Medical Trauma and Sexuality

What Medical Trauma Is

Medical trauma occurs when healthcare experiences overwhelm your capacity to cope. This can happen even when the medical care is necessary, well-intentioned, and technically competent.

What makes it traumatic isn’t the procedure itself—it’s the experience of it. Factors that contribute:

Loss of control: Having things done to your body without control over what happens or when.

Pain: Experiencing pain, especially unexpected or inadequately managed pain.

Helplessness: Being in a position where you can’t stop what’s happening.

Exposure: Bodily exposure to strangers, particularly the genitals and breasts.

Dissociation: Leaving your body to cope, which can become a pattern.

Violation of boundaries: Experiencing touch you didn’t want or weren’t prepared for.

Fear: Fear for your life, your health, your future.

Common Medical Traumas

Childbirth trauma: Traumatic deliveries, emergency cesareans, feeling unheard during labor, unexpected complications.

Gynecological procedures: Painful exams, procedures without adequate numbing, dismissive providers.

Cancer treatment: Surgery, chemotherapy, radiation affecting sexual organs or body image.

Chronic illness procedures: Repeated invasive procedures, loss of privacy and dignity over time.

Fertility treatment: Invasive procedures, repeated failures, medication effects.

Surgery: Especially surgeries affecting sexual organs or body image (mastectomy, hysterectomy, ostomy).

Sexual health procedures: STI testing, abortions, or other procedures involving exposed vulnerability.

How It Affects Sexuality

Medical trauma can affect sexuality in various ways:

Avoidance of similar positions or exposures: If trauma occurred in a certain position (like lithotomy), that position may be triggering.

Dissociation during sex: The learned response of leaving the body kicks in during sexual vulnerability.

Difficulty with penetration: Especially after gynecological trauma, vaginal penetration may feel triggering.

Negative body relationship: Particularly after surgeries that alter the body, feeling disconnected from or averse to the changed body.

Loss of desire: The body’s general shutdown can include sexual shutdown.

Hypervigilance: Difficulty relaxing enough for arousal and pleasure.

Flashbacks: Sensory elements of sex triggering memories of medical experiences.

Why It’s Overlooked

Medical trauma often goes unrecognized because:

It was “necessary”: The procedure saved your life or was medically required. How can you be traumatized by something that helped you?

Others had it worse: Someone else’s childbirth was harder. Someone else had more serious cancer. Your experience doesn’t “count.”

Medical professionals don’t see it: The doctor moved on to the next patient. From their perspective, the procedure was routine.

It doesn’t fit trauma narratives: We think of trauma as violence or assault. Medical rooms don’t fit the image.

But your nervous system doesn’t care about the logic. If the experience overwhelmed your capacity to cope, it was traumatic. You don’t need anyone’s permission for that to be true.

The Path of Healing

Acknowledge It

The first step is naming what happened. “That was traumatic for me.” You can acknowledge this even if the care was necessary, even if others had it harder, even if the providers were kind.

Work with the Body

Medical trauma is stored in the body. Talk therapy alone may not reach it.

Somatic therapies, EMDR, and body-based approaches can help process what happened at a physical level—teaching the body that it’s safe now.

Reclaim the Body

After medical trauma, the body can feel like it belongs to medicine—a thing to be examined, treated, managed.

Reclaiming it as yours involves:

Pleasurable, non-medical touch
Movement that feels good
Body practices where you’re in control
Gradually experiencing the body as a source of pleasure rather than only a site of treatment

Go Slowly with Sexual Healing

Returning to sexuality after medical trauma requires patience.

Start with what feels safe
Maintain control over pace and activities
Communicate with partners about what’s happening
Be willing to stop when triggered
Gradually expand the window of what’s possible

Choose Healthcare Consciously

Future medical care can either reinforce or help heal trauma.

Seek providers who listen and explain
Ask for accommodations (extra time, someone to hold your hand, different positioning)
You can stop a procedure if you need to
Bring support people when possible
Trauma-informed healthcare providers exist—find them

For Partners

If your partner has medical trauma:

Don’t take their reactions personally
Let them control pace and activities
Be patient with healing
Educate yourself about what they experienced
Ask how you can help

Integration

Medical trauma doesn’t disappear, but it can integrate. The experience becomes part of your history without controlling your present.

Many women find that working through medical trauma deepens their relationship with their bodies—not despite the trauma, but through the process of healing it.

Go Deeper

These are the original writings this entry draws from: