Sexual pain makes sex challenging, stressful, and a source of tension rather than a source of pleasure. Sadly, it’s a very present reality for many couples, and one that can quickly erode sexual intimacy for years, and even decades.
Many women are told to ‘watch porn’, ‘drink wine’, or ‘relax’, with no clear diagnosis found and no real solution given. Today’s guest, Jess Setiz, knows this reality all too well. Now a trauma-informed pelvic health practitioner, Jess struggled through painful sex for 8 years before she and her husband were able to find a solution that really worked. In this transcript you’ll read Jess and Dr. Juli Slattery discussing what Jess has learned, and how she’s helping other women enjoy pleasurable, pain-free sex.
Prefer to listen? You can also listen to the full conversation here.
Juli Slattery (00:01.452)
Hey friend, welcome to Java with Juli hosted by me, Juli Slattery. Now, if you’re a long time listener to this podcast, you know that painful sex was part of my personal story. And sadly, I’m not alone. Actually, most women experience painful sex at some time in their life. And while the physical pain is real, sometimes the fallout emotionally and relationally can be even worse.
My guest today, Jess Seitz, experienced painful sex and it was a heavy burden for the first eight years of her marriage. Her husband and her struggled through tears and failed attempts and unhelpful answers and even bad advice with nothing that worked. Thankfully, she and her husband found an approach that went beyond some of the traditional advice that helped them overcome this issue once and for all. And that’s what we’re going to be talking about today. Jess is a trauma-informed pelvic health practitioner who through her own practice at pain free intimacy offers women and couples a holistic and comprehensive approach to painful sex. As someone who went through this herself, Jess is compassionate and incredibly knowledgeable and wise. This is going to be an encouraging, hope-filled episode for anyone who’s been struggling in this area. So let’s jump into my conversation with Jess sites.
Juli Slattery (01:25.036)
Well, welcome to Java with Juli and my guest today, Jess Seitz, has an expertise that I’m so excited to dive into. Jess, so thankful to have you with us. I feel like every single time I speak on marriage and sexuality, somebody has a question about painful intercourse. Listeners may know that this was part of my story for many years. I had no idea where to go for help.
You really are in the space of helping women trying to figure out why does sex hurt, what can they do, what are their barriers? So I’m interested, how did you even know to jump into that field?
Jess Seitz
The short answer is the Lord. But the field kind of brought me into it because I have my own personal story of struggling with pain with sex and specifically with vaginismus. And that was a long journey. that I’m so grateful to have healed from. And before I healed, we experienced vaginismus for eight years in our marriage, the first eight years we were married. After I healed from it, I was like, okay, peace out. I’m never mentioning that word again, never talking about this, I’m done. And so that was over five years ago. And the Lord has been so kind to be like, we’re gonna use this. And so I am an occupational therapist. And so, you know, I have my, you know, expertise is in this kind of field. And so I real quickly would like, no, we’re gonna use this and redeem it to help women now be able to enjoy intimacy the way God created it.
Juli Slattery
So were you already trained in occupational therapy before you went through your own healing or did you pursue that kind of in response to your own journey?
Jess Seitz
Yeah, so we got married before I started graduate school and so throughout graduate school experienced vaginismus and which vaginismus is where sex is either painful or impossible. We couldn’t really get him in. And that’s just how it was for us throughout my grad experience. When I graduated, I ended up working more in a chronic health, chronic pain setting. so helping a lot of just patients kind of work through chronic pain. We use the nervous system to kind of work through that. And so it took me far too long to realize that that’s actually probably more along the lines of what I need to use to help heal my sexual pain. I had been through pelvic floor therapy myself personally so many times and didn’t really find a lot of success with it personally. And so when I finally kind of realized, I need to lean into what I do with my patients to myself. That’s when I started seeing a lot, lot better results. And yeah, we’re finally able to get past it. And so that’s when I shifted and realized, Okay, I think there’s an avenue that’s being missed here. And then that’s you know, the chronic pain side, working in through the nervous system. That’s the avenue that we need to take to really support women better who are dealing with this chronic pain or impossible penetration with sex. And so that’s when I kind of shifted gears and realized, okay, what’s worked for me, I need to talk about more, need to help others kind of experience that as well. And it’s been so sweet and so beautiful.
