Breaking the Silence: Sexual Trauma and Finding Your Voice

Breaking the silence around sexual trauma requires courage, but understanding its impact on our voice and self-expression is critical to healing. Sexual trauma creates a profound disconnect between body and voice that differs significantly from other forms of adversity. When boundaries are violated, confusion extends to all aspects of self-expression—making it extraordinarily difficult to speak our truth, set limits, or ask for what we need.

The protective mechanisms our bodies develop—dissociation, freeze responses, and fawning behaviors—once kept us safe but now limit our authentic expression. These patterns manifest in surprising ways: difficulty with intimacy, delayed expression of feelings, emotional flooding when trying to communicate needs, or literally losing your voice in crucial moments. Many survivors find themselves highly articulate in most areas of life yet unable to advocate for their own boundaries.

Most devastatingly, sexual trauma often implants deep shame that convinces us there's something inherently wrong with us. This shame doesn't discriminate based on when the trauma occurred—childhood, adolescence, or adulthood—and it creates a powerful silencing effect that can persist for decades.

The healing pathway begins with safety, not forced expression. Your nervous system needs to recognize that safety is available before authentic voice becomes possible. Working with small, manageable pieces of activation prevents overwhelm and retraumatization. Finding ways to regulate your nervous system through practices like butterfly tapping or warm therapy creates the foundation for deeper healing.

Remember that your system didn't disconnect your voice out of weakness but out of protection. Thank that part of yourself while recognizing that as an adult, you now have different resources and capacities. Your healing journey isn't about erasing what happened—it's about integration at such a profound level that it no longer controls your life. You get to reclaim your power and your voice, one gentle step at a time.

If this resonates with you, please reach out for support. Connect with me at @iamcoachkirsty or find professional resources in your area. What happened was never your fault, and your journey toward healing and authentic expression matters deeply.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Sexual Trauma Discussion
• 2:15 Defining Sexual Abuse and Its Impact
• 4:31 Freeze, Fawn Responses and Dissociation
• 9:14 Adolescent Experiences and Adult Patterns
• 11:59 How Trauma Manifests in Daily Life
• 18:28 Creating Safety and Healing Pathways
• 21:32 Resources for Support and Closing Thoughts

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hi everyone, I am back to talk about one of the most fucking taboo things that you are gonna find on a podcast, which is around sexual abuse. Now, before we jump into anything, this is going to be a deep episode and I will be talking about childhood sexual abuse, adolescent abuse and abuse in adulthood. So if this has happened to you, I need you to really check in with yourself to see if this is something you can listen to right now, if this is something that you really need to listen to right now and just to hold yourself safe, and if things do come up for you. Please do not sit in silence. Please reach out for support. There are so many helplines out there. You can reach out to me, reach out to a trusted friend or family. Please do not sit there in a triggered state, because that's not what I'm aiming to do here.

Speaker 1: 0:47

I'm aiming to educate around how sexual abuse, sexual harassment, basically creates something so, so different in how we can show up and use our voice. It is completely different to other childhood conditioning. It's completely different to so many different things. So this is why it's really important to talk about it and, before we get into it, I'm actually going to talk about what sexual abuse is defined as Okay. So it's abusive sexual behavior from one person to another, any sexual activity that occurs without consent, unwanted sexual contact obtained by force, threats or when somebody is unable to consent. So we're talking about the under 16 acts of sexual contact that a person suffers, submits to or performs without legal consent and, yeah, that's going back to like being under 16. This includes rape, sexual child abuse, incest, fondling, attempted human trafficking, sexual harassment or any other type of unwanted sexual contact. Now, you get to decide what that is. I'm not going to be here to tell you what you suffered or what you experienced. Is X? You get to decide. This is it. This is part of you calling back your power and you get to decide. Okay, but I just wanted to be very explicit on the type of behavior that we are talking about, because you know it can be misconstrued, whatever, and let's just be really factual about what it is. You get to define your own experience.

