And this brings us to the present day. You finally escaped. You are no longer living with a narcissist; you are finally safe in your own home. Or perhaps you have emotionally detached from them but are still physically present. Your body remains completely asexual. The thought of intimacy repulses you, and the idea of someone touching you makes your skin crawl. You may even meet a genuinely nice and kind person, but the moment things turn romantic, you panic and shut down. You ask yourself, “Why am I like this? Why can’t I just be normal?”
Listen to me very carefully: your asexuality right now is not a sickness. It is not a dysfunction. It is the ultimate act of self-protection. Your agency, your right to choose what happens to your own body, was stolen from you. You were treated like an object, used whenever they wanted or ignored altogether.
Their asexuality leads to yours as well. You were stripped of your control, but now you have finally clawed your way out of the darkness and taken it back. You are the CEO of your life again. You decide who enters your space, when you sleep, when you wake up, and what you do with your time. You have found peace for your nervous system.
The idea of being physically intimate with someone means giving up that control. It means being completely vulnerable—taking off the heavy armor that kept you alive during the war. Your brain looks at intimacy and says, “Absolutely not.” The last time we let someone get this close, they destroyed us. The last time we trusted someone with our body, they exploited us. We are never doing that again. Your body is fiercely protecting the peace you fought so hard to build and views intimacy as a threat to your hard-won independence.
It is completely normal that you feel repulsed. You killed your desire to survive the abuse, and you cannot just snap your fingers and bring it back to life the moment the abuser leaves. Your body remembers the trauma. Your cells remember the feeling of being used.
So what do you do now? How do you heal from this? The very first step is to stop shaming yourself. Stop looking in the mirror and calling yourself broken or ugly. Stop comparing yourself to people who have never endured what you have. You are not a cold, unfeeling person; you are a deeply wounded warrior whose body is simply refusing to take off its armor until it is 100% certain that the war is permanently over.
You have to grant yourself radical permission to be exactly where you are. If you do not want to be touched, honor that. If the thought of dating makes you feel sick, do not date yet. Your only job right now is to prove to your own nervous system that you are finally a safe place to live. You have to slowly reclaim your physical form. You have been a ghost in your own skin for years, and now you need to learn to inhabit your body again—for yourself.
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