What sexual violation can do to desire, trust, consent, and the relationships survivors have to heal back into.

The characters in this article are fictional composites created to portray common experiences and therapeutic themes related to sexual trauma.

Barbara* had one of those smiles that made you think she was the prettier than she probably was. Not because she wasn’t pretty, but because five minutes after meeting her, you weren’t really looking at her face anymore.

You were watching the way she laughed, the way she leaned across the table when you were telling her something important, the way she remembered the tiny detail you mentioned three months ago about your sister. She had a way of making a boring dinner feel like something had happened.

People liked Barbara, and Barbara liked people. Which was part of why her friends were so happy when they saw her across the bar with David that night.

He seemed sweet. Actually, he seemed really sweet. He wasn’t looking around the room while she talked. He wasn’t checking his phone every three minutes. At some point they realized they loved the same kind of music and spent twenty minutes passing a phone back and forth, playing each other songs and arguing over which album was better.

Her friend caught her eye from across the room and smiled.

Finally.

Barbara had taken a break from dating. Her last relationship hadn’t been terrible. I almost wish it had been, because terrible relationships are sometimes easier to leave. This one had just exhausted her. Too much wondering, too much negotiating, too much energy spent trying to understand things she eventually realized she shouldn’t have needed to understand.

When it ended, Barbara made herself a promise. The next time, she would pay attention, to herself, to how she felt around someone, to where she invested her energy. She wanted to be intentional about who she let close.

And that night, sitting across from David, she thought maybe she had chosen well.

They drank. They laughed. They flirted. They kissed.

Barbara liked kissing him.

I tell you that because it matters. She liked affection. She liked sexuality. She liked that delicious few seconds when you realize the person you want also wants you. She liked being looked at, the anticipation of not quite knowing where the night would go, the tenderness of allowing another person close.

She wanted him to kiss her.

She just didn’t want what happened later.

Those are allowed to exist in the same story.

At some point later that night, David wanted to go further and Barbara didn’t. She pulled away, and he kept going. She said no. He kept going. At one point she pushed him away, and he said something like, “Just give me another minute.”

As if her no were an interruption. As if what he wanted was the main event and her resistance was simply something they had to get through first.

Barbara remembers saying no several times. Five, she thinks. Maybe it was four. Maybe it was six. And then something happened that would confuse her almost as much as what he did.

She stopped fighting.

Not because her no had changed. Some part of her simply realized that continuing to fight wasn’t changing what was happening. She wanted to get to the other side of the night, go home, take a shower, crawl underneath her own blankets and somehow make the last hour unhappen.

Later she would put that moment on trial: Why didn’t I scream? Why didn’t I push harder? Why didn’t I leave? Why did I eventually just lie there?

But the body has survival strategies much older than our explanations for them.

When the body stops trying to get out

There is a moment you can sometimes observe in the animal world when the entire organization of survival changes. A prey animal that has been using every available resource to escape a predator can become strangely still when escape is no longer available. The organism isn’t deciding that the danger is acceptable. Its survival strategy has changed.

Humans can experience something similar.

Researchers call one form of this tonic immobility: an involuntary defensive response to extreme threat in which movement can become profoundly inhibited.

Someone can internally want desperately to push, scream, run or get away while finding that the body simply isn’t doing what the thinking mind is asking it to do.

And this isn’t an obscure trauma theory.

In 2017, Anna Möller, Hans Peter Söndergaard and Lotti Helström published a study of 298 women who sought emergency care within one month of sexual assault. Nearly 70% reported significant tonic immobility during the assault, and almost 48% reported extreme tonic immobility. Among those assessed six months later, extreme tonic immobility was associated with greater odds of PTSD and severe depression.

Nearly seven out of ten women in that sample.

I keep thinking about that number alongside one of the questions survivors are still asked: Why didn’t you fight harder?

Barbara’s body wasn’t making a moral decision about whether she consented. It was solving a survival problem. Somewhere along the way, the question had changed from How do I get out? to How do I get through?

We have created a very particular picture of what a violated woman is supposed to look like. She screams. She scratches. She kicks. She fights until there could be absolutely no question that she didn’t want what was happening.

But nervous systems don’t organize themselves around what will make the most convincing testimony tomorrow. They organize themselves around surviving tonight.

