In This Body

How Shame Impacts Intimacy with Aleksandra Trkulja

• Ailey Jolie • Season 3 • Episode 66

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What if pleasure is not about learning new techniques, but learning how to feel safe in your body?

In this episode, Ailey sits down with sex therapist and sexologist Aleksandra Trkulja to explore the connection between body image, nervous system regulation, and intimacy. Together, they unpack why shame, self criticism, and disconnection from the body can create real barriers to pleasure, arousal, and desire.

Aleks shares insights from her work in eating disorder recovery and explains how control can begin to feel like safety. The conversation also explores the fawn response in sex, the difference between compliance and consent, and why learning your body’s subtle signals can transform the way you relate to intimacy.

From there, Ailey and Aleks move into practical ways to reconnect with desire, beginning outside the bedroom through everyday experiences of pleasure, sensation, and preference. They also discuss co regulation, trauma informed pacing, and the role the nervous system plays in connection and sexuality.

If you have ever felt disconnected from your body or unsure how to access pleasure in an embodied way, this conversation offers a compassionate and grounded place to begin.

In this episode:

  • 4:41 Why Body Hate Blocks Pleasure
  • 11:01Eating Disorders And False Control
  • 17:08 Body Image Patterns In Sex
  • 20:53 Shame Based Messages About Sex
  • 28:03 Desire As A Relearned Skill
  • 34:15 Trauma Informed Safety And Pace
  • 40:22 Co Regulation In Intimacy
  • 45:19 Curiosity Over Shame

You can read the full transcript here

Learn more about Ailey Jolie:

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Ailey Jolie

Welcome to In This Body A podcast where we dive deep into the potent power of embodiment. I'm your host, Aile Jolie, a psychotherapist deeply passionate about living life fully from the wisdom within your very own body. The podcast In This Body is a love letter to embodiment, a podcast dedicated to asking important questions like how does connecting to your body change your life? How does connecting to your body enhance your capacity to love more deeply and live more authentically? And how can collective embodiment alter the course of our shared world? Join me for consciously curated conversations with leading experts. Each episode is intended to support you in reconnecting to your very own body. This podcast will be available for free wherever you get your podcast, making it easy for you to stay connected to In This Body, the podcast with me, Ailey Jolie. Welcome back to How to Be in This Body. I'm your host, Ailey Jolie, and today I'm in conversation with Alex, sex therapist, sexologist, and the creator of a forthcoming sex education course with Temple, covering body image, the nervous system, relationships, and anatomy due out later this year. Alex spent her career as a group therapist in psychiatric hospitals working in eating disorder words too. She went in young in her mid-20s, and what she saw there, the full weight of what it costs to be at war with your body, shaped everything that came after. When she went on to train in sex therapy, she found the same gap I found. The field that talks about the body constantly, but doesn't always know how to actually be in it. This conversation is about what connects those two worlds: pleasure and embodiment, desire and shame, the fond response in the bedroom, why you can't access one without tending to the other. Alex is warm, direct, and genuinely funny, and she has no interest in making any of this more intimidating than it needs to be. I hope you enjoy this episode of How to Be in This Body with Me, Ali Julie. The first question I'm going to ask you is one that I ask all of the guests that I have on right at the start of our time together. And I would love to hear from you what does being in your body mean to you?

Aleksandra Trkulja

That is such a great question. I think being in my body for me is really like noticing the small moments. Even this morning, when I woke up, um, my dog is a morning time cuddler. He doesn't like cuddling in the evening. He loves a morning cuddle. So this morning I wake up and he gets on top of me and he makes intense eye contact. And meanwhile, my alarm's going off, and I was like, I've got to get up for this podcast. But it just was like a moment to sink into my body where and it's a conscious choice that I was like, I can feel my body like soften and relax as I just stare into the eyes of this creature. That is just such a nice reminder to be still and slow, like there is no rush, it's okay. And so it's like those tiny little moments that almost like bring you back into your body where you're so hyper-aware of like how in your body you are, if that makes sense. Where you're like, wow, I'm really here. Nothing else really matters right now. That's what it's like for me.

Ailey Jolie

I love that you really brought in an experience of being in the body that I feel like for myself as well. When I'm asked this question or I reflect on it, I don't really have language or like a descriptor of what it means. And similar to you, where I'm just like, it's just a felt sense thing. Um that I don't know if language can ever really contain or

Why Body Hate Blocks Pleasure

Ailey Jolie

can hold. But I'm gonna bring some language that you said back to you into my next question for you. You've said that pleasure happens in the body, but if you're in a body that you hate, it's really hard to access it. And I would just love to even start our time together here around what that means and how that is associated to the work that you offer.

