Reclaiming Sexual Desire: A Sovereign Path to Sexual Awakening

Paige VanderSloot, MS, LMFT, CST, DMQ, Founder of Awaken Center for Healing

You are not broken.

If desire has gone quiet, if your body feels far away, if you flinch at your partner’s touch or feel like sex is just another thing on your to-do list, you are not alone. More importantly, you are not broken.

As a sex therapist and energy healer, I have worked with hundreds of women—and others who have been shaped by similar conditioning—who feel confused, ashamed, or disconnected from their desire. Some push through it. Some shut down completely. Others carry quiet grief, fear, resentment, or a deep sense that something in them has gone missing.

But beneath all of that, desire still lives. It may be buried, it may be quiet, it may feel very far away. But it is not gone.

This is the path of reclamation—not just of sexuality, but of self.

Step One: Name It with Compassion

Desire does not disappear without reason. It shifts in response to lived experience, stress, pain, conditioning, disconnection, and the realities of being in a body that has learned what feels safe and what does not.

The first act of reclamation is to notice, name, and honor what is happening. Not to diagnose yourself harshly. Not to rush into fixing. Just to begin with honesty.

You might begin by asking: When did desire begin to shift? What was happening in my body, my relationship, and my life at that time? How do I actually feel about being touched, desired, or seen? What was I taught about my sexuality, my pleasure, and my worth?

You might journal, you might speak it aloud in therapy, you might simply sit quietly and acknowledge, “This is where I am.”

To name something is not to judge it. It is to see it clearly. It is to stop abandoning yourself in the very place you most need compassion.

Step Two: Clear the Noise and Stop the Bleeding

Before desire can return, it helps to tend to what has been draining it. In many cases, low desire is not the core problem. It is a signal. It is the body’s response to what has felt painful, overwhelming, depleting, unsafe, or out of alignment.

This may include sexual trauma, even if the experiences were technically consensual. It may include relational pain such as disconnection, resentment, repeated emotional absence, coercion, pressure, or years of sex that did not feel truly mutual; It may include emotional shutdown from chronic stress, caregiving overload, mental exhaustion, or having no real space to hear yourself. It may also include sexual pain. If your body expects pain, tension, or intrusion, it will protect you.

These are not just obstacles. They are information. They show you where care is needed.

The body does not shut down randomly. If it closes, something is not right. If desire has gone quiet, there is often a very good reason.

Support may include trauma-informed therapy such as EMDR or somatic work, sex therapy focused on consent and relational repair, pelvic floor therapy for pain or disconnection, and nervous system support to help unwind chronic survival states. Sometimes reclaiming desire begins with less pressure, more truth, and a willingness to stop calling your body the problem.

Step Three: Redefine Pleasure as Your Birthright

Most people have been taught that desire should be spontaneous, automatic, and directed toward someone else. They have been taught to measure sexuality by performance, frequency, or responsiveness rather than by truth, aliveness, and consent.

But many women—and many others shaped by similar conditioning—do not experience desire that way. Desire may emerge only in certain conditions. It may need safety, connection, rest, spaciousness, beauty, emotional attunement, and the experience of being deeply inside your own body rather than bracing against it.

Desire does not always arrive loudly. Sometimes it is quiet, sometimes it responds, sometimes it unfolds slowly, sometimes it asks for an entirely different context than the one you have been given.

Pleasure is not a reward for being easy, good, attractive, available, or accommodating. Pleasure is part of your birthright. Not performative pleasure. Not pressured pleasure. Real pleasure. The kind that is rooted in sovereignty, consent, embodiment, and truth.

Learning to honor the conditions your body needs is not dysfunction. It is attunement.

Step Four: Know Your Accelerators and Brakes

One of the most helpful frameworks for understanding desire comes from Emily Nagoski, who teaches that the sexual system has both accelerators and brakes. Accelerators are the things that turn you toward desire. Brakes are the things that shut it down, inhibit it, or make it harder for desire to emerge.

This matters because many people assume they have a desire problem when what they actually have is too much activation on the brake pedal.

Brakes may include stress, resentment, cluttered space, caregiving fatigue, emotional disconnection, feeling touched out, feeling unseen, pressure to perform, lingering trauma, sexual shame, chronic anxiety, body insecurity, conflict that never gets repaired, or the quiet dread of being needed by one more person.

