A Sex Therapy Confession that Changed Everything: Leah Carey

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A Sex Therapy Confession that Changed Everything: Leah Carey

Leah: There’s like 15 minutes left in the session and she says to me,  “You’ve done great work. I’m so proud of you.”  Like, this is gonna be really great. I’m so excited  to see what happens next.  Are there any last things that you wanna talk about?…And if I had thought about it, I would’ve been too embarrassed. But I’m about to walk out the door!

[encouraging, acoustic music]

August/narration:

Imagine going to see your therapist, revealing a long-held sexual challenge you’d been keeping secret and then setting out on a road trip aimed at sexual adventures. 

If that sounds like a lot, well, it was for Leah Carey. While she found her way to very spicy experiences, the start of her sexuality journey was rough.

As a heads up, you’ll hear about abuse involving a troubling father/daughter dynamic in the first part of Leah’s story.

Leah: Pretty much everything that I can remember from childhood about sex was bad. My dad started talking to me about sex and about his sex life and about me as a sexual being far too young. I don’t remember exactly when it started, but it was around 10 or 11 years old. And there had been sexual material around our house, just always. 

We did lots of puzzles in my house and there was a canister that I remember down in the basement. And it had the picture of a scantily clad woman on it. There were many boxes in our basement filled with Playboy magazines, Penthouse, Variations, which was about quote unquote alternative sexuality. Now I would probably look at it and be like, yeah, that’s a Tuesday! [laughs] But at 10 years old, I was deeply not ready. I was really freaked out by what I saw in those about partner swapping and restraints and just all sorts of things like kink and fetishes and all that stuff. 

So the result was that I was kind of obsessed with the idea of good sex. But also, I was terrified of sex because everything that my dad said or did felt really scary and bad. He would talk to me about his sex life with my mom and how disappointed he was in it. And he would say to me, “You have to lose weight because boys don’t like girls who don’t have pretty legs.” I have kind of heavy eastern European peasant legs just like my mom did. My father acted as though my legs were like the end of the world, but also he pursued my mother and married her. 

So it wasn’t actually a deal breaker, but in my brain it became an absolute deal breaker to the point that I believed that literally nobody would ever be attracted to me. In my mind, the story I created was that the only people who would ever be attracted to me were creeps who couldn’t see how broken and defective and disgusting I was. At the same time that my dad was telling me that I was unacceptable as a sexual being, which is a deeply weird thing to be saying to a 10 or 11-year-old, he was also telling me that he was gonna lock me in my room until I was 30 so nobody could ever get to me. And that he would break the kneecaps of any boy who looked at me.

So it was like, holy fuck, mixed messages. You know, like, am I so disgusting that nobody will ever see me and I will be repulsive? Or am I so attractive and desirable that I have to be protected from the world? What the fuck? And so my nervous system’s response to that was, I am not playing in that field at all.

August/narration:

Still, Leah had her first kiss at 17 and sex for the first time at 25.

Leah: I did masturbate. It was definitely a hidden slash shameful thing. I needed to keep it hidden from my mom because it was embarrassing, but I needed to keep it hidden from my dad because it was dangerous.

My dad died when I was 26, and he died very suddenly. But I remember for those first couple of months being afraid to masturbate I don’t know what happens after you die. Are you just like up there watching me? So, no, I’m not gonna masturbate ’cause I don’t want you to see that.

August: Oh my goodness. Oh, oh. It’s so much for you to carry from such a young age. Did you have any conversations with your mom? 

Leah: My relationship with my mom around sex was pretty fraught. 

My dad’s telling me that he’s unhappy with her in the bedroom. He is making it very clear in front of me. I don’t know what he said in front of my mom, but he would talk to other women very sexually in front of me. 

Now, I don’t know if she was in and of herself sexually repressed or if that was something that happened in relationship with him. The only times that she and I ever talked about sex were really uncomfortable. And in fact he is the one who did the birds and the bees talk with me. In a way that was deeply uncomfortable and still gives me the heebie-jeebies when I think about it.

I was 10 years old. I was going to summer camp for a couple of weeks. My first time away from home. their paperwork, they had said, does your daughter have her period yet? In case she gets it while she’s here, does she know about it? And so my dad took it upon himself to educate me. 

