Body-First Healing Podcast

Why Intimacy Can Feel So Hard: Healing Attachment Wounds & Relationship Patterns

• Britt Piper • Episode 32

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In honor of Sexual Assault Awareness Month beginning April 1, Britt Piper explores a challenge many trauma survivors face: how trauma and survival mode can shape the way we experience intimacy, attachment, and connection in relationships. She unpacks why intensity can be mistaken for intimacy, how self-abandonment develops, and what it can mean when your relationships start changing as you heal. Tune in for a grounded, compassionate conversation that will help you better understand your patterns and begin building safer, more honest connections. 

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LISTEN, FOLLOW & SUBSCRIBE:

How Trauma Can Change Our Relationships

How Survival Patterns Can Lead To Self-Abandonment

Why Our World Changes When We Start To Heal

The Difference Between Intensity And Intimacy

Emotional Intimacy vs Physical Intimacy

Somatic Support For Rebuilding Intimacy

SPEAKER_00

Welcome to the Body First Healing Podcast. I'm Britt Piper, Survivor Turn Somatic Experiencing Practitioner and Aut. If you feel stuck in old patterns, overwhelmed by your emotions, or disconnected from yourself, you're in the right place. Each week I'll share practical somatic tools, personal stories, and conversations to support you in building a more regulated and embodied life. Because you can't talk your way through healing, you have to feel your way through. Together, we'll explore what it means to come back to yourself and create a life that feels safe enough to fully live in. I am so glad that you're here. Hello, my friend, and welcome back to the Body First Healing Podcast. I am your host, Britt Piper, Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, Trainer, author, and survivor. So I'm honestly really grateful that you are here with me today because today's episode feels a bit personal for me. And of course, it's going to be an educational one as well. And for some of you listening, it may feel like someone is finally putting words to experiences around intimacy that you have quietly carried for a long time. Now, this episode is airing on April 1st, and April is sexual assault awareness month. And April 1st is also the anniversary of my own assault that took place in 2009. Now, 17 years later, I still pause on this day every year. Not because I'm stuck there or because I want to relive the past, but because that moment in my life, that day, really changed the course and the trajectory of my life in ways that I could have never imagined. It changed how my body understood safety. It changed how my nervous system understood intimacy. And it really changed how I show up in relationships today. And we're not just talking romantic relationships, but every relationship. So what I want to talk about today is something that I see over and over again with trauma survivors and with clients in the Body First Healing program. And it's something that most people don't even realize it's happening. And it's this when we live in survival mode long enough, patterns of protection can slowly start to replace patterns of connection. And then one day we wake up and we realize that the intimacy that we were longing for somehow got lost along the way. So today we're going to talk about why that happens, what survival mode does to intimacy when it comes to the nervous system, how trauma reshapes attachment and our relational patterns, and most importantly, how somatic healing can help you rebuild connection in a way that actually feels safe in your body. All right, guys, so let's get into it. So, first of all, to understand how intimacy can get lost, we first have to understand what survival mode actually does inside of the body. Now, one of the most confusing parts of trauma is that it rarely destroys our ability to love. Like most trauma survivors still love deeply, they care deeply, and they even long for connection just as much as anyone else. But what trauma changes is not our capacity for love, but the nervous system's capacity for safety inside of that love or inside of the connection. And this happens because the body begins organizing itself and the nervous system organizes itself around protection. And that shift can happen so gradually that we often don't notice it until years later. Now, the reason this happens is because after trauma, the nervous system becomes more vigilant, right? And it does that by scanning the environment and the people in it for signs that something might go wrong again. So your mind might believe that someone is safe, right? Like they meet all of your criteria, check, check, check. They're the perfect person for you, but your body is quietly running a different calculation below the surface. And it's asking what it needs to do to prevent pain or rejection or harm from happening again. And when the nervous system is operating from this place, intimacy can begin to shift in these really subtle ways. And when this happens, you might still like find yourself in relationships, right? You might still be affectionate, supportive, committed, loyal, but instead of relaxing into presence with your partner or your person, your system begins managing the relationship itself. And this can show up by starting to anticipate reactions before they come, regulating your partner's emotions or the emotional climate of the relationship, or even just carefully deciding how much of yourself feels safe enough to reveal. So over time, that protection quietly starts to replace the actual connection within the relationship. And it's not because I feel like I need to say this, it's not because you stopped caring, right? It's not because you don't love this person, but because your nervous system learned that closeness without protection comes with consequences. And so once protection becomes the body's priority, it naturally then begins shaping the patterns that show up in the relationship. And those patterns are what we're going to explore