I was 41 when I realized that I was grossed out by my own genitals.

This was not really a “revelation.” I mean, I had kind of known, but persistently refused to acknowledge this feeling. Not knowing what to do about it, I had tried to avoid it. I’ve since learned how many women carry this shame and how many also avoid facing it.

It came up and smacked me in the face because I was finally, after many years of similar avoidance, trying to reclaim my sexuality on my own terms. That meant learning to actually be present with my own body instead of judging it or pushing expectations on it. And the moment I got present, there the genital shame was. An aura of revulsion. The quiet whisper of disgust. Envying the many men I’ve met who seem to think the world of their dick. And a wave of anger. Because it is very hard to allow full pleasure in a part of your body you believe is gross. And a part of me knew it was neither innate nor useful to feel so awful about my own body.

So I got curious and tracked it backwards. I realized that it started in middle school.

Yep. I had been carrying around thirty years of schoolyard commentary about female bodies — that girls were smelly, that our parts were disgusting — and somewhere along the way those voices went undercover and started sounding like “truth.” I stopped noticing the source and started believing it myself. That’s the part that really pissed me off.

Yes I’m pissed that it happened. I’m more angry that I didn’t stop it or have defenses against it.

This is how internalized sexism works.

The messages start early

The core message girls absorb, very early and mostly below the level of conscious thought, is that our genitals exist for other people’s pleasure and other people’s judgment. Not our own joy.

It’s a strange thing for a culture to land on, given the anatomy, but it makes total sense in the context of patriarchy. And I think it’s an important part of healing our body shame to call that out, to reject that framework on purpose.

People with vulvas have the only organ in the human body that exists solely for pleasure. The clitoris has no other job. We now know that it is not the small button most people picture — most of the structure is internal, and until 2023 nobody had counted its nerve supply in a human at all. The 8,000 figure that circulated for decades, and still appears on major medical sites, came from animal studies.

The actual count, from a 2023 study led by Dr. Maria Uloko, Dr. Erika Isabey and Dr. Blair Peters revealed an average of 10,281 myelinated nerve fibers in the dorsal nerve of the glans clitoris.¹ The same team has since applied their method to the glans penis and found roughly 7,700, though that result is so far a conference abstract rather than a full paper.² For scale, a fingertip runs around 3,000.. (There’s a detail in their methods that’s worth mentioning so thanks can go where they are due, too. Anatomical studies usually use cadavers, but this one used tissue donated by transmasculine patients undergoing phalloplasty¹. The most accurate information we have about the cis clitoris exists because trans people gave it to us.)

So we have a body part built exclusively for the pleasure of the person it belongs to, and a culture that teaches its owners that it is unimportant, and it’s embedded in a larger structure that is somehow gross. No wonder so many women don’t love their vulva and don’t really understand or claim the pleasure available from their clitoris.

But how exactly does it happen for each of us, as individuals?

How the process of early conditioning actually works

Long before anyone says a word about your genitals, the ground for shame is prepared. Dr. Jennifer Harriger and colleagues assessed 55 girls aged three to five (3 to 5!) and found that they weren’t just aware of body size stereotypes — they were already emotionally sold on the thin ideal, at an age when most of them couldn’t yet read.³ It’s a small sample from one region, and it measures thinness rather than genitals. But the point is that the ground is already prepared for evaluating your own body against a patriarchal ideal, years before the load of direct messages around genitalia tend to begin.

Somewhere around middle school, the shaming orients towards genitals. It did for me, anyway.

Boys learn they can feel more included with other boys by targeting girls’ bodies for ridicule. It’s an early lesson in othering: make someone different into a target, and you get to feel included. Insecure kids reach for it because it works. Adults tolerate it far more than we should, mostly by not hearing it at all, and boys are rarely taught better or held accountable. And around middle school, kids start orienting towards puberty, experiencing insecurities around the different developmental paces of their peers, and the limited depictions of sexuality they are exposed to. Genitals are taboo, and therefore intriguing targets for body shaming.

The result is a whole lot of grown women walking around with a middle school boy’s voice in their heads, so thoroughly internalized it now sounds like “fact.”

For some people it happens later. A first partner who has no idea what to do with a vulva and covers his ignorance with a put-down. A partner whose only reference is porn, comparing you to something he doesn’t understand either.

The same thing happened to me in high school, with my face. There was a senior I had a crush on, and the short version is that he told everyone he would sleep with me if I had a bag over my head. I decided, in that moment, that my face was ugly, and I carried that judgment for the next several decades, literally avoiding looking in mirrors, feeling ugly for years. It never occured to me, until I learned my first mindset coaching tools, that maybe a high school douchebag shouldn’t get to decide how I feel about my own face.

These are tiny moments but they create massive impacts. One comment, once. Running unquestioned in the background for decades, growing roots through repetition, becoming more and more insidious and unfortunately, more powerful.

The power such single comments have over us can be life-changing, especially when unchecked. Dr. Gemma Sharp and colleagues interviewed fourteen Australian women who had undergone labiaplasty about what led them there. Ten of the fourteen traced their distress about labial appearance to negative comments from sexual partners, family members, and in some cases, from medical professionals.⁴ It was a small study, and the authors say so. But the mechanism is the one I’m describing: somebody said something, and it stuck, festered, and led to shame-driven elective surgery.

So if you have genital shame, and at least half the women who come into my coaching practice do, take the inventory for yourself: what aspects of your genitals do you think are somehow unacceptable? Look back at who said it, and when. How did you get that message? And then the actual question: do you want to let a clueless, insecure kid (or whoever it was), decide how you feel about the parts built to give you pleasure?

What’s actually true?

“Dirty”, “smelly,” “gross,” “too big” or “too dark.” These are beliefs, not truths. They are optional opinions. That is good. That means that you can actually choose to change whether you believe them, on purpose, and with some repetition work. (Hey, it’s a hell of a lot cheaper and less painful than surgery, and gives better results).

There is nothing inherently dirty about genitals, any more than there is about a mouth or a nose. Flowers are the reproductive organs of flowering plants and nobody calls them gross. The vagina is self-cleaning; the vulva needs gentle washing with water, and at most a very mild soap, like other sensitive body tissues.⁵ That’s normal. If “dirty” is a belief you hold, it’s because someone handed that to you. It’s optional, and not very fun to believe that. But since you’ve practiced it thousands of times, you’ll need to practice believing otherwise a lot too. Remember that a belief is just a thought you’ve thought so often it feels like a fact. That doesn’t mean it IS a fact. (When we know the difference, we enable critical thinking and real learning).

Porn vulvas are not real-world vulvas. What’s depicted is often a pre-pubescent look that doesn’t represent actual anatomy or variation. Imagine only ever seeing one nose shape on screen. Eventually you’d conclude that’s how noses are supposed to look. And actually, let’s make it a baby nose.

This is basically what porn has done with women’s vulvas. Dr. Vanessa Schick and colleagues coded 647 Playboy centerfolds published between 1953 and 2007, along with 185 more recent images, and found a consistent genital appearance was represented: hairless, with labia minora undefined or not visible. They called it a “Barbie doll look,” which is precisely right — the standard on offer is prepubescent at best and doll-like at worst, not real adult female anatomy.⁶ That study looks at mainstream print rather than video, so it doesn’t prove what any given porn site shows. What it does establish is that this pseudo-female “Barbie” look predates the internet and has been remarkably stable for decades.

Some adult cis women naturally have small, pale, tucked, symmetrical labia. That’s real variation too, and it’s just as normal as the other end of the range. What’s strange isn’t the look; it’s an industry insisting it’s the only acceptable one. Surgeons literally call it the “Barbie look,” in print.⁹

Why are we, as a culture, avoiding the celebration of real women’s genitals? We know that many human cultures, for millenia, have indeed celebrated them as sources of power, pleasure, and life. But for patriarchy, that celebration is a threat.

It wasn’t always this way

Vulvas are depicted in some of the oldest known human art: the 35,000-to-40,000-year-old Venus of Hohle Fels and rock art sites like Australia’s Carnarvon Gorge. These symbols appear tied to fertility, shamanism, and primal creative power. Ancient Sumerians revered the vulva, offering hymns about the vulva to the goddess Inanna and using clay vulva amulets to ward off misfortune. There is a wonderful article in Ms. Magazine by Catherine Faurot called “The Secret History of the Vulva” that discusses how, across various ancient and global traditions, women practiced ritual genital exposure (pussy-flashing) to repel evil spirits, enemies, or wild beasts through the perceived supernatural power of the vulva (https://msmagazine.com/2023/03/25/vulva-art-history/).

Vulvas went more and more undercover with the rise of patriarchy, and especially male-centered religion. Meanwhile, historical medical terminology systematically attached shame and stigma to the vulva. (For more on that history, check out this video

).

And as the terminology got more and more shaming, women stopped feeling good about our parts, and we also stopped having positive words for our parts. The word you use matters more than you’d think. Vagina is just the internal canal — the part oriented toward penetration, and male satisfaction. It does not include the clitoris. Vulva is the whole external structure, clitoris included, which makes it the more accurate word to include women’s pleasure. If it feels too medical, pick something else. Pussy works if you want to reclaim it as a positive, which many of us do. Cunt has a wonderful, empowered history (there’s a good etymology deep-dive in this video

).

So name your vulva whatever you like. Name her after your favorite goddess. I don’t personally borrow yoni, since I have no cultural relationship to Sanskrit, but that’s your call. What matters is that you have a word at all. It’s very hard to build a relationship with a part of yourself you refuse to name.

We are Missing Exposure to Real-World Pussy Variation

Real adult vulvas vary enormously. Dr. Julia Lloyd and colleagues measured fifty premenopausal women and found labia minora widths ranging from 7 to 50 millimeters, with no relationship to age, childbirth, sexual activity, ethnicity, or hormone use.¹¹ That’s a sevenfold spread among healthy women, and every point on it is normal.

The reason we don’t see this variation growing up is structural. Boys grow up seeing penises in locker rooms. Girls don’t see each other’s vulvas so easily, so for most of us, there’s no reference set — just the question “Am I normal?” with nothing to answer it. There are some great resources out there trying to correct that lack of visibility: (Resource links: The Labia Library, All Vulvas Are Beautiful, The Vulva Gallery). In addition to labia size variation, there is normal variation in all kinds of characteristics.

Asymmetry is normal. Labia minora thicken and lengthen during puberty and are often asymmetrical from the start.¹⁰ Almost nobody’s are evenly matched, any more than your eyes or your breasts or your feet are exactly symmetrical. I have an asymmetrical haircut and asymmetrical labia, and I’m fond of both. In fact, asymmetry is also normal in testicles, and no one is recommending surgery for that.

Color is normal. Skin tone ranges from red-brown to deep brown to pink, tan, and wine-colored. Genital skin is often darker than the skin around it. Genital skin also darkens commonly with puberty, pregnancy, and age.

Hair is normal. Texture, amount, and distribution all vary enormously, and only prepubescent bodies have none. Whatever you do with yours is a preference (hopefully yours), not hygiene.

Smell is normal. Vulvas have an odor, just like all animal parts. Male genitals also have smells. You’re a mammal. It’s normal to smell like a mammal. Vulva odors shift across your cycle, after sex, after exercise, with what you eat. A very strong or noticeably different odor alongside unusual discharge, itching, or burning is worth a provider visit — that’s an infection question, not a shame question.

What is the shame costing you?

The “love your body” advice tends, for many women, to feel abstract and hard to access. It can sound like one more thing you don’t know how to do. Or impossible. But when you realize what it costs you to carry the shame around, and you learn how to put it down, you may find it’s worth your while to do that work.

What is the shame costing you?

For one thing, how you feel about your genitals affects your pleasure. Dr. Debby Herbenick and Dr. Michael Reece built the Female Genital Self-Image Scale to measure exactly this, and found genital self-image significantly correlated with sexual function across arousal, lubrication, orgasm, satisfaction and pain — though notably not with desire.⁷ So you can want sex, be turned on, and still experience less arousal, lubrication, satisfaction and pleasure, along with more pain, if you don’t feel good about your genitals. This is exactly what was happening for me, and what happens for a lot of my clients. Shame is costing us pleasure and mind-blowing orgasms. That was enough for me to want to give it back to the patriarchy.

It might also be costing you preventative healthcare. A nationally representative sample of over two thousand US women replicated the association and extended it: genital self-image also predicted sexual behavior and, importantly, whether women sought genital healthcare at all.⁸

And then there’s unnecessary, pleasure-reducing surgeries sold largely on shame. The International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons recorded 189,058 labiaplasties worldwide in 2023, a 65.6% increase over 2013, and that figure excludes procedures done by gynecologists.⁹ In the UK, where the public system actually keeps records, NHS labiaplasty rose fivefold between 2001 and 2010 — and 297 of those procedures, performed between 2008 and 2012, were on girls under fourteen, for reasons and with outcomes that were never recorded.¹⁰ Now some portion of labiaplasties are for functional reasons, but it sure seems like most are shame-based. Why?

For one thing, there is no medical definition of the problem being corrected. Labiaplasty is offered as treatment for “labial hypertrophy,” which just means “big labia.” When scientists went looking for a research basis for that diagnosis, they found 400 articles on labial size, 47 of which referred to a definition, and only 3 research papers that had actually measured anything, but none of the measurements were abnormal.¹⁰ Variation in labia size isn’t a deviation from a norm. It is the norm. So “labial hypertrophy” doesn’t even exist medically.

If your labia genuinely hurt — if they chafe, catch, make cycling or sex painful — that’s a medical question and worth taking to a provider who’ll actually examine you. What we’re talking about here is the larger group of women being sold a surgical solution to a manufactured, undefined “problem.”

The tissue being surgically removed is erotic tissue. The labia minora are richly innervated along their entire free edge and engorge during arousal, second only to the clitoris for sensitivity and more sensitive than the vaginal opening.¹⁰

The women most worried that they have too much of it may be the ones with the most to lose. When Dr. Justine Schober’s team asked women to assess their own anatomy, the eleven percent who judged their labia minora to be large reported higher sexual pleasure than women who described theirs as average or small.¹⁰

We have sixty years of centerfolds, a plastic surgery market, and no one along the way establishing what “too big” actually looks like, because it doesn’t factually exist. But the surgical correction for it gets sold — and that means cutting off the part that feels good.

If you’ve already had this surgery, this is not aimed at you. You made a decision inside a system that gave you almost no accurate information and a great deal of pressure. That’s the system’s failure, not yours. Everything in the next section about how to repair your relationship with your vulva is available to you too. Because there’s a good chance that the surgery didn’t actually fix the shame.

