#25: Reclaiming Your Sexual Story: Healing Trauma and Finding Joy
FEBRUARY 27, 2025
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In this episode of Courage to Heal, host Anna interviews Leah Carey, a sex and relationship coach and host of the "Good Girls Talk About Sex" podcast. Leah shares her personal journey from growing up in an emotionally abusive household to becoming a respected voice in sexual education and healing.
She discusses her work with clients affected by purity culture, trauma, and societal conditioning around sexuality, offering insights into developing healthier relationships with intimacy. The conversation covers topics like consent, the "good girl" stereotype, media portrayals of sexuality, and practical tools for exploring desires safely.
Leah also explains what it's like to work with a sex coach and shares valuable resources for individuals and couples looking to improve their intimate relationships.
[00:45] Leah's Journey to Becoming a Coach
[09:38] Breaking Free from the Good Girl Stereotype
[16:44] Understanding Purity Culture
[29:37] Healing from Sexual Trauma
[35:21] Healthy Media Portrayals of Sexuality
[44:24] Working with a Sex Coach
Episode Links:
Recommended media:
Good Luck to You, Leo Grant
Hope Springs
Offspring
Transcript
Anna: Hello friends and welcome to Courage to Heal. Today you will hear a special interview with Leah Carey. Leah is a sex and relationship coach and host of the podcast, Good Girls Talk About Sex.
In a world filled with confusing and contradictory messages about sex, Leah helps sex make sense. In private coaching with individuals and couples, workshops and classes, she helps clients identify their truest desires and then act on them. The result is happier, more fulfilling relationships and sexual experiences.
Leah, welcome to Courage to Heal. It's great to have you here.
Leah: Oh, thank you so much for inviting me. I'm thrilled to be here.
Anna: Wonderful. Leah, I would love to learn more about you. And how you became a sex and relationship coach, because I don't think that's a usual occupation that people hear about. So tell me more.
Leah: That is true. And it's also not something that I grew up saying when I'm an adult, I want to be a sex coach. No, in fact, I came from it from just the opposite, which is I grew up in an abusive home where I learned very young that it was better to, to not be visible that I needed to make sure everybody else was taken care of and happy.
That was how I was able to stay safe. And also, I learned to be really afraid of my own sexuality because the way that my, specifically my father treated me left me with the belief that if I showed up as a sexual being, I would be assaulted, taken advantage of lots of different variations on the subject, but it was bad.
So by the time I reached puberty, high school, and then into college, I had really closed myself off to any experience of touch, of intimacy with, and at the time I assumed that I was heterosexual because, that's what everybody assumes until the day that you figure out it's different as, as some of us do anyway, so I was really deeply yearning for attention from a boy and to kiss a boy and to heavy petting was the thing that people talked about.
I really deeply wanted that, but I was also so afraid. That if I allowed that to happen, that it would end up very badly, that I just didn't allow myself to look for it, to express interest. I didn't have my first kiss until I was 17. And I don't, I don't know how much of this was a self-fulfilling prophecy, but the boy who I had that kiss with turned out to be gay about six months later.
So it was like, apparently, I chose the least, you know, dangerous boy available because he wasn't going to pressure me for anything else. I didn't have any other real intimate encounters until three or four years later. So I went through college, basically single and celibate. And then I started having some more intimate interactions.
Coming out of college, and those were basically all with people who treated me in the way that my father taught me that I should expect to be treated, which was emotionally abusive, sexually coercive yeah, and then I got into my first serious relationship at 25, that was the first time I had intercourse.
In a relationship that was very emotionally abusive. I continued that pattern into my early forties. I never stayed in a relationship longer than two years, because that was kind of my tolerance level for, you treat me really badly. And I'm not going to stay with you any longer. So, I never got to the point of actually considering, you know, marriage or kids or any of those things, kids didn't seem like a great idea anyway, because I had not experienced real healthy parenting.
So what was I going to pass on to kids anyway? But it was in my early forties. So I should say my father passed away when I was 26, it was very sudden, kind of earth shattering because he and I never came to any peace with him and just suddenly he was gone. I was very close with my mother, she passed away when I was 41 and suddenly I had no connection to this old story of who I was, this, you know, girl who sort of sat on the sidelines and made sure that everybody else was taken care of and made sure that everybody was happy and didn't really ask for much for herself and basically was the very stereotypical “good girl.”
