Lounge
In modern India, sex is still dirty
Summary
Clinical sex-focused trauma therapist Neha Bhat explains how to build healthy relationships despite trauma and shame
India is a country of ironies. With an economy fast growing to be among the world’s top 3 and a population of over a billion people, it prefers to keep conversations and issues related to sex hush-hush.
One might argue that social media is helping people name, frame and speak about their human needs, but the sheer lack of social vocabulary ensures that an average Indian’s understanding of sexual and emotional needs aren’t met.
“Normal, fundamental human needs have not only been made invisible but also been demonized by our complicated sociocultural history of colonial and religious trauma. Living in a culture that hides key information about these topics causes layers of shame about what is supposed to be a natural part of human existence," writes Neha Bhat, a clinical sex-focused trauma therapist, in her recent book Unashamed: Notes from the Diary of a Sex Therapist (HarperCollins India) that focuses on taboos around sex and sexuality. While tackling subjects like trauma and shame, Bhat offers ways to develop better relationships with the self and the people around. “Shame keeps people stuck in fear. And when people become fearful of their own biological needs, shame also causes us to look away from abuse and pain around those needs."
In an interview with Lounge, Bhat explains how people from different generations accept pain. Edited excerpts:
Also read: The lives of India’s baby influencers
What are some of the common concerns in India?
There are two problems. One is sexual abuse or sexual harassment. It’s rampant—a neighbour watching a child change clothes, uncle/aunty touching a child at home and the parent hasn’t been able to protect or is not even available.
The other common thing is pelvic pain. Pelvic pain is not talked about at all. There are many people who do not enjoy sex. They’re like, “Oh, I like my partner, but I’m not able to have sex". It could be so because there is trauma from masturbation, rape trauma or there is shame that you feel when you experience pleasure.
We are not taught that masturbation is healthy and orgasms are great. Our past gave us the Kama Sutra, but in modern India, sex is dirty and shameful.
Is shame part of human nature?
Guilt is human nature; not shame. Say, I tell you, that your skin looks bad. Of course, you are going to feel bad, but then you also internalise this as, “I am ugly"—that is shame. And then you create this narrative that women with bad skin cannot be ever in a marriage, that women with bad skin don’t deserve love, that women with bad skin should go for plastic surgery so that they look better.
In India, we don’t even allow people to express that they may be feeling bad emotionally over something. Even if someone is trying to express their feelings, we say, shut up. The other side to this is, even if you do talk about it, you are made to feel bad. If somebody says they are having sexual pain, they are told not to talk about it, or things like, “tell your husband to get you a nice gift and it will be fine."
People in India are made to feel shame at different levels, and so seeking help outside becomes even more difficult.
Is there a way to know when one should seek therapy?
The thing that is confusing for people is that they don’t know whether they should go. My answer to that is just start. From there, you can either go further, or say, no, it’s not for me at the moment.
One of the things you focus on in the book is the importance of unlearning shame-based trauma responses. How does one know one’s reaction to a situation is related to past trauma?
When your reaction to a trigger is extreme, and not proportional to the moment. You are actually not reacting to the present then, but to the past. For example, I go out and suddenly a bug falls on me. My entire nervous system freaks out. I’m panicking, and then I go home and have dreams of the bug. That’s a disproportionate response to the bug that I had removed from my skin.
Similarly, with sexual trauma, even if your partner loves you, there are instances when you’re touched in a certain way, and you end up feeling really bad. So much so that you shut down and leave the room. You have this feeling of your heart closing up. These are somatic responses—literally fight, flight or freeze. That’s when you know that it’s not something your partner did in the present. It’s something to do with your past. That’s when you need to investigate where it is coming from.
Do you believe the word “trigger" is being used loosely, or rather lightly, on social media?
It is irritating, because people don’t understand how difficult it is for survivors of rape who understand the intensity of what a trigger is. People don’t understand that survivors of violence have actual somatic responses that are not in their control and they have to work hard to not get afraid again. Trigger is not about getting uncomfortable with somebody’s opinion. It is not something that someone is saying that’s opposite of one’s opinion—that is a disagreement. If a disagreement feels so big that you cannot even handle it, this means it has gone to the area of trigger. When we are healthier in our bodies, we are able to say, “I like you. But I don’t agree with you". If I’m triggered, I’ll be like, “I need to fight with you and make you wrong. Because if you’re not wrong, I am wrong. And I can’t handle being wrong." That’s a fight response.
These distinctions are hard to make on social media. A therapist can help you know that you’re not triggered, but just upset with a disagreement. Or, that you’re triggered, and need to do inner work.
What’s inner work?
There are two kinds of work—outer and inner. The former is having a job, being a parent, having responsibilities. Inner work is about looking at your psyche, thoughts. What are my thoughts feeling like today? What are my feelings doing today? Am I thinking about something in the past that I’ve not been able to let go of for three days? If yes, then why. So inner work is just asking the why behind what is happening inside. There are many ways of doing inner work. You can reach out to a trained professional or try alternative healing practices like meditation.
Do people from different generations respond differently to trauma?
India is such a unique land but our history is underrepresented. There isn’t a lot written about the emotional impact of the past, of Partition, of religion-based or caste-based conflict. The history is presented as just facts. There’s not a lot of oral history that documents the emotional trauma. Unlike, say, in Germany, where they do talk a lot about the Holocaust. There’s a lot of public investment in actually processing the trauma.
In India, there has been none of that because the older generation was more focused on surviving post independence. The 60-plus people, who are now going to hit retirement, for example, saw a poor India. That’s why they say things like, “We don’t have trauma... all this is just a fad".
And then come the millennials who are in the middle. They are informed but not as excessively as Gen Z (post millennials), who are on the other extreme, because they grew up with mobile phones and the internet. So, there’s been an explosion of trauma and mental health content, written largely by US or British practitioners. There’s a lot of this out-of-context cognitive dissonance in the younger generation, where they think they understand trauma, but they’re not able to relate it to what is actually happening in their life.
Every generation is butting heads because it has a different understanding of their lived experience, which is why intergenerational trauma is such a big thing. In every generation, there is pain, but every generation looks at pain differently.
Also read: Let's talk about pleasure, not just sex
