Understanding Your Body’s Resistance to Intimacy
We can love someone deeply and still find ourselves holding back when it comes to physical intimacy.
Not because we don’t trust them. Not because we don’t feel safe. But because something within us can't fully let go—won’t allow us to soften, open, and receive intimacy in the way we long to.
For so many women, intimacy is not just about the present moment—it carries so much of the past with it. It holds the weight of everything we’ve absorbed about our bodies, our desires, and what it means to be open. Even in the arms of someone we love, we may feel a quiet resistance arise. The body tenses. The breath shallows. Something inside us braces, as if protecting us against a danger that isn’t there.
And we wonder: Why can’t I just let go?
The Body Remembers
When we struggle to surrender in intimacy, it’s rarely about our partner or even the moment itself. It’s almost always about what the body is remembering from past experiences. Even when we’ve done the intellectual work to understand our trauma, acknowledge where it comes from, and let it go mentally, the body may well still be holding the physical imprint of those earlier experiences—the messages, the memories, and the moments when vulnerability was met with threat or confusion rather than safety.
Many of us carry the invisible weight of social, cultural and religious conditioning. We were taught to be ‘good,’ to monitor our desirability, to manage our desire. We were taught to prioritise modesty over self-expression, service over self, control over trust. And over time, this creates a form of internalised surveillance—a disconnect from our own felt experience.
And so, even if we are safe now, our nervous system may not yet know it.
This is where the work of embodiment becomes essential. Not to override the resistance, but to meet it with reverence.
Why Safety Alone Isn’t Always Enough
Psychologist Stephen Porges, in his work on Polyvagal Theory, reminds us that safety is not an idea—it is a felt experience in the body. We can know we are safe, and still not feel it.
This is why even the most loving and attuned partner cannot create surrender for us. That level of openness requires something deeper: self-trust.
It is one thing to trust another. It is another thing entirely to trust our body to stay with us through the process of opening. To trust that we won’t abandon ourselves as we soften. To know that we can stay regulated even in moments of deep vulnerability.
And that kind of trust cannot be rushed.
It's not built by force, but by consistency. It's cultivated in the quiet—by learning to stay with ourselves as resistance arises, rather than bypassing in the name of love.
Intimacy as Embodied Presence
In a society that often treats intimacy as something performative, there is power in choosing presence instead over performance.
So many of us have internalised the idea that we need to be “more open,” “more sensual,” or “less in our heads” to be good partners. But true intimacy is not a role we perform—it’s a state we return to when the conditions are safe enough, inside and out.
The nervous system requires spaciousness. Integration. Permission to move slowly. This is especially true for women who have lived with chronic self-monitoring or who hold trauma in the body (which, as feminist trauma theorist Judith Herman suggests, often shows up in deeply embodied ways: tension, numbness, or disassociation).
When we soften before we’re ready, we fragment.
When we soften at our own pace, we integrate.
A Practice: Meeting the Resistance with Curiosity
Instead of forcing ourselves to ‘let go,’ what if we became curious about what is holding on?
Where does tension arise in the body? Can we offer breath and gentle awareness there?
What memories or beliefs might this resistance be holding? Can we listen without rushing to fix?
What would it feel like to move one degree closer to ourselves, instead of aiming for full surrender?
These are not questions with quick answers. They are invitations into a slower, more honest relationship with our own body.
Because the truth is: we don’t heal through pushing. We heal through presence. Through tiny moments of attunement. Through letting the body lead, even when the mind wants to be further along.
Intimacy Begins Within
Letting go is not about forcing openness. It's about returning to the self—again and again—with compassion and care.
As we build trust with our bodies, intimacy begins to shift. It stops being something we chase and becomes something we allow. We move at the pace of our nervous system, not our expectations. We honour our internal yes’s and no’s, knowing that both are sacred.
And over time, what once felt like a wall becomes a doorway.
A doorway into softness.
Into presence.
Into the kind of intimacy that doesn’t require effort—just truth.
