Mama Making Podcast

Dr. Tina Schermer Sellers | Shameless Parenting: Breaking the Cycle of Sexual Shame and Raising Kids Who Know Their Worth

• Jessica Lamb, Dr. Tina Schermer Sellers • Season 4 • Episode 162

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0:00 | 51:12

What would it mean to raise a child who never learns to be ashamed of their body?

 In this episode, Jessica sits down with Dr. Tina Schermer Sellers — licensed sex therapist, bestselling author, researcher, and founder of the Northwest Institute on Intimacy — for a conversation that every parent needs to hear. 

From the definition of sexual shame and how it develops from infancy, to the impact of abstinence-only education on an entire generation, to the practical framework for healing shame and changing your family's legacy — Dr. Tina brings the research, the tools, and the deep humanity that has made her work transformational for thousands of families. She also shares her work with psychedelic-assisted therapy for trauma, and why she's on a mission to make healing accessible to everyone. 

This one will change the way you think about your own story — and the one you want to pass on.

MAIN TOPICS COVERED

  • Dr. Tina's Swedish upbringing — why she thought every family talked about sexuality like recipes
  • The first wave of abstinence-only education and the shame epidemic it created
  • The clinical definition of sexual shame — and why it starts earlier than most parents realize
  • What to say when your baby finds their genitals for the first time (and why it matters more than you think)
  • How sexual shame develops across the lifespan — from infancy through adolescence
  • The role of authoritarian religious structures in creating unsafe environments for curiosity
  • Religious trauma and sexual shame — how they intersect and where they come from
  • The Frame, Name, Claim, Aim model for healing sexual shame
  • Practical tools for raising shame-free kids at every developmental stage
  • Shameless Parenting — what's in it and how to use it as a roadmap
  • The Northwest Institute on Intimacy — training clinicians in sexual health
  • Psychedelic-assisted therapy for trauma — the research, the ethics, and the Inana Rising organization
  • The patient equity scholarship fund and Indigenous Reparations Fund
  • Dr. Tina's offer: free promo codes for her books for anyone who can't afford them

RESOURCES MENTIONED

  • Northwest Institute on Intimacy 
  • Inana Rising (psychedelic-assisted therapy organization) — https://inannarising.org/
  • Girls and Sex and Boys and Sex by Peggy Orenstein — referenced
  • Brené Brown's work on shame — referenced

HOW TO CONNECT WITH DR. TINA

This episode is sponsored by Collabs Creative - a boutique digital marketing company helping small business owners and creatives tell their story.

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SPEAKER_02

Hello and welcome to the Mama Making Podcast, where we share stories of moms making impact in their own lives and in the world around them. I'm Jessica, and each week I sit down with women for building businesses, leading communities, shaping culture, and redefining what success looks like inside of motherhood. Because motherhood does not have to stop your ambition, it can transform it. Now let's get into it. Hello everyone, and welcome to the Mama Making Podcast. I'm your host Jessica. If you're new, welcome. If you're not new, then welcome back. Today I am thrilled to have Dr. Tina Shermer Sellers on the podcast. Dr. Tina is a licensed sex and gender feminist psychotherapist, best-selling author, researcher, maritime professor, and media personality. Her expertise spans sex therapy, spiritual intimacy, parenting, medicine, and social justice. She founded the Northwest Institute on Intimacy in 2015 after 28 years in academia, training psychotherapists, educators, clergy, and physicians in sexual health. She is the author of Sex God and the Conservative Church and her best-selling shameless parenting and new release bestseller on eight categories.

SPEAKER_00

Welcome, Dr. Tina. Thanks for being here. Thank you so much for having me, Jessica. I'm so glad to be here with you.

