Sex Talks With Emma-Louise Boynton - Meet my sex therapist, Aleks Trkulja

Episode Date: March 7, 2024

*TW: This episode discusses eating disorders and sexual assault.* "If your experience of pleasure happens in your body, but you're in a body that you hate.... how are you supposed to access pleasure? You have to pick whether you're going to punish your body forever or if you're going to forgive it." In this episode of the podcast, Emma is joined by her (former) sex therapist, Aleks Trkulija, to chat through some of the key issues they covered in the therapy room, including: Should you have sex when you don't want to?How do body image issues affect sexual function and desire?Why does shame play such a prominent role in sex?What are the most important things we should be unlearning when it comes to our relationship to sex?What is a pleasure journal?!And how can we improve the relationship we have with our bodies? If you are affected by any of the themes discussed in this podcast Samaritans are open 24/7 for anyone who needs to talk. You can visit some Samaritans branches in person. Samaritans also have a Welsh Language Line on 0808 164 0123 (7pm–11pm every day). 116 123 (freephone) [e-mail] Freepost SAMARITANS LETTERS samaritans.org

Before we start, we wanted to let you know that in this episode, sexual abuse and eating disorders are discussed. So please take a break if you need to, and we've added details in the show notes for organisations who can offer support. Hello and welcome to the Sex Talks podcast with me, your host, Emma Louise Boynton. Sex Talks exists to engender more honest, open and vulnerable discussions around typically taboo topics, like sex and relationships. gender, inequality, and the role technology is playing in changing the way we date, love, and fuck. Our relationship to sex tells us so much about who we are and how we show up in the world, which is why I think it's a topic we ought to be talking about with a little more nuance and a lot more curiosity. So each week, I'll be joined by a new guest whose expertise on the topic

I'd really like to mine and do, well, just that. From writers, always, authors and therapists, to actors, musicians and founders. We'll hear from a glorious array of humans about the stuff that gets the heart of what it means to be human. If you want to join the conversation outside of the podcast, sign up to my newsletter via the link in the show notes, or come along to a live recording of the podcast at the London Edition Hotel. Okay, I hope you enjoy the show.

In today's episode, I am so excited. excited to be joined by none other than my very own former sex therapist, Alex Triculia. Alex is the director of the Pleasure Center, check them on Instagram, and she's a certified sex, relationships, and body image therapist who works with all gender and sexual identities. I started doing sex therapy with Alex during the pandemic on the recommendation of two friends. We'd met the dinner party, and when I'd confided in them both, that I didn't really enjoy sex and hadn't been able to orgasm and partner sex for some six or more years. they were both horrified and said I must go and see Alex immediately.

As it transpired, they'd both recently done sex therapy separately and had since become evangelicals for the cause. Now, I never really thought my relationship to sex was something that I could fix. I just thought I wasn't a particularly sexual person. Sex just wasn't for me. But doing sex therapy had a profound impact on my life. Not least since it eventually prompted me to start sexful.

but more on that later. But fundamentally, it shifted not just my relationship to sex and my relationship to orgasm, I did get my orgasm back, but fundamentally to my body, to my self-confidence, to the way I can show up in relationships. It made me realise that our relationship to sex is such a huge part of our overall health and well-being. When we neglect that part of ourselves,

we cut off a really huge, important part of who we are. of how we connect to ourselves and to others. I really loved this episode with Alex since it was the first time we had a chance to properly dive into all the many topics we discussed in the sex therapy room and which proved so goddamn transformational for me. I hope they can be just as helpful to you too.

Okay, enjoy the show. Welcome. Hi, Alex. Hello. Oh, it's so nice to see you. So I am really excited. for this episode of the Sex Talks podcast season three we're now in. If you had said to me, like, maybe two years ago,

that you will end up focusing your work on talking about sex and pleasure and orgasms and everything in between, I would have said, I do not believe you for a second. And for us in a couple of years, here we are. Alex has come up lots and lots and lots in sex talks and a live edition of sex talks. as, yes, as she was my sex therapist, so really inspired this whole exploration and curiosity

into sex and how sex is such a fascinating prism through which we can explore so many aspects of ourselves, our lives, and kind of society more broadly. Alex, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here. Oh, it's so wonderful to have you. So this podcast is probably going to be a little bit different. Well, it is going to be really different

because no one else has been my sex therapist before. but I talk so much about the impact that sex therapy had on my life and how much it changed not just my relationship to sex but my relationship to my body it ended like a 17 year long battle with bulimia and genuinely it was doing sex therapy was a thing that really brought that to an end and I realized I've talked about it a lot at a kind of at a distance and kind of mentioned you and mentioned the learnings I had in the sex therapy room but we haven't ever sat down in the context of this podcast and really dug into all the incredible things that you taught me and that we worked through in that sex therapy room.

So I really wanted to use this podcast episode as an opportunity to do that and to illuminate all the fantastic things I learned with you that proved so transformative to me and really the reason I set up sex talks because I figured they could be just as transformative for other people too. Before I take everyone into the sex therapy room with us,

I realize I don't actually know why you initially became a sex therapist. As I was prepping this interview, I was like, God, what did prompt Alex to get into this? I know what? She got me into sex talks. But what was that initial thing that made you want to go into this field of work? I think it was a bit of a process, really. It wasn't like a single turning point where I just thought, oh my God, that's exactly what I want to do with my life. I was just studying undergrad psychology and it was so dry.

