Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life

by Emily Nagoski

“Why should I trust my body?” she said. “My whole adult life, my body has been unreliable and falling apart. When I get stressed, everything just shuts down—I get sick, I get injured, none of my systems work. And that includes sex.” This made some sense, given her sensitive brakes, but it seemed to me there was more going on. “It sounds like your body is opting for the ‘freeze’ stress response, where it just shuts down instead of trying to escape or fight,” I said. “It’s what happens when a person has either long-term, high-intensity stress, or is in the process of healing after trauma. Does either of those sound like you?” “Both,”

“I sometimes walk through doors sideways because I think I’m too big to fit. When I catch myself doing it, I make myself go through straight, because what I learned is that it’s not my body that I’m worried is too big. It’s my anxiety.”

Rape has been described by victim advocate and former police officer Tom Tremblay as “the most violent crime a person can survive.”11 Those who have not been sexually assaulted can perhaps more clearly understand the experience of a survivor by thinking of them as having survived an attempted murder that used sex as the weapon.

But survival is not recovery; survival happens automatically, sometimes even against the survivor’s will.

Its opposite is over-identification, as in over-identifying with your own failures and suffering, holding fast to the pain and being unable to let it go. It’s assessed with items like “When I’m feeling down I tend to obsess and fixate on everything that’s wrong.”