In this essay, I’ll share some of my journey and some practices I’ve been experimenting with for befriending my own inner teen. There may be sexual triggers in here, so read ahead with your own teen self cradled in your lap, as mine is now while I write.
There were a lot of great things about coming of age in the 90s: The music - MTV actually played music videos! The fashion was amazing, baggy clothes were hip, and nobody was stuffing themselves into tight fitting yoga pants that constricted their uteruses yet. Nobody knew sugar was bad for you - oh man I ate a lot of airheads. We were still able to get lost off the grid for hours, being told to come home with the sunset, ah yes, we were still beautifully linked to the celestial bodies as our timekeepers.
And the obvious one was being alive before the invention of the internet. Oooh, I have sympathy for the teens today. I’m sure this has made the already suffocatingly awkward time of being a teenager even worse because it’s now on public display. I simply cannot imagine what that does to a young and impressionable budding personality. (Side note, I’m hosting a workshop next Sunday called Body Literacy for Teens, if you’re a mother with a teen daughter, talking about reproductive health, the first perhaps in a series, so get a ticket to that event here!)
But people were relatively clueless about kids’ mental health and well-being back then. We all had some character-building times, didn’t we? Yeah, that’s what they used to call traumatic experiences, things that put hair on your chest.
I’ve been working with my inner maiden this year, especially my inner teen self. She has been coming through in my dreams a lot lately, asking for resolution with some of the traumas I experienced, asking to be seen for how she has been carrying them inside me. Storytelling is one thing she has asked me to do. So here we are.
Examining my narratives around sex from this time has been um, well.. a bit confronting, as there were a lot of sad and even devastating events that happened when my sexuality was budding. Many wires got crossed that I’m only now untangling, two decades into my healing journey.
I am now able to see that, because I wasn’t getting the love and support I needed from a village of mature attuned adults, I learned to use my sexuality as a way to get love and attention. Basically, pleasing everyone else before thinking about what my needs were. I don’t know if I came to this conclusion on my own, or if I saw it modeled by older girls. Either way, I think a lot of us with broken homes came to this same conclusion.
Much of my lifelong sexual imprints were formed in this tumultuous time of life: when my parents were battling for custody, when I was estranged from my father for a time, when a friend at school was raped and murdered, when my high school boyfriend cheated on me, when I felt so much pressure to be sexual, but not too sexual… it was a time when we all were over-sexualized and yet grossly under-educated about sex.
By the time I left home at age 20, I was having sex regularly, and had multiple sex partners as a teenager. I had been unsuccessfully seeking connection through sex, had been taken advantage of when drinking, and had many experiences where my body told me no, but inside I just said, “Okay fine, I’ll just lay here. Hurry up and get it over with.” Disassociating was really easy because painful sex was pretty common. I had had an orgasm maybe a handful of times. Basically, I thought it was a magic trick, but had no idea what the magic trick was. (Learning about the anatomy of female arousal was a huge game changer, much later in my life.)
It took a long time to heal, well if I’m honest I’m still working on it. A lot of this is a lifelong process. I’ve worked through a lot, and this healing journey has deeply informed my work with women today. It’s been largely psychosomatic, meaning at the intersection of the body-mind, where emotion is held in the tissue. This can be a strange concession for some. It was for me as well, before I started to have life-changing catharsis events during hip-openers in yoga class that cracked me open to a flood of memories I had stored in my pelvis.
But if you know, then you know, and this article isn't going to be about convincing anyone about this fact. So here are my top 3 suggestions for working with your inner teen, especially through healing sexual imprints.
EMDR + Posture
When I had my awakening, or the first catharsis events in yoga that led me down a rabbit hole of repressed memories and experiences, I realized I needed professional support. I cannot express enough how important space holding is for this work, especially containers held by compassionate and skilled professional healers. I did a series of EMDR sessions with a therapist, and I asked her if we could combine it with the yoga postures I was having trouble with. Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy is a mental health treatment technique that involves moving your eyes a specific way while you process traumatic memories. There were also accompanying sounds through a set of headphones. This work gave me and my inner teen the first safe environment to tap into the feelings I had been repressing and allowed us to ride the bell curve of sensation together safely. It was profound and ignited a knowing in me, that including the body was important for true trauma healing to occur.
This therapist was also the first to introduce me to parts work, or working with the part of me that experienced the trauma, at that age. My work here in these sessions was focused on my younger self, age 5 or so. I’ve since worked with it in several other therapies for all ages of development.
