episode
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Spiritual Wholeness

The Great Sex Rescue—Debunking Harmful Messages About Intimacy in Christian Marriage with Sheila Wray Gregoire

Episode Notes

In this incredibly thought-provoking episode, Dr. Alison talks with Sheila Wray Gregoire, groundbreaking author of The Great Sex Rescue. They confront harmful misconceptions about sexual intimacy within Christian marriages, amplifying the often-overlooked voices of women.

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Sheila shares powerful insights drawn from her extensive research involving over 20,000 Christian women, challenging damaging narratives and revealing startling truths about sexual satisfaction, obligation, and intimacy.

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You'll learn:

* The 4 harmful teachings that negatively impact sexual intimacy

* Why “sex as obligation” is so destructive for women

* How to reframe your sex story with your spouse

* Practical steps toward recovering true intimacy

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Sheila's compassionate yet bold approach offers hope, clarity, and practical wisdom for those longing to rewrite their sexual stories, reclaiming God's true design for intimacy.

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Resources:

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If you liked this, you’ll love:
  • Episode 125: Recovering From Purity Culture: Dismantle the Myths, Reject Shame-Based Sexuality, and Move Forward in Your Faith with Dr. Camden Morgante
  • Episode 126: Restoring Wonder & Play in Intimacy—Navigating Sexual Brokenness, Safety, and Vulnerability with Therapist Sam Jolman

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Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik

© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author. While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.‍

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Transcript:

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Alison Cook: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I'm so glad you're here with me this week. Today, we're exploring a topic that deeply affects so many people, yet it so often remains cloaked in quiet struggle. It's the complex world of intimacy within Christian marriages, particularly the misconceptions around sex. 

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On the podcast, we focus on holistic mental health, which encompasses our hearts, our minds, our spirits, and our physical beings. We understand that a calm and clear and well-cared-for nervous system not only influences our mental and emotional and spiritual health, but also our physical health, including our sexual health.

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Sexual intimacy is where the emotional, spiritual, mental, and physical aspects of ourselves converge. It's such an important component of how God made us. yet there are so many times that couples and women in particular don't experience sex as fun or romantic, or even as a way to feel more connected to the person they love most in the world,

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Sam Jolman, a past guest on the podcast (Episode 126), writes in his book, The Sex Talk You Never Got, “Sex isn't a bodily function or even a need. It's a story, and it's laced with meaning”. He says it's vital that couples learn how to write a better sex story–one that increases connection and passion and intimacy. 

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I love this phrase that he borrows from Emily Nagoski, where she calls this “adding more to the plot”. I love this way of viewing sex as a narrative, as a story, rather than an act. We can write different chapters to our stories and we can add more to the plot. In many ways, a woman's voice and understanding of this story has often been overlooked, especially in Christian faith communities. 

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Women's experiences with sex can be complex, not only because of the way God designed us, but also because many women, in fact, research would suggest a third of all women, one in three of all women, have had a past experience of sexual abuse or pain.

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That's all the more reason why it's so important to uncover the beauty and significance and deeper longing and voice of a woman's sexual story. That's why I'm so excited to welcome a very special guest, Sheila Wray Gregoire, to the podcast today. Sheila's been a pioneer in bringing a woman's voice into the conversation about Christian sex. 

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I first learned about Sheila's work at a retreat for Christian women authors. Her bestselling book, The Great Sex Rescue, was repeatedly recommended as a vital resource. As a clinician who has primarily worked with women, I've struggled to find literature that honors and highlights a female's perspective within a Christian context, which is why Sheila's work is so important and groundbreaking. 

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She conducted a profound survey that launched this pivotal book. It's a survey that involved over 20,000 Christian women. And it unearthed some startling truths about the impact of certain teachings on marital and sexual satisfaction, challenging and reshaping some of the harmful narratives that have not fully recognized a woman's perspective, especially within Christian faith communities.

