Sex Gets Real 235: Healing, resilience, & pleasure with Staci Haines

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If you’ve been thinking about working with a coach around your desire, relationship, body, or shame, I am now accepting new clients and my rates are increasing January 2019. Learn more at dawnserra.com/work-with-me.

Healing, survival, resilience, and how pleasure heals with Staci Haines

Every once in a while, I have a conversation that brings things into focus. This week’s conversation with Staci Haines one of those special experiences.

I’ve long had Staci’s book, “Healing Sex” on my shelf and used it as a resource for healing around sex. But speaking with her was a rare treat.

We talk about trauma and oppression, surviving, and then move into a beautiful exploration of what it means to heal, having compassion for the ways we survived, and developing a practice around resilience and pleasure.

Why is pleasure so important? How can we invite intentional rituals of resilience into our relationships? Why is social action so crucial to our well-being? What do human beings most need to feel their aliveness?

It is so damn good, and I hope you savor it the way I did.

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In this episode, Staci and I talk about:

• Connecting individual and collective healing to social actions, and how our current social and political state is in need of this healing.
• Understanding what causes harm and the possible ways for it to be eliminated.
• What healing can look like and how to bring this healing to the people in our lives.
• The power of pleasure to heal and why pleasure gets us embodied.
• What resilience means and how we can build our relationships from a place of resilience and pleasure.
• The science behind pleasure in healing and how it brings us into our embodied experiences that allows us to be more connected and more open to the possibilities.
• Creating a daily practice that can help you connect to your resilience and pleasure and being purposeful in doing the practice to help bring us be in a more resourced state.
• How dissociation and appease as survival reactions actually help us to ground ourselves during traumatic situations.
• How trauma splits our safety, belonging, and dignity when we use our survival skills.
• Opening yourself to discomfort to access healing. There will always be discomfort in healing, it’s a part of it but opening yourself up to it will allow you to access more skills and pleasure.

About Staci Haines:

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Episode Transcript

Dawn Serra: You’re listening to Sex Gets Real with Dawn Serra, that’s me. This is a place where we explore sex, bodies, and relationships, from a place of curiosity and inclusion. Tying the personal to the cultural where you’re just as likely to hear tender questions about shame and the complexities of love, as you are to hear experts challenging the dominant stories around pleasure, body politics and liberation. This is about the big and the small, about sex and everything surrounding it we don’t usually name. The funny, the awkward, the imperfect happen here in service to joy, connection, healing and creating healthier relationships with ourselves and each other. So, welcome to Sex Gets Real. Don’t forget to hit subscribe.

Hey, you. Welcome to this week’s episode of Sex Gets Real. I know I have said this more than once. But I’m saying it again because it’s really hitting me hard today. There are conversations that I get to have that shift things inside of me. That wake things up, that make me question the stories that I’ve been living inside of or that give me new context and new perspective so that things I’ve been kind of circling suddenly come into focus. And this week’s conversation with Staci Haines is exactly one of those conversations. It is deeply important to me. I loved talking with Staci and I can’t wait to have her back on the show. And there are moments during this talk, when she shares something that crystallizes ideas, and thoughts, and experiences that I’ve been trying to collect and bring into focus. The clarity of her work, the clarity of what she’s doing in the world and why it matters is incredible. And this entire conversation is about healing and trauma and how utterly resilient we are.

Dawn Serra: There is definitely some talk about sexual abuse and sexual violence, nothing that’s super graphic, but it is present. A lot of the work that Staci does is in that arena. If you have not yet read her book “Healing Sex: A Mind, Body Approach to Healing Sexual Trauma.” It is a crucial book and has long been on my shelf and in my library. She’s also one of the founders of a nonprofit called Generation Five, whose whole goal is to bring a transformative justice approach to eliminating child sexual abuse in five generations. So the work she’s doing is all about embodiment and healing and really understanding how we heal through pleasure and joy and connection and the wisdom that is our survival. I think that you’re going to find a lot of richness in this conversation, I cannot wait for you to hear it.

I also just wanted to remind you that my coaching rates are going up in January of 2019. So if you’ve been thinking about maybe getting a little bit of help, either with your relationship to pleasure and your body, or in a relationship that you’re in, you’re feeling stuck or unsure. That’s the work that I do. I do have a couple of spots left in my coaching practice. And I would love to work with you. So if you want to chat with me about potentially working together, before those rates go up, then you can head to dawnserra.com/work-with-me/. The link will be in the show notes to check out what it means. I, of course, am folding in the Narrative Therapy, skills and techniques that I have recently acquired, and also a lot of the wisdom and the knowledge that I’ve been getting from the body trust work I’m doing through BeNourished. So, if you could use some support, please do take a look at that and reach out to me. I think that would be a wonderful thing to do. Nice little end of the year – self care and support. 

Dawn Serra: So let me tell you a little bit about Staci and then we’ll jump in. Staci and I also recorded a bonus chat for Patreon. So, if you support the show at $3 and above, then you get weekly bonus content. And if you support at $5 and above, then you can weigh in on listener questions and maybe hear your answers read on the show. So this week, Staci and I did have a chance to do a little bonus conversation. You can hear that at patreon.com/SGRpodcast. 

