Permission for Pleasure
A podcast to educate and equip women with the information and confidence they need to express, experience and enjoy their sexuality. Cindy Scharkey RN, BSN, brings her 35+ years of experience as a healthcare professional to open the doors to healthy conversations about sex. This is a community where you can listen and learn to give yourself permission for pleasure. Visit www.cindyscharkey.com for educational blogs and newsletter.
Permission for Pleasure
Healthy Sexuality After Addiction and Trauma
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Vanessa Carlisle, PhD, MFA joins me to talk about their book co-authored with Stephanie Covington called: Awaken Your Sexuality: A Guide to Connection and Intimacy after Addiction and Trauma. We discuss the prevalence and normalization of substances as a pathway to sexual behavior, and how sexual responses can be filtered and affected through this lens. Vanessa also shares how shame can keep us from using our personal power to find intimacy and a satisfying sex life.
Learn more about Vanessa Carlisle, PhD, MFA
More on this topic:
Slow Pleasure with Euphemia Russell
Sexual shame with Mathias Roberts
Using your senses for pleasure
Pleasure after trauma
Supporting Survivors
ORDER my Book: Permission for Pleasure: Tending Your Sexual Garden
JOIN my Newsletter: Good Education for Good Sex
FOLLOW on Instagram @cindyscharkey
VISIT my website and blog
You have to find new methods for communicating attraction, desire, intent. Where before, maybe you had a couple of drinks and the person was touching you now, and you don't you're not even sure how that happened. But here you are.
SPEAKER_01Hello everyone, and welcome to Permission for Pleasure. I'm Cindy Sharkey, your host. I'm glad you've joined me today for my conversation with Vanessa Carlisle. We're going to discuss themes from the book that they co-authored with Stephanie Covington. It's called Awaken Your Sexuality: A Guide to Connection and Intimacy After Addiction and Trauma. I want to be clear up front here before we even start that if the themes of substance abuse or sexual trauma are activating for you, please take care of yourself as you listen. And friends, here on the podcast, my passion is to grow a learning community. Because we don't get to interact with each other often, it feels a little well one-sided sometimes. It would mean a lot to me to know you're out there listening and learning. And one way you can do that is to rate the show on your listening platform. It's pretty easy. You just press the stars for how much you like the show. If you listen on Apple, I would really appreciate hearing something you've learned in a simple one-line review. Just one sentence like I'm learning about my body and pleasure with Cindy on this show. Or I'm learning to talk about sex with my friends since I listened to this podcast. Or I've learned that interesting and pleasurable sex is sex worth having. Really, just one sentence. I'll be looking for your thoughts and your feedback and your ratings, whether you've been here with me for six years or you're just joining me in the last six months. Thanks, friends. Now, let me introduce you to our guest, Vanessa. Welcome to Permission for Pleasure.
SPEAKER_00Thanks, Cindy. I'm happy to be here.
SPEAKER_01I'm delighted to have you on the show. I would appreciate you sharing with the listeners a little bit about you and your work in the world.
SPEAKER_00Sure. I'm a writer. That's sort of my main trade. I have a PhD in creative writing literature and gender studies. So my work is around gender, queer studies, sex work studies. I've been in the human sexuality field for a long time as a sex worker and also as a researcher and educator. I also teach trauma-informed self-defense, and I'm also a death doula. So I have sort of three pillars to my work. And those are all places where people experience trauma, issues with addiction and substance use, right? So there's sort of a foundation that runs through all of what I do.
SPEAKER_01As I told you before we press record listeners, they reached out to me about their book to talk about that. But oh boy, we could talk about your other two specialties as well, and maybe we'll do that another time. But you co-authored a book with Stephanie Covington called Awaken Your Sexuality: A Guide to Connection and Intimacy After Addiction and Trauma.
SPEAKER_00I did, yes.
SPEAKER_01Why this book now?
