Healing Combat Trauma

The Woman's Bill of Rights to Sexual Intimacy and Pleasure

Periodically we revisit the all-important topic, "Healthy Sexuality for Combat Veterans."  In this installment, we include a "bill of rights" that's essentially written for the woman partner, from Gina Ogden, Ph.D., author of "The Heart and Soul of Sex," and, most recently, "The Return of Desire." The author of five books, Ogden is a marriage and family therapist and a sex therapist.  In a conversation directed primarily to women, she says:

"It's important for you to know what your sexual rights are -- no matter what your age or sexual orientation or physical ability.  Some of us seem to know our rights instinctively and are able to set effective boundaries and ask for what we want.  But many of us have never thought about our rights to intimacy and pleasure -- or even imagined that we had such rights.  When we're unaware, we're extra vulnerable to being taken advantage of by others, whether they intend to take advantage of us or not."

The following advice comes from a guide by Ogden for women about "how to say "yes" to pleasure and "no" to unsafe sex."

My Rights to Intimacy and Pleasure:

1.  I have a right to my own body and all of its sensations, including pleasure and pain;

2.  I have a right to think my own thoughts, whatever they may be;

3.  I have a right to feel the full range of my emotions – excitement, joy and anger, sorrow and depression, love and fear – whether or not my feeling them is acceptable to others;

4.  I have a right to acknowledge my memories, whether they are memories of delight or of abuse, and to base present relationship decisions on them;

5.  I have a right to be – or not to be – a sexual person at all ages and stages of my life, and a right to chose how I define what I mean by sexuality;

6.  I have a right to expect that my partner respect my body, thoughts, feelings, and general well-being, and a right to insist on respect, if necessary;

7.  I have a right to ask for what I want;

8.  I have a right to say “no” to any sexual encounter that feels unsatisfactory or threatening – physically, emotionally, spiritually, or sexually;

9.  I have a right to say “yes” to pleasure that is physically, emotionally, spiritually and sexually safe; and

10.  I have a right to feel good about saying both “yes” and “no.”

-- Source: "The Heart and Soul of Sex," by Gina Ogden, Ph.D.

Sexual Healing: Discovering the Ecstasy of Relating in Intimacy

As we touch back in with our recurring topic of "Healthy Sexuality and the Combat Veteran," it's interesting to read the always thought-provoking Arthur Egendorf, a Vietnam veteran and Ph.D. psychologist, with extensive personal experience with the veterans' "rap groups" of the 1970s on this topic as well.  Here's what he has to say, echoing the problem we've been learning combat veterans often have with one of the key basics of sexuality, "intimacy" between the partners.  Writes Egendorf:

"Almost every veteran I’ve seen in therapy has wanted help with intimate relationships.  In his own way, each of these men has been deeply committed to individual survival and to the ethos of the lone adventurer who has to make it on his own.  For such people, giving themselves to a relationship clashes with their long-standing refusal to let anyone get close enough to pose a threat."

Additionally, he writes:

"Virtually all troubled couples view sexual problems as part of their difficulty.  One of them will say that they ought to be having more sex.  From a healing perspective, what they’re missing is fulfillment, and they make it harder to achieve by thinking that more orgasm will provide it.  They don’t see that when sex is ecstatic it is never just the orgasm that does it.  The ecstasy comes with giving oneself in a shared embrace.  Although you can have orgasms alone or with any human being (some manage very well with animals), people seldom bother to do it with just anyone unless they can’t be with someone they deeply love.

It’s easier to have sex with a stranger than with a long-time partner who’s hard to get along with. This is the excuse many people use to sleep around.  But as long as they use the excuse, they don’t discover the ecstasy of relating is enhanced when one gives oneself where it’s no longer easy."

-- Source: Healing from the War: Trauma and Transformation after Vietnam, by Arthur Egendorf.