Speaker 1: 2:14

Now, like I said, sexual trauma or sexual abuse, whatever I'm going to call it sexual trauma because I feel like that's more appropriate. It can really cause a disconnection between the body and the voice because, let's face it, when you have a violation in the yoni or in in any sort of experience, and I want to just highlight at this time as well, like the threat is enough. If somebody ever threatened you with sexual harassment or sexual trauma, that is enough to feel violated. It doesn't have to actually have to be a physical assault or physical touch, it can literally just be the threat of it can still cause that sexual trauma. And when we're doing this type of work, we need to understand that when we're violated in one area, it can affect our voice and it can you know when you look at autonomy autonomy me, me, me, our voice, and it can you know when you look at autonomy autonomy meh, meh, meh, meh. Can't say it, can't say it. But when you look at the, I can't say it fuck, I don't know. Anyway, basically, what I'm trying to say is that the thyroid, if you look at it in its physical form, then it actually really looks a lot like your cervix, which is really, really interesting.

Speaker 1: 3:24

So if you've experienced sexual violation, sexual trauma and struggle to speak your truth in intimate relationships, it is not a personal failing and what happened to you, regardless of any time it was in your life, it was never your fault. It was never your fault and I want you to just claim that right now. It was never your fault. It was never what you was, never what you did. It was never any of these things. What's really important as well, guys, is to realize that, is to acknowledge that if you received pleasure or you felt pleasure during the experience, that's absolutely fine as well. It doesn't mean that you enjoyed. It doesn't mean that if you had an orgasm, you were consenting. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if you liked it and then, as you like, go through the experience, you realize, oh shit, that that wasn't the right thing to do. It was an exploitation of the adult. Whatever it is, it's fine, it's okay and it doesn't need to carry shame.

Speaker 1: 4:20

So this, this type of trauma, can really impact people from a different way, from different childhood conditioning. So during these experiences, you may experience dissociation. This is where you have a protective separation from the body and this is where you might have been in the experience and you may have been like looking down at your body from like an out ofof-body experience. You might have completely dissociated you. Your brain might not even remember. Remember, our brain is very, very clever. So what's this? What it's going to do is it's going to um hide those memories from us. It's going to hide those memories from us so that we don't remember and that we can carry on with our life, because our brain is there to protect us. This is why our nervous protect us. This is why our nervous system gets activated. This is why our subconscious does what it does. This is why our brain does this, because the number one job for your brain and for your body is to keep you alive. Okay, keep you alive.

Speaker 1: 5:15

And you know, when we talk about sexual trauma, it also includes another level of childhood. You know you might have been told don't tell anyone or something bad will happen. No one will believe you. This is our secret. And these messages become embedded not just in the memory but in the physical tissues of the throat, creating constriction patterns. And you know that activate during vulnerability, like why can't I speak out and speak my truth? Because it's not fucking safe. That's why so very common nervous system responses are freeze and fawn. So freeze directly affects the vagus nerve, which controls both muscles and speech. I'm so excited to talk about this, guys. I'm literally falling over my words because I feel like this has been. I've been holding this in for so long and I really want to talk about it and I just feel really excited to really talk about this because I just I don't see anybody talking about it anywhere and yeah. So, going back to freeze, it controls both muscles and speech and the capacity to the body to feel safe.

Speaker 1: 6:22

When we go into fawn, we go along with anything to avoid the conflict because we're scared of conflict. Okay, and you know, for me, I, you know I didn't have that childhood sexual abuse where, um, I was, you know, I was threatened or anything like that, but my mum used to shout all the time and I would do anything I could to avoid it and I and I will often fawn. And this has led like and even when I was fawn in, this led to me having experience later where I completely just went along with things because I didn't want to and also I went into freeze as well because I was worried of the outcome. Okay, so we often go through life experiencing a physical sensation of distrust. When we've had these experiences as a child, as sensations become associated with the violation rather than the wisdom, we're not able to access our authentic voice because it lacks that natural foundation. It was taken in childhood that you can get it back. Okay, remember, you are fully in control. You are fully in your power. You get to be in your power.

Speaker 1: 7:31

The violation of the body boundaries often creates confusion about all boundaries, including vocal ones. So, yeah, it can manifest with difficulty saying no, expressing needs, interrupting others, asking for what you need, like it can be a really, really tricky experience because all boundaries will merge and this is where a lot of people pleasing will come in. This is where the fawning comes in, right, I think a lot of people pleasing actually comes down to fawning because we don't want to have that experience and, most devastatingly, sexual trauma often implants shame and I cannot tell you how much beef I got with shame because I fucking hate shame, fucking hate it. I feel shame is just awful and you may not resonate with having shame, but and I'm not going to tell you that you have shame I know that I've carried shame.

