Beyond MeToo: Healing the Wounds of Sexual Trauma
This podcast is both a resource for anyone affected by sexual trauma, as well as a tribute to all those who are doing the hard work of healing. This project asks the question “Where do we go from here?” – at both the individual and collective levels. To truly work in the direction of wholeness, we must not only tell the story of what happened to us, but we must also share our stories of healing. That is where we find our strength and our hope – the hope that healing is possible for ourselves, as well as for our society.
Episodes
In this episode, Molly shares a meditation originally released on the podcast “Meditations,” by her friend Gregory T. Obert in May of 2019. We are happy to share this recording here, where you’ll hear a set of sexual healing affirmations, ready by Molly and repeated several times in a loop. You may prefer to listen to this meditation in a quiet and private space to take them in. If you’d like to hear...
In this episode, Molly interviews Amy Dawn about how she navigated the criminal justice system after deciding to press charges against the man who raped her. Some key highlights include:
- How Amy found herself in a role reversal from criminal justice student to someone navigating the system, and the challenge she...
In this episode Molly interviews Amy Collins, a survivor of things that were meant to break her spirit. Being honest with her past has helped her heal in so many beautiful ways. She believes in staying true to who she is and doing what’s best for her healing. In this interview, she shares her recent experience being in recovery from addiction, an eating disorde...
“Many sexual trauma survivors went into a freeze state.. And so there’s this sense of ‘My body betrayed me, and I don’t want to be in this body, but I’m stuck here, so I’m going to do the best job I can to not be here.’ And that is the ultimate disconnection. So what we’re going for is to start to reconnect that, just a little bit at a time, maybe at first just with questions and guidance, and little...
“I’m still struggling with ‘my body is my own’... It really does make me angry because it feels like I’m missing out on this wonderful thing that you experience with a partner.”
In this episode, Molly interviews Anne Jensen, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse within a religious cult, shares her journey over the past several years after disclosing the abuse t...
In this conversation, Molly and regular special guest Sarah Brennan discuss consent in and out of the bedroom, fear of rejection (being rejected and/or rejecting someone else), and how communicating clear boundaries begets trust.
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“I like to think that I grew up in a relatively progressive area of the country… but I definitely, by osmosis, absorbed the cultural expectations and ideas of what a man is and should be, and it was definitely not somebody who’d been sexually abused or taken advantage of. And I think that was another factor inhibiting me from talking about it - just not wanting to deal with the consequent shame and h...
“A lot of the work that I’m doing now is because of what happened in the backseat of that car... I would be lying if I said that that is resolved... I am recognizing that I still have a freeze response… It’s taken me nine years of resisting that there was still work to be done from that - because I didn’t want to investigate it… I lived with a very, very deep sense of shame until the last few years… ...
In this conversation, Molly and regular special guest Sarah Brennan share their thoughts and experiences with big emotions, including “overreacting,” acting out/bad behavior, being labeled as “too emotional” or “too sensitive,” self-shaming, shutting down – and ultimately building the capacity to tolerate those big scary emotions with compassion for yourself and others. They also discuss triggers and...
In this episode, Dr. Rhonda Sherrod shares insights from her own healing journey from early childhood sexual abuse, which she also shares in her recently published book, “SHE - Surviving Healing & Evolving: Essays of Love, Compassion, Healing, and Affirmation for Black People.” A passionate educator and sought after public speaker, Dr. Sherrod previously taught undergraduate and graduate psychology a...
**GRAPHIC CONTENT WARNING** please listen with care
In this conversation, Molly and regular special guest Sarah Brennan reflect on how close to home the issue of sex trafficking is, including Sarah’s own story of being groomed and, ultimately, trafficked. Indeed, the Department of Homeland Security’s relatively new definition of sex trafficking acknowledges do...
Since 2018, Kristen has been a a certified rape crisis counselor in the state of Illinois and a volunteer medical advocate for Resilience (formerly Rape Victims Advocates). In her role as a medical advocate, Kristen provides individual level support and advocacy for survivors throughout their process at the hospital. She does this by answering pages to the hospitals that Resilience has contracts wit...
In this mini-episode, Molly invites you to reach out if you or someone you know may be interested in being interviewed on the show. Listen to hear some ideas of who we’re looking for, and reach out to Molly at molly@theembodyconnection.com if you are interested.
“And so while it is my job to support artists in the work they’re doing, I often see my own survival in the work that they’re sharing, and for me that just deepens the sense of not being alone. And every time, I think “Oh, right -- that’s the basic tenet of a healing community -- remembering ‘I’m not alone.’”… And for me it is the thing I need to continually remember and come back to: “I’m not alone,...
In this conversation, Molly and regular special guest Sarah Brennan share their thoughts on a key part of the conversation that we should be having with our young people when we talk to them about sexual assault and how we may be inadvertently blaming and shaming them into silence.
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“You’re experiencing your everyday life in your body already. Sexual trauma is a trauma to the body already. So it’s with you. Learning how to connect to your body and understand it and feel connected to it as a supportive part of yourself can be a really important part of the journey. With some of my clients, we don’t move; we just connect to the body as a resource in other ways.”
“When I wrote The Courage to Heal, if you had asked me who I was at that point in my life, I would’ve said ‘I’m an incest survivor,’ and that would have been it. I didn’t have any other identity. I was consumed by it, and it felt like my life had been destroyed by it and that I would never recover. So many decades later, I’...
Molly and special guest Sarah Brennan share their own experiences of the first time they shared aloud their sexual trauma, as well as what came next.
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Contact Sarah: sarah@theembodyconnection.com
Contact Molly: molly@thee...
“There is, in this, an opportunity to truly listen to what we’re being called to move through and move toward…. I’m being asked and called to surrender much more than I have in the past, to move further into a space of faith. I have a foundation, but I’m needing to build a house on top of that foundation.”
In this special episode (after a year long hiatus!), Molly is interviewed by Sarah Brennan, a former guest on the podcast who w...
In this episode Molly shares some reflections on her healing journey in real time.
"I'm angry that I have to do this work. And I'm angry that I've had to do all of the work I've done. I'm angry that I do most of it alone. I'm angry that I have to pay for it financially, with my time, with my energy. I'm angry that I've had pain in my body as a reaction to the trauma that I've held and harbored for years. I'm angry about it. It's bu...
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