 

For the Good of All Concerned: Sexual Feelings v. Sexual Expression

Healthy sexuality is probably one of the hardest life themes to come to a successful resolution about, whether for combat veterans or really, anyone else as well.  Part of the problem is, of course, from childhood on we've received -- been bombarded, really -- with conflicting messages about whether sex is deeply good or troublingly bad.  After all, there's healthy sexuality and refreshingly bonding intimacy as the result of a connected relationship between two people, and then there are almost as many destructive opportunities as there are people and relationships themselves, from manipulation and selfishness to heavier topics like abuse and rape.  Here to shed some light on the subject is Gay Hendricks, Ph.D., the author of several best-selling self-help books.  In the passage below, he delineates the difference between the messages we get about sexuality and the actual reality:

"Ideally, we should teach children that sexual feelings are fine.  They are a natural part of life, a deep source of energy and potential joy.  We should teach them to be smart, though, about the expression of those feelings.  We would teach them the advantages and disadvantages of the various aspects of sexual expression: masturbation, intercourse, flirting, and so forth.  We should assist them in learning to open up to the feelings while finding means of expression that have positive consequences for all concerned.

Too often the elders confuse feelings with expression.  We are taught that the feelings themselves are somehow wrong.  This belief causes a logjam inside us.  We have a deep sense that sexual feelings are good, overlaid by a belief that they are bad.  This distortion causes us then to express our feelings in distorted ways.

To complicate matters, we also have a stack of decisions about sexuality based on old unpleasant events.  I remember getting caught by my mother in the act of looking at some pictures of naked women.  Several of my friends and I were studying these pictures, bought in the locker room from an eighth-grade entrepreneur, when my mother showed up unexpectedly.  I remember the hot feeling of shame that swept over me when I saw my mother’s reaction of anger and disgust.  I saw in that moment that my sexuality was something she did not want to acknowledge, that somehow it made her uncomfortable.  In fact, I never recall her or anybody in my family saying a word about sexuality in any way during my growing up.  In a way I feel grateful, because at least I did not get a lot of distorted information that I later had to unlearn, but I feel wistful about not learning things about my sexuality that would have helped me feel more comfortable with myself.

Some of us have had much more unpleasant experiences with regard to sex than the mild event I just described.  We have witnessed ugly scenes, been forced to have sex against our will, been seduced into doing things that we would not have done had we had our wits about us. WE cannot change events, but we can always look for any decisions about ourselves or life that we made at the time.  By looking at old decisions made in the heat of unpleasant experiences, we can break the grip the past has on us.

Beyond the traumas and the negative messages about sex is the fact that we often do not get any constructive information about it.  We are not usually blessed with a guardian angel who can come along when we need it and say, “Sexual feelings are good.  Let yourself feel them deeply.  Surrender to them.  Express them in ways that will bring happiness to all concerned.”  Adult life is a process of becoming a guardian angel to ourselves.  We have to learn how to nurture ourselves and how to gather the kind of people around us who can nurture us in the ways that we like.

We can begin by loving ourselves for all the reasons we do not love our sexuality, then going on through to open up in love and acceptance for those deeply positive sexual feelings inside.  By learning how to love sexuality, we can learn more about how to love life itself, for sexuality is but one expression of a deeper life energy which resides in us all.”

-- Source: Learning to Love Yourself: A Guide to Becoming Centered, by Gay Hendricks, Ph.D.

"Only Connect!": The Elusive but Nonetheless All-Important Quality of Simple Affection

The dictionary defines "affection" as: "A tender feeling toward another; fondness;" and more elaborately, via the thesaurus, as: "The condition of being closely tied to another by affection or faith - attachment, devotion, fondness, liking, love, loyalty.  See "connect."

Ahh, "connection."  The feeling that we two are moving together towards a common goal - are yoked together in care and consideration and fellow feeling.  Sounds so good.  "There's a real connection there," we say; "I feel connected to you."  If only combat veterans also could rely on this, themselves.  It seems pretty clear they establish it with one another; but the question remains, are they able to sustain that, or to find it with anyone else?

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Back in the days when I had other things on my mind besides combat trauma -- ahh, the halcyon days of youth ;-) -- I remember going to hear Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain at the Opera House in Boston, right before he finished his run.  Holbrook, parroting Twain, had a very interesting remark, that echoes in my mind today about the plight of veterans, and whether (and how much) we show them that we care.  The remark came towards the end of Holbrook's performance, and it was meant to symbolize an elderly Twain, winding down the course of his life, and wrapping it up for public consumption.  In that context, this is what he said (writeup mine):

Seating himself in the easy chair and stretching his long legs before him, Twain lit the last cigar of the evening.  As he drew steadily on the cigar he reflected out loud on the hundreds and hundreds of letters that he’d received throughout the length of his career from his accumulated audience.  “These letters,” he said, with gratitude animating his face, “have contained compliments, and pride, and a note of affection.  And the last of those is the last and final and richest reward that a man can have.”

