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The Fourth Trimester with Kimberly Ann Johnson
Kimberly Ann Johnson is here this week to talk about birth injury and birth trauma, postpartum healing and nurturing, what cultures from around the world do to tend to folks after giving birth, and so much more.
We explore changing bodies, cultural myths about “pre-baby body”, and sex after baby.
We also dive into her work around activating your inner jaguar – which is all about tapping into both prey and predator energy, healthy aggression, and shifting your relationship with anger.
As I note in the intro to the episode, most of Kimberly’s work is with cis women in heterosexual relationships, so you will hear that in the language she uses throughout. To help supplement that, I want to offer this article in the Advocate, “I’m Pregnant and I’m Not a Woman”.
Plus, Patreon supporters, this week’s bonus chat with Kimberly is FANTASTIC. She talks about sexological bodywork training and how to find a practitioner who meets your needs. We also talk about the myth of the tight vagina and why tightness is actually the last thing we want. We explore sexual pain, why it takes most folks with a vulva 35-45 minutes to become fully aroused, and a few other tidbits.
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In this episode, Kimberly and I talk about:
- How Kimberly got into this work and her own experience with having the birth of her dreams and then grappling with a significant birth injury that led to lots of pain. Plus, her work with sexual trauma in the wake of her own sexual assault.
- Healing birth trauma and sexual injury repair.
- Kimberly’s book, “The Fourth Trimester” and her research into how we can heal.
- The harm of the cultural pressure we place on people who have had babies to “get their body back” and to essentially erase the fact that they’ve birthed a human.
- Becoming a parent is a huge identity shift, it requires mentorship and holding, a new body and perspective on the world. Birth rearranges your being, literally.
- Why health care and tending postpartum bodies is so difficult in our medical model in Western culture, and what cultures who tend to postpartum bodies do to foster healing.
- What activating your inner jaguar means and how Kimberly got into this work of predator and prey.
- The power of anger and healthy aggression, especially for women (and queer folks!).
- Many people don’t want penetration after having a baby, so how can we get creative with the touch and erotic energy we have available to stay connected and pleasured?
About Kimberly Ann Johnson:
Kimberly Ann Johnson is a Sexological Bodyworker, Somatic Experiencing trauma resolution practitioner, birth doula, postpartum care revolutionary and single mom. She specializes in helping women hands-on, hands-in prepare for birth, recover from birth injuries and birth trauma, and heal from sexual trauma. She is the author of The Fourth Trimester: A Postpartum Guide to Healing Your Body, Balancing Your Emotions and Restoring Your Vitality. You can read more about her work and become a part of the Magamama movement at www.Magamama.com.Listen and subscribe to Sex Gets Real
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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 listeners! Welcome to this week’s episode of Sex Gets Real. First up, I just want to say your questions are needed. I’m going to be doing a whole bunch of listener question episodes towards the end of the year, so I would love to hear from you. Where are you feeling stuck when it comes to sex? Pleasure? Kink connection? Communication? Love? Dating? Trauma? Bodies? All the stuff that we tend to get stuck in around shame and guilt and confusion and uncertainty. If you’ve got a place where you’re feeling a little stuck or unsure or even just curious, you can head to dawnserra.com. There is a send a note option where you can email me and you can provide your name and email address or do it anonymously. So please do that.
Dawn Serra: The next thing I want to mention is Patreon supporters, this week’s Patreon bonus is so good. The episode this week is with Kimberly Ann Johnson and I discovered her work through Amy Jo Goddard because Amy Jo had a conference earlier in 2018. One of the talks that she did was with midwives and doulas and talking about bodies and births and all that good complicated stuff that we tend to not have a lot of information about in our culture. Kimberly Ann Johnson was one of the speakers. She wrote a book called “The Fourth Trimester.”
Now, as you’ll hear in the episode, Kimberly suffered a pretty significant birth injury despite having the perfect most ideal birth experience that she could have asked for. It took her a number of years to reckon with this injury that she experienced and to come back to wholeness with her body. She has dedicated her life and her work to helping people with birth injuries and in postpartum phases. She also works with sexual trauma. She’s a sexological bodyworker. She does hands on work as well as sex education.
Dawn Serra: So the Patreon bonus is fantastic. Not only does she talk about the training to become a sexological bodyworker and the kinds of work that she does, but we also dive into why you really don’t want a tight vagina. Because culturally, we have this really toxic message that tightness “is a good thing,” when in fact it actually isn’t. It means we have an imbalance or poor pelvic health. It means we’re not fully aroused when we’re engaging in sex. There’s all kinds of reasons why tightness is indicative of a problem rather than something that we desire and Kimberly tells us what we actually should be seeking and hoping for when it comes to our genitals instead.
She also offers some suggestions around coping with sexual pain and talks about the full arousal process for folks with vulvas. It’s rich and fantastic. It’s about 15 minutes. If you support at $3 a month and above at patreon.com/sgrpodcast, then you get that plus all of the other weekly bonuses that I do. If you support at $5 and above, you can help me field listener questions and someone just sent me some thoughts on a listener question that I recently posted, so I will be sharing that on a future episode. Again, patreon.com/sgrpodcast to hear my bonus chat, which I love and all of the others.