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Today we're going to discuss those findings, as well as some really beautiful reframes about how Jesus respected, valued, and honored women. Sheila Wray Gregoire is a popular speaker, marriage blogger, and award-winning author of seven books, including The Good Girl's Guide to Great Sex, She Deserves Better, and The Great Sex Rescue. 

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She also has a brand new book out, written with her husband, called The Marriage You Want: Moving beyond Stereotypes for a Relationship Built on Scripture, New Data, and Emotional Health. I'm thrilled to bring you my conversation with Sheila Wray Gregoire. 

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Alison Cook: ​I'm thrilled to have you here today. I first learned about you at a retreat with Christian women authors, and it was right at the tail end of the pandemic. It was the first time we were all meeting. Of course, the topic of sex would come up, and I was the resident therapist. 

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I wasn't there as a therapist, but people always ask me for book recommendations, Sheila, and I struggle as a Christian clinician. I think really highly of Esther Perel's work, I think Emily Nagoski is doing really good work, and at the same time, they don't come from a Christian worldview.

So that can be an obstacle for some people. I really struggled. 

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I was asking them and everybody was saying, you've got to get a hold of The Great Sex Rescue. So that's how I first learned of you. I’m so grateful for what you're doing to try to debunk some of the unfortunate messages about sex, especially in evangelical churches, and try to cast a new vision. 

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I'd love to start today with you telling us a little bit about this survey that you did. You surveyed over 20,000 Christian women, and that served as the impetus for the book. Can you talk to us a little bit about that?

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Sheila: Let me tell you how we got started. I had been blogging about sex and marriage for about a decade. I have two master's degrees and a degree in sociology. I was a researcher, but I stayed home with my kids. So I did a lot of writing from home. As they became teenagers, I started speaking a lot, and I was doing marriage conferences and we were producing all of this material.

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I was writing The Good Girl's Guide to Great Sex or 31 Days to Great Sex. But the one thing I didn't do was read other people's books. I figured, they love Jesus, I love Jesus, we're all saying the same thing, but I was really afraid of plagiarizing. I didn't want to read anyone else's stuff.

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Then one day, I was on Twitter. It was called Twitter back then. And people were fighting about whether they needed love or respect, referring to Emerson Eggerichs’ bestselling book, Love & Respect. I thought, I have that book and I've never read it. This is an amazing way to procrastinate, because I didn't want to work that day.

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So for the very first time, I went and I grabbed someone else's book, and I turned to the sex chapter. It was like a nuclear bomb went off in my living room, because I read things like, “If your husband is typical, he has a need that you don't have. And that need is for physical release. If he doesn't get physical release, he'll come under satanic attack. Why would you deprive him of something which takes so little time?” And I called my team.

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Alison Cook: So it was guilting women into having sex, shaming women into having sex, which is so helpful.

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Sheila: I also don't know why you would brag about it taking so little time, but whatever. So he's saying this, and I called my team, and my daughter was working for me at the time, and she had a psychology degree. She had done a lot of work on survey development, and Joanna Sawatzky, a family friend, was working for me when she was home with her baby, and she was a statistician with a master's degree in epidemiology. 

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We were like, we’ve got to do something. If this is what is being said to women, how is that impacting people? What is this doing? We decided to do what we hoped would become the biggest survey that's ever been done of evangelical women. So we asked women to rate their marital and sexual satisfaction using some validated question sets.

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Then we listed a whole bunch of different beliefs. We said, hey, have you ever been taught this? Or did you ever believe it? From that, we were able to see how certain beliefs impact marital and sexual outcomes.

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Alison Cook: Yeah. Can you tell us some of your key findings, both about the beliefs and and the impact of those beliefs?

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Sheila: Yeah, I like to say we had six big findings. I'll tell you the numbers first, because those are fun. They're depressing, but they're fun. So first, the number 47 is a very important number, and that's our orgasm gap. 95% of men almost always reach orgasm in a given sexual encounter, compared to 48% of women.