It was really based on a lot of like diagnosing people. I don't know. I kind of came across like sex therapy as a smaller area of mental health and looked into it more and just thought, wow, that's really fascinating. So I sought an internship with a like a sex therapist in my city. And I just was like, I'll just go see what it's like. Like, what does sex therapists do? And I remember getting to her office. And she was like, let's do a little breathing exercise. And I was like, okay. And so she pulls up this video of an anus. and it's like it's like expanding and contracting and she's like match your breath to the pace of the anus and I was like okay so we're just sitting there watching this anus like expand and contract

and we're going and I was just like wow this is new but it was really interesting because she had no reaction to the anus and she was like if you can breathe to anus like it's really good because it's just a body part and it doesn't matter that you're breathing to an anus. And in fact, and then I've learned so much about anuses. And I think regular therapy is great. And like I've worked as a general mental health counselor. But when you talk about sex and relationships, I truly believe you get to like the crux of the human experience.

And so it just felt like it landed a little in my soul of like, oh, I feel like this is the most authentic and raw space that you can work in. And because of that, it's also the most rewarding. because you kind of get the deepest, juiciest bits and people really can do so much in that space. So that's why I think I got into it. I love the image of you breathing to the anus. I did not expect you to say that.

What a great story to begin on. But I think what you've said there is really important because I've always struggled with therapy. I hadn't even sort of from age 12 and tried lots of different types of therapy. And I really struggled with it because I felt it quite repetitive. And, you know, we'd go back and let's talk about relationship to your mom and to your dad. And I kind of brought, I was like, God, I can't go through that again.

But with sex therapy, I came to you because I couldn't orgasm and partnered sex, and I really didn't enjoy sex. I remember coming into the sex therapy room, our virtual therapy room and saying, I'm broken. I don't think you're going to be able to fix me. I had, I didn't, there was no reflection of you and your work, but I just felt so dysfunctional. I felt there was a part of my life that was really broken. But I didn't really think that it mattered that much because I just thought I'm just not a sex. I'm just one of those people that sex is, I'm just, sex isn't for me, but it was doing sex therapy where I had this really like tangible metric for success almost in that I couldn't

orgasm and partnered sex when I started. By the time I, like, not the, like, complete therapy, but I was like, kind of, there was a tangible metric of like the improvement in my relationship to sex and that by the time I left our actual therapy room, I was coming all over. Look, that's a definitely like a benefit, but I also am very mindful that anyone listening a lot of people would feel a lot of pressure to be like, I go into sex therapy, not being able to orgasm or not having desire, and I should come out the other end with this very goal-oriented approach to therapy. And I would actually, I know it's your experience,

but my experience of the work you did was that actually, I think the fundamental change you made was to stay curious about reconnecting with your body. And it wasn't you that was broken. It was just a broken relationship you chose to consciously mend. And you spent time and effort and energy doing that. And one of the benefits of that work was being able to access orgasm in a partnered setting. That was my experience of therapy with you because I think it's so easy, right, to be like, oh, I was broken and now I'm fixed.

It's so easy. But actually, it was a fuck ton of work. and a lot of vulnerability and a lot of patience with your body and yourself. I think I have definitely defined it at points as having this very tantal metric for success. And also I think it has put pressure on myself in that now I feel like I need to be able to be this wanton sex goddess in all parts of sex, which you obviously don't. I think as well there are a lot of people find sex therapy daunting because they assume, oh, if I go into sex therapy, I come out this sexually liberated goddess.

I think there's like so much pressure for people to be this really sexually like active and liberated people. That's absolutely not the point. You don't need to orgasm every time you have sex. You don't need to orgasm at all. I always tell people, I think it's more about the journey of accessing pleasure and whatever that looks like for you. Learning to reconnect with your body in that way and understanding that your body is a flawed thing, it will not function perfectly at all times for the course of your life. So it's also kind of learning to accept that. And I share myself, I'll be like,

I don't come every time I have sex. Am I disappointed? No. People assume I do because I'm a sex therapist, though. They go, oh, you must have really great sex. I'm like, how would you know? I mean, I think now because I runs the platform called sex off, people assume that I must just be this absolute like super kinky,

And I think particularly any men I begin dating, like there's a shit ton of pressures. I'm sure you feel as a sex therapist to then be able to like be this amazing sexually liberated woman. And I'm like, no, no, no. I went to sex there because I did not like sex. Like, I didn't like it. So we were starting from the room from the other end. So the fact that I'm here and really enjoying it, like that is success in and of itself.

So when I first came into that sex therapy room with you, I said to you very clear, I'm saying, you know, I'm broken. I don't work. I felt totally alone in that, and I felt that it was my kind of personal shame that I couldn't enjoy sex. And I felt that all my friends around me were having this amazing, carefree, confident type of sex. And people say, oh, you know, I got this guy and we shagged. And I just thought, God, how are you doing this without feeling just wrapped in anxiety and worry? It just felt so easy for other people and felt so difficult for me. One of the first things that you said to me in which we discussed was how frequently

people came to you saying exactly what I said. Yeah, sorry. I was just going to say, again, as a sex therapist, people think all you do is talk about sex, but actually what I talk about is shame and anxiety. It's so important to normalise that experience in association with sex and relationships. It's so common. because it's that feeling of being alone in your brokenness that I think stops you getting help initially

and that is certainly how I felt like it was this shame around this part of my life and I actually end up thinking about like the eating disorder and sexual dysfunction as kind of these twin pillars of shame that exist in my life, they're like my dirty little secrets that they happen behind closed doors that if you met me ordinarily you would never guess that I went home to make myself sick

and that when it came to going home on a date, I was dying inside because I was so scared. I knew I was an orgasm. I just felt so wracked and this worry. So they would, yeah, it was kind of my private, my private shame. And I think it's actually talking to you in the context of sex therapy began to break down that shame.

