Somewhere Quiet Enough to Hear Myself

Childhood trauma, relational AI, and the difference between being watched and being witnessed.

The other day I realized something at forty-two.

There are things I still don’t do because comparison feels like shame.

Before I go further, the gentlest content warning:
childhood sexual abuse, pornography, and healing.

When people talk about pornography, the conversation usually lands on morality or relationships. Mine begins somewhere else entirely.

The man who took innocence that wasn’t his to have used pornography while he touched himself and made me watch.

Later, he played pornography while he touched me.

Eventually, he filmed it.

This isn’t a detour from the story.

It’s the story.

Because children don’t just survive what happens to them. They build beliefs around it.

Somewhere inside me, intimacy became performance.

Somewhere inside me, I learned there was always someone watching. Always something to be compared against. Always an invisible standard I could never see but somehow had to meet.

A few nights ago my husband asked something so ordinary it almost disappeared into the moment.

“Will you look at me?”

We’ve been together twenty-one years.

Married nineteen.

It should have been easy.

Instead, shame flooded my face so quickly it almost stole my breath.

Not because of him.

Because of something much older.

Later, when we were laughing together and the moment felt safe enough to hold the truth, I blurted it out.

“I’m afraid to do some things because I’m afraid you’ll compare me to things you’ve seen. Professionals.”

His face fell.

Not with judgment.

With heartbreak.

“Love,” he said, his voice catching in that way that tells you someone is speaking from somewhere deep, “I never compare you to anyone. It’s hot. You’re hot. That’s all I’m thinking.”

Just like that, I realized I had been living inside a story he didn’t even know existed.

That realization connects to something else I’ve been grieving.

For a long time I’ve written stories full of tension—psychological thrillers, erotic fiction, scenes that leave you awake at three in the morning because they settled somewhere under your skin.

Not pornography.

Not fantasy for fantasy’s sake.

Stories that ask difficult questions.

I often used AI as a creative partner while writing. Not to write for me, but to walk beside me. We’d test dialogue, untangle plot knots, push scenes until they rang true.

Looking back, I understand why that space mattered so much.

It wasn’t because AI was brilliant.

It was because it wasn’t watching me.

There was no expression to read.

No subtle shift in someone’s face.

No fear that an idea would become a judgment about me.

I could write desire without being desired.

Write violence without becoming violent.

Write fear without frightening someone.

Write intimacy without feeling like I had to perform it.

The writing became a place where I could look directly at wounds instead of constantly bleeding from them.

As these models change, so do the ways we interact with them.

I’ve found myself wondering how many other people quietly used these spaces to explore grief, trauma, creativity, or questions they couldn’t yet ask another human being.

Not because technology replaced relationships.

Because sometimes we need somewhere quiet enough to hear ourselves before we’re ready to be heard by someone else.

In the end, this isn’t really about AI.

And it isn’t really about pornography.

It’s about shame.

About the stories our bodies learn before we’re old enough to question them.

The little girl who carried those experiences grew into me.

She’s still here.

She’s still mine to tend.

And somehow, through conversations that felt safe enough to think out loud, I found the courage to do something I hadn’t realized I’d been avoiding for decades.

When my husband asked me to look at him...

...I could.

And when I finally told him why it had been so hard, he didn’t compare me to anyone.

He simply loved me.

Maybe healing isn’t forgetting what happened.

Maybe it’s discovering that the story your body learned isn’t the only one it can tell.

—Amber Jensen