“Reclaiming Her Sexy Aliveness”

a Girl Boner podcast transcript

Jane: It really brought me back to life sexually. It turned me back on again. But it wasn’t just turn on because I think this was honestly the first time in my life I’d been so intimately seen by anyone… and I was feeling so lit up, this kind of awakening around the beauty of the heart.

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Jane Garnett is a marriage and family therapist and EMDR practitioner whose sexuality journey has involved Hollywood glamour, a marriage, plant medicine, and a post-divorce awakening.

Jane told me she’s always felt a connection to her sexuality and her sensuality. Take, for example, this early memory involving her friend, Lamia.

Jane: I think we were about six years old. And we discovered what we called snuggling, which was taking our pants off in bed together and like twisting around each other, and it felt amazing. you know, we’d like struck gold. It was good stuff.

Her mother interrupted us. But there wasn’t much speaking going on in that relationship, and I didn’t speak to her mother either. But there was this moment of the mother opening the door and just sort of staying in the doorway and this sense that this wasn’t okay, what we were doing.

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When Jane was 10, she tried to start what she called a “sex club,” which had nothing to do with actual sex.

Jane: My sex club was four people. I wanted to get more, but only four would agree to this.

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To Jane, the word “sex” didn’t mean physical acts.

Jane: The bit that I was really inspired by was this idea of being sexy. I was reading a book at the time I think it was called Ballet Shoes for Anna, and it had the concept of a vow in it. These sisters who were making vows to each other.

Like, “I vow to be a famous ballet dancer,” or whatever it was. And I thought, Oh, that’s so cool that you can make a vow about your life, make a promise to yourself and what would be important to me. And what came to me was being sexy. So I was like, “Well, we must make vows to be sexy all of our lives.”

And I realize that as a kid, what I meant by sexy is actually what I mean by sexy now, which is alive. ‘ Cause I was looking around at the grownups, and…I was always very sort of sensitive to mood and vibe, and I would feel that the grownups were sort of in a flat state. And I was like, why aren’t they, why aren’t they more alive, more sexy, more, like, happening? You know?

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Even back then, Jane was on a path—one that fueled curious exploration in adulthood.

Jane: I was always an explorer sexually. And not so much in terms of all the different things you can do with sex, but just different people. I had a lot of partners, and in the early days, I loved seduction. I love the moment when it changes. I love the moment when the chemistry kicks in. I love the moment where it’s like, “Oh my God, now we’re gonna kiss. Oh, now we’re just starting to touch.” And it’s like opening up a portal and entering a different world. To an extent, I was hooked on that.

It did have some shadow braided into it, which I explored later, but it was also a way of me connecting to my life force, to my passion, to exploration, to theater, to drama. It had a lot that I still really appreciate about it.

In my 20s before I met my husband, I just had a lot of boyfriends. I was straight, I thought. I mean, I’ve actually always been bisexual, but life sort of led me in this, like, ” You will go with men,” kind of path until much later.

So I was sort of just entrained in going with men and I was fine. I was turned on by them, so it didn’t bother me particularly. Before I met my husband, I was just trying on loads of different kinds of people.

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When she met her husband, she wasn’t a therapist yet. She was working in the film business.

Jane: I was in New York. I was kind of like a new producer on the first movie that I ever got to be a new producer on. So I was pretty excited.

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She was also dating around 10 guys.

Jane: There was an itch in me because I was starting to feel restless with the guys that I was seeing. Like, everyone had a pro, everyone had a con. But basically, my clock was starting to tick. I always wanted to have babies, and in my early 20s I had an ovarian cancer. And it was an unusual one.

It was a malignant teratoma over one of my ovaries, and one of my ovaries had to be removed, and we didn’t know if the cancer would disappear. I luckily wasn’t given any chemo and it just came down. The markers came down on their own, and I was fine. But because of that, I had this sort of awakening around my priorities.