So it was the first time I'd ever verbalized in the extent of the detail that we went into, these things that I thought I was completely alone in. And having someone be there and say, Not only you, not alone, but I've heard this so many times, and we can work through this. It's so funny, because I literally said that to a few clients this week. They come in, and they're so distressed because I've had, because it's the new year, I've had a few new clients coming in.

And they'll say, oh, yeah, I'm just struggling to orgasm. Oh, I've noticed my desire's really dropped off. It's affecting my relationship. Oh, I just feel like I can't ask for what I want during sex. And they're crying, and I'm going, you know what? like, this is actually so incredibly common. And what's more is that it's manageable. All of this is manageable and you're not alone in this experience.

So validating that I think is so important to address that sense of like, oh my God, it's just me. I'm alone in the world in this issue. But, you know, I also think no matter what issue you're dealing with, at some point in time, someone throughout history has dealt with it. Because we're all human, like we're going to experience human problems. and none of our human problems are completely unique. There is no such thing.

Someone at some point in time and history has survived what you're going through, which means that you will be able to as well. What role do you see shame typically play in people's relationship to sex? So shame, the way I understand shame is that it's a very social emotion. It's designed to direct us toward belonging.

So when we demonstrate characteristics that go against the social values of a tribe, a community, or a group, we become shamed for those things and we are threatened with rejection from that community. So shame is very important in holding us accountable to belonging. And you see this with cancel culture, right? If there is some kind of deeply disturbing behavior, people will attempt to cancel others and it's done using. shame as an emotion, shaming them for their traits or their behaviours. So if we're keeping that understanding of shame in our minds, when it comes to sex, we don't want to be rejected. We want to belong. We want to be accepted in the partnership or the group setting that we're in. We're also deeply vulnerable during sex, not only because we're being intimate, because we're physically

exposed as well a lot of the time. So there's this level of vulnerability. So there's this level of vulnerability where I think shame can really kick in and we feel that sense of like, oh my God, what if I'm rejected right now? And often then what happens is shame thrives on secrecy. So in order to ensure our belonging, we'll hide the parts of ourselves we fear will threaten our belonging. So something like, I can't come, but I'm too scared to tell this person that I can't orgasm because what if they judge me and don't want to have sex with me again? So I guess I'll just fake it. Alex, I want to go back, as I said when we kind of, I first Star Sex Theory. I came to the therapy and saying I was broken and we, in our kind of first session,

we went through my sexual history, not particularly sorted at all, in quite a lot of detail. I remember telling you all the times I'd had sex where I felt like I had to rather than that I actually wanted to. I felt kind of duty bound in certain situations. I think particularly from my first sexual experiences, I had penitrous sex for the first time at 16, all my friends had started having penitimate of sex at like 12 and 13 such as the norm, going to all-girls school. So I felt there was something I just needed to just crack on and do. We went to quite a lot of detailed in these experiences. Your response was, you know, I'm not surprised you have a slightly kind of fraught relationship

to sex given that so many of your sexual experiences were couched in a low level of trauma. And I wondered now if we could just briefly touch on that. Because my experience isn't unique at all. I'd say most of my friends have exactly the same experience I do. their formative sexual experiences in fact still today are having sex when they don't necessarily want to but they feel that they have to because they owe something to someone that they're with what does having sex when we don't want to have it particularly when we're younger what does that

do longer term to our relationship to sex that's a really good question and by the way I call this obligatory sex so many people have done it and whenever someone says oh yeah I guess I just have sex because I know my partner needs it. Or I have sex because I feel bad rejecting them yet another time. It's not coming from an internal place of I'm desiring this intimacy. And the impacts of having obligatory sex, as soon as someone says this, by the way, in therapy, I tell them stop. I'm sure I would have said it to you. I would say stop. Just stop doing it. Because right now what you're teaching your body is that it's okay to neglect your own boundaries and needs for the sake of someone else. And that's actually not okay.

That's not okay for your body. Your body is learning that it can't trust you. You do not have its best interests at heart. You will willingly put it in a situation it doesn't want to be in in order to ease some sense of distress. Over time, you're also teaching your body that sex isn't a safe space. it's not a space that prioritizes your pleasure and it's not a space that you can have your sense of yes and no trusted or heard it's very confronting by the way this conversation with clients

for a lot of people this is very confronting because they're essentially going oh I'm actually letting myself get assaulted and I'm like well it's not perhaps like that this is more like a violation of your own boundaries. And it's purely based on a lot of anxious thinking that if I say no yet again, my partner will leave me. Then again, it's looking at the shame, the belonging of like, I feel ashamed. I don't feel the desire. And I'm scared of that threat of rejection. So I guess I'll just put myself in this situation anyway. But it is damaging. It's not how we want to be relating to our bodies or to sex with partners. I imagine, and when I've worked with like partners, They're mortified to learn that their partners are having obligatory sex.

