Sex & Chronic Pain: How to Get Your Groove Back

Has chronic pain put a stop to your hot sex game?  Rose Covenant, also known as the pain-free mentor is here to save the day. She hit the locker room ready to offer her insights into recovering from chronic pain using approaches such as pain science and neuroplasty education, mind-body connection tools, somatic healing, and inner child healing. By the end of this episode, you'll understand what chronic pain is, how it can affect your sex life, and how to start healing and get back to banging like the hot sex goddess you know you are

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Transcript

Annette Benedetti: 0:28

Hi, this is Annette Benedetti, your hostess for a locker room talk and shots, the podcast that likes to think of itself as the queer NPR of raunchy women's sex talk. You are about to sit in on the kind of conversations women have on their girls' nights out or behind closed doors, while enjoying delicious drinks and dishing about sex, think fun, honest and feminist as fuck, and always with the goal of fighting the patriarchy. One orgasm at a time. Welcome to the locker room.

Annette Benedetti: 1:08

Today's locker room talk and shots topic is sex and chronic pain how to get your groove back. If any of you have ever dealt with chronic pain, whether for a couple of weeks, a couple months or a couple of years, you know that it makes sex well not so sexy. I myself have been dealing with chronic pain for about five months now, and I am not the bang and badass I used to be. My sex life has been suffering. Now, do I know how to fix it? Absolutely not. Does my guest Absolutely. My guest today is Rose Covenant, the pain free mentor. She helps women recover from chronic neuroplastic pain. She uses approaches that include pain science and neuroplasty education, mind body connection tools, somatic healing, inner child healing and more. But I am going to let Rose tell you just a little bit more about herself.

Rose Covenant: 2:10

Amazing.

Rose Covenant: 2:10

Thank you so much, annette, for having me on.

Rose Covenant: 2:13

So, as Annette mentioned, I am a Rose Covenant pain free mentor and my expertise is really around helping people to recover from chronic pain and ultimately that is a journey from being stuck in survival mode, where your brain continues to send you pain signals even after your body is healed, and to shift those neural pathways, shift the mindset, how you are in your nervous system, but also the emotional reprocessing piece, and we also get into communications and boundaries. And when it comes to sex, this has been a large part of my journey as well, because when we are having disembodied sex not the sexiest sex that doesn't be a big part of what contributes to us feeling not safe in our bodies. And when we're feeling not safe in our bodies, our brain starts to mess up the signals. So my role is really to help women step into their power to get their own internal safety back and to live the unbridled life they want, and that certainly includes having the amazing sex where they're actually in their bodies for it and not completely checked out.

Annette Benedetti: 3:30

Yeah, that really resonates, and we have in past episodes especially the episode we did this year on sexual assault, sex after sexual assault talk about the disembodiment. So this is going to be great for all sorts of people. Folks, I really want you to listen through to the end because, as always near the end of this podcast, we're going to have our takeaways, which means, if you are dealing with any kind of pain and sex, even if, even if that happens to be emotional pain I believe we are going to have some real quick takeaways for you to start working on healing tonight. And then, of course, you will always have the option of reaching out to my guests.

Annette Benedetti: 4:13

I want to remind you all that I now have a voicemail If you have questions after this podcast that you want answered. There is going to be a link in the description of this podcast and you just going to hit it and you leave a voicemail. You don't have to leave your name or anything and I will get your questions answered in one form or the other, either on this podcast or in an article. You can also go to my website at lockerroomtalkpodcastcom and leave that voicemail there. So, rose, I am having coffee. You are aware I'm important.

Rose Covenant: 4:51

I am in the forest in.

Annette Benedetti: 4:52

Germany. You're in the did you say the black forest in Germany? Well, amazing. So I'm having coffee and you're having lemon water. That's healthy, we're both healthy-ish. She's healthier than me, of course, so cheers. Let's talk about getting back to having good sex. Where I want to start this discussion is your story, because, as I understand, you suffered from chronic pain and that is what led you to becoming a pain mentor. So can we start there?

