Empowered Intimacy; 3 ways to keep the spark alive in your relationship and sex life while raising kids with special guest Tilly Storm

All right, welcome back, No Problem Parents. Hey, is the flame barely burning in your relationship? Have you put sex and intimacy on the back burner? Parenting can often be a good excuse for disconnecting intimately with your partner.

However, children benefit from their parents' chemistry and modeling of an intimate relationship without needing to know what goes on in the bedroom. Meet Tilly Storm as a trauma-informed body-based sex therapist and intimacy coach and the magnetic host of the multi-orgasmic millionaire podcast, Tilly has been captivating audiences since 2017 with her unique blend of wisdom, southern sass, and an unapologetic authenticity. With over 330,000 devoted listeners and counting, she's garnered recognition as one of the top 20 sex coaches worldwide, acknowledged by the esteemed Coach Foundation. Drawing inspiration from the timeless arts of Taoism and Tantra, Tilly weaves a tapestry of transformational tools and techniques that transcend the ordinary. She combines the power of somatic healing,

psychotherapy, and a diverse array of coaching modalities to empower high-achieving women in unlocking pleasure in the bedroom and beyond. Tilly is an alchemist, skillfully blending her expertise with a touch of magic. Her clients rave about her ability to guide them through personal breakthroughs, helping them reclaim their sensual sovereignty and rewrite the script of their intimate lives. Stay tuned to learn more about how intimacy isn't really just about sex.

Stay tuned parents, Tilly's going to share with us three ways that parents can keep the spark alive in their relationship while raising kids. Hey there, I'm Jackie Finneman and after 30 years and more than 50,000 hours of working with countless kids and families ranging from the severe behaviors that required out-of-home placement to the, ah, she just doesn't listen to me anymore behaviors. There is a solution. When you, the parent, feel confident, when you don't feel the need to rescue your kids and you aren't losing your cool and yelling all the time, your kid's behavior improves and your kids trust you. They trust that no matter what they're going through, you are going to help them get through it. No Problem Parenting supports and teaches parents how to be the best leader and advocate for your child. If you feel like no matter how nice you are or how strict you are, your kiddos are still struggling, it's time to get off the struggle bus and become the confident leader your kids crave you to be. Join me on this journey of behavioral strategies and resources so that you can feel empowered as a parent again and turn your everyday parenting problems into no problem. Welcome to the show, Tilly.

Oh, thank you so much for having me. So before we get into everything, just a quick little synopsis of why this became your niche and like your calling, your purpose, your passion to support men and women in really rebuilding or building their sex life. Yeah. I mean, it's obviously something I didn't grow up thinking. I'm going to be a somatic sex coach when I grow up. I don't think anyone does that one. It's not typically on the list of what do you want to be when you grow up? Exactly. Yeah. I grew up Southern Baptist right outside of New Orleans, Louisiana. I had some very, very strict religious conditioning around the body and sex and all of these things, which, you know, I've been doing this for seven years now. And honestly, that's the story I hear no matter where you grew up or lived in the world,

people say the exact same thing. And I was about 27 years old when I started to recognize some of my own pitfalls around sex. I was married and I, my husband at the time had mentioned I could only have an orgasm in one way. And I felt really shy and embarrassed about my body. Trying new things was often really difficult. I was not confident. I had super saggy boobs after having and breastfeeding two babies and I didn't like to have my shirt off. Like I was just so clammed up in my body.

Like I did not feel free to express myself sexually. I didn't know what that even, even look like or mean. And I started diving into and working with a Tantra teacher. So my background is on Tantra and Taoism. I definitely work with more psychotherapy and modern coaching modalities as well, but being a somatic sex coach often has this more holistic approach and spiritual component to it. So we're not just looking at like the act of sex itself.

We're not just like talking about it. The Tantra is a, it's a spiritual tradition that did not leave out sexuality as a path to enlightenment. So it's kind of one of the only spiritual traditions that kind of has that, like, no, we're going to dive into this. We're going to go into the shadows and deal with your guilt and shame. And we're not going to leave that out because it's a very important component to our existence is our sex. Tantra is, it's very little to do with sex. That's actually just a spiritual path, but the parts that they did teach about sex were very transformative and they created some amazing practices to help people feel liberated and free in their sexuality and their body, which is what I was seeking at the time when I was 27.

