Not going to offer many details on the where or how, as I don’t intend to dox myself, but suffice it to say that I will continue touching butts for an extended period. I don’t like feeling aroused by the act. These people placed trust in me. Trust that I mean them no harm and that I am safe to be around. I can certainly be both while aroused, but I’d rather not have to deal with this.
I’d prefer not to dissociate through work, but I can’t find another way to contextualize my experiences in a way that doesn’t leave me frustrated until I get home.
Time. It just takes time.
I washed bodies and wiped butts for twenty years. Most of the time, my patients were not on my radar anyway, as I’m hetero and the vast majority were men. Among the women, I’d say 3/4ths were elderly enough that they were well beyond my upper range even now that I’m middle aged.
But there were a few, in the early years, that were very attractive. Of equal or more importance, when I transitioned to home health instead of facility care, family members of patients would sometimes not only be attractive, but assume that I was perfectly safe to be naked around, or even request contact that would be considered intimate to some degree or another.
It really, truly, didn’t take long for my inner switch to just stay in the off position at work. By the time I was thirty, I had family members of patients outright put moves on me and it would take multiple attempts for me to notice because my switch in my brain said that work time is work time, not happy penis time.
It did take seeing a goodly double handful of goodly handfuls before I adapted though. Butt, if your job requires more frequent contact with bodies you’d be attracted to, it’ll happen faster than it did for me in terms of time. More exposure to the experience starts dialing down the sexuality of it. Oh, you might find some arousal on occasion even after years, but it’ll be occasional and you’ll develop the ability to ignore it.
Short term, it’s the same as any stressor you face at work. Identify it, control your breathing as you accept its presence in your mind, and allow that control to filter it out. And it will. It’s a basic meditation technique that’s infallible assuming the ability to breathe with control, and enough practice. The more you control your breathing, the more control gets spread to the rest of you.