Rose Covenant: 5:25

Yeah. So before we jump into the details of my story, just a quick note on pain in general. With all pain, you always want to make sure you've gone to a medical provider to make sure that there's no specific reason for the pain Things like fracture or tumor, colloquially diagnosed nerve damage to make sure you've ruled that out. Now, once you've ruled that out which 85, 90% of people with chronic pain have ruled it out what neuroplastic pain means is the pain you feel is 100% real. There is no such thing as real pain and not real pain. Your brain decides all pain, whether it's from a physical injury or from an emotional injury. Your brain sends the signal. So it doesn't matter what the root was. All pain feels 100% the same.

Rose Covenant: 6:13

So there's the caveat about pain, and the same things that can cause physical pain can also show up as a lot of other symptoms. If you're someone who has been living in survival mode, fight or flight for a long time, it can show up as pain migraines, pelvic floor dysfunction, anxiety, depression, unexplained GI issues, like when the body is stuck in that chronic state of more and more stress. It's going to show up as lots of things in the body and that's part of understanding the pain, starting is understanding all of the symptoms that kind of led up to it. So for me personally, I identified as someone who had a childhood. Was you know I wouldn't get a gold star. Let's say there was no gold star.

Annette Benedetti: 7:06

You and me, you and me, friend, we both get that.

Rose Covenant: 7:10

Yeah, and almost all the clients I work with. There are a few exceptions where they're like everything was amazing, like that's great for you, super happy for that. But then I had nausea as a kid every night. This happened to be right around the time my parents were getting divorced. Huh, could there be a connection? So now I understand that that was my teeny, tiny kid body, kid brain, internalizing stress that I didn't have the emotional words to speak out.

Rose Covenant: 7:43

In my early 20s, when I started working, I got like three to five headaches a week and I was like, oh, this is normal, this is fine, okay, no, definitely not fine. And when we get to the sex, before the pain even started, I was having a lot of sex that mentally I wanted to have but my body was not super into it. Like I could orgasm from a clitoral stimulation, but penetrative, like no it was, it was not good. And I started getting chronic pain actually in my knee right before I moved to West Africa the first time. So my first career was in public health and international development, living in different countries in West Africa, and I was doing a bunch of Zumba at the time and I was like, oh, zumba injury, okay, new slash. It wasn't. The Zumba started with the knee pain, off and on for a year, tried PT, tried all the things wouldn't go away. And then I had a big breakup and that happened to coincide with the end of a contract, and so it was like I don't know where I'm going to live, I don't know if I have a job. I this guy just broke up with me like, and my big injury the physical injury, quote unquote that I attributed the pain to was 40 minutes on a recumbent bicycle, a stationary recumbent bicycle, hmm. And the story that I understood was like oh, because of my knee and I'm hyper mobile and my joints and my muscles were tight, and then I woke up the next morning with this excruciating pain in my back and basically that pain stayed every single moment of every single second of every single day for six and a half years and in that time I I mean, you name it I tried it. I've since had a few clients who tried more things than me because I did not know they existed. I was like I would have also tried that.

Rose Covenant: 9:57

You know, I started with chiropractors, physical therapy, pelvic floor physical therapy as well regenerative orthopedics, orthopedic surgeons, all of these doctors and basically everyone, looked at my scans and they were like, well, there's nothing really that explains it, but they've been like Ah, you have a bit of arthritis, you have a bit of bulging discs, you're a bit hyper mobile, you have a bit of this, a bit of that. And in all of this time I super high achiever. So I was like, right, okay, body shut up, I'm going to keep doing my thing and continued going on different missions and working in public health. And in all of this time I could feel that I had this like emotional turbulence underneath, but with a placid surface, I was like I'm keeping my shit together, like I'm a bad ass, it's good, I can take it, I am resilient. But underneath there was all of this like accumulated crap that I had taken on.

Rose Covenant: 11:03

And then, because of COVID actually, I ended up relocating to the US and I saw this post on Instagram talking about curing chronic pain and my first reaction was that's bullshit. Like if there was a cure, I would know what it is. And that's what led me on the journey of understanding that neuroplastic pain is a thing. First of all, I think most of us think, okay, if we have pain in the body, there's something physically wrong. There's no other option.

Rose Covenant: 11:33

But in fact, the vast majority of chronic pain is due to your brain and nervous system getting stuck in this loop. That because pain is a danger signal, so you keep having this pain. This is also why some people will have pain that coincides with sex. They have muscle tightness and pain with sex because your body is giving you that danger signal and so many of us just override that. And so that's what started my journey of understanding what it was going through the healing process myself, of understanding what pain was, pain reprocessing techniques, which is basically retraining your brain. Hey, these sensations are not actually dangerous. You can turn the pain lever off now, but this is okay. Learning to be safe in my body again and, after I have recovered from pain, going back into sex was a whole different thing, because I realized for the first 30 plus years of my life, I was deciding to have sex from a mental place and it was like if we start making out.

Rose Covenant: 12:49

Then the expectation is, there's penetration and even though in my badass I don't have to do anything I didn't wanna do. The reality was that I went into freeze, that if I was in a situation it was be like, okay, well, I'm just gonna do this now. And it came to this place where my brain was going. My body just was not in trust with me and she shouldn't have been in trust with me. I was doing a really bad job taking care of her. So I recovered from pain After being in pain six and a half years, I had my first pain-free moment six weeks in and I was like, oh, this is real, this is actually a thing.

Rose Covenant: 13:28

And then went on to train as a practitioner to help other women also recover from pain and the connection with pain and intimate relationships and creating boundaries and communication and sex and what all of that means are all of these layers that I think for me it was easier to be in a place of the mind where I could tell myself that I was a badass and everything was fine, and when I really started to drop in and reconnect with my body, there was a lot going on that I wouldn't have been aware of.

Annette Benedetti: 14:08

Yeah, you know that resonates so deeply with me. I have shared on this podcast about my own childhood experiences and experiencing sexual assault at a young age and also not being able to enjoy penetration. Yes, I could muscle through and have that clitoral orgasm, which is basically what a lot of us do. A lot of women are muscling through the sex to get to the clitoral orgasm and missing out on the real pleasure of the journey, and actual sex and even penetration can be amazing when you're connected to your body. So I guess that sounds like where the journey with chronic pain starts right Is reconnecting with your body and figuring out how to turn off those pain signals that have been triggered.

Annette Benedetti: 15:17

Now it sounds like those pain signals can be triggered by an actual event that was an injury that caused and I don't wanna say real pain, but caused pain from the injury. But then the injury heals and your body is still saying this hurts, this hurts, this hurts, right. This makes sense to me and I've definitely experienced that, and you're telling the world. I'm still in pain and the doctors are like you're fine, you're just being crazy, right, and so that's where you come in.

Rose Covenant: 15:53

And more often the pain will come on without a physical injury and our conscious mind needs to be able to justify it to ourselves. So it'll be. Oh, I had a physical injury. It was. I did downward dog and yoga and I felt a pop, or I picked up a box and then a day later my back hurt, like if, the more that you dig into what structural pain is and how it functions there's a checklist for anyone who's interested of like 30 different criteria. Like, is it worse with stress? Does it come on after a triggering activity instead of during it? Sometimes it is due to a physical injury, but more often it's.

Rose Covenant: 16:33

We have this history of priming from childhood. Our brain and nervous system is learning. Maybe I'm not so safe, so loved, so it's not safe to have my emotions here, so we subconsciously suppress them. And then there's a triggering event. It could be physical, it could be emotional, and then that brain tilts over. If you think about us like calibrating, we are calibrated to safety and then, ooh, we start to calibrate into hypervigilance and when that tips, the brain keeps sending pain signals, including muscle tension, as a way to try to keep us safe, even though our physical body is okay.

Annette Benedetti: 17:10

Okay, yeah, and then that becomes part of sex as well, right, so you're hypervigilant now during sex and trying to protect yourself against the pain or even experiencing the pain while having sex. And who wants to? This is, by the way, listener. I know how dirty-minded you are. This is not BDSM pain. This is like very uncomfortable, never gonna be the pleasure, never gonna be the pleasure kind of pain. And so you're actively and on top of it. What you're saying is we disembodied, meaning we kind of mentally and emotionally separate from our physical being, so that we can escape the pain, which also means we escape the pleasure during sex.

Rose Covenant: 18:52

Exactly, and I think for most people we live most of our life pretty disembodied. We become very focused in the mind and we think that we're our thoughts, and so your body kind of learns like, hey, the only way that Annette is going to pay attention to me is if I yell at her.

Annette Benedetti: 19:11

Yeah, my body yells at me all the time. It's we have a difficult relationship.

Rose Covenant: 19:22

All right.

Annette Benedetti: 19:23

It is getting better. It is getting better. I now can have orgasms from penetration. I mean I feel like for me, yeah right, this is a celebration, I don't you know, and I'm curious about your thought on this, as I was growing up and I would go to my mom or whoever and talk about sex and the fact that I didn't like I heard other women had sex from internal orgasms, but I couldn't, and doctors and my mom and other people I talked to. The common thing they came back with is, well, only a very few women can have orgasms from the G spot or the internal sex. It, like most women, can only have orgasms from the clitoris.

Annette Benedetti: 20:09

I believe that is one of the biggest fucking lies. Almost all women, at least within my age range and I don't know hopefully we're changing that dialogue with younger women, but I think it's the big lie. It's just the biggest biggest lie. I think most all women are capable of having internal orgasms and pleasure as much as they are capable of clitoral. But I think most of us, because if you think of the number of women who have suffered at the hands of abuse and experienced chronic pain and I bet you have some stats on who's suffering from chronic pain the most, and I am willing to bet women are at the top of that list. Yeah, look, I know some stuff Dang, I'm winning over here, and so because of that it's likely why we're not having the orgasms.

Rose Covenant: 21:05

I completely agree. Like every body is capable of experiencing a pleasure If it comes all the way to orgasm. My belief is you can get all the way to orgasm with all kinds of body parts, but with this penetration it's the big lie. That's like oh, it's okay for someone to penetrate you without the expectation that you like it. What the hell?

Annette Benedetti: 21:33

Right.

Rose Covenant: 21:34

What the hell? Yeah, and as a side note, dear listener, if you are having sex that does not feel good to you, you have every right to just be like nope. It doesn't have to be painful to say no, it just has to, in that moment, be like do I like this? And if the answer is no, just stop. This is what creates this disembodiment, where, for me, what would happen? And even after I recovered from pain and so I was quite in my body and conscious, but I would fall back into the survival pattern where I started thinking about it like, ooh, do I like this? I don't really like it. And by the time I could try to get the words, it was like my throat closed, like I couldn't, nothing was going to come out, because I just felt so Frozen, heavy, with the expectation Right, and it didn't matter if I was having a good time or not, but I had started it. So it was like, well, I guess I'll just be here and Get through it.

Rose Covenant: 22:43

Take care of my own plitterers, because this person is not doing it.

Annette Benedetti: 22:48

Yes, that's what you really wanted to say. I could see it in your face.

Rose Covenant: 22:54

Rose, whether doing it wrong, you're doing it wrong.

Annette Benedetti: 22:58

Right and it is really hard, especially if you're someone who is disembodied easily or under stress, to communicate your needs and how to have your partner pleasure you, because it's stressful, and sometimes even a long-term partner who you know well won't take correction. Well, it feels like a personal attack and it's just easier to grit your teeth and get through it and then say to yourself well, I'll bring it up later, which we never do. We never do. So I hear that For a listener who is listening right now and dealing with chronic pain and dealing with what could be a relationship that is suffering from their chronic pain, which I do know from doing my studies ahead of time before talking to you. Chronic pain can really, really disrupt relationships and intimacy and lead to the end of relationships when someone can't get it under control or heal themselves. So what would you say is a starting point for that person who's listening right now and just holding onto the hope that you're gonna have some answers for them?

Rose Covenant: 24:17

It's a beautiful question. So the first thing is you always want to check with a medical provider to make sure there's not a specific medical cause. That said, everyone over the age of 25 has some level of degeneration in their body. It's like wrinkles on the inside as opposed to wrinkles on the outside. So, as I mentioned, I have a bit of arthritis, I have a bit of bulging discs, I'm a bit hypermobile.

Rose Covenant: 24:45

So I would encourage you to look more into neuroplastic pain and certainly reach out.

Rose Covenant: 24:50

I'm here to help you do that, to get clarity on is this pain coming in part from something that's structural and that's something where you can learn to better manage the pain?

Rose Covenant: 25:03

And then it's more around shifting the way that you are having a relationship with pain, so that you can also be really confident in your truth and speaking your needs, so you can still show up in that intimate, sexy way, in a way that feels safe to you, because no one wants to have sex with someone who is in pain and not enjoying it.

Rose Covenant: 25:30

And so, for most listeners, you've probably already gone to a bunch of doctors and you've ruled out anything major medical.

