Sex Therapy | Transcript
Find the episode shownotes here!
CW: discussions of eating disorders
Silva Neves:
Nobody's really broken. It's just finding a way through it, through sex education, through understanding your body, understanding your partners, understanding your erotic mind.
Hannah Witton:
Have you ever felt broken sexually?
Jessica Parker:
Sexological bodywork is essentially sex education for adults. The support can cover ways to get you reconnected back to your body using practical tools that involve sound, breath, touch, and movement.
Hannah Witton: Have you ever felt disconnected from your body?
Emma-Louise Boynton:
Doing sex therapy was a really revelatory experience because I think I'd never really considered how fundamental a role your relationship to sex plays in your life.
Hannah Witton:
Have you ever been curious about sex therapy? I'm Hannah Witton and this is Doing It. Over the course of this series, we're going to be unapologetically nerdy about sex. Diving into some of the biggest taboos that impact our relationship with sex, our bodies, and the people in our lives. Join me as we explore porn, disability, money, and parenting. But today, we're talking sex therapy.
So I'm a sex educator. I've been making online content in the form of videos and podcasts all about sex and relationships for over a decade. I've written two books and I just love nerding out about sex. One of my main goals with my work is to get people talking about sex more openly: helping people find the language to express their needs, their desires, what might be going on in their brains, and in their bodies. Today, I want to better understand what happens when someone sits down on a sex therapist couch or lies down on a massage table. More of that later on.
Anyway, to be very clear, I'm not a sex therapist, but I do see a lot of crossover in the work we do. The whole point of sex therapy is to give space and time and resources to exploring our inner world. I want to know why people choose to go to sex therapy, how it transforms their confidence both in and out of the bedroom, and whether it's an inclusive option for everyone.
But let's start with this idea of sex education and sex therapy colliding.
And just to let you know, this episode contains frank discussions about eating disorders, so do take care while listening.
Emma-Louise Boynton:
We don't have very good sex education in this country and I think in a lot of places.
Hannah Witton:
That's Emma Louise Boynton. She's a writer, presenter, and the founder and host of Sex Talks.
Emma-Louise Boynton:
We're not really taught the language of sex. We're not taught how to talk about sex, how to communicate what we like, what we don't like, how to communicate effectively about our bodies. And I think as a result, we're going into sex so unarmed with the language with which to talk about our relationship to it and our relationship to bodies in a productive way.
Hannah Witton:
So I've never actually done sex therapy myself, but I'm open to it in the future and definitely curious about it now. So far in my life, I haven't come up against issues with my sex life that I haven't been able to work through myself… until recently, but more about that later on. Emma, however, has been very public about what she learned about herself in sex therapy, and we'll come back to her experience in a moment.
Here's Silva Neves. He's a psychosexual and relationship psychotherapist. He's very clear about the intimate connection sex education has with sex therapy.
Silva Neves:
I think if there was much better sex education, there will be a lot less demand on sex therapists. So if people in the first place had adequate sex education, I think that first of all, sex therapy could be a lot shorter courses, a lot shorter sessions, but also I think a lot of people would not need sex therapy.
Hannah Witton:
Okay, noted. But given sex education is in the state it's in - another topic for another day - and so many of us are feeling the effects of poor sex education as adults, what is sex therapy and how can it help us unlearn and relearn healthy relationships with our own minds, bodies, and partners?
Silva Neves:
Sex therapy is a talking therapy, so it's like psychotherapy and it's like counselling in the way that you sit down and you talk to somebody - there is no touch, there is no nudity - so the conversations are specialised in talking about sexual problems or relationship problems and often both.
The sex therapist will be trained to have a specific intervention that they can help the clients with - psychosexual intervention for improving sexual problems, for example, erectile dysfunction or unreliable erections, or vaginismus - dyspareunia for people with vulvas - and all sorts of desire discrepancies, for example, uh, as well as relationship issues, how we relate to our intimate partners as well.
What is the difference between a sex therapist and a psychotherapist? And one difference is that we do a lot more psychoeducation in sex therapy, because we actually have to do quite a bit of sex education with our clients to even sometimes to name the body parts that they might not even know the names of, but sometimes to really describe to them the kind of basic functioning of sex in terms of physiology and also psychology.
