She called me from the bath.
I recognised the tone immediately. That particular quality of voice that sits somewhere between elation and confusion. The nervous system flooded. The mind trying to catch up with what the body just experienced.
She is a client. Highly aware. Trained in body-based work herself. Going through a separation. Looking, in her own words, to feel safe again: in herself, in her body, in the possibility of connection.
She had been to a networking event.
A man approached her. He was learning to be a shaman, he said. He looked at her and asked a question she was not prepared for.
How often have you been truly held?
It hit her like a ton of bricks. Her own words.
She had been going through so much. The marriage ending. The recalibration of everything she thought her life was going to look like. The question landed somewhere she had not let anyone near.
He said: there is a hotel just across the road. Come with me. I will hold you. No strings attached. Nothing more than that.
Part One: What the body did next
I want to pause here.
Because I know what happened in her body in that moment.
Oxytocin. Dopamine. The nervous system recognising, finally, the possibility of safe touch. Of being held without having to perform or manage or give anything back.
These are not small things. These are the chemicals the body is designed to release in the presence of genuine safety. Research on affectionate touch consistently shows that being held activates C-tactile fibres in the skin, triggers oxytocin release, lowers cortisol, and shifts the nervous system toward rest and connection. When you have been touch-starved, and separation does that, grief does that, years of managing everything alone does that, the flood is profound.
It is also, and this is the part nobody talks about enough, profoundly disorienting.
Research published in Frontiers in Neuroscience found that oxytocin can impair decision-making under ambiguity. It increases trust and simultaneously reduces the capacity to read risk accurately. The very chemical that makes you feel safe can, in the wrong container, make it harder to identify that you are not.
She said yes.
They sat together for hours. Her on his lap. Her body doing exactly what a body does when it finally feels held: it softened. It opened. It exhaled years of bracing.
When she asked what people around them must be thinking, he said: they think you are my wife or my girlfriend, and you are upset, and I am comforting you.
She asked what would happen if his wife saw this.
He gave what she described as a blasé remark.
They both went to the bathroom.
When they returned, he told her he had taken the liberty of booking a hotel room.
It had come through him, he said, that this was a service he needed to provide for her.
Part Two: What that sentence means
I need you to sit with that sentence for a moment.
It came through me that I need to do this service for you.
She said no. Her body said no. She felt it immediately: that contraction, that something-is-wrong signal the nervous system sends before the mind has found the words.
He said: no problem.
She relaxed again.
The oxytocin was still flooding her system. The hours of being held had done what hours of being held do. Her body had been given something it had been craving, and now it was terrified of losing it.
She changed her mind.
They had sex.
Afterwards, she told me: he had not climaxed. She had already decided this meant it had all been for her pleasure.
I have been sitting with that sentence ever since.
Where did we teach women that a man's climax is the only evidence of his pleasure? Where did we teach women that a man who does not climax has given rather than taken?
Part Three: What this actually is
This is grooming.
The Campaign Against Adult Grooming describes the pattern precisely: a person builds trust using charm, attentiveness, sensitivity, and empathy, then exploits what they have created. Groomers often claim special connections with their targets. They use mirroring, echoing back the target's own story, and frame the relationship as unique, sacred, chosen.
How often have you been truly held? is mirroring. It names her longing back to her.
It has come through me that I need to do this service for you is sacred framing. The spiritual authority used to make violation feel like blessing.
Researchers Winters and Jeglic found that in adult settings, perpetrators use love-bombing, overwhelming affirmation, to bypass critical thinking. When a person in spiritual authority employs these tactics, it can feel sacred. A person studying shamanism is positioning himself as someone with access to higher guidance. That positioning is not incidental. It is the architecture.
This is the quiet, sophisticated, devastatingly effective version that happens in wellness spaces, spiritual communities, and the places women go specifically because they are trying to heal.
This is also why so many women do not name it. The chemicals in the body said: this is what you needed. To call it otherwise feels like a betrayal of the softening they genuinely felt. So they do not name it. They just quietly stop knowing how to receive.
Part Four: What her body was actually doing
Let me name what actually happened, layer by layer.
A man in a position of perceived spiritual authority identified a woman in a vulnerable moment. He used language designed to open her, language that bypasses the thinking mind and speaks directly to the longing body. He created a container of apparent safety. He held her until her nervous system flooded with bonding hormones. He waited. He booked the room. He framed what he wanted as a spiritual calling, as service, as something that had come through him for her benefit.
The body did not betray her.
The body was doing exactly what it is designed to do.
It felt held and opened toward more holding. That is biology. What she needed to know, what so many women in that moment need to know, is that the flood of safety chemicals was real, and the source of them was not safe. Both things are true at the same time.
Part Five: What I spend my days undoing
I have spent twenty-seven years working at this exact intersection.
The nervous system that has been touch-starved will reach for the first thing that feels like nourishment. This is survival. The body is trying to get what it needs.
What I do, what ethical body-based intimacy work does, is create a container so precise that the hormones can do their work without the woman having to hand herself over to access them. The release is real. The opening is real. The safety is also real.
The distinction matters more than I have words for.
Because what happens in a room like the one she ended up in rewires something. It teaches the nervous system that opening leads to violation. That safety is a trap. That the longing itself is dangerous.
It takes what her body was correctly seeking and turns it into evidence that her body cannot be trusted.
The women who come to me years later wondering why they shut down when someone tries to hold them, why they cannot receive even with someone safe, why intimacy feels like a threat they cannot explain. Many of them, when we trace the thread back, find a room like this one. A moment where the body learned that opening leads to somewhere she did not mean to go.
This is what I work to undo. Session after session. With women who came before her and women who will come after.
Part Six: For the woman reading this
She is okay. She is processing it with the clarity of someone who has language for it.
She called it what it was. Eventually. After the chemicals settled and the confusion lifted and the quiet devastation of realising what had actually happened moved through her.
Not every woman gets there. Not every woman has the language, or the container, or the friend who picks up the phone.
I am writing this for the ones who don't.
Your body did not fail you.
It did exactly what it was designed to do in the presence of what looked like safety. The longing for touch, for holding, for being truly seen: that longing is one of the most human things about you.
Still following the breadcrumbs.
Juliette