From my heart to yours, I want to talk about a profound state of suffering that happens when we are disconnected from our deepest, innermost self, our essence and our soul.
When Deceptive Sexuality and Trauma enter a relationship, it creates a catastrophic rupture. To truly understand how someone can create a “Secret Sexual Basement” and cause such profound harm, we must look at the concepts of Split-Self and Split-Life.
As it relates to Deceptive Sexuality and the Secret Sexual Basement:
Split-Self
Due to developmental critical injuries and the inability to move through severe emotional suffering, a person develops a defensive structuring and protective pattern that shapes them in different ways, specifically splitting them in two.
This is an unconscious and protective shaping of dissociation in order to survive. It can show up as one part of them living in a state of apparent functioning, while the other part of them is moving in the primitive state of “intensity and escape.” Both states have them living away from their embodied self, desperate not to feel vulnerable and not to lose control.
As time passes, they fragment more and more, becoming more unconscious and with a feverish need to find an experience of being “alive” outside of themselves, while decreasing the spark of self-contact, authenticity, and whole-self nurturing.
Split-Life
Due to living a Split-Self, what begins to happen over time is they further shape themselves and their life into compartments, where their “functioning self” cannot be close to their “escaping self,” and neither landing point can be lived in for long periods of time.
When they land in their life above the basement, they can only be there for a short time because it feels dangerous for them, especially when experiences of vulnerability and intimacy are present. The fear of not being in control and being abandoned kicks up their need to escape themselves and their life above ground.
They live objectified and split, keeping the two lives devastatingly separated. This shapes them into a constant state of erosion and disintegration, with an inability to name it because they remain unconscious. As they continue this dangerous pattern of protection to avoid seeing and experiencing the harsh reality of their splitting, they lose identity and meaning.
When a person lives a duplicitous life, they are operating from a state of fragmentation. They become disconnected from their true essence, a fundamental truth about who they are and how they exist.
Once this happens, they fall into patterns of treating both themselves and others as mere objects to be consumed. This has them believing they are safe from vulnerability, however what is actually happening is an increase in vulnerability to more complex layers of splitting and disintegration.
To heal, they must understand how this shaping and relational patterning happens, how the basement is built and continues to move in their lives, and how to find the path from fragmentation to wholeness.
The path begins when they land in the reality of how far away from themselves they are. From there, it is pivotal for them to tap into the truth of what has happened and continues to happen. And then, it is imperative that they build the capacity to turn toward the impacts on themselves and others.
A healing path such as this takes courage and willingness, with a landing point of humility. It takes building the muscle of focus and determination, transitioning from thinking or wanting to do something toward action and commitment, and creating a path toward honesty, intimacy, and wholeness.
Some things they need help with:
- Naming the reality of what is happening.
- Reducing harm and increasing empathy for self and others.
- Stabilizing dysregulated living.
- Decreasing the intense escape patterns that were driving them out of true embodiment and self-contact.
- Slowing down long enough to develop the capacity to stop the patterns of self- harm and other-harm.
- Metabolizing and processing the loss of self, the relationship, and a full life.
- Moving from an unconscious and dissociative existence, toward conscious choosing and agency.
- Developing deeper roots into themselves, promoting second-order change and deep transformation, and rising up as a person who lives in honesty, stands in wholeness, and has the capacity for intimacy with themselves and their intimate partner.
The Iceberg of Our Shaping
In this work, I continually draw upon the conceptualizations of Dr. Omar Minwalla and the Minwalla Model. He uses the metaphor of an Iceberg to explain the complex, multi-layered reality of human development and Deceptive Sexuality.
Omar Minwalla, Psy.D., 2024-2025, All rights reserved.
We are all icebergs moving throughout this deep oceanic life, and throughout our lives, we move across 6 different levels of shaping that contribute to who we are, in 3 distinct parts: Under The Water, The Water Line, and Above The Water.
Under The Water (Levels 6, 5, and 4): Deep beneath the surface is our foundational shaping.
- Level 6 holds our deepest and most complex developmental trauma and attachment-based shaping, as well as the adaptive and maladaptive survival strategies related to feeling safe in relationships and learning to trust.
- Level 5 holds our gender shaping—how societal and personal messaging molded us into what it means to be our gender, as well as how to treat others and where we place them in relationship to us.
- Level 4 holds our sexuality shaping—how societal and personal messaging and experiences define our relationship to how we identify, feel about, and express our sexuality and sexual selves, as well as how we hold and treat others in their sacred sexuality.
All of this messaging and early life experience does one of two things: it either brings us closer to our deepest and most authentic selves, or it pushes us away—leaving us split off from our precious self-contact, disconnected and functioning like an “object,” rather than a fully integrated human being.
