Understanding Sexual Trauma Through The Body’s Wisdom with Ailey Jolie

What if the responses that seem most confusing after sexual violence are actually the body’s most intelligent survival strategies?

In this episode, Ailey explores how culture has taught women to doubt their instincts and how institutions have historically silenced survivors. She unpacks what truly happens in the nervous system during trauma, including tonic immobility, dissociation, the fawn response, and why arousal during assault can be a protective reflex rather than desire.

Through the lenses of betrayal trauma, complex PTSD, and the window of tolerance, this episode examines why awareness can be delayed, why leaving can feel impossible, and how survival patterns often get misread as consent. Ailey also explores the links between sexual trauma, hypersexuality, eating disorders, and intergenerational patterns.

This is a compassionate guide to understanding survival so shame can give way to clarity, and healing can begin from the inside out.

In this episode:

• 0:00 Setting Intentions For A Hard Topic
• 4:41 Why Disbelief Persists Culturally
• 12:43 How Culture Primes The Body
• 19:01 Betrayal Trauma And Not Knowing
• 25:23 Why Leaving Isn’t Simple
• 37:28 Delayed Disclosure And Shame
• 42:48 Institutional Betrayal And Justice
• 48:14 Complex PTSD And The Window Of Tolerance
• 53:56 Hypersexuality As Adaptation
• 1:00:48 Eating Disorders, Body Image, And Trauma

Learn more about Ailey Jolie:

• Find: Website
• Follow: Instagram
• Explore: Substack
• Experience: Insight Timer
• Sign up: InBodyMethod
• Email: info@aileyjolie.com

To follow along with the In This Body podcast:

• Follow: Instagram
• Find: Website
• Email: info@aileyjolie.com

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Setting Intentions For A Hard Topic

Ailey Jolie 1:46

Welcome to In This Body, a podcast where we dive deep into the potent power of embodiment. I'm your host, Ailey Jolie, a psychotherapist deeply passionate about living life fully from the wisdom within your very own body. The podcast In This Body is a love letter to embodiment, a podcast dedicated to asking important questions like how does connecting to your body change your life? How does connecting to your body enhance your capacity to love more deeply and live more authentically? And how can collective embodiment alter the course of our shared world? Join me for consciously curated conversations with leading experts. Each episode is intended to support you in reconnecting to your very own body. This podcast will be available for free wherever you get your podcasts, making it easy for you to stay connected to In This Body, the podcast with me, Aile Jolie. Welcome back to How to Be in This Body with me, Ailey Jolie. If you're new here, this is a podcast where we explore what your body knows that your mind might try to deny. Today is a solo episode around a topic very close to my heart. Today's episode is going to focus on the experience of sexual violence and violation in the body. Together, we're going to explore why we keep being shocked by how common it is, why we still do not understand what it actually does to the body, why there's so much distance between what survivors carry and what the people around them, partners, friends, therapists, doctors, juries are prepared and able to hear. I've seen this distance everywhere. Not only in my lived experience of sexual violence and violation, but also as a clinician supporting those impacted too. I've sat in training rooms full of other clinicians and watched them struggle with how a survivor's body actually responded. I've listened to my clients describe the moment they tried to tell a friend what happened and watched confusion land instead of belief. And I've sat with clients after they've been in courtrooms where their credibility was measured by whether they fought back or not. The truth that I want to explore today is that if we, as a culture, still don't understand how bodies actually survive sexual violence and violation, how supportive can we really be? How can a survivor be believed, supported, and held as if a culture and a community as clinicians were still living in disbelief? Right now, this question feels more urgent than ever because the news is relentless. Story after story, files unstealed, convictions overturned, survivors who spent years fighting to be believed, watching the systems that held their truth slowly dismantle it. And as I watch all this unfold, I notice two things happening at once. Some people are shocked. Maybe you're one of them. Maybe the news is showing you something that you didn't know was this pervasive, this protected, this systemic. And some of us are not surprised at all. Our bodies recognize this pattern long before any headlines confirmed it. Whatever lived experience you're coming to this conversation with, you deserve to understand what is actually happening in the body when it survives sexual violence and violation. And maybe that understanding helps you finally say what you've not been able to say. Maybe it gives you permission to name what's happened to you, or maybe it helps you understand what someone you love has been carrying. Or maybe it helps you understand what someone you love has been through. So today I want to talk to you about what the body holds, what it remembers, what it does to survive, and why so much of what women have been taught to be ashamed of was never dysfunction, but evidence instead. Today I'm going to go deep into clinical frameworks, the neuroscience, the history, and the patterns.

