Can I Still Feel Pleasure With Chronic Pain?

Yes, pleasure with chronic pain is available, though it may not look like the pleasure you’ve been sold. Somatic sex educator Emily Royce found hers by starting at neutral, any spot in the body that isn’t loud or painful, and letting that expand. Small, slow, body led. Nothing forced.

In my work as a Certified Somatic Sex Educator and Sexological Bodyworker, I’ve sat with people who arrived convinced their body had become a problem to be solved rather than a place to live. Much of what follows comes from my conversation with Emily Royce, a Certified Somatic Sex Educator, Sexological Bodyworker and scar tissue remediation practitioner at Heal With Pleasure, who has lived with chronic pain since childhood and built her practice around bodies that can’t be pushed. One plain note first: ongoing pain deserves real medical assessment, and nothing here is a substitute for it.

Why does pleasure feel out of reach when the pain is loud?

Because there’s often nowhere quiet to stand yet.

“When I first got into this stuff,” Emily said, “all the pain, everything was so loud.” Being told where to look made it worse. She describes people instructing her to “get into your pelvis, this juicy, enjoyable” place, when what was actually there was “painful and loud and hot and fiery.” Her answer to that is the whole problem in six words: “Don’t tell me what it is.”

There’s a second layer, and in her experience it’s the heavier one. Her pain began in childhood, and she says it “wasn’t so much the pain and other things that developed. It’s, it’s the loaded stuff around it of not trying to be a burden.” One of seven children, she learned not to be “too much, too extra, too this, too that.” What that costs the body is “the kind of holding and gripping and things we do around what we’re experiencing.”

So a body in pain is often also a body braced against being an inconvenience, and Emily sees that across her whole practice. “We generally feel like a burden,” she said, and “we’re too much or not enough somehow.” That bracing shapes what you can feel. If you’ve been numb through sex for years, why can’t I feel anything during sex? sits right next to this.

How do you find pleasure with chronic pain without pushing the body?

You lower the bar until it’s honest. For Emily, that meant starting at neutral.

Here it is in her words. “As soon as someone put neutral and allowed me and my body to decide, okay, can I find neutral? And then I was able to feel, oh, neutral is pleasurable.” Not arousal. Not even comfort. Just a patch of yourself that isn’t shouting. “To be able to find a neutral, not loud, painful spot,” she said, is itself pleasurable. “And then I could lean into that as a resource,” she said, and “that could expand on its own.”

Her definition of pleasure is wider than the one most of us inherited, and the width is the point. “When I say pleasure, I don’t mean it maybe the way that a lot of people see it,” she said, gesturing at the incense beside her: “it’s highly pleasurable.” In her framing, pleasure is “a resource for bodies that have chronic pain.”

She also inverts the usual advice about intensity. Where much of the sexuality world offers “more faster, harder,” her question is the opposite: “can we feel more with less?” and “Can we start with neutral?” The dose stays small. “All this work is small, small,” she said, “because we can get overwhelmed with good too.” In her view the gains land in the pause afterward: “the integration is where most of the plasticity happens anyways.”

What do years of medical care do to your sense of your own body?

If you’ve been dismissed, scanned, prescribed and sent home, this part may be the one you recognize.

Emily doesn’t hedge. The accumulated weight of appointments and procedures “really wears on a person and their body. And it really separates you from your body intelligence. It’s by design.” The more medicalized the history, the further the drift: “you’re getting further and further away from your innate knowing of what’s best for you.” That’s her read on the system. It isn’t an argument against getting care. Please get the care. If a surgery has already changed what you can feel, will I ever feel anything again after pelvic surgery? takes that up.

What she does in session is slow down past what most practitioners would call slow. “I already move slow and this work moves slow,” she said, “but I move even slower.” She also refuses the assumption that a body like yours wants to “get back to quote normal,” with a sexuality that looks like what’s in the movies. Her alternative is plain: don’t presume, let it be client body led.

She opens with one question, “what would make this even better?”, and holds it, sometimes for “20 minutes, 30 minutes,” because people trained not to be a burden say they’re fine and ask to get on with it. Keep asking and something shifts: “yes, I do actually need something behind my knees. Okay. Actually the light is kind of irritating.” What she’s watching for is the moment a client realizes they were the one steering, in her words, “I totally ran the show in that.”

Does pleasure have to involve the genitals?

No, and for some bodies that reframe opens everything.

Emily’s own route out came from what she calls “decentralizing genitals of things that were inaccessible to me, or I kept trying to perform sex, kept trying to perform pleasure.” It started by accident. A friend touched her knee while she was already in a trance state, and she describes a full body orgasmic response. Her reaction was curiosity rather than explanation: “And then I was like, I wonder if my elbow, and then I just started experimenting.”

