Sexual Healing and Stronger Orgasms

So Laura Zam is a playwright, author, speaker, sexuality educator, certified trauma professional and award-winning solo performer. Her writing appears in The New York Times, Salon, HuffPost, SheKnows, international journals, and five book anthologies. Her new book, The Pleasure Plan: One Woman’s Search for Sexual Healing, literally started out as a “screw journal.” We had such a fun chat. 

After thanking her for writing The Pleasure Plan—which is funny and enlightening and and just delightful—I with her what I loved most about it.

August McLaughlin  

I really appreciate the honesty with which you share about your personal challenges with things like low libido and difficulty with orgasm and pelvic pain that you had very early on, starting at age 17. I’m curious what you recall believing about your body and sexuality. Back then in your late teens.

Laura Zam 

I believed I was broken… The first time I tried to have sex, it wasn’t possible. Penetration felt blocked. It felt like there was a physical barrier. And so what I first thought was that there was something wrong. There was something physically wrong and I actually did go to see a gynecologist. And you read my book, August, so you know that going to the doctor was not something that was even possible in my family. My mother didn’t believe in the medical community. But I found on my own a doctor. And she told me, as many people who have this kind of problem were told, and unfortunately still told, to just have a glass of wine and to relax. So after that I just believed, “Okay, I’m broken.” From the time I was around that age, I was speaking openly about the fact that I’d been sexually abused as a child. And so I made the connection in my mind, “Okay, I had sexual trauma, therefore, I’m broken and will always be broken.” 

August McLaughlin  

That really pulls at my heart. I think so many people can relate to that. And the whole idea that you can just sip some wine—basically they’re saying relax, “just calm down,” which is so shaming. And then to internalize that, because we look to professionals like doctors, as you know, the experts, and I know they don’t actually even learn very much about sex or sexuality in training.

Laura Zam  

Yeah, they don’t. And it really varies from medical school to medical school, but I’ve heard anything from just a few hours on a day or sometimes maybe a whole day of sex ed. Of course, it also varies according to what the specialty might be. But even gynecologists are not trained necessarily in the mechanics of sex, let alone pleasure. And I know from my own experience, and that of people I work with, it’s very problematic because we’re going to them to solve sexual problems, and they just don’t have the information for us.

August McLaughlin  

It’s so true. So many people are missing that information, and then it’s very difficult to even feel comfortable bringing it up. You open your book with a really important scene. You’re in a therapist’s office and the doctor suggested that maybe you weren’t a very sexual person. And you asked the question, “Can eros be taught?” And the therapist thought you were joking, but you weren’t. Would you share what led you to that office to take that step? And then to that question?

Laura Zam  

Well, what led me there was a little bit crazy, but it worked. So I didn’t know how to heal sexually. I had been in therapy for decades, in and out of therapy, but in a great way. I love therapy. I just went back to therapy. I adore therapy. But I never really talked about any of my sexual issues with any of my therapists and it just never came up. And so when I got married for the first time, at 46, I wanted to “fix” my sexuality so that I could have this great relationship. But I just didn’t know how. I felt so overwhelmed and so confused, because I didn’t know if my problems had to do with my sexual abuse, as I had always thought, or if there was something now age-related because I was now right entering my late 40s, if there was something having to do with marriage; I’d never really had a very successful long term relationship. I didn’t know if it had to do with ignorance with regard to female sexuality, female sexual response. I just didn’t know anything. I felt so thwarted, really, and overwhelmed. 

So I got a commission to write a one-person play. And I thought, you know, this is gonna be the way that I’m going to heal. And the commission gave me a certain amount of time to write the play, but what it gave me was a process. I had been writing one-person plays. I was a playwright. I have an MFA in playwriting. So I knew that process. And I knew a template of creating art. I knew, okay, you can do research and then you could just proceed with your research and then you write about it and then you put it up on its feet. I knew what that was in my bones. And I thought, “Oh, I’m gonna take my sexual healing and I’m going to basically plop it into this template using this play commission.” And so one of the people that I put on the list was a hypnotist, because I heard that hypnotist could help with vaginismus—one of the problems that I was having, and I wanted to really explore new ways of looking at this. Anyway, that’s what brought me to this woman, who was also a cognitive behavioral therapist and a marriage and family therapist. So I thought she had a lot to offer me.