They're like, I would much rather you just say no than put yourself in this position where sex becomes an anxiety-provoking thing. And actually, they often feel quite betrayed because they don't realize they've somehow been enabling this sort of, like, violation as well. That's so interesting. So I guess, yeah, I mean, you're not giving them the opportunity to honour your boundaries because you're not communicating

what those boundaries are. It is technically, like, deceitful. And you mentioned trauma there and it's something I wanted to touch on because I remember early on our sessions, I said to you I didn't feel like I had said quite a few kind of negative early sexual experiences, one in particular that was really bad

or I just didn't really know what had happened and I'd never been able to talk about it because I felt like I couldn't own the experience. I felt like I had no right to feel traumatized by it because I didn't know what had happened. It was trigger warning for anyone who's experienced sexual assault or violence. I'd essentially been told I'd had sex with someone

and I didn't remember and I was passed out and still today, don't really know what happened. but I did, I think someone did have sex to me, but I, I didn't know how to, like, articulate that. And it wasn't actually until the Me Too movement and I sat down with a friend and we both started talking about our previous sexual experiences. And suddenly we had this new language that had been like, like, legitimized by Me Too. And we started being like, oh, this happened once. Oh, this happened once. And I was like, well, this happened when I was 17. And it was so upsetting at the time. And I, and I remember I was at school. I mean, I got a cab to school. It was

one of my crazy party night. I drunk too much and whatever. And I remember just burst into tears at school and I was so upset because I was so scared. I was like, I just don't know what happened. And then being the shower at home later that night and just trying to just wash my body and I thought, if I can, maybe I can wash this off. Maybe I can just scrub away what happened because it's scary and I don't understand it. But I remember saying to you, I was like I just don't feel like I have the right to feel traumatized by this because I don't have these like, you know, horrendous flashbacks of, you know, what you imagine to be a sexual assault as we understand that, even though I, you know, understand that so problematic now. And I remember

you saying to me that we don't like I had such a kind of I guess skewed understanding of what constitute as trauma because anything can can create a trauma response and it was no surprise that I'd I'd never really been able to acknowledge that it had been a source of trauma but I'd never been able to forget it and it would I'd remember it and I'd be with a new partner and I'd remember it and I wanted if you could just maybe explain maybe how you explained to me just what I guess what is trauma like what creates trauma and how we kind of respond to instances even when we don't really necessarily know or understand what happened yeah so whenever we go through some kind of experience our brain needs to process the components of that experience so you know when I eat breakfast

right my body and brain is acknowledging the context of a situation and the sensory experience of that situation like I had peanut butter on toast and a cup of tea. Delicious. So my body was taking in the sensory experience of that meal and I may have also had an emotion associated with that like satisfaction or enjoyment. My brain is able to process this because as I'm going through the experience of eating breakfast, I'm in no significant level of distress. I am regulated. However, let's say you have a meal out with someone and at that meal, they decide to break up with you. There's going to be like this association of, well, I'm eating this meal. The sensory experience is that there are flavors in my mouth, there's

a certain smell in the air, there's certain level of lighting. I'm looking at this person, their features, their smell, their cologne. And I'm in distress because of the context of the conversation. And perhaps it doesn't, your brain isn't able to process that experience fully because of the level of distress that you're going through. And essentially what happens is that the emotional experience and the sensory experience get trapped in time. So whenever you recall the memory, it comes back as vividly perhaps as it did the first, like when it occurred.

Now, in a situation like yours, there's a sense of, yes, you don't remember the exact things that happened, but the psychological distress of waking up, being told, this is what we think happened. You having a creeping suspicion of yes, I think that also happened because I can notice changes, becoming hypervigilant toward your body, like, am I hurt, can I feel things like what's on me? That emotional and sensory experience is enough, and paired with the distress, is enough to capture in time that experience so that when you recall it, it's distressing in the way that it was compared to like when you recall your breakfast,

it's not distressing. Or you recall a difficult conversation that your brain was able to process. It's not distressing because you were able to process it in the moment. So trauma is really getting like a little bit like stuck in a moment of time in the past. And I would say that a lot of people assume, because I do EMDR with people, eye movement and desensitization reprocessing, it's essentially helping your brain reprocess the memories that have been trapped in time. in your body, so you feel them. And I think what happens is a lot of people assume, oh, I must have had to be like in a really violent, like, car accident or something in order

to have trauma. And I just say, no, it's just a negative experience where you notice that the emotion comes up really strongly and it's paired with that sensory experience of like, oh, I can feel like I'm back there again, as well as, like, a certain kind of meaning of like, oh I'm not safe or like oh I'm not enough so that's how I would kind of in 60 seconds or less describe trauma that's so helpful and I wanted to bring that up because I found it so helpful hearing you explain trauma to me in that way and kind of in a similar way when we were in a therapy room I felt kind of legitimized I guess in acknowledging the pain I felt around that experience, it really helped me process it. And I think when we think about boundary setting

and how we look after ourselves and how we learn to take care of ourselves and our bodies, also being able to acknowledge what has caused us pain and give ourselves the grace and the space to feel it and to work through it and to process it is so critical to that. I think it can be really overwhelming the thought of sitting with trauma. And so I'll just say here and now for anyone listening that you always move at a safe pace. You're not like going into your first or second therapy session and unpacking a trauma that's really distressing to you. It's always the case of building a therapeutic rapport with someone and then feeling safe to do that work, you know. Like, I think we took time before we started talking too intensely about what had happened and the