Dawn Serra: As you heard, this week is an interview and discussion with Kimberly Ann Johnson. There is a link to “The Fourth Trimester” in the show notes for this episode and we talk all about all of the ways that birth and pregnancy impact bodies and the invisibilizing of birth and pregnancy and the impacts that it has on our identity. Why so many people who get pregnant don’t actually have the support that they need when it comes to having a baby and the years and years and years of work that it can take to heal and recover and come back to wholeness when we don’t really tend to ourselves in that immediate postpartum period.
As Kimberly says in the episode you’ll hear, she says almost all pregnant people are just focused on the birth and it’s really difficult to convince pregnant people to focus on the postpartum period. But the birth is going to last anywhere from 24 to 48 or 60 hours max and postpartum is for the rest of your life. You’re in a whole new body that literally rearranged your organs and there’s a lot that comes with that. She talks about cultures from around the world and the rituals that they have for tending to and caring for people during their postpartum that then sets them up for 40 years of health and wholeness rather than what we do, which is trying to race back to “pre-baby body” in quotes and ignoring this new reality. It’s a really rich discussion and Kimberly has tremendous experience.
We also talk about boundaries and consent. We dive into Kimberly’s work around activating the inner jaguar, which is to help – specifically women – learn how to step into a more healthy aggression place. She works with women to help them move in and out of prey and predator spaces to feel those so that they have the option of choosing both rather than defaulting to one or the other.
Dawn Serra: We talk about exploring anger and also the power of rough and tumble play specifically with kids. She has this really interesting thing that she started doing with her daughter around healthy aggression and physicality and wrestling. If it’s something that you’re interested in learning more in, I highly recommend this person named Mike Huber. It’s H-U-B-E-R. He has a book all about rough and tumble play and it’s fantastic. He’s a really wonderful early childhood educator. He talks about the importance of rough and tumble play, especially for really young children. So if you’re kind of curious about this wrestling that Kimberly Ann Johnson does with her daughter, you might also be interested in Mike Hubris work.
Then we also talk about sex and the impact that birthing and postpartum have on the ways that we connect with the people that we are engaging in with sexually. It’s a really dynamic, complex conversation. The one thing I want to offer is Kimberly, almost exclusively – not entirely – but almost exclusively works with cis women and heterosexual relationships. She names that and you’ll hear throughout the episode she talks about women being mothers and men being caretakers in the postpartum period and really needing to step up and support women after they’ve had babies.
Dawn Serra: I just want to acknowledge that this show does recognize that not all people who give birth are women, not all people who give birth our “mothers,” not all people are in heterosexual relationships or monogamous relationships. So you are going to hear that this is very ciscentric and heterocentric. I want us to just invite in that the work is still valuable. Even if you don’t hear yourself represented in the gender and the pronouns that are being used in this work, the tending to body and the importance of resting, the identity shifts, the things that our genitals need still apply.
So I hope that that’s an invitation to just recognize that Kimberly Ann Johnson’s work is with a very specific population. If you’re outside that population, this work can still be a jumping off point of new knowledge and curiosity for you. Please do tune in. Take what works. Leave the rest.
Dawn Serra: Let me tell you a little bit about Kimberly Ann Johnson. She is a sexological bodyworker, a somatic experiencing, trauma resolution practitioner, birth doula, postpartum care revolutionary and single mom. She specializes in helping women hands on/hands in prepare for birth, recover from birth injuries and birth trauma and heal from sexual trauma. She is the author of “The Fourth Trimester: A Postpartum Guide to Healing Your Body, Balancing Your Emotions, and Restoring Your Vitality.” I’ve got links to the book, to her website and to her social media in the show notes. And Patreon supporters, you definitely want to tune in and hear this week’s bonus.
I also have an article that I’ve linked to in the show notes from The Advocate called “I’m Pregnant, But I’m Not a Woman” and I thought that it was just a nice supplement to round out this week’s conversation so that those of you who maybe don’t identify as women but who are or have been pregnant have a resource to just connect with and include in this conversation. So thank you so much for being here. Here’s my conversation with Kimberly Ann Johnson of MAGAMAMA.
Dawn Serra: Welcome to Sex Gets Real, Kimberly! I am really looking forward to our conversation today about activating the jaguar and postpartum and birth and all the amazing work that you do. So welcome to the show.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: Thank you so much for having me.
Dawn Serra: You’re so welcome. So I got introduced to you because you spoke at Amy Jo Goddard’s “Sex, Power & Leadership Conference” a couple of months ago and your talk was incredibly powerful and I was really drawn to so much of the work that you do. It aligns so beautifully when so many of the things that listeners are constantly asking about. I would love if we could just start with you telling a little bit about your story and how you got to this place of doing this really important and powerful work around women and birth and trauma. How’d you get here?
