Healing from Trauma — select a page.

Content Warning / Reader Care

This paper discusses panic attacks, trauma responses, sexual coercion, alcohol-related consent concerns, perceived sexual assault, kink, adult video games, polyamory, group sexual dynamics, It does not describe explicit sexual acts in graphic detail, but it does talk around them. Please read this with care, and take breaks if your body tells you to. I am also taking breaks while writing it, which feels only fair to admit.

Author’s Note on Scope, Bias, and Lived Experience

This is a lived-experience essay, not a clinical diagnosis, not a legal judgment, and not a universal statement about polyamory, kink, asexuality, aromanticism, or trauma. I am writing from my perspective, which means my account is inherently biased in the way all self-witnessing is biased. That does not make it false. It means the truth being offered here is the truth of what happened to me, what I was told, what I perceived, what my body did with that information, and what I have slowly learned from carrying it with me for years.

When I refer to sexual assault or someone being taken advantage of, I am naming the way the situation was disclosed to me and the way I understood its ethical weight, especially because alcohol and vulnerability were involved. I cannot know with 100% certainty what every person involved remembers, intended, consented to, or felt.