“Healthy Sexuality After Abuse” with Tabitha Westbrook, LMFT, LCMHC, LPC
This week, Dan and Rachael sit down with therapist, trauma care specialist, and NFTC® Alumni Tabitha Westbrook for a tender and important conversation on healthy sexuality after abuse.
In a space where many questions remain unspoken, this episode brings language to the shame, confusion, and longing so many carry in silence. With honesty and depth, their conversation offers a grounded invitation toward healing, one that honors the complexity of your story and the goodness of your body.
This episode engages the topic of sexual abuse and sexuality, and includes mature language. Listener discretion is advised.
About Our Guest
Tabitha Westbrook is a licensed counselor and supervisor, EMDR Certified Therapist & Approved Consultant, Certified Sex Addiction Therapist, Certified Clinical Trauma Professional, and Certified Christian Trauma Care Provider, Level 2. She also is the Founder & CEO of The Journey and The Process, a counseling practice with offices in Texas and North Carolina. Tabitha and her team specialize in complex trauma with a focus on domestic abuse & coercive control. Tabitha is an internationally known expert and speaker on abuse, providing training to churches, therapists, and agencies. She also helps train domestic abuse advocates through Called to Peace Ministries’ faith-based advocacy training. Tabitha is the author of Body & Soul, Healed & Whole: An Invitational Guide to Healthy Sexuality After Abuse, available wherever you get books.
About the Allender Center Podcast:
For over a decade, the Allender Center Podcast has offered honest, thoughtful conversations about the deep work of healing and transformation. Hosted by Dr. Dan Allender and Rachael Clinton Chen, MDiv, this weekly podcast explores the complexities of trauma, abuse recovery, story, relationships, and spiritual formation. Through questions submitted by listeners, stories, interviews, and conversations, we engage the deep places of heartache and hope that are rarely addressed so candidly in our culture today. Join the Allender Center Podcast to uncover meaningful perspectives and support for your path to healing and growth.
At the Allender Center, we value thoughtful dialogue across a wide range of voices, stories, and lived experiences. In that spirit, our podcast features guests and hosts who may hold differing perspectives. The perspectives shared on this podcast by guests and hosts reflect their own experiences and viewpoints and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, or endorsements of the Allender Center and/or The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology.
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Episode Transcript
Rachael: Dan, you have committed most of your life to tending to the work of sexual abuse and harm, but also healing and setting forth ways for people to find healing. And we’re very committed to that here at The Allender Center and want to make sure on the podcast we also explicitly engage in that work and thrilled today to be welcoming Tabitha Westbrook to the podcast. So welcome, Tabitha.
Tabitha: Thank you so much.
Rachael: Yeah. Tabitha is a trauma specialist, a licensed counselor and supervisor, a certified sex addiction therapist. She’s trained in multiple modalities and certifications. She’s also the founder and CEO of a counseling clinic called The Journey and Process and helps train domestic abuse advocates through Called to Peace Ministries. Now, specifically here at the Allender Center, we’re honored to call Tabitha an alumnus of our Narrative Focused Trauma Care training, and I’m quite positive she could teach most of what we bring to the table. She’s a speaker and author, and last year released an incredible book that we’re going to talk more about today called Body and Soul, Healed and Whole: An Invitational Guide to Healthy Sexuality After Trauma, Abuse, and Coercive Control. Tabitha is a woman of profound gifting, but what I find most staggering is that she’s also a survivor who comes to this healing work with a deep knowing and a hard won wisdom. So again, so delighted to have you and deeply honored to spend time talking more about your labor of love in the world.
Tabitha: Thank you so much for having me. I’m truly honored to be here.
Dan: Well, as we step into this really profound book, and one of those where you just go, I don’t think there could be enough books addressing the reality that still, for most people, has this shadow of shame and a reluctance, a deep reluctance in our culture, maybe less than 30 years ago, but still a hard won endeavor. So I would just love to hear as we begin, what prompted you to step into these very turbid dark waters and yet you bring such hope and light. And just what’s in your story that you would’ve brought this to play?