So, Staci Haines is a co-founder and the executive director of Generative Somatics. She integrates trauma and healing and a systemic analysis of power into this unique and powerful work. Staci is committed to the interdependence of personal, collective, and systemic transformation. We are shaped by our deeply personal experiences and our social conditions. Through embodied transformation and collective action, we can move ourselves, communities and society toward what is life affirming. The focus of GS is to bring the transformative power of somatics to serve social and environmental justice movements. That was a quote from Staci. Staci is also a founder of Generation Five which has the mission to end the sexual abuse of children within five generations. So, if you want to check out Generative Somatics, they do all kinds of trainings. If you want to check out Healing Sex, her book, which is deeply personal and a really beautiful look at the intersections of healing, sex, and trauma. Or if you want to check out Generation Five, the nonprofit, then all of those links are in the show notes for this episode and also at dawnserra.com for this episode. So here is my– God, such a yummy conversation with Staci Haines.

Dawn Serra: Welcome to Sex Gets Real, Staci. I am so looking forward to our conversation today. 

Staci Haines: Me too. Thank you for having me. 

Dawn Serra: You’re so welcome. So your book, “Healing Sex: A Mind, Body Approach to Healing Sexual Trauma” has long been on my bookshelf and it is a wonderful resource that I’ve recommended to so many people. And you do incredible work in the world around trauma and healing, and embodiment and somatics. I’d love to just start by hearing a little bit about what you’re super excited about these days and where you’re going and what you’re learning. 

Staci Haines: Awesome. Thank you so much. Really where my passion and attention is these days is the connection between healing both individual and collective healing and social action. And sadly, our social conditions right now, in our political situation, are basically demanding it of us. But that connection, I just really see those things as inseparable or interdependent. The organization, a couple of us founded in 2009, is called Generative Somatics. And that is really a home where we’re digging into how do we bring trauma healing to social movement spaces. How do we bring basically social action back into healing and kind of break down those, in some ways, a barrier that we inherited, not that we created.

Dawn Serra: The work that you’re doing with Generative Somatics has been something, one, that I would love to experience and get involved in at some point. But I’ve seen such incredible people partnering and experiencing what you’re doing there like adrienne maree brown and I just saw Imran Siddiquee post that he’s been learning some generative somatics and he’s doing such important work around masculinity and sexuality in pop culture. I love seeing so many people who talk about these intersections of healing and love and sex and pleasure – connecting and thinking about these massive issues, but also from a place of body and tenderness and connection. It’s so rich.

Staci Haines: It is It’s so rich. It really is what gives me a lot of hope in our times. I mean, I feel very honored to be working with a lot of amazing, both activists and social movement folks. And then also to just feel – I mean, I’ve been doing healing and social change work, organizing work, really since my 20s. So, I have a couple of good decades under my belt at this point. And I think what’s so exciting to me, is the depth at which people are taking on this intersection of healing and social justice or environmental justice work. Just to tell you a story – We’ve been in a partnership with the National Domestic Workers Alliance, really, for the last seven years. And, of course, they’re doing – they’re leading a lot of the organizing and campaigns around the border and ICE right now. And, we co-created an embodied leadership trauma healing program for all of their member leaders. So for domestic workers who are organizing other domestic workers and one of the things that was so profound it’s like in that there’s leadership development, there’s a kind of political education and strategy work. And then one of our four day intensive was all about trauma healing – just getting to sit with… It’s majority immigrant, majority women of color, majority poor – getting to talk about healing around domestic violence, child sexual abuse, trauma from immigration,being abuse of their workplaces. 

In our lived experiences, I feel like we tell the truth and our lived experiences – oppression, healing, trauma, all are so interconnected. And I just feel like we’re at a movement moment, especially with people forwarding healing justice. I really want to call out Prentis Hemphill’s Worker and Healing Justice as well and movement for black lives. BOLD – Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity is one of our partners. But that intersection between transformation and social change work, it has me it has me feel excited, hopeful and like our generations are innovating something that’s really relevant to the change we want to see for the world. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah, you wrote this powerful little nugget that I think speaks to this so beautifully in the updated edition of Healing Sex. And it said, “We want to eliminate the causes of harm, not just help an endless stream of people or communities heal from trauma.” I think that’s where so many people get a little bit stuck especially in a show that’s about sex where I’m answering questions from people about, “How do I ask for a better blowjob or how do I find my orgasm? Or why is it so hard for me to open up when I meet someone new?” And then these bigger conversations around community. When our kink communities aren’t safe and aren’t centering survivors and collective healing, what happens? When our poly communities and when the places where we go to try and express ourselves end up creating more harm, we have to be able to talk about the personal and the collective. And so I love how you’re kind of naming, “We want to eliminate the cause that even makes space for this to be able to happen, but we have to be able to have these bigger conversations and see how they tie to us so personally. 

Staci Haines: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, it’s really beautifully said and I know what I want to make sure we have time to talk about resilience and pleasure. They’re so important.

Dawn Serra: Oh, yes.

Staci Haines: One more dip on this side is what I really appreciate about scanning out and looking at broader chunks of time. Like, in social movement workers – social change work, there’s a bunch of different theories. But basically, if we kind of look at 50 year chunks of time, we can understand our current moment better. And, when I think about all the people who really worked and organized for queer rights, organized for sex positivity – obviously organized around, cisgender, trans, and gender binary – cisgender women, trans women, and gender binary folks to have more space and more choice around partnership and sexual expression. 

