Smart Sex, Smart Love with Dr Joe Kort
Psychotherapist, life coach and author, Dr Joe Kort is breaking through the taboos of the most intimate of subjects, to bring leading experts together to talk all things sex and relationships. There’s always room for improving sex and together, Joe Kort and his guests delve deeper into the most personal of human behavior, getting right under the covers to discuss the different paths we take towards pleasure. #pleasure #sex https://www.facebook.com/joekort/ https://twitter.com/drjoekort www.JoeKort.com
Smart Sex, Smart Love with Dr Joe Kort
Why Sexuality Changes Over Time with Jessica Levith
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Jessica Levith is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and certified sex therapist whose work focuses on how life experiences shape sexuality. Trained in attachment focused EMDR and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, she helps clients understand their sexual identities through the lens of personal history, culture, relationships, and emotional development.
In this conversation, Jessica and Dr. Joe Kort explore the idea of sexual contextualism, a framework that looks at sexuality as something shaped by our life experiences rather than something fixed or easily categorized. Jessica introduces the concept of sexual emergence, the moment when someone realizes a new aspect of their sexuality, whether that involves attraction, desire, identity, or erotic interests that were previously unrecognized.
They also discuss how Acceptance and Commitment Therapy can help people relate differently to their sexual thoughts, feelings, and conflicts, especially when desires change or partners discover unexpected aspects of each other’s sexuality. Together they talk about evolving attractions, kink, identity shifts, and why understanding context can help people feel less shame and more curiosity about their sexual development.
Listen to this Smart Sex, Smart Love episode as Dr. Joe Kort talks with Jessica Levith about sexual identity expansion, erotic evolution, and why discovering new parts of your sexuality can be a normal part of being human.
Welcome everybody to Smart Sex, Smart Love. We're talking about sex goes beyond the taboo, and talking about love goes beyond the honeymoon. Today, my guest is Jess Levith, a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and certified sex therapist, writer and lecturer. Jess is fully trained in attachment focused EMDR therapy and Acceptance and Commitment theory. Her fields of specialty include LGBTQIA plus kink, consensual, non monogamy, women's sexual health and problematic and out of control sexual behaviors. In recent years, she has taken a deep dive into insight, meditation and mindfulness in psycho psychotherapy. Today, Jess will be talking about sexual contextualism, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for sexual identity expansion and what all of this means to us. Welcome Jess,
JESSICA LEVITH:Hi, Joe. Thank you for having me in your space.
JOE KORT:Oh, my God, it's great to have you especially, I'm especially interested in hearing everything, but especially the stuff about sexual identity expansion. I talk about it so much I'm feel like I'm going to have a lot to learn from you today.
JESSICA LEVITH:Awesome.
JOE KORT:All right. Well, let's start with the first question, which is the term sexual contextualism sounds pretty complex. Can you explain what it means in simpler terms and how it is to fit into our lives.
JESSICA LEVITH:Yes, so it is a very fancy way of saying that when I work with sexual health, I'm looking at people's histories. I'm looking at the context, you know, what are the lived experiences they've had in this life, and how does it impact their sexuality?
JOE KORT:All right, like, what kinds of questions would you ask them to answer in terms of that?
JESSICA LEVITH:Well, so that's I would get into what I consider the sexual context, which is all of us have a different experience around the world. In our sexuality has a different experience, given that we all have different ways that we identify in the world, and not just an orientation, right? We have a whole social profile and all of these different ways that we identify our age, race, culture, it all impacts our sexuality. Our sexuality comes up through that. That is our sexual context. So our sexual context is, how do we see the world sexually? How does the world see us or not see us sexually? And how do we see ourselves sexually? Those, those are the questions. So any questions, kind of probing around that.
JOE KORT:And why would you say it matters sexual context in and of itself?