Aleksandra Trkulja

Yeah, it's definitely something that my clients don't like hearing, you know, especially my clients who have histories of eating disorders. And then I would say most clients I see have a history of uh a poor relationship to the body. And when they come to sex therapy, they're often saying, Well, I want to be able to orgasm, I want to be able to experience more desire, it's affecting my well-being or it's affecting my relationship. How do I have more pleasure in my body? And when I ask them about their relationship to their body, and they tell me, Well, actually, I'm not happy with it, and I criticize it and I hide it and I shame it or I judge it. I have to be able to articulate to them the relationship you have with your body when it is critical or judgmental or stemming from a place of shame, will actively impact your nervous system so that it creates a barrier to the kind of pleasure you want to experience in your body. So, on a surface level, the easiest way I sort of articulate it is that you can't have full embodied pleasure in a body that you hate while you're at war with your body. Those jumping from hating your body to feeling immense pleasure is not possible and it's not realistic. And it's okay, we're not shaming it, but we have to be realistic about the relationship to the body. And so instead, we need to look at repairing the relationship to the body so that you can access the pleasure you want to access.

Ailey Jolie

What led you, and maybe and maybe it is your personal experience or professional experience that led you to really join those two together? Because at least in my training, which is North American-based, so it could be very different. The realm of sex therapy, I was very lucky, I would say, to have mentors and teachers in my programs that brought a somatic angle or an embodiment-based angle in. However, I would say that most of my sex therapy training didn't necessarily. We were speaking a lot about the body, but not necessarily about being in the body. And I would love to hear from you just how you join those two things together, if it was just personal experience, or maybe it was kind of woven into your training.

Aleksandra Trkulja

It's a really good question because I would say my training was fairly similar to yours. Um, I did a lot of like institutionalized learning and like Western frameworks, which often neglect somatic approaches to embodiment. We definitely looked at like research on mindfulness for like, you know, connecting to the body, but really there weren't very many practical strategies that we were taught or even the importance of the relationship to body. The way these things connected for me was that when I first graduated from my undergraduate degree, so at this point I hadn't done any sex therapy training. I worked as a group therapist in psychiatric hospitals and specifically in eating disorder wards. Um, and I guess I was I was young, like I was like early mid-20s when I started that work, and I was very much thrown into the deep end. I'm very lucky in the sense that I have myself have never experienced an eating disorder, but I have experienced negative body image or diff challenges relating to my body. I think most women and people do to some degree. But essentially in that work, I think I was just face-to-face every day for eight hours with the reality of what toll it takes to continue being at war with your body and how it affected people in the most severe situations. And I guess every day I looked at that and just thought to myself, I wouldn't wish this upon anyone. Like this is truly so difficult and horrific for people to manage. And I lost clients to eating disorders, you know, they were so unwell, and I think it just it did like the opposite for me, where it just made me boldly be like, I have no choice but to exist like with such compassion for this body, like there is no other choice at this point. I'm too like at that point, it felt like I was too old, but I was only in my mid-20s. But I was like, I'm too old to be hating my body. I've been doing this for years. Like, I can't keep doing this, like I can't live my life dissatisfied with the body that I can't change, and I don't want to change. I don't want to, you know, each to their own, your body your choice, but I do not want to spend money on Botox, I do not want to be dieting, I don't want to do any of that. I'm also really lucky in the sense that my family are ethnic, so my relationship to food has always been amazing, and I love eating. And so I was like, I just want to enjoy being in my body. And so working in an eating disorder space of, you know, quite acute mental health um really gave me a massive perspective shift, but it also made me connect in when I then went on to do sex therapy training and realize the gaps that you're realizing as well. I was like, hold on, there's so much here. Like, how do we actually make friends with this body again? Like, how do we repair that relationship? And so I think I kind of just went on my own professional journey of piecing together what works for me, what works for clients, like, and I guess just doing my own sort of like research somewhat of like gathering information, um, until I kind of found like, okay, yeah, these seem to be the things that really help. But I guess like a big first step for a lot of people is like the mindset shift of like a making the mental agreement of like this body is my friend, not my enemy.

Eating Disorders And False Control

Aleksandra Trkulja

You know, that's where I think it kind of starts and the somatic work follows.

Ailey Jolie

What do you feel like you really learned by sharing the experience or being witnessing the experience but also supporting the experience of being around people who are living with an eating disorder?

