Embracing Your Sexuality With Body-Oriented Therapy

As soon as someone starts talking about how enlightened they are, it just gives their shadow more room to act out.

Portland, Oregon, based therapists Gwen Cody and Mark Wald have been doing body-oriented psychotherapy and sexuality related work for over 20 years. Their work with individuals and groups as well as leading workshops offers valid insights for those looking to deepen their sexual connections.

You both do body-oriented psychotherapy. What is the importance of people making this heart and mind connection?

Mark: One of the main premises of body-oriented work is that a lot of the trauma that we deal with from childhood that shows up in our life today is actually held memory in our body as opposed to our intellect. So, working with someone’s body really goes to the core of their issue.

Gwen: Without going into a lengthy neuroscience lecture, our systems are run by neural patterns. These include both our incoming sensory experience and our outgoing motor experience. That is processed by our cognitive system, and our more primitive, the limbic system. Without addressing these as a whole, it’s very difficult for people to make deep change.

How do you work in helping someone integrate their body along with their sexuality?

Gwen: In my work, I primarily look for a few things. First, many people have been sexually traumatized in their home or other earlier environments. When you try to come to a healthy place around your sexuality, you have to work with these traumatic experiences if you’ve had them. Even those of us who have not had trauma in our lives in an explicit way, have grown up in a culture that is so sex-negative and so polarized around sexuality that we carry a huge split between being a good person and a sexual person. When we look at sexuality as a whole, there are so many places in our development where we end up with shame, repression, or over sexualization that cause disruptions in our lives.

Gwen, can you talk about the pelvic heart integration workshop that you offer?

This work really lets you feel what has shaped your sexuality. Your upbringing and parental experience has been internalized inside of you. You now carry those voices and images around sexuality. The work is how to begin to turn them into more positive and integrated experiences. It also really addresses the tendency we have to look outside ourselves for the union, and it really helps you understand that the union happens inside. When two integrated relatively complete people meet, amazing things are possible. When two wounded people meet trying to get that union from the person outside, that limits things quite a lot.

Also, the emphasis in our culture around sex is so much about performance. It’s underrated how much having an open hearted deep experience adds even to the most profane sexual experiences. It’s not that it all has to be touchy feely and sweet and light. Actually when you have that integration, you have more access to your power and ferocity, as well as your vulnerability and surrender. So I want people to know that when we put the heart into sex and and sexuality into the heart, it means that whole menu is much more available to us.

Mark, what are some of the unique challenges you face in your work with men?

Mark: I try to help men be comfortable stepping into their sexuality because so many of us have experienced that it’s not OK to be in our sexual being, and know how to do that in ways that embrace their vulnerability and wholeness. Also, I try to help men learn how to be containers in their relationships, and how to hold their partners and be present.

How do you help people come to understand who they are in terms of their sexual orientation and gender identity, as well as their relationship preferences?  

Gwen: There’s a distinction between who we are as an identity, and that’s often way more malleable than we think it is, and the behaviors that we choose to act on. Plenty of people will tell you I feel this way inside and I behave this way outside, and I want more connectedness between who I am internally and externally. In making room for the huge varieties of experience that people have, I feel it’s important that we recognized we’re all enculturated by the institutions we’ve grown up in. It’s not until you really begin to break those down that you can start to find out what’s true for you. So the more room there is for the authentic experiences that people have around non-monogamy, the more room we have for all this to be OK as natural expressions of our humanness. When that’s seen as good, then we have a space where we can discover what’s true for each of us. I’m a big believer in deconstruction and de-shaming and then allowing what’s truly organic in each of us to emerge naturally.

Mark: Gwen and I have been in an open relationship for almost 10 years and explored many different forms of sexuality in relationship. I think this informs the people we work with.

Gwen: I just want to add that much of the dominant frame is that those who are doing non-monogamy are somehow just avoiding intimacy, and using it for sexual gratification needs. My experience is people will find all kinds of ways to avoid intimacy no matter what frame they’re in. Intimacy is an internal decision about how connected you plan to be, not one that comes from the type of relationship you’re in.

You describe your work as a “journey” as though we will never be completely healed or attain perfect enlightenment.

Gwen: There’s no such thing as a “healed” person. In my own life experience, the more well I get, the more I’m drilling down into the least desirable parts of me, the most pained or wounded parts of me. I would say in some ways the work gets harder and more shocking because it was so far under the surface.

Mark: I’ve never met an enlightened person. As soon as someone starts talking about how enlightened they are, it just gives their shadow more room to act out. Rather than seeing this as a journey with a destination, consider this more like listening to a song where you’re in the middle of it where you’re dancing and feeling the song.

My improv teacher, the late Gary Austin, would often talk about how children have no problem being in the moment. Given our culture’s childlike approach to human sexuality, how do we capture that childlike joy?

Gwen: When you look at little children, they’re ecstatic from all of their sensory experiences. It would be really wonderful if we can start thinking more about what gives us ecstatic pleasure and away from sex as its own little narrow box. The culture is childish and immature about sex and it’s simultaneously sexualizing children at younger and younger ages into adult images of sexuality. They’re not allowed the innocence and freedom to express their joy. This sends them into very rigid expressions of sexuality very early in life. 

This mindset also dictated that only certain versions of sexuality are acceptable, right?

Gwen: I think a lot of positive things are happening around body positivity. Because I’m now a 55-year-old woman, my next epic rant is about ageism. I’ve been actively working with my own internalized ageism to try and look at older people and older bodies as still attractive sexual bodies without the projection that the culture has on that. We all need to break down these rigid boxes around what we deem as acceptable or desirable.

Becky Garrison is a freelance writer currently based in Portland. Follow her travels on Instagram and Twitter @Becky_Garrison

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