Juli Slattery
Then did you go and get some expertise in specifically focusing on sexual pain or is that just, yeah, so now this is all you do is help women with sexual pain?
Jess Seitz
Yeah, so now I specifically work in pelvic health. So now I have a certification as a trauma informed pelvic health practitioner and I’m in the works of getting further like functional public health certifications behind that. So I have completely shifted and now work in pretty much just sexual pain. And I do specifically work with Christian women as my heart just because having then a woman of faith going through this just felt really unsupported by most of the providers I kind of interacted with. so my heart really, my husband and I, we both had a heart just for reaching Christians who just felt unsupported by the system and felt like their needs weren’t specifically being met. And so it’s kind of a mesh between faith, my background as a chronic pain occupational therapist, and then this new like trauma informed response for pelvic health specifically.
Juli Slattery
Yeah. And you have a website. Like it’s not just, you live in Florida, so I’m assuming you see patients in person, but then also you do some coaching and help people remotely, is that correct?
Jess Seitz
Correct, most of my clients are actually, we work through an online model and I work with women all over the world. And I find that works really beautifully because this is such a personal intimate space. And so my heart is to teach couples to be each other’s public floor therapist.
Jess Seitz (06:09.487)
And so all my knowledge is trying to teach you how to do this for you within your marriage so that your husband and you can work to support your pelvic floor and your mind and your body better to really keep that healing and intimate space that translates to the bedroom better and not so much in the clinic space. Because I found that when we keep it in the clinic, it really makes that transition really challenging for a lot of women. And that’s part of my story too.
Juli Slattery
Yeah, I want to hear more about your story. But before then, I just have to ask, how do you help women if you can’t look at their bodies? Like a sort of basic question. But yeah, I normally you go to OB, you go to pelvic floor therapist, and they do the exam, and they have to see your body and touch your body. So how do you get past that?
Jess Seitz
That’s a really, really good question. I have found that, and we do consultation calls so that in the consultation call, we kind of screen through like, what is it that we’re kind of looking at here? And so I do specifically work more in the chronic pain and the vaginismus space, which is pain that has persisted for quite a while. And so a lot of times we’re not dealing so much with physiological issue at this point. We’re kind of dealing with a nervous system pattern. And so your body is responding with a pain response when it really should be targeting more of a pleasure response. And we’re kind of getting the wrong response happening now. And so a lot of this is, yes, I teach you how to do all the exercises and the stretches and the manual releases, but it is a lot to do with kind of helping support our bodies at the nervous system level, helping to reframe our understanding of pain and what our body’s trying to experience. And so with all of that, we have multiple domains that we work through in our program. We do the pelvic floor approach, we do the cognitive behavioral approach. We do the psychosomatic approach. We do the partner kind of environment approach. And then we do the spiritual approach as well. And so with that, the pelvic floor is a portion of it, but it’s not the main part of what we’re doing to target the pain or experiencing.
Juli Slattery
Yeah. So you’ve alluded a few times to your own journey. What was that like? I mean, like what kind of help did you get? How did you find that help to be unsatisfactory or even maybe hurtful in some ways?
Jess Seitz (08:26.769)
So we got married in 2011 and we went to pre-marital. I read some books. We were excited for the wedding night. I previously had been to the gynecologist just because I had struggled with periods and stuff in high school and it never went really well. I also managed to get tampons in, but it was never a comfortable thing.
I honestly kind of just thought that the penis was going to come along and fix everything. And so when the wedding night came, it was not the case. Things did not go as planned. was not like what I had read in the books or heard about or thought it would be. We experienced a lot of pain and it wasn’t entirely possible, which just kind of left us a little confused.
Totally discouraged, so we continued on the honeymoon and things continued as they were. We weren’t able to really make it work. We had fun, we did other things, but there was a lot of question marks left and a lot of pain. And my sweet husband never forced or pushed anything. Honestly, a lot of it was my own doing of like, we’ll just keep going and we’ll just make it better. I actually, I did call my gynecologist from our honeymoon and was just kind of like, excuse me, what is going on?