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Learning to Love Your Vulva

If you have genital shame, it’s important to acknowledge something that can be a big challenge to face: the relationship with your body is one that you damaged, mostly on someone else’s instructions, and repairing it is something only you can do. What I mean is, it’s not your fault that you have a negative relationship with your pussy, but it is your responsibility to fix it if you want to feel better. That’s actually good news, because you have the power to feel better (without chopping off pleasurable parts). Repairing your relationship with your pussy looks a lot like repairing any other relationship: it starts with acknowledging the impact.

Acknowledge the harm. For me that meant naming what I’d actually done: I had been shaming this part of myself, distancing from her, refusing to appreciate what she did for me. I apologized to my own vulva. It sounds a little woo. Try it anyway and see how it lands.

Evict unwanted voices. Identify whose voice it actually is that started you down this path to shame — a bully, an ex, a middle school kid, porn… (and if it’s a current partner, that’s a different conversation you need to have.) Then decide, consciously, that they don’t get a vote. They never did.

Normalize by exposure. I went looking for the variation I’d never been shown — photo galleries, portrait projects, watercolor collections, coffee table books. You see facial variation every day without effort. You have to go find this on purpose. Check these links: (paste again).

Mirror work. Look at your own genitalia with curiosity instead of evaluation. Notice color, shape, the different parts. Treat those details the way you’d treat eye shape, as lovely and unique. See if you can practice acceptance and approval.

Daily gratitude, briefly. Two minutes each morning thanking her for sensitivity, for pleasure, for orgasm, for functioning. Building the relationship on appreciation rather than judgement.

Rinse and repeat until you’re free.

What this repair bought me was somewhere for good things to land. I can take in pussy praise from a partner now. I can ask for it, because I like receiving it, and it registers instead of disappearing. I can take in more pleasure. I can allow more attention. I can take my time. I can deeply listen to what my vulva likes.

It’s tempting to want to skip the repair and just ask someone else for validation. But here’s a warning: we don’t receive from outside what we won’t give ourselves first. Without that foundation, praise disappears into a black hole and changes nothing. Once you believe yourself that your body is acceptable and even lovely, you can truly allow being looked at, touched, praised, receiving the time, attention, and pleasure you deserve. After all, this organ you carry is extraordinarily well equipped to provide it.

There is no downside to this. You are not at risk of becoming genitally arrogant.

Even if you were, it wouldn’t hurt anyone. Exactly nobody is harmed by you walking around all day quietly pleased with your own body.

If you know someone who’s been through this, and you probably do, send it to them.

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An enormous number of people are suffering in silence over something that was never theirs to begin with.

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If you want to start with the body, my free guide, Get Out of Your Head, has four reflection exercises that go deeper than a typical freebie: https://laurajurgens.com/guide. The companion episode to this post is on the Pleasure Uprising podcast, wherever you listen.

Footnotes

1. Uloko M, Isabey EP, Peters BR. How many nerve fibers innervate the human glans clitoris: a histomorphometric evaluation of the dorsal nerve of the clitoris. J Sex Med. 2023;20(3):247–252.

2. Ferrin P, Uloko M, Peters B. How many nerve fibers innervate the human glans penis: a histomorphometric analysis of the human dorsal nerve of the penis. J Sex Med. 2024;21(Supplement_1), abstract 067. Conference abstract; not yet published as a full paper.

3. Harriger JA, Calogero RM, Witherington DC, Smith JE. Body size stereotyping and internalization of the thin ideal in preschool girls. Sex Roles. 2010;63:609–620.

4. Sharp G, Mattiske J, Vale KI. Motivations, expectations, and experiences of labiaplasty: a qualitative study. Aesthet Surg J. 2016;36(8):920–928.

5. Find easy to follow care instructions here: https://bloom-obgyn.com/vaginal-hygiene/

6. Schick VR, Rima BN, Calabrese SK. Evulvalution: the portrayal of women’s external genitalia and physique across time and the current Barbie doll ideals. J Sex Res. 2011;48(1):74–81.

7. Herbenick D, Reece M. Development and validation of the Female Genital Self-Image Scale. J Sex Med. 2010;7(5):1822–1830.

8. Herbenick D, Schick V, Reece M, Sanders S, Dodge B, Fortenberry JD. The Female Genital Self-Image Scale (FGSIS): results from a nationally representative probability sample of women in the United States. J Sex Med. 2011;8(1):158–166.

9. Ortega-Sánchez I, Lucha-López MO, Monti-Ballano S. Motivational factors for labiaplasty: a systematic review of medical research. J Clin Med. 2025;14(8):2686.

10. Runacres SA, Wood PL. Cosmetic labiaplasty in an adolescent population. J Pediatr Adolesc Gynecol. 2016;29(3):218–222.

11. Lloyd J, Crouch NS, Minto CL, Liao L-M, Creighton SM. Female genital appearance: “normality” unfolds. BJOG. 2005;112(5):643–646.

Maybe you have a tendency to intellectualize or spiritualize your experience, but not always fully feel it. Or maybe you can only really arrive in your body when something intense is happening. This episode is about how that happens, how it shapes your erotic needs and the way you show up in intimacy, and what to do about it, if you choose. 

The safety wound is the earliest developmental wound we're covering in this series. It shows up in desires, in relationship, and in sex, plus in every day life where people with this wound have a tendency to dissociate. This episode is Part 2 in the Attachment Wounds and Erotic Emotions series — if you haven't listened to Episode 130 yet, start there first.

What Is the Safety Wound? Origins and Early Development

The safety wound forms in the very first stage of life — from the womb through infancy, before language, and before verbal memory as we know it. The unmet need is fundamental: a sense that the world is safe to exist in, and that the body is a safe place to be.

The causes can include traumatic birth, early separation from a birth mother through adoption or loss, time in a NICU, parental anxiety or depression, domestic chaos, overwhelming or unpredictable environments, or generational trauma. Often nothing was done consciously or intentionally. The body simply learned, very early, that being present was dangerous — and dissociation became the primary survival strategy.

This pattern is recognized across multiple psychological traditions. In Hakomi, it's called the Sensitive-Withdrawn pattern. In the Neuroaffective Model (NATouch and NARM), it's the Connection survival style. In the Somatica Institute® framework, it's the UnSAFE wound. Different names, same consistently observed pattern — and none of them mean anything is wrong with you. This is just a coping style, and it carries some challenges that can be worked with.

We'll also cover here:

What the Safety Wound Feels Like: Dissociation, Floating, and Empathy Overload

How the Safety Wound Shapes Erotic Desires

The Safety Wound in Intimate Relationships and Sex

Healing the Safety Wound: Coming Back to Your Body

In this episode:

• What the safety wound is, where it comes from, and why it forms so early — before language, before memory

• Why dissociation here is a brilliant survival adaptation, not a pathology — and how I recognized it in my own experience

• How this wound is named across Hakomi, NARM, and the Somatica Institute® framework — and why the older Freudian label is worth leaving behind

• What the safety wound feels like from the inside: the floating quality, the empathy overload, the pull toward intellectualizing and spiritual bypassing — and the deep current of pain, fear, or rage that often lives underneath

• How the safety wound shapes erotic desire through two pathways: resolution (craving calm, merged, held, contained, seen) and repetition with agency (craving intensity, edge, risk, primal)

• Why craving dangerous or intense experiences in a chosen context makes complete sense for this wound — and why felt safety is still the prerequisite, even for the edgy stuff

• What the safety wound looks like in relationships: the connection that arrives and quietly disappears, and what partners tend to experience in bed

• What healing looks like for this wound — embodiment first — and why somatic work is more relevant here than therapy or spirituality alone

Companion resource for this series: The Wheel of Erotic Emotions → laurajurgens.com/wheel

Topics: safety wound, attachment wound, dissociation and intimacy, dissociation and desire, not in your body during sex, childhood trauma and sexuality, somatic sex coach, somatic intimacy coach, intimacy coach, erotic emotions, erotic desires, attachment and desire, childhood wounds relationships, sensitive withdrawn attachment, connection survival style, attachment, healing dissociation, embodiment and desire, feminist sex coach

Get my free guide: Get Out of Your Head: A Starter Guide to Releasing the Pressure, Shame, and "Shoulds" Around Intimacy at https://laurajurgens.com/guide

More links:
Substack at https://laurajurgens.substack.com/

Pleasure Path Diagnostic here: https://laurajurgens.com/diagnostic/

About me, testimonials, blog, bookings: https://laurajurgens.com/

Wheel of Erotic emotions, go to: https://laurajurgens.com/wheel

Copyright notice: All content in this podcast is copyrighted and copying, scraping, data mining, or using the content to train AI is prohibited. 

This is the introduction episode for a series on attachment wounds and erotic desires. Before we get into the specific wound patterns, I'm laying the foundation — what attachment styles actually are, where they fall short, and how to understand attachment patterns beyond the standard (avoidant, anxious, disorganized or secure) boxes. We'll talk about how our childhood experiences and specific attachment wounds tend to lead to specific turn-ons. Plus, why that's good news and will help you de-shame your desires. 

In this episode:

• Why attachment styles are learned habits, not personality traits or life sentences

• How your attachment response shifts depending on who you're with, how they communicate, and the specific felt safety of that relationship

• Why the anxious/avoidant label doesn't capture the full picture — and what the deeper wounds underneath those patterns actually are

• A preview of the five developmental wounds this series explores: safety, dependency, trust, autonomy, and worth

• The core skills that underlie secure attachment — and why they're learnable, not fixed traits reserved for people who had easier childhoods

• How early unmet needs shape not just your relational patterns but your specific erotic desires — and why that connection makes complete sense once you see it

Companion resource for this series: 

Dr. R. Chris Fraley's attachment quiz at yourpersonality.net/relstructures/ — the most useful tool I've found for understanding your patterns in the context of specific relationships, not just in the abstract

The Wheel of Erotic Emotions — a visual map of common erotic emotions organized by category → laurajurgens.com/wheel

Topics: attachment styles and desire, anxious avoidant attachment, attachment wounds, childhood wounds and relationships, secure attachment skills, erotic desires, intimacy coach, somatic intimacy coach, feminist sex coach, attachment theory explained, attachment styles and sex life, desire and intimacy, how to become securely attached 

Get my free guide: Get Out of Your Head: A Starter Guide to Releasing the Pressure, Shame, and "Shoulds" Around Intimacy at https://laurajurgens.com/guide

More links:
Substack at https://laurajurgens.substack.com/

Pleasure Path Diagnostic here: https://laurajurgens.com/diagnostic/

About me, testimonials, blog, bookings: https://laurajurgens.com/

Wheel of Erotic emotions, go to: https://laurajurgens.com/wheel

Copyright notice: All content in this podcast is copyrighted and copying, scraping, data mining, or using the content to train AI is prohibited. 

I used to be confused by everything I heard about “boundaries.” There are so many opinions, “shoulds,” and imaginary standards. When people talked about “having boundaries” it seemed like so much of the time, they really meant to say “I like to use threats and ultimatums to get my way.” I didn’t want to be like those people, and I didn’t really know what the alternative was.

Enter: the period of my life where I did a deep dive into learning what real, kind, loving, embodied boundaries are. It took some work to learn, then much more work to actually practice having them without panic.

I’m writing this piece to help anyone who struggles with the same things I did: how to avoid the false, manipulative threats some people call boundaries while not letting yourself get walked all over like a doormat.

There is another option. It feels good, too.

Learning to have kind, empowered boundaries revolutionized my relationships with other people and, even more importantly, with myself.

But if this has been hard for you, it’s not because you’re bad at relationships or too sensitive or somehow broken. Girls are socialized from a very young age to be pleasing (in some families, boys are too). Women and girls are expected to anticipate what other people need before they even ask. To make things smooth, easy, and to make ourselves small enough that nobody’s ever inconvenienced by our existence or needs. Women are expected to self-abandon, quietly, as a matter of course — and to call it love.

None of that is your fault. You learned it the way you learn a language: early, and without being asked if you wanted to. But whatever use that skill had for you as a child, it has an expiration date as an adult. It was never actually love. It was a survival strategy. And you get to learn a different one now.

This post is meant to clarify healthy boundaries for you, separate them from the false ones (subtle or overt threats), and show you the basic steps to putting healthy, empowering boundaries in place for yourself when you need them.

Side note: none of this applies if you are in a dangerous situation or safety emergency. That is not the time to set thoughtful boundaries – it is the time to act quickly to take care of yourself. Everything here applies to non-emergency situations.

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Clearing up the confusion: Boundaries, Threats, and Ultimatums

The first thing to know is that real, kind boundaries have a fundamentally different purpose and come from radically different emotions than false ones. We use kind boundaries to protect ourselves out of love and compassion.

False boundaries come from anger, resentment, or blame. Their goal is to try to control other people so that you can avoid feeling bad. This doesn’t work for several reasons. Any supposed “boundary” coming from anger, resentment, or an attempt to control someone will typically get a defensive response, generate resentment, or be ignored.

Usage confuses things a lot, because so many people mean different things when they use the word “boundary.” Some people may say “I have a boundary about that” when describing simple preferences (often accompanied by a subtle or overt threat of displeasure). This is a way of offering a mild threat of consequences (the person’s displeasure) in a way that is meant to control other people’s behavior. Other people may make more dramatic ultimatums that they mistakenly think are boundaries and wonder why they get pushback. When we don’t know how to set good boundaries, we might easily fall into these patterns by mistake.

It’s important to know that whether our threats are subtle or dramatic, threats are not boundaries. They also don’t tend to work very well. Certainly they don’t increase trust and intimacy, but also they just tend to fail at controlling other people. In fact, controlling other people’s behavior is pretty impossible – and who really wants that job anyway? It’s hard enough being responsible for ourselves.

So if we’re not trying to control people, what are boundaries for? The purpose of a healthy boundary is to take care of our own needs for ourselves. That means we don’t actually need to communicate them to others unless we want to, and when we do, it is without anger or resentment.

This is why people with healthy boundaries may seem to be very grounded, but they don’t talk about boundaries much. They just come across as confident, on top of their business, and with the type of kindness that is not at all false or performative.

Now, we’ve all lashed out and tried to control people with ultimatums -- it doesn’t make us horrible people. But it does not help our relationships and virtually guarantees our disappointment. It’s also one of the most disempowering things we can do. We have given the other person the power to decide how we will feel, and regardless of what they choose, we’ll feel awful. If they choose our preferred option, we’ll always wonder whether they only did it because of the threat. If they don’t do what we want, we will take it as a rejection. It’s a lose-lose situation.

