Latest / The Trauma Therapist / Episode 809: The Healthy Pursuit of Pleasure with Haylin Belay

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Episode 809: The Healthy Pursuit of Pleasure with Haylin Belay · The Trauma Therapist

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Trauma Therapist Podcast. Plus listeners can listen to episodes early and ad free right
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now. Become a Plus listener by going to Apple Podcasts searching for the Trauma
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Therapist Podcast and signing up today or welcome back to the Trauma Thepist podcast.
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My name is Gamiferson. My mission is to help trauma therapist be their incredible
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selves, to be human, to be real, not just a clinician.
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I'm a big believer in who we are is more important than what we know,
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and this requires cultivating authenticity, genuineness, and vulnerability, and that requires
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intention. Can learn more about my courses and workshops by going to the Trauma
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Therapist Project dot com. That's the Trauma Therapist Project dot com. Let's get
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started, all right, he here we go. So five for three,
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two and one, our folks, welcome back to the podcast. I am
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very excited to have as my guest today, Halen Ballet. Helen welcome,
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Thank you for having me. You are welcome. So. Helen is a
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seasoned sex educator and health promotion professional with a focus in reproductive justice and intersectional
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trauma informed strategies for healing and care. There were a decade of hands on
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experience, developing award winning health education programming, and providing professional development for clinicians,
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educators, and activists. Helen has dedicated her life to teaching people of
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all ages practical skills for healthier, more pleasurable life. In addition to her
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classroom work, she's also a yoga instructor and spiritual coach, offering workshops,
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trainings, and one on one coaching from a trauma responsive, integrated mind,
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body, spirit perspective. And there's a lot more about what you do,
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but we'll get into that. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having
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me pleasure to be here. Thanks. So, before we get going,
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share with the listeners where you're from originally and where you are current. Yeah.
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So I was geographically was born in Washington State. I spent most of
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my adult years and career in New York City, and I'm currently based out
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of Baltimore, Maryland. Oh okay, all right, So look, you
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are a very interesting person. I mean, obviously you're looking at your reading,
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your your your bio, looking at your background. You've got a lot
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going on, and you're obviously very passionate. So when I say that to
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you, and when I ask you this next question, I'm serious, what
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comes up for you? How did this all start for you? Yeah?
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It is. I mean that you're not the first person to ask a version
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of that question. I think, especially in my early mid career, when
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I was introducing what I do to people, they'd be like, how do
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what do those things have in common? How do those things all connect?
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My cheeky answer is that they all have me in common, and that I'm
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I'm the connecting factor. Obviously I'm interested in all of them, so they
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must have some in common. The less cheeky answer is that I was actually
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very lucky to find the thing that I was most passionate about at a very
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young age. I was I think fifteen years old when I attended a queer
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youth activism camp, and that was the first time that I learned about social
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justice and these very important topics that I carry into my politics. But also
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is the first place where I had queer inclusive, pleasure based sexual health education.
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I grew up in Texas. In between Washington and New York was Texas,
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so in the state of Texas, obviously was not getting I won't even
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say I wasn't getting quality sex education. I functionally was not getting sex education
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and having the opportunity to get that in this explicitly political context where alongside this
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health information, I was also being told, Hey, there are reasons why
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you aren't getting this information in school that have nothing to do with health outcomes,
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right, the things that de sensibly health professionals are meant to be motivated
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by. And that just lit up a fire in fifteen year old Haylen that
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has not gone out of you know at the time, thinking, you mean
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the grown ups knew this whole time, the information existed, and they've been
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keeping it from us. How is that fair? How does that make sense?
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So it started off as you know, I think that everyone deserves to
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know this stuff, this information that's out there about how their bodies work,
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about what sexuality is, and how they can embrace sexuality in their lives,
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again in this queer inclusive and pleasure based way. And then as I started
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doing that work in my adulthood as an educator of young people mostly K through
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twelve at that time, I found that I was running into a big problem,
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which was, you know, I could tell my students all of the
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information in the world about you know, I could do all the condoms on
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banana demos that I want and if I don't, if my students don't know
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how to talk to their partner about using condoms, how much have I really
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helped them? So that pushed me to the social emotional skills realm and sort
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of developing my skills in these things that are so it's the Trauma Therapist podcast.
