Sexual integration after betrayal is not really about sex at all. It really isn't. It's so much more about establishing safety and trust again and also about learning how to care for each other.
As a society, we've been mis-educated or lied to about sex and romance--even those of us who don't buy into how it's portrayed in popular culture. Like cells that grow in culture in a petri dish, we are conditioned and affected by the environment around us. It's apparent in the rising prevalence of porn and sex addiction, a condition in which brain pathways for arousal are wired with the images and feel-good-chemical-laden experiences during sexual development. And then instead of sex being the fruit of a truly intimate and secure relationship that nourishes, it becomes the fast and easy fix that is found through porn and paid transactions. For some, it even becomes (con)fused with what we mistaken as emotional intimacy if they bring up the familiar feelings we had in our early childhood interactions with our parents or caregivers ("little t" traumas) or our early "big T" traumas.
And so, some people may develop relationships with sex the way some develop anorexia or bingeing with food. Healing from anorexia or disordered eating involves changing a person's relationship with themself as well as seeing food as it is. It follows that healing from sex addiction and "disordered sexuality" involves changing a person's relationship with self first and also seeing sex as it really is. Both food and sex are substances that nourish our well-being, but when used as auto-regulation tools to numb, distract from, escape, or suppress our emotions, they can become part of process addictions that interfere with our ability to connect healthily with ourselves and others.
Because non-masturbatory sex involves another person, the healing of sex addiction must involve healing in relationship with a partner. The sex addict must move away from sex with a "self object" to sex as part of connecting with his partner in the relationship, his primary attachment figure. This gets complicated with insecure attachment patterns and insecure couple relationships. For example, in a relationship with an anxious-preoccupied man who is enmeshed with his mother, there are underlying, unconscious attachment patterns entangled with sexual arousal. Once he is in a committed relationship, he starts to project his mother onto his partner and/or provoke his partner into behaving like his mother, and sex with his partner is no longer arousing, maybe even "icky," or can be arousing and induce shame. So, the idea in re-integrating sex involves disentangling from the enmeshment pattern and shifting from the insecure couple dynamic into one that is secure and collaborative.
To re-integrate sex, the couple can begin to make this shift both in and out of the bedroom. In the bedroom, rather than focusing on arousal and sex as performance to get or be aroused, the couple focuses on safety, trust, and caring for each other instead. Rather than seeing getting turned on or sex as the goal, the couple creates intimate experiences of caring for each other through providing safety, attunement, comforting any dysregulation that arises, delighting in each other, and finally encourage playfulness and exploration. These are the same five factors that foster secure attachment in relationships. (Of course, this needs to occur outside of the bedroom as well.) The shift in attention and focus to doing this versus turning each other on and having sex is likely to lead to arousal naturally, allowing for sex should the couple want that.
Hai Van is an attachment healing facilitator who uses the 5 factors that foster secure attachment as described above in Ideal Parent Figure (IPF) work. She also is passionate about helping individuals and couples heal after betrayal. Learn more about how you can re-map your attachment pattern to earn secure attachment and heal your relationships at www.attachmenthealingipf.com.
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