SPEAKER_02

Yes. So I'm so excited to get into this topic. But before we do, tell us a little bit more about you, who you are, where you're from, whatever you're comfortable sharing.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. So I am a mom. Um, I am a mom of four kids, um, all in their fourth decade. So I've got a 34, 35, 40, and 41-year-old, and then two granddaughters. Moming's been a big part of my life and my career all along. So I'm looking forward to chatting about that. Uh, and right now we live in Sandy, Oregon on eight acres. So it's kind of the over the hills and through the woods to grandmother's house we go. We uh have a bunch of play space that we get to play in and have gardens and collect slugs and do all kinds of things like that. So spend a lot of time with my family here on our property. And as far as work goes at this point in my life, I do still do a lot of clinical supervision. So I work with people around the country who have been therapists a long time and who are adding becoming certified sex therapists to their repertoire of skills. What most people don't realize is that when you go to school to be a doctor or a therapist or even clergy, you get virtually no training in sexuality, in sexual health, in sexual dysfunction, any of it. And so most people don't realize that you have to go back to get that. You have to learn about it. Kind of like physical therapists don't learn about the pelvic region unless they go back to school. We have a thing about that part of the body here in the US. And so we kind of ignore it and leave it all to media. And I was just seeing so much pain and suffering inadvertently being caused by professionals that that's how I started the Northwest Institute on Intimacy and made it really easy for doctors and therapists and clergy and educators to come get that education so that as a frontline person, you could support kids and families with more knowledge and awareness and also become aware of your own biases. Because most of us, if we didn't do the training, we have biases just from having our own interactions with media or our own interactions in our life. So um, so now I do a lot of what we'd call clinical supervision for people who are studying to go on and get certified. And so they bring, they have to do at least 50 hours of supervision where they're staffing cases. Like this is what I was thinking of working on with this people. How does that feel for you? And they're individuals and couples and families and so forth. So that's kind of what I do. And then I, gosh, three years ago started Inanarising.org, which is an organization that supports physicians, psychotherapists, and other kinds of healers, licensed healers who have gone on and get training on treating trauma using psychedelic assisted therapy. And there is profound research in that area, but many of those drugs are still scheduled as schedule one, as if they have no medical benefit, but they do. And if they're addictive, which they are not, but that's still the way they're scheduled. And so we're kind of in a place where there's a lot of people who are like, I really want to help these people who are suffering so much. And what we have to offer them isn't getting them far enough. It's not helping them enough. And so I just started an organization to really support those courageous clinicians that are out there trying to walk that line of how to care for people and make a real impact. If we could not produce trauma and we could begin healing the trauma that we have around us with people, people could live lives that were so much more enjoyable and from their heart and not inadvertently cause harm themselves because hurt people hurt people, right? So, um, so yeah, so I do I run that organization on the side and we do it in a really highly ethical manner that's really important to us. And we also do it in a way that we give back to the indigenous organizations that have been caring for indigenous lives and people for years because this work actually stands on their shoulders. And then we have a patient equity scholarship fund that care can be expensive the way it is right now in the US. And so we really want to have a scholarship fund that supports people who can't afford this care. So we have a place where people can donate, and then that money directly goes towards offering care to people who can't afford it. So yeah, those are the things I kind of play around doing these days.

SPEAKER_02

That is a lot of work, a lot of good, impactful work. I would love to talk more about where it kind of all started. You you touched on it a bit, but what drew you to sexual wellness and sexual health in the beginning of things?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, that's such a fun question. So I didn't realize this at the time, but I grew up in a very unusual home. My grandparents are Swedish immigrants. So my mom was first generation Swedish immigrant. And our family has been open around sexual health for generations. That's, I mean, comprehensive sex education started in Sweden in the 40s, where every single year of school you got something about relationship education, body education, you know, care and consent, all of that, you know, was part of what they were taught. And so it was like talking about recipes. I mean, that's how common talking about sexuality was in my family growing up. And I thought every family was like mine. And I literally was in my 30s before I realized that in fact was not the case at all. And I was by that point already teaching graduate marriage and family therapy students. And I started hearing about their upbringing and how much fear and shame, you know, just feeling unworthy of love because of the desire that they had or because of what they did or didn't do. And I thought, oh my goodness, this is such a beautiful part of you. Like, how did that happen? What have we been doing in culture that has made you feel so badly about yourself? And that really, you know, kind of exploded what I was working on in my career. I was already doing a lot of medical family therapy, which looked at the impact of illness on people's lives and how doctors were and were not dealing with the impact of illness on people. I trained physicians for a long time. But when this thing kind of took off, especially around the year, I started teaching that a sexuality course for graduate students around the early 90s, so a long time ago, and around the year 2000, that sexual shame that I was seeing and hearing really catapulted huge. And so I started to ask a lot more questions of my students and of my clients and realized that I was hitting the first wave of, and I'm gonna use the word kids, they're not the 25 to 35, you know, but first wave of people that were impacted by abstinence-only education, which was religious education in our public schools. It was funded by tax dollars. And it was, we already know from research that it was 80% medically inaccurate education. So, really, what it did was really freak you out about your own desire, about wants, about other people's desires, like who had control. I mean, all of it, right? And so I saw this dramatic sense of self-hatred and humiliation and disgust about themselves increase. And I was heartbroken by it. And that really led to me doing research that came, you know, 11 years later, the book Sex God in the Conservative Church, Erasing Shame from Sexual Intimacy, came out because I just thought people need to know what's happened in America, that we got like this, where the roots of that are, and what sex positive ideas are also ancient that never got brought forward into American thought. And then how you heal and how you understand the role that capitalism and shame play. We run our economy, for example, on helping you feel bad about yourself so you go buy more things. Right? We run our economy on shame, on making just getting people to not realize how beautiful and what a miracle they are. Because there's never been anybody quite like you on this planet, you know, which is amazing. But we don't. We we exploit people in order to get them to purchase more things. So I just started, it's just started to be a big, big part of my life was really supporting people and getting the education and the support and the knowledge that they needed to hold on to themselves and see themselves as precious and important. And then also after that book came out, I started hearing from people and they were like, I know what not to do, but I don't know what to do with my kids or even for myself. Can you help me? And I'm like, I got you. I've been teaching this stuff to doctors and therapists forever. I will write you a book, like a kind of like a workbook, make it really easy, you know, and it'll be divided by ages. And you just need to be a couple years ahead of your kids, like read up to their age and then go one more chapter forward and stay there. And I will tell you all the books to get, the conversations to have, the self-work to do in yourself, so you can. So really, it's just supporting people to have more like the experience that I had growing up, you know, and you can change your legacy in one generation. It's hard work, but you can do it.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. Yeah. I love that idea that we can change a whole generation moving forward just with your own, starting with your own new generation. That's amazing. So I imagine this is kind of where the Northwest Institute of Intimacy started, that you saw the huge need, decided, let's jump all in on this. How, what did that look like for you deciding to move forward with that concept?