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So we have a 47 point orgasm gap in the evangelical church, and we also have an incidence rate of sexual pain disorders of about 23%. Evangelical women suffer from sexual pain at least twice the rate of the general population. We already knew that going into the survey–I'd already written a lot about sexual pain because that was part of my story too.

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One thing we were specifically looking at in our survey was why. What is correlated with sexual pain? We managed to identify four big teachings. There were actually more, but we talked about four of them in The Great Sex Rescue that really hurt women. 

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Alison Cook: Can you tell us what they are?

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Sheila: Sure. Okay, we'll start with the big one. I like to think of this one as like the one ring to rule them all, in Lord of the Rings terminology. I think everything goes back to this one. But it's the idea that a woman is obligated to give her husband sex whenever he wants it. We call that “the obligation sex message” and roughly 40 percent of women said they believed that going into marriage.

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When they got married believing that, their chance of experiencing sexual pain increased to almost the same statistical effect as if they'd been abused. Yeah. Our bodies interpret obligation as trauma.

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Alison Cook: It makes so much sense, and I guess you are adding a layer to the fact that something like a third, I don't know the exact numbers right now, but a third of all women have experienced some sort of sexual trauma or abuse. So already women are struggling with not having had consent on some level, and then suddenly you're being told to have sex on demand. 

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You're adding trauma to trauma. That's what I would hear from Christian women. It's not my area of expertise, but it comes up in the course of “Man, I love my husband. I want to be in a sexually fulfilling relationship. What's wrong with me?” 

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Let's say, in the best case scenario, you're going into marriage with a wonderful man, but you are in that category of women who've had some really hard or traumatic sexual encounters prior to marriage that haven't been necessarily healed because we don't talk about sex well, even with the best of men.

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You're going to struggle a little bit. You're going to take that into marriage. Then, when you add on these messages that you were unpacking, it puts so much burden on women.

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Sheila: It really does, and that “obligation sex message” hurts you even if you haven't been a victim of abuse, and even if your husband is good. That's what's so key, is it's not always about the marriage dynamics. It's the fact that these terrible things that we grew up believing really hurt us because they made sex seem like a threat.

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It’s not what God intends. Genesis 4:1 is a super funny verse. It says, “Adam knew his wife Eve and they conceived a son”. I remember in junior high reading that and thinking, God's embarrassed of saying the real word. But what if that's not what's going on? 

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What if God was serious? Because the root for “to know” there is the same root when David says, search me and know me, God. So sex is supposed to be this deep knowing. It's supposed to be like, “I am bringing everything that I am to the bedroom and you're bringing everything you are, and we're gonna totally know each other”. 

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But obligation tells a woman, it doesn’t matter what you want. What you need is irrelevant compared to what he wants. So now sex isn't knowing, it's owing. It's an erasing of you as a person, and that's a traumatic thing.

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Alison Cook: Yeah, it is. It is. What are a couple of the other lies that you uncovered?

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Sheila: There's one that's very closely related, that a wife should have frequent sex with her husband to keep him from watching pornography. So if your husband watches porn, it's your fault, because you're not giving him good enough sex, which is so wrong. 

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Also, it makes sex into something coercive, because if you have to have sex to stop something bad from happening, then that's coercion.

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Another one would be, and this is related to what we believed as teenagers, that boys are going to push your sexual boundaries, and you need to be the gatekeeper. When girls grew up having to be the gatekeeper, they learned that you had to separate what your body is feeling from what your mind is feeling, and now it's very difficult to inhabit your body when you're having sex.

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Alison Cook: I thought that was so fascinating how you named that in the book. That message alone, putting the locus of responsibility in a woman's body, does something to divide her mind from her body, which you can't magically repair once you're ready to “go all the way”.