You know, how, why do we have anxiety? Why do we have shame about sex and how we can reduce those anxiety with sex education, basically.
Hannah Witton:
What kinds of things do people come to you with, like when they walk in the sex therapy room? What do they sit down and tell you is their problem?
Silva Neves:
People come to me for a wide range of problems. Some people could be that they've had unreliable erections for years and they just really want to resolve it now. It could be often if couples come in, or people in intimate relationships come in,, they might usually come because they struggle in the sex life as in one person wants more sex than the other one, or somebody has lost their sexual desire. It could be that people come for frequent conflict in their relationship. It could be that some people are worried about wanting too much sex or having too much sexual desires. And some come because they have some distress with their bodies or with their sex life that's to do with past trauma or maybe even childhood trauma that's not been resolved.
So, a really, really wide range of problems. For some people, they come in because they actually feel so anxious about their sex life because they haven't received adequate sex education. So often it could be that, and that can come with shame and all sorts of things.
Hannah Witton:
Wow. There are clearly so many reasons why someone might seek sex therapy. So what about Emma? What made her start therapy?
Emma-Louise Boynton:
I'd stopped being able to orgasm in partnered sex. And I just felt disconnected from sex, disconnected from my body, but I was like, “I don't really care because I'm just not a sexual person, it's just not a big part of my life.”
So actually just for a bit of context in terms of another part of the reason I did sex therapy, I'd had quite a bad eating disorder growing up so I was anorexic when I was 12, 13, 14, and then been really bulimic after that and I just always had a terrible relationship to my body, as I know so many women and men increasingly do. I think I'd began to realise prior to doing sex therapy that my relationship to my body was affecting my relationship to sex, in that I hated my body so much, and I was kind of always at war with it. And that was invariably making it quite difficult to then be able to be able to be vulnerable and open with somebody else.
Hannah Witton:
Emma is totally right. Our relationship with our body has a huge impact on our relationship to sex. But let's go back a bit. Because Emma has actually done therapy in relation to her eating disorders before, just not sex therapy, I wondered if sex had ever come up in those conversations.
Emma-Louise Boynton:
I don't think they did. I think I would have felt really embarrassed. It would have felt totally inappropriate and weird and, yeah, just like not an okay thing to bring up in my therapy sessions because I could talk about bulimia, I could talk about anxiety, I could talk about panic attacks, whatever. But to talk about sex would have felt like, “Oh, oh, she's gone there. Oh, we're going there.”
Hannah Witton:
Okay. So, I think it's really interesting that Emma felt uncomfortable about the idea of talking about sex with her general therapist. And when I spoke to Silva, he told me his dream version of therapy would be that there would be more training in sexology and intimate relationships in core psychotherapy training.
He backed up Emma's experience, saying that he often sees clients that come to him for the sex part of their therapy, because their previous therapist was brilliant, but they never talked about sex. So, how did it feel for Emma to finally get to talk about sex in a therapy session?
Emma-Louise Boynton:
With sex therapy, you have a very clear metric for success. I went into the sex therapy room unable to orgasm in partnered sex. The issues in my body, the poor relationship to sex, the like trauma around sex, there was all that stuff, but it was kind of manifesting in this very tangible sexual dysfunction. And as a result, it kind of gave us - in a weird way, it almost like gave us something to work towards.
I didn't find it helpful just going over the eating disorder again, and you know, your relationship with your mum, your dad, and all that stuff in therapy. To me, it just didn't - it didn't move us forward. I was like, “I’ve analyzed this to the death. I get it.” Whereas with sex therapy, I think because sex is a kind of physical thing - because talking about the eating disorder, anxiety, body image issues, through the prism of sex was just really helpful to me as a way of framing the eating disorder and kind of understanding it.
Hannah Witton:
It's so common for people to put like sex in a separate box and it's just like sex is just this thing over there. And you deal with it and think of it as separate to everything else in your life but actually it touches every other part of your sense of self, your mental health, your relationships, like, everything.