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I am not a therapist, but these things that are in the realm
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of psycho education, right helping people to understand their psychology so that they can
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better support themselves and make decisions for their own lives. And from the social
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emotional stuff, it became well, I can give people these tools for how
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to communicate with their partner, but if they can't stay present long enough in
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their body to know what feels good, then how are they even going to
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know what to say to their partner. So there's another layer of having to
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go deeper, and that's what led me into becoming a yoga instructor, learning
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more about body work and throughout all of this. That's the professional timeline,
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But at the same time, I was going through my own personal journey,
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as I think many trauma specialists are. Unsurprisingly in a lot of ways,
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it starts with a curiosity about myself in my own experience, trying to make
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sense of the world, and in college in particular sort of high impact trauma
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led me to kind of going back over the archives and you know, recontextualizing
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things in my early childhood years. That was part of what led me to
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witchcraft, which is also a big part of my personal and professional practice.
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Witchcraft specifically as a you know, for me, it is a secular practice
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that's mostly based in radically reclaiming the idea that I know things and that I
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have power, which are two things that I think for a lot of trauma
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impacted people can be really hard to reclaim. So that's the sort of broad
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strokes of it is. I was at fifteen years old, I lucked out
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and figured out, actually, this is what I care more about than anything,
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and since then it's all been about figuring out how to do that thing
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better and better. That's unfortunate, I think, and amazing that you were
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able to figure that out. So when you went to that camp and how
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to get how did you describe it queer youth activism camp? Because the name
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of the camp, so my guess is you had parents or people in your
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family who No, Actually, I actually I had to get I had to
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request a special permission slip that did not have the word queer anywhere on it.
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And actually had a very touching experience when my mom came to pick me
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up from queer activism camp where you know, going to my cabin, getting
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my stuff, and one of my compatriots walking towards me, and he's got
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a rainbow necklace on, and I'm like thinking in my head, like,
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oh my god, Okay, what's my strategy here? What am I going
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to do? I turned to my mom and say, oh Mom, this
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is you know so and so, and turn back and the necklace is already
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under the shirt. Do you know what I mean? Like, it was
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such a supportive environment to be in of Like, even though I did not
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come from a family where these conversations were discussed or these topics were encouraged around
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the dinner table, I was lucky enough to find a community of people outside
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of my family and some trusted adults outside of my family who were to make
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that space for me. One of the things you talked about kind of really
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struck me was, you know, you can do all the banana demos but
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people can't actually talk to their partner. So what did you learn when you
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started thinking about that? What were you hearing, what were you not hearing,
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and what was going through your mind such that you said, Okay,
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how can we maybe educate people in this way? Yeah, I think it
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was twofold. So on the one hand, I mentioned already that I was
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doing work in mostly middle and high schools at that time, talking to young
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people about putting condoms on bananas and talking about healthy relationships. And I had
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a very striking experience in a workshop where I was talking to a group of
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high school students at an all girls' school and we were talking about sexual decision
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making, consent communication, these kinds of topics. And there was a student
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in that class who sort of like raised her hand at one point and was
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like, well, you know, in this theoretical scenario we're talking about,
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which at the time we were talking about, what is coercion? What does
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like pressure look like in this realm? That this young person was like,
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well, if you know, if somebody says yes to something they didn't want
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to say yes to, it's kind of on them for not being able to
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like withstand the game of the person that they're dealing with, and I was
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so like knocked off my feet. I mean, at that time, you
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know, I was in my early twenties. I was very optimistic that I
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would be going into classrooms where you know, of course, we all are
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on the same page about what our sexual values are and we just need to
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know how to do it. But realizing that a big part of what I
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was trying to teach people was not just the stuff that was you know,
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easy to put on an infographic or a piece of paper and say, here's
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the facts you need to know. It was actually something much deeper than throwing
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up some slides or shoving some pictures reading off to say sticks and actually getting
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into a much deeper and richer type of conversation than I had been having with
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my students up until that point. That was really the impetus to going into
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developing my skill set as a social emotional skills educator. The other half of
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that equation, though, was, in addition to all that stuff that I
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was doing, I also worked in sex shops for like, on and off
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throughout my twenties. Lovely Experience strongly recommend if anybody out there wants to be
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a sexuality educator, you will get no better practice than being on the floor
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sales floor of a sex shop, because that's like the real sex education in
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terms of I'm talking to adults who think they know already, who think that
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they already have the answers to these questions, and realizing that these adults are,
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you know, the grown up versions of students who in more often than
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not didn't get good sex ed at the developmental period. So, you know,
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the other impetus was also being in these ostensibly retail interactions that really were
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like educational conversations and realizing it's not a matter of you don't know the information.