And he turned it into this whole little, like, vaudevillian sketch. It was so gross and disturbing, that my period, once it did come a few years later, became something that I actively tried to hide. Like, I tried to deny the fact that I even had it. I I was the kid who like pushed the underwear to the bottom of the, um, the bottom of the bucket, did not ask for pads because I just, I didn’t, I just wanted to ignore that it even existed…

Honestly, I still get nauseous saying the words, but I will say them for you.

August: Only if you want to.

Leah: I know. He made it this whole thing about, and first of all, this is way more information than a kid needs. Like a 10-year-old basically needs to know you have the, you know, you have the parts to grow a baby. One of the things that happens is that every month your body puts together all those parts, and then when you don’t, you’re not gonna have a baby. It sheds like, it can be four sentences.

August: Yes. Age appropriate

Leah: Yeah. But what my dad did was talk about the “muckus and the blude,” which was his cute way of talking about mucus and blood. You don’t need to talk about mucus. Like, what is that even about? Oh my God, those words still make me nauseous.

August: Oh you poor thing. I can just imagine. ’cause even learning about the blood was challenging for me. so to hear that just brings like a whole new level of cringe. 

Leah: It was horrifying.

August: And it’s not easy to hide your period. 

Leah: No. And it’s kind of pointless too. I don’t have a lot of memory of this. I have a lot of blank spots in my memory, which is, you know, not uncommon for people who her childhood’s like mine. 

I don’t remember the first few times I got my period, but my mom told me, like she would find the underwear at the bottom of the bucket and come to me and be like, “Did you get your period?” And I was like, “No, no, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” 

August: It just sounds lonely. It sounds like a very lonely experience. And I wonder if you had any support beyond, obviously not around that particular thing, but did you have in your life some kind of emotional respite? 

Leah: Hmm. There were a lot of adults in my life. That was one saving grace for sure. I lived in a very adult centered world. I didn’t have a lot of kid friends. I never really knew how to interact with kids anyway. But I had a lot of adults who doted on me. 

There is a lot that I didn’t talk about that nobody knew was going on. And my dad was that type who everybody loved. And then he came home and he was awful. Like we didn’t get that version of my dad. So there were a lot of things I never said because I didn’t wanna “ruin” anybody’s impression of him. But to the extent that I was willing or able to share anything, yeah, I did have a lot of emotional support. 

August/narration:

Thank goodness. But she hadn’t learned anything positive about sex. So when she had her first sexual experiences, they were deeply affected by the mixed and damaging messages she’d gleaned along the way.

Leah: So between 25 and 40, I would say I had three relationships. None of them were longer than two years. For some reason, that was like my window of, I can no longer deal with your bullshit because I chose partners who were really terrible partners. I chose partners who treated me the same way my dad did 

I didn’t believe that I deserved or could have anything better than that. So sex was awful. In fact, with my first boyfriend, I cried every time we had sex for two years. At first because it was incredibly painful. 

At some point it became intermittently less painful, but I would still cry because I was so, it was so emotionally painful. I was so alone. It was like I existed to be a hole for him to fill. 

And somewhere in here I also, it was in my early to mid twenties that I started realizing, oh, the attraction that I have to women is not the same as what everybody everybody else. Like I just thought, oh, this is how everybody feels about women. I was not correct about that. 

Then I thought, well, maybe the reason that all of this is so awful is because I’m a lesbian. I didn’t have any context at that point for bisexual. That was just not a word that existed in my community. So I thought, well, if I’m attracted to women, I guess that means that I must be a lesbian. 

I made a really good effort at being a lesbian for a while, but I had no skills, like not just not sex skills, like I had no interpersonal skills. And so that never went anywhere. 

August/narration:

Not at first, anyway. One of her attempts at flirting finally led to, finally, something positive in the intimacy realm. 

Leah was working as a stage manager for a theater in Boston, and she had a big crush on a woman in the cast. 

Leah: She was a soft butch, which was like oh my god, drooling. And I would just sit and stare at her in rehearsal. 

It’s a regional theater where they bring everybody in from different cities and they put you up. and this particular theater had a big house where they put like 18 people up in this big house. So she and I lived in the same house. And I was just useless. Anytime we were in the same room. I could not speak. 

August/narration: 

Then one night there was a bonfire party. 

Leah: And I did not drink. I’ve never enjoyed drinking. But I was like, I’m gonna, I’m gonna have a drink, I don’t know if I was aware of the fact that I was using alcohol to loosen my tongue or not, but she walked in the back door of the house and I was the only person standing in the kitchen at that particular moment. 