The Water Line (Level 3): This is where the underwater shaping meets the surface. Level 3 holds our templates—our personality template, our gender template, and our sexuality template.
The water line is the space of consciousness. We cannot go back under the water and completely erase what happened to us, but we can become conscious of our templates. If we do not look at our shaping and raise our consciousness at the break of the water, we will continue to feed negative survival patterns, causing harm to ourselves and those we love. We will continue to be living a Split-Self and Split-Life.
It is imperative to dig deep into how we are shaped away from our values and beliefs. To find strength to face the years we lived, and may continue to live, in states of distortions, resentment building, rationalizations, dominating and controlling others, as well as entitlement. The only way to change this way of living is that you have to truly want this type of shift from the deepest ache inside of you—the part of you that is crying out to be found and is calling you to wholeness.
First-order change is the beginning, where we name and stabilize all that has happened and is happening. Second-order change requires a thorough, brave process and metabolization of how we are shaped, and deep truthseeking on how far you have become from healthy beliefs and values. The landing point of twisted beliefs and values is important so we can reshape and repattern new ways of being with ourselves, with others, and in our lives.
A deep shift can happen with consistent truth telling and courageous unwinding from the inflated self; giving yourself an opportunity to make self-contact to the part of you that was abandoned. Tapping into that deflated and vulnerable space within, can promote a path to healing the wounds of integrity, intimacy, and integration.
Above The Water (Levels 1 and 2): The Blueprint of the Basement. As we move up the iceberg, from the deepest layers of shaping and splitting, Levels 1 and 2 are how we move in the world today. When a person is living from a disconnected, unhealed place at the surface, they do not just stumble into a double life; they actively build it in order to self-preserve and survive.
Dr. Omar Minwalla outlines a very specific blueprint for how a Secret Sexual Basement is constructed, step by step. It begins with a disordered seed of entitlement—a belief that they deserve to consume what they want, regardless of the cost. From there, they move into compartmentalization, actively dividing their reality to create the Split-Self and the Split-Life.
To protect this hidden world, they must rely on a steady stream of deception and lying, which eventually escalates into severe Integrity Abuse tactics and behaviros. They use gaslighting, manipulation, and reality-twisting to keep their intimate partner in the dark. They live by the belief system and negative core constructs that if their partner truly knew them, they would be abandoned.
Because they are desperate for “survival,” they split themselves into two, moving away from any sense of a deflated self, creating an inflated self that blooms their sense of entitlement. They remain unconscious and drive forward with rationalizing their behaviors, while continuing to feed them with distortions and resentment building.
As this blueprint takes shape, a profound dehumanization occurs. Not only are they living dehumanized, but the intimate partner is no longer treated as a cherished human being with their own agency; instead, they are reduced to a prop or an object used to maintain the illusion of a normal, respectable life above ground. Ultimately, this descent into callousness and control is what creates an Abuse Victim Trauma-Existing Reality for the partner living unknowingly above it.
Emotion is Energy in Motion (E-Motion)
What drives a person to stay disconnected while continuing to follow this dark blueprint? Because emotions and feelings are terrifying for them, being vulnerable is unbearable and leaves them less in control, and if they are not inflated, they feel they will “die.” This is deeply heart-breaking, especially when they have been shaped in an environment of harm, invalidation, and not having safe others to hold them.
I often state that Emotion (E-motion) is energy in motion—a physiological experience. When that energy gets stored and blocked, we decrease contact with our most authentic and precious selves. The vulnerability feels unbearable so we build up heavy defenses.
The way I describe the patterns of protection are that we build fences around our emotions. When I developed that concept, and the interplay of emotions and defenses, I was working more from a somatic lens to help unwind emotions so they could discharge and disperse. I developed the term “de-fense”. It is important to help others who shut down and away from their emotions to understand the reason the “fense” is there and how it has become a prison of sorts.
The Latin root meaning of defense is to ward off or protect, to defend and push away. Thus, when it comes to emotions and vulnerability, when they are overwhelming and unbearable, the instinct is to push away from them and keep others away from them. This creates a chasm in the relationship with ourselves and others, shattering capacity for intimacy in many ways.
To maintain a Secret Sexual Basement requires emotional detachment. When a person is entirely consumed by their defenses, they lose their humanity. They become “a someone” who acts like an object, rather than a whole, feeling human being, who feels a sense of identity and meaning in life.
To heal, a person must learn how to lower their “fenses”. They must learn to tap into the emotions and feelings they left behind and develop a capacity to sit with the vulnerability of a truthful, intimate connection with themselves. They must learn that they are in charge of this process and that the “fenses” are there for a reason–at one time it was for a sense of safety, however it is now prison that keeps them away from an experience of being a harmonious whole being.