Accelerators may include emotional attunement, sensual presence, feeling chosen, feeling beautiful, feeling safe, feeling autonomous, playful energy, flirtation, spaciousness, novelty, creativity, affection without agenda, warmth, and the experience of being met rather than managed.

For some people, a soft tone of voice matters. Others may need a clean bedroom and enough sleep. Emotional repair, beauty, privacy, slowness, or simply feeling like there is finally room to exhale may be what makes the difference.

Your job is not to perform desire or force your body into responsiveness. Instead, focus on understanding what presses on the brakes and what gently supports the accelerators.

When you understand your erotic ecology, you stop blaming yourself and start listening more wisely.

Step Five: Reclaim Sovereignty and Erotic Selfhood

Much of low desire is rooted in conditioning. Many people have internalized messages like: be a good wife, keep the peace, do not be too much, do not disappoint anyone, your pleasure is secondary, sex is for him, your body should stay available, your no is inconvenient, and your job is to maintain harmony no matter what it costs you.

Of course the body resists. Desire does not thrive in obligation. Desire dies in duty.

Reclaiming your erotic self begins with recognizing your authority. You have full ownership of your body. Your pleasure matters. Your boundaries matter. Also, you have the right to choose when, how, and if you want to engage sexually.

You do not owe anyone access to your body. You owe yourself honesty.

Sovereignty does not mean becoming cold or cut off. It means coming back into right relationship with yourself. It means letting your yes mean yes and your no mean no. It means no longer confusing self-abandonment with love.

For many people, erotic healing begins the moment they stop trying to be good and start telling the truth.

Step Six: Nurture Your Body’s Aliveness

Desire is not a switch that can simply be turned on at will. It is something that grows, or does not grow, based on how you are living and relating to yourself.

Think of desire less like a performance problem and more like a living ecosystem. If your life is all output, pressure, caretaking, tension, resentment, and depletion, your erotic self may go quiet not because it is defective, but because there is no oxygen.

Reconnection often begins with simple, embodied experiences. Move your body in ways that feel nourishing rather than punishing. Create beauty in your environment. Soak in baths. Wear fabrics that feel good on your skin. Play music that stirs something in you. Rest. Stretch. Breathe. Laugh. Let touch exist without obligation or agenda.

You might explore sensuality before sexuality or breathe into your pelvis. Try practicing receiving pleasure in very small ways. Then, notice where aliveness already exists and gently follow it.

This is not about trying to manufacture desire on command. It is about creating the conditions where desire can emerge again. It is about remembering that your body was made not only for survival, but for vitality.

Step Seven: Be Curious, Not Critical

Desire is not a problem to solve. It is a relationship to rebuild.

That means curiosity will take you farther than criticism ever will. Shame tends to shut the body down further. Curiosity opens space.

You might ask: What feels good to me now? When have I felt most alive, turned on, connected, or deeply in my body? What has changed over time? Consider what you need now that you did not need before. You can also explore what interests you, even if you are not yet ready to act on it.

You are allowed to change and to not know. Give yourself permission to be in the process. Along the way, you may discover that what you want now is different from what you once accepted.

Desire often returns not when it is demanded, but when it is invited.

Final Thoughts

If you are in a partnership, low desire is often relational as well as personal. Sometimes healing desire involves healing the space between two people. This may mean learning new ways of communicating, repairing, slowing down, and creating safety together. It can also require telling the truth about resentment, grief, pressure, or disconnection that has gone unspoken for too long.

And sometimes, it means being honest that your body no longer responds to what the relationship has been offering.

You are not broken. Your body is responding exactly as it should.

There is wisdom in that response. There is intelligence in what your body has protected. And there is a path back—not through force, shame, or performance, but through truth, compassion, and reclamation.

If this is your season, you do not have to walk it alone.

Work With Me

If you’re ready to move beyond frustration, confusion, and disconnection—and into a more grounded, honest, and deeply connected relationship with yourself and your partner—there are several ways to work together.

I offer depth-oriented therapy and integrative support that addresses not just communication, but the emotional, relational, and energetic layers that shape intimacy.

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