Cancer, Menopause and Life Transitions: Sexual Health, Low Libido, Survival Patterns and the Nervous System

When Cancer Changes Your Relationship With Your Body

Major life transitions can change far more than our circumstances. Experiences such as cancer treatment, menopause, illness, loss, or relationship breakdown can alter our relationship with our bodies, our sexuality, our sense of self, and our capacity for intimacy, pleasure, desire, and connection. 

These changes are not only physical. They can affect how safe we feel in our bodies, how we relate to ourselves, and how we connect with others.

When Major Life Transitions Reveal Old Patterns

What once helped us cope, stay connected, or navigate life can suddenly become more visible and harder to maintain.

Many people discover they have spent years overriding discomfort, dismissing their own needs, prioritising others, pushing through exhaustion, or disconnecting from their body’s signals to stay connected, cope, or maintain relationships.

In my work, I describe this pattern as self-abandonment.

Self-abandonment occurs when we repeatedly move away from our own truth, needs, limits, or internal experience to meet expectations, avoid conflict, gain approval, or preserve connection. These patterns are often learned through family systems, relationships, culture, and social conditioning; there’s no shame in this.

The body often begins to ask for a different relationship that includes listening, responding, and developing greater respect for its signals and limitations. This can be confronting, and it can also become an opportunity for profound growth.

Understanding Is Valuable, but Skills Create Change

Many people spend years trying to understand themselves. Insight matters, but understanding alone does not create new pathways.

One of the most important distinctions in my work is the difference between lessons and skills. Many people are trying to create a new reality with the same skills that were developed to survive the old one.

We can understand why intimacy feels difficult and recognise the impact of cancer, treatment, trauma, relationships, hormones, and life experiences. Yet insight alone does not create access to new choices.

What creates change is practising new embodied skills.

These skills include:

-Building internal safety, self-trust, and nervous system capacity

-Recognising and honouring what is true for us

-Developing embodied consent, boundaries, and discernment

-Communicating needs, desires, preferences, and sensations

-Staying connected during vulnerability and uncertainty

-Developing emotional intelligence and emotional freedom

-Developing the capacity to receive from others and ourselves

-Accessing playfulness, curiosity, discovery, embodied sensuality, surrender, pleasure, and aliveness

In my practice, somatic therapy uses an experiential approach to develop these skills, allowing people to build capacity in real time rather than only understanding what needs to change.

Rebuilding a Relationship With Pleasure

Pleasure is often understood too narrowly. It’s much broader than sex or orgasm. Pleasure can be experienced through connection, touch, movement, rest, nature, beauty, creativity, rhythm, meaning, and laughter.

For some people, recovery after significant life transitions involves rebuilding their relationship with pleasure before reconnecting with sexuality. This can involve learning how to notice enjoyment and sensuality again, how to receive, how to slow down, and how to recognise, honour, and express genuine desire rather than performing, overriding, or shutting down.

Pleasure can become a pathway back into connection with yourself, your body, and your life.

It’s Not “Just Hormones” – And It’s Not “Just Psychological”

Hormones play an important role in sexual wellbeing. Cancer treatment, menopause, and other significant physiological changes can affect hormonal balance, including oestrogen and testosterone, as well as aspects of sexual function such as vaginal health, erectile function, libido, arousal, and desire.

Many people discover that even when treatment has finished, and their body has healed medically, intimacy can still feel unfamiliar, uncomfortable, effortful, or disconnected, and desire may remain absent.

It’s not only hormones, and it’s not only psychology. Our emotions, beliefs, memories, relationships, and the meaning we make of what we have lived through all influence how we relate to ourselves, our bodies, and others.

The nervous system also plays a central role by influencing our sense of safety and our capacity for desire, pleasure, vulnerability, and connection. Experiences such as diagnosis, treatment, medical procedures, anxiety, loss of control, uncertainty, and ongoing health concerns can have a profound impact on how safe the body feels.

When the nervous system is carrying stress, fear, overwhelm, grief, or hypervigilance, it can become more difficult to access desire, pleasure, arousal, relaxation, and connection. This isn’t a sign that something is wrong with your body; it’s a sign that the body is responding intelligently to what it has lived through.

Experiences of safety, connection, pleasure, and intimacy influence the release of neurochemicals such as oxytocin, dopamine, serotonin, and vasopressin. Pleasure and connection are not luxuries; they are essential aspects of being human that support the body’s natural chemistry, nervous system capacity, vitality, recovery, and our ability to thrive.

The quality of the relationship we have with ourselves, our body, and others plays a significant role in our well-being and aliveness.

Intimacy Begins Long Before Sex

Before intimacy can be shared with another person, it must first be available within ourselves.

Intimacy requires the ability to notice what we feel, recognise what’s true, communicate our experience clearly, and remain connected to ourselves.

Can we recognise our body’s signals?

Can we trust what we feel and honour what’s true for us?

Can we identify and communicate our needs, desires, preferences, and boundaries?

Can we remain connected to ourselves while also staying connected to another person?

Can we allow ourselves to experience pleasure, playfulness, vulnerability, and intimacy without abandoning ourselves?

Somatic sexology and somatic therapy in my work explore how safety, attachment, sexual development, and relational experiences are held in the nervous system and expressed through patterns of connection, intimacy, and embodiment.

Sessions are guided by clear professional boundaries, consent, and the person’s pace. This work is not about sexual techniques or requiring people to share, reveal, or engage in anything that doesn’t feel safe and appropriate.

It focuses on embodied learning and skill development, building nervous system capacity for real-time change in emotional, relational, and embodied experience. These skills are practised in ways that are relevant to the individual and integrated into daily life.

These are not simply relationship skills; they are nervous system skills.

Why I Was Drawn to Somatic Sexology

My interest in somatic sexology began through my own embodied healing. Through reconnecting with my body and learning to listen to its signals, I became deeply curious about the relationship between the nervous system, embodiment, sexuality, pleasure, and intimacy.

What captured my attention was how much shame, silence, taboo, and inherited conditioning surround these deeply human experiences.

As I explored this work more deeply, I discovered that beneath much of this conditioning was not something shameful, but something profoundly human: pleasure, connection, aliveness, vitality, creativity, agency, and embodied power.

I work with the nervous system, and sexuality is one expression of that system. Our relationship with sexuality reflects our relationship with safety, trust, vulnerability, boundaries, communication, self-worth, connection, and power.

Sexuality and intimacy are not separate from the systems, cultures, and relationships we live within. When people develop greater awareness, capacity, and embodied choice, the effects extend far beyond the individual, influencing relationships, families, communities, and future generations.

Beneath the conditioning, there’s wisdom, vitality, agency, connection, and possibility waiting to be rediscovered.

A Different Way Forward

Every person’s path is different. I work with individuals and couples, supporting embodied skill development that creates meaningful change in real time. The process is flexible, collaborative, and responsive to each person or relationship.

There’s no requirement for ongoing sessions or long-term commitment. Many people benefit from a focused period of work, with sessions scheduled once a month over 3-5 months to support momentum and integration. Some people choose to continue for longer depending on their goals, needs, and circumstances.

The path forward is about developing a deeper relationship with yourself that’s anchored in self-trust, choice, communication, capacity, and embodied skill.

When we look at healing through the lens of the nervous system, honour the body’s experience, and develop the skills required for change, new possibilities become available.

The path forward isn’t simply about recovery; it’s about developing the capacity to participate more fully in your life and relationships as you embody new skills, deeper self-trust, and a fuller expression of who you are becoming.

Contact Kate Alderman 

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