[00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to This Complex Life. This episode has a bit of a “little ears” warning, so if you’ve got some little ears around, perhaps listen to this at a later date. It contains some adult-only material and some explicit content. In this episode, I speak with Dr. Sarah Ashton, a psychologist and founder of the Sexual Health and Intimacy Psychological Services, also fondly known as SHIPS. We talk about sex and relationships and some of the common misconceptions.

[00:00:28] Sarah: I think another common belief would be that sex has to end in orgasm. That’s really having a very rigid idea about how sex should happen.

Sarah and I take a look at how we develop our sexual scripts, where they come from, and how they might shape how we interact in relationships.

[00:00:46] Sarah: So, a sexual script might involve information that we get about how sex happens. They influence the way we think that we should go about engaging in sex and the expectations we have of ourselves and the expectations we have of other people. Most people don’t actually realise they’ve absorbed these messages.

It’s a topic that’s not often talked about, and it’s very hush-hush.

[00:01:11] Sarah: Sex isn’t something that you can talk about publicly or perhaps sex is shameful, so we shouldn’t talk about it.

So join me as I lift the lid on this often hidden topic, something that we don’t even talk about. As someone who works as a therapist and as a relationship and mental health educator, I can’t ignore the important part sex plays in relationships, the role it has in our health and well-being, and how to give people some really good, reputable, quality information in a safe way. We need to talk about this. We need to have an understanding about sex and relationships and get it all out in the open.

This is one of a few episodes that I’m going to be doing on this topic. So if you’ve got some questions, feel free to reach out or fill out the form in the show notes, and I’ll try to answer as many as I can on the podcast. I hope you enjoy this enlightening conversation with Sarah Ashton. Welcome, Sarah.

[00:02:08] Marie: Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure.

[00:02:10] Marie: Did you want to give the audience a bit of a background into who you are, what you do, and what you love about what you do?

[00:02:18] Sarah: I’m a psychologist. I’ve been practising for about 15 years now, and I’m also the director and founder of SHIPS, which is Sexual Health and Intimacy Psychological Services, as well as our partner company, Sexual Health and Intimacy Psychological Training.

[00:02:35] Sarah: And SHIPS is actually the first practice in Australia to focus on treating sexual health issues through a psychological framework and with evidence-based modalities. And we’ve been running for about five years now. I’ve always been interested in sex and sexuality.

[00:02:55] Sarah: It fascinates me because it’s not something that we really talk a lot about, and I think that has really complex and interesting impacts on people’s relationships with sex. And also, it has an impact on their broader psychology as well. So, I was waiting for it to come up when I was doing my psychology training, but other than a mention of Freud’s Oedipus Complex, I really didn’t get any other training.

[00:03:18] Sarah: So, in my early career, I worked with sexual offenders and then juvenile offenders. When I was working with offenders, I could see the impact that consuming pornography was having on how they thought about sex and how they thought about relationships. So, I decided to do a PhD, and I did some research on young women’s experiences of pornography.

[00:03:40] Sarah: And when I was doing that, what really struck me was how impactful it was to sit down and have conversations with young women about their experiences. They’d never had a safe space to be able to talk about this. That’s, you know, for some of them, it was the first time they’d ever been able to share some of these [00:04:00] experiences.

[00:04:01] Sarah: And I just felt like, you know, we need more spaces like this. So that’s what inspired me to start SHIPS. It was just me, and now five years later, we have over 30 staff, and yeah, we’ve released over 20 online courses and run regular workshops for the community and for practitioners as well.

[00:04:22] Sarah: It’s just so needed in our community, in our lives. The flow and impact in the healing, both personally and culturally, is a beautiful thing to watch, and it’s a privilege to be in a position where I can help lead that.

[00:04:36] Marie: Yeah, that’s a wonderful story. And slightly off script, but do you think it would surprise people that in all our training—I mean, I was the same—I did psychology undergrad, social work, and family therapy, and the word sex did not come up at all. We learned zero about this really key, fundamental piece of relationships and health.

[00:04:59] Marie: And we learned nothing about it. Like, do you think that would surprise a lot of listeners?

