Sex was always something that turned me on, ever since I was a child. I remember going to the community centre public library after swimming lessons, and stumbling upon the pre-teen section on sex education and sexual anatomy. I probably looked through every book cover to cover, too embarrassed to actually take them out of the library. I remember devouring magazines and books on topics of puberty, like what having your first period was like and developing breasts and choosing bras.
I started having sex when I was 14, armed with whatever knowledge I acquired about condoms from my 8th grade sex ed class. Misguided was my youth. As I look back to that young girl with compassion, I think she was looking for love and acceptance in all the wrong ways. Fortunately, violent sexual abuse never occured to me like it has for so many other vulnerable people in the world. But I do know the experience of feeling sexually used and discarded by men. I once sat down with a therapist and had a 3MMC experience to do an entire narrative review of my sexual history to find that there isn’t any particularly difficult residual trauma around that issue. Perhaps it is my reasonably intact relationship with my father that supports this non-wound. But I do know the sting of romantic rejection.
For instance, there was one relationship in my 20’s where he couldn’t say “I love you”. Sadly, it was his own trauma from his mother wound that had him so convinced that love isn’t real and that it doesn’t last (and it certainly wasn’t enough for his mother stay around to raise him), that he could never say it to me for the two years we were together. I felt so dejected when he ended things.
When that destined-to-fail relationship ended near the end of my Counselling Psychology graduate program, I took a break from being a trauma therapist at my practicum placement, where I was helping male survivors of sexual abuse, to meet with plant intelligence to heal from that transactional relationship. Mother Ayahuasca had to perform an exorcism on me in order to cut the cord of that fellow from my soul body. (Hurray for the sub-perceptual energetic healing of psychedelics!)
One of my WHYs of becoming a sex therapist is knowing the impacts of not being able to know love and intimacy. I had come from post-communist Chinese parents who were serious about pragmatic matters such as money but didn’t know how to express affection and sweetness to us as kids. And I was choosing partners who were the exact same way, and I consciously believed that it was acceptable to live life that way.
Later, psychedelic plant medicines had taught me self-love at a deeply profound neurological level which allowed me to seek out others who had that same imprint of self-love. In psychotherapy, we often say that we play out the dynamics of those that were learned in the home, and I was no exception. Having walked this journey myself, I want to hold space for others who are learning to unchain themselves from their trauma around love and intimacy. I believe that learning to give and receive love is the way out of the collective darkness of world issues.
My next relationship was more nourishing but still there remained this hierarchical sense that his career was more important than mine. So my other WHY is one of this: As I was leaving my 20’s, I said goodbye to relationships where I was made to feel less than because I was a woman. I was tired of being treated as a pretty little object, with my value being derived from how appeasing I was in front of other members of the exclusive member’s only yacht club. I was tired of holding back on my self-expression because it caused jealousy, fear or discontent in whatever socially sanctioned situation we were in. To be fully alive in Eros is to cut the cords of anything that holds you back from being in your fully expressed self. I can’t say I’m a staunch advocate for multiple lovers, but I have zero tolerance for toxic jealousy and an allergy to unexamined social norms.
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