JESSICA LEVITH:It matters a lot because sexual context is what both the individual clients and the therapist can look to for clues as to what may be happening with someone sexually, right? So a person, one person who has a fear of sex, it may be because they got triggered from something that happened a decade ago, an assault, whereas another person that has a fear of sex may actually be afraid of having pleasure in their body. So it's, really it's just a reminder that everyone is so individual.
JOE KORT:I love that. Because people don't understand this. They think that there has to be some general way, and we all should be a general way. And you're saying, No, everybody's unique in the way that they express this
JESSICA LEVITH:Exactly.
JOE KORT:And then you say that we're all born with whatever sexuality we're born with, and then our sexuality develops through our soup of life experiences or circumstances. Will you discuss this?
JESSICA LEVITH:Yes, definitely. So we all are born with a temperament that's well documented, right, the emotional template, and it's also been documented that there are aspects of our sexual orientation and sexuality that we are born with. And so both of these things come up through our context. Come up through our soup our life. I call it the gumbo because I'm from New Orleans, and we they it's because it comes through this that we come out so individual and so differently. Did I answer the question?
JOE KORT:Yes, it does, actually. Now tell me if you talk about it this way, I usually talk about the difference between sexual orientation and erotic orientation. Is that what you mean?
JESSICA LEVITH:Yes, yes. I mean that just because you have a particular sexual orientation, that does not equal a very specific erotic orientation.
JOE KORT:I love it. I love it. We're so aligned. I didn't realize this until you know, like we're talking together. I love this, all right, another term not often used that you use is sexual emergence? Will you explain it and provide some examples?
JESSICA LEVITH:Yes, it's not often used because I made it up myself.
JOE KORT:All right, good, all right.
JESSICA LEVITH:So an emergence, is it? It comes out of our context, right? So an emergence is when out of either nowhere or maybe over a period of time, we come to realize some new aspect of our sexuality that we just didn't know about before, right? And so when I give examples, I start with my own example, which was I was in my late 30s and out of nowhere, I realized I, in a very split moment, was attracted to both women in addition to men. Right now. This is something that had been pointed to me a couple of times, but it just went like this. I truly had no connection to it until this one moment, and so when I became completely disoriented. I was a therapist, by the way, at this time, a sex therapist at this time and when this became, you know, this blew apart my mind. And it I had a small baby at home, you know, I was in a partnership that I'm still in with, with my partner, who is a man and and I needed to figure out very quickly how to frame this. I had, there is no amazing sex education. We have to patchwork it together ourselves as adults. And so I'm patchworking and trying to hold my family together and and I wanted to create for someone else some kind of framework, some kind of guidebook for going through sexual exploration and expansion in a more contained way.
JOE KORT:That's so great, because you're right to be without sex education, it's patchwork. It's porn work and not at all dissing porn. Porn has its place. But without sex education, it can give us a skewed way of looking at things. It can.
JESSICA LEVITH:And I want to be clear that it's not just about orientation and emergence. You know, an emergence can actually happen. You know, if, if a fear emerges, or if there's shift in hormonal or hormone hormones, and there's an emergence there, or a complete cessation, you know, it's any new aspect of our sexuality,
JOE KORT:Tell me if you mean this. Because I, when I was a younger man, I always was attracted to older men, the daddy types, and then I became a daddy type. And one day I woke up, and honestly, my I was attracted to younger men. Is that the kind of shift?
JESSICA LEVITH:Yeah, that would be. That would be so I would be so curious about that, you know, and we would look at the context of your life, and we would look at what those experiences as a daddy felt like. You know,
JOE KORT:That's great to hear, because people, I think people don't understand that your sexuality and your erotic interests evolve, right? We, our culture thinks they progress and can get out of control, but you're talking about an evolution.
JESSICA LEVITH:No, I'm trying to tell people that I'm trying to depathologize it all, you know, because if you're looking at your context, it starts to make sense. You know, it's not you're not going to just fall in line with everyone else. Treatment isn't going to work with you the same. It's going to work with someone else.
