Jumana Sophia - Break the Grip of Past Lovers: Reclaim Your Personal Power, Recover from Neglect, Manipulation, or Betrayal, Reawaken Your Emotional Intimacy (A Book for Women)

Copyright 2019 by Jumana Sophia

Cover design by Laura Beers
Cover image by seewhatmitchsee/gettyimages
Interior design by Frame25 Productions

Hierophant Publishing
www.hierophantpublishing.com

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019944241

ISBN: 978-1-938289-95-8

www.redwheelweiser.com

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Dedicated to all women who find the courage to
claim love and sexuality as a sacred path.

Sexual embodiment and integrity does not
ask us to become something we are not.
It asks us to become ourselves, fully.

Sarah Byrden, The Great Remembering

ONE
The Journey to Wholeness

TWO
Personal Power

THREE
Healing from Neglect

FOUR
Healing from Betrayal and Manipulation

FIVE
Taking Responsibility for Your Own Behavior

SIX
Soaking Up the Positive

SEVEN
Reclaiming Your Sacred Needs

EIGHT
Creating Boundaries for Future Loverships

NINE
Establishing Your Sexual Sovereignty

What's the difference between a friend and a lover?

Sex.

The distinction is so simple, yet we often don't consider all that it entails.

Past lovers, whether they were with you for a night or for decades, leave impressions that can linger long after the relationship is overand in many cases dramatically affect your self-esteem, your capacity for future intimacy, and your emotional well-being. Whether we like it or not, there is rarely, if ever, such a thing as casual sex.

In the current cultural climate, where sexual relationships swing between careless impulse and overly moralized repression, our society has lost the pulse of what truly healthy and vibrant female sexuality is. We no longer know what to do when a sexual relationship falls apart, leaving the wreckage of betrayal, abandonment, neglect, or even abuse in its wake. So many women are sufferingfrom mild discomfort to full-blown anxiety, from depression to total sexual shutdown; from desperate loneliness to recklessly empty promiscuity.

As women we are capable of so much more, but we are rarely, if ever, shown the way.

Female sexuality is a unique weave of physical energy, emotional connection, mental engagement, and spiritual communion. Sadly, this weave has been ignored, invalidated, or even demonized by much of our society over time. As a result, the mysteries of female sexuality are buried under mountains of oversexualized cultural patterning, dismissal of the rich heritage of deep feminine reverence and power, and ignorance of the vast inner terrain that lives within women.

In simple terms, this means that female sexuality is both powerful and vulnerable, and it is unique in a way that almost all healing modalities, therapies, religions, and even spiritual paths don't fully recognize. For as necessary and potent as such practices can be, they have gaps in their understanding about some very core concepts related to women. Those gaps become unbridgeable chasms when it comes to reclaiming our female sexuality, caring for that nature, and understanding and clearing lingering sexual experiences.

If you are like so many of the women I work with, you picked up this book because you are carrying heartache, grief, pain, and unmet longingall of which can be traced back to one or more past loverships. These experiences may also have resulted in the formation of sexual habits that don't fulfill your deepest needs, such as shutting down your sexuality, or overgiving to your partner. For so many of us, after enough heartbreak and disappointment, the desire to love deeply, securely, passionately, and with integrity ends up either dimmed almost to extinction or enflamed with a frustrated anger that burns almost everything it touches.

We must remember and honor the fact that we were created to be sexual creatures, freed from the pendulum swing of oppression and reaction to that oppression. Liberated from all that push and pull, we have the opportunity to recover and know the radical truth, wisdom, and sexual wholeness that is our birthright. This is not a cultural, social, or personality-based liberation. This is a recovery of deep feminine power and knowledge that will free you regardless of circumstance.

Think of breaking the grip of past lovers as code for freeing yourself of deeply unconscious limitations and misunderstandings you have inherited about what it means to be a womanparticularly a woman of sexual desire, longings, emotion, and passion. The breaking free process will require you to be more vulnerable and more sensitive with yourself. The good news is that the freedom that awaits you is vastly more powerful and healing than you can imagine.

In my case, the journey to shed the residual impact of past lovers was not a well-intentioned choice toward self-improvement. It was a necessity born of devastation.

When I was in my mid-thirties, my marriage of seven years (my second), was falling apart. After enduring multiple betrayals, I had accumulated a convincing distrust of intimacyboth with my husband and with anyone else I might be romantically close to after that. I was lost inside a tangle of grief, depression, longing, and isolation that was coloring everything, stealing the passion from my life, and relegating me to the kind of subtle despair and unmet longing that I had witnessed in so many other women. I was exhausted from the pressure of single motherhood and shattered by the experience of witnessing what had once been touching love devolve into chaos, dishonesty, and heartbreak.

Despite all of thisand because I didn't want to lose the relationship we had built, because I was afraid of being financially on my own, and mostly because I came to deeply feel that receiving his full attention and sexual fidelity was how I would feel whole againI ended up staying despite my partner sustaining an intimate dynamic that eroded my sense of self, my trust in men in general, and my hope of ever finding a full and honoring sexuality. As a result of that relationship, I shut down emotionally and sexually. I became jealous and paranoid. And I came to believe that I was not (nor would I ever be) woman enough.

I also lost important time and presence with my son in his younger years because I was emotionally distracted. I got further and further from my own sense of my beauty, my worth, my fullness, and my pleasure. I had panic attacks most nights, and significant depression. I can remember countless experiences of finding myself crumpled up on the floor crying, fighting, in desperate emotional pain. And then the terrible confusion created by all of our good times, when I would remember how much we loved each other and believe again that we could make it... only to be shattered by more dishonesty. On top of it all, I was so deeply ashamed and humiliated by what was going on in our relationship that I hid the truth from all of my friends. They would have loved and supported me, but in my state I could only imagine feeling humiliated and exposed. So I isolated myself from their support and fell even deeper into my sense of unworthiness. I was so desperate for the relationship to work out that I was hiding the truth from anyone who might call it what it was and hold me accountable to either radically change or to be brave enough to leave the dysfunction that I was tolerating.

Before this unhealthy dynamic, I had generally felt very nourished by my sexuality. Not perfect, by any means, but I had come to a place in my life and my sexual expression where I was free of insecurities that had plagued my younger years. Yet by the time I finally ended our marriage, I felt fractured and unworthy of love or fidelity. My light had dimmed, and I was deeply suffering from maintaining and allowing an intimate relationship that was very much in opposition to my core values.