Emma-Louise Boynton:
For me, sex therapy was about unpacking all the like layers of shame that I had around sex. poor sexual experiences, my inability to talk about them. There was so much that I needed to, like, unpack and I think just having someone to talk about it with in a really open, non judgmental way began to break down that shame I'd carried around sex and around my relationship to my body. And then I would say, “Well, I just had sex with someone and actually I felt really shit and this is why.” And then I would go and - and then we'd end up just having quite - I'd have to like really dig into something that I would usually write off and be like, “That was just a bad sexual experience.” But actually then we would analyze it and be like, “Well, why is that?”
Sex therapist Kate Moyle always says that like learning - because we don't have proper sex education, we don't really learn the language of sex. We almost need to get into the habit. We have to just begin exercising that muscle of talking more confidently and openly about sex because we can do that in context of, for example, in a sex therapy session, which gives you prime opportunity to do that. We then build the confidence and also we learn the language with which to be able to then talk about sex more openly when we're then actually having sex with a partner.
Hannah Witton:
I love thinking of talking about sex being this thing that you learn and you practice. Why do so many people find it so hard? Because we were never taught how to do it or given the tools and we don't practice. And I hate to break it to you, but when you first start practicing anything, it's going to be difficult and awkward and you might be bad at it. But that's exactly why we need to practice. And sex therapy, to me, is starting to sound like a really great and non judgmental space to do some of that practicing.
Emma-Louise Boynton:
Going into the sex therapy, suddenly I had someone sitting across from me listening in a very non judgmental way. And not only just listening, but also being like, “Oh, that's really common.” And as I began to talk about it more openly with her, I then began to talk about it more openly with people around me, around even sort of issues around sex, not being able to orgasm. And as I did, people around me also began to then confide in me: “Oh yeah, I have this issue with sex. I have this anxiety.” And I was like, “Wait, what? Hang on a second, I thought I was totally alone in this.” And what I learned through doing sex therapy was I was really not alone. She was quick to tell me how commonplace a lot of the issues that I was facing were.
The first thing I said to my sex therapist when I entered the virtual sex therapy room was, “I'm broken. I can't orgasm in partnered sex. Don't really like sex. And to be honest, I don't think - I don't know that that's gonna change.” I thought I was totally alone in my relationship to sex, alone in my relationship to my body, alone in all the, like, how dysfunctional it all felt.
Hannah Witton:
Emma is far from the only person who's ever felt broken. Here's Silva again:
Silva Neves:
How much of my clients think they're broken? I would say maybe, you know, okay - let's not say 100%, but let's say 99%. And again, that's because of poor sex education. If sex doesn't work, they will often believe that something is really, really drastic, really wrong with them, or they are broken because as a society, somehow we have learned that sex should be natural, sex should be easy, and everybody has a better sex life apart from you. That's really what clients often believe. Because out there there's not only just bad sex education, but also lots of misinformation. So a lot of the time when people come in through the door in the first session, they will feel very bad. They will feel a lot of shame. They will feel they're broken. They will ask me to fix them, and one of my first job is to provide some sex education, to reduce some of the anxiety and the shame about it, and actually it's more about working towards thinking, what is this sexual problem telling you?
And a lot of the time it's about normalizing it. Normalizing that most people in our lives will have sexual problems because our bodies change, and because we age and because, you know, a lot of things can get in the way of a sex life. So it's to normalize it. It happens to everybody. Nobody's really broken. It's just finding a way through it, through sex education, through understanding your body, understanding your partners, understanding your erotic mind.
If you take the example of somebody with unreliable erection, a lot of the time the unreliable erection is not a broken part that needs fixing. It's actually saying something that the client needs to hear, something that is important, something that is not working, but not in the sexual dysfunction, but something that is getting in the way.
And it's not often about something broken. It's about a message that the clients have to hear. Across all sexual problems, what I like to look at with clients and help them with is to find what is the function of the perceived dysfunction. And once people do understand that and they understand their body better and they understand how their mind and their body gets connected, then suddenly things fall into place.
Hannah Witton:
I love this idea of really listening to your body, and that these perceived issues are actually your body's way of trying to tell you something much deeper. I'm curious how someone might start to unravel those layers for themselves if they can't afford or access sex therapy though.