Rose Covenant: 25:39

Then the next step would be to start the education piece about neuroplastic pain because, just to be real, when I first read about it I totally thought it was made up, because it sounds way too good to be true, like how could I've lived in six years of pain without discovering that most chronic pain is neuroplastic? So you can reach out to me, you can reach out to other mind body practitioners to get some clarity on that. And then for me, a huge step was deciding and knowing that my pain was neuroplastic and deciding that I deserved to recover from it, whatever it took. And that was really scary because I had tried, I mean, I had gone through a list of 15 different doctors and different things and it felt really scary to have hope that I could find a way out of the pain. This is very true for people who are diagnosed with chronic low back pain, chronic migraines, like chronic pain is not a diagnosis, it's a description of what's happening.

Annette Benedetti: 27:33

The fear came from, of the hope came from then having that hope, giving it a go and having nothing change.

Rose Covenant: 27:44

Yeah, I've been disappointed a lot of times and every single client that I work with comes with a similar story, whether they've been in pain for six months or decades. Where they come across me on Instagram, right, it resonates with them the same way that the curing chronic pain resonated for me. And there's this gut knowing like that's the only thing that makes sense, because I've done all the medical stuff and none of that worked. But then, having faith in your intuition of knowing, like okay, this is reversible. The next thing that will often come up, and came up for me, was I felt so angry with myself for not having somehow known that the pain was neuroplastic. Like how could I have gone to so many doctors? I have a master's in public health. Like how, and we can switch, because if you think about the calibration of your system from safety to hypervigilance, when the system is in hypervigilance, it will throw you under the bus just as easily as it will throw anyone under the bus. And so this is part of this delicate moment where it's like, okay, maybe you're listening now. Maybe you've heard a bit about mind, body, tms, the pain cycle before and it's clicking for you now. This is what it is for me.

Rose Covenant: 29:11

There might be a little voice in your head that's like does that mean you've been doing it to yourself? Does that mean it's your fault? No, it's not your fault, you've not been doing it to yourself. No one would choose to be in this pain, and in the last 10 to 15 years, pain education has changed a lot, so now a lot of physical therapists are incorporating these types of methods. There are a lot more studies that are being more widely disseminated, but if you come across your average pain clinic, when I went into a pain clinic, they knew me all of 35 seconds before. They were like okay, you have pain in your low back, so we'll give you a steroid injection. I was like wha.

Annette Benedetti: 29:52

Yeah.

Rose Covenant: 29:53

So accepting that it could be this if it is this, it's not your fault and then getting the support that you need to take the journey through Because, to be frank, there's a large part of this that is the science. There are some people that literally read a book about neuroplastic pain and their brain is like, oh okay, I don't have a stat on this, but my gut feeling is that this tends to be men, because men also do experience neuroplastic pain, and I work almost exclusively with women and what I find is there is that knowing. But then the coming back to safety in your body is a journey. It's getting yourself out of the rabbit holes, stopping the super self-critical thoughts noticing when you're in your body and when you're not being able to have those courageous conversations with your partners around intimacy, around sex, around just the way that you're organizing your life, and that's something that isn't going to happen when you read a book. That's a journey that's going to take months to really get back to a place of feeling safe.

Rose Covenant: 31:00

And I'm still on a journey. Right, I'm not in pain, but my growth and learning and expansion continues. I'm a human right. I still get anxious, that still happens, but allowing yourself to take the first step into approaching pain in a new way that's not based on what's wrong with you. Is your body broken? Maybe it's not. Maybe it's just your brain sending you a danger signal that's asking you to address some deeper things. And when you do address those deeper things and create safety for yourself, everything changes, not just the pain.

Annette Benedetti: 31:36

So what are some of your approaches to helping a woman create safety in her body so she can get back to being intimate with her partner and having sex that is pleasurable for herself?

