Healing your relationship with yourself, your body, and intimacy.
Childhood sexual abuse can shape the way you experience intimacy long after the abuse has ended.
Maybe you want closeness but find yourself pulling away when someone gets too close. Maybe sex feels complicated—something you want, something you avoid, or something you have a hard time feeling present for.
You may struggle to know what you actually want versus what you feel like you should want. You might have difficulty saying no, asking for what feels good, setting boundaries, or staying connected to yourself during intimate experiences.
And sometimes, you may understand exactly where these patterns came from but still feel stuck in them.
You might find yourself struggling with:
Feeling disconnected from your body — feeling numb, uncomfortable, self-conscious, or unable to stay present during intimacy.
Knowing what you want — having a hard time identifying your desires, needs, boundaries, or what actually feels good to you.
Feeling safe with intimacy — wanting connection while also feeling anxious, guarded, overwhelmed, or disconnected when things become vulnerable or sexual.
Boundaries and people-pleasing — saying yes when you want to say no, prioritizing a partner's needs, or feeling responsible for their experience.
Shame around sex and your body — carrying guilt, shame, confusion, or discomfort around sexuality, desire, or your body.
Feeling stuck in patterns you understand — knowing intellectually why you respond the way you do but struggling to experience something different.
Recovery isn't about becoming comfortable with sex.
It's about becoming more connected to yourself.
For some people, healing means feeling safer in their body. For others, it means learning to recognize their own desires, boundaries, and needs for the first time.
It might mean learning that you can say no without explaining yourself. That you can change your mind. That intimacy doesn't have to mean losing yourself in someone else. That your body belongs to you.
Therapy can help you build a relationship with yourself where you can make choices based on what you want—not fear, obligation, shame, or the need to keep someone else happy.
A trauma-sensitive, body-based approach
Because sexual trauma is experienced through both the mind and the body, recovery often involves more than talking about what happened.
In therapy, we'll work at a pace that respects your nervous system and your sense of safety. You don't have to tell me every detail of what happened in order to do this work.
Depending on your needs, we may incorporate approaches such as EMDR, Brainspotting, Internal Family Systems (IFS), trauma-sensitive yoga, and other somatic practices to help you reconnect with your body and develop greater choice and awareness.
Therapy won’t make you forget what happened. But it will help what happened have less control over how you live, love, connect, and experience your body today.
You deserve relationships where you can be fully yourself.
You deserve intimacy that feels safe, mutual, and chosen.
And you deserve to experience your body as your own.