Guest: Sarah Nelson — writer of Sexual Empowerment in Midlife, Somatica®-trained sex & relationship coach
Where to find Sarah: Website | Substack | Instagram
We cover:
The question Sarah asked 50+ women: “How did you take control of your sexuality?”
Why midlife can be a turning point for desire, agency, and embodiment
Squirting: what research actually says
“Good girl” conditioning and the illusion of control
Consent, BDSM, porn, jealousy, and nonmonogamy
Sex as healing and sex as transcendence
The nervous system’s role in intimacy
About Sarah:
Sarah brings 30 years of personal and professional experience to her work. She is trained in the Somatica® method of sex and relationship coaching and integrates Positive Intelligence tools to help clients strengthen resilience, reduce triggered responses, and show up with presence and clarity. Before becoming a full-time coach, she led global research programs for mission-driven organizations.
🎵 Music credit:
Intro and outro music: Madre Ayahuasca by Arkawa
Used with permission. More at arkawamusic.com
🌐 And as always, visit www.goddessintraining.online for more tools to support your intuitive journey.
The Midlife Sexual Turning Point
Some conversations feel like gossip.
Some feel like therapy.
And some feel like a collective exhale.
This one felt like the exhale.
I’m joined today by Sarah Nelson, writer of Sexual Empowerment in Midlife and a sex and relationship coach who has interviewed more than 50 middle-aged women, asking one deceptively simple question:
“How did you take control of your sexuality, however you define that? Start wherever you think the beginning is.”
I love that she lets each woman define control for herself. Not empowerment as performance. Not liberation as rebellion. Just: When did you realize something shifted?
Sarah began collecting these stories because she wanted to hear them. Because women don’t talk enough about sex. Because silence shapes us. Because she was trying to figure herself out. And because once she started asking, the response was overwhelming.
What she found wasn’t a single narrative arc. It wasn’t that every woman hit 45 and suddenly awakened. It wasn’t that leaving a marriage guaranteed empowerment. It wasn’t that sexual experimentation always equals agency.
What she found was this moment many women described:
“I thought I was in control. And then I realized I wasn’t. And now I am.”
Midlife is often the setting for that realization. Careers are established. Families are formed or consciously not formed. Perimenopause begins to shift hormones and, as Sarah explains, even brain chemistry. The frontal cortex becomes less entangled with the amygdala. Less fight-or-flight. More “I don’t care what you think.” Biology itself begins softening the edges of people-pleasing.
And yet, empowerment doesn’t arrive automatically. It requires awareness.
Sarah brings a rare combination to this work: decades leading global research programs and formal training in the Somatica® method of sex and relationship coaching, along with Positive Intelligence tools that help people regulate triggers and build resilience. She helps clients move beyond old relational patterns and into interactions aligned with who they actually are.
Her own story informs everything. She had a 30-year marriage that was loving — and also shaped by her desire to manage someone else’s emotions and mold him into someone he wasn’t. Today she’s in a healthier long-term, ethically nonmonogamous partnership in Brooklyn, living with more self-awareness and authenticity.
That arc — from managing others to inhabiting herself — mirrors what so many of the women she interviewed described.
In this episode we talk about squirting (yes, we start there), consent across generations, BDSM as a site of healing, porn as both portal and avoidance, jealousy without shame, and the transcendent quality of sex — the kind that quiets the mind and brings you fully into your body.
Underneath all of it is one theme:
Sex is not separate from who we are.
When we are disconnected from our bodies, we are disconnected from parts of ourselves. When we reclaim desire — however we define it — confidence shifts. Boundaries sharpen. Presence deepens.
This conversation isn’t prescriptive. It’s curious. It’s nuanced. It allows for monogamy and nonmonogamy, experimentation and sacredness, healing and pleasure.
It asks a question I find myself returning to:
If you started wherever you think the beginning is…
what would you say?
