Let's Talk About Sex

Summary

In this episode of the Catapult Effect Podcast, host Katie Wrigley delves into the complex relationship individuals have with sex, exploring the pervasive shame surrounding it and how it affects personal experiences. She discusses the importance of understanding one's own relationship with sex, the impact of trauma, and the journey of self-discovery through periods of abstinence. 

Katie emphasizes the need for honesty and communication in relationships, as well as the significance of building confidence and discernment when navigating intimacy.

Takeaways

• Trauma can significantly impact one's sexual outlook and experiences.
• Abstinence can lead to deeper self-discovery and healing.
• Honesty and communication are key to healthy sexual relationships.
• Confidence in oneself can lead to better relationship choices.
• Self-reflection is essential for understanding sexual desires and boundaries.
• Prioritizing personal healing can improve future sexual relationships.

Credit: Tom Giovingo, Intro & Outro, Random Voice Guy, Professional ‘Cat‘ Herder

Mixed & Managed: JohnRavenscraft.com

Disclaimer: Katie is not a medical professional and she is not qualified to diagnose any conditions. The advice and information she gives is based on her own experience and research. It does not take the place of medical advice. Always consult a medical professional first before you try anything new.

Transcript

Welcome back to the Catapult Effect Podcast. I am your host, Katie Wrigley. Today, we're gonna be talking about sex. Yup, I said it. I've been giving a lot of thought into what you really need and this idea that I've noticed coming up, there's so much shame around sex and it's ruining it. So that's what we're gonna talk about today. Stay tuned, I will be right back and we're gonna dive in.

Thank you again for joining me. So like I said, today we're going to talk about sex. So this idea came to me because I'm constantly in my mind wondering, okay, what do you need right now? What can I do? What can I say that's going to help you with where you are? And one of the things, and we see this outside the United States too, but I also know from people who've grown up in other countries that Americans tend to be a little uptight about sex.

Take that statement however you want. But we are not the most lenient country when it comes to sex. There's others that are much more uptight than we are, but then there's others that are so much more liberal. But as I started to look at it, looking back at my own history with sex, and by the way, mom and dad, if you are listening, I love you and this is not the episode for you. I just wanted to put that out there before I went any deeper. Mom and dad, if you're listening, please stop.

There's lots of other episodes that are not going to go into this area of my life that you'll be more comfortable with. All right, back to the podcast on there. So the first thing I want to invite you to do is to look at what is your relationship with sex now? Do you have a partner? Do you have multiple partners? But just notice what is your relationship now? Does it feel healthy or unhealthy? And how can you tell? So whenever you are having sex, if you are feeling good,

and it's you feel good after and that's also including after the post-coital bliss has faded. If this is something that continues to add value it's probably safe to say you have a healthy relationship with sex but if you're constantly feeling bad or feeling let down or wondering why did I sleep with that person then you may not have the healthiest relationship with sex and that's something

Katie Wrigley (02:28.9)
that you can now do something about because we can bring awareness to it through this episode, through your own exercises in there so that you can start to take action and start to shift your relationship with sex so that it's something that's more enjoyable to you. You don't have to be in a relationship to have sex and everybody has a different comfort level with their sexuality, with their body, whether they want a partner, whether they want monogamy, whether they want polyamory.

And I want to encourage you to start to really explore what seems interesting to you in sex. What lights you up and makes you really want to get curious when you think about it. If you're in a monogamous relationship, are you wondering what it would be like to be in a polyamorous relationship? If you're in a polyamorous relationship, does any part of you want monogamy? And I'm not trying to change anyone's mind. I just want you to open up and start to explore for yourself.

Because when you can turn on that curiosity, you're gonna be turning off the shame and the judgment. Because you're gonna be focused more on what you want versus judging yourself for anything that you're doing. Some of the questions to ask yourself, and I'm gonna touch on my own story here just to help you see some examples, but are you using sex as a tool? Like I know firsthand that in a relationship,

Throwing sex out there is a really good way to end an argument when you need to. That's not usually my preferred method, just so you know. But it can be a tool. It can be something that helps you stay together during tough times in your relationship. It can be the glue that holds you together when nothing else feels like it's working right as you get through this time where you're not as connected. It can help you get back to further connection.

It can also be something that you're using to escape, which is something that I personally did. When you have had early childhood trauma, this can really impact your sexual outlook, especially if it is trauma of a physical nature. While part of me has always enjoyed sex on a physical part, I have had a really complex relationship with it in large part because of that trauma that I endured when I was a little girl.