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Again, I'm talking to adults, you're having sex, you know what's
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up allegedly, but there's still this big gap of you know, how do
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I know what I want and get what I want? So going back to
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that person who said, you know, if they say yes to a situation
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that they don't want, then that's on them. How did you respond?
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What did you say? Yeah? So in that particular circumstance, I was
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at the disadvantage of I believe this was like a three or four session series
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that I was doing as a visiting teacher, and that was one of our
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last sessions together. So I knew that to a certain extent, there wasn't
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going to be I wasn't going to be able to get to the depth that
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I would want to ideally with those young people. But what I ended up
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saying was, I think, at the time, a version of like I
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think my standard like go to thing that in my back pocket of Okay,
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I hear you, and I hear your perspective. For the sake of getting
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through the content that we're getting through today, I'm going to ask that you,
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like come with us on the journey of what if that's not true.
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We can have a conversation later about what if it is true, but let's
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just for the purposes of this workshop, let's say let's say that maybe actually
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that's not let's not victim blame. Essentially, is a version of what I
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said. I think that that was probably not the way that I would respond
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now. I think if I was in that same classroom now what seven or
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eight years on, I would have used that as an opportunity to ask a
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lot more questions, because I think that was actually a really rich opportunity for
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learning that at that time I saw as this is potentially an interruption to or
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an impediment to learning. I think there's a lot as a response that maybe
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a lot of people do have. What would you say now to that person?
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Yeah, I mean this is something I talk about in when I do
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trainings with professionals around trauma and form facilitation is I usually put a little slide
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up towards the end. That's like question mark greater than exclamation point, right
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of like if I can leave you with one suggestion for being more trauma informed
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in your facilitation, it's ask more questions and try to be less reactive because,
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especially in these conversations for my work, right talking about sex, that's
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a topic where the best person might not be at their best right. It's
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a sensitive topic. It brings up weird stuff for people, and knowing that
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people need a space to work through those things that just saying like get that
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out of here, that doesn't belong here, it doesn't actually get them any
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closer to resolving It has been I think the biggest shift in the way that
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I think about teaching now versus in my early days when it really was like
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I have a lesson plan I have to get through these key objectives or whatever.
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My perspective now is much more like the job that I have here,
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yes, is to teach this content, but mostly is to help the people
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that I'm working with lead more pleasurable lives, be more sexually responsible. And
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if someone says that in a classroom that I'm in, that's my sign that
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actually, if that's what my mission is, that's what we got to talk
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about, and not like, all right, let's put a pin in that
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and come back to it later. Are you know you're talking about working on
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working on the floors of sex shops and how what an amazing education that was
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for you? And look, I know I realized everyone's different, But what
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did you discover? What are some of the things you heard? I want
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to have like a fun sexy story, because I think you know, when
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I had sex educator on my business card at cocktail parties, people get excited
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and they want to hear the fund sallacious stuff. The really unfortunate truth is
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that a thing I was not ex that I encountered a lot in the years
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that I worked in sex shops was that I would say, more often than
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not, like more than fifty percent of the people that I was talking to
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at some point in the interaction would reveal that they had some kind of sexual
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trauma that they didn't think of as trauma or had some really internalized like toxic
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idea about sexuality that was again may or may not be my job to solve
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in this retail interaction, but that is it coming up in this conversation because
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you have to imagine that, you know, there's the version of coming to
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the sex shop that is so joyous of like it's a young girl who's like,
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I want to get my first vibrator and I'm nervous, and her friend
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is with her, and it's all very like you go, girl, like
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we're gonna, you know, get you, get you those orgasms. That's
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fun, that's delightful. Less fun is, you know, the person coming
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in being like, uh, do you sell like numbing creams? Because the
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things that my partner wants to do are physically uncomfortable for me and instead of
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not doing them like via p propriate thing seems to be let me not feel
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the sex that I'm having, or not to talk about it or share it
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that it's even bothered me. Yeah, wow right, wow, So you
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know, un sexy stuff happened to the sex shop all the time, right,
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So you know, like I said before, you you obviously have this
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passion for this. What do you feel allows you to be this mediator in
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a sense that that opens up discussions that even allows people to uh confront what's
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going on for themselves. Yeah, it's a really good question, especially because
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I started my career so young. It's hard not to think like, was
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it just a seed that was always going to blossom? Like was this always
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I always going to pop out the womb and be like, let's talk about
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sex. I don't know. I mean, as I was alluding to before,
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it was not a result of growing up in a sex positive household.
