Trauma & Sexual Healing Therapy

Sexuality is often where trauma is most deeply held—and most carefully avoided. For many adults seeking trauma and sexual healing therapy, the difficulty is not a lack of desire or knowledge, but the way past experiences have shaped the body’s sense of safety, permission, and choice.

Sexual trauma may be overt or subtle. It can include boundary violations, coercion, early exposure, emotional intrusion, or experiences in which consent was compromised or ambiguous. Even when events are minimized or rationalized, the nervous system retains their impact. Clients may experience disconnection from desire, difficulty with arousal or pleasure, aversion to touch, compulsive sexual behavior, or a sense of being “present but not embodied.”

These experiences often coexist with relational trauma, complex PTSD, or attachment injuries, and are especially common among individuals who appear high-functioning and composed in other areas of life. Insight is rarely the problem. Safety is.

A Thoughtful, Relational Approach to Sexual Healing

Sexual healing in therapy is not about performance, technique, or fixing desire. It is about restoring agency, bodily autonomy, and internal permission—often for the first time. The work proceeds slowly and with clear attention to pacing, consent, and emotional regulation.

Therapy may involve:

  • Understanding how trauma has shaped sexual responses and avoidance patterns

  • Differentiating desire from obligation, compliance, or dissociation

  • Rebuilding a sense of safety in the body and in relational closeness

  • Working with shame, self-blame, or confusion around arousal and boundaries

  • Integrating sexuality with emotional presence rather than survival strategies

This approach is particularly important for clients seeking sexual trauma therapy in San Francisco or Palo Alto who have felt misunderstood by overly directive or protocol-driven treatments.

Sexual Healing for Thoughtful, High-Functioning Adults

Many individuals drawn to this work are reflective, intelligent, and attuned to nuance. They are often uncomfortable with reductive narratives about sex or trauma, and may have avoided therapy that felt invasive, prescriptive, or pathologizing.

The aim of therapy is not to define what sexuality should look like, but to allow it to emerge—if and when it does—in a way that feels coherent, self-directed, and grounded in choice rather than protection.