On April 26 TJP had the great honor of co-sponsoring an all-day workshop with Staci Haines, founder of Generative Somatics. The workshop was attended by a large group of body workers, activists, advocates, mental health professionals and healers. It was intense, invigorating, and incredibly relevant to the work we are trying to do in TJP. Here we reprint, with her permission, the introduction to her book entitled Healing sex: A mind body approach to healing trauma. We hope to follow up with some more personal pieces about participants' experiences at the workshop.
Introduction to the Second Edition
Staci K. Haines
In 1999, when this book was first published as The Survivor’s Guide to Sex: How to Have an Empowered Sex Life after Child Sexual Abuse, I haggled over the title with the publisher. I wanted the word somatics in the title; the publisher understandably said no one would know what that meant. The next round continued over the term trauma and whether people would understand that word in the context of child sexual abuse. Now, here we are eight years later, and trauma is a more commonplace concept. Well beyond the boundaries of psychology, the general public uses the term to describe anything from the impact of war on soldiers and civilians to the intimate traumas of domestic violence and sexual abuse. And while somatics doesn’t roll off of everyone’s tongues, mind/body integration is recognized as something relevant to healing and learning.
To read this introduction, click here.
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