JOE KORT:You know what you're doing, you're saying a little more than I say, because when I talk about context, and if this is how you mean it, I like to look at the non sexual narratives like the jack Morin, Michael Bader, the people that say even Justin lay Miller, why? Why are people interested in these erotic things? You go beyond just Why are you interested in it? What other things have happened in your life that have shaped your your whole erotica and sexual orientation.
JESSICA LEVITH:That's right, that's right, because when I completely blew my brain apart when I realized I was bisexual, you know, I it was so dire for me, and I had to expand beyond. I was pulling at anything I could find to try and figure out and stabilize myself. And so, yeah, I went existential. Say more about that. What do you mean by that? I meant I looked at the very existence of who I was as a person, you know, and I dug all the way back, and the more I kept digging back, and the more I would get into things like attachment dysregulation, and I would get into, you know, the fears in the body of touch and all of it. It just made sense when you look at early attachment and when you you can't just look at sexuality from a sexuality lens. You know, you have to look at it from many different angles.
JOE KORT:How has this been helpful to your clients? What do they tell you when you when you do this kind of work?
JESSICA LEVITH:What I hear a lot that makes me happy is they feel normalized. They feel like, okay, so maybe I'm not broken.
JOE KORT:Don't you agree that that's like, as a sex therapist, every day of our work, like, that's, it's just like helping people feel that way.
JESSICA LEVITH:Yeah, sometimes I just want to write it on the whiteboard and pass it from one client to another.
JOE KORT:You know, I think we do. We just do it different ways. It's true, though.
JESSICA LEVITH:Yeah.
JOE KORT:All right, so you also talk about a ct hexaflex And your adaptation, the sex of flex. What's this all about?
JESSICA LEVITH:Yes, so it's it's Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and it's pronounced act. It was created by Stephen H Hayes Kirk, Strauss doll and Kelly Wilson, and it is basically taking it's shifting the focus of treatment, from looking at the symptomology and trying to get rid of it, to shifting the relationship to how we See what's happening, shifting in our relationship with the symptomology itself, and it's being able to learn how to tolerate everything that's happening and accepting that it's happening, not necessarily being okay with it, but accepting that it's happening so that you're not frozen in place and can't move, you know, so that from this place of acceptance and presence, you're able to make decisions that are in line with what matters to you in the world.
JOE KORT:I would think that this also helps couples. Do you use it with couples?
JESSICA LEVITH:I have used it with couples. I mean, act isn't just a therapy model. I really truly, it's kind of how I live my life. You know, it's, it's just kind of, it becomes its own value.
JOE KORT:Can you give me example? Like, how do you like, how is it a way of life for to use the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.
JESSICA LEVITH:Well, I have a 10 year old child, and you know, there's so much about what can happen in a day with him that I can't control. And it's not about being like, okay. It's not about bypassing, you know? It's about going, Okay, this is what's happening right now. He is, he is telling me something. To my face, I am wanting to absolutely lose my mind. And now what am I going to do?
JOE KORT:Yeah, and then it helps you make different decisions?
JESSICA LEVITH:Most of the time.
JOE KORT:Yeah, right, right, right. You're human. So of course, it's not going to be all the time.
JESSICA LEVITH:Right.
JOE KORT:And I would expect that a partner listening to this would help her, him, them, have some kind of compassion for a partner for what they find out. Because usually people are coming to my office and the partners are discovering something new sexually that they are disgusted by or surprised by or bothered by, and I would think that this would help them.
JESSICA LEVITH:Yeah, erotic conflicts aren't just a conflict for the person having it, you know, it can absolutely and I don't want to minimize the pain that you know, if you have a partner that is realizing that they have a different orientation, you know, or they all of a sudden have a kink that you have absolutely no interest in, but this kink is like such a need for them, right? It's disorienting, I think I start with the partner and really wanting to hear what part of this is the most painful, and it typically is. I thought I knew them, and then that's when the education of you do, and people evolve.
