00:00:00 Silva
A lot of the time when I try to make the conversation about sex more comfortable, I actually use the analogy of food. Because one of the discomforts that we have about sexual conversations is that we’re not socialized to have them, but we are more socialized to have conversations about food. So we can discuss quite socially different foods that we have that we like, different menus, different cuisines from different cultures. And that seems to be okay to be able to have those conversations. And it seems we don’t judge each other. If I happen to like something that you dislike. We just think, okay, we’re just different. We have different tastes. When it comes to sexuality, somehow we just find it so difficult to have those conversations, but they are exactly the same. It’s the conversations about accepting differences, about being aware that there’s a menu, about being aware that there’s different menus in different cultures and to try them out and even, not try them out, but even to look at the menu and to be curious at the menu. And that is really when we can start to begin to understand our sexuality, understand our erotic processes, understand what we might lean towards, what we might feel warm towards, and what we might feel cold towards, and slowly getting to know who we are erotically.

00:01:19 Rosemary
This is the Gifts of Trauma podcast. Stories of transformation and healing through Compassionate Inquiry.

00:01:37 J’aime
We are here on the Gifts of Trauma podcast by Compassionate Inquiry. This is J’aime coming to you and we also have today Rosemary Davies -Janes, who will be co hosting this conversation with Diana Softa and Silva Neves is our guest.

00:01:54 Silva
Thank you. Thank you for inviting me.

00:01:56 J’aime
Thank you very much for being here and thank you for being the first guest we are welcoming on in this brand new series that we’re hosting all about Relating. A super warm welcome to both of you.

00:02:08 Diana
Thank you so much and I’m so happy to see you again. We’ve spent a year together, Silva, while being in training. I’m happy it’s re seeing old friend. Yes.

00:02:19 Silva
Beautiful.

00:02:20 Diana
Yeah.

00:02:20 J’aime
I feel so much warmth in the room already and I feel like I’m being received by a bunch of old friends. Well, Diana, was the… What was your role?

00:02:29 Diana
An intern. An intern. Supporting the facilitator for the.

00:02:34 J’aime
That’s right.

00:02:35 Diana
For the program for the Compassionate Inquiry.

00:02:37 J’aime
When Rosemary and I went through the year long training back in 2022, Diana was the supporting intern. And I’ve listened to a couple conversations with you that I’m just… oh, yeah, Silva, good to see you again. It would be wonderful just to present how you two know each other. And it would be wonderful to tell our audience about how you came to meet.

00:02:58 Diana

Okay, I can start. Because I actually got to know, professionally, Silva, but I don’t think, Silva, that you know me only from online. Maybe a little bit from online. So I was taking Silva’s course. I really felt called to go deeper into this subject. After exploring trauma and addiction in the Compassionate Inquiry program, I wanted to go deeper into this subject of sexuality, compulsive sexuality behavior. It really resonated with me, his course, his approach. And I was really happy to see him quoting Gabor Maté and also bringing quite a lot of Gabor’s perspective on trauma. I just feel, felt then that I would like to bring his knowledge, his experience, his wisdom to the CI community as well. For the people who are interested in exploring deeper this subject, this theme. That’s how the idea was born and how I proposed Silva. I was so happy to see that you were so open to having this conversation. And I would like just to mention that this is more like it was a passion for me and a professional and personal interest in exploring this theme. But I’m not calling myself an expert. I’m just happy to have Silva here also to learn from him. It’s a conversation, but I rely on his expertise in bringing the details and the theory and experience.

00:04:25 Silva

Thank you. Yes. It’s interesting even at the moment when you ask the question, how did you meet? Because with this online world now, so many multiple ways that we can meet, even though we’ve never actually been in the same room and being in person, we meet, and it’s the meeting of the mind as well, when we can just see and hear people having conversations that resonate with us and then we can just connect. It’s just really wonderful.

00:04:50 Rosemary

I would like to invite all of our listeners into this reunion circle that we’ve created, because we all know each other, or of each other. But I wonder, maybe Diana and Silva, you would like to introduce yourselves to the audience so that they can put this reunion into context.

00:05:10 Diana

Sure, of course. So I am Diana Satta. I would like to say that I’m quite an active member of the Compassionate Inquiry community. I am a facilitator in Romania of the program and a Mentor, a Circle Leader, of course, a practitioner. I’m also a psychotherapist, and I’m working a lot with trauma and addiction in my private practice. And in order not to get bored, I love organizing events, educational events or big events, as you may know from last year’s conference. And I just had another Compassionate Inquiry large conference in Romania on addiction, bringing authorities as well, getting them involved. I just like to mix the activities and to get inspired from all these different areas.

00:05:57 Rosemary

Working with individuals and also educating large numbers of people about the work you do, and what’s possible through the work that you do. Thank you.

00:06:06 J’aime

A self proclaimed learning addict, she says. And I want to just also presence that you said you’re not coming here as an expert, but I admire that because you’re coming from the learner space and the one who acknowledges that this is a really important, vital conversation to be bringing into the light and inviting and welcoming that I just am very grateful that we’re here today having this conversation. And so Silva, what would you like to tell the audience about you? We will provide full bios, so if you want to add something different, you’re very welcome to.

00:06:41 Silva

Sure, yeah. Actually I quite like also to say that I’m not an expert. And I think it’s really the word expert… is quite an interesting word in itself. I’m not sure I really connect with that word because it feels like if somebody calls themselves an expert, it means that they know everything, and then they can’t be questioned. And I’m not really into that. And especially when it comes to sexuality and compulsive sexual behaviors, we are just all learning and we keep learning and we do have to keep an open mind, because it’s a field that just keeps evolving and we learn from each other, we learn from different perspectives. And so I’m also a learner. I wrote a book on compulsive sexual behavior. I do training on it. And I am not an expert. I keep learning too. So this is the first thing I want to say. I’m a psychosexual and relationship psychotherapist. That’s my home, my professional home. I trained as a psychotherapist, a general psychotherapist and then I specialized in psychosexual therapy. And then I also trained in trauma therapy. I’ve been practicing for 15 years. I think something like this, I’ve not counted the years. There are quite a few now. And I’m originally from France. I grew up in France, but I now live in the UK. I’ve been in the UK for over 20 years in London. So now I’m based in London. And now I have these two nationalities, French and British. So in a nutshell, that’s me.