Well, what I really like about this is that, I mean, sex is so voodoo still. Why is that? You know, like, why are we still afraid to talk about sexuality? And I think a lot of us in our minds, it's just because it's all about sex, the actual act of sex. And it's, it's not, And this isn't saying that you're just like going to be all free with your body and go have sex with everyone. That's absolutely not what you're saying.

No, it's about feeling that your body is sacred, that sex is a sacred act. And when you come from heavy religious conditioning, like I did, I think that's one of the things that people are really contending with when they grow up religious is like, well, all growing up. oh, when you get married and have sex, it's going to be this wonderful sanctioned thing. But up until that point, it's dirty. It's bad. It's wrong. Pleasure is only for men. Like these are the stories we're taught. So then when we actually get married and have sex, it's like, uh, how am I supposed to change all of that conditioning and stuff that they told me about sex before? And then all of a sudden now it's supposed to be good. And people really struggle with that, that, you know, sex is bad and dirty and you're a slut and you're a whore and like all of these messages we get growing up, but then when they, when you, when they get married and it's supposed to be good and sacred and holy, like how is this supposed to work? Right?

So people really struggle with us who have heavy religious conditioning, like I did. And to feel that your sexuality and your body is actually a sacred part of you, that it actually, it's part of your wholeness. It's part of who you are. It's why you exist, right? To see it as an amazing component of your existence is absolutely life transformative. Well, and I also love that, you know, because kids are taught, we're all taught like a little bit, at least of sex ed, you know, we get that in middle school or high school. We're learning a little bit about our bodies and all the fluids and things, right? But we're not learning, like you said, about that spiritual side of our sexuality. But I'm super curious before we get into those three ways that parents can keep that spark alive. Let's talk a little bit about what you would say is maybe wrong with the sex ed training and how, and in your approach to helping people realize that sexuality is more spiritual than it is an act. Yeah. Well, I'll go back to a bit of my story. So when I started doing the work on myself, working with a Tantra teacher who is a sexuality expert,

it changed my life. Like I felt completely different in my body. I went from hardly being able to have an orgasm. I mean, I had them, but they weren't anything to write home about, right?

Like it was nothing fascinating. I became multi-orgasmic. My experience of pleasure skyrocketed. Like I was like, oh my gosh, is this what I've been missing all of my life? And I mean, I was only like 27, 28, 29 at the time, which was fairly young to have gone down that path or even knew it existed. Right. So, uh, I was working in a birth center at the time, uh, with new moms. And it was like an ongoing joke when they would come to their six week postpartum appointment and you would clear them to have sex and they would laugh at you, or they would be like, ha ha ha. That's not going to happen anytime soon.

And it was, we're not going there yet kind of thing. And when I first, this was right at the time that my Tantra teacher had, she also went to Stanford. So she did have a degree in sexuality and all of these things. So she had created a sex, love and relationship coaching training with a Tantric approach to sexuality.

And I knew in that moment when she created this training, I was like, yep, this is what I'm here to do with my life to help moms rehabilitate their sexuality after having children. I knew it in my bones. It was just like, I don't know what this is going to take. My goodness, this is a $12,000 training, even though I've already gone to school to, you know, master's degree, all of that stuff.

I'm going back to school and I'm 20, you know, I think it was 30 at the time. So I did. And then I, that's when I started in 2017. I started my podcast, The Multi-Orgasmic Millionaire.

And what I've really learned and noticed from people is that no one got a pleasure education. We were lucky if we got taught how to not have babies or how to not get an STI. And yet women are just left in the complete and total darkness about what their bodies are capable of, the pleasure that is available to them. They have no idea.

women's experiences of pleasure is that they're so multifaceted and so much more nuanced than men's and they're capable of experiencing massive amounts of pleasure that they are not tapping into. So sadly, as science is just not really supporting and backing up female pleasure, it's hard to study because we have a menstrual cycle. So that's just why the science isn't there. So it leaves women at a big disadvantage about what they're capable of even experiencing in terms of sexuality. You're really teaching women how to actually even have more respect for themselves and their spirituality in what you, in what you teach or how you coach.