August McLaughlin  

And then to have that question land in such a way, “Can eros be taught?” That’s a really wonderful question. It’s one that I think more of us could be asking, if maybe we had the courage. I think a lot of people would feel like that could be a courageous question, because it suggests that you’re struggling in that area and people have a hard time talking about that. How did it feel? Did it feel dismissive? Obviously, you’d had experience with with doctors and professionals not having the understanding.

Laura Zam  

Yeah. I love your question so much about that question, because I’m thinking, well, I don’t think I’ve ever answered “can eros be taught” and did I learn eros through this process? And I have to say I did. But to get to the other part of your common, yeah, she was very dismissive. She was dismissive of my sexual abuse having an impact on my really present circumstances. She was dismissive of my desire to become a desirous person. But I love this idea about yeah, I think eros can actually be taught, actually, because I think that change is his only learning, right? Isn’t that what learning is? And so we’re rewiring our brains. That’s how we learn. And that’s how we change. And so I rewired my brain for eros. So yes, eros can be taught.

August McLaughlin  

You demonstrate it so well because you take readers on this adventure of your life and this journey that you’re on and you have really incredible adventures. Some are very eye-opening and empowering experiences. There are some very funny experiences and moments. Could we talk about your Betty Dodson experience? I really love her.

Laura Zam  

Yes. Have you seen Betty?

August McLaughlin  

Yes, I’m familiar with her work. I got to interview her for my book briefly. And I love her thoughts on masturbation and the openness that she brings to this field that’s so important, and she has for decades. I really could feel it as you were meeting her, walking into her space. Would you share a bit about that? That feeling as you walked into her apartment?

Laura Zam

Yes, her apartment in midtown Manhattan. She is this immaculate apartment. She’s been there for decades and decades. I was just terrified. I had done a lot of work up until that point, a lot of sexual healing. It comes rather late in the book when I go to see her, but I was dying to do this body sex workshop. There’s a lot of videos on her website that show you exactly what’s going to go on. I didn’t watch any of them, because I didn’t want to freak out. 

You walk in. Betty’s really gruff, as you know. But I’m from Brooklyn and she reminded me—I put this in my book—she reminded me of cab drivers that I know that were like the blue collar people I grew up with in Brooklyn, even though she comes from the Midwest. It’s not her background, but she’s got that vibe a little bit. She’s like, “Yeah, take off your clothes. Hang them up.” And so I’m like AHHHH! But the next moment was really transformative and terrifying in a whole new way, because I walk into the living room and there are all these backjack chairs. And there are just a handful at that point, a handful of women who are arranged in a circle, and everybody’s naked, and I’m naked. And everything that could possibly come up in terms of body insecurity comes up, right?” Oh, okay. How do I sit? What do I do? Do I look at people in the eye? Do I make a point of not looking at people in a way that they’re gonna think I’m looking at their boobs or lower?”  

Anyway, it was very terrifying and then it becomes normalized, quickly. It’s the weirdest, weirdest thing. By the end of that day, you’ve shown your vulva to this whole group of women who’ve scooted on in close. Betty gives your vulva name and everybody kind of agrees. You know, nods their head “yep.” And on day two, we masturbate and we do this kind of female circle jerk. It’s not really that. I make a joke about it. And that was very, very healing. It wasn’t clinical, but it wasn’t not clinical. And it wasn’t erotic, but it was also a little erotic. It was just an educational experience and included eroticism, that didn’t shy away from it. And I think that’s why her work is so so, so important. Because she’s not just talking about things in the abstract. She’s giving you hands on tools. And you’re doing it en masse, in front of her, where you can ask questions. And I found that I really needed that degree of sex education. I guess I was so clueless, perhaps, but I think many, many people need extensive sex education—as you know, more than anyone, August’s. I mean, that’s a huge part of this, right? This whole endeavor for you. But, anyway, I just, I was so changed by that experience.