JOE KORT:I love that you do. And people evolve, including the relationship as that this information comes out.
JESSICA LEVITH:Yeah.
JOE KORT:And look, if somebody comes to you and they have a kink and they can't accept it. How does your work translate into helping that client?
JESSICA LEVITH:So I think, as Moran would say, you know, you can't get rid of a kink, and as Steven Hayes would say, you can't delete a feeling.
JOE KORT:Mm.
JESSICA LEVITH:Right? So I'm going to say, you can't delete a kink, right? And I would say, I would say working with acceptance around the fact that this is a part of your template, while also building out the template so that you have more things that you can get curious about sexually, so that there's not so much pressure on this one thing, you know, and it's not so dire, you know, and working to kind of pull apart. Why is it so dire? You're doing so many things at the same time?
JOE KORT:Yeah, I like what you're saying. You can't delete a can't delete a kink. You can't like people want to come in and give themselves or want us to give them an erratic ectomy. Have you ever heard that word?
JESSICA LEVITH:Oh, yeah, that Doug used to say that all the time.
JOE KORT:I learned that from Doug brown Harvey too. Yes, an erratic ectomy. You can't give yourself one.
JESSICA LEVITH:Right.
JOE KORT:You describe an intersectional analysis of power and privilege in sexuality and social identifiers. What does this mean and how does it work?
JESSICA LEVITH:Well, it's really great to know we have a sexual context and how important that is, but then we have to be able to pull it apart, you know? And so this is the tool that I'm using, and it is. It is not a tool I made up. This is a tool based on many black women thought leaders, and it's originally created to look at oppression and privilege and power, right? And some of the ways of doing this I was reading, and I have a dear friend, Dr Bianca luriano, and she's a really great teacher on this and and we just, I just started noticing, like, this is how you could also pull out all of the identifiers, and it's not, it doesn't Just have to be about this one particular way to pull apart oppression. I mean, when we look at our sexual context, we're looking at all of the different ways that we may or may not have power. Sexually, we're talking about consent. We're talking about exploitation, and so it works with a lot of different sexual health issues, access to birth control, you know all of it.
JOE KORT:You know what I like tell me if this how this might fit in. People come into our office. I'm sure you've had this where they're interested. They might be lesbians, but they have rape fantasies. They might be people of color, but they like race play. You know, where they're being victimized through the play of the sexual play gay men who are activists by day, but want to be bullied by straight men and humiliated for not for having gay pride at night. How does this work with that?
JESSICA LEVITH:You know, you were saying that. And I actually was thinking about the polar opposite, which it would be, you know, people who preach by day, you know, and are cis, straight men by day, and hella gay by night, you know. And it's like it, can you hold both? Can you can? Can people start holding both? You know, all of it, yes. And like, okay, don't let it freeze you, because you have this big split. You know, look at the split, and let's change your relationship to the split so that you can then move.
JOE KORT:I like that, hold on to both. And that's the tension that as therapists, we're helping people do in the work.
JESSICA LEVITH:Yeah.
JOE KORT:And what if, how do people resist like that? I would think that would be hard to get them to be able to hold both.
JESSICA LEVITH:Well, you know, I mean, when I have a client that is very protective at a certain point, it's like, I'm not going to get in an argument with you. You're here because you're hurting. You know, has what you've been doing worked, you know, like, act is about functional contextualism, you know? And so the hexaflex, the sexiflex that I have, right? Which is just a play on the word hexaflex, because hexaflex means six in Greek, and sex of and sex means six in Latin. And I found that out, and I was like...
JOE KORT:Yeah, that's awesome.
JESSICA LEVITH:I was so excited about that. I hope you trademarked that. I know it was, it was wonderful. It's my partner actually helped me with that one.
JOE KORT:I love it.