Silva Neves:
Actually, a lot of the time, it's about thinking and feeling, and going into our gut instinct, because that's where the wisdom is. And we don't often do that. We stay with our thinking brain. A lot of the messages that people get, it's very much about thinking of sex as a performance, sex as a pass or fail, sex as in if it doesn't work, it means, you know, broken masculinity, or if it's for women, it might mean they're not good enough, or sexy enough, or whatever. It's kind of like almost stepping back from all those messages, stay with ourselves, and to think, “What am I feeling right now? Why am I feeling uncomfortable?” And often if you give enough space for introspection, wisdom will come and you will have the answer yourself. Often with my clients, I don't give them the answers. I help them find their own answers by giving them the space to think and to inquire about all the other areas of their lives.
Hannah Witton:
I think this is such a good point, and for me it connects to the importance and helpfulness of reflecting on your relationship with sex, really checking in with how you feel, what's coming up for you, what does this connect to, and especially for those of us who haven't done therapy, taking time to connect and explore what sex means for you.
I used to have a lot of anxiety in my relationship about us not having enough. sex. I thought it meant that something was wrong, that my partner didn't fancy me, but when I actually thought about where I was getting these messages from - who was telling me that lots of sex equals a good relationship and less sex equals a bad one - I was able to see that that wasn't actually what I believed. It didn't feel true in my relationship, and that wasn't what sex meant to me. I, as most of us do, had been blindly following the nuggets of information that films, music, magazines, and rumour mills had been telling me without stepping back to ask myself what my thoughts about the importance of sex were.
This also makes me think about something Emma says, and that we've been hinting at a lot already, which is that if you're struggling with sex in some way, it's probably having a real impact on other areas of your life too.
Emma-Louise Boynton:
When you do have a form of sexual dysfunction, you do have anxiety around sex. It seeps into so many other things and really, I think, erodes your confidence. And also it's reflective of a lack of confidence in other parts of your life. So I think when you can begin to address your issues there, it has such a profound impact on all components of your being, all components of your public and private life. I always say - I quote Sherry Turkle, that sociologist from America, that we're alone together. We're alone together in feeling broken in sex, which actually means we're not individually broken, but there's kind of more societal issues around how we talk about sex, and therefore these kind of cultural issues, they can be fixed.
Hannah Witton:
It's society that's broken, not you. The culture we're surrounded by really does have a huge impact on how we perceive what's normal when it comes to sex. And there's also so much other baggage that comes with living in a society with these ever present systems of oppression and prejudices. Sexism, homophobia, transphobia, racism, ableism, whorephobia, the list goes on. Marginalized people are dealing with a whole other load of shit on top of the core pieces we've been talking about. So I asked Silva if he feels sex therapy is an inclusive, safe space for queer clients, for sex workers. And he did a little eye movement as I asked, which I have to say was very telling.
Silva Neves:
Just like any other profession, sex therapy has to update themselves and be more inclusive of sexual orientation diversities, erotic diversity, gender diversities, and of course also marginalized population like sex workers. There are some people who are trained as sex therapists who do believe that if you choose to be a sex worker, that must mean that you have a mental illness because nobody in their right minds would choose to be a sex worker. And that is a big problem. And it still happens. So, sex therapy in general, it's not always a safe space, unfortunately, and I feel very sad about this because that's my beloved profession that I love very much.
Hannah Witton:
This is massively important. So, I want to bring some other people into the conversation. Jet Setting Jasmine is a sex entertainment creator and therapist, and Lydia Caradonna is a sex worker and activist. You'll meet them properly later on in the series, but given their backgrounds in sex work, I was keen to hear if they felt therapy was an inclusive space for them and others with marginalized identities.
Jetsetting Jasmine:
No, it's not. No, it is not. It is an institution just like all of the others that has the fabric of institutionalized racism, homophobia. It is still very much a white - damn near white supremacist, patriarchal institution. So I have always known that many of our teachings in school are very biased to people of color, to people of different walks of life and lifestyles. Even with the greatest intentions, you can deliver bias in your product. And I think very deeply that the industry of therapy has done that. That bias has made its way through the therapist in one on one, bias has made its way in policy, and bias has made its way in how therapists provide consultation to other institutions.