And if we don’t understand that, we can take the very response that helped someone endure an overwhelming experience and later use it as evidence against her.

Sometimes survival looks like surrender.

Not consent. Surrender.

Those are two very different things.

The kind of dirty a shower can’t fix

The next afternoon, Barbara sat across from her best friend and tried to explain how she felt. She had been angry that morning, then numb, then angry again. But underneath all of it was another feeling she couldn’t quite shake.

“I feel dirty,” she finally said.

I have heard versions of that word from sexual-trauma survivors more times than I wish I had.

Dirty is an interesting word because dirt is usually something we know what to do with. You get mud on your leg and wash it off. You accidentally bite into something moldy and spit it out, rinse your mouth, brush your teeth. There is something reassuring about dirt having a location: There it is. Get it off me.

But what happens when you can’t find where the dirt is?

Barbara showered that morning. She washed her hair. She stood underneath the water longer than she normally would. But when she got out, she didn’t feel clean because the thing she was trying to wash off wasn’t actually on her skin.

It was what had happened inside the meaning of her body.

Researchers have a term for part of this experience: mental contamination, an internal experience of dirtiness or contamination that can exist without a physical contaminant. Researchers have documented this phenomenon following sexual trauma, including experiences of internal contamination, disgust and urges to wash. A recent qualitative study of women with sexual-trauma histories was literally titled after one participant’s description: “I felt dirty in a way a shower wouldn’t fix.”

The research language helps us name something.

But it doesn’t capture all of what interests me about Barbara.

Because Barbara wasn’t only trying to scrub off David.

She was trying to scrub off the parts of herself that had been present with him before anything went wrong: the excitement when he looked at her, the part that wanted him to kiss her, the eroticism, the openness, the tenderness, the pleasure of being wanted by somebody she wanted back.

This is where sexual trauma becomes much more complicated than fear.

All of those things belonged to Barbara before the violation. But now they are sitting beside it, and the nervous system isn’t always particularly sophisticated about association.

Desire was there before danger, so desire can begin to feel dangerous. Openness allowed somebody close, so openness can begin to feel naive. She trusted herself enough to move toward him, so now she may begin questioning the very instincts she will eventually need in order to move toward anyone again.

The dirt changes addresses.

He crossed the boundary, but she feels contaminated. He disregarded her no, but she questions her judgment. He violated something, but she becomes suspicious of her own sexuality.

And perhaps this is one of the cruelest things about sexual trauma: the person who was violated can begin amputating perfectly healthy parts of herself because those parts happened to be in the room when something terrible happened.

Her desire wasn’t the problem. Her tenderness wasn’t the problem. Her willingness to trust wasn’t the problem.

But knowing that intellectually and being able to inhabit those parts of herself again are very different things.

A systematic review of the literature on sexual violence and later romantic relationships found a complicated picture, which matters, because trauma does not write one inevitable future. but research has identified potential effects across intimacy, communication, sexual functioning, conflict and relationship satisfaction.

That makes sense to me.

Trauma doesn’t only leave a memory of what happened. It can leave a prediction about what closeness means now.

Maybe wanting someone means becoming vulnerable to being hurt. Maybe letting somebody close means losing control. Maybe my body isn’t reliable. Maybe other people aren’t reliable. Maybe sex isn’t safe. Maybe tenderness isn’t safe.

Maybe love isn’t safe.

And perhaps the most painful version: Maybe I am not safe when I love.

This is why I think reducing sexual-trauma treatment to “helping someone feel safe again” misses so much of what we’re actually doing. Because what does safety mean if Barbara can only achieve it by becoming less open, less erotic, less trusting, less alive?

I don’t want that version of healing for her.

I want Barbara to become discerning without becoming defended against her own aliveness. I want her to be able to want someone again without experiencing her desire as evidence that she has surrendered her right to a boundary. I want her to discover that she can reach toward another person and still belong completely to herself.

Maybe healing is partly the painstaking work of returning the dirt to the right address.

Not scrubbing away what happened. Not convincing her that nobody will ever hurt her again. But separating what happened to her from who she is.

What happens when Barbara tells us?

