Forever Beloved

{It is with such pleasure that I introduce Kami Crawford.  Kami and her husband Ben have a YouTube channel called Fight For Together where they post videos on fighting for the togetherness of their family.  They feel family is so incredibly valuable, it’s worth fighting for!  The realness, vulnerability and transparency they show is so refreshing.  So many times while watching one of their videos I’ve thought “me too”!  They have a real heart for Jesus that shines through their videos.  I had the pleasure of meeting their family for lunch a few months ago and found their vlogs are such an accurate depiction of who they are in real life.  Please give a warm Forever Beloved welcome to Kami!  Show her how much you appreciate her by sharing and commenting on her story!}

How I started to embrace my sexuality:

I grew up in a religious household where we didn’t talk about much of anything, let alone sex.  My parents gave me some cassette tapes when I was hitting puberty that talked about sex, I guess.  I don’t remember.  I was mostly left to figure out my sexuality on my own.  Because it wasn’t talked about growing up I naturally thought it was a bad or gross thing.  Something that needs to be hidden away and not talked about.  I was not a curious person by nature so I didn’t really know what a grown man’s penis looked like till I got married.  I also didn’t know where to put my tampon in.  My husband had to help me figure that out.  These parts of my story used to embarrass me but I don’t feel that way anymore.  I mostly feel sad and a little angry that I was so ill-informed about an important part of me.

My first memories of sexual feelings were when I was ten and I liked to touch myself. I remember feeling like I needed to hide it. By the time I was twelve something would happen to me that would take me decades to recover from.  I became involved in an abusive relationship with my junior high youth pastor.  We never had sex, in fact, things were never overtly physical but this relationship was extremely confusing because the youth pastor would treat me like his daughter and also like his girlfriend.  He was a twenty-six-year-old married man.  My first sexual feelings for another man were riddled with shame and secrecy.  I felt like an adulteress.

When I got married, I believed that sexuality was bad.  Especially my sexuality.  I heard it said in Bible studies that it was good, but never could believe it for myself.  This made it so that on my honeymoon the last thing I wanted to do with my husband was to have sex and be sexual with him.  This was one of the only things he wanted on our honeymoon.  So you can imagine the heartbreak.  I even went so far as to tell him that maybe we shouldn’t have gotten married.  For the next 10 years, we fought about sex 2-3 times a week.  And when we didn’t fight I would give it to him because I felt like I had to to keep the peace in our marriage.  This was the number one source of pain in my life.  At one point I even believed I was asexual.

A few things came into my life that started to turn this around for me.  I started attending a 12 step group.  I realized that I had issues that I needed to start to address.  I realized I could change.  My beliefs could change.  I began to acknowledge that what I believed about my sexuality was damaging to me.  I wanted more truth and freedom.  I began to get counseling for what happened to me with the youth pastor.  I began to piece together why I have such a wrong view of my sexuality: I didn’t feel valued as a woman.  So how could I value my sexuality, which is apart of my womanhood?  I began to reject the value was put on me, that I was less valued because I was a woman, and began to embrace the truth that I had incredible value as a woman.  I am beautifully made, every part of me.  My sexuality is good.  My orgasms are not something just to endure but they’re amazing and something to go after.  I began to take back my sexuality that I didn’t even know I had surrendered.  This process took many years.  Many years of not seeing any change.  For us, it took having six children.  And then something broke.

After years of work this past year I finally started to feel something that looked like change.  I had a sexual awakening.  I started to see parts of myself as good that I always wanted to hide.  I cut my shorts shorter.  I posted naked pictures of me on Instagram.  I began to see my body as good.  I began to see my sexuality not as a liability but as a wonderful thing.  Not just for my husband but for myself.  I no longer dread my husband asking for sex.  In fact, sometimes I initiate.  That never used to happen.  I always had some kind of excuse to not have sex like “I’m too tired” or “we had sex on Tuesday”.  I no longer feel shame about my sexual fantasies because they’re only apart of my story.  They tell me something about where I came from.  I see my sexual pleasure as something that God gave me not something that needs to be despised and hidden.  I began to accept parts of me that I had rejected.  Parts of me that I thought were disgusting.  I began to accept all of me.  I don’t know if you’ve been sexually abused.  I don’t know if you were never taught to see your sexuality as good.  But I hope through reading a part of my story maybe you’ll believe that change is possible.  Maybe you’ll get angry at what’s happened to you.  Maybe you will be able to embrace your sexuality a little more, or at least see that it’s possible.  Maybe you’ll start to believe that you are beautifully made, every part of you.

– Kami

You can find Kami here:

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