Aleksandra Trkulja

I learned so much. I think they are some of the most resilient people I've ever encountered. Um I think it was very challenging because uh I think, you know, when I first started, uh eating disorders have the lowest recovery rate of any mental health condition and the highest mortality rate. So immediately I was like, I really don't want to work in this space. But they were like, Well, we really you have like you've done a bit of research on like body image and we really need eating disorder therapists, and I was like, no, like I can't do this, and they were like, you get a free lunch, and I was like, okay, sign me up. Um, and so when I started working, I went in with like I guess a lot of I didn't really know what to expect. And so I guess I found that like eating disorders affect people so differently. Um, but I really found that um if I would have sort of like really reduced it down to something very simplistic, I noticed that for a lot of them it was about control of like I can't control the external conditions of my life, I can't control the outcome of a job interview, the outcome of a romantic relationship, I can't control um how other people treat me or behave toward me, but I can control my body. This body is tangible. I can't hold these other things in my hand, but this I can feel and perceive and I can manipulate, and pretty quickly it will respond, which gives a false sense of control. And so what I really noticed was that for a lot of people it was just about trying to feel safe by controlling their body, controlling like a condition they felt like was, you know, within their control. And so that was quite fascinating to me. Um, but I also learned how to crochet because the girly pops in the hospital would come to therapy, group therapy, and be crocheting, all of them, and for a lot of them, um, their lives were really like limited and centralized around their eating disorder. So it was very hard to relate to them some days, and so I decided to pick up crochet because I was like, well, even if I'm bad, I still have a talking point with them. And so I'd go in, I'd be like, oh, like, can anyone help me with this? Like, I don't know what I'm doing. And I'd be like, Yeah, of course. And they're all so lovely and so sweet. And I think also for me, part of the therapy was like, I can't always talk about food and bodies and weight with them. Like, it's nice to just talk about creative projects and life outside of eating disorders because even though it felt like they were surrounded by it, there was so much more than their eating disorders.

Ailey Jolie

What do you wish more people maybe understood about the recovery process or just the experience in general? How much time do we have?

Aleksandra Trkulja

No, I'm kidding. But what do I wish people understood? I wish people understood that eating disorder recovery is maybe similar to like an addiction recovery process, except instead of being abstinent from the thing that triggers you, you have to confront it three, four times a day. That it's quite in its essence an activating process, you know, that if the thing that scares you, like alcohol or drugs, and it makes you kind of this other version of yourself that you don't like and you're trying to move away from, sometimes it's often easier to like abstain from those things and stay away, remove yourself from the environment. But with eating disorder recovery, you're having to confront the thing you fear, like food every day, or movement every day. And so you're completely reworking a relationship with things that have to exist in your lifestyle, like food and movement, and that takes time and a lot of mental resilience, and I just wish there was a bit more compassion around that process.

Ailey Jolie

Was there a moment that maybe you had when you were work with working with eating disorders that you were like, mmm, I want to go deeper into the body, or where was the curiosity and then the later follow-through of exploring sex therapy? What was it inspired by?

Aleksandra Trkulja

So I guess I I actually had always wanted to do sex therapy. This was my like new gribe job that I was kind of doing while I I guess um throughout I ended up doing like my master's and then my sexology degree. So this was kind of I like I mentioned, I kind of fell into this job um while I was pursuing the sex therapy pathway. So really it was such a serendipitous like experience of complementing the work I was then going on to do. Um so yeah, I think it was essentially so I'm so grateful that I had the experience because, like we've discussed, the relationship to the body is fundamental to being in the body during sex. So I think as I was like on my sex therapy pathway, I'm also turning up to work, exploring, I guess, the most obvious examples of someone being challenged by their relationship to their body, then I was like, wow, this is all really interconnected. And if anything, it just made me think: why are we not learning more about eating disorders body image in sex therapy training

Body Image Patterns In Sex

Aleksandra Trkulja

and mental, even just general mental health training, considering how prevalent it is.

Ailey Jolie

When someone has a spent time at war with their body and maybe they come to a space of sex therapy, where do you begin?

Aleksandra Trkulja

I literally begin by saying, How would you describe your relationship with your body? And I just let them answer. Um, everyone has different answers. Some people have really nice answers, like you know, I feel pr pretty good, like this is like I've never really had a problem with my body. But most people I would say have had some challenge, um, and there's varying intensities, I guess, of challenges that people face. But we really just start there, and the next couple of questions I ask are things like you know, if uh usually someone's presented to sex therapy with sexual function concerns as well. So I'm usually asking, how do you notice these body image concerns affect your sex life or affect being in your body or being present in your body, or being able to like sit still in your body with a feeling or anything like that? And then we also just go on to kind of look at things like what kinds of behaviors manifest from the challenges that you have relating to your body, whether that's body checking behaviors of like, oh, I'm really incessantly checking my reflection in the mirror, you know, or I'm incessantly weighing myself, or I'm uh, you know, always monitoring myself of like during sex, I'm checking that like I don't have tummy rolls or that I look hot from that angle or whatever, as well as the body avoidance behaviors, or you know, which is the other end of the spectrum of like I wear baggy clothing during sex, I have sex with the lights off, I don't let my partner see me naked, I don't sleep naked, I don't want to be seen in a bikini, those kinds of things. So we just start to slowly kind of delve a little deeper into the not just the like uh I guess relationship to the body, but the actual manifestations, the behaviors, and how that presents in sex and relationships.

Ailey Jolie

I know that you've said that you often speak more about anxiety and shame than sex, and you've spoken about some of the reasons there, but I would love for you to share with the listener why those two topics often maybe come up more than actual sex and sexuality in with your clients.

