Felicia: Healing from Sexual Trauma and Addiction

[Note: This story contains a description of sexual abuse.]

Seated in the back of a Chinese food restaurant over her lunch hour, Felicia tells me, “With my first husband, I dreaded sex. I felt so dirty and had to shower right after we did it.” She has arrived at our meeting dressed in her pink, medical assistant scrubs with a delicate gold cross at her neck. Clear dark eyes hold my gaze steady while her head quivers with a grandmotherly tremor. For Felicia, it took many years until the words, “sexual” and, “pleasure” even made acquaintances much less lustily conjoined. This remarkable woman has moved past childhood sexual abuse, rape, an abusive marriage, and heroin addiction to find love, comfort and even satisfying sex.

Felicia grew up being sexually abused by a family member until his death when she was 11 years old. He would interrupt her without notice as she sat on her bedroom floor playing with her dolls. Or he might wait for her when she returned from school. He’d pull down his pants, grab his erect penis and make her watch while he masturbated. As she silently endured, he would call her, “a filthy pig,” “dirty” and “fat.” Like most victims of childhood sexual abuse, she told no one, shoving each encounter in the basement of her mind so she could return to fantasy dress-up or swinging in the park with the neighborhood kids.

Soon after her abuser died, puberty altered the landscape of her body, unbidden and unwelcome, like an earthquake from which there is no refuge. Soon others waited for her after school, boys who wanted to stare and touch and take. While many girls her age dreamed of romance and feeling special in someone’s eyes, Felicia longed only for invisibility. She wanted no one to provoke that dragon of shame and filth locked away in the dungeon of her mind. She reacted so violently to any male interest that peers called her “gay” and teachers labeled her “angry.” She found power only in the brutal workouts at a mixed martial arts studio. “My first sparring partner became a famous boxer,” she says proudly. Although her fighting skill persuaded the fawning boys to keep their distance, it did nothing to tame her wild emotions, which continued to show up like an unshakable stalker. The drugs helped, though. Speed, “black beauties,” kept her mind alert and her body agile and fast. She was just 13 years old.

At 15, she was gang raped inside a dark, abandoned building, her fighting prowess no match for multiple assailants. “I couldn’t see their faces. I always assumed they were from the neighborhood, so they know me but I don’t know them.” Even today, when she returns to her old neighborhood for extended family gatherings, a plate of pork tamales and beans on her lap, she will look across the room at a man joking with a group of her cousins and wonder, “Was that the laugh? Was he one of them?”

She consented to her first sexual intercourse during senior year of high school. And yes, she discovered, you can get pregnant the first time. When she told the boy, he denied that they had ever had sex. She was powerless, pregnant and soon to be responsible for a baby.

At 19, with a one-year-old daughter, she moved to California to live with extended family. She felt safer there, went to community college, worked and bonded with her cousins. Unfortunately, the drug habit went with her. Speedballs, a mixture of heroin and methamphetamine, combined just the energy she craved with the numbing she needed. In California, during the chaos of speedball evenings and matted hair mornings, she met her first husband. “In the beginning, he was gentle and nice.” But soon he became abusive. He called her “fat,” echoing her childhood abuser. “My husband did not want me to gain any weight. So even when I got pregnant with my son, I kept myself really thin.” And like her abuser, “He would masturbate in front of me just because he knew how much it bothered me. He was gross.” He slept with other women. She slept with other men. “I guess I was looking for comfort and companionship.” They stayed together for years raising the kids, working, drugging, surviving.

Two nearly simultaneous events abruptly changed her life when she was 33 years old. Her brother was murdered, and she discovered her husband molesting her daughter. Despite the fog of drugs, she acted decisively. She sent her kids to her mom, checked herself into a psychiatric rehabilitation facility, then pressed charges against her husband and divorced him. If that was not enough, doctors discovered cancer cells on her cervix, and she had a full hysterectomy, bringing a sharp decline in her sex hormones.

In her late 30s, her sobriety solid and her children reclaimed, she met a man. He was different - softer, trustworthy, adoring. “He had terminal cancer, and it was his wish to marry me. We were together for four years.” He had limited life remaining and he wanted her. For the first time in her life, she enjoyed feeling noticed and special. “He was romantic and affectionate. He made me feel sexual and beautiful.” At 40 years old, during quotidian lovemaking, Felicia experienced her first orgasm. “I was so embarrassed. I thought I had peed, and he had to explain it to me.” This time the unbidden sexual feeling was pleasure. Shocking, vulnerable pleasure.

Now only 53 years old, Felicia has been without a period for twenty years and with her third husband for eleven. Her journey to sexual pleasure had been like a scary carnival ride, with its laughing demons and tortured souls. In her current relationship, the ride emerged into the warmth of a gentle day; the jump-scare heart beats faded.

“When we met, he was seeing a sex therapist because he had been abused as a child. Eventually, I started seeing a therapist for my abuse. It helped a lot. We are able to talk about sex openly.” Her face brightens as she leans towards me. “We can have fun role plays; we can go on vacation and have lots of sex like our honeymoon all over again. Sometimes I have an orgasm, and sometimes I don’t. But I never have sex with a sense of obligation or dread. For both of us, the intimacy is the most important part.”

Felicia could have been one of my patients at the school-based health center: a tough, angry girl coming to school despite formidable chaos and trauma in her life. I loved seeing girls like her in clinic because their hard, defensive shell would often melt in front of me when I offered them basic kindness and respect. Most craved someone to listen to them and to see them. So, while I could not take away their pain, I could be present for them. I could bear witness to their suffering and to their resilience. It may not sound like much, but I know it made a difference. I remember one patient named Ann, who came to the clinic for birth control. Once she had established enough trust in me, she told me that sex hurt most of the time. Then she asked the usual questions like, “Is there anything wrong with me? and “Is it supposed to be like this?” I did my best to reassure her that she was normal and to tell her it could get better. Although Ann denied any history of abuse, I saw in her medical chart that she had undergone a sexual assault exam at age three after someone had discovered a male allegedly having anal sex with her. It still upsets me. I knew her road of healing, including her road to sexual pleasure, was going to be long and complicated. I don’t know how Ann’s story evolved. She dropped out of school before I could even steer her to counseling. Would she eventually find sex pleasurable like Felicia did?

I originally embarked on researching the sexual life stories of women to find out if patients like Ann, a teenager who repeatedly consented to unpleasant sex, could come to know sex as an enjoyable intimacy. Felicia confirmed that it is possible. Felicia’s story of trauma and healing provides a therapeutic balm for the pain I carry of the traumatized girls I saw as patients. It gives me hope.