Breaking Free - A Body, Mind, Spirit Approach to Mental Health · Sommer A. Seitz, MA, LMHC

Episode 53: Embodying Your Desire Part I

·58 min·3 clips

Naomi Slater says adults are responsible for satisfying their own sexual needs and desires.

Summer opens the episode by introducing Naomi Slater as an intimacy and relationship coach. She says she worked with Naomi for 12 weeks and found the experience deeply worthwhile. That personal connection matters because the podcast is being relaunched as part of Summer's own healing journey. She names this as a new era for Breaking Free. The point is not just to process trauma. It is also to ask what comes after that open space. Naomi talks about embodiment as something many people keep at a distance. She says some people cannot even close their eyes and feel present in their bodies. For many, that comes from shutdown. The numbness was adaptive and helped them survive. She stresses that the body should not be blamed for that response. She also points to how this can happen inside family systems, religious systems, and communities where something feels wrong but leaving is not possible. That pressure can start very young. Summer reflects on her own experience of living in the mind first and the body last. Naomi describes her own early somatic work as revealing how disconnected she had been, even while her mind stayed sharp. That recognition brought tears and shame. She links those feelings to self-abandonment and to the experience of going against core boundaries in order to stay connected. Fawning and pleasing show up as survival strategies, not character flaws. The conversation keeps coming back to the idea that coming into the body starts with letting what is there be there. The closing note is that real guidance has to be lived before it can be offered to someone else.

As heard by us

A calm, body-centered conversation about healing, shutdown, and the work of coming back to yourself.

Summer brings Naomi Slater back to Breaking Free Podcast for a conversation that stays grounded in healing, embodiment, and life after trauma work.

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Why you'd press play

You want to hear what shutdown feels like in the body.

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