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Navigating the Layers of Circumcision Trauma

by
Blog, Therapy
December 29, 2025

As a sex therapist, I often work with clients at the sensitive intersection of intimacy and trauma. For men in particular, this path often leads to the exploration of wounds left by nonconsensual circumcision and forced genital cutting. Because these procedures often occur in infancy—long before a child has the words to describe their experience—they represent a form of preverbal or somatic trauma that is carried into adulthood and can impact their life in a variety of ways.

While men may lack a coherent narrative or explicit memory of the event, the physiological impact remains stored within the body. This somatic memory may explain why many men in America experience significant medical avoidance. For these individuals, clinical environments or even specific scents, such as iodine, may trigger an instinctive “fight, flight, or freeze” response. These reactions can be deeply unsettling, especially when the individual doesn’t yet understand the “why” behind their body’s automatic reactions.

The Dimensions of Loss

Grief from nonconsensual genital cutting or circumcision experience is a form of body-loss grief, a profound sense of loss that affects individuals physically, mentally, and emotionally. Fortunately, healing is possible through compassionate, individualized care. Somatic trauma processing therapies, specifically, are highly effective in helping clients process and release the trauma stored within their nervous systems.

However, the journey rarely ends with confronting the traumatic event itself. As men begin to voice their pain, they often face a second, more public layer of trauma: social invalidation. They may be told by loved ones, and even misinformed mental-health and medical professionals, that their experience “isn’t a big deal” or that they “should be thankful.” This dismissal can exasperate the pain of their trauma, leaving men feeling isolated in a society that continues to not only normalize this trauma, but to perpetuate it in others.

Deconstructing Societal Norms

Our society perpetuates this cycle of pain by treating routine neonatal circumcision as a trivial matter. This cultural dismissal forces clients to navigate a world that endorses the very practice that caused them harm, adding a layer of systemic betrayal to their personal grief.

True recovery involves addressing each of these complex layers—the physical, social, and systemic. I have seen clients find profound healing through several different avenues:

  • Advocacy: Turning their pain into a purpose by protecting future generations.
  • Reclaiming: Finding ways to reclaim their body such as foreskin restoration methods.
  • Trauma processing: Modalities like EMDR, Brainspotting, and somatic experiencing can help clients process through the trauma and cope with triggers.
  • Relational healing: discovering new dimensions of intimacy and pleasure within supportive, affirming partnerships.

A Path Forward

Circumcision trauma is multifaceted and deeply personal. Healing is unique, individualized, and nonlinear. You are the expert on your own experience, and you deserve to choose where your journey begins. If you are looking for an affirming, nonjudgmental community to support your growth, Intact America’s group therapy program provides a space where your story is heard, and your experience is validated. In this community, you will find that you are not alone, and that lasting healing is truly possible.

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Marilyn

Marilyn Fayre Milos, multiple award winner for her humanitarian work to end routine infant circumcision in the United States and advocating for the rights of infants and children to genital autonomy, has written a warm and compelling memoir of her path to becoming “the founding mother of the intactivist movement.” Needing to support her family as a single mother in the early sixties, Milos taught banjo—having learned to play from Jerry Garcia (later of The Grateful Dead)—and worked as an assistant to comedian and social critic Lenny Bruce, typing out the content of his shows and transcribing court proceedings of his trials for obscenity. After Lenny’s death, she found her voice as an activist as part of the counterculture revolution, living in Haight Ashbury in San Francisco during the 1967 Summer of Love, and honed her organizational skills by creating an alternative education open classroom (still operating) in Marin County. 

After witnessing the pain and trauma of the circumcision of a newborn baby boy when she was a nursing student at Marin College, Milos learned everything she could about why infants were subjected to such brutal surgery. The more she read and discovered, the more convinced she became that circumcision had no medical benefits. As a nurse on the obstetrical unit at Marin General Hospital, she committed to making sure parents understood what circumcision entailed before signing a consent form. Considered an agitator and forced to resign in 1985, she co-founded NOCIRC (National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers) and began organizing international symposia on circumcision, genital autonomy, and human rights. Milos edited and published the proceedings from the above-mentioned symposia and has written numerous articles in her quest to end circumcision and protect children’s bodily integrity. She currently serves on the board of directors of Intact America.

Georganne

Georganne Chapin is a healthcare expert, attorney, social justice advocate, and founding executive director of Intact America, the nation’s most influential organization opposing the U.S. medical industry’s penchant for surgically altering the genitals of male children (“circumcision”). Under her leadership, Intact America has definitively documented tactics used by U.S. doctors and healthcare facilities to pathologize the male foreskin, pressure parents into circumcising their sons, and forcibly retract the foreskins of intact boys, creating potentially lifelong, iatrogenic harm. 

Chapin holds a BA in Anthropology from Barnard College, and a Master’s degree in Sociomedical Sciences from Columbia University. For 25 years, she served as president and chief executive officer of Hudson Health Plan, a nonprofit Medicaid insurer in New York’s Hudson Valley. Mid-career, she enrolled in an evening law program, where she explored the legal and ethical issues underlying routine male circumcision, a subject that had interested her since witnessing the aftermath of the surgery conducted on her younger brother. She received her Juris Doctor degree from Pace University School of Law in 2003, and was subsequently admitted to the New York Bar. As an adjunct professor, she taught Bioethics and Medicaid and Disability Law at Pace, and Bioethics in Dominican College’s doctoral program for advanced practice nurses.

In 2004, Chapin founded the nonprofit Hudson Center for Health Equity and Quality, a company that designs software and provides consulting services designed to reduce administrative complexities, streamline and integrate data collection and reporting, and enhance access to care for those in need. In 2008, she co-founded Intact America.

Chapin has published many articles and op-ed essays, and has been interviewed on local, national and international television, radio and podcasts about ways the U.S. healthcare system prioritizes profits over people’s basic needs. She cites routine (nontherapeutic) infant circumcision as a prime example of a practice that wastes money and harms boys and the men they will become. This Penis Business: A Memoir is her first book.