[00:05:04] Sarah: Yeah, people are usually shocked when I tell them that. When I have to explain that in order to start SHIPS, I also had to write all of the training for practitioners as well because, yeah, it’s just not part of our training. But really, you know, we psychologists and the discipline of psychology are positioned within our broader culture, which shames and stigmatises sex and sexuality.

[00:05:28] Sarah: We kind of omit that from the conversation and omit it from our approach towards health and humanity, but the effect that it has—it doesn’t mean that people are not sexual or that they don’t have sexual experiences. It just means that it’s kind of relegated to their subconscious.

[00:05:50] Sarah: It’s relegated to a separate part of their life, which maintains a disconnected, unobserved, and sometimes pretty shadowy relationship. And that’s when it can cause problems and when it can cause difficulties. So, talking about it, bringing it into the light, providing information and being able to have conscious, connected conversations about it is the antidote to that.

[00:06:18] Marie: It makes so much sense that if we’re uncomfortable talking about it, it’s going to be hard to fund research, to talk about it, and to publicly run talks and write books. Like, no one, like, no, no, please. Yeah, we don’t want to, we don’t do that. Just, like, swish it down.

[00:06:32] Marie: This kind of contributes to our ideas of what we call sexual scripts—maybe that broader context piece. What are, like, how would you define to someone what a sexual script is? You might not even use that language, but how would you encourage someone to think about that and what influence it has on their perceptions of what’s a healthy sexual relationship?

[00:06:53] Sarah: When we’re growing up, we have to learn how to be a human, and we have to learn how to operate in the world. And so, we look to the world around us—the people in our lives, like our family, first and foremost, our social groups, but also information in movies or TV shows where we see representations of relationships and interactions.

[00:07:15] Sarah: We look at these to make sense of, you know, well, how do I do this? How do I form a relationship? How do I approach someone if I like them and I want to date them? How do I initiate sex? So, we look for this information, and we look for evidence of scripts. Scripts are a learned series of interactions that follow a predictable sequence.

[00:07:40] Sarah: They name social actors, they describe their qualities, and they involve cultural scenarios, interpersonal scenarios, and intrapsychic scenarios. A really good example of this is how we might see the relationship playing out in The Notebook, for instance, right?

[00:07:55] Sarah: The arc of the relationship and the building of romance and dating and [00:08:00] connection and what that looks like. So that’s a script, right? And so, a sexual script might involve information that we get about how sex happens. And for most people, that’s porn. Porn is the most vivid sexual script. Because it shows this is what you do to have sex. This is how it looks. This is what you can expect. This is how you behave. This is how you are meant to look.

[00:08:24] Sarah: This is how other people interact with you. And so, we absorb scripts subconsciously, and they influence the way we think that we should go about engaging in sex, and the expectations we have of ourselves and the expectations we have of other people.

[00:08:41] Marie: So, it’s the stories and the beliefs we have about what it should look like, when it should happen, all of that stuff.

[00:08:48] Sarah: Yeah. It’s more the act of how, and what it looks like to embody the process of something. Core beliefs are more internal. So, they’re things that can drive sexual scripts—they’re beliefs that we might have absorbed about meaning that’s connected to ourselves, meaning that’s connected to other people, and meaning that’s connected to the world.

[00:09:11] Sarah: So, for instance, a core belief relating to sex might be that I’m a good person if I wait to have sex when I’m married. So, there’s kind of an attribution of value, of morality, and it has a specific instruction and belief that connects to self and the broader social context.

[00:09:31] Sarah: And that can influence a script—that might influence the way that someone goes about having sex or not having sex, and the sorts of behaviours that they embody in that process.

[00:09:41] Marie: In your experience, how do these scripts differ based on gender, sexuality, or maybe different cultural backgrounds?

[00:09:49] Sarah: We learn sexual scripts from cultural information, right? Yeah. So each, you know, there are thousands of different cultures around the world, and they all have different ways of representing and embodying gender and representing and embodying gender dynamics and relationships—the roles and expectations in that context.

[00:10:10] Sarah: And also the meaning that sex has. So, if we’re going to understand, if we’re working with a client and we’re wanting to understand their sexual scripts and what sorts of experiences might have influenced them, we really need to understand the culture that they grew up in and what were some of the messages that they might have absorbed—who might they have heard them from? And what’s really powerful about that is that most people don’t actually realise they’ve absorbed these messages.