Katie Wrigley (04:50.764)
Now we have seen multiple times with people who have either been raped or they have been abused as younger people, we find that they start to use, they start to become more promiscuous and understand I'm saying this was zero judgment because I wasn't one of them. This is something, it seems counterintuitive, why would you want to become promiscuous when someone has used this part of you against you? Well,

One of the things it does is it puts you in the driver's seat so you feel like you're in control of who you do or don't sleep with. And when someone has taken away that choice from you and they have violated your body, whether once or repeatedly, having that control back can be really, really important and understanding that it is your decision. But when someone has taken that decision away from you and they have taken your body without permission,

and they have violated you in the most intimate way, it is going to fuck with your head, period. And it is going to change your outlook on sex. And you are the person that I am talking to today because again, first hand, sex may not be my wheelhouse as far as what I specialize in day in, day out, but the pain around sex, the pain with sex, the shame around sex, those are all things.

that are within my wheelhouse and I thought it was really important to start to get more personal and bring some of these topics to light because no one talks about them. No one talks about the shame of using your body to help overcome the trauma of being physically violated in a sexual way. No one talks about the shame of not having sex for years either because that's what's happening in your marriage or maybe you chose.

not to have sex or maybe it didn't feel like a choice and you would love to have sex but it just seems like it continues to elude you and you can't find a partner. These are all things that I don't hear discussed very often that I want to bring in to this episode today. And the piece that I'm going to continue to focus on is how trauma impacts your ability to look at health in a healthy way, in a fun way.

Katie Wrigley (07:06.284)
in a way that is going to derive the pleasure that it is supposed to be about. That is one of the cool things we get as humans. All animals, well not all, most animals, I'm thinking of earthworms, they actually don't need to, don't ask me why that came to mind, but most animals have sex in order to reproduce. It's just part of it. As humans, we actually get to enjoy the process too. So it's not always just for procreation, sometimes we just wanna get down on a Friday, Saturday night, or maybe even a Tuesday.

It's going to be so much easier to do that when you can get clear on what you want, you clear out the shame that is attached to it, and you are more clear on what you desire for yourself.

Whenever there's going to be shame involved in sex, and we see a lot of shaming coming from religious institutions as well, it's going to be dampening that experience. It's going to be taking something from you, and it's going to be taking something from your partner. Like I'm thinking back to some of the funnier episodes on sex in the city. And even though obviously it's a fiction and a drama, there was one of the episodes where I think it was Miranda was sleeping with someone who had a Catholic upbringing and he had to shower.

after they had sex and they were starting to really mess with Miranda's head. And when she said something to him about it, he got super defensive. That episode is a great example of what it looks like when someone has a very active shame pattern around sex. You have to clean up afterwards and you can't talk about it. And a lot of times, like, you aren't even supposed to be looking at the body parts, but yet sex is what we put out there in marketing to help sell. So it's already...

creating a complex conundrum within society, regardless of what your own personal feelings are around this.

Katie Wrigley (08:57.06)
So I want to go into before I go into my my own story here to help it be relatable to you as I also want to say is do you think it's saying anything about you if you don't have an active sex life right now? Is it making you feel like you're less than someone else who does and if so I really encourage you to explore that and see why.

or what is making you think you aren't as good as someone else that's getting sex on the regular. Because I can tell you it's not your looks, it's not your weight, it is your mindset. Because we see people of all shapes, sizes, walks of life, everything, they are capable of having sex. So it is not you or anything that is wrong with you.

But there is something on the way that you are viewing sex that is keeping you from being able to have more of that in your life. It's keeping you from bringing in a partner if that's what you're looking for or partners if you know that you want to be in a more polyamorous kind of open relationship. There are so many different ways that you can explore and define this for yourself and I really want to encourage you to get creative. You only have this one life to live. As long as you're being safe and you're being honest.

There's nothing wrong. And of course, as part of that safe and honesty, you are making sure that these are consenting adults only who are involved in these activities. So just want to get clear on that. We want to be safe. We want to communicate clearly. We want to be honest. We want to be very honest, especially if we're doing ethical non-monogamy and absolutely needs to be consenting adults. We're not going to talk about anything other than that. So as we're talking about this discussion, just to be clear,

These are the people we're talking about. So this is where I wanted to share a little bit of my personal story because all of those questions that I just threw out there, those are questions that I've asked myself. And when I look back over my history, when I was first disabled in 2018, I chose to take a year off from dating and I was white-knuckling it. In part because I gave up men, meat and alcohol all at the same time. Meat and men did not stick.