Tabitha: So I am a survivor and I know what it’s like to sit in those places and to not know what to do and not know how to heal and to be looking for resources that both honor my faith and honor my experience. And sometimes, unfortunately, those two things don’t always go together. And so I was really trying to find what I needed when I was in the early stages of healing in some ways. And I was asked to speak the way the book itself became, was one of my friends who is the founder of Called to Peace Ministry said, “Tabitha, I have been praying about this and we need you to talk about sex at the retreat, at the women’s retreat that we do.” And I said what every Christian says, I need to pray about that. And God was already going, no, you don’t. The answer’s yes. The answer’s yes. And so I did what everyone does and got off the phone and God was like, “Ma’am, are you serious?” And so I said yes, and more than any other teaching I have ever done, this one wrote me. And so I called her back and said, “Yes, I’ll do it. ” And right before I taught, I had a panic attack that almost laid me out and had to own it from the stage because I had it in the hallway. And so everyone could see it and could see that I was struggling and crying. I was tended to so beautifully by the folks that Called to Peace Ministries. That was the conference I was at and I was so grateful for their care, but I knew I was going to have to get up on stage and say, “This hits me deeply because it is part of my own story.” And also we allowed the women to ask questions. And I know from doing this work that it’s really hard to ask them out loud when you feel so much shame. And so my team passed around paper and pens and said, you can write it down. And at the end of giving that teaching twice at the retreat, I was sitting in my room with a pile of questions in my lap and said, this is what women need. This is what they need to heal. These are the questions they have. And I was already talking with a publisher and I called them up and said, hey, I think God wants me to write a book about sex. I’m certain someone had a heart attack there, but they said yes. And so that is actually how this book saw the light of day, and I’m so grateful for it.
Dan: Yeah. Well, I personally love the people at Tyndale. So I know their deep commitment, not just to the deep things of the Bible and to a deep theological orientation, but to addressing really hard issues. So grateful that you stepped into engaging it. But I would love to know what are some of the questions that struck you when you began to hear the women? And obviously what you’re saying is those questions echoed things within you as well.
Tabitha: Yes. So I’m going to give a little bit of an activation warning. I don’t super love the term trigger because activation is data and we can have amazing activation and activation that scares us. So I just want to start with that. So if as I’m talking, you’re noticing in your body it tightening up your breath quickening, maybe your palm sweating or a sudden urge to flee, I’d like to invite you to take care of you. You are the only you that you have. So feel free to step away. You can always come back. It is a podcast. It’ll just be there and take care of you first and then come back and listen. I definitely want you to listen, but I want you to take care of you. So with that said, the one question I got more than anything else was, is masturbation a sin? And I think that’s probably the top 10 question for Christians of all time. And also then different things about what am I allowed to do in the bedroom? Or what about this aspect that hurt me or how do I manage violence that is woven into my own arousal template and our arousal template, as you guys know, is the constellation of all of the things that turn us on. So it’s the landscape of what becomes arousal for us. And so all of these things were asked and I thought, gosh, we need more than 10 minutes in a Q&A to answer these. We need a lot of words around it so that a), it’s handled really gently and embodied, and b), have enough time to really answer it for real.
Dan: Well, the material in the book on arousal structure is just so brilliant.
Rachael: So good.
Dan: So powerful. So take us into the kind of questions, but also the kind of issues you’re addressing when you use the term arousal structure.
Tabitha: Yeah. So our arousal structure is being formed from birth. So from the time that we enter into this world, we are getting input and our brains and cells and souls are being formed in a million different ways. Our arousal structure is part of that. So arousal can sometimes feel like a four letter word with more than four letters, right? Especially if you’ve been harmed, it can feel a lot like profanity, but really arousal’s what I need to just get out of bed in the morning. If my heart rate doesn’t increase, if the cortisol doesn’t start releasing, I’m just going to stay in bed and that’s not going to be a good thing. So arousal’s not a bad thing. I am aroused and excited when my child does something really cool. I’m aroused and excited when I see an amazing sunset. When I get into the sexual landscape, I’m aroused by things that have woven themselves into that space, and that can be good or it can be not so good. And as we look at how did this get to be, one of the things that we look at is the stories of harm. And so if you have a story of sexual harm, and I would say that the statistic is currently one in two women and one in four men. My son, who is now 21 when I was writing this book, said, Mom, I don’t know a girl that hasn’t had some sort of sexual harm.
Dan: Yes.