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My mom to this day will say insist that she's a virgin, and that's
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in addition to me, she also has a fifteen year old so that seems
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very unlikely. But you know, from that extremely conservative background, I think
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the natural curiosity that I had as a young person, and it might seem
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like a weird answer, but also my undiagnosed neurodivergence at that time that I
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had a kind a genre of curiosity that because it was not diagnosed, my
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mom didn't have the tools to rein in the way that she might have wanted
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to, which actually made me, I think, able to not just like
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talk to people, but to have a type of curiosity that allowed me to
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be a really multidisciplinary learner and to say, like, the thing that I'm
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interested in is sexuality. There's actually a million different entry points into that.
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There's all kinds of things that I can learn from all of these different arenas
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when it comes to I mean, even beyond just sexuality, this concept of
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pleasure and what it means to pleasurably. I've come to learn in retrospect that
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a lot of the problems I was trying to solve with that inquiry were the
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problems of undiagnosed nerd divergence. So, you know, trying to find this
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self understanding and to make peace with it, but not yet having the language
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of the DSM to kind of describe it for me. So what's very interesting
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to me as we're talking, you know, it seems like when you talk
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about sex, it's not just the physical act of sex. There's so much,
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so many tangentials and topics that go into this. But let me just
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such that was just a common here. So how does your neurodivergence play out.
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What does it look like for you? Yeah, so I think I
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don't want to answer this question because I could talk about this for an hour.
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By I'll say this, So when I talk about witchcraft in particular,
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frequently, when I talk about witchcraft, I'm talking about it from again,
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a secular perspective that's very body based and very somatic based, so talking about
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intuition as interoception and manifestation as efficacy. And from that perspective, many of
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the most powerful intuitive kind of natural which is that I know people who are
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naturally attracted to things like taro and to ritual and kind of intention and infusing
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the world around them with an intention, are neurodivergent people. I suspect that
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has to do with the fact that if you look at kind of all the
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things that are under the neurodivergence umbrella, which is a lot of different things,
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one thing that they tend to have in common is being exceptionally sensitive,
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right, like a very sometimes overly receptive nervous system. And in the conception
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of intuition that I work with that is very based on polyvagal theory and is
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very based on again this the neuropsychology of what these experiences feel like. It
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doesn't surprise me then that the people who tend to be the most curious about,
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well, how do I reconcile the thing inside me that I know to
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be true and the conflict that I'm feeling from the outside world that maybe doesn't
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get my internal reality, tend to be people for whom it's harder to dissociate
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from those feelings. Right. As a person of Nerdi version experience when I
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have jobs that I can't tolerate being at, I literally I throw up in
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the bathroom, like I literally can't tolerate being there, right, And so
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it kind of forced me to have a different relationship with my feelings, my
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sensations, my body because I don't have the same access as your quote unquote
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neurotypical person might have to like just turning those things off or down on a
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day to day basis. And that's why it brings me so much joy to
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share that with other people, because I think there are a lot of people
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for whom their distress is like just barely tolerable, right, And just barely
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tolerable means you can stay in that space for years and years and maybe your
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whole life it's exceptionally sensitive, and saying actually, there's a different way to
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do things that honors and protects that sensitivity is a really special I think role.
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For me, this might seem like a naive question, but do you
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approach speaking on the topic of sex differently with queer people or non queer people.
