EXPLORE THE IMPACTS
Grooming
Grooming is a calculated process that manipulates a person’s natural need for safety, affection, and connection—often by pairing care and love with underlying exploitation. When trust is built only to be violated, the brain and body adapt in ways that make it harder to recognize danger and easier to confuse unsafe situations for safe ones. This rewiring can blur the lines between affection and abuse, leaving lasting imprints that shape relationships, instincts, and self-perception. By understanding how grooming alters the nervous system and survival responses, we can better support survivors in rebuilding a true sense of safety and reclaiming healthy connections.
Brain
Grooming puts the person being groomed into a parasympathetic flock response. Since they are already in the parasympathetic state, when the perpetrator AKA groomer flips and becomes violent, the person being groomed goes directly to a submit (AKA faint) response. The ability to flee or fight from danger is not accessible because those are part of the sympathetic nervous system, which is not online at this time. It is like being in an express elevator from the top floor to the basement. Every floor in between is out of reach.
Neural networks are developed that pair sex with affection, as well as ones that create a drive that safety is something you must earn.
Body
Grooming works best when it is paired with love and affection by someone in charge of the person’s care or their access to brainstem needs like food, water, elimination needs, and/or connection. This is the biological mechanism behind the “Stockholm Syndrome” the “Battered Woman Syndrome,” “Mood Syntonic Abuse,” (abuse paired with love & affection), and “Betrayal Trauma.”
In children, grooming reverses the poles for safe and unsafe. Since children need safe touch in the first three years of life to hold their calories on their bodies, so they do not develop “Failure to Thrive,” the brain will assist them in connecting with unsafe caregivers as a means of survival. One does this by signaling feelings of safety when they are around unsafe people and signaling lack of safety when they are around safe people. This reversal of safe and unsafe can also be seen in human trafficking situations & interpersonal violence when survivors have early histories of trauma.
Being around people the age they were when their trauma occurred will drive “visceral” (felt in the body memories and drives), to reenact the trauma.
Behavioral Patterns
Survivors of grooming will confuse sex and affection. They may seek sex when they want affection or any kind of connection.
In children, this can show up as precocious sexual knowledge that are acted out toward adults, other children, their pets or toys. Anyone or anything from whom they would seek safety, connection or soothing. Please be aware that precocious sexual knowledge, which is sexual knowledge that is not a part of that developmental stage is a _learned _behavior NOT a choice to be punished. It is a sign of sexual abuse by a primary caregiver that included grooming.
Without interventions that reach the subcortical parts of the brain, these drives will continue because we do not have “conscious” control over the subcortical parts of the brain. This is not an excuse, but it is a context that can help us apply the most impactful types of supports and interventions. Talk or language based interventions or supports alone do not reach these parts of the brain because they are subcortical and therefore record memory, make sense of the world, & communicate through body sensations and _pictures. Pictures _however have the passport to the cortex because it records memory, makes sense of the world, and communicates through _pictures _and words.
Supports
Therapeutically, Somatic Experiencing and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reexperiencing (EMDR) therapy work with the lower regions of the brain and then work to connect and coordinate the entire brain. If EMDR is used be sure to use one that incorporates work with attachment patterns since this has been disrupted by the need to pair sex with affection and survival through the grooming by a primary caregiver.
Supports include highlighting and increasing experiences of non-sexualized affection & connection. Help the person identify interests and hobbies and find groups of people in the community who share those interests. Facilitate positive, safe relationships among that group over time. Become members of the group and find ways to contribute or establish a valued role within the community.
Engage the Safety Script for all limit setting, so that limits, especially those around sexual contact are connected with safety. This will help to change back the parts of the brain that give cues of safety for unsafe sexual behavior and unsafe people. The person will be supported in building new neural networks to feel safe and be safe.
Reflect, Honor, & Connect is a way to communicate in a trauma responsive manner and should be used for limit setting, listening to their trauma stories and/or anything they share with you. This does not mean you are agreeing with them, but it does give them a feeling of being heard, which is the first thing taken by a groomer once they flip and become abusive. Allow the person to feel heard without having to trade sex or any other form of abuse for it.
The 3 Ps to support the person and their caregivers to prepare for a situation where they have experienced unsafe drives in the past. They will also need to be with others to support them as they develop new safe ways of being with others, especially anyone the age they were when they were abused.
The sugar scrub activity described in the PSP Workbook on page 40 will be a safe way to begin to integrate self touch and experiencing safe touch from a safe, consenting caregiver.