Why Disbelief Persists Culturally

Ailey Jolie 5:38

Because survivors deserve to be met with more than belief. They deserve comprehension. And the rest of us deserve the knowledge that will actually allow us to show up for them. Before I go further, I want to be really clear about a choice I'm making in this episode. I'm going to speak today about and for women's bodies. Sexual violence happens across all genders and identities, and every experience deserves its own language, its own specificity, and its own space. I'm not generalizing. I'm being specific because when we try to hold every experience in one conversation, we can sometimes end up not holding anyone's experience with integrity. So today I'm speaking to and about women, acknowledging that even doing that, I'm gonna have to do some massive generalizations. But I want you to know I'm doing this not because other experiences matter less, but I'm doing this because every experience deserves dedicated focus, time, attention, and integrity to the embodied experience. Additionally, I'm going to be using the word survivor throughout this episode. I know that word does not fit for everyone. Some of you prefer victims, some of you don't want to label at all. Use whatever language holds your experience. I'm using survivor as a container, not because I use that language for my own experience or think that you should either. I know language is deeply personal and also political. So for our solo episode today, I'm gonna start with a little bit of history. Because every few decades, women begin to speak about what was done to them, about what their bodies remember. And every few decades the same thing happens. They're disbelieved, pathologized, silenced, and then forgotten until the next wave of women start speaking, and power finds a new language for the same old silencing to happen again. I'm gonna take you through this pattern because if we don't see it, we can't understand what we're up against. And when we cannot understand why our silence, our own shame, our own inability to name what happened, because if we do not see it, we cannot understand what we're up against. And we also can't understand why our silence, our own shame, our own inability to name what happened, is not a personal failure, but is instead a predictable result of over a century of deliberate suppression. In 1896, Sigmund Freud presented his seduction theory. Yes, we're going all the way back to Freud today. Freud listened to his female patients describe childhood sexual abuse and he believed them. He also published his findings. And when he did this, the medical establishment was absolutely horrified. Not by the abuse, though, by the accusations themselves. Within a year, Freud recanted. He decided his patients had fantasized their abuse. He called it the Oedipus Complex. He determined that these women were not remembering real events, but expressing forbidden desires instead. Just take a moment to think about that. The foundation of psychoanalysis, the framework that shaped a century of mental health treatment, was built on the decision to stop believing women. The original trauma was real. The withdrawal of belief was political. A few decades later, in the early 1900s, women who could not speak, could not walk, could not stop shaking were diagnosed with hysteria. The word itself comes from the Greek word for uterus. The diagnosis was your womb is making you crazy. The cures were absolutely brutal. Institutionalization, forced marriage, surgery on reproductive organs, rest cures were given where women were forbidden from reading, writing, or any intellectual stimulation. What we now recognize as trauma responses, the body telling the truth, medicine called madness, and the treatment was designed to silence the body. And less than a hundred years later, in 1990, when adult survivors began recovering memories of childhood abuse and therapy, the backlash happened again and it was immediate and organized. The false memory syndrome foundation was created largely by parents who had been accused by their adult children. And here's what most people don't know. False memory syndrome was never a real diagnosis. It was never in the DSM, never validated by peer-reviewed research. It was a legal and public relations strategy designed to protect accused perpetrators and discredit survivors and their therapists. I remember learning about false memory syndrome in university in 2011, not with any context about where it came from or who created it or why. It was taught as an established science. And it worked on me. It kept me quiet and shut me up for a few years. And that's how effective these strategies are. They don't just silence the generation they target, they echo forward. Every single one of these moments carried the same message. Your body's memory cannot be trusted. Your knowing is suspect. Your experience requires external validation that will never come. And now look where we are. Women come forward, they named what happened, they testify, they submit their bodies to evidence collection, they endure public scrutiny for their sexual histories, their mental health, their motives, their credibility. They do everything the system asks of them, and the convictions get overturned on technicalities, files get sealed, plea deals get struck that defy explanation. The very thing that makes survivors feel believed, collective witness, the understanding that what happened was not isolated but systemic becomes the thing that is ruled pre-judicial. Your pattern doesn't count. Your collective knowing is inadmissible. Meanwhile, there are hundreds of thousands of rape kists untested in police storage across the United States. The evidence survivors submitted from their own bodies in the hours after assaults is collecting dust. This is not administrative backlog. That's a message. Judith Herman wrote about all this in 1992. She called it the central dialectic of psychological trauma, the conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud. The powerful have every interest in denial. The powerless have every interest in truth. And the study of trauma has been held hostage to this conflict for over a century. And this is the pattern. Freud to false memories, to overturn convictions, to untested evidence today. Different decades, same mechanism. Women speak, power discredits, the culture moves on, and women are left holding what the world refuses to witness. And what they're holding lives in the body. That's what the rest of this episode is about. Not just what happens during sexual assault, but what happens there before it. Because sexual violence and violation does not happen on a blank site. It happens on a body that's already been taught what it's worth. If you grew up in purity culture, you were taught that your worth was located in your virginity. A contested concept already. And you don't need to have grown up religious to have been shaped by this belief. Purity culture is so embedded in North American life that it's almost impossible not to have been touched by it. The message was that sex outside of marriage was not just wrong, but ruinous, that you could become contaminated, used, worthless. The metaphors were always about damage that could never be undone. You were taught this is the reason why women in these cultures were taught that they are the gatekeepers of male desire, that boys cannot control themselves, that male behavior was female responsibility, that if something happened, you must have tempted him, you must have led him

