Trigger Warnings: Sexual assault, sexuality trauma, sexism, political violence

Disclaimer: For the sake of ease and realness, I’m going to share from my own experience so that I can speak on a deeper level here without compromising any client confidentiality. What I’m sharing are threads that are unfortunately so common. I’m not unique in these kinds of experiences, so I will make use of it here. I’m only here to tell my own story and have no desire to infringe on anyone else’s voice.

Somehow, I’ve found myself surrounded by beautiful men.

I know, a lot of us are not happy with men right now – and honestly, for good reason. This also caught me by surprise, so bear with me.

The last trip I went on was epic. I went to the Netherlands for a training all about somatics and sexuality (one of a 4-part series I will continue to do). I went to Glasgow and Dublin, and then to Tuscany for Rebel Rebel Flower School as I mentioned in my last post.

In the last few years, the dust has settled on some major Tower times, and thankfully I’ve been feeling more grounded than I have ever felt in my life (is it the progesterone?!). So going into this trip, I could feel the groundedness alongside these persistent sparks of connection. Little connections of relatedness to the other participants and connections to threads I’ve been working to heal in the past several years. I felt so rooted but also like a live wire in the best way possible.

The healing journey is wild. You may find yourself walking the walk, but you still may not be sure of where it’s going. Whether certain pain points will ever get better. What your life will look like on the other side.

But you keep going. 🐦‍🔥

And then you find yourself surrounded by gorgeous men being vulnerable with you, without any hint of trying to get with you and I couldn’t help but wonder how the hell I got here.

Let’s back up a bit though and define a few things.

Sexual Trauma vs. Sexuality Trauma

First, most of us are familiar with sexual trauma usually in the form of an acute assault or ongoing abuse of some sort. But we can also have sexuality trauma.

Sexuality trauma can be thought of more as the ways that our sexuality, or ability to show up as a sexual being in a way that is authentic to who we are, have been harmed in our journey.

And lots of things can harm our sexual selves. Sexual assault for sure can impact our sexuality. But also things like sexism, homophobia, racism, societal pressures, gender dysphoria, projections or judgments from others, body shame, capitalism, body disconnection, religion, the list goes on and on.

I love this distinction, because it looks at that sexual trauma piece in a more nuanced kind of way, taking into account our personal experience within the meso- and macro spheres.

In 2025, this feels particularly relevant. We’re witnessing unprecedented harm being done to women, trans, non-binary, and even boys at the hands of immature masculinity with patriarchy in full play. The systematic rollback of rights and protections, combined with rising harassment and violence, shows us how much work we still have to do – our sexuality is literally under political assault.

And I’ve also seen these nuances in practice. We may work through an acute sexual assault, yet the client may still struggle with sex. Or comfortability with certain genders. Why? Well, often those struggles are in the realm of sexuality trauma. Because it’s not just what happened to your body, it’s what happened to your sexual self and often this includes how we feel within our relationships to gender as well.

Keeping an eye out for sexuality trauma (rather than just sexual trauma) gives us a much more considerate view of the ways that we can struggle sexually and where to look for that buried treasure of healing. ❤️‍🩹

Let’s Dive Deeper

In my own lived experience, sexual projection from others has been a major part of my own sexuality trauma. This, ultimately, has been from people of all genders. But punctuations of assaults at the hands of men as well as experiences of boys feeling immaturely entitled to me, had caused me to deeply distrust men.

And I find it all so ironic because I was very, very close to my Dad.

But he’s not your average guy. In hindsight he really embodied the masculine and feminine. He worked on my old Chrysler with me and also showed me how to iron my clothes. He was adamant that I knew how to hammer a nail and plunge a toilet for the explicit purpose of being an “independent woman who doesn’t need to rely on a man.” 🛠️

He was my confidante. And when I cried about how boys would objectify me and then say that I was leading them on when all I really wanted was to be their genuine friend – he would always say, “darling, you’re the brains and the beauty and the boys don’t know what to do with you.”

Well past his death, his words still stick with me.

Well into my adulthood, too many grown men have continued to play right into the same old shit that I endured from boys in Middle School. (It’s so easy to get so angry at this, like what gives?!)

Naturally, my nervous system did the sensible adaptation to a persistent problem that refuses to budge: avoid.

As a result, I started to keep my distance from men. As a psychology major, then social work grad student and psychotherapist, it has been easy to avoid men as I am routinely in female dominated spheres.