The last and richest reward a man can have?  Sounds pretty good to me.  I wonder if that's how we're treating veterans, though -- or marginalizing them to the edge of society with their scary stories we can't relate to, and their trauma we just want to ignore?  Hope not.  This New Yorker cartoon I saw recently reminds me of the plight of veterans on the subject: still waiting to be brought into the conversation with America, still waiting to be heard.  Let's hope it isn't so, or won't continue to be so. 

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More on the "affection/connection" front:

A few years ago, again living in Boston, I took the opportunity to see a documentary at an independent movie house called "Darshan: the Embrace," about India's "hugging saint," Ammachi, a.k.a. Amma, a.k.a. Sri Mata Amritanandamayi Devi (Sanskrit for "Mother of Immortal Bliss").  There were only two people in the movie theater (my being one), which goes to show you how little pull the concept had, but the movie was most mystifying to me.  It was a documentary about the apparently considerable impact of an Indian woman whose sole raison d'etre was that she would dole out hugs to those who wanted them.  Really. 

At the risk of insulting someone's religion, and I hope I don't (but probably will), that really was all there was to it.  Amma has apparently hugged hundreds of thousands, perhaps literally millions, of people worldwide; she hugs for a prodigious number of hours a day, when she's on task; and people who are eager for one of her hugs line up for literally hours -- maybe even days -- in India's sweltering heat (and elsewhere, when she's on tour), for just...a hug. There was so much buildup about her hugs in the movie, and about her being the human embodiment of divine love, that I really was...set up for a disappointment.  They were just...hugs.  Nothing more, nothing less.  She had a few rules for them, too: women should de-smear themselves of makeup, lest they rub too much off on Amma while hugging, and a couple of other ones that I forget. 

But two things really struck me about the experience, as portrayed in the movie (again, forgive me, it's just my opinion; you can have yours).  One is that we as a society are WHACKED if we are this desperate for what amounts to unconnected affection at such a low level; and two (minor point) that people who give up everything to go and FOLLOW someone like this are even more embarrassingly whacked on the topic than should be safe to admit.  And there were quite a few who were compelled to do so. (For a more sympathetic portrayal of the "Amma Phenomenon" than mine, I would refer you to an article in USA Today, linked here, from July of 2006.)

As relatively empty as the experience nonetheless seemed to me, do you get the big picture on this?  Possibly millions of people worldwide feel basic-affection-deprived to literally stand in line for hours to have a stranger with allegedly mystical properties hug them -- none of whose mystical properties are actually the draw of the visit?  Just the hug.  The irreverent, possibly sacrilegious side of me felt a little like Jay Leno, astonished by Hugh Grant's dalliance with Divine Brown, while he was dating supermodel Elizabeth Hurley: Just how badly DID you want it?  Yikes.

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A little closer to home, we can revel in the safer, non-religious, amystical "Free Hugs" campaign, portrayed on YouTube, linked here, which was filmed on the streets of Vancouver, B.C.  As one respondent wrote on YouTube, essentially, "hey, I tried to imitate that in my local mall, and they kicked me out!" -- "Is that any way to spread love and compassion in the world?" (Watch the video, linked here, it's totally uplifting and fun. You may even shed an actual tear...)

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We've talked a lot about "healthy sexuality and the combat veteran," and we will continue to talk about that all-but-forgotten, way-too-overlooked, thoroughly neglected topic more in the months to come.  But interestingly enough, as much as healthy sexuality and intimacy may be hard for the combat veteran to find/take part in, so too may a far more basic experience - simple human affection.

"Only Connect!" - two such all-important words, from prose or poetry, come flooding back from the days of English literature.  But from where?  From E.M. Forster's Howards End, published in 1910:

"Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the gray, sober against the fire."

and again:

"Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die."

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Mark Twain, Amma the Hugging Saint, the Vancouver "Free Hugs" man on downtown Robson, E.M. Forster: the message is the same: simple affection is crucial, nay vital, to life -- only connect.  See what you can do today to bridge that gap yourself, help others feel understood and connected, and appreciated.  A gift that changes the giver and the recipient...a bridge between human beings.  Only connect.

The Power of Love (and Sex): Healthy Appetite v. Unhealthy Cravings

Continuing our on-again, off-again series on "healthy sexuality for the combat veteran," here is an interesting contrast, from a bodywork tradition, about the difference between love and lust, appetite (healthy) and cravings (unhealthy).