SPEAKER_00There's so many reasons to focus outward and not on ourselves right now. There's so many reasons. And we do need to put a lot of our energy toward all the external things, be they political action, taking care of a family, trying to get a job in a difficult economy, right? There's all kinds of things we have to do that are external actions. At the same time, our ability to feel our own bodies, our ability to understand our own feelings, honor our feelings, and have healthy connections with other humans is actually the foundation for all of that. I truly believe that relational work is life-saving, it was for me, and that sexuality is the ground from which a lot of our questions about connection and meaning and pleasure and joy, sexuality is the ground from which a lot of those questions emerge.
SPEAKER_01Well said. And in the book it says women in recovery, since this book is about intimacy and connection after addiction and trauma. One of the quotes I stopped at is that women in recovery almost unanimously express dissatisfaction with their sexual lives. I want to talk a little bit about why this is.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. That quote comes from both Dr. Stephanie Covington, my co-author, her work with women in recovery. She's a um she's a longtime recovery specialist. She was the person who developed women's services at Betty Ford back in the 80s. She's been at this a long time and she's worked with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people. And so that's her observation from doing this work. And I'll say that my work echoes that as well. When we started talking about that issue, that women who are in a recovery process from a substance use issue or an eating disorder or any of the reasons why women might might enter recovery. And I'm including, you know, non-binary people and people who have any kind of affiliation with the word woman. We're going to use it really expansively here. This is trans women, this is this is everybody. But women in recovery have so much difficulty connecting sexually. And that is in part because for women more than men, the overlap of traumatic experience and addiction is very, very large. So it's more likely for a woman in recovery to have a history of trauma. And for many, many women, substance use issues emerge from trauma. They're a way to manage trauma symptoms and the feelings of pain and shame and isolation that come from trauma. So that means that when you start recovering from the addiction or this substance use issue, the issues that were a part of your sexual life are still there. And sometimes they come forward a little louder because you you're feeling your feelings now.
SPEAKER_01Yes. I think what Vanessa and I both want to maybe communicate. We're just saying, like, we see this is an expansive issue, and we see that there are so many who have experienced trauma. And we see you. I mean that's what I want to say. You know, we we see you, and I want to hold space for that in this conversation that it might not all be super easy to listen to, but I hope helpful, helpful to start the conversation perhaps in your own life or with someone else that you care about. And you know what's interesting, as I was reading your pages, there was a part about being sexual. A lot of women, I don't know about men, but a lot of women have not been sexual without the aid of alcohol or substance. And this is a huge concern for people in recovery. However, I hear this from people who I who don't identify as being in recovery or having a problem with alcohol or other other things, but this same, this same statement. Like, well, I've never been sexual without having had three drinks or the aid of weed or you know, whatever it is. It doesn't that is how is that specifically an issue here? Let's talk about that for people coming out of addiction and in recovery, yeah. But then overall, it will hit everyone.
SPEAKER_00It's true for so many people, right? That the normalization of substances as a pathway to sexual behavior, like that's just a cultural thing that we live in. You know, it starts young, right? It's part of college hookup culture, it's part of online dating culture, like it's just it's a huge part of the soup we're in. So it is particularly an issue for people in recovery, of course, because it means you have to develop totally new habits and you have to find new methods for communicating attraction, desire, intent. Where before, maybe you had a couple of drinks and the person was touching you now and you don't you're not even sure how that happened, but here you are, right? And you don't have to cross that threshold as intentionally when you're using substances. But there is a threshold we cross when we go from being in conversation, communication, social situation to sexual with somebody. There's a threshold that gets crossed where the touching begins, where the consent happens. And to get to a place where you're comfortable talking about what you want, letting someone know that you're having attraction for them, desire for them, that you that you're interested. So many people, addiction issues or not, are too uncomfortable and embarrassed to have that conversation without the aid of an something that lowers their attention.
SPEAKER_01Sure.
SPEAKER_00And I think that's a sexual education issue.
SPEAKER_01100%.
