Some women describe it as watching their own life from a few steps behind. Others only notice it in particular moments: lying on a massage table while their mind drifts up to the ceiling and stays there, going quiet and far away during sex, or realising halfway through a medical appointment that they can't quite feel their hands. A lot of women never had a word for it. They just knew that at certain times the body carried on and they weren't fully in it.
The word is dissociation, and it is one of the most common and least discussed after-effects of trauma, particularly sexual trauma. It is also far more widespread than most people assume. More than one in five Australian women have experienced sexual violence since the age of fifteen,¹ and the Australian Child Maltreatment Study found that 37 per cent of women experienced sexual abuse before they turned eighteen.² Behind those numbers are many women who may be living outside their own bodies without ever having linked the two.
This piece looks at what dissociation is, why the body does it, and why approaches that work through the body (breath, slow attention to sensation, and Tantra bodywork) are increasingly part of how women find their way back.
One note before going further: Everything here applies to anyone, whatever their gender. We speak about women because women are who we work with, not to single any gender out.
What dissociation can feel like from the inside
Dissociation is the mind's way of putting distance between you and an experience that is too much to be fully present for. In the moment, that distance protects you. The difficulty is that it can outlast the danger and become a habit the body keeps without checking with you first.
Bessel van der Kolk, the psychiatrist behind The Body Keeps the Score, describes how people who have been through trauma often come to feel unsafe inside their own bodies, and cope by learning to tune out what is happening within them.³ Cynthia Price, a researcher who has spent much of her career studying bodywork with survivors of childhood sexual abuse, notes that separation from the body is reported at high rates among these women, and that it began as a helpful, protective way of coping.⁴
Day to day, it rarely looks dramatic. It might be a numbness that settles in whenever you're touched, even by someone you love, or a fog that arrives during intimacy so that everything goes "fine" while you are somewhere else. Some women don't know what they felt about something until hours later. Others notice hunger, tiredness or pain only once it has become extreme, or relate to their body mainly as something to be managed, fed and kept going rather than somewhere they actually live.
It can also show up in the bedroom in ways that are easy to misread. In a study of more than 900 adults, women reporting sexual difficulties other than pain had significantly higher bodily dissociation, and women with low desire or arousal had lower body awareness than women without those difficulties.⁵ What looks like a libido problem is sometimes a body that learned, for very good reasons, to keep the volume turned down. There is an emerging connection between trauma and endometriosis.
Why the body leaves
Many women carry a private question they rarely say aloud: why didn't I fight, or run, or say something? The research on this is clear, and for a lot of women it comes as a relief. In a Swedish study of 298 women seen at an emergency clinic after sexual assault, 70 per cent reported significant "tonic immobility" during the assault, an involuntary state of freezing, and almost half experienced it at an extreme level.⁶ Freezing is one of the body's oldest survival responses. It is not consent, and it is not weakness.
Dissociation belongs to the same family of protection. The psychiatrist Daniel Siegel described a "window of tolerance": a range of arousal (not sexual) within which we can think, feel and respond with some flexibility.⁷ Above it sits hyperarousal, with its panic, racing thoughts and pounding heart. Below it sits hypoarousal, where numbness, flatness and shutdown live, and where dissociation tends to happen. Trauma narrows that window, so that ordinary things (a hand on the shoulder, a certain smell, a word, the weight of a partner) can tip the body out of it before the thinking mind has caught up.
Gabor Maté frames it another way. In his view, trauma is less the event itself than the wound it leaves inside a person, and at its core that wound is a disconnection from yourself.⁸ If that's right, then part of the way back is simply returning, slowly, to the parts of yourself that had to go quiet.
What the pelvis may be holding
It makes sense that the parts of the body most closely tied to a sexual trauma are often where it stays most on guard, and this is more than a figure of speech. In laboratory studies, women's pelvic floor muscles tightened involuntarily while they watched threatening or sexually threatening film scenes, whether or not they had any history of vaginismus. The researchers described it as part of a general defensive reaction.⁹ The pelvic floor braces under threat in much the same way shoulders rise and a jaw clenches.
Another study compared young women who endured rape in adolescence with women who had not. Three years after being treated for post-traumatic stress, the women who endured rape were still 2.7 times more likely to have pelvic floor problems and 2.4 times more likely to have sexual difficulties such as pain and reduced lubrication.¹⁰ The authors suggested the physical side of the trauma may simply have been left unaddressed. That finding may sound familiar to anyone who has done good work in therapy and still found that their body hadn't quite caught up.