[00:10:36] Sarah: They don’t understand where this script has come from because they’ve never talked about it or had to think about it in their life. We really are absorbing and are kind of a sponge when it comes to the environment that we’ve been situated in. And that’s going to really influence diversity in the sexual scripts that we internalise.

[00:10:57] Marie: It sort of reminds me of when we’re kids and we grow up thinking, “Oh, you know, there’s the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.” And at some point, new information comes in, and we realise that’s not a real thing. It seems like when it comes to sex, we get these ideas, or we absorb this content, or we observe what’s not being spoken about. And then that might remain unchallenged. So it might be like becoming an adult, still thinking, “Well, yeah, I’ve lost a tooth. Where’s the Tooth Fairy?” Like, this is not right.

[00:11:26] Marie: I guess it’s something like that where sometimes we just don’t have extra information or new information to challenge that. So, we hold that as kind of still true.

[00:11:35] Sarah: Yeah, that’s right. Everyone’s experience is different, right? So we can’t make generalisations about how this works for any one person.

[00:11:46] Sarah: For some people, it really is an absence of information, and that’s quite impactful, you know, and the underlying message connected to that is, “You don’t talk about sex.” Sex isn’t something that you can talk about publicly, or perhaps [00:12:00] sex is shameful, so we shouldn’t talk about it.

[00:12:03] Sarah: But for other people, they might receive really overt messages about sex. So, you know, if you have lots of sex as a cis woman, that means that you’re bad, that you’re worthless. There might be really prescriptive information about what sex means—that you have to look a certain way in order to be sexually desirable, for instance. So there might be really clear, overt messages—or not.

[00:12:28] Sarah: And then for some people, there might be sexual traumas that they experienced early on in their life. Unfortunately, childhood sexual abuse and sexual abuse later on in life are really common occurrences in our population. So those experiences are going to mean that people internalise beliefs about their body and about what sex means and what it’s connected to, and the fact that they haven’t experienced that in a safe way.

[00:12:55] Sarah: They’ve experienced it in a deeply, atrociously traumatic way. And so, we really have to understand the individual and their journey and what meaning has been attributed to their experiences in their life, and then how that’s impacted on how they think about themselves and sex now.

[00:13:10] Marie: It’s very intersectional, isn’t it? Because you’re really looking at gender, sexuality, culture, how your body moves, what size body you have, if you’re able-bodied—there’d be all these different beliefs and stigma and assumptions. Like, it’s actually quite deep.

[00:13:26] Sarah: And one of the helpful things is observation of those experiences.

[00:13:30] Sarah: So, just going back to what you were saying before, it is mostly the case that people have never thought about or had a chance to speak about their experiences and to be able to name the impact of what they have internalised and to interrogate it. So, there’s something in terms of the scripts and the beliefs that we’ve absorbed—what can be harmful about them is not interrogating their legitimacy or whether they’re something that we actually want to hold onto. People might have internalised the idea that sex is dirty or immoral, but they’ve never gone through the conscious process of identifying that and then being able to decide whether that’s actually a belief that is helpful for them or something that they want to hold onto, because that’s the beautiful thing about therapy, right?

[00:14:22] Sarah: We have the opportunity to make conscious choices around things that we’ve passively consumed and internalised throughout our lives.

[00:14:29] Marie: So, you’ve mentioned one belief there about it being maybe dirty or immoral. In your experience, are there other kinds of common themes or misbeliefs that seem to present frequently in your work with clients or in your training?

[00:14:43] Sarah: I think another common belief would be that sex has to end in orgasm. So, that’s really having a very rigid idea about how sex should happen, or that you have to get an erection, that orgasms have to look a certain way, or that arousal is linear and then orgasm follows.

[00:15:03] Sarah: That rigidity around the script is something that is really common when people experience, or it’s common and co-occurring with, sexual disorders because, really, as humans, we don’t follow that rigid script. And we can have lots of beautiful, pleasurable, intimate sexual experiences that aren’t necessarily orgasmic, or that ebb and flow, or that don’t have a definitive start and finish, and also that involve so much more of the body than the genitals.

[00:15:38] Sarah: So, it’s when people have this rigid expectation of themselves and how things should go, and then it doesn’t, for whatever reason, something doesn’t follow that process, then they can start to be critical of themselves. They can start to be anxious about what other people will think or anxious about the issue arising again, and then [00:16:00] that can impact on their capacity for arousal, you know? So, yeah, I would say that one of the seemingly innocuous but really problematic beliefs is that it has to end in orgasm, or that there’s one way to have sex, or that there’s one way to be good at sex, or that you have to look a certain way.

[00:16:22] Sarah: I think particularly if you’re a cis woman, you’ve been exposed to millions of different messages about how you should look, what makes you desirable, and that your appearance is central to your value as a person. That is so destructive for cis women, both in terms of their mental health and their sexual health, and their overall sense of well-being and worth.

[00:16:46] Marie: So, that bit about it not having to end in orgasm—that really does sound like a lot of the couples I work with, where it’s cisgendered, heterosexual couples, and they really seem to struggle with what it’s supposed to look like. So, if someone is experiencing some pain or discomfort, or recovering from a procedure, it seems very hard to think outside the box for some people that it can look different. Where would someone start to even have those conversations? Like, if they hear this episode and think, “Oh, it doesn’t have to be that way,” how would they maybe tell their partner? Like, how would they even start the conversation to explore what else is on the table or on the menu?

[00:17:27] Sarah: So, really, we want to move back to basics and focus on sensation. The more you can tune into your senses and the experience, particularly of touch, the more conducive that is to pleasure, arousal, and just having really enjoyable, intimate sexual experiences. So, Sensate Focus Therapy is a therapy that we use specifically in the context of sexual issues.

[00:17:56] Sarah: And really, what that’s doing is bringing mindful focus back to the experience of touch without the expectation of orgasm or arousal. So, it’s a series of structured touching exercises. And so, even if someone’s not able to do that in a sexual context, it can be really helpful to just bring your awareness back to pleasurable senses.

[00:18:21] Sarah: So, throughout the week, notice things like what you really like to smell, what you really like the taste of, what sounds you like to hear, what textures feel really nice to you. And what that does is it means that you’re orienting yourself back to your sensory experiences of pleasure.

[00:18:44] Sarah: And then that can really be translated to intimate sexual experiences. So, you can start to think about, well, how can I construct some things that feel pleasurable and nice to me with a partner or in an intimate scenario?

[00:19:02] Marie: That’s so interesting. I’ve done that as an experiment with some of my couples where I might even get them to—it’s very Sensate Focus-based—where one partner puts out an arm and the other just strokes the hand. And it’s so interesting to see how that can bring up all these sorts of things. Like, “Am I getting it right? Am I doing it wrong? Do they like it?” It starts to actually show how caught up we are in our heads sometimes. Yeah. Like, do you notice that some people really are so preoccupied? And I think it goes back to what you were saying, that a lot of that dysfunction can happen from the beliefs we had about what something’s supposed to look like, and it can take away everything that feels good about that moment.

[00:19:42] Sarah: Yeah, that’s right. Most of the time, what brings us away from pleasure is being in our heads, right? And so, if we have anxious thoughts or critical thoughts, then that moves us away from being focused on the sensation in the moment. And also, if we are engaged [00:20:00] in self-objectification.

[00:20:01] Sarah: So again, linking back to that really common experience with a lot of cis women, we learn to notice and evaluate our appearance and how we’re going to look to others. And so, something that can occur while having a sexual experience is this kind of observation or critique of self. “How do I look? What’s my body doing? Do I look okay in this position? How attractive am I right now? Am I doing this right?” So this is where we’re kind of taking a bird’s eye, objectifying view of ourselves rather than being in the moment, embodied in the sensations and the experience.

[00:20:39] Marie: That seems like a lot of work to start with for some people. What would be the lowest, like low-hanging fruit? Like, if someone’s listening and thinking, “I’d like to just start somewhere,” where can they start—either with themselves or with their partner? Like, what’s a starting conversation or a starting practice or thought or exercise?

[00:21:02] Sarah: So, I think mindfulness is a great starting place, right? And that doesn’t necessarily have to be done in a sexual context, but if you can learn to focus and attune to your sensory input, bring your mind back to the present moment, and just notice, then that’s a really great skill that lends itself to Sensate and to being present and connected with whoever you’re experiencing sex with.

[00:21:36] Marie: And if you then notice something that shows up for you, whether it’s anxiety or stress, or maybe you’re about to get a cold—if that tuning in allows you to recognise what’s happening—how could you start to introduce that into your relationship? Like, if it’s completely foreign and you’ve never really had these chats with your partner, what would be a way to broach that topic or just sort of say, “This is what I’ve noticed or observed, or this is why I even tried to do this.”

[00:22:06] Sarah: The most important place to start is to be able to understand yourself, right? Everything that we’ve talked about today—you being able to understand the link between the thought that you’re having and where that might come from in terms of your scripts and beliefs that you formed around sex and sexuality, or maybe even other beliefs that connect with the way that you think and how you show up as a person.

[00:22:28] Sarah: The more insight you can develop about yourself, the more you’re going to be able to helpfully explain that to and share that with someone that you’re with. So, you know, I think if we’re having an anxious thought like, “How does my body look right now?” and we’re with a partner, it’s not always helpful to ask them to help us with this thought, right?

[00:22:55] Sarah: So if I’m feeling anxious about my body, “Could you tell me that I look okay?” Right? Because what that does is it externalises the process of resolution or the process of feeling uncomfortable. And really, we know that a lot of those thoughts come from something internally in your own experience.

[00:23:17] Sarah: So maybe some of the beliefs that you’ve internalised about how you should look or what your body should look like. So if you’re not able to identify that yourself and also have a way of noticing and challenging those thoughts yourself, then it means that you become sort of dependent on reassurance from your partner. So, I think there’s a real balance between when we’re thinking about building intimacy generally in relationships and building intimacy in sexual experiences. We need to know ourselves, and we also need to be vulnerable and share what’s going on with a partner as well.

[00:23:56] Marie: And if someone wants to start talking about this with their [00:24:00] therapist or with their GP—GPs I find will be very functional and maybe just testing for STDs, STIs. They’re not really focusing on pleasure. What are some things that someone can look out for? Because not all therapists have the skills or knowledge and might have some of the same misbeliefs about sex themselves.

[00:24:21] Marie: What are some things that people can look for in the help that they seek?

[00:24:25] Sarah: We find that a lot of the time, it’s helpful for people to identify services themselves. So, they might find someone who they feel has the right fit or the right approach.

[00:24:35] Sarah: And so then when they go to their GP, they know what they want, they know what they need, and they’re just asking for a referral. So they already know the outcome. Yeah, it’s unfortunate that we don’t have the space to be assisted with that within appointments with GPs.

[00:24:53] Sarah: But if you come in armed with knowledge about what you need in the process and who you’d like to work with, then that can be really helpful.

[00:25:02] Marie: And in terms of not being around a sexual issue—even if it’s just wanting to start with understanding this about oneself—what sorts of things should people look for?

[00:25:14] Marie: Like, I know when I’m reading therapists’ bios or looking at websites, sometimes it just seems so generic or so specific that I think I might not fit. Like, how do people even, or what can I ask reception if they’re feeling uncomfortable? Like, it must be really hard to pick up the phone and say, “Does your therapist work with sex stuff?”

[00:25:32] Marie: How can they even start to sift through? Because there are so many—like, there are psychologists, social workers, counsellors, sexologists, relationship therapists. It is—it’s so overwhelming to make sense of all of that.

[00:25:48] Sarah: I think there are two important things to consider.

[00:25:48] Sarah: One is the sorts of issues that you are aware of or that you’d like support around, and then there’s also the approach or methodology that’s used to address those issues. Different practitioners are going to have different training in different types of approaches, and that’s going to change the way that they work with you.

[00:26:12] Sarah: Really, I guess what’s important to note is that sometimes it takes a little bit of trial and error to find the right approach for you and also to find the right person for you. Every practitioner is going to be quite different in terms of their approach and their personality. You’ve got to find someone you trust and that’s the right fit. So sometimes it can be a bit of a process in terms of finding a starting place so you can understand what’s going on for you and clarifying what sort of approach is going to work. Something that we do at SHIPS is we have an intake session where a practitioner helps you with that process. They help you understand maybe some of the issues that are going on and what sort of approaches are going to be helpful for you.

[00:26:54] Sarah: So, particularly if there might be co-occurring mental health and sexual health issues and they might be related, then seeing a psychologist who works in the sexual health space is particularly helpful.

[00:27:07] Marie: Yeah, that’s awesome. So it’s really sort of that resilient help-seeking, in a way, where some of it is trying to find what works for you, what interests you, do a bit of Googling and asking around. It sounds like it doesn’t really matter where you start, but it will involve a little bit of exploration and kind of sifting through some stuff to see if that person fits for you. Yeah.

[00:27:33] Sarah: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:27:33] Sarah: Yeah, I guess the main thing I’d say is don’t give up. I think I hear so many stories of people who, because it’s a really vulnerable and really brave thing to do to reach out, particularly if you’re talking about a sexual issue, to reach out and share that with someone that you don’t know at all.

[00:27:50] Sarah: And I think that so many people can feel put off if that first appointment or that first person isn’t the right fit or it doesn’t go well. But it’s so important that you [00:28:00] don’t give up—that you try again. Because you will eventually find someone or a service that works for you.

[00:28:06] Sarah: It’s going to give you more information about, “Okay, I think I need something that’s more like this,” or “This aspect of that service worked well for me; I’m going to try and find that somewhere else.” Just like any relationship, really. Like, it would be great if we could luck out and meet the love of our life at the very start of our dating experience, but that only happens for a very small portion of people.

[00:28:28] Sarah: Like in The Notebook, right? Like in The Notebook, and then you break up, and then they build you a house, and it’s all happy. There’s a difference between—maybe this will be a nice way to wrap up—it might be uncomfortable to talk about, but you shouldn’t feel judged.

[00:28:43] Marie: Like, how can someone distinguish when they’re in a session with someone between, “Well, this is kind of awkward,” versus “I think that person’s judging me.” Because it’s not always going to be easy and fun, and you need a bit of pressure to kind of push through.

[00:28:57] Marie: It’s like going to the gym sometimes, but then there’s a point where you shouldn’t feel like you’re being judged or super uncomfortable. How do you help people navigate that distinction?

[00:29:10] Sarah: It’s tricky, right? Because therapy can be uncomfortable, and it should be challenging at times, but also you should feel safe and held by the practitioner that you’re working with.

[00:29:22] Sarah: It’s always important that you’re not judged or generalisations are not made from the outset. And I think it’s so important to tune into how you feel and what’s coming up for you internally, and to trust your feelings and intuitions about what the dynamic is like with that person. Ideally, what you’re looking for is a therapist who gives you permission to and encourages you to talk about things that you need to. That they’re not making assumptions about you from the outset of therapy—that they’re perhaps assisting you when you’re feeling discomfort, to be able to work through that, and they’re guiding you through that process.

[00:30:07] Sarah: And also, you want to work with a practitioner who’s open to feedback and actually asks for feedback. So, they need to be checking in to see whether what they’ve said and how they’ve approached things with you—whether that works for you. Because everyone is different, and everyone needs something different.

[00:30:23] Sarah: And therapy is a space for you. It’s about you—your journey, your needs. And so a therapist needs to be getting ongoing feedback from you and attuning to what that process needs to be for you. Having said all of that, I think you’re there to learn and grow, and so it’s also important that the therapist isn’t just making you feel nice all the time or just saying comforting things. They might say things that encourage you to think outside the scope of how you’ve been previously considering things, and so that can still feel a little bit uncomfortable. But you should be able to feel contained and held in that process as well.

[00:31:04] Marie: Yeah. The closest metaphor I can think of is—I like to do gym workouts—is that sort of process. There’s a difference between the trainer saying, “All right, I’m going to stand behind you; can you just lift one more rep?” versus shaming you or belittling you or saying, “What do you mean? You can only do this?” It’s like there’s something in having someone say, “Let’s push a little harder. And this is going to hurt tomorrow, but let’s just try and level that up a little bit,” versus feeling judged or insecure or unsafe.

