74. Dr. Tina Schermer Sellers - How to Heal Sexual Shame and Rewrite Your Sexual Legacy

Dr. Tina Schermer Sellers is a licensed sex psychotherapist, best-selling author, and researcher whose expertise spans sex therapy, intimacy, parenting, and social justice.

Her book Sex, God, & the Conservative Church has had a global impact. And Her latest book, Shameless Parenting – Everything You Need to Raise Shame-free, Confident, Kids and Heal Your Shame Too! was a New Release Bestseller in eight different categories.

She speaks throughout the world on how to heal, and how to raise shame-free relationally confident children. In 2015, Dr. Sellers left her academic position of 28 years to found the Northwest Institute on Intimacy, a post-graduate institute to train psychotherapists, educators, clergy, and physicians in sexual health and understanding their sexual biases. 

Dr. Tina can be followed on Instagram @DrTinaShameless

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JEREMY IS A MEDITATION TEACHER, LIFE COACH, AND DIGITAL HABITS EXPERT WHO WORKS WITH ENTREPRENEURS, EXECUTIVES, AND LEADERS.

Jeremy overcame addiction, shame, self-judgement, and depression in his early twenties with the help of mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness not only helped him let go of destructive behaviors, it also allowed him to connect with deeper meaning and purpose in his life.

For the past 10 years Jeremy has been teaching mindfulness and emotional intelligence practices at universities, recovery centers, and companies throughout Asia and the US. He holds a Bachelors and Master’s degree in Genetics and Genomics, and spent several years at Duke University working towards a PhD in Genetics & Systems Biology before he turned full-time to teaching mindfulness.

Jeremy is also an ICF certified Executive Coach. As a former scientist and academic, Jeremy has a great passion for bringing his EI based coaching skills into the corporate and professional world. He realizes how powerful & transformative these practices can be for skeptics and senior-level managers. He is known for his calm and grounded demeanor, his expertise in habits and high-performance, and his compassionate approach to transformation.

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Jeremy is a Certified Teacher with the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, a mindfulness-based emotional intelligence program initially developed at Google. He also spent time living and training as a fully-ordained Buddhist monk in Myanmar. He now combines his science-based expertise with a hunger for personal development to help others discipline their minds and achieve genuine inner- peace and fulfillment.  

Transcript

 All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another episode of the Unhooked podcast. I am your host, Jeremy Leitz, and I'm joined today with a special guest, Dr. Tina Shermer Sellers. Dr. Tina, welcome to the show.

 Thank you so much. I am so glad to be here with you. 

I'm excited to dive into this topic, that we're gonna be discussing today. And it's a big one in the recovery world and the addiction space, but particularly in, in porn addiction and sex addiction. Shame is just, it's so important to dive into, it might be the most important thing to talk about in recovery from sex and porn addiction.

so I guess, you know, for the listeners who are tuning into this just now, just give a little background about, you know, what you do and what your work is.

Sure  I've had a little bit of a circuitous route. Um, I started out as a junior high and high school teacher, and then then realized how much people's home environments affected their ability to learn. Went back to school, got a graduate degree in marriage and family therapy. Ended up becoming concerned with how medicine was not managing the psychosocial impact of illness and not teaching doctors.

So I ended up working in medicine, having a clinical appointment in family medicine at the University of Washington,  having an associate professor position in a marriage and family therapy program for 28 years, teaching, you know, therapists, future therapists, um, about how to work alongside doctors and. Also around sexuality. So sexuality ended up being something I taught from the early nineties all the way forward. It was a required course for licensure. And um, and then a little bit later decided I wanted to get my PhD in clinical sexology, wanted to understand human sexuality.  Um, just because we live in a really interesting, this, the United States is a very interesting culture in that it just absolutely ignores and shame sexuality.

And so we don't provide the knowledge that people need to do interpersonal relationships  with intimacy, with attachment in a way that's really helpful. And so much of the patriarchal stuff that comes down through  media, et cetera, ends up pitting people against each other as opposed to helping 'em out.  So somewhere around the mid two thousands I started to notice that there was a dramatic increase in the shame that my students and and clients were describing when the stories they were telling were very normative, right? Felt definitely in that range of normal. But they described themselves as feeling perverted.

Something was wrong with them. Why were they like this? Whatever. And I couldn't really honestly figure out what I was seeing at first. It took about three years. And then I realized I was seeing the first wave of kids that got exposed to abstinence only education, which was we now know 80% medically inaccurate and was a religious education. And um, and then those kids that also were involved in youth groups or whatever as kind of the religious right was growing and evangelicalism in the  way that we know it to be now was really growing, that it was really shutting down and hurting.  Um, youth and people in their twenties. So I was seeing and hearing about sexual dysfunction, um, at levels I had never seen in someone in their twenties and early thirties. But seeing it both in family medicine and then seeing it with my own students and my clients, and I just was like, whatever's happening out there in culture is causing so much pain that these, these young people, these youth, these young adults are showing up with symptoms that match somebody who's experienced childhood sexual abuse.  And so I finally started writing about it, speaking about it, taking, you know, research notes on it. And, and later, you know, in 2017, took 11 years, wrote a book called Sex, God in the Conservative Church, erasing Shame from Sexual Intimacy. Um, because I wanted people to know what had been going on, that it wasn't them. That it was oppressive symptoms systems that we live in and, and that it had been building for a long, long time. It had a long history and that there were ways to heal and that there were ways to sort of live a really, um, what for them felt like a healthy what loving, liberated way in relationship to their own selves and their bodies and their sexuality and whatever.  Yeah. It kind of came, became my thing. Mm-Hmm. Yeah. And so, uh, in 2019, I left my academic position In 2015, I started in institute training physicians and therapists and educators and clergy and sexual health and understanding your sexual bias. I'm just now selling that institute and I have started another organization on looking at how to support those clinicians that are going into psychedelic assisted therapy and the, the way in which that is showing to be able to do a lot of healing of trauma.

And we just have. So much of it in our country and it's really impacting people's ability to live kind of liberated and more fun, joy filled lives. And so, um, so yeah, there's a little background

on my circuitous travels.

Uh, there's so much I want to get into. Uh, one thing I just wanna know, you know, you mentioned we live particularly in the US but in the west, in this this time where sexuality is so shamed and so, you know, suppressed. And what's interesting is. It  at the same time that it's shamed and suppressed.

It's also hyper celebrated and hypersexualized. I mean, the hypersexualization of our culture  alongside the hyper shaming and suppressing and avoiding of the topic kind of creates this really potent mix of shame I imagine. 