Kimberly Ann Johnson: That is a great question and a huge question. The two major turning points were my first real sexual experience was sexual assault in college. So that really turned my world upside down. I was raised to think that if you were a good person, then good things happen to you. When I was assaulted, that really shifted my worldview and I was really confused. And so, in a way, the past– That was when I was 17 and I’m 44. It’s like the past 27 years have been a healing process from that place to reclaim my sexuality, reclaim pleasure, and in some ways, not even reclaim it, just claim it to begin with since I didn’t really have a lot of positive experiences to be comparing it to.
Then the next major turning point was when I had a baby. By that time, I was a longtime spiritual practitioner. I had been practicing and teaching yoga for– I’ve been practicing for 13 years and I had been teaching for about nine at that time and I was totally shocked by the birth process. I was completely confident about my body. I was really healthy. I had the birth that I wanted. I had a home birth, unmedicated, exactly what I imagined. I just came out of it with a pretty serious injury that resulted in a lot of pelvic floor dysfunction and pain – back pain and S.I. joint pain – and just a lot of physical reality that I’d never dealt with before. I was pretty shocked by it.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: Fortunately, I think in part because of the earlier descent of my worldview getting shifted so drastically, I knew that it wasn’t just me. I knew it wasn’t just a personal problem I was having. I knew there was something else going on societally and archetypally. I knew I needed to understand it. So in my process of understanding it and then also healing myself, healing my body, which meant healing my emotions, healing my relationship, healing my spirituality, healing my sexuality. What I mean really by that is just wholing it, bringing it back into a state of wholeness.
Many people started telling me about their own gynecological, pelvic and sexual health. Since I hadn’t worked explicitly in women’s health before that, I really hadn’t heard that magnitude of the stories that I started to hear, which is just so many women suffering after giving birth and never seeking help for it or seeking help and being dismissed or seeking help and getting strange asymmetrical answers. So I dedicated the last ten years to helping women heal from birth injuries and birth trauma, then that just completely intertwined with sexual boundary repair.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: All of these things had been… All the hardest experiences of my life had become compost for helping other people and serving other people and hoping that the darkness that I felt that my experience can somehow make someone else’s darkness just feel a little bit lighter.
Dawn Serra: I love how you call it compost. I’ve never heard that before and I love it. That’s really important. One of the things that really stood out to me as I was reading your book, “The Fourth Trimester” and looking through so many of the beautiful blog posts and interviews that you’ve done is something that I’ve talked about on the show a lot, which is the cultural myths that we have around our bodies and how so many of the myths that we have around how our bodies should look and what they should do and what sex should be and how it should feel are often based on men’s sexual experiences and men’s bodies. But also, just on keeping us really disconnected from our bodies and our wisdom.
When I think about the stories that we get about becoming a mother, I immediately think about that kind of trope that we get sold of like, “Get your pre-baby body back” and seeing celebrities who look like they never even had a kid after their birth. This pressure that I sense in almost making your body back into a shape and a form as if birth never happened and pregnancy never happened. What are some of the things you encounter around the shame and the stories that people carry about what happens after we give birth? Cause that’s kind of a black hole.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: Yes. The universal story that I hear from women, no matter if they’re five days postpartum or two years postpartum, is that they feel they should be farther along than they are. They feel they should be either physically back to where they were or emotionally back to where they were and they don’t understand why it’s taking so long.
Like I said, it could literally be someone who’s three weeks postpartum coming to my office, to me looking like someone who’s never had a baby, cause I wouldn’t even let someone come into my office three weeks postpartum if they asked to come. So they’ve just signed up on via internet, made an appointment and come in. From the looks of it, I would never know that they just had a baby. That person still feeling like they’re not far along in this process of getting back, which is really unfortunate language because what we really want to be doing is growing into this new identity.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: Becoming a mother is a huge identity shift and any huge identity shift, especially one that includes a complete physical rearrangement requires time and space. It also requires mentorship and holding. That’s unfortunately one thing that our culture is really lacking right now. Women don’t have the support they need when they have a new baby and so they get lonely and isolated and then the anxiety about everything multiplies.
Dawn Serra: I’ve had clients myself and also people write into the show who have had doctors dismiss either pain that they’re experiencing or this place of something’s different like, “The sexual experiences that I’m having, something is different, but I don’t know what it is.” Having doctors almost gaslight that experience of, “Well that’s not really your reality because ‘things look fine’” and this weird, “Is it really happening? I don’t really have a way to find language. I don’t have a way to find support.” So what can people do in that situation?
Kimberly Ann Johnson: So if we’re talking specifically about postpartum, sometimes people are feeling so discombobulated, so out of sorts, based on maybe a birth experience that was completely different than what they thought it was going to be. Could be that there’s just difficulty all around. It could just be because again, it’s a huge shift for the body and the psyche to make and we underestimate it because as super women and badasses, we think that we can do anything and doing anything means do what you’re doing and keep doing everything else, too. We don’t really understand that we’re going to have to let go of certain things, especially in that six week to six month window.
In my book, I shared that it took me six and a half years to gain my full life force and feel full physical capacity to essentially to recover from childbirth. In a way you kind of think, “Well, how could it”– “Why would we have an expectation that it would be anything less, something as profound as bringing new life into the world?”