Examples of Kind and False Boundaries

Here’s an example. Let’s say that I have a friend who is often late for our lunch dates. She sometimes forgets them altogether and also forgets to text me. I am tired of sitting in restaurants by myself, wondering if she’s going to show up. I have built up thoughts about being wronged and feelings of hurt and anger. Now I am once more sitting in a restaurant waiting for her, but this time, I am seething. She eventually arrives and I tell her that I’m not going to sit around any more waiting for her, that if she cared about me she’d at least text to tell me she’s running late. I tell her if she does it one more time, I’m never having lunch with her again.

That is an ultimatum, not a boundary. It is coming from anger and it’s meant to threaten her into behaving the way I want her to. Even if she does it, I will not feel happy, because I “forced” her into it. I also may feel guilty about how I showed up and blame her for “making” me angry. In actuality, it was me who made me angry by stewing about being “wronged” when I could have taken other action to care for myself.

For example, let’s say the situation is the same, but while I’m waiting, I ask myself what I really want to do. Let’s say I decide that I am okay with sitting quietly by myself for about 15 minutes, which I actually find relaxing, but after that, I don’t want to do it anymore. I’d prefer to order, eat, and go, or just go and get lunch elsewhere after 15 minutes. I also ask myself if this friendship is worth my effort. Let’s say I decide yes. In that case, I remind myself that I have chosen to love my friend, so it is probably worth allowing her to have human failings. So now when she shows up, I am calm. I can say with all honesty and caring for both of us: “Hey, so I know you have a hard time with appointments sometimes and I still love you. But I am not willing to wait for longer than 15 minutes. So if you’re going to be later than that, feel free to text me and ask if I’ll stick around a bit longer, but I will go ahead and eat or leave anytime you’re more than 15 minutes late.” That is a healthy boundary. The only person I am requiring to take action to follow through is myself. I’m the one who will eat or leave. She gets to do whatever she chooses. But she has an option to see me by either being on time, or letting me know in advance she’s running late. And I still respect myself enough to give myself the option to say no.

Here’s another example. Let’s say I’ve been putting away my partner’s laundry for years and quietly resenting it the whole time. A false boundary sounds like snapping “I’m sick of doing your laundry, you’re so lazy. You need to do it yourself.” A kind boundary is different. I take the time to consider how to care for myself and keep myself out of resentment. Then I can calmly say, “Hey, I’m not going to put away your laundry anymore. That’s yours now.” And then I don’t do it anymore. No passive-aggressive sighing about it, no doing it anyway and feeling like a martyr. I just stop. My relationship stays cleaner because I’m not walking around with secret resentment anymore. I have decided to treat myself with love and my partner with the respect enough to believe that they are capable of basic adulting.

An example that doesn’t get talked about enough is stopping obligation sex in a long-term relationship. Here’s the deal: I’m not going to have sex when I don’t actually want to. If I haven’t gotten enough affection or foreplay to really be in the mood, that’s not me being difficult. That’s a completely reasonable, kind boundary.

I know what obligation sex actually feels like in the body, because I’ve done it. There’s a specific kind of absence to it — you’re there, technically, and also nowhere near there at all. You’re waiting for it to be over while trying to look like you’re not waiting for it to be over. That’s not a small cost. Every time you do that, you’re teaching your own body that its “no” doesn’t count, and your body remembers. It gets quieter. It gets harder to hear the next time.

A kind boundary here sounds like: “I’m not in the mood right now, and I’m not going to have sex I don’t actually want.” Full stop. It’s not punishing anyone. It’s not a rejection of your partner as a person. It’s just taking care of your own body instead of overriding it to make somebody else comfortable.

Here’s one more, and it’s a good one for anyone who’s been socialized to just take whatever advice is handed to them, especially from men who assume they know better. Last week a guy started telling me how to load my kayak onto my car. I didn’t get mad, I didn’t over-explain myself, I just said: “I don’t actually need advice on this, I know my car and my boat. If you’d like to help, you may, if you are willing to follow my directions.” That’s it. Not aggressive, not mean, just clear. I wasn’t trying to control whether he offered advice again in the future. I was just taking care of myself in that moment, and leaving the door open for him to actually help if he wanted to, on my terms instead of his.

But This Sounds Hard

Healthy boundaries are harder than ultimatums and threats. There are three reasons for this. The first is that they require us to accept the reality of other people’s free will and not live in the fantasy world where we get to imagine we can control people. They also require us to accept responsibility for our own emotional well-being. The last reason is that healthy boundaries require us to value our own decisions. We take responsibility to follow through, even if we’d rather not. For example, if you set a boundary for yourself that if your sister calls you certain names on the phone, you will leave the conversation—well, then you have to actually leave the conversation when she calls you those names. Because you can’t actually control her actions, you will need to accept that sometimes she may follow the pattern she always has.

This applies even to something as serious as leaving a relationship. If you say, “I can’t trust you to follow the agreements we’ve made — if this keeps happening, I’m going to leave,” that can absolutely be a kind boundary and not a threat, as long as you actually mean it and you’re willing to follow through. The challenge with a lot of boundaries isn’t even setting them. It’s actually following through. The real skill is being honest with yourself about whether you’re trying to control the other person’s behavior, or whether you’re deciding, out of love for yourself, what you will and won’t accept — and then doing what you said you’d do.

Now, the good news is that reasonable people will often try really hard to respect boundaries you set to care for yourself, if they are delivered with love and respect for the other person too. You’re much more likely to get agreement that way than you are with ultimatums delivered in anger and blame. But there’s no guarantee. Accepting that you may very well have to follow through and then respecting yourself enough to do so takes practice. It’s also an amazing way to learn how to have your own back. Try it.

Before we get into the steps, I want to call out what happens internally first. A boundary rarely starts as a sentence in your mind. It starts as a feeling in your body — a tightness, a bracing, a small clench somewhere, a kind of internal flinch you might not even consciously register at first. That’s your body’s “no” showing up before your mind has caught up enough to write the words.

Most of us were never taught to notice that signal, let alone trust it. We were taught to override it or even smile through it. So step zero, before step one, is just this: notice the tightness. Don’t do anything about it yet. Just notice that it’s there, and ask what it needs from you. That is good information. Our bodies usually knows what they need before our minds do.

How To Do Kind, Empowered Boundaries

1. Release anger and blame for the other person, and any for yourself you may also have. Accept that we are all imperfect human animals doing our best, even if that “best” isn’t always very good. This step may take a while. That’s okay. You don’t have to agree with their behavior, or forget it, you just need to release your own anger so you’re not punishing yourself by carrying it around feeling mad. That means accepting that this is what this person is capable of. That acceptance will allow you to make cleaner decisions for you.

2. Consider what you really want out of the situation, what your deal-breakers are, and what truly matters to you. How do you want to show up in your life? Who do you want to be? What is important to take care of you? Then make a decision about what you will do if the person continues the behavior that you’re finding problematic (scenario A) and what you will do if they don’t (scenario B). Make sure you’re fully willing to do both, because you will probably need to do your least preferred option.

3. Decide whether you want to tell the other party. (You don’t have to. You can have a boundary that remains silent, where you’re the only one who knows how you will respond to scenario A or B.) If you do decide to tell them, remember that all you can do is make a request for them to choose your preferred scenario and tell them what you’ve decided you’ll do to care for yourself if they don’t. Open up the conversation when you are feeling compassion and respect for both of you and can speak calmly. Do not do it when you are triggered. (Seriously. Wait until you’re calm. Don’t rush it and do it while you’re mad.) You don’t need to know the exact words you’re going to say in advance. If you’re coming from compassion and respect and you know your decisions for both scenarios, you will do fine. (If you do it mad, you’ll probably get defensiveness or start a fight. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

4. Follow through on your decisions no matter what, even if you worry you’re being “mean” and even if you’re uncomfortable about it. Let yourself feel the discomfort and notice that the world has not ended. This is the discomfort of learning to have your own back and trust your own decisions. The less often you’ve done that in the past, the harder it will be at first. It gets easier. Remind yourself that you’re learning and do whatever self-soothing you need to do to help you get through the urge to backtrack and capitulate. Then celebrate yourself for doing something hard.

5. Get help if you need it. Look, everyone has been taught to not have boundaries from a young age. Especially women. Loads of people need coaching support for learning how to implement healthy boundaries. I certainly did. Reach out for a consultation if you need support, or find a friend with good boundaries and ask them to be your boundary mentor.

Kind boundaries are the foundation of true self-care and the bedrock of deep connections with others. When we trust ourselves to care for ourselves, we don’t have to worry about what life throws at us. When we trust ourselves, we can allow ourselves to be open, honest, and authentic with others. When we trust ourselves, we can become truly kind to others without resentment.

If this felt helpful, please share it with others.

Here's what the research actually says: none of that is what separates great lovers from everyone else.

Dr. Peggy Kleinplatz at the University of Ottawa spent years interviewing people having what she calls magnificent sex — the largest in-depth study of its kind — and what they described looks almost nothing like what we've been taught to aspire to. The traits that actually made the difference are learnable. And almost nobody is talking about them.

In this episode:

• The cultural myths most of us are still measuring ourselves against — and why they're not just unhelpful, they're actively in the way

• All eight traits Dr. Kleinplatz found in people having truly magnificent sex, and what each one actually means in practice

• Why the cure for low desire isn't more desire for the sex you're already having — it's more desirable sex

The book referenced in this episode is Magnificent Sex by Peggy Kleinplatz: https://www.routledge.com/Magnificent-Sex-Lessons-from-Extraordinary-Lovers/Kleinplatz-Menard/p/book/9780367181376

Topics: what makes a great lover, magnificent sex research, low desire, low libido, somatic sex coach, intimacy coach, feminist sex coach, embodiment, erotic intimacy, sexual communication, be a better lover

Get my free guide: Get Out of Your Head: A Starter Guide to Releasing the Pressure, Shame, and "Shoulds" Around Intimacy at https://laurajurgens.com/guide

More links:
Substack at https://laurajurgens.substack.com/

Pleasure Path Diagnostic here: https://laurajurgens.com/diagnostic/

About me, testimonials, blog, bookings: https://laurajurgens.com/

Wheel of Erotic emotions, go to: https://laurajurgens.com/wheel

Copyright notice: All content in this podcast is copyrighted and copying, scraping, data mining, or using the content to train AI is prohibited. 

It is connected. The slow creep of feeling like your partner's parent is one of the most consistent desire-killers I see in my practice. In this episode I'm breaking down the three forms it takes, where each one comes from, and what actually moves the needle — whether you're the one carrying the household or the one wondering why your partner never wants sex anymore.

In this episode:

• The three patterns I see most: chore-based parenting, "good-boy syndrome," and anxiety-based reassurance-seeking — and how to recognize which one you're in

• Why your nervous system cannot be in caretaking mode and erotic mode at the same time, and why wanting to want your partner isn't enough to override that

• The flip side: why the person in the "child role" often has high desire and gets stuck in a loop they can't see from the inside

• Where this comes from — work-life balance issues, patriarchy and male learned helplessness on one end; the developmental roots of not being able to self-soothe on the other

• Why the frustrated-complaints approach keeps not working — and what I've seen actually work instead

• What moving out of this dynamic looks like, depending on which side of it you're on

Topics: parenting your partner, desire killer, low libido, not attracted to partner, emotional labor, mental load, resentment and desire, nervous system and sex drive, somatic intimacy coach, intimacy coach, relationship coach, male learned helplessness, self-soothing, attachment anxiety

Get my free guide: Get Out of Your Head: A Starter Guide to Releasing the Pressure, Shame, and "Shoulds" Around Intimacy at https://laurajurgens.com/guide

More links:
Substack at https://laurajurgens.substack.com/

Pleasure Path Diagnostic here: https://laurajurgens.com/diagnostic/

About me, testimonials, blog, bookings: https://laurajurgens.com/

Wheel of Erotic emotions, go to: https://laurajurgens.com/wheel

Copyright notice: All content in this podcast is copyrighted and copying, scraping, data mining, or using the content to train AI is prohibited. 

I'm not talking bruises here, I'm talking about emotional distance, shut down, and loss of libido. 

This episode is built around a real couple — smart, communicative, good at relationships — who did years of power play without ever having a proper negotiation conversation, because they both assumed that trusting each other was enough. It wasn't. The fallout was a sexless relationship, nervous system shutdown, and a lot of hurt that took real work to untangle. 

I want to help you avoid that entirely.

Whether you're using restraints, doing impact, or just soft-topping: the negotiation is the first scene. Done right, it's not a clipboard and a liability waiver — it's where the anticipation starts, where you find out what your partner actually wants, where you start co-creating something that's going to be really, really good. This episode is about how to do that.

In this episode:

• Why smart, aware people keep skipping BDSM negotiation — and what it actually costs them

• What subspace is, why your prefrontal cortex goes offline in it, and why that means the bottom has to be an architect of the negotiation, not a passenger

• The real difference between topping/bottoming and dom/sub dynamics (and why accidentally agreeing to the wrong one causes relationship problems)

• How to make the negotiation desire-forward, not just limit-focused — starting with how you want to feel, who you want to be, and what energy from a partner opens you up

• Why aftercare isn't an afterthought, and how to talk about it before you play

• Where to find real community and credible resources if you want to go deeper

Whether you're kink-curious or have been playing for years, this one's worth your time.

Resources mentioned: 
Yes, No, Maybe Lists from various sources (pick your favorite): 
Babeland: https://www.babeland.com/babe-blog/how-tos/yes-no-maybe/
Bex Caputo: https://www.bextalkssex.com/yes-no-maybe/
Sunny Megatron: https://sunnymegatron.com/consent-sexual-boundaries-yesnomaybe/

Get my free guide: Get Out of Your Head: A Starter Guide to Releasing the Pressure, Shame, and "Shoulds" Around Intimacy at https://laurajurgens.com/guide

More links:
Substack at https://laurajurgens.substack.com/

Pleasure Path Diagnostic here: https://laurajurgens.com/diagnostic/

About me, testimonials, blog, bookings: https://laurajurgens.com/

Wheel of Erotic emotions, go to: https://laurajurgens.com/wheel

Copyright notice: All content in this podcast is copyrighted and copying, scraping, data mining, or using the content to train AI is prohibited. 

That's what this episode is about. How we get there — there are three really common pathways, and I've lived through all three myself — and more importantly, how to find your way back to your own body, your own desires, and your own pleasure. This episode is about hope, and about a door that's still open to you no matter how long you've been on the other side of it.