SPEAKER_00I do. I think it's sex ed. I think it's general like cultural discomfort with talking about sexuality in a way that's frank and honest. I think it has to do with the way that we are fed, you know, media that shows people just falling into bed without a conversation, kissing each other without asking. Yeah. You know, sure. So there's all kinds of inputs that we're getting, but none of them offer us that blueprint for that conversation of, you know, I'm having a great time with you and I'd like to kiss you, or I'd like to talk about sexual health with you before we go any further. Right. These are things that are just, there's no, there's no math for that.
unknownNo.
SPEAKER_00We're definitely not offered it as young people in our sex ed.
SPEAKER_01So if you're a parent listening, oh I'm you don't get me going, but you know, these are the kinds of conversations we want to be having with our young people around consent, around, you know, how to communicate simply and clearly. You know, I wish so much that this could start so much earlier than it does if it starts at all.
SPEAKER_00So yeah, for sure. There's also the issue for girls, young women, and grown women. There's the issue of not being encouraged to even know what we want, not being encouraged to even feel how we feel. So I'm saying, you know, you got to be able to assert how you feel. Well, I know there's a lot of people out there, especially women, non-binary folks, and people who were raised as girls, where we're sitting there going, I don't even know what that feels like. The only thing I know how to do is respond to someone else expressing attraction towards me. That I know how to do. That I I can figure that out. But that sort of initiating moment or the moment of feeling your own desire or your own attraction, you know, that's also that's really tricky for a lot of women.
SPEAKER_01Yes, yes. We talk about that on the show a lot because I think the other piece to that is with attraction and desire, is a lot of women are sort of trained up to not recognize their own arousal and what that looks like and feels like. And so then it it plays into this big picture that you're describing, which is really problematic. Yeah, that's such a big topic. I wonder, you know, to how do we help people start to do that? I mean, in that in the book, how did you say, like, let's start here?
SPEAKER_00We start with um an exercise that's attuning to your senses. It's not about sex at all, right? It's about learning to notice what you like looking at, learning to notice what smells good to you, really noticing what textures are enjoyable to you, and starting to drop into the sensations of the body. That's one of the exercises in the book. It takes several days, it goes slow, it's not difficult, but we move slowly, especially because people with trauma histories dropping into the body doesn't always feel safe to do. The body isn't necessarily a safe place to be when you have a trauma history. So for many people, this is a restructuring and a rewiring of what is it like for me to really feel a sensation and to notice it and to decide, you know, if I want more of it or not. And it's a very slow practice, it's a quiet practice, it can be a private practice, it can be something you do with a women's group. It doesn't have to be totally private, but that sort of initial sensing and learning to reconnect with the senses, I think is is key. And I do this in my coaching practice, I do it with people who don't have trauma histories, who are just a little disconnected. I do it with people who do have trauma histories. It's like almost all of us could use a few more minutes of noticing our senses, no matter what, you know.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. You and I speak a lot of the same language, so this will be familiar to the listeners. I'm gonna also reference the conversation on the podcast with Euphemia Russell, who talks about this exact slow pleasure and dialing up pleasure through sensation and all right.
SPEAKER_00It's a beautiful book. Beautiful. It's a beautiful book. We reference it and awaken your sexuality.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, they really gave a lot of practical tools in that episode, so I'll reference that for ways to get started. And I just wonder, too, if we want to just call out loud that, you know, I think everybody wants an easy button. We all do. We think it's gonna be an easy, like you said, it's not fast, it's slow. And everything that you want to investigate and think about and learn so often is gonna start outside of sex. What do you think about that?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think that's really true. And I think there's sort of a commitment that someone has to make to sexual recovery, you know, in the same way that if you commit to quitting alcohol, whether you're doing meetings or not, right? You make a commitment and you have to keep it. You have to keep it every day. And some days are harder than others. Sexual recovery has the same kind of pathway. So you don't just decide one day, I want to feel better about this. What do I need to do? And you watch one video and you're good. You know, that's not how it works. And there's not really a pill to take to fix it. It has to be a commitment. You you have to be willing to sort of sink into a process and become curious about what emerges from that process. And, you know, I say this and it's like, oh, wait, that's good sex too. That's actually how good sex functions is you're not goal-oriented, you sink into a process and you start sort of seeing what emerges and and being interested in what you see and what you find in the present moment, right? That's how we get there. And so it's very frustrating for people when they're like, give me the end goal. Yes. And I'm like, I, you know, no. Sure, it doesn't work. It doesn't work that way. Yeah. You know, I you can't hand someone an easy orgasm if they've never had one before. And you can't hand someone easy sober sex if they've never had it before.
