Pleasure can be far from simple for all kinds of reasons. After sexual assault, finding joy in your sexuality again and reclaiming pleasure can feel almost impossible.

This post comes with a trigger warning for abuse, trauma, and sexual violence. It mostly focuses on healing rather than assault itself, though I have included some brief details of my own experiences. It also comes with a disclaimer that, although I am both a survivor and a trauma-informed sexuality writer and educator, I am not a psychotherapist, psychologist, or any form of medical or mental health professional.

The first, last, and most important thing I want you to take away from this post is this: your journey is your own and wherever you are now is okay.

There is no correct way to recover from sexual trauma and there is no set path. Everyone’s experience is different and numerous factors impact healing. To that end, this is not a how-to guide. It’s just a set of lessons I’ve learned that have helped me in my ongoing journey towards healing. Maybe they’ll help you too. Or maybe you’ll find something completely different that works for you! Either way is wonderful.

Reclaiming Pleasure is Not a Linear Journey

It’s not a straight line. You won’t just get better and better each day until suddenly you wake up and find that you’re fully healed. At least, I don’t know any survivors whose experience has been this way.

You’ll have good days and bad days. Sometimes you might feel like you take two steps forward and one back. All of this is normal. Pleasure after sexual assault is complicated, multi-faceted, and messy. You don’t need to berate yourself because it’s harder today than it was yesterday.

Be where you are today. Wherever that is, it’s okay.

A Healthy Sexual Relationship With Yourself Can Be Immensely Healing

Sex doesn’t have to involve another person unless you want it to. In fact, masturbation and other forms of self-touch – both sexual and non-sexual – can be a really important part of healing from sexual violence and reclaiming pleasure as a radical act of self-love after trauma.

Masturbation and solo sex is something you do entirely for yourself. You don’t have to perform or worry about pleasing someone else. You don’t even need to involve your genitals at all, if you don’t want to. The only agenda is to touch yourself in the ways that feel good, and stop when you want to stop.

Self-touch is a wonderful way to get to know ourselves, to be kind and loving and gentle with ourselves. Pay attention to your body and what feels good. Do you just want to run your hands over your skin for now? Perfect, do that. Does using a wand vibrator through your clothes help you access pleasure in a way that feels safe? Amazing.

Your Healing is For You and You Don’t Owe It to Anyone Else

Many survivors feel anxious to recover from or “get over” their experiences because they want to be able to give their partner sex (or certain kind of sex.) Sometimes this pressure comes from the partner. Other times, the partner is completely supportive and this pressure is internal.

Either way: your healing is for you.

Yes, it’s wonderful to be able to share awesome sex with your partner(s) if you want to. But ultimately, your sexuality is your own. Reclaiming pleasure after sexual assault has to be for yourself first. No-one has the right to access to your body. Not even if you’ve been married for fifty years.

You can heal with other people. In fact, love and support are virtually essential for recovering from trauma. But you can’t heal for somebody else, and you don’t owe your partner(s) a certain kind of recovery.

There is No “Correct” Version of Healthy Sexuality

Pleasure is personal and it can look countless different ways. A healthy relationship with your sexuality means something different to everyone.

Sadly a lot of people still believe that the only correct way to have sex is for that sex to be penetrative, heterosexual, monogamous, vanilla, and within the context of a serious relationship. Survivors of trauma who identify as queer, non-monogamous, kinky, asexual, demisexual, or highly sexual may find themselves pathologised, with professionals and loved ones alike attributing their identities and experiences to their trauma. This is tremendously damaging to survivors and is another form of taking away our agency.

Reclaiming pleasure after trauma means that you get to decide how your sexuality looks. If it’s happy, risk-aware, and consensual, you’re doing it right.

The Hardest Lesson About Reclaiming Pleasure After Sexual Assault: Some Things Might Never Go Back to the Way They Were

I still grieve for the Amy who never met her abusers. I still grieve for the version of me who didn’t get pressured into sex in her teens, who didn’t lose half her twenties to psychological abuse, who didn’t get raped at a party in her thirties. Honestly? I probably always will.

When it comes to reclaiming pleasure, the hardest thing for me to learn was that some things will never be the way they might have been in that alternate timeline.

Because abuse, assault, violence? It changes us. It has a deep, profound, and lasting impact. I know that the things I’ve experienced will, in some ways, be with me forever. I’ll never go back to the way I was before. Not completely.

But I am starting, in some small ways, to be okay with that. Nothing stays the same forever, and every experience we have shapes and molds us. So no, I’ll never be the person I might have been without those experiences. But I can grow into someone else. She might even be someone great.

If you need crisis support after sexual violence, please contact RAINN in the USA and Rape Crisis in the UK.