Healing From Sexual Abuse: What I Wish I’d Known About Reclaiming My Body, Intimacy, and Pleasure
I am intimately familiar with the extractive, performative, and objectifying patterns woven into our culture around sexuality.
I was sexually abused as a young child and teenager and sexually trafficked as a young adult.
My body learned to override, to perform, and to disconnect from what I actually felt and wanted.
I've had a lot of sex I didn't want. I’ve also had a lot of sex I did want, but couldn't feel.
And now I have a lot of sex I want and feel.
I've walked the long road from numbness to aliveness. From an armored body to a sensitized one. From leaving my body during sex to being able to stay - to feel, choose, soften, and open.
There were years when flashbacks hijacked my body. When the presence of my abusers hovered like ghosts in the room during self-pleasure or sex with another human.
I’ve gone through periods of time when pleasure felt impossibly far away. And the only thing present was grief.
Back then, I never imagined I'd feel safe in my body again. I longed for sex to feel ecstatic instead of threatening. A part of me always knew it could.
Now, years later, after the spiraling descent back into my body and the reclamation of my agency, there are many things I know now, that I wish I would have known then.
Survival responses aren't flaws.
Freeze, flight, fawn, dissociate - these are, and were, genius strategies. My body knew how to keep me alive. It was not betraying me.
Fawn can be one of the trickiest nervous system state because, from the outside, it can look like consent. But internally, you do not feel you have any choice but to perform desire, a yes, or a specific act.
And the perception of threat can happen with people who deeply love and care about you. You could be fearful of disappointing a lover or fearful of making them angry. At its core, the perceived threat may be losing the connection. Fawning becomes the body’s attempt to preserve it.
The shame was never mine.
Not one bit. It belonged to the people who violated me, and to a culture that silences survivors through blame, dismissal, and gaslighting.
Shame causes you to disconnect from yourself and the other. It leaves you believing you are wrong, bad, and undeserving of love. Shame will make you want to pull away and hide. I like to think of it as a fierce protector. It often shows up when you are afraid or at an edge to protect you from perceived threat. It keeps you small and contained to try to prevent you from experiencing more hurt.
You can take the presence of shame as an indication that you need to slow down. And you can build new ways of protecting yourself - through attuning and listening to yourself and speaking up for your needs and desires. And then dissolve the shame with conscious attuned pleasure. Each experience of pleasure in which you are listened to, respected, and free to choose can begin to create a new embodied reality: my desire is not shameful, and my body belongs to me.
Self-doubt is part of the abuse itself.
Abusers want you to believe it's your fault, and that creates profound confusion - confusion that makes it nearly impossible to trust your own instincts. Blaming yourself becomes a way to cut through that fog - if it was your fault, at least you had some control. At least it makes sense. And if it's your fault, you can fix it, prevent it from happening again.
Society reinforces that self-blame through victim-blaming and refusing to believe survivors. I broke that cycle by telling my younger self: "I believe you. I'm listening."
You don't need all the details to heal.
Memory works differently after trauma; fragments are normal, blank spaces are normal. The body doesn't lie. If your mind can't remember, your body knows, and that knowing is enough.
Anger is a healthy response to violation.
Like many women, I was taught it made me difficult, unlikeable, and too much. But your rage cuts through confusion and tells the truth: "It's not your fault. Your boundaries, needs, and desires matter." Learning to trust your anger, instead of swallowing it, is a form of protection. Feeling and expressing your anger is part of coming home to yourself.
Triggers aren't failures.
They're openings. Maps. Messages from your nervous system saying: "I'm scared. Slow down. Stay with me." They show you exactly where you need more love and attention.
Safe touch begins with your own hands.
Self-intimacy can feel like reclaiming stolen territory. And wanted touch becomes the medicine that heals the wounds of unwanted touch. Safety begins with choice, and you get to choose the pace.
I was afraid my sexuality would make me vulnerable to violation again.
Then I learned: when I inhabit my erotic self fully, I can feel what's a yes and what's a no, and voice my desires. That presence is one form of protection I can offer myself. It's also what makes real intimacy possible. And life so much more vibrant.
Pleasure and grief are two sides of the same coin.
To feel one fully, I have to be willing to feel the other. When I stopped protecting myself from grief, pleasure opened up. Not despite the pain, but because I was finally willing to feel. Each time I opened to a new level of pleasure and connection, I had to grieve how disconnected I'd been. That grief made space for the new to become normal, which opened the door to go deeper still.
My body was never broken.
An abundance of pleasure is here.
A felt sense of safety is here.
Deep trust is here.
Ecstatic connection is here.
I got here by learning to move at the pace my body could genuinely trust. By refusing to abandon any parts of myself. There were times I pushed, forced, performed - and had to learn from that too. The path wasn't, and isn't, perfect. But I keep coming back to curiosity and gentleness. To finding the people, the plants allies, the spaces, the moments where connection and pleasure feel even slightly available, and expanding from there.
In my Eros Alchemy containers, I accompany people through somatic exploration, intimacy practices, erotic bodywork, and plant medicine, creating conditions in which safety, agency, connection, and pleasure can become genuinely available.
What’s Next?
Eros Alchemy containers are available for individuals who are ready to feel more deeply and cultivate the embodiment necessary for satisfying relationships and sexual exchanges.
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