Without Safety, A Kiss Can Never Feel Like Love
For many of us who survived incest, love was never just love.
It was command. It was confusion. It was the warmth of a familiar hand that also burned.
Our bodies remember.
Not only the pain, but the split—the way affection and fear arrived in the same breath.
So even now, when someone says I love you and means it, our pulse races as if danger just entered the room.
“The brain is a historical organ,” Dr. Bruce Perry reminds us in What Happened to You? “It records every experience and builds itself from those experiences.”
Those histories live in us. And yet, here we are—still breathing, still reaching, still daring to imagine that love might one day feel like safety.
Reflection Prompt:
Close your eyes. Whisper the word “safe.” Notice what your body does first—tighten, sigh, or tremble. All are holy beginnings.
1. When Intimacy Feels Like an Ambush
Intimacy can feel like being caught unprepared—heart open, body alert, mind sprinting toward escape.
We crave closeness but panic when it arrives.
Dr. Perry explains that this reaction isn’t weakness; it’s wiring. The lower regions of the brain—those shaped earliest by experience—learned to equate touch with threat.
Until those networks are soothed, love can register as danger.
That’s why many survivors freeze during sex or shut down during tenderness.
The body isn’t betraying us—it’s protecting us with the only map it knows.
In The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, Perry writes, “Sometimes what looks like bad behavior is really the body’s best attempt at staying safe.”
Our avoidance isn’t rejection. Our silence isn’t distance. It’s history rising through flesh.
Reflection Prompt:
Place a hand on your chest. Feel the heartbeat beneath it. Tell yourself: This is my body trying to keep me safe. And I can teach it something new.
2. The Neurobiology of Love and Fear
To love after incest is to wrestle with the oldest parts of the nervous system.
The amygdala—our inner smoke alarm—remembers every betrayal.
The prefrontal cortex—our reasoning mind—tries to insist, This person isn’t my abuser.
But reason alone cannot quiet alarms set off by memory encoded in the body.
Dr. Perry’s Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics (NMT) gives us language for this paradox.
Healing must travel in sequence: first the body, then relationship, then meaning.
He calls it regulate, relate, reason.
When we attempt deep emotional connection without regulation, the body floods.
That’s why a kind partner’s touch can ignite panic even when the mind knows we’re safe.
Our nervous system hasn’t yet learned the new story.
Reflection Prompt:
When closeness feels like chaos, step back to rhythm—rock, breathe, hum. Let safety be rebuilt in movement before you return to words.
3. Regulate, Relate, Reason — Learning to Love Again
Dr. Perry often says healing is not about insight—it’s about pattern.
Insight alone cannot rewire the neural highways built by terror.
To change the pattern, we must start where the pattern began: the body.
Regulate
We regulate through rhythm—breath, rocking, drumming, walking, dancing.
Each repetition tells the brainstem, We are alive and present.
Without this foundation, no amount of talk or understanding will make intimacy safe.
Relate
Once the body is calm enough to stay, relationship becomes possible.
In moments of shared safety—eye contact, gentle laughter, a hand held without pressure—the limbic system learns a new equation: connection = comfort.
“Healing requires being known and seen,” writes Perry in What Happened to You? “It happens when we are safe in the presence of another.”
Reason
Only then can we reflect, make sense, and build boundaries rooted in self-respect instead of self-protection.
Reason follows safety the way dawn follows night.
Reflection Prompt:
Think of a time your body finally exhaled around someone. What were they doing—or not doing—that made that possible? That’s what safety feels like.
4. Touch as a Language of Safety
For many of us, touch was the language of violation.
Now, it must become the language of healing—but gently, slowly, on our own terms.
Dr. Perry’s research on sensory regulation shows that repetitive, predictable physical experiences—like gentle rocking or weighted blankets—can calm over-activated stress systems.
This applies to consensual touch too.
When touch is predictable, requested, and kind, it begins to rewrite the body’s associations.
In healthy intimacy, we learn to pair touch with choice.
We practice saying yes and no not from fear, but from embodied truth.
We learn that we are allowed to stop, to change our minds, to be held without expectation.
“Regulation is the gift of rhythm,” Perry notes. “The body finds safety through predictability.”
Each intentional, predictable touch becomes a message to the nervous system: This love will not harm you.
Reflection Prompt:
Before accepting touch, ask your body—not your mind—‘Do I feel ready?’ Notice its answer. That answer is sacred data.
5. When Desire Feels Dangerous
Desire is complicated for incest survivors.
It carries both longing and terror, memory and hunger.