And I didn't know that I was opening the door to exploring something different until the door was already kicked open, but I decided to take a, I had been living in Northern New Hampshire because that's where my mom was. And once she was gone, there was no reason for me to stay. So I decided I would take an extended solo road trip around the United States to see where I wanted to live next.
While I was on that road trip, which ended up being six months, I started allowing myself to have some sexual experiences. And I allowed myself to only choose experiences that felt like they were going to be a hundred percent positive, that we're going to not just respect my consent, but like fully be like, no, we're not doing that because you said you didn't want to, you know, it's not just listening for the explicit yes, but it's respecting the no to the point that they say, no, you said you didn't want to do that. So we're not going to do it.
And eventually I ended up settling in Portland, Oregon, which is where I am now. And I had the opportunity here. Part of the reason that I stayed here is because I found the organization “Sex Positive Portland,” which is a group where you can go and actually learn these lessons.
You take lessons in consent and coercion. And what does a conversation before you have sex look like so that you make sure that not only do you understand each other's health histories, but you know, what turns each other on and what turns each other off, you know, like the stuff that we should be asking each other, but basically never do because.
There's this idea that, well, if they love me, then they should just know it, it should just be easy and natural, but that's not how bodies work.
So, I go through all of this. I'm having all of these incredible experiences. I'm sharing them with some of my girlfriends and that turned into because once I was sharing my story with them, they started sharing their stories back to me.
And I realized these were the conversations I had been wanting to have since I was a young teenager and had never been able to, because I was so shy and so repressed. And so I started this podcast, which you mentioned, “Good Girls Talk About Sex,” where I interview these women. Well, I should specifically say people who are brought up as little girls, plus transgender women enter them, interview them about their sex lives and about the, like the nitty gritty, not the, you know, crazy wild sexual experiences, but like, when did you start masturbating and how did you discover it?
And what was your first kiss like? And you know, how do you feel about your body? That kind of stuff. And as I was doing that podcast. People started contacting me and asking me questions and I realized, “Oh, I actually have answers and I was already trained as a coach.” And so it just became a natural thing to move into the world of sex and relationship coaching.
So, that's the long answer. The short answer is if you had told me 10 years ago that I would be doing this, I would have told you, you were balls out crazy because I literally couldn't even say the word masturbation out loud.
Anna: Wow. Wow. So quite a journey that you've gone through over the last 10 years.
So Leah, in your answer, you mentioned letting go of being a good girl. What exactly is that good girl stereotype? And why did you have to let go of it to really fully embrace your sexuality?
Leah: Yeah. So I happened to grow up in a particularly abusive situation. And I know that a lot of people, especially women, did. But even people who grew up in a non-abusive situation grew up in a culture that sort of foists this good girl persona onto us.
And the people who managed not to take that on tend to be people who have a, an extremely strong sense of self right from the time that they were babies. The rest of us were brought up in this culture, and I know you grew up in a different culture so I should specify that I'm talking about the United States, you know, basically Western because I'm not familiar with other cultures.
I don't want to make assumptions. But here in the United States, we're brought up in a culture that pays lip service to the idea that, oh, everybody's equal and girls can do anything that boys can do. And girl power, those are the words, but what's underneath all of that are all of these very blatant messages of “take care of everybody and make sure that everybody else has their needs taken care of before you even think about your needs.”
And maybe just don't ever think about your needs. That would be good. And you know, it's as even as basic as asking the girls to clear the dishes at the end of dinner, rather than asking the boys to do it at all ever. There are so, and then there's the whole thing about like this is one of my favorites.
In sex ed class, now lots of people in the US don't get sex ed at all, the people who do get sex ed, regardless of the type they get, are taught this message, boys get erections and have, you know, night ejaculation, have wet dreams and experience pleasure. Girls get their periods and suffer. That is basically your entire knowledge about where pleasure lands in sex.
Boys have pleasure. Girls suffer. And that forms. Base of so many people's knowledge that they're not supposed to experience, they're not supposed to expect pleasure. Also, we now have a generation who are brought up on free porn because it's so easily available on their phones. And so we have the next generation of girls who think that they're supposed to perform pleasure without ever thinking about whether they're feeling pleasure.
