Trauma, Intimacy, and the Joystick of Doom: How Childhood Sexual Abuse Warps Emotional Conflict About Sex
Saturday, June 28, 2025.
Let’s start with a simple, chilling truth:
If your first lessons about sex came through violence and betrayal, adult conversations about intimacy may still feel like combat drills.
Now picture this: you're in a quiet lab in Canada. You've brought your partner. You're here to talk—on camera—about the one sexual issue that bothers you most.
Then, like some surreal therapy-themed video game, you’re handed a joystick.
You’ll use it to track, second-by-second, exactly how you felt while watching yourself argue about sex.
No pressure.
This isn't dystopian couples therapy—it's a groundbreaking experiment led by psychologist Noémie Bigras (2024). The study tried to map how childhood trauma rewires adult emotional responses during sexual disagreements.
And to my surprise, it appears that attachment anxiety, not avoidance, turned out to be the real saboteur in the room.
Not All Trauma Is Equal, Especially When It Comes to Sex
Here’s what the study found: couples who carried a history of childhood trauma—abuse, neglect, or the haunting gray zone of unmet needs—were more likely to express and feel negative emotions during intimate conflict.
Positive emotions? Shorter. Fewer. Evaporated like mist on a mirror.
But that headline, while sobering, flattens the hierarchy of hurt.
When we dig deeper into the research literature, one trauma in particular makes adult sex talk especially volatile: childhood sexual abuse (CSA).
The Emotional Reverb of Childhood Sexual Abuse
CSA doesn't just leave a scar.
It rewires trust, boundaries, and the neurobiology of arousal itself. Survivors are often caught in a cruel contradiction: yearning for intimacy and simultaneously dreading it.
Studies by DiLillo and colleagues (2006; 2011) show that CSA survivors report higher rates of sexual dissatisfaction, sexual avoidance, anxiety, and emotional dysregulation than peers with no trauma—or even those with non-sexual forms of abuse.
In fact, sexual trauma survivors are more likely to interpret ambiguous or even affectionate gestures as threatening, especially in emotionally charged moments.
And if they have high attachment anxiety, their reactions can look like emotional overdrive—crying, clinging, shutting down, angry, dismissive, defensive, panicking—often leaving partners confused, overwhelmed, or just plain bewildered..
However, the Bigras study lumped CSA together with other traumas, which, while a practical choice for stats, it is a clinical loss, nonetheless.
Because sexual trauma tends to colonize adult sexuality in a way the more common experience of emotional neglect simply doesn’t.
Attachment Styles as Emotional Translators
Now, let’s revisit attachment theory.
Attachment anxiety says, “I need you, but I fear you’ll leave.”
Attachment avoidance says, “I don’t need you, and I’d rather not talk about it.”
Bigras and her team discovered that trauma-linked couples with high attachment anxiety had a particularly bad time during these lab discussions.
They felt worse, expressed more negative emotion, and offered fewer emotional repair attempts.
Their partners also showed a decrease in positive emotion, suggesting that this anxiety doesn’t just isolate—it infects the shared emotional climate.
Strangely, attachment avoidance didn’t play a significant mediating role.
Yes, avoidant folks expressed fewer warm fuzzies, but their cool distance didn’t seem to link trauma to the emotional blowout in the same way.
It’s a reminder: emotional heat might hurt more than emotional frost, but it’s the heat that melts boundaries and floods the room.
Joystick Intimacy and the Language of Emotion
One elegant feature of the Bigras study was the use of continuous emotional ratings—participants watched their conversation and used a joystick to show, in real time, how they felt. This gave researchers access to the moment-by-moment decay or bloom of emotion, not just before/after snapshots.
Now imagine this in the context of someone who survived CSA.
They’re watching themselves flinch, wince, go numb, lash out. They're trying to make sense of why a conversation about frequency or desire feels like a re-enactment of betrayal.
Joysticks don't lie. But they also don't explain.
Sexual Conflict as a Mirror of the Past
Sexual disagreements in couples aren’t just about sex. They’re about:
Power (Who initiates? Who avoids?)
Value (Do I feel desired?)
Safety (Will this conversation end in connection or chaos?)
For CSA survivors, those questions are booby-trapped.
Research by Leonard & Follette (2002) suggests that CSA survivors often anticipate rejection or violence during sexual intimacy—even when none is present. Their implicit memory system, designed to detect threat, remains on high alert.
So when a partner says something like, “I’d like more variety,” the survivor may hear:
“You’re not enough. You never were a good partner. You can’t find your way around your own body, or mine.”
These are not overreactions. They are echoes.
Where Do We Go From Here?
This line of research, including the Bigras study, has profound clinical implications:
Sex therapy for trauma survivors must center emotional safety before technique.
Attachment anxiety deserves special attention in couple conflict—not just as a personality quirk, but as an embodied survival strategy.
Sexual trauma history needs to be treated as a unique category—not a footnote in a broader trauma questionnaire.
But Bigras is already thinking ahead.
Future research will use daily diaries and longitudinal tracking, hopefully parsing trauma types more clearly.
Maybe someday we’ll have the nuance to distinguish between someone who flinches from neglect versus someone who flinches from a hand on their thigh.
Final Thought
If you’ve ever wondered why sex fights with your partner feel radioactive—why the room spins, your chest tightens, your voice trembles—it might be that you’re not arguing with your partner. You’re arguing with a ghost.
But ghosts can be named. And once they’re named, they don’t necessarily have to run the show.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Bigras, N., Rosen, N. O., Dubé, J. P., Daspe, M.-È., Bosisio, M., Péloquin, K., & Bergeron, S. (2024). Attachment insecurity mediates the associations between childhood trauma and duration of emotions during a laboratory-based sexual conflict discussion among couples. Archives of Sexual Behavior. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-024-02743-1
Bowlby, J. (1988). A secure base: Parent-child attachment and healthy human development. Basic Books.
DiLillo, D., Long, P. J., & Russell, B. (2006). Childhood sexual abuse and attachment: An intergenerational perspective. Clinical Psychology Review, 26(1), 31–64. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2005.06.003
DiLillo, D., & Damashek, A. (2003). Parenting characteristics of women reporting a history of childhood sexual abuse. Child Maltreatment, 8(4), 319–333. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077559503257104
Johnson, S. M. (2019). Attachment theory in practice: Emotionally focused therapy (EFT) with individuals, couples, and families. The Guilford Press.
Laurent, H. K., & Powers, S. I. (2007). Emotion regulation in emerging adult couples: Temperament, attachment, and HPA response to conflict. Biological Psychology, 76(1–2), 61–71. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2007.06.001
Leonard, L. M., & Follette, V. M. (2002). Sexual functioning in women reporting a history of child sexual abuse: Review of the empirical literature and clinical implications. Annual Review of Sex Research, 13(1), 346–388.
Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R. (2016). Attachment in adulthood: Structure, dynamics, and change (2nd ed.). The Guilford Press.
Ogden, P., Minton, K., & Pain, C. (2006). Trauma and the body: A sensorimotor approach to psychotherapy. W. W. Norton & Company.
Schore, A. N. (2003). Affect dysregulation and disorders of the self. W. W. Norton & Company.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.