Speaker 1: 8:22

I know that I've carried deep shame about multiple things around my sexual partners, around what happened to me, all of this stuff. I know that shame existed and I've worked with women for the last 12 years and the key thing around. This is shame, and I'm not being funny. I've. I've helped women report rapes to police, all of this stuff and yeah it the. The number one thing is the shame and and the embarrassment. Now there's nothing to be fucking embarrassed about when something is not your fault, okay, and I cannot. I cannot express that enough.

Speaker 1: 8:55

And you know, when we have this deep shame, we often think that there's something inherently wrong with us. We're enough. Who would want us after what happened to us? Who would want us because we're this imagined badness? And then we just get smaller and we shrink and we don't do the things right.

Speaker 1: 9:15

And you know, let's move out of childhood sexual abuse and move into, like adolescence, when you're first fumbling with the first guy that you that you decide to lose your virginity to, for example, or maybe you didn't decide that, maybe it was taken away from you. Like that's what happened to me I. You know I was sexually assaulted and I had my virginity taken away from an older boy at school. On the first night I got drunk. That that was my experience of losing my, my virginity. And you know, as adolescents then I just learned that, okay, boys like to do this and that's what love is, don't forget, like I didn't have a dad, so I don't have a solid foundation of my dad, uh, or like a good male relationship in my life. So I kind of had to learn about men from the streets. And the streets are cold, babe. The streets are fucking cold, I tell you.

Speaker 1: 10:01

But yeah, I kind of went through this like really warped experience, like sex equals love and I don't think I am the only woman that has ever experienced that. I know that's really common and I can see it in a lot of the women that I've worked with as well which is fine. Like if you never had a strong male role model to show you what a healthy masculine relationship is. It's fine. We can accept that we we know better now that we're adults. But as I was going through these experiences, I was fawning and I was going along with what I thought they wanted. So, although I felt like my mind consented, my body didn't. I didn't want to have sex, I didn't want to have sexual encounters with these people, but I went along with it because I felt like that's what you should do. Quote unquote and these patterns again, not my fault, this is what I learned. That's fine. It is my responsibility now to heal it.

Speaker 1: 10:47

I have been on a deep healing journey with this for a really long time and it's why I can talk so openly about it now. It doesn't really bother me, um, to talk about it, because I feel like people just need to hear the story and as we get into adulthood, we only need the threat or the experience to to really mime us, and we could have been that really confident person. But then if you're in a relationship where you are constantly going along with things or you're having sex for the sake of having sex, because it's not worth the argument like that is not fully consenting and that can really impact your ability to use your voice, okay, and again, I'm not here to tell you anything, but I am here to tell you that it's really important to know what your body wants and what you want and how to advocate for that, because that's you protecting yourself. But also your nervous system might work against you in times where it's like I need to freeze or phone to go along with this. And we'll talk a little bit more later about how we can start to really work with our nervous system and work with ourselves so that we can start to advocate for what we really want, what our mind is saying, not what our body feels like it has to do to survive. So how these patterns manifest in your daily life today it shows up in your relationship.

Speaker 1: 11:59

You may feel like you physically struggle to be intimate. I've worked with clients who cannot hug people. They cannot be intimate, or if they are intimate with their husband, it just feels really uncomfortable and they're unable to express their sexual preferences or boundaries with partners, like the voice literally disappears. On the topic of intimacy, you might be in a relationship where you don't talk about sex, like sex is the thing that you do but you don't actually talk about which is really important to talk about because you need to know each other's boundaries. There may be a delayed feeling between feeling something and speaking up, like I used to do this in my last relationship. All the freaking time and I've seen clients do it as well they feel something on a fucking Monday and it takes you five working days to work through it to be able to say it. And that's absolutely fine as well. If that is your way of processing and speaking up, that's cool, that's fine. Remember, I'm not here to tell you to change anything. I'm here to educate you and if you decide afterwards you want to change things, that is your prerogative, that is your choice. I'm never going to force anybody to change and I'm never going to label things for people, but I have to educate you so you can make an informed decision. You know, when we are doing that five day turnaround of speaking up, that is fine. You get to reset your boundaries every single time, anytime, any place. If it's a week later, five weeks later fucking, five years later, it does not matter. You get to reset those boundaries at any time. Boundaries do not have a time limit, and this is the number one thing I will say to all my one-to-one clients.

