Welcome back to the place we find ourselves podcast. I'm joined today by fellow therapist and author Jay Stranger.

Jay, it's good to see you.

Adam, it's good to see you as well. Good to be back.

We are going to talk about how our stories affect our sexuality, which is what we've talked about in the past.

But let's start with this Jay. Why even talk about sex and sexuality?

I think where I would begin with that is just the notion of, you know, one of the things I write about and unwanted is like,

so much of the way that we talk about sex tends to be this sense of don't do it.

So the analogy that I make is kind of just with regard to learning how to cook.

Most of us are not going to learn how to cook through exclusively learning about food poisoning.

So most people learn about sexual pathology and some of the research that's been done would say that between K through 12,

the average student will receive about 17.5 total hours about understanding their bodies, healthy sexuality.

And then what makes it even more dire is to be a licensed mental health counselor like you and I, to be a medical doctor any level of the professionals that you see,

they are only required to maybe have one class in human sexuality in the entire duration of their training.

So that sense of if our leaders don't know what they're doing, all the research would also say that they have the same sexual difficulties that the rest of the population has.

So I think that sense, there's an overwhelming amount of silence and then just an overwhelming amount of just limited material out there to invite us to understand our sexual story.

So I think all of that leads to, you know what Brenda Abrams said so simply and elegantly, shame needs three things to grow, secrecy, silence, and judgment.

So a lot of us come into our sexual stories and our sexual lives with a lot of silence, a lot of secrecy, a lot of judgment and therefore a lot of shame and shame will kill creativity and curiosity every time.

In your book unwanted one of your fundamental premises is that sexual struggles in the present are not random that there's a reason for the particularity of each person's sexual struggles and sexual pain.

And here's how you put it in the book, you say sexual problems are road maps, they pinpoint the location of past harm.

What do you mean when you say that sexual struggles in the present pinpoint the location of past harm?

Yes, so this is, I would say this is a big paradigm shift. Most of the time when we see sexual problems, you know, compulsive sexual behavior, hypoeactive sexual desire, we tend to think that they reveal how broken we are.

But the pivot that I always want to make is that sexual problems actually provide clues into the healing and the growth that we need.

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