Bodyworkers have talked for decades about emotion being "stored" in tissue, and science is beginning to take the idea seriously, referring to them as implicit memories. Fascia, the connective tissue that wraps every muscle and organ, turns out to be richly supplied with sensory nerve endings that feed the brain's sense of what is happening inside the body. A 2026 review in Frontiers in Psychiatry went as far as proposing that fascia may carry the physical imprint of emotional distress, including in the tissues of the pelvis, while noting that the clinical evidence is still young.¹¹
This is part of why, in Tantra bodywork, the belly, hips and pelvis are approached slowly and never assumed. When an area that has been braced for a long time is met with patience, and only as far as the woman wants to go, the bracing sometimes eases. Emotion can sometimes arise without seeming attached to any particular memory, and letting it go feels like a release. Neither is a goal, and a Tantra session in which nothing dramatic happens is not a lesser one.
Why touch matters: what the research on massage shows
Van der Kolk makes a point that is easy to skim past. Touch is the most basic way humans calm one another, yet it is largely left out of therapy, and as he puts it, "you can't fully recover if you don't feel safe in your skin." For that reason he encouraged some form of bodywork in his book, including therapeutic massage.³
The most careful research here comes from Cynthia Price. In one study, 24 women in psychotherapy for childhood sexual abuse received eight one-hour sessions of either massage or a body-oriented therapy that combined touch with guided awareness. Both groups improved in psychological wellbeing, physical symptoms and their sense of connection with their bodies.¹² A closer look at the same women found that dissociation reduced across the course of the sessions.¹³ Price has suggested that reduced dissociation, which she describes as a more coherent sense of self, may be an important part of why massage helps.¹⁴
One way to picture it: skilled, predictable touch gives a drifting mind something concrete and safe to land on. Where you might normally leave, there is a hand resting on your back, a pressure you can feel, a place to come back to. Repeated often enough, that small experience of staying can start to feel ordinary. It starts to alter the baseline positively.
Breath and slow attention: the quieter tools
Touch is only part of the picture. Van der Kolk and his colleagues ran a randomised trial with 64 women living with chronic post-traumatic stress that hadn't responded to other treatment. After ten weekly classes of trauma-informed yoga, 52 per cent of the yoga group no longer met the criteria for PTSD, compared with 21 per cent of women who attended health education classes instead.¹⁵ This wasn't athletic yoga. It was a mindfulness-based practice that combined simple postures, breathing and attention to what was happening in the body.
Breath is the simplest of these tools and the one you carry everywhere. A systematic review of slow breathing, at fewer than ten breaths a minute, found it was linked with measurable changes in heart rate variability and with people reporting more comfort and relaxation and less anxiety.¹⁶ For someone prone to drifting, it is also one of the few things that can be used in the moment, quietly, without anyone else noticing.
Tantra shares much of this ground with yoga: breath, awareness of sensation and a slower, more attentive relationship with the body. In Tantra bodywork those practices sit alongside touch, so awareness and contact can support each other rather than leaving either to do the work alone.
Where Tantra bodywork fits: a body that gets to say no
Judith Herman, whose book Trauma and Recovery shaped much of modern trauma care, wrote that trauma strips away a person's sense of power and control, and that "the guiding principle of recovery is to restore power and control."¹⁷ Much of how I work follows from that.
Nothing happens in a session without your agreement, and agreement isn't a form you sign once at the start. You can pause, change a boundary, change your mind or stop at any moment, and you never need to explain why. I remain fully clothed. Touch goes one way only, from me to you, and there is no reciprocation involved of any kind. There is no expectation that you'll feel aroused, relax on cue, cry, have a breakthrough or respond in any particular way, and you don't need to perform calm, pleasure or spirituality to be doing it "right".
Tantra doesn't mean intimate touch is part of a session by default. For many women carrying trauma, sessions may never go there, and that is complete, worthwhile work in its own right. Where intimate work is relevant, it is discussed specifically beforehand and only happens with your clear consent, which stays yours to withdraw at any point.
For someone whose NO was once ignored, having a NO that is respected instantly, every time and without a flicker of disappointment from the other person, can matter more than any technique. So can discovering that it's fine to say YES to something small and then stop. What I've seen again and again is that the most important shift is rarely a dramatic release on the table. It is a woman realising that her signals are being read and respected, and that her YES and her NO carry weight again. Having that permission back in her own hands is, in itself, part of healing.
What the body learned through a negative experience can sometimes be met with a different, more positive experience at that same embodied level. That’s how the body will remember it. That's one of the places where Tantra bodywork can work.
