Taking your power back in sex & intimacy
There were many nights I lay awake, feeling the empty space between my husband and I that used to feel warm and exciting, and now felt weighted down with expectation.
I should want sex tonight.
I should try harder.
I know he wants it; I should just get it over with.
But I’m so tired.
And I just washed my face and put on my jammies…
I’d lie there, bargaining with myself, trying to talk my body into a transaction it didn’t want to make.
And somewhere underneath all that guilt, a whisper I didn’t want to admit:
I bet he resents me.
(We won’t even talk about the nights I felt like Jesus Himself was watching, shaking His head, whispering that I was a dirty wretch for wanting sex at all.)
Eventually, I started to wonder: Why is this tension here?
Is it his expectation? My exhaustion? Or something deeper. Something that’s wedged itself between us, unseen?
Here’s what I couldn’t see then: Sex is yours — not his, not theirs, not Jesus’ — yours.
But when your body has learned to protect first, and your mind associates sex with duty or dirtiness, it becomes tangled with survival, negotiation, and shame.
So this piece is for the woman who craves closeness but still hears that small, confused voice inside:
“I don’t know how to make this feel good for me.”
Together, we’ll explore what intimacy really is, how sex gets hijacked, and how to reclaim your body, your desire, and your right to feel - first and foremost - for yourself.
The What: Beyond the Act
When most people talk about “sex,” especially in today’s culture, they’re really only talking about the act itself: what happens between two bodies.
But intimacy isn’t just an act; it’s an experience of safety and sacred connection between two people.
When your body doesn’t feel safe, pleasure becomes almost impossible. Biologically, your nervous system simply won’t let it through. Why would it?
If you were about to get into a car accident, your body would surge with adrenaline, cortisol would spike, and every muscle would brace for impact. You wouldn’t suddenly feel a burst of dopamine (pleasure).
It is the same for emotional trauma - the body is still bracing for impact.
A body in protection, can’t open to connection.
It’s not disinterest; it’s your body not yet recognizing that this moment is safe, that it can finally let the guard down.
And the hard truth? You can’t think your way into sexual arousal.
No matter how much you tell yourself I want this, if your stress responses don’t naturally come down, your body won’t register the pleasure.
Pleasure receptors require safety before they can fire adequately.
In Come As You Are, Emily Nagoski describes this through the “gas and brakes” model. She discusses that we all have accelerators (things that turn us on) and brakes (things that shut us down). The more pressure, stress, and/or fear your body carries, the harder those brakes clamp down.
When we grow up with mixed messages -
that sex is sacred but sinful, beautiful but shameful, natural but only on someone else’s terms -
our nervous system learns to approach it like a test we’ll never pass.
We’re told shame, shame, shame our whole lives, and then one day it’s like, Poof, go do it, it’s fine now!
But a brain that’s been coded for years to see sex as wrong can’t just flip a switch.
So we learn to perform instead of feel.
To give instead of receive.
To disconnect from our own bodies in order to satisfy someone else’s.
And that’s the moment sex stops being sacred - or even pleasurable - and starts being about proof & the mind’s overactive analytics:
proof of love, proof of worth, proof that “I’m not broken,” proof that we’re “good.”
But sex, in its truest form, was never meant to be proof of anything.
It was meant to be a conversation between your soul, your body, and your aliveness.
Reclaiming intimacy isn’t about “doing it better.”
It’s about remembering what your body already knows,
that pleasure is not a reward for perfection;
it’s a sign of safety & self-acceptance returning.
The Where: How Sex Gets Hijacked
So if we’re born wired for pleasure, sensitivity, connection, and curiosity…
where does it all go sideways?
The short answer: conditioning.
But here’s the long answer too -
From a young age, most women learn that their worth is tied to compliance and control.
Be good, dad said.
Be modest, mom said.
Be careful, sister said.
Don’t tempt. Don’t feel too much, religion said.
Don’t want too much, society said.
Guess what? That’s not freedom.
That’s programming.
This is what psychologists call adaptive social conditioning - adapting to the system of beliefs and behaviors in order to belong.
And like any well-coded system, it runs quietly in the background, until one day we wake up and think, wait a second... am I even running this show?
The psychology Beneath It
When you were punished, shamed, or ignored for expressing emotion or desire, your system took a note: feeling = danger.
According to trauma expert Dr. Peter Levine, the body doesn’t differentiate between emotional and physical threat. Both can trigger the same physiological shutdown.
So even years later, a small moment - like your partner reaching for you when you’re tired or stressed - can subconsciously reactivate that old message: too much, too soon, not safe, danger.
Your system hits the brakes, not because you don’t want intimacy,
but because your body still believes that expression = punishment,
and staying small, quiet, and in control = safety.
Sex researcher Dr. Lori Brotto found that women who experience chronic stress or trauma show reduced blood flow to genital tissue and dampened arousal response.
Again, not from disinterest, but from a body prioritizing survival over sensation.
If your sympathetic nervous system (fight, flight, freeze, or fawn) is constantly activated, your brain sends blood to your vital organs - not the organs that are for pleasure.
So, your body isn’t broken;
it’s loyal. To protecting you.
The Cultural Hijack
And then… (yes, there’s more) there’s religion and purity culture.