00:08:07 J’aime

Thank you so much. Silva. You may or may not be familiar with this practice, Silva. Diana will be very familiar with it. That in Compassionate Inquiry. We always open a session with stating an intention. And so we want to create just a little bit of space to presence, why we’re here. And I’ll go ahead and start that. My intention is to create an open space for a safe and curious conversation about how Compassionate Inquiry can support authentic sexual and erotic expression, specifically in the context of relationships. Diana, would you like to go next?

00:08:43 Diana

I think my intention is to just to bring a sense of softness toward this inner world of pleasure or sexuality or intimacy. Just softness and curiosity, inviting it, while we just explore the subject.

00:08:59 J’aime

Thank you.

00:09:00 Silva

My intention is similar to you, J’aime and Diana. I think I’d like to also, if possible, bring to the listeners maybe a sense that for the subject to be less scary or the subject to be less prickly, the subject of erotic, the subject of sexuality sometimes can provoke in some people some discomfort, some shame. People just find it difficult to have those conversations in open ways. So my intention would also be to offer that space and hopefully for the listeners, as you were saying, Diana, softness for the listeners to be more comfortable with these kind of conversations. And hopefully they can continue those conversations themselves and with their peers.

00:09:43 J’aime

I so deeply appreciate that. What I notice right off from you, Silva, is just an incredible feeling of safety. And I appreciate your speaking to wanting to create more comfort, more softness. Diana, as we start to explore this topic, that when I even state wanting to create an atmosphere where we can encourage more ease for people to own their sexuality or their eroticism, I noticed something happens in my own body, just with those words. And I feel like a really good place to start is with that noticing, because I saw both of you nod your heads really big when I said that. And I think where I would like to really start is just why has sexuality and eroticism, how have they become such taboo issues when it’s a primary function of our existence? None of us would be here without sex.

00:10:35 Silva

That’s right. It’s interesting, isn’t it? When I’ve done the research of sexuality, it’s so fascinating to see that in the history of humans, there’s been so many different norms and so many different relationships when it comes to sex, sexual practice and sexuality. And there is a time that was before the modern religion as we know them today, where there was such a different relationship with sex and sexuality, where some sexual practices and bodies, different bodies and different sexualities were embedded in society as part of life. And then some religions came in, and here we’re talking about the early version of Christianity, where then it became about prohibition and it became about sex has to be just for procreation, and sex should not be pleasurable, and sex should be just between two people and they should be married, and abstinence is a virtue. So all of these things really come from those early times. And then, of course, with colonization, these ideas spread all over the world. And even though now we have more of a liberal society, the state is separated from the church. A lot of the assumptions that we have today still in our modern time, around monogamy, around sexuality, around what is deemed okay and not okay, still have its roots from Christianity, from religion. I say Christianity because it’s one of the main one. But the other modern religions that we have today, like Islam, also have lots of prohibitions around sexuality. And these kind of norms that comes from those kind of early religion have really infiltrated our everyday thinking. And now a lot of us also, because there’s very little good sex education provided, that there are so many things about sex that people believe to be true and facts, when they are only just constructs that have origins in religion.

00:12:29 J’aime

Yeah, I appreciate that context, and I really appreciate you naming not just religion, but colonialism specifically. We still have these deep shadows, and this is a really incredible time for us to be visiting these shadows now that we have tools.

00:12:44 Silva

That’s right. And it’s not to say that those religious values are not good. It’s not about good or bad, but it’s just about an awareness that some of the things can be imposed on us rather than us actually really thinking for ourselves. And when we are aware that the things that we believe to be true are actually just constructs, then we can start to be more autonomous with our thinking and with our sexuality.

00:13:05 J’aime

I can really see how your message resonated so much with Diana, coming from the Compassionate Inquiry perspective of examining these unconscious beliefs. This is really at the core of your work and at the heart of Compassionate Inquiry as well. I would love to, first of all, just create a space for us to start to bridge this very specific conversation we’re having about sexuality, trauma, Compassionate Inquiry, and relationships. I put those in front of you like a little hors d’oeuvre. And I would love to hear what’s alive for you right now as I bring these different themes together.

00:13:44 Rosemary

And maybe I could put a question in there to add to that smorgasbord that J’aime just set up. Silva, when you spoke about the lack of sex education, that we get minimal and probably rather biased. I’m curious about what we are missing out on. And it could be the fear. People are nervous about this topic. We’ve been conditioned to move away from it rather than move toward it. What sorts of aspects of relationships are we not enjoying that we could be enjoying because of this ignorance and fear and move away. I’ll add those as separate small plates on the table.

00:14:27 Silva

Yes, thank you. And I’m glad you are actually even talking about plates on the table and the menu that we have. Because a lot of the time when I try to make the conversation about sex more comfortable, I actually use the analogy of food and menu. Because one of the discomforts that we have about sexual conversations is that we’re not socialized to have them, but we are more socialized to have conversations about food. So we can discuss quite socially different foods that we have that we like, different menus, different cuisines from different cultures. And that seems to be okay to be able to have those conversations. And it seems we don’t judge each other. If I happen to like something that you dislike, we just think, okay, we’re just different. We have different tastes. And when it comes to sexuality, somehow we just find it so difficult to have those conversations. But they are exactly the same. It’s the conversations about accepting differences, about being aware that there’s a menu, about being aware that there’s different menus in different cultures and to try them out and to even not try them out, but even to look at the menu and to be curious at the menu. And that is really when we can start to begin to understand our sexuality, understand our erotic processes, understand what we might lean towards, what we might feel warm towards and what we might feel cold towards, and slowly getting to know who we are erotically.

00:15:50 Diana

I love your metaphors that you used in the course. Bringing the food and playing with that. And it’s always creating a shift in this because it’s, as you mentioned, it’s much easier to speak about pleasure when it’s about the culinary taste. But in the end, it’s just a different aspect of pleasure. It’s the same. It’s just that it’s been conditioned for hundreds of years not to speak about it. It’s been silenced. And then this, I think, brought this connection and it made us exile, this part of us, in the end, exiling the connection to life force, to creativity itself, because we’re interconnected. Sexuality and life force and creativity and joy of life.