And this was like the bravest thing I had ever done. I turned to her and I said, “I just really wanna kiss you.”

She was really taken aback and kind of flustered, I think. And then she was like, you know, I’m dating three women in this city and they’re all a mess and I don’t wanna drag you into that. Which partially, I’m sure was an excuse, and also was actually really sweet of her to not just like take advantage of this situation where this naive young thing is throwing herself at you. 

And she said, “So we can kiss, but that’s it. Is that okay?” And I was like, “Uh huh.” And so she said, meet me in my room in like 10 minutes. I went to her room and we made out for a little bit. 

We were probably there together for another four weeks or so. And I think over those four weeks we maybe like made out a little bit twice more. And I even slept in her bed one night and absolutely nothing happened. So I think of her with great affection for a lot of reasons, but I think of her with a lot of gratitude because she had the opportunity to really take advantage of that situation. And she did not.

August: Ah, after people that you had trusted did.

Leah: Yeah, exactly.

 

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August/narration:

So how did Leah go from all of that to a blossoming sexual awakening? Just before it took shape, she said goodbye to her mom.

Leah: My mom and I were super, super close and I had stayed in the northeast because I wanted to be near her. Specifically, I had stayed in rural, Northern New Hampshire to be near her. There was not much of a life to be had for me there, but it just felt really important.

She had been the one stable person in my life. She was my safety, especially after my dad died because I just sort of, I went into a black hole. I went into a really serious depression. And she held me through that. so when I was 39, she was diagnosed with cancer. I got to be her companion through that, along with her best friend. It was kind of the Three Musketeers.

And it was really, really hard, but it was really good too, because we said everything, you know? There was nothing left unsaid. She allowed me to grieve with her, which was like this unbelievable gift that I don’t think very many people get. But when she was gone, there was nothing holding me in New Hampshire anymore. 

August/narration:

Not only that, but Leah’s mom had her make some promises before she died.

Leah: …including that I wouldn’t make any big decisions for a year. 

So a year after she died, I put her house on the market. That gave me some money that I had never had before. 

I knew I didn’t wanna stay in New Hampshire, but I didn’t know where I wanted to go. So I decided, along with my therapist, who is wonderful, I decided I was gonna take up to a year to travel around the US and see where I wanted to live next. 

August/narration:

A couple of days before driving off, Leah had a final session with her therapist. 

Leah: And there’s like 15 minutes left in the session and she says to me, “You’ve done great work. I’m so proud of you.” Like, this is gonna be really great. I’m so excited to see what happens next. Are there any last things that you wanna talk about in these last 15 minutes? 

And I, being the excellent patient client that I was [laughs], said the thing that I had not been saying for like all of the time that we had been working together, which was, “I don’t really have sexual sensation. Is that something we can work on in 15 minutes?”

August: Oh my gosh. It’s so endearing though. Was it courage that came up? Was this a thing you were actively trying to keep in, or did it just sort of like come to you in that moment? 

Leah: It was definitely something that I thought about a lot. I was deeply afraid that there was something broken that my, there was something wrong with my nervous system that I couldn’t feel things. But I don’t know that I had necessarily thought about bringing it up with her. And if I had thought about it, I would’ve been too embarrassed. But I’m about to walk out the door.

August/narration:

So what did she have to lose? 

Leah: Because sex was such a hard, scary topic for me.The belief that I held so deeply was that if anybody knew that I had sexual thoughts, feelings, attractions, they would laugh at me and say, why do you think anybody would ever be interested in you? So I think legit, what kept me from ever saying that to her before was, I didn’t want her to laugh at me and tell me that I was ridiculous for thinking anybody would ever want me.

August: Oh…

Leah: I couldn’t have bared that because she was so important to me. I look back on that now and I’m like, how the hell did I ever think that she would’ve said that to me? But it was such a hard and fast truth for me at that time that I couldn’t see beyond it. 

August: You didn’t even question it. It wasn’t a doubt. It was a certainty. 

Leah: Yeah. It was an absolute certainty.

August: And baked into you from probably the time you could talk, it sounds like.

Leah: absolutely. So anyway, I say, I say, this ridiculous thing to her

August: And beautiful. 

Leah: God bless her. She had every right to be like, ” that is a ridiculous question. We have 15 minutes left.” But she didn’t. She took me seriously and she said, “Well, this is not my area of expertise. But, you’re about to go on the road and you’re gonna be in all of these cities, and I bet somewhere you’ll have the opportunity to have a session with a sex therapist if you want to.” That was like this door of permission opening that I didn’t know I needed. Here was this woman who I loved and trusted and admired and respected so much, and she was giving me permission. 

August/narration:

And with that, permission in tow, it was time for Leah to set off on her grande adventure. 

[car door closing, engine revving, uplifting music: “Wings of Desire”]

Leah: So you know, I packed up my little four-door sedan. got on the road. 

August/narration:

She wasn’t sure what exactly she was looking for — sex therapy didn’t feel quite right; she had talked herself to death in therapy for years and yearned for something more, hands on. Whatever “it” was, she figured she might find it during one of her first stops: New York City.

Leah: And I was like, well, you can find anything in New York.

August: It’s so true! The big apple apple. 

Leah: Yeah. 

August/narration:

With sexual self-discovery in mind, she started with some online querying. She’d been talking to a group of girlfriends online, in a Facebook group, about her trip.

Leah: And I was like, y’all, this is weird to ask and I’m sorry if this makes you uncomfortable, but I have these sexual issues and I really would like to figure out some way to deal with them. And I’m gonna be in New York. I wanted somebody to put their hands on me.

So I asked does anybody have any idea of what terms I would search to find somebody? ‘ cause I don’t even know what I’m looking for and I said if I actually end up going through with this, I will report back. ‘Cause that won’t be awkward! [laughs]

August: I love that once the permission door was open. you just kinda started 

Leah: It was all the way open. 

August: It’s so freaking great. 

August/narration:

Contrary to Leah’s fears, the women did not laugh at her. Quite the opposite.

Leah: The response that I got from these girlfriends was, 95% “I don’t know anything about this, but, oh my God, please come back and tell us about it because I need to know.” 

They were cheering me on and then one woman gave me the words. She suggested that I try, yoni massage and maybe tantric massage. 

August/narration:

Leah searched for the term and found a woman who offered tantric massage — a type of massage that involves your whole body, including your intimate parts. 

Leah: Somebody who does this work is classified as a sex worker. And it’s pretty common for sex workers to wanna do a voice verify call before they’re willing to meet you. So we made the appointment and she said, I’ll call you at this time on this day to make sure that you’re a real person. And so I expected it to be a three minute call. We ended up on the call for an hour with her taking my full sexual history. Because I had said to her, here’s what I’m dealing with. Is this an appropriate place to bring this? 

August: So you told this person that you weren’t feeling sexual sensations. 

Leah: Yeah. I let her know that I had a background in trauma, a background of abuse and that pretty much all of the sex I’d had was not good. And that I was afraid there was something really wrong with me.

So by the time I actually met her in person, I already felt safe with her because we’d had this long conversation already. 

August: And she welcomed you, it sounds like.

Leah: Yeah, for real. In fact, she told me that she had been training to be a doula and she switched her to, to tantric massage because she saw so many women trying to give birth through this just incredible pelvic dysfunction from earlier trauma. 

August/narration:

Leah had one session with the woman. It lasted for 3 hours.

Leah: I was nervous, like jittery shaking. and for. 

August/narration:

So the woman had Leah sit down with her at a table.

Leah: and talk for a few minutes while I um, descended into the room, a little bit.

August: So brave. 

Leah: And then we went into the bedroom. and she had me sit down on the bed. She brought out a plate of berries and chocolate. And she said, I want you to just pick what appeals to you and put it in your mouth, but I don’t want you to chew. I just want you to experience it. And it was a really profound moment. 

I have been so disconnected from my body that I had maybe never taken a breath to experience something as opposed to just move through it.

I remember so clearly, like I put a chocolate square in my mouth and I just let it melt and dissolve. And I was like, so in my own experience of this, and when I finally opened my eyes, she said, “That was really sexy.” And that was a really important moment for me. 

August/narration:

Leah was able to take her words at face value. She was a professional who’d worked with thousands of women, after all. She had to know what she was talking about. 

Then, the session moved into physical touch. 

Leah: She had asked me in advance if I wanted it to be entirely external, if I wanted to include internal, if I wanted there to be genital touch. If it was just external. She gave me all the options and I was like, well, I’m only gonna do this once so let’s do the whole enchilada.

