Alana McKenzie Page was stunned when a surprise, supposed-to-be-sexy date turned out to be super inappropriate. Krystal Casey realized that the very thing she strove to protect her kids had entered her home. And both women found their way from blindsiding heartache to immense pleasure and fulfillment – in and outside of the bedroom.
This episode touches on a few difficult topics, with mentions of abuse, addiction and death (in the second story). It’s also rich with light, encouragement, sex lessons learned…and a few laughs! As always, please take care while listening.
Stream the Girl Boner Radio on Apple Podcasts/iTunes, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, Spotify or below! Or read on for a lightly edited transcript.
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“Blindsided on the Way to Lasting Pleasure: Alana and Krystal”
a Girl Boner podcast transcript
Alana: I was just like, what the heck is happening? That was my emotional level. I was just like, I do not get it. I cannot process what is happening right now.
Krystal: It left me absolutely shattered. As you can imagine, totally destroyed to a point that it sent me into the hospital. I questioned literally my worth as a woman.
[acoustic music]
August/narration:
Alana and Krystal. Both women both navigated rocky paths to get to the sexual self-discovery and pleasure they appreciate today. And while the specifics of their experiences are very different, both women experienced stunning surprises that felt pretty awful — deeply traumatic, in Krystal’s case.
So you’ll hear mentions of boundary breaking and abuse in this episode, especially in the second half. But you’ll also hear about delightful growth, rich pleasure, advice to help you invite similar goodness into your own life and even some sex toy fun. As always, take care while listening.
Let’s start with Alana’s story.
[acoustic, encouraging music]
Today, Alana McKenzie Page is a dating and intimacy coach and author. Someone she probably could have used early on, after learning very little about sex and relationships as a kid.
Her first memory related to sexuality happened when she was nine or 10.
Alana: I had a friend who had that book, It’s Perfectly Normal, and we thought that was hilarious. It’s illustrated like almost cartoons of how people have sex and procreation happens. It was kind of this mix of being very intriguing and also like a big joke. Like it was a big joke.
August/narration:
As for sex ed, she had it…
Alana: …sort of. I went to a small private school, so we didn’t have a standardized curriculum around sex education. But we were taught, I think starting in seventh or eighth grade anatomically how things worked and why babies happen. I don’t think they even did condoms ’cause I learned about that from tv Right. Or, or movies. Like, there would be, you know, how to put a condom on a banana or whatever. I don’t remember learning that. It was just kind of like, not that important, I guess.
August/narration:
Alana remembers finding sex sort of cringe-y back then.
Alana: So I think for me, there was something about who I am that I was kind of put off by it. And by the time I was a teenager, you know, and I had my high school friends and of course we were the “Sex and the City” girls. Like I was definitely Samantha.
’cause I was like, I’m never getting married, but I love to make jokes about sex. But during my childhood and early adolescence time, I was just not that open about it, and my mom would try to talk about it a lot. My mom wanted to be very open about it and I was really uncomfortable with her trying to talk to me about it,
when she wanted to tell me her opinions about sex and how it worked. I had almost an aversion to it in a way.
So I had this weird kind of push pull of being immensely curious and intrigued by it, and also very like, oh God, please don’t, like, please don’t tell me about the pleasure of sex, like God.
August/narration:
So as her peers started blossoming into their sexuality or starting to date, Alana felt like the odd one out.
Alana: I just didn’t have any experience. Like, was never asked out on dates. What I would say now is I didn’t have my sexual power turned on.
I didn’t really get any attention, you know what I mean? Nobody was interested in me, no one got a crush on me. I was not desirable in that way — or I perceived myself as not desirable in that way. That just kind of led to a bunch of drama for me personally. And lots of failure in my early dating.
August/narration:
Alana left home after graduating from high school, and she moved to Europe. That, she said, is where everything started to “change in a big way.” [“Shining Light” European pop music]
Alana: Because first of all, I was really far away from where I’d grown up and the community I had grown up in and my parents and everything I had assumed about life until that point. But also Europe is a little bit more, you know, stereotypically so, but it’s like really true. Like there’s just a little more openness about how dating is and how relationships work and bodies. I mean, just all of it is just like a little bit more acceptable across the pond.
August/narration:
And it was there that Alana fell in love. Or lust. Well, both..sort of.
Alana: At least the first person I slept with. We were not in love. I was in love with him, sort of, depending on your definition of what that is and he was really good at what he did.