00:16:35 Silva

Yes. And I’m glad you bring that part, the joy and the fun, because this is really such an alive place for sexuality. But when we are really so uncomfortable talking about sex. There is such an absence of fun and joy. We just feel kind of stunted with that. And if you add with that the plate of trauma, where obviously it’s very complicated and very painful type of conversations. And if trauma is somehow connected with sexuality, then it can become such a hard place to even enter, let alone be interested in or be curious about. And so then we just try to stay away and try to just not be there or maybe find a quick fix solution to say, if I can grab to one simple thing, then things will get better. And often this is when people get lost.

00:17:19 Diana

And if I may add as well, if we can’t talk about sex, then we cannot talk about boundaries or consent or what inspires us, what it brings pleasure for us.

00:17:30 Silva

Absolutely. And even further, that sometimes people don’t even know the actual words of body parts that are associated with sex. And that can be a real block to sexual health and to even overall physical health. There are quite a lot of anecdotes of women, especially, because the female body is even less studied and even less put out there as a legitimate part of the body. And some people, if they’ve been touched inappropriately or if they have pain in areas around the genitals, or areas that are associated with sexuality, they don’t even know the words. And so then they can’t actually explain where the pain is or where they’ve been touched inappropriately. And that creates blocks to sexual health and to healthcare. And that’s really terrible. Again, it’s really important when we talk about those things, it’s not just about the frivolous part of sex. It’s actually a core part of our health.

00:18:24 Diana

I just remembered that I noticed this being a problem or an issue even for therapists. Not being comfortable in using the language, just bringing another word which is not the biological word. You’re bringing like a name or a joke, or making fun, but not using the words.

00:18:42 Silva

That’s right, yes. And if nobody uses the word, then nobody knows really what we’re talking about. And everyone can be quite confused. And therapists, we are trained to have difficult conversations. That’s the biggest bulk of our training. And yet when it comes to sexuality, there isn’t a lot of training on how to speak about sex explicitly. And a lot of therapists have a lot of shame around talking about sex explicitly. They’re not asking the questions because they don’t know how to or because they’re afraid of what might happen if they ask sexually explicit questions. And that is A block too. And it goes beyond therapy. I’ve got some friends who are medical doctors and they said to me, the knowledge that they’ve learned in their medical courses on sexuality, they could write it at the back of a napkin. So it’s really prevalent in all areas that the sexology knowledge is really absent in most healthcare professions.

00:19:37 Rosemary

Yeah, that’s quite shocking because if the medical professionals and the psychotherapists are having difficulty using this language, how on earth is the person who has an issue supposed to find the words to bring it into the medical clinic or the therapeutic room? One of the things that The Gifts of Trauma is known for are stories. And I wonder, can either of you think of someone that you’ve worked with who was dealing with an issue, whose story could be shared to kind of illustrate for our listeners how this path can be traveled?

00:20:13 Silva

Yes, I’m happy to. Maybe not a specific client story, but certainly a common story that I hear for so many clients is things like, how they try to make sense of some of their sexuality or their sexual desire or even their sexual problems. And when we think about the issues with sex, as well, it’s patriarchy is also an issue. And what that means is that the medical professional is still very much in patriarchy. And so it means that as I was saying earlier, a lot of the female body is still misunderstood. And there is a lot less help for women who experience sexual pain. Often they are still blamed to say that it’s all in their head and they’re just, they’re quite dismissed. And sometimes sexual dysfunction in women take years to be diagnosed properly, which is a very big issue. But also patriarchy is heteronormative. And heteronormative means that we view everyone in this kind of binary of male, female, and in the context of heterosexuality. So one of the very, very common stories that I have is when men, gay men, for example, may have an issue with their anus, or maybe like a fissure or something like this, which makes anal sex extremely painful and in fact impossible. And they might go to a doctor for that and the doctor will just dismiss it as non urgent because they don’t realize or they don’t even want to know that it is actually a part of their sexual health or maybe even like the sexual life gone completely, because of this issue. The doctor would react really differently if it had been an issue with a penis, for example, then they would treat that with much, much more urgency. And so this is one of the blocks sometimes that people that are outside of the box of Patriarchy and heteronormativity face issues with. And of course with female sexuality, it’s the same thing. If a woman has sexual pain, it’s not really considered as urgent, but if it’s something to do with the penis, you’ve got plenty of help straight away. So sometimes what I recommend some of my clients is to find a therapist that actually understands or a doctor that actually understands these things. And unfortunately, not everyone can have access to those kind of therapists. In big cities like London we are spoiled. There is a medical doctor that I know who is really able to work with gay men and understand gay men sex life and understand gay men’s issues. And I’ve got medical female doctors who can really work with women and really understand menopause and all the changes in the female body without blaming them, like it’s all in their head. So this is the story that I hear on a regular basis. But another story I hear on a regular basis for so many clients is how people are just afraid of their sexual urges. And that is again, it’s a bit gendered. And it’s especially with men at the moment, where men, and this is men of all sexualities, men are shamed for having sexual urges at the moment because there is quite a narrative that male sexual urges is dangerous. And of course, part of that narrative is attached to the narrative of male sexual abusers that are basically making the biggest part of sexual offense. And so because of that, because of the statistics of male sexual offense, male sexual desire has become dangerous or perceived as dangerous. And I do have a lot of men that come to my consulting room, especially in the context of sexual compulsivity, when they actually do not have sexual compulsivity, but they think they do because their sexual desire is perceived to be higher than what is deemed okay either by their partner or by society. And so then with that comes a lot of shame. And to be able for them to understand that sexual urges are just a natural part of life and people have different wants and different levels and different intensity. And to teach them what sexual urges actually are and how to serve them and how to meet them and how to make sense of them is a really important part. It’s education, but it’s also staying with them and looking at them as a human being, not someone who’s broken or attaching a narrative that has nothing to do with them, just on the fact that they have strong sexual energies.

00:24:32 J’aime

You speak of this range of really specialized areas like London, where somebody can go and get these really niche… I mean, it’s not niche, is it? It’s not niche at all. Some sexuality understood it’s not niche, but.

