What happens to intimacy when the cost of being understood feels higher than the cost of being alone? And what does connection look like for survivors of sexual assault, when every disclosure feels like a risk?
Ayla doesn’t notice the flinch until after it happens. Her partner reaches for her thigh during a quiet moment on their couch, and before she has a chance to process, her body pulls back – barely, a breath’s width – but enough for her to feel a flash of shame.
“The funny part is I know I can trust him,” 28-year-old Ayla Moretti told me. “I’ve been with him for two years, and some days, all I want is his touch. But other days, like today, my body still thinks it’s in danger.”
[Unsplash: Louis Galvez]
For survivors of sexual assault – and there are millions of them – this is the part of trauma that rarely makes it into public conversations: the way their bodies keep their own timeline, logic, and fears.
Even when trust has been rebuilt – in Ayla’s case, over two years with her partner – the nervous system follows an older instruction manual: freeze, withdraw, protect. These reflexes persist long after the survivor believes they’ve healed.
Trauma specialists say that these responses are anything but rare. For many survivors, the nervous system essentially stays stuck in ‘protection’ mode, treating even safe touch as a potential threat.
This hyper-vigilance – the body remaining on high alert, even when the mind knows it is safe – is a well-documented trauma response.
Survivors across the board report similar experiences: flinching at a gentle touch, nervous systems that haven’t caught up with their minds, and the specific shame of being startled by someone they love and trust.
“It’s like my skin remembers before I do”
Aisha Khalid
These reflexes are not a judgment of the partner’s character; it is, quite literally, the body remembering what the mind is trying to forget. Undressing this dynamic is crucial: intimacy after trauma is not just about trust or desire.
It’s about a recalibration that survivors must navigate alongside their partners – a negotiation with their body’s memory.
Memories and motion
Trauma keeps its receipts. Months, years, even decades later, survivors report small, inexplicable betrayals: a sudden recoil at familiar touch, a hitch of breath when someone reaches for you across the table, an instinctive, internal tightening that precedes thought and logic.
These bodily responses are not theatrics or attention-seeking; they are the nervous system doing what it was taught to do in the worst possible classroom – protect at any cost.
Dr Lesley Goth, a trauma specialist with more than 20 years of experience, frames this plainly when she describes how sexual violence changes the way bodies read safety.
Speaking from her clinical experience, she explains why consensual intimacy often feels dangerous to survivors, even when they know and trust the partner.
“With consent, there still might be that fear that boundaries are going to get crossed at any minute. I might consent to kissing, but is this person now going to start touching me, even though I didn’t consent to that?” Dr Goth explains.
“If consent was used and abused in the past, then there could be that fear, from trauma, that it could be used and abused again, even if you’re in a safe relationship. It really takes so much time of building the evidence that your partner is trustworthy.”
Read beside a moment like Ayla’s – a partner’s hand landing on her thigh, her body recoiling before she even knew why – Dr Goth’s clinical explanation suddenly becomes literal.
‘Evidence’ isn’t abstract; survivors rebuild it over time, with repeated proof that touch can stay within agreed boundaries. Small demonstrations of respect and restraint – a partner asking, pausing, waiting – are where the power lies.
These tiny demonstrations teach the nervous system that touch can be safe again, and without them, even the most well-intentioned touch can re-open the body’s archives.
And these archives of trauma are vast, to say the least.
According to the World Health Organisation, approximately one in three women worldwide experiences physical or sexual violence in their lifetime.
According to RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network), in America, someone is sexually assaulted approximately every 68 seconds. That means by the time you reach the end of this article, several lives will have been forever derailed.
The statistics are no better in the UK; a 2021 survey by UN Women UK found that around 97% of women ages 18-24 have already experienced sexual harassment.
The one thing that these statistics establish with certainty is that survivors are everywhere – in every demographic, every community, and every type of relationship – all carrying nervous systems trained by fear.
Aisha Khalid, 21, told me that she still can’t handle being kissed from behind. “It’s like my skin remembers before I do,” she said. She loves her partner deeply, trusts him, and still, her whole body tenses when his footsteps are too quiet.
