KRISTA: I had an experience years ago where someone didn’t listen to my boundaries and ended up making me bleed anally (I had to go to Urgent Care!), and now, even though I have a loving and totally respectful partner, I have a really hard time trusting that anyone can be careful enough with me and understand how slow I need things to go if we’re doing anything back there. Explaining what I need, taking deep breaths, and stopping the instant I feel weird helps me out. I’m working on it. Slooooowly.

STEPHANIE: I have a fear of things not feeling quite right emotionally. It definitely comes from my first sexual experiences. The first guy I slept with was emotionally abusive, and that also translated to sexual abuse. I was basically emotionally blackmailed into sex. One day, he wanted me to have sex with him in my friend’s garage and she was at home, looking out the window, and I was just like, “Dude, no.” He got pissed and basically didn’t speak to me for HOURS. He told me that I was rejecting him and if I didn’t want to have sex with him anymore that we should break up because it meant I didn’t love him.

My interpretation of this was: OK, I said yes once (or six times or whatever it had been at that point), so I guess this means I have to say yes forever unless I want to break up. So we had sex. I went numb. For the rest of our relationship, this was how sex went. It happened in dirty public bathrooms and other places where I felt super uncomfortable. So I just went off into my head, like conjugating verbs for my Spanish tests and stuff. Twenty years later, I still deal with that detachment. I can’t always say what triggers it. Sometimes it’s because I’ve been writing about him or reading about assault. Sometimes I WANT to have sexytimes, but I’m thinking about work, a deadline, or taking my cats to the vet, and then this thought spiral happens: OK, maybe I don’t want to have sex right now. Shit, what do I do? Do I tell my partner? I don’t want to disappoint him. I mean, he gets it, and won’t be mad. But I’m not sure if I want to stop or not. I don’t want to be in this place again where I’m going through the motions…am I going through the motions? Am I numb? Oh god that was horrible when I was numb…and then, boom, I’ve frozen up. Fortunately, he knows my whole history. We’ve had LONG conversations about it, and we have a code for it now: When I start to fall into that spiral, I say, “Hey, I want to just kiss.” Looking into his eyes can make me feel connected again sometimes, but sometimes I have to just cuddle that day. Mostly, I’m cool with that.

ANNIE: Whether or not you identify as a survivor of sexual assault, I rec the book The Survivor’s Guide to Sex. It helped me out a lot, though I continue to have hard times in bed. Sex is weird and that’s fine. The biggest thing that helps me is to breathe and warmly invite the hard feelings instead of telling myself that I shouldn’t be having them. That book recommended something that comes to me again and again: It challenges you to figure out if you have a default setting for sex and push back a little against it. If you often break from sex because you feel triggered, it suggests that you gently challenge yourself to push forward through it. If you realize that your default is to have sex all the time when you might not really be wanting to, it suggests that you slow down, make yourself stop, or take a break.

It’s person-to-person, moment-to-moment, day-to-day what you’re gonna need. For me, one of my biggest problems has been pushing myself to have sex because of that scarcity mentality. Often, I’ve been with a partner who’s checked in with me very compassionately—which for me means asking questions, like “Are you into this? Is this moving too fast? Do you need to stop?”—but I wasn’t listening to my own needs. There have even been a couple of times (especially under the influence) when I’ve pushed myself to do something with a partner who really did check in with me, and I felt like I had been raped.

I’m celibate/not dating for the moment, but sometimes sex has been really nice. Even your sexual experiences feel mostly fraught and you have a hard time feeling like you’re ever going to be able to relax, focus on any little parts of sex that have made you feel lighter, warm, happy. Those moments can point the way, and show you what it can be like for you, hopefully with more and more regularity. Traces of trauma may always stay in your life, but it won’t always cast a giant shadow over everything you are and everything you do.

III. PROBS WITH RECEIVING (Worrying, Because: Your Bod)

What about body dysphoria, or being dissociated from your body? What about being consumed with worry that you look unattractive?

LOLA: Some of the most constructive, healing things I’ve realized about this are about how, actually, It’s OK to hate your body—even if you hate your body right now, you still deserve sex with the body you have. This doesn’t mean you will never learn to love and accept your body, or that it’s a good idea to hate your body forever—it just means that even if you’re having issues with your body, you still deserve to experience pleasure with it as-is, in this moment.

KRISTA: If I’m worrying I look “bad” naked, or I feel vulnerable about how I look in a particular position, I’ve brought my worries up to my partner. True story: she always tells me she was not thinking negative thoughts about me at all—in fact, she was thinking the opposite! As in, “You look hot when we’re doing it.”

KRISTA’S PARTNER, JEN: You do look hot. I think it’s hot when you’re in a position that is maybe more vulnerable and different from how I usually see you, but you’re still trusting me enough to be with you there, in that moment.