Healing From Sexual Trauma One Boundary at a Time
Recovery isn’t just healing. It’s reclamation.
Introduction
I’m a guest on Sara Stansberry’s “How to Blow Up Your Life.” It drops tomorrow. And, yes, I show my face. This excellent piece, “Healing From Sexual Trauma One Boundary at a Time: Recovery isn’t just healing. It’s reclamation” 1serves as an introduction to our conversation.
This essay and the related podcast episode contain information about recovery from sexual trauma. It’s a sensitive topic, but one I feel should be discussed if we’re ever going to bring the shame into the light and help victims heal. If you’re a victim and need to sit this one out, that’s ok.
How to Reclaim Your Body and Your Power After Trauma
It’s taking back your body after someone treated it like it was theirs. It’s reclaiming your voice after being told your truth was too much, too dramatic, or too inconvenient. It’s breaking every rule you internalized about what you owe, who you should be, and what love is supposed to look like.
And if you’ve ever experienced sexual trauma—whether it was an assault, exposure to pornography as a child, betrayal in your marriage, or a thousand other ways your boundaries could be violated, you know that recovery is a life-long practice.
A daily, messy, imperfect practice of choosing yourself when every instinct tells you to disappear.
I remember the first time my therapist explained sexual trauma to me. I was in my thirties, sitting in her office, trying to make sense of why I felt so disconnected from my own body.
The Shame That Isn’t Yours to Carry
“Sexual crimes are the only crimes where the perpetrator walks away feeling justified, and the victim walks away feeling ashamed,” she said. “Think about it. If someone robbed your house, you’d be mad about it. You wouldn’t feel ashamed that you had a house or that there was a window that allowed the crime to occur.”
What she said made so much sense, yet somehow I couldn’t shake the shame that had been lying dormant behind the scenes for years.
What Trauma Does to Your Relationships
Tomorrow, I’m sitting down with April Daniels —speaker, advocate for sexual trauma survivors, and author of Paperdolls and Cowboy Boots—to talk about something most people don’t address: how sexual trauma shapes every relationship you have, not just the intimate ones.
In our conversation, April talks about how trauma can lead to superficial relationships because when you’re disconnected from yourself, you can’t truly connect with others. You’re performing. Managing. Protecting.
I recognized myself immediately in what she was saying.
For years, I thought something was wrong with me. Shut down, hypervigilant, afraid of the world around me.
It wasn’t until I started trauma therapy that I understood: this was my body trying to protect me.
When you’ve been violated, your nervous system learns to stay on high alert. It doesn’t trust safety because safety was taken from you. And so even in moments when you’re not in danger, your body braces for impact.
Recovery means teaching your body that it’s safe now and that you’re in control. You get to decide who touches you, when, and how.
And that takes time - more time than anyone tells you it will.
Breaking the Rules You Didn’t Know You Were Following
One of the hardest parts of recovery was realizing how many unspoken rules I’d internalized about my body and my sexuality:
Good women don’t talk about sex.
Your needs aren’t as important as his comfort.
If you say no, you’re being difficult.
These rules kept me small. They kept me silent. They kept me performing instead of participating.
Breaking them felt terrifying. Like I was betraying some invisible contract I’d signed without realizing it.
In my conversation with April, she talks about how society objectifies people—particularly women—reducing them to objects for others’ satisfaction rather than treating them as whole human beings with agency and boundaries. And how this cultural backdrop makes it even harder for survivors to reclaim their sense of self.
But here’s what I learned: those rules were never about protecting me. They were about protecting everyone else from my truth.
And I was done with that.
What Reclamation Actually Looks Like
Reclamation isn’t one big moment. It’s a thousand small ones:
The first time you say, “I’m not in the mood,” and don’t apologize for it.
The first time you tell your partner what you need and don’t soften it with “if that’s okay.”
The first time you feel pleasure in your body and don’t immediately shut it down out of guilt or shame.
The first time you set a boundary and hold it, even when someone pushes back.
The first time you choose connection over performance.
It’s learning that your body isn’t something to tolerate or manage. It’s yours and you get to decide what happens to it.
Installing Boundaries in Every Area of Your Life
Here’s the thing about sexual trauma: it doesn’t stay in the bedroom. It bleeds into every relationship, every decision, every interaction.
If you learned early on that your boundaries don’t matter, you carry that belief into your friendships, your work, and your parenting. You say yes when you mean no. You over-explain. You accommodate. You shrink to make others comfortable.
Recovery means installing boundaries everywhere:
At work, when someone asks for more than you can give
With family, when they cross lines you’ve set
In friendships, when someone takes more than they offer
With your kids, when you model what healthy limits look like
In romantic relationships, when you stop performing and start being honest
It’s not just about reclaiming your body. It’s about reclaiming your voice. Your agency. Your power.
In our podcast episode dropping February 25th, April and I dig into how to navigate healthy relationships after trauma - how to communicate your needs, how to recognize when you’re falling into old patterns, and how to trust yourself enough to stay present instead of dissociating.
Because that’s the real work: learning to stay in your body instead of leaving it.
The Power of Sharing Your Story
One thing April emphasizes in our conversation is the power of sharing personal stories—both for the speaker and the listener. When you share your story, you’re not just processing your own healing. You’re giving someone else permission to name what happened to them. To believe their own experience. To know they’re not alone.
That’s why I’m writing this essay. That’s why April wrote her book. That’s why we’re having this conversation on the podcast.
Because silence protects perpetrators. And speaking up empowers survivors.
If you’re reading this and recognizing yourself—if you’ve carried shame that isn’t yours, if you’ve minimized your trauma, if you’ve spent years trying to just get over it—I want you to know:
You’re not broken. You’re not too much. You’re not being dramatic.
You’re healing. And healing doesn’t follow a timeline. It doesn’t care about productivity or progress metrics. It just asks you to keep showing up for yourself, one messy, imperfect day at a time.
Creating a Fulfilling Life After Trauma
At the end of my conversation with April, we talk about something that gave me so much hope: the possibility of creating a fulfilling life after trauma.
Not in spite of the trauma. Not by erasing it or pretending it didn’t happen. But by doing the work to reclaim yourself—your body, your voice, your power—so you can show up fully in your life.
That’s what recovery is. Not forgetting or fixing. But reclaiming.
And you get to decide what comes next.
Listen to the Full Conversation
If this essay resonates with you, I hope you’ll listen to my conversation with April Daniels on the How to Blow Up Your Life podcast, dropping February 25th. We go deeper into:
How psychological manipulation precedes physical trauma
The ways trauma shows up in your relationships (even the non-romantic ones)
How to recognize when you’re objectifying yourself versus honoring yourself
Practical tools for navigating intimacy after trauma
Why believing and supporting survivors—especially children—is crucial
How writing and storytelling can be part of your healing journey
April’s wisdom, combined with her own lived experience, offers a roadmap for anyone navigating this complex, painful, necessary work.
You Don’t Have to Do This Alone
If you’re ready to reclaim your voice, your body, and your life, let’s talk. Subscribe here for weekly essays on healing and transformation. And if you need more support, reach out for 1:1 coaching.
Because you deserve to feel whole again. And that’s not just possible—it’s your birthright.
The only change I made was the intentional misspelling of “Paperdolls.” Not a big deal, it happens all the time. But, when I see it, I correct it. Because we are all connected. I guarantee you that you know someone who has been sexually assaulted and the repercussions of that abuse has effected you. We are all connected.
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