A lot of the things that we have today, and I’m not saying it’s all perfect, we have a lot of work to do, but those are because people before us actually organized to make more space and more liberation and more safety. So I always think of it as, in some ways, our healing, our empowerment, our pleasure, right? As well as how we make space for the future and future generations. Those all feel like, to me, part of our inheritance and also our accountability. And then I just always like to remember the folks who came before us like, “Wow, who made this possible for me? It’s not easy. It’s not simple. But who made this possible for me and how can I be a part of making it possible for a bunch more people who come after me?” 

Dawn Serra: I love that question. Who made this possible for me and recognizing… I think what that helps so much with is a lot of people don’t get involved and don’t know where to start because they feel so overwhelmed often because our culture teaches us that in a hyper individualistic society, it’s on us. It’s on me individually to fix my life and fix my problems. And if I positive-think my way towards it, then I can make anything happen. When we start realizing that so many of the things that are impacting us are not because only of my individual decisions, but they’re because of these larger systemic systems and cultural stories. It can feel like, “I can’t possibly fix that. So, why start? I’m just going to stay small.” But to ask that question of, “Who made this possible for me?” and to see that there’s a lineage happening. It feels like there’s so much more access to power and connection.

Staci Haines: Yeah, totally. I mean, just a little bit in my… I started dealing with my own history of child sexual abuse in my late teens and early 20s. I happen to be in setting at college, where I was really learning inner sexual analysis and third wave feminism. And I often think it is because I was getting politicized and because I was learning names from my own experience and other people’s experiences, that I got to start healing that young. Because on the days when I’m like, “There is no way I can deal with us today on my own.” I would do what we were just talking about. I was like, “Okay, who came before me and who can I do this for that’s after me?” And it gave me strength to do my own healing. I don’t know. Maybe it’s not the same for everyone else, but I’m like, that political empowerment and then getting socially active really was a part of my healing. And then my healing, I also brought to my political work or my social action.

I also think like – just in the times we’re in whatever he who shall not be named, whatever. So many people are like, “Oh my god, what do I do?” And really I have two answers to it. One is I go double down on your healing, because these times are the pressures are traumatizing and join an organization that’s doing social change work. Because it’s so much isn’t so much about our individual activism right now. It is that if we all plugged into an organization of our choice, then that organization gets bigger and we have more collective power, which is what we need right now. So, I found myself now that we’re however many months into this phase, really saying those two things: join an organization and get active, and if you need help finding one, let’s chat. And then, really double down in your healing because the pressures really push us toward isolation, towards splitting, toward fighting with the people we love most or are working with. We need more resilience to be in these times. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah, I just want to name for everyone listening. It’s been a tough couple of years, but especially right now with all of the #whyIdidntreport that go along with the Brett Cavanagh controversy and survivors. Survivors choosing to come forward but also a lot of people kind of feeling like they have to bleed and show their trauma in order to contribute and to feel like they have to, I think is making it really difficult for a lot of people to show up in their lives and to feel safe. 

I think one of the things that’s so incredible about being part of an organization and finding community… For me, personally, one of the biggest parts of starting the journey of healing my sexual trauma was getting into community with other people who had experienced similar types of sexual violence and just feeling utterly held and seen. 

Staci Haines: Exactly, yeah.

Dawn Serra: Yeah. And kind of pushing against that isolation and that shame. But then also feeling like there’s so much wisdom here, that I can learn from and also share and to be able to be in community in that way really does offer us something powerful. So, I love that invitation of – If things feel really hard right now, not only doubling down on healing, which I’d love to talk a little bit more about, but then becoming a part of something important and lending your voice to increase that collective power is just crucial, I think. 

Staci Haines: Yeah, yeah.

Dawn Serra: So, when you say double down on healing, for people listening, who are either new to their healing journey or who don’t even really realize that they kind of really are needing that. When you talk about healing, what are some of the things that come to mind or that you can offer for people who are really kind of like “God, I just feel lost and stuck and numb and cut off.?” 

Staci Haines: It’s a great question. I think one of the first things I think about, and this is definitely our orientation inside of somatic transformation or somatic healing, is really one of the first questions is what do you want and what do you long for? I think so often in healing, we focus on what’s wrong and that’s okay but we do need to face what either is happening or happened. We need to face – to deal with that. But this piece about what are we wanting and what are we longing for is such a great guide in healing. Just like it’s a guide in social change work, really, we’re doing work toward the world we long for; that we wish we had, you know? So inside of healing, starting with that question. And then in some ways going, “Okay, so what needs to be healed on the way to that longing or on that way to what I want?” And for many of us, sadly, for way too many of us, it is trauma. Whether it’s sexual trauma or intimate partner violence, or…

I think one of the things that’s getting more and more acknowledged, is that systems of violence and systems of oppression are also traumatizing. So, if you have had the experience of sexism and misogyny, which so many of us have, if you had the experiences of racism, the impact of racism or homophobia. To really go over, “Right, those things are impacting me and I have survival strategies that I’ve come up with around them. And the survival strategies may or may not be serving my life and my wholeness.”