Juli Slattery
Well, good for you for even doing that. A lot of people don’t do that.
Jess Seitz
I don’t know how helpful it was because she was just like, drink some wine, use lube, relax, you’ll be okay. I think about four years later, we were still really struggling. We had just done other things, but I’d opened up to, I think, two friends and both of them looked at me like I was crazy. Like, what do you mean you’re still having pain? He can’t really get in.
I had been to a couple of doctors, no one really had anything, everyone just kind of like, everything looks good, which is really hard to hear when you know things are not the way they should. And so I finally had a gynecologist that kind of mumbled the word vaginismus, which is like, great, a diagnosis, thanks me. So then I got a referral for pelvic floor therapy, which was super intimidating, but I went. And I think I did pelvic floor therapy for the next like three or four years and was,
Jess Seitz (10:41.505)
And I’m in graduate school for this. I’m learning this stuff. I’m doing my exercises. I’m doing all the stretches. I had made it all the way through the dilators, which dilators are kind of the most talked about intervention for sexual pain. And they’re just like little graduated cylinder tubes that get bigger with size. They start about the size of a finger, get to the size of the average male penis. I had gotten all the way through those, which was a lot of work. And then I couldn’t transition to my husband.
It still wouldn’t work. And that just spiraled me into frustration and feeling completely broken. Felt like maybe I just, my body was messed up. My pelvic floor therapists were kind of like, well, you know, at this point, that’s all we can do for you. It’s probably all in your head. So then I started the journey of, what the counselors? Several of them had no idea what was going on with me. I got referred to a sex therapist who unfortunately was probably more damaging than helpful and suggested that my husband and I watch porn together so that we could learn how to do this. She also suggested that maybe I wasn’t attracted to my husband and we weren’t sexually compatible, which then just further like confounded the lies that I had already had seeping in. And so I really started just questioning why Lord, did you let me get married? I actually looked up what a eunuch was in the Bible to see if it was possible for me to be a eunuch. I thought maybe there’s I mean, yeah, am like asexual and I shouldn’t have gotten married. And we saw specialists, I tried creams, was on like, like nervous system, amitriptyline medications and stuff to help. Nothing really seemed to help. And so after about eight years of this, we were exhausted. I was depressed. I was pushing my husband away in anger, trying to protect him from being married to someone like me. Our marriage was hurting and we were, we tried. We would be intimate in other ways, but I always just felt like… lacking. Felt like I…
Juli Slattery
So like eight years of this. Eight years of marriage. Oh my goodness. And the first four, you couldn’t consummate the marriage at all?
Jess Seitz
Not fully. I mean, there’s a couple of times he got in a couple a little bit of the way, but it was never… It was always a, okay, okay, okay, let’s go. Let’s go. And then he never wanted to… He never wanted to put it. So yeah, it was hard.
Jess Seitz (13:01.865)
I had a friend too. I opened up to asking for prayer and she took me to a different church’s prayer event and it was hard but she kind of introduced me to this other person that was leading the prayer event and asked what I need to pray for and she good heartedly kind of just shared like, she’s struggling with intimacy and so right there in front of the whole church they prayed away the demon inside of me that was causing me to have this problem and I was humiliated and then I felt okay, I’m asexual, potentially a eunuch, have a demon inside of me, not attracted to my husband, and I’m supposed to compromise my morals to either get drunk or watch porn in order to get past this. And so just felt totally helpless and broken. And yeah, at that point, I remember my husband and I just sitting down and he was like, well, what are we going to do? Like that we can’t keep going on with a marriage like this. And so that’s when we kind of like, let’s take a complete step back, take a deep breath and just figure out what do we do from here?