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That's not a naive question. I think it's a really good one.
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So again, I think this is something that at the beginning of my career
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I might have answered differently, but there was a transition point. Frankly,
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I think of it as like around the time I hit twenty five, so
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about ten years deep into thinking about these things is when I feel like I
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started really getting it. And part of what really getting it meant for me
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at that point was that that was also the time period at which I stopped
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teaching queer sex ed as a separate class and instead making a point of saying,
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all of the sex said that I teach is queer inclusive. It is
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all being taught from a perspective of like, queer people exist and are part
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of this conversation, and that being such an important thing, not just because
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queer people exist that's obviously really important, but the other important piece being that
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people who don't identify as queer can still learn a lot about themselves by learning
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from this queer inclusive framework. I think a perfect example of that is talking
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about sexual anatomy. You know, when you look at the development of the
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sexual organs, they're all analogous cells. They're really interesting and useful insight to
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be gained at looking at the analogous structures in different types of genitals, different
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types of bodies. That's something that if you're coming from a really narrowly like
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heterosexual penis in vagina kind of perspective of what sex is or what kind of
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sex education you need to offer, not only is that doing a disservice to
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the queer people in the room, it's doing a diservice to the essentially straight
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people in the room. It's also doing a disservice to the potentially closeted people
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in the room who maybe would not identify themselves openly as being queer, but
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are still hungry for that information. So yeah, I think at this point
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there isn't a difference because at this point I think I've matured into an understanding
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of well actually none of this is that different, right. It's one of
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the reasons why I do so many different things that seemingly quote unquote don't have
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to do with sex. Well, they all have to do with sex.
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And where that's where the manifesto on my website comes from, right, All
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people deserve an integrated life and the healthy pursuit of pleasure. And that integrated
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life piece means like your sex life isn't this separate secret thing that happens behind
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closed doors and has nothing to do with who you are at work or with
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your family or in your hobbies or whatever. You're the same person in all
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those spaces. And that's a big part of what I feel, like my
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messages, my ministry is. That's very interesting because I think for a lot
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of us, there is a gap, a chasm, right, yes,
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behind those behind our bedroom doors and the face we show talk the face we
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show at work or talk about that. Yeah. So I want to be
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clear that I do believe in boundaries, right, So just saying that,
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you know, we should all have integrated lives. That I'm actually extraordinarily private
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about my sex life, even more so than other of my peers in the
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sexuality space. For reasons that are my own. You know that to me
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is not in conflict with the idea of but my sexual self is not a
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person that I put, you know, in a in a closet or in
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a back room somewhere when I'm going about my day to day life. I
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think, again, I can talk about just this for an hour, but
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the most simple way that I think I can put it is from this.
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I'll give an illustrative example. So I was having a conversation with about essentially
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a pattern they had experienced in their romantic eess sexual relationships, where they were
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sharing with me like, oh, yeah, I've had lots of experiences where
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someone just like grabbed me and kissed me. And I was like, whoa,
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I don't think I've had, you know, more than a couple of
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experiences like that, and they were really exceptional, and you know, kind
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of talking to them and being more curious and you know, to make a
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long story short, part of what came out of that conversation was a realization
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that they had a very deeply embedded idea of like well consensual non consent or
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like what would I think, in the common partlance be called like rape fantasy
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of being like, well, I know that's not what I'm into. I
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hate that. I think it's gross. I'm very anti that conceptually. And
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then as we were talking, I was like, h it kind of sounds
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like you have like a ravishment fantasy that you're really uncomfortable with, and because
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you're really uncomfortable with it, you don't look at it. And because you
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don't look at it, when you find yourself in circumstances where the ravishment fantasy
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is being fulfilled, it doesn't register you to you that that's actually a dangerous
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situation, right, that it's like in this non consensual situation, it actually
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it actually kind of is quote unquote meeting a need for you, right in
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this very shadowy kind of way. It's something that you want and that you
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like, but because you're so alienated from what you want and what you like,
26:26
it makes it more difficult to distinguish between the safe version of that thing
26:30
and the unsafe version of that thing. And I think you see versions of
26:33
that with lots of different you know, whether it's like a specific kink or
26:37
fantasy, or even just on a much more broad level, like the types
26:41
of fantasy, non sexual fantasies, that we have about relationships. I think
26:44
that's something that holds true unsurprisingly in a lot of places outside of the bedroom,
26:48
that we think that we don't want something and find ourselves inadvertently kind of
26:53
doing the thing because we're struggling to acknowledge the part of us that wants it.
