Eroticizing Shame - Turning Pain Into Pleasure

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign. [00:00:08] Speaker B: Welcome to Gaming Going Deeper, a podcast by the Gay Men's Brotherhood that showcases raw and real conversations about personal development, mental health and sexuality from an unapologetically gay perspective. I'm your host, Matt Lansadel and joining me today is Merle Yost. [00:00:24] Speaker A: Thank you. I'm delighted to be here. [00:00:25] Speaker B: Yeah, it's good to have you here. So Merle is a full time psychotherapist, writer, speaker and consultant specializing in sexual trauma. With over 35 years of personal and professional work, Merle has taken the summary of his experiences and training to help others. All of his books are about helping people live better lives. Merle is committed to continuing his teachings and efforts to educate people about themselves. Merle's own healing journey informed deep compassion for the emotional pain people experience as well as his profound belief in the possibility of healing and claiming one's life. Today we're talking about a very interesting topic. I'm very excited to unpack it with you. Eroticizing shame. We're talking about turning pain into pleasure. So what we want you to get out of this episode is just greater awareness that shame may have an influence on your sexual desires and arousal by eroticizing that shame as a way of coping with it. So, so we're going to unpack this topic. Why don't we start with just how you got into doing this work? I'm curious, like everyone has a story like how you got into psychotherapy. What's, what's kind of your origin story? [00:01:31] Speaker A: Well, my origin story is, is that when I moved out of my parents house after I completed high school and we'd been with a couple friends and as we roll in college and one of them said, hmm, I think you might benefit from talking to my therapist. I was very strange and totally dissociated and had no idea about any of this at the time. And so I went to see the therapist and things got really interesting and it was really the beginning of my discovering me and coming to life. I had been profoundly, I mean profoundly dissociated for a few decades at that point. [00:02:11] Speaker B: And what does that mean? I just want to maybe for people that don't understand what dissociated means, what does that mean to you? [00:02:16] Speaker A: That means that I'm not in my body. That means that I'm walking through kind of a cloud all the time and there's nothing really in focus. If you're dissociated, that means you're out of focus for lack of a better term to describe that. And they're varying degrees from A little bit to all the way on the other side of the planet. But your body's here and you're somewhere else. Yeah. And confrontation would immediately send me into this associated state. [00:02:42] Speaker B: What causes it? What causes somebody to dissociate? [00:02:45] Speaker A: It's a survival skill. So if you're in the middle of being horrifically abused or tortured in some way, you're going to leave. You're literally leaving the room and leaving the body here behind. Because the body will do what it's going to do with it. But the. The being. The sense of being is gone. In my own experience, which we'll talk a little more about suspect shortly, is just that when I was being brutally raped, I would literally go out the window. And so. And even in the repeat ones, when I would hear the footsteps on the stairs coming up to my bedroom, I would just go out the window because I knew what was coming. [00:03:20] Speaker B: Yeah, like you'd almost like. I want to just bring my consciousness out of my body out the window. And I'm just basically a corpse laying in this bed. [00:03:29] Speaker A: It's all. It's just a body and there's not a person. And so, of course, it was all recorded in my body. It was all there. I wasn't completely able to escape it, but. But it was. It's a survival mechanism. [00:03:40] Speaker B: Yeah. It's very common amongst people who are sexually abused or when they have sexual trauma, it's especially repetitive sexual trauma. They learn that as a coping skill to get out of the body so they don't have to actually be conscious of what's going on in the body. Although, like you said, the body will imprint memories of this. [00:03:57] Speaker A: It's all there. At some point when you heal, you have to go back through that. That's. There's no ultimate escape from it. But at least later, hopefully it shows up in a therapy room and you can have some support in walking through that. [00:04:10] Speaker B: Okay, so then you know what happened next. So you go to therapy. [00:04:15] Speaker A: I started going to therapy and realized how messed up I was. I remember in that very first session of the therapy, she was talking to me and she said, you seem really anxious. Are you afraid of me? And I said, no. She said, what are you afraid of? And I just said, what's inside of me? And the work began. That was the. She was the right therapist at the right time. And I just opened up. I felt completely safe. And it would be years before we would truly know the depth of the trauma because I had occluded memory. Occluded means Repressed memories. And so it's so bad that you literally block it out of the consciousness. Yeah, that's the only way of surviving. And when that shifted, story about that, too. I'm trained in emdr, eye movement, decent processing, which is the preeminent form of trauma work. And I went to my very first training with Francine Shapiro, who founded it. This was very, very early. It just come out and was starting to make a splash. And the first day of training, we went there and they did their thing and they gave us some small tools to work with, and they sent us off to group and said, practice. And so they still need to pick a small T trauma of big T trauma because they didn't want to open up this huge can of worms in the middle of the training session. And so the only thing that I could think of to work on because I was really, really dissociated was my fear of tall buildings. I look up at tall buildings and just about pass out. And what we now know is that phobias are often, if not most of the time, a cover for trauma. [00:05:54] Speaker B: Wow. [00:05:55] Speaker A: And so. So we said, okay, we'll do this. This tall building thing. That was freaking me out. And so about 30 seconds into doing the bilateral stimulation, my head went back, a cock went down my throat, and I was gone. I just totally dissociated, which completely freaked out the trainer, of course. He's like, now what am I going to do with this mess in the middle of my training session here? So that was the beginning of the memories coming back. Yeah. [00:06:20] Speaker B: These were memories at. How old. How old were you when this started happening? [00:06:23] Speaker A: Nine years old. [00:06:25] Speaker B: Unbelievable. Honestly. [00:06:26] Speaker A: Went on till 12. [00:06:28] Speaker B: Yeah. Do you feel like going into more of the story? I just. [00:06:31] Speaker A: I'm happy to. [00:06:32] Speaker B: Okay. [00:06:32] Speaker A: I don't have any shame about this. Yes. You have to understand, I grew up on a farm essentially in the middle of nowhere. We didn't really have neighbors. We didn't have other kids to play with. It was just me