Katie Wrigley (11:21.304)
alcohol did, but it was a little bit too much to give up at once and so, whoops, had a couple backslides. But I did actually manage to go a whole year without sex. I did not take that time to dig into any of my motives around sex, any of the things that I really liked or didn't like. And I got a long list of stuff I don't like because I was promiscuous for a long time and it taught me a lot. Get into that in a moment. But that year that I took off,

I didn't really touch any of the stuff that had been impacted in my interpersonal romantic relationships. I hadn't gotten to that level of healing yet. So what happened when I went back out into dating is I did the same thing and I rushed into sex too quickly for me. Now again, this is not saying anything about when you choose to have sex, but for me, I know that I need a long trajectory and I want to know the person before I sleep with them.

And I know that I no longer want to have sex outside of a committed monogamous relationship. That is not the way that I've always lived, but that is absolutely without a doubt what I want for myself now. But just taking that break, and that was 2018-2019, all it did was teach me how to help myself on my own when there was no one else around to...

to a much better degree, which is by the way, never a bad thing. But it didn't help me to take anything and create a healthier sex life for myself. My sex life has always been fun, even in the times when it wasn't. There's always been an element of fun to it, but I didn't take anything for it to be able to continue that fun. And so I continued to learn those lessons. I was with people who didn't have my best interests at heart.

And then I took another break that wasn't super intentional. And again, now this time I was doing more healing. And then I was ready to have a relationship and my last relationship lasted about a year and a half. Someone who wasn't really energetically in alignment with me. Great person for someone else, but for me, we just didn't mesh. And again, I hadn't done deeper work. So after that year and a half relationship ended,

Katie Wrigley (13:47.17)
I really took it seriously. It's like, okay, I'm not fucking around anymore. I'm tired of going back into the dating pool. I'm tired of being on this roller coaster, these ups and downs of my sex life with my dating life. I'm done. And so I have just in the past, I think two months have started to dip my toe back into the dating pool. I've been single for almost two years, which means that I have been abstaining from sex for almost

two years. This is something that has not been super difficult. Now I do want to say sometimes again I think of Sex in the City and a quote Carrie Bradshaw said one time of I just need to feel the weight of a man over me. There are times because I am heterosexual that that is absolutely what I want. If you're a woman and you like other women you may want to feel the weight of a woman on you. It's going to be different for everybody. Of course

I'm going to have urges just like every other human on earth. But here is what this is giving me, this period of abstinence. One, it gave me this space to really do that deeper healing that I needed to do so that I can show up as the person capable of having a long-term relationship. Throughout these breaks that I've taken, I've gotten very clear on the type of relationship I want, what I want the relationship to look like, the dynamics of it, how much independence we have.

I have been looking at all of those things and I now know exactly what I want. And it's given me the patience and the discernment that is going to keep me from jumping into bed with someone before I'm actually ready to. So one of my prior motivations for sex and a lot of people's prior motivations for sex is that it's so much easier to hop into bed than it is to let someone get to know you.

It's much easier sometimes to let someone see you physically naked versus emotionally naked. And that was a huge driver behind my promiscuity because part of what I used to need before I took this break was I needed that validation. Having sex with a lot of different men or a lot of different men wanting to have sex with me made me feel like I was sexy. It made me feel like I was worth something.

Katie Wrigley (16:13.036)
It made me feel like I was desirable. Now the flip side of that is because it was just empty sex, it was actually doing more damage to me because the way that I'm wired, again, everybody's different. So please don't apply what's happened to me to you unless you really feel like it fits. Everybody responds to sex differently. I'm actually kind of a prude as it turns out, which is not a word that would have applied to me for a long time. I only want to share my body with someone that I'm starting to fall for.

who has taken the time to get to know me over months. Whether they're having their needs met somewhere else, I don't really care. As long as they have the patience to get to know me as I am before they're trying to get to know my body, that's what I'm looking for right now. I know exactly what I want and I now have the tools and the skills to be able to bring that into my life. I would not be able to have those skills had I not taken this break and looked back and analyzed my old behavior.

So there were multiple times in my promiscuous days where I would suddenly realize that I was hanging out with two, three, maybe four. I hate the numbers. But I had slept with every single one of them. And it was awful. And there was one day in particular when I was at the drop zone. And I had actually, for a long time in skydiving, I had kept that to the side and I did not shit where I ate. But then I did pee a little bit in my playground.