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It makes so much sense. That's not the way we're designed. We are whole-body beings. If we've been conditioned to disrupt those natural feelings, there are so many mixed messages that are constantly firing in the nervous system.

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Sheila: Yeah, totally. That's why that particular message was highly correlated with arousal problems. Once you're married, it’s highly correlated with orgasm problems. Mindfulness was too difficult.

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Alison Cook: So on that note, I've heard you say, and I thought this was so interesting. “Wait until you're married to have sex, but don't have sex until you're aroused. Figure out the arousal piece first”. What do you mean by that?

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Sheila: Oh gosh. We've got some more stats coming on this in our new marriage book, The Marriage You Want, and it is so depressing. But when you look at the first time a couple has sex, if they waited for the wedding, that subgroup of the survey respondents, we asked, hey, did you bring her to orgasm before you tried intercourse? 

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Or did you bring him to orgasm before you tried intercourse? We were far more likely to bring him to orgasm. Okay. So women are helping him with orgasm first, but he’s not helping her. Then when you say, okay, who actually did reach orgasm in your first sexual encounter? I don't remember the exact numbers, but 87 percent of men did versus 11 percent of women, maybe.

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It's incredible when you look at how lopsided our first sexual encounters are. There was a really neat study out of the University of Toronto last year, I think 2022, which found that your sexual debut, the first time you have consensual sex that involves intercourse, if she reaches orgasm in some way, her libido is really likely to be basically the same as her spouses or her partners. 

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But if she doesn't, then her libido is more likely to be lower. So our sexual debut matters. I think about all of these Christian couples having sex for the first time, not caring about her pleasure at all. Because when you wait for the wedding, it's this big thing. Oh, we finally get to have intercourse. You have intercourse, and you weren't waiting for her arousal. 

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It didn't flow organically from something you were doing. We're doing it backwards. I'm not saying that people should have sex before the wedding, but think about what happens when a 17 year old has sex by accident.

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They weren't planning on having sex, but they were making out for three hours, and then they got more and more excited. And that is what is supposed to happen. There's supposed to be this sexual response cycle. Now, not when you're 17, but that's the way your body is supposed to work.

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But what do we do? We get married and then, oh, now we finally get to have intercourse. So you don't do any of the other stuff. You don't know what you're doing. You feel embarrassed. 

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Alison Cook: Even psychologically, we live in a culture where we have to be preparing our girls and boys for healthy sexuality. It's not enough either to give them the abstinence message that I got in the eighties or the purity culture stuff, obviously, which got so toxic in the nineties and two thousands. You're right. It's delicate to talk about it, but I love that you're looking at the facts. 

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Here's what's happening for women. Sheila, I really appreciate that you're trying to amplify the voices of women and women's experiences, to try to close that gap. You do these reframes and you start off the book emphasizing the mutuality of sex. 

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It sounds so simple when I say it, but it's actually a profound reframe. “Sex was designed to feel good for both people. Both people in a marriage desire sex”. Instead of “guys want it, girls don't”, you're really trying to reframe that messaging. Tell me why that's so important for women.

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Sheila: Think about what we have normally heard over and over again in almost all of our marriage bestsellers and sex bestsellers. It's that men have needs. Men have sexual needs, and women need to meet them. We see that in For Women Only. We see it in His Needs, Her Needs. We see it in Love and Respect.

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Sex is a need that men have, not a need that women have. It's called a need. God created men with these needs, and it is your job to meet them. That is so often the message that we get about sex. That it's not about our autonomy. It's not about our desire. It's about a man using a woman's body to meet his needs. 

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That's not an intimate thing. That is a very shallow thing. When you talk about sex that way, I'm amazed that we then berate women for having no libido, because what do we expect? If you tell women their whole lives, hey, men have these needs that you need to meet. Why would any woman get excited by that? 

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Every Man's Battle, that book series, sold 4 million copies. It literally called women the methadone for their husband's sex addictions. Do they think that this is going to excite women, that this is going to make women want to have sex?

