'What's normal?': sex and dating after sexual assault
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Hey there, Nat here. And just a heads up, you probably gathered it from the show description, but this podcast involves stories about sexual abuse, sexual assault, family violence, and mentions of childhood abuse as well. It's a heavy conversation for anyone to listen to. So if it's something that you've gone through or are going through and it gets a bit too much, you can call Lifeline on 1311. 14 or 1-800 respect. There's always someone you can talk to there. And you can check out those numbers in the show description as well.
The way I am now, I can't see it in the near future of me being confident in bed or that desire to come back.
Warning, adult content, the hookup, love and on Triple J. Enjoying sex and trusting a new love can be a real challenge when sex is linked to a trauma you've been through. And it's not actually as uncommon as you might think. Over the years, quite a few people have gotten in touch with us about this very topic. You'll hear some of their stories in this episode, and we'll be talking about how to open yourself up again to love, to dating, to relationships, and to a healthy sex. I'm Nat Tenchich. Now Zack, not his real name, emailed the hookup with the subject line What is normal? When I spoke to him, I learned that what he went through may not necessarily be normal. But he wasn't alone with his story.
When I was twelve years old, I was abused by my brother. at a family camping trip. You know, it was something that started when I was twelve and went off for three years or so. It was something that from there it took me a long time to deal with it and to actually, you know, transition out of that phase of my life into an adult with a sex life, to be honest. Without an accepted experience or a normal experience growing up, then I question everything and it's a You live in this world of anxiety just through questioning every single thing that happens in the real world and then filtering it through like this really weird, anxious cycle that you go through in your head. if it ever starts to feel like I'm not having what I would call like a normal life, what other people would call a normal life.
A normal sex life then it's something that Yeah, it's something I start to freak out about all the time because you that really traumatic thing that's happened in the past starts to feel like it still has control over something in your life that you really wanna feel good about. I have no idea how much it connects to a past trauma or the fact that I'm just going through what is normal and what everybody goes through. I don't feel like I'll ever be able to answer that question because I've never again had that normal experience growing up. And so for me, experiencing those things, like I naturally just tie it to everything that's happened in my life and the sexual experiences that I've had.
The way I react to sex in my life at the moment is completely unreliably. Like I've no standard of um or no understanding of oh it's gonna feel like that today or I'm gonna be really into it today and it's gonna be something that uh changes between every single situation. And so sometimes Sex just doesn't work and that's okay. Sometimes sex works probably too easily. You know, struggling to get it up or struggling to perform or feeling like you're kind of overperforming, you're just on the extremes of that whole spectrum. You you never feel like you're kind of or I never feel like I'm really in a place where I can reliably have sex, feel good about it, and know kind of how things are gonna go. It's always a question of
Will it work this time? If it does work, then is it gonna work too well and am I gonna be too sensitive and too into it or whatever it is? Uh, to actually enjoy the situation. Understandably people react in a lot of different ways, uh depending on how a situation really plays out. And I think that if, for example, can't get it up in a situation, th the first natural reaction is to kinda take it as a personal thing. You know, the other person in situations always saying
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