Meet Jenna, 35: she lives with vaginismus, where the vaginal muscles involuntarily contract, making penetration painful or impossible. This is a fictitious client profile, one of an ongoing series built from a decade of real work with women, showing what actually helps when someone's done the therapy, read the books, and still feels like nothing has landed.

TW: this episode discusses sexual assault and its lasting effects on the body.

Vaginismus isn't a malfunction, it's a protective mechanism, and often a clever one. For Jenna, the pain was the trigger, not the cause: an assault she never told anyone about because it left no visible scars, held instead in her body. Naomi walks through why the presenting pain is almost never the real story, what it means to work with a nervous system stuck in freeze, and what changes when a woman's body finally gets a space to speak instead of being fixed. (NHS has basic information on vaginismus if you want a clinical starting point). Naomi's own experience is that even smear-test clinicians often don't fully understand the term.

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