They're supposed to perform certain sexual acts because that's just normal. When in fact, that would be, in my generation, would have been considered really extreme. Now it's just considered, oh, that's what everybody expects, so I have to do it, whether I want it or not. All of these things sort of coalesce into this idea of the good girl who sits down, shuts up, you know, pulls her skirt down, covers her legs, covers her shoulders.
And doesn't make her, and makes herself attractive enough for boys to want to look at her, but does not make herself sexual enough that she causes boys to stumble in their thinking and want to have sex with her. Both of those things are insane because both of those things are reliant on, on little girls and then women to behave in a way that serves the men that serves the boys.
First, you're going to make yourself attractive for the boys to look at and, and we get these messages that we kind of owe attractiveness to men in our culture.
As simple as, you know, posting a photo on Instagram and all these men showing up and saying either, “Hey, why don't you show some more skin?” Or if you show some skin, but they think that you're not a perfectly fit body, then them saying, “Put that away. I don't want to see that.”
So we are treated as if we owe attractiveness to men. But then if we perform attractiveness to such a degree that men find us too enticing, we're told to back off. So, every part of that message is about how we serve men, how we are viewed by men has absolutely nothing to do with our own internal core of what feels good to me.
What do I want? And even when people rebel, they tend to rebel. How do I want to say this? Because I don't want it to be judgmental. This is actually an incredibly natural response. But let's say that a teenager wants to rebel against the messages she's receiving. And so she puts on, you know, long pants and a long sleeve shirt to leave the house, but then she gets to school, and she changes clothes into like a crop top and a mini skirt.
Well, that rebellion against being a good girl goes straight into the opposite aspect of “If you're going to tell me that I can't show any skin, then I'm going to show all of the skin and please the boys.” It never comes back to what do I feel good about? What do I want? Who, who am I? How, what feels really authentic and genuine to me?
That's a question we're never invited to ask, and when we do ask it, we're called selfish. So that is the essence of a good girl.
Anna: I see. Yeah. That, that resonates for sure. So one of your specialties is working with people who were affected by purity culture. So, can you speak more about what purity culture is and how can it affect people's relationship with their sexuality?
Leah: Yeah. So if it's okay with you, I want to just back up a step in answering this question.
So I did not grow up in purity culture myself. I grew up in what would be called a high control or high demand household. That is a home in my case, I had a father who exhibited a lot of narcissistic qualities. He's been dead long enough. You can't posthumously diagnose somebody as a narcissist. So you will not hear me say, my father was a narcissist, but he had a lot of the qualities.
Since I've started learning about that, I can very confidently say that, and I have been diagnosed as having both CPTSD and narcissistic victim syndrome.
So what that has meant for me is that I grew up without any sense of autonomy over my body, over my thoughts. I was told what to think, I was told how to behave. I was told, you know, who to be in the world. And if I didn't step up and do those things. That put me in significant emotional danger.
My father, thank God, wasn't physically violent, but he was extremely emotionally violent. So I learned to just shut down and do what I was told. Even if my father was looking at the sky. And saying the sky is green, I would perform a million types of contortions to convince myself the sky was green, even though I was looking at it and seeing blue.
So that's the home that I grew up in, again. For people who aren't familiar with the term, it's high demand or high control because so much of your thinking and your actions are controlled by somebody else. As I, and this is all relatively new learning for me over the last 10 years. As I've been learning about this, I found myself really drawn to memoirs and other stories of people.
Who left cults and who've left purity culture. And the reason is because even though we all came out of really different situations, the long-term effects are virtually the same because we all came out of this high demand environment where we were not allowed to, to truly experience who we were, because we were so busy fulfilling the you know, the chapter and verse of what we were told we were supposed to be.
So, as I have grown my coaching business over the last five, six years. I have discovered that many of my favorite clients are people who have come out of purity culture and other high demand situations because I get them at such a deep level because I've been there. I understand the issues.
And so it's like, we, we're talking the same language. Okay.
So now your question was about what does all of purity culture, what does it mean? And okay, so purity culture is a relatively new term for something that's been going on for a long time. In evangelical Christianity, purity culture is this idea that your father owns you until he hands you over to your husband and your husband owns you and that you save everything for your husband.