SPEAKER_01Well, and you brought up uh one of you brought up in the book, I remember it stopped me. There was that circle back to this idea of sex ed early and how many people in adolescence, you know, and then into maybe college age or that eight young adulthood, and they're using substances and drinking, never really getting a chance to understand themselves sexually, just like you framed out earlier in our conversation, and they're only filtered through the substances you were saying. And so they may have to go through you called it sexual, you all called it sexual development later in life. I liked this idea of calling this out and being clear and saying, if you never did it here, back here, you know, even though it doesn't feel great, we've got to do it at some point. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00The part that doesn't feel great is the embarrassment, is the social expectation that you're gonna be farther along somehow in your development. That's the part that doesn't feel great. I think the the part that feels really good is when you start actually connecting with your body and what your body wants and starting to understand, you know, your desires and preferences and attractions, or maybe lack thereof. You know, for some people, this investigation reveals asexuality or demisexuality. I want to be careful about how I talk about this because you know, to be inclusive, we have to recognize that for some people, dropping in and trying to sense these things, what they find is it's not really for me, you know. But for most people, what's gonna happen is a sense of reconnection with pleasure. That feels good, but you have to kind of get over the pride issue or the or the disappointment. There's a little bit of a rankling, you know, or you get a little humbled, and you kind of have to do that. And then you find, oh, once I've given up on this expectation about being a certain way, now the world has opened up to me. And now my body is starting to respond.
SPEAKER_01Yes. And along those lines, you know, the blame, shame, and guilt issue is problem mindset, all of us. It, you know, it's just so prevalent related to everything and especially sexuality. I really appreciated this section in the book because it comes up so regularly with my clients too, and women I meet with. And I just would like to kind of have you frame out a little bit around this topic. It's a huge topic, but I think in the book you said recovery can keep ourselves from using our personal power in a lot of ways. And then you had three of the most common. Could I just you maybe you know them by heart, but I could also list them because I I pulled them up. But living in constant self-punishment for our destructive behavior in the past. Just that constant self-punishment that we, that critical voice in our head is just it's so loud for people. And it in itself can be so destructive, along with how we feel about our past.
SPEAKER_00Agreed.
SPEAKER_01Let's just pause there before we go on to the other ones. So I give you a chance to say anything you want to say about that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think you know, for those of us who've been through addiction, you can spend your whole life in atonement, and in some way you do. But there is a point where there's uh an acceptance. You have to you have to accept what you've done, you have to accept the mistakes you've made and the hurt you've caused, you have to be able to be willing to interact over it with people who want an apology or want to process it more with you. And you have to recognize the difference between accountability and punishment. Because punishment, you know, we have decades and decades of social science telling us punishment actually doesn't work that well in the long term. It can dissuade behavior in the short term, but long term people don't learn from being punished. And they don't grow and they and they become harmed ultimately. So that's not what we're going for when we think about apology or reconciliation or accountability. Accountability is about standing in the truth of what happened and also having integrity in the present and being able to care for yourself in the present, knowing that whatever it is you do going forward, you have control over. You're in charge now. And sexually, what that means is knowing that if you've had destructive behaviors in the past, that you can work with that material to make It's right to the best of your ability in the places where you can't make it right to do your grieving and your processing, and that from now on you are making choices and you're standing in a different level of integrity around who touches you and when, who you touch and when, and that you're making choices around that that have mutual pleasure at the center, that have respect and care at the center, right? Your values start to be really present in your sexual life. That's accountability.
SPEAKER_01Appreciate that. The next one is taking blame or inappropriate responsibility for abuse that we endured. This is so so prevalent, too.