In this episode:

• The three pathways into sexual self-abandonment — through approval-seeking, through abusive relationships, and through trauma and dissociation — and why they so often overlap

• Why "sacred sexuality" group spaces can actually be dangerous if you haven't done this work yet

• The six steps back to yourself, including the grief that's part of the process (and why that grief is a good sign, not a setback)

• What it actually means to come home to your own body, your own erotic self, and your own yes and no — and why that's the foundation everything else gets built on

Topics: sexual self-abandonment, somatic sex coaching, sexual trauma recovery, de-shaming, erotic self, intimacy coach, body-based healing, dissociation, reconnecting with your body, feminist sex coach

Get my free guide: Get Out of Your Head: A Starter Guide to Releasing the Pressure, Shame, and "Shoulds" Around Intimacy at https://laurajurgens.com/guide

More links:
Substack at https://laurajurgens.substack.com/

Pleasure Path Diagnostic here: https://laurajurgens.com/diagnostic/

About me, testimonials, blog, bookings: https://laurajurgens.com/

Wheel of Erotic emotions, go to: https://laurajurgens.com/wheel

Copyright notice: All content in this podcast is copyrighted and copying, scraping, data mining, or using the content to train AI is prohibited. 

It was so hard to get the words out of my mouth that I wanted to run away. But I knew I couldn’t. I’d been running away from my own reality for years.

“We need to stop, babe. This just isn’t working.”

Watching his face fall, I felt a wave of sadness. He rolled over and we lay side by side. Deflated. Sex just wasn’t working for me. I kind of knew why, but I didn’t know at all how to fix it.

The previous week, I’d seen a sex therapist again. I walked away with new insight about my own history and why I tend to shut down during sex. I had finally acknowledged in our session that yes, that I-don’t-know-what-is-happening-but-it-hurts “sex” at 14 was rape. Despite being 41, a punk rocker, a feminist, a scientist, I had always thought it was my fault for not knowing enough about what was happening to say a clear “no” and not fighting harder. I hadn’t realized I was too young to even be able to consent. I had spent the past week, and two boxes of tissues, forgiving myself.

But none of this insight was changing how I felt now, in my body.

Nearly 30 years later, here I sat with no idea how to access my own desire for a partner I deeply loved.

Your story may not have big-T trauma. I hope it doesn’t. But chances are, whether you do or not, your story has some level of disconnection from your own body’s true needs and wants. And you have probably tried some things.

This is for everyone who has genuinely tried.

You’ve done therapy — individual, couples, maybe both. Read the books, some of them good. Had the conversations. Maybe you’ve tried mindfulness, tantra workshops, date nights, pole dancing, lingerie, toys, erotica, or all of it. You understand yourself now better than you maybe ever have before, and you still feel shut down when it comes to sex and desire. Like you’re trying to cajole your body, but she’s just not responding the way your mind thinks she “should.”

You have new insight. But nothing has changed in your body.

That’s a specific kind of discouragement, because it can feel really hopeless even though it’s not.

I’m going to say that again: nothing changing yet is not a sign that you are beyond help. It’s a sign you’ve been using the wrong tools. And that’s not your fault.

There are a lot of things being sold out there. Some of it helps some people. But a lot of it fails to really get at the underlying issues, and so we’re left feeling as if nothing will. I’m here to say that there is a path forward that, for me, has been foolproof — and the reason it works is because that path is guided by your own body.

Not your mind, your body.

Today I’m going to explain why it’s normal to feel let down by the commonly available tools, especially therapy and hormones. But I’m also going to talk a bit about what has worked for me, and what has worked for my clients. If you’ve been struggling with your sexual desire and arousal, your erotic connection to yourself or your partner, and feeling hopeless – this is for you.

The Problem with Working on Insight Only

Everything that tends to be available when we’re struggling with intimacy operates on the same layer — the cognitive, mind-based, narrative layer. That includes therapy, thought work, self-help books, journaling, and conversations with your partner. All of it works through language, insight, and meaning-making. This is useful. I’m not dismissing any of it. I use all these tools myself.

The problem isn’t the tools. It’s that desire, pleasure, and a real sense of embodied safety and intimacy don’t live in those layers. They live in the body, in the nervous system, and in the relational field between people that our bodies and nervous systems are reading constantly.

And the body doesn’t lie. Even when you want it to.

Our minds tell us ridiculous stories all the time, and try to tell other people those stories too.

That’s why when someone tells you “I’m fine” in a weird, constricted voice, you don’t believe them. You’re reading the relational field, and you’re prioritizing that over the literal meaning of what they said. We do this to ourselves too. We try to use the mind to override the body.

Interestingly, in my experience, the body just waits. It waits until the mind is ready to hear it. Sometimes the mind forgets how to listen. Mine sure did. I needed help to find the path back to hearing my own body. Help to feel entitled to it, safe to listen to it, and unashamed of it’s needs and desires. To do that, I needed more than cognitive tools. More than insight.

Reaching the nervous system and the body requires tools that operate at that level. Not at the level of understanding it better. You can have completely accurate, healthy intellectual ideas about sex, you can know that “there’s nothing to be ashamed of” and still feel deep shame and shut-down in your body.

The fact is that cognitive tools don’t work well for a large portion of libido and sexuality issues. This includes mindset or “thought work,” Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and Dialectical Behavior Therapy — anything that works through language, insight, and meaning-making. Not that these are bad tools — I use them in my practice and in my own life, and they work well for some things. But not for everything. Not every problem is a nail requiring that hammer.

The Self-Blame Trap

Unfortunately, for people who tend to blame themselves for their problems, cognitive tools can lend themselves to even more self-blame. Because when you can change some things with them, it’s tempting to blame yourself when you can’t change everything with them. It usually sounds in your mind like some version of “I haven’t done it right,” or “I haven’t done enough work.”

The reason cognitive work hasn’t solved your sex life or intimacy challenges isn’t that you haven’t done enough of it, or haven’t found the right thought, or haven’t worked hard enough. It’s that libido issues are primarily not cognitive in nature. The nervous system patterns that drive disconnection from desire and arousal tend to be non-verbal or pre-verbal, subconscious, and rooted in the body through patterned, repetitive experiences.

I love thought work for things like reducing shame over time (body shame, shame around desires, needs, etc.). It’s also great for shifting how you interpret your experience, and turning that inner critic into an ally. But it can’t update an automated body response. That is not what it’s designed to do.

Some schools of thought-based coaching will tell you that all feelings come from thoughts. That’s actually not true — the science doesn’t support that at all. There are also body-based, nervous system processes that generate feelings — what some call “bottom-up” emotions. This doesn’t mean some feelings don’t come from thoughts — some do. But a lot of emotional responses are automatically activated through the subconscious, the body and nervous system. Especially when it comes to close relationships, intimacy, attachment, and sexuality. So it’s normal for cognitive approaches to fail here.

Similarly, traditional talk therapy is oriented toward processing what happened with your conscious mind. Understanding your history, making meaning of your experience, metabolizing old wounds, working through what you’re carrying. That’s genuinely useful, and often necessary.

But it’s backward-facing by design. Desire and arousal are forward-facing.

Processing what happened is its own valuable thing — and a different thing from building what you want now. Therapy asks: what happened and how did it shape you? The work you actually need asks: what does your body need to feel safe and alive and present?

Here’s what I mean: if whatever has been happening hasn’t been working, you need to do something differently, now and in the future, for that to change. Desire, arousal, and real intimacy require building new capacity — new embodied experience, new ways of being in your body and with another person. It’s less about processing the past and more about asking what skills do we need to practice, what do we need to build? New behaviors are what will get you new outcomes.

Too many people think the answer is in the past, when it’s almost never possible to go backwards. Even if you’ve had great sex in the past, those conditions may not exist now. The cocktail of brain chemicals from the honeymoon phase of a new relationship is not permanent. Wondering if someone was into you, a new partner’s deep attention, the approval you used to give your 28-year-old body: all of these may have generated specific emotional conditions that were erotic to you. You’ll need to learn how to create those emotions on purpose now. That’s normal. That’s future-facing.

The past is over. Moving into truly connected, playful, authentic eroticism in long-term relationships requires building something new.

But why doesn’t insight change the body?

Desire, arousal, shame responses, and sexual patterning are (for the most part) not stored as narrative memory — the kind you can talk about and work through cognitively. Some aspects of shame are the exception; you may well be aware of them as conscious thoughts. But many of our shames are in hiding. Shame loves to hide, even from ourselves.

The body’s true desires — for specific energy, touch, quality of attention, the felt sense of safety needed for arousal to emerge — those things live somewhere language doesn’t easily reach. They’re stored as procedural, somatic, pre-verbal patterns, living below the level of insight. We can eventually bring them into conscious awareness, and that’s part of the work needed— learning to own your arousal needs and explain them to partners. But first you have to find them where they actually live, which is in the body’s own languages: touch, sensation, and felt experience.

There’s actually solid research on this — van der Kolk’s work on how the body stores trauma, Lisa Feldman Barrett’s on how emotions are made, and plenty more in the academic realm. These advances have been slow to trickle into clinical training, and especially slow when it comes to sexuality. Which is honestly maddening, but that’s where we are.

The problem with conventional “experts”

The problem with a lot of experts people go to for help with libido and intimacy challenges is that they are experts in something totally different than the problem you are bringing.

We don’t expect an expert car mechanic to be an expert in fixing our roof. But for some reason, when it comes to sexuality, we go to people with very little to no training in sexuality.

Your doctor is a good example. Most doctors have virtually no sexuality training. Yep, you read that right. Doctors maybe get one lecture on human sexuality, of varying quality, mostly oriented towards reproductive function. Nothing on pleasure. They don’t understand how libido works, and they haven’t read the research on it. So if you come reporting low libido, they give you the tool they have (typically hormones) — without ever saying “I have no real training in this.”

So your doctor offers hormones not because it’s the right answer for most people — it’s not. Hormones don’t help in the majority of situations, and that’s documented in the research they usually have not read. (Hormones do help in specific cases: when you’re genuinely enjoying the sex you’re having, there’s no anxiety, shame, or disconnection with your partner, and a hormone deficiency is the only thing going on. That’s not most people.) Your doctor offers hormones because they don’t know what else to do.

Same thing with therapists. They might have suggested better communication, date nights, scheduling sex — because that’s what they know to say. Most therapists are not trained in sexuality, and they’re definitely not trained in how to help with desire and arousal issues. Most don’t even know the difference between those issues. And none of that is bad faith. It’s a training problem.

And frankly, even most sex therapists — who may be very knowledgeable about sex — are typically only trained in talk therapy as a solution. Most don’t have the somatic tools needed for body-based issues and do not offer relational practices to help you feel into what creates safety and arousal for your specific body.

None of this means the right help doesn’t exist. But if you’re not an informed consumer, it’s genuinely hard to know who has what you need, especially when most practitioners don’t acknowledge the limits of their training or help you understand other options.

I wasn’t always an informed consumer. Why would I have been? Nobody handed me a map, but I’d like to offer you what I learned along the way. That’s a big part of why I’m writing this article.

My story: from “fix me” to discerning consumer

I spent about 15 years with analytically-trained talk therapists — traditional psychotherapists. Smart people, presumably caring people. And not one of them, in 15 years, ever identified that I had serious unprocessed trauma, or told me trauma was outside their scope, or referred me out to a trauma therapist. A lot of that therapy was actively re-traumatizing — not because anyone was malicious, but because they didn’t know their tool wasn’t the right tool.

It took me finding a therapist who was actually trauma-trained. She diagnosed me with PTSD right away and could explain clearly why sitting in a room telling my story to someone trained not to show emotion or empathy had been making things worse.

I’m still angry about it. I spent 15 years with the wrong tools — countless hours, loads of money I didn’t have, while I was in serious distress, going through depression and periods of suicidal ideation, going into debt and scraping the floor of my car to pay rent. I found my way out through somatic work, trauma-specific therapy, mindset coaching, and deep self-compassion work. All of it, together.

The real cost of a system that doesn’t train practitioners to understand their own limitations, or to be honest with clients about where their scope ends, is anywhere from adding extra layers of harm to simply allowing someone to stay miserable for way longer than they need to.

What I learned from all of that is to become a very discerning consumer. I’m not just showing up and hoping they will “fix me” anymore. I was in so much distress for so long that I assumed anyone calling themselves a therapist knew how to deal with whatever I brought. That’s a totally valid assumption for someone who doesn’t know what questions to ask. I know better now.

I’ve had clients land in similar situations. One man said to me: “I am so mad that the couples counselors we went to before never told us that someone like you existed. We’ve made more progress in two sessions than in two years with the last person.” And I get it. I don’t actually think most of them were trying to cause harm or keep this couple stuck. But the counselors themselves didn’t know that other approaches existed. This is a big reason why I do not accept clients with certain mental health diagnoses or active trauma for which they are untreated. I refer them out to other specialists. Not every issue needs my specific blend of tools. That is ok.

What does tend to need my blend of tools are body-based intimacy challenges. Not that I’m the only one doing this.

But because sexual challenges are body-based, the work needs to happen at the level of the nervous system and the body — not just the mind. And it needs to be forward-facing: building new capacity, new experience, new ways of being with yourself and maybe with a partner. That’s a different container from processing what happened.

But ultimately, for it to work, it needs to be led by your own body. Because the path back is to you — your own pleasure, your own erotic self. That’s the destination, and from there, everything else gets easier and more possible and more real.

When you’re looking for support for taking that path, if that appeals to you, look for someone trained in body-based (somatic) sexuality.

To be a discerning consumer, I suggest someone with a skills-development orientation, who specializes specifically in sexuality and desire, has multiple tools available, and is honest about their scope, their boundaries, and their philosophies. Make sure those align with yours, or if you’re unsure, ask the why behind each position and be sure you like the answer. A good practitioner won’t be threatened by those questions. I’m not the only person doing somatic sex and intimacy work — there are quite a few of us, though not nearly enough. I genuinely wish it were more mainstream, more visible, and easier to find.

The important thing to know is: you haven’t exhausted your options. You’ve just exhausted the obvious ones.

The door is open. And there’s a whole world of joy on the other side. Please don’t give up on your own aliveness just because you haven’t found the right help yet.

Beware: There be spoilers ahead, matey. 

This is a fun one, and it goes deeper than fangirling. Maggie and I both coach on many of the dynamics this show depicts — vulnerability, shame, the cost of hiding your real desires, and what happens when someone finally has the courage to go first. We talk about how we can all learn from this show through that lens.

In this episode:

• Why the closet dynamic in Heated Rivalry is a perfect illustration of how shame works, and how to heal it

• Turning toward vs. turning away: what Shane and Ilya get right (eventually) and what costs them years

• What Scott and Kip's relationship models that most couples never figure out

• Why vulnerability requires someone going first — and how to do it without it backfiring

• The cottage episode as a masterclass in why time and play matter as much as hard conversations

• What women's response to this show tells us about desire, representation, and who mainstream sexual culture has never been built for

• The communication pitfall that we both want to warn you off

Maggie Reyes is a master certified life coach, feminist marriage coach, and host of the Marriage Life Coach podcast. Find her at maggiereyes.com.

