The topic of healthy sexuality for combat veterans that we started talking about yesterday, here, is so huge, and is going to have to be covered in so many ways, over quite a bit of time, in order for it all to sink in, and make sure it's all covered. Unfortunately, before we get to the "good stuff," as they say, we still have to cover the "bad stuff," because there's quite a lot of that. And by "bad" we're not even meaning, the criminally bad stuff -- military sexual trauma, already covered, here; and domestic violence, already in progress -- how to leave someone with PTSD when you've really gotta go, no matter how much you love the veteran, because your safety and life are at risk. That's another thing we're gearing up to talk about on the blog, and then we'll be "done" with this overall, comprehensive topic of "things related to sex and the veteran, both bad and good."
However, all we mean for the moment by "bad" is the stuff that plagues combat veterans' lives, and that of their partners, and shuts them down, and kills off the potential for great, nourishing, healthy, supportive, mutually affirming sex. Which of course is one of the very currencies of existence, and without which people's lives, and psyches, essentially begin to wither up and die (true, not just poetically speaking.) Combat veterans bring an awful lot of baggage to this equation; but their partners sometimes do as well. Or their partners develop some resistance, based on the other things that are going on in the relationship with the veteran. The unhappy "dance" of abstinence, rejection, emotional numbness, resentment and neglect (among others) can be a sad waltz that both partners know too well, and from which there seems very little chance or hope of freeing themselves.
That said, it's not surprising that if we step away from the whole "landscape" of inadequate, inferior, and ultimately unsatisfying sexual experiences, fraught by the problems combat veterans and their partners can experience (other people can too, but we're talking about them right now) -- that we have to look "elsewhere" to get a cleansing breath of "fresh air" about what healthy, balanced sexuality could look like. Not sexuality that's based on compulsion, addiction, or effective bargaining tools: but sex as an affirming life-force between two mutually consenting, and non-addicted personalities. From Den Ming Dao's beautiful book once again, 365 Tao, and as you reflect on it, consider how many filters he's saying that we view healthy sexuality with, that ultimately serves to ruin it for the participants. Of course, it doesn't have to be that way: What we put into love determines what we get out of it.
