey were and I could only remember 13 and 18, but I was wrong still, who I thought was 18 1 had just turned 19 while I was in the hospital. the 13 year old was about to turn 14 and I didn’t have any other children. I suddenly felt an emptiness by my mental side, like I had babies there but they disappeared, so I thought maybe I’d had a dream and got confused about reality? My wife says I also incorrectly remembered she liked having cat treats thrown at her to make the cats go to her and attack her, and I recognize something that silly and ridiculous as something I would say, to tease or joke, but have no memory of saying or even thinking of it.I slowly became aware of my memory eirdness so have been extra cautious about remembering. I went ti put my earrings back in after removing them for an MRI, and got confused trying to find the holes in my ears that I have vivid memory of, so asked myself whenI’d pierced my ears, since asking how ol my four children were helped get the right memories aligned with reality. I only remembered the first two from when I was 16 andd rebelling against the church I’d grown up in now that Mom had left the church, and the second pair of piercings were done at walmart with my first boyfriend, still rebelling against the church. I rationalized it as, sure th bible says earring are a mark of slavery and that’s fine with me! Aren’t I God’s slave? I’m still not sure why that was comforting for me in any way at all. I must havebeen trying hard to separate my sense of self from the church and recognized I still saw myself as a child of God even though I renounced religion and pastors broadly without exception. The body is a temple, so I don’t need to go to church. I’m always there! <mic drop> Iguess that sums up my understanding of how I processed the circumstances of my childhood, where a man who claimed to be a devout follower of God invoked his name to coerce and brainwash a flock of mentally handicapped people to further his own purposes. No matter how you look at it, that person was only looking out for himself and didn’t care about others except in what they could do for him. I can’t paint all people in similar positions with the same shade of blood, but I have o really pay attention in order to keep the color from bleeding through because of the activities of those formative years.I wrote about those experiences and posted some online in my blog/journal and on deviantart.I really need to re-process everything again because What I wrote was the empty vessels of the actions, not the feelings. and betrayal and fear. Taking the good and leaving the bad is also something I never learned to do. How can I still feel love for someone who could be such a monster? After reading “zthe Body keeps the score” I understand much better that My experiences at that man’s hands were never black and white, soulless husks repeating traumatic behavior endlessly somewhere in my memories. They were everything, my whole world. I couldn’t let anyone that close again, no matter how soft and comfortable they seemed. Even if all of me yearns for that closeness, even the slightest sense of wrong will send me running. I’ve happily enough continued my asexual journey all these years. my youngest was born in 2011 and for our 10th anniversary in2015, my wife and I got a hotel and stayed in Carmel by the Sea, walking on the beach together and celebrating on May 20th with a lovely dinner. we went back to our hotel where I once again disappointed her with my refusal to be intimate. I tried with all of my being, but could only feel the overwhelming fear and repulsion I’d come to associate with seduction of any kind. I helplessly disappointed this person I loved and valued enough to put myself through those feelings repeatedly to make her happy. We haven’t tried at all ever since, and I’ve become blissfully immersed in asexuality ever since. I can see now How many moments in my life went sideways because of the expectations of sex. My relationship with sex is awful, I don’t associate it with anything good or necessary. I’d say, if you’re trying to figure out if you’re ace, remember there are all kinda of “flavors” of ace and I think it boils down to “can you live happily without sexing with someone? is your hand enough?” I would have continued saying yes to that if my dreams while recovering hadn’t completely messed with my head. I repeatedly had dreams of being very intimate with someone, an unknown man who I trusted and loved like they were part of me. I kept waking up to a deep sorrow of missing someone important to me. Unless I was Isekai’d into this body, I’ve never experienced that with anyone though I’ve read about it in romance novels. I never felt it, empathically connecting with it so hard it resonated in my soul.Maybe it’s from a past life? I’ve always heard people say “that kind of experience never happens in reality, it’s just restricted to movies.” so I assume it’s just my imagination. Unless someone is out there who misses me like that and is transmitting their loneliness to me. Either way, I have a yearning that’s giving me very x-rated dreams that leave me feeling incomplete upon waking. So I have to listen to myself here and assume I’m really not Ace. I’m not going to be able to do anything about it, but writing this out will hopefully help someone understand themself better. listening to yourself, even when you don’t like what you’re saying, is really important. Don’t ignore you. you’re smarter than you give yourself credit for and, knowing your brain has a section left over from time as a primate is in there, and that hind brain’s only goal is for you to survive, should give you some idea of what that part of you might be saying. I picture my hind brain as a soft fluffy kitten with gentle paws, claws retracted, watching and waiting for a comfy warm lap to cozy up in. It’s helped me see myself that way because I find it harderto get mad at myself and relentlessly try to punish myself for my unwanted behavior. Another reason is because one method to help the frontal lobe mature is to take care of another being. Feed them, clean, give them a safe home. tending to a garden, working on a farm , those actions help abused children recover.If you managed to grow up enough to wonder about your own sexuality, you might find it easier to raise your animal self if you can’t work with animals.I hope Everyone can find their dharma and reach the peak of maslow’s hierarchy!
These are the books I’ve read to help myself overcome my childhood and understand myself. I’ve also taken a class on psychology at Foothill College in Winter 2017 from ProfessorTiffany Rideaux
“The Sexual Healing Journey: A Guide for Survivors of Sexual Abuse” by Wendy Maltz
“The Body Keeps the Score Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma” by Bessel van der Kolk M.D.
“Intuitive Eating,” 4th Edition Paperback – June 23, 2020by RDN Evelyn Tribole, MS
The F*ck It Diet: Eating Should Be Easy Kindle Edition by Caroline Dooner (Author)
Class textbook: “Psychology” by Saundra K. Ciccarelli