impacts just because it can be overwhelming. And for some people, I will say some people, they go, no, I'm okay to talk about it like earlier on. And I go, okay, and other people like, yeah, I'm going to need heaps of time, and I go, no problem. I once saw a client for two years before she was ready to talk about sex and previous negative experiences. And that was just the time she needed. And I totally respected that. That's really helpful to know. And I think for anyone listening who's considering themselves, if they might get so many people who say to me,

can you give me your sex therapist number? Can you give me your contact details? Because it's obviously help you so much. But I think it's, you know, obviously everyone's sex therapy or therapy journey anyway is going to be very different. But I think just recognising that you can work through those things and however long it takes you, however, whatever that process looks like to you, there is liberation in that process and it can be liberation that you don't expect is possible for you because you haven't even begun to like acknowledge the thing. I want to bring us on to eating disorders quite early on in our sessions, Alex. When I described my brief of sexual history and my prior relationship to sex, we got on to my relationship to my body quite quickly, which I wasn't expecting. I had a, I was anorexic when I was

12 for a couple years and bulimic. And then I physically got better. I was stopping anorexic at like kind of 15, 16, then just had a kind of low level eating disorder that kind of was always there. But because the like very physiological manifestation of the eating disorder was gone, I always, as an adult I very much talked about it as a past tense thing so the eating disorder was very much in my past it wasn't something that was part of my present I kind of ignored

like I was quite believe me I had just been my like coping mechanism for any sort of anxiety for basically since I've developed that I'd developed at 11 by the time I was in the sex therapy with you

because we spoke kind of as we were coming up pandemic I'd hit an absolute rock bottom with it I had and I hadn't But again, but I didn't acknowledge it. It was just, I'd hit rock bottom and I was in a place of such chaos with my relationship to my body, with being sick. But I just, I couldn't acknowledge it as something as part of my present. It was just something that I did, again, behind closed doors.

So it didn't occur to me that it would be such a big factor that would end up feeding into the conversations we had about sex, even though, obviously, my relationship to my body, was so closely bound to my relationship to sex because my relationship to my body... Yes, because when you have sex, how do you experience sex? Through your body. Crazy.

But I hadn't even made that connection, which seems wild now, but then I think when you were in that period of being so disconnected from your body, my body was something that was a source of pain and shame. Yes. It was something I wanted... I sought solely to punish.

I would eat. eat, I would under-eat, I would overexercise. It was just, I was always trying to control the contours of my body however I could. And I didn't, nothing else matters. So you said to me, kind of early on, you asked kind of my relationship to pleasure. And pleasure was just, I was like, what? Like, my body's not something to give pleasure to you. My body's not something to act to discipline and to kind of, to whip into shape.

I, again, as I said, I thought I was very alone in this. I thought that my kind of, I said, my eating disorder and sexual dysfunction, my kind of twin pillars of private shame that I didn't really talk about openly. You were the person who then told me and introduced me to the research that actually shows that there is a connection between body image and eating disorders and issues around sex. Can you just begin by telling me, kind of what the research, telling us listeners what that research shows? Yeah, so essentially this was research I did in my master's, which ultimately, got me interested in working with eating disorders because I knew I wanted to be a sex therapist. So my research was on the medicalization of female sexual dysfunction. So I was looking largely at the assigned female at birth experience. This idea that if women are presenting to their

GPs with concerns around desire or orgasm, they are likely, the research showed they are likely to also present with anxiety and or depression and or some kind of eating disorder or body image concern. And that research really blew my mind. I was like anxiety, I get, you know, like performance anxiety, I get it. Depression, sure, like if your relationships affected by, you know, lack of desire. But the eating disorders really threw me. And so then I started working in eating disorders and then, I mean, like you said just then, it's like, it's so simple. Like, how do you miss it that of course if your experience of pleasure happens in your body but you're in a body that you hate and you're punishing that body how are you supposed to access pleasure

and so this is something that i say to people who report like really strong body image concerns or eating disorder behaviors is that i'm like how do you expect a body that you are punishing to also provide you with unlimited pleasure and orgasms like you cannot do both and you have to pick one You have to pick whether you're going to punish your body forever or if you're going to forgive it and you're going to move on and allow it to be free and accessing pleasure because you cannot do both. The body image concerns, eating disorder behaviors, and for anyone listening who's like, I don't have an eating disorder, you don't need to be diagnosed for there to be like inklings of unhelpful behaviors that you do to your body. And this looks like overexercising, restricting, dieting. it could also look like taking laxatives, it could look like some body image-based behaviours as well as like body avoidance, so like not letting people see you naked or like having sex with

the lights off or covering up in certain social contexts like at the beach, as well as like body checking. So constantly checking your body in the mirror, checking certain clothes still fit, checking that you look okay during certain sexual positions. Like, oh, can you see on my tummy rolls? Can you see my cellulite? Maybe I should change. This kind of thinking and focus on the body completely takes you out of the body and into your head. And so you're not accessing pleasure.

Hearing you also reel off that list, there was nothing I didn't do of that list to punish my body. I was inventive with the array of things I did to constantly punish my body. And I'm just, as you were saying that, I remember one of the things you asked me to do quite early on was to kind of get, to kind of help me kind of. get used to experiencing pleasure my body was to kind of really um seduce yourself you need to get used to seducing yourself and kind of being kind of sensual just by yourself and you said you know yes have a bath light a candle masturbate and even that I remember as you said it thinking what the

fuck I didn't like baths because I didn't like being in water and seeing my body and being still in my body because I was so used I'd always I'm just active active like people would always say to me like why you're never at home, you're always out and about in the gym and doing things. And I was like, in my head, because I never said this. I was like, when I'm at home alone, I am in a war with myself and I'm going crazy and I'm cooking up a meal and then being sick, but I just didn't know how to be okay alone because I hadn't taught myself how to look after myself. So pleasure is like one end of the spectrum.