And if you give anything away to somebody else, then it means that you are damaged goods. You've been used up and thrown away. So that's why you hear about people who've waited for sex for marriage. But you've maybe also heard about people who waited to kiss until marriage or waited to touch each other until marriage, like.
Depending on the particular version of it, you'll get different levels of extremity. But the idea is you're saving yourself for this person. And the way that this lesson frequently gets taught is that if you allow yourself to, let's say, kiss a boy, who you end up not marrying, then that means you're like a piece of chewed gum and the gum can never be un chewed again.
Or, and this often happens in rooms where, you know, there's a circle of kids, teenagers. And the facilitator takes out an Oreo or a cupcake and they say, you know, “Who wants this?” And everybody says, “Me, me, I want it.” And then they lick it and they say, “Okay, how, now who wants it?” And everybody's like, “Ew,” well, “That's what it's like if you let somebody kiss you.”
That is absurd. That is just one piece of how purity culture shows up, but it is so deeply damaging because again it tells kids, teenagers, young adults, that their natural desires are sinful. Their natural desires are against God, which no, they're not.
We would not have these things if we weren't meant to act out on them. And this is going to be an issue for anybody who believes in purity culture anyway, but we are descended from animals and animals do not wait. To have their first sexual encounter until they pass some arbitrary measure of something.
When their body is ready for it, they do it. Now, I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't be careful about pregnancy and STIs and emotional damage that can be done. We certainly need to be aware of power dynamics and all of those things.
But all of those things can be dealt with in a healthy and positive way, whereas in purity culture, you're just taught, no, bad, don't think about it, definitely don't do it, and if you do, you're bad, you're sinful, and God might hate you, and that's, that's really damaging.
Anna: Right. Right. So when you work with these people who are affected by purity culture, which I'm, I'm assuming are women or people who were assigned female at birth what are some important steps that they can take to reclaim their sexuality?
Leah: So actually, again, I want to back up a step because in fact, men are as damaged by purity culture as women are, and I do have men in my practice who have come out of purity culture.
The first thing that I do when I'm working with somebody who comes out of purity culture is we have a lot of myths that they've learned about what sex and relationships are supposed to look like that we need to untangle. I can't start helping them to develop healthy means of communication and healthy relationship skills.
Until we've sort of cleared out all these old ideas about how you're wrong and you're bad and you're sinful. If you think any of these things about consent and healthy communication. So that's the first thing, is a lot of myth busting. And you know, over time, for some people that might take, you know, maybe they've already done a bunch of learning and maybe it takes one session.
For some people, maybe it takes a few months. However, whatever it takes for any given person. But once we're moving through that, then we start having conversations about, okay, what does consent actually look like? What does consent actually mean? Because it is actually incredibly different than, really, what's taught in the general population, let alone in purity culture the general population version is no means no.
Yes means yes. And that is so ineffective and so reductive and does not help. It actually ends up with a lot of women. Blaming themselves for their own experiences of being assaulted because yes, does not mean yes to everything that you want to do from the moment I say yes forward, it means yes to this thing in this moment.
And then if we move on to something else. We need another yes there is lots of complexity in there, but starting to really pick apart.
What does consent mean? How are you allowed to think for yourself? What do, what do you actually want? Like, that is a question. That a lot of people in general, but especially people coming out of high demand childhoods have never asked themselves, what is it that I actually want versus what am I doing to please the other person?
So often, and again, this is true regardless of how people grew up. So often people are stuck in I want to make sure that I do what they want because then they treat me as though I'm lovable, so then they won't leave. Well then you're having sex and relationships in general on the other person's terms, which is eventually going to leave to resentment on your part.
Instead of saying what's going to please us both, where do our needs and our desires cross? Where do, where do they intersect? What can we do that we're both going to enjoy and love so that we can have this great, fulfilling, mutually joyful experience that lifts us both up rather than creating resentment and disconnection.
Anna: I see. I love that, that just a completely different way of thinking about. Being together is where do we both find pleasure and satisfaction and then going from there.
Leah: Yeah, it's one of the reasons that I don't do any marketing or any language anywhere about like, I'm gonna help you spice up your sex life because very often Spicing up what's currently there is actually not at all the answer.
But going back and looking at why are you not enjoying what's happening right now is the beginning. And you have to be willing to actually ask those questions. And people who are stuck at how can we spice up our sex life are very often not willing to look at those questions.
