When Trauma Lives in the Body: How to Alchemize Grief, Rage, and Pleasure

If you're someone who's experienced a physical boundary rupture, this is for you.

Listen to the audio below, or read at your own pace.

It’s no secret that women carry trauma in their bodies. I frequently share in my sessions and coaching calls that women are often referred to as the “shock absorbers of society.” But the reality is heavier than many of us want to admit:

• 50% of women have experienced sexual physical violence.

• 1 in 4 women have experienced completed or attempted rape.

These aren’t just numbers—they are lived realities that shape how we move through the world, how we relate to our bodies, and how we trust (or struggle to trust) intimacy, safety, and pleasure.

If you’re reading this, chances are your body has its own story.
A rupture.
A betrayal.
An inherited wound.
A silence that was too heavy to break.

And whether those ruptures were emotional, physical, or both—trauma doesn’t just “go away.” It lives in our tissues, our breath, our nervous systems, our pelvic floors.

Trauma Is Not Just a Memory—It’s a Body Imprint

I’ve seen it time and time again in my 1:1 practice for holistic pelvic physical therapy and embodiment. The young woman whose first time having sex wasn’t her choice. The repetitive “fine, okay” she mutters in instances after that really isn’t “fine” or “okay”, with her romantic partner or her medical provider. The numbing she participates in unconsciously to avoid feeling her authentic feelings. Doing it with her husband, as her "wifely duty".

Over time her body begins to harden like armor. A shell forms. She starts to wonder why sex is painful. Or why she hasn’t been able to orgasm like she used to. Or why she can’t get pregnant.

When something happens that overwhelms us—our nervous system often doesn’t get the chance to fully release. The body contracts. Freezes. Holds. Protects. Collapses.

That holding pattern can turn into:

• pelvic pain or numbness

• painful sex

• a disconnection from desire or pleasure and anorgasmia

• confusion around sexuality and cognitive dissonance (I’m wet but not horny, or vice versa)

• a sense of “checking out” or disassociating during intimacy or even daily life

• fear and anxiety around medical visits, exams, or undergoing surgery

What lives underneath these patterns for most women… is something deeper. An opportunity to feel what’s been buried.

Journal prompts for you:

• Where in your body do you feel grief, rage, or fear most often?

• How do you notice your body responds when you’re triggered—tightening, freezing, collapsing, checking out?

• What do you wish your body could say out loud if it had a voice?

Why This Healing Is Imperative

I was recently struck while watching the documentary Unknown Number. Without spoiling the story, it reminded me how critical this trauma healing work is—not just so we don’t pass trauma or our unhealthy patterns down to our daughters and sons, but so we break cycles in our own lifetimes.

Yes, it matters for the generations to come. But it also matters for you.
For your body.
For your joy.
For your capacity to feel at home in yourself now.

Stories from My Practice: Reparative Experiences

Like I shared, I’ve sat with women whose first experiences of sex were taken from them—some at single-digit ages—without their yes, without their choice. That leaves scars, seen and unseen.

Our sessions together become a space of repair. At every step, they are given the opportunity to stop, adjust, check in, or add more pressure (or not) if and only when they’re ready. The pace is slow enough for them to practice tracking their own body sensations and energy. Consent is constant. Safety is everything.

Because the truth is: many women also experience boundary ruptures in clinical or medical environments. Pelvic exams, childbirth interventions, procedures and surgeries they’re convinced they need—these can leave imprints of violation when the body wasn’t honored or consent wasn’t fully respected. Even when medically necessary and felt as the right choice, these experiences can fracture trust in one’s own body.

So in the reparative process, the body learns again:
“I am safe.”
“I can feel my feelings.”
“My yes and no matter.”

Each woman leaves feeling truly heard. Witnessed. Empowered. Mobilized into aligned action.

Journal prompts for you:

• How does it feel to imagine a space where your body is fully listened to?

• What part of you longs for that kind of repair?

Reclaiming Erotic Innocence

Another layer of this work is the reclamation of what’s called erotic innocence.

Before the wounds, before the ruptures, before the silence—there was a time when your desire was pure. Innocent. Unshamed. Untouched by the violence of culture or circumstance.

It can be down-right confusing when there is a cognitive dissonance—especially as a young child or young woman who knows something isn’t right, when that same something actually feels quite good in the moment.