I couldn't even just do the basic things of nudge myself, run a bath, cook a nutrition, meal that I didn't want to throw up. I was at this real kind of loggerheads with myself. You're not safe in your own company. So whenever you're alone, you're the one to be scared of. So even you suggesting having a bath was absolutely alien to me and was like really quite kind of scary. And the process that we had to go through was kind of almost helping me to learn how to look after myself in a really basic, quite fundamental way. And one of the things you said to do was to keep a pleasure journal early on where I would like note down five things a day that gave me pleasure, but there were non-sexual. Why did you want me to do the non-sexual focus on the non-sexual stuff?

So the pleasure journal, yes, is about documenting pleasurable things that you experience in your body through your five senses. And we start with non-sexual because it's a skill that's transferable. noticing pleasure in your body in a non-sexual context is very low pressure because you could be sitting you know like the sun's decided to come out this morning so I could be sitting here going oh I can feel the sun on my skin that's a pleasurable experience got like a cup of tea you know this is an enjoyable cup of tea I'm liking you know I like the taste or whatever it is and because there's no pressure here there's no pressure to orgasm feeling the sun on my face I can just sit here and notice what it's like in my body to enjoy that sensation. And then essentially

I'm building the skill to the point where I can then transfer it to a sexual context. A lot of the exercises that I assign people is essentially just tricking people into like being in their bodies with their consent, of course. A lot of people really don't want to be in their bodies and I have so many clients that were so similar to where you were at back then, where they're very like, go, go, go. Being slow in their body was like, a worse nightmare. They're like, if I'm slow in my body, my brain just goes, goes, goes, and I'm, and I'm going to be so on edge or distressed, and so I may as well just, like, distract myself. Now, the funny thing is, is that that distress is often something that isn't

tangible, right? Like, we can't control that distress or that sense of, like, like, agitation we may have within ourselves, but our bodies are tangible. And they give us a fault. And they give us a sense of control. So if you manipulate your body, you think you have control over a situation, but you actually don't. You're just taking it out on your body. And you're in this kind of frenzied loop because you're right, it's not really getting to the heart of the problem. It's not addressing why you're feeling anxious. But it's also a never-ending, it's kind of a never-ending project. Your body is never going to be perfect because you don't even know what you want it to be. It's just it's almost the cycle of punishment is the thing that you're addicted to because it kind of

this release and this like it gives you a release and you just get stuck in that cycle and that's very much the cycle that I was was in and by the sounds of it kind of a lot of the other clients that you that you see how in terms of how that presents in people's relationship to sex what do you see amongst your clients who like me struggled with their with an even sort of struggle with body image in terms of how that then presents in the bedroom so many people had trouble with orgasms so like, you know, pretty standard performance anxiety concerns. So many people had concerns around desire. So like, I'm just not feeling the desire because I'm so fearful that, I don't know, like someone won't like my body or my body's not enough or something like that. There are a lot

of concerns around sexual pain as well. This isn't body image concerns in terms of like physical appearance based on beauty ideals. It was more so body image concerns around function. like oh my every time i try to be penetrated there's pain so my body's failing me and now i want to punish my body for that or i'm having trouble trusting a body that's causing me so much pain this also goes for people with like chronic pain issues it can be very difficult to be patient and trust a body that's causing so much pain so there's a number of different things that body image concerns would be associated with different forms of like function that echoes a lot. I think my experience was very much that it was

it was even less so about what people would think about me in the context of having sex but more about like just me being obsessed with thinking about my own body in the context of having sex and being like disconnect disconnect, disconnect because as you said before like you're being present in your body when you hate your body is very painful and sex is a very visceral bodily thing and so when you're being almost like called to your body it's so confronting and you look just like disconnect disconnect and I think there's a the term like spectatorship you kind of almost like stand outside of your body and it feels like you're almost like watching the sexual experience and not really being a part of it

which obviously is the number one way to ensure you don't really enjoy it and you're not going to reach any sort of well yeah that's kind of like a you know for like a form of dissociation you know is to kind of not be in your body and be viewing the whole setting from outside of your body but it's also partly you know something we call the observer's perspective of this idea that, I think the research I did, actually, I found that the observer's perspective was essentially viewing your body from a third-party experience, so kind of going, okay, if I'm sitting here, can they see my cellulite and my belly rolls, like, showing whatever, that's the observer's perspective. And the research showed that women will engage with the observer's perspective

every 20 minutes. Every 20 minutes. All the time. Day to day, they, well, especially, it may be triggered more by like certain settings so being in social settings or being like in you know at the beach but like I mean perhaps being at home it may not happen but I you know a lot of people would be like oh I'm just cuddling my partner in bed yeah and they've got their hand on my belly and I'm going well can they like what are they feeling right now or what are they thinking about my belly kind of thing and so that's the observer's perspective of you're viewing yourself from an outside experience and then making a judgment based on your body meanwhile your partner's just enjoying cuddling.