SPEAKER_00So if the first thing is about I'm punishing myself because I know I caused harm, right? We think we deserve that. And we'll go with that forever. That one's really tricky. The next one is someone caused harm to me, and I keep thinking about how I invited it, I participated in it, I allowed it, right? And so we become overly invested in the behavior of another person because we think we could we could have controlled it, we could have stopped them, or we could have uh, you know, we could have, we could have made it better in some way. And it's a very common coping mechanism when you've been hurt, victimized, whatever word we want, especially for sexual trauma. And one of the reasons why it's especially true for sexual trauma is because of a thing called arousal nonconcordance, where the right, where the body responds, even if the emotions are saying no, the body might still respond just because something sexual is happening. If you've survived a sexual trauma and you have conflicted feelings about it, that's absolutely normal. But having a lot of shame about it can can weigh you down going forward, especially if you if you take more responsibility for it than you should. The other person caused the harm. If the other person did a behavior that crossed your boundaries, if the other person did a behavior without your consent, that is their responsibility. And I feel like because of how murky things get in sexual situations, it's very common for women and people who've been raised as girls to take on responsibility for the other person's behavior. I mean, we're taught all day long to be responsible for the men around us, you know. So we have a lot, I think a lot of gender training around thinking that whatever happens to us was totally our fault.
SPEAKER_01Let's use an example. I'm thinking of a consult of mine in a situation of date rape and where you there's just this constant taking of responsibility. Well, I drank at the party, or you know, this, I wore that, or I said I wanted to, you know, go up to their room. I just thought we were gonna kiss and make out. And you know, I'm just I'm being I'm not trying to be flippant, I'm just trying to say, like, here's one example, uh, just if to kind of uh give framework to this, where then someone takes responsibility for what was done to them that there was not they did not choose, yeah.
SPEAKER_00There's a woman uh in the book who's profiled in the book, her name is Michelle in the book, and she has a similar situation. She got assaulted at work, and one of part of the process she goes through is feeling guilt and uh shame and responsibility because she flirted back with somebody and she felt like I led him on. I never actually said no to him. And so, how would he know that I didn't want him to do these things if I flirted you know a little bit here and there and I never told him no? I avoided him, it was a little bit creepy, but I never told him no. And so for her, that was like a sort of obsessional moment of just like I never said no, I never said no. And you know, it's it's very difficult to arrive at the moment where you say, Oh, I never said yes. That person wasn't reading my body cues at all and also never got consent from me. And that's on him.
SPEAKER_01Thanks for sharing that. Yeah, the third one goes along these lines of identifying with our shame more than our curiosity or pleasure. Well, I have a lot of feeling about that. I think that so many of us lean towards that. We lean towards the shame rather than curiosity or pleasure. I appreciate it this context uh that we're talking about because this podcast is so much about giving permission for pleasure and being curious and you know, permission to be delighted. And and yet if we identify with our shame I'm just thinking, I'm I'm just working this out as we're sitting here, so this isn't really uh it's just like when we identify more with our shame, it becomes really difficult to pursue curiosity and pleasure.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. They're antithetical, they don't work at the same time. Now, you can bounce back and forth between them pretty quickly, and I think that's actually what most people do. Is they have a feeling of shame about their body and they turn the light off and try to put it out of their mind. They have a feeling of, you know, shame about their level of experience, and so they go a little faster and try to put it out of their mind, right? I think people actually toggle between shame and the pursuit of pleasure a lot, but they don't work at the same time. And you can't be fully curious about your own body or about your partners if you're also trying to hold on to a lot of shame about your body, about your sexuality, about your gender, about your performance, about your smells, about your sounds, right? Any of the things. So when we over-identify with those things and we feel anxiety about those things, and we feel we feel alone in those things, that's the other thing that's sort of mind-blowing to me is how alone people feel in these experiences that are massively common, right? Something that many other people are going through, but you experience it as just you by yourself. That is the power of shame. That's how powerful it is, is that it will convince us we're the only one in this moment. It's amazing how powerful of an influence it is internally. So when we identify with the shame more than with our desire to experience things and learn about our own responses and, you know, try something new with somebody. When we're identifying with our shame more than any of those other things, our sexual life becomes very constricted. We might still be having sex, but we're having probably the same sex. Or we're having, you know, we're we're following a script that feels safe. Or we're not ever talking about it, or whatever, right? It it for there's lots of ways that can show up, but it but it constricts the sexual experience a great deal.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's a very small box.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And it makes it not as fun.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_00It's just not as fun. It's like, oh, that's kind of a scary thing that I just have to get done.
