Partial profile · Book Profile — full narrative profile planned
Healing Sex_ A Mind-Body Approach to Healing Sexual Trauma
A somatic, sex-positive guide that helps survivors of childhood sexual abuse reclaim their bodies, desire, and sexual empowerment by working through the body rather than around it.
A profile of this book is on the way.
What it’s about
Healing Sex reframes recovery from sexual trauma as an embodied, mind-body journey rather than a purely cognitive one. Drawing on somatics, trauma neurobiology, and decades of sex-positive education, Staci Haines shows survivors that the body—the very site of attack—is also the surest path to healing. Through practical exercises on dissociation, consent, boundaries, triggers, masturbation, pleasure, and intimacy, the book teaches readers to re-inhabit their bodies, tolerate and enjoy sensation, and build a self-defined sexuality grounded in their own needs and desires. It refuses both the shame-laden sex-negativity of mainstream culture and the pathologizing of survivors' coping strategies, insisting instead that survival was intelligent and that pleasure, choice, and empowerment are the birthright of everyone. It also situates individual trauma within a larger social context of oppression, arguing that personal transformation and social change are inseparable.
The through-line
- Who it’s for
- A survivor of childhood sexual abuse who wants an empowered, pleasurable, self-defined sex life and to feel at home in her own body.
- The problem
- Sex triggers memories, dissociation, pain, aversion, or compulsion, and the survivor cannot experience embodied pleasure, consent, or intimacy. She feels shame, self-blame, guilt, fear, and a deep distrust of her own body and desires, believing something is wrong with her.
- The plan
- Establish external and internal safety and build a support network.
- Reclaim your body through somatic embodiment practices and address dissociation.
- Rediscover desire, pleasure, and accurate sexual information.
- Learn embodied consent, boundaries, and communication.
- Embrace and heal triggers by moving into and through them, feeling the emotions.
- The payoff
- An embodied, self-defined, pleasurable sex life grounded in your own needs and desires. · The ability to know and communicate boundaries, say yes, no, and maybe freely. · Freedom from the control of triggers, shame, and self-blame.
See our guide
Additional reading
- Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror · Judith Lewis Herman, M.D.
The book frequently cites or alludes to Herman's foundational work in understanding trauma, particularly the concept of dissociation and the stages of recovery, providing a clinical and theoretical backbone to the book's practical advice.
- The Anatomy of Change: A Way to Move Through Life’s Transitions · Richard Strozzi-Heckler
The author explicitly thanks Strozzi-Heckler as her teacher in somatics. His work provides the direct theoretical and practical lineage for the mind-body approach that is central to this book's thesis.
- The Good Vibrations Guide to Sex · Cathy Winks and Anne Semans
The author's experience working at Good Vibrations was formative. This book represents the sex-positive, educational approach that Haines integrates with trauma recovery, providing the factual and attitudinal basis for reclaiming sexuality.
- Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma · Peter A. Levine
Levine's work on Somatic Experiencing is a major pillar of the modern understanding of trauma in the body, focusing on the release of fight/flight/freeze responses, a concept central to Haines's description of somatic healing.