So yeah, while I was a seductress and a sexual explorer, I also knew that pretty soon I wanted to actually find a partner and have babies, and I wasn’t looking to be polyamorous or anything like that. Like, if I’m single, I’m single. If I’m with someone, I’m with someone. But the guys that I was dating in New York were, to me, just not anywhere near husband and baby-making material.

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Then she met the man who was that material.

Jane: He blew them all out. the guy who was right at the time for the thing that I needed to do, which was build.

My work was going well. I was rising in the film industry and, I was exploring, But I was knocking on that next chapter.

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She vividly recalls meeting him.

Jane: So there was another movie I was kind of helping on. It was called The Empress Club, and it was starring Kevin Kline.  And I’m looking out at this big sea of action, you know, this big shoot going on, and it’s all these, like, people dressed as, like, schoolboys in togas and, teachers and then lots of production people, and everyone’s milling around. And I’m looking at the energy flow, and I’m seeing that there’s a guy who’s just a leader. You can see people are going to him for answers. I immediately say to the writer, “Who’s that? Who’s that guy?” he’s like, “Oh, that’s, that’s Mark. That’s, the LA producer. He’s come in.”

Soon enough, Mark comes over, and the writer introduces me to him, and I say hi. And we’re immediately in a thing. The energy’s on. And then we part ’cause he’s busy, but I kind of catch him looking at me a couple of times, and then that’s it. And then at the end of the day, just getting in a cab, and I’m about to go home, and I get a call from my boss.

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He was about to have drinks with Mark — “and maybe she should come.” So she had the cab turn around, put on mascara, and joined them at the bistro.

Jane: …with the red leather booths and low-lit lamps and martinis and steaks and all of this kind of stuff. So very like classic. I get there, and it’s just the chemistry is just really on. Pretty soon into me arriving, which everyone pretends is a natural thing, my boss like does this big yawn. He goes, “Oh, I’ve gotta get going. I, uh…” He says, “My wife’s having a colonoscopy tomorrow. I’ve gotta get going.” And then I’m there with him, and that chemistry is there. Like everything else disappears.

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She writes about this in her memoir, This Time with Feeling—the moment when there’s a “forcefield of potential between two people.”

Jane: We were crazy about each other. It was real. We were really into each other.

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For various reasons, that didn’t last.

Jane: He was a lot older than me. He was a lot more successful than me, and he had a lot more money than me. And that power imbalance became a drag after a while. As I evolved, it was hard for us to co-evolve within that dynamic. He was the leader, but I’m kind of a leader, too, and so we basically were in a bit of a power struggle. We had fun, and we could relate, and we could go to Hollywood events and come back and just break it down and laugh.

But we never really cracked the code in terms of the emotional life, attachment issues, control issues. Neither of us had the language for it. So we would have huge fights and just be at other ends of the universe. And meanwhile, I was growing so much by becoming a mom, by becoming a therapist, by my own sex drive changing because retrospectively I see all of that chemistry was so loaded

I mean, he’s definitely a sexy guy anyway, but he was the guy I was looking for because I wanted a leader. I had a family history of guys crumbling and not coming through, alcoholic father, and I needed an alpha. I needed a guy who was just the guy who was just a rock.

Now I had those needs met, so I don’t need that guy anymore, but I did, and I respect that. That’s what I needed. I’d had the cancer. I needed a baby-maker. He had already had two sets of kids. It was proven. I didn’t wanna fuck around. I wanted to get those kids out, and I wanted to do that thing.

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When it was time to part ways, she knew that was the right move. And it was still tough.

Jane: Oh, it’s such a hard decision. Who wants to get married and then get divorced? It was so braided with sort of the beginning of my spiritual awakening really. You know, it was two kids into the marriage. I’d lost my sex drive. I’d lost really my connection to myself.

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Jane tracks this in her book, what she calls “a movement of losing yourself.” Here’s it went, leading up to the divorce. It involved cosmetic surgery.