Kimberly Ann Johnson: Cultures all over the world respect the postpartum time and they do so in different ways. But there’s five things that are universal to all of them. The first one is an extended rest period. The second one is very specific foods that vary from culture to culture, but they all are similar in terms of dense in collagen and very nutrient-rich. The third is loving touch, which usually comes in the form of pretty vigorous bodywork. The fourth is the presence or council of wise women and the fifth is contact with nature.
But it’s kind of like Maslov’s hierarchy of needs because if you don’t have that extended rest period, you can have the rest of it and it doesn’t matter because you won’t do that foundational level of healing that you need to. By the way, I didn’t do it and I didn’t have that. That’s why one of the reasons it took me so long to recover and because a lot of people listen to it and they’re like, “Oh my gosh. I’ve done everything wrong.” Well, I didn’t have any of this information either. That’s why I have gone through this whole process of writing a book and sharing everything that I wished that I would have known.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: When women go to practitioners, for instance, doctors are notorious for not really knowing anything about biomechanics, even orthopedics who are supposedly specialists in biomechanics. So if you need an evaluation of maybe you’re feeling like your pelvic floor is too tight after you had a baby and things are really constricted or maybe you’re feeling like you can’t contact those muscles anymore and it feels disconnected. OB GYN is not really the person who can evaluate that. That’s not what they’re trained to do. They often don’t even evaluate organ position, which is they are trained to do. But again, that’s more of a biomechanical question. A doctor, especially an OB or a midwife, they’re really trained to look at biochemistry. It’s almost– It’s why there’s this conundrum of who can help me. Because in my case, I had an organ prolapse. I had hemorrhoids. I was fecally incontinent. I was having searing pain during sex. So who do I go to to talk to about that?
Well, if I go to a psychiatrist or a psychologist or a social worker, they’re going to… They would have… I didn’t do that, but I know they would have diagnosed me as depressed because I did feel depressed. But I felt depressed because it felt like my organs might fall out of me and I was in chronic pain and I’d never been in pain before that. I’d always been crazily active, like teach, do a two-hour yoga practice and teach three classes a day kind of thing. So it was really new reality for me. But if I go to a physical therapist, then they’re going to deal with perhaps the biomechanics, but they’re not going to deal with scar tissue or they’re not going to deal with the emotion.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: So part of the reason that I was prolapsed and I had all of the pain was because I had a lot of scar tissue. But scars themselves, they store the stories, they store the energetic component of what formed the scar in the first place. So in order to dissolve the scar, you really have to get into the nervous system matrix. They created the scars, so then it will let go.
We’re in this place where care is so segmentalized. If you have trouble breastfeeding, you call the breastfeeding specialist and have to pay for it. Then if you have pelvic floor problems then you go to the PT and you’d try to beg your care provider to give you a referral. It’s a little easier in Canada, but it’s not easy at all here in the US. Then you pay out of pocket for the MFW and all this stuff just gets thrown into the category of women’s mental health because we have a history of pathologizing women’s health like that’s Freud and hysteria and putting it like, “Oh this isn’t,”
Kimberly Ann Johnson: There’s all these articles I think just last week, one came out in The Atlantic about the discrepancy of how doctors treat men’s pain versus women’s pain and how hard it is for women to be taken seriously. So I just do want to mention one thing on the flip side because I have had a number of women come to me feeling like there’s something wrong with their genitals, but there actually isn’t anything wrong. But the amount of anxiety that they’re feeling, how out of sorts they feel because they don’t have the container where they can rest and be cared for. All of their anxiety is getting put on a perceived problem in their genitals.
As far as you know, I do internal work so I’m actually placing my hands and doing evaluation. From a purely physical standpoint, there’s nothing wrong. I’ve had women come to me before that have… they were diagnosed with a very low grade prolapse, like barely a one, which means the organs are just a tiny bit below where their optimal position is, which would be pretty normal in someone post-birth.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: That’s why there’s practices like everyone should do vagina steaming after they have a baby. If it’s a Caesarian, they have to wait until six weeks. If it’s a vaginal delivery, then they need to wait about four days to seven days and then you should steam sequentially for 20 to 30 days. If you did so, your cervix would close properly, your uterus would go to… Everything that needed to get pulled out of your uterus, would get pulled out. Your uterus would go into the right position.
Right now, women have a baby. If they have it in the hospital, they stay there 24 to 48 hours. They get sent home and it’s just like, “Be careful. Listen to your body.” But most women don’t know how to do that because they’re used to doing everything. So they carry the car seat and they walk up and down stairs and their postpartum plan is their partner staying home for ten days or something. So it predisposes for the injuries.
Dawn Serra: What I’m hearing is for anybody who is either pregnant or postpartum, there is some really important information that isn’t easily available culturally and seeking out resources like yourself and your book and people who work alongside you could be a really wonderful way for more people to feel like they’ve got more information and they have more resources and find more support and to really be able to ask for those times of rest and for both physical and emotional support and–
Kimberly Ann Johnson: And to know that those are… Because women usually feel guilty about that. There’s shame and there’s guilt. But to know that these are not luxuries, these are necessities. So just because our culture is out of balance– I mean, at least in Canada, you guys have much longer paid parental leave. And as far as… I mean, you said you live in Vancouver. To me, it seems Vancouver’s like the pussy capital of the world, but it could just be my perspective.