Rose Covenant: 31:54

So, specifically around sex, being honest with yourself about if you're a full body yes. So before you're engaging in that next step, whatever it is and if you know you're someone like me, as soon as we have a passionate kiss, my brain is like, okay, now we're having sex. So, wherever before, that starting point is put a hand on your heart and a hand right above your pelvic bone and just take a few deep breaths and actually ask your body do I want to be intimate in this moment with this person, and it doesn't have to do anything with them. They could be a new partner. They could be a husband, a long term partner, a wife it could be anyone. Is this the moment where my body wants this? And if it's a no, it's okay. If it's a no, and if it's a maybe, that's still not a yes. So, getting clear on the full body, yes. And having a conversation with the partner around, like I'm on a journey of reconnecting to myself and this is nothing to do with you or our connection or the relationship, but I want to be in a more conscious place and so I'm going to approach it in this way and that's going to give someone a lot of information about how their partner reacts to that. Right, because I will also say there are a fair number of people who go on this journey. I was one of them who ended up leaving a partner and leaving a job because my body was a no and I overridden that no for years.

Rose Covenant: 33:32

Another thing I would highly, highly, highly recommend is some form of meditation. Now, I was someone who thought my brain is too fast, I could never meditate. How can I possibly meditate? I can't do it. I can't do it. All meditation is is practicing focus.

Annette Benedetti: 33:46

That's all it is.

Rose Covenant: 33:47

It's not cleaning your mind, it's not going to the top of a Tibetan temple and levitating, it's just focusing. So on an MRI, if you do breath focused meditation for 12 minutes for 30 days, they can see a difference in your brain scan. So start that practice for yourself. For some people, sitting meditation feels really uncomfortable, so you can do a walking meditation. There are great apps for this. The most powerful way that I have found in what I personally practice is silent meditation. But if you're new to meditation, definitely download an app and start practicing that, because what that's going to allow you to do is increase your window of tolerance of stress so that, even if stressful things happen, your body doesn't automatically go into fight or flight. This allows you to come more into your body so that when you do put that hand on the heart, that hand on the low belly, and you ask your body, something comes up, because that's a radical act, actually asking my mind, body and spirit. Do I want this? Let's talk about penetration, annette.

Annette Benedetti: 34:54

I would love to talk about penetration.

Rose Covenant: 34:57

I'm exciting for it Penetration, so it can become so normal for us to have sex. That is not pleasurable from a penetrative perspective and if you are someone who for years is like letting the guy you know maybe you're even like you're like I'm into it You're not really into it. Numbness is the biggest thing that I experienced. That I hear from clients experiencing sometimes pain, but often numbness Can't feel it.

Rose Covenant: 35:31

If you cannot feel the thing that's inside of you. Don't put it inside of you Slow way down. If you're in a place where you're like I'm feeling numb internally and so I just wham, wham, wham on my clitoris until I have an orgasm, there is a new and better way. So have that conversation with a partner. I want to get into Tantric connected, whatever the words are that are aligned for you. But start experimenting with your body, with yourself or with your partner, what actually feels good. And if penetration doesn't feel good, you don't have to do it.

Rose Covenant: 36:13

You, dear listener, I give you I Rose Covenant, hereby give you permission to never be penetrated again If you don't want to be. And I promise you that, as you give yourself that permission and build that safety in your body to be able to say is it a yes, is it a no, is it a maybe? That all of a sudden, all of those nerve endings that have basically shut down for safety because numbness, is basically saying I'm not in touch with this, I don't want to feel pain, so I'm just gonna. This is not conscious, by the way right.

Rose Covenant: 36:49

Obviously conscious. So Giving yourself the permission that I don't have to do anything that doesn't feel good to me in the moment, because I can change. Maybe you're having beautiful sex with a partner and then all of a sudden there's, you know, an ambulance that goes by or dog barks and you're out of it and all of a sudden you can't feel your pussy anymore. Stop it, like really giving yourself that, that ultimate permission to say no at any moment in time, that you deserve to feel Pleasured, you deserve to feel present and really honoring your body, and the more that you do that, the more she is going to come alive.

Annette Benedetti: 37:31

This is true, this is true, it's so true. I think that having that power to say no or to say you know, I want this to happen before any pinn you know, any penetration happens, like your body just knowing that it's not gonna be forced into anything, even if it's not Physically forced, like your partner's not physically forcing you. You're just being like okay, fine, stick it in and getting through it. Your body just shuts down, and when it knows that you're not gonna do that, then it wakes up. Like I know I didn't feel anything inside my vagina for like 47 years and the minute like I did and my listeners know this, I don't know if you do, though I did a 365 days of orgasms challenge, where I had an orgasm every day, and most of it was alone, because my partner at the time was long distance, and that was when my vagina woke up, because it was like well, I guess it's just you and me and we're just having fun and there's no pressure.