Staci Haines: I think we look in that direction and then you also said it beautifully. It really is, “Where do we then go get help?” And that help might be a group – like a group of people who share your experience or similar experiences and the intention of that group is healing. It is often really helpful to find someone who is farther down the path from you. And that could be a mentor that could be a healer or therapist, or that could be like a teacher. But, who’s down the path that understands what it is to really heal from harm – heal from harm. And then the last thing is, I really hold that we are deeply resilient people. It might be a harsh way to say it, but I’m like, “Well, we’re resilient enough to be here still. We’re resilient enough to keep orienting towards love, and pleasure, and connection. We’re resilient enough to keep going.” We’re going to change this thing, right? So we’re very resilient. 

I think one of the other pieces we want to really focus on inside of healing is purposely recognizing, “What brings me resilience?” And that is unlike get through it resilience, but rather, it’s like, “What brings me aliveness?” “What brings me a deep sense of wholeness?” And then how do we purposefully practice that even in times that are tough. Just let me give you an example. There’s really great research around resilience and somatics. Some of the things that just pop up are, that research shows but to make it digestible is nature, a direct sense of spirituality, art, dance, and movement, staying connected positively to other people, being able to help others – Those are all resilience factors.

Staci Haines: I put in my daily practice – somatics loves practices, “What can I put in my daily practice that hasn’t been plugged into my resilience, even in these times, or even in the midst of a difficult part of our healing?” And, pleasure is really one of those. So I don’t know if that’s a good segue. 

Dawn Serra: I had the opportunity to talk with Monica Ray Simpson from Sister Song recently who is someone I’ve admired for a really long time; and we had this wonderful discussion around how in this time where so many of the conversations are about trauma and oppression. It’s like this deep exhale to get to talk about pleasure and the ways that it can heal and offer us that resilience. So I love that as you’re thinking about these huge questions around trauma and oppression and the systems that lead to them. Also, then thinking about the depth of our resilience and how pleasure plays a role. When you think about pleasure, how does that impact and feed our healing? What role does pleasure play?

Staci Haines: That’s a great question. I can answer it from a fairly somatic vantage point first and then a different one. So when we need to move into a protective response, right? There is a very predictable way that we do that. We all have what we called Somas. So you might think of them as mind-body spirits, right? Like we all live in bodies. And we have a very deep – and by we I go, this is deep in our human biology. There’s a lot of grounding for this but we have a deep need as humans for safety, for belonging, and for dignity. We can kind of think of those as inherent needs. And then,of course, we have a need for resources like food, housing, school, right? Like that, right? But safety, belonging, and dignity when those are threatened through abuse, oppression, other kinds of trauma. There are very predictable survival strategies that we go into. And folks have probably heard about the fight flight response. And I just want to expand that a bit to fight, flight, freeze, appease, and dissociate. We don’t have to learn any of those. Those come with our evolutionary wisdom, those come with our body. Those are survival reactions that put us in a fairly tense or hyper alert or hyper vigilant state. And the bad news is if we don’t get a chance to heal those, those states continue and can continue over many years and decades.

What pleasure does is the opposite. So, pleasure, resilience, things that put us into states of resilience, have a profoundly calming effect on our psychobiology’s. So, where survival or fear might pick us up. Pleasure tends to soothe us, open us, widen us, and help us come down into our bodies. I’m talking about really an embodied experience of pleasure. I’m not talking about a great adrenaline rush in whatever way we all might do that. No, but no bad. But I’m really talking about pleasure. Pleasure is a really beautiful word like pleasure, joy, resilience – those are very deeply embodied experiences. So, whether it’s pleasure, whether it’s sexual pleasure or sensual pleasure with ourselves or with others or is the pleasure like I was just back in my home state. I grew up in rural Colorado in the Rockies. And I’ll tell you, when I look up at those pine trees, those high mountain peaks and that blue sky is a very deep experience of pleasure. So we can get it many different places, but it has actually a healing quality in and of itself – in our mind, body, spirits, and our psychobiology. So it’s very relevant and it makes us happier. It makes us more connected and it helps us think of more possibilities.

Dawn Serra: This episode is brought to you by Care/of. Care/of is a monthly subscription vitamin service that delivers completely personalized vitamin and supplement packs right to your door. So when you first had to Care/of’s website, one of the things they asked you to do is take this online quiz. And you get to talk about the things that you eat your, your health goals, your lifestyle choices, maybe whether or not you’re getting enough sleep or enough sunshine. It takes a couple of minutes to fill out and then they tell you what vitamins and supplements would help to fill in the gaps. So, I took the quiz and they had some recommendations for me based on concerns about heart health and memory and sleep. And then what they do is they send customized vitamin packs and this cool little sleeve right to your door and they have your name it says “Hey, Dawn” and then it has like a little quote of the day and it’s got personalized vitamins. 

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Dawn Serra: I love that. The fact that being in our pleasure and allowing it to be something that we invite in, and explore, and play with, to find that joy and that embodiment, then opens us up to more possibilities. That’s a beautiful byproduct of something that is inherently enjoyable. 

Staci Haines: Exactly, exactly. And it really helps to reset our nervous systems, if you want to think of it that way. From a more triggered state to really a more connected, calm, and coherent state. And again, it’s a more resourceful place to be making decisions from, right? To be healing from and to be changing the world from. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. 