She started with me laying on my front while she touched my back. She found what I reacted to, which was this real feather light kind of caressing. 

August/narration:

And that prompted a huge epiphany for Leah.

Leah: I realized, oh, this has always been what I reacted to. I’ve even asked people for this. Maybe I didn’t ask loudly enough. Maybe they didn’t pay enough attention. Like, I don’t know where the breakdown in that communication happened, but I rarely got it.

Here I am thinking, oh, well the kind of touch that goes along with sex is this kind of grabby, aggressive touch. And that’s what I don’t feel. So I don’t have sexual sensation. Well, that is fucking bullshit. I have sexual sensation when somebody touches me the way that my body responds to, and my body does not respond to grabby aggressive touch. 

August/narration:

At the end of the session, the woman looked at her and said, “You are not broken.” Finally, Leah could start believing that. 

The next day, she jumped online and reported to her friend group.

Leah: And so I wrote this pages-long screen. At the top, I was like, “If this is TMI, please feel free to ignore.” And they all came back and were like, “Oh my God, tell us more. Tell us more.” And they asked all these questions. 

August/narration:

That back and forth continued as Leah traveled on — with some homework from the bodyworker. She suggested that Leah seek out as many opportunities as possible to be touched, to heal her lingering emotional wounds.

August/narration:

To find those touch experiences, she hit up the classifieds site, Craigslist. 

Leah: And I got really good at figuring out how to vet people. 

August/narration:

She met people in a neutral place first, like a coffee shop.

Leah: I would get as much information as I could about them. Name, phone number, make of car, email address, whatever it was that I could get. And I always had at least one or two friends who had that information and who I would, you know, check in with. 

August/narration:

Leah considers the adventures that followed “six months of gently expanding.” And wow, did she have some escapades. Take this standout example.

Leah Carey

Leah: 

So I had landed in Portland. I answered a Craigslist ad, met a couple. He was very appealing to me. She intimidated the hell outta me because she had the perfect little body and the perfect little sweater clingy dress. At the time, I was very interested in threesomes, but I was like, I cannot be in bed with her because I will spend the whole time comparing myself to her. 

But the three of us all got along really well, and they made it clear that they were interested in me. So I took a little bit of time to think about it, and finally I went back to ’em and I was so nervous and I said, “I think that I need to kind of back up a step. I feel like a threesome right now is varsity and I need to back up to JV, you know?” I didn’t go into any details, but I was like, “I am really working on recovering from some old shit,” and this guy…

August/narration:

Leah sent this guy she calls Matt a message:

Leah: Matt, you seem like the kind of man who would be really good at being with a woman through this experience of healing. Is that something you’re interested in?

 August/narration:

She hit send and sat there, so nervous. She thought for sure that- 

Leah: …either they were gonna laugh at me or they were going to shame me for like, well, you came in for a threesome and… 

August/narration:

Now she was changing her mind, to only have sex with Matt? Thankfully she didn’t have to worry for long. Within 10 minutes his reply popped up. He said, 

Leah: “Oh my God, this is the bravest, most awesome thing I’ve ever read. Yes, absolutely.” And then I got a message from her like a minute and a half later, and she was like, “Absolutely, I think you should do this. And I’m totally in support of it.”

August/narration:

So, Matt and Leah got together.

Leah: And he asked me, “what do you want?” But not in that like, Hey baby, what do you want? That makes it feel like, oh, I have to come up with an answer that you are gonna really enjoy.

He was asking me what I wanted. So I said this thing that I had been fantasizing about for years, but had never actually asked for, which was, I would like for you to touch me without me having to reciprocate so that I can just feel, and I want to not feel like I have to touch your dick until I’m really ready. 

And he was like, “Oh my God, absolutely!” [laughs]

August: Yay, Matt. 

Leah: And we played for hours that day. We would play for a little bit and it would be amazing, and then all of a sudden my nervous system would get overwhelmed. And I would start to cry or I would pull away or something, and he followed me. He say, “Okay, do you need to take a break” He would hold me because that’s what worked for me. 

And then after a few minutes, my nervous system would calm back down and we would start again. 

August/narration:

Leah and Matt were in a comfortable flow when he asked her another question that felt big – and honestly, perplexing.

Leah: “Would it be okay with you if I touched myself while looking at you?” Which was deeply confusing for me because, you know, still dealing with this whole, “I’m so unattractive that nobody could possibly want me” thing.

