Why does sex feel easier than vulnerability?
Emotional walls-Ask Liza Express Answers
Sex can feel easier than vulnerability because it allows physical exposure while protecting emotional exposure. Physical intimacy is measurable, predictable, and can be controlled. Emotional vulnerability is unpredictable, carries risk of rejection, and requires honesty about your fears, needs, and insecurities. For many trauma survivors, emotional intimacy is far more threatening than physical closeness.
Sex becomes a shield—a way to connect without actually being “seen.” It allows you to maintain control: you decide the pace, the tone, the level of disclosure. Emotional vulnerability removes that control and activates attachment wounds. If you’ve been hurt, abandoned, or shamed in the past, letting someone into your inner world feels unsafe.
This dynamic is common among people who learned early that emotions were dismissed, punished, or weaponized. In adulthood, the body becomes a safer channel than the heart. But this creates relationships that are sexually active but emotionally starved.
Healing requires reversing the hierarchy: emotional intimacy must become the foundation, and physical intimacy becomes an extension—not a replacement. When you build trust slowly, safety grows. When safety grows, vulnerability becomes possible.
Sex isn’t the problem; it’s the shortcut. And once your heart learns that being seen doesn’t equal being harmed, vulnerability becomes less terrifying
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