quite a bit today through the lens of attachment. Okay, so these patterns are what we could call our like protective shifts. Okay. These, again, they don't often appear in really obvious ways. They commonly show up as patterns that we may have carried for years without even recognizing where they came from. But in trauma work, we often talk about fight, flight, shutdown, freeze, fawn, right? As kind of these survival responses. But those responses don't only appear in moments of crisis. They can also shape the ways that we show up in relationships. And these patterns or these strategies can then live on long after the original event or trauma has even passed. Okay, so let's break down some of these patterns. So when the nervous system learns that connection can be unpredictable or painful, it develops strategies to maintain relationships while minimizing emotional or even physical risk. Okay, so some people respond by moving toward others with urgency. Okay. They can seek reassurance, closeness, frequent emotional confirmation that the connection is still secure. You can kind of think of this as chasing or being codependent. And this is what we commonly refer to as an anxious attachment, okay, where love is deeply desired, but it's always felt like it's slightly fragile, right? As if it could disappear at any moment. Now, in contrast, we also then have some who use the strategy of pushing away. So not pulling towards, not chasing, but pushing away. Okay, they respond to conflict by moving away or separating from their partner. So their nervous system regulates itself through independence and emotional distance. And that doesn't mean that they don't care. Okay. They probably care deeply about their partner, but closeness itself can feel really overwhelming or even suffocating because the body associates vulnerability with danger. Now, this, of course, is commonly referred to as our avoidant attachment, and avoidance kind of falls under the categories of fearful avoidant or dismissive avoidant. We won't get into that today. And then another strategy, okay, maybe you fall under this category. We have many people who oscillate between these two states. And this is less of an organized strategy, right? Like anxious avoidant has an organizing strategy of moving toward or chasing. The avoidant has the strategy of pushing away or separating. That is an organized strategy. Disorganized attachment is a little bit of both. Okay. So one moment you might be longing for connection. The next moment you feel the urge to run away, to retreat. We call this the push and pull dynamic. Like we want connection, we want love. But then when it gets too close, oh, it feels a little too uncomfortable and scary. So then we push away. So it can look really confusing on the outside, but from a nervous system perspective, all of these patterns, all of these strategies are incredibly logical because your body learned how to stay connected just enough to survive. But survival strategies come with a cost, right? So the ways that we protect connection can slowly begin shaping who we become inside of it. And this takes me to what I feel like is one of the most devastating costs of living in these survival patterns, and one that I have been exploring quite a bit on social media lately. And that's the concept of self-abandonment. Okay. One of the most common costs of maintaining connection in survival mode, as we've been talking about, is self-abandonment. For many people, staying connected meant learning how to abandon themselves in these very subtle but sometimes very destructive ways. And again, this doesn't usually happen consciously, but it develops slowly as the nervous system learns that certain emotions, certain needs, or individual truths that we have might threaten the stability of the relationship. And so instead of expressing those things openly inside the relationship, the body begins to suppress them. You'll see this show up by softening your needs, okay. Needs that you feel like might overwhelm the other person. You might silence your instincts because you believe that might create conflict. You could learn to anticipate what will make the relationship easier and then begin shaping yourself kind of around those expectations. Okay, so over time, this pattern becomes so automatic that you likely don't even realize it that you're doing it. You don't realize how much you are shrinking, sacrificing, and self-erasing within this relational dynamic. And what's even more confusing is sometimes at first, like it can actually feel like maturity, right? It can feel like growth. It can feel like, oh, I'm really good at compromising, or I'm such a good partner, I'm so flexible. But when self-abandonment becomes the foundation of connection, something essential begins to erode. Okay, because relationships built around self-erasure can only sustain the version of you that learned how to disappear. These relationships cannot sustain the version of you that eventually heals, grows, and begins asking to be fully met. When you start to find that the life inside of you is outgrowing the relationship that you're living in, that's probably a good sign that you perhaps were self-abandoning along the way. And this is where healing begins to change everything. So at some point in the healing journey, there is probably going to be a moment when the nervous system begins waking up again into regulation and into prioritizing connection. And this is going to happen likely after years of dissociation or numbness or emotional suppression. Okay. Sensation is going to return to the body in ways that can feel almost overwhelming, especially for those of us who are participating or engaging in somatic or nervous system work. It's like our body comes alive again and we begin to feel things that we once ignored. And that can feel so confronting when it first happens because we can start to notice like the emotional dynamics in conversations that previously passed unnoticed. You might find that your awareness really sharpens. And then with that awareness comes this really deeper sensitivity