Get my free guide: Get Out of Your Head: A Starter Guide to Releasing the Pressure, Shame, and "Shoulds" Around Intimacy at https://laurajurgens.com/guide

More links:
Substack at https://laurajurgens.substack.com/

Pleasure Path Diagnostic here: https://laurajurgens.com/diagnostic/

About me, testimonials, blog, bookings: https://laurajurgens.com/

Wheel of Erotic emotions, go to: https://laurajurgens.com/wheel

Copyright notice: All content in this podcast is copyrighted and copying, scraping, data mining, or using the content to train AI is prohibited. 

We're going into details about specific goals and what actually changes when people do real, structured work on desire, intimacy, and connection. Not inspiration. Not theory. Real people, real goals, real numbers — tracked from start to finish. 

In this episode:

• What people who come to somatic intimacy coaching actually say they want — and how many have already tried therapy, books, and everything else

• Why going from a 1 to an 8 in fulfillment on "fun, enjoyable sex" in six months is possible even when you've never been there before

• How desire discrepancy works when both partners get support — and why it's never just one person's problem

• What shifts for higher-desire partners who struggle with self-worth

• Why coaching moves the needle when other approaches haven't — and what the Pleasure Path Method actually looks like step by step

Get my free guide: Get Out of Your Head: A Starter Guide to Releasing the Pressure, Shame, and "Shoulds" Around Intimacy at https://laurajurgens.com/guide

Find out about the Pleasure Path Diagnostic here: https://laurajurgens.com/diagnostic/

Find out more about my offerings and read the blog: https://laurajurgens.com/

Copyright notice: All content in this podcast is copyrighted and copying, scraping, data mining, or using the content to train AI is prohibited. 

This episode is for the high achievers who have done real work on themselves — the therapy, the books, the hard conversations — and still can't get traction when it comes to desire, intimacy, and their closest relationships. It's not because you haven't tried hard enough. It's because you've been using the wrong tools for the wrong system.

In this episode:

• Why capable, self-sufficient people are often the last to get help with intimacy — and why that costs them the most

• The cultural lie that you're supposed to just know how to do sex and relationships (and why it makes zero sense)

• Top-down vs. body-up: why cognitive tools and talk therapy can't reach what's actually stuck

• Why "trying harder" and "knowing more" can fool you into thinking they'll eventually work for everything

• What somatic, body-based work actually reaches — and what changes when you find the right tool for the real problem

Topics: high achievers, intimacy, somatic sex coaching, low libido, desire, nervous system, body shame, sex therapy, intimacy coach, relationship help

Get my free guide: Get Out of Your Head: A Starter Guide to Releasing the Pressure, Shame, and "Shoulds" Around Intimacy at https://laurajurgens.com/guide

Find out about the Pleasure Path Diagnostic here: https://laurajurgens.com/diagnostic/

Find out more about my offerings and read the blog: https://laurajurgens.com/

Copyright notice: All content in this podcast is copyrighted and copying, scraping, data mining, or using the content to train AI is prohibited. 

This episode is about what it actually feels like when you find it. The felt sense of coming home to your own body's sexuality — as a resource, a grounding force, and the place from which real confidence, real connection, and real intimacy become possible.

I was skeptical this even existed. Then my teacher demonstrated it on me with nothing but eye contact — and my body responded before my brain could catch up.

In this episode:

• What sexual energy actually is — grounded, demystified, no woo required

• Why most of us have it locked away (and what that actually feels like from the inside)

• The breathwork and mind-body practice that opened it up for me — and how I now use it with clients

• What becomes possible from this place: confidence, connection, intensity, and desire that doesn't require performance

• Why this isn't something you have to earn or learn from scratch — you already have it

• A note on group settings, charismatic facilitators, and who this actually belongs to (you)

If you've ever felt like you were performing intimacy instead of inhabiting it — this one's for you.

Get my free guide: Get Out of Your Head: A Starter Guide to Releasing the Pressure, Shame, and "Shoulds" Around Intimacy at https://laurajurgens.com/guide

Find out about the Pleasure Path Diagnostic here: https://laurajurgens.com/diagnostic/

Find out more about my offerings and read the blog: https://laurajurgens.com/

Copyright notice: All content in this podcast is copyrighted and copying, scraping, data mining, or using the content to train AI is prohibited. 

When Sam and Tina first came to see me, she was 43, a psychotherapist, and had completely stopped wanting sex.

Not slowed down. Stopped. She was experiencing pain with penetration, had withdrawn from any kind of physical intimacy, and the idea of power play — which had been a significant part of their sex life for years — made her feel something close to dread. He was 49, an engineer, and couldn’t access arousal without it. They were, in the most practical sense, at an impasse.

They’d been doing real play — bondage, degradation, intensity that required skill and trust — for most of their relationship. What they had never done, not once, was negotiate.

Not formally. Not in the way the BDSM community means when they use that word. They had desire and chemistry and genuine connection. They had assumed those things were enough. What they didn’t have was a container — a shared, explicit structure that named what each of them actually wanted, where the edges were, and what would happen when things got hard.

Here’s what got me: she had all the language. She made her living helping people talk through the hardest things in their lives. And she still hadn’t found the words for this. When I asked, she said “I loved and trusted him. I thought it would be enough.”

Her limits had been crossed. Not maliciously. He genuinely hadn’t known where they were, and neither, it turned out, had she — not with any real clarity, not in language she’d ever said out loud to him. She hadn’t fully registered the crossings in the moment. Her body registered them later. Slowly, cumulatively, her nervous system had drawn a conclusion: this isn’t safe. And then it had done what nervous systems do. It shut the door.

He was frustrated. He wanted the BDSM play back. He said he couldn't get turned on without dominance.

That turned out not to be the case, and I’ll come back to them. But first — let’s talk about how this happens, and why it happens to people who genuinely love each other.

I want to start with what negotiation actually is

Because I think the word is doing a lot of damage.

When most people hear “BDSM negotiation,” they picture something clinical. A checklist. A spreadsheet of limits. A conversation that sounds more like a liability waiver than a prelude to sex. And I get why — that’s how it gets taught in a lot of places. So people look at it and think: we don’t need to be that formal. We know each other. We trust each other.

And then things go sideways.

Here’s what I want to offer instead: negotiation isn’t the paperwork before the play. Done well, it is play. It’s the first scene. It’s where you start learning each other’s nervous systems, desires, edges, and trust. The anticipation of what you’re building together — the naming of what you want, the mutual witnessing — that’s not just practical. It’s erotic. Jack Morin, in his book The Erotic Mind, describes the erotic charge of obstacles and anticipation, of moving toward something you want with full attention. A well-held negotiation conversation is that. You’re not filling out forms. You’re building the container that makes it safe to actually go there.

Skipping it doesn’t just create risk. It skips one of the most connecting, charged parts of the whole dynamic.

Why the structure matters more than you think

There’s a paradox at the center of D/s and BDSM dynamics: the more freedom you want inside the dynamic — the deeper you want to go, the more you want to genuinely surrender or genuinely lead — the more structure you need underneath it.

This isn’t just a consent principle, though it is that too. It’s a nervous system principle. Your body needs to know it’s safe before it can open into genuine vulnerability or genuine authority. The negotiation is how you build that safety together — not as a cage, but as a container.

Here’s the part that most BDSM education doesn’t explain.

When someone enters a submissive or bottom state — what the community calls subspace — something real happens neurologically. Research on BDSM and altered states¹ has confirmed what practitioners have known for decades: bottoming produces a measurable decrease in prefrontal cortex activity. That’s the part of your brain responsible for self-monitoring, executive function, and decision-making. The monitoring mind releases. That release is precisely what people are seeking — it’s the whole point — and it’s genuinely profound.

But here’s what that means in practice: once you’re in that state, your capacity to track your own limits is reduced. Not because you’re weak or careless. Because your brain is doing exactly what you wanted it to do. You can override your own boundaries in that state without fully registering it in the moment. The experience may not land as a problem until hours or days later — sometimes much later.

This is why the protocols exist. Experienced BDSM practitioners didn’t develop detailed negotiation practices because they’re overly cautious. They developed them because they understood this vulnerability and built the safety architecture before anyone enters the container.

When you skip the negotiation — when you go in on trust and assumption instead of explicit structure — you remove that architecture. And then as the bottom, you’re hoping your top is reading you perfectly in real time, with no map, while you’re in a state that makes it hard to signal clearly even if something does go wrong.

That’s a lot to hope for.

The part no one talks about: this is the sub’s responsibility too

Rudimentary BDSM education puts the weight of negotiation on the dominant (or topping) partner. Know your partner’s limits. Check in. Hold the container. All of that is true and it matters.

Even very good BDSM education — where the dominant partner’s role is explicitly stated as ethical stewardship of the sub’s safety and well-being — often forgets to emphasize the sub’s responsibility.

The bottom is not a passenger. They’re an architect of the dynamic.

Their job in negotiation is to know themselves — their genuine desires, their real edges, the difference between something that feels exciting in fantasy and something that might feel overwhelming in a real scene. Where are the limits that are fixed? Where are the ones that might shift with more trust or more experience? What does “too much” feel like in your body, and do you know how to name it before you’re in a state where naming things is harder?

That’s not simple work. And it’s not work anyone can do for you.

When a sub avoids it — because self-knowledge is hard, or because naming limits feels like it kills the mood, or because they’d rather leave it to their partner to figure out — they’re not giving the top freedom. They’re giving them an impossible task: lead without a map, and carry full responsibility if anything goes wrong.

I see this pattern a lot. It’s usually not malicious. It’s often the most enthusiastic, most trust-filled bottoms who skip this work, because their trust is real and their desire is real and formal negotiation feels unnecessary when connection feels this good.

That trust is lovely. It’s also, on its own, not enough.

Beware this inclination. You want to outsource responsibility during the scene, yes. Don’t fool yourself into believing that means it’s safe to outsource it beforehand.

What actually happens when the container isn’t built

I want to be specific here. Vague warnings don’t help anyone make better decisions.

In my practice, I’ve worked with people who entered BDSM or D/s dynamics with genuine love for each other and genuine desire for the dynamic — and didn’t do the work of building the container first. Here’s what I’ve seen happen:

Loss of desire. When a scene goes somewhere that wasn’t negotiated — even something that might have been welcome with more preparation — the body can register it as threat, not pleasure. Desire protects itself. It pulls back. Sometimes temporarily. Sometimes not.

Erosion of trust. Power exchange is a trust structure. When that trust is breached — even accidentally, even by someone who was genuinely trying to do right by their partner — the relational rupture can be significant. And because BDSM and D/s aren’t always easy to bring to therapy or talk about with people in your life, couples often don’t get the repair support they need.

Loss of the capacity to do any BDSM at all. This is the one that surprises people most. The nervous system learns from experience. If power exchange becomes associated with feeling unsafe or overwhelmed, the body can begin to respond to any BDSM-adjacent context as threat — shutting down desire and arousal even when the person consciously wants to try again. I’ve seen this. It’s not rare.²

None of this means BDSM is dangerous. Research consistently shows that practitioners are, on average, psychologically healthy — in some measures, more so than the general population.³ What’s dangerous is the absence of the container. And the most common version of that isn’t extreme edge play gone wrong. It’s the rookie move: “we trust each other, we don’t need to be so formal.” It’s the assumption that love or chemistry is a substitute for structure.

It isn’t.

Subscribe now

What good negotiation actually looks like

Good negotiation isn’t a one-time intake form, or just deciding safe words. It’s a practice. And it doesn’t have to be clinical or boring.

Start with individual self-knowledge. Before you negotiate with each other, each partner does some internal work. What do you actually want? What are you curious about — is that genuine desire, or “I think I should want this”? Where are your real edges? You won’t have perfect self-knowledge going in, and that’s fine. What’s required is honest engagement with what you do and don’t know about yourself.

Name what you want, not just what you won’t do. Most negotiation frameworks focus on limits — what you won’t do. That matters. But desire-forward negotiation also asks both partners to name what they actively want, what they’re hoping to feel, what kind of experience they’re reaching for. This shifts the conversation from liability management to genuine co-creation.

Get specific about context. Power dynamics in a Saturday night scene and power dynamics woven through daily life are different containers with different weight. Part of negotiation is being honest about where this dynamic feels nourishing and where it would be too much — and how you’ll each know the difference.

Let it be what it is. The negotiation conversation doesn’t have to be a separate clinical event. Talking about what you want, what excites you, what you need to feel safe — that’s intimate. Many couples find that a well-held negotiation conversation is some of the most connected, turned-on they’ve felt together. Let the boundary between “negotiation” and “play” blur. It’s allowed.

Keep going. Desires change. Bodies change. Relationships change. A negotiation from two years ago doesn’t cover who you both are now. Build in regular check-ins — not as a sign that something went wrong, but as a normal part of maintaining a dynamic that keeps working.

When the conversation keeps not happening

Sometimes couples know they need to have this conversation and keep not having it. That avoidance is useful information.

Maybe one or both partners aren’t sure what they actually want. Maybe there’s shame or fear about naming desires out loud. Maybe the gap between what one person wants and what they think their partner wants feels too risky to look at directly.

If the negotiation itself has become the stuck place, a checklist probably won’t unstick it. The blocks tend to be body-level — connected to nervous system patterns, attachment, relational history — and those don’t resolve through information alone. That’s when working with someone who specializes in this territory can make a real difference.

Back to Sam and Tina

Their story doesn’t end with the damage.

What we did in our work together wasn’t fix what had broken — some of it may not be fixable, and that’s worth saying plainly. Bottoming may be off the table for her permanently. We don’t know yet. Her nervous system gets to decide that on its own timeline, and it doesn’t owe anyone a particular answer.

What we did was build the container they’d never had. We did the negotiation work — slowly, playfully, in sessions where both of them had support — and in that process something unexpected happened. It turned out that what he had wanted, underneath all of it, was to surrender to really grounded energy. He’d been pushing her into submission for years partly because he wanted someone to take him there, and didn’t know how to ask for it, or even fully admit it to himself.

Once she understood what he actually needed, and once she had some real practice learning to drop into that grounded authoritative energy, something shifted. She lit up. She became the domme. He got to be taken somewhere for the first time. He was obsessed. It was even better than before.

They’re playing again. It looks nothing like what they were doing before. It required negotiation — real negotiation, the kind that felt uncomfortable and vulnerable and took time — to find out what was actually there.

That’s what negotiation does. It doesn’t kill the erotic charge. It finds out what the erotic charge actually is, underneath what you’ve been assuming.

Two Notes

1. I'm going to release a full negotiation guide and checklist that goes deeper than most — for anyone exploring power play, whether you're brand new or have been doing this for years without ever quite formalizing it. For paid subscribers. Out this month.

