When Babeland offered Staci Haines’ Healing Sex for review, I decided to snap it up. You see, after I was sexually assaulted in 2005, a friend at that time had Haines’ Healing Sex DVD and lent it to me sometime in the months following the assault. While Haines’ focus is on survivors of childhood sexual abuse, her techniques can definitely be applied to recovering from any sort of sexual trauma. I remembered the DVD as being insightful, so I was happy for the chance to read and own Haines’ book.
Staci Haines specializes in the somatic approach – “an educational and transformational approach that assumes that the body, mind and emotions are one interconnected biological system.” (p. 15) She discusses a great deal the concepts of being aware of what you’re feeling, or indeed being aware if you’ve dissociated and stopped feeling. Being present during your sexual experiences is a major first step towards healing. Being aware of your body and reactions helps get you away from dissociating – “checking out” – during sex.
Haines is realistic about the conflicting emotions that survivors may feel – they may feel guilt or shame when they feel sexual pleasure, they may love and hate their perpetrator at the same time. Being triggered during sex with a partner may cause a survivor to take their anger out on their partner. She doesn’t paint a picture of recovery as being all hearts and flowers – but she does point you towards the wonderful future you can have if you take the time to heal. As they say, nothing worth doing is ever easy.
The approach is entirely sex-positive. She explores different types of sexual expression, everything from oral sex to S/M and in between. There’s chapters on sexual anatomy, creating boundaries for yourself, partnered sex, navigating your way through triggers and how to work on healing them, and even the use of sex toys. Many of these chapters have interesting sex-positive information that would be useful for anyone. (The book is aimed at women survivors, of any sexual orientation.) While she discusses the problem of survivors sometimes becoming sexually compulsive in reaction to the abuse, she makes clear the point that being a fully realized sexual woman with a stronger sex drive than our society thinks you should have is NOT the same as being compulsive. She then goes on to discuss the real difficulties with actual compulsion. She also doesn’t glamorize sex as being the perfect image we see in porn or read about in books. Haines is clear that we bring our quirky human selves to our sex lives – there will be times when things go wrong and you and your partner end up laughing. Sometimes you may need to stop the action for a time and get back to it after dealing with difficult memories. There’s even a chapter for partners of sexual abuse survivors.
The final chapter in the book is a phenomenal collection of resources – everything from healing sexual trauma, to dealing with any sort of trauma, to women-friendly sex-positive sex toy stores (Babeland is on the list).
One minor gripe: this book has more than an average number of typos that were not caught and fixed. If you’re a grammar nut like me this may irritate the heck out of you.
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