Tabitha: And that’s just in his little microcosm. So I feel like just in this world, this hard world that we live in, the statistics are actually higher. And I know Dan, in Healing the Wounded Heart, one of my favorite books, you also talk about the widening of the lens of what sexual harm is versus just something that is a physical contact versus all of the other ways that can show up in our stories. And I think when we look at that and we start looking at what’s our exposure, it starts to help explain to us the things that turn us on or that are part of our arousal template. And for people who have been deeply harmed, especially when it has been developmental or started in your childhood, or you’ve been in a coercively controlling marriage for a very long time, then you can find things in your arousal template that you have a really tough time talking about like violence, like wanting to watch pornography and reenact it, enactments that you are doing. Which an enactment is just our way when we’re trying to heal of fixing something that was broken and trying to do it again so we don’t have the same outcome. I just want to say that doesn’t work very well. There are better ways to cope and to heal, but it’s what we’re doing when we don’t know what else to do. And then we are standing there going, “What’s wrong with me? ” And the better question is, what makes this make sense?
Dan: Again, you offer not only such clarity, but such kindness, such gentle kindness to be able to say almost all forms of sexual violation involve a degree and sometimes massive degrees of degradation, of the person not merely using you, but violating in a way in which their contempt for you, their disgust toward you is woven into a… It’s like the air you breathe and it’s affecting your lungs. So in engaging that degradation, oh my gosh, I just think of how, I mean, decades and decades of interaction with folks, the sense of in naming the degradation, you feel degraded. And it’s almost a vicious cycle of, if I step in to name what’s true in my body, it almost seems to be the indictment that I have feared all along. I really am foul. I really am bad and I’ll never know goodness and healing. How do you see that to be disruptive?
Tabitha: I think that it permeates our cells in so many ways because when we’re in this place, when we are reckoning with harm, we take on other people’s responsibility often and we are saying, it’s my fault that this happened because I was wearing this or I was here or I married this person or or or or… I should have known better. We “should” on ourselves all the time. And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention spiritual abuse in this, particularly in the Evangelical spaces. You are told that this is your job as a woman to please your husband, to please a man, all of these things. And I’m hopeful, I hear less of that now than I did in the past, but it’s still unnervingly present, unfortunately. But when you have that, and my definition of spiritual abuse is this, it is taking someone’s good and right devotion to God and using it as a weapon against them. And that happens in this space. And so someone who wants to love, wants to please, wants to serve the Lord is told this is how you do it, whether you are a child or an adult. So if we think about young men who have been abused by leaders, they are told, you’re special to me. I’ve never done this with anyone else. They’re told all kinds of things. And so they think this must be this. I must be gay because this must be what I want or I must be doing something that is causing this and having this leader, look at me this way, touch me this way, say these things to me, whatever it is. And so then we say we’re complicit with evil. And I think, Rachael, I’ve heard you say that so well, that when we think it’s our own yes, then we believe that we are a part and parcel and that’s not the case. We have to look at autonomy. What level of autonomy did you really have in this space? Were you able to say no? And I have a very, I don’t know what I’m allowed to say on this podcast, but I’m going to say it this way. I couldn’t print it in the book this way, but my definition of consent is it is either a hell yes or a hell no and there is no in between. And we don’t get taught that. And so we think, well, I acquiesced or I ascended and that is not consent. And so people then hold this shame. And boy, the evil one, he loves to use shame to go, yeah, it was you. And to whisper that right in our ear and then to keep ourselves safe, we oftentimes, particularly in consistent abuse, we say, I have to agree because if I don’t, the outcome is bad. I can’t get away. I’m not safe. In order to save myself, I have to agree. And then we feel even more complicit. And so that creates the worst bind on the planet for people because you feel like, well, I asked for this and now what do I do?
Rachael: What. So incredibly tragic. It’s tragic and heartbreaking. And I think keeps people very bound to that sense of complicity, to shame, to contempt towards themselves. And I’m so grateful that you mentioned spiritual abuse and I love your definition and I want you to send it to me when we’re done talking so I can quote you when I talk about spiritual abuse. But I think especially your work on coercive control and how sexual harm and sexual abuse plays out in marriages could be its whole own category of like a very specific form of spiritual abuse. And for those listening, a word like coercive control, they think they know what you’re talking about, but could you expand a little bit on like, what do you mean by that? And what has your work with people’s sense of your own story look like in that realm of, but where like spiritual abuse and sexual abuse are basically like interwoven and very hard to parse out, right? Yeah.