Our books are written without the perspective of the people that they intend to care for so the way that in which we study, our professors are predominantly white. They don't have a lived experience that they can pull from to bring into the classroom. Oftentimes, those of us who attempt to take higher leadership positions are unable to because the same systemic stuff that happens in every other industry is happening here, where folks of colour, folks of any marginalized community are bottlenecked at the very lowest level of that industry because of systemic racism, homophobia, classism, etc, etc.
Lydia Caradonna:
Therapy as a sex worker is generally quite inaccessible because we get pathologized a lot.
Hannah Witton:
This is Lydia's experience.
Lydia Caradonna:
There are lots of studies that suggest sex workers have, like, higher rates of mental illness. I think this is misinterpreted as the sex work itself is a symptom of the mental illness, rather than, you know, a symptom of poverty or a symptom of accessibility. So I think a lot of people will go through therapy and have sex work being this huge part of their life and this thing that would really benefit from talking about but they don't feel able to bring it up because they think that everything they do is now going to be judged through the lens of, like, prostitution. So lots of people don't feel safe to disclose it.
Jet Setting Jasmine:
We are not prepared as therapists to take sex workers on as clients because we have been taught that the only people that engage in the sex trade must be there out of survival, desperation, or against their will. Therefore, when a sex worker comes in for therapy and says, “I'm having a bad day today,” a therapist usually says, “Well, maybe we should think about quitting your job.” Why, bitch? You're having a bad day too. Maybe you should quit your job. Like, no! Right? Like, no! That's not why I'm here.
And that's happened to me on multiple occasions where I'm like, “You know, my partner and I are having some communication issues.” “Well, maybe it's because... of the kind of work that you do.” No, maybe it's because I asked him to pick up his socks and he didn't! He didn't hear me! That's why. So yeah, it is - it's not a safe environment. And in the same breath, I encourage people to go to therapy. We can be good consumers and we understand the deficiencies in the industries that we want to engage in. We can be informed consumers. We can know what kind of questions to ask our providers. We can look for sex work friendly or porn friendly therapists or physicians.
Hannah Witton:
This is such a great point from Jasmine, and I wondered if Silva had any advice for finding an inclusive sex therapist.
Silva Neves:
I think that if you are a sex worker or if you are identifying as queer, it's really important that you look further, not just as the sex therapy qualification, but also look at their experience, and maybe how they identify and their experience of working with marginalized clients. And I said to all of my clients and to everybody that it's actually really, really okay to interview your sex therapist before you decide to work with them. That would be one of the questions of clients interviewing the therapist would be, you know, what was the latest training that you've taken on sex workers, for example, LGBTQ or gender diversities?
Hannah Witton:
Let's come back to Emma. How did doing sex therapy improve her relationship with her body and with sex?
Emma-Louise Boynton:
Talking about sex and talking about my relationship to it was the thing that allowed me to address the other issues I'd had with my body and to really move past them and it was the first - and it really is true - it was the thing that stopped me being bulimic. My sex therapist said to me quite early on, “You really need to learn to give yourself pleasure and to make the time to give yourself pleasure.” She was like, “How are you going to allow someone to give you pleasure and to be able to see - to enjoy your body in a pleasurable way if you are constantly at war against your body, if you dislike your body so much, if you find it really difficult to give yourself any - allow - permit yourself any sort of bodily pleasure.”
And she kind of set me this homework to basically seduce myself. I think her selling, like, “No, you need to carve out this alone time as time when you, like, look after yourself, and you cherish yourself, and you give yourself pleasure, and you masturbate in this bath.” Like, it changed how I saw time by myself and made me kind of step up and be like, “Okay, I need to look after myself first and foremost before I can expect someone else to do that.” And it broke a 17 year or so pattern of bulimia.
Hannah Witton:
The journey Emma went on, and what she managed to get from her work in sex therapy in terms of her relationship with her body, mental health, pleasure and sex feels so powerful. It's incredible to hear the effect that sex therapy can have: the way it can touch so many parts of your life.