There is something else the research tells us that I think we need to take much more seriously: what happens after sexual assault isn’t neutral.

Sarah Ullman has spent decades studying what happens when sexual-assault survivors disclose their experiences to other people. In a study with Henrietta Filipas involving 323 survivors, more negative social reactions following disclosure were associated with greater PTSD symptom severity. Later, Ullman and Liana Peter-Hagene studied 1,863 survivors and found that positive social reactions predicted greater perceived control over recovery, which in turn was related to fewer PTSD symptoms; negative reactions were related to greater PTSD symptoms through several pathways.

I keep thinking about what that means outside the research paper.

Barbara says no that night and isn’t listened to.

Then she tells somebody what happened and hears: How much did you drink? Why did you go upstairs? But you liked him, didn’t you? Why didn’t you scream? Why did you eventually stop fighting?

Perhaps the person asking believes they are simply trying to understand.

But what might Barbara hear?

Convince me that you behaved well enough for what happened to you to count.

She had to convince somebody that her no mattered that night. Now she has to convince somebody that it mattered the next morning.

I think of this as a kind of second violation. Not because an insensitive response is equivalent to sexual assault—it isn’t. But because something psychologically familiar can happen again: another person becomes more interested in their interpretation of Barbara’s experience than in Barbara’s experience itself.

Your experience is still negotiable.

And perhaps this is why the opposite matters so much too. Being believed, being listened to, being allowed to retain agency over what happens next, none of those things undo an assault. But they begin to create a different relational environment around the wound.

We sometimes talk about trauma as though it happened inside Barbara’s nervous system and therefore healing has to happen inside Barbara’s nervous system.

But trauma happened between people.

Some of what heals afterward happens between people too.

I couldn’t not write about Cornell

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this while watching the conversation surrounding the allegations connected to Cornell.

I almost didn’t write about it, and then I thought: How could I not?

There is a legal process, and I wasn’t in the room. I don’t want to turn allegations into facts simply because the subject evokes enormous emotion.

But Cornell didn’t create this conversation.

It revealed how badly we still need it.

Sexual violation predates Cornell and will, unfortunately, outlive whatever happens with this particular case. And every time one of these stories enters our homes, universities, group chats, marriages and conversations with our children, we are participating in what happens next.

Please don’t tell me her skirt was too short.

Please don’t tell me that because she went upstairs she should have known what would happen, or that because she drank she forfeited her right to have a boundary, or because she kissed somebody enthusiastically she became responsible for everything that happened afterward.

Is that really the standard we want?

Does someone have to behave perfectly before we agree that their body still belongs to them?

If Barbara kissed David, she consented to kissing David. If she wanted his hands on her at one point, she wanted his hands on her at that point. If something changed thirty seconds later, she was allowed to change too.

But I think consent requires us to go deeper than teaching women how to say no.

We also have to become interested in whether people know how to receive one.

Can you tolerate disappointment without turning disappointment into pressure?

Can you tolerate being incredibly turned on and having to stop?

Can you tolerate somebody wanting you at 10:03 and changing their mind at 10:07 without making them responsible for managing what their change of mind does to you?

Can you remain connected to another person’s humanity while your own desire is frustrated?

That’s a much more interesting conversation about consent.

Sexuality requires more than desire. It requires attunement: the capacity to remain in relationship with another person’s subjectivity while you desire them. The person in front of you is a living, changing human being, not an agreement you secured twenty minutes ago.

I don’t want the highest standard of sexual ethics to become Well, technically, nobody stopped me.

I want something much better than that.

Safety is not something Barbara can create alone

This is the part I know very well as a trauma therapist.

I can help Barbara notice where her body disappeared and work [somatically] with defensive responses that never got to complete. Maybe months later she feels the floor underneath her feet, the strength in her legs, the force in her arms. Maybe she pushes against my hands and I move backward.

Her force has an effect.

For someone whose body learned my no doesn’t change what happens next, that can be profound.

We can work with disgust, shame and collapse. We can help her differentiate I want this from I don’t want this, and I don’t want this from I’m afraid to disappoint you. We can help her reclaim not only her no, but her yes, her pleasure, desire, eroticism, tenderness and reach.

This is extraordinary work, and it is part of what I help therapists learn to do with enormous nuance.