I like to explain it in terms of like this. Okay. People will go to a life coach. They'll go and get a financial advisor. They'll get a career coach even, but let's not ever talk about sex.

Right. And, and sexuality is the quickest path to self-awareness and personal growth and development. It is the quickest path because when you have the courage to move through the resistance, to dive into this stuff in the first place, it's like you are changing the foundation of your very being, the way that you feel in your body, the level of embodiment you have, how much am I even connected to those sensations in my body? Like you are in this human body to live and experience being a human in a human body, yet we are so disconnected from them. So when you dive into sexuality as a path to personal growth and development and just self-awareness in general, It skyrockets self-awareness and what you learn about yourself.

It affects every single area of your life because when you aren't confident in who you are, which is like the foundation of your beingness, your sex, when you aren't confident in that, you're showing up in work being a people pleaser. You are not standing up for yourself and speaking up for yourself, asking for the raises. You are not showing up in motherhood with good boundaries. you're letting your kids walk all over you. You don't know how to say no. This is what I see when people have issues that the root of them are based in sexuality issues. Makes a lot of sense.

Boundaries is a sexuality issue. Yes. And when you go to that and you work on self-consent and self boundary, it affects everything. So I know this is kind of like terrifying for people to even think of like, Oh no, I'm so scared of that topic. Like we're not going to go there, but it really changes everything for the better because you're working on core issues, like core wins when you dive into sex. It actually, I mean, this really totally, I mean, I love this. This makes perfect sense, but again, it's like so personal and it's so vulnerable. Yeah. I tell people, I mean, people can hear me say this all the time on my podcast, but you can't really thrive as a human without access to pleasure. And the things that are limiting you from pleasure are all your negative conditioning and stories about sex and pleasure growing up and any big T and little T traumas that you experienced because so many women have experienced sexual trauma or abuse, or just a conglomeration of really crap beliefs and stories that like imprinted it in the body as a trauma. So it shuts down their sexual desire. It shuts down their ability to connect with pleasure and they struggle having orgasms or they struggle with pain during sex. They struggle with feeling numb and disconnected during sex,

or they're just like, I can't get out of my head. And I don't know why that is the result of negative conditioning and trauma. So all of these things are, are so related and reclaiming our access to pleasure is just so much more than like, I just want a good orgasm. I don't want a good sex life. It actually is just so much more than that. Yeah. I hear you're saying it's a way to reconnect with your body and it's not just even about the orgasm or anything else. There's so much more to it than that. You do have some like actionable things that people could do right away just to even start when they're feeling that a disconnect in their relationship. And so let's talk about those three ways that parents can keep the spark alive and not just in the relate they're in the, in the relationship and sex life while raising kids. Yeah. So what I'm going to tell you now is very basic. Like it's very much, you probably have never listened to a sex podcast.

I don't blame you, especially if you've got kids in the car, you're like, when am I going to have time to listen to that with headphones on. Probably not. So I get it. So to prepare people to even broach the subject, to even get to the point where you're like, okay, Tilly, I need help.

I'm ready to sign up for something. Right. Before you even do any of that, there are some very implementable action steps that you can take right now that can really make a big difference in your experience in your relationship, in your sex life. So parents will tend to, you know, like I said, my experience working in a birth center, I'm not interested in sex, or there's so many excuses about that women tend to give about why they can't have sex. Right. And women tend to be, tend to be the lower desire partner. So in relationship, there's always one partner who's probably going to have more sexual desire than the other. And this is the biggest pain point for most couples is how in the world can we both be happy? Because generally the man wants it way more than the woman wants it. Sometimes it's the opposite. I have always been the higher desire partner in every relationship I've always been. So I don't want women to think that, you know,

maybe I'm just overly sexual and there's something wrong with me. No, there's not. It's beautiful. celebrate that. Okay. Um, but most couples, it tends to be the woman lacks the desire, or it's just not as much as the man and how can they be happy? So the first step and really getting the spark back between you two is to implement a weekly date night and a sex date night standing appointment style. Okay. What does that mean? It means that every week, same day, same time every week, you're going to have a date night, which has nothing to do with sex.

