168: Moving Past Shame – Tilly Storm
Summary: Today’s conversation surrounds sexual shame and negativity and how that leads to a loss of desire and pleasure in sex. Tilly Storm, a sexual coach, helps such women whose desire has been lost due to the burden of shame and negativity around pleasure. She is here today to share her knowledge on how to reclaim your sexuality, get familiar with your own body, and experience pleasure like never before.<br><br>How did you get started?<br><br>Tilly grew up in the suburbs of Louisiana in a conservative, religious environment with shame around her body and sexuality was hanging over her. It lasted until she gave birth at the age of 23 when she realized everything she was taught about her body, sex and pleasure was utter nonsense. She then set out to help other women rediscover their sexuality that was lost after giving birth. Some courses she offers are sexual relationship coaching, ancient tantric wisdom, and Taoist practices. Tilly started her journey as a sex coach by first working on reclaiming her sexuality and body and by losing the shame and guilt she was taught.<br><br>Where does sex-negativity stem from?<br><br>Sex negativity can show up in both men and women. Tilly says a lot of her clients relate to her story of developing shame around sexuality while growing up in a conservative and religious environment. She says being ridden with guilt and shame registers as trauma to which people give out a hypo-response or a hyper-response. While women respond by shutting down and losing the desire to have sex, men respond by developing an addiction to sex and porn.<br><br>Tilly says sex-negativity can also stem out of the fear of STDs, STIs, and unwanted pregnancy. Our culture also conditions us to feel shameful and guilty of becoming pregnant young or contracting an STD or even for harboring controversial desires and eroticism. What people find desirable and erotic are so limited normalized that everything that sounds too foreign than usual is associated with shame.<br><br>What opened up your beliefs?<br><br>Tilly’s time of giving birth brought her closer to understanding her body’s potential and capability. She said it started with realizing that there was nothing inherently wrong with her body. After going through a stage of body image distortion, she found the right mind to look at her herself. Jade egg practice helped lift her shame and guilt around sexuality and pleasure. It’s a practice where you take an egg-shaped stone made out of jade and use it internally to do squeezes, releases, and breath work practices. Tilly says, “It’s yoga for your vagina”. It helps you to connect with your body and what’s down there.<br><br>Is there a timeline to be rid of sexual shame?<br><br>She points out that it takes time to get rid of all that shame and to “undo the narratives you were taught”. It also takes time to process that and get it out of your body. Sexual problems cannot be fixed just through talking because, as Tilly says, sexual problems don’t just stem from thinking. They’re deeply rooted and if you want to do things differently, along with insight you have to experience things differently by working on your body.<br><br>How to get out of your head & away from sex-negative thoughts?<br><br>Tilly starts by helping her clients with transformational breath work, where she uses the gentle trauma release method to release tension and trauma from their bodies. She guides them to feel unstuck and to open up. The next step is to “rewrite your sexual narrative”. She makes her clients write down scenarios of what would happen if they grew up in a sex-positive environment. They write it down, record it and listen to it for 10 days straight. While she acknowledges it’s a challenging process, she offers a solution to entangle it piece by piece.<br><br>She talks about inner child dynamics where it’s vital to work on trauma encountered by your inner child. She warns that the inner child when...
