Why You’re Not Broken and 5 Ways Childhood Trauma Impacts Your Sex Drive
- May 6, 2025
- 5 min read
Written by Kellie Sheldon, Trauma and Sex Counsellor
Kellie Sheldon specialises in helping clients overcome childhood and complex trauma, as well as sexual difficulties, to find their voices. Using human connection and evidence-based frameworks like EMDR, she boldly addresses the shame and stigma around trauma and sex, promoting healing and empowerment in her practice.
Maybe you’ve sat there, late at night, wondering why you never want sex. You might’ve looked at your relationship, your hormones, or even just blamed being tired. You tell yourself it’s normal, that life is busy, stress is high, maybe you’re just getting older. But underneath it all, there’s a quiet fear that something isn’t quite right.
This isn’t about shaming you into “fixing” your libido. It’s about something no one talks about, the way childhood trauma can shape the very foundation of how safe, connected, and open your body feels when it comes to intimacy. For a lot of people, low libido isn’t about hormones or technique. It’s about survival.
When you’ve grown up with trauma, whether it was neglect, abuse, or simply never being allowed to express yourself, your body learns how to protect you. And you’re not alone in this. Research suggests that around one in three children experience some form of stressful or traumatic event during childhood. Sometimes, that protection looks like shutting down your desire completely. (Source: Mayo Clinic News Network)
1. Your body has one job: To keep you safe
It can be confusing to want sex intellectually, to care deeply about your partner, and still feel your body pull away the moment anything physical happens. That disconnection often leads to self-blame.
But your body’s job has never been to please people. It’s to protect you.
If it learned early on that closeness led to fear, confusion, or pain, even subtle emotional withdrawal or pressure, it might respond to intimacy now with withdrawal. Your mind can say, “I’m okay,” but your nervous system might still be bracing for danger. And when your body doesn’t feel safe, desire won’t be the first thing it lets through the door.
2. You were taught to perform, not feel
So many of the people I work with were never asked what they liked. Sex wasn’t something to be explored; it was something to endure, to please, or to tolerate. If you were raised in an environment where your needs weren’t spoken about, or you were told directly or indirectly to “get on with it,” it’s likely you developed a kind of sexual autopilot.
That means your body went through the motions while your mind floated somewhere else. Over time, that disconnect becomes normal, and desire doesn’t feel like it comes from within. Instead, it becomes something you perform. And eventually, it just disappears altogether.
3. Arousal doesn’t always feel safe
This one is rarely talked about, but so important. When someone has experienced trauma, especially sexual trauma or shaming around sexuality, arousal can become confusing or even threatening.
You might feel turned on one moment and suddenly sick or shut down the next. It doesn’t make sense logically, and often people blame themselves or assume they’re being dramatic. But if your earliest experiences of arousal were wrapped in shame, fear, or powerlessness, your body remembers. A recent global review found that nearly 20% of women have experienced childhood sexual abuse. That kind of experience doesn’t just disappear because you’re now in a safe relationship. Your nervous system keeps the score. (Source: ScienceDirect)
This often happens without any conscious memory at all. The body simply reacts, and then shame follows, reinforcing the idea that something is wrong with you, when really, your body is just doing what it learned to do.
4. You might be living in freeze, not flirt
We hear a lot about fight or flight, but freeze is often the trauma response that goes unnoticed. It’s subtle. It can look like feeling numb, not being able to respond, or saying yes when deep down you don’t feel ready.
When your body is in freeze, your system is in survival mode. It’s not going to allow space for curiosity, playfulness, or desire. Even being touched can feel like too much. This is especially true for people whose trauma involved feeling powerless or whose boundaries were ignored as children.
You might feel like you’re “just tired” or that sex doesn’t do much for you anymore, but it could be that your body is stuck in a state of collapse, one that’s so familiar, you don’t even notice it anymore.
5. You’ve spent a lifetime numbing out
This is one I see again and again, and it’s usually the hardest for people to recognise in themselves. If you learned to disconnect from your feelings as a way to survive, it makes sense that pleasure also feels far away. You can’t selectively numb.
When you’ve spent years tuning out pain, shame, and fear, you also lose access to joy, excitement, and connection. It’s not that your desire is gone. It’s buried under years of surviving.
Wanting sex requires access to your body. It needs presence. And when your body hasn’t felt safe to be inhabited for a long time, libido is one of the first things to disappear.
A real story and a quiet shift after trauma
One woman I worked with came in convinced she was broken. She’d been through the tests, the supplements, the couples counselling. Nothing changed. She avoided sex, panicked at even mild touch, and hated how her body shut down whenever things got close.
She didn’t have clear memories, just an overwhelming sense that something about her was “wrong.”
We didn’t start with talking about sex. We started with helping her feel her feet on the ground, noticing her breath, and slowing things down enough for her body to stop bracing. Over time, we used EMDR to gently revisit the body-based memories that had never had the chance to be processed.
One day she sent me a message after cuddling with her partner. She wrote, “I didn’t flinch. I actually wanted to stay.”
It wasn’t a dramatic moment. It was simply about staying present. That was the shift.
If this feels familiar
You’re not broken. You’re not “too much.” And you’re not the only one.
Your sex drive hasn’t failed you. It has protected you. And now that you’re older, safer, and more aware, there’s room to do something different.
Desire doesn’t return because you push harder. It comes back when your body feels safe enough to stay, when you stop performing and start listening, when the goal isn’t to want sex, but to feel like yourself again.
Studies show that women with a history of childhood trauma are significantly more likely to experience sexual dysfunction later in life, not because they’re damaged, but because their bodies have never known safety as a baseline. (Source: Mayo Clinic News Network)
If any part of this feels familiar, start by getting curious. What might safety look like for you? What would it feel like to move at your own pace, without shame or pressure? Reconnection doesn’t happen all at once. But it begins when you stop trying to “fix” your body and start listening to it instead.
Read more from Kellie Sheldon
Kellie Sheldon, Trauma and Sex Counsellor
Kellie Sheldon specilises in helping her clients move through childhood, complex trauma, and sexual difficulties to find their voices. She uses psychodynamic (exploration of childhood), the body, emotions, and memories to remove the shame and stigma that is often found around complex trauma and sexualities.
Her university education, as well as practice-based evidence, has led Kellie on a mission to working with client in a unique way that empowers her clients to find their lost voices and build a life of joy and resilience. Her bold methods of working attract those who are tired of living in the shadows.