But after getting divorced, I re-entered the main place where I might engage with men – dating. 🙀

And in the past few years, I realized that I don’t like how most men commonly interact with me. Their behavior, far too often, doesn’t make me want to be their friend.

And, yet, my mind would return to my dad, baffled, because he was such a good man.

Now to be clear, this is not at all how I felt about the men I work with as a therapist in part because my branding does a good job of weeding out people who are not the right fit (thank you, past me!), but also, it’s a very defined container with very sharp boundaries I uphold.

But in the personal realm, I’ve been stubbornly optimistic, you could say and I am not sorry. This optimism has exposed me to so much learning, growth, and healing that I am beyond grateful for, as much as it hurts sometimes.

Returning to my dad’s words, “darling, you’re the brains and the beauty and the boys don’t know what to do with you” – I realized a key word in that line: BOYS.

To quote a close colleague of mine, Kristal DeSantis, LMFT who specializes in working with masculinity, a lot of the challenges we are having with masculinity (to the point that it is toxic for us) is because this version of masculinity is immature (and also given the keys to the kingdom).

Kristal advocates for using the phrase “immature masculinity” rather than “toxic masculinity” because it invites us to consider how we can mature that masculinity. Help grow up how we define, lean into and embody masculinity. This work is not limited to men.

There’s so much that we have gendered that should never have been gendered, like the idea that emotional capacity is something only women hold and being a provider is something for men. Women can be fierce providers. Men can have exquisite emotional capacity. And all people of all genders embody aspects of all human traits, experiences, roles, and the like.

Yet we inherited a gendered world, and I find it important to name when gender norms are in the room so we can deconstruct them (or f*ck with them in a fun way!).

So, in the past few years, I sought to clean up my own relationship to my femininity, androgyny, and masculinity. This was quite confronting and involved a lot of looking at what aspects of my femininity are immature as a starting place. Imploring myself to consider questions like:

In what ways am I only expecting masculinity to be immature in others?

What would more mature forms of that which we have gendered look like?

How can I embody all of it?

Alongside, cleaning up my own immature aspects related to gender, I also started to challenge the fact that I barely had any male friends. How can I date men if I can’t even find any to be real friends with? Isn’t a healthy foundation of a relationship a true friendship? 🤯

There’s a loop. There’s always a sneaky loop.

So, over the last several years, I did what any relational trauma therapist would do: start with safety and connection.

Putting this into practice, I tried to notice when I felt safe with a man and when I did not. When I felt safe, I was deliberate to not make any sudden moves relationally and just employed a kind of “wait and watch” approach to see what would happen next if I didn’t let my defenses run the show and pull away.

Naturally, I found myself attracted to most of them. Part of me is a bit embarrassed to admit this, but honestly, as a sex therapist, this is so basic: Safety is HOTTT.

And with those men, I started to realize that I had been in a shitty feedback loop with men:

1. Experienced objectification by men 🔥
2. Don’t feel safe 🚨
3. Avoid men 🙅🏻‍♀️
4. Meet a man who does feel safe 🦄
5. Develop sexual or romantic feelings for them 🌶️
6. End up objectifying them as a potential object of my affection 🙈
7. Miss the opportunity of a genuine friendship 😔
8. Cycle repeats ⛓️

This blew my mind!

My avoidance created a desert where I ran the risk of doing the very thing to men that they had done to me!

This did not sit well with me at all, so I sought to foster genuine friendships with good men whenever they crossed my path. Sometimes that was someone I dated, or a practitioner I worked with, or a colleague in a training.

Some of these beautiful men are very boo’d up, so that also helped to focus on the friendship rather than the crush. And the crushes calmed down.

And there’s a sense of alignment I now feel with myself: it’s never made sense to me to hold so much resentment toward half the population on the planet. And I also get it. The harm that’s done from this immature masculinity, patriarchy and sexism is VERY REAL.

But to quote Kristal, again, “Men are people too.”

Men need safe places to be a human and heal too. In fact, the rest of us need them to have safe places for healing.

Do I want them to be active participants in that healing? Absolutely.

This is where we have to be discerning about what we are available for and I will be the first to tell you, that at this point, my standards are quite high with regard to which men I will befriend and hold personal space for or not.

But if I see you in the ring, being vulnerable and trying, I am here for it.

And it’s been healing for me as well.