Obviously, these are all massive wins for Emma, but I was also curious about her original goal, remember? She said she'd first gone to sex therapy because she couldn't orgasm during partnered sex. In fact, she was writing a whole column about it on Stack World called Conversations With My Sex Therapist. And she'd been going to sex therapy for about six months when this happened:
Emma-Louise Boynton:
I remember with this guy, I just had this, like, yeah, I had this, like, new confidence and suddenly sex felt like exploratory and I was driven by curiosity and exploration rather than fear. And I remember having sex with him and then I didn't orgasm the first night, but then the next morning he just went down on me for ages and I came and I was like, “Oh my gosh!” And he's like, “What?” And I was like, “You fucked my sex column! Because the whole column was about not being able to orgasm.” And he was like, “What?” And I was like, “Well, I just orgasmed! You fucked my column.” And he was like, “Do you say this to everyone?” And I was like, “Absolutely not. If only you knew.”
Hannah Witton:
Yay for Emma being able to orgasm, even if it did ruin the premise of her column. But Emma also had some really great insight into why that happened and what had changed.
Emma-Louise Boynton:
First and foremost, I didn't know what I liked. I didn't really masturbate that much, I didn't really know my body that well, obviously I had this very bad relationship to my body, so I just didn't really know, fundamentally, what I liked sexually. Second of all, I never really have the language to communicate that and I didn't have the confidence to communicate. And I think doing sex therapy allowed me to first of all build the confidence to begin communicating better in partnered sex. Once I'd had that orgasm in this partnered sex, I was like, “Ah, yes, I'm not broken. I can do this. I can do this.” And then, yeah, had a great summer.
Hannah Witton:
Haha, I bet you did!
Hannah Witton:
So I want to introduce you to someone else now because while I haven't done any talking sex therapy, I did experience some sexual function issues after the birth of my child. Basically, my pelvic floor was hella tight and penetration became really painful and impossible. I knew I wanted to improve this situation, but I decided not to go down the talking sex therapy route and instead opted for a more somatic approach. And that's how I met Jessica.
Jessica Parker:
I'm Jessica Parker and I am a sexological body worker and a sensual event manager and massage therapist.I really value the power of hands-on touch in a touch-starved society. This is something that is super important and the basis for a lot of my work, how to go about enhancing - getting more connection that way.
Hannah Witton:
Hang on. What exactly is sexological body work?
Jessica Parker:
Sexological body work is essentially... sex education for adults. So practical information and support. All the stuff that we weren't really taught at school. The support can cover ways to get you reconnected back to your body using practical tools that involve sound, breath, touch, and movement, presence, body-based practices, learning about communication skills, asking about consent.
Hannah Witton:
I definitely hear the word somatic thrown around. It feels like a bit of a buzzword at the moment. Can you kind of explain what that word means?
Jessica Parker:
So the word somatic to me and my interpretation means remembering or coming back to the body in its full holistic sense. So the senses, the sensations, and the sound, breath, touch, and movement elements we have within our body. All around in our heads, buzzing all around, just thinking, thinking, listening to podcasts like this, which is great. But we tend - andlooking at our phones or being in our heads and thinking constantly, even when we're going on walks, rather than somatically, so body. Experiencing and feeling, using all of our senses in the present moment.
Hannah Witton:
What are some of the things that people might come to you for sexological body work that they want to work on?
Jessica Parker:
Sort of two main things that people come to me with in terms of masturbation, or that they find that they can't orgasm during partner sex. I think what I offer is lots of different touch points, literally, for people who want maybe just a talking session, or maybe they want a little bit of a inspiration of how to masturbate differently, or maybe they want a bit of guidance how to create a bit more of a pleasure practice for themselves. With couples, I find, I have people who are just starting out and wanting to get their communication nice and clear at the beginning of the relationship and learning about each other's bodies due to past experiences where they basically didn't quite nail that for whatever reason. Or I get the other end of the spectrum, where people have, you know, couples have been together for a very long time, they may have had children during that time and they're all are just a bit sensually burnt out So they recognize the fact that they’re like, “We don't necessarily need talk-based therapy/” Or maybe they've gone through lots of talking based therapy, counseling through all the issues and now they're like, “We just need to get our bodies back on board.”
Hannah Witton:
What can sexological body work do that talk therapy can't?
