Erotic Felt Sense as a Clinical Innovation: Erotic Embodiment, Creative Expression and Storytelling for Holistic Sexual Health

Abstract

Background

Patients in sexual medicine often describe erotic distress through bodily language such as numbness, shutdown, tension, charge, or inability to stay present. Present models of desire, arousal, orgasm, pain, and trauma do not always provide a practical way to work with this pre-verbal embodied layer. This Innovation manuscript introduces erotic felt sense as a proposed clinical term for the bodily awareness of erotic aliveness, including self-expression, pleasure, agency, boundary, and relational readiness. The concept is translated as measurable domains rather than metaphysical claims: interoceptive awareness, autonomic regulation, muscular guarding, dissociation, and affect tolerance.

Objective

• To describe a clinically usable framework that integrates erotic embodiment, creative expression, and storytelling in holistic sexual-health care as an adjunct to standard medical and psychosexual treatment.
• To identify a next-step research pathway for a holistic mobile community qualitative project using storytelling as well as optional creative media.

Methods

• Narrative Innovation article drawing on peer-reviewed literature within embodied sexuality, interoception, trauma-related mind-body interventions, and storytelling in public health.
• Proposed three-part practice sequence: attunement to bodily signal, creative externalization, and narrative integration, making meaning.

Results

• The manuscript offers a new clinical language for a diverse range of patients who experience sexuality as difficult to name but strongly felt in the body.
• It reframes patient descriptions of “stored pain,” “release,” or “blocked energy” as clinically interpretable processes, including breath restriction, muscular holding, autonomic activation, sensory narrowing, and dissociative distance.
• It proposes that creative expression can help externalise difficult-to-verbalise sensations, and that storytelling can connect these sensations to safety, consent, shame, identity, and possibility.

Clinical Impact

• May improve sexual health history-taking in complex presentations.
• May help clinicians distinguish protective shutdown from low desire and support more embodied forms of consent, pacing, and referral.
• Creates a bridge between individual care and person-centred, community-based sexual-health research and knowledge translation.

Notable Comments

• This article does not present trial data.
• The next phase is a mobile, community-based qualitative project in Collingwood through Bridget’s Bus, using safe storytelling spaces and optional digital/ documentary methods to study sexuality, expression, and embodied meaning-making.

Conclusions: Erotic felt sense is proposed as a first description of a clinically relevant construct that may help sexual medicine address the holistic embodied and narrative dimensions of sexual wellbeing more precisely. The framework is feasible for a qualitative study and suitable for future mixed-methods evaluation.