Erika Shershun: Healing Sexual Trauma Through the Body, EMDR, and Reclaiming Touch
The Intimacy InquiryShow Notes
Erika Shershun is a somatic psychotherapist and EMDR practitioner based in the San Francisco Bay Area, specialising in healing sexual trauma, PTSD, and CPTSD. After a career in the arts she retrained in somatic psychology, drawing on organic intelligence, brainspotting, somatic experiencing, and internal family systems. She is the author of the Healing Sexual Trauma Workbook and the Healing Sexual Trauma Guided Journal, with a new book for practitioners forthcoming from PESI. Erika's path to this work began with her own struggle to heal. After 17 years of talk therapy that addressed her depression but never touched the sexual trauma beneath it, a single bodywork training session triggered unexpected flashbacks and everything shifted. She returned to school to study somatic psychotherapy, pieced together the approaches that finally worked for her, and began teaching them to the survivors who arrived in her practice. The conversation opens with Erika reflecting on growing up with contradictory messages about female sexuality, and on the sexual assaults she experienced as a teenager that she did not recognise as assault at the time. She describes how the body stores what the mind pushes away, and why the unconscious protects a person from their trauma until they have enough resources to face it. Sexual trauma, Erika says, is not just a body-mind wound but a soul wound; one that tends to produce more symptoms and run deeper than most. She explains how EMDR combines integration with memory reconsolidation so that the negative beliefs survivors hold about themselves organically become positive ones when the process is complete. Much of the conversation focuses on practical healing: establishing safety and presence before deeper work begins, understanding what emotions reveal about needs, and formulating those needs as requests. Erika describes Betty Martin's Wheel of Consent and the body mapping exercise she uses to help survivors and their partners navigate touch with clarity and care. She is direct about the role of partners in healing: they need to regulate their own nervous systems, because the survivor cannot manage both. She shares a striking example of a client whose partner's anger during a flashback mid-sex set her recovery back significantly, and explains what genuine support actually looks like. Andrew and Erika also discuss the $160,000 average financial cost of sexual trauma per survivor according to CDC data, and where to begin if you have never done body-based work. Erika describes her orienting exercise, Coming Into Safety or Presence, the first chapter of her workbook, available free at healingsexualtrauma.com. https://erikashershuntherapy.com/healing-sexual-trauma/ link to Erika's excellent books Note: this episode contains frank discussion of sexual assault and trauma. Listener discretion is advised.
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