Because the more I surround myself with these beautiful men who are kind, respectful, sensitive, safe:

1. The more there are opportunities to see men embodying these qualities 🌹
2. The more I see this in them, the more they share their real humanness with me 👀
3. The more I see how human they are, the more compassion I have for them 🤗
4. The more they experience my compassion, the more they feel safe with me 🐻
5. The more I feel let in by them, the more I feel safe in the world 🖤

It genuinely helps me to feel safer knowing that mature men do exist and I know some of them. It also helps me feel safe knowing that I have flexed a very important muscle in being able to suss them out from the rest.

This has become a feedback loop of safety rather than a feedback loop of harm. Harm that in my case has been a major part of my own sexuality trauma.

From here, I feel more like a human with fellow humans, regardless of our genitals.

And at the end of the day, this is how it should be – because even genetically, we have more in common than not.

How to Break the Cycle: Clinical Recommendations

If any of this resonated with you and you want to try to work on your own sexuality trauma as it relates to your experiences of men and masculinity, here are my recommendations of what to do:

1. Have your boundaries about what you are available for. There’s a massive difference between experiencing the brunt of someone’s unhealed child parts versus experiencing a person trying to acknowledge, hold, account for, and heal the child parts within themselves. You are not required to hold space for someone dumping their unprocessed trauma on you.
2. Catch your biases. Be mindful of those moments when you are only expecting the worst of immature masculinity from a man. If it helps, take a page from my dad’s line – those are boy parts not the whole man. Again, if a man is only operating from his boy parts, it’s not your job to hold all of that, but check yourself to make sure you are open to seeing their mature aspects as well, even if that is them expressing vulnerability.
3. Take stock of any beautiful men you can think of even if they are not in your personal life – for me, it’s my Dad, Mr. Rogers, Bob Ross and of course, Levar Burton. 🦋📙🌈 Anytime you feel that deep feeling of safety with a man, take note and see if you can forge a real friendship with them.
4. Notice what happens within your body through all of this. Some people will say all the right things, but your body is like no or all stirred up. Trust this. There’s plenty of good reasons not to trust, but see if you can sense the moments where something different-in-a-good way happens. These feelings may be much more subtle than those big crush feelings (if this happens for you!) so you’ll have to pay close attention.
5. Notice what happens around you when you show up with compassion and genuine curiosity about who they are as people. Are there any patterns??

It’s been about 3-4 years of me working on this diligently, and in this past trip (er, year!) I’ve noticed that I have started having some really lovely men flock to me in abundance. Not in a romantic way, but in a real, genuine, human kind of way.

And it feels really tender. I think a lot of men are deeply hungry for more safe spaces. And because something has shifted deep within myself, I’m seeing them show up more and more in my life. It’s beautiful, sweet and feels like I’ve regained a part of my dad I miss dearly.

And I think a lot of women, genderqueer people, and even other men and boys are longing to feel this kind of real, human safety with men too.

The Path Forward: Creating Safety in Unsafe Times

This work feels particularly crucial right now. Gender liberation and body autonomy is under attack at the hands of the patriarchy.

And it may feel like a sidestep to think about sexuality trauma. But how many of us are trying to navigate how to express our gendered selves in a way that is in alignment with our values? Date men or exist in relationships with a masculine person? Or raise boys into mature men who value the sovereignty and dignity for all people?

To do any of this we need to have a more nuanced conversation around masculinity alongside reclaiming our ability to discern between safety and danger, between mature and immature expressions of masculinity, between men who would stand with us and boys who may harm us.

The political landscape we’re living in makes this discernment more important, not less. We need allies. We need to know how to recognize them. And we need to heal the parts of ourselves that got so wounded by immature masculinity that we lost the ability to see mature masculinity when it shows up.

This doesn’t mean you have to befriend men. This doesn’t mean you have to date men. This doesn’t mean you have to forgive anyone or do emotional labor for people who haven’t earned it.

What it means is refusing to let the worst examples of humanity dictate your entire relationship with half the population. What it means is healing the sexuality trauma that keeps you trapped in cycles of objectification – whether you’re being objectified or doing the objectifying.

Ready to explore your own relationship with sexuality trauma? Whether you’re working through the impact of assault, societal messaging, or the broader cultural moment we’re living through, you don’t have to navigate this alone. Schedule a consultation to begin your own journey back to authentic connection and embodied discernment.