This week we're talking to NY Times bestselling author, TED Talks presenter, podcaster, and professional sex educator Emily Nagoski. Emily is the author of 'Come As You Are' and the forthcoming 'Come Together' and co-authored the book 'Burnout' with her twin sister Amelia. Emily has her PhD in Health Behavior and was the Director of Wellness Education at Smith College before focusing on speaking and writing full time.

This episode contains frank discussion of sexual and anatomical topics, as well as self-care, dealing with rage, how to not hate your long-term partner, what consent really means, and a lot more. As usual, headphones might be a wise choice!

You can find all of Emily's work at EmilyNagoski.com and you can follow her on Instagram . Her new book is currently available for pre-order at your local indie book shop, and they can get you her current books as well.

Thank you for joining us today on Barnyard Language. If you enjoy the show, we encourage you to support us by becoming a patron. Go to Patreon to make a small monthly donation to help cover the cost of making a show. Please rate and review the podcast and follow the show so you never miss an episode.

 You can find us on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok as BarnyardLanguage, and on Twitter we are BarnyardPod. If you'd like to connect with other farming families, you can join our private Barnyard Language Facebook group. We're always in search of future guests for the podcast. If you or someone you know would like to chat with us, get in touch.

 We are a proud member of the Positively Farming Media Podcast Network.

Welcome to Barnyard Language.

We are Katie and Arlene and Iowa sheep farmer, and an Ontario dairy

farmer with six kids, two husbands, and a whole lot of chaos between us.

So kick off your boots, reheat your coffee, and join us for some

barnyard language, honest talk about running farms and raising

families.

In case your kids haven't already learned all the swears from being in the barn,

it might be a good idea to put on some headphones or turned down the volume.

While many of our guests are professionals, they

aren't your professionals.

If you need personalized advice, consult your people.

Hi, and welcome to another episode of Barnyard Language.

After lots of back and forth, Katie and I have finally figured out how to

actually be able to record, surprisingly, when it's summer holiday for your kids.

And they're all home all the time.

It's a lot harder to find a few quiet moments to record.

So, Katie, what's going on in your house these

days?

Uh, mine are thankfully not home at the moment.

Um, yes.

But yes, they're gonna be home all day tomorrow.

Um, we're at that weird point of the summer where it's like we're past

the halfway point, so now we're into that downhill slide of, um, doctor's

appointments and dentist visits and all that before school starts.

You know, they have to have all their well-child checkups sort of things.

And talking about, you know, back to school shopping.

Um, when

do your kids actually go back?

They start back middle of August, August 23rd.

But the girl child has Okay, two weeks of summer school before that,

um, I think because she had a, a fairly substantial speech delay.

She is, A little bit behind on some of her sound recognition for learning to read.

Mm-hmm.

Um, and so for many reasons, our school is very proactive about things like

summer school and after school tutoring.

And she loves it because she loves school.

Um, so she's very excited to go to summer school and, you know, get

more school than the other kids get.

She's, she's very excited about

that.

Take that other kids Yeah.

To heck with you guys.

She's getting more school.

She could be even smarter than most of you.

Yeah.

Um, but that's starting out pretty soon and I signed them both up for

gymnastics, so I'm sure there's gonna be some, you know, doctor's notes for

that and just getting all that hoo-ha.

Ready.

And we're getting to that point where the combine got pulled

out of the shed last week.

Um, obviously not ready to run it yet, but we're moving in

that, in that general direction.

So, yes.

Yeah.

Making sure things are kind of ready.

Yep.

Yep.

And Oats will be ready to, to run through probably pretty quick.

They're looking pretty brown, so they'll be ready to go pretty soon.

Um, in the big excitement, apparently a uh, jack lantern and it got left

on the back step too long last year has sprouted a pumpkin patch in my

flower bed next to the front door.

So the boy child is now lobbying perfect for the purchase of a pumpkin harvester.

If anyone knows where we could purchase one that might be suitable for one plant,

um, yeah.

How many pumpkins does he think are gonna come outta this plant?

Well, so far only one, which I'm really praying, right.

There's a second one on there.

Because if we get one pumpkin for two kids, it's gonna be ugly.

Um, yeah.

I don't know how many pumpkins he's anticipating.

I suggested that we could do it by hand, but he was not having it.

Um, yeah.

The only

other just pick it up.

That's

too much.

The only other update he found a, a patch of bare dirt in the yard the other day.

And so he brought all his tractors out and I shelled some corn for him, you

know, and off an ear from the grain bin.

And he planted it and he watered it and he put in a little

sign for it and everything.

And, and then he left with daddy to go get some supper.

And about the 30 seconds after the car pulled out of the driveway,

looked out the window and my chickens were out there packing all the corn

out of the ground and eating it.

So hopefully he won't notice if nothing grows.

Yeah.

But he didn't actually see it happen.

So he doesn't have a uh, no, have a grudge against the chickens right now.

No, not yet.

But I'm sure any day now it'll happen.

So how are things in your world, Arlene?

Thanks for going well.

Um, we've got a few, like I said last time, cow shows are on the calendar.

My husband and daughter have a few judging events that they're

going to over the next few weeks.

And my oldest, my daughter actually ended up getting a job working for someone else,

um, kind of in preparation for, and at one of the big summer shows here in Ontario.

So she's gonna be gone for about two weeks, I guess.

Um, they, they left this afternoon to go to a judging competition, and then

they'll, they'll drop her off at that other place on their, on their way back.

So, It means a few more chores for the rest of us, but we bet, we'll,

we're gonna have to get used to it cuz she's going away in September and

so we need to be ready for, uh, to take on all the jobs that she has.

Uh, so expertly taken on over the last few years.

So that's gonna be adjustment for, for everybody.

And we got, uh, a request in from our next door neighbor for some chicken checking.

Well, they go on vacation.

So my 15 year old being very, um, uh, industrious maybe, I'm not

sure if that's the right word.

Anyway, I told him how much she was willing to pay per visit

and that she didn't need him to check on them every single day.

And he's like, but if I go every day then she'll pay me for every day.

Right?

And I was like, well,

maybe not.

I think, think she'll pay you what she's willing to pay you.

So if you go every day, that's fine.

But if she says they don't need to be checked that often, then maybe not.

So we have to go over there this weekend and, uh, check on what

her expectations are for, for chicken chores over at their place.

We don't have any birds left at our place.

So.

We get to keep the eggs too.

So that's an added bonus.

I don't know if he considers that part of the payment, but as the mom who's

making sure that those chores get done, I will, I'll happily accept them.

And what else has been up lately?

We went to my parents' cottage on the weekend, so that was fun.

My parents bought a cottage last summer, and so this is our first full summer

with them having access to the water.

And they don't have a, there's no motorized, uh, boats yet, but lots

of kayaks and some canoes, and lots of swimming is going on there.

So that's been pretty fun.

No, uh,

no creepy guys with axes in the woods this time.

Uh, not that I've

seen, no.

Like at my, uh, my visit with your brother-in-law, uh, for our listeners, we

spent an evening at Arlene's, folks cabin.

It is lovely, but I looked out the window and there was a man

that I did not know with an ax.

Or perhaps a hatchet directly outside the window staring in at us.

Um, thankfully the rest of them knew who he was because I was not

quite prepared for this, this sort of a greeting from the locals.

Yes.

Um, but indeed it was our last brother-in-law who is a lovely gentleman.

Yeah.

But yeah, not, not so scary when he is not holding a hatchet for sure.

No.

No.

And I don't know if we've actually talked about it here or not, maybe it's

come up in passing, but we have talked about the fact that I grew up on a

farm, and when we're talking about the cottage, uh, I will say that my, the

farm that I grew up on has been sold, my parents sold it a few years ago.

And having a cottage is kind of, I'm not saying that it would be one or the

other, but it's not something that I could have pictured them doing if the

farm was still something that was in the family, I guess you should say.

So I know that you and I, Katie, talk a lot about, you know, Hoping that

farms stay in the family and that maybe our kids will take over or maybe not.