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Alison Cook: It's so dishonoring to both men and women. You say that in the book, it's so one-dimensional. It's such a caricature of men. It's so dishonoring to both.

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Sheila: The last teaching that we mentioned that really hurts is also really dishonoring to men. It's a huge one, and it's the idea that all men struggle with lust. That's hugely destructive. That's one of the biggest reasons that women lose libido, is believing that or hearing that as a teenager. 

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The authors of Every Man's Battle literally say that men don't have a Christian view of sex–what they're saying is that men were made inferior to women. There's something wrong with men that women need to fix. So women were created as sin management tools for men. We are sin management tools. That is not sexy, people.

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Alison Cook: Yeah. It's not helpful. It's not helpful. You're really clear about that. I’d love to go back to what you were saying about that biblical idea of knowing. That word was not a mistake–Adam and Eve knowing each other is the same term that David used to ask God to know him.

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I heard you say something to the effect of, this evangelical framework in particular has turned sex from knowing to an unknowing or an unseeing, especially of women. I think that's really profound. That's part of why this book is touching a nerve in women, is that longing to be known and to be seen. What would you say to the woman listening, who has that longing? Where can they start to begin that journey?

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Sheila: Yeah if we want to fix our sex lives, first of all, we need to believe deep, deep down, truly believe that we matter. Because we've been told all kinds of messages that we don't. Sex will never be intimate unless we know that we matter, that we know that we can speak up, that we know that we can say, hey, I don't like this, or I do like this, or I'm not really feeling it right now.

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We need to be able to speak up, but we can't speak up, if we feel like we don't matter as much, or if we feel like he's going to sin if I don't do this, that's not a healthy dynamic at all. I think there are a lot of misconceptions around whether or not sex contributes to intimacy, because they're often used interchangeably.

In sermons, when pastors are afraid to say the word sex, they'll say intimacy–that marriages need physical intimacy, as if intercourse is automatically intimate. It's actually not. 16 percent of women reported that their primary emotion after sex is feeling used. That's not intimate. 

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That means that for them, they would feel closer if they hadn't had sex. Then there are others that may not feel used, but they don't feel good. There are a lot that really are not enjoying it and it's not bringing them closer together. If their husband watches porn, if he has a pornographic view of sex, a pornographic way of relating, if sex is shallow, then it's not going to make them feel more intimate. 

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But a lot of men don't know how to share their feelings, don't know how to open up and be vulnerable. For them, sex seems like it provides connection without making them have to do the work of connecting. So they feel connected, but they're actually not.

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I think that we need to get away from speaking about sex as if it automatically is intimate, because it's not. And that's something that I think women need to hear–you're not alone if sex makes you feel lonely.

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Alison Cook: That's really good. That's so important. Maybe don't start with sex as in the act of intercourse. Maybe start back all the way up to dating when we're 17. What does it feel like to be sitting in the movie theater with your husband, and start there, almost back into that feeling of connection, of closeness.

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We don't have to go right to “let's make the sex great”. It's almost like we have to re-tap into that innocence, that play, that got lost somewhere along the way. That is well before the actual intercourse, that flows naturally from that excitement and from those good feelings.

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Sheila: I think play goes away for very obvious reasons. So let's say you have a Christian couple, and they want to wait until they get married. They do, or maybe they might've had sex a few times, but it may not have felt that great, whatever. Okay. But they go into marriage, not really experiencing great sex yet.

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The first time they have sex, when we asked women to name the main word that they felt after their first time having sex, the most common word was bewildering. That's not a good word. That is not a good word. But it's the most common one that we got. 

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You have sex, you have intercourse, and it wasn't what you thought it was going to be, but often he has a really good time. It feels good for him and he wants it again. He wants it to reassure himself that they're going to have a good sex life. He wants it because it feels good. Maybe they keep doing this and it never feels good for her.