Aleksandra Trkulja

Sure. Yes, I do say that. I think um so many people think sex therapy must be such a glamorous job, and like maybe it is, and I am I feel very grateful to do it, but the reality is that most of the time I am just talking about anxiety and shame because those are the two, I guess, experiences and emotions that underlie a lot of the challenges we often feel, whether it's in relation to body image, in relation to sexual function, in relation to even communication, vulnerability, attachment styles. Often people feel quite anxious about their skill set in communicating. And often, I think I'm gonna use a very general statement, but I feel pretty like confident in it, that most of us have grown up with some element of shaming around sexuality in the body. And I say that because, you know, we grow up in if we've grown up in Western societies, and specifically if people have grown up in particular religious institutions, it is sort of founded upon shaming parts of sexuality, shaming the body for being impure, all of which is untrue. It's just a natural expression of sexuality, but of

Shame Based Messages About Sex

Aleksandra Trkulja

course, it's going to have an impact on sex and relationships and how you relate to your body.

Ailey Jolie

Could you share a little bit more about what some of those impacts are?

Aleksandra Trkulja

Absolutely. So uh I will use, do you mind if I just use like an example kind of okay, great. So this isn't any particular client. This is like an I guess a little amalgamation of a common presentation I see, which is that I usually have a young woman with a Catholic upbringing. Now I have a running joke that I'm in a job because of the Catholic Church, which is probably a bit of dark humour, but it's true. Um essentially, what I find is that young, young people, even, but a lot of young women who grow up in Catholic institutions will often note to me I didn't get adequate sex education. And because I didn't get adequate sex education in school, I went looking for it myself, and my friends told me rumors, or I would watch like porn, or I would seek my own sex education elsewhere, which weren't necessarily reputable sources or reliable. And even still, they're not necessarily through, like uh, they're often sources that look at the male gaze when it comes to sex, and it's not really focusing on women's pleasure. So pair that, your sex ed resources, with comments from people in society, like your parents, your teachers, the church, your friends, whomever. This idea that, like, oh, men only want one thing, or like, you know, you're impure if you have sex before marriage, especially in this religious context. But even if you're not growing up in a religious context, often there are still shame based messages around sex and bodies, especially for young women and girls. And so, what often then kind of happens. Is they end up in a place where they're having sex that isn't for them, it's often for their male partners, um, and that sex often becomes an obligation where their pleasure isn't prioritized, um, and they're feeling dissatisfied. At times they may also experience like uncomfortable sex, pain with sex, um, and even pair that with potentially like negative sexual experiences where people took advantage of them if there was assault, things like that. There becomes this kind of relationship to sex of like this isn't safe, and yet it's something that I'm told I should do, or that is necessary for relationships. So, how do I do this when it feels like really scary? And so, scary on a physical, emotional, mental, spiritual level of like, you know, the shame, the anxiety, but also the physical sense of safety. And so you can see how then someone might turn up to therapy and just be like, Where do I go from here? You know. Um, and I'm so anxious about sex. And actually, now that I'm talking about it, I feel quite ashamed that like, you know, um, sex, you know, hasn't even been for me, or I feel ashamed to even ask for what I like, or I feel ashamed for the fact that I don't know what I like because I never had access to adequate sex education. So that's how it kind of manifests.

Ailey Jolie

In there, you name something just really subtly, but that is the fawn response that so much of so many of us are socialized into, and it's that tendency to people please or seek seek safety through attachment or proximity, even when there's an underlying sense of threat. And I would love to just explore a little bit more about how this shows up in people's sexual lives or how we can maybe even start to identify that a fawn response might be what's showing up in our sexuality.

Aleksandra Trkulja

That's a really great question because I think it happens way more often than we realize. Like I think I I yeah, I think that the fawn response doesn't get enough attention in the sense we talk about fidal flight a lot, but actually I believe there's new research to show that the fawn response is more common for women, as in like when men and women are activated on a nervous system level, women move into fawn response before they move into the fidal flight, whereas men might move into fidal flight first. And to really, I mean, classically, research doesn't really look that much at women. So when we kind of look at the application in relationships, I would say it's about noticing, it comes back to your first question that you asked me of like, how do you what does being in your body look like for you? How do you know when you're in your body? This is like the fundamental skill of mindful awareness of your body because to recognize the foreign response requires you to actually take that moment of mindfulness to notice like what is my body signaling to me right now. I do this thing where I go to the supermarket, right? And I go, Alex, what do you want for dinner tonight? And I literally will walk down the aisles and I'll be like, Do you feel like that? And then I like notice my body, and my body will be like, nah, and I'm like, and it to me, it just feels like a little zing, like that, like a little no. And then sometimes I'll look at something and I'll be like, Do you want that? And my body will be like, mmm, like that. Little openness. And it's almost like those subtle messages from the body will also come up in context to your relationships, your interpersonal relationships in the company of someone else, your body will have the ink or the mmm feeling. And that's how you can also start to connect to a sense of am I feeling safe and grounded and secure and connected, or am I feeling a little under threat? Am I feeling a little tense? What's happening here? Another way that you can almost check in to see if you're in like a bit of a fawn response, is to check in with your asshole. Like, what's your little asshole doing? Is it going zunk like this? Because usually if it's going zunk, you're tense, right? The pelvic floor muscles, especially for women, are so connected to like our emotional uh, I guess, state and where we can store things, but I'm I'm mindful around that language of like I don't want to shame people for feeling like they carry their emotional, you know, history around. It's not so much that, it's more that like your body doesn't tense up for no good reason. Like your body is constantly communicating to you. And so if your little asshole is going, zink, I'm a bit, I'm a bit tense around this person. You kind of go, okay, like I need to almost set a boundary, be like, hey, like I need some space, I need to like ground myself, or I need some reassurance, or I don't like the tone of voice that's being used here, or whatever it is. Um, similarly, if your your bumhole is just going, mmm, I'm relaxed, you're like, okay, I like this person. You know, that's just a few ways that the body is uh constantly communicating to you