August McLaughlin  

One of the parts that I highlighted in that section, you wrote, “In a flash for the first time, I understand why I can’t climax with Kurt or any man before him. I’ve only been getting chubbies.” And then you that Betty’s technique is specifically designed to circumvent chubbies, which I know your husband calls a partial erection, essentially, by covering more landscape. That is, I think, such an important point. And I actually just this last week received a question by email from somebody who is a cisgender woman and she’s never experienced an orgasm. And that piece, the discovery and the realizing that you didn’t learn these things – many of us don’t know a lot about our landscape.

Laura Zam

Right? I mean, that is what a Girl Boner, from a certain perspective. It’s an erection and we have the ability to have a full erection, but we also might sometimes—many, many times I think, especially for for cis-hetero women, have a partial erection. And we don’t even know that we’re having a partial Girl Boner because we don’t have a gauge for it. We don’t understand enough about our pleasure apparatus or erectile tissue apparatus to understand that there is a greater erection out there for us. And that ultimately, pleasure is going to be dependent on that, as well as comfort during penetration. Oftentimes there can be pain because there’s just not enough arousal and that can easily happen if we feel like we’re having to rush things. Our pleasure or arousal, so that we can get to what’s seen as the main event, right? Or do the “foreplay” thing, which of course doesn’t make sense, so that we can get to this main event. That’s really a setup, I think, for many, many people with vulvas and vaginas that we just get used to having this partial erection and don’t know our own capacity for pleasure because of that.

August McLaughlin  

Absolutely. And learning, as I know you did from Betty, that if you have a vulva, you actually have more erectile tissue than a cisgender man. And it kind of makes sense that it would take more time to arouse more of the tissue, but then also to maybe relax into it—especially if you’ve been struggling with orgasm. You’re perhaps bringing in some anxiety or feeling distracted: “Am I going to come? Is it going to happen soon enough?” What are some of the tips that you would provide somebody who is in that place?

Laura Zam  

Well, I recommend for everyone that they have a pleasure hour. So regardless of whether or not you’re having issues, what your gender is, I think that everyone could benefit from an hour a week of pleasure. And I think for people particularly who have sexual problems or issues, I think of this pleasure hour as a time for recovery and discovery. And I think the recovery piece is big and ongoing. I think that another one of your podcast guests talked about something called trauma management. And I just love that term. I thought that was so brilliant—this idea that recovery is something that’s ongoing. The rewiring is ongoing. That’s what I’m getting at here. 

And that teaching ourselves eros, staying connected to eros, is an ongoing endeavor. Because if you have had trauma or other kinds of issues, the other wiring is just kind of hanging out in the wings. It’s like growing up in a dysfunctional home, you know? It’s just it’s right there. You walk through the front door of your parents’ house and you’ll slip right back into it right or something will happen that’s similar to something from your childhood and you’ll go right back there, even though you’ve done decades and decades of work to free yourself of those patterns. So I like to think of the pleasure hour as a time to work on our wiring, our sexy wiring and our recovery or healing wiring, and maintenance. So yeah, recovery to just recognize what those old patterns are and what the new patterns are, right? Then having a practice to balance them out. Antidotes, let’s say, and then discovery: finding out and continuing to find out, “What do I like? What would I like to try what’s exciting to me right now?”

August McLaughlin  

I love that advice. Really prioritizing pleasure and setting time in your schedule for it the same way you would prioritize anything else that’s important and the self-discovery that can come come from that. You reminded me of a part of your book that I really relate to and I haven’t heard anyone else really talk about. Your appendix burst and you essentially ignored the pain of the infection for days. And that really struck me, because I went through that same thing. I was like, “Oh, I think I’m a little depressed.” I was chalking it up to not a big deal. And this was before I had some very major epiphanies in my sexual self-discovery. And my whole relationship to my body has changed since really stepping into and focusing on and prioritizing my own sexuality.  And I thought that was really fascinating because it shows this disconnect that I think is really common and impacts so many areas of our lives. I wondered if you could speak a bit to that disconnect, because it feels to me like there’s a connection between having shame or some kind of disconnect in our own sexuality from the damaging messages, lack of education, all of these things we’re talking about and really respecting our bodies.