How Culture Primes The Body

Ailey Jolie 13:40

on, you must have worn the wrong thing, said the wrong thing, been in the wrong place. Research shows that people who grew up in purity culture often present with systems that resemble PTSD, panic attacks around intimacy, disassociative states during sex, even wanted sex, even years after leaving the belief system, vaginismus where the body literally closes itself off, the muscles clenching around penetration, the body enacting a protective response to messaging that taught the body that sex was dangerous. One researcher called purity culture a form of grooming, not because it's always connected to hands-on abuse, though sometimes it is, but because it introduces sexualized body awareness earlier than is developmentally appropriate, because it teaches children to monitor and mistrust their own bodies, because it shifts responsibility onto children for managing others' desires and behaviors. And when assault happens within purity culture context, survivors often face an impossible bind. They've already been taught that sexual contact aside marriage makes them damage. So the assault itself becomes proof of their contamination. They can't separate what was done to them from the shame they were always taught to carry. But purity culture is just one version of a broader pattern. Even outside of explicitly religious contexts, girls are growing up and swimming in messages about their bodies being for others, being for evaluation, being for consumption. Media teaches us to view ourselves from the outside, to monitor how we look rather than how we feel inside. It teaches us to exist in a state of constant self-surveillance. Antonio de Masio's research on somatic markers helps us understand what gets lost there. Somatic markers are the body's way of guiding decisions through felt sense. That gut feeling, that inner knowing, the body's wisdom accumulated through experience, communicating through sensation rather than thought. When we're trained to live in the external gaze, we lose access to our somatic markers. We become cut off from the body's guidance system. Research on self-objectification shows that women who are primed to think about their appearance become less accurate at detecting their own internal signals, their own heartbeat, their own hunger, their own fatigue, their own arousal, their own fear. This is called impaired interoception. Introsception is your ability to sense your own body from the inside, to know what you feel, to register your own states, and it gets systematically damaged by a lifetime of being taught to monitor yourself from the outside. This is not trauma with a capital T. This is ordinary girlhood. And then they're the rape myths. She wanted it, she asked for it. Look at what she was wearing. She didn't fight back, so it couldn't have been that bad. Only certain types of women get raped. If she was drinking, she's at least partly responsible. If she didn't report immediately, it probably didn't happen. And these myths don't just affect how juries see cases, they affect how police handle reports, they affect how friends and families respond. They affect how therapists and doctors interpret symptoms. And most significantly, they affect how survivors see themselves. Research shows that victims often internalize these myths as protective mechanisms. If I can find what I did wrong, then I can prevent it from happening again. If it was somehow my fault, then the world is still orderly. Then I'm not living in a reality where this can happen to anyone, anywhere, no matter what they do. The myths also make naming impossible. If you didn't fight back, if you knew the person, if you had been drinking, if your body responded, if you didn't report immediately, then by the miss logic, what happened to you doesn't count. It wasn't really assault. It was a misunderstanding, a bad experience, a regret. And so survivors walk around holding experiences they cannot name, knowing something happened, but unable to fit it into any category that would grant them the status of being harmed. So by the time something actually happens to us, many of us have already been primed. We've already learned to distrust our knowing. We've already internalized the belief that our bodies are not fully our own. The violation often arrives in a body that's already been made into a stranger. When it's someone you know, someone you need. Jennifer Frey developed a framework called betrayal trauma theory, and it changed how I understand why so many survivors don't recognize what happened to them until years later. I know it fundamentally changed how I understood my own sexual history. And the core insight of her work is that when the person who harms you is someone you need for survival, your brain processes the trauma differently. It had to. Because fully recognizing the betrayal would threaten the relationship you depend on. Think about a child being abused by a parent. That child needs that parent for food, shelter, safety, love. If the child fully registers the betrayal, they might withdraw. They might show fear or anger. And that could threaten the attachment relationship. They literally need to stay alive. So the brain does something remarkable and devastating. It blocks full awareness. Not because the child is in denial, but because the brain is prioritizing survival. And survival requires maintaining the attachment. This is why so many survivors of childhood abuse do not have clear memories until they're adults, until they're no longer dependent on the abuser, until it's safe enough to finally know. But betrayal trauma does not only apply to children, it applies to a situation where the perpetrator is someone the survivor depends on: a partner, a boss, a coach, a spiritual leader, a therapist, anyone whose relationship the survivor needs for economic survival, emotional support, professional advancement, or community belonging. In these moments, the brain calculates outside of conscious awareness, of course, is it more dangerous to know or not know? And when knowing would threaten a necessary relationship, the brain chooses not knowing. If you didn't recognize

Betrayal Trauma And Not Knowing