Tabitha: They are. And I’m going to give a succinct-ish definition of coercive control.
Rachael: Great.
Tabitha: And I’m going to use my friend Greg Wilson and Jeremy Pierre’s book, When Home Hurts, which is a fantastic book for churches. And it really talks about domestic abuse and coercive control. You hear a lot now out there about narcissistic abuse, and I absolutely cannot stand that term, and I’m going to tell you why. Welcome to my soap box.
Rachael: Go for it. Let’s hear it.
Tabitha: It is such a minimization of what is actually happening. So not all narcissists are abusers and not all abusers are narcissists, which trips people out because they’re like, well, narcissists aren’t super nice. And I’m like, no, they’re not. But also what they’re not doing is taking the personhood of the other party and that’s where it shifts. When you are denigrating the image of God in another, so that’s Greg and Jeremy’s definition, you are taking their personhood. You are taking some piece of them. So the difference between addiction and abuse is this for me. All addiction is abusive. Not all addicts are abusers. So when I’m working with someone who is struggling with compulsive sexual behaviors, whether that’s a man or a woman, they are not taking the personhood of their partner if they’re not an abuser or coercive controller. They are doing terrible things. They are gaslighting. They are lying. They are deceptive. None of it is good. All of it causes betrayal trauma. And so I am not minimizing that in the least. But when we also start to control their movements, control their finances, control, use the children against them, those kinds of things, we have crossed into you are nothing but a couch that can make sandwiches and you’re a blow up doll in the bedroom. And that is where we shift into coercive control. So when someone sees the other party as property, someone to use for their personal gain, we have moved into coercive control and the same heart that is present there is the one that Satan had when he was thrown out of heaven, which is, I will sit on the throne and be like the most high. And that is terrifying. And we have to understand that even if there’s trauma present, even if there’s addiction present in the perpetrator, lots of us have trauma. I mean, the three of us sitting here have trauma and none of us are abusers. So clearly it is not positive. It may have correlation, there may be correlative data, but it is not causative and we have a choice. And I also do perpetrator work. We are Men of Peace Partners in my practice, which is a faith-based batterer intervention and prevention program. And I have had the guys in that group straight up say to my face, I did it because I wanted her to comply. And if that is not the most telling, it is not accidental, it is not automatic, it is a choice. And that is something that we see when we take the Bible and then weaponize it and say, this is your duty as my wife, as my partner. You don’t get to withhold your body from me, which I love to disentangle scriptures. I get very excited about that. I’ll try not to preach here.
Dan: Preach on.
Tabitha: When that happens, the person who truly loves the Lord and wants to serve him and thinks this is how I serve him, they put themselves in that bind. They enter into that bind because they want to do good. And that is one of the places a coercive controller uses their weaponization of someone’s goodness and it’s consumptive. It is, I will consume you for myself. And so narcissistic, as you can see, is just too bland for what is actually happening here.
Dan: Well, in that process of being able to disentangle really bad theology with coercive communities that often support that theology, in fact, promulgated. And then you’ve got the particularity of a couple where the woman usually is in the position of being violated, yet it’s seen to be her issue that she’s not being submissive, not being committed to God as well as to her husband. I mean, the weight of that, the weight of so many systems, understanding a scripture and then the cruelty that parades as a form of righteousness, I just want to say, how do you begin to cut through that shit?