Annette Benedetti: 38:47

And now I'm like During sex, my partner will start giving me oral sex and I'll be like give me the cock, give me the cock, I want it in me, because it's a new feeling inside and and like if you have not felt that feeling for like 47 years and suddenly it wakes up. You're like holy mother, fuck. Like now I'm like penetration. I enjoy it for up to like 45 minutes like. I know that sounds crazy, but it's because my body feels safe. I love that. You say that give yourself permission to not have Penetration ever again and then maybe you'll get to have it and enjoy it. Is there a long process to starting to become embodied Again, especially during sex?

Rose Covenant: 39:32

So first two quick pro tips. Pro tip number one verbal consent. Tasty verbal consent, if you like, before everything, certainly before penetration, so that you can really give yourself a moment to be do. I actually want this? Because there's an interesting study Between men and women the difference between perceived arousal and wetness. Where basically for men it's like 90% they think they're horny and their cock is hard for women it was like a 10% overlap. So just because oh, I'm wet, I guess they can have sex with me now, does not mean that you were in the mood or that you want it. So verbal consent. The other thing when you do get to the point where your body is like, yes, I do want penetration, containment. Containment, just slow penetration and then staying there and very consciously, intentionally feeling In your vagina, everywhere, that you are being, that you are in contact with your partner.

Annette Benedetti: 40:39

So you mean you slowly start the penetration and then you kind of stop and allow the vagina owner to feel All of the sensations, correct?

Rose Covenant: 40:53

Yeah, no pumping, no movement, but give it. Give it a 30 second, give it a minute to really let your body, because so often we're like, oh, we're having sex and then we're trying to accomplish goal, we're not actually feeling what's happening. So, just having that moment of no movement to really center in your body, bringing your full focus to your vagina and feeling what's there and not starting moving until you can actually feel it.

Annette Benedetti: 41:21

And it feels good.

Annette Benedetti: 41:22

Can I ask you if this is a common experience, Because this resonates with me so much?

Annette Benedetti: 41:29

Again, me feeling my vagina is very, very new and I'm lucky that my partner is patient, because what I do, I do this I guess I did this without even talking to someone who told me to is I like it just to go in a little bit and then I'll kind of like sit there and then I do tiny, tiny, tiny movements and I mean it will just get me so close to orgasm and the more excited I get I'll start to move.

Annette Benedetti: 42:03

If my partner starts like it poor individual, but like if he gets all excited and starts moving more, I'll be like uh-uh-uh-uh-uh, and because if my body has to be ready to accept that deeper penetration and then the spots deeper inside of me the P spot and A spot start to like spark and wake up. And then, right when I'm about to orgasm and during orgasm and after orgasm, even after orgasm, because that is not the highlight of my penetration moment Then I like the big, deep movements because I'm feeling everything all over inside of my vagina. But it starts with and it could be like, seriously, it could be like 20 minutes of me doing tiny little movements right around my G spot, as it should be. It's wonderful, it's fucking wonderful.

Annette Benedetti: 42:54

Yeah, it's so great, don't move, don't move.

Rose Covenant: 42:58

And micro movement sex. Like you, your pussy has not lived.

Annette Benedetti: 43:03

Micro movement sex. Is that coined? Can we coin that Micro movement sex? That's exactly what it is Tiny little movements that just. Yeah, it's interesting when you haven't been able to feel a part of your body for so long and then you do. It's like I mean it's magic, it is. It's kind of crazy to have that sensation.

Rose Covenant: 43:28

I tell all new partner I was like approach my pussy like she's a wild animal. No sudden movements, don't scare her off, Cause when she's scared off like game over, you're not coming back from that.

Annette Benedetti: 43:39

I love that so much Approach my pussy like she's a wild animal. It's brilliant. I don't know it's brilliant. All right, we are nearing the end of our conversation and chronic pain healing from it, getting back to being able to be intimate, is a big conversation. I mean, we just kind of touched on some of the topics I would love for you to list off. I only mentioned a couple of your approaches to dealing with pain but for my listener, can you give kind of the full list of the different approaches and methodology and methodology you use to help someone healing from chronic pain?