Yoni Steaming
The practice of Yoni Steaming dates back thousands of years. It can be traced back to almost every indigenous Asian, African, Mayan, and Native American culture. Yoni Steaming is the hottest trend right now in female sexual awakening, with reasons grounded in folk medicine as well as science. Check out the first scientific study that has been completed on the effects of yoni steaming for postpartum recovery.
Yoni steaming is a gentle method of maintaining female reproductive and sexual health with herb-infused steam. Yoni steaming is an excellent pre or post-menstrual hygienic practice, as well as standard postnatal treatment by midwives around the world. Yoni steaming is known by many traditions as yoni steaming, v-steaming, chai-yok, bajos, and womb therapy.
Working with your inner teen while yoni steaming can melt the imprints of past partners, trespass experiences, tension, and dissociation, and begin to build trust within your body. This is the most gentle and nourishing way I know to slowly bring sensation to the sexual tissues, while it’s just you and the steam. Being with your own energy only at the beginning of this journey can be completely revolutionary.
Here is a guided meditation I made specifically for Yoni Steaming with Your Inner Maiden.
You can read more about Yoni Steaming on my website, including a very cool map from the Peristeam Hydrotherapy Institute which documents the places where data has been collected about the use of yoni steaming in cultures around the world.
Internal Pelvic Mapping
One of my top three suggestions for women wanting to heal from dissociation, tension and hypertonicity, hypotonicity and desensitization, childbirth, sexual trespass, or pelvic trauma. Making this a regular practice is going to revolutionize your life.
When we bring the inner teen into the sphere and proceed only at the pace she is comfortable with, asking her to guide us and set the pace, the unraveling can be immediate. Layers and layers of crossed boundaries can dissolve, making it easier for us to proceed with the power behind our voices once more.
Going into the tissues themselves, with your own hands and nobody else can be absolutely revolutionary. It was during Pelvic Floor Teacher Training that I was first invited to go home and explore myself internally. The thought had just never occurred to me before. It was also in this training that I learned the concepts of hypertonicity and hypotonicity, or pelvic tone dysfunction due to too much tone, or not enough tone, both signifying a structural weakness. I theorized by analzying my symptoms at the time that I had hypertonicity, but it wasn't until I did some internal pelvic mapping that I was able to confirm it. Releasing this held tension opened me up to a new world. This presented a vital mind-body portal for me, and was a catalyst for the next decade of my training in learning how to guide others and to eventually work internally with women.
I wrote a nice guidebook, on how to do at-home internal pelvic mapping with yourself. It’s just $10 and funds the free speculums I give out in my in-person workshops!
Sometimes I work one-on-one with women to remap, teaching them about the anatomy of their own sexual body and arousal, which is done within a container of a Woman’s Living Pelvis Reset Protocol.
If you're interested in working with me, please visit that link, or book a Living Pelvis Discovery Consultation with me to discuss further.
So while some of you reading this grew up before the internet, we all now live with it, and that means we all are constantly harangued with the over-culture’s ideas of what we should look like, how we should dress, how sexual we should be etc.
I believe healing our relationship with our young teen selves can make us more resilient in the face of all this augmented reality. From a Harvard Business Review article titled: Research: How AR Filters Impact People’s Self-Image
“Addressing the risks associated with AR starts with understanding them. Our research explores how the use of AR tools can actually shift people’s core beliefs about themselves, leading to a phenomenon we call the “augmented self” — that is, a self-image that has been influenced by AR. For some, we found that this augmented self threatens the existing sense of self, negatively impacting their psychological wellbeing. For others, it can offer hope that self-enhancement is possible (which isn’t necessarily better, as it can lead people to focus excessively on changing their appearances through makeup, new outfits, or more extreme solutions such as cosmetic surgery).”
Let’s all make sure to go outside lots, talk to each other face to face, learn our own anatomy of arousal, and yes, my last feral suggestion is to touch our pussies with our hands more.
I am looking forward to the conversation in the comments below!
What a fantastic suggestion with steaming. I have utilized the practice to support my cycle, but hadn't considered it's healing potential in terms of trapped trauma and womb wounds. Stretching, dancing, writing and internal mapping all supported me after a miscarriage when I opened pandoras box inside of my shadows. I began dreaming of a black panther and experiencing a freeze response that opened me INTO my teenage years. Dreamworld really supported me by consistently allowing me to explore the landscapes of my unconscious and delivering messages through my dreams that lead me to the next breadcrumb of healing. I wonder about our primal ancestors and the rites of passage into their sexual evolutions. Did their natural dynamics within a tribal setting and their deeply spiritual relationship to nature mean they didn't have these oh so confusing and traumatic sexual wounds and confusions?