“Do you have any history of sexual trauma?”
My training dictates that upon first meeting a new patient, I must turn my words into claws and eviscerate their deepest secrets by doing a “thorough” intake.
I should ask the name of the person that held your hand in the police station or let you cry into their lap as you shivered and shuddered on the twin bed your first year of college.
Maybe you were still in high school when the never-to-be-spoken-about event occurred. You confessed only because you were high in the bagel store parking lot, or behind the large willow tree in your local park.
You outgrew or outran those friends who helped you put one foot in front of the other, those friends who held your secret.
I will rarely ask about past trauma during a first session. Instead, I will wait to plunge my hand into your chest and remove your heart from the hard shell you have worked so hard to create to protect yourself. I will wait until we decide, after our first session, that you and I are a good fit. I will wait until you decide that you want to set up another appointment, rather than operating under the assumption that the way I practice my craft will be the way that works well for you.
I will allow you to leave my office intact. It is the least I can offer to someone who is brave enough to find a stranger online and silently beg to be saved.
“Do you have any history of sexual trauma?”
I will ask this question along with several other uncomfortable questions and double-check your medical history and emergency contact at the same time.
If you were born male, the answer is often a simple yes or no.
For those who were born female, the answer is yes, no, or hesitation—a pause that lasts just a few seconds longer than it should.
And the longer the pause, the more complicated the issue.
How do you talk about something that went farther than you intended … how do you not blame yourself for all of the things that you should have and could have done differently? How do we help patients cope with a sexual incident, a sexual event that still haunts them, but falls just short of fitting into the categories that are more clearly defined?
Rape is thought of as clear cut in the level of violence, although the he said/she said phenomena is significantly and statistically altered by the consumption of drugs and/or alcohol.
Sexual assault implies a violent act.
Sexual offense has the connotation that a legal decision was the determinant.
In a world where the language is constantly changing, adapting, and adjusting to changes in our environment, we are still missing the appropriate verbiage to properly address the in-betweens of sexual trauma. And the in-betweens don’t leave scars that mark the violence and unpredictable nature of what you went through.
We lack the words to quickly and concisely explain that in-between place where you thought you could control the level of sexual exploration, only to be stripped of your power.
The victim is left holding the heaviness of the physical, emotional, sexual, power struggle that is often driven by the aggressor’s ego, rather than romantic or sexual passion.
We shove it into the back of our mind, we try not to think about how it made us feel because we worry that the violation or offense wouldn’t be deemed enough—after all, it wasn’t enough to condemn the adolescent actions of a Supreme Court judge.
And so, we shrug it off. Because we have no words for what has become a commonplace rite of passage that so many of us go through.
How can we overcome sexual injustices when we hesitate to identify them as traumatic? How do we move forward from the experience of being sexualized in a way that we neither wanted nor understood, if we feel driven to validate the inequity of what occurred by identifying the proper word, rather than having faith in our subjective experience?
You may not have the words for the way in which your sexuality was used against you, but for now, perhaps we can agree that the feeling of having been sexualized in a way that you didn’t want is enough.
“Do you have any history of sexual trauma?”
(Pause)
“Well, sort of.”
“Maybe.”
“I’m—I’m not sure.”
“I understand. Maybe we can talk about it and figure out the answer together?”