Who knows what, what's gonna happen in the future?

Right.

But I also wanna say for people who are maybe in that place where the

family farm is not going to continue, that there is life after the farm and

that it's not, well, it's important.

And you know, a lot of us value that, that it's not the be all and end all.

And that if, if farms don't stay in the family, the family is still the

more important part of that equation.

So I'm not gonna go into any details, obviously on why things happened

the way they did, but yeah, it's enough to say that the family part

is more important than the land

sometimes.

Jim and I did some, um, we went to a, a farm couples weekend before we

had the kids, and one of the big.

Things was about to set, you know, your really top priorities for your

family rather than just for the farm.

And realizing how much our family was a higher priority than the farm.

I mean, ideally they would both be successful, but to really

literally put it in writing that doing, and I mean, obviously

families split up and shit happens.

I mean, that's, that's just what it is.

But whatever we can do to, to not let the farm come between family

members, let's put it that way.

Um, that that's our higher priority.

Because we know a lot of families who are estranged because of farms, and that's

a family farm doesn't mean much if the farm is what rips the family apart, so.

Mm-hmm.

You know,

um, Yeah.

And people's health be that mental health or physical health is more important too.

Right.

You can't, you can't sacrifice yourself for something that, I think we've

talked about this before too, to, to honor your ancestors doesn't mean to,

to put yourself in the ground early.

Right.

It doesn't, doesn't do, doesn't, you don't, you're not honoring

yourself or your ancestors if, if you can't, if you can't live the life

that you are meant to live because you're trying to maintain something

that, that is beyond your capacity.

And I'm not saying that it's easy to know when, when that line has been

met, but that's the one of the hard truths that some of us will have to

deal with at some point, I suppose.

I know, um, whether it's the farmer, an off-farm job or whatever too.

It can be, and I'm certainly guilty of this real easy to say, well,

I'm doing this for my kids, but if.

If it ruins your relationship with your kids or your kids don't know

who you are, or they're learning priorities that are not the priorities

you would be teaching them, if you were being more clear-minded about

it, um, it's not really for your kids.

And I am, I'm absolutely guilty of my kids saying, oh, mommy has to work now.

And it being a very negative thing because especially working from home, and this is

obviously absolutely true when you live on the farm, it's way too easy to let

that work time just seep into everything.

You know, it's, it's not a nine to five and mm-hmm.

It can be real hard to back away from that.

But yeah, for it's very important.

Well, this has been a deeper intro than we normally go

for.

Yeah.

No kidding.

Wow.

So this episode that we have coming up for you is one that Katie and I are

really excited to share with you guys, and I am gonna give all the credit to

Katie for being the person who, when she finds someone out in the world

that she wants to talk to, she just goes ahead and asks the question and

asks if they wanna be on the podcast.

And this person said yes, and we were both nervous and super excited to talk to them.

So we can't wait for you to, to hear this interview.

So enjoy.

Yay.

Yeah, just,

just put some lube on it.

I'm like, I'm here for Lou, but sometimes that is not enough.

Yeah, that's right.

We're gonna leave that in because that's a good way to get started.

So today, that's an awesome way to get started.

I feel like

that's a good, um, I don't wanna say warning, but a good, uh, yeah.

Intro.

It sets the tone.

Yes.

Yeah, for sure.

So today we are very excited to be talking to Emily Naski, who's the author of the

bestselling book, come As You Are, and it's Associated Workbook, and also is the

co-author with her twin sister of Burnout, the Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle.

She's also the author of romance novels under the pen name Emily Foster.

And she has her PhD in health behavior with a focus on human

sexuality and can be found on multiple podcasts, TED Talks, and Netflix,

including ours, which is so exciting.

So Emily, we start each of our interviews with the same questions,

so it works really well for farming people, but also for non-farming guests.

So we always ask, what are you growing?

So this can cover families, careers, businesses, and also crops and

livestock if you happen to have a farm.

So Emily, what are you growing?

Uh, I am currently growing my book, which is about

six weeks past its deadline.

That's a good time.

I'm sure your publisher's fine with that.

I, you know what?

Actually my publisher has been amazingly supportive.

My editor is so here for me and the feedback I'm getting is really helpful.

And the book is just taking the time it needs to become the book

that it always needed to be.

Exactly.

You can't rush those.

But that doesn't mean I'm not like terrified and

exhausted.

Yes.

I'm sure.

We really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us in the midst of this.

Oh God.

I will take any procrastination that seems like productive

that I can get my hands on.

I am

delighted to talk to you.

It's, uh, marketing, you know, little tiny bookcase.

Okay,

sure.

So before we go any further, is that a giant set of lady parts behind your

head or am I just like right here?

Yeah.

Yes.

So that is one of my three vulva puppets.

Um, so these are made.

By, uh, I think her name is Dory Lane.

Uh, howso Chicks is the original website.

The vulva puppets, uh, are originally sex education and sex therapy tools.

So if you hand someone a puppet that represents their genitals,

it's this very like, approachable, gentle way to strengthen your

relationship with your own body parts.

And the vulva puppet is part of that.

This particular vulva is, uh, black lace and silver satin

with purple satin inner labia.

Her name is Cassandra and she is my most recent vulva puppet acquisition.

I have a slight problem with collecting vulva puppets.

I have at least four or five.

Ultimately,

it seems a little more approachable than, uh, what movie was that?

Fry Green Tomatoes, where the women all go and get handed a mirror in

a big circle and are expected to, you know, inspect their lady parts.

Seems a little.

Yeah, that can be, that can be a lot for people.

So when I was 18 years old and getting my original training, my earliest

training as a sex educator looking at my own genitals in the mirror

was a homework assignment for me.

Annie Lomax, my trainer, the group said to the group, your homework is go home, get a

mirror, and go look at your own genitals.

And um, I received only very regular sex education.

I was not explicitly taught to feel ashamed of my own genitals.

Uh, and yet when I went to look at my own genitals in a mirror, I felt

like I was going to confront an enemy.

Where did that message come from?

I don't know.

No explicit messages just seeped into me from the broader culture.

And then when I actually did look, I instantly burst into tears.

I.

Because it turned out all this times my genitals were just this regular, ordinary,

integrated part of my body, like the soles of my feet or the backs of my elbows.

And I had spent all these years with this fear feeling, with the sense that it was

the enemy and I felt this sudden grief for the negative messages I had been

sending it and all the sort of discord I had built between me and this part of my

body that was just a normal part of me.

And that moment actually is sort of the foundation of my work as a sex

educator, knowing that anytime I have a question, the answer will ultimately

come from me turning toward my own internal experience, turning toward my

own body with kindness and compassion.

And folks, that's why Emily, uh, has a book deal and you know,

I'm sure it's taken bajillions of dollars telling us about vulvas.

I'm sure it's just a disgusting amount of money.

So that actually we had to replace our roof and it helped with that.

Yeah,

we've been, we've uh, done a roof project recently too.

It's, um, it's a lot.

It's a thing.

Yeah.

Um, so that actually leads perfectly into my first question, which is how

did you get into this line of work?

Because I'm, you know, like I'm writing these questions and I'm picturing you

like, trotting to your sixth grade career, day fair or whatever at school

being like, I'm gonna be a sex educator.

You know, like how, and what, what was your parents' reaction when

you, I mean, presumably by now they do know what you do, right?

Oh yeah.

They, they have known what I did cuz I've been doing this.

Uh, so I started when I was 18, my very first semester in college.

I, I did not, like if you asked me in the sixth grade when I was gonna be, uh,

I would've said, uh, an English teacher.

The answer would've stayed English teacher until my 12th grade

advanced placement English class.

Uh, when my English teacher was so bad, I decided, oh shit, I

don't wanna be an English teacher.

Uh, but, uh, I knew I was a nerd.

So when I got to college, uh, I knew that I needed some sort of like

volunteer work on my resume to look like a good candidate for grad school.