Dawn Serra: Woohoo!
Kimberly Ann Johnson: So in my book there’s that worksheet called a “Postpartum Plan” and it’s four pages and it’s things to go over with a partner if you have one, and things you can put in place so that if you know you need care afterwards, it’s easier for you to access it. And also, so that it reminds people it’s very hard to convince a pregnant person that the postpartum time is important because everyone so fixated on the birth cause the birth is this main event. But the birth is only going to last 24 to 48 hours. The postpartum time is forever. I guess, once you’re a mom, you’re never not a mom again.
So it’s really important to follow these other traditions. I know there’s a huge Asian population in Vancouver and a lot of what I borrowed in my book comes from Hong Kong, Taiwanese, Korean, Indonesian and Indian postpartum care practices where mothers and babies are revered as a unit and the whole family structure reforms to take care of that unit for those six weeks. The amazing thing is they say 42 weeks… Sorry, 42 days for 42 years. So how you’re taking care of during that 42 days, if you line yourself up and you have the right support, then that dictates your health for 42 years. You can actually heal lifetime illnesses during that time because your system is so open. But the converse is true. If things set in during that time, it’s much harder to heal them.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: It’s this cultural antidote because we want everything so fast and so quickly and we want to get back in shape. And if we can just slow down and know that we’re making a long term investment in our health. If we can slow down for those six weeks and not go out to eat and not go to Target and resist the urge because people say they get stir-crazy and it’s like preserve the energy that you have during that time by staying in an enclosed environment. The point is not self-care. So the point isn’t that women should have to be taken care of themselves because they’re already taking care of the baby. So they need to be mothered. New mothers need to be mothered so that they can mother their babies.
Dawn Serra: I think this is a beautiful transition into talking about some boundary work.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: Great.
Dawn Serra: You wrote this beautiful paragraph on Instagram and if it’s okay with you, I’d love to read the paragraph because I think it’s a beautiful intro into your activate the jaguar work. So would it be okay with you if I read it?
Kimberly Ann Johnson: I look forward to hearing you. I can’t even remember what I wrote.
Dawn Serra: Okay. Good. Okay. Here’s what she wrote:
“There is never a time when your body is not your own. You may have spent some time apart. You may feel estranged. You may feel forsaken or betrayed. But there is never a time when your body is not your own. At any moment, any next moment, you can step back in and return. When your dentist says you need fluoride and it cures just about everything, you can say, ‘No, thank you.’ When you are birthing in a hospital and you find yourself inside the snowball, you are dreading, you can walk out. When you are birthing at home and the vibe just isn’t right, you can check yourself into a hospital. When you get to your OB GYN appointment and you realize you are overtired, weepy and not up for an exam, you can ask to come back another time. When you are getting a pap smear, you can ask for the person to explain what they’re doing before they do it. When you’re making love, you can say, ‘I’m complete’ before orgasms happen.
Dawn Serra: Your body is your own. Your pleasure is your own. You get to decide who touches you and when. You get to untangle all of your habits and conditioning about social graces to risk making someone angry, to risk awkwardness and confusion, because a sovereign forthright woman will indeed present them with new and unusual circumstances. Most women just go along with things, tolerate and accept them without knowing they can have a choice. Why? To say yes to yourself, to your own freedom, to reclaiming yourself. You are the steward of your body. Stewardship comes with responsibility. That responsibility allows you to be the protagonist of your own life. Your body, your life, sacred. Protect it like you would your friends, your children, and the earth.”
So that gave me chills when I read it and I thought it was such a beautiful invitation into this work you do around activating the jaguar. So could you tell us a little bit about activating the jaguar, what it means and the work that happens there?
Kimberly Ann Johnson: I started to work… I’m a sexological bodyworker and I started to work with women who are coming because for a variety of reasons. Some of them had the birth experience that just went in a direction they never anticipated or they found themselves in their marriage sitting farther and farther apart from their husband and not knowing why. Rationally, in their mind, not wanting to do that, but finding their body doing that.
So I decided to act out animals like a wolf and a rabbit or a jaguar and an antelope. I thought that the women would want to be the wolf because they’d been in the rabbit position so much of the time. But when I offered that to them, the ones who accepted where then terrified and said, “I have no idea how to do that. You’re going to have to show me how to do that. You’re going to have to show me how to stop. You’re going to have to show me how to act that way.” Then some of them just either froze or outright refused to occupy that side of the predator-prey spectrum.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: So I realized, I took a couple of them through a process over a series of sessions, learning how to growl, learning how to be on all fours and walk in a zigzag stalking prey. I realized that without our capacity to access the full spectrum of the nervous system, then we end up only in one side of that equation.
