Pleasure And Fear: Navigating Arousal, Activation, and Your Nervous System.

If you’ve ever felt afraid or overwhelmed in a moment that was supposed to be pleasurable, you’re not alone.

Maybe a soft touch sent your heart racing… in a way that didn’t feel that great. Maybe your body responded with arousal… even though your mind felt unsure. These moments can be confusing and might come with a cascade of questions: Was that fear or turn-on? Why did I freeze when I wanted to feel close? Am I broken?

What you’re experiencing makes perfect sense when we understand a little more about how the nervous system works. Let’s unpack this a little bit:

Why Turn-On and Fear Can Feel So Similar

What turns us on and what scares us might, on the surface level, seem like polar opposites: one rooted in pleasure, the other in danger. However, on the level of ‘bare sensations’, they often feel nearly identical. This is because both states are forms of nervous system hyperarousal, which means they both involve physiological sensations like increased heart rate and temperature, faster breathing, flushed skin, muscle tension, and heightened sensitivity.

This is known as interoceptive confusion — the challenge of accurately interpreting internal body signals (like a racing heart or tightening belly) as ‘wanted’ or ‘unwanted’ experiences. That is, a fast heartbeat might mean “I’m scared,” but it might also mean “I’m excited.” Tension might mean “I’m bracing against something unwanted,” or it might mean “I’m on the edge of something exciting and delicious.”

For survivors of sexual trauma, these sensations may carry the association of past experiences of danger. So, even when you’re in a safe and friendly context, exploring safe and friendly play, your body may interpret signals of arousal as signals of a threat, due to past associations. This isn’t a shortcoming. It’s a skillful survival strategy. Your body learned to associate certain experiences or feelings with danger due to the past, and now in the present it’s trying to protect you.

However, there’s no denying that this can create a lot of challenge when trying to enjoy play and pleasure in the moment, when there are old wirings between fear and arousal to contend with. Luckily more and more research is coming to light that can help with retraining and relearning the signals your body is sending, parsing out what is a threat, what is a turn-on, and how to connect with pleasure. And it all starts with getting curious. When you meet your body’s signals with curious openness, you can start to build somatic discernment — the ability to map out what are sensations of fear, what are sensations from the past, what are sensations of excitement, and what are sensations from the present.

This is where mindfulness, nervous system regulation practices, kink, and embodied pleasure practices can become powerful tools.

How to Support Your Nervous System When Arousal Feels Like Fear

Here are some of the most effective approaches I’ve found for working with this overlap — drawn from neuroscience, somatic therapy, trauma research, and sex science. Please don’t do all of these at once! Please think about them as a menu of options - if there’s one that you find interesting, maybe try it out for a week, and see what happens!

1. Mindful Awareness of Interoception

Lori Brotto’s work with low desire has shown that mindfulness — specifically, nonjudgmental awareness of bodily sensations — can help people better interpret and respond to their sexual arousal.

Instead of pushing past confusing sensations or experiences of activation, you pause, and practice paying attention to the ‘bare sensations’ that are showing up. What are the energy movements, temperatures, breathing patterns, body postures you’re experiencing in your body? Where are you noticing them? Really strive to stay with the sensations, without jumping into stories, or conclusions about what they mean.

This creates space to notice what’s actually happening rather than reacting automatically and piling on assumptions or deepening old belief systems. Over time, mindfulness can help create more space to notice and be with sensations arising, as well as melt the associations we have between a sensation (e.g. racing heart) and a belief (“I’m scared”). The trick is to start with ‘bite sized’ experiences - there’s a much greater chance you’ll be able to stay with your body as you do this practice.

2. Nervous System Regulation

According to nervous system research, such as the Polyvagal Theory, the nervous system has multiple branches of response:

• Fight or flight (hyperaroused dysregulation)

• Freeze or shutdown (hypoaroused dysregulation)

• Social connection and safety (the window of capacity: regulation)

Pleasure is best available to us when we’re in a regulated state, however many of us still find ample ways to enjoy pleasure wherever we find ourselves with our nervous systems. I’ve written an article here about the basics of nervous system regulation, as well as one here about using pleasure to regulate our nervous systems, and another one here about how we can play with our nervous systems.

3. Dual Control Model of Sexual Arousal

According to the dual control model of sexual response, made popular from Emily Nagoski’s Come As You Are, our sexual response system involves two branches:

• An accelerator (which responds to sexually exciting information in our environment)

• A brake (which responds to anything the brain interprets as a threat or reason not to be aroused)

Often when we’re struggling with arousal, desire, or activation during sex, it’s not about trying to press harder on the accelerator, it’s about learning how to ease off of the brakes. A certain touch, tone of voice, or body position might hit the brakes without conscious awareness. (Sometimes it might *also* hit the accelerator, and sometime it might not. Once again, this comes down to your unique wiring,  what you happen to find sexually exciting, and what happens to hit your arousal brakes.)