But I guess the society in which women are so objectified, scrutinized, sexualized, demonized. I'm not actually that surprised to hear that. We kind of learn to experience our bodies through the eyes of another and typically that external gaze is a male gaze. And so that idea of that kind of external, I'm depressingly unsurprised to hear that. I'm more positive to let our listeners know

to move on to the kind of not the happy ending, but the happy element of doing sex therapy was that you do, by tricking me into beginning to explore pleasure, you had such a profound impact on my relationship to my body because over the course of our sessions and the homework you set me outside about and the conversations that you started in the therapy room,

which I then had outside of the therapy room, you, I think, really helped me build a connection into my body that I'd never thought was possible. I remember one of the first things I did. I got, like, dumped, unfortunately, after, by someone I dated after sex therapy and I was really sad about it. But I bought myself these cotton sheets afterwards. And I remember in the mornings having a coffee in my really expensive cotton sheets

and being like, this is pleasure. And this was, and it was so for me. And I thought I've never ever done this. I've never, like, prioritized giving myself this kind of sensory pleasure. allowing myself, like giving myself the permission to just sit and relish. And then I booked myself a holiday. I went to Rome and I stayed in a really nice place. And every evening I would decide where to go to dinner.

And I'd be like, oh, partly to say, oh, you know, just go to the shit place and they buy it. And I think, no, date yourself, seduce yourself. And I even did a call. I did like a raviote. I mean, this is really like you pray love stuff. But I did a course on how to make ravioli and we had to eat it at the end. And I had like a few bites. And the teacher's like, oh, you know, you haven't finished your pastor.

Emma, like, you know, you need more. And I thought, you don't realize this is the first time I've even passed since I was 12. I was like crying. I was like so happy. But I went home and, you know, initially my head's like, you need to be sick. Ah, and I was like, no, you have to look after yourself in a private setting. And it was really the learning to see my body through the prism of pleasure rather than just pain shifted something so profound in me. And I learned to be my best carer, my best caregiver.

And that's amazing. It's the most liberating thing. I can now travel on my own. and not be scared of what's going to happen if I'm alone. I can do, I like, I'll like go and have a glass of wine by myself, but it's just it unleashed so much and was such a profound shift that I had never, as I said, imagined possible. So thank you.

No, I love that so much. And it actually reminds me I came across a poem yesterday by Mary Oliver called Wild Geese. So there's a line from that poem that says, let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. and it literally made me cry. It just was like, fuck, like, this body is so precious. You only get one. You only get one.

And it's not perfect, but it has to be perfect enough for you because you have no choice. And so if it wants to eat the damn pasta, let it eat the damn pasta. And if it needs to rest, then let it rest. And if it needs to cry, then let it cry. And if it needs to dance, then let it dance. Like, it's just this, such a precious gift to have a body and to allow it or to be able to build a relationship with it where you become like friends is such a special thing to have. And if you can live your life in that friendship and it not be so conflicted and distressing, then the rest is easy. That's what I think anyway.

Your body is your home. It's like the one piece of like continuity. Everything life can change. Like all the time, like we have no idea what's going to happen really tomorrow and next after. But what you can be certain of us, you're going to wake up in your body. And I think when we abuse our one constant or we take for granted our constant home, we lay such a poor foundation for how we go into the rest of our lives, how we step out into the world. If you can create some level of peace in your own internal home and your bodily

home, the ripple effect in all other aspects of your life. And I think that's what I found really an unexpected outcome for me of doing sex therapy was the confidence it built in other aspects of my life was profound. Because I think when you are very, if you're wrapped in shame and discomfort and you're in this kind of cycle of self-abuse in the private sphere, that trickles into the public sphere to how you presently in a really profound way because you're kind of like, almost like, I don't want to overuse the analogy of the home, but like you're almost like limping out of your home because you're not caring for stuff then. I think, you know, with the boundaries that you set with people you sleep with, all these stuff that you do at that kind of

intimate, vulnerable level, I think it creates a template or a kind of benchmark for how you then go out into the world. So if you can kind of smooth out and address any issues you're having there, the impact else in other aspects of life is huge or can be huge. And it's just going to say, we're coming to the end of the recording. One of the things that we, I think we touched on in the therapy room, and I was reminded of the other day, is the similarities between addiction and eating disorders and how they might show up in the way that we relate to intimacy. And I was reminded of this because I read this beautiful book that you would actually love by Octavia Bright called This Ragged Grace.

And she describes in it her experience of overcoming alcohol addiction, consequently and subsequently falling in love as she's in this recovery process. I was really shocked by how much I resonated with her addiction, her reflections on addiction. And there was particularly one bit, which I want to read to you, that really struck me. She'd seen a psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist said to addicts, I remember the psychiatrist saying, she writes, during one of our sessions while looking me pointedly in the eye. Mistake intensity for intimacy. And you know what they say about intimacy, he said.