After working with a lot of women one-on-one and doing this and seeing how quickly their behaviors started to shift. So this includes some talking, but not much talking and includes a lot more movement and tracking of movement and then times to pause and see what comes up emotionally or sometimes imagery arises. Trauma is an incomplete circuit in the nervous system, so sometimes a circuit kind of like a record that’s scratching. The system just keeps getting stuck at the same point and then going around and getting stuck there again. Sometimes the stuck points would manifest themselves in sessions, so we had a chance to complete it and smooth out that scratch on the record.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: I recorded a Me Too video last year, the day Me Too started on a Sunday and I recorded it on a Monday and I talked about this, how we’re never going to live in a utopian world. We’re never going to live in a world that doesn’t have threat or danger because we live in the natural world. We’re mammals and every predator has prey, but every predator is prey for something else. Knowing that, as mammals, it behooves us greatly to be able to access every part of that spectrum in our system.
Now, some people get freaked out and they go, “Wait. Well, does that mean I’m going to be aggressive or are you training alpha females?” Absolutely not. In fact, some of these females are alpha in their normal life. It’s just that in a sexual situation, their behavior shifts and they don’t know why it shifts. Or not even in a sexual situation, in anticipation of something that could potentially be sexual.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: Lots of people wrote to me after I recorded that video and said, “Okay. I get it. I understand and I need to do my part.” Because also what I was saying is that consent is not a purely verbal thing that we have to coordinate our facial expressions, our words and our body language because it’s ultimately aren’t nervous systems that are communicating. It’s not our words that are communicating. So we can all come to a greater level of coherence in our nervous system and it’s actually an amazingly free experience to do that because then if you want to enact predator-prey dynamics, you can do so safely because you’re in full consent and you’re acting that out within the framework of a consensual environment, which is, I know you address kink in your podcast and it’s what so many people misunderstand about kink and BDSM. They don’t understand the framework of a lot of that sex is happening without alcohol, fully conscious, with very explicit agreements. I think the non-BDSM and kink world could learn a lot from it.
I started teaching an online class called “Activate Your Inner Jaguar” and I’m on my fifth round now. I think I’ve taken about 400 people through it. Really democratizing this information about the nervous system that I learned in somatic experiencing, trauma resolution training. Cause I thought this is great if someone’s a practitioner and can go to three years of training, but this… To me, this should be like junior high curriculum. We all should just know this in our bodies. How does it feel when you like something? How does it feel when you don’t like something? What happens when you don’t like how something feels but you want the approval of someone else? These are all situations that we can role play and we can track our own systems and how our responses are before the consequences escalate so much. So it’s sort of an amazing way to have group support as we move through establishing restorative and reparative experience. Cause the biggest antidote to trauma is pleasure and reparative experience.
Dawn Serra: This is an opportunity to invite people to not only explore boundaries and pleasure, but also power and how we interact with it.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: Boundaries have everything to do with power and there’s so much conditioning about who’s allowed to have power and how does it look when we have it. The other thing that it makes me think about is just anger and healthy aggression. If we have channels for healthy aggression, then it doesn’t become boundary violation. But so many women are afraid of their own aggression and therefore they stay in trauma loops because it could be something very simple, but because trauma is individual, it’s not an act. It’s how our system assimilates and digest that act or event or experience.
So say for somebody, they’re walking down the street and someone slaps their ass. There’s going to be a number of different reactions. One type of reaction is to slap the hand away or turn around and scream. Another one is ignoring. Another one is just to walk faster to get away. Another one is to be stopped in your tracks and go into your head and think of all the potential responses. So of all of those that I just explained, the person who’s going to be the least traumatized is the one who slapped the hand away or the one who said something. Because in general, if we’re able to activate our sympathetic nervous system, that response will get completed.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: Now, some people are listening and they’re going, they’re feeling shame or they’re feeling like they don’t do that or they can’t do that. That’s not the point. The point is that as we start to what I’m calling restore our jaguar capacities, that kind of response becomes an undeniable physical impulse because instead of going towards freeze or collapse where many of us are conditioned to do that because if you scream, you are calling attention to yourself. You might be considered bitchy. Someone might turn the tables and say what’s wrong with you or deny it. So there’s many good reasons for all of the ways we react. And that’s what I– I mean, it’s probably my favorite part of my work is removing morality and ideology from physiology. Cause those are physiological responses. Even if you wanted to say something. If your physiology is not onboard based on prior experiences, then no matter how you want to be one way, your body is going to react another.
I help people to coordinate those two things or actually, like I said, it’s facial expressions, words and physical body language, but what’s underneath that, coordinating that is the nervous system. Having a deeper understanding of how the nervous system works in your own system so that you understand when you’re going into freeze, you understand, “Oh. No wonder when my husband looks at me that way, I have an automatic flight response and I just want to get out of the room.” Instead of taking it personally, you can just name it, “Oh. I’m having a flight response.” That already takes away so much of the shame and the confusion cause really, it kicks us into confusion and disorientation. Why am I react– I don’t feel this way or think this, but I’m still reacting this way.