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She starts to believe, “I'm not sexual because he wants it all the time. So he's obviously sexual and he orgasms really easily. So he must be more sexual than I am”. We forget we were made differently. Our bodies react differently to stimulation or types of stimulation that we like, or types of stimulation that bring you to orgasm. 

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When we asked both men and women, Do you do enough foreplay? 96 percent of men and 88 percent of women say, yes, I do, or yes, he does, if she frequently reaches orgasm. But if she doesn't, 71 percent of men and 52 percent of women still say that he does enough foreplay.

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So that's over half of women think that he does enough foreplay, even if they're not reaching orgasm. What that tells me is that we've internalized the idea that we're broken. We're not sexual. Because the first time you have sex, or the first few times, it works for him and then his experience becomes the default. It has become the norm. 

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Alison Cook: It works in one sense, in a very finite, tiny, limited understanding of “works”. I hear what you're saying–it's the normalized messages. “It's working for him. It's not working for you”. As opposed to, it's actually not working for either of us in the fullness of how God intended it.

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Sheila: Yeah, because sex is supposed to be mutual, intimate, and pleasurable for both. That's the short form that we use all the time. If he's the only one really enjoying it, then honey, you're the one being deprived, yet we use those verses against women so much. “Do not deprive him”. 

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Look, if he's had an orgasm every week for seven years and you've never had one, you're not depriving him by not having sex very often. You are so deprived, or maybe you are reaching orgasm, but sex makes you feel used. You're still being deprived because sex, the way God intended it, is mutual and intimate and pleasurable for both. It's not merely intercourse.

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Alison Cook: Yeah. That's so good. It's so good. You go on to these different pillars of sexuality. Again, it's recasting a message in the mutual way that God intended sex to be. It should prioritize both partners. Sex should be pressure free. Sex is a gift that is freely given. Sex should put the other first. 

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Both members of the partnership have to put the other first. Sex should be pure. It sounds so simple, but it's actually so revolutionary, especially for women. I really appreciate all the work you did on this and all the research to back it up. Any other findings that you think are really important for women to hear?

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Sheila: This is actually a finding from a men's survey. So this one's from the book, The Good Guy's Guide to Great Sex. But I have some good news about pornography, because we often hear bad news about pornography, and for very good reason. Porn is super destructive in marriages. 

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But what we found is that if a guy's been watching porn and he quits porn and he gets rid of the objectified view of women before he marries, he's pretty much going to have the same sex life as if he'd never watched it.

So porn doesn't ruin your life forever. I think that's important to hear, because one of the problems with purity culture is that we tell girls, hey, if you have sex before you're married, you've ruined everything. I think we're doing the same thing today to both boys and girls who watch pornography.

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If you give it up and you get rid of the objectified view of women, you're actually in pretty good shape. Now, if you don't give up porn till after you're married, you don't necessarily get all of the intimacy and great sex that you would have, but it's not that big a difference.

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It's not like it's a huge difference. You can still have a really great sex life and a really great marriage. I want people to hear that. Porn is something that an awful lot of people put behind them, but it isn't enough to get rid of the pornography. You also have to address, why is it that you turn to it in the first place?

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What are you hiding from when you use it? If we're using porn as a self-soothing technique, which quite often people are, to avoid boredom, worry, insecurity, shame, whatever, then what are you gonna do in its place? How are we going to address those things instead? Because I think what often happens is people try to white knuckle it.

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They say, okay, I'm going to quit. That doesn't work, because you have to look at the underlying things. But when people put the work in and when they do quit porn and quit the objectification of women and get rid of that obligation message, they really can flourish. It doesn't mean that it's over now, big caveat there. 

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If a guy says he's quitting, but he won't let you see his phone and he's not going to go to a counselor, he hasn't really quit. I'm not trying to say that you should let all the husbands off the hook. I'm saying if he does the work, there is great hope.

