Why Do I Feel Numb in My Marriage? What Christian Women Need to Know About Their Bodies
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By Francie Winslow
For most of my life — and honestly for the first fifteen years of my marriage — I couldn't look at my body. I couldn't name parts of my body. I definitely couldn't touch my body. And all of that added up to an overall numbness. A sense of dread. A kind of quiet disgust that I carried everywhere I went and never talked about with anyone.
And here's the thing that made it so confusing: I loved God. I raised my hands in worship. I wanted to love my husband well. I was trying so hard in every area of my life.
But when it came to vulnerability, receiving, pursuing pleasure? I was somewhere else entirely.
I was what I'd call disembodied — disconnected from my own body, living entirely from the neck up, shoulding myself through intimacy with no understanding of being fully present for it. It wasn't until about six years ago that I could even say the word pleasure without cringing. It felt dirty. Like a bad word. Like there was something very wrong about me.
It wasn't any one person or one teaching that got me there. I think it's pretty much baked into our humanity from the beginning — that nakedness and shame and fear all got wrapped up together. And for those of us who grew up in faith communities that were mostly silent on the topic of our bodies and our sexuality, that vacuum didn't get filled with good news and God's design. It just got filled with shame.
If any of that sounds familiar — this is the conversation I want to have with you.
The Thing Nobody Warned Us About
Most women who feel numb or disconnected in their bodies didn't get there because something is fundamentally wrong with them. They got there because of a very human, very understandable response to a lifetime of quiet messaging.
Nobody sat us down and said your body is shameful or your pleasure doesn't matter. But the silence communicated it anyway. The absence of good education communicated it. The purity culture that told us what not to do but never gave us a vision of what God actually designed our bodies for — that communicated it too.
And so we learned to disconnect. To live from the neck up. To push through intimacy without really being there — managing it, getting through it, hoping it would eventually feel like something.
Here's what I've learned: that disconnection has a name. And it has a pathway out.
What God Actually Said
Before the shame. Before the silence. Before centuries of cultural messaging that taught women to treat their bodies as suspect — God looked at what he had made and spoke two Hebrew words:
Tov Meod.
Very good.
Not just good — like the rest of creation. Very good. Tov meaning beneficial, lovely, harmonious, fitting. Meod meaning exceedingly, abundantly, to the fullest degree.
That was spoken over your body. Over your femininity. Over your capacity for pleasure and connection and aliveness.
The numbness, the dread, the shame — none of that is God's original word over you. It's the distance between where you are and where he always intended you to be.
And here's what I find so beautiful about the Jesus story: he has come to reconcile. To bring things back. Through Christ, God is not just saving our souls — he is restoring all things. Including our bodies. Including our sexuality. Including the parts of ourselves we've been most afraid to bring into the light.
What Female Flourishing Actually Means
Female flourishing is the journey of becoming fully alive as a woman — emotionally, physically, spiritually, and sexually — as God originally designed.
It's not a program or a performance. It's a direction. A slow, honest, sometimes surprising process of coming home to the body God gave you and discovering — gradually, gently — that it was always good.
The opposite of female flourishing is disembodiment — living so entirely in your head that you've lost real connection to what your body is actually experiencing. Most of us have practiced disembodiment for years without even realizing it. We rush through showers without feeling the water. We eat while scrolling without tasting the food. We go through the motions of intimacy without being genuinely present for it.
And we wonder why we feel numb. Why nothing seems to land. Why two people can be trying hard and still missing each other.
Embodiment — coming back into your body — is the work of female flourishing. And it is possible. I am living proof of that.
The Journey Back
On my 39th birthday I put a stake in the ground. I said: this is the year I befriend my body.
Not because I had a plan. But because I was tired of carrying shame into the most intimate spaces of my life and calling that normal. Tired of walking in shoulds. Tired of spiritually bypassing real pain with try harder, Francie and never actually getting anywhere.
Befriending my body is what I call the slow, intentional practice of learning to treat your own body with curiosity and kindness instead of criticism and avoidance. It looked like moving my body in ways that felt freeing instead of forced. Learning to look in the mirror and practice agreement with what God said instead of what my shame said. Noticing the patterns of disconnection and gently interrupting them — with breath, with movement, with honest conversation with God and with trusted women.
It has been years. It is still ongoing. And what has grown from it is more joy, more lightness, more freedom, and more of myself to bring to my marriage than I knew was possible.
Wyatt said to me recently — Francie, you are more alive now than you have ever been in our marriage. Six kids later. Twenty-one years in. And I feel it. Because I am finally coming home.
A Place to Begin
If you have that sense of shame that feels like a heavy cloak — if there is dread when you look in the mirror, or numbness where there should be feeling, or a long-standing sense that your spiritual life and your physical life exist in completely separate categories — that is an invitation.
Not to shove it down or bind it up or rebuke it. But to bring it. To sit with it before your Maker and ask honestly: where did I first learn to believe this about my body? Where did this come from?
Your story is a treasure. It's where God has been walking with you all along. And he wants to shepherd you there — not just your heart, but your body too.
Tov Meod. Very good. That is still his word over you. In this season. In this body. Right now.
This series is an invitation into that journey.
Learn more about pleasure in Back to the Garden: A Married Woman’s Guide to Pleasure by Design. It’s a great place to start and it’s an instant download you’ll come back to season after season.
Have a question you want Francie to tackle on the podcast? Send her an email — she's always taking notes.