August/narration:
Alana knew it felt good — and can see that even more, looking back. At the same time, she barely knew up from down in terms of sex. Unlike many teens, she’d never even seen porn.
Alana: My dad had told me when I got my first computer when I was 15 , if I looked at porn, the computer would know and like viruses and just like all kinds of things.
August/narration:
So even if porn were helpful sex ed — which it generally isn’t — she could barely picture what sex might entail.
Alana: So it was very much this brand new experience and, and really being led into what it meant to experience pleasure sexually.
There was this beginning of the awakening I think was right then. [choral voices swell]
August/narration:
Great in bed as the guy was, Alana said he wasn’t all that into her.
Alana:
We were living in a very small village and we were both immigrants, right? We were both not from Germany. We were both alone. He was 21, I was 18. We were both very young and just alone and just very young and alone in a little village.So I think most of that relationship was kind of loneliness. It was sort of a reaction about loneliness.
There was a girl he liked in his village in Slovakia, and he ended up bringing her over to Germany. And then he just ghosted me. And I found out all about that because Facebook, like a picture of her popped up later.
And I was of course incredibly, like my heart was just shattered. You know what I mean? Then it was like, wow, now I’m heartbroken. And my first love was a joke and I was just still really, really lonely.
August/narration:
So one night, Alana ventured to a festival in Germany called An Easter Fire. [German festival ambience]
Alana: It’s this huge bonfire, essentially like a community bonfire that everybody comes out to, like the whole town. And I just went by myself ’cause I was secretly hoping that like he would be there, you know, like he would show up. But instead I ended up meeting these three other guys and they took me back to a little house party they were having and I met this guy. Let’s call him Max. He was just like a very normal guy.
August/narration:
There wasn’t anything particularly special about their connection. She wasn’t really drawn to him. But they talked enough that when she ran into him on a bus a week later, she recognized him and said hello. [bus moving, soft crowd murmurs]
Alana: We were both headed out to like, go out to the city I guess ’cause you had to leave this tiny town of course. He ended up asking me out and I accepted. And we did, we went on probably three or four dates. And then I left the country, and we kept up by email for almost a year.
And then I was going back to Germany and wrote to him, you know, like, “I’m coming back to the village, maybe you wanna see each other.” And he asked me out again and he told me he was gonna take me on this very exciting date that required that I wear something sexy.
And so that is what I did. I dressed up in my little black dress with my kneehigh boots and I was feeling it. I felt very sexy.
August/narration:
Where he actually took her turned out to be pretty shocking…which she wouldn’t find out until they arrived. On route there, Alana was excited.
Alana: I thought he was taking me to a theater or something. Like somewhere there were going to be lots of people. It was going to be kind of romantic, right? Something like super nice and classy. Like, I don’t know…is he gonna helicopter me to Paris? That would be awesome.
That is not what happened.
So he drove me about 40 minutes away from our little town. I didn’t know where we were. And then we just pull up to this thing that looks like a warehouse.
August/narration:
Anyone else getting true crime vibes?
Alana: On the side is written Dream Palace. Then we get inside and it is like, there’s a box office and there’s this woman wearing black lingerie, very fancy, you know, and the box office is like red velvet.
It’s very classy. So I’m like, oh, interesting. Maybe like, a burlesque show or something like that, that could happen. It’s sexy and it’s like, kind of novel, like, that’s cool. And then she starts explaining what’s gonna happen and it just no longer makes sense because I didn’t really know that sex clubs existed.
August/narration:
Yep. He took her to a sex club, which could have been great if she had agreed to it. And remember, Alana is still new to exploring sex. She had had one partner, one heartbreak, no sex ed — and now she was entering the land of semi-public naked hanky panky palooza.
Alana: That was not really on my radar of things that happen in the world, let alone like things that I would go to. And like that was something for TV or something, you know what I mean? Like that was very outside of the realm of possibility for my brain. So like the stuff that she’s telling us to do just doesn’t make any sense to me.
And it’s in German, too. I’m sure she gave us directions on what to do, which then he told me later was like, we were gonna undress and then we had to participate in Gang bang night.
August/narration:
That’s right, “gang bang night.” Surprise?
August: Wait, you had to participate?
Alana: So it’s only free if you’re a couple. It was free if you were a couple and you participated.
So this man did not want to pay. So he’s like, oh, I found this like tourist lady, who I can just bring and then it’s free for me to go to the sex club.