and my twin sister most of the time. And I have an older brother who's much older and who was off doing other things. And so we were really isolated from the world. It was just the four of us most of the time. My mom, dad, and my twin and I. And. And so there was no escaping it. And so I. All I know is I remember, well, the morning after that, I knew something had happened. I knew that I felt sick to my stomach and I was completely lost. And. And I. When I tried to get on the school bus, I couldn't I couldn't face the world. And I remember spending the day just wandering around outside with the dogs and. And trying to make sense of what was going on. I couldn't make any sense of it at the time. It was not. I was just so completely overwhelmed and so totally dissociated from the experience because it's the only way that you survive. And eventually my parents blackmailed me into going back to school. I was. I didn't go to school for a week. I just couldn't go back. And somehow I. They forced me in and I got through it. And that would just work practice in shoving everything down and away so that I didn't know what it was. And again. And this just kept happening over and over and over, and it changed everything. I mean, I couldn't. I was a straight A student and I was doing really well. And this just really shifted my whole life in just about every possible way. And without any understanding of why, because it was all blocked. And then all I remember is, is that while I was always afraid of my father because he was incredibly violent, this is just on a normal basis, is that I hated him. I absolutely hated him. I didn't have any memory of specifically why. That didn't come back till the occluded memory, but I just loathed his. His existence and avoided him at all costs. And unfortunately, he was the center of our universe. And out in this little farm in the middle of nowhere in the backwoods of the Ozarks in Missouri, it sounds like something out of a bad movie. Yeah, but it really was. It was just. It changed everything. I mean, it literally altered the whole course of my life. [00:08:52] Speaker B: Yeah. So you were experiencing sexual abuse from the age of 9 to 12 from your father. [00:08:59] Speaker A: And at 12, when we moved from Missouri to Arizona, it like magically stopped. It just like disappeared overnight. So how this led into me being a therapist, that was the original question. So when my therapist, that original therapist introduced me to the New Age movement and I jumped in with both feet and it really spoke to me because I grew up in this pseudo cult. My mother believed that she was ruler of the universe, sitting on the right hand of God. And we got daily messages from God and the angels. And this was not a normal childhood. And so I spent a lot of years in therapy. And it got clear to me after that first therapist that this was what I was going to do. This is what I wanted to do. This is the. And I was successful in business doing what I was doing. But this gave a meaning for living, in a sense. And also as I healed, believing that I could help others along the way. And so I think that's probably why I attract so many severe abuse survivors, and especially sexual abuse survivors, is that they often say to me, you really understand. And that's without knowing my story. But I do. I really get it. And so they feel the empathy and they feel the acceptance and understanding. There's a judgment on my side and so. Which is what they're afraid of. When they start to tell their story, they're going to be belittled or shamed or, or minimized in some way. And obviously that's their approach. [00:10:20] Speaker B: Yeah. I almost wonder too, if talking about it, therefore it goes against the principle of dissociation. It's like dissociate to stay away from the feelings in the body. Like, I see this with so many people. I also too, and I've spoke about this on a previous episode about my own sexual abuse at. When I was 19, it was essentially a rape that had happened and I was drugged. [00:10:41] Speaker A: So many gay men I know have been through that experience. [00:10:43] Speaker B: Oh, I know. And I don't remember. I don't remember it, but my body does. [00:10:48] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. [00:10:48] Speaker B: But it's interesting how 20 years goes by. I didn't tell a single soul. [00:10:52] Speaker A: Yep. [00:10:52] Speaker B: And this is a very common thing for people to do. So why do you think that is? Why do you think people hold back from sharing it? [00:10:58] Speaker A: Well, shame. And males particularly aren't allowed to be victims. To be victim as a male means to no longer be male. And so our society set it up. You're not supposed to be weak. You're not. You're supposed to be able to defend yourself. And I worked with one guy who was gang raped and so drugged and then. But he had memories of all that and helping him work through that really changed his life. But as you know, it's a sadly common story out there as to how this. This happens. And gay men torturing other gay men to me is just unconscionable. Anybody doing that, of course, but within our community, it just seems so bizarre to me that people do that. But my experience is that people who sexually abuse have been sexually abused. So they got programmed that this was acceptable on some level. Not that that justifies it, but I didn't ever rape anybody. And so if anything, I'm on the other extreme end. I don't get laid a lot because I want to process why we're doing what we're doing and how we're going to do this and they like, how if I get this over with. [00:12:08] Speaker B: I wonder too if that is a byproduct of having sexual trauma. Because I can be like that too. It's like I have a hard time resting in my body insects. Because I find like my mind wants to try and guard and protect. So do you think people who dissociate over develop, whether you can call it the ego or they overdevelop their mental structure, like where they're always in their mind and they have a very, very much more. [00:12:31] Speaker A: Yeah, because the body isn't safe. And so the retreat to the mind, then they cut off from here down. And every now and then you wake up to a certain degree and for this or that, but mostly you're a little ahead walking around because you feeling is if you really give yourself open feeling, all that's going to come back. And we're doing everything we can to not be overwhelmed by that experience and those memories. And so yeah, it's survival. [00:12:56] Speaker B: Yeah, totally. Okay, let's maybe define eroticizing shame and then we'll go into this because I want to really kind of layer this over everything we're talking about. So what does it mean to eroticize shame? [00:13:08] Speaker A: Well, shame means I am bad, I'm evil, I'm sick, I'm twisted. It's all those negative words tied to that. And so we are raised to avoid those kind of feelings. And. But what happens is that erotic eye shame means that you have taken a neurotic experience that was probably painful or bad in some way. If not just physically painful, emotionally painful, like being molested by a parent or a sibling, which is all too common. The best I'll do my short thing here. The vast majority of sexual abuse is within the family or the family system. The minister, the boy scout leader, the whatever