Staci Haines: I would even say inside of here, as we’re kind of looking at the aspects of healing and translating this into how we do our social change work. But we could really think of what what is a daily practice that you can be in that either connects you to a deep felt sense of resilience or connects you to pleasure? And inside of that, it’s like, practice it on purpose. So we might go, “Okay, right. This is what resilience, what pleasure, what it serves at this time. Why this is important to me.” Make sure in the practice, we’re feeling ourselves deeply and let it really run through your whole system. So, it has the effect of helping us re-center and then go, “Now let me bring this into my day as much as I can.” But that purposeful daily practice to help set ourselves toward a more resource state, I think, is really important. Maybe we can say particularly in these times, I just think it’s really important no matter what.

Dawn Serra: Yeah. And I’m even thinking to have that practice of… My therapist likes to say, “How do we orient towards pleasure?” And, of really doing that centering and that orienting towards pleasure so that we can feel it and be present with it with that resilience. And then move deliberately into our day from that. Not only is that going to help us in the ways that we’re moving through the world individually, but that also nourishes and feeds the relationships in our lives that are important to us. The ways that we show up for the people that we love is very different when we come from that resourced place versus that much more drained or triggered or or dissociated place.

Staci Haines: Completely. And you can think about it or how I also think about it is how we can deal with conflict is so different when we fed pleasure, resilience and connection in ourselves. Right? One of the things we do and the organizations that we partner with that are doing social justice work is we have folks really get to know what they all care about. So literally, you know what each other cares about, which is also so important in any relationship. And then we help folks get to know “Okay, what happens to us individually and collectively when we get triggered and how do we re center?” And then what’s really important as we have ever been to get to know what brings each other resilience. Then really go, “How can we practice this together on purpose?” And I’ll tell you, when we have that kind of base that shared and community or shared inside of a social justice organization, it just has us be much more resourced and when there is conflict, to deal with it in a way that can let us be actually build more trust rather than split. 

So I feel like you know, you said this from the beginning, but how healing is relevant to an individual, to partners and friends, and then up into community that’s doing social action. It just has relevance across all those groups. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. The deliberateness and the intention and the mindfulness is, one, something I tried to practice – don’t always succeed. But that’s okay – progress. But even just being able to have discussions with the people that we care about. To be able to say to our partner or our spouse or our kids or our co-workers, “What helps you to connect with pleasure and resilience? How can I help support you when your resources are really low? Here’s how you can support me when my resources are low, so that we can show up in this really deliberate way instead of trying to pat things into place and move on,” which is what a lot of us do when we aren’t sure what to do. It

Staci Haines: Exactly and one of the things I really appreciate with our intimates and, again, whether it’s our personal intimate or our social change partners, is often we’re really good at supporting each other in stress or like what’s wrong or can you believe the latest moment on Cavanaugh? And sometimes what we forget to ask each other is the, “What’s your good news?” What’s your good news? What made you hopeful this week? And let’s actually linger for a few minutes because it literally helps shift us and it keeps feeding and nourishing a strength that isn’t fed any other way. Or if we take it all the way down to really healing around violence and sexuality, it’s also one of the key questions we ask is, “Let’s get to know what brings you pleasure, especially for sexual assault and sexual abuse survivors.” 

When something as intimate and profound as sex was used for harm, it is so important that we get to rediscover and reclaim, “Here is what is pleasurable for me in touch. Here’s what’s pleasurable for me in sex.” I mean, to me, it’s just such a profound reclaiming. It’s funny how this it’s so intimate and specific, and then it has such wide use. Because if we know what brings each other resilience and pleasure, we can actually build that into our relationships in a different way.

Dawn Serra: Yeah. I’d love to circle back. I know a lot of people know the fight-flight-freeze trio. That’s been around for a while and it’s been written about and it’s pretty common knowledge. I think that dissociation and dissociating has become more known. It’s talked about more in recent years, especially with folks who’ve read “The Body Keeps The Score,” Peter Levine books. And despite that, I find a lot of people really struggle with hearing how dissociation can be a really wise response. The ways that we survive and got us to here are ultimately resilient. Sometimes it’s just hard to be in a body and so leaving the body is sometimes how we just get through our day or how we get through a really tough moment. And so the wisdom that’s in dissociation, I’d love to just kind of chat a little bit about and then appease, I think, is one that a lot of people haven’t heard about and how appease really is a trauma response and a survival response. So can you share a little bit more about that so people can kind of recognize it?

Staci Haines: For sure. First of all, I just feel so… I’m just having a moment of feeling so compassionate about our survival reactions. And I also just want to say, it’s not like we chose them. There is no conscious choice in fight-flight-freeze-appease and dissociate. We just deeply, much more unconsciously and, again, from this kind of evolutionary wisdom of our bodies, chose the strategy we thought was going to keep us alive or connected.

So if what someone does most the time is dissociate or appease, the first move is we really want to go, “Okay, let’s understand it. Let’s build a little compassion.” I’m feeling a lot of compassion. So, the good news – there’s good news and bad news about all of these and what I want to acknowledge that The good news about dissociation is it helps us not be there for what’s happening. And in violations, violence, rape, highly threatening situations, right? It’s really great to check out because we don’t have to feel what is happening. It’s a really, really profound and very important strategy. In the big picture, what we want to do is check out temporarily, and then come back in and be able to process through the impact of whatever happened to us – that’s how we’re built. Often what happens is because we don’t have the context of support, we don’t come all the way back in and we don’t get a chance to process through what happened to us. Right? Or because it’s happening so many times one right after another, then we’re just like, “Forget it. I’m staying out.” 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. 