August: Oh! Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. Okay. Yeah, keep, keep, keep talking. I’m a little like, I’m feeling stunned, especially like before I even knew what a sex club was, what a horrifying feeling. ‘Cause I feel like I would feel a little trapped.
Alana: Yeah! I did. In a warehouse too, right? There were no windows. I was just like, what the heck is happening? That was my emotional level. I was just like, I do not get it. I cannot process what is happening right now.
So I just followed him in and there was a unisex locker room, and then that’s when I was like, “What the heck did she say?” Right? Because it’s all in German. Like I’m, I’m double not processing.
August/narration:
Alana speaks German well, but not when she has zero idea what’s happening.
Alana: I’m like, what is she talking about? You know what I mean? Like, I don’t get it. And he’s like, “Oh, it’s a sex club. It’s like a sex party and you just need to undress a little bit.” So I took my tights and my boots off, but I was like, I am not taking my clothes off right now. Like, I’m sorry. And then we went out and of course everyone else is naked. Everyone else is like maximum in underwear.
And when I say everyone, I mean a bunch of middle aged men; that’s who’s there. So for me that was not like a sexy experience, as then I was 19, right? So I was not really feeling that. That was not really what I had ever expressed being into… There was no kink there for me, right?
August: And no consent. So it’s like, even if you were into that, it could be the sexiest thing in the world to you, but if someone coerces you. I mean, you feel Yeah, you’re coerced into it. It kind of takes all the sexiness out of it.
Alana: Right? Exactly. That’s the thing that’s definitely the kind of thing that you get consent for. I mean, I don’t really know because I wasn’t in the scene, but I feel like BDSM was even more underground at that point. So there was really no mainstream discussion at all about what it meant to have really open, honest sexual discussions, right?
Like the culture has changed so much since then and it was just like not, it was just not available at the time, but that is exactly what we would say today is like you need consent for that situation.
He did have this idea of like a safe word, right? Which is that, I was gonna say, I got sick. I was gonna say I had a headache if I wanted to leave. But I’m not really a liar person. That’s not really my MO. So just being like “I’m sick, I have a headache,” seemed really stupid to me. [laughs] So I didn’t wanna use that line.
We were there for way too long ’cause I just could not like to get it through my brain. And I think, you know, there may have been other layers of a little bit of fear, right? Kind of just shock and, I mean, the confusion is that too. How do I just move through whatever’s happening?
And eventually, the gang bang started and I was like, “no, I don’t wanna watch that.” You know, like I did manage to say that.
There was like a swing upstairs and then the lady in the lingerie from the box office room was in the swing and that was how the gang bang worked. And I was like, I don’t want to go there. But he did, Max did. So I let him go up there and do that.
August/narration:
That’s when she came upon better company. Pun definitely not intended.
Alana: There was some really nice guy, like 40- something, had just gotten divorced, hanging out, and he just sat with me and like we told each other our stories and it was like a really nice moment.
And then when Max came back down, I sort of remembered, oh yeah, I get to say whatever I want to say. I don’t have to be like, I have a headache, I need to leave. Like I actually can just talk about myself and my needs and like what I want. That works, you know? And so I told him, “I’m ready to go. Let’s go. Like it’s time.”
August: Thank goodness. I love how, and I even felt it in my own body, when you were able to talk to someone who was kind and respectful and be yourself. Did that just relax you? Is that why you were able to then go, oh wait, I’m out of that kind of fight flight, right?
Alana: Yeah, exactly. That was sort of the turning point moment of like, oh yes, I’m, I remember like I’m a sovereign human… I don’t have to just take the guy’s word for whatever reality is. I also get to say what I need. But it was definitely up there on the worst dates that I’ve ever been on.
August/narration:
Nowadays, Alana approaches dating from a stance of her own personal pleasure – a shift that she said has changed her life. And getting there took years of growth and effort.
Alana: First I just continued to be a mess for many, many years, basically a decade. Eventually got to this place where it was like I’m the common denominator. I had to really look at that because it was, at that point it was obvious, you know, I’d fallen in love another time, like. And then I had dated so many men and I had lived all over the world and I had traveled a ton and I had met so many men and I had dated so many men and I had talked to so many and it just never went well.
It just was always disappointing or heartbreaking or just meh. And I had to really get to this place of like, dang, like it’s me. I am the one who’s doing something. I don’t know what it is, but I’m doing something that’s not working, right? It’s not attracting the kind of love that I want to have. It’s not maintaining the kind of intimacy I wanna have.
