Healing in the Aftermath Sexual Assault: Retrieving the Sacredness of Touch
Inspired by the words of Celtic philosopher John O’Donohue
“Touch brings presence home,” writes John O’Donohue in his soul-warming tribute to friendship, love, and other sacred mysteries of life: Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom. “At the highest moments of human intensity,” he goes on, “words become silent. Then the language of touch really speaks.” In our most human moments, he explains, written and verbal language falls short, and touch reaches out, a language in itself, bringing us “out of the anonymity of distance into the intimacy of belonging.” The world of touch, he tells us, “is a sacred world of presence”, through which we can communicate an otherwise inexplicable belongingness, tenderness, warmth. Thus, O’Donohue concludes, “Touch offers the deepest clue to the mystery of encounter, awakening, and belonging. It is the secret, affective content of every connection and association. The energy, warmth, and invitation of touch come ultimately from the divine.”
John O’Donohue’s sentiments are beautiful. But as a survivor of sexual assault, the experience of sacredness and presence in touch is something that, for most of my life, has felt elusively out of my reach. I learned at an early age that touch from others was not a language of mutual intimacy, but rather an act of power and abuse. My body became something foreign to me, an object of gratification for someone else, not my own at all. Physical touch was the opposite of an experience of presence: I became anonymous to my own physical form, learned how to float above my bodily existence at such great heights that I could no longer feel ordinary sensation. And because the abuse I experienced was serial in nature, after awhile, I just didn’t come down. What started out as my brain’s genius safety mechanism to carry me to a safe haven during inescapable trauma became a habit of disconnect and dissociation that I couldn’t kick once I was actually safe.
So how do I, as a survivor of sexual assault, reconcile my experience of touch as violation with John O’Donohue’s beautiful testament to touch as a language of belonging and connection? How do I “retrieve these gentle and sacred words of touch” that are so intricately tied to the journey of “engaging our full human nature”, when touch to me has been neither gentle nor sacred, nor acknowledging my human experience at all? How can I reclaim the intimacy of sexuality, which as O’Donohue says, is “the most tender aspect of human presence” in which we “let [the Other] right into [our] world”, when the sexuality of another took my world by storm and against my will? Where do I begin?
O’Donohue acknowledges the entitlement and greed that has drawn us away from true intimacy: “The words of intimacy, the night words of eros and affection, the secret words of love, have been vacated in the neon day of greed and consumerism… The world of Eros is one of the devastated casualties of contemporary commercialism and greed.”
I have tried and failed to fit into a culture where sex was seen as a form of recreation and entertainment, an indulgence, rather than the true intimacy of touch as an opportunity to move deeper into a sacred, tantric connection with a kindred soul. Trying to participate in the former, for me, has always lead to the same results: I am triggered into a flashback and a torrent of accompanying emotions — panic, emotional nausea, devastation, worthlessness. Then my mind comes to the rescue, and I slip out of my body into dissociation, into that safe haven that hovers somewhere above the physical world. Recreational sex and PTSD just don’t mix. Not for me. For me, entrusting my body to another person involves a profound sense of a soul-level kinship and trust; Only then am I opened up to the possibility of safety and comfort within the presence of my body and another’s; to experience intimacy through spirit and touch.
“Anam cara means soul friend,” John O’Donohue writes.
“The anam cara was a person to whom you could reveal the hidden intimacies of your life. This friendship was an act of recognition and belonging. When you had an anam cara, your friendship cut across all convention and category. You were joined in an ancient and eternal way with the friend of your soul.”
He goes on: “In this love, you are understood as you are without mask or pretension. The superficial and functional lies and half-truths of social acquaintance fall away, you can be as you really are. Love allows understanding to dawn, and understanding is precious. Where you are understood, you are at home. Understanding nourishes belonging. When you really feel understood, you feel free to release yourself into the trust and shelter of the other person’s soul.”
For me, I need that a soul-level kinship, that deep underlying current of friendship and trust. I want to clear the trail to my beloved’s doorstep, and walk it often. I want to move closer into intimacy, but first through the pathways of the soul, then through touch. I’ve come to realize that for me, sexuality can only exist in this context, an act of tantra. It cannot exist without those foundations, without that undercurrent of a profound spiritual bond. And I’ve finally realized, that’s okay. That’s more than okay, because it opens me up to the possibility of true intimacy. In fact, I wouldn’t want it any other way.
“Touch is such an immediate sense. It can bring you in from the false world, the famine world of exile and image. Rediscovering the sense of touch returns you to the hearth of your own spirit, enabling you to experience again warmth, tenderness, and belonging… Touch brings presence home.” — John O’Donahue