Yeah. And you know, again, because we don't talk about it because we don't. Teach on it. We don't provide knowledge on it. That conflation that you're describing there actually makes us so much more confused. Right? Because what's happening in culture is that since about 1980, we have moved to have a cultural, sexual, uh, an an ethic all the way across business that is, products are more important than people.  It doesn't matter how we get there. So  the means,  um, the ends is what important, right? The, the ends justify the means. So if we're making our stockholders money, it doesn't flip and matter how we got there. That ethic changed in about 1980 with Reagan, and there's some very clear things that we can look at to see that. So at the same time, we had video games coming online.  We later followed with online, just online entertainment, right? So online pornography was a piece of that.  And then on top of that, we had social media.  Meanwhile, we have had dramatic increases in violence against women since the early seventies. There have been requests with every organ, every major sort of political, like the FCC and this Congress.

And there's been these requests for please pass laws that have to do with violence against women.  So what we've been selling is a particular kind of violent eroticism, not a kind of eroticism that joins us and helps us celebrate and have fun and be like, yay, I love being human. Like this is a great thing. No, it's a kind that actually hurts people, exploits people, takes advantage of people. We're not meant to do that. Our heart is not meant to take advantage of others and hurt others. So of course it's pulling down people. So you have people learning about this kind of sexuality  while they're not getting anything of the real knowledge. And so some people, that's their entire quote unquote education. So they're going into relationships thinking, well, if I just pull her hair, she's gonna really like that. Or if I tell her I'm gonna, you know, shove it up, or, you know what, she's gonna really like that because that's what women like. Right? Right. And I can't tell you the amount of people, especially straight couples coming into therapists and sex therapists, office telling stories, and your heart breaks because it's like sweet pea. You want a good relationship, you, your heart wants a good relationship, and we set you up  for trouble all the way across the board, men and

women.  You know, our, our queer couples are actually doing better because there's no script for them. They get to start figuring things out and they've been working on coming to terms with their identity. They've been doing so much work, right? So they're not as blind. They've been going after what is the real information here. But our straight couples and our straight men in particular, you know, who think Patriarchy's serving them  

No Uhuh. It's not. And, and we're hurting people right and left. So, so I really always wanna be very clear about the kind of sexuality we're talking about. 'cause there's nothing wrong with  it's beautiful sexuality and introducing kids at age appropriate ways to, what does it mean to love, respect boundaries.

Know yourself, know, listen to somebody else. You know, all those things. Um, but when we give kids nothing except for our media, and that's what they're supposed to build, relationship, meaningful relationships on, we wonder why so many people. Can't make it. I, I can tell you why they can't make it.

Yeah. 

Yeah. Just the, the type of sexuality that is promoted is the hyper,  hyper violent, hyper extreme. It is just a skewed distortion of 

what healthy sexuality and healthy intimacy is, and it's no wonder people are 

coming in kind of screwed up to no fault of 

their own. It's just the system that they're

No, no. into.

It's the system. It's a very, very oppressive system. Um,  and it's, it's a violent system.

Yeah.

Yeah. But it's, but it makes money, so we don't care.

Right. And that's, you know, that's a big part of it is that it, there is a porn industry and it's a big industry and, and, and, it's not even the 

porn industry. I mean, social media, anything that sells, it's, it's selling on what gets the most attention, what gets the most clicks. And so

Yeah. I

mean, it.

could be movies.  

Yeah.

exactly. There's so many things, you know, I can just, I'm old, right? So I think about, oh, you know, people losing their mind over, you know, showing a pregnant actress's belly, right? Who's pregnant or, or somebody performing right at a  sports event and their breast falls out. It's like, that actually isn't a big deal. That's actually beautiful.  How is it that we're making that bad and we are condoning violence and exploitation,  you know, all the time? Um, 

Yeah,

there's a lot of crazy double standards and just weird cognitive dissonance in in the world in terms of 

what gets shamed and what gets celebrated.  Yeah.

Truly, truly. 

Let's dive in just at the very basic level of what is shame and what is sexual shame. 

Yeah. Oh, I love that question so much, you know? You wouldn't believe this Jeremy, but, or maybe you would. We didn't have an operational researched based operational definition of sexual shame until 20 17, 20 17 in our literature at all, anywhere.  So I had had a PhD student find me and say to me, I've been studying your work and I really wanna do my doctoral dissertation on religious sexual shame, but I can't because there's nothing in the literature on sexual shame. And I said, well sweetie, you're gonna have to start there. And I, for one, will be very grateful. Many other people will be too, but so much will build, get built on this once you do start there.  So it was after my book came out. So I, I have this definition in the audio version of my book, but not the actual book.

But I wanna read for you what came out of her research. 'cause it, I remember being on a plane reading her dissertation and just like. I'm just feeling like my life had stopped because I saw in black and white what I'd been seeing in the lives of so many people for so long.  But I want you to notice in this definition is how permeating, how widespread sexual shame is in someone's life and how it attacks the very place that's core to our happiness.

The very place where we attach, we feel, seen, known, loved, accepted, right? Um, because I can't, in doing the work that I do, I've come to a place where I don't believe we could hurt anybody more than hurting them in this particular place.  It's so, it's so, um,  comprehensive. Really sexual shame is a visceral feeling of humiliation and disgust toward one's own body and identity as a sexual being and a belief of being abnormal. Inferior and unworthy.  This feeling can be internalized. So we think it and feel it on the inside, but it also manifests in interpersonal relationships. So between you and someone else having a negative impact on trust, communication, and physical and emotional intimacy. So really every key place that we do attachment  sexual shame develops across the lifespan in interactions with interpersonal relationships once culture and society, and creates a subsequent critical self-appraisal.

So that's really that feedback loop that gets going that pretty soon your own inner critic is attacking you and the way that you were attacked growing up.  There is also a fear and uncertainty related to one's power or right to make decisions, including safety decisions. Related to sexual encounters, along with an internalized judgment toward one's own sexual desire. So that's from the doc, the doctoral dissertation work of Dr. Noelle Clark.  And that last piece, what I wanna point out there is  Peggy Ornstein, who's a New York Times journalist, wrote two books, girls and Sex. And Boys and Sex, both fabulous books about the impact of media on kids today. In the book on Girls, she said,  I interviewed 80 girls  between 15 and 22. So many of them described themselves as feeling confident and confident and knowing what they wanted and having voice until they got ready to go out. And then they were putting down three, four, and five shots of hard liquor because they didn't know if they could keep themselves safe  or if they had the right to.  Now, she did not interview religious kids. These were secular kids. So if you want to know how widespread sexual shame is, look at that research, right? and and how much, um, rape culture is affecting the kids. And, you know, and I'm, I'm talking, red culture is affecting boys and affecting girls, right? Because boys are often thinking, oh, well she's gonna like this, right?