August/narration:
Alana was also experiencing painful sex from vaginismus, a condition that involves involuntary tensing or spasms of the vaginal muscles – issues that are common in folks who carry sexual shame or trauma; it can seem complicated. But talk therapy and pelvic floor therapy and therapy helped her with all of that.
[Tentative but soothing music: “Wings of Desire]
Alana: There was just kind of this whole really painful unfolding, I guess, of my love and sex life. And they were kind of bound up together, right? Like a lot of the problems that I had in relationships were the things that were playing out in my sex life.
Like being unable to ask for what I needed and being able to relax, being able to just be okay and myself and all of those things. And got in the way of emotional intimacy and sexual intimacy.
August/narration:
Alana found one really helpful tool through another surprise — this time it involved a guy she was dating who wouldn’t have sex with her.
Alana: And I was like, wow, I feel completely unloved by this person who obviously doesn’t think I’m hot enough to sleep with me, but it’s better than alternatives that I’d already experienced.
So I stuck it out and he was into Tantra. He would talk about all these philosophical ideas. So I started looking into that. ’cause I was, I was very curious about like, well, what is he talking about? This man won’t sleep with me. But he’s talking about tantra, which I believed at the time was all about sex. Like I had that very western view. And so I started to educate myself about intimacy and tantric connection.
And also like Western science. There’s a ton of research in Western universities about how relationships work and how mating works and how to date more effectively. And I learned so much, I guess is really the only way to say it. I just really learned so much about all of the mistakes I had been making and the ways that I was showing up in dating and therefore also in relationships and how it wasn’t serving me.
I’m a very active person, so I just thought I was most valuable for all the things that I do and all the things I learn and all of that instead of just being like, oh yes, I’m innately valuable just for being and receiving. And that’s where I wanted to get to.
I didn’t have a framework previously for that. And I’d grown up believing giving was much better than receiving. And that just, the more that I was able to give, the more people would value me.
I was not aware that I had that framework, but it was very present and especially present for me in dating. And learning to think about receiving and, and embody receiving really changed pleasure for me.
And there was a lot to work through in terms of feeling, not worthy, right? Like not feeling worthy to receive and feeling guilty about receiving and not feeling comfortable sometimes. But once I got there, I mean, it was like the first experience I had, we actually never even had penetration-al sex. I met this guy while I was traveling again, and we just had like the most intense connection sexually that I’ve ever had.
And that amount of pleasure that I was able to get to without a person that I had spent a lot of time with, right? Like not someone that I had been getting to know for a long time.
And it was very shocking to me the level of intimacy that was possible with someone as long as I was willing to be honest and be aware of myself and be in the receiving.
August/narration:
Since then, Alana said, she hasn’t looked back. She embraces receiving, versus focusing only on giving, and experiences far more pleasure, connection and autonomy.
To experience more pleasure yourself, in relationships, during sex and elsewhere, Alana recommended what she considers a powerful tool: your breath.
Alana:
The breath is so powerful for getting you to a regulated nervous system is how we could say it technically, but just getting you centered, getting you back to yourself, getting you feeling, you know, okay, really is what it is. Like, just feeling okay.
So I highly recommend that people start with at least some kind of breathing practice. You have to find what works for you, what kind of hits the areas that work for you in terms of being with your breath , and being able to stop or pause once in a while or at least slow down.
Just have a moment where you can take a breath and come back to yourself. Really, that’s where it’s come back to yourself. Come back to your body. Just remember where you are in the world right now. It’s very simple and weirdly powerful. It has continued to blow my mind over the years of like, oh wow, that is so powerful to really just come back to like, oh, here I am and I’m a breathing person… That’s all I need.
[encouraging, acoustic music]
August/narration:
Next, Krystal’s story. Krystal Casey is the founder of Flight of the Phoenix, a Women’s Empowerment Collective. And like Alana, her sexuality knowledge growing up was basically nil.
Krystal: So I didn’t learn about sex, at least not in the traditional sense or in a good way. I was actually molested as a child and I kept that quiet for a long time.
I moved schools a lot and when I moved schools, I would miss sections of the curriculum because they didn’t all do the same thing at the same time, right? So sometimes I would learn the same thing over and over again in a year, but like not learn about something altogether.
And I feel like fifth grade, fourth grade, like right when you’re learning about all that stuff was the time that, one of those curriculums that I had missed. So literally in no ways had I learned about sex. I learned through what I experienced negatively, and talking to my friends.