And so that’s when we kind of used a little bit of my framework as an occupational therapist in chronic pain. And we’re like, okay, if we treat this like you would your patients, what do we need to do? What avenue would we take for that? And so that’s when we started zooming out a little bit and seeing this is not just a vagina pelvic health problem. And this is not an all in my head problem. And it’s not just a spiritual problem. Like this is confounded in all of that. And we’ve only been isolated treating like the isolated domains and not kind of together seeing Jess as a whole person and Matt and Jess in our marriage. And so we switched gears and kind of redid it all. And that took about five months maybe of going through that. And then we were able to transition to pain-free sex after that, which was shocking for both of us. We honestly thought it was a fluke.
Juli Slattery
Really without outside help, like this was more your own journey?
Jess Seitz
At that point, outside help was scary. It had only left more question marks and more just feelings of brokenness than it had, I felt honestly helped at that point. So this was kind of our own journey of kind of coming together and figuring out what do we need to do that worked for us. But yeah, so now it’s been five years and I don’t use dilators anymore. There’s no pain. It’s amazing. I actually have a sex drive and I want this because at one point I remember, I told my husband like, I could go the rest of my life without sex and I’d be totally happy.
Jess Seitz (15:22.925)
It was just that much of a burden to me. Of course that broke his heart. But now it pains me to know that I was ever at that point. it’s such a beautiful, beautiful part of marriage. And it’s how God designed intimacy. the marriage relationship to be was to have this Garden of Eden connection between us that’s full of just pleasure and connection and emotion and elation. So sad that that was missing, but I’m so grateful that he’s taken that and redeemed that. And so, yeah, I’m so grateful to be where I am now and thankful for that story that can be used now to help others in that same journey.
Juli Slattery
Well, thank you for sharing it so vulnerably. I know that’s a long time to suffer, but to see God redeem that is a really beautiful thing. Let me ask you a few just specific questions about sexual pain. Is all sexual pain vaginismus or is that one category of sexual pain?
Jess Seitz
That is one category of sexual pain. Disperunia is the word for sexual pain or pain with sex. Vaginismus no longer is a part of the DSM. They removed it and it’s under kind of a more broad category. And so with that, it’s hard to kind of nail down like what specifically is vaginismus versus sexual pain. Sexual pain can stem from a whole variety of things, it can be a physiological issue. Like, you you vaginally delivered and there might be tearing. And so a few weeks, months after a vaginal delivery, there’s going to be some pain. There could be, if you have endometriosis, there could be like lesions and things in there that need to be addressed. And so there are, you know, you could have low estrogen, which causes that. And so in the consult, our consultation calls, we try to kind of piece through, are we looking at something that’s more of a nervous system, chronic pain response?– which I would say is more vaginismus. Which is your body is involuntarily contracting and giving a pain response upon something enduring. It doesn’t always have to be a penis. It could be other things. Sometimes you can get a tampon in, but you can’t get a penis in. Sometimes you can get a dilator in and you can’t get a speculum in. So it’s a little more vague, but that’s more of what we specifically target is at that nervous system body level of giving that response versus.
Jess Seitz (17:45.421)
Yes, there are other physiological conditions that can lead to sexual pain. Those can lead to vaginismus too, which makes it even more complicated. Right. So it’s really more that fear response or that involuntary body, the tensing up the muscles, which causes more pain.
Juli Slattery
Yeah. I think I read somewhere that 70 % of women experience sexual pain at some point. Is that the right statistic?
Jess Seitz
It’s hard to measure because not everyone talks about it, but that’s what I’ve heard. It’s very common.
Juli Slattery
So it’s more than half of women, but yet we don’t talk about this. So sometimes when I’m speaking on sexual marriage, I’ll even mention sexual pain and then like the questions flood in. I haven’t been able to consummate my marriage. You’ve been married for a year. Where do I go for help? Like all of your story. So I’m guessing that’s kind of what you’ve heard over and over again with people that reach out to you. They’ve probably already seen the OBGYN. Maybe they’ve gone to pelvic floor therapy. And you almost like, like you described in your story, you feel like you want to give up. Like, I guess there’s just something wrong with me. There’s something wrong with my marriage. Like what hope do you give to woman, a woman who’s been in that situation for many years?
