Ep. 17 Why Your Body Shuts Down During Intimacy (It's Not You)

Have you ever felt yourself freeze up, go numb, or just... disappear during moments that were supposed to feel connecting? You're not broken. Your nervous system is doing exactly what it was designed to do — protect you.

In this episode, Chelsea explores the deep connection between nervous system safety and intimacy, weaving together Ayurvedic philosophy, polyvagal theory, and the ancient concept of Eros — the uniting force of love, harmony, and sensation that lives in all of us.

This is a tender, honest conversation about what happens in the body when intimacy feels out of reach. Why the nervous system shuts down before desire even has a chance to move. How neuroception — your body's subconscious threat detector — shapes your experience of closeness, pleasure, and connection. And what it actually takes to begin thawing a nervous system that has learned, over time, that it isn't safe to feel.

You'll come away understanding why freeze and dissociation aren't character flaws — they're protective responses. How the vagus nerve plays a central role in your capacity for intimacy and pleasure. Why processing the things that don't feel good is what opens the door to feeling good. And simple ways to begin signaling safety to your body so that Eros — that deep, sensual life force — can begin to move again.

Intimacy with others begins with intimacy with yourself. And that begins with listening.

00:00 Reconnecting With Eros

01:01 Nervous System Safety

03:13 Deep Listening Pause

03:48 Neuroception Triggers

04:53 Vagus Nerve Basics

06:01 Arousal Safety Cues

06:50 Freeze Mode Tools

08:43 Dissociation And Numbing

09:59 From Sadness To Pleasure

10:34 Eros As Self Intimacy

Chelsea Johnson Ayurveda

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Body Rhythm Podcast. I'm your host, Chelsea Johnson, talking all things diet, lifestyle, health, and healing with a dose of heart and soul. Hello. Today I want to talk about Eros or reconnecting with Eros and greater intimacy. So, Eros is one of the fundamental causes of formation in the world. Traditionally, it's called love. Eros was the uniting power of love, which brought order and harmony among the conflicting elements of chaos. When we talk about Eros, we're talking about love, we're talking about harmony, we're talking about balance of sensations that feel good, of acceptance and peace. Before we begin, we really have to look at the nervous system and our autonomic nervous system, which regulates everything in our body. Everybody has one. It controls heart rate, blood pressure, digestion, and sexual arousal. And we are our own experts on our nervous systems. Your nervous system reacts in a different way than mine does. And as human beings, we are designed for thriving. Nobody wants to be depressed. No one wants to be stressed out. Nobody wants to feel lost or not knowing why they are here. And so a nervous system that doesn't feel safe supports narratives that we tell ourselves that we are not safe. And then we tell ourselves that we're not safe, then the body doesn't feel safe. And it becomes this feedback loop of not feeling safe and supported, which in turn can lead to these continued feelings of not feeling wanted, feeling depressed, not knowing what we're doing here on this earth, not knowing what is happening. And so the autonomic nervous system controls our breathing, it controls sleep, it controls our deep relationships with others. The autonomic nervous system has to be balanced to develop greater intimacy and more resilience. But in order to get there, we have to begin to notice what is happening in our own body. This is the deep listening, the taking the pause to ask ourselves what's happening and what we need. Because the autonomic nervous system is um so primitive, it sometimes is reacting to what has happened to us previously rather than what's happening in the moment. And if you've ever had uh something happen, maybe you're with your partner and they say something to you perfectly normal, and you just go off, right? And they're like, Whoa, what happened? And you don't know where it came from. You kind of just reacted in the moment. They don't know what happened, and so they're taking it personally, like, hey, what did I do? And you're not quite sure what's happening, and that can be because the autonomic nervous system is reacting to something that happened previously that's in the subconscious, and it's called neurosception. It's a process where the nervous system is evaluating the cues of safety, of danger, of threats, and it operates at a more primitive level than our consciousness, and the vagal nerve is the main nerve of our parasympathetic nervous system, which is the rest and digest nervous system. The system controls all of the functions such as digestion and heart rate and our immune system, and these functions are involuntary. That means that you can't consciously control them. And the vagus nerve accounts for about 75% of the parasympathetic nervous system. The vagus nerve is the longest cranial nerve. It runs from your brain to your large intestine, and the vagus nerve supports efficient emotion recognition for promoting safety and survival. It is linked to the ability to monitor and regulate our attention, our emotions, our communication. And so when we think about sexual arousal, the very first step of sexual arousal is maybe a glance. It's a very subtle cue, maybe it's just a thought. But the nervous system is beginning to send signals of safety. Are you safe enough to take this further? And so, in our reaction, if we are feeling safe enough, we might move further into the sexual arousal response. So maybe a gland, we move toward each other and it becomes a touch. But if we're feeling too vulnerable, if the nervous system is sending signals that it's not safe, then we might begin to freeze up. And if we don't have the tools to adapt to the situation, then the sexual arousal response isn't gonna go any further. In times of intimacy, this freeze mode might communicate that we want to flee. And so that's where communication can become very important. Communicating with ourself, with our partner, maybe looking into our partner's eyes, maybe coming back to a connection with ourselves, taking a time out, maybe doing some sweet sighs, or naming the emotion, or maybe it's just touch that feels really good, the arms or the hands or the palms. But if we've been in a state where the parasympathetic is receiving signals that it's not safe, it takes time for the parasympathetic to thought about. It takes time to begin to tell the parasympathetic you're safe and you're supported, especially if over time it's been told that it's not safe, that it has to freeze to feel protected. The system, though, will learn to find its way back to reconnection. It will learn to find its way back to balance. One of the ways that we can see if the parasympathetic is in a frozen state is it numbs out and we can't feel emotions. You know, we might say something like, I don't care, it is what it is. That's disassociation. The disassociation from the emotion, but also disassociation from the body. If the emotions aren't moving, if they're not being processed, then we are in the first step of becoming rigid. And that's not to say that that doesn't serve its purpose. You know, sometimes there's just so much happening that we have to say, I don't care, because it's too much to deal with in that moment, or we have to respond with it is what it is. If you don't have the capacity to deal with it in the moment, then that's okay too. But can you realize when you're saying that it's because you're not wanting to deal with what's happening and you know that you're gonna have to deal with it when things have kind of calmed down a little bit, when you allow yourself to have a little bit more space. And the more we can begin to access the sad things that happen to us, the more we can begin to access pleasure. Pleasure during intimacy with our partners, pleasure when we're eating a delicious meal. We we don't want to be flat all the time. It's an evolved practice of loving ourselves, and loving ourselves means processing all of the things that don't feel good of loving ourselves. This is what Eros is, this is what connection is. It's intimacy with ourselves, but intimacy with our nervous system and being able to recognize what is happening and how we move forward. That's it for this edition of the body rhythm. Thank you for joining me. Be well and nourished.