Speaker 1: 13:26

Something else you might experience is emotional flooding. So when you're trying to express your needs and make coherent speech, you're just like it all comes out as a fucking jumble. Because you're experiencing like this emotional flooding, like you become really, really overwhelmed. Your nervous system becomes overwhelmed. You're like holy fuck, I don't know what the fuck I'm doing, and then nothing makes sense. And then afterwards you feel frustrated, let down, guilty, shameful, whatever. Because you weren't able to clearly communicate what was going on. You might be able to highly articulate everything, everything in your life apart from your own needs and boundaries. You have to be able to feel like you look perfect, because if you look perfect and if you are perfect, nothing bad will happen.

Speaker 1: 14:17

Okay, some people actually speak like you, you know, in a childlike voice, because during conflict or intimate discussions that you unconsciously regress to the age of the trauma. So this is something to be very mindful of and it's very, very interesting. You know, there could be a stark disconnection between what you know intellectually, like what you want to say, and what actually emerges when you try to speak. If you actually get the words out and during an intimate connection, you might notice like your throat can trick, like constricts, your jaw tension, difficulty, swallowing, swallowing, your whole body could just freeze and you just kind of want to just sit there and just go oh, when the fuck is this over? Because you're not enjoying.

Speaker 1: 15:04

Okay, another thing is when pleasure begins to awaken in the body, you might experience a sudden shutdown of both sensation and voice. This is a protective pattern as well, preventing a full embodiment. So what is happening in that moment is that you're starting to feel a little bit of pleasure. And don't forget pleasure is not sex. Pleasure is not sex. We need to get fucking away from this in society. Pleasure and sensuality is basically embracing, accepting pleasure through all of our senses. That is it as child. As children, we are very much sensual beings, like we need to just think like. I know it's hard to think about it, but we are, because our play is enjoying pleasure through all of the senses and that's how we learn and that's how we grow and then, as we get into adulthood, that's where intimacy gets involved and that's yeah, that's something that's really important. So when we have the pleasure of awakening the body, your body will go holy fuck, that isn't safe and we shut it all down and then we disconnect and you might find it really, really hard. You know you're slipping into the freeze, you're slipping into the phone, you're slipping into the fight or flight where you're like I have to get away from this situation happens. And when you are starting to understand this like self-judgment and what is happening for you, this is where compassionate healing happens.

Speaker 1: 16:24

I used to think that everything was my fault. I used to carry so much shame. I used to think, fucking hell, like who would want me. After I've been through these experiences because I've not been through one experiences. I've been through multiple, but that doesn't take away my power anymore. I've claimed that power back because it's so important to me to be the woman that is not only like in her power, attracting the man of my dreams, which, to be honest, now I attract deep, meaningful relationships with men that are so fucking healthy and I am not afraid to walk away from something that isn't isn't serving me, and a lot of women will stay in relationships that are abusive. A lot of women will develop addiction. A lot of women will kind of just ignore things that are going on when really you need to acknowledge what has happened to you and how to heal it, because it is really really, really important, like I know I keep saying really important about fucking everything in this podcast, but it's because it is, and you know the unique healing pathway for you comes with safety first, unlike other voice work, you know where it's like oh, just communicate better. Well, fuck off, sandra.

Speaker 1: 17:35

If I could, I would trauma recovery like requires establishing physical and emotional safety before attempting the expression work. I'm not going to force you to tell your partner what you want to fucking say, because your body doesn't know how to handle it and will get overwhelmed and we run the risk of re-traumatization, which is not what we want to do. Okay, we need to make sure that we are going from the bottom up. So we're starting with the body and then we're going up into, like, the thoughts and intentions, then we're going up into the spiritual, we're working on the energetic body because, you know, we have these experiences and they're coded into our energy, so then we're more likely to attract that type of of behavior, that type of man, that type of thing.

Speaker 1: 18:19

Okay, your, your body is so clever and your system will release the trauma patterns at the pace it can integrate. It will never release more than what you can handle, which is a really great reminder for me right now. But gentleness and patience are key and you can start to do this work on your own and you will get so far. But this work requires somebody to hold you. This work requires somebody else to hold your hand as you go into the deep, deep, dark depths of this work and to hold you without judgment, to hold you in safety, to hold you in love. Okay, so resourcing is really important. So who is that person for you, who can be that safe person with you to walk this journey with you. You know who is your support system and provide safety around you. You might think, fucking hell, nobody does so. How can you create that for yourself? Your nervous system needs to know that safety is available before expression feels possible.