Into me see. The pursuit of intensity alone, she notes, is a way of avoiding being really seen for who you are, faults, imperfections and all. And reading that, I was so struck because I thought, that sums up where approach relationships looking seeking the kind of as kind of pseudo intimacy which is actually as kind of intense frenzy we know i mean we weren't going to my kind of problematic dating life but really that it really made me think about what you'd said in the therapy room about the similarities between addictions and eating disorders and i wondered whether you could maybe kind of elucidate

what that similar what those similarities are and how they potentially affect the way people who have had an eating disorder or some form of addiction approach and relate to intimacy. Yeah, so I guess the similarity based on my experience of working with people between eating disorders and addiction because I worked in a rehab. So I was in a psych hospital where I worked in eating disorders but also drug and alcohol. And that's where I started to really notice the similarities. Because essentially it was escaping yourself or trying to control your circumstances by either using drugs and alcohol or manipulating food, body, shape, and weight. It all had the underlying premise of deep shame about oneself and a sense of wanting to escape

sitting in that shame. I think those are like the similarities for me. Other people may say there's like more or different. I'm sure they're right. And I think the way that affects intimacy is essentially that if you turn up with a narrative of like, I don't belong here, it makes it really hard to turn up authentically. And you're going to be guarded. You're not really going to give people the full picture of who you are as a person. You're not going to turn up in the necessary vulnerable state. And when I say vulnerable, I don't mean vulnerable to hurt.

I mean vulnerable as in willing to connect. You will be guarded. because you are on the defense. You already feel like you don't belong there. And so it affects the way that you can relate and connect with people. And that's not to say that you should never feel any shame ever, but especially if there are these kinds of eating disorder, active eating disorder behaviors or substance abuse behaviors,

it's going to act as a barrier for true connection. What advice would you give to someone who is listening, to this and thinking, God, that's me, I'm really struggling to show up in dating in a vulnerable, open way because I haven't been able to resolve these things, this kind of shame around my body or kind of whatever I'm going through. For someone who maybe isn't ready to do therapy or doesn't have access to therapy now, what is one thing that someone can do to try and cultivate the capacity for vulnerability? I would say the one thing, if you can't access to, I would say the one thing, if you can't access therapy, is to practice some level of self-reflection.

And that may look like just acknowledging what are the things that I'm noticing aren't really helping that I'm doing, you know, like what are the coping strategies I have in place right now, whether that substance use or eating disorder behaviors, that I know, like, work because they help with the distress, but also I could recognize are problematic. To start with just any level of self-awareness is so key. But to really be able to flourish in that space, taking that self-awareness or self-reflection into therapy will help you to expand and better understand how to work with that. Alex, we won out of time, sadly, as I have a million on other questions. But I want to, let's kind of wrap it up with one final

question, which I'll answer a rapid fire away before we say goodbye. Sex therapy, for me, was involved so much unlearning of quite damaging narratives I had built about myself, my body, sex, intimacy, relationships, the whole works. And talking to you over the period that we spoke, I felt myself unlearn a lot of these like quite damaging narratives and begin to, at least at the framework for beginning to learn much better ones. And for that, I will always be grateful. What do you think is one of the most important things we can all unlearn that will help us have a better relationship to our body, and hence, to sex. Ooh.

So I'll give kind of a general answer, which is unlearning. I think the process starts with questioning everything. So whenever, when I started just my own process of reconnecting with my body, and I would have a thought like, oh, like you look fat today, I'd be like, where did that come from? Where did that line of thinking come from? and then I would ask myself questions like, who benefits from that line of thinking? And if the answer is a middle-aged cis-hete white man, then I would not let myself think the thought.

I'd just be like, if I think I'm fat, I'm more likely to want to diet, I'm more likely to want to sign up to a gym, all of which the money might want to engage in pharmaceuticals, all of which the money goes to people who are enabling patriarchal structures. And essentially capitalized, of me being insecure. So I would just question everything. And I think that is what helps you to start doing your unlearning or deconditioning, is to really start to just be curious about any line of thinking of like, oh my God, what if I don't orgasm? I'd be like, where did I learn that? Where did I learn that I have to orgasm from porn? And what's porn? It's essentially like action movies about sex, where people are doing sex.

stunts. Am I a sexual stunt person? Absolutely not. I'm, I'm, you know, I'm no Tom Cruise. I'm not doing my own stunt work. Like, I'm just a regular human that may not come. Speak yourself, I'm double jointed and all my joints. I feel like a stunt woman every time I have sex. That was probably the, I think, a foundational skill I learned was to like question absolutely everything and choose then if I wanted to act in alignment with those values and thoughts. And I think that really helped with the deconditioning process. Question everything. Alex, a perfect note to end on. Thank you so much. Thank you for speaking to me today. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. No, really thank you. You've taught me so

much and set me off onto this fascinating journey that is led purely by this infinite curiosity. So I think there's nothing more interesting than learning about how we work. work and yeah and i agree getting curious about all the things that have shaped who and who we are now and how we see the world and realizing that there can be lots of different ways of seeing and thinking and it's so exciting and fun when you get to do that and as i started out this podcast saying i never thought that i would be able to live in my body peacefully and enjoy sex i really didn't think i could so if anyone's listening who similarly feels that they don't enjoy sex that they can't stand their body and they'll never going to change like a hundred percent you can and when you do

when you do the work it is so amazing and liberating so yeah thank you for that I really yeah I really appreciate it oh my god it's my pleasure and as I say to all my clients it's I have the same conversations over and over again it's really what people decide to integrate so all the progress is a reflection of the hard work that you have done thank you so much for listening to today's sex talks podcast with me, your host, Emma Louise Boynton. If you'd like to attend a live recording of the podcast, check out the Eventbrite link in the show notes as we have lots of exciting live events coming up. And finally, if you enjoyed the show, I hope you did. Please don't forget to rate, review and subscribe on whatever platform you're listening to this on, as apparently

it helps others to find us. Have a wonderful day. Thank you.