Tabitha: Gentleness. It starts with gentleness, right? Because most of the time people don’t come to my office and go, “Hi, I’m an abuse victim. I’m really enduring sexual abuse within my coercively controlling marriage. I’m going to need to disentangle that.” Nobody says that. Now, maybe there will be someone who watches a TikTok, hears something about it and then comes in from that, but that’s not where people start most of the time. They usually come in going, I want to be a better wife. There’s something wrong with me. I am broken. Why were my parents so wicked to me? It must be me. They have something in them that they feel like they need to fix. And so the first part is understanding their story. I need to know this person. I think Diane Langberg says it so well. What makes you? And so I want to find that out first. And so as I’m finding that out and learning a bit about them and their story, then I can help them ask curious questions. And curious questions are one of my favorite things of all time. Tell me what could have made you that bad that at six, your grandfather did this, or tell me what made you so bad that at 10, your youth leader said these things to you. If that were your friend, your daughter, your spouse, what would you say about it then? And just inviting them into a place of compassion that is hard to have for yourself when you’re sitting there going, but it must be me. We have to start from that place of, can we understand your story and make it make sense a bit for you? And yes, there might be things in your story that you’re like, wish I hadn’t done that, but also, why did you do that? What happened? And so inviting that space in also with the somatics, what do you notice in your body when we start to talk about these things? I had one person tell me they couldn’t notice their body at all. She was like, I don’t know. I don’t feel anything. And I was like, okay. And we started getting to some of the curious questions and I asked this question, what was it like when your mom turned her face away from you and all of a sudden her knees began to hurt. And she almost went over the couch and threw the wall behind her. And I was like, tell me what’s happening right now. And she’s like, I don’t know. I said well, let’s just slow it down. And so that’s another big thing is helping people slow down so that they can feel so they can be curious. We’ve spent a lifetime of operating on autopilot, pushing things out often so that we don’t have to feel it. And so giving them space and learning to help them build, some people will call it window of tolerance. I sometimes call it building an island, so we don’t just jump into the ocean of trauma and do the backstroke. We build a beach.
Rachael: Because the backstrokes, I have a son who’s a swimmer and the backstroke’s actually really hard and you can do it more easily, but you can’t actually direct where you’re going. So you could get way off course with that backstroke. That’s all I’m saying.
Tabitha: Exactly. So we got to have a beach to start off from here. And so helping folks have that and learn that self-compassion piece of it and also listening to whose voice it is. I am a big fan of vows and curses, as you guys know from reading the book, and I know you are as well. And so that has been such powerful language for people to what was spoken over you and what did you choose to believe either for survival or because it became ingrained in your world and can we challenge some of that? And I told this story in a book and it’s one of my very favorite stories from Body and Soul, Healed and Whole because it was electric when it happened. And I was at a women’s retreat and I had just spoken on vows and curses. We spoke on play and vows and curses. It was such a delight for me. I had such a good time because both of those things are awesome. And the one woman was saying I think this is my fault and she’s really struggling. And we were all sitting in a circle and one of the gals went across the room and got on her knees and was literally with her forehead on this woman’s knees praying and praying over her and everyone is weeping and she looks up at her and she goes, hose voice is this? And that woman looked over at me and I said, Whose voice is this? And she said, it’s my husband’s. And you could feel God just enter the room and light break through to the darkness. I mean, there was not a dry eye in there. And I watched from that moment forward, and this has now been several years, I’ve watched this woman walk to freedom, and that was so hugely powerful. So when we can say, what are we believing? What if we chosen to ingest because of our survival or what we had to do or what we learned to do? Then we can start breaking that stuff down and walking in a different direction.
Dan: Well, and let’s go back to the issue of when there’s coercion and violence, even if it’s not what most people would call violence, the reality is when the body is being touched in a sexual process, it’s impossible for there not to be some degree, even if it’s a very small percent of arousal, dopamine, our bodies respond to touch, having even an enemy touch your face, your face and the sensation of touch will increase arousal. So again, how do you see that disruption in one sense, that violence against ourself for having felt pleasure in any context where we know we have been degraded? You are such a tender and wise woman. How do you step into that with people given the reality that they’re often going to feel, even in the naming, a sense of their own degradation?