Building awareness of your unique brake and accelerator can help you create conditions where pleasure feels more possible. Noticing when something is hitting your brakes can be a game changer, since you can then respond by setting limits on the things that hit your brakes, see if there are ways to reframe the experience that makes it feel better for you, or try workshopping it with a somatic sex educator or other facilitator to see what you can learn about what might make sex and pleasure feel more a little more easeful.

4. Understanding Arousal Non-Concordance

Have you ever felt physical arousal even when you weren’t mentally or emotionally turned on — or the opposite, where your mind was ready to party but your body didn’t respond? This is called arousal non-concordance, another concept made popular by Nagoski’s Come As You Are, and it’s common, completely normal, and can be a piece of the puzzle of navigating fear and arousal. As Emily Nagoski puts it, “Your genitals are not a reliable measure of your desire or consent.”

In other words, your body’s response and your brain’s response don’t always line up — and that doesn’t mean anything is wrong with you. Physical arousal can be a reflex, even if it’s unwanted. And mental desire can exist without your body jumping on board right away.

For trauma survivors this can be especially confusing if there is a mismatch in their physiological and mental responses to sex or desire. Using strategies such as mindful awareness can support a greater understanding and re-wiring of this experience of non-concordance.

5. Pendulation and Titration

These techniques involve moving in and out of intensity in ‘bite sized’ ways, rather than leaping straight into the middle of intensity.

• Pendulation is the gentle swinging between something activating and something neutral or soothing.

• Titration means working with small doses of intensity, rather than overwhelming yourself.

These practices help teach your nervous system to stay regulated in the face of intensity — whether that intensity is fear, arousal, or both.

For example, if your arousal is building during play, but it starts to feel overwhelming, you could try asking for a pause from whatever’s happening, pay attention to your breathing and touch something neutral (such as the sheets), or maybe even splash a little cold water on your face. Then reconnect with yourself or your sweetie (if you’re playing with others) and decide if you’d like to go back to play or do something else that might not be sex, but keeps the connection going. The key here is to practice *slowly* building your ability to stay with pleasure. It’s kind of like eating a rich slice of cake, taking a pause when it gets to be a little too sweet, having some water, and then going back to the cake (if you want!) once your feelings of sweetness overwhelm have subsided.

6. Empowered Kink Play & Trauma Informed BDSM

Intentionally playing with your edges through creating experiences of power exchange, sensation play, and chosen vulnerability can be a profound tool for rewriting your relationship to arousal and fear. Through this, we have an opportunity to intentionally choose and explore experiences that bring up fear, and try infusing more pleasure into them. Or, we have a chance to embrace experiences that scare us and turn us on at the same time. Or, we can wholeheartedly indulge in things that bring up feelings of arousal for us, even if they are often thought of as scary experiences for others. We can reclaim agency in formerly disempowering dynamics, we can explore intensity in structured containers with clear agreements, and we can learn more about ourselves (or that which has wounded us). Often using some of the other tools in this list such as pendulation, titration, nervous system regulation, and mindful interoception can be really assistive in creating experiences that reclaim and rewrite and sometimes completely transform what we find scary, an what turns us on.

For instance, Taylor had a complicated relationship with bottoming and being a submissive. Past experiences of powerlessness made it hard to relax into submission — even when they knew they wanted to. With a trusted play partner, they began exploring this element of kink. They thought about what would feel sexy and reasonably challenging - something that would help them embrace powerlessness AND take care of their nervous system. They landed on a scene where they asked to be restrained slowly while their partner whispered affirming words and only used gentle touch on bodyparts that didn’t feel charged to them. They set a time container to make sure they would know when it would be over. They also asked for aftercare that they thought would help with any ‘drop’ they might experience from the scene: a foot massage, pre-prepared bowl of fruit, and co-showering with their sweetie.

At first Taylor was feeling the edginess of their choice. But the slow pace, clear agreements, plus a pre-agreed safe word, and the pre-agreed aftercare helped them realize they were in choice, that this experience was for them, and they could say ‘no’ at any time. While their shape certainly didn’t change immediately, with each scene, they reclaimed the pleasure and joy available to them in moments that used to trigger fear. Kink offered a structured way to intentionally meet their edges — and stay connected to their own internal “yes” or “no” throughout the process.

You Don’t Have to Rush

To be clear, healing sexual trauma doesn’t mean never getting triggered again. It means gaining more tools, more options, and more self-trust when intensity shows up, widening your window of capacity, and your ability to stay self-aware and resourced in moments of intensity. With up to date education about the nervous system, neuroplasticity, plus sex positive sex education and a willingness to try out different tools you learn, you have more choice available to you than ever before to work with feelings of pleasure and fear to create expanded choice and embodiment for yourself.