Jessica Parker:
Sexological body work can be a lot more practical than talk therapy in terms of relearning about themselves and that's where the sexological body work can actually support a person and to actually being able to show them, hands on or hands off, to be able to see their own body in a new way. So that's sort of more practical homework that you can take away and then use in your daily life straight away. And that phrase getting into your body can sound a little bit hippie trippy or ethereal. What does that actually mean? What does that look like? But that's essentially, I guess, what embodiment could be.
How I explain it is learning to actually feel what you're feeling - so sensations - rather than thinking what you're feeling. But basic skin on skin, touching, breathing, coming back to our actual, the tangible sort of that tangible reference point where we can feel rather than being in our heads. I think that's the beauty of body work and how touch body work, massage, or dance, any sort of element of body work can actually bring us back to that centre.
Hannah Witton:
In what ways can like body work and talking therapy be combined? Like how do they work together?
Jessica Parker:
Once we feel heard and seen, that allows our busy minds to get out of the way for our bodies to be able to be opened up to heal in whatever pace that they want to be healed. When we get our brains out of the way that allows our bodies to be able to be receptive to experience more pleasure, healing, or whatever it is, the intentional, the state that we want our bodies to be at.
And the combination is valuable because it's allowing you to get into your body so you are having practical toolkit to actually, you know, empower you to discover yourself at a deeper level and to have the actual body work practical tools can support that journey to empower you to be able to direct your own experience rather than having a much more of a verbal external experience.
Hannah Witton:
I want to come back to Emma because, spoiler, all of this learning is ongoing work. Lifelong work, really. So, while Emma did get that elusive orgasm, that was by no means the end of the story. It's not just a case of doing a nice six months of therapy and neatly ticking “get good at sex” off your to do list. Her experience really demonstrates this bigger idea of needing to get out of our heads and into our bodies.
Emma-Louise Boynton:
I do think that the talking therapy element of it is a really important first step because I think it's what is so critical to breaking down that shame, but I realized I was becoming very good at talking about sex and not that good at having sex. I just was just feeling a little bit disconnected again. And I was like, “Oh, I need to, like, practice what I preach a bit, like, get back into my body a bit more, and kind of step out the theory and into the practice.” And I've been told - I've got lots of friends who live in Lisbon and there is a sexual healer there who so many of my friends had seen and said was phenomenal. I think he's basically a kind of tantric masseuse, somatic, sexologist, therapist. A bit of a - let's call him a multi hyphenate of the sex world. I was so skeptical when I heard about him at first. And then I was like, “You know what, I need to step back into my body, so I'm gonna go and see him.”
So I went there, and you kind of chat, you do a bit of, like, talking therapy first, and you explain your relationship to sex, and then he begins doing body work. So you lie on the floor, and he begins to like, move energy around your body. And I have to say, I am quite cynical about a lot of, like, spiritual woo woo things, but actually found it quite amazing. And I think having someone just also touch your body in certain bits and be like, there are just certain points which would be really painful that he’d touch, and then there were bits that would feel like I'd want to cry, and then bits would make me laugh. It was, I felt - it was a really powerful exercise to get me to really be present in my body.
And the whole time, he was asking me, “Does this feel good?” And then he goes down, and then he goes to your pelvis, and then he's like, “Are you okay for me to do, like, internal body work?” And then he does, like, internal - basically, it was like a yoni massage. And then ended up orgasming, and then we kind of lie there, he puts a blanket over you, you just take a few moments. Then I went, got dressed, and then we sat together, and he gave me cookies and tea, and we talked about it. And it was such a bizarre experience, obviously. Mainly because I was kept on thinking in my head, I was like, “I can't believe this is this man's day to day. This is wild. Like, what do you put on your LinkedIn?”
Hannah Witton:
What do you put on your LinkedIn?
Hannah Witton:
I love Emma's story, and I also think it's really interesting how we were both coming to body work wanting to feel more connected to our bodies, but how different our actual experiences were. Before my session with Jessica, where we did some vaginal mapping, she explained to me that it could be a really erotic experience, if that was the vibe that I wanted, or it could be a very non erotic and purely functional experience. I opted for the more functional. It was like somewhere between a massage and a physiotherapy examination, as that was what I was comfortable with. But it's really cool that there is this huge spectrum of somatic body work experiences you can have.