Dawn Serra: I love talking about boundaries and I love talking about anger, especially. That’s been a place that’s been so exciting for me to be exploring is the ways that we can develop a healthy relationship with our anger and the ways that our anger is constantly checking to see if our edges are being tended.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: Yes.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. I think that’s such an important place for anyone who’s in a marginalized community, whether it’s women or queer folks or trans folks or people of color to really be able to start developing a new relationship with that anger. I think helps us to tap into so much more of that power and that agency. The culture certainly around us does not reward for expressing our anger and honoring our anger, but therein lies some of that power that we can reclaim. So what kind of work have you done with anger? How can people start playing a little bit with an emotion that for them might feel really, really distressing or foreign?
Kimberly Ann Johnson: Great question. First of all, it depends on what kind of anger your habit is to experience. So for me, I always thought I’m not an angry person. I don’t experience anger. Then I realized that it was because I mostly experienced what I call white anger. So my anger was shut down. My version of anger was internalized, freeze my facial expressions and leave the room type of thing. It allowed me to feel superior and it also allowed me to just being complete denial that I was experiencing anger.
Now, there’s other people who’s go-to anger is what I call red. And I don’t think, this is just me. I think I got this, I read this in Buddhism at some point a long time ago. Red anger is what we typically think of the cartoon type of anger with the steam coming out of your ears and your face turning bright red. And then I think there’s usually like some kind of things coming out of your head.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: So those are two very different expressions of anger and how we would work with those would be really different and how I worked with it with myself. Lately, what I’ve noticed is when I’m feeling angry and noticing how angry I’m feeling, it’s usually because I’m overgiving. It’s usually because I haven’t said no enough times to things that I need to in order to say yes to myself. Then I’m finding my anger go sideways. I’m getting angry at things that are unrelated to that boundary setting.
It’s worth saying too, there’s a lot of anger in the collective right now. So if you’re really tuned in to current events, if you’re really following Me Too, that’s going to generate… For some people it generates feelings of helplessness and sadness as well, which are other nervous system responses. But there’s no simple answer because it really depends on the situation. But certainly, anger needs a vehicle.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: I’m not a big proponent of pillow punching and primal scream just because I come from the somatic experiencing frame of mind, which is about titration and about little by little. So rather than if you have the impulse to scream, rather than just screaming as loud as you can, dialing back a little bit to see where’s that impulse and what else might happen if you address a subtler impulse level. I’m not saying that that’s always wrong. I mean, I think long time meditators and people who have really suppressed anger and convince themselves that they’re eternally forgiving and compassionate, who start getting in touch with their anger, then being like radically expressive might be helpful because it’s a pendulation away from that kind of spiritual bypass.
But because I’m a practitioner, I can’t really give a generalized answer since it’s such a specific situation thing and how it works in each person’s system is so specific. Like for me, it’s just a matter of having courageous conversations and being willing to say things that might… That mean– To me, most women don’t express dissatisfaction because they’re afraid of disconnection and so we don’t want to lose the connection. We think if we just don’t say what’s bothering us, then we can preserve the connection. Sometimes we’re right. Sometimes certain connections can’t withstand expressions of truth, but many can. It’s that we haven’t really tried it.
Dawn Serra: I love that you’re saying that because I had a fairly recent experience that I think I shared on the show a couple months ago, where my habit of anger was always to swallow it and just do similar to what you mentioned, which was leave the room and let it stew and over-analyze it and obsess over it and feel shut down. I recently had the experience of just in that moment looking at my husband and saying, “I am angry and this is not okay.” To have him say, “Alright. Let’s talk about that” and to just have my anger held without any kind of like blame or defensiveness, it was just like, “Got it. Anger is here.” It was such a radical shift for me. Everything in my body felt different and it felt new and I wanted to stop being angry so that I could just be like, “Holy crap! That was totally new and that was really exciting.” So we like circled back to that later, but it was one of the first times that I just was able to say in the moment I’m angry and to just let myself be mad. It felt foreign and exciting and I don’t know that I’ll always have the awareness to be able to do that in a moment. But it certainly was a moment where I was like, I want to do this more and invite more of this in because it felt radically different.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: Yeah. I like what you’re saying. I mean, it’s not like you even act it out – the anger – and you just stated that it was present. Honestly, especially within couples – and right now we’re talking about a heterosexual couple – men respond in general really well to it. When someone stuffing it and ignoring you or shutting down, you know something’s wrong. You know they’re feeling it anyway. But it’s hard to pry that out of somebody.
There’s a lot of power in anger. That power can be used in many different ways. I think that’s what we’re so afraid of is because it feels so big., right? I mean, when we’re kids, you’re not really allowed to get angry. It’s unusual, if in your household you’re allowed to get angry. You’re not allowed to throw tantrums. You got to be quiet and be nice and behave yourself and be good and maybe people have different modeling from both parents of how they dealt with anger and how that felt as a child to see their parents behaving in certain ways.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: So many of us are still responding with that child-like feeling of, “It was so scary when my mom got angry. Therefore, I can’t also feel that way.” It feels like a survival question. When you’re able to just stand in it and realize, “Okay. I’m angry and I’m still okay and you’re still here and here we are and I’m angry.” There’s a lot of directions where that can go. I really like wrestling.