Desire As A Relearned Skill

Aleksandra Trkulja

to demonstrate like how you're feeling in response to your circumstances.

Ailey Jolie

You name something in there, just like very briefly, but it was in the example, which is this question of really honoring our desire and our and our wanting. And I know that that's a common thing that people come to sex therapy with is this presentation of like, I don't know what I want. And I would love to hear from you if you have any loose theories or hypothesis, hypotheses around why it's so hard to identify our desires, but also our wants.

Aleksandra Trkulja

That's a really great question. I love that question. I don't think I've ever been asked that question. So I guess my the my theory on why it might be difficult to identify our desires and wants is that it goes back to what we discussed around anxiety and shame. Often young girls and women specifically are not empowered to explore the things they desire, the things that they want. They are often uh quite overtly shamed for wanting things. And I think because we live in a patriarchal society, feminine things, such as painting your nails, getting your hair done, getting doled up, looking pretty, liking girly things, all of that is in implicitly uh shamed. Like, and and look at, I mean, if there's one way we can kind of really make that obvious, it's like look at what we raise young boys to not do. We we almost like shame them for embodying feminine interests, qualities, and characteristics. Um, and so really I think femininity, feminine desire, wants is quite overtly shamed in society. And so when young women turn up in their relationships going, whoa, like I don't think I know what I actually want or what I desire here, that's no coincidence to me. It's like, no, no, that's like decades of being shamed for, or even like, not even shamed necessarily, but being kind of um prevented from exploring. We don't do that to young boys to that to that degree. They're allowed to explore their wants and desires in a way.

Ailey Jolie

How do you work with someone who is maybe disconnected from their desire or their wants?

Aleksandra Trkulja

It's a really great question. Um the first place I go with them is when they go, I don't know what I want. I don't know what I desire. I say, well, what kind of music do you like? And then they always say something. You go, show me, show me what's on your Spotify. Like, what's the music that you're enjoying right now? What kind of food do you like eating? Like if you're gonna go on a date, what kind of cuisine do you enjoy? Right? Do you like linen bed sheets, bamboo bed sheets, cotton bed sheets? Do you know? Like, do you like certain kinds of sport or movement? Like, how do you enjoy moving your body? Um, these are all actually desires and wants. And so, really, what I'm doing is taking a non-sexual context and empowering that person to realize that they actually can identify their wants and desires, and that skill is totally transferable. In the same way that you explore the food that you like, you can explore the sex that you like. Sometimes it's trial and error, sometimes you got to eat that, you know, like weird dish and then go, okay, not for me, you know. I've tried snails, not for me, you know, but that's I only figured out that I don't like snails because I tried them. And so I think that sometimes it's actually not as daunting or as intimidating as most people often anticipate. It's actually quite simple that you are quite uh quite simply just coming back to a sense of curiosity about what does my body enjoy. And that's it.

Ailey Jolie

I know I know that you often invite your clients to call, um invite your clients to do a practice called pleasure journaling. And I would love to hear how this ties into connecting to our wants and desires and why you feel like this is a really important process of not only connecting to our sexuality but also our body.

Aleksandra Trkulja

Yes, so the pleasure journal is very much complementing this exact idea, which essentially is a bit of an exercise that I put together for people based on the dialectical behavioral therapy skill of describing, as well as the five senses grounding technique. I kind of just put those together. Um, so all you're really doing is using your five senses to identify every day three things that bring you pleasure. And for me, every day it's my coffee. So I love making coffee, I love drinking coffee, I'm 100% addicted to coffee and I've made my peace with that. But essentially, what the pleasure journal would look like for me is just sitting down, holding the warm coffee in my hands, noticing the warmth. I'm using neutral language to describe my sensory experience. So I'm not saying this hot coffee is in my like, I don't know, old, haggard, wrinkly hands. Oh, like I'm just going, I can feel the warmth of the coffee in my hands. As I sip, I'm noticing the flavor of the coffee. I'm noticing the texture of it, I'm noticing the sensation of the coffee moving through my mouth down my throat. I'm noticing even the smells and aromas of the coffee. And all I'm really doing there is just taking that mindful moment to connect into a sensory experience with my body that is non-sexual. So, very similarly to like noticing the food you like to eat or the music you like to listen to, this is just training the skill of bodily awareness. It's really like non-intimidating for a lot of people. But what I describe to them is essentially how this skill applies down the line to sex and relationships, where at some point you can then start to drop into your body during some kind of physical touch or intimacy and really start to notice: am I enjoying this? Could this be better? Right? Like this idea that you can be present in

Trauma Informed Safety And Pace

Aleksandra Trkulja

your body during touch and potentially give feedback or potentially just continue enjoying whatever's happening.

