My Delight with Sarah Bartel

Healing from Past Sexual Wounds, Regrets, and Harmful Messages

• Sarah Bartel

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Opening with "birthday cake" analogy, this episode focuses on different ways to heal from sexual wounds, abuse, regrets, and harmful messages that a woman may have suffered. These harms can bind her up and keep her from experiencing the fullness of freedom, connection, joy, and delight the the Lord intends for her in marital intimacy. During Holy Week is the perfect time to bring all these wounds to Jesus, to lay at the foot of his Cross. 


Therapies that can help heal emotional wounds from past sexual abuse:

Deliverance Prayer 

Free Enhancing Marital Intimacy Guide for Catholic Women: 9 Skills for Body, Mind, and Spirit (for married and engaged women)


So think about birthday cake, and I'm gonna relate this to our sexual wounds, especially suffering abuse. So stay with me with this one. But think about birthday cake. Do most of us enjoy birthday cake? Right? Like, yay, it's celebratory, it's delicious. But there was a time when you were a baby and you didn't. Know about birthday cake and you didn't like it, and think about what happened between then not knowing about and not liking birthday cake to now when you enjoy it. Well, you went through a process, right? Like now when we think about birthday cake, we think about, you know, it's festive. It's delicious. You gather with family and friends. If it's your birthday, everyone's focused on you and celebrating you, and there's something special that happens with the cake. The candle, and it's presented to you with. Singing the Happy Birthday song and then you enjoy it together in this atmosphere of love and celebration. On your first birthday, you were probably presented with a smash cake that they have now, or maybe a piece of cake, and you, maybe your mom and dad put a little hat on your head, put a bib or a, you know, maybe full body bib on you and your family and friends gathered around you and were very, joyful and yay. Saying, yay. And then let you do whatever you would want with that cake. Maybe you just poked it with your finger. Maybe you, really got your hands all into it and brought a few bites to your mouth. It's rare that a baby will really go to town and devour that whole piece of birthday cake. Usually there's some sort of exploratory nibbles. Especially if this is the first time they've ever tasted cake. But then the next year, there'll be more the, that 2-year-old will be more familiar with eating in general and perhaps we'll have witnessed on someone else's birthday and will feel a little more confident with that cake. And in the Rema, the years to follow more and more. You learn to like birthday cake by attending other people's birthdays, by having more of your own, by tasting it and developing your taste for it, as well as all those positive connections around it. And. Ideally, this is how we learn to like love making in marriage as well. That you go from being a child and not knowing about sex or love making and and then being a full grown married woman, enjoying love making and marriage again, in this atmosphere of love and celebration of focus, special attention on you, on, giving you this freedom to develop your taste for it. In this special ritual with the special setup for it. And. You know, you went through a process of sexual maturation to learn to enjoy it, you know, from maybe your middle school or teen years, having crushes on boys maybe dating a little bit, and, those younger years first kisses later, making out a bit more and engagement feeling really trusting and close to and connected with that man. And then in marriage exploring. Learning, with your bodies, developing your own love life together. And so that is, you know what you can celebrate each time you connect and make love in merit. When we think about sexual abuse, it seems to me that this is like if someone's first introduction to birthday cake was as a child or a teenager. S that a bad person was in the room and with the cake and with the victim of the sexual abuse, and they just stuck their hand right into that cake and, and, you know, just grabbed a big glob of it and then threw it at you. So you're covered with this cake mess and it feels gross and it feels unsafe and you know, something bad was done to you and you think. I don't like cake. Yuck. Why would I ever like cake? Same thing. If our first introduction to sexuality or a later experience of sexuality was to be abused, to be touched in the wrong way, to have bad things done to you sexually, you'd think, Ooh, this whole sphere of sexuality, I don't like that. Why would I ever. Like that, but it is possible to find healing, to understand that was bad, what they did to you. That's not what cake was for. They misused that cake and that was wrong of them. That's not how cake is supposed to feel. Yeah. And you know, you weren't, that wasn't your fault. And let me teach you what cake really is, like what you know, and so you could give this person who'd had cake thrown at them, be like, no, no, no, no. That's not what cake is for. Here, let me serve you a piece just for you. You can just, take a tiny little bit with the fork, nibble, whatever you want to do. And just have that reassurance communicated to you. No, it's okay. What cake really is for is for celebrating and it's, in this context of love and it really is delicious. If you, and no fine. Explore, see what kind of cake you like here. In a, in a nice, safe, trusting environment, someone presents you with that piece and says, it's okay. You can, you know, just, I'm with you. Let's just each together have a little nibble, and then you can, see what you like. Try a little bit of the frosting, a little bit of the cake part, maybe together, have some tea that you're familiar with or milk to go with it, and then be like, okay, actually, yeah. Oh. Maybe I'll try some more later, and then just bit by bit slowly learn to like cake. I believe a similar thing can happen sexually. Now, I'm not a therapist, but I do work with women. I'm a moral theologian. And a Catholic sex and marriage coach. But I do work with women who've had sexual wounds to help them you know, as a compliment to therapy to help them in my course, my delight. Learn to be, feel free and safe and able to enjoy love making more. So I'm just gonna share. A few notes and ideas about healing past sexual wounds, or regrets or, you know, bad messages that you may have received about sex so that you can be more free to enjoy love making and marriage. And the idea is that we wanna bring this all to Jesus. He cares so much about you. The Lord loves you and cares about you. And maybe if it was a man who sexually abused you. Maybe though it's more helpful to go to our lady to marry the mother to her compassion and love and reassurance, and ask her to help you with these past wounds or even regrets so that you can really find healing, compassion acceptance. Try to n neutralize the shame around it so that you can be more free to enjoy love making and marriage Now. So I have received therapy and in my course I do bring women