Anna: Right, right. And, you know, that makes me think, because as we're talking about people who've gone through the purity culture what about people who have gone through sexual trauma?
Whether it's assault or sexual abuse, are there common themes that you notice there that they have to overcome before they can enjoy themselves?
Leah: Yeah. So. You know, to, to just refer back to what I was saying a moment ago about this feeling that they are responsible in some way for the assault that they experienced because I didn't say no or I said no once, but I didn't scream or I didn't scream, but it wasn't loud enough.
Or there are so many ways that people of all genders, and I don't want to make this just about women, people of all genders experience assault. And there is so much victim blaming and self-blame, and it does not help that so much of our media whether it's social media or TV or whatever. Tells women that they are to blame.
So, you know, the court cases where the judge comes out and says, well, I'm just going to give him a couple months of probation because he's a promising young lad and I don't want to mess up his future. Except that this promising young lad has done really severe emotional damage to a young woman who may also never be able to fulfill her, you know, her destiny or whatever you want to call it.
There are studies that show that people who have experienced sexual assault have a decreased earning potential over the course of their life. So, I have a lot of thoughts about that. One of them being that the most vulnerable people in our world are so often vilified for being poor or having addictions or, you know, having a filthy home or whatever.
Very often those people come from abusive situations themselves. They are not able to get the health care, the mental health care that they need. And then they end up with lower earning potential, which keeps them in the cycle of poverty.
I am extremely smart. I feel it's such a strange thing to hear yourself saying, but it's true. I am extremely smart, and I have always worked in low paying jobs. I have always lived kind of in that hand to mouth. One or two paychecks away from destitution because I was trained to believe that I was stupid and unworthy and nothing I could do would be right. And therefore I have never had the funds to get the help that I needed.
When my mom passed away, I was fortunate to inherit enough money. To take that, you know, trip around the United States and do all those things, which was such an incredible gift. But it's why now I am so committed to making sure that even people who don't have a lot of funds can get the help that they need.
I work on a tiered pricing system so that people can choose the price that works for them. Because I am that person who couldn't get the help that I needed. I just don't want other people to be in that same situation.
Anna: Well, first of all, I want to say thank you for doing that because I think that the unaffordability of whether it's mental health treatment or this kind of coaching that, you know, couples and individuals can find very useful is a huge issue in our society.
Leah: Huge. It's a huge issue and I, I'm not taking my fellow sex and relationship coaches and educators I'm not taking them to task for this.
We all need to earn a living. We all need to keep our lights on and put food on the table. Also, we as an industry have a pretty clear understanding of how abusive relationships and lack of understanding about consent and all of these problems are really closely connected to all of the dysfunction that we see in the world.
And how if we could do some of this work at a more global scale to help people understand consent and to help people understand healthy communication and effective communication skills and all these things, it could have a really profound worldwide. You know, change, and yet we don't do a good job as a group of making our services affordable to the people who need them the most.
Anna: Right, right. Couldn't agree more with you there.
And Leah, a bit earlier you mentioned media, like social media, regular media, and how things are portrayed there. So that makes me think, you know, there's definitely a lot of unhealthy portrayals of sexuality, but I'm sure there are some healthy ones too. So I wonder if you can think of a piece of media that does a good job of showing sexuality and one that does a bad job of doing it.
Leah: Oh, there's so many examples of bad jobs. But yeah, so I love that you're asking this question. There are two things that pop immediately to mind. And then there are a whole bunch of others that I have lists of them somewhere that I can say, I have a resource page that has some of them listed.
There's a movie that is in the United States available on Hulu called “Good Luck to You, Leo Grant,” which is an absolutely stunningly beautiful portrayal of a woman who is in the latter part of her life played by Emma Thompson, who has not had sexual fulfillment or enjoyment throughout her life with her husband, he has recently passed away and she decides she finally wants to have that and she hires a young man to be to a sex worker to have that experience with.
It is so beautifully done and during my healing experience, my healing journey, I can tell you, I visited a handful of sex workers. I had experiences with a handful of sex workers and that movie portrayal is very true to what I experienced. People who are deeply invested in my healing and who were there to serve me, not to just sort of do what needed to be done and, you know, take their money and run.