Knew I was going to grad school, no idea for what.

But this guy on my floor was pre-med and he said, Hey, come be

a peer health educator with me.

And I was like, I like health, why not?

So I applied and I got accepted and I got trained to go into residence

halls to talk about all sorts of health topics like stress and relationships and

communication and nutrition, physical activity, and also sex, condoms,

contraception and consent essentially.

And while I was getting my, my degrees in psychology with minors and

cognitive science and philosophy and.

I actually use it all the time.

I love the brain stuff, but the work I was doing academically couldn't

make me like who I am as a person.

The way my work as a fledgling little sex educator made me like who I am.

I could see in the moment how this really basics education was changing

people's lives right in front of me.

Um, so that's the path I chose.

Oh, and my parents, uh, so my, um, mostly my parents don't

ask me about my work itself.

Uh, there was one time when my mother said, Emily, please don't

talk about work at the dinner table.

We get pulled back.

They're otherwise supportive.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's usually about cow sex.

I think.

If not, Humans

best, but same general.

Yeah.

We've talked before about there are times for me when it's about other animals.

Yeah.

We've talked before about how semen is a, is a semi-regular

dinner table conversation in some farm families, but in a, in a different sense.

Yeah.

So this is why we

don't go out for supper.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah.

I'm gonna ask a few questions about

the stress side because as much as they Oh yeah.

You know, like they aren't linked, they're so, they are so much linked.

Both, both of these, these topics obviously.

I mean, one without the other or you know, preferably you could

have more of one without the other.

So in your book you talk about completing the stress response

cycle in the book burnout.

And the one thing that, I mean, it's so early in the book and yet it was

mind blowing to me and shouldn't be, but it talk, you talk about how.

You have to complete the stress response cycle.

And that doesn't mean removing the stressors from your life because, I

mean, obviously they're right, most of them aren't going away, right?

I mean, for farmers, like the weather is gonna do what it's gonna do.

World markets livestock as parents, our kids are not leaving anytime soon.

And even if they leave the house, we're still thinking about them.

So can you talk about what it means to complete the stress response

cycle even when our stressors are still right there in front of us?

Yes, it's, it's both a good news and a bad news situation.

Yeah.

So, Uh, so the stress response cycle is the complete beginning metal end of

what we're used to thinking about as the fight or flight response, right?

Like we all know that, uh, when a threat is present, your body will flood with

adrenaline and a lot of other chemicals.

It will activate like an increase in your heart rate and increase in your

blood pressure, and it'll slow down your digestion and slow down your

reproductive system and slow down every other organ system your, uh,

even your central nervous system like your cognition changes because your

attention gets focused on solving that one problem until that problem goes away.

And in the environment where we evolved most of our stressors that activated this

physiological process, you know, had sharp teeth and could run 30 miles an hour,

and there's only really just one thing that you do when you're being chased by

something like that, and that is you run.

And it's easy to imagine that escaping the predator.

Is what completes the stress response cycle.

That is the beginning and middle and an end.

There's the activation, there's all the chemistry that motivates you to engage in

some behavior or other, and then there's the relaxation response, which happens

when you complete the stress response cycle, but it is not escaping the predator

that completes the stress response cycle.

It is, in this case of the running itself that does it.

So nowadays we're, it's pretty rare that we get chased by something

with sharp teeth that can run 30 miles an hour, like not usually.

Our stress, our stressors now are our kids and all the things you were saying

and the weather and the markets and the global political climate and our family

and employers and commutes and traffic and like money and like all that stuff.

Even though those are really different kinds of stressors, our physiological

stress response is very similar.

So when you're being stressed out, not by being chased by a lion, but instead

by, um, a drought, what do you do?

You got pretty much the same chemistry.

So you can't actually just make it rain, but you can deal with the

stress that's happening in your body.

And physical activity is the, you know, when people say

exercise is good for you, it is.

Exercise is good for you.

If it's available to you, I highly recommend it.

And this is why.

It's because it communicates to your body that you have escaped

the stressor, whether or not you actually have escaped the stressor.

So the, but the good news here is that you can do something and I'll

talk about many other strategies for completing the stress response cycle.

The physical activity is not for you.

I am a natural exerciser.

I have always had the experience where I know if I just put on my

shoes at the other end of run or the cycling or the rock climbing,

I'm gonna feel so much better.

If I could just put on my shoes and go do it, I'm gonna feel great.

Uh, I have an identical twin sister, the co-author of Burnout, who has

literally never had that experience and thought I was lying when I described it.

She is not a natural exerciser.

So if you're not a person for whom exercises something that's your

preferred thing or even available to you, Amelia is now, um, disabled by Covid.

She has, uh, chronic fatigue syndrome and a variety of other energy,

sort of metabolic issues where like exercise will only make her sicker.

Um, so.

The good news is that you can complete the stress response cycle,

even if the problem still exists.

It also means that your stress might continue even after

you have solved the problem.

So like you're a grownup and you have a very adult rational conversation with,

you know, your romantic partner about the dishes and when they're gonna be

done and like you're like being very reasonable and calm and a grownup, or

you're talking to your kids and you're like, you need to put your shoes on.

Were they waiting five minutes?

I need to put your shoes on.

Two minutes to go.

It's time to put your shoes on.

I need you to put your shoes on, and the next three minutes,

I'm gonna count to three.

And you're gonna put your shoes on.

Like you're being so calm and rational and inside your chemistry is doing

the thing it does when you are being threatened for your life and

your body kind of wants to go, ugh.

Right?

Yeah.

Does that, does that make sense?

Yeah, that sounds familiar.

So, Even though you have dealt with the stress, like your child puts on their

shoes, your partner does the dishes.

Woo.

Your body is still in that escalated state.

And look what happens to your body when you stay in that escalated state.

Your heart rate stays increased, your blood pressure stays increased.

Your digest system stays slow down.

Your reproductive system stays slowed down.

So just take one organ system.

Um, your cardiovascular system, your blood pressure increases, which creates the

blood vessels, are designed to mostly deal with like a steady trickling stream of

blood flow, um, with the stress response.

It's like a, a fire hoses and it's only gonna last like 15 minutes in

the way that it's evolved to work.

And then your relaxation response kicks in, your blood flow returns to normal

and your blood vessels have a chance to repair themselves from the damage that

got done by that high blood pressure.

But if your blood pressure stays elevated for a long time, not only.

Does it keep getting damaged, but also your immune system, yet another

organ system doesn't kick on fully because it too is suppressed during

the fight or flight response.

Um, so you're increasing the damage done to your blood vessels, you're reducing

your immune system responsibility, its ability to heal that damage.

And so over time just the stress itself causes heart disease.

It's just stress, but it's a cause of disease, which is how just stress

is more likely to cause US disease and even death than many of the

things that cause the stress itself.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, that does make a lot of

sense.

So you talked about, you know, physical activity is obviously one of the

ideal options, but I'm thinking of, you know, like people who are working

in physical jobs all day, you know, some of our farming listeners who.

It feels like all day is physical work, and that actually is the stress.

So can you talk about some of those other options, like you said, for people with

physical disabilities?

There's so, there's so many.

Yep.

Yes.

Yeah.

So if, if for any reason you're like, I'm not gonna exercise my stress away, cool.

I get it.

I actually have, uh, a balance disorder that's degenerative.

The older I get, the worse it gets and the less physical

activity becomes available to me.

So I really rely on these other ones now.

Um, one is sleep, and that's, I've just started with a really complicated one.

Yeah, sounds, sounds so easy.

Lazy,

right?

Just sleep.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You guys didn't already know that sleep is really important, did you?

No.

Never heard that.

Oh, no.

No.

Yeah.

Everybody knows that sleep is important and yet so many of us are sleep deprived.

And the reason for that, well, partly it has to do with physical limitations.

So, for example, I'm in perimenopause now, and one thing that, uh, Many doctors do

not share with you is that once you get to perimenopause and into menopause, your

sleep is gonna be, uh, messed up for a while there just because of the hormones,

because of the changes that are happening.