teacher. It's not the stranger abduction. That's the extreme rare experience. The danger is inside the family unit and that superstructure. So we always want to make it about out there because people don't want to think about their families doing these horrible things. And I can tell you these families do horrible things all the time. So. But I think that eroticizing it happens for a few different reasons. One is that it's a survival mechanism again as a way of tolerating this experience. Two is that if it's like in my case, a parent, this was really how I felt. Oddly felt loved by him because he was brutal. I mean, he killed so many family pets because he'd get mad at it, he'd beat it to death. Or shoot it or this was not a fun childhood. And so I was terrified. I just. Tiny little guy. And so you always did what you had to do to make dad happy or keep dad liking you, because if not, it could be painful. Yeah, lots of spankings and beatings and all the other crap that went with that. The sexual abuse was just icing on the cave to all the other daily trauma. And then with mom being crazy and doing her thing, there was no safe haven here. And I think that's true for most people. You can't go to mom and say, well, dad just fucked me, because you're going to get belittled or told you're lying or causing trouble and all these other things because they've allied with dad all too often and they may be afraid of dad too, and so they're not going to intervene. But it's taking the pleasurable aspects of it and focusing on it. So sometimes there is a pleasurable experience in the middle of this, a moment or something. And so you focus on that as a survival mechanism and you can feel it in your body. It may be the first experience of intimate pleasure you've ever had. And then it's all twisted and all this other stuff. And then we get on the whole line to masochism. So shame is I'm bad, I'm awful, I'm twisted. And that's how you see a child being sexually abused is going to see themselves as the perpetrator. They're. Because they're somehow magically responsible for everything that happens to them. And so they're trying to find a way to process this and hold onto it. And feeling any pleasure in that experience is going to give them an outlet to focus on that. And then shame is really complex and it's ubiquitous in our society. And if not all societies, it's a control mechanism that gets used to shame somebody into doing. Getting them to do what you want to do. And. But we don't really talk about that either. And how brutally this is used to control people. So if you go into whatever pleasurable experience out of this, I'll give it another example. I had a client once who, about 16, 17 years old, worked for a family friend and end up got a blow job from this gay man who was the family friend. And it took him decades to get over that because as a straight man, he couldn't understand why he experienced pleasure because it was a very pleasurable experience, someone having probably the first blowjob he ever got. And so consequently he couldn't Reconcile the pleasure with his heterosexuality framework. It just kept clashing up against that. It took him a long time to process that. So we have these conceptions about how we're supposed to be in the world from the programming we got from our families. And anything that comes contrary to that then can really mess up the whole system. And of course, since we often blame ourselves, victims, brain, themselves, I shouldn't have done this. And that wouldn't have happened. And of course, all what you know now is not what you knew then. But we tend to blame ourselves. We can't. It's just a normal mechanism in my experience. And so you have to get people past the guilt and shame of taking responsibility for all this and putting the blame where it belongs, which is often mom and dad. And they don't want to make mom and dad the bad guy. But unfortunately you need to do that in order to heal. You have to be honest about what really happened. So you focus on the pleasure. And it can be from a mild recreation or role play of that all the way to full blown masochism, which is. I still to this day don't. I think all BDSM is some degree of erotic life shame. And I still don't understand. Personally, I can understand it intellectually. These guys who go in and they get whipped and they just slice open their back with one massive wound after another and they feel transcendent because they've survived the pain. It also releases all these endorphins inside, which gives them a certain degree of pleasure. And so they're looking for that high that's connected to the painful part. And that's not unlike what eroticized shame is, is that you're trying to get the high, the good part of that without all of the horrible. [00:18:56] Speaker B: Yeah. So this is probably where dissociation comes into play because we can almost dissociate from the pain, but we're keeping focus on the pleasure. And almost focusing on the pleasure is a form of dissociation, really. [00:19:09] Speaker A: Well, it's a survival. [00:19:11] Speaker B: It's a form of survival. That's probably a better way to. [00:19:13] Speaker A: Yes, it's a survival. I mean, because association means literally leaving the body. [00:19:18] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:19:20] Speaker A: And so. And enough trauma, you're going to. Its only option is to leave. You can't stay here because it's not survivable in that moment. [00:19:27] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. And there's actually. There's two types of dissociation, really. There's left brain and right brain dissociation. So right brain is more like the Freeze response. Right. Where we drop out of head into body. It's more that kind of rest free, like frozen state. And then left brain is more flight. Right. So people, they dissociate from their body and they go into an extremely busy, busy form of. Of mental. Right. So keeping themselves busy so they don't have to be with their emotions essentially, which are in their body. [00:19:57] Speaker A: Right. All that pain that they're trying to avoid feeling. Yeah. My experience is mostly with the left brain in terms of they're just trying to run away from all of this. It's very effective to help me survive my childhood. If I hadn't associated, I don't know what I would have done. It would have, yeah, because they would have never believed. My mom would never believe me because that would have put her safety into jeopardy as well. So. [00:20:20] Speaker B: Yeah. So can you have eroticized shame without dissociation? [00:20:24] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. I mean, yes. In some ways you don't really get to the depth of the shame, the eroticized shame until you come back into your body. Yeah, yeah. And absolutely. I think most people have some varying degrees of both. And if you've worked to done enough therapy, you can process that dissociation and actually find this as a safe container that I'm this big, strong guy now that can take care of myself, or if not, I can understand why I didn't and not blame myself. So as a child, you don't have all those rational. You have all these strange ways of trying to make sense out of it. As an adult, you have a few more tools, hopefully to understand and process what just happened. [00:21:04] Speaker B: Okay. And then I also heard in your story a lot around safety. Right. So doing this as a way to feel safe, to feel connected. So there's also like part of a fawn response that comes into play here. Right. Is that accurate to say same, more fawn response. Like a fawn response, meaning, you know, essentially like not necessarily a trauma response because fawn isn't used in the form of trauma response, but could be a response to fear. Right. If there's a fear in the home, it's like, okay, well, I'm going to let this happen. I'm not going to say anything. I'm going to make sure dad's happy, like these sorts of things. So it's, it's. You learned from a young age that you had to fawn. Right. You had to please him. [00:21:42] Speaker A: You had to keep everybody happy in order to get the minimal amount of abuse as opposed to the maximum. [00:21:47] Speaker B: Exactly. [00:21:48] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. [00:21:49] Speaker B: Okay. So I still want to grapple with this concept of dissociation and eroticized shame. Because if someone were to go to therapy, let's say, right, they had some sexual, you know, molestation or whatever it was, they go to therapy, they start working on coming out of, you know, thawing from dissociation and coming back into their body, does their eroticization of shame change? Or do you think that would still stay prevalent? Like, does healing change this? Or is this just something that is therefore then programmed into your sexual preferences, you know? [00:22:23] Speaker A: Well, my experience is once something gets eroticized, it stays eroticized. [00:22:27] Speaker B: Okay? [00:22:28] Speaker A: And you can choose to do it in a healthy way as opposed to with a partner that you trust and is conscious of what's going on. It isn't just acting out whatever that's going on to them. The key is, is not to recreate the trauma. And that is being unsafe, being unprotected. And this is a. And my experience, my own experience is, is that when I live out a fantasy, it often goes away because I've processed that completely, because that's taking back the full power of the experience and not being the victim, but being engaged in this. I don't know if that's true for other people, but I've seen that, certainly true in my own life, that if I live out whatever this fantasy is, it just goes away. Or I've been there, done that. Next. So. Which is kind of nice in that sense. But when. It's just hard when you're into the BDSM part, it's hard to find someone you can trust. That is because, unfortunately, they're often getting triggered because they've never processed their stuff. And so it just complicates things. [00:23:34] Speaker B: I almost wonder, too, if embodiment is important to use something like that for healing. Right. Like, you know, if you have sexual trauma, you're using BDSM or using partners where you're playing out fantasies, you need to be embodied. You can't be dissociated. And then, you know, because I. I've never heard of somebody that was dissociated and healed. Right. Dissociation is actually the severing of the part of you that needs. That you need online in order to heal. Right? [00:23:57] Speaker A: Yes. [00:23:58] Speaker B: So I can see how this can be healthy for healing, but it can also be unhealthy if you're perpetuating the pain of the experience. You know, thinking if you're repeatedly dissociating. [00:24:08] Speaker A: If you're not actually walking through this. But that's the problem is finding A partner that be cognizant enough to recognize that you've just dissociated. [00:24:18] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:24:19] Speaker A: That's the problem. Because you may not know in the moment. You may not be that focused. You may be lost in some of the energy and not recognizing that you just went out the window and that this is happening again. It just seems normal because it's happened so many times where. That's. Where that's the difficulty is finding someone who has some astuteness psychologically about what's happening. And that's a big ask. [00:24:44] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:24:45] Speaker A: Most guys have never been in therapy, let alone have a consciousness of what's actually going on in the room. [00:24:51] Speaker B: I know, I know, I know. That's part of my mission here. We're. We're getting. [00:24:57] Speaker A: We're. [00:24:57] Speaker B: We're normalizing therapy because it's so important and coaching and it's a good therapist. [00:25:02] Speaker A: The problem is that there's a lot of bad therapists out there too. So it's really probably. I. In my last book, I wrote a whole chapter on how to find a therapist. And my first thing is, when you meet a therapist first time, you need to ask them, how much therapy have they done on themselves? How much work and how did it help them? And if they won't answer the question, find the next therapist. [00:25:25] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree. I agree. And have done family of origin work. I just think that's so important. You know, you go into therapy because. [00:25:32] Speaker A: Family all goes back to family of origin. [00:25:34] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:25:35] Speaker A: Either did it or they didn't protect you from it. Doing it, or. And so. [00:25:40] Speaker B: Exactly. [00:25:40] Speaker A: Our parents are gods. [00:25:42] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [00:25:47] Speaker A: Wound up gods, but gods. [00:25:50] Speaker B: I want to explore the concept of desire and how this can form out of, like, almost it being intergenerational. I'm curious, in your case, was your father sexually molested by his father? [00:26:03] Speaker A: I have no idea. [00:26:04] Speaker B: Okay. [00:26:05] Speaker A: I would not be surprised given his proclivity sexually. And I think. I don't know if I should tell this story. I discovered belatedly in life that they had been practicing anal sex for a lot of times as a contraception. But I was just driving along one day and all of a sudden all the pieces and boom, boom, boom. Oh, I get now. So I don't know. I think that surprised me. I mean, in some ways, we're rather conventional on the outside. Good Southern Baptist family and the whole nine yards that goes with that. And then. But of course, with the cult thing on top of it, which is really confusing. And given his violence and her tolerance of that. I know my Mother was tortured by her mother. And I don't know much about my dad's experience other than his father was a bastard in an era that that was not okay. And so I think that got pushed down through the generations as well. [00:27:04] Speaker B: Okay. Because I got to think there's a correlation between eroticizing, shame and perpetrators. So somebody who has experienced. [00:27:12] Speaker A: Oh yeah, they're just acting out their stuff on somebody else. That's the way they. They think they're taking back their power then instead of perpetuating the cycle. But again, that, that requires a certain to not see. I'm always on the other end of that. I'm afraid of traumatizing somebody if we're going to get into some complaint like that. And so I'm hyper vigilant to the point of not going there. Because most people haven't done enough work on themselves to go there and process that because they're still in the complete victim modality. [00:27:44] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:27:44] Speaker A: And you have to actually heal. You have to work on that in order to come out of. It doesn't just magically dissipate into the air because it's 40 years later. [00:27:52] Speaker B: Yeah. Complex, eh? There's so many layers to this. [00:27:56] Speaker A: Again, sex is not simple enough. We treat it like this casual thing, but there's so many layers to this and it brings all of your past into play in this moment. And that's why I have. I don't do hookups because I need to have a certain amount of conversation about sex and sexuality and what they like and their history and so forth. They have an idea of what the playground is that we're in here so that no trauma doesn't happen. I remember doing this one scene with this one guy many, many years. It was nothing violent or anything, but he sobbed at the end. He literally was just sobbing and released. So I was. I didn't understand why he didn't come back. Because he had a really profound experience. He says. He says, because I'm afraid you know me better than I know myself. I thought that was an interesting response. [00:28:45] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, it's interesting when you. I find that when, when you do your work. Right. Like I've also done a ton of inner work and I don't dissociate anymore. So I have an astute sensitivity now because I think I grew up in an environment where I had to be very hyper vigilant. So I had that cognitive piece online. I was always observant to everything going on. But then when you start healing from dissociation, you start connecting back into the body. Your sensitivity skyrockets. And I can attune to somebody like, you know, like, no one. Right. It's pretty powerful. Which makes things like sex extremely sensitive. Right. Like, I. I'm picking up on so much. My nervous system is. There's a lot of data. Right. So I really agree with you. When it comes to. To hookups, I'm just like. I can't even fathom, like, I can't do a hookup. [00:29:32] Speaker A: It just doesn't. That's not. I don't understand how people. I just think it's a way of acting out their trauma. I mean, and anybody who's sexually compulsive had sexual trauma. Sexual compulsivity is a result of sexual trauma. [00:29:45] Speaker B: Tell me more about that. [00:29:46] Speaker A: Well, you're unconsciously trying to resolve that trauma. And so many guys just become a whole way of being because they're so dissociated from their own stuff that they're over there focusing all this energy so they don't have to stay in touch with what's happening inside of them, looking for that next high, that next altered experience. Because sex puts us into an altered state. And so the point is, as long as you're not dissociated, which is another. But yeah, I can't conceive of a hookup. It just simply. I have to have some sense of them. I have to have some sense of trust. I have to have a gestalt of this before I go into it or it is not going to happen. I've pissed off lots of guys. I'm so sorry. Sex is not that simple. And they keep treating it like it's just getting lunch and it's not. And what you're talking about is an advanced form of being, as far as I'm concerned. Because most people aren't aware of what's going on in their body as they're making contact with other people. Because if you pay attention to what's going on inside of you, you're going to know what's going on inside of them. [00:30:50] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:30:50] Speaker A: And most guys have no clue to this at all. They can't read what's going on. They're so lost in their stuff that they can't read what's happening with the other person. [00:30:59] Speaker B: Yeah. It's interesting because you say a lot of people who are sexually compulsive have been sexually abused or have sexual trauma. [00:31:07] Speaker A: I would say all of them. I wouldn't say some. I would say it's just as a result of sexual trauma. [00:31:11] Speaker B: Yeah, I would agree, but I wouldn't say all. And what I would say is, where I would say all would be. I'd replace the word sexual trauma with dissociated. And that doesn't necessarily have to mean in, in from my opinion that it was sexual trauma because I think it could be developmental trauma of growing up gay, dissociate from that. Right. Become extremely hyper vigilant, associate from that, and then perpetuate the social conditioning that we get as gay men, which is to prioritize sex, that's our currency to each other. And then we perpetuate that. Right. Because I know, I do know some people and maybe they just haven't shared it. I do know people who have, who are sexually compulsive and they've never experienced sexual trauma, at least not in the way that I would define sexual. Sexual trauma. [00:31:58] Speaker A: But I, I think a lot of them get sexual trauma. Your first exposure to porn can be that sexual trauma. [00:32:05] Speaker B: Okay, so it's how we're defining sexual trauma, I think. [00:32:08] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I have a broader definition. [00:32:10] Speaker B: Okay. [00:32:11] Speaker A: And there doesn't have to be, it can be simply threatened in some way getting raped to the degree I was. And I'm guessing that you were that certainly that's obvious. But there's all these subtle layers that, that end up putting you in the same place. And so they're trying to. Because a child's brain is developing and then if an adult brings too much energy, sexual energy towards that child before the brain is ready to process that degree of, of stimulation, then they're creating a trauma. It doesn't have to be any more than that. And that becomes a blockage in their development of the brain developing around, tolerating and managing that erotic energy as it goes through the brain. And so porn is one of the big ways that a lot of guys get sexually traumatized because they get exposed to porn before they're capable of processing that. Or they have an older guy have, it may not have been violent or anything, but a 40 year old guy can generate a whole lot more sexual energy than a 12 year old boy. And so he's overwhelmed by simply the amount of energy coming towards him. Doesn't have to be violent, doesn't have to be. Uh, mean it could simply be. That's what, what I'm talking about. There's always some degree of something underneath there that needs to be processed so that they can, can fully integrate and do these different parts. Yeah, it doesn't have to be violent or rape or okay. Being sexually traumatized covers a lot more ground than that. [00:33:37] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, it makes sense then, for sure. But I would still stand by what I said earlier, which is dissociation is always going to be the underpin. Right. Because if somebody's sexually compulsive, I get the sense from my perspective that they are operating their sexual mechanics from mind. Right. And they're horny in mind. Right. And I think because I, I was that way from all of my 20s and I was very sexually compulsive and my mechanics was my mind, my ego, I was mentalizing sex, essentially. [00:34:04] Speaker A: Yes. [00:34:04] Speaker B: And when I started to embody and I started to come back from dissociation and connecting the cords again, I didn't desire the same type of sex. My body was actually went through a depression where it was screaming at me to stop doing the things that I was doing because my body didn't want it, but my mind was bullying my body into doing it. And I think that's the disconnect. And I see this a ton of this in our, in our culture as gay men. I think a lot of us are walking around dissociated and having dissociated sex, in my opinion. [00:34:34] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, I agree. I think they exist in their cock and balls. They don't really exist in the rest of their body. And so I can go a side angle here that I think is interesting. Several years ago, when I was living in San Diego, I went to this gay men's meetup. It sounds, I think it's technically a spiritual one. But the facilitator started and it was very clear to me he had no idea what she was talking about. And so I just took over the meeting, which I'm quite capable of doing. And so I introduced the topic of intimacy. Because what we're really talking about here is intimacy in one form or another. And most guys have no fundamental understanding of what intimacy is. And so intimacy is the act of being vulnerable, of revealing a part of yourself to another person that may get you rejected. And so consequently, real sex happens when you're intimate, when you open up yourself to this other person without all the barriers. And that's when things get really interesting. That's when you can have this three dimensional sex and the tantra stuff that can show up and naturally because you're, you're not merging, but you're making contact on a really profound level because merging is bad. Sorry. The only time you should ever merge is with a child under three years of age. All other merging is a bad idea. [00:35:57] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. It's Trauma bonding, essentially. [00:35:59] Speaker A: Yeah. And so we're not intimate is we don't use sex in an intimate way. We don't use the. And I remember these guys were just in shock as I explained to them how this worked and so forth. And they. And they proceeded to talk about the whole rest of the time. They were just. Nobody had ever told them that the vulnerability was the key to good sex. [00:36:25] Speaker B: Where are these guys, though? I want these guys. I wish there was a way to find guys like that because I don't come across guys like that very often. [00:36:33] Speaker A: No. Well, they're not. Guys aren't trained to be vulnerable. They're trained to be strong and to conquer the everything in front of them. Not tried to be. To open themselves up and expose themselves to hurt or shame or being belittled in some way. And so. But that's where the juicy stuff really happens. [00:36:50] Speaker B: I know. [00:36:50] Speaker A: And that's when you just. Both of your hearts open and you make this contact and there's this container that's held for the two of you that just. You can go to really incredible depths. And my. I've only been in one long term relationship, lasted 19 years and our sex was just off the scale because we had this profound intimacy. We go into these altered states and it would go on forever and everything would go into slow motion. And it was just unbelievable. But I've never found anybody since then that's willing to get vulnerable enough to do that. [00:37:24] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:37:24] Speaker A: It's really sad. [00:37:26] Speaker B: It is sad. Yeah. Again, that's a big reason of why I do what I do. The work that I'm doing and building the community that we're building and educating men to go into therapy and to start working on themselves, develop consciousness. Self consciousness, I think is so important because you have to have self consciousness in order to come in to consciousness with another human being. Right. I think that's so important here. [00:37:48] Speaker A: Yeah. Most of these guys are not aware of their own. They've just sort of put all their history onto the shelf and they don't have to deal with that anymore because they're here and now. And that's not how it works. You're all coming with you. And until you process that, it's running your life well. [00:38:02] Speaker B: Exactly. Through subconscious programs that people don't even really. They're not even aware of them. Right. That's why, that's why therapy is so important. Like things like emdr, I think are so powerful for that because you're actually working with the subconscious mind. Right. You're bringing Things forward from the subconscious to the conscious, to therefore be examined, looked at, and healed. Essentially. [00:38:21] Speaker A: Yes. It's amazing. It was a paradigm shift in psychotherapy. It has changed the entire field. And it's. I'm a gestalt therapist, so I combine the gestalt with the emdr, and it's a really profound. Because gestalt's about being totally embodied. And so we get people off the couch and make them do things so that they feel their body. So they're like. One of my favorite exercises when they're. When they're avoiding something is that I'll have them get up and we do a pushing hands kind of thing. [00:38:50] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:38:50] Speaker A: And so they have to match the pressure that I'm giving them. And it just brings them into contact in the relationship in that moment. And all of a sudden, everything starts flowing. So that's all these wonderful things that can happen. But most therapists are not somatic therapists. They aren't looking at it from the body and. [00:39:07] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:39:07] Speaker A: So. [00:39:08] Speaker B: Which is so unfortunate. It's got to be a blend. I just think that if you're. If your therapist isn't inviting you to feel what the words that you're speaking. If it's just pure talk therapy and there's no, like, okay, let's pause and. And check in what you're feeling about what you're talking about, then you're probably. That would be my description of. So not a good therapist. If you're seeing somebody that's just doing talk and they're not actually associated because talk's important. It's important for emotional attunement. But you need to blend that in. Therefore, to check down, let's go downward and see how what you're saying is impacting your body. [00:39:40] Speaker A: I call it mental masturbation. [00:39:43] Speaker B: Mental masturbation diagnosis. Yeah. Yeah. Can eroticizing shame be a healing experience, do you think? [00:39:53] Speaker A: Yes, I think it is a way of taking back our power. I think it's a way of declaring victory for life. A better way to describe it and that we need that because that was a horrific time experience when we were powerless to be in touch with that. But again, it has to be done in such a way that is healing and not shaming, because you're in touch with that eroticized shame. And sometimes it's about asking to be shamed in a certain way. But again, it's. It's in your control. You're not. You're not a victim at that point. You're taking back your power, and you're playing with this and you're turning it into something more pleasurable. The thing we didn't talk about is that once something gets eroticized, in my experience, it virtually never goes away. [00:40:38] Speaker B: Yeah, I want to know more about that because you made