Jane: I had a boob job as sort of an attempt to kind of get my sex back. I met another woman, like a Hollywood wife, who’d had this beautiful boob job. She was so sweet. She seemed so happy and she showed me.

In fact, all the Hollywood women were always showing me their boobs, which was awesome. Because they were always having boob jobs and they just wanted to show someone probably. They’d probably tired out their husband with it or whatever. But maybe they just wanted to make out with me. I mean, I’d like to think it’s ’cause I’m so sexy, but I think it was more that they thought that I was open, and they were happy to show me.

August: Maybe a bit of both. I could see that.

Jane: I hope so. I appreciate that. You know, I mean, I’m always open to looking at boobs.

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The next thing she knew, she was on that operating table herself.

Jane: I mean, I never would’ve imagined I would’ve had a boob job ever in a million years. And then I did it, and then I hated myself for it because it felt so like, “This isn’t me.”

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Just so out of character.

Jane: My old friends are like, “You did that? Like, what?” Where I come from is so different from where I ended up in terms of sort of LA and performing a life and feeling disconnected. It was that disconnection that led me to another layer of my journey. So it was that disconnection that led me to the boob job.

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After the procedure, she wanted to get away from it all.

Jane: I was like, I’m gonna go and recover in Brazil where a friend of mine who’s a yoga teacher had this really kind of beautiful remote spot. I took my kids out there, and I found myself out in the middle of nowhere, and there were these shamans visiting. And they were in a completely different state than me.

They were in a state of connectedness and wholesomeness and heart-centeredness and connection with nature. And I’m there with my Botox and my boob job and my Xanax and my disconnection and my shame.

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At first, she resisted her new surroundings.

Jane: I’m like, “These guys are, they’re phonies. They say annoying words like prana, you know?” I was like, Fuck you with your prana and your quais eggs and your bullshit yoga and all that stuff. But I could feel their health. I could feel their real connection. And I could feel my own disconnection, and the mirror was too vivid to turn away from.

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So she pushed through. Stopped criticizing and started listening.

Jane: I walked up and down the beach in Brazil asking my heart to speak to me because I knew it had turned off, and I could tell that because they were talking about their hearts and talking to their hearts. And so I kept talking to my heart, being like, “Do you have anything to say? Do you have anything to show me? Is there anything left in you?” Like, “What do I do?”

Eventually my heart spoke to me, and it gave me an image. It was an image of future, and it was the image of a man that wasn’t my husband. Very different energy, very different. Specifically, physically different. And I was like, whoa, that’s crazy.

I didn’t take it too literally, but it was starting to shift something. I was starting to have this deeper conversation with, what was it? Nature herself, the jungle, my own heart, all of these kind of like cosmic spaces.

I didn’t take ayahuasca on that trip, but then when I went back to LA, I did. And I went back thinking I can save the marriage. I’ve got these new shamanic tips. I was putting spells into my husband’s tea and asking him to take ayahuasca with me and really wanting to save it.

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Jane said they were in different places emotionally. Still, he agreed to try ayahuasca with her. She thought it might help.

Jane: But the ayahuasca separated us more. Because to me, the ayahuasca journey was a massive homecoming. All of the seeking that I’d done, all of the soul searching that I’d done sort of found validation in that experience. I felt like it released a lot of shame in me and I’m like, “I’m not, wrong. I’m not even lost. I’m just on a journey.” Just like on a fucking journey. And, he had had different expectations. I’d studied it already, I’d been around it already, and I was a therapist already, but he thought it might be more of, like, a groovy drug experience, taking a load off.

For him it was more like being hit over the head with a frying pan. But, you know, it’s different for everyone, right? For me it was very, very validating. And on that journey, I asked about the marriage, ‘cause you can kind of ask the plant or ask your higher self in that experience, questions.