00:24:46 Silva

But it feels niche, right?.

00:24:47 J’aime

What this is pointing to me. Yeah, what this is pointing to me is the baseline need of definitions of starting points. And I heard you say on one conversation that many people don’t agree on the definition of sex itself. Can we just begin with that?

00:25:03 Silva

Yes. Where do you want to start with the definition of sex? Are we talking biological sex? Are we talking sex as a practice? Are we talking sex as a desire? It’s.… There’s so many. Even the word sex itself just provokes shame and barriers, isn’t it? Certainly, if we talk sex in the context of sexual desire and what sex is, it’s, as Diana was saying earlier, it’s something that it’s deeply human, but it’s supposed to be fun. We’re supposed to approach sex, human sexuality, with a bit of lightness and a bit of play because it is actually fluid. Anything that’s to do with human sexuality is fluid. It means that it changes over time. It means that we have to keep in touch of it. Just like our appetite, just like our palates for food. We don’t always like the same food all our lives. When I was a teenager, I didn’t like peas, and now I do love peas. My favorite dessert when I was in my early 20s is different from now. And maybe my favorite dessert will be different when I’m 60. This is kind of the same idea about our sexuality. It changes, it fluctuates, and we just have to keep in touch with it. It doesn’t always mean the same. And that is the big issue right now. When we talk about sex and the word sex, we have different definitions and we can’t define it because it’s so very subjective. One thing that sex is not is one thing and one thing forever. And so this is really like the take home that I’d like to tell people. For some people, sex equates penis in vagina penetration. Okay? That is one tiny sliver of what sex can mean. For other people sex means prohibition, or it means, I don’t want to talk about this before marriage. Okay, that’s fine. No problem. It’s part of culture, it’s part of some beliefs, no issues. Importantly, though, not to impose that on other people. For other people, sex is associated with trauma, depending of what happened in their childhood, depending on how they discovered their sexuality. Sometimes, unfortunately, people discover their sexuality through sexual abuse. And then there is the process of grooming, which is often that the abuser will make the child love them. And so then love, intimacy, sex is fused in trauma. And for some, this is the association. So when we talk about sex and what it means, we have to talk about today that person, that individual person. And as Rosemary was saying, it’s all about stories. What is the story of that person? What do they make of it? What is their meaning? And if their meaning is too rigid or too restrictive in the way that it causes them problems, then our role is to expand the narrative, expand the stories. Offer different parts of the menu, making them aware that there is a menu that they can choose from. And slowly, side by side with them, one step at a time. We sit at different tables looking at different menus.

00:28:06 Diana

I love that, for me, it’s a landscape for connection. It’s not so much about sex, but it’s about intimacy, about connection, about sharing not only our bodies, but, as I mentioned, our inner world. Access to our fears, vulnerabilities, our mind, our emotions. So it’s much more than just the physicality of sex. It’s an entire world. And it’s not only the connection with the others, but also with ourselves. What’s the relationship that we have with our own bodies and how safe we feel and to explore our own bodies and sensations. And if we allow that, it can also be like a nest for shame and all of the other heavy emotions. So it’s interesting that we have so many… it’s like an entire palette or bouquet. Different definitions and perspectives.

00:28:59 Silva

Yeah, and I love that you talk about connection, because connection is another word that people have different definitions with. What does connection mean? And some people believe that connection is when you have a romantic aspect of it, when you get to know a partner, when you look into each other’s eyes and spend time with each other. But some people find great erotic connection with a stranger. And it might just be just a moment of deep connection where they can deeply connect with a part of themselves and deeply connect with a stranger. Not getting to know them, but still a connection. And that definition of connection is often missed as well,when we talk about connection or when we talk about intimacy. Another word, intimacy. Multiple meaning to the word intimacy, depending on the person’s stories and depending on the person’s experiences. It’s all very fascinating. And we can’t even begin to properly understand it unless we do what we’re doing right now, which is taking the time to have these conversations about those meanings.

00:30:02 J’aime

I do want to get to the definitions of sexual compulsivity, but where we are right now feels super fertile to be weaving in the conversation around relationships and relating. And specifically, Diana, what you were saying about how sex is also a very individual, personal interaction, inner world of how we relate and how we feel safe in ourselves. I’m wondering what’s coming up for you and also curious to hear about how this shows up in your practice with the people you work with. Specifically in the context of Compassionate Inquiry and people looking for this kind of support. Do you get to weave in what you’ve learned with Silva? Do you get that opportunity to talk about sexuality and what does that look like?

00:30:49 Diana

Yeah. Thank you for the question. I think what it brought me by doing this class and exploring the subject. I became more comfortable with the subject. Even though I had it before in my practice and I worked with men and women and their own struggles with sexuality or desires. There was a shift within myself. Like taking this work helped me in becoming really soft and comfortable with the subject. And there was no more subtle tension that was present before. I think now it’s really from a space of openness and curiosity and no judgment, just pure presence and attunement. So I would take that as I embodied more comfort by going through my own process while taking the course. All the modules are also inviting, like in Compassionate Inquiry, inviting to take these questions and to notice how it was for you. And actually quite intense, going through the process, exploring your own history with sexuality and with trauma. And even though I thought at the beginning that I worked quite a lot on this, there were still new nuances on it, and it was quite intense emotionally at the beginning. So that was beautiful in a very soft and inviting way to explore further in a safe space. So I managed to bring this into the practice. And even if the question in Compassionate Inquiry is always not what’s wrong with you? But what is this behavior doing for you? What does it bring you? Then it’s also important, the energy that you’re having while you’re bringing these questions. Is it just a theory, or are you really open with what is arising in the other person?

00:32:41 Silva

That’s right. And if you’re asking that question, what is this behavior doing for you, genuinely asking the question, then you have to be prepared for all the answers, even the answers that might invite stepping into a world that you have no knowledge of. And that is the beauty of it. Because, as you say, sexuality is a landscape, but for everyone, it can be my landscape can be really alien to somebody else. And so we can be entering alien landscapes. And yet still not to pretend that we understand it, or to pretend or to say, oh, if it’s an alien landscape, it means it’s a problem. Let’s just make it a landscape that I understand. And that’s when we can start to impose things of our own world onto someone else’s world. And that’s when things can really start to go wrong. And in the area of sexuality, because of poor education, it really does happen quite a lot. In the psychosexual world we have a joke that says that the therapist believes that the client has too much sex if they have more sex than the therapist. And that is… It is a joke, but it’s some truth behind it, some truth that sometimes the therapists do have some judgment over the client’s sex lives and all relationship styles based on their own biases that is unchecked. Absolutely right that we have to continue to really self reflect on ourselves and to be able to hold our own world and to accept that our client’s world might be quite alien from ourselves. And we have to be open to that.

