How pain from abuse lives in the Body

Trauma is not only remembered in the mind. It is held in the body.

Common bodily experiences include:

• feeling constantly alert or on edge

• living “in your head,” disconnected from physical sensations

• difficulty being present

• struggling to feel your body as a whole

• discomfort with touch or physical pleasure

Some survivors experience unexplained physical symptoms, chronic pain, or health issues. Others feel detached from bodily signals such as hunger, fatigue, or pain.

Dissociation (feeling like you leave your body or aren’t fully here) is another protective response that once helped you survive.

Effects on intimacy and relationships

Abuse often distorts how safety and closeness are experienced.

You may notice patterns such as:

• difficulty trusting people, or trusting too easily

• discomfort with affection

• struggling to say no or set boundaries

• fear when people get emotionally close

• repeatedly testing partners until the relationship breaks

• becoming involved with emotionally unsafe or abusive partners

At the core is often a painful belief: I don’t deserve healthy love.

This belief can coexist with a deep longing for connection, creating confusion, push-pull dynamics, or chronic loneliness.

How abuse affects sexuality

Sexual experiences can also become tangled with shame, power, and disconnection.

Survivors may:

• feel unable to say no

• feel disconnected during sex

• use sex to meet non-sexual needs (comfort, validation, control)

• avoid sex altogether or seek sex they do not truly want

• feel conflicted when desire does arise

• struggle to stay present during intimacy

• find it difficult to combine emotional closeness and sexual connection with the same person

None of these patterns are moral failings. They are adaptations to experiences where safety, choice, or agency were compromised.

Parenting after abuse

Parenting can bring up its own layers of fear and hypervigilance.

Survivors may feel anxious about:

• getting boundaries “right”

• being too strict or too permissive

• protecting children from harm while not projecting their own trauma

This sensitivity often comes from deep care, not inadequacy. With support, it can be transformed into attuned, conscious parenting rather than constant self-doubt.

Healing begins with recognition

Healing does not start with fixing yourself.

It begins with recognising that your responses make sense.

What happened to you shaped your nervous system, your beliefs, your relationships, and your sense of self, but it does not define your future.

Awareness creates choice. Compassion creates space. Safety allows growth.

You are not broken, you adapted.

Healing is not about erasing the past, it is about reclaiming the parts of you that learned to hide, harden, or over-function in order to survive.

Slowly. Carefully. In your own time.

Rebecca xo