SPEAKER_01

Well, I think I had for several years been noticing the impact of absident education on people who are becoming clinicians, you know, and who really wanted to help people too. And I thought at that point, I started really looking into, well, where are our training programs? And they were all Midwest to the Far East and Southeast. And I was at that point in the Pacific Northwest, I was in Washington, Seattle. And I thought, well, therapists just don't make enough to do a two-year program where they have to travel, you know, every other month or twice a year or whatever. They, it's too difficult to lose, you know, that week or two of seeing clients and put themselves up somewhere. And I thought, I got to make this easier. And so working with the um requirements that the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors, and Therapists, that's the parent organization that certifies, started working with their requirements. I decided I can I can make this easy for people. And not easy as in you're not gonna have to do work, but easy as in we'll make it time efficient and cost efficient. So you're not taking a lot of days off work. We'll do two long weekends, for example, and we're gonna just power through a bunch of stuff and we're gonna have the same supervision requirements, obviously, that ASEC requires. And so we put together a very different kind of program than there had been elsewhere in the country that really took care of the clinicians that were busy seeing their own patients, right? And so they could say, okay, I can mark out those two weekends and I could, you know, read these books and write down my questions and do these things before the class, and I can get most of my requirements done in those two weekends. And then Asect allows you to take courses from your grad training that apply against their requirements. So rather than asking them to study and pay for those things again, we just would sit down with them after they had done their courses and be like, okay, let's pull this from your ethics class, because everyone has an ethics class and that kind of thing. So we just made it so that people could do it. At the point we set up the Northwest Institute on Intimacy, there were only five certified people in the state of Washington. Almost very few anywhere else along the West Coast, very few. And now we have well over a hundred people who are certified. We have several training programs now in the Pacific Northwest. And so now you can go see a therapist. And rather than they're just trained in psychology, which is like your emotional life, or your psychosocial, so your social, your relational life, we now have people that are trained in bio, so they understand the role that our bodies play in our emotional and relational health. Bio, psychosocial, spiritual, the role that that might play in someone's life, and sexual health, because that's what humans are. So I'm always saying to all kinds of people, doctors, whatever, when you walk in the door to see a clinician, you don't leave part of yourself behind. But you may have learned, I can only talk to this person about my body, I can't talk to them about anything else. Or I can only talk to this therapist about what I'm angry about or my emotional life or my relational life, but I can't talk to them about it. And that's not fair. I think that borders borders on unethical. I want people to be able to come in and see a therapist and know they can bring all parts of their story and have them heard and understand and a real curiosity brought to them that allows them to move in a direction that allows them to heal in a way that they want to see their life become. So yeah, that's that became that became my baby. And then I left academia four years later after the institute had been going for a while.