I don't have to ask. I mean, don't ask, you don't talk about it because then you would be admitting you don't know, right? You just do it. You know, you wake her up in the middle of the night, right? Or you whatever. No, no, no, no. We have all these really good kids that are doing harm and not even realizing that they are.

And we have all these girls where harm is happening and they don't know what to do about it, right? So sexual shame is incredibly pervasive and prevalent in our lives, and we're not doing anything about it that I can see.

Yeah, I got, I got chills and, and goosebumps when you read that definition, because of some of the things, you know, when you really dive into the definition, the things it brings up around the self-judgment, the, the judging. Am I, do I have the ability to, to make these decisions? Am I safe  in the work that I do with my clients?

This comes up all the time and it is so pervasive. Just the feeling of, I'm not safe, I'm broken, I'm unworthy. This sexuality is, is not a safe place. Um, 

the other thing you mentioned towards the end just now, the,  the impact of media and what people are learning from pornography. You know, I've mentioned this many times, but you in porn, you never, ever see a girl saying no to sex  because then it wouldn't be porn.

And so just what is 

that doing to the minds of young men and young women who see this, they young boys think girls are always in the mood. As long as I make in advance it will happen. And girls are getting the message that they always have to be in the mood. That they can't say no. 'cause 

they never see a woman in a porn video 

saying no. And so 

just as you're saying is people are questioning, do I have the right to say no or do I have to 

ask? You know, is consent.

Consent is never part of it.  So all 

the ways that porn is influencing people. 

Yeah. And I, I want to say that because we give a lot of power to porn,  I like to take a little power away from porn,  and one of the ways that you do that is you provide education, right? So we teach kids that you can't scale buildings safely  until you're much older and you actually have some equipment and you know about how to belay and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?

All the things, give them actual education so our kids aren't watching Superman and Spider-Man, and thinking, oh, I can go do that. Because there are other people around that are constantly educating them on  how gravity works, how things work, right? And so they can separate fantasy from reality in that area.  We don't let our kids turn 16 and have told them, oh yeah, someday you'll drive, but you don't get anywhere near them now because they're gonna hurt you. You don't do it. It's dangerous. And then at 16, hand them keys where they can go anywhere they want. We don't do that. That would be foolish.  But in the place of interpersonal human relationships, how to understand the value of pleasure and connection, we give kids nothing. And we go so far as to say to teach a 5-year-old anything around quote unquote sex education. Oh, that's horrible. Right. Most people don't even know what the components of quote unquote comprehensive sex education are for children. Let's say five to eight. And then what happens from eight to 18? What do we teach?

What's different? People don't even know. So literally, the only reason that porn has the power that it does in the United States, and it has more power in religious states  is because people don't know. They don't know. Nobody said to them, honey, this is this part. You know what I mean? Whatever. There's a million places.

It's why I wrote my second book. Um, shameless Parenting Everything You Need To Raise Shame-Free Confident Kids, and Heal Your Shame too. Because so many people came to me and said, I don't wanna do to my kids what was done to me. And I'm like, I got you.

I will give you something. Just be two years ahead of your kid and get these books and follow these things and you are gonna be fine. I promise you can change the legacy in one generation, but they needed something. Right? Um,  it's, it's so, it's so doable. But there's things you say to five year olds that have to do with like boundaries and understanding your body and where you begin and end, and other people, and why we listen to other people and why we need other people to listen to us and what a good friend is.

I mean, there's all kinds of things we do at five and six and seven and eight at nine. We're, we're teaching them a little bit more about their bodies and what happens and why it's important that we listen and what is happening in media. Some media literacy so that they can see who's being sold what, and who is it for and who is it not for, and who does it include?

Who does it not include? Who does it help, who does it hurt? We have some of these conversations and then they get a little bit older and we've got, you know, the,  you know, 9-year-old, 10-year-old, 11-year-old, 12-year-old, whatever, you know, average age is nine that you get exposed to pornography.  We've already had conversations since when, when you see anything. That scares you, feels uncomfortable, is different than the ethics in our family. Please come and talk to me. 'cause I just wanna share with you because one of the hard things about growing up is,  is coming to terms with how the outside world might be different than how our home is. And I just wanna help you make sense of this is these things.

So things come up and they're gonna come up in lots of ways. You're gonna see people be mean to other people. You're gonna see things that maybe don't make sense, you know? And you can even say there's a thing called pornography, it's adult entertainment. And it's, people are often naked. It may not make any sense.

If somebody shows you, they may giggle and laugh about it, that's fine, but I need for you to come see me. 'cause if you're a kid, it can feel big, it can feel over your head. You

know? 

I don't want you to feel bad about it.  Yeah. You just, you just do. You do the little things, what I call sound bite conversations, 101 minute conversations, and you do them every year.

And you

know what they're needing.  You know, and so you don't shame their curiosity. You just provide them the education they need so that they're not bamboozled out there in the world.

yeah. And, and so that it's not the case that the only source of education that they're getting, education that they're getting is from porn, 

because that's the thing is they're, if they don't get sex education from their parents or from the school, then they're getting it from the things that they

sneak a view online of, and it's 

providing 

Yeah. And Yeah.

and even the stuff that we're not sneaking, I mean, Jeremy just sit and watch movies,

you know, the movie, whatever. You're gonna get warped views of bodies and people. I remember one time somebody showed me how Superman's body has changed over the last 50

years  

Yeah. 

and how that makes people feel,

Yeah, 

you know. 

yeah. The, the perfect kind of, the perfect body, everything chiseled, everything is, is perky 

and tight. And the ways that we, I mean, yeah, you're right. It's not just porn, it's, it's social media, it's entertainment, it's comic books, it's video games. It's all the more reason that we need healthy, open, vulnerable education and conversation about these things.

And it's 

one of the reasons I started this podcast is I, I, just, I knew that we needed to have more conversations about  porn and the 

impact of porn, and I think that conversation is the thing that's gonna do it.  Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And, and I, I really like to see people talking more about the power  of comprehensive sex education. You know, we spend a lot of time cultivating what's important for a 2-year-old or a 3-year-old, or a five-year-old, or an eight yearold to know as far as to be, have a, a successful life, right?

CareerWise or whatever. And we spend so little time actually helping them develop the skills that they need to have thriving relationships in their life, as well as to be able to discern exploitation. And then how do you stand up against it? How do you support your friend who's being hurt? Or how do you stand up against somebody telling you that you are supposed to be exploitive? Right. The sort of the boy code,

Yeah. I mean, 

There's so much we could be teaching

and it goes beyond just kind of intimacy, relationships and sexuality. It's just, as you're saying, we teach people, we teach young kids about math and algebra and history, but we don't teach them emotional intelligence or 

resilience or how to 

Right. Relational intelligence. All of these things.