00:34:10 J’aime

Most of us will remember, who have come through the training, Gabor, speaking about how similar to your colleague Silva, that the amount of trauma education he received in medical school could be written on the back of a napkin. Certainly the case with sexuality. And of course, we could all look back and invite the listeners to think back to their own first experiences of sex education in home, in schools. We’d have funny notes to compare that could last the length of this podcast, for sure. Bridging that. Who we are, this cohort of people with what’s coming up now, with the generations that have social media and that have carte blanche access to porn on the Internet, if there’s no guard on their phone, on their search engine. I’m curious to hear how we are meeting that reality. And I’d love to hear what both of you have to say about that.

00:35:05 Silva

Yeah, for me, I just really want to stay curious because at the moment, research is really inconclusive of anything. And of course we can look at or hear so many people’s opinions and clinicians definitely will have opinions and they will have different opinions from one another, especially to do with access to porn and what does that do to people? What does that do to new generations? And we can have assumptions, we can have opinions, but none of us really truly know. And that’s really what shows up in research, is that none of us really truly know. And we can never know because it will always be unethical to actually do research on children. And so it’s always going to be research that we’re going to have to see from that introspective research. And that leaves so much room for interpretation that we can never truly control a study and actually really figure out what does happen because there are so many different factors that can come into play. Factors of the children’s household, factors of their mental health, factors of parenting, culture, and on. So with the topic of porn and the access to porn and what does that do, I really want to stay, not neutral because it’s impossible to be neutral, but to be open and curious and knowing that one person access to porn can have a different effect to another one. And some of the research that we can look at certainly shows that there are some young people and when my young people, 18 plus. But this kind of young adult, even 16, actually sometimes the research has showed that some young people understand what porn is and what porn isn’t. They understand it’s not sex education, they understand it’s adult entertainment, and they don’t try to replicate it into the bedroom. Other cohort of young people think that, oh yes, sure, I’ve seen a video of someone choking their sexual partner, so I’ll do the same at home. And of course they’ll do it wrong. And then things go wrong. So both stories happen, both narrative happens, both occur. So it is impossible to say that one type of porn has one type of effect. And this is in the narrative of pornography. The big problem, two big problems. One is that we really confuse causation and correlations. So plenty of correlation, but we haven’t found a single causation so far. And the second one is that when we say porn, that’s all we say. We say porn. And in fact there are multiple types of porn, not just one. There is the sexist, misogynistic porn with very unpleasant sexual practices, but that’s one type of porn. And then there are multiple other types of porn. There’s feminist porn, there’s ethical porn, there is queer porn. And those are really completely different. And so we have to, when we have the conversation with porn, we have to really ask ourselves the question, what type of porn are we talking about? And what is the person’s mental health interaction with that? Because we know that the problematic issues with porn or the people who have identified problems with their relationship with porn is mostly to do with their mental health, not the porn itself. And what that means is very much like any other coping strategies, that if we have depression, we are more likely to try to find coping strategies. And let’s also be clear here that when we talk about porn, we also talk about masturbation, because porn and masturbation go together, that it is a really effective soothing method that can alleviate depression quite well. So when we look at that, we look now at the research, the more modern research on pornography is really pointing to the direction that the problematic porn watching, the compulsive porn watching, is a symptom of depression or a symptom of other mental health disturbances, usually acute anxiety, post traumatic stress symptoms. But depression comes at the top. And I really see, I see that in my clients a lot. In my clients I see that when we look at what’s behind their compulsive use of porn, it is that they feel their life is flat, they’re quite depressed, they have no meaning in life, they just stumble across life, forgot themselves or never got to know themselves. And that’s really the common story of people with compulsive porn watching, but also of compulsive sexual behaviors, other compulsive sexual behaviors, compared to the people that might be watching porn every day, even sometimes several times a day, with no mental health issues. And that’s really well integrated into their lives and they cause no issues. So it’s not about the frequency, it’s not often about the content. It’s about people’s mental health. And that is a narrative that gets lost somehow when we talk about porn because there’s so many big emotions and big opinions about it. Fair enough, as I said earlier, we have to be careful that we don’t impose our own world onto other people. And with porn, I certainly met a lot of people who hate porn. And because they hate porn, they’re more likely to look at the problems of porn and think and believe a causation narrative. To be fair, I’m not pro porn, okay, I’m not anti porn either. But I just don’t have big, strong opinions about it. So when I look at it, and I try to look at it from the most objective point of view and looking at the whole body of research, we don’t know. We don’t really know. There are some pros and cons of it, just like most things. Pros and cons in chocolate, pros and cons in cannabis, pros and cons in all other coping strategies that we, that we might be using.

00:40:44 Rosemary

My mind is struggling to grasp the complexity that you have raised because on top of all of the perspectives around sex, it’s all interwoven. I was trying to think of a dish that’s got so many spices. And if you were to break it down to the ingredient level, there’s culture, there’s conditioning, there’s family perspectives, there’s religion, there’s whatever’s going on in your own social group, connecting to peers, connecting to your partner, trauma potentially, you know, what’s wrong with me that this feels good.

00:41:25 Silva

Uh huh. Shame.

00:41:27 Rosemary

I can’t talk to anybody about that. Nobody else is… And again, keeping it behind closed doors. This is – nobody’s talking about this – there must be something wrong with me. Just the whole taboo aspect. I’m just trying to figure out how on earth to even get a handle on how to address this topic. It’s vast. I’m curious though, Silva, your intention for writing your book. I’m sure all of this chaos, all of these various interplaying ingredients might have been part of the inspiration. Can you share with us what inspired you to write your book and what your intention is for it to serve with the people who read it?