SPEAKER_02

I think that's a great part to pivot to talk a little bit more about this whole shame aspect, how it gets passed down, how we look at shame, where it kind of comes from, and then talk about maybe some tools for parents on this subject.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah. Of course, as you would imagine, I loved talking about this because so most people are aware of the work of Brene Brown. Brene has done some brilliant work on helping us understand shame and the role that shame can play in our lives and how it impacts us and also a bit about how we heal. But believe it or not, there had not been one piece of research on even the operational definition of what sexual shame was until 2017. So we knew what general shame was. We didn't know the role that body sexuality played inside that shame bubble. Like we didn't understand that at all. And it's really important to understand. So what I'd love to do right now is just to read the definition for you and for your audience so that they know what came out of that research. And people can listen to this definition and say, have I felt or noticed any of these things, right? So the definition is it's by the dissertation of Dr. Noelle Clark. And it says, sexual shame is a visceral feeling. So in your body, it's in here. It's not just cognition, visceral feeling of humiliation and disgust toward one's own body and identity as a sexual being. It's also a belief of being abnormal, inferior, and unworthy. So at my core, like Brene says, I don't feel worthy of love because I'm such a bad person inside, right? This feeling can be internalized, but it also manifests in interpersonal relationships. So between you and another. And I will go so far as to say, and I can explain this later, infant and caregiver. Okay, it starts very, very early, um, manifests in interpersonal relationships having a negative impact. So as we grow up, a negative impact on trust, communication, and physical and emotional intimacy. So my ability to attach is where it really hurts me. Sexual shame develops across the lifespan in interactions with interpersonal relationships. So a lot of your audience have kiddos, right? When do they find their genitals? How old are they? When they like, wow, look what I found. You know, how old are they? They're usually somewhere between 10 and 12 months because they've just started to reach toward things and be able to grab them. And they're not getting whacked in their head by their hands so much anymore, right? So somewhere around 10 months to a year, somewhere in that window, they're gonna be getting their diapers change or they're gonna be in the tub and their hand is gonna land on their genitals. And I always say that's one of the best days ever because they don't learn it all at once, but this part of their body is with them all the time. And it has an incredible amount of nerve endings. It's really a beautiful gift that we have for ourselves, right? What kids need at that moment is somebody that says, yep, that's your vulva. It's a wonderful part of you. Let's finish getting putting your diaper on. Or yep, that's your penis. It's a wonderful part of you. Let's finish drying you off. That's all they need because all they need at that point is they need their world label for them. Nose, ears, eyes, right? They need their world labeled for them. That's all we need. What they don't need is somebody who raises their voice, gets a scared look on their face, slaps their hand away and says, yuck, gross, that's dirty, or anything like that, because they are acting from a place of innocence and discovery. And so when a child is acting from a place of innocence and discovery and they get in trouble, they don't know what they're in trouble for. They just think something must be wrong with me, with who I am. And now you're gonna be able, you're gonna have lots of opportunities as they keep finding this place on purpose to say, Oh, what a great part of your body. I'm glad you found it. I'm gonna teach you that we're gonna go into our room or into the bathroom if we want to. That's just what that's what we all do. That's what mommy does, mommy and mommy, daddy and daddy, whatever. This is what we do too. And I'm gonna teach you and keep reminding you to do that. They're not gonna get that. They're not gonna get it, get it. Like, do it until they're probably four or five. So you may be saying it a lot and you need to say it with a smile on your face. Yep, that's that wonderful part of you. And I'm, you know, it initially you don't even teach them more than that because they can't take it in. But as they start being able to take in direction, you can begin to tell them and you will tell them, like you might tell them not to eat their boogers a hundred thousand times before they finally start to get it. But you're gonna do it not in a shaming way, but in a way that just says, Yep, you know, this is what we're learning. It's just another social thing we're learning. So that's that's the interpersonal piece. But then it says once culture and society lays its shame, right? So I told you how we run our economy, right? And then that creates, so I've got these interpersonal relationships that I've had these conversations with. And then I have culture and society telling me I'm not enough, not good enough, not pretty enough, not strong enough, not brave enough, right? So that we can drive our economy. And that leads to a critical self-appraisal and a feedback loop. In other words, my inner critic starts going, and pretty soon that's what's attacking me the most. And it will keep attacking you until you heal from it, right? It's a feedback loop. There is also a fear and uncertainty related to one's power or right to make decisions, including safety decisions related to sexual encounters, along with an internalized judgment toward one's own sexual desire. What that's really saying is I don't know if you're familiar with Peggy Ornstein, but she wrote two books, one called Girls and Sex, one called Boys and Sex, where she interviewed like 80 kids between 15 and 22. In the girls' book, she found she would have all these young women who would describe themselves as confident and they were confident in lots of things until they got ready to go out. And then they were putting down three, four, and five shots of hard liquor because they didn't know if they could keep themselves safe out there or if they had the right to. And these were not kids from religious backgrounds. These was just a real spattering of kids. And so that shows you how much of a rape culture we have instituted by not providing sex education and only giving kids media and no accountability to power abuses. So when someone decides they want somebody else's body, there's