Um, but it's not just physical reasons, it's also because I kept, in

sociology they call it the third shift.

So there's a first shift where you work a job, job, your second

shift, which is where you take care of the family and the household.

And the third shift, which is the time of night when people

are supposed to be sleeping.

But some people have more permission to sleep than other people do, right?

Yeah.

And we know that there's gonna be social rules about who's more

entitled to rest than other people.

Amelia and I have, that's my sister Amelia and I have lost count of

the number of women who've told us that they feel guilty for sleeping.

And our culture does not reward us for like showing up to a social event.

Somebody asked how you are and you're like, you know what?

I've been getting seven to nine hours of sleep every night for

the last month, and I feel great.

Their response is not like high five go you.

It's Oh, that's so nice for you.

Yeah.

I have been staying up like baking the cupcakes for Becky's birthday party,

but no, self-care is really important.

Good for you.

Yeah, like all these messages about self-care and then you

take care of yourself and they're like, mm, musts be nice.

Yeah, it fucking is.

So sleep we know is complicated, but also, and and like we

can talk about sleep forever.

I literally have an hour long talk just about sleep.

So whatever questions you have, I will be more than happy to answer.

But So a third strategy, a big old cry.

You know how like sometimes you're like just barely holding it together

and then you like lock yourself into a space where you can just cry and you

let yourself cry for, I don't know, just five, 10 minutes and you're, it's

like you've drained away all the stress and you're like, and you feel better.

That's your body completing the stress response cycle.

People say crying doesn't solve anything, and those are people who don't know the

difference between completing the stress response cycle and dealing with the thing

that caused the stress in the first place.

No cry only under really specific life circumstances.

Does crying deal with a stressor or, but what it does is complete the stress

response cycle so that your body can recalibrate down to the relaxation

response so that you are well enough to deal with whatever it was that activated

the stress response in the first place.

So that's three four, a big old laugh, the not the like, socially

posed, polite kind of laughter.

It's the helpless belly aching laughter.

Uh, that's like if you look embarrassing, it's usually with other people that

sort of like helpless laughter has a lot of the same characteristics as a

big old cry where you get to the end of it and you feel physically like,

oh, like something really big happened in your body, moved all the way

through something and got to the end.

All of these things are a practice in, like a stressor happened.

I wa I felt unsafe in my body and then physiologically I transitioned into

a place where I felt safe in my body.

Even if you are not actually safe, because a lot of us live in a world

we are where we are never fully safe when we go out into the world.

People of color, transgender and non-binary people, people with

disabilities, when they go out into the world, they're never fully

safe, but they can return to a place of feeling safe in their body.

Given the opportunity to complete the stress response, and especially

to do it within the safety of other people who care for them as much as

they care for the people around them.

We have, so we're up to four.

We've got physical activity, we've got sleep, we've got a big old

cry, we've got a big old laugh.

Uh, imagination is five and it's one of my favorite.

It's actually the one that really made the difference for Amelia.

We wrote the book together because when I wrote Come As You Are, I like traveled all

over talking to people, anyone who would listen about the science of sexuality.

Um, but people kept coming up to me after these talks I would do and saying, yeah,

all that sex science is great, Emily.

But that one chapter, chapter four about stress and feelings, that was

the one that really changed everything.

And I told Amelia and she was like, yeah, no kidding.

Remember when you taught me that stuff and it, you know, saved my life?

She said twice.

She said, and I was like, oh, we should write a book about that.

So Amelia's situation is right.

That, that seems important.

Yeah.

It's, and I was like, then this is, this is an important message.

She, uh, has a dma, a doctor of musical arts in choral conducting

from a program where she remains the only woman ever to finish that

program, because that's just how misogynist classical music training is.

Uh, and in the process of finishing that degree, she was hospitalized

twice with quote unquote just stress.

She had an elevated white blood cell count, but they

couldn't find any cause for it.

So they told her to go home and just relax.

And she was like, why is my body trying to kill me?

And I've got a PhD in public health?

Like, I felt very bad that she did not already know.

Like, so I, I showed up in the way our family knows how to express love by giving

her peer reviewed science about the impact of stress on her physical wellbeing.

And, uh, she.

Learned somehow, she did not yet know that stress is, is not just an idea.

It's not just, um, like a, it's not a personal failing.

It's a physiological event that happens in your body and has real

physiological consequences in your body.

And if you accumulate too many incomplete stress response cycles

at a high enough intensity, it will.

Uh, activate disease processes and that's ultimately what it did for her.

And she ended up in so much pain.

She thought she was gonna die lying on the bathroom floor in the hospital.

And she began physical activity I mentioned like does not,

is not a thing for her.

She doesn't get it.

But she was still like, you know, on the elliptical machine five

days a week cuz she's a good girl who does what she is told.

So she started integrating imagination into her workout.

So instead of like watching TV or reading a magazine, she got on the elliptical

machine and visualized herself as Godzilla tromping on the ER's office.

And the.

Parking lot and her advisor's

office.

So she imagined herself into her own stress response and she conquered

her enemy and her imagination and human minds are so powerful.

Well, we already know that the imagination can activate a stress response cycle.

Anytime you've experienced a physiological stress response activated in your body

just because you were worrying about something, there's nothing bad happening

right now, but you can be plenty worried about a bad thing that might happen.

We know that the imagination can activate a stress response.

The good news is it can also complete a stress response.

You just really visualize yourself viscerally so that you can

feel it happening in your body, conquering some enemy or other.

And this is all.

Really well established in the performance research in both music,

other arts, and in athletics.

The visualization is a powerful way to help your brain to imagine its

way through an emotional response.

To get all feelings or tunnels, you have to get all the way to the

end to get to the light, right?

So she could imagine her way through a stress response assisted by light

physical activity on the elliptical machine, and that got her to the end.

So number five is imagination.

Number six goes right with that.

That is creative self-expression.

If a therapist has ever told you to journal, um, You may, I I have

had therapists tell me to journal.

Do they mean that the construction of sentences is inherently like

good for your emotional health?

No, they're providing an opportunity to take all those activated emotions

that are inside you, move all the way through them, put them on the paper

so that they're not inside your body, they're in a place where they can't

do any harm to you or to anyone else.

Creative self-expression is about taking all that stuff and putting it into

something that is meaningful for you.

It's writing for me.

Uh, for Amelia, it was music for a long time.

Then she became a professional musician and it had to become something else.

Um, so she turned it into like cooking and writing and other

forms of creative self-expression.

For some people it's gonna be sculpture.

For some people it's gonna be, uh, performance arts.

So, So whatever your thing is that you're like, I know, like I can

sit down, I can knit my booties of rage and I will have made something

and gotten the rage out of my body.

Creative self-expression.

Does that make sense?

That does.

I think, and for that one, I like how you mentioned that once music became

her job, that couldn't be her creative self-expression anymore, right?

We have to stop that idea of, oh, I can make this thing and it helps me

de-stress, so now I'll start selling it.

Or creating a side hustle or turning it

into something else, right?

It can just be key tip is that like to prevent yourself from taking

something you really love doing and turning it into a side hustle, choose

a form of creative self-expression that you were not very good at.

Yeah.

Or just make one huge scarf.

It just, it never ends.

Yeah.

You, you'll never be good enough at it to be able to make any kind of money.

So you just, Amelia uh, also does horseback riding.

Mm-hmm.

She will never be any good at it.

Like she will never be able to compete.

She will never be able to participate in a group of people doing it.

But it's physical activity.

It's, it's also connection, which is like maybe the biggest strategy for

completing this stress response cycle.

Cuz remember, all of these are about shifting your body into a state where

it feels that you have returned to a place of safety inside your own body

and connection with a loving presence.

Isano like these hu humans are spectacularly social as a species.

For some people, connection really does mean connection with other people.

People who listen to the podcast so that they can have that sense

of connection with other people who are similar to them, who understand

the things they're going through.