2. A note on breath play: it deserves its own full piece, and I’ll write it. But I want to name it here because it’s having a cultural moment right now, especially for young adults and teens. The harm is real. If you’re curious about breath play, please do serious research before you do anything. It is not low-stakes. Here is a good resource for teens (and adults): https://www.scarleteen.com/read/sex-sexuality/breathe-risks-realities-safer-choking-breath-play

Footnotes

1. Ambler, J.K., Lee, E.M., Klement, K.R., et al. (2016). Consensual BDSM facilitates role-specific altered states of consciousness: A preliminary study. Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice, 3(3). The study found bottoming associated with transient hypofrontality — measurable reduction in prefrontal cortex activity — while topping was associated with flow state.

2. This clinical pattern — sub bypassing limits during the subspace state due to absence of prior negotiation, followed by post-scene distress, desire disruption, or loss of capacity for BDSM — is documented in my practice. It does not yet appear in the peer-reviewed literature, which reflects a broader gap in research on consent violations within BDSM contexts and their aftermath.

3. Wismeijer, A.A. & van Assen, M.A. (2013). Psychological characteristics of BDSM practitioners. Journal of Sexual Medicine, 10(8). BDSM practitioners scored more favorably than controls on multiple measures of psychological wellbeing, including lower neuroticism, higher openness, and higher subjective wellbeing. See also Richters et al. (2008) for demographic data.

Anke Richter is an international cult journalist, author of the bestseller Cult Trip (HarperCollins), and founder of Decult — the first cult awareness conference in Australasia. She spent six years inside ISTA (International School of Temple Arts) before becoming one of its most informed critics. She's also researched Centrepoint, Osho/Rajneeshpuram, and OneTaste firsthand.

This is Part 2 of a series. Start with the previous episode "The Men Behind Sexual Polarity Have A Lot to Answer For" — or read the full article on Substack (link below).

In this episode:

• Why smart, educated, well-resourced people end up in cults — and the myth that it couldn't happen to you

• What actually makes something a high-control group (and why "you can leave any time" doesn't disqualify it)

• How ISTA and similar neo-tantra spaces specifically target ex-evangelicals and ex-Mormons leaving purity culture

• The slippery slope from a weekend workshop to deeper entanglement — and what the escalation actually looks like

• Osho/Rajneeshpuram as the ideological origin of modern neo-tantra — and the documented child sexual abuse that history includes

• The playbook: how spiritual framing gets used to override consent and silence complaints

• "Acting from your wounding" and "stuck in victim consciousness" — the specific language used to shut down resistance

• The veneer of consent: why trauma-informed language and consent frameworks can be used as cover

• Why the word "victim" gets weaponized in these spaces — and why that needs to stop

• How David Deida's sexual polarity ideology functioned as a gateway into neo-tantra spaces for a generation of people, and why it is harmful

Resources mentioned:

• Cult Trip by Anke Richter — available wherever books are sold
  Anke Richter: https://ankerichter.net
  Decult — cult awareness conference and resources: https://decult.net
  Red Flags in Workshops — free consent-forward resource for participants and facilitators: https://redflagsinworkshops.com
  Part 1 — Have You Been Sold the Patriarchy's Version of "The Divine Feminine"?  https://open.substack.com/pub/laurajurgens/p/have-you-been-sold-the-patriarchys

Get my free guide: Get Out of Your Head: A Starter Guide to Releasing the Pressure, Shame, and "Shoulds" Around Intimacy at https://laurajurgens.com/guide

Find out about the Pleasure Path Diagnostic here: https://laurajurgens.com/diagnostic/

Find out more about my offerings and read the blog: https://laurajurgens.com/

Copyright notice: All content in this podcast is copyrighted and copying, scraping, data mining, or using the content to train AI is prohibited. 

My husband is one of the good ones.

I mean that without sarcasm. He’s a peace and justice activist. A feminist. A punk rocker. A genuinely caring person. My best friend of many years. He has spent his adult life working to end war and stop the bombs. He believes in all the right things.

And he has been almost completely silent.

Not minimizing. Not dismissive. When I brought it up, he listened. He hugged me. He let me vent. He was kind in all the ways he knows how to be kind.

But I brought it up. He didn’t.

I’m pretty sure it’s because he’s afraid to hurt me more by bringing it up. He knows I was raped at 14. He knows I sometimes need distance from the news. He was probably waiting to follow my lead. I get the pickle he’s in.

But in this case, I need him to bring it up. I need to be checked in with. Not just once, but now that we’ve cracked it open — again. And again after that.

We already live in a world where men who are known, and even convicted, for sexual assault are elected president, and it seemingly doesn’t matter. Where 58% of multiracial women and 49% of indigenous women experience sexual violence¹.

Then come the Epstein files. Horror after horror. No prosecutions.

Then CNN journalists expose an online network where men share tips on how to drug and rape their wives. The site, owned by an American man, was up for way too long, with increasing visitors². Men online arguing about the traffic numbers on the website — as if the question isn’t settled by one. One man doing this is too many. One woman waking up not knowing what happened to her body is too many.

And we walk around knowing this is normalized. Not knowing who it’s happening to. Knowing there has been, and may never be, anything like real justice.

That is what we are carrying right now.

I’m not writing this to indict my husband. Or yours. Or your dad, your son, your brother. I’m writing it because the silence — even from the good men in our lives — is its own kind of message.

It says: the impact on you is less important than my comfort.

Even when that’s not what they mean.

Here’s what I want. It’s not complicated.

I want him to say: “Hey — there’s been so much in the news lately about men’s violence against women. I just wanted to check in. Do you want to talk about it, or vent? What would feel best right now?”

That’s it. The whole thing.

Not a TED talk. Not solutions. Not him venting back to me. Just: I see this is happening. I’m thinking about you. I know you are carrying extra load around this. I’m here.

And then — if I say yes — I want him to listen and validate my experience. Just to hear that I am scared of this world I live in. That I am really fucking angry. That it makes complete sense for me to be both of those things. And that carrying this in my body, in my nervous system, every single day — that’s real, and it’s exhausting, and it deserves to be witnessed. Not avoided.

Now, we’ve done a lot of work together, my husband and I. He knows how to actually do this well. He can hold space for my pain without flinching. He never tries to explain the violence away — he doesn’t understand it either, and I’m glad. He never gives me the “not all men” line.

But even this great guy has been too quiet. And I think a lot of women are living with some version of that right now — men who love them, who would never hurt them, who are nevertheless not saying anything. Not to us. Not to each other. Not out loud.

I know some of you are married to men who are not activists. Not feminists. Not already spending their days working against violence in the world. Men who maybe haven’t thought much about this at all.

If that’s you, the gap probably feels even wider.

You might be avoiding even bringing it up because you know he will do all the things you don’t want. Try to “cheer you up.” Tell you that he’d never do that. Try to tell you that it’s “complicated.” Heaven forbid, argue the statistics at you or make a joke.

I literally cannot imagine what I’d do in that case, if kicking him out the door with a boot to his ass was not a viable option. And it’s not always, not for everyone.

It is insanely hard to know that, not only do you have to carry all this, you can’t even get basic empathy from the men closest to you.

I am heartbroken that so many women live with that. You deserve better.

Because what we’re describing isn’t a high bar. We’re not asking men to fix rape culture by Tuesday. We’re asking them to turn toward us. To say: I know this is happening, and I give a damn that it’s affecting you.

That’s available to every man who loves a woman. You don’t need a politics degree. You don’t need to know the right words. You just need to ask.

We need to talk about what’s not enough.

Not raping anyone — that’s the floor. That’s not the achievement. Being a “safe” man in private, while staying quiet in public, is not the same as being part of the solution.

Here’s what actually helps, beyond talking openly to us:

Saying something out loud. Not in our living rooms. Publicly. To other men. Men who abuse women are losers and only worthy of contempt. Full stop. That sentence, said where other men can hear it, does more than a hundred private conversations with us.

Calling it out when you see it. Not later, in the car on the way home, telling us you thought it was gross. In the moment, to the person. That’s what shifts culture.

Talking to other men about this — without us in the room. Getting together and actually asking: what are we doing? What can we do? And then doing something. Showing other men this is absolutely not okay. Not asking us what to do. We’re tired of answering that question.

Not making it our job.

It is not our job.

I’m not writing this from a place of hopelessness. I’m writing it from a place of love for the men in my life who have earned the right to my attention — including my husband. I am writing it from the deep belief that they’re capable of more than silence.

I want them to know that we can feel the silence. Even when it’s kind. Even when it’s careful. Even when it comes from a man who spends his days working to end war.

We feel it.

I’m also writing a companion piece — something you can hand directly to your partner. A practical guide for men on how to actually have this conversation. Coming soon.

In the meantime: please forward this to whoever needs it. Print it out and leave it on the counter if you need to. You shouldn’t have to translate your own pain for someone who loves you — but if this helps bridge that gap a little, it’s here for you.

For me, after I wrote this piece, I told my husband what I needed. He got it. I hope yours does too.

¹ National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, 2010 Summary Report (Centers for Disease Control & Prevention)

² The site — exposed by undercover investigative journalist and CNN Paris Bureau Chief Saskya Vandoorne and her colleagues Kara Fox and Niamh Kennedy — was finally taken down May 8, 2026. The same team reports on the take-down here, citing efforts from survivors Zoe Watts and Amanda Stanhope, who recently launched the #EndEyeCheck campaign to end drug-facilitated rape and support survivors.

Note: Substack writer Daphne Delvaux writes on how the Dutch took down the Motherless site, founded by an American man expecting impunity operating in Europe. Check out her piece here:

The Motherland

The Dutch Took Down the Motherless site

The Dutch took down Motherless last Thursday night…

Read more

4 months ago · 32 likes · Daphne Delvaux, Esq.

Sexual polarity teachings are everywhere right now. They promise to unlock your feminine energy, reignite desire, and deepen connection. Sounds great. The reality is different. They're built on a foundation of made-up science, cultural theft, and a paper trail that leads somewhere deeply problematic. They are also actively causing harm. 

In this episode I'm mapping exactly where this ideology came from, who's profiting from it, and what it's actually doing to women's desire, relationships, and sense of self — because I see the damage in my practice every single day.

In this episode:

• Why "sexual polarity" isn't ancient wisdom or real science — and how it borrows language from physics to sound legitimate

• David Deida, Tony Robbins, and Deepak Chopra — the men profiting and what their paper trail actually shows

• The Osho/neo-tantra origins: why the history of this ideology goes back to documented child sexual abuse in cult communes

• Why the OneTaste sentencing matters — and what Nicole Daedone's case tells us about who enforces patriarchal ideology

• What women are actually hungry for that polarity coaching hijacks and exploits

• The difference between genuine erotic power play and a grooming script dressed as spirituality

• How to recognize a genuinely qualified practitioner — and what red flags look like in these spaces

This is part one of a two-part series. Next episode I'm joined by journalist and cult researcher Anke Richter, author of Cult Trip, for a conversation on sex cults, ISTA, and the darker end of this spectrum.

Resources mentioned:

• Full article with sources and resources: https://open.substack.com/pub/laurajurgens/p/have-you-been-sold-the-patriarchys?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

• Barbara Carrellas' Urban Tantra: barbaracarrellas.com

• Midori on consent-forward BDSM: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLaxv6fBRPDep5NIrLfjEUNzmPtY4Ax5CN

Get my free guide: Get Out of Your Head: A Starter Guide to Releasing the Pressure, Shame, and "Shoulds" Around Intimacy at https://laurajurgens.com/guide

Find out about the Pleasure Path Diagnostic here: https://laurajurgens.com/diagnostic/

Find out more about my offerings and read the blog: https://laurajurgens.com/

Copyright notice: All content in this podcast is copyrighted and copying, scraping, data mining, or using the content to train AI is prohibited. 

If you’ve been struggling with desire, you’ve probably done this: lying in bed, or in the shower, or on a walk, and thinking really hard about how to want sex more. Reminding yourself that it may have felt good in the past. Telling yourself your partner is attractive and you love them and there’s “no good reason” you don’t want to.

Maybe you’ve read the books, done the therapy, listened to the podcasts. You understand more than you used to. Maybe you even tried hormones.

Your body still hasn’t gotten the memo.

That’s not a character flaw. It’s a mismatch between what we’re told might help and where the actual problem lies.

I want to help you understand why. Today, I’ll explain the actual research on desire and arousal. I’ll help you understand how both live largely in the body and in the nervous system, and why talking, information, therapy, and even drugs tend to miss the mark. We’ll also look at where your mind actually does help. (Hint: the key is to give it a job that’s useful, not let it run amok.)

Confusion about desire, arousal and their order

These words get used interchangeably constantly — by doctors, by partners, in articles, occasionally even by me — but they’re describing very different events. The difference, and the order of operations, actually makes a huge difference.

Arousal is a body event. It’s physical activation: increased blood flow, genital engorgement, lubrication, heightened sensitivity to touch. It can happen without you consciously wanting it to. It can be absent even when you think you do want sex. It’s not reliably in sync with desire.

Desire is the wanting — the pull, the sense of I actually want this right now.

The model most of us grew up with — and that’s still in most medical textbooks — says desire comes first. You feel the urge, arousal follows. That sequence is presented as normal. It is actually only “normal” for young cis-men, which is who that old research was based on. It is not the norm for older men, women, anyone with estrogen in their system, and anyone with a complicated history with sexuality.

Dr. Rosemary Basson spent years documenting what women actually reported about their sexual experience. What she found was that many women — not women with sexual complaints, just cis-women from the general population — frequently start from a place of neutral. Not wanting, not not-wanting, just not particularly thinking about sex. Then, in the right context, with the right stimulation, something starts to happen in the body. Arousal comes first. Desire follows.¹

Dr. Ellen Laan and Dr. Stephanie Both took this further, proposing that desire is actually the conscious experience of an already-excited body — not a separate thing that appears first. Instead, it’s the moment your brain perceives that your body is already responding.²

I’d add one thing from my own work that the research doesn’t fully capture: for arousal to generate desire, you also have to feel safe enough to actually want what the arousal is pointing you toward. You have to have had good enough experiences with what’s about to happen that your body is willing to continue. You can notice arousal and still want nothing to do with it.

All of this is why sitting there trying to generate desire through thinking — trying to want sex through willpower or self-talk — doesn’t work. You’re trying to create a perception without the underlying event. It’s not a moral failure. It’s just the wrong tool.

What the nervous system has to do with any of it

This is the piece that’s missing from almost every mainstream conversation about desire. It’s missing from the medical model. It’s missing from internet sex advice. It’s missing from nearly all therapists’ training (as is sexuality, generally). It’s also the part that, when my clients finally understand it, they stop blaming themselves. I want that for everyone.