not adequate accountability to that, especially when it's boys acting out. And that's been a part of our culture long before the United States, right? That's very much embedded in religious culture too. So this definition, I think, really highlights the impact and why I care about it so much. Because I can't think of a place where we hurt people more than hurting them at the place where they're going to do bonding in their life, intimacy with themselves, with another person that they bring close to them, with their own children, right? So we, if we have sexual shame, which most of us do, we've got to take that seriously to work on healing that for ourselves so that we can pass a different legacy onto our kids. And so when your kid does something that freaks you out because your parents didn't know what to do with you, right? Freaks you out. You at least can take a deep breath and put kind of a neutral face or a happy face on. Like, wow, what an interesting question. You know, like buy yourself some time, put on a happy face, say, I want to learn more. What are you really? Can you tell me a little more what you're asking? Or tell me a little, describe a little bit more what you're meaning. I want to make sure I understand you. Buying myself time to breathe and then figure out what I want to do with this, which sometimes is. Let's go discover that together or whatever. It's but all that stuff you're feeling, that's from your parents and their parents and their parents, you know, and it's you you came by it naturally, but you deserve to heal it. Yeah. Does that help a little bit?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. Yes, absolutely. It's got my brain going in like a million different ways. One of the things that I would like to get into, I know it's a large topic, so um, and we don't have a ton of time to really dive deep on it. But one of the areas that I'm interested in in the work that you do is religious trauma and shame around sexual intimacy. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Um, I think for more context on my end, I did not grow up in a religious household, nor do I have a religious framework. And I'm just interested to know this side of things, especially from a clinical perspective as well. How we kind of got where we are.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Well, I'll say that if you've got readers where you where they're like, yeah, I did. Like there was authoritarian parenting, or I had authoritarian people in my community or in my youth group or whatever, that authoritarian um power differential is part of what made it unsafe for you to discover yourself and to learn about yourself. And and was part of where you got the message that you're not enough, that something must be wrong. And um so it's important for people to take the time to look at the structure of the religious community that they're a part of. If the structure is men over women or men over women and children, or anything that's authoritarian like that, then it is going to be oppressive and unsafe to be curious and to grow and to learn and to ask questions. You're going to fall in line so you don't get in trouble. But meanwhile, you're going to be thinking to yourself, man, something must be really wrong with me, or boy, this isn't just not safe, right? And so most high control religions around the world are organized in a hierarchy that makes it unsafe for women and unsafe for children, right? And it also is hurting the men who are in charge and have the power. It's hurting them too, because it's telling them to have a successful household, you will have to be in charge. You have to always know. You've got to not show any vulnerabilities. You can't really be a person that has emotions and care and faults and learning like human. You don't get to be human. You have to power over, not power with your partner and with your children, right? And um, and so that when you think about, I gave a little image of, you know, children discovering their genitals at, you know, 11 months old, right? And then they keep discovering them. And then pretty soon, around four, they're five, they want to play doctor, right? Or and then they're curious about others. These are all normal developmental curiosities in the book Shameless Parenting. I go over every single one and I'm like, what's that going to be like for you? How can you be there for your kids? Here's the top books I would read in many categories in this time frame of their life. It's really important that we don't silence the conversation around curiosity and desire and sexuality. And the kid, it comes in all kinds of ways with kiddos. Sometimes it'll be about their bodies or somebody else's body or something that was said at school, you know, but sometimes it's an idea that came from TV or it came from a friend down the street or whatever. If you want to be a resource to your child, you have to be a safe person for them to not know with, for them to ask, you know, I heard somebody say the word fuck today. And I think that's a bad word. Can you explain that to me? You know, right? You've got to be a safe person that doesn't lose their stuff because then the child is not going to go to you. And you really, most parents really want their kids to go to them, especially in their later childhood and during their teen years. And one of the things we know so well from research is that kids who have homes where it was safe to talk about sexual development and body development and relational development and consent and just all these important concepts, those are the kids that keep talking to their parents. And we know this from research that kids who are raised with comprehensive sex education get involved with sex later, make safer sexual choices, choose partners that are more egalitarian and loving. When they do become sexual, they have better sexual experiences versus assault type experiences or experiences where they're being assaultive and they don't even know. Right. And they report, this is my favorite piece of this research. They report themselves to be closer to their parents overall. So I'm always saying to folks, if you really want that, you know, get the shameless parenting book, read the other one, and follow your kids through it. Be a safe person to ask any question to, you know. So I don't know if that helps, but that's sort of how I think about it. And and and in religious homes, there's less, there's less of that malleability and there's more rigidness often.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, yeah. So obviously we're gonna recommend that everybody get the book, but in short, what are some practical ways that we as parents can start to cultivate a shame-free home or child and parent relationship?