Ailey Jolie 19:58

what happened to you until years later, that's not evidence that it didn't happen. That's not evidence that you're making it up. That is evidence that your brain was protecting you, that you were in a situation where knowing was more dangerous than not knowing. And now finally, it is safe enough to know. I know for myself, this has been a really hard one coming from a history of childhood sexual abuse and looking back on relational dynamics. There's one that always stands out to me. I was traveling in a foreign country and I met someone and we went back to their place in the rice field. And I felt so unsafe and so uncomfortable. But in that moment, I fully depended on this man that I didn't know who had taken me into the rice field and I didn't know where I was. And so I just totally froze. And now I look back and I can name that that was sexual assault and I didn't consent. I was scared and took me such a long time to really honor that situation and to be honest with myself that in that moment I didn't know how to leave. I didn't know how to get home. I didn't know where I was. And so, of course, my body would respond in that way of shutting down and freezing because in my mind I had no other option of getting out of that situation. And so oftentimes when we bring up this concept of betrayal trauma, we can think of it in children and think of how they don't have the capacity to leave a situation and are depending on someone who's maybe harming them. And we can also maybe extend that a little bit more to a boss or a coach. But I always invite my clients to extend that out into other relationships that they've been in and other ways that we've been harmed. Because I know for myself, having a clinician that was really able to hold me and challenge me and question me to go deeper into the felt experience in my body allowed me to honor that a lot of my experiences fell into this experience of betrayal trauma because I didn't have another option to get out of the situation. And I was dependent or felt dependent on the other person and the maintenance of that relationship to stay safe, even though I was about to be harmed or was harmed. Maybe you had an experience where you did recognize that leaving, like my younger self in that situation where there was a moment in that example that I've just given there, my younger self in the rice field, where I did recognize what was happening, but leaving felt not possible. And this is where the question comes in that so many survivors face from others and from themselves. Why did you stay? Why did you go back? If it was really that bad, why did you just not leave? And trust me, I know these questions so deeply. And they're ones that haunt me. And I just have so much compassion for how painful these questions can be if they live inside your mind, because these questions reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of how the brain responds to abuse. And they can be so hard to get out of your head if you've had this cultural programming and conditioning, and if these myths have made their way into your psyche. What I'll say to hopefully help these questions move out of your mind if they're in your mind, or maybe they're ones that you're holding yourself. I'll bring in the frame of an abusive relationship. In an abusive relationship, the abuse is not the constant. There are good times, moments of tenderness, apology, connection, hope. And these moments are unpredictable. You never know when the good version of Person will appear. And this unpredictably creates a dopamine pattern in the brain that functions like addiction, what neuroscience calls intermittent reinforcement. And it's the most powerful mechanism for creating persistent behavior. It's why slot machines are so addictive, and it's why trauma bonds are so hard to break. The survivor becomes neurochemically bonded to the abuser, not because they're weak, but because their brain has been hijacked by the same mechanisms that drive any addiction. To have this conversation fully, we need to bring in Martin Segelman's research on learned helplessness. When an organism experiences repeated, inescapable stress, it eventually stops trying to escape even when escape becomes possible. The brain learns that effort is futile. Many survivors have tried to leave, tried to fight back, tried to make it stop, and nothing worked. So they stopped trying. Not because they gave up in a moral sense, because their brain learned that trying was pointless. I want to name right here, if you again have a history of childhood sexual abuse, this can play out in adult relationships later in life where maybe you don't want the sexual contact or it feels scary or too much. And yet there's no fighting action, no stopping action because earlier on in your life you learned that doesn't work. So as an adult, the body taking that wisdom of, okay, this didn't work back then, it got me more hurt, applies it to the adult situation. And this is a whole piece that I feel like oftentimes gets missed in how we understand what can be the repetition of trauma. I want to name that there is very real danger of leaving. If I refocus us back on abusive relationships, we know statistically the most dangerous time for a person in an abusive relationship is when they're trying to leave. Abusers often escalate when they sense they're losing control. And many survivors know this instinctively. This piece blends from relational abuse into sexualized violence. Staying often feels safer than leaving because staying is a known danger while leaving is an unknown one. Right in that sentence is what Evan Stark calls coercive control. I'm gonna bring us back to an abusive relationship example again. And in coercive control, there's a pattern of domination that often surrounds sexual violence too. This is the pattern of isolating the victim from friends and family, monitoring their movements and finances, controlling what they wear and who they see, gaslighting them into doubting their own perceptions, alternating abuse with affection. The result is kind of an invisible cage. The victim may not have any bruises, they may not be physically prevented from leaving, but