Sexual arousal isn’t its own isolated system. It’s part of your broader nervous system, running on the same infrastructure that governs how alert you are, how safe you feel, how oriented toward your environment you are. When that system detects threat — real or perceived, current or historical — it prioritizes survival. Digestion quiets. Immune function takes a back seat. Sexual arousal is de-prioritized for a body that thinks it might be in danger.

There are also higher brain structures whose specific job is to actively suppress arousal when the nervous system reads threat. This is not “stress reduces libido” in some vague, general way. This is a dedicated suppression mechanism.

The gazelles running from the cheetah are not stopping for a boink in the bushes. There is very good reason that stress suppresses sexual drive, evolutionarily, in mammals like us. Survival takes precedence over pleasure and reproduction

Here’s what makes this more than just “stress is bad for your sex life:” your nervous system learns and encodes patterns. Repeated experiences become automated responses. And your nervous system doesn’t particularly distinguish between danger is happening right now and danger has happened here before. Both generate protective responses.

So if intimacy — being seen, being touched, being desired — has historically been associated with shame, pain, coercion, disappointment, performance, or any kind of feeling unsafe, your nervous system has learned that this territory is threat territory. When you get into a sexual situation now, that pattern activates. Not because you’re broken. Because your nervous system did exactly what it’s supposed to do.

These patterns don’t live in your explicit memory. You can’t tell yourself that your current partner is wonderful and your last one was dangerous and just update the file. These responses live in automated, below-conscious circuitry that activates faster than your thinking brain can track.

There’s also a cultural layer here that I want to name plainly, because it matters especially for women and people socialized as women. A lot of that threat conditioning didn’t come from personal experience. It came from the culture. We absorbed, very early, messages that women’s desire is dangerous, shameful, or exists primarily for someone else’s use. That wanting is risky or makes you a slut. That it exposes you to violence. These messages are reinforced constantly. Those messages don’t just live in our brains as conscious beliefs. After that much repetition, they become embodied responses.

The flatness when someone desires you. The vague dread. The blankness when someone asks what you want or how you get turned on. That’s not weakness or personal failing. That’s a nervous system reacting to patriarchy, doing exactly what it was designed to do.

Brain imaging research adds another layer. Researchers found that in women, reaching orgasm requires significant quieting of specific brain regions — the areas responsible for self-monitoring, moral judgment, and vigilance.³ The hypothesis is that, given how women are socialized to feel danger, shame, moral judgement, and body-criticism, those brain regions are chronically hyperactivated during sex, and they actually need to go offline for full release into orgasm.

There’s a related finding that I think about a lot in my practice. Neuroimaging research on women with low desire found that when they encountered erotic material, a specific part of the brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC)— the brain region responsible for reward-based learning, the structure that tracks whether something is going to be rewarding — was deactivated rather than activated.⁴ In women without desire difficulties, that region activated and triggered the cascade that leads to physical arousal. In women with low desire, it goes quiet instead.

That part of the brain, like most, learns from experience. The mOFC encodes the value of stimuli based on what has historically happened for you. I see it all the time in my practice, and it’s pretty obvious when you think about it: if sex has repeatedly been disappointing, obligatory, disconnected, or physically uncomfortable, you’re not going to want it. The neuroscience just explains it in technical terms. The mOFC has accurate information. It’s not malfunctioning. It’s doing exactly what a reward-learning system is supposed to do — telling you that this particular activity hasn’t been worth it.

Here’s the direct implication of all of this: thinking hard about why you don’t want sex — judging yourself for it, trying to convince yourself you should — means that you’re doing precisely the thing that keeps the vigilance regions online and keeps the reward regions suppressed. You’re using the tool that suppresses the thing you’re trying to create.

Where the mind actually helps

I’m not saying the mind has no role. I’m trained in both somatic (body-based) and cognitive (mind-based) work, and I believe in both — they just do different things.

Cognitive work done well can genuinely help identify and challenge shame narratives, reduce self-judgment, and build more accurate understanding of your own patterns. Over time, that can reduce the frequency with which the threat response fires. It’s real and important, and it’s part of the foundation.

But here’s where it hits a wall: understanding something doesn’t update your nervous system’s automated patterns. You’ve probably experienced this — you know something intellectually and yet you react in the completely opposite way. You can know that sex isn’t actually shameful, but have a body that still responds as if it is. You can know that you find someone attractive. Your body still might not respond when they flirt with you. The intellectual brain is over-ridden by the body’s experience.

This is also why talk therapy, even good talk therapy and sex therapy, often doesn’t complete the job. Therapy is useful for building insight, processing history, and shifting how you think about yourself and your experiences. But insight tends to land in the cognitive layer — and as we’ve just covered, the cognitive layer is not where these patterns live. Many people leave therapy with a much clearer understanding of why they struggle with desire and still arrive at the same stuck place in bed. The talk therapy “worked.” It just couldn’t reach the territory that needed updating, because that territory isn’t accessible through language and reflection alone.⁵ It requires body-based, experiential, relational work — which most therapists aren’t trained to provide and most therapy formats aren’t designed to deliver.

Intellectual knowing is stored in a different place than your body’s experience. And your body’s experience will always override it.

The place where the mind is genuinely powerful is in generating desire — not correcting it. Creating the internal conditions that allow arousal to happen.

This comes from work I trained in through the Somatica Institute® and from psychologist Dr. Jack Morin’s research on the erotic mind.⁶ Everyone has specific emotional states that are particularly erotic for them — that activate the erotic mind and start flooding the body with the chemical cocktail of emotion that leads that specific body to desire. Some people are turned on by feeling desired. Some by feeling naughty. Some by feeling humiliated, controlled, powerful, welcome, free, loved, manipulative, irresponsible. You get my point: the list of possibilities is very long. None are wrong.

Erotic emotions are individual, specific, and largely unconscious until you investigate them. They are also surprisingly stable across a lifetime. You will find new, different ways to generate those emotions, but the emotions that turn you on tend to stay pretty stable. The theory is that childhood attachment wounds shape the kinds of emotions that are most erotic to us, and adult sexuality is a way to play with healing those wounds in connection.

Deliberately cultivating the emotional states that most turn you on is something your brain can help you do — through intentional imagination, fantasy, and curating experiences that generate those feelings.⁷

The difference: “I should want this” is top-down pressure. That thought itself creates shame. Imagining something intentionally to activate your actual erotic emotions is a brain stimulus your body responds to by boosting arousal. Both happen in your head. Both affect the body. But they’re radically different activities with very different impacts.

A note on information vs. experience — and what your doctor doesn’t know

This brings us to something that’s a little funny for me to say, given that I’m writing this.

A lot of people struggling with desire already have a lot of information. They’ve read the books. Some of those books are even good. They’ve done therapy. They understand quite a lot about themselves. And they’re still stuck when it comes to the body. That’s not because they haven’t found the right information yet. It’s because information is not what’s needed. New experience is — and those are very different things.

Most doctors don’t know this either, which is worth addressing directly. The medical system has a reasonable-sounding story: low desire is sometimes hormonal, and hormones can be prescribed. So people walk away from a fifteen-minute appointment with a testosterone cream or an estrogen patch, feeling like the problem has been identified and is being addressed. When it doesn’t help, or doesn’t help much, they feel like they’re out of options. (Side note: you’re not.)

The research explains why this is the wrong solution for most people. When someone has little or no experience with truly great sex, or a mainly negative sexual or relational history, pro-sexual drugs — whether hormones, dopamine agonists, or others — will not facilitate desire.² The problem isn’t in the chemistry. It’s upstream, in how the brain has learned to evaluate whether this territory is safe and worth approaching. You cannot chemically override a learned pattern of avoidance. The nervous system is going to win.

Hormones are one input into a complex system. They’re genuinely relevant in specific contexts — menopause, surgical removal of the ovaries, certain medical conditions. They can also become more effective once the upstream work is done: if your history with sex has been largely positive, or once you’ve built enough safety and good experience that your body is actually interested in responding. But for most women with low desire, hormones alone are not the answer, and prescribing them without addressing the underlying nervous system and relational patterns is treating the wrong level of the problem.

Most doctors don’t have much else to offer. They’re not trained in women’s sexuality beyond the basics of reproduction and anatomy. They don’t know what questions to ask about relational context, nervous system history, or the quality of someone’s actual sexual experiences. They have fifteen minutes and a prescription pad. If you left your doctor’s office feeling vaguely dismissed, or like the problem was being oversimplified, that’s probably an accurate read — not because your doctor is indifferent, but because the medical training simply doesn’t cover this territory.

Books and doctors have this in common: they’re both working at a level that can’t reach where the actual problem lives. I want to be clear that this article is no different. My purpose here isn’t to fix anything — it’s to help you understand why what you’ve tried hasn’t worked, so you won’t feel so hopeless that you give up before finding what does.

What updates the arousal-desire system in the body?

The body updates through experience. Specifically, it needs repeated positive relational experiences where you actually feel safe enough to feel good, and where desire and embodiment can come together in practice. Experiences where inhibitory emotions like fear and shame can be released in the context of real human connection.

Shame is a good example of why we need to “update the system” in relationship. Shame is a social wound — it predicts rejection (”if I don’t hide this horrible thing, I will be cast out”). The release of shame requires someone staying with you, celebrating you, caring about you even when you say aloud what you’re ashamed of. Thinking about how you shouldn’t feel ashamed doesn’t touch it.

And this is where the mOFC comes in again. If that region has learned that sex isn’t rewarding, the path forward isn’t more pressure or talk — it’s more rewarding experiences. Which means starting with play — not with sex, but with what actually feels good right now. Simple touch that you genuinely want. Flirtation that feels fun. Foreplay that generates real pleasure and real arousal. Finding what that is for you. Gradually, carefully escalating toward sex with a partner only when your body is actually on board, at your body’s pace — with whatever tools help you get there and stay there. Communication tools, body-based practices, toys — whatever removes friction and maximizes the chance that what happens next feels genuinely good. You’re not building toward better performance. You’re taking performance out of the situation entirely. You’re building real evidence for your body that this territory is safe and pleasurable enough to be worth it.

That’s what retrains the system. New experience, accumulated slowly, in a context where safety and pleasure are actually present. It’s not a pill. It’s not a mindset hack. But it’s what works.

Reading a book about swimming, or talking to someone about how you’d like to swim, doesn’t teach your body to swim. At some point you have to get in the water and try some of the basic motions, and it usually helps to have some support while you’re learning.

That’s what somatic and relational coaching actually does, and why I do it. It’s available to you if and when you’re ready for it.

Please know that if therapy or drugs have not helped with your libido, you haven’t failed, and you’re not a lost cause. They’re actually just working on the wrong level. Your body has a very specific requirement to feel safe and curious enough to even consider generating desire.

It’s not more information. It’s new, positive, safe experience. That is what actually works.

If you want to go deeper on erotic emotions, Episode 5 of Pleasure Uprising “All About Erotic Emotions and Getting Curious About What Turns You On” is the place to start. And if you’re ready to understand what your specific path looks like, that’s what the work I do is for. Feel free to reach out here, or find me at laurajurgens.com.

References

¹ Basson, R. (2002). Women’s sexual desire — disordered or misunderstood? Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 28(S1), 17–28.

² Both, S., Everaerd, W. T. A. M., Laan, E., & Janssen, E. (2007). Desire emerges from excitement: A psychophysiological perspective on sexual motivation. The psychophysiology of sex, 8, 327-39.

³ Georgiadis, J.R., Kortekaas, R., Kuipers, R., et al. (2006). Regional cerebral blood flow changes associated with clitorally induced orgasm in healthy women. European Journal of Neuroscience, 24(11), 3305–3316.

⁴ Holstege, G. (2016). How the emotional motor system controls the pelvic organs. Sexual Medicine Reviews, 4(4), 303–328.

⁵ LaPierre, A. (2006). Neuroscience book review part III: Neuroscience in somatic psychotherapy. USA Body Psychotherapy Journal, 5(2), 43-61.

⁶Morin, J. (1995). The Erotic Mind. HarperCollins.

⁷If you’re interested in discovering and playing with your own erotic emotions, check out Episode 5 of the Pleasure Uprising Podcast. I’ve also built a free resource specifically to help people find their own erotic emotions: the Wheel of Erotic Emotions. You can get it at laurajurgens.com/wheel. The short workbook .pdf walks you through identifying your own erotic emotional landscape, which is the starting point for using your mind in a way that actually works with your nervous system instead of against it.

That's not a sign you're beyond help. It's a sign you've been using the wrong tools.

This episode explains why the things most people reach for — talk therapy, mindset work, even good communication — don't reach desire and embodied intimacy, and what kind of support actually does. Whether you're partnered or not, high-desire or low — if you want a more satisfying sex life, this episode is for you.

In this episode:

• When therapy is genuinely valuable — and what it wasn't designed to do

• Why mindset work and self-talk can't override a nervous system pattern

• What somatic therapy does well and where even that hits a limit

• Why your doctor's answer probably wasn't the right one

• What body-based, future-facing work actually looks like

• Why I wish you wouldn't give up on your sex life before trying the right tool

Get my free guide: Get Out of Your Head: A Starter Guide to Releasing the Pressure, Shame, and "Shoulds" Around Intimacy at https://laurajurgens.com/guide

Find out about the Pleasure Path Diagnostic here: https://laurajurgens.com/diagnostic/

Find out more about my offerings and read the blog: https://laurajurgens.com/

Copyright notice: All content in this podcast is copyrighted and copying, scraping, data mining, or using the content to train AI is prohibited. 

Let me start with a story.

A few weeks ago, at my gym here in Asheville, I got talking to a guy in his late twenties who’d been hired to facilitate “Tantra Speed Dating” workshops — I recognized the name immediately. I’d attended one myself, as an invited speaker at a festival, to see if it might help some of my single clients. It was facilitated by the founder, Guy Shahar. I left feeling deeply disturbed.

So when this guy told me men are assigned the “protective masculine” role and women always the “receptive feminine” role, I wasn’t surprised. But I asked anyway. I asked whether he’d ever considered how those roles reinforce gender stereotypes. He looked uncomfortable and then said the standard line — the one all these people say when you press them: “Well, yes, but everyone has both energies.” Ok, fine. But do the men ever actually step into the “feminine” as they’ve defined it? In practice? The answer is no. When I asked whether he’d ever considered switching it up, he looked at me with something between discomfort and surprise. “I’d be fired,” he said.