SPEAKER_01

Yes, yeah, love that question. First and foremost, no child development information. What happens? What are three-year-olds into? What's what's trying to emerge in their cognition and emotional development? What is trying to emerge there? Most people may not realize that kids start gender identifying at three and four years old. And so sometimes that looks exactly like what's in their home, you know, or what the genitals that they were born with. And other times it looks really different from that. But know that kids start asking those questions. They can ask them that early, you know. Like I remember one of my kids was like, mommy, you're not going to work, right? Because in graduate school, when you're not going to work, right? Because mommies stay home. And I'm like, where did you get that idea that mommies stay home? You know, like let's talk about this, you know. You want to be able to just kind of bring that up, but know that that's a normal time for that to come up and other things. Because then when they those things do come up, whatever those, and there's lots of child development books out there, shameless is certainly one around development, many kinds, emotional and physical development, but also about the things they're curious about and how that might come home for you. But there's many others, no child development. My kids laugh at me because they're like, Mom, one of the conversations I remember hearing phrases I remember hearing you say most often is you're fulfilling your job description. So they could be 13 and being the smarty pants or whatever. And I would say, you are perfectly being 13. You are fulfilling your job description. And that in part means that I have to hold this boundary, you know, or whatever. But I don't want to shame them for being who they are. They're pushing away, they're trying to individuate, they're trying, whatever they are doing, they were always right on task. And so I could see it that way and not take it personally. This didn't have to do with me, it had to do with them becoming, you know, and so knowing child development was a major help in that department. So I would say, and and back when I was growing up, child development information was actually readily available. There were some very popular books that all parents pretty much were reading. We hear, since we've been focusing on capitalism and growing corporations and et cetera, and making money for our stockholders, very a whole lot of child development has gone into the background. And a lot of people don't know that three-year-olds aren't 30-year-olds. You know, they drop things constantly. Or that seven-year-olds might make up a story like I held my breath for five minutes underwater today at my swimming lesson. That's just not knowing the difference between fantasy and reality yet. They're still working that out, you know? Isn't that a lie? You know, but you need to know child development to be like, well, wouldn't that be the best? I would like to stay down there for, I don't know, a year or two and like build an underwater house. Would that be fun? Play with them with that. Like if you know what's developmentally on target, you can enjoy where they are and help them as they become their next step. But unfortunately, we can't breathe underwater. It's kind of a bummer, huh? You know, we can do both.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I love that. And I think um, as us, you talk a little bit about media and how that informs and impacts. I think the I'm I'm a millennial and I know myself and my cousins and friends all got so much education, quote unquote, from media and maybe not as much from our parents as we probably should have. What can we as this generation and continuing generations do to address some of that internal shame that we have and maybe didn't really know that we had? How can we start to address um, I guess doing more healing work to actively raise more shameless kids?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. In the Sex God and Conservative Church book, I talk about a model called Healing the Mess, the model for erasing sexual shame. And in it, I talk about four areas that you want to start working on kind of continually, you know, that not like linear, but just keep working them. The first one, it's frame, name, claim, and aim. So the first one is frame. Get yourself a frame or a scaffolding of sex education. And this is where a book like Shameless is really great. There's not an inordinate amount of sexual health books out there, but there are other ones. What I like about shameless is that it's really to the point. And so it says birth to two. What are they trying to do behaviorally, emotionally? How will they express themselves? What do they need from you? How will you be about that? And here's the top books and websites. And so I'm often saying to people, if you want to get that sex education in a pretty succinct kind of way, walk yourself first through that book for yourself. Imagine that you're reading some of these books to go get them at the library, have them delivered, whatever. Imagine you're reading them to your two-year-old self. And then ask yourself, what would it have been like if there had been somebody in my life that could have read this book and asked me these questions? Like, how might that have been for me? And what you'll notice as you walk yourself through your life by reading that book, you'll you'll actually feel the shame come off, some start to come off of you. Like, I just didn't know that. I just didn't know that. And these books are great. I mean, they're totally for that age and they help with all the things that they are developmentally doing at that point. So I say that's the the frame. Get yourself that sex education. Name is tell your story. So, like when you're talking and you're like, yeah, I don't, I didn't really probably get that. And you are 95 or more percent of people in the US did not get comprehensive sex education in their schools or from their family. That's just common. It's unfortunate, but it's common. And um, and so you just need to tell your story. And I'm often telling people, like, if you can find a group of five to six friends and you just walk through that book together and you take the time on like one night that you guys are together having a glass of wine or whatever, talk about what it was like growing up in your particular family around these things, you know, like what was said and what wasn't said, you know, and what do you think the impact of that was for you? And by not providing comprehensive sex education and only providing media and friends for input, we're actually setting our kids up to be exploited or to exploit, right? Because that's what's in the media. And so they don't know when exploitation is actually I always I often say it's throwing them to the wolves. They don't know when they're potentially being exploited. They can't, they don't have the inside gut developed yet that says, oh yeah, that didn't feel right to me. You know, or I need to go talk to somebody about that. So anyway, that's that tell your story. So that's name, name your story. Claim is claim your body. Claim your body is good. That's a lot of work because most of us have by this point really digested and metabolized that we're