to the emotional landscapes of the people around you. They can't manipulate you anymore. They can't silence you anymore. You also may start noticing kind of this quiet sadness behind someone's voice or the avoidance beneath a very casual conversation. And when you start to sense into that, when you start to sense that you are present with people who are not present with themselves, it can start to feel really isolating. So, all that to say, healing sharpens perception in ways that cannot be easily undone. And it can feel like you are now suddenly living life in full color while the parts of the world around you or the people around you are still kind of operating in this grayscale. And that new depth of awareness that you start to acquire can reveal something that can feel both liberating but also very painful. Okay, so that's the awareness piece, right? Like as we start to change, we look at the world differently. But now I want to talk about how as that awareness deepens, that you might also begin to notice shifts inside of your closest relationships. So let's just rewind here. And I just want to encourage you to go back to where some of your relationships started. Okay. Were you living in survival mode at the time? Were you actively healing? Were you a more secure version of yourself? Or were you stuck in some of these insecure attachment patterns? The reason I'm asking this is because sometimes we attract partners who meet us exactly where we are in our healing journey. So that means that a relationship might arrive during a time when we needed more reassurance, where we needed more excitement or stability or validation, or we needed someone who was more distant. Those relationships can be helpful. And of course, they can be meaningful because they meet real needs during specific seasons of our lives. So they may support us in, you know, kind of rediscovering parts of ourselves that we've forgotten. They might support us through moments when we feel lost or uncertain. And often the love in those relationships is very real. But as we begin to heal and our nervous system heals, our attachment and relational patterns also heal. So as we process trauma and reconnect with ourselves, those relational needs begin to evolve. Okay, so the version of us that once tolerated some of that emotional distance begins longing for presence. The version of us that once accepted, you know, partial connection begins recognizing the importance of reciprocity. And sometimes these shifts reveal something that is kind of uncomfortable truth. And that's that the relationship that once fit the version of you that was surviving no longer fits the version of you that is now healing. And I just want to state that realization does not mean that the love was false, that the love is lost. It simply means the container that the relationship was built inside may not be able to expand to hold who you are becoming. Think of it like you are now growing, and the soil that you have been planted in is not good soil. It's not fertile anymore. And I know this sounds dramatic, but there's probably a part of you that knows deep down that if you stay planted here, parts of you will wither and will wilt away. And it's in this kind of confronting moment that people begin questioning something deeper about what love is actually supposed to feel like. Okay, so let's take a breather here because I know we're getting deep. And I just want to kind of segue here for a moment into a conversation around intimacy. Okay, I think that one of the most common confusions that trauma can create in relationships is the difference between intensity and intimacy. So when we've lived in survival mode, okay, for a long time, intensity can actually feel like connection because it activates the nervous system in really familiar ways. So it can feel electric, magnetic, uh passionate, chaotic, or just really like emotionally consuming. But intensity is often fueled by nervous system activation or our stress hormones that are guided by fears such as adrenaline and cortisol, rather than being guided by genuine safety and our love and bonding hormones such as oxytocin and vasopressin. So when two people are operating from activation and likely unresolved wounds, the connection can feel incredibly powerful. Okay, you might notice or experience longing, um, intense chemistry, this deep emotional pull, but intensity alone does not create stability and safety. Okay, real intimacy is going to feel different. It is going to move much slower. Okay, it's not fueled by adrenaline, it's going to feel steadier, and it's also going to allow space for honesty, imperfection, and for both people to remain whole and authentic. Okay, no self-erasing here, inside of the relationship. So intimacy in love means choosing relationships that exist fully in reality, not just in potential or patterns from the past. And part of redefining intimacy also requires understanding something that many relationships struggle with today. And that's the difference between emotional intimacy and physical intimacy. So let's get into this just a little bit more here. So for many people, especially trauma survivors, okay, physical intimacy can sometimes be a substitute for emotional intimacy. It's like the body may know how to move toward closeness physically, but emotionally there may still be layers of distance, of protection, or kind of this unspoken truth between two people. Now, in healthy relationships, emotional intimacy usually precedes and supports the physical intimacy. And again, it's these loving and bonding hormones of oxytocin and vasopressin that actually open the body up more, right? That settle the body more for connection, for touch, for opening up. So just think of a flower here, okay, ladies. And also, too, like, can we just talk about birth and the power of oxytocin and this love hormone that actually opens the cervix, right? Oxytocin opens the body for. For bonding, connection, and reproduction. So feeling emotionally safe, okay, allows the body to relax into closeness. It allows for touch, for affection, for