Episode 6: Sexual abuse, shame, and what the body never forgets

This episode goes somewhere most podcasts won’t. We are talking about sexual abuse, not just as something that happens to individuals, but as something that moves through families, through generations, and through the body in ways that science is only now beginning to fully understand.

We explore how sexual trauma lives in the body long after the event is over, through dissociation, addiction, chronic pelvic pain, vaginismus, endometriosis, fibroids, and even cancer. We talk about what happens when you speak up and no one believes you. About the mothers who blame, who collapse, who go silent. About the shame that gets passed down through generations without a single word ever being spoken.

Connect with me: vevian@vozmediano.com

Transcript

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Welcome back to Breaking the Cycle, the podcast about unpacking your roots and rewriting your story. I'm Vivian, your host, and I'm so glad you're here. I want to start by saying something before we go anywhere else. This episode is going to be really sensitive. We are talking about sexual abuse today, not just as something that happens to individuals, but as something that moves through families, through generations, through bodies, and through silence. If this is a topic that lives close to you, and for many of you, it does, whether you know it conscientiously or not, I want you to know that you are safe here. This is not a space for shame. This is a space for truth. And truth, even when it's hard, is where healing begins. There is a particular kind of silence that lives in some families. You can feel it without being able to name it. It sits in the room at the dinner table. It lives in the things that are never talked about, in the way certain subjects get changed, certain questions get deflected, certain names never get spoken. It is not an empty silence. It is a full one, packed with everything that was never allowed to be said. And one of the heaviest things that silence carries in more families than most of us would ever guess is sexual abuse. Not always something that happened to you directly. Sometimes it's happening to your mother, your grandmother, a sibling, or someone in the generations before you. And it was never spoken about, never acknowledged, never healed. But silence does not make trauma disappear. It just makes it invisible. And invisible trauma doesn't stay contained. It moves through the nervous system of the family. It shows up in the body, in boundaries, in the way people relate to their own sexuality, their safety, their own sense of worth. It becomes part of the inheritance, passed down, not through words, but through patterns, through the body, through the silence itself. For many people listening, the abuse happened directly to you, in your body, in your life. And at some point, maybe as a child, decades later, you told someone, or you didn't, or you tried. In my work as a trauma-informed coach, I've sat with so many women who carry their abuse in silence for years before they finally had the courage to speak it out loud. And what happened next was this own wound. I've sat with clients whose mothers slapped them across the face when they told them about their sexual abuse, whose mothers ran into rooms and cried, making the child responsible for managing the mother's pain on top of their own, whose mothers looked them in the eye and told them it was their fault. I know this not only for my clients, I know it for my own life. I was sexually abused twice, once at 15 and again at 19. The second time I was in a relationship I stayed in, not because it was right for me, but because his family was close to my parents. I was choosing attachment, the love and approval of the people I needed most over my own safety and my own truth. I didn't tell my mother about the sexual abuse until about two years ago, and her response was to make me feel like it was my fault. I share this not for sympathy, but because I know some of you carry a timeline measured not by months, but by decades. And I want you to know it was never your fault. Not then, not now, not ever. The mothers who blame, who collapse, who slap, who deny, they are almost never responding to their daughter. They are being swallowed by their own unprocessed history, their own silence, their own wound that was never witnessed. That does not make it okay. But it is the cycle, and it is exactly what we are here to break. This is the part I really want you to stay with, because I think it is the most important conversation we have about sexual trauma and the most rarely had. The body is where sexual abuse happens, and the body is where it lives long after the event is over, long after the person has moved on in every external sense of the word. Your mind can minimize it, rationalize it, file it away, tell yourself it wasn't that bad. But the body doesn't rationalize, the body remembers, and it will speak one way or another until it is finally heard. Let me walk you through what it actually looks like. First, we're going to talk about dissociation or living in your head and disconnected from your body. One of the most common responses to sexual trauma is dissociation. And I want to describe this carefully because many people experience it without ever having a name for it. Dissociation is the feeling of not quite being in your body, of living mostly from the neck up and in your thoughts, in your mind, in a constant internal dialogue, while the body feels distant, unfamiliar, almost foreign, like you're observing yourself from the outside rather than inhabiting yourself from the inside. It can feel like numbness, like a kind of emotional flatness that you can't explain, like being in a room full of people and feeling like you're watching it all through glass. For survivors of sexual abuse, dissociation is not a character flaw or a malfunction. It was a survival strategy. When something unbearable happened in the body, the most intelligent thing the nervous system could do was leave, float above it, create distance between the self and the experience happening to the body. And it worked. It protected you. But the nervous system doesn't automatically know when the threat is over. And so many survivors spend years, sometimes their entire lives, partially dissociated, partially absent from their own experience, living in their heads because their bodies still don't feel safe to inhabit. Moving on to addiction, numbing what the body won't stop feeling. When the body holds trauma and the person has no tools to process it, no safe witness, no language for it, no space to feel it, the nervous system will find another way to manage the unbearable activation. And that is where addiction enters. Research is consistent and clear on this. Survivors of sexual abuse are significantly likely to develop addictive behaviors, not because they are weak or broken, but because the body is in chronic pain and the mind is desperately looking for relief. Food addiction is one of the most common and least talked about. And I think it deserves to be named directly. Overeating, binge eating, using food to numb, to soothe, to fill a void that has nothing to do with hunger. This is one of the body's most accessible ways of managing the unbearable. Food is legal, it is available, it does not require anyone else, and it works temporarily