not good enough, that something is wrong. Many things are wrong, maybe, right? And I would say, no, you are perfect the way you are. If you get to get up in the morning and you're not in severe pain, which is blocking your ability to invest in your own life, it's a good day. And your body, no matter what it is or how it is, is a good body because it is the pen that allows you to write the poetry of your life. If you want to hug, you can hug. If you want to sit and think, you can sit and think. Your body is what's accompanying you as you carry out what's in your heart, right? And so your body is good and we need to make amends with our body. We don't want to get to our deathbed and realize that we pounded on ourselves emotionally and on our body from six on. We know from research, 50% of six-year-old girls are already modifying their diets. Two-thirds of nine-year-olds and 90% of 15-year-olds. That's how effective our marketing campaigns are in making people feel not good enough, right? So that's frame, name, and claim. As we keep working on this, we're gonna aim for a whole brand new legacy of sexual health and just health in general, right? Because we will have gotten aware and knowledgeable and we'll be able to say, you know, my parents did the best they could, but they didn't get this either. And but I can be the one that does the healing, and then I can give my kids a different experience. And I am all about that, right? And you'll see, you I mean, I get the benefit of watching my children, who are now parents of children, be completely different than most parents are around bodies and sexuality. And they just talk about it in these tiny little snippets. I call it 100 and 101-minute conversations. It's just like boop, boop, boop, boop, you know.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, there's just something to normalizing conversations like this. I mean, it's different, but we always um talking about swearing in our house, we we probably should refrain from swearing as much as we do. But when our son hears it out in the wild, he's completely unfazed. And luckily, fingers crossed doesn't say it out in public or in inappropriate spaces. But I have kind of this that same philosophy of the more normal and regular these topics are, the less um shock factor they're gonna have as it starts to come up.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. And if they're given kind of some information around it, like, well, why is it a bad word? Well, that's such a great question. Maybe we can unpack that together. Is it a word that hurts people? Is it a word that scares people? Is it, or is it just something that we decided wasn't an okay thing to say? Or what's the legacy of that word? Like we can have these conversations that actually help them really, in the normalizing, understand the context, right? And they're like, yeah, so when their friends do it, it's like, whatever. I'm choosing not to do it, or I do it in this kind of situation. I I have a four-year or five-year-old granddaughter right now, and she's spicy. Um, and the other day she was over and and she said something, and I looked at her and I said, Wow, that was a big time adult sentence. What does all that mean? And then her sister's like, oh, you know, like this. But you know, I'm I'm not gonna react about it because she's being five, perfectly five. And there's so much they're starting to hear, right? And yeah, it's an opportunity. It's all an opportunity to talk.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I love that. So with a few minutes left, I would love to talk about the work that you're doing with therapy, healing therapy through psychedelics. This is kind of a taboo topic in some circles. I would love to hear more.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah. So I'm in Oregon. Oregon is one of a few states that have now legalized psilocybin and cannabis both. And we have regulations for actually providing therapy around trauma with psilocybin. There's service centers and there's facilitators. I went to do all the training because I wanted to understand it. But I've chosen where most of my work is really supporting people who are also trained. It was interesting. Somebody had posted today, I don't remember if it was on Substack, but AOC was actually being was actually talking to a leading um physician around the how FDA does its scheduling. Like I had mentioned before, some of these drugs that are actually incredibly helpful under the right circumstances and they're not addictive, are having benefits for things that we really have no good treatment for. So when we're working with somebody who has severe post-traumatic stress disorder, it is often affecting every area of their life, how they feel about themselves, their intimate relationships, their relationships with their children, the relationships that are most important. And it's because their central nervous system got blasted, right, with early sexual trauma, early physical trauma, early war trauma that really shapes the brain to be particularly afraid, right, in particular ways. But it also makes it different for us to control our temper, to think, to settle ourselves because our nervous systems are going off all the time, right? And so we're like literally a shaking mess on the inside. Well, most of our therapies barely touch this. And the research that went before the FDA um a year ago, August, on trying to get approval for MDMA, which was in clinical trial for 20, over 20 years, and showed that people in controlled settings that were given preparation, given the medicine, given integration sessions, then given the medicine again, given integration sessions, given medicine again, and then integration sessions. So it was over several months. These were people that had PTSD severe for 20 years or more. They were showing 68% of them were showing no evidence of PTSD following the clinical trial and a year following the clinical trial. In other words, their brain could reprocess and actually it it shapes itself because we have plasticity in our brain. The brain is able to create these new connections and erase the really difficult ones, not erase the memory, but erase the impact of the memory on us. And it frees people to live their life and love their kids and love their partners and love their friends and not be like a frayed wire all the time, which is what they are. I want to see us not have our scheduling of drugs be so political and so ridiculous in this country because I really want to. I mean, some of this trauma we have created, the government has created, the situations, the oppression the systems have created. We need to be a part of helping to heal people. And I'd really like to see us move this along. So it was good to see AOC talking about this and scheduling in a congressional hearing today because we need people to understand this better.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. Yeah. I love the idea of being able to explore that for people who traditional therapies might not be working for them and their their complex trauma needs something else or something more to support them. I'm always a huge advocate for doing what makes people better. And so I love to hear that you're part of that work. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