Another survivor, Tom Richardson, 34, described automatically freezing when his boyfriend touches his lower back: “My brain says ‘I want this’, but my body? My body acts like I’m back in that room where I was first violated.”
These experiences are not personal quirks; they’re patterns. A 2021 meta-analysis in the Journal of Traumatic Stress found that post-traumatic autonomic responses – startle, freeze, withdrawal – persist long after conscious fear has faded. In simpler terms, the body stays scared long after the survivor believes they’re safe.
A nervous system rewired
Dr Goth goes further to explain why these archives are stubborn, locating the problem not in personality or willpower, but in physiology, emphasising how repeated or early trauma fundamentally changes how the nervous system responds to intimacy.
“Sexual trauma, especially from a young age, rewires the brain. It really rewires the nervous system, and it creates just as an overall sense of lack of safety. Even though there could be a desire for closeness and safety, that doesn’t feel safe,” she told me.
She wasn’t sorry for what she felt – she was sorry for being seen feeling it.
“It sets up the brain and the body to be attracted to patterns like avoidance, or anxious attachment styles, or choosing people that are distant, because that can feel safer.”
This is often the moment where survivors turn on themselves. They begin to see their instincts – the pulling away, the attraction to distance, the difficulty trusting safety – as personal flaws instead of neurological adaptations.
But research tells a different story. A prominent Harvard neuroscientist and trauma expert, Bessel van Der Kolk, describes the imprint of trauma as “nonverbal, visceral, and persistent” in his book, The Body Keeps the Score, noting that traumatic memories are stored in the amygdala and sensory networks rather than in narrative, verbal memory.
Essentially, the body literally remembers what the survivor consciously forgot, and it replies first.
For many survivors, this disconnect feels like arguing with your own skin. The wanting is real, but the fear is real too, and they both happen simultaneously – a tug of war no one outside their body can see. It isn’t just guilt for the trauma, it’s bewilderment at the body’s refusal to cooperate.
24-year-old Nilab Kairo told me that she would often apologise after flinching: “I felt like I owed him an explanation for my body.”
The apology shouldn’t belong to her at all, but trauma teaches survivors to take responsibility for reactions they didn’t choose. She wasn’t sorry for what she felt – she was sorry for being seen feeling it.
It’s almost funny, isn’t it?
How survivors end up protecting everyone else from the fallout of what was done to them?
As if their pain is impolite.
As if the real crime would be making someone uncomfortable with their truth.
It’s estimated that only 17% of childhood sexual abuse survivors develop a secure attachment style – the kind that makes stable, trusting connections easier to form.
The inverse of this is staggering: approximately 83% survivors struggle with attachment patterns that directly affect physical intimacy. Many describe feeling “broken” or “behind,” as if everyone else was given a manual on how to be touched without fear.
But fear is not failure; it’s memory. It’s biology. It’s survival.
Trauma specialists treat these reflexes not as symptoms to be judged, but as patterns to be retrained. Somatic approaches – breath work, grounding, paced exposure to safe touch – aim to give the nervous system new data.
If repeated experiences of safe closeness can slowly overwrite old, traumatic associations, then the work is essentially evidentiary: proving, often in tiny, patient ways, that safe touch can exist.
Safety, then, isn’t an abstract concept; it’s built moment by moment.
Dr Goth stresses how this healing work and evidence building requires both the survivor and the partner’s contributions: “It really takes so much time and patience for both people to build that evidence of safety – that the partner is going to seek consent, and that they’re not going to do anything outside of the boundaries of that consent.”
This evidence might be as simple as a hand pausing mid-movement until consent is clear, or an announcement of “I’m going to rest my hand on your thigh” before doing it. Regardless of what the intricacies for each survivor are, the bottom line remains the same: there’s work to be done here.
Recent research from early 2025 suggests that predictability – partners narrating actions, honouring “no” without hesitation, checking in before a touch – is one of the strongest contributors to rebuilding sexual safety.
Understanding this mechanism will fundamentally change how we listen to and show up for survivors. When a survivor flinches, it’s important to remember that it is not a test of the relationship, or a commentary on its worth – it’s a reminder that the nervous system learnt one story, and it will need several, patient counter-examples before it is willing to write a new one.