Laura Zam  

Yeah. That process of loving the whole sexual healing process just taught me so much about respecting, as you say, and respect really comes down to listening. I think it’s a kind of deep listening. My husband and I have been listening to a lot of Thich Nach Hahn, this Vietnamese Buddhist monk. He talks about deep listening and he talks about in this very specific way. Like he said to be really present and to really, really listen is analogous to saying, “I’m here. I see you, darling. I’m here. I’m right here and I see you and I hear you. And I’m really, really, really present.”  And I think that it’s very difficult for so many people to do that with our own flesh: “I’m here for you, pain on the right side. I’m listening. What are you trying to tell me? What is it that you’re trying to tell me?” 

Along these lines, I had this really huge revelation in my therapy just a couple of weeks ago. So it’s in my book, I have this kind of lifelong phobia around getting breast cancer. And nothing worked. I just would get a panic. I finally started getting regular mammograms at least I’m clear there, in terms of my breast health. But it’s still such an episode. I’m really cautious about taking drugs, but I make my primary care physician give me one Xanax to go for this mammogram, because it’s just so incredibly traumatizing for me. 

So in my therapy, we were talking about it and I realized that a lot of the terror around my breasts is connected to my sexual abuse in a way that I never ever saw, after all this work. And I didn’t see it, because I never really approached my trauma from the body: respecting, listening: “What are you trying to tell me?’ And then take that and develop an understanding of strategies, and also an understanding of, “Ah, I see. This is what’s going on.” 

And, you know, a lot of the problems that I had, as well—vaginismus, this muscle spasm, overly type weak pelvic floor muscles—is also, I call it in the book, PTSD of the vagina. It is a form of PTSD. But it’s not really quite recognized yet, because we’re not yet used to looking at a way of looking at trauma that is about respecting the body and respecting how the body has been impacted by the trauma. And that it may not conform, let’s say to maybe traditional notions of post-traumatic stress and how that manifests or other responses to trauma or events. So I think this listening has a lot of importance for us, but also it’s something I think could hopefully change the professions: helping professions, medical professions and behavioral health professions.

August McLaughlin  

Absolutely. Thank you so much for sharing that. That really resonated with me and I’m sure it will with most of us have gone through something traumatic. And you mentioned earlier that managing trauma versus trying to just heal and move past it and there’s this finish line—that was sex therapist Jamila Dawson, I believe. She’s really brilliant about that topic. I’ve learned a lot from her. And in my own experience, it was so foreign to me that you feel trauma in your body that when my therapist would ask me, “Where you feeling it in your body?,” I felt like I didn’t have a body. It was to the point of seeming kind of funny to me, although that’s actually quite sad. 

But the transition and the growth that can happen when you start to respect that the body does hold onto trauma and knowing that can help you start to process and have compassion for yourself. And, as you mentioned, for your pelvic region, anyone who’s gone through sexual trauma, knowing we bring everything into the bedroom and into sex: the good, the difficult. And to have that grace and compassion for yourself, if it’s challenging, there can be so many reasons. What would you like to share about your own process of managing trauma, specifically related to sexual trauma? And as you mentioned, vaginismus? What what helped you the most?

Laura Zam  

What helped me the most was to get a great diagnosis, to be able to understand all the different problems that I have and that I had. And some of them are ongoing. And to be able to parse those out and understand that each of them need something else. Each of them has a its own particular kind of antidote. And it could be kind of interwoven how I might deal with these different issues. For instance, I have age-related atrophy, or now they’re calling it GSM genital urinary syndrome of menopause. So I’m on estrogen to help deal with these kind of ravages to the vagina and also the changes to the vulva because of low estrogen and and also test low testosterone. So that’s one thing.  