But then Barbara leaves my office.

And this is where I think we have sometimes located too much of trauma healing inside the traumatized person.

No amount of somatic work I do with Barbara can guarantee that the next person she trusts will respect the boundary we’ve worked so hard to help her feel. No amount of nervous-system regulation can turn an unsafe person into a safe one. And no amount of helping Barbara relearn trust internally can replace having actual people become trustworthy externally.

If trauma has taught her that intimacy can become dangerous without warning, somebody eventually has to give her different relational data.

And I think this is where we need a much richer understanding of safety.

Safety isn’t simply the absence of assault. It is the presence of relationships in which your subjectivity continues to matter when it conflicts with somebody else’s desire.

It’s being able to say wait without having to manage the other person’s disappointment. It’s discovering that your boundary doesn’t cost you connection. It’s learning that tenderness isn’t a trap.

Perhaps this is part of what trust actually is.

Not believing another person will never disappoint you. Not becoming so regulated that nothing scares you anymore.

Trust is accumulated relational evidence.

When I show you more of myself, what do you do with it? When I become vulnerable, do you become more careful or less? When I say no, do I become less lovable to you? When what I need interferes with what you want, do I still exist?

Those are nervous-system questions too.

People are infrastructure

This is where the conversation becomes much larger than Barbara.

We hear the word infrastructure and think about policies, universities, reporting procedures and institutions. Those things matter enormously.

But people are infrastructure too.

A systematic review of 85 studies examining bystander intervention in sexual-violence contexts found that social norms were among the important contextual influences on intervention. In particular, people were more likely to intervene when they believed their peers supported intervention.

I find that enormously important because it means the room is always teaching us something about what the room permits.

What gets laughed at matters. What gets challenged matters. What your son hears his friends say about a girl matters. What he watches another boy get away with matters, and what he watches another boy refuse to participate in matters too.

What your daughter hears you say about the woman on the news matters. What happens when somebody tells a story about a drunk girl at a party and everybody laughs matters. And what happens when one person says, Wait. That’s actually not funny, matters.

Our homes are infrastructure.

Our marriages are infrastructure.

Our friendships are infrastructure.

Our schools are infrastructure.

Our sons’ group chats are infrastructure.

The conversations men have when there isn’t a woman in the room are infrastructure.

Culture gets built in thousands of tiny moments where human beings learn what will be tolerated, what will cost them belonging, what earns status, and what happens when somebody speaks.

This is why I don’t want our response to sexual violence to be exclusively about making vulnerable people better at identifying danger.

I want us becoming better at creating safety.

I want us teaching our sons that desire is beautiful, but desire doesn’t entitle you to another person’s body. That being disappointed isn’t an emergency. That masculinity does not become smaller when you hear no. That noticing another person’s discomfort is part of sexuality, not an interruption of it.

I want our daughters to know that desire doesn’t make them responsible for what somebody else does with it. They can move toward and then move away. They don’t lose ownership of their bodies because they flirted, drank, kissed somebody, loved somebody or trusted the wrong person.

And I want adults learning this too.

Because safety cannot only mean I have become excellent at protecting myself.

It also has to mean: There are people around me who know how to protect the humanity between us.

Six months later

Barbara is kissing someone else.

And she wants to be. [That matters.]

She likes his hand on her body. She likes the feeling of being wanted. She likes, perhaps with some surprise, that desire has begun to feel like hers again rather than something she needs to monitor for evidence of danger.

Then his hand moves somewhere and her body changes.

“Wait.” He stops.

Nothing dramatic happens. He doesn’t heal her. He doesn’t say the perfect trauma-informed thing. He doesn’t even know that something enormously important has just occurred.

He simply stops.

And perhaps this is what I find so moving about it.

For months, Barbara has been doing extraordinary work to recover something that should have been ordinary all along: the experience of having her internal reality matter to another person.

She gets to discover that desire and boundary were never opposites.

She can move toward somebody without forfeiting her ability to move away. She can be soft without becoming powerless, erotic without becoming available for everything, trusting without handing somebody else ownership of her body.

The violation had collapsed all of those distinctions.

Healing begins giving them back.

And perhaps this is how the dirt finally begins returning to the right address.

