Practice Heinis
Therapy after sexual violence
At your pace
When a sexual assault won't stay in the past and affects your life now: your sexuality, your intimacy, your relationships
Some people feel the weight of a sexual assault straight away. For others, the effects only surface much later. And some people have no idea that an assault or a crossed boundary back then is behind the difficulties they have today, with sex, with intimacy, in their relationships or in life generally. I’m here for all of them.
The strain or trauma a sexual assault leaves behind can show up in all kinds of ways, or not at all at first. Sometimes the memories of what happened are gone entirely, and later your system reacts to things that seem to have nothing to do with it. Then it takes a bit of detective work to trace where a reaction comes from. Much of this runs unconsciously, barely noticed, and it weighs on you all the same. That’s exactly where it’s worth taking a closer look.
Other things are very conscious, and you know exactly: I can’t go there. Being touched from behind, a smell, a certain situation, a place. Usually your body reacts first, before your mind has caught up with what’s happening. You’re not imagining it.
So for many people, the first step is to understand what happened to them. Depending on where you are in your process, we work through it and slowly come closer to it again, so that you can cope better with the here and now, make changes for yourself, and experience your relationships and your intimacy more fully again.
What brings people to my practice
- An assault that happened recently, and the question of how to carry on from here.
- Something from the past, perhaps from childhood or your teens, that's only making itself felt now, often set off by a new relationship, a pregnancy or the children leaving home.
- A sex life that feels numb or has stopped altogether.
- A body that shuts down as soon as things get close, even though you trust your partner.
- Images that flash up in the middle of a lovely moment.
- A feeling that something happened, but no clear memory of it.
- Boundaries that were crossed in a relationship and never named.
- Consent that was broken in a kink or BDSM context.
- Guilt that you didn't react differently back then, or that your body reacted.
- The question of what to tell your partner, and how much.
- Difficulties in your relationship or everyday life that you're only slowly starting to link to something from back then.
- As a loved one: someone close to you went through this, and you don't know how to handle it.
So what does this have to do with your sexuality and relationships?
The consequences of a sexual assault show up most of all in your own intimacy and sexuality, and that’s where they weigh heaviest. There are many reasons for this. One of them is that intimacy and sex bring up the very states that may also have been there during the assault: loss of control, closeness, being hurt, arousal, a body that reacts. An experience like this can shake and change our whole system, body and nervous system, so deeply that it can no longer tell these states apart. Your sense of whether a situation is dangerous or not shifts too. That’s why understanding it matters so much.
From the outside, the result looks contradictory: desire and defence at the same time, freezing that looks like consent, or a mind that leaves while the body stays. Many people take exactly this as proof that something is fundamentally wrong with them, or feel ashamed that this happened to them at all.
Your body reacting says nothing about whether you consented. Arousal is not consent. For some people, hearing this finally gives them permission, after years, to stop blaming themselves.
How I work with you
My work rests above all on what I learned in my training: the foundations of gentle trauma therapy (schonende Traumatherapie) as developed by Martin Sack, and the Sexuality & Trauma training with Dr. Melanie Büttner. I reflect on my work in regular supervision.
What matters most to me is that we start by building a solid foundation and a safe setting. So there’s some groundwork we talk through together first, and we always go at your pace.
That said, we won’t tiptoe around the difficult topics forever. We do go there, at your pace and when the time is right, and only as far as you can manage. My job is to keep you safe within that setting, including when psychological reactions such as dissociation come up, so that we can understand them and help them settle again.
Frequently asked questions
No. You share only what you can, at exactly your pace. You decide when and how we look at it together, and I guide you through it. Sometimes, once you feel safe, you may find you want to share more. That’s always your call.
No. For many people this only comes up decades later, often set off by something new, like a relationship, a birth or an upheaval. If your system is coming back to it now, that doesn’t mean you’ve missed your moment.
Yes. Nobody but you decides whether something was bad enough. What counts is whether it weighs on you, and nobody else’s yardstick comes into it.
First, we can look together at what exactly happened. Usually your body was simply doing its job, or protecting itself. Sexual arousal is a physical reaction. It isn’t consent. Lots of people find this the hardest part to carry, and it’s one of the first things we untangle.
It can be a clue. Pain during sex, or vaginismus, is often a sign that the body is protecting itself. That doesn’t automatically mean there’s an assault behind it, but it’s still worth looking at closely.
Yes. Sometimes that’s helpful, because your partner may not know how to react and, out of sheer caution, stops doing anything at all. We can start with individual sessions and continue as a couple later, or the other way round.
I’m not a fully trained trauma therapist yet. I’ve completed courses in sexuality and trauma, and gentle trauma therapy was part of my training. I don’t offer EMDR. I work where these two areas meet, and help people move forward from there. If it turns out you need specialised trauma treatment, I’ll tell you.
You can start with a free discovery call by video, or book a session straight away, online or at my practice in Munich, in English or German. You book everything directly online.
You pay for sessions yourself. German statutory health insurance doesn’t cover them; with private insurance and Beihilfe it depends on your policy, so it’s best to check in advance. You’ll find my current fees on my fees page. One side effect that matters to many people in this area: nothing ends up on record with an insurer.
When is the right time?
Good reasons to come for support:
- You avoid situations, people or places that actually matter to you.
- Sex and intimacy have become something foreign, something you just get through.
- You feel disgust, or your body closes itself off.
- Your partner can tell something’s wrong, and you can’t find the words for it.
And sometimes it starts smaller, with the wish to say it out loud just once without anyone flinching. This space is for that too.
Do you work with these topics professionally?
I offer supervision for professionals and training on relationship diversity (see the overview).