What I Actually Do When Someone Comes to Me After Sexual Trauma

Sexual trauma rarely announces itself clearly. It shows up as "why am I like this." As the part of you that disappears during intimacy. As shame with no clean origin that just lives in your body.

I grew up in a South Asian family. I know what it means to carry something you can't name out loud — where the community is everything, and disclosure could cost you everything too. A lot of my clients arrive holding that exact weight.

I'm not waiting for you to say the words.

I'm listening from the moment you walk in. How you talk about yourself, your relationships, your body. Where guilt lives versus shame — they're different, and I pay attention to that difference. Whether you've quietly absorbed responsibility for things that were never yours.

I'll ask about your history, your support system, the practical realities of your life. Immigration status, financial dependence, what it would cost you to tell the people closest to you — these aren't side notes. They shape everything.

We don't start with the story.

Most people expect to tell it all first. We don't work that way.

Before anything else, we build your capacity to hold what happened. That means working with your body — your nervous system — using Somatic Experiencing. Moving toward hard material slowly, then back out. Strengthening your system rather than flooding it.

A lot of our work will be about shame. Where it lives, how you've been holding it, what you've decided it means about you. In South Asian families and other tight-knit communities, shame doesn't just belong to you — it gets held by everyone, which makes it harder to put down. I understand that from the inside, not just theoretically.

Your no matters as much as your yes.

I practice consent in the room itself. When you push back on me, I notice. When your body says no before your words do, I trust it. Part of what we're doing together is helping you feel the difference between responding from fear or habit — and responding from actual choice. That difference is everything.

I don't use the word "resolution."

What I look for is integration.

Integration means you can feel a trigger without being taken over by it. You tell the same story, but you're not in it the same way. What happened is something that was done to you — not the thing that defines you. You know your yes and your no. Intimacy is something you can approach without dreading it.

And you're not holding it alone anymore.

Healing isn't linear. Something new will sometimes surface something old. That's not failure. It's just how this works — and each time, you'll have more capacity to meet it.