And then you're going to have a sex date night, which is like an extended gourmet style. We're going to light the candles, turn on the music. We're going to take our time. We're not going to rush through this, but we're going to give each other the time to really tune in and pay attention. So having that as like a prerequisite, like every week, you know, okay. Tuesdays is our date night where we go out and do a thing. And then Thursdays is their sex date night. Okay.

I know couples for the most part, they don't like the idea of scheduling sex, but when you're struggling to keep the spark alive and to have it in the first place, that is literally the best thing I can tell you to do because sex is a positive feedback loop, meaning that the more you have it, the more you actually want it for the most part. So do that. Any questions about that? Does that make sense so far? I love it. I mean, for years we've talked about, make sure that you have that mom and dad date night, even, even if it's in the kitchen after the kids are in bed, make sure you schedule that date night. But I've never heard schedule a sex night and it makes perfect sense. Yeah. Good. And when you have a, like a set day and time each week, it makes it really easy to schedule in a babysitter, um, to just have that expectation. So you don't have to check in about it every single week. It's just like, Oh, it's Tuesday. It's day nine. Oh,

it's Thursday, it's sex date night. Right. And then it just becomes like an expectation and then it becomes a habit. And you want that to be a habit, especially when you have young children, because there are so many reasons that young children can pull you out of making your relationship and sex life a priority. And you're doing yourself and your children a disservice if you don't make it a priority. Okay. So there's another cool thing that you just said. I want to, I want to highlight this part. It's not just about waiting to have your sex date night at 10 o'clock at night after the kids are in bed, the dishes are done, you know, and you plan for your next day, you're saying, no, get a babysitter.

Yeah. Do this at three o'clock in the afternoon on a Saturday or 7 PM on a, you know, Wednesday night, excuse me, or 7 PM on a Wednesday night or whatever it is, but actually, and which can be uncomfortable. I can already hear the listener or feel the listeners being like, what I'm not, that's awkward. It's like, cause if you're out of practice with it, you're thinking you can only do this like at night. Right. That's a big limiting belief right there. That's a huge limiting belief.

And when you think about in your dating days, you didn't care what time of day it was when you were ready, you were ready. And that will lead me to number two. Well, before we go there real quick, if you're thinking like a date night, I don't even know what we do. It's so freaking boring.

Like I'm just, I have no idea where we would even start there. It doesn't excite me at all. if that's kind of where you're at, no judgment. That's where a lot of couples are with young kids.

I have the epic sex blueprint that I designed specifically for that. So if you're like, I need like sex dates, what does that even mean? It's 10 sex date nights for you. It's audio and video guided. So you can go check that out on my website. Okay. Enough about that. I love it. Thank you for that. Yeah. So the second thing is to get your spark back or to keep it alive and your relationship is to build in what I call the passion trifecta, mystery, obstacle, and novelty or naughtiness into your relationship. So if you aren't actively incorporating the passion trifecta into your relationship, the chemistry will die. 100% of the time it will die. Some couples are lucky that they intuitively know these things and they intuitively, like without even thinking about it, they'll, they'll be doing this already, but some parents get so disconnected and, you know,

they haven't been prioritizing their relationship with their sexuality for so long that it just starts to die. If you have ever had a spark with your partner at one point in your life together, usually the beginning, and it just died, you can always get it back when you start incorporating mystery obstacle and novelty or naughtiness into your relationship. So an example of that, um, obstacle is spending time apart. All right. So if you have a couple who does spend a lot of time together, they do a lot of things together. This can often become an issue. So having personal dates with yourself, having hobbies or activities that you do separate and apart from your spouse can be super important to create a little bit of distance from your partner, because if you're always there and always with them. It doesn't make it when you come together, very excited,

right? Got to have some obstacle. So mystery is take turns. Who's going to plan date night and don't tell them exactly what you're going to do. You can drop in the things that they're going to need to know about it, but you got to build a mystery. You did this when you were dating your partner. Okay. You did it without trying because it's just normal human behavior.

