Not just another book about sexual abuse, this book explores the possibility of the hard but real journey to self-respect. It is an in-depth approach to understanding the individual's experience in sexual love, and an exploration of the nature of the self and sexuality. Describing a wide range of violations of sexuality and the resulting injuries to self-respect, it has the theoretical and clinical depth to be useful to professionals, while written in language accessible to the lay reader. The necessity of bringing in the body is examined and the text offers an experientially relevant way of conceptualizing bodily processes (bioenergetics) in sexuality and the self. This work affords new avenues for understanding the possibilities of the evolution of the self in adult life, and of child development toward the rebirth of self-respect and the development of a sexual ethic.