That connection is helping them to return to a place of safety inside their body.

Uh, the research suggests something like a 32nd hug.

It's, it's not about the 30 seconds, but it is about hugging for a duration

that would be, Potentially very awkward if you don't really like and

trust the person that you are hugging.

Right, and that's the point, Suzanne, I ascend.

The sex therapist calls it hugging until relaxed, where you just

press your body against the other person and breathe with them until

you feel the shift in your body.

That's one way that connection can help to ground your body in

an experience of feeling safety.

When I'm with this person, I am so safe that I have come home, but there's

also connection with animals, so.

Much as I adore my husband, I'm very lucky.

He's a wonderful, wonderful human being.

There are times when like the purity of my dog's joy at seeing me when

I come home just cannot be matched by anything A human can express.

Their faces all soft and glowing and their tails wagging.

That sense of joy just like connects with me and makes me feel like

I have come home in a way that connecting with any human can't match.

For Amelia horseback riding is like that when you go see the same horse

every week and you groom it and you ride the horse and it just feels like

you're connecting and she's physically connecting, trying to tune her body

into the same rhythm as the horse.

That experience is really similar to her, her musical specialty.

She's a choral conductor and which she conducts.

She tries to tune her body to the same rhythm as her choir and

that experience of connection.

Not only is it good for her in terms of feeling like she's grounded in a

sense of safety in her own body, it also brings her a sense of meaning

and purpose, which music doesn't have for me, but it does for her.

Meaning and purpose is like a whole other chapter in burnout.

Um, but so connection with humans, connection with mammals,

connection with landscapes.

For me it's the beach.

For some people it's the mountains or the desert, or a lake or the forest.

People have landscapes where when they go to that place, their body

resonates with it and it just feels whole and connected and like, oh, I

have come to a place of safety because I am in this kind of earth scape.

Um, and finally there's connection with the divine.

Many people's experience of their spirituality is being

held in a loving family and that connection when it's happening.

In your brain when you experience it, it is real, it is happening.

Um, and can bring up in the same way that animals can have a sort

of more pure and uncomplicated sense of safety and connection.

Our connection with a divine can have that more pure, uncomplicated, simple sense of

safety of being held in a divine family.

So connection.

Yeah.

I had a question about connection and the, the, uh, and

co co-regulation at the same time.

Mm-hmm.

Because you talk in your book about co-regulating and I live with my four

kids and my husband, and one of the things that is one of my stressors

is taking on the emotions of other people and how they're feeling.

And then, you know, inevitably how that makes me feel if

they're not feeling great.

And so that.

Kind of ends up making me feel like I want to connect less almost.

Yeah.

Like it makes me feel like I wanna pull away from them.

So how do, how do I satisfy my internal need for connection?

So, When what I actually end up feeling like is I want to turn away from

those feelings because it makes me feel worse.

Yes.

This, uh, brings up one of my favorite messages in the book, which is that

wellness is not a state of being.

It is not the state of being connected or not connected.

It is not a state of mind.

It is a state of action.

Wellness is the freedom to oscillate through the cycles inherent

and living in a mammalian body.

We are not designed to like rest all the time or to work all the time.

We're built to oscillate from.

Rest into activity, back to rest and back to activity.

Were not built to stay in a state of like always being full.

We're designed to eat and then digest, and then eat and then digest, and we're

designed to oscillate into connection and back out to autonomy, back into

connection, and back out to autonomy.

And just as each of us has different appetites for all those other

things, different sleep needs, different meta, metabolic food needs,

different kinds of bodies, we all have a different need for connection

and a different need for autonomy.

Introverts are the people whose natural appetite for connection is smaller.

It uses up energy for them to be in connection with people

and they gain energy being.

Autonomous being alone, and extroverts are the people who gain energy being with

people and then drain energy being alone.

But everybody needs both Amelia and I are not just extrovert,

are not just introverts.

We are both strong introverts.

We're also on the spectrum.

So our connection needs are really out of balance from how most people

relate to the idea of connection.

And yet even we writing this book could not help coming to the conclusion

that connection is actually, it's, it's the most important thing is the

cure for burnout is not self-care.

It is all of us caring for each other.

And one of the ways that we care for each other is by taking up

slack when someone we care about really needs some time on their own.

So, Emily, I'm gonna jump in here.

I don't know if you actually, um, got a chance to read the outline

of questions or if you're a psychic or if we're just like, Separate.

I did read it Earth somehow.

Yeah.

Um, as someone who is also a neurodivergent introvert, how do we ma

I don't wanna say make myself, but how do I prime myself to want to connect

with others because it is so much work.

Yeah.

And I, it's, it is very much like the responsive desire

that you talk about that.

Mm-hmm.

Once I am connecting with people, I enjoy it and I feel very fulfilled by it.

Gen generally depending.

Yeah.

Generally I've gotten rid of basically anyone I don't like in my life.

That's a really healthy move.

I work from home and I'm a neurodivergent introvert, so I just

don't deal with people I don't like.

Yeah.

Easy.

Um, but how do I get myself in the head space to want to connect with people

because it is, It's so much work and it's so much planning and it's uh, and

then a lot of times you have to leave the house, which is, you know, and it's,

I have to say the way Amelia and I finally, uh, we

were not diagnosed until 2021.

Um, and the thing that motivated us to be like, you know what, actually

there might be something going on here and we should probably go ahead

and get evaluated, was the fact that the pandemic was hitting us really

differently than how it was hitting.

Pretty much everyone else we knew, we were like, this is amazing.

I just wanna stay home by

myself.

But that wasn't just me.

Cuz same, it was like, I feel really horrible for all the people

who are getting sick and all these horrible things are happening to

them and it is really inconvenient.

Yeah.

But this is pretty awesome.

Like yeah, they want us to stay home and make sourdough done like,

All right, sounds good to me.

Yeah, you know, so the motivation, so I actually use this metaphor I learned

from a sex therapist named Christine Hyde, um, when client couples will come

to her where one partner is interested in sex, and the other one is like,

ah, I'm really struggling with desire.

Um, and she puts it this way, imagine that your best friend invites you to a party.

You say yes because it's your best friend and it's a party.

And then as the date approaches, you're like, Ugh, there's

gonna be all this traffic.

We're gonna have to find childcare.

Am I gonna wanna put on party clothes at the end of a long week?

Am I gonna wanna leave the house?

But you know what you said you would go, so you put on your party

clothes and you show up to the party.

And generally what happens is you have a pretty good time.

You benefit the way you.

Want to benefit from the experience of going and being with people

you genuinely care about.

Even for neurodivergent people generally, if it's somebody you care enough about

to like follow through and show up.

Uh, my sister has this happen when, when her kids were still

in high school and junior high.

Um, she's the mother of three stepchildren who are all now in their twenties.

But when they were in junior high, she would show up.

She's a professional musician, and she would go to their, like high school

musical, like it's physically painful for her to sit through a high school

musical, and she would like check off each number on the program as it

finished counting down to the end.

But she was always, even though it was difficult, she wanted

to be there for the kids.

She genuinely loved seeing them in the show, and she could

always honestly say when the kids asked, so what did you think?

How was it?

She can say, I loved seeing you in it.

I thought you were great.

So if you understand like, what am I, what is it that I'm looking to get out

of this experience, you know that it's not necessarily to have a good time.

And I'm saying this to other neurodivergent people with social

differences, not to the neurotypical.

People are like, but I have a great time.

I love seeing all the kids in STA on stage, and I love going to a party.

Like there's a lot of us out there who are like, no, I get

home and I just feel exhausted.

But you stay focused on what's meaningful about that experience for you.

We're back at chapter three, like what is the meaning of this?

What does this contribute to your life and your purpose on earth?

That's the way I do it.

Well, and I, I think this is such an interesting conversation getting

into the, the sex side of your work, because I feel like there's this,

obviously consent is a tremendously, tremendously important thing.

Yeah.

But I feel like there's this.

