Unshaming Desire: How Therapy Supports Sexuality Repressed by Racism, Ableism, Gender Norms, and Religious Dogma

Explore how therapy can help individuals process the trauma of repressed sexuality due to racial, disability, gender, and cultural oppression. Learn how somatic therapy, EMDR, and parts work support sexual empowerment and emotional regulation through a neuroscience-informed lens.

Why does embracing your sexuality feel like betrayal for your culture, your family, your gender, your faith, or even your own body? If you’ve ever asked yourself, "Why can’t I just be normal?" or "Why does sex feel confusing, scary, or disconnected?" you are not alone in that silent wrestle. For many individuals whose identities intersect with racial, gender, disability, or cultural marginalization, sexuality has never been neutral; it has been policed, shamed, or erased.

At Embodied Wellness and Recovery, we recognize that sexuality is deeply connected to identity. When your identity has been marginalized, your ability to feel safe, whole, and expressive in your sexuality often suffers. But therapy, particularly somatic and trauma-informed approaches, offers a powerful path to unearth, reclaim, and rewire how you relate to your own body and desire.

The Hidden Costs of Sexual Repression from Marginalization

Sexual repression is not just about the absence of freedom to express desire. It’s about the accumulated trauma of being told, explicitly or implicitly, that your pleasure, your body, your gender, your longing are shameful, unsafe, or invisible.

     — For Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC): Racialized hypersexualization (or desexualization) distorts how individuals see their bodies and how they’re seen by others. The "Jezebel" stereotype, for example, weaponized Black women’s sexuality, while Asian men have historically been feminized and desexualized.
    — For people with disabilities: The cultural myth that disabled individuals are asexual or incapable of intimacy can lead to internalized shame, isolation, or detachment from desire altogether.
    — For queer and trans individuals: Compulsory heterosexuality, gender norms, and religious dogma often create an internal war between authenticity and acceptance, safety and selfhood.
    — For those raised in purity cultures or strict religions: The body becomes a battleground where guilt, fear, and repression suffocate natural sexual development.

This repression doesn’t stay psychological; it lives in the body.

How Repression Affects the Brain and Nervous System

Neuroscience shows us that chronic suppression of identity, particularly under threat of rejection or violence, activates the brain’s fear circuitry, particularly the amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex, which can lead to heightened vigilance, emotional shutdown, or dissociation during intimacy (Porges, 2011).

When sexuality is repeatedly paired with danger, shame, or punishment, the brain wires in avoidance and disconnects. Over time, this contributes to:

     — Sexual anxiety or aversion
    — Dissociation or numbness during sex
    — Difficulty with arousal or orgasm
    — Performance-based or perfectionistic sex
    — Emotional detachment or fear of vulnerability

What’s often mistaken for “low libido” or “relationship issues” is actually the nervous system in a state of dorsal vagal shutdown, a freeze state that is the body’s response to a perceived lack of safety.

The Role of Therapy: Reconnecting with Safety, Pleasure, and Self

Therapy provides a sacred, nonjudgmental space to unlearn repression and rewire the nervous system for connection and pleasure. But not all therapy is created equal. At Embodied Wellness and Recovery, our integrative approach blends neuroscience, somatic therapies, EMDR, and parts work (like Internal Family Systems) to address the deeper wounds at play.

Here’s how therapy supports this healing journey:

1. Naming Internalized Oppression

Many clients begin therapy unable to name how systemic oppression has shaped their relationship with their bodies or desires. Therapy helps illuminate how cultural scripts and survival adaptations have informed their beliefs. Through compassionate exploration, clients begin to see their "blocks" not as personal flaws but as protective responses to real pain.

2. EMDR to Reprocess Root Trauma

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) allows clients to target formative memories where repression, shame, or sexual trauma became internalized. Whether it's a moment of public humiliation, a religious sermon, or parental punishment, EMDR helps the brain update those memories so they’re no longer stored as threats.

3. Somatic Therapy to Restore Safety in the Body

Repressed sexuality often lives in the body as tension, numbness, or shutdown. Somatic therapy works directly with the nervous system to restore regulation and awareness. Clients learn grounding, breathwork, and movement practices to reconnect with sensation and increase their window of tolerance for arousal, vulnerability, and joy.

4. Parts Work to Heal the Inner Conflict

Internal Family Systems (IFS) and parts work reveal the inner exiles, those younger parts of ourselves who carry shame or grief, and the protectors that keep sexuality guarded or cut off.

By building a relationship with these parts, clients foster inner safety and self-compassion, allowing pleasure to emerge from within.

Real Questions Clients Ask

     — Why do I feel ashamed after sex, even with someone I love?
    — Why can’t I enjoy intimacy without dissociating?
     — Why do I only feel desire in certain gender roles or settings?
    — Why does sex feel performative or disconnected from my real self?
     — Why do I freeze when someone touches me, even when I want them to?

These are not signs of dysfunction. They are signs of a body that adapted to survive in a world that didn’t make room for your wholeness.

Creating Space for Authentic Sexuality

Reclaiming your sexuality is not about fitting into a model of what sex “should” look like. It’s about finding your relationship to pleasure, connection, and embodiment on your terms. Whether that includes kink, celibacy, polyamory, queer expression, or simply the freedom to feel at home in your skin, it is valid.

At Embodied Wellness and Recovery, we help clients unearth their truths beneath the conditioning. We recognize that healing sexuality isn’t a linear path; it’s a spiral of remembering, grieving, and reimagining what it means to feel alive and whole.

Reclaiming You Sexuality

If your sexuality has been shaped by the weight of racial, religious, gender, or cultural shame, know this: you are not broken; you are becoming.

Therapy can help you reclaim the parts of yourself that were silenced, shamed, or shut down, not just cognitively, but in your cells, breath, and heartbeat. It can offer you a path not just to understanding, but to embodied liberation.

🔍 Want to go deeper?

At Embodied Wellness and Recovery, we specialize in somatic therapy, EMDR, and relational healing for clients navigating identity, intimacy, and trauma. Whether you’re working through sexual repression, religious shame, racialized trauma, or chronic disconnection, we’re here to help you come home to your whole self.

Contact us today to schedule a free 20-minute consultation and begin your journey toward embodied sexuality and emotional freedom.

📞 Call us at (310) 651-8458

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References: 

1. Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-regulation. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

2. Siegel, D. J. (2012). The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (2nd ed.). New York: Guilford Press.

3. Van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking.