Sex and Gender Feminist Psycho - therapist: Dr. Tina Schermer Sellers
Dr. Tina Schermer Sellers is a licensed sex and gender feminist psychotherapist, best-selling author, researcher, emeriti professor, and media personality whose expertise spans sex therapy, spiritual intimacy, parenting, medicine, and social justice. Known for exposing the impact of sexual shame on our ability to securely attach to our partners, and instruct our children to attach to theirs, Dr. Sellers’ book Sex, God, & the Conservative Church – Erasing Shame from Sexual Intimacy has had a global impact. Her latest book, out June 2021, is Shameless Parenting – Everything You Need to Raise Shame-free, Confident, Kids and Heal Your Shame Too! . She speaks throughout the world on how to heal, and how to raise shame-free relationally confident children. She can be followed on Instagram @DrTinaShameless.
Here she answers the Mama Sex Six:
What is the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the phrase "mama sex"?
I guess the first thing that comes to mind is ‘new mama’s’ and the pressure they often feel to get back to having “sex”. I am referring of course, to cis/het women married to cis/het men raised in America. It is this group that so often feel pressure to ‘resume having intercourse’ after delivering a child … and who often feel this pressure externally from a partner, well-meaning family member, and unfortunately far too often, untrained physicians who out of their cultural bias, support a transactional sexual relationship, where the husband’s assumed ‘needs’ are privileged over her restoration, pleasure, desire, and energy.
What inspired you to work/create/advocate on the topic of "mama sex"?
I want people everywhere to live shamelessly as sexual beings, knowing they deserve connection and pleasure. All of my years of work has been around providing compelling education and tools that can empower you to rise above your sexual shame and embrace your value. It's my hope that my work will bring couples together, help individuals to know and express themselves freely, help parents raise healthy children, and help clinicians serve their clients holistically.
People often ask how I ended up with a career in sexuality and intimacy. The truth is, I was always preparing for it—and never planning on it.
I grew up in a big, Swedish immigrant family in America. My grandparents and four great aunts lived on a single, huge piece of property, near our home in the Pacific Northwest. My family was big, boisterous, extremely loving, and tightly interconnected in healthy bonds of love and good humor. Swedish love of the sensual permeated the culture of how we did family. This included an ongoing and open conversation about bodies and sexuality that happened easily and spontaneously among all of the members of the family. I grew up watching lots of open affection among the adult members of my family—seeing married people flirt, giggle, and sit on each other’s lap.
I didn’t know until I was well into my thirties that I grew up in what I came to call a “sound-bite sex home,” where we learned about sexuality and sensuality gradually over time through bits and pieces of shared, chuckled-over wisdom, rather than all at once in what many people call “The Talk.” I can’t remember one singular conversation about sex because sexuality education was an ongoing, open, age-appropriate conversation that I had with both of my parents, my grandparents, and my aunts and uncles along the way.
It’s really because of the comfort that my family had in sexual matters, and their sense of joy and play in their married lives, that I grew up comfortable with the field and study of sexuality and intimacy. I give all the credit to my Swedish heritage and especially my wild extended family. Their openness was such a gift to me.
My first job after college was as a science and Latin teacher at a private college prep school in La Jolla, California. I somehow ended up teaching their sex ed program, and I loved it—so much that I couldn’t figure out why more teachers weren’t jumping at the opportunity! At that time, of course, I hadn’t yet realized that I’d grown up in an “odd” family, one that was very comfortable with its own humanness.
Plus, by that time I was married and a new mom, so I was getting my first shot at passing down my family’s heritage of open conversation to my first child over time, getting to help him to know, as my family had taught me, that sexuality is a woven-in part of life. In other words, I was getting to help students at school learn about their bodies, and I was getting to help my tiny son learn how to navigate the waters of being physical from a very early developmental stage. I was having a blast.
Teaching adolescents, and especially learning how a child’s home life can affect his or her ability to learn, led me to grad school to become a marriage and family therapist. After I graduated and started my practice, I was asked by one of my past professors if I would teach the human sexuality class in the degree program I had just finished. I jumped at the chance. That was 1991. Six years later, I found myself teaching full-time in the program, directing its medical family therapy program and continuing to love my human sexuality course.
In 2000, I began to notice an increase in sexual dysfunction and religious sexual shame and trauma in the sexual autobiographies of students who came from a religiously conservative background. This concerned me greatly, and I started to keep research notes on what I was seeing. In 2006, I wrote an article titled, “Christians Caught Between the Sheets: How an Abstinence-Only Ideology Hurts Us,” published in the online journal The Other Journal – An Intersection of Theology and Culture. The article went viral and I realized that I’d struck a nerve. I heard from people around the globe! I was seeing that there were so many people suffering under religious sexual shame and trauma, but that no one had begun to speak about it or name it for what it was.
That led me to pursue a Ph.D. in clinical sexology, do formal research on the effect of sexual shame on couples’ intimacy, start a blog, launch an online community called Thank God for Sex, design an intimacy retreat for couples, begin speaking at various venues, write articles, chapters, and books, and establish the Northwest Institute on Intimacy in order to encourage all therapists who treat couples to become proficient at improving intimacy and sexuality in the people they serve.
I want to see our culture come to a place where all people have access to solid information about sexual health and relational intimacy in all its various colors, so that each person can gain a glimpse into what is possible for them. I also want to see the field of psychotherapy, medicine, and theology “grow up” such that proficiency in sexual health and intimacy becomes a standard part of training, and to see loving, intimate touch as a viable avenue to healing attachment. I’m convinced that sexuality can be a powerful resource to nourish our human experience, and that even in our sex-saturated culture, we’re generally missing out on something beautiful, playful, and fun in the way we approach sexuality and commitment. I hope that my work can help us to reclaim it!
