I meet many married women who love their husbands but don’t love sex. Their question is always the same: they want to know why. Is it the stress of marriage, children, work? Or could it be more than sheer exhaustion or waning libido?   Could it have something to do with the sex they had [...]

Sexual abuse has a broader definition than we may assume. There are four types of sexual abuse: verbal, visual, physical and psychological. Verbal sexual abuse includes sexual threats, sexual comments about your body, lewd or suggestive comments and inappropriate sexual conversations with children. Visual sexual abuse includes exposure to pornographic, sexually explicit material or scenes, [...]

Sometimes we can feel a certain way for so long that it starts to feel normal, comfortable even. It becomes so familiar that we stuff down that nagging thought that we should do something about our struggles. The process of healing can seem scarier than what we’re experiencing now. I met a woman at a [...]

There’s another way your abuse could be impacting you and that’s in your enjoyment and desire for sex with your spouse. In addition to the ways sexual abuse damages our bodies, spirits and emotions, sexual abuse also damages our view of sex. When we’ve been used for others’ sexual pleasure the experience becomes associated with [...]

Rough estimates put one in three girls and one in six boys in the US at risk for being sexually abused. But exact figures are hard to assess because most children delay reporting their abuse until later in adulthood or never report it at all. Many of the women I’ve led through healing were not [...]

Perhaps you’ve been struggling for years with feelings that you can’t understand or explain. Here are some of the ways sexual abuse affects a child, which can follow into adulthood. Maybe you’ll see some of yourself in the list below: Self-blame: When children experience trauma, their inherent egocentrism leads them to believe that they are [...]

Has love betrayed you? There is hope. “Why was it so hard to resist sex before marriage, but now in marriage, resisting is all I do?” “Why do I love my husband, but don’t want to make love?” “Why was sex so good before marriage when I shouldn’t have been having it, but now that [...]

Does God care about your love life? First comes love…or sex? “First comes love, then comes marriage, then here they come with a baby carriage.” You may recognize this little rhythm my generation used to sing to embarrass each other.  Based on today’s culture the rhythm could go: “First comes sex, then comes living together, [...]

Whether our sexuality was stolen from us or we gave it away, we experience a loss. But unfortunately many of us don’t allow ourselves to grieve those losses. Psychologists tell us that there are five stages of grieving; denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Writing out our life map begins to move us beyond denial to [...]

When we’ve been used or abused with sex, it damages our view of sex, ourselves, others and God. Part of the healing process will be seeing ourselves and sex from God’s perspective. God made sex. And He made it good, pure and pleasurable. But when sex has been a source of pain and wounding, it’s [...]