Maybe you’ve never said this out loud to anyone. Maybe you’ve tried to push through it, ignore it, explain it away, or simply accepted it as just the way you are now. Maybe you’ve ended relationships because intimacy became too hard, too triggering, too exhausting to navigate. Maybe you’ve stayed in them, going through the motions, feeling absent from your own body while wondering if something is permanently wrong with you. If trauma — whether sexual abuse, childhood harm, an abusive relationship, or any experience that made your body feel unsafe — has changed your relationship with sex, intimacy, or your own desire, this is written for you.

What you’re experiencing is real. It has a name. And it is not the end of the story.

What You Might Be Experiencing

Trauma doesn’t always announce itself clearly in the bedroom. Often it shows up in ways that feel confusing, shameful, or completely disconnected from anything you could explain to a partner.

You might recognise some of these:

• Sex feels mechanical, distant, or emotionally empty — you’re present in body but not really there.
• You dissociate during intimacy — drifting away, watching from a distance, losing time or connection to what’s happening.
• Your body shuts down — arousal disappears, desire vanishes, or your body and genitals physically won’t cooperate even when you want it to.
• Certain touches, positions, or moments trigger panic, anger, or overwhelming emotion seemingly out of nowhere.
• You feel deep shame about your sexuality — about what you want, what you don’t want, or what happened to you.
• Intimacy with someone you trust and love still feels threatening — and you don’t understand why.
• Physical pain during sex that has no clear medical explanation.
• You avoid relationships altogether because the risk of getting close feels unbearable.

None of these mean you are broken. Every single one of them is your nervous system doing its job — protecting you from a threat it learned, at some point, was real. The problem is that the body’s protective responses don’t automatically update when circumstances change. They continue running old software in a new situation. And that is what trauma-informed sex therapy helps you change.

You Are Far From Alone

One of the most isolating things about carrying sexual trauma is the silence around it. It can feel like something uniquely wrong with you — like everyone else somehow has a normal, uncomplicated relationship with sex and intimacy, and you are the exception.

The data tells a very different story.

The Australian Child Maltreatment Study — the first nationally representative study of its kind — found that approximately one in four Australians (28.5%) have experienced child sexual abuse (Mathews et al., 2023). Among women, that figure rises to more than one in three. The Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Personal Safety Survey (2023) found that at least one in five Australian women has experienced sexual violence since the age of 15, rising to more than one in two women in their 20s (NASASV, 2022).

This is not rare. This is not exceptional. This is an enormous number of people — many of them quietly navigating its effects on their bodies, their relationships, and their sense of themselves as sexual beings, often without ever speaking about it or seeking support.

You are not an outlier. You are part of a large, mostly silent community of people who deserve care that actually understands what they’ve been through.

Why Your Body Responds This Way

When something threatens our safety — especially when that threat involves our body, our autonomy, or the people who were supposed to protect us — the nervous system doesn’t simply file it away as a memory. It encodes it somatically: in the muscles, the breath, the arousal system, the threat-detection wiring that runs beneath conscious thought (van der Kolk, 2014).

This is why you can cognitively know you are safe, that your partner is trustworthy, that the situation is different now — and your body still responds with shutdown, panic, or disconnection. Your nervous system isn’t being irrational. It is running a protection programme that once made complete sense, and hasn’t yet received the signal that it’s safe to update.

Porges’ (2011) polyvagal theory helps explain this clearly: our nervous system operates in a hierarchy of states. At the top is social engagement — the state of openness, connection, and availability that intimacy requires. When there is a perception of threat, the system drops into fight-or-flight, or further into shutdown and freeze. For trauma survivors, the intimacy context itself can be enough to trigger that drop — because the nervous system learned to associate closeness with danger.

This is not a mindset problem. It is not something you can think your way out of. It lives in the body, and it heals in the body — with the right support, at the right pace, in a context of genuine safety.