Why Leaving Isn’t Simple

Ailey Jolie 26:20

their autonomy has been systematically dismantled. Their sense of reality has been undermined, their support system has been severed, their resources have been controlled. So when someone asks you, why did they stay? the answer is because my brain was chemically bonded to my abuser. This doesn't have to be in an ongoing domestically violent or abusive relationship. This can happen after any form of sexual assault or violence. And I really want to underscore that. I've moved in and out of the example of an abusive relationship, but your brain can become chemically bonded to the person who was sexually assaulted you after the first incident. And that was held with more reverence because it's such, it's such a hard experience, such a hard and confusing and painful experience that culturally we don't understand. And I would even say many clinicians don't even understand that. This is how staying in contact with the person who assaulted you or the person you're in an abusive relationship or staying in the relationship happens. It's because the system and our culture has made it almost impossible to leave by gatekeeping some of the information that I've just shared with you today. Because oftentimes the only way we know how to survive is by staying. Because I was surviving the only way I knew how, the only way my culture had taught me. And that survival started in the body long before any conscious decision. When we encounter a threat, our brain's threat detection system activates before our conscious mind even registers what's happening. The amygdala, our brain's alarm system, responds in milliseconds. It doesn't wait for the prefrontal cortex, the thinking brain to analyze the situation. It acts first. This is why your response to assault was not a choice. It was automatic. It happened before you had any chance to decide what to do. The amygdala has several options for responding to threat fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and it chooses based on a rapid unconscious assessment of which response is most likely to ensure survival. And here's what most people don't understand. Freeze is the most adaptive response to sexual assault and violation. And it's also the most common. Research on tonic immobility, the scientific term for the freeze response, shows that it's an ancient evolutionary adaptation. Many animals go still when captured by a predator. This is not a decision. It's an automatic nervous system response. And in humans, it's extremely common during sexual assault. Studies suggest that between 40 and 70% of sexual assault survivors experience significant tonic immobility. They couldn't move, they couldn't speak, they couldn't fight back, they couldn't flee. Not because they didn't want to, because their nervous system made that decision for them in the service of their survival. During tonic immobility, the body releases endogenous opioids, its own painkillers. Heart rate may actually decrease, the person may feel detached from their body, as if watching from the outside. They may have fragmented memory of the event or no memory at all. This is where disassociation comes in. Disassociation during trauma is the brain's way of protecting the mind from experiences it can't integrate. Time may seem to slow down or speed up. The person may feel like they're floating above their body. They may feel like what's happening is not real, like they're in a dream. They may have gaps in memory or memories that come in fragments rather than a coherent sequence. And all of this, the freeze, the disassociation, the fragmented memory, is the brain doing exactly what it's designed to do when overwhelmed by inescapable threat. It's not evidence of consent. It's the body's ancient wisdom protecting you the only way it knew how. And then there's the fawn, the please response, the appease response, the disappear into accommodating response. This came from studying how people survive when fighting back would make things worse, when fleeing is impossible, when the threat is not a stranger but someone you live with, depend on, went on a date with, or feel you can't escape. Shelley Taylor's research on tend and befriend adds another dimension. She found that women's stress responses are often different from the classic fight or flight model, which was developed primarily by studying male subjects. Under threat, women often respond by seeking social connection and by tending to others. This is mediated by oxytocin and may be an evolutionary adaptation. In the context of assault, this might look like trying to calm the attacker, trying to create connection, trying to make the situation feel less dangerous by being agreeable, pleasant, accommodating. This is a sophisticated survival strategy, but from the outside, fawn looks like consent, it looks like willingness, it looks like cooperation. In the book, Women Who Run with the Wolves, the author, Carlesa, writes about the instinctual self, the wild knowing that lives in women's bodies, the part that can smell danger, that trusts her own animal responses, that knows what's wrong before the mind can name it. And she traces how that wildness gets trained out of us, how girls learn to override their instincts because their no is too loud, their knowing too inconvenient, their truth too threatening. The risk is even greater for women whose bodies are marginalized by race, disability, poverty, or identity. Women who know that fighting back might just not be ineffective, but might not just be ineffective, but actively dangerous. Women who have learned that the systems supposedly designed to protect them often cause more harm. This is not an isolated issue. This is an epidemic. The World Health Organization estimates that one in three women worldwide will experience physical or sexual violence in her lifetime. One in three. And those are only the cases that get counted. I want you to stay with me here because this is where so much of the pain concentrates, not just in what happened, but in what follows. I've heard some version of this more times than I can count. A woman arrives in my office not just with what happened, but the shame of how her body responded. No screaming, no running, just stillness, silence, collapse. And then years of numbness, years of sex feeling like endurance, years of wondering if somehow she consented by not resisting. And I want to be really clear here. Freezing is not consenting. Stillness is not safety. Disassociation is not passivity. An arousal can happen during assault. So can orgasm. This does not mean that whatever happened to your body when you were frozen is anything you wanted. Arousal in orgasm doesn't mean it's okay. The body can be terrified and still generate sensation. This is not a contradiction. This is survival. The nervous system is trying to reduce harm any way it can. Lubrication reduces tissue damage. Arousal can be a protective response, not a sign of desire. But imagine trying to explain that to a culture steeped in rape mess. Try holding the complexity when everyone around you uses your body's response as proof that you must have wanted it. And so what happens afterward is often where the most enduring pain lives. The confusion, the blame, the silence, the belief that fighting meant consent, that being wet meant you wanted it, the shame that burrows deeper than the event itself because your body responded in ways you cannot explain. And the shame is often what keeps survivors from telling anyone. There's another piece that oftentimes gets used against survivors. And this is the question of why did you wait so long to report? As if waiting is a sign of fabrication, as if real victims would immediately go to the police, as if delay meant doubt. The research tells us a completely different story. Delayed disclosure is the norm. I want you to hear that again. Delayed disclosure is the norm, not the expectation. Most survivors don't tell anyone about their sexual assault for months, years, or decades. Many never tell anyone at all. And the reasons are entirely predictable given everything we've talked about. Trauma memories are fragmented and sometimes inaccessible. It can take time for the brain to integrate what happened enough to form a coherent narrative. Betrayal blindness may have blocked full awareness. Survivors fear not being believed, and that fear is well-founded. They don't understand the biology that you can have arousal and orgasm, and that can be your body's way of protecting you by causing lubrication in a situation where you genuinely don't have desire. Additionally, many have internalized the myths, and additionally, many survivors have internalized the myths that we've explored together today and blame themselves. Many perpetrators also explicitly threaten harm if they tell anyone. And some survivors simply don't have the language for what happened. If the assault doesn't fit the cultural script of rape, they may not recognize it as assault for years. I know I've been one of those people. Even me, with all of my knowledge in this realm, have been one of those people who struggle to name their experiences of sexual assault because it doesn't fit the script of what doesn't fit the cultural script of what assault should or should not be. So I want you to know if it took you a long time to tell, if you're only now in this moment recognizing what happened to you, if you've still not told anyone there's absolutely nothing wrong with you. You are evidence of how difficult this culture makes it to name and report sexual violence. And here's one more thing that doesn't get talked about enough. What happens when you do come forward and the systems fail you, anyways? This is something I know so deeply and so intimately, not only being a clinician that has watched the system re-traumatize my clients, but also someone who's gone through the system and has been deeply let down by the system and also received an apology for being let down by the system, which is a very confusing experience to watch justice not be served and actively get an apology, which validates your experience of what happened is true and real, but also justice isn't gonna happen to you, which has been an experience that definitely shook my trust in the judicial system, which for many people is rightfully being shaken right now as they watch the cultural moment unfold. I want to bring in Jennifer Freight again, who I mentioned in regards to betrayal trauma theory. And she also developed a concept called institutional betrayal. And this is what happens when an institution that is supposed to protect you instead fails you, disbelieves you, or actively harms you. When a survivor reports to police and is dismissed, when they tell a therapist and are questioned, when they confide in a friend and are blamed, when they report to HR and face retaliation, when they pursue a court case and are put on trial themselves. Research shows that these experiences of institutional betrayal can be more traumatic than the original Saul because they represent a second violation, a confirmation that you are alone, that no one will help you, that the systems are not for you. The rape kit backlog I mentioned earlier is institutional betrayal. Hundreds of thousands of kicks collecting dust. That communicates something to survivors. These cases don't matter, these bodies do not matter. The time and pain you invested in that evidence collection was worthless. It adds layers of helplessness, of injustice, of rage that has nowhere to go. And it often prevents

