This is probably one the most common question asked of authors: What made you decide to become an author?
After working for 23+ years in the fitness/yoga/wellness industries, I had decided to write a book about creating a career in those areas. I had begun that project when Sex on Fire demanded to be written.
You book is a very intense self-exploration of how trauma is begun and perpetuated over time. How did you step from recognition to writing?
I had struggled a lot with elements of shame in my trauma experience, and it took me years of different therapy modalities to personally get beyond the shame, and then there was another layer of fear when I wrote down and verbally shared many elements of my story in a small women’s circle about a year before I began the formal writing process. I used a couple of voices in the book: teenage/young adult Leah, and adult/healed Leah. Using multiple voices allowed me to write both the experience as well as the recognition. They both had to be there for the book to be written.
Your background in Personal Training seems a recurring theme for you in the book. Did personal training help with possibly recognizing the developing trauma, or did it provide a place of stability to recognize and come to terms with your personal experiences?
Personal training really came after the trauma, but it was a great teaching tool as I was doing the bulk of my healing work. Personal training was one of the arenas where I fumbled through creating personal and professional boundaries. Also, I found that having an outlet for body movement really helped me to stay grounded in my physical self. So even though one of my trauma symptoms was dissociation (mentally “leaving” your body until the trauma or flashback is over), I maybe didn’t suffer as many lingering or long lasting dissociative tendencies as other trauma survivors because of my strong foundation of bodily “connection.” I’m grateful for that. My body generally feels like a pretty safe place to be, and many trauma survivors really struggle to get to that place in their healing processes.
Sex on Fire: Finding Embodied Intimacy After Trauma is a very interesting choice for a title. What was the defining idea that triggered this as the title from other possibilities?
Frankly, I wanted something that would catch the eyes of potential readers surfing the shelves at a bookstore. It was harder to land upon the right subtitle, but after some help from the publishers, I think we have got it.
Writing from personal experience is very intensely emotional. with your revelations in the book, did you find the experiences easier writing in sequence, or was there less stress in writing them non-sequentially?
Sequence was the way to go for me, even though I had to go back and make a few additions when certain memories were triggered that had been stored away for a long while. For instance, I had almost forgotten about the interaction I had with a youth pastor. That particular experience was not as traumatic as the others, so I think I stored it a little deeper in my memory than the really painful stuff. Yet, as I was writing, I saw so many patterns of my interactions with adult men when I was a kid. It was like I one memory would trigger another with varying positions on the “yuck” scale. Being able to look back on those patterns actually helped me more with understanding some of my behavior as an adult on a deeper and more forgiving level as well.
As you detailed this personal journey, what was easiest to write about?
I really enjoyed recounting and showing myself my own power and independence when I moved with my daughter to Nashville on my own. It was a leap of faith, but I also had the hard work and smarts to back it up. The Universe helped so much — seeing that whole community be created around my daughter and myself in writing was very cool.
What was the most difficult part of your writing journey with this book?
Recounting the trauma pieces was hard, for sure, but I was surprised to feel a lot of fear and anxiety when I was writing about my relationship with my mother.
As your book deals with helping oneself find “good intimacy”, some might want to lump your book in the “self-help” category. To me it feels that “self-help” is a very catch-all term for books. Do you find this category accurate or misleading for describing your book?
I hope that my book is helpful for anyone who reads it. However, I did not set out to write a “self-help” book. I view most books in that genre as pretty surface-oriented. As in, “do these things exactly the way I, the author, have laid them out and get the desired result.” My book offers a non-clinical account of how several therapy modalities worked to help me heal myself. If anything, I hope the book communicates that healing is possible, shows some good examples of what the reader might expect if he or she were to try out some of the tools, and encourages that trauma sufferer to search and try stuff until she finds her unique way through the pain and emotions to a level of wholeness she may not have experienced before.
Finally, while this book is primarily aimed at women, would you recommend men read it also?
Men who have suffered sexual trauma or who have partners (male, female, trans) who have suffered (trauma does not discriminate between gay and straight relationships, the relationship behavior holds the same patterns) sexual trauma can really benefit from this material. My husband had to do a lot of “behavior decoding” with his own therapist while I went through a lot of anxiety about trusting him and getting close to him at the beginning of our relationship. This book can shed a lot of light on how it really feels to open oneself to a safe relationship after trauma, regardless of which partner had the trauma.