Yeah.  Let's 

And yet they're so important, aren't they? To our happiness,

It's the most important 

thing. Yeah, 

exactly. Yeah.

Um, what would you say is the impact of sexual shame on  people's mental health? 

Well, I think, I mean, shame fundamentally leaves you feeling that you're unworthy of love and belonging. You're unworthy of being desired in case of, of sexuality. Um, and so then how, if I feel unworthy of being loved, I feel unworthy of being desired, um, of, of really being belong, belonging, you know, being seen, known, loved, and accepted by somebody, even though that's my core human desire.  If I don't believe that that's worthy, then that affects both how I love others.  So I put on a mask. I try to be who you want me to be. I try to perform loving in the way you think I should, but inside I'm feeling like.  It's not real. So you are not really, if you love me back, you're not really loving me.

And if you knew who I really was, 'cause I'm so corrupt, right? You couldn't possibly love me. So I keep this mask going. So fundamentally it affects people's ability to give and receive love.  Now, I worked in oncology for a decade, and I'll tell you one of the most important, impactful lessons of my life  was the way that people talk about life after they think it might be short. Whether it is or not, almost doesn't matter, but when they think it is,  they don't talk about their careers. They don't talk about all the stuff they've accumulated. They talk about the quality of their relationships.  How well they feel. They see no love and support hold another, how well they feel seen, known, loved, and accepted by others.

Right. That becomes the number one thing.  And so we are affecting people at the core place of happiness. I mean, capitalism,  late stage capitalism, what we're in right now has gone to a place where people don't even see how they have been usurped by this ability. Do more, be more, and then I'll be worthy  until they're in their sixth, seventh, eighth decade, and then they're like, oh no,  I don't have the relationship I want with my kids, with my neighbors, with my community, with, and I don't have any more time.

I don't have much more time. Right. And to me, that is heartbreaking. If there is any soapbox I will stand on forever, is that people deserve to know how precious they are. They came into this world. I like to say a divine expression of creativity and abundance. Like that's who you were when you were born. Then we look at little kids and they believe it for a while, right? When they're three and four and five, you know, they absolutely believe it. You put on their favorite clothes backwards and they're like, this is what I'm wearing today. My favorite polka dot dress or whatever. You know? It was like, I love it so much, but I believe that that's the core of who we all are. And then it all gets tarred over and people are waking up now so late in life that it is absolutely tragic to me. I, I'd do anything to change it. I mean, I think that's part of the reason that I, I see some hope in psychedelic assisted therapy 'cause it can give people powerful experiences that are like existential and mystical where they can come out and they go. Oh my gosh. I am worthy of love. I am love. I can love, and they can, you know, if somebody helps them kind of actualize that or get clear about that, they can then put that into practice in their lives in a way that frees them in a ways that a lot of our drugs are just dealing with symptoms. They're not dealing with the core issue.

Yeah, and you brought this up earlier in our conversation, but just how much,  you know, you were saying that shame addresses possibly the most important component of that core of our self-Worth. And I really believe that shame, shame and isolation is one of the most painful experiences because it's that feeling of,  you know, I'm gonna be left out, I'm gonna be abandoned by the tribe.

I, I am, I don't belong here. I have no safety. That feeling of, of lack of safety, that I can't be 

seen as I am, I can't be loved. I'm not worthy.

It is so 

yes.  

It is so when you're living with shame, it's like you're walking around your whole life feeling unworthy and unlovable and it's, you're walking around with one of the deepest pains there is.

And it's no 

wonder addiction is so, so powerful a force. 

Absolutely. It's like  just the desire to escape that pain, right? That deep belief that you are unworthy of love, unworthy of belonging, of unworthy, of being seen, known, loved, and accepted. So you are so alone in that, and you're just Sure if you shared it with anybody that would get confirmed. Right? And so you stay alone in it. Yeah. I, I've told people recently about a book, there's a book called, um, outlive by Peter Atia, and he's, um, a Stanford, I believe, standard based researcher on longevity and life and living a healthy life with this beautiful New York Times bestseller.  Last chapter of the book,  it's on mental health now.

He's gone through every system of the body prior to that.  He writes this last chapter and he says,  in this chapter, I'm not gonna write as an expert. I'm gonna write as a patient. And then he talks about how he almost lost everything that was important to him. Super well known, super famous humans, done brilliant work in his life, but the trauma of his childhood, he covered it up by being, um, like an expert, better at right.

Academic, all of it.  And he just did more and more and more and more. And that was his drug of choice, right? But he was angry  inside and he about lost his marriage. He about lost his kids. And he has a very famous, uh, psych psychiatrist friend who actually talked him into going into inpatient treatment twice.  He left the first time early 'cause he was sure he had it figured out  he didn't, right.  He then ended up working with some very well known therapists. One of them was a man named Terrance Real, and Terry helped him see how patriarchy had hurt him  and what, how he got caught up in that. Of course, given what his childhood was made perfect sense. But what it mean to what it means to untangle that, to learn, to be vulnerable, to listen to your reactivity inside and self-soothe. Be curious about it, learn from it. Bring people in to see his worthiness and his value.  That last chapter makes the whole rest of the book make sense because he speaks to the cost of shame and sexual shame in people's lives.

And it also, it almost cost him everything. And he says, he goes, I work so hard every single day doing these practices. To take care of myself so I have the bandwidth to go inside and do the emotional work so I can be present to my partner, present to my kids, have the life, I mean to have, he said, but it is the hardest work I have ever done, but it's also the most important work I've ever done. I was so thrilled to see that. I listened to him on a, um, an Andrew Huberman podcast. I get interviewed and I thought so many people could benefit from this chapter because it is, we're at epidemic proportions of people feeling this kind of shame and it's costing them too much. It's costing them too much. 

I think it also highlights how we can put on these masks to run away from it and pretend like it's okay. And I 

think particularly in the high functioning, high achiever type A personality,  

and this is quite common in in porn addiction as well, is is that feeling that we have to. Hide these parts of ourselves and fight it off with 

external validation and being successful and being well liked.

And you've, you've 

said this earlier in the conversation, but if people knew the truth about me, dot, dot, dot, you know, if they 

knew what I was really like alone in my bedroom, they would think I'm 

a pervert, I'm a monster.  

And then you live with that broken identity, that imposter syndrome of feeling like you 

can't be seen and loved as you truly are. 

As you truly are, which is really where freedom and liberation come. It's when we are like relaxed inside ourselves.  We have a sense of what our strengths and our weaknesses are. We're okay with that. We're on a mission to keep growing and learning, but we're at peace. We're content. We're grateful,  

And I, I think one of the, the things that was healing for me in my own journey and is a lot of the work that I do with men is one of the best things you can do to heal your shame is to let yourself be seen and realize that people aren't gonna run away screaming. Like when I first told 

somebody about my porn 

addiction and they didn't call the cops and call me a pervert,  it 

was like the most liberating thing ever.