Vaginismus is something that I quote unquote, “cured.” Any time there’s any pain, the vaginismus will kick in because the muscles get tight. Basically, the vagina says, “No. Okay, I’m going on shutdown. I don’t like this.” There are different kinds of remedies, but getting a good diagnosis definitely was something that I would recommend for others to find out what’s going on. And that also includes psychologically, to find a good sex therapist, or a great therapist, who is really knowledgeable and comfortable talking about sex, because not every provider, both from the medical field and from the mental health field, has sufficient knowledge. And so I think we really need to find the right person and sometimes a team—more and more so, doctors and mental health people are working in teams with other other providers—get a great diagnosis, number one.  

Number two, to be able to get that sexy information, that pleasure information, I think is really, really critical and a critical piece in terms of healing. I think that it’s so lacking for most of us… I have never met a person who was like good, that had enough sex ed. So I think getting that getting that sex ed, and then maybe just apropos to our conversation, August, maybe just adding that part, too, to think of it this way, that if there were another part of your body that had been harmed—let’s say that when you were young, you were in an accident and your knees were was damaged, you might have psychological and emotional issues that are related to that accident. But you might also have issues with your knee. And I think we’re missing that part. The body part absorbs the the trauma itself. It was damaged. And I think that applying whatever that is, that healing to that area, particularly finding out what it needs, I think is often a missing piece, but a critical piece, in terms of someone’s recovery and wellness.

August McLaughlin  

Absolutely, yes. I know you tried many different approaches to sexual healing. I know that different things work for different people, and there are so many methodologies that people aren’t aware of. I know you can’t probably speak to all 30 of the ones that you’ve tried, but could you just name a handful of them that you feel are perhaps under-recognized that someone listening might benefit from?

Laura Zam

Absolutely. And I’m actually I’m consulting the back of my book, because I list them all, so I don’t forget something. I think sex therapy… I think people do know about it, but I think there’s a lot of fear around it and maybe misconceptions. I was terrified to contact a sex therapist. So I think that just understanding that a sex therapist is a regular old therapist who just has special training, special certification in human sexuality, and very broad training and very comprehensive rigorous training, is something that I think is under-recognized. 

Another another remedy that is under-recognized EMDR. I think EMDR is really great and I think not enough people perhaps know about it. And I that’s something that can be really helpful for a lot of people.  I put it in my book under the rubric of public speaking, but I think talking openly about our own sexual journey is, to me, a very, very important part of this process because we often blame ourselves for not just what happened, but how it affected us. And I think that being able to claim that and say, “Yes, this happened to me and this is the result” is a process of moving past shame. And shame is really, really insidious. And so I think, just speaking up about what happened, and again, what the effects were is really, really going to be important. 

And then one last thing that I’ll mentioned is, some people call it sexological body work, and it’s basically hands-on sex education or sexual healing. I went to see a Tantric, who is not technically a sexological body worker, but it’s just this umbrella where you might have some sort of hands-on session… I felt like I needed it, because hands had harmed me and I felt like I needed hands to heal me. 

August McLaughlin  

Beautifully said. I really appreciate that. I know that people can learn a lot about your evolution and personal growth through your book and I hope they will. I’m curious if you can share a bit about your life now and where you are in your sexuality and your sense of self, from that time where you were in that therapist’s office wondering about the teaching possibilities of eros?

Laura Zam  

I had no idea where this would lead me. And I’m so shocked, really, that it created a kind of fearlessness. I’m shocked by it, but so pleased, obviously. I think it’s about shame. And I think that maybe you could identify with this. When you start to talk openly about these things, it’s like this line that you have to cross over in order to have these conversations. And I felt that in crossing over that line, I left behind a part of myself that was ashamed about my body, who I was. Ashamed of the effects of how this all had affected me. Ashamed to speak up, ashamed of my voice. I didn’t realize that I had any of that shame.

