Sexomnia

[Satori60]

Does anyone here have experience with this phenomena as the receiver? I would like to hear more if possible. Thank you

[radical]

Are you talking about being hyper-sexualised, as a result of abuse?  Or are you talking about the perpetrator?

If the former, this quote from  "the Body Keeps the Score"  p. 165 might cast some light:

"Sexual abuse speeds up their biological clocks and the secretion of sex hormones.  Early in puberty the abused girls had three to five times the levels of testosterone and androstenedione, the hormones that fuel sexual desire, than the girls in the control group"

The girls in the control group weren't sexually abused.

[Three Roses]

Sexsomnia - "Sleep sex, or sexsomnia, is a condition in which a person will engage in sexual activities while asleep. This condition falls within the broad class of sleep disorders known as parasomnias." (I Googled it.) Sorry, no insight here, no experience with it.

[radical]

Ooops.
Apologies.  I read it as 'sexomania', so completely misunderstood.

[Dee]

I don't have any experience, but that doesn't mean I am not interested in how you feel.  Is this a present day or past problem?  Are you okay?

[Satori60]

Its a conversation I have had over and over in my own head with my father, and my mother since it showed up about 8 years ago. I am not sure where to go with it from here?
There is so little understood of this phenomena and it happened when I was quite young with my father, being compounded by other significant sexual trauma, years later by other men. A great deal of the work I have done is somatic/energetic release vs. the earlier cognitive therapy session work (12 years ago is when I started rebuilding) that did not do much for me. This release work still feels like just scratching the surface in some ways around this piece. I am hoping that someone who has also experienced this might be able to share some light on what they did to resolve the unhealthy negative mind loops. There is still a part of me asking if this really happened, yet somatically/energetically working with others, and a couple experiences I witnessed unfolding with my sons when they were quite young with my father, keeps coming up as a definite Yes. I'm not sure how much I want to put out here right now so will leave it at this.

I have done extensive Entheogen work yet the negative looping is still there; just not as intense as it was in the past 2 years when I started sitting in ceremony with Ayahuasca and doing personal work with low and high dosage levels of Psilocybin, including microdosing. (These are all in a sacred ceremonial context and I have witnessed huge shifts in a number of areas esp. around emotional regulation.)

Feeling fortunate to have found this forum. Thanks for listening.

[Three Roses]

I don't have any experience with sexsomnia, and so I'm reluctant to say anything regarding it - but in another thread I quoted some studies about memory, which I'll repeat here;

"The next time someone tells you, 'That probably wasn't as bad as you remember,' tell them about the Grant Study of Adult Development, which followed over 200 men for fifty years, from their college years, just prior to World War II. 'The men were interviewed in detail about their War experiences in 1945/1946 and again in 1989/1990. Four and a half decades later, the majority gave very different accounts from the narratives recorded in their immediate postwar interviews: With the passage of time, events had been bleached of their intense horror. In contrast, those who had been traumatized and subsequently developed PTSD did not modify their accounts; their memories were preserved essentially intact 45 years after the war ended.' "(p. 177, "The Body Keeps The Score")

But wait, there's more! p. 179 - "These early researchers (Jean-Martin Charcot, Pierre Janet, and Sigmund Freud) referred to traumatic memories as 'pathogenic secrets' or 'mental parasites', because as much as the sufferers wanted to forget whatever had happened, their memories kept forcing themselves into consciousness, trapping them in an ever-renewing present of existential horror."

So let's just sum that up; we remember our traumas clearly and accurately - we  remember them longer than ordinary memories - and our brains force us to re-live the events!"

[mourningdove]

So let's just sum that up; we remember our traumas clearly and accurately - we  remember them longer than ordinary memories - and our brains force us to re-live the events!"

This is often true, but isn't it also true that sometimes we don't consciously remember because of dissociation, while the body does remember? Sorry, I don't mean to derail Satori60's thread, but I feel like it's an important question.

I wish I had some answers for you, Satori60. Welcome! 

[Three Roses]

Yes, mourningdove, but the way I understand it, the brain is what prompts the body to relive the event, for example, increased heart rate, feelings of fear, etc., at what would be considered by most a minor thing.

Example - when I was much younger, my husband and I were having a very minor disagreement while he was driving. As he turned the car around a corner, his hand came up on the steering wheel, just turning the car, and I saw a flash of light out of the corner of my left eye. In response, the left side of my face went numb - and stayed numb for the better part of 3 days. My amygdala had "hijacked" my body's response, sending my face into a panic of self protection before my neocortex could realize it wasn't an attack, just a flash of light from the corner of my eye.

I was stumped. I hadn't even thought consciously that a blow was coming! But a part of my brain did, and reacted.  Later as I tried to understand why this had happened, I remembered that I had often been struck without warning,  and one particularly memorable event was from my left. No amount of reasoning with myself brought feeling back to my face ... just the passing of time.

Sorry for the interruption, Satori60. We now return you to your scheduled program. 

[Satori60]

Much appreciate the dialogue and not feeling liked anything has been hi-jacked. Its all good; just to know there are others that can comprehend the depths of these unfortunate unfoldings that have imprinted themselves in the ways that they do!
Blessings and many thanks.