So that is beautiful for anybody who's wanting to explore later in life, especially. You know, those of us who are 40, 40 plus, it's a, it's a great reminder that it really can happen.
Another one, it's a little bit older and maybe has a few things that are maybe would be a little questionable today if it were remade, but it's called “Hope Springs.” And that is about marital counseling and it's again, a couple who's, you know, in the second half of their life and decide that they really want to do the work and it, it walks through how challenging it can be.
There's also for people who would like to see media that portrays people in larger bodies as fully desirable sexual creatures. I highly recommend a show out of Australia called Offspring. It's about a woman who is an OBGYN in Australia. She is beautiful, but she's not Western beautiful. She's normal beautiful. And there are two characters, two women in the cast, who are in larger bodies, and who are portrayed as just as desirable and beautiful and, and sexual as everybody else in the cast. And that made a real difference to me watching it. I
f you have young, younger people in the house who you want to, you know, spark some great conversations, highly, highly recommend the show “Sex Education” on Netflix. It's a scripted drama. It sounds like it might be educational. It's not. It's a scripted drama, but it's so well done.
Anna: That's excellent. Those are some excellent recommendations. Most of them I have not heard of before. So I will make sure to mention them in the show notes for people who want to take a closer look.
Leah: Yeah. And you can find that whole list plus a bunch of others at leahcarey.com/resources.
Anna: Oh, perfect. Yes. On your website. I'll make sure that that's in the show notes as well. And Leah, I am just guessing that for bad portrayals of sexuality, we can go to something like Fifty Shades of Grey or any number of things.
Leah: Fifty Shades of Grey is the worst. It's the worst. I, I always want to hold a place for the fact that it brought BDSM awareness into the mainstream. And so there is that kernel of goodness about it. Everything about everything else about it is terrible. It's it is a portrayal of a deeply abusive Dom. And I really, really hope that people don't look at that and think, “Oh, this is what that relationship is supposed to look like,” because it is really, really not.
Anna: Right. Right. Absolutely. That's something that really stood out to me when I was consuming that media of Fifty Shades of Grey is that this is not what a healthy BDSM relationship should look like.
So, as we talk about all of this, I wonder what advice do you have for people, whether they're men, women cisgender, transgender, it doesn't matter, who want to develop a healthier, more open relationship with their sexuality.
Leah: So, I think that the first thing is to really look at your relationship with touch.
Are you enjoying the touch that you're receiving? Are you enjoying the touch that you're giving? If you are, then we can work to bolster that. But a lot of people are gonna answer no to one of those two questions, if not both. And that's the place to start. To start thinking about what do I really want?
It's very tempting to start at “What do I not want?” Because that's what we're familiar with, but it's, it's a more generative exercise. It's, it's easier to take action. Let me say it this way. If you go to your partner and you say, “I don't like it when you do this, this and this.” You've given them information, but you haven't given them anything that they can act on because now they're going to try and stop doing those things and they have nothing to replace it with.
Whereas if you go to them and you say, “You know, babe, I was thinking, and I would really like to try this, this, and this,” that gives you a place to start. I understand that for many people hearing that, and even considering the possibility of saying the words, “I want to try” is like, there is no way I can say those words.
I promise you that you can, I promise you that you can. And a friend of mine was just saying, I thought this was so, such a great idea.
She was telling me that she was trying to live by this new motto. Which was, “What is the bravest five seconds I can have?” You only have to be brave for five seconds. But what is the bravest thing I can do in those five seconds? And maybe saying to your partner, I'd really like to try this, is what you can do to be brave in those five seconds.
Another way to think to start approaching this thinking about what you want as opposed to what you don't want comes from Emily Nagoski, who's an amazing researcher in the field of sexuality. And she talks about If you aren't enjoying the sex that you're having and it's causing you to have less sex and to maybe not want sex at all, and maybe to be questioning your libido and like, do I even want to have sex with this person ever or am I just forever shut down?
The question to ask yourself is what does sex that's worth having look like? So it's not about the sex you're having today and what you don't like about it. But what would it look like, feel like, smell like, whatever, whatever turns you on, what would that be if it were sex worth having? And I think that's a great place to start.
Anna: Lovely. Thank you so much. That's definitely, I love the bravest five seconds and the What is the sex that's worth having? What does that look like? So Leah, that brings me to a question of what is it like to work with a sex coach? Like if people hire you, what can they expect?
