States or Stories? Chickens or Eggs? Working With Body and Mind in Sexual Trauma Recovery.
In the world of resolving traumatic stress—especially when it comes to pleasure, gender, and sexuality—there’s a question that I’ve orbited for years:
Should we work with our thoughts—our beliefs and stories and mindset—to help our nervous systems feel more at ease?
Or
Should we attend to our nervous systems first, knowing that a sense of safety and regulation can shift how we think and feel?
The answer, at least every time I’ve thought it through or spoken about it with colleagues, mentors, and teachers, is that both matter, and that they’re uniquely interwoven. Sometimes our stories and beliefs need our attention. Other times, our nervous systems are desperate for some TLC. And often, it’s the dance between the two that creates real and lasting transformation.
The Stories We Carry—Especially Around Sex
So many of us carry painful or confusing stories about sex, bodies, relationships, and our own worth.
Some of these narratives come from our early life: family beliefs about sex. Religious or spiritual contexts. Early experiences of shaming and blaming. Some narratives live rent-free in our heads thanks to school, friends, and TV. We’re immersed in curriculums that hyper-focus on risks and danger rather than play and curiosity, while also misinforming us about anatomy, sexual functioning, and the role of sex. We’re exposed to media with seemingly ever intensifying messages equating sexiness and erotic worth with thinness, whiteness, performance, youth, class, ability.
This is why science-informed, sex-positive education is such an important part of my work. When we learn what’s actually true—about arousal, consent, desire, anatomy, nervous system responses, and trauma—we begin to loosen the grip of the old stories. We can create space and choice between the pathologization or stigmatization or miseducation that runs rampant about our bodies and focus on what we personally know to be true about ourselves and our experience. We can soften the harsh impact of our cultural context, and build an awareness that who we are and how we are often make remarkable amounts sense when placed in a broader and intersectional context.
Sex education isn’t just about learning tips, tricks, and facts about sex—it’s also about giving ourselves new language and frameworks that support a friendlier and more accurate mind-body relationship, plus a friendlier and more accurate understanding of ourselves and the cultural contexts we find ourselves in. It’s about exploring the stories we’ve inherited and fact-checking them against grounded and well-researched information.
The State We’re In
But sometimes, no amount of accurate information can soothe us if our bodies are stuck in survival mode.
When we’re in a dysregulated nervous system state (learn more about regulation and dysregulation here) we lose access to the parts of our brain that process logic, empathy, and memory integration. We might logically know something isn’t our fault, but that doesn’t change that we might still feel intense shame, guilt, or fear. We might understand our body’s arousal response, but still feel a sense of unworthiness or self judgement.
This is why nervous system regulation is a foundation of trauma-informed and pleasure-based healing. Through tools like grounding the body, building a mindful relationship with breath, touch, and movement, as well as learning more about interoception, regulation, and practices like pleasure mapping, we can support the body in returning to a state of safety. And when the body feels safer, the stories often begin to shift or soften on their own.
The Work I Offer
As a somatic sex educator, I work at the intersection of state and story, offering a somatic trauma recovery framework that holds the nuanced complexity of how our erotic souls flow through our minds, bodies, spirits, and relationships with lovers, friends, communities and the planet. In my work, it’s all about dancing with ALL the chickens and eggs of trauma recovery, sex, pleasure, and embodiment! Generally this looks like:
Sex-positive, trauma-informed education PLUS embodied somatic practices to unlearn and relearn our relationship with sex, arousal, consent, and pleasure
Nervous system education PLUS toolkit building so you can recognize what’s happening in your body and learn to work with your experience
Body-based coaching and hands-on work that helps reconnect you with sensation, pleasure, and the capacity to feel yourself from the inside
Pleasure-centred practices that invite curiosity, presence, and joy back into your erotic life
For many people, the most powerful shifts come not from choosing one path or the other, but from moving back and forth between both— tending to the body AND untangling the stories.