Decolonizing Your Sexuality: Reclaiming Your Body from High-Control Systems
Who Gets to Decide What Your Body Means?
Think back, not just to the obvious moments—the church lectures, the family dinners—but to anywhere you felt your body wasn't really yours. Maybe it was a parent's rules about what you could wear, a classroom's demand for "appropriate" behavior, or a boss deciding your body was a productivity machine. Maybe you were shamed in a doctor's office, stared at on public transit, or side-eyed for who and how you love. These messages weren't always explicit, but they were everywhere: your body is up for review, and someone else gets the final say.
These systems didn't just want your compliance—they needed your belief that their control was for your own good. That's not protection; that's colonization.
It's not just about religion or family systems. High-control environments can show up anywhere—at work, in school, inside relationships, or even embedded in mainstream culture. And they all have one thing in common: they want you to look outside yourself for permission, for validation, for the right to feel or desire. If you grew up neurodivergent, queer, disabled, fat, racialized, or just a little too much for the default settings, you got the message double. Maybe triple.
How Shame Gets Under Your Skin
Over time, these constant corrections don't just leave you with a list of rules. They get under your skin, into your nervous system. Maybe you learned to mute your needs before someone else could. Maybe you stopped listening to your hunger, your restlessness, your longing for touch. Shame becomes a strategy for survival—an early warning system designed to keep you in line and out of trouble.
What nobody tells you is that this isn't a matter of "just changing your mind." You can reject the beliefs, but the body will still brace, freeze, or shut down if it thinks feeling good is dangerous. If pleasure makes you anxious, or you check out during sex, or you feel like a stranger in your own body, that isn't a personal failing. It's adaptation. It's what kept you safe in places that never were.
When "Standard" Healing Doesn't Work for Neurodivergent Bodies
And if you're neurodivergent, the rules were never built for your brain or your body. The standard advice about "healing," "mindfulness," or "wellness" doesn't work when your nervous system is running a different operating system. When therapists say "just breathe through it" but deep breathing triggers your anxiety, or when meditation practices ignore how your brain naturally processes information, or when "grounding techniques" assume you experience sensory input the same way neurotypical people do—these approaches don't liberate; they further alienate. You deserve ways of coming home to yourself that are actually possible for you, not just for the so-called "default" people.
Healing Isn't Linear, and That's Real Progress
Let's be honest: most healing isn't a beautiful transformation montage. Sometimes it's ugly crying, regression, rage, or feeling nothing at all. Sometimes it's a week of progress, then a month of feeling stuck. That's not failure. It's evidence you're alive and learning new ways to inhabit a body that's been a battleground.
Reclaiming your sexuality or autonomy isn't about performing for applause. It's about experimenting, making mistakes, trying things that actually work for your nervous system. It might look like stimming, seeking out sensations that ground you, or saying "no" even when you were taught never to refuse. Your rituals don't have to be pretty. They have to be real.
A Tiny Practice for When Shame Shows Up
Try this: Next time shame shows up during pleasure or intimacy, place a hand on your body (anywhere that feels right) and silently say, "I notice shame is here. It doesn't get to decide what happens next." This tiny act of witnessing creates critical distance between you and the shame response—a first step in reclaiming your autonomic nervous system from external control.
Holiday Triggers and Religious Echoes
As we approach holiday seasons and family gatherings, many of us feel the ghosts of religious trauma and family shame systems resurface. The carols that once came with purity messages, the dinner tables where your body was commented on, the rituals that reinforced whose authority mattered most—these aren't just uncomfortable memories. They're somatic triggers that can reactivate old patterns of disconnection and shame.
Notice if you're bracing for these encounters. That tension in your jaw, the tightness in your chest, the way your appetite changes—these aren't character flaws. They're your brilliant body remembering what kept you safe. Liberation means you get to choose different protections now, including the radical acts of leaving early, setting boundaries, or not showing up at all to spaces that demand your dissociation.
You Don't Have to Do This Alone
Shame thrives in isolation. It withers in community. You don't need an audience for every messy moment, but you do need spaces—online or in person—where other people get it. Find your fellow rebels, your neurodivergent kin, your queer, disabled, fat, or just-too-much-for-this-world companions. Healing becomes possible, and even joyful, when someone looks at you and says, "You're not too much. You're just here."
Join the Collective Resistance
If you're ready to get radical, here's your invitation: share one small act of bodily reclamation—whatever it looks like for you. Post it, comment, or DM your story for a future episode or post (with your permission, of course). This isn't just personal healing; it's collective resistance against systems designed to keep us disconnected from our own power. Your reclamation becomes a roadmap for others still searching for their way back home.
Your body was never the problem. Your pleasure was never meant to be policed. The revolution isn't just coming home to yourself—it's dismantling the systems that made that journey necessary in the first place.
Want to go deeper? Join us in The Ember Vault at untamedember.com for resources, reflection prompts, and a community built for shame-smashing, pleasure-hungry, beautifully rebellious souls just like you. And if purity culture or religious sexual shame is part of your story, you'll find specific resources for healing from the unique impacts of these high-control systems.
Welcome back to your body. It's been waiting for you.