Just a little bit. But there was one day, I was at a different drop zone, and someone that I was sleeping with came with me. They actually came into town to see me and we're gonna go jump together. And then we ran into not one, but two other men that I had slept with. And now the person who had come in from out of town, I'd actually been super transparent with him. So he knew exactly who I was, he knew my partners, et cetera, et cetera. So he actually thought it was absolutely hilarious. I was horrified.

The other two men that were there had no idea. One of them I didn't really interact with much. But the other one, when he actually hugged me, he propositioned me again and said, you know, hey, anytime you want to go for another role in the, hey, I'm up for it. Suffice it to say that wasn't the most appealing invitation, not just because I already had someone with me that I had an actual sex life with, but it just wasn't that great of a night in general. I'm digressing. The way that I felt though,

Katie Wrigley (18:43.086)
from having multiple partners in front of me. That's not a way I want to feel. I felt kind of gross. And now I've never had an STD. I've never had a venereal disease. A lot of people do, and that adds to the shame. And there isn't any shame around it. All you need to do is let people know what is going on with you. And if you are not comfortable to own that story, maybe don't have sex with them until you are. That may be a really telling mark for you.

of when it's time for you to get into bed if you have had happen to have contracted an STD especially if it's one that's permanent that you can't get rid of like herpes or HIV or Hepatitis. Those are ones that can stick with you for life. There's no shame around those. You had sex just like everybody else and in your case you happen to also get a virus that may or may not go away. I always hold out hope that there's gonna be different cures because we see this all the time.

and mindset can be a huge cure for you as well. But letting go of that shame, giving yourself that space and noticing and me realizing how gross I felt to be around multiple partners at a time, that was telling for me. Now it doesn't mean that I stopped doing that behavior right away. Quite the opposite.

But I needed that external validation so much. And so even though it made me feel gross, it also made me feel like I was kind of cool. So there was this constant paradox going on in my head, which was not very much fun.

This period of abstinence that I've been in has been one of the best things that I've done for myself because I am at the layers of healing. Like I said, now I can bring in the relationship I want and the next person I have sex with, there's a good shot. I get to have that be the last person I have sex with because that's where I am in my life. That's what I want for me. And again, I want to encourage you to find what works for you. If you're not done trying on a whole bunch of different partners yet, then by all means, go out there and keep trying them on.

Katie Wrigley (20:51.662)
The only thing I ask is that you be safe, you be honest with yourself, and you be honest with any partners that you are sleeping with. Don't let your desire for someone override your integrity and keep something from them. It's not fair to that person. You want to let them decide to have sex with you with the relevant information on the table.

They don't need to know your entire history. They don't need to know the numbers game. In fact, I don't think that's a conversation anybody should ever have because the chance of your partner having the number of people that you think that they should have for their skill set is slim to none. So I don't see any advantage of having the numbers game, but are you healthy? Yes or no? And to what degree that is an important conversation to have. What are the likes and dislikes as you start to get more comfortable with someone?

What do you like and dislike in bed? How comfortable are you to explore new things? Do you have a kinky side? Do you have any fetishes? Being able to have those conversations and open that door, that's going to help increase and improve your sex life. Honesty is going to be the key of it there. And it starts with you being honest with yourself and letting go about any negative feelings you may have over your own actions and your own history in there.

One of the other pieces that keeping my body to myself has taught me is the importance of energy and how much energy I'm giving to someone else when I allow them to share my body like that. And the last person that I had dated, like I mentioned, I had a really early sign that we weren't incompatible, but for other reasons that were more important at the time, I kept going. But this person showed a dip in integrity because they chose

to have sex with me before I knew the whole picture. And the whole picture was that within a couple of weeks after we had sex, they were actually gonna be leaving for six months. Would have been useful information. Now in my case, I was so desperate at that time. This was after another long break, that it would not have impacted the outcome. I still wanted to have sex with that person really, really bad.

Katie Wrigley (23:07.768)
But that actually showed me a lot about that person that came out to be really important. So notice what people are sharing about themselves before you have sex with them, because it's going to be indicative of who they are as a person on a much broader scale than just their sex life.

Katie Wrigley (23:25.678)
The last thing that abstinence has been giving me is I am now incredibly discerning about who I spend time with. So I've done online dating multiple times. As I've talked about in other episodes, because of the trauma, I had not been successful in long-term relationships because I hadn't yet healed it enough to gain the tools required to have a healthy long-term relationship, one that can last for life. I didn't have the tools until recently.