I was like, wait, I can tell 

someone and they're not gonna think I'm a, a freak. 

Right, right, 

just 

realizing you're not alone and you're not broken is so powerful. 

You are not alone. Exactly. I talk about in sex, God, in the conservative church, I talk about how to heal sexual shame, and I, I call it the, the model for erasing sexual shame, healing the mess, the model for erasing sexual shame. And there are four components. There's frame, name, claim, and aim frame is first, get yourself a scaffolding of real sex education so you can begin to distinguish the baloney from the truth of your magnificence and the magnificence of your body. You need to do that. Second  name and name is what you're talking about. Tell your story. Tell your story to someone who can be empathic and compassionate. Whether it's a group of people, maybe you're reading the book together or whatever. Just tell, you're gonna find out you are so not alone. In fact, I speak all over the country and I'll ask people, raise your hand if you grew up in a family where they talked about bodies and sexualities really appropriately.

As you grew up along the way, you know, you weren't shamed. You just learned like you learned about spaghetti and how you make, you know, tuna casserole or whatever, you know, and you learned about your body. And I have, you know, I can be a hundred people in the room and maybe three or four hands will go up. So I say 90 to 95 per percent of people in the us. Grow up in homes that are silent or silent and shaming. They're basically thrown to the wolves, to media to learn how to be an interpersonal relationship and to learn about themselves. Terrible. Like we don't do that to our kids in any area, but we do it here all the time. Right? And I just think, ah, you know, like we could be doing, we could be doing so much better. Yeah.

What was the rest of 

the, the, it was the 

So, so frame the frame name and then claim is, claim your body as good. Now that's hard

work because we run our economy on making people feel badly about themselves so that they spend more money, right?

Buy more things, buy more toys, buy more, fix their hair, fix their nose, whatever. Right? We run our economy on that. Literally, we have 50% of six year olds, two thirds of nine year olds, and 90% of 15-year-old girls all modifying their diets. 

That's how prevalent this is. Right? So learning to claim your body as good, I don't care what it looks like.

If you get to get up in the morning and you're not in severe pain,  then your body is the pen to write the poetry of your life with.  It's, it's a good body. Your heredity determines so much more about the shape of your body, how it grows, how it ages than any other factor.

Right. But 

Any other factor. I'm Swedish. 

if, if we're a 

little bit flabby or chubby 

whatever. 

Or thin. even. Yeah.

I mean.  Yeah, I mean, I'm, I'm Swedish. I look just like all my relatives, you know, and I'm like, of course I do. You know,

it, it's just, it's hilarious to me. But we don't teach this, right? We let people, we lead them to be victims of the media that we have set up and the economy that we have set up, but it costs them a lot.

So when you start to do the work of claiming your body, standing in front of your body, I'm gonna stand here every day  and begin after. I've already know all the things I don't like, and I'm gonna begin to learn to love them. And I'm not gonna stop until I love this body. I'm gonna do it. You know, you can get groups of people together to do it together to talk about how you do it together. But so when you frame you name, you tell your story, you claim, you claim your body is good, what you're doing as you work those three things is you begin to aim for a whole new, brand new sexual legacy.  So everybody who knows you, your children, other children, youth, friends, whatever, they start to see, oh, you're in relationship different to yourself.

You've got language vocabulary now to talk about things. Like you're you're so different than so many people. You don't run from conversations about things 'cause you've been learning. Like, it's, it's so liberating. And then I say, you just changed that legacy and it doesn't ever have to repeat again as a legacy that hurts people.

I want to 

So that's about, 

yeah, I wanna dive into one of those aspects. The last part, the claiming and it, you mentioned it was around claiming your body to be good and really healing the relationship with your body. 

And that's, you know, for me,  body dysmorphia is something that I experienced, um, disordered eating.

And I know it's very 

common among women. It's also very common among men. We don't talk about it as 

much among men, but, 

um, we have a slightly different version rather than. Anorexia nervosa. We have anorexia a cy where we want to be. We never feel muscular enough, we never feel fit enough, and we're 

always comparing ourself to  the cover of Men's Health Magazine.

Um, 

and it makes sense. I can understand, you know, for me, a big part of my healing journey was loving my body and realizing the ways that I was being harmful and violent towards myself.  I imagine that another component of this claim step, that claim your body to be good. I imagine that 

a kind of corollary to that would be claim your sexuality to be good. 

You know, 

that kind of saying, Hey, my desire is healthy. My, my sexual desire is good. And what I wanna 

ask you is  how does someone know?  Because they're, and, and and maybe you will disagree with this, but this is a conversation we can have. I can imagine that there are desires, there are cravings that are unhealthy. 

That are, are coming from a place of where we might have been warped by some of the media we're seeing.  

Well, I, I don't know. I mean, maybe there is no desire that's unhealthy, but I'm curious, like how do you start to really  accept your desire as healthy? 

Yeah. Uh, it's a beautiful question.  It's wonderful. So when I was writing the book Sex, God in the Conservative Church, one of the questions I asked was,  did we, we have been very much shaped by a, a. Empire Christian background, the United States. And so I, I asked the question, well, if that's shaped us so much, and then we, we shaped our capitalism basically inside that bubble. Then has there ever been anything sex positive that's come out of that, or has it always been this, you know, men can't control themselves. Women are responsible for how men behave. I mean, it goes all the way back to the fourth century, right?  So I ended up in Jewish literature way above my head and, but fortunately I had scholars around me that I could ask.

But I found these beautiful stories that were in there that were never brought forward into the wider culture.  One of the stories is from about the fifth century or so, and, um, it's a story about, the story goes that the rabbis were feeling like the people of the village were not dealing with their sexuality well. You know, they were being, what they thought was a little out of control. So they went into the temple and they begged God to take that desire away because they just thought it's gonna ruin things right? And God said no. And they begged God again. And God said, no. This went back and forth five or six times, God kept saying no. Finally out of the center of the Holy of Holies, jumped a lion of fire.  'cause God said fine. And then that, that spirit of fire  went across the whole village. And the next morning hens stopped laying their eggs. Artists stopped creating, people stopped working like in the banks and all around it was as if the deepest depression had just settled on the village.  So the rabbis were like, well, okay, so there's some connection between just. Desire, you know, to create and sexual desire. Let's go talk to God. So they go back like, God, can you give us those? But then take the sexual desire away. And God says, no. With every great gift I give you, I give you the responsibility to manage it.  And they said, okay, fine. Just give it to us a little less strong. And that's how the story goes. So in Jewish thinking, desire is the breath of God that literally when a baby is born and a baby takes its first breath,  it's the in spirit, the inspiration of the divine, which courses through a human's body with every breath until they expire and the spirit leaves their body,  right?