26:59
So as we kind of wind down here, let's talk about you your
27:04
website. Do you offer trainings and workshops and if so, what Yes,
27:11
so I offer a whole bunch of things. At this last year, I've
27:15
been focusing primarily on one on one work, but coming up in twenty twenty
27:19
four, I'm going to be focusing more on doing trainings, trainings with fellow
27:23
professionals, professional development type things. I have a few also, just like
27:30
open public group classes coming up this well, I guess February is not quite
27:34
Spring, but coming up in the next few months on topics related to like
27:40
more of the What I like to say is my magic trick of being like
27:44
come for this really sexy fun topic. Surprise, it was psycho education the
27:48
whole time. So I have a series coming up this next month on b
27:52
D and DSM, which is about tabletop role playing and BDSM and also is
27:57
about internal family system and like encountering the self. So that's kind of the
28:03
perspective that the public classes take when it comes to the other work that I
28:07
do. You know, I love working with, like coming coming out to
28:14
work with a group of clinicians, practitioners, whatever. I also have a
28:19
few self paced programs that are available for especially folks who are in some kind
28:26
of trauma related field where maybe the body piece or the somatic piece isn't an
28:33
explicit part of the training that they're getting at their workplace. The healing the
28:37
traumatized body program that I offer is intended for also self healers and civilians,
28:44
shall we say, but I have heard from from professionals and from practitioners that
28:48
it's been really useful for fl filling in gaps for fields where that's not explicit
28:52
part of the conversation and the one on one work you do. What is
28:56
how does that work? Yeah, it's a lot of different shapes. I
29:00
sometimes de fault to calling it coaching because that's legible for people, but it's
29:03
really not coaching. The more accurate terminology I think would be mentorship or apprenticeship,
29:11
because you know, coaching tends to be about like having external structure and
29:15
kind of someone who's guiding you along that process. Uh. The way that
29:18
I work with people one on one is much more like I'm a person who's
29:22
available to you on the journey that you are taking right and helping people to
29:27
develop. Like, for example, one of the clients I'm working with right
29:32
now, the main thing that we're working on is that she wants to develop
29:36
a spiritual practice that feels authentically hers. Well. Part of what that means
29:41
from my perspective of what I do is I'm not chasing her down on a
29:45
bi weekly basis to say, hey, have you done your spirituality homework.
29:48
Part of the work for her is figuring out how do I authentically know when
29:52
it's time for me to go to my spiritual mentor and have that conversation.
29:56
Okay, okay, Helen. I need people like you in the world.
30:02
I feel like you have a certain courage and tenacity and mission that a lot
30:08
of us don't. I mean, what you're talking about, let's face it
30:12
exists in the shadows culturally for us, socially for us. You know,
30:18
and I think the work you're doing is is incredible and inspiring. You're welcome
30:23
back here anytime. Thank you very much, would be a pleasure to come
30:26
back. I appreciate it, all right. So what's the best way for
30:30
people to get in contact with you? Yeah, so the best way to
30:33
find me is it's nice to have a google able name ww dot h A
30:37
y l I N dot co. And that's where all of my everything is.
30:41
If you want to have me come speak at your school, if you
30:44
want to chat one on one, if you have a question that you want
30:47
to pop off in half an hour, I've got options for that too.
30:51
And I do technically have Instagram. I will say this now, it's not
30:56
the place where i'd want you to find me. You can follow me there
30:57
if you want to. I hate at Instagram, so so that's not a
31:02
place where I put my best stuff, I think. If you're looking for
31:07
the good stuff, join the newsletter. Okay, okay, we'll have that
31:10
link up here at the show notes page at the Trauma Theapris Podcast dot com.
31:12
Helen is awesome meeting you, talking with you. Thanks so much.
31:17
Yes, thank you so much for inviting me. All right, byebye, Thanks