Navigating the Depths of Shame with Rena Martine
Dismantling the idea that sexual shame is tied solely to sexual trauma
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A note to you, dear reader: while this podcast and companion newsletter are meant for childfree Latinas y Latines, occasionally people will pop in that aren’t childfree or Latine. There will always be a rhyme to this reason, and today’s guest is actually the first non-Latine to join La Vida Más Chévere.
This is also the first episode edited by a professional audio engineer! So I’d love to hear your feedback on this interview. Listen on your favorite podcast app, or scroll to the bottom for Apple and Spotify options. Then simply leave a comment on this post to tell me what you think, or email me directly.
I asked Rena Martine, an intimacy expert and former Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney that I met at a friend’s birthday party and immediately wanted to talk to forever, to be a guest because she has very specific field of expertise: shame.
At the time she was also a week away from performing at her first ever burlesque show. If that alone doesn’t illustrate her ability to display comfort in her own body, rebelling against what society has told us is acceptable for us to do and be as women, then I don’t know what to tell you.
So because shame is a universal negative and damaging emotion, and we’re all here to dismantle the toxic cultural bullshit we all grew up with, we’re going to tackle a minefield of questions like:
What is the true meaning of shame?
What is at the root of shame?
What causes sexual shame?
Later in the interview we’re going to get deeper into sex and shame. Rena wants the listener (and you reader) to feel relaxed around this topic, as if you’re sharing a glass of wine with a friend. To get a jump on that, check out Cellars Wine Club, a wine delivery service.
This is a lightly edited version of our whole conversation. We’re going to jump in right where Rena explains what the hell an intimacy coach is.
Rena: As a women's intimacy coach, I work with women one-on-one to help them love their bodies, experience deep intimacy and have great sex, shame-free. What the heck does that mean, Rena?
Really, I serve a lot of different women. Some are in relationships where perhaps things have either gone stale, [or] they were never that great to begin with. Perhaps there's some religious shame at play, where a woman just has never been in touch with her body or pleasure, or was told that it was something that she wasn't supposed to be allowed to want.
Or we've got someone who's single, who's recovering from a breakup and who's taking a real hard look at her past relationships and saying, “wait a second. I wanna get off this ride. I wanna stop repeating these patterns.”
So every woman is unique, but what they all have in common is a sense, "okay, what's wrong with me that I can't do this thing, right?"
Whether that be sex, whether that be romantic relationships, or whether that even be platonic intimacy. Cuz I've worked with quite a few women who are these successful badass bitch go-getters at work, but they have no idea how to turn that off and form meaningful connections with people.
So intimacy is really just showing up as you are and allowing yourself to be seen. Whether that's inside the bedroom or outside the bedroom.
Paulette: So you're not just a sex coach?
Rena: Correct! Yes. Because pretty much anyone can have sex, but not everyone can experience intimacy. And so that's where I bridge those two together.
And you can have sex without intimacy and intimacy without sex, but sexual intimacy is kind of its own beast, and that's a huge part of the work that I do with my clients.
Paulette: How did you get into that? How do you jump from being in this hardcore legal situation to now coaching women one-on-one in something that requires such a tender touch?
Rena: Not that it didn't require a tender touch with a lot of children, which is what I did when I was a DA. Childhood abuse survivors, but also grown adults too, and not just women, men as well.
But my own journey really plays into why I do what I do today to help women. Because I felt a tremendous amount of shame in my own life cuz I did all the things that I was told I should do and should want.
So I got married and we had the white picket fence lifestyle and I really sucked at monogamy and I was like, “why can't I get this thing right? I'm supposed to want this, I'm supposed to wanna get married. I'm supposed to wanna have kids. I'm supposed to wanna go to couples game nights all the time. And oh my God, I just feel like I'm living in a prison!”
I've been in therapy most of my adult life, and I'll tell you, not all therapists are created equal. And I finally found someone who was mind-blowingly good. And I came to her begging for her to fix me. Like help me just be grateful and happy for this really good life that I have.
And she dismantled that. Broke me down in the kindest way, but led me to understand that I wasn't broken. And that's really what shame is: it's this idea that there's something broken with us, there's something abnormal about us. That there was nothing wrong with me. I was just trying to fit the square peg of Rena into the round hole of the white picket fence.
And once I went through that journey, I came out the other end of it, I ended my marriage and I started living my best life. I felt so free. And then the pandemic hit.
And after I had baked all the bread and watched all the tv…at that time I knew that I wanted to help people differently. I had really burned out from prosecuting sex crimes because the justice system doesn't always work how it's supposed to.
All of these things kind of collided at the same time where I had my great reckoning during the pandemic. I'm living my personal life in a way that aligns with me, where I feel like I'm in integrity. I have partnered with someone who doesn't want the conventional white picket fence either. I'm living my life according to my rules, but there was still this crack in my container when it came to my work life.
