Your Brain on Purity Culture (It's Not a Vibe)

[00:00:00] Foreign. [00:00:11] Welcome back to Untamed Ember, the podcast where we dismantle shame with science, burn outdated sex scripts, and rewire your nervous system with a healthy dose of rebellion and probably too much coffee. I'm Dr. Misty. You, your certified sex therapist with a PhD, a trauma brain, and a lot of feelings about weaponization of girlhood. [00:00:34] This week we're asking the question, what does purity culture actually do to your brain? Spoiler. It's not just cringe, it's neurologically confusing. And your nervous system is out here just trying to survive while you're thinking about whether liking someone's hands makes you a secret, pervasive foreign. [00:00:59] Okay, let's nerd out about your brain on shame. Shame isn't just an emotion. It's a full body event. When you feel shame, your limbic system goes off like an overprotective smoke alarm. Amygdala activated, Cortisol flooded. Prefrontal cortex offline. Goodbye rational thinking. This is the same system that lights up during trauma. So when you grow up learning that your desire is dangerous or that pleasure is for marriage only or makes you dirty, your nervous system learns to associate sex with threat. And I don't mean threat like bad date. I mean existential meltdown threat, like you'll be rejected, you'll be unloved, you'll disappoint God, your mom, and probably your cat. Over time, the body begins to treat desire like a danger zone, even when you want to want it. And that, my love, is how purity culture messes with your pleasure pathways. [00:02:03] Let's talk about the real reason purity culture is still thriving. Control. [00:02:08] Because when you can hijack someone's entire sense of bodily safety, you don't need to physically restrain them. They'll do it for you with guilt and beige cardigans. Shame keeps people small. It's self policing. It doesn't just say, don't do this, it whispers, you're disgusting. If you even want to. So your dopamine system, which is supposed to light up when you experience joy, sensuality, connection, it starts glitching. You anticipate rejection. You prepare to be punished. And your brain, trying to keep you alive, just quietly files pleasure into the danger folder. It's not dysfunction. It's adaptation. [00:02:51] So let me tell you a little story. For years, I used to dissociate at the exact moment pleasure would start to build like clockwork. I'd be present, connected, maybe even feeling good. And then, poof. Gone. Suddenly, I'm mentally folding laundry or analyzing my own performance like some kind of shame. Spectator sport. Why? Because somewhere along the line my nervous system decided, hey, this much aliveness, this much intensity, that's not safe. That gets you judged, that gets you abandoned. And honestly, even when I knew better, it still happened. That's the trickiest part. The body holds on to shame long after your mind is like, ugh. We graduated Purity Culture. Thanks. It took me being in a deeply safe, deeply patient relationship to even notice what I'd been doing. To slowly stay in my body, to build new associations, to finally let go of needing to perform and just exist in my own erotic experience. [00:03:54] And that rewiring? It's the work. It's slow, it's weird, it's hilarious and painful and sacred and sexy and awkward and gorgeous. And it's so damn worth it. Shame isn't just emotional, it's neurological. Your brain literally reacts to desire like it's a threat. Purity culture exploits your nervous system's need for safety and turns it into self surveillance. Reclaiming pleasure isn't just a mindset. It's a body based rebellion. One that rewires your nervous system through safety, slowness and curiosity. [00:04:33] So here's your reflection prompt for this episod what moments in your life have taught your body that pleasure isn't safe? And how might you start building micro moments of safety? Not perfection, not performance. [00:04:47] Just enough safety to feel one extra second of aliveness. One breath, one taste, one sigh that lasts longer than you thought you were allowed. This week's worksheet inside the Ember Society is called Shame in the Body, Safety in the Senses. It includes a body mapping activity for tracking where you carry sexual shame. Simple sensory pleasure prompts to start rebuilding safety and journal reflections on performance versus presence. You can grab it by joining the Ember Society and the links in the show notes or head to members untamed ember.com that's it for today. Love. Be kind to your nervous system. Flirt with your pleasure and remember, you're not broken, you're brilliantly adapted. And that shame you carry, it was never yours to begin with.