And that discernment has been really important. And so I've gone into online dating much more differently this time than I ever did in the past. And I am happy to say that I am actually really enjoying it. It has been the slowest ramp, for lack of a better term, that I've ever had. I've only gone out with two men in the last couple of months, had conversations with tons, but I've only gone out with two men in the last couple of months.

There's a third that I may go out with, but I'm really taking my time and noticing, they taking time to get to know me? Or are they just reacting to how I look? Are they hearing what I say? Like I'm really using this as an opportunity to start to gauge people's character because they're showing you who they are right out of the gate. Like for instance, a lot of people don't read profiles. I'm actually gonna read someone's profile before I reach out to them because it's not their face.

that's gonna keep me entertained for the rest of my life, it's gonna be their character. That is gonna be someone who either enhances my life or takes away from it. And I'm not interested in having anybody take away from my life. My life's amazing. So anybody who comes into it has to be able to enhance it. And so I read people's profiles before I match with them. And one of the things that I put in my profile is I know my schedule, I know my life.

And unless you're in a one hour radius, this isn't gonna work. And I have guys hitting me up from Virginia. I'm in Maine, by the way. Virginia, Massachusetts, New York, Maryland. huh? So I'm not gonna match with them. I had someone else just lay out all of their dating angst that they had ever gone across and the guy actually came across really interesting and then he kept talking.

Katie Wrigley (25:48.634)
And I was like, holy cow, like, okay, dude, like, good luck. And you actually have a lot of work that would help you to do before you're ready for a relationship. I didn't say that to him, but I just kind of went, wow, okay, that was a little bit of oversharing and good luck to you. We're not a match. And that can be tough, I, that discernment, it's giving me everything that I've needed.

And it's allowing me to have that patience because I am so okay on my own. And this is something else that has been a huge gift from abstinence is my confidence in myself and who I am as a person. And my awareness of what I bring to the table is so high that I'm not going to settle again. I'm not going to choose someone who is not in alignment with me. And I'm going to continue to progress.

Slowly with people and monitor how it feels as we progress and if it doesn't feel right I'm gonna sever that tie as soon as I know that it's something that's not gonna work. That's not an alignment. I never had that patience before Like I I joke to some of my friends that I used to bleed with my pussy because I did Because hey if you're having sex with me then all of this stuff up here everything in my head and everything in my heart You're not gonna be nearly as interested in this because I can just keep

pushing my body to you and you're not gonna notice my heart or my head so much. And that worked really well. There were always men, always people who wanted to get in deeper and I would make sure that I would do something to blow it up. Not consciously of course, but I wasn't comfortable being seen. It was so much easier to just let them physically see me than to let them see into my heart because I was so insecure with who I was and I was so not clear.

what I brought to the table. All right so your action item from this episode if you choose to take it is one look at your relationship with sex. How does it feel to you right now? Does it feel like it's supportive in alignment with where you are or does it feel like it may be disruptive and it's distracting you from things that are more important in your life? Notice do you have any shame around sex?

Katie Wrigley (28:05.344)
If so, dig into that. Try doing the five whys. Why it out. Go five levels deep. Okay, why do I have shame around sex? Where is this coming from? And really go back to those origins and then challenge. Is there any truth to that shame? If it came out of a trauma, by all means, please reach out to a professional like me, like a therapist, someone to help you undo that shame that's come from the trauma.

that's now mixed into your sexuality and getting in the way of you fully embracing your sexual self. And then the third thing I want you to do is really be honest with yourself. What do you want for your sex life and how important is sex to your overall relationship? Whether you have one now or not, how important is it? And how important is it versus other aspects of your relationship or your life? And really measure it against that.

Because when I was prioritizing sex, when I was highlighting it as like the be all end all, it was a great distraction from all the other things that were much more important for me to deal with. And now I deal with all of those things first. I have plenty of room to do it. And I'm really looking forward to when I meet my partner or maybe I've already met him and we just haven't gotten further enough along that path. But I am really excited for the time when it is the time.

to get intimate with someone again, because I know that I'm ready and I know it's gonna be amazing because of everything that I've learned and everything I've been able to let go of to be fully confident, fully present and fully engaged in any kind of sexual activity that I choose to get into later with my partners. Thank you so much for listening. I know you have a choice of so much to listen to out there on the internet and I really appreciate you taking time to stop and listen to this episode today.

I trust that it is helping you bring things into your life that are going to help improve your sex life. And until next episode, be well. I'll see you soon.