[00:31:33] Sarah: Yeah. Or if you met them for the first time, and they said, “Right, go and do 30 reps of this,” and they hadn’t taken the time to ask you about your previous experience or get a sense of your needs, your wants, your fitness level—all of that before you start working out together.

[00:31:51] Marie: So maybe the other bit for listeners is—I mean, I know for me, it probably takes me—I tell clients between one and three sessions [00:32:00] to sort of even just start to get the lay of the land. That while it’s therapeutic and it might be helpful to just get stuff off your chest, it can take me that long, and sometimes longer, to just understand what’s going on, what’s brought them there, what their history is, what’s worked before, how they want to work with me if we’re on the same page. And so when someone says, “I went to therapy once, and it didn’t work,” and I’m like, “How many sessions did you have?” and they’re like, “Two.” Yeah, that’s probably true. It can take some time to get to know what’s happening for that person, right?

[00:32:46] Sarah: Definitely. I think it’s a balance, right? Because if you’ve got some red flags that are coming up straight away, and you just know for sure that this is not the right fit for you, then you’ve got to trust in that.

[00:32:46] Sarah: But at the same time, absolutely, it does take time to establish a connection. And really, in those first few sessions, the therapist is just going to be listening and asking questions about you and your life and what you want support with. Because they’re only going to be able to give you—then collaborate on what you’re going to work on together and sort of explain how they might be approaching that if they have a good understanding of you.

[00:33:12] Sarah: So I think that’s really difficult when you’ve been—particularly with sexual issues, we see that people might have been struggling with this for so many years, and they’ve just finally reached the point where they’ve had enough, and they want things to get better right now.

[00:33:26] Sarah: And so it can feel like, yeah, you just want to race in and get support straight away. And it’s an investment of time, it’s an investment of money. It’s a high level of investment before you can figure it out. So I think it’s really important just to acknowledge that, but also to acknowledge that that’s an important part of the process. And if you really want to get the most out of it, then it’s a marathon effort. It’s not a sprint. Think about any other relationship that you build in your life. It’s not like you race in straight away, and you’re super close and connected. You have to build that up, and it’s the same in a therapeutic relationship.

[00:34:10] Marie: Wonderful. Where can people learn a little bit more? Do you have some books you’d like to recommend or other resources?

[00:34:17] Sarah: So, the book that I recommend to everyone, if you haven’t read it already, is Come As You Are by Emily Nagoski. It’s a really wonderful book that explains how we function sexually in really easy-to-understand language, and it’s also got exercises that you can do and that you could do with your partner or partners.

[00:34:37] Sarah: So, yeah, a really great book. Fantastic resource. And Emily’s also got some of the worksheets on her website as well, so you can download them too.

[00:34:47] Marie: I’m sure her next book, Come Together, will be just as insightful.

[00:34:51] Sarah: Yeah. Can’t wait. Yeah. And on our website, on the SHIPS website, we’ve got lots and lots of blogs on different topics that are written by our psychologists here.

[00:35:02] Sarah: So they’re all available and free to access. And then we’ve also got resources, including some of Emily Nagoski’s resources, on our website. So yeah, feel free to check that out. And then on our Instagram, we regularly post on different topics or issues. I really believe in taking information out of the therapy room and making it available to the public, much like what you’re doing on this wonderful podcast.

[00:35:26] Sarah: So, we make that information available on Instagram too.

[00:35:30] Marie: Great. Thank you. And just before we wrap up, as a therapist, when you’re not doing therapy, running the practice, or creating PDs and workshops, what do you do for self-care, or what are your hobbies and interests outside of this professional space?

[00:35:48] Sarah: Yeah. Yeah, so important. I guess a balanced life is important, particularly as a therapist, because there’s such a high emotional load and mental load. I love running. So, for me, moving my body and moving some of that energy through is really important and getting out in nature.

[00:36:09] Sarah: So I love to get out and run in the morning. That just sets me up for a good day if I do that. And I love to paint. I love to express and to feel in a flow state when I’m painting. So that’s something I love to do.

[00:36:25] Sarah: Yeah. And patting my cats is always a wonderful form of self-care. And spending time with people that I love and eating delicious food is always great too.

[00:36:35] Marie: Lovely. Thanks so much. This will be a really interesting episode, so I’m so glad to have you on it.

[00:36:42] Marie: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.