Speaker 1: 19:16

When we are working with small, manageable pieces of activation, this prevents overwhelm. When we're pulling out little bits at a time and we're pulling back the layers, this means that we are working through these situations. We're not about to trigger you into a big fucking meltdown, into re-traumatizationization, and a lot of the work actually means that we don't need to talk about it. We actually just need to get into the body and we need to get into the energy system and work out what's going on there. We don't actually need to talk about everything, because you can go to therapy and you can talk about it all, which is great. But if you're not feeling it and you're not getting into the body and you're not clearing that fucking energy, nothing's going going to happen. You just become more self-aware in therapy, which is great, and it's great if that's what you want.

Speaker 1: 20:00

But for me, I'm like I want to heal, I want to move forward from this. I want to be able to put this to the side and not have it impact my daily life anymore. That's exactly what I do with my clients and what I have been doing with women for years. So the goal isn't about forcing expression, but it's creating conditions where authentic voice emerges naturally and the system gets to recognize safety. So this has just been such a activating episode for me. I've really wanted to talk about this for so long and I can't believe I waited for so long and stuff that might help you is obviously working one-to-one with me, because I'm the fucking best in the game at this. Not only do I have my personal experience, I have 12 years of experience being a trauma-informed expert. I know what it's like to work with women who are highly traumatized. I've worked with women who have experienced significant abuse, and there is nothing that fucking shakes me or can make me judge you when I say I've seen it all and more. I have seen it all and more.

Speaker 1: 20:59

Okay, so something that you can do is you might want to start to find out ways that your nervous system can feel safe. Is that the butterfly tap? You know you get to google this, because I'm not going to run through all the all the different ways to make your nervous system feel safe, because it's up to you and what what happens, but for me, like the butterfly tap, where you cross your arms and you slowly tap, can be really really helpful when you are doing warm therapy. So hot drinks, hot bath, sauna really really good those are my like go to when I'm feeling really dysregulated. And, yeah, find your ways of making yourself feel safe.

Speaker 1: 21:38

Now, this has been a really intense episode and if this work is sacred work, it's about restoring the connection not just between your body and your voice, but between your authentic self and the fucking world, because you are here for a reason. You are here for a very, very special fucking reason. You're not here to just exist. You are here for a reason, very special fucking reason. You're not here to just exist. You are here for a reason, and I often believe that our experiences happen to us for a reason. I know like that sounds so harsh when you're like, oh my god, well, why the fuck did this happen to me? It has to be for a reason, guys. It has to be. It has to be so that we can help other people, so that we can learn a lesson, or for whatever we break the cycle of our ancestors, because I have not even begin to talk about the historical oppression of women, how sex and rape and all of this stuff has been used as weapons against women for a really fucking long time.

Speaker 1: 22:30

And epigenetics is a thing and trauma gets passed down. So a lot of the freeze and the fronting and all the other nervous system activations might not even be from you. It could be from your mother line. The mother line is so, so important with this work and you know I want you to just remember that on this journey, when you're healing something so deep and so sacred, some days expression will flow easily. Others old patterns may resurface.

Speaker 1: 22:56

Remember, healing is not linear and healing isn't about getting rid of what happened. It's about acceptance on such a deep level that you integrate it and it no longer becomes something that bothers you. Be extraordinarily gentle with yourself in this process. Your system didn't connect your, didn't disconnect your voice out of weakness. It is just out of protection and you get to thank that part of you for that protection and you get to say I don't need to be protected now because I'm an adult and I'm a woman, and I get to call my power back in and, with all that being said, this has been a really deep and difficult episode, I guess, to hear.

Speaker 1: 23:36

So if you do need support, please reach out. There's the Samaritans. There's lots of helplines. I don't know where you are in the world, but there will be people online that you can talk to. You can reach out to me directly at I am coach Kirsty on Instagram. Please do not sit silent. Do talk to a trusted person about this. This has been something I've wanted to talk about for a really long time and I will be talking about it a lot more. But yeah, I'm just sending you all so much love and if this has happened to you again, it was never your fault and I'm going to leave it there. So much love.