That was it until I had my first sexual experience, which was my junior year of high school, and it was with a boy that I was head over heels in love with.I had known him since I was 12 years old. I remember it was wintertime. I remember being in his room and I remember fooling around like teenagers do.
I had boundaries in place. There were certain things that I was okay doing and certain things that I was not okay doing. And going all the way was one of those things that I was not okay doing. In my head, I was gonna be a virgin until I was married.
We were fooling around, and that boundary was crossed. And to this moment, I can’t even exactly tell you how or what exactly led up to it. I just kind of remember going blank. When I’m looking back on it now, I remember that I kind of instantly went into my head into that space that I went into when I experienced abuse. I was physically there, but I was checked out, I was somewhere else, and it happened to me.
And as soon as it was over, I remember rolling over and crying, very quietly, very silently. He didn’t know.
At that point, I figured, well, what the hell? I did it once. You know, I’m no longer a virgin that’s gone. I’m “dirty” now. I’m tainted.
There was definitely a lot of heartache, a lot of pain, a lot of deep wounds there that I didn’t even realize needed to be healed at the time. I mean, I’m a kid, right? So all of my experience, my learning about sex from the time I was young to through my first experience, it was just all negative, not good.
August/narration:
Years later, Krystal would marry that boy.
Krystal: He is the boy. I met him when I was 12. He was my first love and I ended up marrying him. But we didn’t get married until I was 25.
And in between there, he was actually married to somebody else. We were on and off, on and off since high school. My first experience wasn’t the first time that I had allowed my boundaries to be crossed because of my history, my childhood.
August/narration:
Every time I hear those words, that she “allowed her boundaries to be crossed,” I want to hug her and assure her that none of that was her fault. Even if she knows that now, I couldn’t not say that. Especially for anyone who relates.
Krystal: And sadly, it wasn’t the last time that I allowed them to be crossed because I stayed with him and a couple of weeks later, he ended up cheating on me. He had sex with two other girls in the same day. Two weeks after taking my virginity. So we had an all out, like we had a screaming match in the street, like it was, you know, it was drama.
August: Did he tell you that he cheated?
Krystal: He told me! He told me to my face. I walked into the shed. He had this space in the back of the house called the Shed, and it was like the hangout where all the kids hung out. I walked in there and this girl I knew said hi and kind of looked at me and walked up and walked out. And then he told me, and he said, “that was the girl. And then her friend was the other girl.” And I’m like, say what now? I mean, I got mad. I stormed out, but I forgave him and It was on and off. But after a while it was off because I was like, yeah, I just can’t, like, he’s like, this is really too rocky and going in a direction that I don’t wanna go in.
And I loved him, but I also had my eye on a vision that I had created way back when I was a little girl dealing with all of that trauma and that vision to escape where I was to go somewhere greater, had a bigger force for me. And so that’s where I was going. And then I found out he joined the Marine Corps. He was just about done with his four years and was talking about reenlisting.
So, we reconnected. He was going through a very ugly divorce at the time. I was going through an ugly breakup and my sister and I were having a night. She was comforting me because of my breakup and mentioned his name. And I couldn’t stop thinking about him from that point.
I was like, you know what? We had so much fun and like, yeah, he did all of that bad stuff, but he was my first love and you know, you just, you get nostalgic about stuff. So I reached out to him and I was like, Hey, I know you’re married, now you’re in the Marine Corps. Like I just, “I hope all is good,” da da da da…
And that’s when he emailed back and he was like, “yeah, I’m in the Marine Corps, but going through a divorce and I was just talking about you the other week. That’s so weird that you emailed me.” And it was just nonstop from there.
He was overseas in Iraq at the time I was living in Illinois. And we just kind of, very quickly. I mean, we had already had so much history, right? And he had already gone through so much, like he had been through bootcamp and two tours in Iraq and a divorce, and we’d grown. So we’re like, okay, this is it. And we decided, we got engaged, we got married, and we had five babies, like boom, boom, boom. Like very quickly. Yeah.
August: Wow. Oh my goodness.
Krystal: So from the time I was 25, when I got married to the time that I was, when did we stop? 35? Yeah. In 10 years we had five kids.
August: Wow. Oh my gosh. And what was your marriage generally like?
Krystal: Um… That’s a big question. [laughs] It was a lot like our young relationship, honestly. It was intense. It was intensely good when it was good and it was intensely bad when it was bad.
August: Mmm. What is an example of a good memory you have?
Krystal: There’s so many. I mean, I made five children with this man. We built a home and a life.