Consent, closeness, and communication
Even after the nervous system begins to re-learn that touch can be safe, survivors must navigate a world of ongoing micro-negotiations, where intimacy is less about desire, and more about consent, closeness, and communication – often invisible to those who haven’t had to live it.
Dr Goth emphasises the role of the partner in these negotiations: “Partners need to understand that trauma survivors have a really hard time with boundaries and feeling safe,” she told me.
“As a partner, the most loving and caring thing to do is to really open up lines of communication – talk about what feels safe, what doesn’t, what’s okay, what’s not.”
These negotiations are lived realities for several survivors. Ayla told me that she often pauses her partner’s hand mid-motion, asking, “Can we slow down?”, and he often checks in with questions like “Is this okay?” before continuing.
Similarly, Tom shared how he and his partner have developed a system of hand signals for physical touch – a simple, yet transformative tool to signal consent without words.
These measures aren’t indulgent; they are survival mechanisms, giving the nervous system repeated proof that safety exists.
Research continues to underscore the significance of this. A study published in the 2023 issue of the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, involving more than 1,200 adult survivors from the US, found a positive correlation between consistent partner check-ins (verbal and non-verbal), and significantly lower anxiety and physical shutdowns during intimate moments.
In other words, the survivors whose partners actively communicated and sought consent experienced far fewer automatic fear responses.
This study shows that intimacy after trauma isn’t emotional or relational – it’s physiological. Safety, then, is not an abstract concept; it is built moment by moment. Every pause, question, and signal of understanding becomes concrete evidence.
The stakes are anything but high for survivors of sexual assault, who often also face the internalised expectations of an ‘acceptable victim’, a societal script dictating what traumas are real, and which ones are invalid.
As Dr Goth explained, when it comes to sexual assault, “There’s this narrative that unless it was violent, or unless there’s concrete proof, then the victim doesn’t have a valid story, or then it’s just not acceptable. Culturally and legally, it’s been a huge problem for survivors, because they are so afraid to be blamed and shamed.”
So, as it stands, negotiating intimacy is not just with partners; it is also with internalised societal expectations, shame, and fear, all alongside the body’s memory of past violation.
Even with these strategies in place, intimacy still isn’t foolproof. Nilab revealed that in the past, she’s broken up with supportive partners because she felt “tired of needing to ask for so much consideration.”
She left believing that her boundaries and her need for safety were too demanding. This imbalance of expectation can weigh heavily on survivors, especially those who’ve previously found comfort in prioritising others’ needs and comfort.
Irrespective of this, for those who persist, intimacy can often become a site of reclamation. Survivors like Aisha describe the exact moments where their nervous system began to trust again: “When he asked first, I feel like my body relaxed before my brain even had a chance to panic. I could feel the internal difference. My body knew it was safe.”
These moments, multiplied over months and years, form the building blocks of a new relational architecture, one in which desire and safety can co-exist.
For many survivors, the renegotiated rules of intimacy, including verbal and non-verbal check-ins, reaffirm safety long-term, prioritising physical and emotional consent over performance or expectation. Each of these deliberate, repeated actions contributes to a cumulative effect: evidence that the present is not the past.
Love after trauma becomes less about surrender and more about collaboration; less about instinctive passion and more about deliberate attunement. Each micro-boundary respected, each question answered, and each moment of consent honoured becomes a tangible affirmation of safety – a small, but profound reclamation of power.
Attachment and avoidance
Trauma doesn’t just wound, it re-wires, and so, relationships become complicated. For many survivors, distance feels more familiar than closeness – a strange, uneasy safety found, not in comfort, but in emotional or physical withdrawal.
The fact that 17% of childhood sexual abuse survivors develop what researchers call a “secure attachment style” casts a long shadow, suggesting that for the vast majority of survivors, early trauma permanently reshapes how they relate to love, trust, and intimacy.
Avoidance is not coldness – it’s fear.
Dr Goth points out that due to sexual trauma, “A young person learns that being close and connected, especially physically, isn’t safe. Even if they desire closeness, they might think, ‘I’m bad’, or, ‘I’m dirty.’”