And so pre-pandemic, I thought to myself, I'm gonna go back to school and become a therapist and take my time doing that. While I was still working as a DA, I'll take the years and years, it'll take me to accumulate the number of hours I need to, but I'll do that.
And then by the time I turned 50 when I could actually retire with a pension from the DA's office, I would have a second career lined up and I could just transition into doing that. So pandemic hits, and I'm like, “wait a second. 50 years old. That's 12 more years of my life! Is there a way I can start helping people now?”
I went and got a coaching certification just to see if I would like working with people one-on-one. It turns out I loved it [and that] there was a huge demand for intimacy coaching, especially evidence-based. And I say that because most sex coaches out there are spiritually-based, and I'm not one of them.
There are very few who take a neuroscientific approach to what they do, but it's the lawyer in me. I want the evidence, I want the data, and I want the facts. So yeah, I was kind of juggling both at the same time, working from home as a lawyer during the pandemic and also seeing clients. And something had to give.
And I thought, if not me, then who? I don't have kids I have to support. I'm not married. My partner and I live separately from each other. I don't have a mortgage. My car is paid off. Who else is gonna be able to take this massive leap from a very stable government job with the golden handcuffs, to follow their passion?
If not me, then who? So I made the scariest decision I have ever made (which is saying a lot cuz I've made a lot of those) and left my really stable career to help women do in a shorter period of time what it took me years to do on my own. Like years of therapy, years of anguish, years of couples retreats with my then husband, trying to figure this all out.
So I've committed myself to saving people time in their journey so that they can reach the other end of the rainbow cuz it is so nice over here. The water's warm. Come on in!
The Universal Hurricane of Shame
Editor’s note: I misspoke at this point in the interview. Rena’s TEDx speech is about a hurricane1 of shame, not a tornado.
Paulette: Shame is a thing that I think is universal. Everyone understands what that means. And this tornado of shame I think will really resonate with my audience, Latine or not, because there's a lot locked up in feeling guilt. Feeling like putting ourselves first is such a shameful thing to do. [That] you should never prioritize your own self before the family. These are real problems that our culture faces and we're made to feel bad about that. What do you say to someone in that situation?
Rena: Well start by understanding that biologically, we're wired to feel shame. Because we needed shame to stay alive a really, really long time ago. We have a lot of parts of our brain that are still holdovers from when we were hunters and gatherers, and shame is one of them. So at the time, if you were threatened of being cast out from your community, from your tribe, this unpleasant feeling that we now call shame would creep in so that you could stay alive essentially.
And so we are left with this feeling of shame. But interestingly, it's now universally considered to be a psychologically damaging emotion. So it's bad for us. Not only is it like our appendix where it doesn't really do anything, it's actually bad for us. Like I said in my TEDx talk, it's like if our brains were computers, we're walking around with these clunky, outdated desktops on our necks that also have viruses on them.
So really confronting our shame is an act of rebellion. And I wanna touch on what you brought up about how pressure and shame shows up in the Latina community and the sense of you have to be a martyr. Because I see that so often with my clients, who span the race and ethnicity spectrum.
One of the first things we do is really start unpacking: what external messages did you get growing up about what it means to be a woman? About sex? About what a woman's role is? And so often, and not just with my Latina clients, but with other clients, I will see them saying, "well, I grew up in an environment where my mom says, you gotta do everything for the family. It's your job to keep things together."
And so it's no wonder that now as adults, they're people pleasing in their relationships. They don't know how to use their voice. They're sticking around in relationships that may even be borderline abusive. Because as children, they were taught, “no, it's your job to keep things together, and if things are therefore falling apart, that's your fault.”
So that's how I see shame creep up. And as far as this tornado, this hurricane of sexual shame, when we're talking about women, people say, "Rena, where do you think the majority of women's shame comes from?"
I think the better question is, where does it not come from? Because it can come from our families of origin, it can come from our religion, it can come from the Instagram accounts we follow, the the trash reality TV we watch.
And sure it can come from surviving sexual trauma. Because that's what a lot of people assume. “Well, sexual shame, that means that you must have survived some sort of traumatic event.” No, [sexual trauma is] a small portion of the sexual shame that we have walking around on this earth.
Because I see plenty of women saying, "Hey, my body doesn't work this way. What's wrong with me? I can't orgasm this way. What's wrong with me? Is it abnormal that I do this?"
So anytime I hear words like “normal,” “abnormal,” “what's wrong with me,” or the word “should,” I know that that's all code for some sort of underlying shame.
Stay tuned for the rest of this conversation coming next week, or listen to the whole thing now on your favorite podcast app.
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To get the full show notes, and an episode transcript, go to PauletteErato.com. And stay tuned for an expanded version of our conversation right here on Substack, coming later this week.
Did you know that the word hurricane comes from the Taino word "jurakán"? Taino are the native people of Puerto Rico. Learn more with this YouTube video.