SPEAKER_01I'm gonna reference in the show notes my conversation with Matthias Roberts, all on shame listeners, if you're wanting a more you know, a deeper dive here, because I'm gonna move us into the shoulds of shame. I just feel like people, let's say some of these out loud, Vanessa, because like you said, people feel alone and like it's only them. It is not guaranteed. And so I wonder if we called out a few of these. You had several should statements in the book. I really appreciated this because it helps people enter in and say, oh, it's not just me. I'm not the only one who thinks I should want more or less sex.
SPEAKER_00Right. I've been in recovery for a while. I should be further along. I should be in some other place.
SPEAKER_01You also the one other one in the book I want to mention is my sexual assault wasn't really violent. So I shouldn't have so much trouble with sex. I'm just like listeners, I have my hand over my heart right now. Just these kind of shame statements, or even in the another one you all had was it's been years since my trauma happened, and I should be over it by now. I just really think, you know, there's so much shoulding of ourselves. We've talked about this critical voice in our head, punishing voice in our head, the shame and uh these shoulds. Do we all see the the soup here, as you so well said, Vanessa?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I think we become so uh uh uh accustomed to thinking this way and feeling this way, it's hard to see it. And that's actually why we use the word awaken for this book is because it's not about I I mean, we there's lots of other words we could use. Cultivate is a good one, nourish is a beautiful one. You know, there's lots of words to use, but sometimes you are awakening to something that's been like an engine that's been running this whole time, right? That you just didn't hear it, you didn't hear it because it was it was the white noise of your life. And for especially for trauma survivors, self-hatred and shame are the white noise of our life. We don't even notice that it's happening, it's just part of life. Other people may not even know what we're carrying because it's not visible to them, you know. It's just part of the, it's just part of the deal. It's just like, oh, I didn't even know there was another way to feel. And so that awakening of recognizing that, you know, oh, I can I can peel back these layers and I can get closer to a sense of my authentic self and I can kind of like them. Like, oh, that that's actually a person I I like. I would spend time with them. You know, that's like a whole, that's just a huge, that's a huge transition in a healing process. And so I think that's a you know, that is an awakening. Shame is just like this, you know, it's a dampening force. It's heavy, it muffles things, it makes it difficult to really hear or see other people. If you're feeling a ton of shame, everything comes through the scrim of that shame. And like I said, we bounce back and forth trying to feel something else. You know, sure. We're in the shame, we're trying to feel something else. We're in the shame, we're trying to feel something else. But when you start actually peeling back that shame and recognizing that it doesn't, you don't need it and it doesn't really belong to you. Some of it belongs to your culture, some of it belongs to your abuser, some of it belongs to you. You know, some of it belongs to your lineage, your you're you've been passed down a bunch of shame from the women in your family, right? There's all kinds of ways we come up with it. It's insidious and it's constant. And so you have to be in relationship with it and aware of it in order to continuously clear it out. It's like dusting. It's like you have to, you actually do have to dust the things or they get covered in dust. You know, there's an entropy to shame. It's just happening.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I like this, the way you're describing, you know, some different ways you're describing this might help different people, you know, hear it and recognize it in different ways. So I really appreciate that, Vanessa. Sometimes with the language we give, you know, somebody will say white noise. Uh-huh. White noise. It's white, you know, somebody will say dust. It's just covering every whatever it is for people. I appreciate that language because it does help us recognize what's there in a way that we can understand and then maybe work with. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Thanks. Thanks for letting me bounce around some metaphors. Yeah. It's helpful to me to try to get at it the the way that shame feels in all my senses. That's that's what's happening, is I'm sort of thinking through my senses. What does it look like? What does it smell like? What does it sound like when I'm feeling shame?
