Did you know that 89% of veterans experiencing PTSD report one or more kinds of sexual dysfunction? And that survivors of childhood sexual abuse have a very common set of negative feelings and beliefs about sex? That’s the bad news.

The good news: your marriage can become a place to help heal trauma — even through what happens in your most intimate moments.

In our previous  post we asked whether trauma might be having an unseen impact on your marriage, and how you can identify and begin to heal this issue. Previous trauma can have a major impact on a marriage by  damaging your ability to trust and open up to your spouse. It can also have a major impact on marital sexuality.

Like last week, we’re not trying to encourage anyone to make up something that isn’t actually there. But I believe that trauma is impacting more of our marriages than many of us realize. And one area the symptoms are particularly evident in is the area of sexuality.

We’re going to start by looking at how trauma impacts female and male sexuality individually. And then we’re going to show you how to improve your sexual relationship directly.

If trauma is affecting your situation or even if you don’t have any trauma that you’re aware of, the last half of today’s post is going to have some very useful teaching on becoming more conversant about your sexual relationship.

How Trauma Impacts a Wife’s Sexuality

Unfortunately, a common cause of trauma in women is childhood sexual abuse. And although this also happens to men, we do have a very useful study from 2012[i] that specifically looks at the impact of childhood sexual abuse on women’s sexuality.

Based on their review of the research, this study found that trauma impacts women’s sexuality in the following ways:

"Women with a history of CSA report more negative feelings about sex and experience less sexual satisfaction than do non-abused women[ii]”. I want to be clear: this is normal. I know when statements like this are made it’s easy to put yourself in the “damaged goods” category. But that’s not what this is about. It’s really helpful when we’ve been through something profoundly difficult like trauma to know that we’re not alone in our struggles. Finding out that this is a normal experience should normalize it. So you’re not crazy, you’re not the only person like this. The good news is that there is hope and recovery. So just stay with me here. The first take-home point is that it’s not uncommon to report more of these negative feelings.

Next, “Forming intimate adult relationships is often difficult” for survivors, and “when relationships are formed, sexual and emotional fulfillment is often lacking[iii]”. So if you’re listening today you may be listening because you want more from marriage — more from your relationship with your husband. That’s great!

Research has found that the most common sexual difficulties in survivors are “disorders of desire, arousal, orgasm, and less often dyspareunia (painful sex) and vaginismus[iv]”. Vaginismus is the term given to recurring, involuntary tightening of the muscles around the vagina whenever penetration is attempted, making sex difficult or impossible. So these are common issues that female trauma survivors face in the context of married sexuality.

What causes these sexual difficulties?

That’s a good question to ask. One common underlying factor is often that survivors of sexual abuse have been found to have "more negative self-schemas [ways of thinking about self] than non-abused women[v]". When psychologists talk about schemas they are referring to our core beliefs- the things about ourselves and the world which we hold as irrefutably true. You can imagine that in intimacy when these deeply held negative ways of thinking about yourself are the dominant stories, it’s going to have an effect. It doesn’t matter how beautiful your husband thinks you are — you just can’t see yourself any other way.