Return to Desire

Desire is what returns when my body finally feels safe. It is the taste that comes back after starvation, the pulse that stirs when the nervous system loosens its grip on survival.

For a time I lived without it, convinced that wanting was a risk too big, a luxury I couldn’t afford. I swallowed my needs, muted my hungers, censored my truth.

That bottling slowly ate away at me from the inside until eventually I collapsed, worn out and uncertain of how to go on. For a time, I was lost — cut off from myself, cut off from the future.

Rebuilding from there has been slow, clumsy, and imperfect. But it has also been tender and surprising, because in the ashes of survival I found something I never expected: the beginnings of desire.

Desire has been returning in small, everyday ways: for colour, for taste, for music that moves my body. For honesty in relationships. For the freedom to say no without apology, and yes with hunger.

And then, perhaps most tenderly, sexual desire — a landscape once scarred by trauma now slowly softening, opening, daring to feel again. That awakening has carried both fierceness and vulnerability, a reminder that even in the places where pain once lived, life insists on returning. Desire itself has become a sign that I am alive.

Psychology helps explain why desire vanishes under trauma. When the body perceives threat, it mobilises every resource toward survival.

The sympathetic nervous system floods with adrenaline and cortisol. Muscles tense. Breath shortens. Senses sharpen for danger. In more prolonged states, the body may freeze entirely, shutting down to conserve energy.

In these states, pleasure is not just unavailable — it is biologically unsafe. It’s not possible to want when the body is fighting to exist.

Polyvagal theory (Stephen Porges) helps make sense of this. Our nervous systems are wired with different “gears”: fight-or-flight for danger, freeze for overwhelm, and social engagement for safety. Safety cues — tone of voice, facial expression, touch, even breath — are what allow the body to shift into connection. And only in that state can intimacy, play, and desire emerge.

Gabor Maté writes that trauma is not the event itself but the disconnection that follows — the splitting off from our own sensations, needs, and truths. And so the absence of desire is not weakness but evidence of that disconnection.

The return of desire signals something else: that reconnection has begun.

It is at this stage of the healing/ feeling process that I turn to Esther Perel, who reminds me that desire and intimacy are not the same thing.

Intimacy is closeness, predictability, the warmth of the known. Desire is the spark that requires distance, curiosity, risk. She says eroticism is less about sex than about aliveness: the ability to feel the pulse of longing and let it move us.
And there’s another distinction that matters just as much: intimacy and intensity. Intimacy is about how deep you go with another person. Intensity is about how fast you get there.

For years, I confused the two. A relationship that burned hot and fast felt “deep,” but often it was only intensity — a surge of chemicals, drama, or urgency that masked a lack of true intimacy. Real intimacy takes time. It’s the slow build of trust, the willingness to be known without performance.

Desire lives differently in both spaces. Intensity can spark it, but intimacy is where it can settle, breathe, and grow. Learning to separate the two has been part of reclaiming not just my relationships, but myself.

For me, desire began in the simple act of speaking my truth. The moment I said, without filter, this is what I want, something shifted.

Sometimes it came out as anger. Other times as vulnerability, confessing how much I wanted closeness. Each time it was raw, unedited, alive.

And here’s the paradox: that kind of honesty deepened intimacy. Naming what I wanted — even when it created tension — invited others into relationship with the real me, not the palatable version I used to perform.

Desire became the bridge between truth and connection, between risk and closeness.

Of course, desire doesn’t only belong to the realm of relationships.

It is in the way food tastes after months of bland routine. The way water feels on a parched tongue. On holidays, flavours sharpen and colours brighten because our bodies leave grind mode and remember how to receive.

That first sip after a long thirst — it floods the whole body. That is what desire feels like when it returns. A quenching, an awakening, a reminder that we are built for more than survival.

Desire can be for anything: rest, beauty, touch, silence, music, movement, words. It is the honest naming of what we crave.

And it is no small thing. To want openly is an act of courage in a culture that so often shames or suppresses it.

But let me be clear: living inside a recovering mind and body is not a straight line into desire.

It is messy, full of oscillation. One moment I am flooded with aliveness; the next I collapse into numbness or self-doubt. The old groove of silence and self-erasure is easy to fall back into.

Forging a new path feels like hacking through dense undergrowth in a forest. At first it is exhausting, each step a fight. But each time I choose differently — each time I name a want, sit with an ache, let myself feel instead of shutting down — the track becomes clearer.

This is neuroplasticity in action: the brain literally rewiring, new circuits of safety and desire being laid down through repetition.

The somatic work is just as real. My body trembles at first when I let myself feel the charge of wanting. Desire is tension by definition — the pull between what is and what could be.

Learning to tolerate that tension without fleeing into numbness or collapse has been sacred practice. Some days I manage only seconds. Other days I stay with it long enough to taste the sweetness that follows.

And then there are the gentler days. I’m approaching desire like a guest in my home — showing it the options, asking what excites it, letting it choose the clothes, the colours, the words, the music.

In that playfulness, I’m learning that desire isn’t something to control but something to welcome. It surprises me. It delights me. And it teaches me how to live in this body again.

This is recovery not as perfection but as persistence: the willingness to walk the new path again and again until it feels like home.

Which brings me back to the wisdom of Gabor Maté.

If trauma is disconnection, then desire is reconnection. Desire is the compass that points us back to ourselves. It says: you are alive, you are safe enough, you are allowed to want.

Too often desire is framed as indulgence, as excess. But in truth, it is part of integration.

A body that desires is a body that is no longer ruled by survival.
A mind that can say this is what I want is a mind that has remembered its agency.
A heart that beats faster in longing is a heart that has not given up on connection.

Desire reframes the human experience from endurance to engagement. It says healing is not just about reducing pain but about reclaiming joy, intimacy, intensity.

It is about tasting the world again.

So I no longer fear the tension of desire. I welcome it. I see it as the fruit that ripens after winter, the taste that tells me I am alive.

And perhaps the most surprising part is this: desire now feels steady, regardless of how others respond. Acceptance, rejection, indifference — none of it can take away my wanting.

Because desire is not dependent on their answer. It is mine. It anchors me in my truth, reconnects me to myself, and reminds me that life is meant to be lived with appetite.

Desire is not the end of healing. It is the beginning of living.