Ailey Jolie

How do you maybe change your approach to the pleasure journal or even the conversation around desire or wanting when you know the person in front of you has a history of trauma?

Aleksandra Trkulja

Um, that's a really great question. I think it really depends on the individual. I think um in sex therapy, I often will ask people um about, you know, are there relevant histories of trauma that I need to be aware of? We do not go into detail about this in like the first few sessions. It's more just like flagging, um, if it's part of your, I guess, larger like context. And most people who do have histories of trauma might say, yep, this is something that's like happened um for me, um, and this is how I'd like to address how it might still be impacting my sex, my experience of sex and relationships. So as we go along where we're exploring things like the pleasure journal, we're also looking at what does safety feel like in the body? How can it be created even in your physical environment? So, earlier, when we were talking about the fawning response, I used an example of someone's tone of voice. Um, this is like a really big one that especially if I'm working with a heterosexual couple and a woman has experienced a history of domestic violence or any kind of trauma, and and during conflict, uh voices get raised that can be quite activating for a lot of people. And so, really, it's creating this like physical environment where, like, even in conflict, voices don't get raised, it's always like respectful, it's using body language, tone of voice that continue to create safety, even in moments where emotionally it might feel a little bit um tense, and so it really just depends on the person and their specific needs for their nervous systems and what safety looks like for them. But it's a conversation around even if they're connecting to their body and they're feeling like a block, we might even just slow the process down, be like, let's breathe into that space. What's let's notice what comes up there, and let's also take time. We don't need to rush through it. There's no like timeline, you know. A lot of people like, so how many sessions do I need? I don't know. As actually, your body will determine that. So we kind of just always manage the expectations of like we move at your body's pace, and that could change along the way depending on what comes up.

Ailey Jolie

In your answer there, you gave a few little sentences or statements that in my mind relates back to the polyvagal theory, which I know is that is something that informs your practice. And I would love to just hear what led you to kind of merge those two things together or why you think polyvagal theory and sex therapy are such a good combination together, because sex therapy and interpersonal biology neurobiology oftentimes don't get paired together. Sex therapy can be um sometimes quite clinical, quite cognitive, and not necessarily merging itself into the latest research or I would say like fringe psychotherapy techniques and practices.

Aleksandra Trkulja

Yeah, look, I think it's a really interesting conversation because even recently, I guess I was like, you know what, the polyvagal theory was studied mostly on like men and maybe rats, if I'm not mistaken. So, like, even still, like there's emerging research that actually might accurately describe women's experiences. So unfortunately, I'm using this very like general kind of research, but I do think that the any nervous system research is helpful research. At its core, therapy, face-to-face therapy is about nervous system regulation. That I think what people don't realize is that even when you yes, it's cathartic to talk about your issues. Yes, it is helpful to be given strategies and resources to help with your development. But fundamentally, face-to-face therapy is about turning up, dysregulated, and co-regulating based on your therapist's regulated nervous system. Much like a child seeks reassurance from like a parent who then soothes them with like a calming, you know, it's okay, everything's alright. Like, oh, you're hurt, it's okay, like we'll put a band-aid on it. Like that approach of unconditional, I guess, like care is fundamentally about nervous systems. And so I think it's important for all therapy to be connected to nervous system work. Um, and I think specifically in sex, where your body is so so much at the forefront of the experience, it's yeah, deeply important to consider the state of your nervous system. Um, that without considering it, you're not considering the body really. And so it becomes this like cognitive work. And I guess that's also what I found really fascinating in my like Western institutionalized learnings of sex therapy was that it was all cognitive work. It was all heady, like, let's talk about the experience of being in your body. And I was like, okay, and are we gonna talk about or are we gonna look at how to be in the body? Are we gonna, you know, somatically, how are we going to actually land in our own bodies to notice? And so I guess uh yeah, the nervous system and the body work is deeply important to,

Co Regulation In Intimacy

Aleksandra Trkulja

I guess, talking um and working with sex and relationships.

Ailey Jolie

You spoke there a lot about the experience of co-regulation, and I would love to just explore a little bit in your perspective, the difference between co-regulation and self-regulation, where maybe one is more important than the other. I know some people don't believe self-regulation to even exist, but just also to just speak to that kind of nuance there, because I think it's so important and oftentimes gets missed over, specifically when we talk about sexuality and how those that we are sexually intimate with can be our greatest co-regulators, or they can be our greatest dysregulators as well.