Staci Haines: But again, it’s not a very conscious decision. It is a strategy. It’s a biological strategy is how I think about it. So what I want to say about dissociate is I also know it has a lot of costs. We don’t make a lot of great decisions when we’re making decisions for being checked out. And one thing I really want to say to the… I’ll just say the whole sex positive community in lots of different ways that that’s expressed, is when I first entered that community, I was actually a little bit surprised about how much dissociation I saw. And I was concerned about if consent was really happening, because it’s hard to consent from being dissociated. And again, it is no bad. It’s just, I want us to be collectively committed to embodied pleasure to embodied consent, right? So I have a big…

Dawn Serra: I wanted there to be a big flyover poster on a biplane for that. More people need to hear that and really, really take it in because it does mean slowing down a little bit and really checking in with the person or the people you’re engaging with. 

Staci Haines: It really does. It means both those things and it means as much as we’re saying we’re coming into practicing safer sex. We’re also a commitment to practicing embodied sex and that we’re both present. And that both people can fully consent or all people, however many, right? But that takes practice and that takes a collective commitment for us to get there together. So, we’re on the same team.

In dissociation, one of the very cool things, if we look at it somatically, is most people can answer the question, “When you dissociate, how do you do it and where do you go?” So somatics as a healing approach is really so interested in the question “How?” more than the question was “Why?” Because the why is important and it doesn’t actually inherently transform anything. But when we go, “How do you dissociate? Do you hide away deep in your belly or your pelvis? Do you check out and pop out behind yourself?” What’s amazing to me as most people when asked the question, can answer it.

Staci Haines: So, let’s say it’s a little bit of both. It’s like, “I pop up and out and I go behind myself. I pop up and out and I go really, really far away or I tuck myself inside.” Once we know how we dissociate, we can go, “Great, so we’re just going to slowly follow that path back into our bodies.” And what that means is as we do that we’re going to have to feel and deal with and heal what had us checked out in the first place. But it really is the healing path is coming back into our aliveness, coming back into living inside of our own skins. And then, any of us who’ve been harmed, there is grieving to do, there’s raging to do. There’s learning how to live inside of our bodies again to do and there’s rediscovering pleasure to do. That’s okay, that’s the healing path. But what’s great about dissociating in, some ways, is it already gave you the path out. So that means you already know the path back in.

Dawn Serra: That’s incredible. I have never thought about that before. That feels so much less confusing. Because I think sometimes, at least in my experience, to dissociate and to come back there’s this almost loss of time sometimes. But to think about, “Well, I left which means if I travel that path and I come back, I know how to get back. So clearly, I’ve got knowledge and I’ve got understanding and wisdom. It’s just being able to be a little bit more conscious of that.” That’s a wonderful invitation.

Staci Haines: I’m glad. Yeah. I’m glad. Should I talk about appease a little bit? 

Dawn Serra: Oh, yeah. I think a lot of people would love to hear about that one. 

Staci Haines: My favorite way to understand associate is through looking at other mammals, especially other social animals, because we’re social animals. But appease, most people can totally relate to, is like “Well, what do dogs do when they appease?” They roll over and they show their bellies. I think most people can relate to that or they might duck their head down first then roll over and show their bellies. But they make themselves smaller and then what they’re doing is they’re basically showing their vital organs. What that is communicating is like, “I won’t hurt you. Don’t hurt me.” So we think about it as submissive but I really want to take out that frame. I just want to get very much down to what’s happening. One bite at the vital organs can kill a dog so what they’re showing is, I’m showing you my vital organs,” to basically say, “I’m not going to hurt you. Don’t hurt me.”

So, what’s amazing about humans is we do the same thing. We’re like, “Okay, how do I navigate this situation?” The choice comes from a very deep, mostly again, unconscious assessment of how I’m going to best get through this or survive. And so that appeasing which we also shrink, we make ourselves smaller, we tend to shrink up our stance. Often, if you can imagine it with me, we tilt our heads to the side like, “I don’t know. Whatever you want. It’s okay.” Those are all appeasement cues – agreeing, nodding our heads and agreeing is an appeasement cue. But what’s amazing is that tilting our heads to the sides, what we’re actually showing is our jugular vein. Does that make sense?

Dawn Serra: Yes, it does.

Staci Haines: And so, it’s so deep. We’re just like dogs and I respect both species. 

Dawn Serra: We don’t deserve dogs.

Staci Haines: Dog lover I can tell. So, we’re doing the same thing – tilting her head to the side, making ourselves smaller, becoming agreeable is basically saying, “I won’t hurt you. Don’t hurt me.” Now, that was probably a great strategy to survive whatever moments taught us to do that. We all know how to do all of these survival responses that just usually are context or the types of harm we’ve experienced, tend to have us get really, really good and generalize one or two of them. 