So desire is good.  What we do with desire is our responsibility.  So in Jewish thinking, desire. is is like, you know, you wouldn't ever put desire down because it's like the very breath of God in you. However, the desires that you have need to serve love and justice.  They can't be selfish like,  I wanna do this.

It doesn't matter if it hurts you.  Right? It has to serve love and justice.  So sexual desire is a wonderful thing. Kids' desires to climb on the top of a table and do a dance. Wonderful thing. Is it safe? Maybe not. So we might have to teach them about safety. Yeah. The desire, the creativity, the innovation. That's what keeps human life literally going. Like, we just have our desires. We get in the, we get in the zone, we're doing the thing, and we feel like we can't even feel time anymore. It's such a wonderful thing in sexuality. We can have that experience when we combine together love and justice. And our sexual desire.

So there's consent. We know what's gonna happen. They know they're fully into it. We're fully into it, and we build these experiences. We can have experiences that are ineffable where we don't even have the words because it feels like we got transported.  It's just such a, an incredible experience. We can have that with our own.

I had a client one time who had recently buried her husband a few years before, and, but she was taking care of kids.  She said to me one time, she goes, I have a hot tub in my backyard. And every night I go and sit in it. And I sit and I thank God  that we're fine. We're fine. We're making it.  And she said, and always when I'm there, I masturbate and I feel the power of my sexuality, the power of my body, and I offer it up to God. And I say, please take care of this until I'm ready to share it with someone again.  It was like a prayer  and that taught me so much because she saw her, that part of her as good, but she just, there was no time to share it with anybody yet in her own life. Right.  That taught me a lot. Yeah. So, yeah, I think, um, desire, I have come to believe desire is a beautiful thing and I love watching it in children,  but when we are not mindful of it  and we live in a culture that is so much about, it doesn't matter the impact of your behavior on other people, if you didn't intend to do it, it doesn't matter if it hurt them. Right. We've got all of these ways in which we are blatantly hurting other people  and we're letting it be okay. It's not you had a desire, it wasn't mindfully cared for. It's not okay. 

Hmm.  I guess I'm trying to parse out,  because I'm on board with you. I, you know, I think a big part of, of my healing journey and a lot of the people I work with is, is really coming to accept your desires and, and recognize the beauty in them. And saying  

it is one of the most beautiful aspects of being a human being is our sexuality.

And getting to embrace that in a 

healthy way is one of the 

purest joys there is.  Um,  at the same time, I know that there's a lot of,  you know, the, some of the desires can be kind of infused with these old habits that are not so 

healthy. That might be.

mm-Hmm

Harming other people, you know, they might be infused 

with, with things like rape or violence or degrading.

Um, and they're not taking responsibility for the, the impact of those actions on other people.

mm-Hmm.

And so I think you can recognize, okay, this, this desire is coming from a wholesome place. It's a desire for, for intimacy, connection, pleasure.  But then how do you separate, how do you do that kind of internal check?

Is this coming from a place of love and justice and responsibility? 

Yeah. I mean, I, I really, I think you're saying it, I can ask myself,  is this desire I have, how is it going to serve me? And if there is an other involved, how is it gonna serve the other, how is it going to feel just or right, or caring or mindful to me and how is it going to feel just or right or care caring for the other, it means conversation.

If there is an other, it means being clear and explicit  about, this is what I'd like to do. Tell me what you would like to do, what feels like connection and pleasure to you. Here's what feels like connection and pleasure to me. You figure it out. You work it out together until you're both. An enthusiastic yes about it.  There is love and justice in there. There's care in that, in that kind of consent conversation. Right. Um, it is not so much what they're doing if they're both on board for it and has been clearly defined. And especially I think if there are not substances involved. 'cause substances kind of, you know, turn our prefrontal lobe off often.  So in order to give consent, I think we need to be pretty clearheaded and feel safe enough to say, yes, I'm up for, no, I'm not. You know? Um, and so there's just, there's some components that I think are involved around discerning,  if it's loving  and discerning, whether it's just  or not, right. And just to the soul of the person, the body of the person, et cetera. And,  and really, I mean, I think as a sex therapist, one of the things I've come to know is people do their sexuality in all kinds of ways. You know,  all kinds of ways. And what is a flavor that one person likes? It's not a flavor another person likes at all. That doesn't matter if you're an adult. What matters is that you know how to have clear consensual conversations and get on board with someone else if there's going to be an other, right. Um,  if there's exploitation in any way, if there's violence in any way that isn't agreed upon. I mean, there are people that, you know, like getting tied up, like high impact

play a lot of people who are neurodiverse, like impact kinds of ways of being, because anything soft is too much for them, right? So it's, that's not the issue.

The issue is whether the other person is in, you've been clear and they're on board with all of it as well.  I  for people who have become familiar with, um, the kink culture, one of the things I have learned from that culture is  when people are at, um, kink, what we call dungeons or clubs, right?  You have to go through a new members class. You have to know all the rules. There are no substances allowed. There are people that roam around and make sure everybody's following the rules and having clear conversations. There's an understanding that if in the middle of a play scene, a person decides they want something else because right.

Passion is a drug, right?  The answer's always no,  like great idea, and we didn't negotiate that ahead of time. How about we put that on the maybe someday list? And they just keep going. Right? People know that. I have often said, oh, if the vanilla world could be taught that and act that way, we would have so much less assault occurring. You know, because as many as there are people that know they're being assaulted, there are twice as many that don't realize that they are, because like we've talked about, they learned from something that was exploitive, that this is what people like. 

Yeah. Well, and as you say, it's a drug as well. I mean, it's, it's an intoxicating substance and so you lose 

your sense of the, you know, they've, I forget the actual study, but there were these studies that show that when kind of sex is on the table, your sense of morality and, you know, your ability to decipher what's right and wrong 

kind of gets diminished and that you are more willing 

to act unethically 

when Yeah.

Compromise your ethics when sex is on the table and.  

That's 

it, it's so powerful and intoxicated. It 

really does kind of have this way of, and, and this is 

one of the things I experience, one of the things many of my clients experience is this feeling like you become another person. You become this slave, like this hungry monster that just wants this thing and you lose your sense of self.