Is now the right time? A few practical thoughts
There is no level of healing you need to reach before trying Tantra bodywork, but a few things tend to make the experience a better one, though these are not prerequisites in any way.
Some steadiness helps. Day-to-day stability, and support in place if old material surfaces, make a difference. The women in Price's studies were also seeing a psychotherapist, and the bodywork sat alongside that work rather than replacing it.¹²
Wanting to explore is a better starting point than feeling you ought to. If part of you is booking because you think you should be "over it" by now, that is worth noticing.
Start smaller than you think you need to. A first session can involve no intimate work at all. Learning what it is like to receive touch while staying present is a meaningful place to begin.
Notice drifting without judging it. If you realise partway through that you've gone somewhere else, that is useful information rather than failure, and often the moment to slow down, open your eyes, feel your feet or pause and talk.
Bring your questions. You're welcome to ask anything before you book, including the questions that feel awkward to put into words.
Coming back, at your own pace
Your body didn't leave because something was wrong with you. It left because, at some point, leaving was the safest option it had. Coming back doesn't need to be forced or fast. It can happen a breath at a time and one part of the body at a time, with someone who treats your pace as the right one.
Tantra is a complementary practice and not a substitute or replacement for trauma therapy or psychiatric care where it is needed.
References
Australian Bureau of Statistics. Personal Safety, Australia, 2021–22. Canberra: ABS; 2023. abs.gov.au
Mathews B, Pacella R, Scott JG, et al. The prevalence of child maltreatment in Australia: findings from a national survey. Medical Journal of Australia. 2023;218(6 Suppl):S13–S18. childsafety.gov.au summary
van der Kolk BA. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking; 2014.
Price C. Characteristics of women seeking bodywork as an adjunct to psychotherapy during recovery from childhood sexual abuse. Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies. 2004;8(1):35–42. sciencedirect.com
Carvalheira A, Price C, Neves CF. Body awareness and bodily dissociation among those with and without sexual difficulties: differentiation using the Scale of Body Connection. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy. 2017. doi:10.1080/0092623X.2017.1299823
Möller A, Söndergaard HP, Helström L. Tonic immobility during sexual assault: a common reaction predicting post-traumatic stress disorder and severe depression. Acta Obstetricia et Gynecologica Scandinavica. 2017;96(8):932–938. doi:10.1111/aogs.13174
Siegel DJ. The Developing Mind. New York: Guilford Press; 1999. See also Ogden P, Minton K, Pain C. Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy. New York: W. W. Norton; 2006.
Maté G, Maté D. The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture. Toronto: Knopf Canada; 2022. See also Maté's interview on CBC's The Next Chapter (2022).
van der Velde J, Everaerd W. The relationship between involuntary pelvic floor muscle activity, muscle awareness and experienced threat in women with and without vaginismus. Behaviour Research and Therapy. 2001;39(4):395–408. pubmed. See also van der Velde J, Laan E, Everaerd W. Vaginismus, a component of a general defensive reaction. International Urogynecology Journal. 2001;12:328–331.
Postma R, Bicanic I, van der Vaart H, Laan E. Pelvic floor muscle problems mediate sexual problems in young adult rape victims. Journal of Sexual Medicine. 2013;10(8):1978–1987. pubmed
Shah SM, Jahangir M, Alhudaithi GS, Taneja C, Alharbi FS, Lin X. Fascia's role in the mind–body continuum: a novel target for integrative treatments in psychiatry. Frontiers in Psychiatry. 2026;17:1687288. doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2026.1687288
Price C. Body-oriented therapy in recovery from child sexual abuse: an efficacy study. Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine. 2005 Sep–Oct. pubmed
Price C. Dissociation reduction in body therapy during sexual abuse recovery. Complementary Therapies in Clinical Practice. 2007;13(2):116–128. doi:10.1016/j.ctcp.2006.08.004
American Massage Therapy Association. In safe hands: massage and PTSD. Massage Therapy Journal. amtamassage.org
van der Kolk BA, Stone L, West J, Rhodes A, Emerson D, Suvak M, Spinazzola J. Yoga as an adjunctive treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder: a randomized controlled trial. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. 2014;75(6):e559–e565. doi:10.4088/JCP.13m08561
Zaccaro A, Piarulli A, Laurino M, et al. How breath-control can change your life: a systematic review on psycho-physiological correlates of slow breathing. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 2018;12:353. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2018.00353
Herman JL. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence, from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books; 1992.