In addition, they must develop the agency and capacity to sit in their vulnerability for longer periods of time, quelling the rising intensity to escape, while riding the waves of their emotions, their energy in motion. Doing this clears the path to them and their deepest, richest, sacred aliveness. This type of honoring would ignite the path to wholeness, authenticity, self-contact, honesty, and aliveness with themselves and others.
The Path to Wholeness: The Three I’s
Dr. Omar Minwalla beautifully highlights the pathway out of this fragmentation through the Three I’s: Integrity, Intimacy, and Integration. These three elements are like a precious, holistic thread. If you pull on one, they all move together. You cannot have true integration until you first have truth and honesty (Integrity) and deep connection (Intimacy).
Healing is a journey from intrapersonal (within the self) to interpersonal (with others):
- Integrity: It begins with truth within the self, which breaks the cycle of deception and leads to truth within the relationship.
- Intimacy: It requires self-contact and dropping the heavy defenses, which then allows for true intimacy with a partner.
- Integration: As the Split-Self begins to heal and the basement is dismantled, the person becomes integrated and whole, which finally allows for an integrated, healthy relationship.
When a person is deeply working on coming back into an integrated self, they are becoming more human. The sense of dehumanization melts away. And then it moves outward into their relationship with an intimate partner, where holding another human from deep love and cherishing can mature. This is when they can hold themself while holding another in their heart, making conscious decisions for another’s well-being and keeping the relationship safe.
This path is not fast. It is a deep dive into what it feels like to have been so disconnected and to have relied on maladaptive survival patterns that took you away from your own soul. This is not about releasing accountability for the choices that were made and the devastating impacts that happened; this is about becoming deeply accountable for your path to wholeness—honoring it, cherishing it, and never leaving it again. That type of accountability keeps you and those in your life safe.
Intimate Partner Impacted Splitting
The moment a person discovers the Secret Sexual Basement, they now lose the ground underneath them. Another metaphor that I pair with the Secret Sexual Basement is the partner impacted recognizes that part of the intimate partner impacted is in a Dark Cave existence.
During the Covert Phase a part of their life was missing and they did not know it. Due to the erosive patterns of this phase, which can go on for many years and decades, they are suffocating in the dark places of unlit truth, feeling something is off and yet unable to get the validation needed.
Once the deception is discovered, there is a psychological death and an extremely shocking split that happens within them. This can move them through many rapid cycling patterns of hyper-states and hypo-states, never truly knowing where to land, and at times getting swallowed up by the Dark Cave of isolation.
If you have been impacted by a person who lived a Split-Self and Split-Life, you are now splitting. The traumatic ripple effect of how they shaped hits your own iceberg into a seismic shattering, especially above the water. And, it can crack into everything below the water as well. This can create dissociation, confusion, a furious storm inside, as well a chaotic interpersonal rhythm that leaves you panicked, breathless, raging, and out of body. The splits crack through you and into your life.
You are now forced to float in the dark, in a life you cannot recognize, a state of the unknown, an altered reality of self and life, and you are oftentimes unable to name the moments in your life from the past, to the present, and into the future.
You are now having to face that you are scattered everywhere, writhing in pain and suffering, with a desperate need to pull yourself together. The alignment you had with the Three I’s (Integrity, Intimacy, Integration) gets obliterated, and you are ripped from the home base of what you thought was an honored and shared value system.
With your heart crushed and your soul ripped, you are in need of a safe-enough landing point, one that can name, stabilize, and help you move into metabolizing the enormity of it all. This is so you can move from fragmentation to wholeness again.
It will take holding yourself as priority, and honoring your need to come back into alignment and heal. It is not easy to turn toward what happened to you, the splitting of you and your life, and the aftermath of it all. However, it is of utmost importance to slow it all down, opening your truth while moving through it all, so that you can find you again.
This is a courageous choice for you… to create the path to you… finally arriving on the glorious shore of you, and being able to say: Here I Am… Becoming.
Step Into Your Becoming: Sacred Sister Cocoon
If you are ready to do this deep unearthing and begin to move from fragmentation to integration, you do not have to walk this path alone.
I invite you to join me for my upcoming in-persons intensive, HERE I AM BECOMING: Sacred Sister Cocoon. In this precious space, we will gently unwind the impact of the basement, clear the popping nervous system stories, help you come out of the dark cave and up for air, and guide you as you reclaim your alignment and wholeness, alongside other women who move with you and who truly understand.
Click here to connect with me and learn more about the upcoming In-Person Sacred Sister Cocoon