Not because Barbara becomes clean.

Barbara was never dirty.

What happened was that the dirt changed addresses.

Someone else crossed a boundary and shame landed in her body. Someone else disregarded her no and she became suspicious of her own desire. Someone else failed to protect the humanity between them and she spent months wondering whether she had been too open, too trusting, too sexual, too willing to love.

That is the part I want us to understand.

Because if healing only teaches Barbara how to become harder to violate, we may accidentally help trauma finish the job.

I don’t want Barbara less open, less erotic, less tender, less trusting or less capable of surrendering into love.

I want her discerning enough to protect herself without having to protect herself from her own aliveness.

And that cannot be Barbara’s work alone.

We can help her body recover its push in a therapy room. We can help her differentiate then from now, reclaim the defensive responses that disappeared when fighting was no longer possible, and slowly rediscover that her no can have an effect.

But eventually Barbara has to leave our offices and bring that nervous system back into relationship.

Someone has to receive the no without making her pay for it. Someone has to remain tender when what Barbara wants is different from what they want. Someone has to show her that intimacy can contain desire, disappointment, difference, boundaries and love without requiring anybody to disappear.

That is why safety cannot only be something we teach survivors to manufacture internally.

Safety is also something human beings create for one another.

And perhaps that’s the conversation I wish stories like Cornell would force us to have.

Not only: How do we help people protect themselves?

But something much harder:

What kind of people are we raising, loving, befriending and becoming, and how safe is another human being’s vulnerability in our hands?

Thank you for being part of this important conversation <3.

Warmly,

Esther

A few questions people ask about sexual trauma and consent

Why might someone freeze or stop fighting during a sexual assault?

Tonic immobility is an involuntary defensive response to extreme threat. In Möller, Söndergaard and Helström’s study of 298 women seeking emergency care following sexual assault, nearly 70% reported significant tonic immobility and almost 48% reported extreme tonic immobility. It is one reason the absence of continued physical resistance should never simply be interpreted as consent.

Why can survivors feel “dirty” even after showering?

Researchers describe mental contamination as an internal sense of dirtiness or contamination without a physical substance that can simply be removed. Sexual-trauma research has described internal contamination, disgust and urges to wash. But clinically, that dirtiness can become entangled with much more: sexuality, desire, pleasure, tenderness, trust and the survivor’s relationship with their own body.

Can the response someone receives after disclosure affect recovery?

Yes. Sarah Ullman and colleagues have repeatedly studied social responses following sexual-assault disclosure. Negative reactions have been associated with worse post-traumatic outcomes, while supportive reactions can contribute to greater perceived control over recovery. This does not mean social support determines a survivor’s outcome, but it does mean recovery unfolds in a relational environment.

What can families and communities actually do?

Talk about consent before anybody desperately needs the conversation. Teach people to tolerate another person’s disappointment and to notice changes in participation rather than looking only for a technically spoken no. Challenge degrading stories and jokes. Model receiving boundaries without retaliation. Research on bystander intervention also suggests that perceived peer norms matter: people are more likely to intervene when they believe the people around them support intervention.

Because safety isn’t created only by teaching vulnerable people how to protect themselves.

It’s also created by becoming people who are safer to be vulnerable with.

Research referenced

Möller, A., Söndergaard, H. P., & Helström, L. (2017). Tonic immobility during sexual assault—a common reaction predicting post-traumatic stress disorder and severe depression. Acta Obstetricia et Gynecologica Scandinavica, 96(8), 932–938.

Ullman, S. E., & Filipas, H. H. (2001). Predictors of PTSD symptom severity and social reactions in sexual assault victims. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 14(2), 369–389.

Ullman, S. E., & Peter-Hagene, L. (2014). Social reactions to sexual assault disclosure, coping, perceived control and PTSD symptoms in sexual assault victims. Journal of Community Psychology, 42(4), 495–508.

The Association Between a History of Sexual Violence and Romantic Relationship Functioning: A Systematic Review (2020).

“I Felt Dirty in a Way a Shower Wouldn’t Fix”: A Qualitative Examination of Sexual Trauma-Related Mental Contamination (2024).

A Systematic Review Exploring Variables Related to Bystander Intervention in Sexual Violence Contexts (2022).