when we have our healing call, which we just had, I'm recording this episode on Wednesday of Holy Week, 2025. So we just had a healing call inside my delight, where invited women to bring to the call their memories so that they could go through this healing exercise that was. Taught to me and, you know, led I was led through this by my therapist. So I'll just describe briefly how it goes. So if you would like to try to go through a process yourself in reflection and prayer, maybe with journaling, maybe an adoration to help bring some of these past wounds to the light of God's love for healing, to help make you more free. So I lead the women in my course through this healing exercise that my therapist had done with me several times through the course of our work together. And it comes from in internal or Yeah, internal family systems. It's parts work where you talk to the younger part of you, the younger version of you that suffered that wound, and you bring her the voice of compassion. That, oh honey, that was, that should never have been done to you. I'm so sorry that that happened. And that was other people's problem. That wasn't, that shouldn't have been done to you. They had their own wounds, but you are good and it was not your fault. And this parts work can be really helpful for abuse, but also for when you picked up harmful messages. And it can take a little work to try to tease out. Like for example, I had a woman in one of my calls just this week who said, you know, everything was good at the beginning of our marriage, but problems developed later and it's just like anxiety around having sex. And I asked her, okay, so there are some. Thoughts in your head causing this? What are the sentences? And we went back and forth and she realized, okay, it's not actually coming from my husband, it's this internal pressure. She feels that she has to show up for sex more and more often. And as I went back and forth with her, she was able to identify, oh, actually it came from hearing her NFP teacher early on say that she wished that she. Were made herself available for sex with her husband more. And so this woman in my class picked up this idea that, okay, this is what a good wife does and I need to do that. I need to strive. And just really put, internalize this sense of pressure that developed into this anxiety. Now that's really binding her. So when we did the healing call, the healing exercise, I said for her, what you're gonna do is go back to the younger version of you that heard that NFP teacher say that, and we're gonna tell younger you, young woman, you, you know what, that was actually a really harmful message for you to hear right then. And the NFP teacher, she shouldn't have said that. She was, you know, reacting out of things she heard in her own anxieties and wounds, and this incorrect view of sex in marriage, that it is a debt that a woman that a wife owes or husband, or that there's this obligation that she has to, strive always to, to be more and more sexually available to him. And she passed that on to you. And honey, you, you should have been left free with your husband to create your own sexual relationship together, free of that burden and free of that pressure because that was a distortion that's really gonna cause some harm to you later. So you can use this kind of work for, you know, for. Realizing where you picked up harmful messages, for example, or an idea that your body is bad. Where, where did you get that idea? Go back and reflect and then speak to younger you with that voice of compassion and bring in the Lord's love. He sees you as so good. He created you very good, and he loves you and he accepts you. And this can really help neutralize the, the shame and the yuck. From these, these past wounds. So I'm not gonna walk through the whole exercise on this episode but I just wanna encourage you to seek additional help for healing those past wounds, be it from a therapist and or from seeking out healing prayer, or from bring or from bringing it to the Lord in adoration or in journaling or prayer. That you are worth that healing no matter what it takes. You're worth it. You're worth it. Setting aside the time, setting aside whatever money you need to plunk forth to the therapist and a no on therapy, you are gonna have the most success in therapy. If you really get along well with your therapist you really like and trust her or him the benefit you receive from therapy really correlates with. The quality of your relationship with the therapist. So if you feel off or get a bad vibe or just feel like, ugh, I don't know, they kinda make me cringe. Don't hang around. Go find, look for another therapist. I think I've had probably about six or seven therapists over the course of my life and I really like one and the others were sort of like, so, so, or not helpful. So it's, I just wanna encourage you, it's worth it to really seek out therapy that's really gonna help you. And then, healing prayer can be so wonderful as well. And I highly recommend the unbound form of deliverance prayer from heart of the father ministries. And I know there's other forms of healing prayer out there as well. But definitely avail yourself of that and bring forward, whatever wounds or lies or hurts or regrets are holding you back. Because the thing is the body keeps the score. These harms or harmful messages, they are stored in our body in some way. And they hold us back from being free in our body to experience the fullness of delight in love making that God wants for us in our relationship with our husbands and marriage. So it's absolutely worth it to have the courage and the vulnerability to go back in and find those wounds and bring them to the light. However you do it with prayer, spiritual healing, therapy, maybe just sharing with a trusted friend and let her tell you, words of reassurance and acceptance and love, and so that you feel like you're not so alone in having to bear that. All this can be just really, really helpful, and we think about bringing our wounds to the Lord, especially during this holy week when he bears so many wounds in his own body. We can just bring those and he'll take them up to himself with the add them in, bear them in his own wounds, bring them to the cross, and he'll bring them down into death with him, and then rise again. Transfigured, resurrected. Renewed a new creation and help make you a new creation so that you can receive light and wholeness and peace as you revisit those wounds and help neutralize the sting of them. Yeah. God wants this healing for you and I'm praying for you. And I just really believe in the power of seeking healing and the importance of it so that then you can learn more about delight and pleasure and being mindful and present in your body in, you know, real life time right now in your. Sanctuary of intimacy with your husband and not have to dissociate or tense up or feel anxiety or you know, any sort of badness around that. So I'll be praying for you and I will link a bunch of resources for healing to this episode. So, and I encourage you to just believe that you are worth the healing that is needed for these wounds and God bless you.