Jess Seitz
The main hope is the reminder that you’re not broken, that this is a medical condition. And so there is the potential to get past this. It’s not like your body is stuck in this way and this is just how you are. There is the hope that there is healing from this. And it is treatable, it’s totally treatable with the right strategies. And that’s what’s hard is sometimes we hear things, we check out things, we get told the wrong advice, and then it further kind of spirals us like I experienced. But just, I love just whispering into a woman’s ear and saying, is hope, you can get past this.
It took me eight years. have a client who has been married for 30 years and she was not able to concentrate her marriage. And I think two months ago she graduated and she and her husband went on their second honeymoon after 30 years of marriage to celebrate. And so if she can get past this, you can too. And it’s totally possible. we are, yeah, it takes kind of breaking out of the shackles and showing a body that it’s worthy of healing and it can.
Jess Seitz (20:04.693)
So I think the hope is seeing that it is possible to heal. I had never met anyone that had vaginismus. And so I felt isolated and alone. The handful of people I opened up to looked at me like it was crazy. The therapist I talked to had no idea what I was going through. So I scream on social media and as loud as I can now that, there’s hundreds and thousands of us that have this and we’ve gotten past it. And so you can too. Don’t tolerate the pain, you’re worth healing and we can do it.
Juli Slattery
Jess, in your situation and some of what you described, there are women who just can’t tolerate any penetration or unable to consummate a marriage. But in other situations, intercourse is possible, but it’s painful. And so a lot of couples in that situation just think, well, this is the way it’s going to be. I need to sort of push through this pain. Can you talk about why that’s not a helpful approach?
Jess Seitz
Yeah, well, God did not design sex to be painful, especially for the woman. It shouldn’t be painful for either, but as the receiver, we sometimes just, okay, this is how it is for me. I’m gonna grin and bear it. And no, that’s not how we designed it to be. It is supposed to be so enjoyable and connecting for both of you. And so when you push past the pain, you are telling your body that this is how it’s supposed to be. You are accepting that pain is a part of the story, and the body is almost in this cycle of anticipating pain, experiencing pain, confirming the pain, and we keep that cycle going. And so once we learn and really believe and accept that actually pain is not okay, pain is not how this story is gonna continue, then there’s an exit out of that circle. And so now the opportunity’s there to experience intimacy without pain. Now once we get, that’s when we have to kind of do a lot to kind of work with the body to start adopting as an intimacy experience that’s void of pain so that we can create a new cycle and a new circle. It does not have pain in it. But when you push past and you keep going in pain, you dig in deeper of just making that more solid. we call these are neural pathways. And it’s a cycle from the brain down to your vaginal canal that says pain, pain, pain, pain, pain. When he’s coming at you, pain will result. And we just feed it and we keep feeding it every time.
Jess Seitz (22:24.823)
And that’s why I want to say don’t do it. Don’t push past it. If there’s a pain, I tell my clients if it’s a pain above a four out of 10, don’t do it because we’re further feeding the pain cycle. And we want to start exiting out of that and create safe experiences that are void of pain. So no, don’t do it.
Juli Slattery
Yeah. Okay. So I’m guessing that this is coaching not just for the woman, but for the man also, like what messages are they bringing into their sexual relationship that make them feel like, both the man and the woman, like we have to just push past this and keep being sexually active even if it’s not great.
Jess Seitz
Yeah. Well, I think we have such a narrow definition of sex and marriage and it has to be this penis and vagina intercourse experience for it to be consummating or to be, you know, the pinnacle event, which is hard because majority of women don’t orgasm in that way anyway. So even if you don’t have pain, it is like one-sided in a sense, experience of that orgasm experience. Now know we can be receivers and it’s still be very pleasurable and enjoyable, but that is such a narrow view of what sex is. And we love to redefine sex as something that’s mutually pleasurable and mutually connecting for both. And so that doesn’t have to be him coming into you. It can be. We want that to be a part of it. We want that to be an option. And so that’s what we’re working towards is that pain-free penetrative sex experience. But when that’s what has to happen every time, we narrow our view of it to the point where it kind of almost like stifles the woman’s experience in this, in a sense. And so we want sex to be something so beautifully broad. And so I think we work with both the man and the woman to kind of do that reeducation, to understand how God designed sex to be on a broader scale. I’m so grateful that my sweet husband works a lot with the husbands in the program. And so he has a husband’s mini course that our partners take and they get to go through and kind of learn about what is vaginismus, how we can support them in this and then how they can support their wives better. And through that, we do kind of like educate on female anatomy and how pain works and how we want to support them. And then he leads a monthly support group for the guys too that just offers encouragement to help kind of answer questions and help them to adopt this more expansive view of beautiful intimacy the way God designed it to be.