So I said, “Show me the marriage.” The vision showed me the marriage bed. Underneath the marriage bed, there was a very scared, distrustful stray dog. And I knew in that moment that I couldn’t tame it. Was the dog him? Was it me? Was it the marriage? Was it all of the above? Who knows? But it was a sort of reconciliation with I’ve been trying to tame and change this thing, and that’s generally my pattern in relationships. I skew codependent and start trying to, change and improve everything,

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Gradually, Jane realized the marriage needed to end.

Jane: For me to keep growing, I needed to move on. And I remember being with a healer at this beautiful house that I lived at. She said, “To really live your life, you’re gonna have to leave the castle.” It’s kind of reverse Cinderella.

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After Jane’s divorce, she had her first relationship a woman–which brought on a full-on sexual awakening.

Jane: My sexuality was flatlining a bit after two kids and a divorce. And so I’m feeling a little panicky about going back into the dating scene… But I’m trying anyway. I’m going on these dates, but I’m not really feeling it. I’m just mainly worried about, am I still attractive?

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So she goes on a date with this really nice guy she’s been seeing. Really more of a friend.

Jane: We’re both trying ’cause I want a boyfriend, he wants a girlfriend.

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One night they go to a gala. Something about the environment.

Jane: At our table, there are these two women, and one of them’s actually a famous singer, and the other is her manager at the time. They’re great, these women. I just really connect with them. They’re gorgeous and they’re fun, and so I end up sort of spending the evening with them.

The woman that I end up being with, and she and I end up in a conversation, and she tells me that she’s bisexual. She’s in a poly relationship with a woman. What else does she tell me? I can’t remember. But enough to get my head spinning. Like, I hadn’t really had contact with these communities before. And she’s super compelling and I’m like, Wow, this is so interesting. And then she says something to me that’s really so intimate that I feel like for first conversation, I feel like she’s overstepped, but I’m interested.

She says, “Why are you with that guy?” And I’m like, “What do you mean?” And she’s like, “Well, he’s not your type.” And I’m like, “How do you know what my type is?” And she said, “You’re passionate.”

August: She saw who you’ve been since you were that six-year-old.

Jane: Yeah. Exactly. She saw me in that way.

It wasn’t like I never had any other contact with women. But I’d basically put away that dream, not as something shameful, but just as something like, “Oh, it’s not gonna happen at this point in my life.”

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And suddenly she’s like,

Jane: “God, maybe it could,” you know?

But I’m terrified about it, and I couldn’t understand why she would find me attractive so… But she kept coming towards me. Eventually I made a pass at her and it worked out. But like, I was kind of freaked out and spellbound by the whole thing, you know? I was like, really?

And you know, I’d been in such a Hollywood world and such a sort of tough marriage, and there’s so many complications. I mean, I was with a tough guy, and then I was with a very tender woman. And it was such a contrast.

It was such a study as well because with her, as things started to go wrong, which inevitably they do, when the dynamics start to kick in, I found myself more like him and she was more like me in the marriage before.

So I started to understand the other side of it because she was, at the time…much stronger, but she was more vulnerable and unsure about her life choices, needing more validation and affirmation from me, which is more who I was with my husband, who was so confident and I wanted him to bolster me and she wanted me to bolster her. And I felt the weight of that.

I also felt like because she was so young and beautiful, I felt like I’ve got a princess on my hands. I don’t know if I can handle it. I was still thinking in these heterosexual terms, like if she’s a princess then I have to be the prince or if she’s a queen I have to be the king. I am not ready to be the king.

I’m just picking my life out of the gutter over here and I’m a parent to two small children. So it was, it was a lot of information coming in. But really stunning sexual and heart chemistry.

August: So how did that impact your sexuality? ‘Cause it sounds like, like you said, you had kind of flat-lined.

