When the Body Doesn’t Fight

Rethinking Disconnection, Consent, and Somatic Healing After Sexual Violence

Jun 03, 2025

She sat on the edge of the couch, legs crossed tightly, shoulders curled inward as though trying to disappear. Her eyes darted toward mine, then away.

“I don’t know if it counts,” she said.

Her voice was careful. Too careful. The kind of caution that doesn’t come from confusion but from shame. “I didn’t fight. I didn’t even say no. I just… froze.”

Then, almost apologetically, she added, “I keep wondering if that means it wasn’t assault. Or if it was my fault for not doing more.”

I have heard some version of this more times than my heart or mind will allow me to remember. A woman arrives in my office carrying not only the weight of what happened to her, but the quiet shame of a body that froze when the world told her it should have fought.

There was no screaming. No running. No cinematic struggle. Just stillness. Silence. Collapse. And then years of numbness. Years of sex feeling like endurance. Years of feeling restless in stillness. Years of wondering why her own skin feels like something someone else owns.

What I wish more women knew, as a Chartered Psychologist, is that these are not the symptoms of dysfunction. They are the symptoms of survival. If we are to speak honestly about healing from sexual violence, we must first tell the truth about what the body does to keep us alive and why the body deserves reverence, not only repair.

My time as a psychologist has led me to know that sexual violence is not rare. It is not uncommon. It is not something that happens “out there” to someone we do not know. It is staggeringly and shockingly common.

The World Health Organization estimates that 1 in 3 women globally will experience physical or sexual violence in their lifetime. In the United States, someone is sexually assaulted every 68 seconds. In Canada, over 50% of women report experiencing physical or sexual violence at least once since the age of sixteen.

These statistics are even higher for Indigenous women, Black women, disabled women, and transgender people; a truth that is rarely centred in feminist circles or mainstream narratives of trauma recovery.

I don’t know a single woman untouched by some form of sexual violation, whether in her own body or through the body of someone she loves. I am no exception. I have lived through what I now hold for others. For a long time, I carried the same questions my clients ask: Was it really assault if I didn’t resist? If I stayed? If part of me dissociated and part of me felt something?

For myself, and many of the women I have supported, the shame didn’t come from what happened. It came from how the body responded. For me, it took years of slow, body-based work to understand that my response wasn’t a failure or a betrayal, it was protection. A brilliant, unconscious instinct that allowed me to survive something that felt unbearable in the moment and unspeakable after.

Despite this reality, the dominant frameworks for healing are not designed for women and are therefore often insufficient. They were built on male-centric models of trauma that prioritize visible resistance, fight, escape, confrontation, over the quieter strategies many women are socialized into. These frameworks are also individualistic, sanitized, and patriarchal. They assume the body will fight and ignore that many women have been taught not to.

They assume that stillness signals safety. But for many, stillness was where the danger lived. They assume healing means going back; without ever asking if it was ever safe to be there at all.

This is where these models break down because they fail to understand the conditions in which trauma occurs. They fail to account for relational trauma, for fawning, for the legacy of being conditioned to accommodate. They fail to honour the ways women survive when they are not permitted to say no.

And so when women cannot return to their bodies, it is not resistance; it is memory. It is biology. It is the body protecting them in the only way it knows how. This is the part of trauma theory that gets misread, even in many therapeutic spaces. We speak of 'healing' as if it’s a matter of effort, rather than safety. We speak of 'embodiment' as if it’s a decision, rather than a possibility that the body must learn to trust again.

But embodiment is not about returning. It is about recognizing why we left, who taught us to leave, and what it might take to trust the body again.

As a Chartered Psychologist trained in somatic trauma therapy, I specialize in working with complex trauma and dissociation. I also hold a postgraduate certificate in Trauma Recovery from Harvard Medical School, where I studied clinical approaches to healing from sexual violence, including sex-based war crimes. Because of this, I know how to support people who want to return to their bodies but feel as though they cannot. When a client finds themselves in this place, I tell them this: their nervous systems are not resisting healing. And when the body has been the site of violation, being in the body is overwhelming, and it will remain overwhelming until the right support is in place.

This is not a personal failure. It’s a biological response. The body does not resist healing out of stubbornness; it resists because it remembers.

In the language of interpersonal neurobiology, this is called neuroceptive threat detection; the brainstem’s capacity to detect danger before the conscious mind can register it. Long before we form language or logic, the body is already responding: muscles bracing, breath catching, awareness narrowing, or shutting down entirely. This is especially true in experiences of sexual violence, particularly when there is a power dynamic, socialized conditioning, or threat of escalation. The dorsal vagal system can override fight or flight entirely, plunging the body into freeze, collapse, or dissociation.

This is not weakness. It is a brilliant survival strategy.

