Healing my Fractured Relationship to Pleasure
A brief history of how I went from a good Mormon girl to self-actualized Sex Coach.
I grew up in a conservative Mormon household. During this time, I learned a lot of healthy things for a child, like how to say no to drugs and suspicious men with candy. Aaand several things that I could have skipped and been fine without, such as…
Sex outside of marriage is a sin just below murder.
Masturbation was its cousin in crime. (What do you expect? The root of the word literally means to defile.)
As a young girl I was already keenly aware of how good my body felt when I touched it in a certain way. I also knew what the scriptures said about adulterers and fornicators, so I learned early on to divorce myself from desire.
Even though I believed it was wrong, that didn’t stop me from exploring it.
When I was a teenager, I would sit in a private room with an older man from my community, and talk about sex.
Welcome to confession.
If it sounds disturbing, it was. I didn't realize how damaging it was at the time. I was trying my best to be a good Mormon girl. Confessing your sins to someone in authority was an important part of the repentance process.
Subtext: there-is-no-authority-in-you.
I confessed things that were an entirely normal and natural part of adolescent development.
Conveniently no one told me this until much later on.
In my early 30s I began to unravel this thread and see how damaging it had been.
Part of my reclamation journey of my sensual embodiment has been to cultivate a pleasure practice.
In a surprising plot twist, the very thing that was off limits to me became the medicine. It became a tool to gently unravel the old stories.
Masturbation is very last century. Instead, meet pleasure practice!
Here are six tangible reasons to reclaim your personal pleasure:
Self pleasure is a healthy way to develop an awareness of what you enjoy. What you like is unique and evolves.
When you are with a partner you have a self knowing of your preferences and can show or ask for what you want.