I know I learned a lot about my post pregnancy body from Jessica. She explained to me why it's very common, particularly with C-sections, for vaginas to go into a bit of a holding pattern, as she calls it.
Jessica Parker:
Lots of pelvic gymnastics have gone on with contractions and everything sort of prepping, getting ready So when the actual birth canal is all ready and then the baby sort of bypasses the canal through a C-section, the muscles are still primed, you know, to do their their marathon. So having lots of internal massage or mapping or holding afterwards is really key. I've had one very powerful client that, you know, almost had the rest of her contractions like a couple of years afterwards.
Hannah Witton:
Wow!
Jessica Parker:
It was a massive emotional release and she had had a C-section and she was just feeling tight and not quite right all those years after. And it's almost like we completed the birthing process in a way. It was, yeah, it was mindblowing what the body can still hold on to.
Hannah Witton:
That story is absolutely wild, and I wanted to dive a bit deeper into that: the idea that our bodies can hold onto emotional experiences for so long.
Jessica Parker:
Most of the time there's either a sense of numbness, so not feeling sensation when it's - when they're touched, or not being aware of any sort of pleasure or any tangible sensation in their body or the other extreme, where there's too much sensation like pain. So you can see it structurally how they hold their bodies and postures where they may not be as open or free moving and restricted. So rather than just instantly pull away, we're just hanging out in that zone just to see if there's any lessening or what happens when we do notice and zone and have presence and send breath to that area. So it's quite a slow process, and you can do this on any part of your body, but particularly with you, we wanted to focus on allowing the space for your body to let go of whatever it was holding onto.
Hannah Witton:
I found it completely fascinating learning more about sex therapy, what happens behind closed doors, and the impact it has. I have to say, it's definitely got me more fired up about the importance of sex education too, because I see all the many reasons why people feel so broken and alone and in need of sex therapy, and I really do think so much of that could have been prevented if we'd had better sex ed and lived in a less erotophobic society. Alas, one can dream.
It's also frustrating to hear that sex therapy might not always be the most inclusive or accessible place for more marginalised populations. But I loved Silva's advice about interviewing your sex therapist about their training and specialist interests. And, of course, I recognise that money is a huge issue when it comes to the accessibility of sex therapy, but money is such a huge topic in itself when it comes to sex and relationships that I actually want to dedicate a whole episode to that. Keep your eyes on your podcast feed.
Anyway, I wanted to end on this really uplifting message from Silva:
Silva Neves:
What I love about being a sex therapist, even though we deal with a lot of very difficult, heavy topics like abuse and trauma and so on, is that at the end of it all, at the end of a journey, you get clients to embrace joy in their lives. And to embrace pleasure as well, which is really, really important. I do believe that pleasure is the antidote to a lot of problems that we have in our lives. If we incorporated pleasure, the pleasure of living even more, including sexual pleasure, but not only sexual pleasure. Pleasure in general is the gateway to joy. And when I see clients accessing that, accessing pleasure, guilt free. and joy in their lives. There is something that's just so beautiful. It's just so on a human level. That's what keeps me going. That the kind of work that we do is just amazing. I just don't think I want to do anything else in my life.
Hannah Witton:
Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to support the show, you can go to patreon.com/hannahwitton, where you can also find ad free versions of the show and bonus behind the scenes episodes and extended cuts. And you can find transcripts and shownotes over on our website, doingitpodcast.co.uk. Are you considering whether sex therapy, talking or somatic, could be right for you? I'd love to continue the conversation with you over on Instagram @doingitpodcast.
Next time we're talking sex, relationships, and disability.
Lolo Spencer:
I want to normalize disabled people being an option for partnership. Disabled people being an option for dating, and love, and sex, and a good time.
Jennie Williams:
So, somebody wants to have a cheeky little wank, right? Something that is going to be very private to us, and they want to watch some porn. And for most of us that's really easy, because you just go on your phone, right? If you're in a care home and you need that support, that isn't the case.
Hannah Witton:
This podcast was hosted and co produced by me, Hannah Witton, produced by Mia Zur-Szpiro, and edited and mixed by Anoushka Tate. Episode transcripts, shownotes, and social media produced and created by Moog Florin.