Juli Slattery (24:52.161)
Yeah, boy, that’s fantastic. There has been a lot of conversation, I would say, within the last 10 years about how purity culture, or even the message of save sex from marriage has led to more sexual pain. And also given messages like we were talking about for both the husband and wife that it’s all about having sex, having intercourse. It sounds like you kind of grew up with some of that messaging too. Like looking back, what’s your take on it? You know, some people are saying, you should get a running head start into marriage so that you don’t have this, or how do we have a sex positivity message? And there’s tensions there too. So kind of where do you land on all that?
Jess Seitz
My husband and I, we’re in a college town and we do a lot with premarital counseling at our church, which has been such a joy for me now to help break down some of this that comes in. And so here’s just an example.
We had a student the other day who’s in a dating relationship, probably will get engaged soon, plan to get married. And she came to me, sat down on my couch and she presented a list to me. She’s like, I need you to hold me accountable to this list. And I read the list and it was, he’s not gonna touch her knee three inches above the knee cap and they’re not gonna hold hands for more than like 25 seconds and just very specific, nuanced things.
And she’s like, we came about this list together. He’s going to have a guy hold him accountable to it. And I read the list, and I could feel my anxiety start mounting. I’m like, well, flashbacks to maybe things that I would have thought would have been OK in my day. Like, yeah, we’re trying to be proactive here. We’re trying to protect ourselves and boundaries and all of this stuff. And looked at her as like, I will do what you think is best in your relationship, but I will be honest. I don’t think this is wise. And the reason for that is, this is a list of do not do that tells you that the following that might happen, like that leading into temptation, stumbling that might follow that is going to be this massive sin thing that should be put off. And all of these things that you wrote on this list are natural things for you guys to want to experience when you’re two people who are flooded with hormones and desires and talking about marriage in the future. Like all of these things are really cool.
Jess Seitz (27:09.401)
Like they are a natural biological thing that we would happen and expect to happen. But we want them to happen in the right timeframe. And so what I explained to her is like, you if my husband and I are going grocery shopping and all of a sudden we feel a little turned on in the produce aisle, we might give each other a look, but we’re not doing anything in the produce aisle because we are in the produce aisle. Like that event will happen later at home and it might be a little, look, I glaze right now, but we know we’re not acting on that in the produce aisle because biologically that doesn’t make sense. Our nervous system is going to shut down that desire. It’s going to put the brakes on and say, don’t do that. You’re in a supermarket and that’s natural and it’s healthy. We didn’t say that sex was bad. We just said sex is not good right now. It’s in public. And so we let biology naturally kind of calm us down in that moment. Now it’s going to be different if we’re at home on our couch and we look at each other and it’s like, okay, biology is going, we’re alone. This is great.
And so my encouragement to her is like, instead of creating a list that’s going to stifle these natural biological feelings that you have, create a scenario and an environment that’s going to naturally do that for you. So my suggestion would be just put yourselves in the produce aisle, always. Don’t be alone at home. Don’t put yourself, like don’t go stargazing in the middle of the field in the middle of the night because your biology is naturally going to let things go and you’re gonna have to come and say, that’s bad, suppress it, suppress it, suppress it, when we want that to flourish in marriage, but the current context is not marriage, it’s dating. So put yourselves in the produce aisle, go out in public, go on double dates, go on stargazing in a field with a couple or another group of friends or something and have that experience, but don’t let biology win. Let that become a natural experience so when you are alone in the future, it’s super sweet and beautiful.