She works with that deliberately now, including with partners who learn to circle an elbow, and she’s careful to say it isn’t for everyone. The orientation is the part worth keeping. Rather than returning to a site that hurts or has gone quiet, the whole body gets treated as terrain with unmapped territory in it, and performance drops out. On that, why does sex feel like a performance? goes further.

A practice you can try

This is Emily’s neutral practice, condensed. It isn’t a treatment for pain, and it asks nothing of you physically.

1. Get as comfortable as you can, and take longer with it than feels reasonable. Ask one question: what would make this even better? A cushion behind the knees. The light lower. A blanket. Keep asking until the answers stop coming.
2. Scan for neutral. Not the pleasurable place, not the painful place. Somewhere that simply isn’t loud. An earlobe, a forearm, the sole of a foot.
3. Rest your attention there without doing anything to it, and if it starts to feel faintly good, let it expand on its own. Don’t chase it, don’t add pressure or speed.
4. Stop early. Being overwhelmed with good is not a figure of speech.
5. Sit still afterward with nothing happening. In her framing, that pause is where the rewiring lands.

On a bad day, when even that is too much. Emily carried one thing out of Kundalini yoga that applies exactly here. Some of her teachers told her that if she couldn’t do the practice as prescribed that day, “just envision it. Just imagine it. And your neurons are going to fire the same as if it were happening.” She believes that’s true, and used it through a period when her body couldn’t perform most of what was taught.

So: lie however you’re lying and imagine one of the steps above. The cushion, the quiet patch of skin, the warmth. Or skip the body and rest on something in the room that asks nothing of you, a scent, a sound, a window. One moment is enough. In her words, about holding a posture: “Am I capable of keeping ’em up in this moment? I don’t have to think about the next moment.”

Listen to the full conversation: Pleasure Beyond Pain: Chronic Pain & Sexuality – Emily Royce on the Your Body Remembers Pleasure podcast.

Common Questions

Can I feel pleasure if my pain never goes away?

Emily Royce’s answer, from a lifetime with chronic pain and years working with others who live with it, is yes, and that it rarely starts where people expect. She began not with arousal but with neutral, a place that isn’t loud or painful, and found that locating it was itself pleasurable and could expand from there. Ongoing pain still needs medical assessment, and this is not a treatment for it.

Why does it hurt more when someone tells me to feel pleasure in my pelvis?

Because being instructed what to feel overrides what your body is actually reporting. Emily describes being told to get into her pelvis as a juicy, enjoyable place when what was there was “painful and loud and hot and fiery,” and says it made things worse. Her alternative is to let your own body decide what it can find, starting at neutral.

Can pleasure happen somewhere other than the genitals?

Yes. Emily’s own opening came from what she calls decentralizing genitals, after a touch to her knee while in a trance state produced a full body response, which led her to experiment with her elbow. She works with that deliberately now and is clear it isn’t for everyone. Where some areas are painful or numb, treating the whole body as possible territory changes what’s available.

What can I do on a day when I can’t do anything?

Imagine it. Emily carried this out of Kundalini yoga, where teachers told her that if she couldn’t do a practice as prescribed, she could envision it and her neurons would fire as if it were happening. She considers that true and used it for years. Picture the cushion, the quiet patch of skin, the warmth, or rest your attention on one pleasant thing nearby.

Does slowing down actually change anything, or am I just avoiding the work?

Slow is the work, not a concession. Emily says this work moves slowly and that she moves slower still, and that all of it is “small, small, because we can get overwhelmed with good too.” She puts the lasting change in the pause afterward rather than in the peak, noting that integration is where the plasticity happens.

Closing

If you’ve spent years being told your pain is manageable, exaggerated, or in your head, you’ve probably stopped expecting much from your body. That’s a reasonable conclusion from the evidence you were given. What Emily offers isn’t a promise that pleasure will fix anything. It’s smaller and more honest: there’s likely somewhere in you that isn’t loud, that place is worth finding, and you decide what happens in it. Please keep working with your doctors on the pain itself.

If you want a place to begin, the Genital Awakening Meditation is free, and comes with a 12-point genital armor checklist so you can see what your own body is carrying.

And if you’re ready to rebuild your relationship with sensation at a pace your body sets, Reclaiming Your Pleasure is where that work goes deeper.

Rahi Chun is a Certified Somatic Sex Educator and Sexological Bodyworker, and the founder of Rahi Chun. This piece draws on his conversation with Emily Royce, Certified Somatic Sex Educator, Sexological Bodyworker and scar tissue remediation practitioner at Heal With Pleasure, on the podcast Your Body Remembers Pleasure. Related reading: Why can’t I feel anything during sex? and Why am I still numb after years of therapy?