Tantra Speed Date was founded by Guy Shahar, who also co-founded The Tantra Institute, a business that certifies its own facilitators and now operates in over 25 cities. He has no credible certifications listed on his website. Instead, he markets himself to men as someone who can help them “bring out the alpha in each of us” and asks men if they are ready to “master the feminine” and “penetrate the world (and your woman).” At the event I attended, women were instructed to touch and be touched by strangers with no consent framework. The message was explicit: this is what it means to be in your spiritual feminine. For anyone with a trauma history — which is most of us — that’s not liberation. It’s a nervous system disaster.

Their Asheville workshop leader was friendly, enthusiastic, and clearly well-intentioned. He also had zero training in sexuality, relationships, trauma awareness, or gender dynamics. I asked. All he had was a script.

Given my own prior experience, I wasn’t surprised. But I was — and remain — furious. Because that young man with his script is just the minor-league version of something that goes all the way up. Men are making a lot of money off of it. And it is causing real harm to women.

The script he was handed has a name: “sexual polarity.” And it has a paper trail.

Where this actually came from

Before I explain why sexual polarity frameworks cause harm, I want to spend a moment on why so many intelligent people believe they’re true. Because the belief isn’t random or foolish. It’s been manufactured with some care.

Sexual polarity as an idea has the feel of ancient wisdom fused with modern science. It is neither. But that feeling is intentional and very profitable. The contemporary version of this ideology traces primarily to David Deida, whose 1997 book The Way of the Superior Man introduced the framework that now underlies most sexual polarity ideology worldwide. Over a million copies sold. Endorsed on the cover by Tony Robbins — who was himself the subject of a 2019 BuzzFeed investigation detailing allegations of sexual misconduct including groping followers, berating rape victims in his seminars, and instructing staff to find attractive women in his audiences. These are the men at the foundation of this movement. Propping each other up. Selling each other’s frameworks.

The sales tactic is straightforward: make a made-up idea sound both spiritual and scientific. Deida’s framework borrows the word “polarity” directly from physics, where it describes a real, measurable electromagnetic phenomenon. He borrows the term “law” from science too — and to be clear, almost nothing in science has earned the status of a “law” because it has to be universal, quantifiable, and supported by massive empirical evidence. Deida claims “masculine and feminine energies in intimacy are governed by the law of conservation.” What law of conservation? Mass? Energy? No. Those are physical laws with nothing to do with human relationship dynamics. He invokes “quantum” to lend yet another sheen of scientific legitimacy to claims that have no relationship to quantum mechanics whatsoever.

This is a deliberate rhetorical strategy. Take words that carry real scientific credibility. Attach them to ideas that have none. Watch people’s critical thinking soften in response. There is no peer-reviewed research supporting “sexual polarity” as Deida defines it. No studies. No data. Just a man who sells books and seminars telling you that your attraction depends on whether you are sufficiently in your masculine or feminine “essence” — and a thousand workshop leaders who bought his framework and are now selling it to you as truth.

Here is what the book actually says. Deida describes the masculine ideal as a man who “loves to take his woman sexually, to ravish her.” Elsewhere he asks men directly: “When was the last time you really ravished your woman?” — noting that if it’s been too long, men might find themselves “turned on by rape scenes on TV.” He writes that “her gift, if she is a good woman, is to test you with her darkest moods, over and over and over, until your consciousness is unperturbed by feminine challenge.” He instructs men to “learn to find humor in the unending emotional drama the feminine seems to enjoy so much.”

Read that again without the spiritual vocabulary layered over it.

That is a description of a woman whose emotional needs are inconveniences to be transcended. Whose resistance to sex is an obstacle to be overcome. If someone said this to you directly, without the pseudo-spiritual terminology, you would recognize it immediately. The spiritual framing is the mechanism that makes it unrecognizable.

Meanwhile, running underneath all of it is a thread of cultural theft: neo-tantra strips Sanskrit vocabulary and sacred frameworks from South Asian Hindu and Buddhist traditions — removing historical context and inserting a male-serving sexual agenda. Then it all gets repackaged for sale to a Western audience desperate for more meaningful eroticism than we’ve been offered in porn.

Neo-tantra as a Western phenomenon traces largely to Osho (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh), whose ashrams in India and later Oregon in the 1970s and 80s blended Eastern spiritual practice with purported “sexual liberation” — and became notorious for the same pattern we see repeated today: charismatic male authority, spiritual language used to override boundaries, and documented sexual exploitation of followers, including children.¹ Osho himself has since been identified by researchers as a rapist. The ideology didn’t start with Deida. He just made it sellable.

Deida claims this isn’t about gender — that anyone can hold either “pole” regardless of biological sex. That’s what Shahar trains his facilitators to say too. But as countless practitioners have documented, in every workshop, every retreat, every coaching session, the feminine role is assigned to women and the masculine role to men. Every single time. My Asheville facilitator confirmed this without meaning to. When pressed, practitioners retreat to “it’s about essence, not gender” — but the essence always, without exception, maps onto gender. That’s not a coincidence. That’s the product.

None of them got rich asking whether it harmed anyone. Someone has to.

Why Women Went Looking — And Who Was Waiting

Here’s what I want you to understand about why women have been drawn to divine feminine teachings, sexual polarity teachings, and neo-tantra spaces. The hunger underneath it is completely legitimate. We want better sex. We want desire that’s actually ours — not performed, not obligatory, not something we’re managing around someone else’s feelings. We want to feel genuinely turned on, present in our bodies, connected to our partners. We have an inkling that we are missing the erotic power inside us.

And we live in a culture that has very little to offer us on that front. A culture built around men’s arousal patterns, men’s orgasm, men’s preferences in pornography. A culture that tells women our desire takes too long, asks too much, and exists only to serve someone else’s pleasure. Most of us carry enormous sexual shame. Taught since childhood to override our body’s signals, to make ourselves available, to not be difficult. Is it any wonder we went looking for answers? Or that when someone offered to help us “unlock our feminine energy,” we were interested?

The problem is who’s been doing the teaching.

Newly released DOJ documents show that Deepak Chopra — who co-launched a 21-day Activating the Divine Feminine meditation program with Alicia Keys promising to connect women with their “gentle, giving, and nurturing” feminine energy — maintained a close, documented relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein for years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction. Chopra invited Epstein to events asking him to “bring your girls.” He responded “Good” when a victim dropped a civil lawsuit.

I’ll let you sit with that for a moment. A man defining the divine feminine for millions of women. Writing “Good” when one of Epstein’s victims goes away.

He’s not an outlier. He’s a pattern.

What “polarity” actually does in practice

Let me be clear about what sexual polarity teachings are, because I see the damage in my practice constantly. It is dom-sub role play mapped onto gender stereotypes and dressed in scientific-sounding language. The teachers claim it’s not about gender. But watch what happens in practice — women are always the receptive-submissive ones, men are always “dominant.” Every time.

And the vast majority of it is rooted in heteronormativity so deep it doesn’t even notice itself — queer relationships, non-binary people, and anyone whose erotic life doesn’t fit the man-leads-woman-receives template are simply not in the picture. The framework wasn’t built for them. It was built around a very specific vision of what sex is and whose pleasure it’s for.

Here’s the test. Ask a straight, cis man in one of these frameworks to play the “feminine” role. If he resists — if it feels beneath him — that tells you everything about the hierarchy baked into the model. The “feminine” isn’t a neutral energy. It’s a subordinate position. Being sold as spiritual wisdom.

Real BDSM culture, for what it’s worth, has explicit contracts, negotiated consent, and safety protocols precisely because power play requires guardrails. In genuine BDSM practice, the person in the submissive role leads the negotiation — they name what they want, what they won’t do, what stops everything. The dominant partner or “top” serves that vision. That requires trust, training, and mutual respect. What you don’t need is a spiritual ideology telling you to drop your boundaries in the name of accessing your feminine essence.

That’s what sexual polarity does. Strip out every single one of those guardrails. Wrap the whole thing in spiritual language. Then tell women that their receptivity — their borderlessness — is their natural feminine essence.

It isn’t. It’s a grooming script for sexual exploitation dressed up as a spiritual mandate. The message underneath it is unambiguous: if you have boundaries, you’re not spiritual enough.

And it makes things worse, not better. It doesn’t help women access real desire, sustainably. Women coached to “be more receptive” experience it as one more demand on a body that’s already exhausted and already over-accommodating. Men coached to “be more dominant/masculine” double down on stereotypes they’re already swimming in — and end up more entitled, less emotionally available, and genuinely confused when their partners still aren’t into it. The desire gap widens. The resentment compounds.

What women are actually hungry for

I want to be careful here, because I don’t think women are foolish for being drawn to this. The desire underneath is real and legitimate. There are two things women are actually hungry for that polarity coaching hijacks and exploits.

The first is genuine interest in erotic power play — in the electricity of roles, of someone taking the lead, of surrendering into a partner’s full attention. That’s a real and beautiful thing. Real BDSM culture has built sophisticated, consent-forward frameworks for exactly this. You don’t need a gendered spiritual ideology. You need communication, trust, and a partner willing to actually negotiate what you both want.

The second — and this is the one I hear underneath almost everything — is the exhaustion of over-caretaking. Women are trained from birth to manage men’s feelings, to soften our needs, to make sure he’s not hurt or emasculated or frustrated by our bodies’ actual rhythms. If we’re partnered with a man, we bring that into the bedroom. Worrying more about his reaction to our “no” than the “no” itself. Faking it, rushing it, showing up before we’re ready, never giving feedback because we know it won’t be welcomed.

What most women describe as wanting “dominance” from a partner is actually something more specific. They want a partner who shows up so resourced and so present that they don’t have to take care of them. Who can hear “not yet” without making it a problem. Who follows the body’s actual pace — slow, delicious, worth every minute — rather than acting out a porn script. That’s not dominance. That’s attunement. And it requires actual learning. Not a rebrand of entitlement.

Sexual polarity teachings take this real, legitimate hunger and feed women the opposite of what they need. “Be more receptive” is not liberation from over-caretaking. It’s more of it. Dressed as spirituality.

When it becomes something worse

Last week I was at a gathering and overheard a woman saying “I’m just not good enough at getting into my feminine.” She was visibly distressed. Blaming herself — her body, her personality, her spiritual development — for the problems in her intimate life. She had bought in completely.

That is the mild end of the impact, and it is bad enough.

This month, Nicole Daedone — founder of OneTaste, a woman who built an “orgasmic meditation” company on the promise of female empowerment — was sentenced to nine years in federal prison for coercing women into sex acts with the company’s male clients and investors in the name of spiritual growth. That a woman architected and ran this system is not incidental. It’s a reminder that patriarchal ideology doesn’t require men to enforce it. One victim told the court she had believed in what she called Daedone’s “so-called feminist mission,” only to be left with significant financial damage and emotional harm. The U.S. Attorney said it plainly: “Coercion disguised as wellness or empowerment is still exploitation.”

The spiritual gaslighting at the core of these systems — the idea that your resistance to a teacher’s sexual agenda reveals your own spiritual deficiency — is not unique to OneTaste. I’ve worked with women who survived years of it in neo-tantra spaces. Shamed as spiritually undeveloped for feeling uncomfortable. They lacked the words for what was happening because the language they’d been given described their own resistance as the problem.

The untrained Asheville “Tantra Speed Date” facilitator with his script. David Deida’s “superior man” who must learn to “ravish” his woman. Deepak Chopra’s “gentle, giving” divine feminine, marketed to millions while he messaged Jeffrey Epstein to “bring your girls.” Nicole Daedone’s exploitative orgasmic meditation commune. These are points on the same line — an industry that built a profitable infrastructure on monetizing women’s receptivity, with no accountability for the costs to actual women.

The reclamation

You don’t need anyone to define the divine feminine for you.

You don’t need anyone, besides your own body, to tell you what feels good, what turns you on, or where your boundaries are. You may need help learning to listen to your own body — and that is normal. Most of us have forgotten how to listen. I sure had, before I found my way back.

Good help exists. Here’s one way to recognize it: anyone genuinely qualified to support you will have healthy boundaries of their own, and will actively ask about and then celebrate yours. They won’t tell you what to want, what to do, or ever imply you are spiritually deficient. They will create safety for you to discover your own desires, with curiosity. That’s what support actually looks like — not a teacher who needs your compliance to deliver their curriculum.

And if you want to find the divine feminine, I suggest looking for yourself.

In traditions around the world, the divine feminine has never been passive. Kali is both liberator and destroyer. Athena rules over war and wisdom. Pele burns entire landscapes so something new can grow.

Sacred rage is not a corruption of the feminine. It is one of its purest expressions. And everywhere I look right now, women are starting to turn that rage outward instead of inward — to stop weaponizing it against their own bodies and desires, and to direct it at the systems and people who have profited from their compliance.

Real sacred sexuality exists. It’s just not what these men were selling. It’s built on consent so thorough it would make a polarity coach’s head spin — on everyone arriving as equals, on deeply listening to your body, not leveraging spirituality to override it.

Reclaiming your own erotic birthright starts with being ruthlessly honest about who you’ve been listening to and why.

We need to stop handing the microphone to men who have a financial or personal stake in keeping women receptive. Seek out women experts — in sexuality, in somatic work, in trauma-informed intimacy. There are many of us.² Watch out for women following a patriarchal agenda too — Nicole Daedone is a case in point — and be an informed consumer who respects your own instincts.

Connect with your own body — not the one that’s been trained to perform and accommodate, but the one underneath that. The one that knows when something feels wrong. The one that has its own pace and its own timing and was never broken to begin with. Learning to hear that body again, and to trust it, is the most genuinely radical act available to women in a culture that has spent centuries making sure we couldn’t.

That is the divine feminine, for me. Not gentle, giving, and nurturing on demand. Strong, grounded, big, fierce, tender, erotic on her own terms, and entirely unwilling to perform receptivity for someone else’s pseudo-spiritual agenda.

If this resonated, I’d love to hear from you in the comments. And if you know someone who’s been told their resistance is a spiritual failing — share this with them.

Laura Jurgens, PhD is a desire and arousal specialist, somatic intimacy coach, and host of The Pleasure Uprising Podcast. Find me at laurajurgens.com.

¹For more on the Osho abuses:

Read this piece by Anke Richter: Forty Years After the Oregon Cult Commune: The Girl from the Osho Ranch

An important film: Children of the Cult. Short overview and link to film here. Also on Prime or Apple TV (as of April 2026).

²A few places to start:

For sacred sexuality rooted in consent, queerness, and body autonomy: Barbara Carrellas’ Urban Tantra

For women-and-queer-friendly BDSM, done with skill, humor, and actual safety: Midori. Start here.

For individual and couples work — nervous system support, trauma-informed intimacy, secure attachment, and the actual skills of embodied eroticism in an intersectional feminist framework – this is me. Follow me here, check out my podcast: Pleasure Uprising: Desire, Attachment & the Sex You Actually Want, or find me at laurajurgens.com