or when you try and attract a partner, you're like, Oh, I gotta, I gotta give her some mystery. Like I gotta give her some, some crumbs and like, you know, get her to go down the trail. And like, you know, it's becomes like a, the, the catch, you know, like that is so pivotal to keeping chemistry alive. So if you're not incorporating mystery and, you know, building things into your relationship where there is some mystery at all, like if you're telling your partner everything all of the time and they know everything about like, that's actually not that conducive to sexual chemistry. So that makes a lot of sense. The last one was novelty or naughtiness. So an example of that means that you do not go to the same restaurant you have been going for 10 years on your date night. Oh my God, please change it up. Boring. Okay. There's nothing new or exciting about it. So, I mean, if you love doing that one thing you guys love doing great, but if you want to build in more novelty into your relationship, you got to do new things. You got to try new things, whether it's sexually or just what you're going to do on your regular date night, go to a different, do a different activity, do an activity date night, go play putt-putt golf, go ride your bike to the beach at sunset, whatever, but you got to try new things constantly. So that's my second tip, mystery, obstacle and naughtiness and novelty. Awesome. All right. Let's go to the third

and final tip. Okay. This one is for my ladies. So you got to, uh, well, I guess for the men to help the ladies consider sex and intimacy and ongoing act. It's not just something that happens whenever it happens. Okay. This is because women are their path to turn on and pleasure and their sense of like wanting to actually have sex with you, um, is mostly derived over slow buildup over time. It is not, uh, very rarely is it a spontaneous excitement, something that they're just spontaneously going to want. Um, this is, you know, we could get into the science here, but there's responsive desire and spontaneous desire. And most women are not spontaneous desire, responsive desire mean that they, their turn on their desires based on what is happening.

So men, like if you are considering sex and ongoing act, you start for play the moment, the last sexual act ends. Okay. It's gotta be like, um, giving her little tidbits of turn on throughout the day and knowing what those things are that are actually going to work for her is much more explored on my podcast. So there are just like love languages, there's erotic languages. So if you're approaching her like in a love language, if her love language is, um, words of affirmation and you're giving her gifts all of the time, she's not registering gifts as love. It's the same thing with sex. So if you're approaching her in a particular way, that isn't her erotic language. She's not going to understand your turn on or what you're trying to do. It's not going to make sense to her. So you can go download the five days to epic sex training for more info on that stuff. But you know, you got to consider it sex, like an ongoing thing. Like how can I keep this chemistry alive and turn on throughout the day? Um, because that's really going to support women and actually wanting to have sex when the time is right.

And not feeling like, um, uh, you know, most couples foreplay is just so short or non-existent. And that's one of the biggest complaints that women have with their male partners is that they don't get enough foreplay. And I just think men and women, we haven't been taught this. So I don't think we pay attention to even the dating period. It's like you date and it's all good and great.

So you want to get married and then you get married and it's like, okay, now what do we do? Like you were saying kind of full circle at the beginning of the episode. It's like, now what do we do? You keep doing what you did when you were dating. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And it takes work.

sorry to inform you, but it does. No one got taught relationships and sex skills. No one was modeled those things. There are learned skills. So just like if you expected to be healthy and fit, you wouldn't think that you would just never have to pay attention to what you're eating or how much you're working out, right? Like you would know better. Like if you wanted to be healthy and fit, you'd actually have to go to the gym and work out and you actually have to pay attention to what you're eating. It's the same thing with sex and relationships. You cannot expect to have a great relationship over the course of decades without putting in time, energy, and effort into learning new skills and practices and techniques to make it better. So it's no different than anything else.

You know, if it's a priority to you and you want to make it better, then you got to put some time, energy, and effort into it. Oh, I love that. Well, Tilly, this has been so enlightening. Parents just really nurture that relationship sexually, um, intimately and tune in to, uh, to Tilly's podcast and check out Tilly's five days to epic sex and pleasure for high achieving women. Um, we can really model that healthy relationship, um, with, with our spouse. So, um, or our partner. So I just appreciate you so much taking the time to be on the podcast today. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.

All right, parents, that's it for today. Make sure you head over to the website, noproblemparents.com. Sign up to get our emails.

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