Loving Someone Who Has Sexual Trauma: A Compassionate Guide to Supporting Your Partner and Improving Your Relationship

by Megan Lara Negendank

Create a supportive and secure relationship with a partner who has experienced sexual trauma. If your partner is a survivor of sexual trauma, they may experience anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, or feel triggered by intimate situations. And you may feel confused, overwhelmed, or unsure of how to support them. This gentle guide will give you the tools you need to help nurture intimacy and trust, and cultivate a secure relationship. In Loving Someone Who Has Sexual Trauma , marriage, family, and sex therapist Megan Lara Negendank offers self-compassion and attachment-based communication skills to support your partner. You’ll also learn powerful, trauma-informed techniques and strategies to help you understand the full impact of your partner’s past experience, increase feelings of safety and connection, and ultimately improve your relationship in the here and now. In this gentle guide, you’ll If you’re ready to move beyond fear, anger, and disconnection to a thriving intimate relationship where you both can feel loved, safe, and connected, this book can help you get started.

Genres: Nonfiction, Self Help

200 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 2023

About the author

LMFT CST

Reviews

[Shannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book is a helpful resource for not only the partner of a survivor, but the survivor as well. I really liked that not only did the author explain and define sexual trauma and some of the different ways it can affect the survivors and their partners, but there were scenarios and reflection questions, along with tips and exercises that will help support partners and improve relationships.

Thank you to Netgalley and Publishers for giving me a digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

[Markie · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Loving Someone Who Has Sexual Trauma: A Compassionate Guide to Supporting Your Partner and Improving Your Relationship" by Megan Lara Negendank is a valuable resource for partners of survivors of sexual trauma. This gentle guide provides essential tools and strategies to nurture intimacy, trust, and a secure relationship with a survivor.

The book acknowledges the challenges that partners may face in understanding and supporting their loved ones who have experienced sexual trauma. It addresses common emotions such as confusion, overwhelm, and uncertainty that partners may experience, offering guidance on how to navigate these complex situations.

Megan Lara Negendank, a marriage, family, and sex therapist, combines self-compassion and attachment-based communication skills to provide practical support for partners. The book offers trauma-informed techniques and strategies to help partners gain a deeper understanding of the impact of their loved one's past experiences. By increasing feelings of safety and connection, partners can foster an environment conducive to healing and growth.

Key topics covered in the book include effective communication skills to promote trust, methods to avoid or deescalate triggers that may arise, identification of attachment styles, and strategies to soothe conflict patterns. Additionally, the book provides guidance on emotional and physical bonding skills, which are crucial in building a strong and secure relationship.

With its compassionate approach, "Loving Someone Who Has Sexual Trauma" aims to help partners move beyond fear, anger, and disconnection. By implementing the tools and techniques outlined in the book, partners can work towards creating a thriving intimate relationship where both individuals feel loved, safe, and deeply connected.

Overall, this book is an invaluable guide for partners seeking to support and understand their loved ones who have experienced sexual trauma. Its compassionate and practical advice, rooted in trauma-informed principles, offers hope and guidance to partners navigating the complexities of such relationships.

[Panda Incognito · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is filled with compassionate, helpful advice for partners of someone with sexual trauma. The author explains some of the many different forms that sexual trauma can take, describes different ways that victims might react to or cope with it, and helps readers better understand what their partner is going through, how they can provide support, and how they can work through their own complicated feelings about this. The author does a great job validating how isolating, confusing, and painful this experience can be for the partners and spouses of abuse survivors, and her compassion and careful handling of this issue stand out, especially since so few books engage with this dynamic in a relationship.

There’s lots of great advice here, and this book covers a variety of important topics. There’s material about how to understand sexual trauma, better understand triggers, process your own reactions, and create a safe, trusting relationship that can help the abuse survivor heal. There’s also advice about how to communicate better, nurture your attachment, and bond more, and the author includes lots of helpful self-reflection questions and activities, along with things that couples can process and do together, if they’re both willing.