The same sensations that once preceded danger now awaken during arousal, blurring the line between pleasure and panic.
This confusion isn’t moral—it’s neurochemical.
Perry’s studies on trauma and the stress response reveal that the hormones released during fear overlap with those involved in attraction.
Adrenaline, cortisol, dopamine—they dance in the same circuits.
Our bodies literally confuse danger with desire because they learned those signals together.
To heal, we must separate the two through gentleness and time.
Safe partners help by slowing everything down, by allowing curiosity instead of expectation.
As we stay present through sensations—without judgment or dissociation—the body learns new associations.
Reflection Prompt:
When arousal stirs fear, pause and breathe into the place of tension. Whisper: I am allowed to want. I am allowed to stop. I am allowed to be safe and alive at the same time.
6. The Slow Art of Repatterning Connection
Healing intimacy is not a leap; it’s a rhythm.
Each heartbeat, each shared glance, each small act of truth becomes one more thread rewoven into safety.
Dr. Perry often reminds us that “the brain changes through repetition of experience.” Repetition—not revelation—rewires us.
That means we don’t need perfect partners; we need consistent ones.
People who stay. People who listen. People who understand that healing from incest means rebuilding trust at the pace of breath.
When we are met with patience, the limbic system—our emotional brain—learns new expectations.
It stops scanning for danger and begins looking for comfort.
Slowly, connection becomes less about survival and more about choice.
Reflection Prompt:
Think of one person whose steadiness softens you. What does your body do in their presence? That’s the sound of neural rewiring.
7. When We Let Someone Stay
There comes a moment in every survivor’s life when we face the mirror of love and realize we’re no longer flinching.
Maybe they brush our hair aside, and we don’t freeze.
Maybe they say, “I’m not going anywhere,” and something deep inside us dares to believe it.
Dr. Perry writes, “Safety is contagious.”
When we are consistently treated with gentleness, our nervous system catches it—like sunlight warming frozen ground.
We begin to stay present for our own lives.
In that staying, intimacy transforms.
Touch becomes communication, not coercion.
Vulnerability becomes a choice, not a trap.
Love becomes collaboration, not control.
To let someone stay is to declare that the past will not dictate every heartbeat of the future.
Reflection Prompt:
Place your palm over your chest and whisper: I am learning that presence does not equal pain. I can stay.
8. Sacred Reckoning — Choosing Love After Betrayal
Sacred Reckoning is that holy threshold where we stop apologizing for surviving and start honoring the wisdom that survival gave us.
We stop trying to “get over” the past and instead learn to walk beside it—eyes open, heart awake.
Dr. Perry teaches that healing happens “in the context of relationships.” We were wounded in connection; we heal in connection.
But this time, the connection is chosen, not forced.
This time, love becomes ceremony.
Every tremor, every tear, every trembling moment of trust is evidence that the brain is repatterning and the soul is remembering its worth.
We are not reclaiming innocence—we are claiming sovereignty.
When we choose love after incest, we’re not naive; we’re brave.
We’re saying to our nervous systems, I will not live my life as a reaction to fear.
We are reclaiming desire as devotion.
We are rewriting what love feels like in the body that once carried betrayal.
Reflection Prompt:
Ask softly: What does my body need to believe I am safe to love? Whatever it whispers—time, space, slowness, solitude—is sacred instruction.
9. A Prayer for Safe Love
(Call to Action)
May the ones who survived touch too soon find touch that heals.
May the ones who learned silence discover language gentle enough for their truth.
May every survivor of incest know that their body is not broken—it’s brilliant in its design to protect them.
And may each of us remember: safety is not the absence of fear, but the presence of compassion.
Dr. Perry’s work gives us the map. Our bodies hold the compass.
Together they lead us toward a love that no longer burns, but warms.
Reflection Prompt:
Breathe. Feel your heartbeat. Say aloud: I am allowed to be safe, desired, and free—all at once.
Join the Movement of Safe Love
At Holey Love, we honor this sacred reckoning.
We merge neuroscience with soul work, helping survivors of incest reclaim intimacy through embodied safety and trauma-informed rituals.
Explore our guided practices for emotional regulation, partner communication, and somatic trust-building.
Discover daily tools that teach your nervous system the language of peace.
Every rhythm you reclaim, every gentle boundary you honor, becomes part of a collective healing bigger than any single story.
Visit HoleyLove.com
to begin your own rhythm of restoration.
Because love that heals is not a fantasy—it’s a practice.
And you, beloved survivor, were born to master it.