Especially for those of us who I think weren't really raised with consent as

being as big a thing as I think a lot of us are raising our kids to be now,

that if we're not super enthusiastic about sex going into it, that it's the

same as not consenting where, I mean, I might not be excited to go to that party,

but I showed up willingly and it's, you know, it's not like I was kidnapped.

Right.

Um, and so here's my question.

You show up to the par, and this is how Christine Hyde uses

the analogy with her clients.

Like, do you have a good time at the party?

If you had a good time at the party, you were doing it right.

And my thing is, if you're not having a good time at the party, there is

no amount of being really excited about going to parties that would

make that party worth going to.

So the, the, the, uh, Thing for me is to forget entirely about

desire and how enthusiastic you are about going to the party.

Sometimes you're like, fine, I will.

It's like how I feel about exercise.

I'm gonna put on my shoes because I know if I just put on my shoes and I go out

the door, I'm gonna be so glad that I did.

If you put on your party clothes and you have show up, you put your

BO in this in terms of sex, you put your body in the bed, you let your

skin touch your partner's skin.

If it feels good, if you enjoy yourself, you get to the end and

you're like, that was a good idea.

I'm really glad we did that.

You were doing it right.

The short way to say this is pleasure is the measure, pleasure is the

measure of sexual wellbeing, not how often you do it or who with, or in

what positions or how horny you are, or even how many orgasms you have.

It's whether or not you like the sex that you are having.

If you are having fun, you are doing it right.

So, What about, I'm just gonna like lay my whole personal

history just right out on the table.

Great.

I love that.

Um, I, funny story when I told my husband that we were doing this show and I was

like, you know, I would like to know where your boundaries are about how much

of our sex life I talked about Yeah.

In front of all these people.

He somehow took that to mean that I thought that he should talk to

Arlene's husband about what our sexual boundaries and come to

our mutual understanding somehow.

Yeah.

Like, no.

Are they sex partners?

No.

I, I don't need you to talk to Hugh about our sex life.

Please

don't.

They've

never even met in person, so.

No, it's not as far as I know.

Yeah.

Boundary done.

Um, so for my husband and I, we started trying for a baby, like

on our wedding night, basically.

Like we weren't.

Really preventing for a month or so before that, but you know, mm-hmm.

Now we're married and we're good Midwesterners and we're

adults and we can do this.

And, and then four years of fertility treatments, which is basically four years

of people saying, give us all your money.

And do really embarrassing, bizarre physically and emotionally painful things

while we tell you to relax because it's your own fault that you're not getting

pregnant because you're not relaxed.

And then miraculously having two babies in a space of 16 months in a high risk,

very physically difficult pregnancies.

Where do I even start with ever wanting to have sex with ever again?

Because I, you know, and I've had this conversation with my husband,

but like, you know, it's not you.

It's me.

Is it crazy?

No.

You've been traumatized, but fuck.

You know what I love is that you're asking the question the right way.

Way.

Where do I even ever start?

Where do I start?

Cuz?

So, especially since the pandemic, I've been getting this question

of like, how am I supposed to want to have sex with my partner when

I'm so angry about so many things?

How am I supposed to want sex when like basically the whole world is on fire?

Yes.

And the answer is you are not supposed to want sex under any circumstances.

You explore where pleasure is and you follow it.

So you begin with sex off the table.

Like sex is not gonna happen anytime in the foreseeable future,

but you can touch each other.

You can hug and kiss and get to know each other's skin.

You can independently reconnect with your own body.

Don't start with your sexual or reproductive anatomy.

Start with every other part of your body.

Cuz if you have been the birth parent to children, it's not just, there have

been physical changes, it's the whole meaning of your body has altered.

So your relationship with every part of your body is brand new.

Your relationship with your partner is brand new.

You are starting entirely from scratch with a new body and a new relationship.

So it makes sense that it would be difficult.

It would be particularly difficult because you spent so long with the fertility.

Treatments and trying are for people who are inter gamy producers, where one of

you's got sperm and one of you's got eggs.

And the expectation is you're gonna have sex by getting the

sperm to the eggs via intercourse.

Like it just can be so destructive to a sexual erotic connection.

So part of it is rebuilding your relationship with your body, beginning

from scratch, with your relationship with your partner, and releasing, remembering

that there is actually other reasons to have sex besides having babies.

And that is pleasure and connection.

So, Um, there's an, so one of the things that I ask people

is what is it that you want?

When you want sex?

What is it that you like when you like sex?

These are important questions that I think people should spend a bunch of time with.

Um, and there's sort of four big categories of answers.

The first is connection.

So finding a way to, there are lots of other ways to connect with

people who really matter to you.

Um, and, but sex is one of them.

For some people, sex is a really important mode of connection.

I don't know if it's important for you, but it is one, and it might

be important for your partner.

So that's one thing.

A second thing is they want the pleasure of it.

Um, and when sex has been as stressful, as exhausting, as sort of existentially

threatening as it has been when you've been through so much of a fertility

process, and people talk to me about this all the time, doctors are always like, how

do I make sure my partner, my, my patients still have a, a decent sex connection

after they get through this process?

Um, so it's very common.

Um, so.

It might be difficult to access pleasure through your body that way.

And it just takes practice, basically.

Um, it's like a phobia.

Tell me if this makes sense.

Right?

So you get in a car accident and now every time you approach a car, your body's

stress response activates and you have to go through a process of graded exposure

where you get, you think about cars and you practice relaxing and you stand next

to a car and you practice relaxing and you sit in a car and you practice relaxing and

you gradually get closer and closer to the experience of driving while training your

body to be relaxed in that new context.

You do the same thing with sex.

You like, Lie in bed with your partner fully closed and allow your body to relax.

You do breathing exercises, you practice meditation, whatever it

takes for your body to be in a relaxed state while also physically present

and in contact with another person.

You practice relaxation while you are touching different parts of your own body.

You practice being relaxed while you are skin to skin with another person.

You practice being relaxed while you are alone and unclothed you

practice in the shower or in the bath practice being with your own body and

experiencing sensations while still being relaxed and not stressed out.

And gradually from there, if you can be calm, relaxed, peaceful with your

body and its sensations, then you begin exploring where the pleasure is and

letting it come out from hiding because it's been hiding because, uh, it's been

associated with stress for so long.

Does any of that make sense?

Well, I'm just over here trying not to cry because I feel like.

I have become, it's become so ingrained that now when I even, I don't wanna

say when I even see my husband, but when there's any amount of contact,

my brain just goes straight to offer, fuck no, I'm not having sex with no.

Yeah.

You know?

And so I skip everything that should be in between there.

And I feel like for me, the, honestly the biggest struggle of

fertility treatments was the anger.

Because as women, we are not allowed to be angry.

And as mothers, like the one thing you cannot do is be angry.

And especially if you know it's irrational and you're getting so

angry with friends because they look at their husband and they got

knocked up in the backseat of the car.

You know?

And like, I'm happy for them.

It's not like they're having a baby meant that I couldn't.

Yeah, but for fuck's sake, I've, yeah.

Never felt rage like trying to have a baby gave me.

Yeah.

And I'm gonna send you the new book.

It's not done yet, but I'm gonna send it to you.

Thank

you.

Because there's this whole section on rage.

Oh my God.

Has to be.

So there was, it's actually part of what I call the emotional floor plan.

Rage is one of the primary process emotions.

It's one of the fundamental emotional spaces in our brains.

And the actual like biological motivation of rage is to move toward and destroy

something that is in our way when we hate.

It's because something is in our way.

We're trying to get to something and we can't.

And so we're in that state of like attacking the thing that is in our way.

Does that make

sense?

Yep.

And we were actually talking on our social media the other day about what

the word would be for the anger that comes from being afraid and finally

just went for hangry, you know, like hangry, because it's, yeah.

I've, I'm on a medication.

You're angry, your fear Yeah.

For dysautonomia because my body just cannot fucking even anymore.

Just cannot even, yeah.

And so it blocks my adrenaline response.