It's like,  you know, this,

this feeling of waking up sometimes. And like, what did I just do? Like, just like, where am I and what have I done? And that losing of yourself can be so scary and 

so powerful.  

yeah. And I, I think, again, all of that is bathed in this ignorance and naivete, right? We have an overarching message to men  that they're not entirely responsible for the desire that they feel, you know, it's a little too much for them, which to me is like so disrespectful. We expect men to be responsible. For so many desires all the time. And what he can't manage that one. Are you serious? He totally can. He just has to be taught how to,  right. It's totally possible. Can you learn to manage your temper? Yeah, you can. You have to be taught how to,  there has to be probably some consequences along the way if you act in a way that's hurtful. Yeah. So letting men off the hook has not been helpful to men or to their relationships or to, especially if they're in relationship with other women  who don't feel as safe 'cause of power differential. Right. So I think there's an accountability structure that we need to put in there that says, yeah, it is powerful, dude.

Let me tell you, between 13 and 15, your testosterone levels are going to increase by 20 times. That's like you're gonna go from a bicycle to a fricking rocket ship.  So let's talk about how you're gonna manage that. Okay, because that's there, because of evolution, it's there. So to keep our species going, you're probably not gonna want to become a parent for a while. So let's talk about sex drive  different than sexual desire, and let's talk about how to be responsible to it.  What does it mean to be responsible to how we masturbate so we can move through our arousal cycle, calm down, right? Not make anybody else responsible for our sexual drive. We're responsible for it so that we can then be free to negotiate sexual desire, the desire for connection, sharing pleasure, feeling something with another, and actually being able to be with them, right?

There's so much that we can teach that is helpful for kids to evolve in a way different than what we're giving them now,

Yeah, and I think it's not just kids that we need to get the message of. Responsibility and ownership across to, it's  to 

adults as well of, of saying, Hey, you know, just because this is a powerful substance doesn't mean you're off the hook even more. So. The 

reason that you need to be careful with these, you know, with your 

sexualities, knowing how intoxicating it can be, you need to be that much more responsible. 

Absolutely. And it's a message that we need to give,  you know, all genders,

right? Because this idea that women don't feel sexual desire, they really just want relationships. Men feel, you know, sex drive, but they really don't want relationship. That's baloney. That's not

true. I think the loneliest people in most straight relationships is the man.

Mm-Hmm. 

'cause he's often not seen by his partner the way that he wants to,  and he doesn't have enough friends that actually see him.

Yeah.

She's got all kinds of people that are seeing him. And so men have taught me that. They have taught me that over the years, and I'm like, women, you're not seeing him. He's alone in this world. You know? So we have to help him know how to have his emotions speak in a way that he can be heard and blah, blah, all kinds of things. But, um,  often he's left with, you know,  I do, I do clinical supervision with people all over the country during the week. And, um, I can't tell you how many times I have this conversation, you know, but, um, a guy will come in and he'll say, and this is, it's not always this way, but 70% of the time it is.

A guy comes in and he says, I'm not, we're not having enough sex.  And I always say, well, what kind of sex aren't you having enough of?  And they look at me like I'm outta my mind,  right?  Well, I find out that they're having penis and vagina sex, but she's not showing up for it emotionally. Her body is, but she's not.

He feels completely alone. He doesn't know. How to make it any better. So it's the only, and so when I say,  can you trust me to change it so that she wants to show up?  And so you can be seen and loved and known, right? 'cause this is what you're craving. And, but if we do that, that you'll be okay if I like change things up.

Because right now you're having really bad sex.  When you have sex, it's really bad. I wanna get you to a place that whatever kind of touch, connection, and pleasure you are sharing. Both of you feel seen, known, loved, accepted, you've had fun, you've played together. It's good. And it might be different every time,  but you're having what I call good sex.

How does someone,

if a man or a woman is listening to this and they're in a relationship where the intimacy is not fulfilling it. It feels empty or kind of devoid of connection. 

What is the first step on that journey to, to healing it? 

First step.  First, I want you to, to know that you deserve or it's good for you to have. It's healthy, it's, uh, nourishing for you to be seen, known, loved, and accepted in an intimate way. That is, if that's what you're looking for, that's a good desire. That is fine. It's all good.  growing up in our culture has taught you that  penis and vagina sex needs to be happening this often, it doesn't matter the quality. And neither one of you are really happy, or maybe you think he's happy with it, but you are not. Or you are thinking she's happy with it, but you are not. Whatever. I mean, whatever it is,  you need to find a way to  think about sexuality. Like you think about really delicious food,  like you probably don't eat the same thing for every breakfast, and then eat that for lunch and dinner too. 'cause it's only a matter of time. You're gonna be super bored with it, right? This is about connection and pleasure. This is about sharing that with somebody that you love. There are so many ways for you to have connection and pleasure. It's not gonna look the same at 22, right after you had a baby. If you're sick, like right now, I'm n I'm, um,  nurturing a hip replacement surgery.

You know, it's just not gonna look the same. But there are so many ways for us to share connection and pleasure, and so we have to be able to develop what I call a vocabulary or a banquet of all the different things we love, and then develop enough trust and conversation with each other that's like, tell me what you feel up to.  Could be, let's sit in the bath together. Okay, yeah, let's do that.

Let's, I mean, you show up, you're emotional, all that.

I think one of the things that I've, you know, with some of my, my clients that we were just talking about this this week, the hardest part is actually starting that conversation  because 

that feels unsafe to 

to even talk about sex. And this goes back to the 

shame topic of. We can't talk 

about This This isn't safe.

And so

Yeah.

do you have a, a recommendation for like,  you know, a sentence you can say or, you know, like how do you start that conversation? 

Yeah, you know,  there's books you can read together that sometimes really helps, kind of takes the pressure off. One by Michael Castleman called Sizzling Sex. Great book to read. Um, you can go see, um, a therapist that's also trained in sexuality. So there, there may be a licensed marriage and family therapist and A-C-S-D-A certified sex therapist.

They're gonna ask you questions. They're gonna make it easy for you to, or easier for you to have these

conversations.  Um, sometimes we just need to  push a, a away a little bit, but we add, add a aid to help us with that because we often come to the conversation without the words, without the knowledge, without the language.  And in so much fear. And, and we're so tender in this place in our life, you know, like there's a con, there's a,  a connection between sexuality and spirituality that I cannot describe, but I would tell you that I have learned that it is there. And so that's part of the reason it feels so vulnerable to talk about it because it's so deep inside of us.

It's also usually if you grew up in the United States, it's our first shame. 'cause you found your genitals somewhere around a year old. That's when your hands became something that actually worked for you rather than smacking you, right? And you, it landed, your hand landed in your genitals, either in the bath or when you're getting your diaper changed somewhere around 12 months  now.

You don't hold onto your memories until about five.  So somewhere between one and five every day you were finding your genitals and it was a great thing. Except for that you kept getting in trouble. Somebody was going, gross, Ew, gross. Let's wash your hands. Ooh, slap your hand away, whatever. Over overreacting.

