Understanding sexual trauma responses
When we have had sexual trauma, our bodies often end up carrying those stored memories and responses. This can impact many areas of life, especially sex and relationships. It can feel incredibly isolating and frustrating. You want so desperately to feel carefree and to have this beautiful, pleasurable sex that everyone talks about, but you don’t know how.
You and your partner feel stuck in a loop. They might take your trauma responses or sexual avoidance personally, feel rejected, or feel confused. Your relationship becomes a dance of resentment, disconnection, and miscommunication.
You might logically know that you are safe, but your body shuts down when you have sex. You feel pain, you dissociate, your body feels numb. You get in your head and think about past trauma, or unrelated things like the laundry or daily tasks, or you feel guilty and ashamed.
You are not broken for feeling this way. You are not destined to be stuck in this cycle forever. Your body is responding from a place of protection. It is trying, in the best way that it can, to keep you safe. If you have experienced sexual trauma, sex has most likely become associated with complex and difficult emotions including shame, disempowerment, guilt, or numbness. Your autonomic nervous system’s survival mechanism becomes activated as a trauma response, because that is what it has learned to do.
There are a few ways that this may show up for you sexually:
Fight: Your autonomic nervous system may go into fight when you have sex or when sex is initiated. You might feel angry, upset, or defensive when your partner mentions sex. Your body may end up feeling tense during and after sex and you might feel resentment or angry afterwards.
Flight: You may experience a flight response to sexual initiation. This could involve trying to avoid sex or trying to avoid talking about it. You may experience anxiety and panic when you think about having sex or when things start to get intimate with a partner. You might even try to reassure yourself that you are safe and that things are okay, but you feel a deep primal panic that you need to avoid the situation.
Freeze: A freeze response involves having your body feel shut down. You might feel like you cannot move or react. Your body might feel numb or you may feel dissociated. Dissociation could feel like you are outside of yourself looking down, you are in a dream, or things don’t feel real. You may end up feeling uncomfortable or being in pain, but you have a difficult time speaking, moving, or communicating your boundaries or needs because you feel frozen.
Fawn: A fawn response may feel like you need to please your partner and agree to things that you actually don’t feel comfortable with. You may feel guilty if you have boundaries or needs and agree to sexual activities even when they are painful, uncomfortable, or unenjoyable. Sex might feel performative instead of pleasurable and embodied.
You might find you frequently experience one type of trauma response or that you cycle through multiple trauma responses. Whatever your experience is, recognizing and acknowledging that your body is having a trauma response is an important part of healing. And honoring that this is your body trying to care for you and protect you, even if it feels counterintuitive. There are ways that you can start to have more embodied, empowering, pleasurable, and present sexual experiences. It is a journey that is filled with deep self-compassion, slow self-discovery, liberation from internalized messages of shame and guilt, and pleasurable embodiment. In next week’s blog post, I will share several practices and journaling prompts to support you on your path to beautifully connecting, healing, and joyful sex.