Jane: Yeah. I mean, it really brought me back to life sexually. It turned me back on again. But it wasn’t just turn on because I think this was honestly the first time in my life I’d been so intimately seen by anyone. And she definitely has a gift that way. There are some people who have a real gift at being able to reflect other people. In fact, I have a bit of that gift myself. And so to sort of like receiving your own medicine. You know, she, she gave it to me. Now, I hadn’t had that before. She’s like, “I see this in you, I see this in you.” And it was very flattering as well.

She thought it was sexy that I put notes in my children’s lunchboxes. She saw my softness and my tenderness, and she reflected it back not just as lovely, but as sexy. I’m like, whoa, this is so good. You don’t have to be hard, and tough, and seductive. You can be soft, and you can be sweet, and you can be innocent, and that can be sexy.

And so it was kind of like this melt. It was very sort of psychedelic in that way, and it also was spiritual. I was learning a lot about mindfulness at the time. I’d started actually teaching meditation at a local space. So I was really kind of into this, slowing down and being with the senses, and then I’m having this sensual awakening at the same time.

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There was also a lot going on with roses.

Jane: This was the other thing I just was so excited about, being with a romantic woman. She would send me lingerie shots, and I would send her pictures of roses, which was my equivalent. And I was feeling so lit up, this kind of like awakening around the beauty of the heart.

To feel the power of softness when I’ve been so sort of locked into these other kinds of powers, the power struggle of my marriage, the power of Hollywood, the power of performing a perfect life, of having to pick it up for your kids every day, right?

There’s all these places in life you have to step up, buck up, and tough up. And then to just be able to just melt in the middle of midlife, what a blessing, you know?

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The relationship eventually ended, and Jane’s self-discovery continued.

Jane: That was about 10 years ago that we broke up, I would say. And in that time, in the last 10 years, I had about seven years of being single. after her, I went back out again. I went back out into the world. You know, we broke each other’s hearts. It was a mess. We were not a sustainable situation.

So I had to watch her go and get married to another woman in a castle and live a fairy tale and like, ugh, daggers to the heart. Life goes on and, and so back out and, I tried a lot of things. I was like, “Maybe I am poly,” like, “Maybe I am this.”

And I was attracted to men again and… But when I went back to men, I also was noticing something different, which was I was noticing patterns in the guys that I was drawn to. And Maybe ’cause my heart was still broken, but not fully, I was noticing there was some sort of toxic in the patterns. That there were some guys who I would be in these situations where they were kind of like teasing me and keeping me on the hook and wanting me to stay interested, but not really going for it.

I was captivated. I was caught in the web. So I started wondering about this because my consciousness was growing, so I was having more awareness around my own patterns, I thought did something happen to me when I was young?

But I couldn’t remember. But I did know that my dad, who just passed a year ago, was an alcoholic. Didn’t feel safe to be around. And he did, pedestal me. You know, “You’re the savior.”

You’re the special one. You’re the only one who understands me.” You know, he’d pour me wine when I was young and like, praise me like a lover, not sexual, but romantic. And I never remembered a single, overstep from him. But I thought it’s possible that I blocked it out.

I researched everywhere I could, couldn’t find anything. But I heard about this plant medicine, iboga, which is a very, very deep kind of get into your root system medicine. And I had a bunch of guys go, “Oh, you’re not a vet. You don’t need to do this. You’re not a tough guy. You don’t need to do this.” I’m like, there’s a tough guy inside me. Trust me.

August: Yeah, don’t cross me.

Jane: Yeah, don’t fucking  cross me. Like, I’m gonna do it. So I did it, and it was a very rough journey. and it was very deep research into sexuality amongst other things. One of the things I saw was unsafety in the family line. I think, my mother and her sister carried some traumatized sexual energy from being objectified by their stepfather, who possibly interfered.

I don’t think just that, but like probably many generations of women feeling unsafe in their bodies. So there was a hereditary component to it. What I saw in with my father was not that he had done something And I think this is really important for a lot of people because a lot of people are like, “Oh, well, nothing actually happened.”