So appease is, again, like, “Good job, you’re here still.” And as you know, there’s also social training – social norms that make it more acceptable to do certain responses. If I talk about myself, so (I) grew up in a working class family, I’m white. I’m cisgendered, identifies as female. In my situation, and the abuse inside of my family, appeasing was a really good strategy because I had a very big father and he had very big friends. And they were loud and scary and violent. The truth is, I mean, I won’t tell my other sisters stories. I also watch other people fight back, it didn’t go well. So I’m like, “I’m not going to do that strategy. I’m going to get really kind, super connected to them and try to effect of their state by popping out of myself, i.e dissociating, and trying to appease and soothe their state by being non-threatening.” Sometimes it worked – just doesn’t work to navigate an empowered adult life. So then it has costs as well. And it was a long process of, healing, pain – healing pain. And truthfully, feeling more and more empowered through becoming politicized and socially conscious, right? That had me help to heal that and the truth is under really high pressure, I sometimes still will appease first and I just have to go, “That’s okay. It’s saving my butt. It’s okay.” 

Dawn Serra: The social change piece really resonates in this point in the conversation for me because it’s difficult for me to advocate in certain situations for myself. As someone in a fat body and medical situations, because I’ve just experienced so much bullshit from the medical industrial complex – I tend to just leave and appease like, “Yeah, whatever you say. Okay. I’m nice, I’m funny. I want you to be my friend. I’m not really advocating for my needs because I just want you to like me enough that you won’t hurt me.” One of the things that I’ve learned through the help of my therapist and also just being out in the world the way that I am – being able to advocate for others, is where I’ve found some power. I have a voice when I am getting fierce and warrior-like and defend boundaries on behalf of someone I care about or someone that I feel like I can really do well for; that has helped me to learn how to take up space so that it becomes a little bit easier for me to try and do that in my own way. So, I so clearly see that connection, like the places where it’s hard for us to show up for ourselves. Often we find it’s really easy to show up for other people and to really be like, “No, that’s not okay.” There’s a lot of, again, that collective power.

Staci Haines: Exactly. And what feels important, I mean, I so get you and I know hundreds of people were like what you just said, which is awesome, because it gives us that kind of collective power and power within for other people. And what’s so important is that eventually we backtrack that to ourselves. We’re also worth fighting for and it’s not only about ourselves, it really is like… I just think it is so healing to be about the “We,” and the “You” and the “I.” right. So it’s like “Those places we found empowerment, how do I back that back to myself?” Or let’s say I found a piece of empowerment, “How do I extend that out to others?”

There’s something else I thought alluded to really well, which is one of the ways we can, again, break down understanding trauma and then therefore also understanding healing is that trauma threatens safety, belonging, and dignity. These three key needs that I talked about. And then, a lot of our survival strategies split those things. So we have to choose, like you just said, between safety and belonging. I’m just going to go for belonging and I’m actually, at some level, going to give up safety. Some people do the opposite. Some people are like, “Fuck that.” I’m sorry. I don’t know if I’m supposed to cuss on your show. 

Dawn Serra: Oh, no. It’s fine.

Staci Haines: So some people are like, “Fuck that. I’m going for safety and I’m going to keep myself more isolated and disconnected.” So they’re giving up belonging or some people are like, “I’m going to go for belonging and give up dignity.” We know those situations – “I’m going to hand over my dignity so that I can belong.” And that is so understandable. It is exactly what trauma and oppression does, it splits those from each other and really what healing is whether it’s individual or collective, is we’re weaving back together safety, belonging, and dignity. So we don’t have to give up any of them. That’s just so important when I go, what’s the aim? It’s like safety, belonging, and dignity all are coherent. We don’t have to give up and we don’t ask other people to give up any of those.

I also find that a way to understand oppression and also social change, like what systems of oppression does or structural oppression is it said some people’s get safety, belonging, and dignity at the expense and cost of other people not getting it. That is privilege and that is oppression. And the same thing with resources, some people are allowed to get resources at the expense of other people being exploited. So, this orientation of whether it’s a community, an organization, or of course, we want this to be an economy that actually supports the safety, belonging, and dignity of all peoples and the plane, then it’s like, “Okay, well, then it’s not going to be so traumatizing.” 

Dawn Serra: That’s an incredible connection of just really thinking about, “Does the access that I have come at the expense of someone else’s safety, belonging, and dignity? What are the systems in place that offer that to certain people and how…” I mean, that gives us such a clear lens for being able to examine some of these things that sometimes feel really nebulous and we’re just kind of using words that don’t really mean anything, but being able to tie them to that safety, belonging, and dignity is very concrete feeling for me. 

Staci Haines: I’m glad, I’m glad. I think also just one more piece of – most of us are located in multiple experiences. So it’s like, I got trained into whiteness, through white supremacy that is harming a lot of people and I do not want to be a part of that system. So that means I need to actively change myself and actively try to change that system. And then at the same point, I’ve been very targeted and harmed as a woman and as a child. I think it’s like how we learn to hold that complexity inside of ourselves, the places we need healing and empowerment, and the places we need transformation and more accountability. That’s the complexity I think we learned to hold as we heal and as we grow.

Dawn Serra: The complexity piece is, one, that I think so many of us struggle with because we want certainty, we want answers, we want solutions, we want to know how to fix the thing otherwise not it. And to hold that complexity whether it’s being a cis man or someone who has access to money or being – well even just cis – or white and being able to really hold the, “Here’s the places where I’ve been harmed and traumatized, and here’s the ways that I’ve had access to things because of the exploitation and harm of others.” That requires a lot of discomfort. I think that’s why so often, especially around conversations – so many conversations, but I’m thinking specifically around conversations of consent, “What do I do? It’s the yes or it’s the no. It’s the enthusiastic or it’s nothing. We kind of default to, again, the binaries and the black and the white. But to really grapple with these things, like trauma and healing, we’ve got to just be uncomfortable and we can’t know the answer. It’s just not possible. I can try working together towards something. 

