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Sexual Abuse

What is sexual abuse?

Sexual abuse is any unwanted touching, penetration, or fondling of ones body.

Child sexual abuse is perpetrated on the child by an adult, older (and bigger usually) child, or even peers. It may include fondling genitals, masturbation, oral-genital contact, digital penetration, or vaginal and anal intercourse. Child sexual can include exposure, voyeurism, and child pornography.

Affects of sexual abuse...

There are a number of possible psychological and emotional problems that can result from sexual abuse. Exactly how the individual is affected will vary depending on a number of different factors. Each person is different. Here are some of the problem that can may arise:

Memory gaps

Often victims will have gaps in their memory. Gaps are significant periods of time from their childhood for which they cannot remember. With clients in general memory gaps is a red flag that childhood sexual abuse may have occurred.

Hypersexuality

Adolescents and teens will often be hyper-sexual. They have a precocious interest and preoccupation with sexual related topics and activities. Sexually related comments will pepper their conversation.

They can also exhibit the opposite symptoms and seem to go into into a panic or avoidance reaction whenever something of a sexual nature is discussed.

Sexual difficulties

Adults that have been sexually abused as children, in addition to memory gaps, will often have difficulties in their adult sexual relationships or have sexual dysfunctions (see Sex Therapy page for further details.) Also, their is increased risk because of the mind-body connection for gynecological problems. Men may have erectile dysfunction problems or difficulties having orgasms.

Control issues

Victims often have major control issues. They feel they must be in control all the time or nearly so, and become very anxious and/or angry when they do not have that control.

Incest

Incest is sexual activity between two closely related individuals. All states have laws against incest. Boys as well as girls can be victims of this type of sexual abuse/assault.

Incest and biology

To wax academic for a moment...

Most cultures have taboos against incest. Although reading the Torah or Old Testament book of Genesis (and others) you can find instances of incest by main Biblical characters, e.g. Cain's wife (Genesis 4), Abraham and Sarah (Genesis 20:11-12). Also, ancient Egyptian pharos and nobility engaged in incest as did the rulers of a few other ancient cultures. In general, incest was taboo.

From an evolutionary genetic perspective, incest leads to inbreeding. Inbreeding, in general, decreases genetic variability and reduces fitness. Consequently, most organisms have mechanisms that operate to help in insure outbreeding or to inhibit inbreeding.

In general the reason we don't commit incest or inbreeding is because it exposes deleterious genes and leads to weak and sickly individuals that do not do well at surviving or reproducing--the two imperatives of evolution.

OK, back to incest and victims...

Often incest victims, because they are young children, will see nothing wrong with these sexual acts that are thrust upon them. Also, they very often are threatened not to tell. Because they often live with the perpetrator and may see or be in contact with on a frequent basis, these threats are very real.

Perpetrators

Perpetrators will often groom their victims, that is befriend, give gifts, be very nice to, etc. This is akin to a courtship dance. All the while, they will increase the amount of physical/sexual contact leading to the actual sexual abuse.

Treatment

Using Equine Assisted therapy, the interaction between the horse(s) and victim helps them process and work through their issues. This can appear almost magical as the therapist and equine specialist stand and watch the dance unfold. Usually the horse session are supplemented with traditional talk therapy to help the client process what occurs.

I have used for decades a type of cognitive-behavioral hypnotherapy that integrates Gestalt, Transactional Analysis, and Regression Therapy that is usually very effective. It gives the client tools to deal with the anxiety and PTSD aspects as well as insights.

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