There's some really good books out there that people can read and documentaries that they can watch that'll help them understand what is different about this, these medications than the way we typically think about medication. And it's part of also why in the 70s, Nixon got so freaked out in the 70s about, you know, how it was creating shift and change, because some of these medications, in addition to all of that help that they provide, they also give people a sense. This is true whether they're have cancer or whatever, a sense that they are a part of something bigger, that there is this thing called love, and that life will continue, love continues no matter what happens, that we are connected to all things, past, present, and future. And this sense of, wow, I'm a part of something bigger, like my soul, my whatever is a part of something bigger gives people so much hope. And we need people to have more hope in my book. So so it these are very special medications, I think. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

I'm excited to see where all of that continues to go in the coming years. With a couple minutes left, I would love to hear more about the program that you have for scholarships. You were saying? Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

So we have about right now just under a hundred clinicians across the country that have all trained in psychedelic assisted therapy. And they are either physicians or ARNPs or therapist, licensed therapists, or licensed physical therapists, whatever. They're all a licensed healer. And uh different states are very, very different about this. But we wanted to be able to say to people if you're doing this work out there in the world, whether it's above ground or below ground, if you're doing this work in a mindful, careful, clinically accurate way, and you want to serve people in your community who don't have the resources but have the trauma, we want to have a fund where you can say, as the clinician, say, I can afford to slide my scale this much, but I can't slide it anymore and still pay my own bills. So I can do this. They can come to our fund and say, I'm gonna need this much money to do this kind of care for this person for this much time or whatever it is. And we would have the money to be able to send to them and say, okay, you can do this and you can, we will offset that cost for you because it's unreasonable to ask clinicians to slide so far just to serve people that don't have the resources. And it is completely unethical to have people who need care and can't afford to get it. And yet that is very much a part of how we do healthcare in the US. I'm not about it at all. And so we have this fund. We understand that this fund is gonna have to grow very large because we're asking for anywhere from 20 to 40 hours of a clinician's time to take someone through this care. That's a lot, right? And so we know this fund is gonna need to really grow. And so we're just hoping in time, and and we've had some so far people who are like, you know, I can't afford to contribute to this fund. We're making this fund a hundred percent available just to offset patient care costs, not for overhead costs or anything in running the corporation or the not the um organization at all, just on that. We also have a uh an um indigenous reparations fund. And so our members pay a bit to to be a part of the organization, and then we give every single quarter to a different nonprofit Indigenous organization because we know the indigenous folks across the globe have really held the wisdom of this kind of care and they have been so poorly treated. And so that was part of our commitment too as an organization. We really want to, it's gonna be a slow growth, but we want to do it in a way that is so ethical and caring that we set a new standard for how care is provided in the US. And so that's what we've been all about. And so we have a board that, you know, helps us make decisions and keeps us going in the direction, right direction, and and hopefully we'll be able to make a real difference for people.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. Well, Dr. Tina, you are doing some incredible work. I am blown away by all the stuff that you're involved in and so glad that we were able to connect and talk more. Please tell my listeners where they can find you, social media website, um, where they can donate to the fund, all of the stuff.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, sure. So I'm on Instagram. We have three different accounts. So there's Dr. Tina Shameless, and that's really about this work that we've mostly been talking about today. I have Inana underscore rising underscore P A T, which stands for psychedelic assisted therapy. That's another pretty new one that we've only had about a year or so. Um, and that's where we post, you know, things that inspire us or trainings that we're doing for the organization or for clinicians or whatever. And then for those people who are like, how does this woman still do things with her family? She sounds so crazily busy, which has always been the thing with me. I have an Instagram is um the, I think it's the underscore Swedish underscore ya, or it might be all one word, the the Swedish ya. But that's stuff about like our property and playing with the kids and all the other stuff that we do in our lives to stay connected with each other and connected with our community and just being a good neighbor and having fun. So are welcome, but I try to keep them a little bit separated because they would be so crowded otherwise, I think. Yeah. So that's that's one way. And then another thing I'll say is I want to say to your listeners, if anybody's really wanting to do this healing work and healing shame and sort of making a new legacy for themselves and for their family, and they go to find Sex God in the Conservative Church or Shameless Parenting and they feel like I can't really afford it right now, given everything that's on my plate, you can DM me and let me know what's going on for you. And I will send you a free promo code to an audio version of either one of those books. I want people, if they really are doing this work or they're committed to this work, I want to support them. And I don't want finances to get in the way. I think this work, I've watched it change generations of people and families. And I I want to support people as they want. And doing the work can be hard and it can be painful, but it's important work to do because you deserve to be free of shame. And your kids deserve for you to be free of shame too. So, and they need you. They are gonna need you to help them figure out how to navigate this world. And it's hard enough as a parent just trying to understand their world, I think, because it's was different than ours. So those are good ways to get a hold of me. I do have a website that is just my name, TinaShermerSellers.com. It has a bunch of free stuff on it. It tells you a little bit more about me and my story. But as far as communicating with me, probably DMing is the easiest thing to do.

SPEAKER_02

Awesome. We'll put all of those links in the show notes. Thank you so much for being on.

SPEAKER_00

This has been amazing. Thank you so much, Jessica. It was a joy to be with you.

SPEAKER_02

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