Trauma and Intimacy

I didn't realize that I had unresolved sexual trauma until I started to be intimate with a partner. Emotional intimacy was hard for me, but physical intimacy was even harder.

I would freeze in the moment, exhale and then just not breathe in, as if willing my body to hide or dematerialize. 

I didn't see my numbness and shutdown as signs of unresolved trauma, because at the time, I didn't understand what trauma was.

I didn't know how to recognize the signs of unresolved trauma that being sexually intimate with someone else were bringing up.

At first, like most sexual trauma survivors, I thought there was something wrong with me, like I was defective. And I felt waves of shame and inadequacy.

I also believed I was the only one in the world who was experiencing this issue. I was so full of shame that I couldn’t find the courage to tell anyone — even my therapist — what was actually going on.

Pushing Through the Freeze Response

I felt frozen, shutdown, numb, and I wanted so badly for things to be different.

Instead of pausing to recognize that something was wrong, I pushed myself to "get over it." I felt like if I could just muster up enough willpower, I could manifest my way out of my freeze response and into feeling something.

Every time my freeze response happened, I thought to myself that I should be trying harder.

We often try to push through a freeze response with numbing or mood-altering activities. This can be anything from disordered eating to abusing substances, binge-watching Netflix, or obsessively scrolling social media. Anything that keeps us from fully feeling our bodies.

It can also look like risk-taking and high sensation-seeking behaviors where we crave intensity to feel something through the numbness.

But trying to push through is one of the worst things we can do with unresolved trauma. Pushing through a freeze response risks retraumatizing us and it just makes things worse.

In the moment, we might tell ourselves everything is fine; but dismissing and overriding the shutdown of our freeze response comes at a price. Often, we get so used to pushing through that we don’t realize the damage we’re doing to our nervous systems.

Instead of looking closer at what was happening, I stopped listening to my body because I didn't like what my body had to say. I felt like my body was against me whether she was full of overwhelming feelings or feeing nothing at all. There was no middle ground between the overwhelm and the shutdown.

No matter how hard I tried, it felt like there was no safe space. 

The Impact of Flashbacks

Often for survivors of sexual trauma and child sexual abuse, being sexual can trigger strong flashbacks that interrupt the joy and the flow of intimacy. Flashbacks are unintegrated traumatic memories and can be very disturbing to our sense of wellbeing, especially when we don’t know what they are or how to navigate them.

PTSD flashbacks can look like re-experiencing overwhelming visual pictures or auditory sounds from the traumatic event. For Complex PTSD flashbacks, the experience is often emotional, instead of sensory, and accompanied by a flood of shame.

For me, being sexually intimate often triggered feelings and responses like disgust. These were related to the traumatic incidents in the past and had nothing to do with my partner or our relationship. But it was confusing at the time and hard to keep the two separate.

Sometimes during intimacy, I even had flashbacks of the original trauma. Those were especially hard to deal with.

When I froze and dissociated, I just tried even harder to stop thinking about it and to "get over it." What I really needed was to be with myself and slow down.

Trauma Resolution and Thriving

I am sharing about intimacy with other survivors of sexual trauma and child sexual abuse because these experiences leave a mark on our minds, emotions, and bodies. We need to talk about them to shift the stigma and heal ourselves.

It's uncomfortable but essential to recognize when unresolved trauma tries to rob us of the life we are living in the moment, when the past tries to steal our vitality and aliveness, our pleasure in the now.

Unresolved trauma shows up especially in our most intimate relationships, with our husbands, wives, partners, girlfriends, boyfriends...And it's really hard to talk about it. Giving up and going numb is not something we do consciously. It is an aftereffect of the original trauma.

As I've written about before, numbness is a sign that we don't feel safe. This is especially true when we are being sexually intimate with another person.

We often get confused, thinking that the numbness has something to do with our partner or our relationship — even when things are really good and we’re otherwise happy.

We try to look for the cause of our numbness and shutdown in the present, when it’s often hiding in the past (and it’s scarier to look in the past, especially without the right kind of support).

The Body Wants to Heal 

Unresolved trauma often shows up when we are safe enough in our intimate relationships that our bodies feel they can continue their healing process.

Survivors of sexual trauma and child sexual abuse need extra safety, time, and love to feel safe being intimate in our partnerships.

We often think about safety as physical safety, but safety includes emotional safety. It includes knowing that we will not be abandoned for sharing how we feel and that our partners understand we need extra support to stay present.

Feeling regularly unsafe in situations that are actually safe is a sign that there is something else going on. When we are with our partners, feeling at ease and connecting, a traumatic response might seem to come out of nowhere.

The trauma comes up then because our bodies feel safe enough for it to arise in our conscious awareness, with the hopes that it will finally be resolved.

Often, we don't know how to deal with unresolved trauma when it comes up during intimacy. It's really easy to let it sabotage our partnership, which is often our most valued relationship.

For survivors of sexual trauma and child sexual abuse, not knowing how to deal with our unresolved trauma can result in avoiding intimacy in our relationships altogether. If you do this, please don’t be hard on yourself — it’s normal.

When connecting with a partner, it's not uncommon to have strong feelings, including revulsion, shame, and disgust. They might be directed at ourselves or even our beloved. The feelings can be hard to make sense of, until you know that they are a sign of unresolved trauma.

After sexual intimacy, survivors often feel ashamed, guilty, or even dissociated. It's not uncommon to try to numb our feelings and confusion because our trauma response doesn't "make sense."

When sexual numbness and shutdown go on for prolonged periods in our relationships, it is a sign that there is something deeper happening that needs attention.

Numbness and shutdown in our intimate relationships are signs that we need to heal.  

The Courage to Heal

When we have unresolved trauma, our nervous systems want to heal and move out of self-protection mode. It's exhausting to be hypervigilant all the time. Our bodies know it’s not a good use of energy and there is more to life than this.

We know, deep down, that we’re missing out. 

There is such a taboo against talking about it, but unresolved sexual trauma affects our ability to connect securely with our partners. And secure relationships are medicine for our health and happiness. We need them to thrive.

I hope you know that trauma healing is possible, no matter what you’re still carrying, how long it’s been, or what you’ve been through.

You deserve to get support to heal what comes up in your intimacy and in your relationships. We all deserve to live free from the weight of the past, and to fully enjoy our intimate relationships.

There’s a whole world of connection and goodness waiting for us, if we have the courage to heal. 

If you want to learn more about the trauma resolution work I do with clients, reach out to me here.

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