🚫 What it means to have grown up exposed to parental sexual behavior
Growing up exposed to parental sexual behavior meant witnessing age-inappropriate sexual content in your home, forcing your developing mind to process adult sexuality before you had the emotional framework to understand it safely.
You may have developed a distorted understanding of healthy sexuality, where boundaries became blurred and consent felt unclear. Those early experiences may have left you feeling either uncomfortably aware of sexual undertones in everyday interactions or completely shut down from them as a protective mechanism.
You may find that during intimacy, you sometimes disappear from your own body—floating outside yourself or going numb—because when you were little, dissociation was the safest way to cope. Your intimacy boundaries might swing between extremes, and you may secretly question if you can love healthily at all when your earliest role models portrayed sexuality in confusing or inappropriate ways.