Delayed Disclosure And Shame

Ailey Jolie 38:25

survivors from seeking help again. Why would you try again after being so badly failed the first time? If you reached out for help and you were met with disbelief, blame, or indifference, that was not your failure. That was institutional betrayal, and the harm it caused was real. Everything I've described so far, the betrayal, the institutional failure, the shame, the silence, all of it accumulates in the nervous system. And there are two frameworks that can help explain what the accumulation does over time. Many people are familiar with PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. It was originally developed to describe the responses of combat veterans to acute, discrete, traumatic events. The symptoms include flashbacks, nightmares, hypervigilance, and avoidance. But Judith Herman, the same researcher who described the central dialect of trauma earlier in this episode, proposed a different category, complex PTSD. This describes the response not to a single event, but to prolonged, repeated trauma, especially trauma that occurs within relationships, and especially trauma that begins in childhood. Complex PTSD includes the symptoms of PTSD, but it also includes features that are often more debilitating, difficulties with emotional regulation, feeling overwhelmed by emotions, or feeling nothing at all. Disturbances in self-perception, persistent shame, guilt, or feeling fundamentally different from other people, difficulties in relationships, trouble trusting, patterns of re-victimization, or avoiding intimacy entirely. This matters because the treatment needs are different. Standard PTSD protocols, which focus on processing discrete traumatic memories, may not be sufficient. Healing from complex BTSD often requires longer-term work on safety, emotional regulation, and relationship repair in addition to trauma processing. If you've been in therapy and felt like something was missing, if the treatments help some but not enough, it might be because your experience requires a complex BTSD framework. Dan Siegel's concept of the window of tolerance helps explain what this looks like in daily life. The window of tolerance is the zone in which you can experience emotions, respond to stress, and function. When you're in your window, you can think clearly, feel your feelings without being overwhelmed by them, and engage with life. But trauma narrows that window. You become more easily pushed out of it into one of two states: hyperarousal, the activation state, anxiety, panic, rage, hypervigilance, flashbacks, intrusive thoughts, difficulty sleeping. Your system is flooded with stress hormones, you can't calm down, or hypoarousal, the shutdown state. Numbness, disassociation, depression, fatigue, emptiness, disconnection. Your system has collapsed. You can't feel anything. Survivors of trauma often oscillate between these two states, ping-ponging between overwhelm and numbness, between too much and nothing at all. This is not instability. It's what happens when your window of tolerance has been narrowed by what you've survived. If you feel like you're constantly either overwhelmed or numb, if you can't seem to find the middle ground, if people tell you just to calm down or just feel your feelings, and it doesn't help, this is why. And widening that window takes time, support, and patience, and it can't be rushed, and it requires safety. It can't be rushed. For many survivors, they can be totally out of their window of tolerance, but look completely fine. So many survivors I've worked with express feeling completely shattered on the inside while the outside world sees a version that probably our culture would define as fine. Janina Fisher writes about what happens when trauma overwhelms us. She talks about how the psyche splits one part, which she calls the apparently normal part, keeps living. This is the one that's able to maintain that outside image. It works and socializes, going through the motions of daily life, really appearing fine. While the other part, the emotional part, holds the tear and it gets frozen in time, stuck in the trauma, carrying the pain that apparently the normal part can't afford to feel. And this is what we call structural disassociation, and it explains why you can be competent and capable in most areas of your life, but fall apart when something brushes too close to the wound. Your psyche did exactly what it needed to do to keep you alive and functioning. It compartmentalized the unbearable so you could keep going. The problem is that the exile parts don't stop existing just because they've been banished. They keep trying to be heard through symptoms, through triggers, through the body's insistence on remembering what the mind has tried to forget. Now that we've spent some significant time together exploring sexualized violence, I want to speak to one of the ways those exiled parts try to be heard is through a response that almost no one talks about. What happens when survivors seek more sex, not less sex, after assault. The dominant narrative says that trauma leads to sexual shutdown, that the proper response to violation is to close off, withdrawal, avoid. And for many survivors,

Institutional Betrayal And Justice

Ailey Jolie 43:45

this is exactly what happens. But for others, the opposite occurs. More sex, riskier sex, compulsive seeking of sexual experiences. And the shame around this is immense. Survivors who experience hypersexuality after sexual assault often talk about it. They feel like their response proves the myths are right. As someone who's both personally navigated sexual trauma and professionally supported hundreds of survivors through their processes of coming home to their bodies, I need you to understand this. Hypersexuality following sexual violence is a sophisticated nervous system adaptation that deserves our deepest respect rather than our cultural shame. Before explaining, because I know the shame can be so big, I want you to know that I know this territory personally. I experienced sexual abuse and exploitation as a child and more sexual violence as an adult. And one of the things I struggled with the most has been my sexuality. Because the childhood abuse had shaped it before I ever had the chance to. I cannot tell you what my genuine adult authentic desire was and what was a trauma repatterning. And if you're in that confusion right now, trying to feel out, okay, what is my genuine sexual desire? What is trauma? All that confusion, I want you to know that confusion is not evidence that something is wrong with you. It's evidence of how early the wiring got disrupted because you experienced something that no one should ever experience. Now that I've given that kind of disclaimer of personal experience, but also clinical experience and the validation that it can be super confusing and that doesn't mean anything is wrong with you, I want to explain what's actually happening when we speak about hypersexuality. The reality is when we experience sexual violence, our autonomic nervous system does not simply toggle between activation and shutdown. It creates complex Patterns that shape our capacity for connection, protection, and survival long after the event is over. Stephen Porge's polyvagal theory describes this landscape. Our social engagement system, the part that allows us to feel safe with others, to connect, to experience intimacy, becomes fragmented after sexual trauma. And that fragmentation seeks resolution. For some survivors, this manifests as the nervous system attempting to complete an interrupted cycle of connection and safety through repeated exposure to sexual situations. The body is trying to prove to itself that it can survive this territory, that it can have some control over what happens here, that maybe this time will be different. I see this often in my clinical work, what we call functional freeze. The body appears engaged while remaining neurologically disassociated. You can go through the motions of sex while being entirely checked out. You can seem present while you are actually totally gone. And this creates the paradox of someone seeking sex constantly while never actually arriving in the experience. And I know that this was a huge part of my sexual history. And it led to me to experience a lot more sexual violence and violation and trauma because there was this part of me that was putting myself in high-risk sexual experiences with people that were completely unsafe that I wasn't attracted to. And yet I was engaging in these sometimes long-standing relationships because I was being really driven by this part that wanted to find mastery or wanted it to be different or wanted to be changed. And it was only even in some of those experiences, I knew that my trauma was playing out. And yet it was such a strong current that I couldn't pull myself out. And it's now that I'm not in any of those dynamics. And I know the pull of that feeling in my body and what that trauma really feels like because I've had so much safety in my life more recently that I just have endless compassion for this experience. And I hope if any of this resonates, that you can feel some of that compassion and that you don't turn it on yourself as judging yourself or blaming yourself or shaming yourself or making yourself wrong or creating a story that you're the reason you experienced more sexual trauma because you were seeking XYZ. No, the body is always seeking healing. It's always seeking resolution, always seeking completion, it's always trying to serve us. And there are people in this world who are harmful and will perpetuate violence and violation on the body. And we are not responsible for that, even if we have a history of trauma. If we do have this patterning, each sexual encounter can become an unconscious attempt to discharge the survival energy that remained trapped during the original trauma. The body is trying to complete a stress response cycle that was interrupted by immobilization during the assault. It's trying to finish something that got frozen mid-process. Modern neuroscience has validated what Freud once called the repetition compulsion. I am bringing Freud back in, even though he deeply invalidated women, because the repetition compulsion is really great. And it gives us a really wonderful lens for understanding trauma from my perspective. So if I take the neuroscience lens to the repetition compulsion, we know that the mygdala becomes hyper-vigilant after trauma, constantly scanning for danger while simultaneously being drawn to familiar patterns. How confusing is