But what follows is often far more damaging than the moment of violation. The woman who froze becomes the woman who thinks she consented. The person who dissociated becomes the person who believes they are broken. The trauma does not only live in the event, it festers in the aftermath. In the blame. In the aloneness. In the inability to name what happened, because the dominant narratives never made space for how the body actually survived.

This is where we need to talk about structural dissociation. According to structural dissociation theory, when trauma overwhelms our system and cannot be integrated, the psyche splits into “apparently normal parts” (ANPs) and “emotional parts” (EPs). The ANPs carry out the functions of daily life, work, social roles, routines, while the EPs remain stuck in the unprocessed emotional and somatic content of the trauma.

Structural dissociation gives us language for what many survivors feel but can’t name: a life that appears functional on the outside, while parts of the self remain frozen in trauma. This isn’t an inconsistency; it’s an adaptation. A system split not out of weakness, but in service of survival.

In cases of sexual violence, this split can become particularly pronounced. A woman might move through the world looking functional—successful, even—while her emotional parts remain exiled, terrified, hypervigilant, or numb. She may say, “I’m fine,” while her body braces at every unexpected touch. She may engage in intimacy while feeling nothing—or everything—all at once. This is not a failure to heal. It is a fragmentation that occurs when the body is still overwhelmed, and the conditions for integration have not yet been met. The violation hasn’t been metabolized because the necessary support to process it safely has not yet presented itself.

This is not just something I understand professionally. It’s something I’ve lived. My own return to the body after sexual violence was not linear; it was disorienting, fragmenting, and full of grief, rage, confusion—and a thousand other unnameable emotions. There were moments I wondered if healing would ever come. But it did. Slowly. Through relationship, through safety, through presence.

And one of the hardest truths I had to metabolize was this: sometimes, the body responds to assault with arousal. Sometimes, it orgasms. This does not mean it was wanted. This does not mean it was okay. The body can be in pain and still generate sensation. It can be terrified and still flood with response. This is not contradiction, it is survival. The nervous system does what it must to reduce harm. For many survivors, this creates confusion, shame, and silence.

But physiological response is not consent. Sensation is not agreement. Orgasm does not erase violation. For many, this blurs the line between violation and confusion, between memory and shame. But a physiological response is not consent. Sensation is not agreement. Orgasm does not erase harm.

What it does reveal is that the body’s mechanisms of protection are more complex—and more brilliant—than we’ve been taught to understand. And that the shame so many carry is not theirs to bear. And often, what looks like silence or compliance in the aftermath is misread; as passivity, as choice, as consent. But what if these, too, are survival?

Here’s what most trauma discourse still fails to name: many women were never taught to fight. They were taught to fawn. To appease. To preserve relationship at all costs. To prioritize belonging over boundaries. This isn’t just a personal pattern. It is a cultural conditioning. A collective inheritance.

Fawning is a trauma response. It is also a socialized survival strategy embedded in patriarchy. And yet, it is rarely included in the dominant frameworks of trauma theory, which continue to prioritize fight, flight, and freeze. In my clinical work, I have seen again and again how this omission erases the reality of so many women’s experiences; particularly when the survival strategy looked like staying quiet. Smiling. Pleasing. Complying.

We do not undo this by telling women to speak louder or fight harder. We begin by telling the truth that freezing is not consent. That fawning is not weakness. That numbness is not failure. The absence of resistance does not mean the absence of harm.

We begin by acknowledging that the nervous system is not a metaphor. It is a map. And every flinch, every shutdown, every blank stare has a place on that map if we are willing to look without judgment.

So when a client sits across from me and says, "I want to feel again, but I can’t," I do not push them toward embodiment. I help them understand why the body left in the first place. I help them feel reverence for their symptoms. I help them build relationships with the parts of themselves they’ve had to exile to survive.

Because we do not heal disembodiment by demanding presence. We heal by respecting absence.

Share Words From This Body | Ailey Jolie

We heal by holding space for the parts of ourselves that froze, dissociated, or fawned, not as failures but as protectors. We heal by remembering that trauma did not break us. It protected us. And that protection deserves to be honored before it can be released.

So to the person reading this who wonders why they still flinch at kindness, why they can't meditate, why they feel nothing during sex or too much all at once; you are not broken. I’ve lived those questions too. The flinching. The numbness. The sense that something must be wrong with me for not being able to stay present during intimacy. I’ve felt like a stranger to my own body, even after years of therapy. It’s only through somatic therapy; slow, steady, and honest, that I’ve been able to return to myself, not all at once, but piece by piece.

The healing, when it comes, will not be because you forced yourself back into your body. It will be because something softened. Because someone stayed. Because your body learned it was never a site of harm, but as a place worthy of deep devoted care. Because safety arrived; not as an idea, but as a felt sense.

And when that happens, embodiment will not need to be demanded. It will become possible. Not because you tried harder.

But because your body finally believed it would not be hurt again.