He reaches for your hand at the table and your stomach tightens before you've thought a single thing. You want him near you. Your body has learned something separate: that his hand rarely stays just a hand. It's the opening line of a conversation that's going to end up somewhere specific, and you feel cornered before it's even begun.
This is a different pattern from going numb or feeling nothing. You feel plenty. What you feel is trapped, because touch stopped being able to just be touch. It became a request, every time, and your body started answering the request before you'd consciously registered it was being made.
Why "just say no" doesn't fix this
The obvious advice is to simply say no when you don't want it to go further. That's true, and it doesn't touch the actual pattern, because the bracing happens before the choice point, at the first touch, not at the moment things escalate. Saying no after you've already flinched at hello doesn't rebuild the thing that broke. What rebuilds it is touch that reliably, provably, does not lead anywhere else, often enough that your body stops needing to defend against the possibility.
What separating touch from sex actually looks like
This is the whole logic behind structured, non-sexual touch: a defined block of time, an obvious end, and an agreement, held by both of you, that this specific touch goes nowhere else tonight. Not forever. Just enough times, with an outcome your body can verify for itself, that touch stops being a euphemism and starts being allowed to be only what it is.
You can say this out loud tonight, before either of you buys anything: "Five minutes, my hand on your arm, and it ends there. If either of us wants more, we say so out loud, we don't just drift there." Naming the edge, in words, before the touch starts, is what lets your body actually rest inside it instead of scanning for where it's headed.
The 10 Touch Rituals were built for exactly this: ten small, non-sexual touch practices with a clear beginning and a clear end, so both of you get real, repeated proof that a touch can be just a touch. It's the fastest way I know to hand your body some new evidence.
Trust that touch means only what it says is rebuilt one honoured boundary at a time, not one conversation.