Staci Haines: Exactly, exactly.I think two things here, I really think about consent as an embodied skill. It’s an embodied skill we need to learn and heal our ways into. And we can’t fully embody the skill of consent unless we also understand power dynamics. So I’m like, “Cool. It’s an embodied skill. Let’s all learn it. Let’s not just think it. Let’s actually say practice it, learn it and keep growing into it together.” And then the thing about about discomfort, and I’m going to bring this back around a pleasure too, is that wherever we’re shutting down an experience– Again, I’m looking at this somatically, wherever we contract, numb, andover contain an experience like, I want it to be simple or I just want there to be an answer. I mean, please, I relate. I don’t think that’s what this life is about. I think complexity is what this planet and life is about. But the more we shut something down, We’re shutting everything down. We’re shutting down discomfort. We’re shutting down connection. We’re shutting down pleasure. Because we’re not compartmentalize beings. We have actually one body and that is our sensing organ, that’s what aliveness moves through. That’s what perception happens through.

Somatic sees the body and the self as inseparable. I mean, I love conversations about what happens when we die. But the truth is, we don’t know. Because once someone’s gone, they don’t tell us, right? Anyway, I mean, I have a very deep spirituality. So I have my own senses around that, but really we don’t know. But the more we open up to discomfort, the more we open up to aliveness. The more we open up, actually, the more pleasure means that we’re also making space for more discomfort and not in a bad way. But somatics really says, “Make room for discomfort. It’s a part of healing.” It’s a part of being a skillful adult, is that we can be with discomfort and keep navigating toward what’s important to us and what we’re committed to. I wish we could only shut down discomfort and open up to pleasure but they go together. 

Dawn Serra: Yes, they do. And I find, too, that often really grappling with that discomfort and leaning into it when I’m able can create some of the richest experiences and those points of connection with other people where later you giggle over that weird thing and how felt or it leads you to new questions that you never would have thought about before. To be, and I want to just name, to be in discomfort sometimes is terrible. I mean, when I’m in it sometimes, I’m like, “Get me the fuck out. This is terrible. I’m going to die. I don’t like the way this feels. Everybody’s going to leave me.” So it’s not easy but to do that practicing of going in and being around people who can be in it with you, in my experience, transcendent things can happen. 

Staci Haines: Definitely. Definitely. And for me, too, when I do all the same things you do. When I come down to the level of sensation and get a little bit out of the story, then I’m like– I mean, what’s so weird is that I feel like the SM community is good at this. What sensation, right? If we come down into sensations like “Oh right, I have a constriction of my chest and my breath is short and I feel really uncomfortable in my right thigh.” Then we’re just at the level of sensation. It’s like “Okay, let me just learn to be with this and station and not run 100 yards down the street to all the things that means: someone’s going to leave me–” All the things we just automatically make up. In somatics, we call it sensation driven narratives. The narrative isn’t inherently true. I mean, we should check out if it’s true. We should pay attention to like, is there something I should do right now? But really dropping into that level of sensation lets us work with ourselves at the origin instead of at the, once we’re already taken by what we think all that feeling means. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. So, we are going to continue our conversation over for our Patreon supporters. But before we do that, because I want to respect your time, can you let people know how they can find you online and learn more about the work that you’re doing in the world? Because I have a feeling a lot of people listening will want more.

Staci Haines: Aww, thank you. Awesome. You can find me a couple places: generativesomatics.org is the organizational website. And then, we have been having a little trouble but I’m going to give you the website anyway. The healing sex website you can also check out, I don’t know if you said this in the beginning or not, but we also created a DVD very similar to the Healing Sex Book. So those of you who like watching a healing movie, instead of reading the book or both, that’s also at healingsexthemovie.com, you can check that out. And then I also just want to give a shout out to Generation Five, which is another organization that I’m a part of that really does social change work to end the sexual abuse of children through a transformative justice model. And we just put out a new transformative justice focused, it’s like 100 pages focusing on child sexual abuse, so folks can check that out too. 

Last, but not least, I’m working on another book. I’m excited and really it’s about everything we talked about on this conversation – connecting healing. Healing needs, social change, and social change needs healing. So anyway, that that’s the very brief of it. But I will, knock on wood, that is out next Fall. 

Dawn Serra: Oh, well, I would love to have you back when that book’s coming out so that we can chat a little bit more about it and hopefully get everyone buy in a copy. 

Staci Haines: Thank you. Thank you. 

Dawn Serra: Thank you to everybody who tuned in thank you so much for listening. You can get all of those links that Staci just mentioned in the show notes and as always at dawnserra.com. If you have any questions or stories you’d like to share, you can always send me a note from dawnserra.com and until next time, I’m Dawn Serra. Bye.

Dawn Serra: A huge thanks to The Vocal Few, the married duo behind the music featured in this week’s intro and outro. Find them at vocalfew.com. Head to patreon.com/sgrpodcast to support the show and get awesome weekly bonuses. 

As you look towards the next week, I wonder what will you do differently that rewrites an old story, revitalizes a stuck relationship or helps you to connect more deeply with your pleasure?