How to have sex after cancer?

Sex and Intimacy After Cancer: Reconnecting With Your Body and Relationships

Cancer is a life-altering, body-mind-altering, and relationship altering journey. When we're healing and recovering from cancer, we might not even think about our sex lives, intimacy, and relationship. Other times, it's in the forefront of our minds. Here are some tips for having sex after cancer treatment:

Disconnect Is a Survival Response

During cancer treatment, it’s common to dissociate from your body just to get through it. Medical trauma, surgeries, blood tests, and constant touch by providers can leave you feeling more like an object than a person. That survival mode can cause deep disconnection from pleasure, identity, and yourself.

If you’ve lost your sense of being in your body, you’re not broken or alone. That disconnection helped you survive. But when it comes time to rebuild and reconnect, try starting with small acts:

• Massage a scented lotion into your skin and notice the texture, scent, touch.

• Stretch in bed.

• Get a manicure or pedicure.

• Try breathing deeply into your belly and simply noticing what you feel.

Start small, whatever that is for you, for tiny ways to come back to yourself.

Cancer Is a Trauma And Trauma Affects Desire

Cancer is traumatic. Anxiety, fear, depression, and dissociation are common in recovery. These responses are even more complicated for people who are queer, trans, disabled, or part of other marginalized groups that face medical discrimination. But, sex requires safety. And safety can’t happen without facing the trauma. Seeing a therapist or other healer, especially someone trauma-informed or trained in somatic therapy, EMDR, or body-based approaches, can help you slowly process what happened.

Sexual Pain After Cancer Is Real, And Treatable

Cancer treatment can damage nerves, tissues, and hormone levels, which may lead to vaginal dryness, erectile difficulties, pelvic pain, numbness, or inflammation. Scar tissue can limit mobility or create painful or numb sensations during intimacy.

A sex therapist, sex educator, or pelvic floor physical therapist can help. Whether you’re exploring lubricants, positioning options, dilator therapy, or body-safe toys, there’s support.

Rebuilding Intimacy With a Partner

Sometimes, partners shift into caregiver mode and intimacy takes a back seat. You might start feeling more like roommates than lovers. That doesn’t mean love and sex is gone, but the dynamic may need to be rebuilt from the ground up.

Have conversations about what’s changed. Grieve the losses together. Then, start slow: cuddle, kiss, hold hands, or create moments of nonsexual touch that feel good without pressure. Intimacy is a spectrum.

You Don’t Need to “Earn” Pleasure

Here’s the thing no one may have told you: You are allowed to feel good again!!

You don’t need to “get back to normal” or wait until you’re fully healed. Pleasure, sexual or otherwise, is not a reward for being done. It’s part of how we heal. So let this be your permission slip: you’re allowed to feel desire, joy, closeness, and connection, right now, just as you are.

If you need support with communication or intimacy after cancer, please read out for support! Check out my website to learn more: sexedwithbyrd.com