that. That's a big claim. So I'm curious your thoughts on that. Yeah. [00:40:44] Speaker A: You can clear trauma and EMDR is really powerful at doing that and there are other techniques to it, but erotic energy gets hardwired into our system. [00:40:52] Speaker B: I mean, that's where pedophilia comes from. [00:40:55] Speaker A: Oh yeah. Guys who've been or pedophiles are almost always sexual abuse victims as well. They're just passing on. They're trying in their own way to. To make sense of this, to work on that. Unfortunately, I don't have a consciousness about what they're doing because they're in this regressed state. People who, who do things, who act out things in violent ways like that are almost always. I don't think I've ever experienced somebody who wasn't a victim of that as well. And so we need to have compassion along with putting a very strong boundaries around that. [00:41:25] Speaker B: I agree. Yeah. So the only treatment for that, from your perspective, would be abstinence? That you can't actually change somebody's erotic desires. [00:41:34] Speaker A: No, but what I do is, is I take them back to the pain of their own experience and then relate that pain to what they're doing the other and that they're condemning another child lived their life. [00:41:48] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:41:49] Speaker A: And so if there's any self awareness, if there's any compassion in there that becomes. That becomes anathema to what they want to do. They may have a fantasy about that on some level, but my experience is that tends to diminish. But a lot of these guys are just an arrested adolescence and they're never going to grow up. [00:42:08] Speaker B: Well, and probably dissociated and only focusing on the pleasure. If they're perpetuating that, I. I don't get the sense that they would be perpetuating the pain consciously. [00:42:16] Speaker A: Not consciously, no. [00:42:17] Speaker B: Unconsciously, probably. So I'm assuming probably your treatment plan and working with people like this would be to bring them back into an embodied place. So get them back online from dissociating. What does that even look like? How would you even begin that process with people who are severely dissociated? [00:42:33] Speaker A: Well, it's a long process of reflecting back to them, their experience accurately in that moment. And this is where like you, I'm. I'm rather acute awareness of what's going on inside of me because there's this whole conversation going on all the time and I get a lot of practice and so I'll look at the client and say, so what's going on in your stomach right now? What's happening? They're like, how did you know? It's like, yeah, because you can feel it. I mean if you're, if you're tuned in, you know exactly what's going on. The other person. Unfortunately, most people don't get embodied enough and learn how to track that because it's the most useful information you're ever going to get out of another person is to know what's going on inside of them. And so what you're doing is you're reflecting back to them that their feelings are real and that you're aware of this and you're there with them and you haven't shame about having whatever's going on at that moment. And so it's a healing experience. And I think you can come out the other side and so that you recognize your pattern and so then becomes more and more minimized as you stop enacting that and you recognize what this is and you choose not to make that choice. That over time it just diminishes whatever that is. But it takes time and it takes willingness to feel all that. And they have to go back and process their trauma so that they get that they won't ever have anybody else live through what they've lived through. So I was never, never occurred to me to have sex with a child. I guess if I'd been younger that might have been because I think it's with young, young kids, this is 2, 3, 4 year olds, 5 year olds as opposed to I was 9 at the time. And than going through adolescence through all of this, which didn't help anything either. But I think that guys who are pedophiles in my experience almost always were sexually abused very, very young. And they're just acting out what was done to them in one way or another. And some of them just have take joy in it for lack of a better description. But I think that's their anger. Yeah, but that doesn't justify it. It doesn't make it okay. [00:44:36] Speaker B: Yeah, a lot of unconscious or like subconscious processes at play. I agree with you. I think rage plays a big role in that and power differential. It's like I'm going to reclaim my power back that I had taken from me by taking it from somebody younger. It's, it's very pathological in my opinion. [00:44:53] Speaker A: And I think that's why a lot of parents abuse their children, whether it be physical abuse or psychological abuse or whatever is. They're simply acting out what was done to them. And never, of course, God forbid they should do any work there. So it just doesn't happen. [00:45:08] Speaker B: So, yeah, I want to leave the audience with some, like, almost kind of like tangible things, because if. If people are listening, they're like, geez, am I eroticizing my shame? Am I, you know, is this. Am I perpetuating something? Whether it's, you know, more on the severe end, let's say molestation or abuse, or maybe it's some of these lighter dynamics that you talked about within sexual trauma. How can they know if they are exploring this, you know, in a healthy way versus an unhealthy way? Like, what are some things that might be, like, pointers that you could get them to look at or see if it's something that needs to be looked at or if it's. I know that's a very big question, but. [00:45:46] Speaker A: Okay, let me chew on that for a second. See, most eroticized shame in my experience is about what's happening to you. It's not about what's happening to them. And so if you're out there and this is about making this then feel this way, then you're perpetuating what happened. [00:46:02] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:46:02] Speaker A: As opposed to the guy who gets off on slicing somebody's back wide open. I think that's problematic personally, because I think it's just violent and he's going to get into an altered state. He's also going to have. But it's also feeding something inside of him. But we don't take enough responsibility for our own actions. We tend to. If my dick says it wants to do this, I'm going to do this. It isn't about thinking, well, how is this going to impact the other person? There's no real compassion or the impact you're having on another person. And that. I think that's epidemic among men in general, but certainly gay men who get compartmentalized in this whole other way. It's really problematic. And that's these endless hookups and doing whatever they're doing. They're doing it to get off and using this other body or whole as a means to do that without any real compassion or understanding of what this is doing to that other person. And that, I think, is the problem. It's not that I. I think that people should never have hookups. I mean, it happens. And some people, it's the only kind of sex they have because they don't want anything that actually has any real intimacy tied to it. I mean, I have to have a long conversation with somebody