00:42:12 Silva

Yeah. Originally I was trained in sex addiction because that was the only training that was available. So I trained in sex addiction. I did the addiction model. I worked in a sex addiction clinic. And from the very beginning, it never made any sense to me. But because there was no other training or no other kind of understanding, I thought surely it must be me not understanding it properly, or if I practice, things will come. It never did. I never got on with it. I always thought it just did not make any sense. And also when I was working with my clients with the sex addiction model, I seemed to be only working with people struggling with relapse and struggling with relapse and struggling with relapse. And I’m thinking, surely there’s gotta be more to it than that. If clients struggle so much with relapse, there might be an issue with the treatment here. And so then I decided to move away from that. I told my clinic director, I’m just not getting on with this, I’m just going to leave the clinic. And he was fine with it. We’re still friends. We just disagree, but we’re still friends. And then I decided to do things in my own way. So with my psychosexual knowledge, not the addiction knowledge. And then I took an extra training on eating disorders at the time as well. And when I did the training on eating disorders, and especially the binge eating part of it, I thought, this is it. This is how we can really work with sexual compulsivity. Because with binge eating, obviously we don’t talk about abstinence. We talk about a different relationship with food and we talk about what’s behind the problem. And just like Compassionate Inquiry, how does that serve the person? How does it fit in the person’s system? That was the light bulb, the missing light bulb that I needed. So I combined my trauma knowledge, my psychosexual knowledge, and the binge eating treatment knowledge into what became my book. At the beginning, I was just doing it by myself in my own clinical space, like a rogue. And then when I started to speak to a few of my colleagues who were friends, I said, look, I’m doing this now and I’m. There’s no books about it. I don’t know if I’m doing it right, but it seems to be working because my clients got better and are not struggling with relapse all the time. And then my friends that you said, you gotta write a book about this because there’s no books about it. You gotta write a book. I was thinking, I don’t know, I don’t want to. And then I met a colleague from the USA called Doug Brod Harvey, who wrote a book with another colleague called out of Control Sexual Behavior: Rethinking Sex Addiction. And that made sense because I’m thinking, oh, now there is somebody else who actually is working with sexual compulsivity, but with critiquing the addiction model, not working with the addiction model. And it works for him and his clients. And of course, it came from a sexological point of view, just like I did. We talked to each other, we made sense to each other, and so that was great. And I thought, okay, it’s not just me. There are other people that are doing it, great. And then Covid came and I just didn’t have to commute to my clinical space. So the commuting time, I used it to write the book, and that’s how it happened.

00:45:10 Rosemary

Wow, what a great story. I’m going to just admire and appreciate that you had the courage to step out into the unknown where nobody else was working because it made sense to you, and what was accepted did not make sense to you. So, yeah, I’m very happy for all the people who’ve read your book and all the people you’ve worked with that you had the courage to follow your gut, to follow your truth.

00:45:36 Silva

Yes. For me, it didn’t feel courageous. It felt like what I had to do, because for me, it’s clients first. I just thought that in the sex addiction method, we don’t see clients, we just see a model and we make every client fit that model, it was just really not my style. I’m just a human, and I do therapy differently with each of my clients because I really treat them as human individuals. And so for me, it was more like, if I don’t do that, I’d rather retire. There was not a choice of courage. It’s either I do the best for my clients, or I just don’t do it at all.

00:46:10 J’aime

Authenticity.

00:46:11 Silva

That’s right.

00:46:12 J’aime

The sure sign of authenticity. Do it or die.

00:46:16 Silva

Yeah.

00:46:17 J’aime

I don’t want to live doing it this way. I have to do it this way. I want to keep my integrity and my authenticity.

00:46:23 Silva

Yes, exactly. My supervisor has a joke about that. She says, integrity is like virginity. You only lose it once, then you don’t get it back.

00:46:36 Diana

That’s a good joke.

00:46:38 J’aime

I saw a light bulb when Silva was speaking earlier, Diana. And did you have something you wanted to add or say as that was…

00:46:45 Diana

Just thinking on how Silva shared the story of his approach on sex addiction and compulsivity. Actually shifting the perspective. And I know. I noticed that today there was a celebration, if Silva, if you could share about it. I was so happy to read about it. But you created the community around this, so…

00:47:04 Silva

Yes. Thank you. Yes. The Journal of Sexual and Relationship Therapy Journal, which is one of the leading journals, international journals in psychosexual therapy, has published a position statement on sex addiction and porn addiction and basically saying that we should not be using that term or those treatments because they are not supported by science, and instead use sexological approaches and framework and with the language of sexual compulsivity, or if they don’t meet the criteria, sexual problems or sexual distress. And that was like a really major step forward because it will really encourage more therapists to rethink and to think more critically about all those diagnoses, especially the ones that are not scientifically endorsed. Even though we use, a lot of therapists, still use the word sex addiction, it’s not endorsed. Now. There will be more people that could actually critique it in. In more robust ways, but also that will influence research to be a lot more robust as well. Because one of the things that is really plaguing the field is so many poorly conducted studies, unfortunately, because of the unchecked biases and moral biases and so many gaps in the literature that is very heteronormative and not really looking at diverse populations and so on and on. So that was a really big step forward. I had contributed to this, as I’m very proud of it. But it’s also the editorial in the journal really came from the perspective of different clinicians who live in different countries that really wanted it to be international just to make sure that it was culturally sound from different aspects. So we have some authors from South Africa, Brazil, France, USA, Canada, from all sorts of different… many countries around the world that really chipped into this editorial to really make a statement that was relevant to our profession. So it’s out just now and I’m very proud of it.

00:48:59 Rosemary

That’s wonderful. Does that mean there will be an update to the next DSM that is published that removing that altogether?

00:49:06 Silva

It’s actually never been in the DSM. The DSM is not actually having any, any endorsement of sex addiction or even sexual compulsivity. Is the ICD 11 the World Health Organization one that came up with compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder. That’s the only set of criteria that we have. It’s better than nothing because it means that now we can actually base ourselves on something that’s more objective rather than just the clinician’s opinions. But still, that criteria, that diagnostic criteria is not perfect. There’s some room for improvements. So hopefully it will just encourage more people being more curious about this rather than just going with one single narrative.