But once I crossed over the line, which was just a simple thing, because it was a project where I was doing initially, that one-person play, so it just started with me having casual conversations with people: “Oh, you’re a writer! What are you working on?” “Well, I’m working on a play about overcoming my childhood sexual abuse and reclaiming my sexuality. Hi, what’s your name?” It just changed my life in so many ways, because all of a sudden, I crossed over this line, and just literally felt like a different person because of it.  

And then it changed my sex life in incredible ways, because the whole project was about adventure and experimentation: “Okay, I’m trying this. We’re trying this as a couple.” And it put in my head, “Oh, okay. This can continue forever.” Every single time I make love, every single time we make love as a couple., it could be this adventure. It could be “Okay, what are we gonna try? We’re gonna plan it in advance,” or “we’re going to improvise,” so we’re going to decide on something and then build around that. It became something that was so exciting for me as  a sexual being. But as a creative person, as a curious person, as a person who wants to be in a healing relationship with my body, I want to be present. It just gave me everything, to think of my sex life in that way. And I think ultimately, it gave me power. Because now I was invested. I almost felt entitled, entitled, you know, to my own pleasure. And so I could advocate for it and I could make suggestions based on that.

August McLaughlin  

That is incredible. It made me think of another phrase in your book which speaks to power of another kind, a sort of healing anger. I think it was after you had attended a sex brunch and you wrote, “I refuse to be trapped by a need to make men bleed. Then it comes to me, more possibility than conclusion. Whatever resentment I have toward Kurt and father and patriarchy, why can’t I roll it into a goal? Why can’t I fight my own way? Turn fuck you into fuck me. The way I like it.”

Laura Zam

Yeah, my anger is there. Of course it’s there. But it comes down in this way. My anger is my activism towards sex education, getting the word out. It drives me. And, also, my anger is there in terms of saying, “Well dammit, I’m gonna have a great experience, too.” And that was really revelatory for me to realize I didn’t have to be angry in a prescribed way. I could find my own way through this. I could find my own way to be.

August McLaughlin  

I love that transformation so much, the reclaiming of that power and the the shift of the lens there is so big. What advice would you share for listeners who are having trouble prioritizing pleasure in their lives of any kind right now?

Laura Zam  

I like to think about pleasure as something that is really related to being present. And I think that a lot of people do different kinds of mindfulness meditations where they might cycle through the senses, right? So you just you go, “What am I seeing right now? What am I hearing? What am I tasting?” I think that there’s kind of degrees of delight. So one of those degrees of delight is noticing when we enter the pleasure realm. We bump up our degree of delight and we add enhancement. Someone who is struggling can just start in that really tiny place, right? Notice, so that you can ground yourself in the senses: “What am I tasting right now?” 

Let’s say I had a sip of coffee a half hour ago: “What am I tasting still on my tastebuds?”  But then I can enhance it, I could say, “Ah, what would be really amazing to be drinking right now?” And then to go ahead and give yourself that experience of pleasure, that deliberate powerful, empowered experience of, “Okay, now I’m going to intentionally delight myself, give myself pleasure. And I’m going to kind of melt into the sense of being, the sense of mindfulness or pleasure. Presence in the middle of that.”

And then, in terms of moving this into a more erotic zone…let’s say somebody does decide to do this pleasure hour or solo play, however you want to think about this, maybe starting with the senses, and then seeing if that that pleasure enhancement might kind of trickle down, so to speak. Because often when we allow ourselves to feel pleasure, there is a little tingle in those in those erogenous areas, because we are wired for pleasure and it’s all so interrelated, interconnected, like a kiss, right? Something that’s happening in the mouth, but of course, you know, we know it can really have great resonance in other parts of the body. So, so that would, I think, be my advice.

*****

To hear the full episode, including thoughts from Dr. Megan Fleming on emotional aspects of struggling in the Big O department, scroll up to the top or find Girl Boner Radio on your favorite podcast app.