before I actually want to sleep with them. [00:47:20] Speaker B: Ditto. [00:47:21] Speaker A: And usually the conversation kills any possibility of having sex because they are completely clueless about what's going on inside of them. It's like, okay, go see a therapist. That or pay somebody to do this. I'm not pay this. And so. Which makes for a very lonely sex life. I know. Non existent. And I'm bored to tears with masturbation. I'm just really, really bored to tears with. Yeah, but. And I don't know, it seems coupling. We don't have any consciousness about what it means to couple. We don't have. We have so few. We're trying to insert these heterosexual models which aren't healthy to begin with. And so I'm hoping that conversations like ours at least wake some people up a little bit. And I'm about to. Interestingly enough, I'm going to say two commercials here. One is that horrible movie. I saw a horrible movie over the weekend and it inspired me. I'm in the process of writing right now and about to launch it. I think I'm coming up with a workshop called the best sex of your life for men only. And so there will be a version of this for women. It'll have to be done by a woman. For women. I'm not getting into that. But I actually am going to take guys through the whole concept of what sexuality is about and intimacy to actually be able to truly connect with another human being in a really healthy way that empowers both of you and what this really looks like. All that vulnerability, all that, all those other parts. And so I've been. It'll be fun. I'll have a great time. And Because I'll. I'll put them on the spot and we'll have a really good time. So that's coming soon. I love the title. I think it's a great title. [00:49:03] Speaker B: I love it. [00:49:03] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:49:04] Speaker B: You'll have to let me know when you release it. Sounds interesting. [00:49:06] Speaker A: Yeah. And the other is I do. I have an online workshop that's self on self. You do it yourself. You don't have. I'm not. That's recorded. But it's called unspoken boundaries. And it really teaches people about these boundaries that we've been talking about here and how to recognize what's going on in the other person and how not to absorb the other person's stuff and all of These things, it's really in depth. It's. It's certed for 24 CE continuing education hours. So it. This is an in depth class that takes some time to go through. Lots and lots and lots and lots of exercises. [00:49:40] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:49:40] Speaker A: But it also just frames from a whole different way of looking at human interaction so that they actually have the tools to keep somebody out if they're trying to merge with them and recognize what's happening and how to clean up things if things happen. And so it's online on demand. They can go through through my website or through the direct1 to unspokenboundaries.com it's all available there. But the people who take it and embrace the tools, it changes their life. It just completely shifts. And I really pushed this initially around therapists who. They need this more than anybody. [00:50:12] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, we're working with so much. Well, trauma, like, vicarious trauma is a legit thing, and there's research to back it. Like, when you're working with trauma all day long, you're taking it in. Right. So like energetic boundaries. As somebody who's highly sensitive man, I had to learn how to master energetic boundaries because it was all about. [00:50:32] Speaker A: It's all energetic boundaries. So the whole core. Because I get deep into all of that and what that looks like and how to clean that up on a daily basis. And. And I do things we call thought daggers. Because if you believe that the power of positive thought can impact another person, then you have to believe that negative thoughts do the same thing. [00:50:51] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:50:51] Speaker A: And that's what I call thought daggers. And so I teach people what these are and how to get them out. And I'm going along, and all of a sudden everything starts going haywired in my life. Like every. Nothing's working. I have to. Oh, I have to see if there's any daggers that somebody zapped me with. So I have to pull that out and everything goes back to normal. But it's just really weird. You're just like, everything's blowing up in your face. So anyway, it's a really useful course for anybody to take. Man, woman, other and. But both of these classes, and I think this one's for men, if they're interested in really learning about sexuality, I think it'll blow them away. As I go into the deep end of the pool on this, it'll be interesting to see how respond. I'm gonna have to do a test one soon to see how it goes. [00:51:37] Speaker B: Yeah, maybe. So I think maybe I could have you on again because I really like creating with you and maybe we could do the topic of unspoken boundaries and do an episode about it and talk a bit about it. Sounds like we both have experience in this area. So I'm sure it's the center of. [00:51:52] Speaker A: My existence because I'm clairvoyant and so I'm really get way a lot of information all the time. I have to block, block. No, no, we're not going here. [00:52:01] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I'm not clairvoyant. I'm clairsentient. So everything comes through my felt sense and believe it or not, my gift never came through until I came back online from dissociating. Oh, of course I wasn't actually connected to the part of me that is my compass. It's giving me the information through. [00:52:19] Speaker A: It's all in the body. [00:52:20] Speaker B: It's all the body. [00:52:21] Speaker A: Tells you everything that's going on if you're paying attention. Yes, absolutely. So that's what the unspoken boundaries workshop is, really teaches people how to get there and do that. So. [00:52:31] Speaker B: Okay, well maybe I can have you on in the fall again. So we'll put it. [00:52:36] Speaker A: Sure. [00:52:37] Speaker B: For those of you who want to learn more about Merle, you can go to merle yost.com so m e r l e y y dash t dot com I'll make sure to put that in the show notes as well. And yeah, thank you for coming on and sharing all this. This is such a stimulating conversation. I feel like we could have gone like another hour and talking about this. But I want to, I want to be mindful that of time, your time and the audience. But if you are watching on YouTube, drop some comments. I know this, this is a very interesting topic and you might have some questions that you want. I'll make sure that the collective questions. [00:53:11] Speaker A: And the next one will answer the questions exactly. [00:53:14] Speaker B: Yeah, put them in. Or we can go on the in the comments and answer them there too. So if you do have any questions, please drop them in the the comment section. And if you're listening on your favorite podcast platform, please. If you enjoyed what you heard today, give us a five star rating and a review. Let us know your thoughts about our podcast and until next time, thanks again, Merle. Appreciate it. [00:53:34] Speaker A: Thank you so much for having me a great time. [00:53:36] Speaker B: Yeah, thanks much. Love everybody.