What Trauma-Informed Sex Therapy Offers That Regular Therapy Doesn’t

Many trauma survivors have already done therapy. They have processed their history, developed insight, built coping skills. And yet something remains — a gap between what they understand intellectually and how their body actually responds in intimate situations.

This is where sex therapy specifically matters. Because standard trauma therapy, as valuable as it is, rarely addresses the sexual body directly. And standard sex therapy, without a trauma-informed foundation, can inadvertently push survivors toward intimacy before the nervous system is ready — making things worse rather than better.

Trauma-informed sex therapy holds both. It begins not with sex, but with safety. Not with performance or outcomes, but with the fundamental question: what does your body need in order to feel safe enough to begin?

Research on adapted approaches for sexual trauma survivors emphasises a paced, consent-centred process — one that includes body mapping to identify triggered and safe zones, somatic tools for managing dissociation and hyperarousal, and a gradual, entirely client-directed reconnection with sensation and desire (Malkemus & Smith, 2021). Progress is not measured by sexual milestones. It is measured by your growing sense of ownership over your own body and experience.

What Working With Me Looks Like

At my private practice in Goodwood, I work with individuals who are navigating the intersection of trauma and sexuality — including people who have never spoken about their experiences before, people who have done years of other therapy and feel stuck, and people who aren’t even sure if what they experienced “counts” as trauma.

It counts. Whatever happened to you that made your body feel unsafe, violated, or not your own — it counts, and it deserves care.

My approach to trauma integrative, working whole-person, and completely non-prescriptive about what healing should look like for you. Sessions move at your pace. Nothing is required of you except your honesty and your willingness to show up. I will not push you toward any particular outcome. I will not tell you what your sexuality should look like at the end of this. That belongs to you.

What you can expect is a space that is genuinely safe — not just professionally boundaries, but actively attentive to your nervous system, your history, and your dignity. A space where shame has no foothold. Where your body’s responses are treated as intelligible rather than dysfunctional. Where the work is always, at its core, about returning something to you that was taken. That being said, boundaries are important, and if trauma is living in your body often I will start exploring what boundaries feel and look like.

I also want to be clear: this work is for everyone. Regardless of gender, sexual orientation, relationship structure, cultural background, or the nature of what happened to you. LGBTQIA+ individuals are warmly welcome. Survivors of all genders are welcome. You do not need to justify or explain your identity before you begin to heal.

You Don’t Have to Keep Managing This Alone

If you have carried this quietly — through relationships, through avoidance, through the private exhaustion of pretending — I want you to know that support exists, and it is more specialised, more gentle, and more effective than many people expect.

Healing does not mean forgetting what happened. It does not mean returning to who you were before. It means building a new relationship with your body — one grounded in safety, agency, and the slowly returning knowledge that pleasure and intimacy are still available to you, on your own terms.

That is what I do. And it would be an honour to do it with you.

References

Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2023). Personal safety, Australia, 2021–22. ABS. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/crime-and-justice/personal-safety-australia/2021-22

Malkemus, S. A., & Smith, J. F. (2021). Adapting sensate focus for sexual abuse survivors: A trauma-informed approach to reclaiming body and intimacy. Sexual and Relationship Therapy, 38(4), 532–549. https://doi.org/10.1080/26929953.2025.2479548

Mathews, B., Pacella, R. E., Scott, J. G., Finkelhor, D., Meinck, F., Higgins, D. J., Erskine, H. E., Thomas, H. J., Lawrence, D., Haslam, D. M., Malacova, E., & Dunne, M. P. (2023). The prevalence of child maltreatment in Australia: Findings from a national survey. Medical Journal of Australia, 218(6 Suppl.), S13–S18. https://doi.org/10.5694/mja2.51873

National Alliance for Sexual Assault Services and Violence [NASASV]. (2022). Sexual violence data. https://www.nasasv.org.au/data

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.

van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.

This blog is for educational purposes and does not constitute therapeutic advice or mental health care. If you are experiencing distress, please reach out to a qualified mental health professional.