Rose Covenant: 44:28

Sure. So my method is called to be on pain and there are a few steps in that. So the overall approach I call the recalibration effect. This is everything that's bringing your mind, your body, your brain, your nervous system out of that state of hypervigilance and pain and danger signals into a place of safety. The first part of that is getting past your analytical mind. So this is the pain science, this is going through the peer review journal articles so that your analytical mind can really accept, yes, your brain is causing the pain and yes, it can cause pain that is this severe and yes, all pain is real. This is really the first step and going through a deep dive of all of your symptoms.

Rose Covenant: 45:12

Very often, once you go through your timeline, you discover, oh, I've actually had symptoms for many, many years. Maybe it was anxiety before, maybe it was nausea before, maybe it was headaches before, before the pain starts. Then we get into what I call brain rewiring. So this is a mix of mindset, so bringing yourself out of those self-critical, negative rabbit holes, being in a place of anxiety and worry. When you're in pain, you're always thinking about it and you're always thinking like, can I go to dinner with friends? Because then I'm going to have to sit, can I do this? And that it takes up a lot of bandwidth. So bringing yourself back more into the present and then the pain reprocessing techniques are basically bringing the fear down. Your brain processes emotional and physical pain in the same place. That's why your brain can misinterpret emotional pain and flick on the pain signal, the physical pain signal, and so bringing down the fear is going to also start dissolving the pain cycle at the root. Then we get into nervous system regulation. This is a mix of somatically getting into your body and breathing to be able to manually bring your nervous system out of fight or flight and into rest and digest, back into safety.

Rose Covenant: 46:25

Emotional reprocessing this is the biggest piece. This is basically working through whatever accumulation of emotional stuff that you have from the past and also starting to let go of some of those behavioral or thought patterns that we have that are ultimately related to something our great-great-grandmother taught her great-great. A lot of it goes quite far back. Getting into new patterns and then learning how to be okay and present and aware of big emotions coming up, allowing them to come through the body instead of contracting and compartmentalizing and subconsciously suppressing them. Then we get into the boundaries and the communications, because when we're talking about safety in the body, it's also creating the external safety. These are the big courageous conversations with partners and the big courageous conversations with work.

Rose Covenant: 47:19

And the theme throughout all of this is also unmindfulness piece, as I mentioned, meditation, being able to keep your body out of fight or flight as much as possible, realizing that, by the way, we're all humans and you're never gonna do it perfectly. I don't do perfectly and it's just about shifting your body's default, your brain's default, from hypervigilance back to safety. And then you'll notice, within the first six to eight weeks, most clients will see a shift in their intensity of symptoms. Some clients will even see no symptoms at all. And then there's that transition point where you're continuing to give yourself messages of safety.

Rose Covenant: 48:01

This can include doing some of the inner child work, really tending to the different parts of yourself that are calling for safety. So the method that I use it's kind of the kitchen sink method. I had one client who had been in pain for over five years, full body pain. For her it was needing to set some boundaries with her family. Literally the week she did that she was able to go back and play piano for two hours, which she hadn't been able to do in years. So when you create that safety, you'll see quite fast significant changes in how you're feeling emotionally and how you're feeling physically.

Annette Benedetti: 48:40

If that resonates with anybody listening, let them know how they can get in touch with you and find out more about you.

Rose Covenant: 48:48

Amazing. So you can get in touch with me on Instagram, iamrosecovenant. I'm also on LinkedIn at Rose Covenant and my website is livebeyondpaincom.

Annette Benedetti: 49:03

Thank you so much, rose. So check her out. If anything in this podcast speaks to you, you've got someone now you can go directly to follow, to reach out to and get help. You deserve it. You deserve to have a pain-free sex, pain-free life and to experience pleasure, and I think that both of us are proof that that can happen. You can find me, guys. You know where to find me Locker Room, talk and Shots on Facebook and Instagram. You can follow me on my personal Instagram at BeingBinadetti. Also, she explores life on Facebook and Instagram. Head over to TikTok, where I am horrifically suppressed. But whatever, join me anyways. It's Locker Room Talk and Shots podcast, and don't forget to send me your voicemails. Oh, if you wanna see our beautiful faces, head to my YouTube and at Binadetti, and you can actually see who's talking and listen to this podcast in full on YouTube. So until next time I'll see you guys in the Locker Room. Cheers, cheers, cheers, cheers, cheers, ring Loom.