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Alison Cook: Yeah, the way you're describing it reminds me of any sort of addiction model. I work in the internal family systems model. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, where there are three parts of us. One part is that firefighter, that self-soother, that escape artist, that you have to replace with healthy comfort. 

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Anything that you give up, if you use willpower, you're not healing the vulnerability underneath, which is what leads to intimacy. But I love that note of hope, that it's so possible. The impetus to reach for porn isn't because the wife isn't doing her job. It's something broken or hurting that needs healing inside of you. It can be healed, and also it’s important that ownership is taken. 

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Sheila: Yes, and if there are pastors listening to this, please stop blaming women for men's porn use. It's unbelievable how often people say they wouldn't turn to it if the wife was doing more. The vast majority of porn use pre-dates the marriage. They came into marriage already watching porn or using porn.

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So this isn't on her. This is a habit that he formed. This was a form of yes, self-soothing that he started. It's not on her. Okay. Big soapbox here. Sex and porn are not substitutes for one another.

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That's the insinuation. “He wouldn't watch porn if he had sex with you”, but porn is using it for your own gratification. Sex is a deep knowing. Those are two opposite things. They're not substitutes. They're opposites.

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Alison Cook: That's so good. Sheila. The other thing I really like that I've heard you say gets at how we've located, whether consciously or subconsciously, whether it's been intentional, whether it's been a complete horrible oversight, we've located the problem in women's bodies. 

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The other message that women have gotten is, you're responsible for men's lust. In some cultures, men are taught, don't look at the women or don't be alone with the women. I love how you said this. You said the solution to men's lust is not to stop seeing women. It's to learn to truly see women. 

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Jesus, you say, saw women. I love that. I want the women listening to hear that. You're not the problem. Jesus sees you and knows you. That is so powerful. I love that.

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Sheila: Because this whole advice to men, to bounce your eyes, don't look at women, that is seeing women in the same way that pornography does. So you know, they're told, hey, the way to beat lust and porn is to not look at women. But in both cases, you are seeing women primarily as a sex object.

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You're seeing her as a threat to you, a threat to your purity. That's not how Jesus sees us. Jesus didn't refuse to look at women. Jesus chose to truly see us.

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Alison Cook: Yeah, that's right. In our fullness, in our wholeness.

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Sheila: Yes. The solution to lust is to learn to actually see women and not objectify, but learn to respect women. That's what we need to be teaching our boys.

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Alison Cook: That's right. Which ironically then leads to that intimacy, that curiosity about who the whole person is, that then will lead down the road with the right woman, with your wife, the better sex if you're seeing her as a whole person.

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I love that. I have one last question that I like to ask all my guests. Sheila, what would you say to the younger version of you, maybe however old she was, based on what you know now about this sexual journey?

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Sheila: Speak up sooner. I spent a lot of years and like I said, sexual pain was a big part of my story for the first few years of marriage. I pushed through because I didn't want to deprive him. I wanted to be a good wife. I was afraid. I was afraid of all kinds of things. But speak up because you matter, I would say. 

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Alison Cook: That's beautiful. Thank you for your work to uncover a lot of these lies that have hurt so many women. Where can people find you and your work and what do you have coming up next?

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Sheila: We're at baremarriage.com. I have the Bare Marriage podcast every Thursday. I write on my blog almost every day and all my social media links are there. Instagram and Facebook are super fun. You can also find our orgasm course, our libido course there and my books. 

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Then coming out this March is our book, The Marriage You Want, which my husband and I wrote together based on our matched pair survey that we did last winter. It's going to turn the Christian marriage industry on its head because it's not saying any of the typical Christian marriage stuff.

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Here's the stuff that actually matters. I'm really excited about it. It's going to be such a healthy and biblical book.

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Alison Cook: I love it. Thank you for the work that you're doing. Thank you for giving us your time today. I appreciate you.

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Sheila: Thank you. I appreciate being here too.

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