So I, I don't feel the fear the same way, but I sure get

the anger that comes after it.

Yeah.

And that's, it's really shocking when it happens because

there's no, so let me add to that, the third major, uh, what I

call them pleasure adverse spaces, but they're the difficult emotions

that we are motivated to avoid.

One of them is rage, one of them is fear.

And the third one is panic grief, which is a technical approach

to thinking about loneliness.

This comes from when?

So, so love is a biological drive.

We require connection, uh, to stay alive.

Even people like us who are on the spectrum, we require some

connection in order to stay alive.

And you know how infants, um, whale to, and they need to be picked up and held

like babies will die just of loneliness.

And as adults, it's no longer true that, uh, our survival

depends on our adult caregivers.

But our bodies don't know that.

Our bodies are pretty sure that if we don't get connection with our

attachment object, that we're gonna die.

They call it heartbreak for a reason.

So underneath all of that, um, fear and all of the anger and like, let me

just add that there's an injustice.

Where your rage is grounded like a real unfairness happened to you

and so rage makes perfect sense.

And also the process of trying to bring a child into the world it sounds

like was this major cause of emotional separation between you and the person

you picked to spend your life with.

So I hear isolation in that, like buried underneath the rage at the fear is

the despair of like an infant who has been crying and their adult caregiver

hasn't come and hasn't come, and their attachment object isn't there.

And so they switch from the panic of, I need some help, I need some

help, I need some help to, no one is ever gonna come to help me.

Are you

gonna bill me for this therapy session?

Because just an educator,

I feel like I'm gonna get a bill in the mail for like $700 or something.

Like shit.

Should have, should have asked if this was covered by insurance.

Someday I'm gonna finish writing this book and it'll only be like 20 bucks.

Cool.

Cool.

And yes, that was me just totally deflecting.

Um,

no I get it.

I make jokes too.

My therapist has this like polite laugh that she does when I make

a joke about something cuz she knows when I make the jokes.

It's because uh, something has gotten really close to the hardest part.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's probably the thing that people ought to know about those of us who

make jokes about things is right.

The harder we're joking about it, the closer you are to

whatever the actual problem is.

Right.

Um, yeah, I feel like this whole process of becoming apparent for me

changed my fundamental understanding of my own personality so much and I

just haven't had time to catch up.

And it's, wow.

It's a whole thing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's a whole thing.

We're just gonna leave it there.

All of that.

And it, it does like, it takes so much time.

And the irony is that you are now much busier, caring for others than you

ever have been before, at the same time that you need to be taking more time

to reflect and understand yourself.

I will say that my, my big driver for starting the podcast

was a, a fear of my own mortality.

And my big drive for having you on was to thank you for giving us

concrete steps to deal with this shit.

Because being put into this and then being told to, to go to therapy, which

I finally quit with the blessing of my therapist because I logically, I've

therapy my way through everything, but my, my body has not, yeah.

Caught up.

And then, You know, take a bubble bath and light some candles and meditate.

And why are you still angry?

You took a bubble bath.

Yeah.

Like,

cool.

Yeah.

You gotta, do you, do you have skills in place for what you do

when to process the rage each day?

No.

Okay.

No, but I'm working on it.

Yeah.

And that's, that's what I can do.

It's a huge step that you recognize that you have rage, you

know what it feels like in your body.

Like you can recognize, oh, here's how I know that rage is the thing

that's happening right now, as opposed to fear or as opposed to loneliness.

Uh, that's a great first step.

The next thing is understanding what pushes you into that emotional space

and how you pull yourself or how someone can help pull you out of that space.

Those are, those are sort of the three pieces of it.

What does it feel like when I'm there?

How, what got me into here and how do I get out?

That's how you, you know, your feelings are tunnels.

You have

to go all the way through the darkness to get to the light at the end.

And can you hear my cat on the

desk?

Yes.

Speaking of cats and looking at the cat, who started this whole problem last night?

Oh, not the whole problem.

Turning at my camera.

You can see her?

Yeah.

Oh

yeah.

Yellow cats, they're always a problem.

Um, when you think you're on top of the tunnel, just kinda like having a stroll

and then it collapses underneath you and you're just right back in the middle.

Because what I find for myself is that I'll be going along, just everything is

fine and, you know, everything is fine.

And then last night, like the cat clawed me in the face.

It's not his fault.

He's a cat, he's dumb, you know, whatever.

But I am uncontrollably sobbing.

Like, you know, my entire family has just been run over by a garbage

truck or something, you know, like I am just losing my mind.

Over the cat scratching my face, which whatever.

So how do we, how do we deal with that?

Because that's, yeah,

but the cry, the crying was completing

the stress

response cycle, right?

Am I getting it right here?

Yes.

Was the crying, the crying

was good for you?

The crying, when you're crying to that intensity from something

that in and of itself is not that serious, you know that you're not

actually crying about the cat, right?

You're crying just because you have all of this rage inside you and it wants to

get out and it's like the cat created this tiny little channel for the rage to come

out of, and it just like opened the little space for the rage to start coming out.

It's not that it's actually rage about the cat, it's just the generic

rage that you have inside you that so many of us have inside us.

Especially like if, as raised as girls, were taught that anger is.

Not allowed.

You don't even have any anger and by the time you notice and acknowledge that you

do have rage, you've got this back stock.

Like your body is just like very politely.

Hang on.

She pushed a button.

At least you didn't hit the mute button.

Oh my god, cat, can I just get up and like give her some

food because Yeah, absolutely.

I'll be

right back.

I'm sorry.

I know what cats are like.

Sorry about that.

Okay.

No, absolutely.

So the gift of our amazing human brains is they will just

like hold on to our incomplete stress responses indefinitely.

So a lot of us are walking around with just decades of incomplete stress

response cycles that are no longer differentiated into like, oh, this is a

fear response, this is an anger response.

It's just stress.

It's just this big glob of undifferentiated negative

emotion in our bodies.

Um, For a lot of people, those will set up camp in a particular organ system.

For me, it's musculoskeletal and it shows up as lower back pain.

Felia, it's generally her digestive system or her reproductive system.

So it shows up in people's bodies in different ways, but let our bodies will

just hold onto it for us for a really long time until we gradually learn the skill

of completing stress response cycles, purging that stuff from our bodies so

that our body can recalibrate itself.

And it actually really does help to have a supportive other person

there with us when we need it.

So if, if I were the one giving advice and I'm not, I don't wanna

really do advice, I'm not good at it.

Um, cuz like I can't project myself into other people's lives very accurately.

I don't have kids, I don't know.

But, uh, a combination of the people you are already really close

friends with who can stay calm with you while you are in distress.

And maybe not a talk therapist, but um, a somatic sensory therapist, like somatic

experiencing or somato sensory therapy where your body is actively involved.

Doesn't even have to be therapy.

It can just be yoga.

Yoga, and basically moving your body or more evidence-based treatments

for depression, for, uh, moderate depression than any medication.

How you feeling?

Be we lose here?

Are we all just waiting for somebody else to something?

I, I

think, I think we're all just having a pause.

Yeah.

We were just having a moment.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So you think it's gonna be about relationships?

You think it's gonna be about like, you know, how to like,

wear sexy underwear, whatever.

No, it's about how to like, cope with the fact that our bodies

are full of difficult feelings.

Being a human is incredibly difficult.

We both desperately need to be connected with each other and we

both desperately need to be separated from each other and all of that.

Like, that is not a contradiction.

We ju we need to oscillate, we need the freedom to move

through all of these cycles.

Mm-hmm.

Could you

not just make the next book about buying sexy underwear and taking

bubble baths so we can stop having all these feelings and dealing with all this

shit just like I'm gonna the underwear?

It's just about the underwear.

It has nothing to do with how you feel about your body.

Yeah, that's right.

Oh my God.

She wants us to do yoga and like therapy and embrace our feelings and get,

I don't want you to, here's how I feel about yoga, fucking yoga.

Like it's so goddamn good for you.

Like it's, it's just, it's, it's just so good.