Aleksandra Trkulja

Yes, absolutely. So, yeah, I guess um self-regulation uh is the process of using particular skills or strategies to soothe your own nervous system. Um, that could look like doing your own paced breathing exercise, it could look like journaling, it could look like going for a run, it could look like listening to some music and doing some housework. Like it ultimately just means doing something on your own to help regulate your nervous system. Um, whereas co-regulation is where you're using another nervous system to regulate. And the research uh does, I guess, kind of move in favor of co-regulation, but that I think is fundamental to being human beings, which is we often need another nervous system in order to regulate more effectively, I would say. And so co-regulation um, I think is a really great skill to have because you can do it with anyone, you can have a hug with a friend, family member, like you can um co-regulate with almost any other nervous system, which is I think as well why like things like uh animal therapy, things like that, can be super helpful. Um, and I don't know that self-regulation is futile, I still think it's worthwhile, but I do think that co-regulation is probably more effective for a lot of people. And I think in sex and relationships, especially as you're moving through things like trauma or conflict resolution, um, or even just periods of intense stress, having co-regulation exercises established in your relationship can be super helpful at moving through those kinds of sticky moments that we just have because we're humans, you know?

Ailey Jolie

What are some things that you wish more people knew about sex therapy? Ooh.

Aleksandra Trkulja

I really wish people knew that sex therapy isn't necessarily this intimidating like process. I really wish people understood or were open to understanding sex therapy as a life-changing personal growth journey, that it really is putting under the microscope your own relationship with sex based on a lot of the messages that you received, you know, from society, friends, family, culture growing up. And by I guess inspecting it, empowering yourself to move more fluidly through sex and relationships in your life and how liberating that can be.

Ailey Jolie

What are some common misconceptions that you often find yourself maybe um experiencing with clients or potential clients or just general public out there?

Aleksandra Trkulja

Um a lot of misconceptions, I guess, around sex therapy is that we just talk about sex all the time and that it's like quite explicit. I would say, again, it comes back to the topic we spoke about earlier that really it's talking about a lot more things to do with anxiety and shame, um, belief systems, mindset, perspectives, body image, like all of these things. Um, I guess are more common topics that we talk about in sex therapy. Sometimes we talk explicitly, but usually it happens in a very um almost like practical way. Of understanding, like, okay, like if you're experiencing pain with penetration, let's talk about exactly where that pain is being experienced in your body, or if we're talking about difficulty uh reaching orgasm, like let's examine the kinds of sexual behaviors that occur in your sex life, and are they sufficient enough to arouse you? Are you enjoying them? Like the the explicitness of sex therapy is never done in like a shaming way, it's in this incredibly like neutral, non-judgmental, like curious way where we're just constantly asking why, like, or what could be better here? Like, how could this be better

Curiosity Over Shame

Aleksandra Trkulja

for you? Um, so I think that's a pretty common misconception that I would love to debunk.

Ailey Jolie

What do you feel like really helps someone start to apply more of a curious perspective on their sexuality and the relationship they have with their body body rather than one of shame?

Aleksandra Trkulja

I think one of the things I often encourage people to do is question where they learnt certain beliefs about sex relationships and bodies. Um and I often encourage them to dig a little deeper. So, for example, when I have clients who turn up and say, Oh, you know, like uh it's embarrassing for me to ask for what I want, or like my partner's pleasure is the priority. I have to make sure he's satisfied, otherwise, you know, um, we might break up, or actually, I have to, my body has to look a certain way in order to like find a boyfriend that's when I'll be like lovable. I'll also often ask questions like, well, where did you learn that? Where did you learn that in order to be deserving of love, your body must look a certain way or weigh a certain amount, or where where did you learn that in order to be in a safe, happy relationship, you must cater sexually to a partner? Like, where did let's explore that? We're not judging it, but like genuinely, where did that message come from? And the more we delve deeper, I guess, the more people start to really examine their sexological worldview, so the set of attitudes, beliefs, behaviors that form how they relate to sex relationships and bodies. And through that, I think I'm never telling anyone like how to be curious or how to change their relationship. I'm just prompting the curiosity train, if you will, to be like, hmm, I wonder if we examine this, what would happen? And it's they kind of you know open a door, I guess, of being super curious, and that kind of makes them start to question everything, which is really fun for me to watch.

Ailey Jolie

What do you wish more people were curious about when it comes to their body and the relationship they have with it?

Aleksandra Trkulja

I think this is really hard to answer because I find myself wanting to project my own curiosities onto other people, but really I think it's so subjective. Of like, I personally was so curious about these messages my body would send me in the most like menial context, like shopping in the supermarket, where my body, I just was so curious about like wow, my body is constantly communicating to me. Um, but maybe other people are curious about their pleasure, maybe other people are curious about their safety, um, maybe other people are curious about how their body needs rest, you know, like there are so many different things to be curious about, but I guess even starting with the approach of let me be curious about something to do with my body is always so meaningful and rewarding, in my opinion.

