When I first work with clients, they often say something along the lines of “I don’t have a history of sexual abuse that I know of.” But then they go on to use words and phrases such as “It was weird,” “He was a little off,” “I was partially responsible,” and “It wasn’t that sexual.” The reality is that one in four girls and one in six boys are sexually abused by the age of eighteen.[5] If our first sexual template was formed somewhere on the spectrum of sexual abuse, it would benefit us to be curious about how the harm may have continued to play out over a lifetime.