All of this is too, because what happens is she says, don’t touch me above the knee. And she starts telling herself like, I have to hold back on these emotions. And so when you get married, your body doesn’t know that you have a ring on. Your mind does, but your body doesn’t know. And so it’s been taught to, I feel a little bit of a spark coming. I have to suppress, I have to stop it. Even though your brain says, your body can’t make that distinguish it by just a ring on your finger and saying, I do.
Jess Seitz (29:22.967)
And so you’ve trained it for your entire dating and engagement season to suppress that and to stop it. And guess what that leads to? Pain, sexual pain, shame, guilt, suppression of feelings, not allowing yourself to experience the highs of intimacy because that’s what you’ve taught it to do for the foundational years of your relationship. So instead of suppressing, let it be natural, let it happen, but don’t put yourself in a situation that it can happen.
Does that make sense?
Juli Slattery
I love that distinction. Yeah, that’s really, really wise because I could see how you talk about neural pathways. The more we tell ourselves sex is bad, don’t feel that, don’t allow that, you’re associating any sexual desire or touch with a negative emotion. Whereas if you’re in public, you’re never in a car alone, you’re safe. So I love that distinction. I think that’s a good paradigm shift for people to have.
Let’s say that they’ve moved beyond dating and now they’re engaged and they’re getting ready for the honeymoon, say they’re 12 to eight weeks out. What advice do you have for that couple and for that woman in particular?
Jess Seitz
Well, we strongly encourage them to not attempt penetrative sex on their wedding night. Just to just be in each other’s presence and to naturally just enjoy that. Part of what can lead to chronic pain is when you have a high stress event matched with a pain event. I sometimes say like, you if you’re moving your apartment at the end of a semester and you have a small timeframe to get your stuff moved and you lifting a box and tweak your back, you’re high stress and you had an injury. And so now we have chronic back pain can come from that. And there’s a lot of science and reasoning to that. I equate that to the wedding day. Think about the most stressful day of your life. You have for six months, a year planned this massive event. Every person you know in the world is there. Your great aunt Fanny is looking at you, knowing what you’re about to do that night. You’re in high heels, you’re sweaty, you’re caked in makeup, and now you need to go do the most biologically pure thing you can do. And you need your body to be fully regulated and rested for that in order for it not to be painful. Because if we have any kind of tension, we’re going to get pain often.
Jess Seitz (31:45.785)
And when you wear high heels, and you walk around with good posture and you’re uptight and worried about what everyone thinks. And if you’ve got spinach in your teeth, you have a lot of tension coming in and our pelvises are really great places the whole tension. So you do that all day long, walking around and you get to the bedroom and you are nervous because naturally this is the moment. And now you insert something that’s probably the largest thing you’ve ever inserted into you and you’re tense about it. And so you create a pain response or he doesn’t get in all the way, hits the wall because you’re so tense whether it’s from nerves or whether it’s from the high heels, you’re tense. And your body, that’s your first experience. Your body learns it, latches onto it and says, not safe. And it continues. For some, can train that out pretty quickly, but for many of us, that gets locked in. Add in a sprinkling of purity culture, the guilt and the shame that you feel that it wasn’t the way you thought it was gonna be the first night, and it just continues on. And so for us, we often say like, take penetrative sex off the table the first night. I promise you both will still have fun whether he comes in or not, but just relax and enjoy each other. And then the next morning after you have a bath and you’ve processed the day and you have relaxed and had a good night’s sleep, go for it. Let it be a beautiful time where you come together, but doing it on the most stressful day of your life as the female is going to be really, really hard. Really, yeah, there’s gonna be a lot of tension there.
Juli Slattery
Yeah. What are the best resources that you would recommend to a couple that’s getting ready for their honeymoon?
Jess Seitz
Hmm. You have anything in mind? That’s a good question. I like the book, The Celebration of Sex. I think I’m trying to think of what it is.
Juli Slattery
For Newlyweds? Doug Rosenau?