August/narration:
Those sounds of “life” in the background are Krystal’s kids.
August: Did you feel like you had a solid friendship with him in the good times?
Krystal: Yeah, I felt supported. I felt like he got me. I felt like he wanted to protect me. [softly cries] I felt like he was the kind of person that loved me so much. Everybody knew how much he loved me and he told everybody how much he loved me.
But at night, I would have to beg him to come to bed. Most nights he wouldn’t, or he would, but it would be four in the morning and I’d be getting up to go to work and get the kids ready and,
August: Did you know why he wasn’t coming to bed, at the time?
Krystal: Alcohol had been an issue in our entire relationship, honestly. He drank when we were kids. And that was one of the things that I was like, I don’t drink, I don’t do drugs. I don’t do any of that – because I worked, I had two jobs. I went to school, I had a little sister I took care of.
I just was in a different world and I thought it was the alcohol. I knew it was the alcohol. Alcohol definitely played a part, but I didn’t realize that he was also using meth.
August: Mmm. Wow.
Krystal: I don’t think he was using the entire marriage but definitely at the end,
August: Hmm. you don’t have to go into any details well on anything, but, when you talked about the highs and the lows was the dark part of the intensity, like, did you have arguments? Was it a lot of boundary crossing?
Krystal: Absolutely… I did not feel like there was abuse happening. That’s the really messed up thing.
August/narration:
And sadly, so common in abuse situations.
Krystal: Early in our marriage, he crossed a line physically and put hands on me. He pushed me. He had his hands around my throat, and after that incident I looked him in the eye and I said, “if you ever put your hands on me again, I’m gone. I don’t care. Like that to me, is abuse. I knew I was not going to tolerate that.
And he didn’t. He never put his hands on me like that again. But he did throw things. He did intimidate. He did raise his voice. He did make me feel like I was crazy a lot of the time. He did spin things around and put blame on me. He did absolutely cross boundaries. It got to the point where I stopped saying things because it didn’t matter if I said it or not.
It was going to happen if he wanted it to happen. So what was the point? I felt myself over the course of our marriage shrink back into the shell of who I was before we got married.
August/narration:
In her mind, nothing about that was “abusive.” How could she have known otherwise, when she’d learned as much about abuse as she had learned about sex — extremely little that was helpful.
Krystal: What I knew I learned on TV. I learned from watching dramas and sitcoms and movies and talking to friends. and reading, you know, so I’m educated. I love to learn and to dive into it. But when you read something in a book and when you live something in life, it doesn’t always match up.
August: Yeah. And abuse is so insidious, that part of abuse is the manipulation. So someone has to like, Creep in. I mean, it’s not like they just show up and like, “hello, I’m abusive.” It’s so hidden and it’s so gradual and it’s wrapped up in this, “I love you so much.” Everyone knows that he loves you so much. I mean, that’s, uh, it’s really, really hard.
Krystal: And I have a history of mental illness because of my trauma. So it always came back to one of two things: I needed to go back to therapy and get back on medication. Or it was my hormones ’cause I was pregnant again. That happened so often that I would be at the point of leaving like, this is enough. I’ve hit my limit. I can’t do this. I would start literally going crazy and then it would pop up that I’m pregnant.
Then everything would come back to, well, that’s why you acted like that. That’s why this happened. Because you’re hormonal, you’re pregnant, you’re having a baby. Everything will be okay in a little while.
August: Oh, you were blamed for everything.
Krystal: And then, you know, how long does it take to grow and have and recover from a baby to when I’m just about ready to walk out the door again, guess what? I’m pregnant. that was my cycle. And it got to the point to where eventually I stopped trying. I just didn’t care anymore. I’m just like, okay, well I’m here. I’m just gonna be the best mom that I can be and take care of my kids. And a lot of times, you know, that just meant making sure they were alive at the end of the day. I mean, keeping a human alive is very hard.
August/narration:
Keeping five humans alive? I can barely imagine.
Of course, all of these things — the abuse, having a full house of kids to care for, what Krystal had learned, and not learned, about sex — impacted her sexuality.
Krystal:
August: Did you have a sense of like, you had a sexuality that was your own? Did you have any pleasurable sex in your relationship?
Krystal: So when things were good, they were really good. And that was one of the areas that was really good when it was really good. I mean, yeah, we had a great sex life and then we also had a sex life where I was there, but I was 100% not there.
August/narration:
Times when she dissociated.
