Alchemy of the Body – Healing Trauma Through Somatic Sex Education
- Brainz Magazine
- Oct 10
- 5 min read
Updated: Oct 13
Claire Gunzel is a registered counsellor and somatic sex educator in Victoria, British Columbia. She has been in the coaching and counselling space for seven years and is the founder of Alchemy Wellness. She is passionate about working with marginalized groups such as people who are neurodivergent, sex workers, and other underserved populations.
For many trauma survivors, the hardest part of healing is not remembering what happened, it’s learning how to feel safe in your body again. As someone who has lived through big-T trauma, I understand the quiet exhaustion of a body that won’t settle, the mistrust of touch, and disconnection from pleasure. For years, I did what survivors are often told to do, talk about it, understand it, reframe it. Talk therapy is, and will always be, profoundly valuable. However, my nervous system remained hypervigilant, my tissues tight, and my breath shallow until I began integrating somatic and erotic body-based practices.
It was then that I experienced what I can only describe as an alchemical shift, a transformation from simply surviving my story to truly inhabiting my body again.
Through my work as a somatic sex educator and counsellor, I help others access this same transformation. The process is grounded in neuroscience, Polyvagal Theory, and the embodied wisdom of the fascia and tissues that hold our lived experiences, our pain, our resilience, and our potential for pleasure.
Understanding the nervous system
Dr. Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory is a framework that maps the autonomic nervous system, your body’s internal surveillance system, into three states:
Ventral vagal (safety and connection)
Sympathetic (mobilization or fight/flight)
Dorsal vagal (shutdown, collapse, or freeze)
Cycling between hyperarousal and collapse becomes normal for those who have complex histories with trauma. Psychoeducation and real-time practice in navigating what these states look and feel like while experiencing them is a very real skill you can build.
You can learn how to befriend and regulate yourself through body-based awareness, movement, and safe, titrated exposure to sensations that have long been suppressed.
1. Relearning the language of the body
Interoception, the awareness of internal bodily sensations, is often changed or dysregulated in trauma survivors. In somatic therapies, we begin to shift things, moving at a client’s pace and creating a baseline of safety and trust (with themselves and with their therapist).
Clients learn to notice and verbalize small bodily cues, warmth, density, lightness, tingling, breath changes, or subtle openings and contractions. Each moment of noticing reconnects the prefrontal cortex (thinking brain) with the limbic and vagal systems (feeling brain), bridging the divide trauma created.
One way to engage with yourself and your bodily awareness is through a tool called mindful erotic practice. You can explore embodied well-being not as performance or pleasure-seeking, but as a somatic meditation. The goal is safety, not stimulation, and presence, not performance. Over time, this develops self-trust and the ability to discern your limits and boundaries (what your senses deem as feeling “good,” what doesn’t, and for how long), which are the nervous system’s language of sovereignty.
2. Fascia, armor, and the tissue memory of trauma
Modern research in fascia and somatic psychology supports what ancient traditions have long known, your body remembers. Fascia, the connective tissue that encases every muscle and organ, is a living sensory network capable of holding emotional imprints, even consciousness.
When trauma occurs, especially sexual or relational trauma, fascia can contract and remain chronically tense. This creates a felt sense of rigidity, numbness, or even pain.
Genital de-armouring is a therapeutic process aimed at releasing these stored contractions through mindful, attuned touch and somatic release techniques. It is not sexual stimulation, but an intentional, trauma-informed approach to restoring sensitivity and flow. Clients often describe a profound softening, increased vitality, and a reclaiming of their body as their own, sometimes for the first time since the trauma occurred, or maybe ever.
From a neurobiological perspective, this release is accompanied by parasympathetic activation, which supports emotional integration and physiological repair.
3. Pleasure as reclamation
Culturally, pleasure has often been seen as taboo, frivolous, or dangerous, especially for women and marginalized identities, who have been taught to prioritize safety over self-expression. Yet pleasure is one of the most regulating and freeing experiences the nervous system can access.
Through mindful erotic practice and genital de-armouring, your body can enter the ventral vagal state (characterized by grounded presence, ease, and connection). Pleasure, in this context, becomes a neurophysiological antidote to trauma, inviting your nervous system to experience aliveness without threat.
This is where you begin to reclaim your sense of wholeness, not by erasing what happened, but by re-patterning your body’s relationship with sensation and safety. It is less about “getting over” trauma and more about becoming who you were before you received messaging and experiences that pushed you to disconnect.
4. Cultural competence and sexual sovereignty
Healing trauma through the erotic body must also acknowledge the cultural, social, and systemic contexts that shaped each of our relationships with sexuality. Many individuals carry inherited or cultural trauma, shame, guilt, and fear rooted in religion, colonialism, gender norms, racism, or body politics.
In my practice, cultural competence means holding these layers with care and awareness. It’s recognizing that some clients’ nervous systems have not only endured personal trauma but also generations of disembodiment and systemic silencing.
Through somatic sex education, you reclaim what is innately yours, sexual sovereignty, the right to inhabit one’s body, pleasure, limits, and boundaries with full agency. This reclamation is not indulgent, it is sacred resistance.
When my clients reconnect to their erotic essence, their life force, they begin to experience the alchemy of integration, trauma transforming into wisdom, contraction into expansion, survival into embodiment.
Healing as alchemy
The alchemical process of trauma healing is not linear. It is cyclical, organic, and deeply human. The elements of the psyche (fear, pain, longing, pleasure) are transformed not through rejection but through inclusion.
As your body softens, fascia unwinds, and your nervous system finds rhythm again, you remember what wholeness feels like.
This is the invitation of somatic sex education, to turn the lead of trauma into the gold of embodied living.
Our bodies, when listened to, hold not only the stories of our past but the map toward our freedom.
To book a free 30-minute consultation, email here or check out my website.
Read more from Claire Gunzel
Claire Gunzel, Registered Professional Counsellor & Sex Therapist
Claire Gunzel is a Registered Professional Counsellor and Somatic Sex Therapist passionate about helping individuals and couples cultivate deeper connections, heal from past experiences, and embrace pleasure with confidence. With a compassionate, body-based approach, she empowers clients to navigate intimacy, relationships, and personal growth. Claire’s insights blend science, mindfulness, and real-world strategies to support lasting change. Learn more about her work and latest articles at [your website or link].