Complex PTSD And The Window Of Tolerance

Ailey Jolie 49:11

that? The familiar feels safer than the unknown, even when the familiar was what hurt us. Survivors unconsciously recreate scenarios not from masochism, but from a deep neurological drive to predict and control outcomes. If I can re-enter this territory on my own turns, maybe I can finally resolve it. And I know that was such a deep, dark, sticky, painful belief that I had for such a long time. And I so wish I could go back in time and just wrap my arms around my younger self and say, oh honey, sweetie, no, you you can't resolve this. It doesn't matter how many times you end up in this situation, it is always going to end the same. Always gonna end up her. But I I can't do that for my younger self. But I deeply wish I could do it for not only my younger self, but every single client I've seen in this pattern actively, or that I've seen in this pattern too. I'm bringing all this forward because it explains why many survivors report feeling simultaneously powerful, empty during periods of hypersexuality. The thinking brain registers choice. I decided to do this, I'm in control. Meanwhile, the emotional brain remains stuck in a trauma response. The two systems are out of sync, creating the confusing experiences of wanting and not wanting at the same time, of feeling in charge and feeling desperate, of being present and being gone. Your hypersexuality after trauma is not proof that you wanted it, liked it, or were not really traumatized. It's your nervous system attempting to metabolize an overwhelming experience through the only pathways it knows. It's the body trying to heal with the limited resources available to the body at that time. And hypersexuality is not the only way trauma moves through the body without being recognized. There's another way almost gets treated as its own issue when it's really part of the same thing we've been exploring today. There's a strong clinical link between sexual trauma and disordered eating. And the connection is pretty direct. And I wanted to bring this in because, again, it's such a big piece of the conversation. And oftentimes as clinicians, we don't want to draw a link between things unless we have quantifiable data. And yet, many of us do see this link in our practices or maybe our lived experiences or the resources and the clinical knowledge that's available to us. So I'm going to bring some of that today. And maybe there's a link for you, maybe there's not. When your body has been violated, controlling what goes into it can feel like the only autonomy available. I know that that was my experience. Because when you've learned that your body attracts danger, making it smaller or less visible or less attractive or whatever can feel like a form of protection. Because when you can't escape the sensations of being violated, numbing those sensations through restriction, purging, overeating, exercising, binging, all of it can feel like relief. Eating disorders or disordered eating and trauma survivors are often not about weight or appearance at all. They're about control, numbing, protection, punishment, or erasure. Their attempts to manage unbearable feelings through the body. Body dysmorphia, the distorted perception of one's own body, is similarly linked to trauma. When your body has been the site of violence, it makes sense that your perception of it becomes distorted too. Seeing your body as wrong or bad or gross after sexual assault or sexual violence is very sadly the norm. So if you've struggled with disordered eating, eating disorders or body image issues, and you also have a history of sexual trauma, these things could be deeply linked for you. Your eating disorder or disordered eating may be a trauma response. Your body dysmorphia may be a symptom of disassociation. Treating these issues without addressing the underlying trauma often doesn't work. And this is something I'm so passionate about because we know that the recovery rate from an eating disorder, as classically defined and diagnosed, is quite low. It's about one in three that receive treatment. I've been really curious about is the recovery rate so low because this link between sexual trauma and eating disorders and disordered eating is kind of fringy and no one wants to say it because we say that there is a link between eating disorders and disordered eating. Are we kind of painting everyone with the same trauma brush? Obviously, we don't want to do that. And yet, my clinical experience is because we don't want to do that and say everyone who has an eating disorder or disordered eating has been sexually violated, we oftentimes don't honor the link. When the reality is we live in a culture that is full of sexual trauma, I think that we're seeing that everywhere right now. How we speak about sexuality, how we speak about sex, how we claim ownership of the female body. I mean, there's so much sexual trauma in our culture that to deny there being a link between eating disorders or disordered eating and body dysmorphia and the rise of those in a culture full of sexual trauma to me feels uh quite confusing. So I wanted to just name that today because I think it's a really important piece in the conversation when we speak about sexual violence and violation that often gets missed. One piece that also gets missed is the reality that we carry trauma that's not even ours. So research on intergenerational trauma shows that the effects of trauma can be passed down from one generation to the next. And this happens through multiple pathways. There's the pathway of learned behavior by watching someone else, their hypervigilance becoming ours, their triggers becoming ours, sharing ways of coping. There's the pathway of attachment. Trauma affects how parents bond with their children.

