How to navigate intimacy after s****l a*****t
Although people don’t always talk about it, victims of sexual abuse in childhood may have difficulties dealing with sex in their adulthood, especially if they do not go through counselling
One of the many painful memories Oscar Kinyanjui* struggles to suppress is that of hearing himself cry hard, begging for mercy from the house help to not do it again.
On those days, he would want his mother to just stay at home and take care of him as the rest of the world went about its routine and to long for evening so he could unite with people he actually trusted when they returned home from work.
It had already become a norm for their ‘trusted’ house manager to play around with his private parts and eventually molest him.
“When my parents were around she was the epitome of goodness: an angel, and no one could think she was capable of doing such things. However, once they stepped out, she would change. She could just harass me and reach out for my penis to play with it. It always felt so uncomfortable, but there is no way I could speak out because of people perceived it as tabia mbaya,” he explains.
This went on until she stopped working for them. Even though she left the home, the lingering effect of her actions haunted Kinyanjui into his adulthood.
It changed everything he felt about sex. It dented him so much and ruined how he felt about women; he was filled with resentment and anger.
“I just didn’t know the meaning of sex for a long time and it actually felt so bad because anytime I tried to engage with a woman I would just get flashbacks of the number of times our house help assaulted me and start laughing,” he recalls.
This further ruined his relationship with the women he would come across and set him on a path to promiscuity.
Coping mechanism
“I remember I would just go for any woman who was pretty, but wouldn’t really want to be with them, because I had others. This didn’t shake me,” he explains.
Kinyanjui is among many young adults navigating a frustrating sexual life after experience with sexual abuse in their childhood.
The effects are far and wide and includes immediate and long-term psychological problems that can affect married life and parenthood and cause mental health issues.
“I stop and think of my future and I am too afraid that at some point I’ll be expected to settle down and start a life with a woman. After this I would just never know how to tell her about my childhood because she might pity me or it will always come between us,” Kinyanjui adds.
Elmard Rigan, a counselling psychologist says given that sexual abuse involves unwanted sexual contact or inappropriate exposure to sex, sexual intimacy relationship can become a place where difficulties may appear later on in life.
He cautions that children choose a path according to how they handle the experience of having been sexually abused.
Consequently, if they are not taken through proper counselling sessions to help them accept, understand and adopt proper coping mechanisms, they might be affected both in the short and long term.
Tailor-made
Like in Kinyanjui’s case, getting more sexual partners makes a person feel superior giving them control over a situation they had lost in their childhood.
“When men are sexually abused, they might be okay with casual sex later on in their teens, but problems come in when they have to engage in sex within the context of a loving relationship,” he says.
Rigan says it is normal for memories to reappear during sexual intimate moments and couples need to understand each other and look for a way to work through it, including seeking help to establish trust and to understand that their partner means no harm.
James Mburu, a psychologist, however cautions that promiscuity is just one of the many ways survivors of childhood sexual abuse react and not all of them would take this route.
“We cannot link getting multiple partners to sexual abuse although people react differently. A person may be going through this because they don’t know how to react to what they went through,” he says.
“They may exhibit violence tendencies and this sometimes affects them because they might not know how to handle their anger,” he explains.
Other than that, some of them end up abstaining from sex, because they feel they might find peace there.
“Due to the traumatic experiences, some tend to switch off during sex, or cry while engaging in sexual intercourse because of their past experience,” he says.
It is difficult to give a one for all solutions approach, he says. “Solutions need to be tailor-made for individuals,” he adds.
*Name has been changed
