October 17th, 2019

We forget that emotional stresses and traumas related to feelings of shame, or guilt, can often have physical consequences that are very real, and detrimental to our health, sexually, and otherwise.

Growing up, sex was treated as a dirty word in our household.  There was no particular reason for this, other than the fact that I grew up with a parental figure who held to old-fashioned notions of what was appropriate or acceptable.  Certain subjects were taboo, and sex, or anything having to do with sexuality was definitely taboo.  As a result, there were never any conversations about what to do, or not do, or how to deal with the changes that one deals with in going through adolescence.  When sex education began in 5th grade, I brought materials home that were deemed to be completely inappropriate and thrown away.  As a result I felt ashamed that I was even being subjected to such information at school, but at the same time relieved that I was learning something about this mysterious aspect of human life.
When I was fifteen, I remember watching a nightly news show with my family when there was a guest speaker brought in for an interview who was a sexual expert.  She was discussing various aspects related to sexuality that were often misunderstood, one of which was masturbation.  I was immediately told by my parent how what I had just heard I should forget about completely, and the only thing I should remember is that masturbation was a bad thing and I should never do it.
When I was sixteen the blockbuster movie Titanic came out.  I went to see it with my family, and was asked to cover my eyes every time there was a scene of a sexual nature.  I had to leave the room whenever we watched a movie and anyone started kissing.  I felt embarrassed, and confused as to why this obviously natural part of life was something that I couldn’t be allowed to experience in any way, even as a spectator.
I lived a very sheltered life, and was homeschooled for a portion of my middle school and high school years, and had a practically non-existent social life until I was in college.  When I was nineteen, I was still living at home, but attending a community college full-time. I finally had my first boyfriend and my first kiss.  When we started dating seriously, and the relationship became sexual, and my family found out, I was accosted with screaming fits and called a “slut.”  When birth control pills were found in my dresser drawer, I was subjected to looks of great disapproval for even possessing something like that.  And I overheard a phone conversation where a family friend said, "If she were in my home and had done that, she would be kicked out."
I was an outstanding student - straight A's, honor's list, and ultimately graduated summa cum laude, while working full-time all the way through school.  I reasoned with myself that I should disregard the disapproval I was receiving, and the shaming I was experiencing, because I really was a "good kid."  I was a hard-worker, and not falling into a life of depravity, simply because I had a boyfriend and was sexually active.  Even though I could reason logically, it was hard to completely dismiss the nagging voice inside that was recalling everything I had heard growing up that was telling me I must be doing something wrong.  I must actually be a bad person, and a slutty woman.
Over the years, when I realized that I wasn’t going to get any sexual education from my family, I had tried to educate myself through reading, even if it was a romance novel I found in the bookstore, or research I did online.  By the time I was an adult, I felt that I was strong enough to overcome the years of sexual shaming I had experienced, and was determined not to let it govern my life moving forward.  Even so, I was filled with a lot of internal confusion, and ingrained subconscious shame about being sexual.  So when I was called a slut at age nineteen, it hurt deeply. 
Years of repressed sexuality, and unintentional shaming from someone who loved me and thought they were doing what was right did take a toll.  It has taken years for me to work through subconscious psychological issues that have also resulted in physical manifestations in my body. We forget that emotional stresses and traumas related to feelings of shame, or guilt, can often have physical consequences that are very real, and detrimental to our health, sexually, and otherwise.
It’s so important for our society to have an open dialogue about this topic, because often sexual bullying doesn’t even come from external society – it can start right in our own homes, with our own family, because parents don’t understand how to approach a topic that should be as natural as any other aspect of growing up.