This book has a lot of great elements, and it’s very compassionate and wise. The reason why I’m not rating this higher is because even though the author introduces multiple diverse case studies and returns to them repeatedly throughout the book, none of the relationships includes a straight man as the abuse victim. It is extremely difficult for me to see this as anything other than an act of bias. The abuse survivors in these case studies include straight women, a lesbian, a gay man, and a nonbinary person, but a straight male victim? Clearly that’s a bridge too far. Even though this book’s content can still be very helpful for an abused man’s girlfriend or wife, the choice not to include a case study for this irks me immensely.

I received a temporary digital copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

[Lily Heron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clear, concise and helpful, this is the book I would recommend for those whose partners are living with sexual trauma. A lot of the books I have read so far are complex workbooks, or very heavy on the science of trauma, whereas this one manages to balance advice with simple tasks with brief quotes and case studies of other couples in similar circumstances. Very accurate to the blurb, 'if your partner is a survivor of sexual trauma, they may experience anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, or feel triggered by intimate situations. And you may feel confused, overwhelmed, or unsure of how to support them. This gentle guide will give you the tools you need to help nurture intimacy and trust, and cultivate a secure relationship.' And it does, focusing on communication skills, de-escalating triggers, soothing conflict, and building an emotionally and physically secure relationship, attuned to the specific needs of the trauma survivor. The book is addressed to partners, and the tasks and discussions involve the survivor, so it is especially helpful for partners, or could be purchased by a survivor for their partner. The book emphasises the importance of everyone in the relationship being on board and consenting to the activities, so perhaps bear this in mind concerning whether the book is appropriate for the stage of trauma recovery your partner is at currently.

I am grateful to the publisher and NetGalley for providing an ARC of Loving Someone Who Has Sexual Trauma in exchange for an honest review.

[Bailee Gubler · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am a survivor of sexual trauma, and I experience anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and can feel triggered by various forms of intimacy. It’s hard to let my husband know how to support me and I wanted to read this guide to see if it is something that I could get him to read to help the both of us.

In Loving Someone Who Has Sexual Trauma, marriage, family, and sex therapist Megan Lara Negendank offers self-compassion and attachment-based communication skills to support your partner. You'll also learn powerful, trauma-informed techniques and strategies to help you understand the full impact of your partner's past experience, increase feelings of safety and connection, and ultimately improve your relationship in the here and now. For my husband and I, how to avoid and de escalate triggers and healthy communication were part of our main focus on learning from this book. It is my hope that we can continue to learn from this book and I think it was very helpful for our relationship.

I had the opportunity to read an advanced reader’s e-proof of Loving Someone Who Has Sexual Trauma by Megan L Negendank courtesy of New Harbinger Publications via NetGalley. All opinions above are my own.

[Maria Dimschkie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is such a helpful resource for couples managing the pain, fear, and hopelessness that often come up while navigating the impact of sexual trauma on relationships. Whether you are a survivor, the partner of a survivor, or a clinician who works with couples working through sexual trauma, this book offers compassionate, salient insight and exercises to support the process of healing. Megan does an incredible job weaving in narratives of couples working through the impact of sexual trauma, which are not only helpful for understanding the concepts and tools, but also provide the reader with a sense that they are not alone in their struggle, that others have worked through and survived these challenges, and that there is hope. This guide walks us through the impact of sexual trauma on the individual, partner, and relationship and offers concrete strategies to improve communication, (re)gain intimate connection, and to reimagine your relationship as a source of healing. 


[Lynsea Montanari · Rating 5 out of 5]

I get this book 5 stars because there’s nothing else like it. As a victim of sexual trauma, it’s hard for me to find any books that are just specifically on sexual trauma with or without relationships. Although this book was geared towards partners, I still got a lot out of it. And I plan to share this with my current partner. I would absolutely recommend.

[Katie Colloso · Rating 4 out of 5]

Was very informative, but was a slow beginning.