vulnerability and sexuality to feel grounded, mutual, and present. But when survival patterns are active, that order can flip. Okay. Physical closeness might happen while emotional closeness remains guarded. And then the deeper impact of this is instead of just the physical overriding, when there is so much emotional neglect and lack of emotional safety and intimacy, the body can even start to reject physical intimacy as well. Right. We see this a lot when we feel like our body wants to recoil from our partner when we're touched. We can start to feel rejection or disgust towards our partner. Okay, so this means that someone might share a bed with a partner while still feeling profoundly unseen and maybe even not safe. And that can start to create a lot of confusion because people may believe that they're close because they share maybe physical intimacy, while the deeper emotional meeting between two nervous systems never actually fully happens. Okay. True intimacy is going to integrate both. Emotional presence and physical closeness begin reinforcing each other rather than replacing one another. So as we start to bring the episode to a close, you guys know I love to give some somatic support. So rebuilding intimacy after trauma does not happen through just insight alone. Okay. Understanding our relational patterns intellectually is helpful, but the body must also experience safety again. Because without that physiological shift, the nervous system is just going to continue reacting to connection as if it's dangerous. So this is where somatic healing becomes really essential and really supportive. And while this process can take time, there are a few simple somatic practices that can help you to begin gently rebuilding intimacy within your own body. Okay, so let me give you a couple of options here. So first, we can start by noticing your internal signals instead of overriding them. When you're with someone that you really care about, can you start to pay attention to what your body is doing? Is your breath shallow or is it more relaxed? Are your shoulders tightening or are they softening? Remember that intimacy begins with reconnecting to the signals that your nervous system is already sending. Okay, second suggestion here would be to slow down your moments of connection. And this is important because trauma often pushes the nervous system into urgency or quick withdrawal. And that's that adrenaline, right? The survival and stress hormones that are guiding us. But intimacy grows in these slower spaces. Okay, so can you let conversations just kind of linger? Can you allow for pauses? Can you give your body time to actually register the presence of another person? Third tip would be to orient to safety before vulnerability. So that means before sharing something that feels emotionally important, can you take a moment to just ground your nervous system? You can do that by feeling your feet on the floor, by just taking a slow and steady breath, uh, by noticing something that feels really stable or supportive around you in your environment. And then fourth tip is allowing emotional honesty in small increments. Okay. Titration here. You guys know we love titration. You don't have to reveal your entire inner world at once. And honestly, that would probably feel really overwhelming for your partner. Okay, intimacy is built gradually through small moments of truth where you allow yourself to be seen just a little more than before. And then the final tip here is to practice self-connection first. The more comfortable that you become sitting with your own emotions and your own sensations, the easier it becomes to begin sharing those experiences with someone else. All right, my friends. So if you're listening to this episode and recognizing pieces of your own story in these patterns, I just want you to know that nothing about your experience means that you are broken, means that you are unlovable. Your nervous system adapted exactly the way that it was designed to in order to survive what it experienced. Okay, but survival mode was never meant to be your permanent home. Healing is the process of reclaiming the intimacy that survival once interrupted. It is the slow return to relationships where you no longer have to disappear in order to stay connected. And sometimes that process requires grieving relationships that cannot meet the person that you're becoming. And I just want to reiterate that that grief is real. Okay, but so is the possibility of relationships where you can finally be seen fully, loved openly, and met with the same depth and authenticity that you offer to others. And that kind of intimacy is worth rebuilding your life around. So if you are going through that season, know that you are not alone. I am here with you. All right, you guys, we are going to bring this episode to a close. Thank you so much for spending time with me here on the Body First Healing podcast. If this episode spoke to you or you feel like it could support someone in your life, please, please, please feel free to share either over on Instagram, tag me at Heal with Brit. As always, I love when you guys tag me in your stories. And if you feel like this is work that you would love to start exploring in your own personal capacity, then head over to bodyfirsthealing.com where you can join me in the Body First Healing program. There we do explore the concepts of attachment, nervous system, and somatics. And I would love nothing more than to support you in that journey. I will see you guys next week here on the Body First Healing Podcast. Bye. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Body First Healing podcast. If this episode resonated with you, I would be so grateful if you subscribed, left a review, or shared it with someone that you love. I'll see you back here next week, and until then, be gentle with yourself. You're doing the best you can with what you have, and that is more than enough. Just a quick note this podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for medical advice. Always consult a qualified provider for personal support.