If you’ve ever had a sexual history taken by a physician or therapist, they probably asked you a lot of questions about what you’ve done, when you did it, and who you did it with. That kind of sexual history is really for the benefit of your provider, as it allows them to better understand some aspect of your sexual health and then help you with whatever difficulties you are coming to them with.
Writing your own sexual history is a different kind of exercise. It’s only for your benefit and as such you get to define the terms and parameters and even the questions. Whatever sort of change or growth your looking for in terms of your sexuality or your sex life, writing your own sexual history offers many benefits including:
- the chance to reflect on your experiences from your earliest memories to the present and think about the choices you’ve made and what resulted from those decisions,
- getting a big picture perspective, that can help you see patterns and paths that you might not have otherwise noticed,
- the chance to identify the things you like and don’t like, and understand your sexual terrain in new ways,
- gaining a sense of emotional and psychological control over your sexual history and how you experience positive and negative past events in the present,
- getting more control over your current sexual behaviors.
What Goes Into My Sexual History?
Just as history is about more than names and dates, your sexual history can include much more than what sexual behaviors you’ve engaged in, when, and with whom. Those details might be in there, but so might your thoughts and feeling about sex and how those have changed. It might also include the way you treat others and the way others have treated you over your life as it relates to sexuality and gender. Anything that you think is related or relevant to your sexuality or your sex life belongs in your sexual history, whether it’s a dirty joke you learned when you were six or your first orgasm.Do I Have to Know How to Write?
Absolutely not. Remember that this may be something you never share with anyone and there are no bonus points for grammar, style or punctuation. The goal of this exercise is to make the elements of your sexual history explicit to yourself. Even if you can’t write this down on paper or type it out on a computer, the act of telling yourself these stories is beneficial. Keep in mind though that this isn’t always an easy thing to do. It takes some patience and perseverance, but the results are well worth it.What’s a Sexual History Look Like When It’s Done?
Because you’re not doing this for anyone other than yourself (and possibly a partner if you choose later to share some of it) the final format can be anything. It might be that you write a story with a beginning, middle and end. Maybe one section is a poem. When you read the questions on the next page maybe you’ll feel like drawing something instead of writing out an answer. In the end, the point of the exercise is first to communicate something about your sexual development to yourself.Next page…Where Do I Start?