First, this piece of information, according to their tradition:

"The sexual center (enjoyment/ creativity/ playfulness) is ... the center of drive, creativity, and enjoyment of life.  When the center allows a free flow of energy, one is happy, very creative, enthusiastic, and has a sense of optimism.  When the flow becomes restricted there, one finds it hard to enjoy life and becomes self-destructive."

And now the comparison/contrast of the two states of being, one healthy and one unhealthy:

Love and Lust; Appetite and Craving

Appetite is known in all traditions to be the sign of good health and appreciation of life.  Unfortunately, a lot of people are afraid of their appetite because they mistake a desire for certain foods for craving.  In a civilization of plenty where diets rule, appetite has become a synonym for sin.  The desire for food, a desire rising up from the deep, has also been associated with the desire of the flesh, the desire for sex, and the sin of lust.  In my opinion, we need to differentiate between appetite and cravings, which relate to each other in the same way as love and lust.  Our inability to differentiate [between the two] leads us to [mis]take one for the other.

Love = Appetite = Good Health

Lust = Cravings = Poison

Love involves, among a lot of other things, a healthy desire for sex in a fulfilling and satisfying relationship.  Yielding to love results in immediate improvement ofhealth.  Then, sex becomes healing.  In it is in fact the most potent and efficient health enhancer in the world.  Cultivating our potential for love involves the ability to satisfy ourselves as well as others, and radiates the healing energy developed within us toward others. 

Appetite means good health.  It means our body lets us known what it needs, in what proportions, and when.  Appetite changes according to seasons, weather, geographical location, mood, physical and mental activity, food availability, and even gender, blood type, body type, and ethnicity.  It is the result of an extremely sensitive and sophisticated inner network of communication that can be refined.  It tells us what kind of food we need to nourish ourselves, and when we get it, we feel satisfied.  Yielding to our appetite is the gateway to love.  How we eat generally is a reflection of our sexuality. 

Lust is sexual craving.  It is born out of the inability to satisfy our sexuality.  We try over and over again, often with different partners, with the sad result that every unsuccessful attempt builds a potential of failure that inevitably will end up in depression.  A lack of knowing better in matters of sexual satisfaction and an overload of pent-up energy, are usually the different factors that lead to lust.  Yielding to sexual cravings leads rapidly to a huge loss of vital energy and is destructive to oneself and others.

A craving is a sure sign of imbalance in our health and points precisely to our poison.  When our health is out of balance, our whole life has a tendency to lean in that imbalanced direction.  A craving points to what we shouldn't have, because if we have it, we can't stop desiring more of it.  We are never satisfied, and we are able to stop only when we get sick.  We never get satisfaction from yielding to cravings, and that is one way of distinguishing cravings from appetite. Cravings can, and often do, lead to intoxication and addiction.  As we saw in the chapter on detoxifying, addiction is the attempt of the body to prevent oneself from going through the suffering of detoxifying.

This does not necessarily mean that the objects of our cravings are all toxic for everyone and that everyone should stay clear of them.  What is poison for you can be the right food for someone else.  In any case, yielding to food cravings leads to metabolic imbalance due to not getting the energy we need.  In addition, a huge loss of energy experienced from the overload of work results in poor processing, overload, becoming toxic, and the flooding of stress hormones from our dissatisfaction.  Paradoxically, when we indulge in our cravings we might feel that we do it for compensation or reward, but yielding to cravings and eating too much is a form of self-abuse that sends the inner message that we don't deserve to live.  Yielding to cravings is also a gateway to lust and resulting ill-health.

Unfortunately, in our distressed industrialized world we easily lose faith in ourselves and look for approval through mass consumption.  I personally associate pornography, the over-exposure of sexually-explicit material designed to induce craving for sex, with over-exposure to food products designed to induce food cravings.  Both originate from greed and seeking short-term rewards, and both only provoke disgust in the healthy person.

-- Source: Healing from Within with Chi Nei Tsang, by Gilles Marin. 

Editor's note: If you can't help hearing the words, "The Power of Love," without thinking of ... Celine Dion... Andre Bocelli ... or Luther Vandross -- help is at hand.  Videos of each of them pitching their aural woo are on YouTube.  Enjoy :-)

Avoiding Intimacy: Passion is Frozen Out, Along with Every Other Good Emotion

In our on-again, off-again series on "