Jess Seitz
Yes. Yeah. That’s kind of my go-to. Yeah. It even has a small section on vaginismus that touches on it, but it is very practical. It doesn’t shy away from just like here’s the facts. Here’s what you need to know. And I would encourage just having the, you know, I encourage couples to talk about it.
If they need to have another couple there when they talk about these conversations, go for it. The first time you guys talk about sex and know that it shouldn’t be on that paramount event, like this would be, it’s such an integrated, beautiful part of sex and intimacy, or I’m sorry, of marriage, that this is something we want to start talking about beforehand and just what are the expectations? What do you think it’s gonna be like? And what are we gonna be up against? And start having safe conversations about it so you feel comfortable.
Jess Seitz (34:08.727)
So that when you get married, you can continue on those conversations because you set that foundation for it. And every couple is different on how they react to that. Having a book or a guide to go through like Celebration of Sex can be a helpful tool to be like, did you know this? Huh, okay, this is enlightening.
Juli Slattery
Yeah, that’s a great resource. And he actually has one for newlyweds. So Celebration of Sex for newlyweds is a lot shorter. The big book is a little bit intimidating. It’s a lot. It’s a textbook.
Jess, you have some training in trauma and the research would show that approximately 50 % of women have experienced some kind of unwanted sex, some form of trauma around sex. How does that impact a woman’s response and does that lead to vaginismus?
Jess Seitz
Well, every woman is different, so I’ll preface that. And trauma looks different in everyone. But yes, having an unwanted sexual experience definitely can lead to vaginismus. It doesn’t have to. I would honestly say 90 % of my clients don’t have a traumatic sexual experience. happens, yeah, different ways. But if you do have a history of sexual abuse, sexual trauma, or unwanted sexual encounter, yeah, it unfortunately can lead to vaginismus. And it’s your body takes that event, stores it in a way, and oftentimes it manifests out in vaginismus or in the pelvis. And so the pelvis is a…
It’s kind of a hotspot for attention. And so if you have any kind of lived experience that is negative and you associate it with that area, and I say trauma, I mean, it can be sexual trauma, but it can also be like you started your period when you were 13 and you were in a white skirt and the whole entire school bus saw you. And that can be enough for you to have trauma in that area. Definitely different than sexual trauma and sexual abuse, but it’s a traumatic event in that area that has caused you to dissociate from that area. And so things coming in, we’d have no acceptance of that area. have no acceptance personally, we’d have no acceptance of the outside world coming into it either, whether that’s your husband or even a gynecologist or something. And so that trauma can look different. And I found that it can be the smallest, most what we think is insignificant thing our body has held on to this area we now dissociate from. And so some of my clients have even they we you know, one of the first things we do is we grab a mirror and we just go over anatomy, look, we look at ourselves. And I have a handful who will pass out with that.
Jess Seitz (36:32.86)
The dissociation is so strong that we can’t, our brain cannot recognize that that’s our body that we’re looking at in the mirror. And so maybe that’s sexual, but maybe it’s something different. And maybe it’s even just the purity culture that has helped us associate that much.
Juli Slattery
Jess, I feel like what you’re doing is so beautiful and important and needed. How do people get in touch with you? What’s the best way for them to continue to learn and benefit? Particularly those individuals or couples who are struggling with painful sex.
Jess Seitz
Yeah, so you can find me at painfreentimacy.com. I do have a resources section there that has a bunch of free resources and guides. We also have a blog that describes a lot of different topics. I do have a free Facebook group called Vaginismus Recovery Tips, Tricks, and Resources for Painful Intimacy. It’s kind of long. In that, there’s a bunch of free training videos on what to do to get through this.
And then I am on all the socials, you can find me at painfree.intimacy. I think on Instagram I have a Dilator 101 guide that just kind of like 10 different reels that walk you through what to do with dilators. A bunch of stuff. Try to give away a lot of free content because it’s hard, but I think the most important thing is knowing that you’re definitely not alone in this. And I think a lot of people appreciate the Facebook group and just the Instagram to know, my gosh, there’s thousands of other women who are in this. I’m not alone. And there’s so much power in knowing you’re not alone.