But what I saw was my safety bubble was burst. It was not safe. And that his energy was spilling all around me in a way that felt chaotic, and that some of that energy was sexual, romantic, alcoholic, you know, just a tangle of shit. I was supposedly the bright star in the middle of that. It’s too much.

So I kind of worked through that. I saw it. I felt at peace. My energy changed, my chemistry changed.

 August/narration:

And so did her patterns.

Jane: Before I went on that journey, there was a guy I was super into. He was really hot. And we used to go to the beach together and lie next to each other. And he would give me little massages while saying things like, “Trust me, Jane, you don’t wanna have anything to do with me. I’ve got a black hole inside my heart,” While our bodies are just like, “Ah,” zinging around each other. So I was in this little cat and mouse dance with him. And I say little, but it was like, quite strong for me.

I remember going back to visit him after I’d had this journey and we lay down next to each other on the beach, and I’m just waiting for my body to start freaking out with sexual attraction ‘ cause I’m lying right next to him, and it always goes like that.

But it doesn’t go like that. And I’m like, “Oh my God.” And I remember driving back from Malibu that day going like, “Oh my God, I’ve broken the thing. I’ve broken the spell.”

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No more toxicity of being something that she couldn’t have. She was no longer hooked on the chase or the unavailable man.

Jane: It was so weird ’cause I felt like such a combination of liberation and grief. It was like a chapter was really over.

August: Was there a grief in looking back on your life, like grieving what you didn’t know sooner, or was this more grieving the “old,” quote-unquote, “you”?

Jane: Yeah, I It’s a good question. I’m trying to answer it honestly. I think it was the sigh of like, “Oh, oh,” all of that, pent-up energy, all of the excitement, it was that, it was like shedding, a heavy coat that you’ve been wearing, but that you also really loved.

August: I totally get that.

Jane: Yeah.

August: Even when it was a challenging coat.

Jane: You know, there’s something there because Like, I love this conversation. I love these stories. I love these memories. It’s so precious. And that’s one of the things I talk to people about quite a bit is like, we’re so quick to try and label things toxic and get out of this situation and rearrange our lives so that they’re better, and it’s all so precious. It’s all our experience. It’s us.

August/narration:

The wisdom Jane would like you to walk away with ties into her memoir.

Jane: The title of my book is This Time With Feeling. And it’s based on the old Hollywood director would say to the actor if they weren’t putting themself into the, the take enough, right? If they were just kind of phoning it in. The director would say, “One more time, this time with feeling.”

It’s my ongoing note to self, and it’s my encouragement to the listener, which is to sort of remember that we always in this kind of turning over of selves. We’re always in this opportunity that keeps presenting itself to us again and again. And the opportunity is to come online in our, our own lives and our own experiences, and to embrace being the, the heroes or the heroines of our own narrative.

And if you feel like you haven’t done that so far, that’s no excuse to not do it now. Like, every minute is a new opportunity. We can always take off an old coat, put on a new one. Generally, nobody else really cares what we do. It’s our choices.

To live as your own hero or heroine, to relish your own moments, you know, to relish your own mistakes, to relish, to enjoy. It’s way less about the perfect score and way more about the attitude.

Learn more

August/narration:

Jane described This Time With Feeling as a fun and sexy read that’s especially helpful if you’re on a psychological, spiritual, sexual awakening journey. She said it’ll give you more food for thought.

She also hosts EMDR dance parties in Los Angeles, which are all about “coming alive in the middle of your own stories, de-shaming, reclaiming, and learning to be really creative in the middle of your life through joy and celebration.”

Learn more at the link in the show notes, and more about Jane’s work at janegarnett.com.

And, if you’re enjoying Girl Boner Radio, I’d love it if you’d join my Patreon community, where you’ll get fun extras — including bonus mini Q&As with guests and storytellers, access to archived episodes and more — while supporting this show so I can keep it going. I so appreciate ratings and reviews on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, too. Thanks so much for listening.