to bring the nervous system down from its constant state of activation. But it also keeps the person disconnected from their body, which for a survivor is sometimes exactly the point, because feeling the body means risking feeling everything the body is holding. Alcohol and substances work similarly. They chemically suppress the nervous system's distress signal. They create distance from the feelings that live in the body. They offer for a few hours the relief of not having to feel. And then they wear off, and the body is still there, still holding everything, still speaking. Other addictions to work, to relationships, to sex, to control, all follow the same logic. They are all moral failures. They are pain management strategies for the nervous system that was never given the tools to process what happened to it. Moving on to the pelvic floor region where sexual trauma lives in the body. Now I want to get very specific about something because this is a conversation that almost nobody's having and it needs to be had. Sexual trauma lives in the body, and it lives with particular intensity in the pelvic region. The hips, the lower stomach, the reproductive organs. This is not a metaphor. This is sociology. Vaginismus is one of the most direct physical expressions of this. It is a condition where the vaginal muscles involuntarily contract, making penetration painful or impossible. The body quite literally closes itself off. It says no in the only language available to it when the person was never able to say no out loud. For many women with vaginismus, the condition is directly connected to a history of sexual trauma or to the shame and fear around sexuality that was transmitted through the family, even without direct abuse. Endometriosis, a condition where tissue similar to the uterine lining grows outside the uterus, causing severe pain, inflammation, and often fertility challenges, is showing up increasingly in research as connected to chronic stress, trauma, and the suppression of emotion. Women with endometriosis have a significantly higher rate of trauma history. The body is inflamed. It is in a constant state of internal conflict. And the research is beginning to ask whether the chronic inflammation is connected to the immune system that has been perpetually activated by unresolved trauma. Chronic pelvic pain, unexplained, persistent pain in the pelvic region with no clear medical clause is one of the most common presentations in women with sexual trauma histories. The pelvis holds, it braces, it contracts, and when it has been doing that for years, for decades, the result is pain that doctors cannot explain because they're not asking the right questions. And then there's ovarian cancer, cervical cancer, uterine cancer. The research in this area is still developing, but what we know is this chronic stress, immune suppression, and unresolved trauma create a psychological environment in which disease is more likely to take hold. The reproductive system, which is so intimately connected to identity, to violation, to shame, is not separate from the emotional life of the person living in it. And when that emotional life has been suppressed, silenced, and unwitnessed for decades, the body eventually speaks in ways that cannot be ignored. Beyond that pelvic region, sexual trauma lives throughout the entire body in the form of chronic nervous system activation. Hypervigilance, that state of always being slightly on alert, always scanning for threat, never fully able to relax, is exhausting in a way that is hard to describe to someone who hasn't experienced it. You might look calm on the outside, but internally the nervous system is always working, always watching, always preparing for the next thing that might not be safe. This shows up in sleep disturbances, in chronic fatigue, in a startled response that is disproportionate to what triggered it, in the inability to fully be present in one's life because some part of you is always somewhere watching, waiting, and protecting. It shows up in intimacy, in the walls that go up the moment someone gets close, in the tendency to leave your body during sex, to dissociate, to perform, to go somewhere else internally, in using sex as a way of managing connection or avoiding it rather than experiencing it. This is why the research on trauma and physical illness is so consistent. A body that has been in survival mode for years, for decades, is a body that is running on empty. That is more vulnerable to illness. So, what does it take to actually heal something this deep? It starts internally with yourself, acknowledging that it happened, that it was real, that it was not your fault, that the shame you have been carrying belongs somewhere else entirely. That internal acknowledgement can take years to reach because the body has been protecting itself from the full weight of it, and it will only open when it finally feels safe enough to do so. The second thing healing requires is a witness, someone, a therapist, a trauma-informed coach like myself, a trusted person who can receive that truth without collapsing, without blaming, without making you responsible for your reactions. Someone who can say, and mean it, I believe you, I see you, this was not your fault. For many survivors, that is the first time those words have ever been spoken in relation to this wound. And the impact of being truly witnessed for the first time cannot be overstated. The third thing is body-based healing. Because talking is not enough on its own. You can tell your story a million times, but until you can connect with your body, it's not going to heal anything. Trauma lives in the body, and the body must be part of the healing. Whether that is somatic therapy or internal family systems, which is the type of psychotherapy I work with, breath work, pelvic floor movement, or simply the slow and patient practice of learning to inhabit your own skin again. The body cannot be left out of this process. Healing cannot happen from the neck up. Sexual abuse, whether it happened to you directly or whether it lives in the silence of your family history, is not something you simply get over. It's something you heal from slowly, nonlinearly, with the right support and with more compassion for yourself than you've probably ever given. If you have been carrying this in your body, in your silence, in the shame that was never yours to begin with, I want you to hear this clearly. You are never the problem. Your body was never the problem. What happened to you was a violation of something sacred. And the silence that followed was not the truth. It was just the only option that felt safe for the time. You are allowed to break it now. In whatever way, at whatever pace feels right for you. Before I let you go, I want to leave you with one question to sit with this week. What has my body been telling me that I haven't yet allowed myself to hear? You don't have to answer it right now. I just want you to sit with it. If this episode reached something in you, if it names something that you've never named before, I'd love for you to leave me a review. It helps reach more people and it inspires me to create more episodes. And if you're ready to do this work with support, I would be honored to walk alongside with you. I'm going to leave you my direct email in the description box for this episode. Thank you for being here. I'll see you on the next episode.