In your work/practice/art, what are the biggest hurdles mothers are facing in terms of their sexuality?
There are a couple of places where enormous hurdles face mothers. First, we live in a culture that only gives lip service to women, children, childcare, women’s rights at work, and work/life balance. America’s capitalist values of money and power at all cost (corporations are people), while deferring to the subsequent desires of land-owning white men has long skewed adequate support for mothers and their children. In fact, these corporate values have far too often made mothering more difficult. For example, the media barrages children with messages of how ‘not enough’ they are and how they ‘should be’ something other than who they are. These messages attempt to drive home to the child their inherent lack of value. This undermining of a child’s core confidence rips at the fabric of emotional stability that a mother is often reinforcing in her child.
Second, mothers often lack the needed support for education, reproductive rights, and healthcare for herself and to support her children; along with limited pay and opportunities in her career. Mothers, in the midst of all they are juggling, are often also the primary citizens fighting for the improvement of conditions for children. To be the mother she desires, women far too often must make tremendous sacrifices in her own health and wellness, in order to persist and overcome this constant societal undermining and gas-lighting of her many roles, responsibilities, values, passions, and talents.
What do you think society at large should know about motherhood and sexuality? And what is society getting wrong right now in regards to it?
No society will remain resilient, let alone fundamentally improve, when it continues to undermine mothers and fails to support them and their children. When women are exhausted and exasperated, everyone in the society loses. At best it’s a zero-sum game. When she loses, her children lose, society loses, we all lose. When there is no slack, she will find it difficult to bring her needs to the fore – her need for rest, pleasure, emotional, relational and physical investment. This impacts her mental and emotional health – not least of which is her ability to intentionally enjoy sexual and relational connection and pleasure. Mothers need support (childcare, healthcare, reproductive justice, and education) if a society is to truly thrive. Not only does research back this, but we see examples of this thriving in the egalitarian Northern European countries.
What piece of sex advice would you give mothers? Was there something you wish someone had told you?
I wish I had someone who would have sat me down and helped me see the larger systemic issues at work in our culture and society so I could see the river before I was in it. This may have helped me develop strategies earlier for saying ‘No’, putting up boundaries, learning to disappoint, learning to advocate, and learning to care for myself. I had many years of internalized cultural messages to heal from before I could begin to care for myself with the level of advocacy that a woman must employ if she is to stand into the forces that seek to silence and erase her.
Now, I help women see and hear these forces, and help them to claim and use their power. Claim their beauty. Claim their inner goddess diva. They have more sexual power than they realize. It is all theirs. It doesn’t belong to anyone else. It is theirs to love, enjoy and live into. They are the creative power of the universe. They need to feel it coursing in them. They are now and have always been the sacred feminine. For so long women have been told their sexuality was dangerous. That it belonged to men. That it was in the service of men and that men would abuse them with it. They were told to be afraid of it. All of this has been nonsense. That has been patriarchy’s abusive power and control.
The power of sexuality begins and ends with women. It is part of why women all over the world were burned and killed for thousands of years – and still are in many parts of the world. Their healing creative power has always scared men – but she has always delivered the babies, nourished the children, healed her land, and healed her people. When we weren’t silencing and killing her, she has been the voice for healing and change. It is time for women to claim their creative force, their sexual force, their loving force. We are the heartbeat that will heal this planet.
Let's amplify our voice: Who are some mamas you love following on social media?
@Mamadoctorjones
@Mindfulmamamentor
@Onestrongmamaprenatal
@Deconstructingcolors
@kristinbhodson
@moon.daughters
@jhuckins
Resources from Tina:
The Shameless Parenting Community – a place for all parents to gather, get exclusive content only found there:
webinars, Q&A time monthly – all questions and concerns welcomed, resources, blog articles for different age groups, special topics, relationship articles, etc. https://tinaschermersellers.mykajabi.com/store
Shameless Cheat Sheets for Professionals – Medical Providers, Educators, Psychotherapists, & Clergy (these will be up on the tinaschermersellers.com website by the end of September). Professionals will be able to be downloaded these as pdfs and mp4s with a license to be used in any way that will serve the parents served by the clinician/professional. These cheat sheets include intro pages explaining how they can be used, and then are age ranged birth to 2, 2 to 4, 4 to 6, 6 to 8, 8 to 10, 10 to 12, 12 to 15, 15 to 18. Each cheat sheet is front/back 8 ½ x 11 if run off as a handout, but can also be displayed on a website utilizing the mp4 GIFs. Like what is in the Shameless Parenting book, these cheat sheets highlight the developmental behavioral and emotional tasks of the child at that age range including the sexual/body/relational curiosities. The backside introduces the possible shame triggers common for parents to feel and how to heal them if they emerge. Then it reinforces the parenting needs of the child at that age, and the current leading resources for parents and for children/youth at that age/stage.
These cheat sheets will be sold in bundles most commonly needed in the different settings:
Medical – primary care, pediatrics, obstetrics
Psychotherapy – individual, child, and family therapy
Clergy/Community Youth Groups – all faith traditions that value parental developmental education
Education – K through high school, elementary school, teens, preschool
To find out more and connect with Tina
https://www.tinaschermersellers.com/
@DrTinaShameless (Instagram and Twitter)
facebook.com/TinaSSellers