I was recently on my friend's podcast, Heal with Kat, and she put it perfectly like this:

To reclaim erotic innocence is to reconnect with that primal truth:
Your sexuality is not broken.
Your pleasure is not shameful.
Your erotic energy is life force, not something dirty to hide.

This reclamation doesn’t erase what’s happened. But it allows you to step back into the parts of you that were always whole, always yours.

Journal prompts for you:

• What does the phrase erotic innocence bring up for you?

• When in your life did you feel most free or curious in your body, before any shame or fear crept in?

• How might reclaiming this innocence shift how you experience pleasure or intimacy now?

What We Can Do About It

As Peter Levine says, "Trauma is a fact of life. It does not, however, have to be a life sentence. Not only can trauma be healed but with appropriate guidance and support, it can be transformative."

Talking about trauma is powerful.
But trauma doesn’t fully resolve through the mind—it resolves through the body. Sometimes you have to complete the physical cycle you weren’t able to complete in the actual moment trauma occurred.

That’s why I created a short guided meditation for you:
To let your dark feminine, your sacred rage, your grief, and your Black Panther energy come out of hiding.

This is not your typical meditation for relaxation, stillness or calm (at least not at first).

To give your mind a head’s up on what your body will be asked to do: It’s for shaking, crawling, growling, punching, pulling, screaming into a pillow.
It’s a ritual to help you release what’s been frozen and remember the fire in your body.

➡️ LISTEN TO THE MEDITATION HERE

Journal prompts for you after the meditation:

• What surprised you about what came out during the practice?

• What did you feel in your pelvic floor, throat, or chest as you moved and expressed?

• What part of you feels most alive afterward?

The Deeper Work: Vaginal Alchemy

This meditation (and the others on this season of the Pelvic Pulse Podcast) is a doorway. But it’s not the full journey.

So many women don’t just carry the memory of trauma—they carry the residuals:

• ongoing pelvic pain

• numbness or loss of sensation

• difficulty experiencing orgasm

• disconnection from their own desire

• feeling insecure

• feelings of helplessness or hopelessness in other aspects of life

• and many more

This is where Vaginal Alchemy comes in.

Vaginal Alchemy isn’t just about “dealing with” trauma.
It’s about alchemizing it.

Through guided practices, embodied ritual, therapeutic tools, and deep connection with other women, we work not only on healing the ruptures—
but on reintegrating pleasure into your entire body and your life.

So pleasure isn’t just something that happens during sex—

It’s how you cook a new recipe for dinner. It’s how you laugh so hard you snort amongst friends. How you walk barefoot outside, picking flowers in your garden. How you feel the breeze on your face.
How you breathe.
How you live.

After one very powerful online session where I guided a group of women in mapping their own pussy’s energy and pelvic floor, one woman said in the Zoom chat:

"WOW that was safe and felt amazing! Can’t wait to talk about this in session! Coming from a gal who was raped and didn’t find much pleasure in sex. I learned so much about what feels good and what to ask future partners for more pleasure! :)"

Other women have come to me after 1:1 sessions, where we worked on receiving touch at the pace of the slowest part of them, sharing that they were able to engage in pleasurable sex with a partner, experience multiple orgasms, could laugh and connect more intimately and honestly with a partner who hurt them, or have been able to tap into their creative joyful energy in their work.

Journal prompts for you:

• When do you feel most numb or disconnected from your body?

• What small moments of pleasure (a warm shower, soft fabric, sunlight on skin) do you already feel safe enough to enjoy?

• What would it mean for you to live in a body that longs for and receives pleasure freely?

A Voice That Affirms You’re Not Alone

This is a collective wound. And it takes collective healing to break the silence and move forward.

Here’s a clip from The Pelvic Pulse podcast where we talk about what it really means for sexual abuse survivors to reclaim their bodies. Listen to MJ here:

It IS good, and worth it to reconnect to yourself like this.

Because your story is not isolated.
And your healing doesn’t have to be, either.

Closing Thoughts

The numbers are staggering. And. You are not a number.
You are a woman with a body that remembers—and a body that longs to be free.

Start with the meditation.
And when you’re ready to go deeper, to not only release the pain but to reclaim your full aliveness—join the waitlist for Vaginal Alchemy.

Because your rage is sacred.
Your grief is holy.
Your pleasure is your birthright.
And your erotic innocence is waiting for you to return to her.