At a certain point, near the end of the relationship, Krystal discovered something horrific that would change everything.
Krystal: Toward the end, I had an intuition, a feeling. I don’t even know how to describe it, but there were moments where I remember walking through the house, like specifically walking up the stairs to my daughter’s bedroom and getting this icky, gross feeling come over me.
It was the feeling like I was walking up the stairs to my childhood home. And I didn’t understand why I was feeling that, and it happened a couple of different times and I’m like, God, this stuff is coming up again and I don’t understand why. And now looking back, I feel like I knew before I knew. My, my aura knew.
My energy knew before my brain knew. And that was part of me ignoring my boundaries, ignoring the red flags, ignoring my intuition that things weren’t quite right. Or am I, am I crazy or is it my fault? All of these things.
August: Because so much was taken from you. You were put into survival mode at such a young age.
Krystal: And what was so messed up for me was that I loved this man so much and there was so much passion and so much fire. And when we fought, like we fought, like we didn’t necessarily, like we didn’t fight each other, get physical, but like it was intense. We would yell and we would scream and
August/narration:
It was all just…a lot. On so many levels.
On Krystal’s website, she talks about being completely blindsided by her husband.
August: Do you remember the day you were blindsided?
Krystal: I do. I want to pull something up…
August/narration:
Krystal wanted to read something she wrote, from a letter she wrote to a woman who reached out to Krystal after hearing her story. You’ve probably gathered this, but it turned out that the man she had married had assaulted their daughter.
Krystal: Here we go. this is what I wrote to her. I said, he was my biggest advocate and greatest supporter in my recovery from childhood trauma and sexual abuse.
When I stood up for my beliefs and protecting my kids, he stood right behind me. When I spoke up against abuse in the community, he encouraged me to speak louder. I would confide in him my concerns about certain people or situations about my kids. He would validate and reassure me, at least in the beginning.
That definitely shifted toward the end of our marriage, but I digress. My point is I never saw it coming. And I was looking out for it from everyone except him. With him, I thought I was safe. So when I discovered that he had repeated the same cycle, the same cycle that he knew I had vowed as a child to break, it left me absolutely shattered. As you can imagine, totally destroyed to a point that it sent me into the hospital.
I no longer wanted to exist on Earth. I questioned literally my worth as a woman. He would rather put hands on his own child. What does that say about me? So that was really hard. The other part of that was, of all of the things in the world, this was the thing I was gonna protect my kids from and I failed.
August/narration:
But Krystal didn’t fail, of course. And she took action the moment she learned of the abuse.
Krystal: My daughter disclosed and as soon as I found out, I removed the rest of my children from the home and I turned him into the authorities. I filed a restraining order the next day, and that’s how he got arrested. He broke the restraining order. He was arrested. There were seven felony charges brought against him while he was in custody he admitted to all of the charges.
And when he was bailed out, that’s when he overdosed. He was in a coma and then he passed.
August/narration:
More than most anything, Krystal wants more child victims of abuse to be believed.
Krystal: If some child comes to you and says that somebody is putting hands on them, you listen to that child. You take them seriously and you hold the abuser accountable. And when I spoke up about my abuse, I was told, “It happens. That happens in families and it’s still family.”
August: Who told you that?
Krystal: My grandmother.
And what I’m discovering through sharing my story I have people coming forward that are saying that I’m so brave and thank you because when I told my mom, or when I told so and so they didn’t listen to me. That just absolutely blows my mind and, and shatters my heart all at the same time.
And that is a big reason why I do what I do, because abuse thrives in darkness and quiet. So somebody needs to shine a light on it.
August/narration:
Another thing Krystal finds senseless is how little so many of us learn about sexuality and sexual pleasure — a lack that plays a role in abuse, by the way. Studies show that kids who learn age-appropriate education about their bodies and sexuality are more likely to report inappropriate touch promptly, and to have the language and basic understanding to do so.
August: You not only do a lot of advocacy in your life and speak up about abuse, you also are really passionate about sexuality and women’s sexuality. Where did that spark come from?
Krystal: I never learned about sex, like I said. So when I was asked to be the maid of honor at my best friend’s wedding, I wanted to do something really cool, and I stumbled across this direct sales company and learned that they throw like the best bachelorette parties ever. Got on a call with a consultant and by the end of the call, instead of inviting her to come out and do the party, I decided I was gonna sign up and do it myself.
From there, I started learning about sex. I started learning about sexuality. I started learning about my body. I started learning how my passion for life and my creativity is very intimately connected with the sensual side of my being.