Tabitha: Yeah, such a good question. So I’m going to step back for one second and talk about what abuse is, because I do want to differentiate physical abuse. All abuse is physical abuse, unless you can take your brain out of your skull and stick it in a jar. a) it is a body part, and b), it is dumping neurochemicals into your system all the time. So sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me is a lie from the pit, which we all know. And so I have no distinction at this time in my life between physical and emotional abuse, because again, unless you can stick your brain in a jar, it is in your body and it is doing stuff. So all abuse is physical abuse. And that’s again, why I don’t like the term domestic violence, because it implies something that is, again, too lightweight for what we’re talking about. So when we get into the matter of pleasure, first of all, the “P” word pleasure is a problematic and tricky word in the Christian faith at times. We seem to not be allowed to have it despite the fact that we were created with it. So I’m really confused as to how that works at times. And I think that first of all, reexamining pleasure, and for some people, we need to start outside of the bedroom for this. And I did this when I was redefining words in the book, and I did this when I spoke on it that very first time. And it was beautiful because I started getting these cool text messages about what people were experiencing and it was amazing. And we talked about things like savoring and sensuality and all of these things that are so not just sexual. They are beautiful. I take pleasure in an amazing sunrise, an amazing sunset. Recently, because one of my friends posted a video at Peace Love and Vans from this year, which is like a van life gathering, which I do love a good van life gathering is I love my van. And she posted a girl at the music stage with a light up hula hoop and I was like, I need that. I need that, but I can’t put it in a van. What am I going to do? So I found Light Up Poi, which are like the balls that light up. You can apparently set some on fire, but these are light up ones, right? And so did I bring them to the campground I’m sitting in? Yes, I did because they fit in the van. Did I absolutely play with them outside after dark? Yes, I did. And did I take incredible pleasure in that process? Yes, I did. And so sometimes when we’re orienting people to pleasure, we start with the non-sexual so that they can have the vocabulary, they can have the expansion and they can enter into the place where having to talk about it in this space of harm is a little bit easier, not easy, but a little bit easier. And so we’ve given them the words, we’ve given them the framework, we’ve built a little bit of a beach for them, and then we can go wait out in the water a little and say, when this happened to you, how did your body respond? And that is such a tender place for people. And so as someone who is a people helper, giving them that space and asking the question, when I’m training advocates, when we get to the part on sexual harm, I encourage them to directly ask gently, build the relationship first, but directly ask because it’s not something that most people just volunteer. Hi, I’d like to tell you about the most shameful thing in my life. I had an orgasm while I was being raped. That’s not where people start. And if they tell you that with flat affect, I have other questions. So it’s really important for them to have that space, but to have the invitation, it’s okay to talk about it here. It’s okay to talk about it
Dan: Well it’s making in some sense a very difficult assumption, and that is the abuser conscious or not, wants not only for you to be aroused, but for you to be degraded and for those realities of the intersection, the binding of shame, contempt, and arousal. Again, when I’ve worked with abusers, again, it may be just the few that I’ve worked with, there’s much more consciousness of something of the desire they want that person to suffer. Now, again, it takes quite a while for there to be ownership of that, but when you realize the abuser knows you’re aroused and that they want to, in some sense, take that wound … And put salt in it so that you bear that effect. It’s part of the work of being able to say that even if the abuser did not have that intent, the kingdom of evil does. And now we’ve got to deal with what you put such good words to in the book, that the issue of there’s a curse here and it is between you and the person who violated you, but it’s also a generational curse. It’s also an unseen world curse against you. And so I think there is that richness in your writing that just takes both the deep psychological, the deep spiritual, the reality of what the believing community often doesn’t have either the wisdom or courage to address. And I just can’t help but say, how have you dealt with the pushback?
Rachael: Yeah.
Tabitha: It’s an interesting space. So there are some aspects where if this book had been written by a man, it would be better received. And there are more aspects though of having women DM me on Instagram or find my Facebook or message me through my practice to say, thank you so much. I didn’t have words. And so there’s been some pushback with some spaces, some churches. Like for example, I was invited to speak at a church and they said, no, because women aren’t allowed to talk on sex, which I thought it’s a man’s issue is what I was told.
Rachael: Why you need me to come talk?
Tabitha: I thought that was a people issue, but all righty then. But I think it’s misguided, right? It’s a misguided understanding of scripture. It’s a misguided understanding of how we are created and it’s a misunderstanding of the relationship between men and women, truthfully. So I just look at it as there’s just more for people to learn. There’s more for people to understand and to the places that God will let me bring my feet, then I’m going to do my best to help them understand and I’m going to do my best to bring an invitational space to it so that stories have space to be told because we have got to have other people hold this story with us and these stories with us. Just recently, I did a podcast episode on my own show, which is Hey Tabi, where one of our NFTC alumni who is a certified NFTC storywork coach led me in a story. I said, you got to get on here because she’s amazing. And I said, I want you to engage one of my own stories. And I picked a story of sexual harm and we did it live, which I thought was so helpful because people need to understand the value of storywork. And it’s so easy to talk about, but it’s so hard if you’re like, This is not a concept I possess. I don’t understand. And so I was like, Well, then we’re just going to show people what it looks like. Let’s do that. And it was a very tender place. And there was a moment after I hit publish on that. I was like, yeah, we just told a whole lot there. But I was like, well, you know what? I’m going to see what God does with it and I’m going to trust him with my story ultimately. And the feedback I’ve gotten from that episode is so tender and delightful. And women saying, “I couldn’t call my parents either because that is part of the story is I couldn’t call for help. No one knew. And so I was in this space too and I was here too and I felt this too. And sometimes when you just go first, it helps others come behind you. And so I will take any amount of criticism at any point to go first so that there can be people free behind me.