SPEAKER_01So there we go. Back to the beginning of using our senses with intention. And we talk about that a lot on this show in relation to delight and pleasure and sensation. And now we are bringing it into this conversation of shame and recovery as beautiful and new. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. Is there something you really want to share from the book that maybe we haven't touched on that you feel is so critical to for people to hear? I'd like to give you the opportunity to do that.
SPEAKER_00Well, I'll say there's a for people who find the main text sort of like chunky, it's a chunk of a book. She's she's got girth, and we love that for her. There's a workbook. And so there's actually another way in to the material. So that's just one thing I want to make sure I mention because I love a workbook. So, you know, so we made one. And I think the workbook has a lot of room to reflect on the questions that we're bringing up today. The main text has a lot more of the people. So you're following a lot more of their stories in the main text. Um, so that's just one thing I'd like to mention. But from the from the material, I'll say one of the main messages that we come back to and come back to is it is possible for you to face what is unknown or painful about your own sexuality and grow into a new loving relationship with this part of yourself at any time. That I don't know that I believed that some years ago in sort of the darker parts of my trauma symptoms. And hearing that from someone who had been there was really important for me. I needed someone to hold that faith for me when I wasn't really feeling it. I really believed like maybe I'm too far gone.
SPEAKER_02Yes.
SPEAKER_00And I so I I speak this possibility to people because you do, you don't have to hold it yourself, but other people who have been there and who have walked this road believe it for you. There's a community around, you know, there's a community around. And even though sexuality is something that we do pretty privately, most of us, not me, but most people do it very privately. It's also something that you can share in community with like-minded people, with people who are close to you. It's a way that you can grow. You don't have to do it alone. Whatever it is you're doing, you're not doing it alone. There's definitely other people who are experiencing something similar. You might be rare, but you're not alone.
SPEAKER_01What a beautiful way to wrap up this conversation with that hope and your confidence in that hope, Vanessa. That's beautiful. Thanks so much for being with us and sharing your work in the world.
SPEAKER_00Thank you.
SPEAKER_01How will people find you if they're listening?
SPEAKER_00I am easy to find. My name is Vanessa Carlisle, and that is the name for my website. I'm Vanessa Carlisle on Instagram. I have a sub stack if you want to be on my newsletter and see what I'm up to. Yeah, V-A-N-E-S-S-A, and my last name is Carlisle C A R L I S L E. I'd love to be in touch.
SPEAKER_01Lovely. On this podcast, we well, we do different things, but I think this season now we're going to move into sharing a delight like we always do, but this time it's going to be a gentle pleasure. My community knows I'm grieving, so my word is gentle for myself. And I wonder if there's a gentle pleasure that's delighting you these days.
SPEAKER_00That's lovely. Again, uh, first just send some solidarity to your grief.
SPEAKER_01Thank you.
SPEAKER_00And I have I live in a place that's very dry, and so I'm in continual experiments to find the perfect hand lotion.
SPEAKER_02Hmm.
SPEAKER_00And I found a very expensive but lovely one that I really, I, I really, really like. And so yeah, several times a day I'm enjoying the sensation of replenishing my my epidermis.
SPEAKER_01I like that word picture again. Thanks for sharing that. I hope people will find your book and this hope that you're offering through its pages and workbook. Thanks again for joining us.
SPEAKER_00Thank you so much. The I'll just say the title of the book again, also since we have it for a minute. It's Awaken Your Sexuality: a Guide to Connection and Intimacy After Addiction and Trauma. And it should be easy to find. Thank you so much for having me.
SPEAKER_01I enjoyed talking with you and listeners as we wrap up. That is my hope that you will each awaken your sexuality in whatever space you find yourself. Certainly, as you give yourself permission for pleasure.