Hypersexuality As Adaptation

Ailey Jolie 54:53

A mother who disassociates can't be fully present, cannot be fully present, and therefore she can't attend and provide the secure attachment needs her child needs. And therefore the child grows up with their own attachment wounds, which then affect their relationships and their vulnerability to trauma. And then there's emerging research on epigenetics, which suggests that trauma may actually change gene expression in ways that can be inherited. Studies on children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, for example, have found differences in stress hormone regulation that appear to have been transmitted across generations. This means that if your mother or grandmother or early ancestors experienced sexual violence or violation, you may be carrying echoes of their trauma in your body, not because you're imagining things, but because trauma changes bodies and bodies make other bodies. If you've always felt like something was wrong, like you're carrying something heavy, like you're afraid of things that have never happened to you, this might be part of the explanation. Healing may require acknowledging not just your own wounds, but the wounds of those who came before you. What does healing actually? So if you've got so if you've listened to this point so far, you might be wondering what the heck healing actually looks like. And it looks like things you probably don't expect because it requires something counterintuitive. It requires honoring the ways you've left your body rather than forcing yourself back into it. Also requires really acknowledging all the ways our culture continues to try and pull us out of our bodies, which is what I hope this episode gave you some insight and wisdom around, specifically in the experience of sexual violence and sexual violation. The truth is the nervous system doesn't change through force or shame. It changes through gradual embodied experience of safety and connection. And that takes time and patience and usually the support of someone who can stay present when you can't. Dev Dana, who has done so much to make the polyvagal theory accessible, talks about befriending the nervous system rather than fixing it, about being in relationship with your body rather than managing it or dominating it or forcing it into compliance. And this is different from the ways wellness culture often approaches the body, where the nervous system becomes another thing to regulate, track, monitor, another metric to measure yourself against, another way to fail. So the question is not, is my nervous system regulated? The question is, can I be with myself wherever I am? I want you to know that embodiment does not begin by forcing presence. It begins by understanding absence. And I hope you receive some information and understanding around your absence if you've experienced sexualized violence or you love someone who has, has been clarified today. Embodiment does not begin by forcing presence, it begins by understanding absence, by asking why did my body leave? What was it protecting me from? And what does it need in order to feel safe enough to return? In my clinical work, I don't push clients into presence. I help them build a relationship with parts of themselves they had to abandon. We don't start with stay in your body, we start with what made leaving necessary? Always. We create the conditions for safety slowly, steadily, until the body begins to trust that it no longer is in danger, until presence becomes possible. Not because we forced it, but because the threat has finally passed. So if you flinch at kindness today, if sex feels like too much or nothing at all, if you go numb when you try to meditate, if you oscillate between overwhelm and emptiness, if you spent years wondering what is wrong with you, I have lived those questions too. The numbness, the confusion, the aching to feel something, and the fear of what might come if you do. My healing has not arrived because I've tried harder. It didn't arrive because I found the right technique or read the right book or pushed myself past my limits. And I did all those things. It came to me slowly, slowly, slowly because I stayed. Because safety was not just talked about, it eventually became felt. Slowly in the body, in the steady presence of someone who did not turn away. My own somatic years ago and my partner today. Slowly, what happened when my body stopped resisting, not because I convinced it to come back, not because I forced it into presence, but because it finally believed it would not be hurt again. This is how embodiment begins. Not as force, not as achievement, but as a quiet, steady return, a homecoming. One that says you are never the problem, you are always the one protecting, protecting your mind, your heart, and your body, your home. If there's one thing I want you to take from everything I've said today, it's this. You're not broken for having responded to trauma with increased sexuality, with eating disorders, with staying in harmful relationships, with taking years to tell someone, with freezing during assault, with any of the ways you coped. There's also nothing wrong with you if a lot of the information I shared today with you was completely new and foreign to you. For those of you who did experience sexualized violence, I really hope that you were able to receive today that your responses were your nervous system's best attempts to survive overwhelming experiences with the resources available to you at the time. They are adaptive, they were intelligent, they kept you alive. Healing from sexual trauma is not about achieving some ideal of normal. I don't even know what normal means in our in our culture where sexual trauma is so prevalent. It's about expanding your window of tolerance so you can experience deeply embodied pleasure, delight, and joy. It's also about integrating the exiled parts, merging the apparently normal part and the emotional part. Structural disassociation is a part of your lived experience. And it's about learning how to gently stay with all of the parts of you and all of your experiences too. And this might mean for you, slowly expanding your capacity to feel pleasure without disassociation, to experience desire that emerges from your authentic self rather than your trauma, to discover what genuine sexual agency feels like in a regulated nervous system, to trust your body again and to trust your knowing again. It might mean learning to notice when you're leaving your body and choosing gently to stay,

Eating Disorders, Body Image, And Trauma

Ailey Jolie 1:01:45

not forcing presence, choosing it because it finally feels safe enough. The body keeps what power tries to bury. And every generation women dig it back up, not because they want to, because it never stopped asking to be known. A woman who finally hears her body becomes dangerous, dangerous to every system that tried to silence her, dangerous to anyone who needs her to stay outside herself, dangerous because she no longer doubts what she knows. You're allowed to be dangerous. You're allowed to come home. If this episode stirred something in you, if you're navigating the aftermath of sexual violence, or you're starting to understand the legacy of sexual trauma that's prevalent in our culture, and you're wanting to build a different relationship with your body, inbody is a 14-week guided journey back into your body. It's not self-improvement, it's not another program telling you how to be. It's just a slow, sacred work of learning to stay in your one and only body. The next cohort opens in May, and you can find out more and join the wait list at embodymethod.com. My Substack is a place where I write about all of this and more. You'll find writing on the frameworks, the critiques, and the things I'm still figuring out. It's paid or free. I would love to have you there. You can join at alejorie.substack.com. And if this episode meant something to you, share it with someone who might need it or leave a review. It really does help more people find the podcast. And thank you for being here with me today, for holding all this with me. If you are someone who's experienced sexual violation or violence, I'm so grateful that you allowed. I'm so grateful that you listened to this podcast and maybe absorb some of the information and were willing to really look and explore sexual trauma from this lens. I know how challenging and hard it can be to really come into contact with some of these ideas and acknowledge how much our culture is creating atmospheres and environments that make healing and coming home to the body after these experiences so hard. If you're someone who hasn't experienced sexual violence or violation, but loves someone or knows someone who has, because we all do when one in three women have experienced some form of sexual assault or violence, we all know someone. Thank you for being here and for being willing to learn and listen and confront again all the cultural stereotypes and norms and myths and beliefs that are deeply unhelpful and make it really challenging for those that you love to heal from sexualized violence and violation. I really have a lot of respect for your willingness to learn and grow in this area, specifically in this cultural moment where it's so important as so many people right now are facing a form of retraumatization as they watch how the world is responding to more disclosures and systemic silencing of those who've been harmed through sexualized violence and violation. Thank you. Thank you for your time. Thank you for being here. And I can't wait to spend more time with you. If you found value in this episode, it would mean so much to me for you to share the podcast with friends, a loved one, or on your social platforms. If you have the time, please rate and review the podcast so that this podcast reaches a larger audience and can inspire more and more humans to connect to their bodies too. Thank you for being here and nurturing the relationship you have with your very own body.