There is a particular kind of pain that comes after surviving sexual abuse. One that is hard to name and even harder to bear. This is an attempt to put words to it, and to what becomes possible on the other side.
Sexual abuse feels like a destructive storm that has torn through a garden that had just begun to grow. It feels as if someone has trampled every flower, cut down every tree, and filled the soil with dirt and filth that does not belong to you—yet, somehow, feels as if it does. You can no longer tell which roots are yours and which were forced into the soil.
This is often the most painful part of having survived sexual abuse: even though it was someone else who brought the destruction and the contamination, you can no longer distinguish it from what is your own.
When someone takes your body without permission, they take something else too. Hope is taken away, because the sense of having a choice is taken away.
Many attempts to heal might be unsuccessful because it can be too difficult to imagine that something different is possible—that this is not our only chance to create our garden. There are many new chapters of our story yet to be written, and many possibilities to recreate our garden as we wish.
On reclaiming choice
One of the most important parts of healing is restoring a sense of choice and hope—reclaiming the capacity to imagine different ways of living in our bodies and experiencing sexuality. Choice as the possibility to orient ourselves towards something different: towards joy, pleasure, and aliveness. To begin to feel this in the body might sound like: “I choose to move towards or away from situations, people, and relationships.“ Hope as a sense of faith in possibilities that, until now, have been unimaginable.
And yet, even this can feel threatening. Sometimes feeling your own aliveness evokes fear, because in the past it attracted the wrong kind of attention. And so, we shut it down again and again.
It takes a lot of time to regain trust in our bodies; trust that the body can feel pleasure, and that inhabiting our body does not have to feel threatening or unbearable.
It takes courage and immense strength to reclaim our aliveness, our body, our dignity, and our own authority over our body.
This is where the restoration of power and control becomes essential. Not as an abstract idea, but as something felt from the inside. It is distinct from power and control over others, rooted instead in accessing your own strength and the capacity for discernment needed to choose with whom, how, and where to share this aliveness.
It does not mean it is easy or that it happens overnight, but by connecting to hope and faith in something bigger—to a sense of deserving and worthiness—we can begin to tend our garden again. Not because we failed before, but because we are only now being given the chance.
It is so very difficult to look delicately at what has been destroyed, and to respect and honour the parts that cannot be returned. To recognise the pain and struggle that comes with it, and to acknowledge all the avoidance patterns or learned survival responses we have put in place. It is a slow process, and we need to take one step at a time.
On weeding
Weeding can be a painful process. Some weeds grow there for a reason: to protect you, to help you survive. The weeding process does not mean dismissing what those weeds once offered; it means gently discerning what still serves you and what is ready to be released. Some we recognise clearly, while others are subtle and harder to detect.
And then we must learn how to choose the right soil for planting—something many of us were never shown how to do, and never given the conditions to practise. We learned only to endure, to adapt, to make do with whatever soil we were given. That is not a failure of will; it is what survival required.
Returning to Eros
Reclaiming aliveness is not only about the body. It is about reconnecting to the very current of life itself. To beauty, sensation, meaning, and the felt sense that we belong in the world.
Eros is not an abstract force. It is the warmth you feel toward a piece of music, the way beauty can stop you in your tracks, the pull toward another human being or your pet. It is aliveness, vitality, beauty, sensuality, and also connection with others.
We have so thoroughly conflated the erotic with the sexual that when violation occurs, we disconnect not only from our sexuality, but also from Eros itself. In order to restore our sexual lives, we must first restore our faith in Eros, which is life.
The erotic landscape
This is where the concept of the erotic landscape comes in. It is about cultivating new possibilities within our erotic garden—the garden of Eros, the garden of life.
The erotic landscape is not only about sexuality. It is the terrain of your inner world: what stirs you, what moves you, what makes you feel most alive. It might be found in the pleasure of a meal, in art, in the quiet joy of being held safely, or in the warmth of sunlight on your skin. Slowly, gently, we begin to notice what nourishes us and we start to tend to those places with intention and care.
Because even if the landscape we once knew—or hoped to cultivate—seems irreversibly damaged, making it nearly impossible to imagine it ever blooming again, there is something to remember: nature never gives up.
We continuously witness damaged landscapes spring back to life, transformed and beautiful in ways we couldn’t have imagined. This same resilience lives within you. Cultivating your erotic garden after it has been violated is tender work, but it is possible—I have seen it happen. It requires time, precious time that deserves to be honoured, not rushed. And when the transformation happens, there is so much to celebrate.
The garden was never lost. It was waiting. And you, too, are worth tending to.