This sets up the brain, as well as the body, to be attracted to patterns like avoidance or choosing people who are distant, because that likely feels safer.
This split – wanting connection, but being wired to run away from it – explains why many survivors find themselves drawn to emotional unavailable partners or repeat patterns of avoidance and self-sabotage.
A comparative study from 2018 compared adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) and non-abused controls, and found that CSA survivors were far more likely to report insecure attachment styles, with symptoms of both anxious and avoidant attachment. They were also more likely to report higher levels of sexual avoidance and compulsivity.
Tom described this with disheartening clarity: “I want to feel close. I want to be held. I want the intimacy more than anything. But at the same time, if someone gets too warm, too present, too intimate – my body flips the switch. It’s like trust and danger get tangled together.”
Aisha had similar feelings “I dated someone who was nothing but kind and gentle, but the closer we got, the more I felt like I was suffocating. I couldn’t tell if I was scared of him, or just scared of feeling,” she told me.
These patterns – avoidance, fear, self-sabotage – are not flaws. They’re survival mechanisms embedded in the body’s nervous system. But they don’t, and won’t, disappear on their own.
And because relationships often carry expectations – of closeness, touch, emotional safety – survivors may find themselves stuck between longing for intimacy and the instinct to flee.
In therapy or supportive relationships, re-wiring can be gently challenged, but only if both partners understand that avoidance is not coldness – it’s fear. It’s not distance, it’s self-protection. In these contexts, attachment isn’t an abstract personality trait, it’s a survival pattern – and it requires patience, attunement, and relentless understanding.
Fear, feeling, and fragility
Love can feel like violence. What other people call closeness – touch, affection, vulnerability – may read differently in a survivor’s body, triggering an alarm that was taught to associate these things with danger.
Intimacy doesn’t just become a risk to their feelings, but to their physiology, to their very sense of safety.
“Sometimes it’s more terrifying to have that sense of closeness with someone because it feels very vulnerable and exposing,” Dr Goth explains.
“Trauma survivors often have this mindset that if someone really knows the ‘truth’ about them, then they’ll be rejected or abandoned. That’s why being alone can feel safer sometimes, even though it’s lonely.”
This fear isn’t abstract – it’s encoded. A 2022 neuropsychological study found that survivors of interpersonal trauma exhibit heightened amygdala activation and hyper-vigilance to both over threats and emotionally intimate cues, such as a partner’s voice or touch.
This demonstrates how interpersonal trauma can condition the brain to perceive even non-threatening, positive social cues as potential threats.
Many of the survivors I spoke to revealed how they internalised shame long before they even understood their own trauma. They feared being “too much”, “too demanding”, and “too fragile”. They believed that needing space, or pausing, or saying “no” too frequently meant that they were “broken”or “damaged”.
This internalised script – the idea that vulnerability makes you weak – is compounded by the fear of being misunderstood or judged. Survivors often anticipate dismissal or criticism, and this anticipation can make even moments of potential closeness feel like high-stakes negotiations.
[Unsplash: Joe Yates]
Healing, honour and hope
Trauma, as we have seen, writes itself into muscle memory. A flinch, a tightening, a hesitation – they are sentences the body learned long before the mind could understand.
Healing, then, isn’t about erasing these sentences. It’s about writing new ones in parallel: small gestures, repeated proof, the language of understanding, spoken over and over until the nervous system begins to believe it.
It is never grand, or flowery. It’s in the pause, the question, the intentional reaching. It’s in touch that is not demanded, but offered.
Desire does not return all at once; it is reconstructed, measured in small victories. And each microsecond of safe touch, each moment survived without collapse, is a quiet revolution.
Neuroscience confirms what survivors already know: the body can change. Fear can coexist with safety, hesitation can coexist with trust.
The work is iterative, cumulative, often imperceptible – but in this accumulation, often something radical happens: the body stops being a battleground and becomes a home again.
For survivors everywhere, the flinch may remain. But so does the willingness to try again.
Featured image by Mika Baumeister via Unsplash.