Dawn Serra: Ooh.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: Specifically wrestling with men and that is part of the jaguar work because there’s really something about meeting another person’s strength and having physical containment. So I mostly learned it with my daughter because there was a point at which she was becoming very authoritarian and a couple of my friends kind of stepped in to tell me, “She’s really running the show right now and you better get a handle on it.”
When I was working with it, my therapist at the time, who was the one he told me that I was like a Jaguar. He was from the Amazon. I used to live in Brazil for eight years. He said, “You need to watch how the jaguars parent their cubs cause it’s the mothers that teach their cubs to hunt.” And what the jaguars do just like orangutans and a lot of other mammals, they basically bat their kids around. That physical kind of batting them around shows them who’s boss physically. They don’t have to say anything. They just hold them down. So I started holding my daughter down. Holding her head down, holding her body down, dominating her and doing it in a playful way.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: Play is also a really powerful way of mobilizing and moving, metabolizing anger because play is our social engagement system together with our sympathetic arousal. So the social engagement part of it where we can have eye contact and we can have the smell of something familiar allows a level of safety where that aggression can come through. So I think getting on all fours and pressing your head into someone else’s head or moving your head around theirs or getting your shoulder into it can be a really great way of mobilizing anger.
Dawn Serra: How can the men in women’s lives who are coming into this parenthood as well, better support someone who is going to be moving into a postpartum stage soon or they’re recently there?
Kimberly Ann Johnson: I love this question because here’s the deal guys. If you prioritize this period of time and you invest cash like $4,000 in these six weeks, so that your partner has exactly the right food to eat, her body is taken care of, she has somebody else organizing it all so that she’s not also having to be household manager at the same time as she’s figuring out how to breastfeed, changing her pads, trying to do her vagina steams… I cannot even… I mean, I’m going to say it gives you back a hundred times because you will have a partner who’s eternally grateful, available for intimacy much sooner.
Where we get it wrong is we think, “Oh. Well, we should just divide gender roles so we should equally take care of childcare duties.” Not true. At this period of time, the baby needs the birthing person. The person whose body expelled the baby is what the baby needs. So I just cannot overemphasize because what happens is you end up paying that money later on in therapy, pelvic floor PT, counseling and my book.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: Even though I’m a single mother and I haven’t had a married life, I’m so passionate about couples and relationships staying together through child rearing because it’s so important for the couple to remember that they are the anchoring and the stability for the family. So many people have a baby and then the baby comes in between the couple and both parents just keep looking to the baby and forget to look at each other and remember that they’re the foundation of this whole project.
I really believe that the child benefits so much from loving, connected parents and the postpartum time is such a beautiful time to elaborate your definition of connection and sex and intimacy. That can be hard because for people who’ve relied on penis and vagina, penetration is their only way of connecting. It can be really jarring because most women don’t want penetrative sex postpartum for a little while. But if you’re willing to broaden your perspective and incorporate things like orgasmic meditation or other practices like sensual massage or some people just like they just want to lay together, hug each other. But if you invest some time, even five minutes a day, it’s such a more loving…
Kimberly Ann Johnson: It can make all the difference to how a woman goes through that period of time cause she’s regulating the baby’s nervous system. She needs someone to regulate her nervous system and the best person to do that is her partner. If you hire somebody else to do caretaking, if you hire somebody else to do cooking and light household chores, either a postpartum– Postpartum doula is probably the best choice. But even if you say, “Well, I could never afford that” and you spend money to have somebody come once a week for four hours for six weeks, that still makes such a huge difference in a woman’s postpartum experience – to have a trusted woman who she knows is coming to take care of her every week, where she can count on someone else drawing the sitz baths, someone else doing the steam, someone else to hold her baby while she takes a shower and gets the right herbal supplements that she needs. It’s really, really important.
Dawn Serra: I think that is such a fantastic invitation for folks to just sit with and finding ways to fit that into budget and life and perspective. I love all of that. So we are at the end of our hour. Kimberly and I are going to go record a little bonus for our Patreon supporters. But Kimberly, for people who want to learn more about what you do, stay in touch with you, learn about your “Activate Your Inner Jaguar” course and grab the book, how can they find you online?
Kimberly Ann Johnson: They can find me at MAGAMAMA, magamama.com. On Instagram I’m @magamamas – M-A-G-A-M-A-M-A-S.
Dawn Serra: So I will have links to the website and to Kimberly’s Instagram in the show notes for this episode. Please go check it out. Also, be sure to check out her book “The Fourth Trimester,” if you or someone in your life is either pregnant or just recently gave birth or even if you gave birth awhile ago and you just want to have this information, it’s good stuff. So please check it out.
Kimberly, thank you so much for being here with us and sharing all of your wisdom and experience. This has been a rich discussion.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: Thank you so much.
Dawn Serra: To everybody who listened, if you’ve got questions or comments, you know I love hearing from you. Please go to dawnserra.com/. There is a contact form there where you can send me a little note, so please do that. Otherwise, I will talk to you next week. Bye.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: Bye, 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?