August/narration:
This was all happening during her rocky marriage with her ex, by the way, when she already had three kids and before so many things shattered. And already, things were tough.
Krystal: Financially we were struggling. He was an alcoholic. There were issues with him holding a job, and I needed to get diapers for my babies. That’s the bottom line. I needed to be able to put formula in the bottles, you know?
August/narration:
And so she started doing the sex toy parties part-time.
Krystal: And I just, I absolutely fell in love. It opened up so much for me, connecting with women, getting out, talking about things, and then meeting with women one-on-one and having them open up to me and being like, oh my gosh, I never knew, or, this has been my experience, or this has been so helpful and impactful, and the connections that I’ve made are, are just it. It’s incredible.
August: Wow, that’s so fascinating that you were going through. I don’t know if you would use the word turbulence, but really intense ups and downs in your relationship and a lot of things were happening and there was something also blossoming for you.
Krystal: How did that impact you just as a person in that life you were leading? It actually opened up so many doors for me. It allowed me a chance to get out and be somebody other than Mom, which as a stay at home mom with three babies, it’s very easy to get lost in that and lose a sense of identity as a woman.
So it was awesome to be able to get showered and put on makeup and something pretty and go out and hang out with the girls and be someone other than wife and mother. It also helped me establish my love of business. I didn’t realize I loved business. In fact, when I was in college, I said the two things I wanted nothing to do with were sales and business. Look at me now.
August: You just had to throw some vibrators in there!
Krystal: Apparently. [laughs]
August: Did these experiences and this part of you that was just blossoming and this business sense and this passion for sex, did all those things help you in the aftermath?
There was a shock. But then also, I’m sure there was a time of just trying to pick up the pieces. But would you say that, all of that did help you begin to carry on after all of the stuff came out?
Krystal: So yes, I was definitely, like, there was a lot of emotional, mental damage there, but specifically there was sexual damage there. And a lot of sexual healing that I had to go through. Initially sex felt dirty again. It felt dirty and wrong to talk about it. I didn’t wanna talk about it. I didn’t wanna engage in it.
I didn’t wanna think about it. It made me sick to think about it. I couldn’t work. My job was talking about vibrators and telling women how to enhance their sexual relationships, and the thought of sex made me physically sick.
So it was, at first, disconnect…disconnect/mind, body altogether. And then after a while, after I got outta the hospital and I started taking these steps to healing, which I’ve actually since turned into a course . But one of those was recognizing that sexual healing was something that needed to be addressed.
And as I started kind of dipping my toes back into conversations, right? I wasn’t ready to necessarily dive back into work, but just kind of opened myself back up to those conversations, I discovered a thing called Widow’s Fire, which is a period after you lose a spouse where you crave sex. You’re missing that intimacy and that, physical closeness and anyone and everything looks good.
Anytime. Sounds good. And it’s kind of, you know, It’s a fire inside of you, widow’s fire. That creeped up. And when that started to creep up, I started to rediscover again my connection between my sexuality and my passion and my creativity and pleasure and fun both in and out of the bedroom and how they all kind of intertwine and that’s kind of what started to bring me back to life.
August/narration:
In Krystal’s offering, Ignite Your Spark Toolkit, she explores a whole bunch of ways to navigate pleasure and sex while managing trauma. One tip in particular she wanted you all to hear today was to trust your inner voice.
Krystal: I think the most important thing to remember is to pay attention to the red flags, to listen to your intuition and to allow yourself to use your voice to express your desires as well as your boundaries.
August: Where are you at now as far as those things? Like your sexuality and your desires and your ability to talk about your boundaries?
Krystal: I am in a very good place.
August: Ah, that’s so good.
[acoustic chord riff]
August/narration:
Learn much more from Alana McKenzie Page check out her book, The Art of Feminine Seduction, available on Amazon. It’s written for straight women, she said, and chronicles her personal love life while teaching “an energetic dating system for reclaiming power in relationships.”
To learn more from Krystal Casey and check out her toolkit, visit ignite.krystalcasey.com
Find direct links for Krystal and Alana’s work in the show notes. There you’ll also find links to resources and support around domestic violence, sexual abuse and concerns about your own sexual desires or behaviors – including what’s known as minor attraction. Help is available to prevent abuse in the first place and break those cycles.
And if you’re enjoying Girl Boner Radio, I would love it if you’d give it a rating or review and tell your friends about it. Thanks so much for listening.
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