And so you got shamed hundreds, if not thousands of times  before you were five and you got caught playing, doctor. That's the one you remember. Trust me, sweetheart. That was not the first. So it is deep in your cells, and so that's part of why it feels so dangerous and scary to talk about.

And there's so many, uh, every person that I've talked to has some formative memory of being shamed.  For their sexuality, whether it 

was  making an advance on a girl or, or getting caught touching themself or looking at something and then being yelled 

at for looking at something. Everyone has these experience and 

they're, they're traumatic in that sense of they leave a 

lasting impression.  

Yes. 

Yeah. Yes.

absolutely.

Yeah. But it's important to know that it's, that wasn't the, for,

there were so many when it, you were preverbal.

This is, so,

this is a deep deep wound.

Deep wound in most, most people in the

and it's a generational wound 

Or in the western world. 

wound in terms of the way we educate people and the the lessons 

we're giving people. Yeah. 

There's so much work to do 

to heal This This generational wound, and it's great. You know, this is the work you're doing and it's so wonderful that 

you're helping people.

This, it really is one of the most important topics that comes up in, in my coaching calls and the work that I do is healing, shame and embracing healthy sexuality. And it is 

a long road and it's a,  

it's a windy road and it's challenging and difficult, but like you say, it's,  it's so important and so powerful because there is nothing, almost nothing as liberating as when you,  when you fully embrace your sexuality and have no shame anymore of just, yeah, I'm a sexual 

being and these 

desires I have are, are beautiful and maybe I need 

they are. 

the way I act on them.

But

Yeah. Yeah. 

But then finding those ways to really enjoy it, whether it's with yourself or with somebody else. It's a  qualitatively different experience when you've done some of that healing work. It's a, it's a celebration. That is where another place where we see this sort of deeply spiritual tie, that there's something that happens in there. And so in a way that.  You can hurt somebody in their sexuality and you've also hurt them in your soul, in their soul, but you can also heal somebody in their sexuality and you can heal them in their soul with their sexuality. And, um, it's a powerful  divine gift. I think it's so human. People do it real differently, but it's, it's, it has a power to it.

That's really wonderful. 

Getting back to this question of healing shame, you mentioned the frame it, name it and claim it. Is there anything else that's important in terms of, let's just say somebody's listening to this and they're dealing with a lot of sexual shame and they've dealt with it since they were young. 

mm-Hmm.

there anything else important for them to know about healing?

Shame.  Particularly sexual shame. 

Yeah. I, it's a process now. You, it's, it, it wraps itself tightly around you, you know, like being. Tie it up in yarn, it's gonna take some time to unravel. Be patient with yourself. Be gentle with yourself, but stay with it. Right? So that's where things like, you know, reading sex, God in the conservative church with some friends and continuing to talk about it. Just stay on the path. Keep reading, keep talking, find your group, find your people. Keep healing. And you're gonna slowly in time. Remember, I may have taken you 20 or 30 years to get here. It's not gonna take you that long to heal, but it might take you a decade if you're 30 or 40, right? It might take some time, but it's gonna, you're gonna be able to feel some relief along the way, and you're gonna feel like, oh, there she is.

Or there he is.  That sweet boy that was around when I was little, that got shamed. Or that beautiful little girl, or that just sweetheart of a person. You know? Like they're there and now they're beginning to come. I'm beginning to feel them, you know? And. And, and love them, care about them. And so it's a process.

It's a process. So I'd say stay with it. We have a lot of resources in, in the Shameless Parenting book,  I've had lots of people that aren't parents who say, this book has been so helpful to me because it showed me what I should have gotten

and I've actually gone and got some of those kids' books and read them.

And I feel like I'm re-parenting my 2-year-old, or my 4-year-old, or my 8-year-old, or my 10-year-old. And that has been liberating for me. So thank you for that. You know, I didn't even put it together with that in mind, but it has, I've heard from so many people that they've just said, okay, I'm gonna do this for myself,

you know, and they go to the library and they get the books and yeah, it's, it's great.

It's a '

cause there's a lot of, you know, in, in, in healing all this stuff, inner child work and reparenting and  inner 

family systems and, and all these things. And 

I could imagine you rewriting the book of, you know, shameless re-parenting, like healing the inner child 

and it's just, just completely like, you don't have to be a parent. This is just 

how to, you know, shamelessly, re-parent yourself around your sexuality.

that's right. Around sexuality. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I love that idea because that's what people have been telling me that, you know, who don't have kids. They're like, I got this book because I just wanted to read what you had been saying. Oh man, it's so good because the stuff's out there.

There's some great books out there and, and websites out there, but there, we don't talk about 'em in media. You know? Like

you kind of gotta know somebody who tells you where to go look for 'em, but they're there

and they're brilliant and wonderful.

the topic is not, you know, there are people like yourself and myself and, and there are people in this world, but it doesn't get a lot of airtime because it's a, it's a sensitive kind of taboo topic that makes people squirm.  I,

Yeah. It also stands in the face of late stage capitalism and patriarchy. 'cause if we liberate people

to learn how to love and be loved, they're gonna say no to a whole lot of things that they're saying yes to right now.  So there's a lot of forces against people being healthy

in their homes, in their com neighborhoods, in their communities.

It's unfortunate, but that's the reality of the oppressive structures we're in.

And that statement goes well beyond sexuality into 

health 

it does. 

physical health and 

nutritional health and everything. Yeah.

Mm-Hmm hmm.

Yep. 

On that note, um, is there any last words you wanna share with the audience today? 

 I would say if you feel like  you've got a ways to go in healing, shame, or just feeling like. You're, you're a precious miracle  and there's only ever been one of you. And we need the fullness of you in the world, for the world to, to be the best world it can be. We need you to be your most authentic self who sees that and cares about that and loves that. If that's a struggle for you,  then um,  find ways. Whether it's writing yourself affirmations, whether it's, it's beginning a walking meditation practice where you're listening to meditations about your value.  Start doing some practice where you get reminded daily of how  infinitely valuable and important you are just by being you  authentically you, and then learning to heal that person that got so hurt along the way.  We're all gonna be better the more people are able to heal, do this work and come into the world in a truthful, loving, honest, authentic way, and then begin to challenge the systems that are hurting people in communities. So just,  just know that you're, you're more incredible than you can even imagine.

Yeah.  Remember that you're worthy of love and self-Respect.

Yes, absolutely.

Beautiful. Well, it has been a joy to chat with you, and I know that this is gonna be a powerful episode for a lot of the listeners. Um, so thank you for making the time to come on, uh, and.

Absolutely.

That's it for today everyone. Thanks for tuning into another episode of Unhooked.

We will catch you on the next episode.