It's that pesky

science, right?

It's the science challenge.

Yeah.

Stupid evidence-based interventions.

Stupid science.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh god.

Going from

walks outside.

Yeah.

So I wanna, I wanna talk about the science because the one thing you

talk about a lot in cu as you are, is that a lot of things are normal.

Like there's no, like genitals don't have to look a certain way.

Sex is not the same for anyone, all that kind of stuff.

Yes.

And yet, the one thing you bring up a lot about not being normal

is that sex should not be painful.

Right.

And yet, so often after people have children, especially, What medical

providers sometimes tell us, or other people will tell us, or media will tell

us, is that a certain amount of pain is normal and you just have to deal with it

or get through it, or you're not relaxed enough or, you know, the blame comes

back on the person who brought children.

Exactly.

Like we started off with a bit of lube and a glass of wine and it'll be fine.

So talk to us about the fact that pain is not normal.

Yeah.

Because I don't think we should

accept that.

It's, it's one of the very, very, uh, I actually have a definition of

normal that is the main one I use now.

Are you ready?

Normal sex is sex between peers or among peers where everyone

involved is glad to be there.

Free to leave with no unwanted consequences, no physical consequences,

and also no emotional consequences.

No emotional blackmail, no.

Oh, come on, no guilt.

Free to leave with no unwanted consequences.

And there's no unwanted pain if it's wanted.

Pain, if you are having closed pins attached to your nipples and

you love it, if you're having your hair pulled and you love it, great.

Do you?

But if you're experiencing pain and you don't want it, that is

outside my definition of normal sex.

Uh, there are a wide variety of effective evidence-based interventions

for the many different types of pain people can experience with sex.

Uh, many of them are offered by pelvic floor physical therapists,

uh, which is a great starting point.

Assume if you're having genital pain in particular.

Especially if it's after you've given birth or had some other, like major

trauma to your genitals that, uh, physical therapy is your first line of

intervention and then you go from there.

Mm-hmm.

But it's the idea that it's normal for sex to hurt, especially if you were

raised with an, it's a girl kind of body.

You were taught that it's your punishment to bear pain and suffering.

We just assume that some degree of discomfort is normal.

And when I was teaching, I had a student, uh, with a mobility disability.

Uh, she had chronic inhibitory tone of her pelvic floor muscle, which is often,

uh, described with the word vaginismus.

Um, and.

She was told by her doctors that there was no treatment for it.

And I don't know if there's something about her condition

that made her vaginismus.

Not at all treatable, but I feel very confident that she, if, if she were a 19

year old boy with genital pain who, uh, couldn't have sex because of the pain,

uh, that she would not have been dismissed and told it was just untreatable.

Yeah, prob pretty likely it's the patriarchy is the reason

why we believe pain is normal.

And I'm here to, I'm, I'm not here for the patriarchy.

I'm here for us to live in a world where women are not taught that their bodies

are the enemy and a source of suffering, but instead our bodies are a gift and

are a potential source of great pleasure.

All the pleasure that we choose to participate in

that our body can experience.

Yes.

Thank you.

And that's the message we need Circling.

Yes.

Circling back to the closed pins.

Um, a lot of us, we've now, I'm curious in more conservative rural areas, so

how, oh, that's where you're going.

I thought you were gonna cross your husband's boundary.

No, no.

Um, how do we balance being sex positive and being advocates not only for our

own children, but for, I don't wanna say for other people's children, cuz

that sounds a lot like, I'm gonna throw condoms at your kid, no matter

what your personal beliefs are.

Um,

do we, some person believes or not that you should condom at their kid, you

should, uh, just hide the pockets away with the kids' consent in their backpack.

Yeah.

Sounds good.

That's the solution.

So how do we advocate for things like sex ed that's actually useful, um, without.

Becoming knows people.

Yeah.

So I mean, here's my definition.

H of sex positives have those people.

Yeah.

So sex positivity for me just means that everybody gets to choose how and when

they are touched and everybody gets to choose how they feel about their own body.

Just it's, you know, Bo autonomy is what sex positivity is.

It is not even a little bit radical.

It is not saying that all sex is positive, that is demonstrably obviously untrue.

It's saying that everybody should get to choose.

Everybody deserves the information they need to make choices for themselves.

And I think advocating for that is not complicated, except that a lot of people

disagree that everybody should be free to choose how and when they're touched.

Right.

Yeah.

I'm wondering too, how, and let's talk about what it means to have

sex education that is useful.

Like, what is sex education for young people supposed to do?

Uh, let's say prevent unintended or unwanted pregnancies,

prevent the spread of STIs.

Those are two pretty good goals, right?

Um, if you wanted to, we could even add the goal.

This is one of my favorite pieces of jargon.

Delay sexual debut.

For some people, that's an important outcome.

Uh, increasing the age at which people have their first sexual experiences.

If you wanna do any of those three things you wanna give people as

comprehensive a sex education as you can get, talking about all the

various forms of contraception, all the various sexual identities, and gender

identities and sexual orientations.

And you wanna talk about communication skills.

You wanna do, uh, values exercises where people think

about what's important to them.

Communication exercises where we talk about who is allowed to say yes

and no to what, what pleasure means.

Teach people what pleasure feels like in their own body so they can recognize it.

If someone ever says to them, does that feel good?

That's what useful sex education does.

And there are absolute, like, I, I think most people would be

like, yes, let's prevent STIs.

Let's prevent unwanted pregnancies.

Uh, and, but.

Let's not do it by giving people any information.

Let's just rely on them making the choices that we would want them to make

without giving them any of the tools they need to make those decisions.

I have a lot of big opinions about this, obviously.

Well, I'll say just, I mean, just cause it's like what I do for a living.

But the thing is, we know exactly how to achieve these goals of reducing

pregnancies when they're not wanted.

We know how to prevent STIs.

We have known for 50 years.

We do not lack the knowledge.

We lack the political will.

So what we need is really for moderate people who are like, I

would prefer that my child not get pregnant before they really want to.

And I would prefer that my child not have a sexually transmitted infection

to be like, actually it's completely fine with me if you talk about gay

kids and, and like gay people in history and trans people in history.

Because if that's what it takes to help my kid feel comfortable with

themselves and able to say no to the things that they do not want, and yes

to the things that are right for them because I'm raising my child to be

aware of their own personal values to protect and defend their own values.

And I trust that given the right information, they're gonna make a

values aligned choice for themselves when it comes to sexuality,

pleasure, and reproduction.

I feel like too, one of the things we miss so much with sex ed

is that we don't teach kids jack shit about how to get pregnant when it is an

appropriate thing for them to be doing.

You know, I mean, I'm of an age where our sex ed was literally, you know,

don't touch boys, you'll get pregnant.

Don't look at boys, you'll get pregnant.

Here's some overhead slides of terrifying, terrifying things Yeah.

That you will catch if you touch boys and then, you know, to go to

the fertility clinic and to realize that even, you know, I was lucky

enough to get more comprehensive sex ed in high school with, uh, sex ed.

That actually meant something.

How much I still didn't know about how babies are made.

I mean, I know how babies are made.

Yeah.

But it's a fucking miracle that anybody is ever actually created.

Seriously.

And like it's the, and the thing is like, like you were

saying, some people get pregnant.

Literally the first time they have p and l vaginal intercourse

with ejaculation into a vagina.

Like it just happens the way they scare you about, and for other

people it takes years of struggle.

Well, no, I know when I got to the clinic and we were talking about it, one

of the clinicians was totally without, um, violating privacy, was telling me about

a couple who came in who had such a poor understanding of how reproduction works,

that the husband had been ejaculating on his wife's stomach, not understanding

that that would not ever get her pregnant.

And this had been going on long enough that they got referred

to the fertility clinic, which generally takes at least a year.

So this poor couple had just thought that they were unable to conceive a

baby, had gone through all this testing, had gone through all this stress.

Wow.

Because of shit drastically bad education and it just infuriates me.

You know?