00:49:47 Rosemary

We’re taking a brief pause to share what’s on offer in the Compassionate Inquiry community. Stay with us. We’ll be right back. 

If you’re interested in experiencing Gabor Maté’s trauma healing approach, consider working with a certified compassionate inquiry practitioner. Access healing, support for mental, emotional and physical symptoms, unresolved trauma, relationship issues, addictions and more. Use the link in the show notes to access our global directory of certified professionals. In addition to their years of CI training and regular certification reviews, our practitioners bring the depth of their own personal lived experiences, and skills in additional complementary therapeutic approaches. Use the link in the show notes to access our global directory of certified professionals.

00:50:42 J’aime

And I would like to take a moment right here to just be with what we’re talking about a little bit in a more expanded and grounded way because for a long time you’ve been holding this position Silva, that there’s no such thing as porn addiction or sex addiction. I would love to take a moment to really land that to say the couple who haven’t had sex in over a year and one partner is getting their needs met through porn, and it’s becoming compulsive and they think have all of this shame and there’s problems in the relationship. And you spoke earlier about how depression is often underneath that behavior. But can we take a moment here to just really unravel sexual compulsivity from addiction.

00:51:28 Silva

Sure. Again, there’s lots of different definitions of what people mean by addiction. And what people mean by compulsivity. But for me, the main difference is that an addiction is something that is an independent disorder. Even though at the beginning, the person who is accessing addictive things like drugs, alcohol, or behaviors like gambling, might be because of trying to soothe themselves and because of trying to cope with some disturbance. Over time, the change in their brains means that the addiction really stays, even though the distressing part might have finished. And so then it becomes an independent disorder. People have to treat the addiction because it sticks around. Compulsion is only dependent with the environment. So it means that we are compulsive about some things. If the distress stays as the person’s life. But if the distress disappears from the person’s life, Then the compulsion disappears. So that’s really the main difference between the two. And the very big difference between sex and gambling, because often people say, if gambling is addictive, sex can be addictive. Addictive surely is not the case because those are two very different behaviors. And really, the biggest difference between the two Is that sex is a primary drive. We call it a primary drive because we develop a sex drive naturally. Gambling is a secondary drive. It’s really different. We don’t naturally develop a gambling drive. Or we don’t naturally develop a cocaine drive. So the secondary drive, the secondary rewards, they can be addictive. Because that is not part of the normal functioning of a person, or the innate desires of a person. Sex is just like food is. That’s why some people do call eating disorders food addictions. But this is also not endorsed. Food is not an addiction. It is a primary drive that people have to understand their relationship with, same as sex. So that’s one of the biggest difference between the two, in my opinion. And based on, obviously, what I’ve read and researched. The other difference is that, especially for men. Is that the physiological process of sex is that when people ejaculate, there is a natural stopping of the desire and the behavior. Which we call refractory period. And if refractory period can last an hour for some people. But for some men, it can be six hours. It can be even a full day. And that means that the theory of addiction really doesn’t fit with that. Because addiction is something that we do continually when there’s no stopping. There is no physiological stopping of gambling. People can gamble all night long, 24 hours, 48 hours in a row. Not going to sleep, spending all the money. With sex, people can sometimes edge, delay the ejaculation. But once it happens, there is a natural stopping. And so then we have to think of something different because physiologically speaking, and certainly from a sexology point of view, the addiction theory doesn’t fit or the addiction criteria as we understand them, don’t fit. But it fits a lot better with the theory of compulsivity. Because with compulsivity also people have the awareness. That’s another hallmark of compulsivity. People have the awareness they know what they’re doing. And somebody who washes their hands compulsively, they know they’re washing their hands. They know that the gems will stick around even if they wash their hands. But at the moment of washing their hands, it relieves the tension. So they’re happy to do it. Not sure they’re happy to do it but they do it knowing what they do and knowing that they have to do it again and again because of the anxiety with germs. With sex it’s the same thing. People are aware. Often people say I can’t believe I’ve done this. That’s a figure of speech. But people are aware when they draw cash out of the cash machine and then go to CSX worker and pay cash so that their partners don’t notice the transaction on the bank statement. But still it’s not that they are wanting to cheat. They do it because they have to meet a need that is soothing a disturbance. And they do it because it’s the best way that they have found so far in alleviating their distress. And they’re aware of it. So those are the biggest differences. I hope I made sense of it. I’m not sure. You tell me.

00:55:44 Diana

I’m always fascinated to listen to Silva’s argumentation. Yeah. And bringing all these real reasons for proposing this perspective. And I was just thinking that it was such a brave movement. You are now creating a wave of consciousness like creating collective consciousness. Bringing the different perspective over sexuality and this course, the glasses of addiction and shifting it. Yeah. To inviting to become curious on what is actually this behavior.

00:56:16 Silva

With my fellow clinicians, I do talk about using the right terms because terms do inform the treatment that we use. And I think it’s important that as clinicians we know what we treat. But with clients, I don’t care what words clients use. You know, if they use the word addiction, I’m not going to tell them they’re wrong for using that word. But I want to be curious. And this is really the Philosophy I bring to all my clients is just think and be curious about any words that you’re going to be identifying yourself with. What I do often is for my clients to be really curious about not just themselves and what they feel, but also the context in which they feel it. And especially with compulsive sexual behavior is so super important. An example would be that if a client tells me, and that’s quite common, actually, they said to me, look, I’ve been cheating on my wife since the beginning of marriage. I’ve never been faithful. I’ve cheated on my wife previously. I’ve cheated on all my girlfriends before that. So I’m a sex addict. I’ve got a problem. I said, okay, sure, maybe you have a problem, but let’s be curious about it, and let’s just look at a different perspective. If you have never been monogamous, but always chose monogamy, is the anomaly monogamy, or is the anomaly the sexual behaviors? If the context was that you were in a polyamorous relationship, would that be a problem, or would that not be? And so I’m not really wanting to dismiss people saying, I have an issue and I’m a sex addict. What I want them to think first is let’s look at what is happening here. Because many, many people are not naturally good at being monogamous. But a lot of people don’t know or they’re not aware that there are other relationship styles they can choose from. And this is going back to how we started this conversation about heteronormativity and patriarchy and early Christianity messages that is on in our world today. So many people still believe that the only way people can have a relationship is with monogamy. But then when we look at how many people never can sustain monogamy and then blame themselves for it, the question is, okay, is the problem monogamy or is the problem with sexual behaviors? And I just leave it as a question just so that people can think. And it’s a question that can be really uncomfortable. But it is our role as therapists, and especially with Compassionate Inquiry and with really getting to know ourselves really well, to just ask those questions, the questions that nobody asks. And that’s the thing that I love about therapy and I love about the work with compulsive sexual behaviors is that it’s a real sacred space where we can ask the questions that nobody else asks about intimacy, intimate relationships, and sexuality. And people can just think for themselves.