Leah: So I can only tell you what it's like to work with me.
With me, it's this, it's conversation. I mean, it's not quite so interview style, but it's conversation. You keep your clothes on and I will never ask you to take your clothing off. I will never ask you to do anything sexual during a call. I will never ask you to do something that makes you really uncomfortable because the basis of our working relationship is consent.
So, if I suggest something and you're like, “Whoa, that's, I don't think I can do that.” Then I'm like, great. That's information. That's let's figure out what would work for you so that we can help you to have positive experiences that build your tolerance rather than giving you things that freak you out so that your nervous system goes, “I don't want to be here.” And then either you shut down or you just connect completely.
So, working with me is all about conversation. Looking at what has happened in the past and how that has hurt you or what you've learned from it so that we can kind of clear out all the old gunk and then also looking at what do you want and how do we help you get there?
The, as I think about it, the primary difference between coaching and therapy. Is that therapy spends therapy says, where do you want to go? Okay, let's look at your past and see what's holding you back. And coaching is about, okay, where do you want to go now? Let's move toward that instead of looking back, it's looking forward, which of course will always end up, we'll end up looking back anyway.
But that's, that's sort of how I think about the difference between coaching and therapy. And so it's going to be a lot of, okay, what do you want to experience next and how can we help you get there in a way that leaves you continuing to feel safe and whole. And fully in your body and all of those things.
Anna: Oh, I love that. Thank you for explaining that. That makes a lot of sense. And I love that you say that people don't have to take off their clothes when they work with me. Because I think a lot of people hear sex coach and they think, oh, goodness, what do I have to do?
Leah: Exactly. I have it all over my website. Like, you will not take your clothes off. Nothing sexual happens in a session.
Anna: Yeah. Okay. So I know that people can find you online on your website, leahcarey.com. Also, you're on YouTube @xoLeahCarey, and I will make sure to put all of those in the show notes.
I believe you have a very popular freebie on your website called the “Yes/No/Maybe” checklist. Can you tell me more about that one?
Leah: So, this is a great tool if you, let's say you have a partner. And you're wanting to maybe try some different things or explore some different territory, but you're not quite sure how, you're not sure what you want to explore. You're not sure what's going to work for both of you.
Maybe one of you wants one thing and one of you wants something completely different. This is a long list of activities. When I say long, I mean, long.
It's, I don't know, like 14 pages or something of lists of activities that you get to say, yes, I'm interested in this. No, I am not interested in this ever. Thank you very much. Or maybe I'm interested in this under the right circumstances. And you each like the instructions as it's written is you each take a copy of the list and you fill it out separately.
So you're not trying to please your partner and answer the questions the way you think they want you to answer them. You're answering them truly for yourself. And then you come back together and you find the places of overlap. And. It's actually really interesting to see how often two people who have had a certain type of sex life.
We'll do this exercise and discover they're both interested in something that neither of them felt brave enough to talk about. So it's a great way to find those areas of intersection and also to start having some conversations with some safety because you're not just taking stabs in the dark, you're saying, okay, you're interested in this.
I'm maybe not quite as interested in that, but I'm interested in this other thing. So what if we do one night trying your thing and one night trying my thing, you know, so it gives you places to start conversation.
Anna: Oh, I love that. What a great resource. And I know you mentioned some others on your website, so I'll make sure all of that is linked because I would just love for all the people out there to have better sex.
Leah: Yeah. I, and that along with a ton of other resources are at leahcarey.com/store. So there's everything from freebies to $3, $5, you know, all along. If people who are in or coming out of purity culture are listening to this, I have something specifically for that population.
And couples who want to sort of get an idea of why things aren't quite working, but don't want to do all in coaching right away, I have something for you as well. Like there's all sorts of stuff on there. So please come look around.
Anna: Oh, wonderful. Thank you, Leah. Thank you so much for stopping by answering all of these questions, giving out such great resources. It's been a pleasure. I really appreciate your time and expertise.
Leah: Oh, thank you so much for having me.
Anna: And for all of you listening, I hope you'll be feeling a little lighter and more empowered. Remember, healing takes time, and you're exactly where you need to be. Take care of yourselves, and until we meet again, be kind to your heart.