August/narration:

Still, she thought…

Leah: I guess if that’s what you want. He did, he started masturbating and he was legit looking at me, and after a minute I started to get really squirrel-ey. 

August/narration:

He called her on it: What was going on?

Leah: I said, “Well, I feel like I’m supposed to be doing that for you.” And he said, “No, we made the agreement that you’re not gonna touch my dick until you’re ready.” I was like, “But that doesn’t seem fair!” He’s like, “No, that’s what we agreed. That’s what consent means.” 

And my brain fucking exploded all over the room. [laughs] How did I get to 43 years old? And I literally had no fucking idea what consent meant? That was the first time it ever occurred to me that I wasn’t there to be pleasing andto be there for somebody else, for their benefit. 

August: And how did that impact your body and your pleasure for the rest of that? Were you more relaxed? Was it just a lot to take in? 

Leah: Oh yeah. I mean, it was a lot to process, but I was able to relax more. I was able to give into that feeling of, oh, he actually is genuinely attracted to me and this is a thing he’s really enjoying, and it’s okay if I don’t participate.

 

August/narration:

Leah continued to learn a lot through her “gentle unfolding” and her “active seeking,” as she called it, which lasted a good 6 months more. And that included more adventures.

Leah: I went to Boulder, Colorado and I found a couple to have a threesome with. I went to my first like house sex party. I booked a five day trip to Hedonism in Jamaica a swinger’s club, where I did not do a single thing for five days.

Like I did not touch another person. No kissing, no boobies, no nothing. I discovered that, swinger’s culture is not the right place for me, but I had the opportunity to be naked for five days in public and to learn that oh, nobody’s telling me to put my clothes on and go back inside. My body is just like everybody else’s body. 

August/narration:

Of all of the places she ventured, Leah found the greatest sense of community in Portland, where she’s still planted.

Leah: Something happened when I got to Portland. I got to Portland and I found the organization sex-positive Portland 

They have a whole bunch of introductory classes that you have to take before you can join as a full member. And so I got to take classes on consent and boundaries and all of these things. And again, like my mind is just exploding on a regular basis.

August/narration:

Amed with those skills, skills she continues to practice and hone, Leah started going to actual touch events.

Leah:…where I began having more and more opportunities to Just kind of blow the lid off of my comfort zone. you know, I met people at the events who I would then contact and play with outside. So it was like six months of being on the road of gently going. And then I got to Portland and then there was like another six months of just having all of the fun with all of the people [laughs] 

August/narration:

As is often the case with sexual self discovery and extra exploratory times, Leah learned a lot about herself through the process. About her desires, what she enjoys and her identity. 

August: After that, where did you, not that there was like a, you know, a finish line and I’m done exploring or anything like that. I know that’s not the case, but like, Do you identify in a certain way relationship style? Like what’s your sexuality kind of palette like these days and relationship wise and stuff? 

Leah: I love that, sexuality palette. It used to be very scary for me to admit that I was attracted to multiple genders. Now that’s easy. And I have been with my partner for, I think, coming up on six years. We spent a lot of that time monogamous because we needed that foundation. About maybe a year and a half ago, we decided we wanted to open.

August/narration:

Meaning they decided to allow themselves and each other to have sex outside of the relationship – based on specific agreements they set together. 

Leah: And that has been such an incredible. Incredibly beautiful journey for us. I think I started with a leg up…

August/narration:

No pun intended. 

Leah: Because I do coach people through you know, especially throughconversations and communication is my specialty. 

August/narration:

That’s right. Leah’s journey of healing and discovery led her to become an intimacy coach. 

Leah: So I’ve coached people through how to have these conversations, including when you’re opening. So I came in with a toolbox full and was able to guide us through this process and make sure that we had all the conversations we needed to. 

August/narration:

And the timing turned out to be helpful, too.

Leah: Three or four months after we opened, I ended up starting to have some health issues that basically took my body kind of offline for most of the last year, between just having zero sex drive and also being under doctor’s orders to not have any kind of penetration. The fact that he’s had somewhere else to go to get his physical needs met when I couldn’t meet them? Thank God on his behalf that he had that. And also thank God on my behalf that I wasn’t sitting here so stressed out all the time because I wasn’t meeting his needs and somehow I was being a bad partner.