Rachael: You are so delightful and so full of life and so unapologetically generous in making that way. And I think you do this so well in your book too of the way points of how do we get there? And I’ve heard you say it hasn’t always been your truth that you got to be in your body and have a deep sense of, because it takes a lot of agency to step into this work in the church and to feel that delight of God even when there’s kind of a, it’s rattling things. And so I would love to hear from you, if someone’s listening and they’re going, “I can’t even imagine one, having a language for my body, or two, feeling like I have enough agency to say no or to say yes. What’s some of the path that you would point them towards in this journey of healing and reclaiming?
Tabitha: Start small, right? A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. We do not love that in our society. We are like, can I just microwave it? Why can’t we do that? And healing is not microwavable for one thing. It doesn’t work that way. Sometimes God straight up delivers us. I don’t see that as often as him walking us through a process to be real. And so you start small. And one of the things I do with people when they say, I can’t feel my body… we just do some really little things like pressing our fingers together. Can you feel each fingertip touching the other fingertip? What if you lift one up, what changes for you? And they can feel that. And so that’s a body sensation. And so we start there and then we move gradually to noticing what’s happening, what’s coming up, our energy shifts. And then we can notice as we tell our stories, what do we feel where? I’ll often ask people, if you had to give it a color, what color would it be? If you had to give it a shape, what shape would it be? And for people who don’t visually, they don’t have internal visualization, I ask them to describe it because I could say, let’s say, Rachael, you can’t see your couch in your head. You can’t envision that, which is a weird space. I can see all the things in my head and you’re like, I can’t. But I’m like, If you saw your couch, would you know it? Of course you would. So can you tell me about your couch? Describe your couch to me. And now even if you can’t visually represent it in your head, you can tell me about your couch. Can you tell me about your fingers? What are they doing? I noticed them moving. Oh, they’re moving. Tell me where that goes for you. What comes up for you? And that really helps people start to orient into their body and to give some grace and kindness to their body. One of the things I did that I talked about in Body and Soul, Healed and Whole is thanking different body parts, which seemed a little ridiculous, but it was like, I’m going to try this. I got to do something. And so I remember starting with the ones that weren’t upsetting. So thank you hands for the ability to hold, for the ability to hug, thank you for the ability to pick things up off the floor. That’s always a gift, right? And so went from there and did all of the body parts that were less reactive to the ones that were more reactive. And as I got more intense, I brought that into therapy with me. So I was writing it out as well. And I would go to my therapist and say, okay, I was able to thank my feet today and this is what it looked like and here’s what it brought up all the way up to, I thanked my crotch today and then I threw up. Because that’s the reality of it, right? It’s a mixed bag. And so we have to be okay with the term is dialectics, the two opposite things that can be synthesized, right? So the both end of it all, the now and the not yet, if we’re going to use evangelical vernacular, right? We have to be okay with those things. I can thank my crotch for its goodness and its nerve endings and all of these things. And then I can feel really awful because bad things have happened and I’m going to go puke now and still hold space and gentleness for both places. It doesn’t mean I failed in thanking my crotch. It means I am a whole human with a lot of layers.
Dan: Yeah. And the necessity for particularity, we’ve often emphasized this. And again, what frustration for people, because it’s like, how do I actually speak to parts of my body that in some sense have spoken to me and yet I don’t speak back. Or if I do, I speak as you have spoken so well in your book, curses, I have cursed my body and using even the word body is a euphemism because as I get closer to what I’m cursing, I’m actually going to feel the intensity of my judgment. I can feel my own hands, even as we’re talking, having to … Wait a minute, just relax with the war you bear. And I think that’s part of evil’s intent is to put us in a war, not with it, but with what God has made good. And that is our body. Rachael often begins a podcast with good people with good bodies. And in that, I love that phrase, I’m not going to take it, but nonetheless, to come back to, you’re inviting people to the particularity, not only of harm, which often we don’t engage, but to the particularity of redemption means we get to speak and get to tend to and actually bring goodness too. So let’s take that and come back to the category of masturbation.