Ailey Jolie

If someone is listening to this podcast right now, and maybe they struggle to connect with their body or they have no idea what it means to be curious with their body, and they're just beginning to wonder, or maybe start to explore, um, what would you really want them to know?

Aleksandra Trkulja

I would want them to know that I'm so glad that they have been listening to our conversation and that even by being present with this podcast episode, they're already showing curiosity. The curiosity is already there. Um, that to expand the curiosity to their own bodies would be something as simple as slow intentional moments of bodily awareness, whether that's mindfully drinking your coffee, whether it's mindfully eating or chewing some food that you're having, whether it's even mindfully applying like moisturizer or lotion to the body, or washing your hair, or putting on a jumper, like all of these little moments, even like the moments we have where it's like, you know, when you change your bed sheets and they're all clean, and then you have a shower and you're all clean, and then you get into your bed and you're like, mmm, like those are bodily aware moments, like you're in your body in those moments, and that's you being curious and noticing, like, oh my body likes this, you know. And that's I I would love for people to know that that's enough to start there, you know.

Ailey Jolie

Thank you so much for your time today, but also the work that you do. I always ask guests right at the end of our time together if they have anything upcoming that they would like the listener to know about.

Aleksandra Trkulja

Oh, okay, exciting. Um, the upcoming thing I have is that I have just written um a sex education course with a company called Temple, and we have put together essentially a lot of different um topics, exercises, somatic strategies. We I've written about two-thirds of the content, so we have a lot of sex therapy input stuff on body image, mental health, the nervous system, relationships, communication, anatomy, but we also have contributors who come from mindset backgrounds and tantra somatic backgrounds. So to just check that out.

Ailey Jolie

The line from this conversation that I keep sitting with is one Alex opened with you can't have full embodied pleasure in a body you hate. It sounds so obvious when you say it out loud, and yet it's probably the thing most people who come to sex therapy have never been told directly, because the dominant cultural message is almost the inverse. Fix your desire, fix your sex life, and your relationship with your body will change. Alex is saying the opposite, and I think she's right. What she's describing clinically is the relationship between the autonomic nervous system and sexual response. When the body is in a chronic state of low threat, the nervous system is not in a state that supports arousal, pleasure, or genuine erotic presence. The sympathetic branch is running the show, blood flow is redirected, the pelvic floor, as Alex pointed out, with characteristic directness is holding, and no amount of technique or communication skill changes that if the underlying physiology hasn't shifted yet. This is why I've always understood sex therapy and somatic work as inseparable, even though mainstream sex therapy training doesn't always treat them that way. The body is not just the site of the symptom, it's the site of the work. And the work of returning to the body after a long period of shame or disconnection is not primarily cognitive. You can't think your way into felt safety. You can't reframe your way into pleasure. You have to actually arrive somewhere. The piece about the fawn response deserves more space than we gave it. Alex named something clinically important that for women, fawning tends to precede flight or fight on the threat response hierarchy, which means in sexual context, the most common way dysregulation presents is not refusal or shutdown, but compliance instead. Sex that happens because it feels less dangerous to say yes than to navigate what saying no might mean or cost. That's not consent, but it's extraordinarily common. Recognizing this requires exactly the kind of interceptive awareness Alex was describing, knowing what your body is actually signaling underneath the social performance of being fine. The way she works with clients who don't know what they want, starting with music, with food, with bed sheets, is clinically elegant because it decouples desire from the weight of sexuality before any of that territory has been made safe. Desire is a skill, it's a muscle, and it atrophies in people who are shamed early for wanting things, which is most women to some degree. You build it back in low stakes places first. That's not a workaround, that's the actual therapeutic sequence. The pleasure journal practices follow the same logic. Mindful sensory attention and completely non-sexual context. DBTs describing the skill, the five senses applied to ordinary daily experience. It's not about asking someone to be in their body during sex before they've ever practiced being in their body at all. The scaffolding has to come first. And I want to spend some time exploring the co-regulation piece, which I think is the most under-discussed dimension of sex therapy. What happens between two nervous systems in intimate contact is not a metaphor. It's physiological. When your partner is dysregulated, you will feel it too. When they're settled, you will feel that too. The quality of the relational field is not separate from the quality of the sexual experience. They are the same thing, which is why working on your relationship with your own body and working on how you regulate together with a partner are not two different projects. Alex's sex education course with Temple is out in 2026. All details in the show notes when it drops. And if this conversation stirred something in you, embodies where I take this kind of work deeper and into practice, you can find out more at embodymethod.com. Thank you for listening and for being in the tender, ongoing process of coming home to your body and allowing this podcast, our guest, and me, Ailey Jolie, to be a part of that process too. If you found value in this episode, it would mean so much to me for you to share the podcast with friends, a loved one, or on your social platforms. If you have the time, please rate and review the podcast so that this podcast reaches a larger audience and can inspire more and more humans to connect to their bodies too. Thank you for being here and nurturing the relationship you have with your very young body.