Purity culture promised a body that had been told to stay silent for years that it would speak fluently on the wedding night. Many couples are still waiting.

Dr. Laura Anderson has spent her career at the point where that promise fails. A therapist, trauma recovery coach, and author of When Religion Hurts You, she founded the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery, created the Certified Religious Trauma Practitioner program, and works with people on nearly every continent on religious trauma, coercive control, sexualized violence, and the nervous system. Her view, offered plainly in this conversation, is that purity culture is a form of sexual abuse, and that the body holds that whether or not the person still believes it.

That claim organizes the hour. We begin in Nashville, where a stranger's second question is often which church you attend. We move through what purity culture actually contained, which was far more than a pledge card, and why its aftermath can resemble the aftermath of sexualized violence. We ask what the old rules do to desire inside marriage, why a patriarchal arrangement leaves even its men without a victory, and where a wife is supposed to find room to want when her husband asks her to want it. Laura describes her starting point for rebuilding a relationship with a body that was taught to be an enemy, and it involves the restroom. We also talk about deconstruction inside couples therapy, and about midlife, perimenopause, and why old material resurfaces when it does.

If you came out of a high-control environment, or love someone who did, this conversation offers vocabulary and leaves the verdict open. The question it returns: if a body can learn to treat itself as dangerous without anyone laying a hand on it, what exactly are we calling the injury?

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Michelle Dovey spent twenty years as the painter of oak trees. Then, sketching classical statues in Florence, she looked down and found she had drawn an entire male figure except for one region, left blank without meaning to. The next afternoon she drew nothing but the genitals of Michelangelo's David. Within a year she had drawn more than seventy naked men, in a project she designed as an act of permission.

In this episode, the internationally exhibiting artist and author talks with existential sex therapist Dr. Emma Smith about what that year taught her about shame, and about the skill at the center of her work now, the shameless ask: sensing what you want, trusting it, and naming it clearly.

The conversation starts with the blind spot, the thing in plain sight that your conditioning won't let you see. From there it moves to the friends and family who begged her to stop, and to the men who told her it was the first time they had ever felt seen. Its hinge is a question the models kept asking her: how would you like us to pose? Michelle found that asking made her feel fantastic whether or not she got what she asked for, and that not asking left her irritated and tired. Dr. Emma brings it home to long-term couples, for whom asking is harder precisely because their partner knows them, and to the men in her practice who want, more than they can say, to feel desired. They also talk about the female gaze, a tantric gazing practice, and Michelle's retreat in Venice this November.

If the person you love asked you tonight how you would like them to be, would you have an answer, or would you hand the pencil back?

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Michelle's Venice retreat, November 4–8: https://venice.michelledovey.com/unedited

More from Michelle: https://invitation.michelledovey.com

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On the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, a plaque explains that it was once called the Big Canyon. Somebody upgraded the marketing. Dr. Emma read it at the end of a month spent trying to name the size of two losses that arrived at once.

Her cousin died after major heart surgery. In the same weeks, a business partnership she had believed was also a friendship ended, with the departing partner labeling her, essentially, a liability. She expected grief to sort itself by rank. Instead, the business breakup landed with a sucker-punch quality the death did not, and this solo episode asks why.

Her answer is authorship. Death is universal; it says nothing about you except that you are human and that you loved. A loss with an author arrives with a verdict attached. From there, Dr. Emma moves into territory she works in every day as an existential sex therapist: what happens when you can feel that something is off and keep hearing "it's fine," why insight offers no exemption from pain, why any relationship, romantic or professional, means accepting some liability, and the sentence she wishes she had used: "I hear you saying you're fine, and it doesn't feel fine to me. Are you willing to explore this with me?" If the answer is no, that is important information.

It is also an episode about perspective you prescribe for yourself: hiking just far enough into a canyon to feel caught between above and below, and a new deal landing in the inbox while a draft obituary sits open on the screen. Grief and good news keep arriving in the same week. Nobody gets to choose the order.

Who in your life has told you everything is fine, and what would it cost to say it doesn't feel fine over here?

Full show notes

Support for the show: Nine to Kind Planners, the planner Dr. Emma actually uses. Code EMMA20 for 20% off → https://ninetokind.com/

If this one landed, tell Dr. Emma: http://forms.gle/sS7z5AFH1DohJjAU6