Rachael: I knew you were going to bring… I was waiting. I was like, he’s going to wait till the end and then he’s going to bring it back. It’s good. Let’s do it.
Dan: It’s good to be known. But given that’s the reality for many people that we began masturbating in the womb and as young beings, it was often our only means of self-soothing. So how do you help people engage what is so fraught with such judgment and shame?
Rachael: And also, I just want to name before we say it, and rarely as women, something we’re even allowed to talk about or acknowledge is a human experience, not just a male experience, not out there.
Tabitha: Absolutely. And I will say, as I edge ever closer to menopause, it is a topic, arousal, masturbation, orgasm are topics that are not often enough spoken about, especially for women. And there are just things that change in your body as you get older that make orgasm a little bit more challenging and sometimes a vibrator helps you out. So there’s that. So when it comes to masturbation, I want to gently say that you can trust your own convictions because people are going to land in different spots and the Bible itself is silent on it. It doesn’t specifically talk about it. What it talks about is immorality. It talks about lust. It talks about those things. It talks about where your heart is. And I would say that is your benchmark. For some people, if you have struggled with compulsive sexual behavior, masturbation may be off the table for you because it takes you somewhere you do not want to go or somewhere you’re trying to learn to not go. And so that is something that you want to consider. Where are you? What is okay for you, between you and God? And where’s your heart? What’s your fantasy life like in those moments? All of those are really good questions to ask. And I can’t answer what’s right for you because I’m not you and I’m not God. I’ve met him, but I am not him. And so I would rather you have that conversation with him and your therapist, frankly, and really wrestle it out for you. And also, I think we’ve lost this so much in our current society, the concept of season. And what I mean by that is something might be okay today that isn’t okay tomorrow because something has shifted in you, something has shifted in your environment. I’ve had a lot of women say to me, I used masturbation to finally have pleasurable touch that wasn’t violent to help undo parts of my arousal template. And now I’m in a committed relationship, in a safe space, very safe sexually, yes, there are still things I have to reckon with. By the way, you don’t just remarry someone who’s amazing and then all of your sexual problems go away just in case someone needs to hear that out there. But I no longer want to turn to masturbation for things. Okay, that’s awesome. Someone else might feel different. Someone else may say, I need a vibrator. And look, I know talking about vibrators in the evangelical space is a little bit challenging. However, I think that as women’s bodies change, it is something that can be a gift and to help in the bedroom. And so I just want to say that because I know that in my own story, things like that would have been like, oh, you’re a sinner, you’re disgusting, you’re not allowed. And I just want to say, talk to God because maybe you are. And if you’re not cool, but if you are and this is something that would help you, then why would you say no? Now, the caveats I give with that is like, look, there’s not a Christian vibrator shop that I have found. So a lot of them come with, if you’re struggling, go watch these videos. I am very much not a fan of pornography because of what it does to you. And that includes erotic fiction. Y’all can come at me in the comments if you like. But I think that it takes us out of good places and out of the beauty of God’s design for sexuality. And so when it becomes, again, consumptive of another party, that was the essence of Jesus saying, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” What I mean by that is lusting after someone in your own heart, right? What is lust? Lust is consumptive. I will take you for my pleasure. When we are in that place, which is very much what pornography is, and we all know that it’s not really consensual when it’s being created either, that it takes you somewhere. So when you are looking, if you feel like God says yes for a vibrator, and I’m putting this on the internet, so here we are, that please be mindful of what else you accept with it. And so again, it’s that prayerful, curious, intentional posture of what is okay for me in my life and what is okay and appropriate in this season for me. And so I would just invite you in that place to be curious and to not say yes or no with wanton disregard.
Dan: No, so kind. And I think that’s where I come back to talking about Body and Soul, Healed and Whole. It’s a kind book. It is a wise book. And in the invitation that whatever the harm you’ve endured, be it as a child, be it in your marriage, the reality is that the loving God of the universe has so much joy in seeing your body, your heart, your mind brought back the wholeness of what Shalom really is. And so we’re so grateful for you and so grateful that you’ve been part of NFTC, and yet we’re just so inviting others to see this book takes you even further. So thank you, Tabitha.
Tabitha: Thank you so much.