00:59:08 Diana

Yeah.  And being aware of their own values and needs and like choosing from A more mature perspective or point of view than just going with the flow of society and culture and family.

00:59:21 J’aime

It’s such beautiful and noble work, just expanding the menu, letting people know there are other options, and extracting the shame from the ingredient list. I did hear you say that shame is often the motor of sexual compulsivity.

00:59:35 Silva

Yeah, that’s true. And this is going back to what Rosemary was saying earlier. A lot of people feel ashamed to think there must be something wrong with me for feeling pleasure out of something that is wrong. How can I feel pleasure with watching porn when my partner hates it? How can I feel pleasure with seeing sex workers when I know it’s a breach of my marriage or breach of my agreement? And this… And there’s a lot of shame about this. And with all these narratives of it’s bad to see a sex worker, it’s bad to pay for sex, it’s bad to watch porn, it’s bad to do this, it’s bad to do that. People feel so much shame about all these things, and that stops curiosity. Of course, we’re not here to promote cheating. Of course not. But we’re here to help clients understand why they do what they’re doing. Because I really believe people don’t do things because they’re broken or because they’re diseased. They do things for good reasons, and we have to find what the good reason is. And sometimes they’re really confused. They don’t know. That’s why they come to see us. If they knew, they wouldn’t have a problem. They would be able to resolve it themselves. So this is really the space that I love about it. And that really shows up in research so much that the issues with the distress with watching porn or the distress with sexual behaviors has a really direct correlation with shame. And so what it means is that the more people feel shame or the more people have negative values about pornography, the more they will perceive themselves as being a porn addict or have a problematic relationship with porn compared to someone who has exactly the same behaviors but don’t feel the shame or the negative value about it. We also know that if the two people in a relationship have different values about pornography, they are going to have conflicts. If the two people have the same values about pornography, they live in harmony. And if the two people in a relationship have positive values about porn, that can enhance the sex life. So these are showing up in research, and that’s important, that we can talk about this and we can bring that to clients as options and bring that to clients as part of the menu. What if? And what if? Because what we want to do is to reduce the distress of that person’s life, so that the compulsion has no need to be there anymore. So sometimes it is. Yes. Their own issues, like they hate their work, they have financial distress, they have health problems, their parent’s ill, all sorts of chronic stress like this. But sometimes the distress can be because they’re in a relationship that they’re not supposed to be in, or they’re not in the right relational structure, or they’re not able to say what their true desires are in the bedroom to their partner. Or maybe they’re afraid that their partner might leave them if they disclose that they have a particular kink or a particular sexual fantasy. And so all those things create the shame. And the shame then becomes part of the problem.

01:02:28 Diana

And that is also making the beliefs about themselves even stronger. Like, I’m a bad person for having this kind of activities or fantasies. Or I am unworthy of love just because I have all these activities. Or I’m not good enough. All this

01:02:42 Silva

Not good enough. That’s a big one. It’s a common one.

01:02:45 J’aime

Yeah, I’m not good enough. Yep, that’s one we see reappearing time and time again in the Compassionate Inquiry world. One of those core beliefs that helps us survive, yet later in life hinders and immobilizes us from really being who we are. Yeah. As you’re both speaking, I’m really feeling what you talked about earlier, Diana, about the exiled parts, how these come to be reinforced in our relationships and our ways that we interpret our own desire. And as we wrap up, I would just like to invite you into our Compassionate Inquiry Gifts of tTauma tradition of… If you had humanity’s ear, which you’d do right now, what would you like to leave our listeners with as we close?

01:03:30 Diana

I would go to the fact that sexuality is not the opposite of spirituality. It’s actually… It’s our common humanity. And if each of us would do our own work in reconnecting with ourselves also in this way, with our bodies and with our pleasure, I think we would all live in a much more harmonious world or harmonic world.

01:03:54 Silva

Yeah, I agree. I think, you know, it might just sound corny, but I would say love. I’d say that love is another word with multiple meanings. But for me, love is love of humanity. Actually, to be able to love ourselves and to love the other, even if the other is different from us. Even if we don’t understand the other, we can still love another that we don’t understand. In the context of loving the people that we do understand, it’s also loving them when they have different ideas, or sometimes loving them for finding pleasure somewhere else. And I’m not saying with cheating, but I’m saying sometimes we have to… For example, for me, when I love my partner, I also love my partner when he has great joyful times with friends or with a hobby that does not include me. And that is part of love. So we have to be able to love at a distance and sometimes we have to be able to love in close proximity. But I think that type of love, that expansive type of love, is what I think the world needs more of, a lot more of.

01:05:02 Rosemary

What a wonderful sentiment to end this conversation with. And thank you so much. It seems the very first thing that we need to do more of is talk about this more. And I really appreciate that you’ve both been here to initiate this conversation in this first in relationship series for the Gifts of Trauma. Thank you so much for being here and sharing your wisdom.

01:05:26 J’aime

And as fate would have it, for those of you whose curiosity got piqued about this conversation of what other options could be available, what relationships could look like other than the menu we’ve traditionally been handed, we’re coming back next week with episode number two on this series about relating, where we will be hosting a conversation that explores polyamory. Thanks again to our guests Diana and Silva.

01:05:53 Diana

Thank you so much. And I’m so happy just to be part of this conversation. And I took so much from it.

01:06:01 Silva

Thank you so much for inviting me. It was such a great pleasure.

01:06:11 Rosemary

The Gifts of Trauma is a weekly podcast that features personal stories of trauma, healing, transformation, and the gifts revealed on the path to authenticity. 

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