August/narration:

Leah isn’t polyamorous. Managing more than one relationship just doesn’t speak to her, she said. But she loves that she and her partner can have their needs met sexually in multiple ways. 

That turned out to be  a bit part of her own desires, which she uncovered through all of her exploring.

August: Do you think, back on you before you started this journey, before you had this out loud, I was gonna say emission, but that sounds like-

August/narration:

Ejaculation??

August: [Leah laughs] Okay, we’ll use it — emission your therapy office. Before that, could you imagine if you met future-you, who came up and said, “By the way, next year you’re gonna have a threesome and you’re gonna be at this event where you’re gonna squirt,” or whatever it is… Could you even see that? How do you think you would’ve felt? 

Leah: I couldn’t even say the word masturbation out loud. So if you had come to me and said like, five years from now you’re gonna be a sex and intimacy coach, I would’ve laughed you, oh my God. I would’ve told you to get your head examined. Because there was just, there was absolutely no context for that whatsoever. 

August/narration:

But along the way, she had a lightbulb moment – again with the posse who’d cheered her on.

Leah: 

And the more I share, the more they start coming back to me with their own stories and questions. And I’m like, huh, I actually have answers for these questions. Like, I know a thing or two. 

August/narration:

Beyond intimacy coaching, Leah was intrigued by all the story sharing that was happening among her friends. So she started her thoughtful podcast, “Good Girls Talk About Sex,” where she coaches people in real time. Many are working through shame, much like Leah has.

Leah: What I have heard from listeners is that it is incredibly healing for them to hear other people tell variations of their own story, to like hear their own story and to know, I’m not alone. I’m not broken, I’m not weird, I’m not perverted, like whatever the thing is that they’re afraid of. 

August/narration:

If you relate to Leah’s story, maybe you sense the need for sexual exploration or want to find healing or discover new desires, she wants you to know that it’s never too late.

Leah: I was in my early forties when I started this journey. I’ve met people in their eighties who are having rollicking sex lives. There’s this idea, especially for women, that we sort of lose our attractiveness, but also our capacity for sex when we hit menopause. 

That is some fucking bullshit. I mean, that is some patriarchal man shit. It’s ridiculous.

August: I want people to have that as a soundbite because it’s so true that that’s the message that we get in so many different ways, and it’s so easy to internalize that message and to just give up on ourselves and on our sexuality. 

Leah: Yeah. It would’ve been so easy for me to think I’m in my early forties. I probably only have seven or eight years left to why even try? Oh my God, I would’ve missed so much.

August/narration:

Leah clarified that her own sex drive changes aren’t related to aging or menopause, but to surgery and trauma her body has been through over the past year.

Leah: I absolutely am looking forward to getting back to being fully sexual. 

August/narration:

Whatever that means for her at the time. The specifics are different for all of us. But one thing Leah is sure of is her commitment to doing so shamelessly. And she wants that for all of you. 

Leah: You know, so much of my work is about normalizing all of the experiences. Like there’s really nothing wrong with you. 

There are things that people want that they’re ashamed of. None of that is shameful. And we can have that conversation all day, any day. But there’s also this sense of, here are all of the ways that I’m broken. Here are all of the ways that my body doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to. Here are all the ways that I have been sexually impure that I judge myself for. Like there’s all of this judgment and what is so clear to me over and over and over is that every one of those things came from somewhere. 

So whether it’s like me, I didn’t have sensation because I wasn’t being touched the right way. Like that is for real. Also, somebody who chooses to find their validation through having a lot of casual sex partners, we’re so judgmental about that. And I hear people being so judgmental of themselves and yet it is so obvious to me when I talk to them and hear their stories that they are dealing with something. And this is, and not just logical, but actually a really adaptive way of dealing with it. 

So when my body turned off this year, I was able to come to it with this sense of, Oh yeah. That makes sense. There’s just not enough energy for everything right now. That’s cool.

August: Yeah. And you can still have a really healthy relationship with your partner you can explore dating if you want to. That’s really beautiful. 

August/narration:

For more from Leah, visit leahcarey.com. There you can find a fun quiz called “Who Is Your Sex and Relationship Alter Ego?” You answer a few questions then get matched up with someone from pop culture who embodies challenges you might be having, see how they manifest and start working them out. 

If you’re enjoying Girl Boner Radio, make sure you’ve hit the follow button on your favorite podcast app. I’d also love it if you’d share links with your friends. Thanks so much for reading.