Want: 8 Steps to Recovering Desire, Passion, and Pleasure After Sexual Assault (Recovering from Sexual Abuse or Assault, Healing PTSD) - Softcover

Peters, Julie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1633539644 ISBN 13: 9781633539648

Publisher: TMA Press, 2019

Synopsis

Rediscover Love and Desire after Sexual Assault

Readers of The Body Keeps the Score, The Deepest Well and Trauma Stewardship should read Want: Recovering Desire after Sexual Assault.

Have the courage to heal. We know, increasingly, how common and devastating sexual violence is for women, but we don’t always talk about how survivors can recover from the trauma and return to desire, sexuality, trust, and pleasure. Want is the story of how Julie Peters did just that―and how you can, too.

Move past the fog of trauma.  In the years after the assault, Julie was in what she calls the fog of trauma: the colorless, tasteless experience of barely getting through the day. No one―not counsellors, support groups, or other survivors―could give her any advice about how to find the desire that could bring her back to joy, intimacy, and connection. She had to make it up on her own. In Want, Julie tells the story of getting from the devastation of trauma to living a full life in eight sometimes challenging, often bumbling, and occasionally delightful steps.

Experience hope, healing and recovery. We have plenty of stories about the helplessness, frustration, and vengeful feelings that can follow trauma. Culturally, we have started a conversation about these experiences, and we’re all confused about what this all means for our relationships with each other. We need stories of hope, healing, and recovery. Survivors of assault, if you've been thinking to yourself, "I thought it was just me," Julie is here to show you that you are not alone. Your loved ones may not know how to support you, but they can learn more about your experiences and how to walk alongside you through this book, just as you can learn how to recover from the trauma you've experienced. Want offers a window into one person’s experience of recovery―plus the happy ending we all need to know is possible after trauma.

About this title

About the Author

Julie Peters is a yoga teacher, writer, and yoga studio owner in Vancouver, BC. She has been practicing yoga and other forms of movement and mindfulness for over 20 years. Her first book, Secrets of the Eternal Moon Phase Goddesses: Meditations on Desire, Relationships, and the Art of Being Broken (SkyLight Paths 2016) explored a set of Tantric moon goddesses who invite us to think about the messier aspects of life, including desire, anger, loneliness, and heartbreak. Julie has an MA in English Literature from McGill University. Her essay, “Why Lying Broken in a Pile on Your Bedroom Floor is a Good Idea,” went viral, with 504,641 views and 25,033 shares on Facebook in 2017 alone and counting.. Also a spoken word poet, Julie has twice represented Vancouver in the Women of the World Poetry Slam and was a part of the Vancouver Poetry Slam Team. She frequently collaborates with dance artist Olivia C. Davies on poetry and dance projects exploring themes of love, connection, heartbreak, and the stories that live in our bodies.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

What I remember most is what happened after. I’m sitting in my car, staring out the windshield. It’s raining, and it’s late, maybe 3 or 4 in the morning. The wipers are on but the car is not. I watch them spread the rain across the windshield (badly on the right side, that wiper has been broken for years). I listen to the rhythmic squee for a while, staring, not quite able to turn the car on and drive myself home. My thoughts don’t seem to want to take an order. I’m not physically hurt, I’m fine. I’m fine. I think I’m fine. But I left my best friend’s house at 3 or 4 in the morning in the rain because I needed to get the hell out of there. And now I’m sitting here across from his apartment, listening to a broken windshield wiper, not getting the hell out. I don’t know how long I sat there before I finally figured out I could turn the car on and go home. Sometimes I try to remember, really get the details in order, sort out what happened, go back to the beginning and think it through til the end, but it’s difficult, like trying to get ants to walk in a straight line. It gets mixed up with other memories―the other times he’d tried to touch me when I didn’t want him to. Or when pushed me into a dark room and locked the door behind him. Or trying to leave earlier that same night, sitting on the stairs, my coat half on, him pleading with me to stay, me making him promise nothing would happen. I remember enough, anyway. When a bad thing happens, you have to survive twice. First you have to survive the thing itself. You have to be physically alive after the thing has happened. That’s certainly key to the whole process. But then you have to survive again, to get through the consequences of the thing that didn’t kill you. You have to figure out how to be a person in a world where your trust in people or your faith in what you think the world is has been shattered. Survival is a gift, but not always the kind you want. Sometimes it’s like the worst of Grandma’s Christmas sweaters, because still existing after a terrible thing happened is confusing and painful and sometimes itchy and definitely comes back every Christmas. So survive we must. However long it takes, we need to create a container of safety before we can start dealing with the devastation of sexual assault. We need to see that whatever we had to do to survive at the time was what we had to do, and we survived, goddammit. It doesn’t matter if we smoked ten thousand cigarettes or dated all the wrong people or pushed away everyone we cared about or drank ourselves to the bottom of the ocean. Your desire, your will to power, your creativity, your ability to love and connect and fuck and feel don’t completely die unless you completely die. Whatever happened, if you’re still alive, you can heal.

Edition details

• Publisher: TMA Press
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1633539644
• ISBN 13: 9781633539648
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 250