The kind that preaches that women’s bodies are both sacred and sinful in the same breath.
That says our actions will “tempt others,” monitor how we dress, move, and express.
As if someone else’s choices are our burden to carry.
It teaches us to dissociate from our own pleasure while centering someone else’s.
But here’s my question (and answer) to that:
If God didn’t want women to feel pleasure,
why would He design the clitoris - a body part with over 10,000 nerve endings and no other biological function but to feel?
This is the paradox so many of us were raised in:
Shame the body, then expect it to open.
Condemn desire, then demand devotion.
In my opinion, that’s not encouraging the sacred union.
That’s spiritual gaslighting.
The How: Reclaiming Pleasure as a Return to Safety
If protection is what your body learned,
then safety is what it needs to rewrite and remember.
Like we mentioned earlier, you can’t think your way into sensuality; you have to feel your way there.
The mind is where memories are stored - where protection mechanisms are coded and even, at times, where painful memories are hidden to keep the organism safe.
The body, though, is where those memories live on as lingering visceral sensation - the place where, even if the brain erases the picture, the feeling remains.
And that’s why the body is where rewriting takes place.
Trauma researchers call this bottom-up regulation - working with the body to calm the mind rather than trying to think the body into submission.
As Dr. Bessel van der Kolk explains in The Body Keeps the Score, regulation is not achieved through reasoning, but through re-experiencing safety.
It’s how we slowly and somatically teach the nervous system that connection and pleasure are no longer threats.
This is also why talk therapy alone often can’t reach the parts of you that shut down during intimacy.
Because the shutdown wasn’t just logical; it was physiological.
The Path Back to the Body
Safety before Sensation
Pleasure can only flow through a body that feels safe.
Start by orienting to your environment: notice colors, sounds, the texture of what’s beneath you.
Visually and physically sensing that you are here, now.
This tells your brain: “I’m here. I’m safe.”
Dr. Stephen Porges, creator of the Polyvagal Theory, calls this neuroception - the body’s subconscious scanning for safety cues.
By consciously scanning and registering safety, you begin to rewrite the story your subconscious has been repeating for years.Feeling over Fixing
When emotion rises, resist the urge to “make sense” of it right away.
Let the tears, frustration, or even numbness exist without trying to fix them.
Just be with, and allow, what is there to be there without pushing it away.
This is how you build emotional tolerance and the capacity to feel without fleeing.
When ready, share what happens inside your body during certain situations with your partner. If you know where it originates, name it.
This is how you create the opportunity to be witnessed, not managed.Desire over Doing
True sensuality and sexuality isn’t about technique or performance.
And it is absolutely not about doing it like you see in the movies.
It’s about attunement - to yourself first, then to your partner.
Ask yourself often: What do I actually want to feel right now?
What do I want to experience in this moment of connection?
The answer might surprise you.
And it’s likely softer, slower, quieter, and safer than you expect.
Over time, these small acts begin to rewire the pathways that once equated pleasure and sexual intimacy with danger or punishment.
The body starts to understand: it’s okay to express myself.
When that happens - when the mind and body finally exhale together -
sex stops being something you have to do,
and becomes something you get to experience.
Returning to the Sacred
Because sex was never just about the physical.
It’s the pulse of your aliveness; the bridge between the human and divine.
When a woman reclaims her pleasure, she’s not just reviving her libido.
She’s remembering that woman is the source of light and life in this world.
She was never meant to be the supporting character in someone else’s story.
She was always the main event.
The Return: To The Woman In Her Power
There comes a moment in every woman’s life when she realizes she’s been living from the neck up - thinking about feeling instead of actually feeling without the thinking.
When she’s been giving her body away
without ever truly being inside it.
These moments arise with the thoughts:
Does he even care about me, or just my body?
Are my inner thoughts and emotions important too?
Why do sexual interactions leave me so unfulfilled?
I feel used.
That moment - those thoughts - don’t mean failure.
It means you are waking up to what has been happening inside you , and to you, for so long.
When you start to truly feel again, instead of perform or prove, just be;
the world begins to move differently.
The air settles into the lungs, colors are more exquisite, your own presence more captivating.
You stop trying to be enough for anyone else, and remember:
you already are.
Because this - this body, this breath, this heartbeat - is sacred.
Not because someone told you it was,
but because you can feel that it is.
When a woman returns to her body, she returns to the source,
to God, to the ever fulfilling love of the universe, to everything.
And that’s the real awakening:
Sex no longer becomes something you give away.
It becomes pleasure you expand into.
A reclamation of your power, your softness, your belonging.
Not as a role to play,
but as a truth to live.
As we close this entry, before you click away - take a breath.
Feel where, and how deep, it lands in the body.
Place a hand on your heart, or your lower belly, and ask:
What part of me have I been protecting the most?
Let her exhale.
Let her be seen.
Because your resolution and reclamation aren’t found in more doing,
they’re found in witnessing.
Your body already knows the way back.
You just have to follow her lead.
If this stirred something awake in you, that’s your sign to follow it.
This is the work I do inside my 1:1 coaching,
where the science of the nervous system meets the soul of feminine embodiment.
You don’t have to navigate this alone.
✨ Book Your FREE Subtle Shift Call Here ✨
Let’s bring you back to yourself.