JESSICA LEVITH:But that's functional. Contextualism is act sexual. Contextualism is Is act it is basically what is functional, what is working for you and what is not working for you, because you could be doing what you think is absolutely the right thing to do, but if you're doing it in the wrong context, it's not going to work.
JOE KORT:So can you give us an example of that, so people know what you're talking about?
JESSICA LEVITH:True. Okay, let me think of one. All right, you got a couple that comes in, right? And they they've been together 10 years, and you know the sex is getting robotic, and you know you're asking them to set aside some intentional time, right? You're not going to get too prescriptive, but you're going to set aside some intentional time. So you've got this couple here that can do this, and then you've got this couple here that have a newborn and a two year old, you know, who it's not going to it's not the same ballgame, you know. And so that's what I'm talking about, the context, the context of, you know, what are you asking someone to do, to work on an issue? Is it possible in the world that they live in, you know, in their experience of the world? Because if it's not, then you're asking this couple to do something that they can't do, and then it's hopeless.
JOE KORT:Right.
JESSICA LEVITH:And they get they feel hopeless.
JOE KORT:Right because they can't find their way through it or out of it.
JESSICA LEVITH:Because, you know, they've got a kid attached to them.
JOE KORT:Right, right. You say that you have a book coming out to publish soon, which is awesome. Congratulations. Will you tell our listeners about it? Describe you describe it as a Hitchhiker's Guide to our sexualities. What does that mean?
JESSICA LEVITH:So yes, I am in the last chapter of this book, and the book is actually on everything we're talking about. It's on sexual context. It takes you through the entire six processes of Act and looking at our sexual health through that being able to kind of pull apart who we are sexually. And then heading up each chapter is a part of what happened during my sexual emergence and what has happened. And so it starts in the moment that I realized, and my brain blows apart, and then takes you back and back and back in time. And then it brings you back up to present, where my partner and I go start to dip our toes in non monogamy. And you know, so it's, it's, I'm very excited about it.
JOE KORT:What I love is that you're normalizing, which a lot of people don't like sometimes. But it's true how what happens to us as therapists informs our work, and that's what's happened for you.
JESSICA LEVITH:Yes, you know, I think I've always found it very interesting that people who work in chemical addiction, they can more openly talk about how they've had their own issues. But with sex, it's again, this very compartmentalized thing, you know. And I'm saying, Yeah, I'm a sexual person, you know, and I just like everyone else, it's going to evolve throughout my life.
JOE KORT:Yeah, and should. I my entire life? I'm a gay man. I've only been attracted to men, and then when I turned 50, I was at a party, and I was across the room, and then started talking to this woman. She was wearing a zipper dress from the front, and I had these naughty thoughts, unbelievable, of unzipping that dress and taking her in my head, I would never say a word. I would never show her that or anything, but it was the most disturbing thing that ever happened to me, mostly because I was, I'm a trauma survivor, and my perpetrator was a woman, and so I was like, I went, I had to go back to the therapist that I did my original trauma work with and she basically taught me, talked about it in terms of sexual fluidity. But what would what would you say? Would you say the same thing, or would you add to it from your work?
JESSICA LEVITH:Oh, what what comes to my mind immediately is the Kinsey scale versus the Klein scale, right? So the Kinsey scale is one to seven. Pick one, right? And, and, and the client scale is like, hold up. You know, you may be a one here, but it's in this context. What about this context?
JOE KORT:Yeah
JESSICA LEVITH:What is it about context?
JOE KORT:Right, right He breaks it down to behavior, fantasy, desire, attraction, I love, emotion, all of that.
JESSICA LEVITH:Yeah.
JOE KORT:And you do it too. It sounds like you flesh that out in the work you do.
JESSICA LEVITH:Yeah I mean, I try to flesh out all of this stuff. You know, I created a, what's called the Spirograph of sexual something. And it, it is all it's looking it's all of us taking our identifiers and putting it on paper. And looking at it, you know, so that we can get a visual of how complicated this actually is, how nuanced.
JOE KORT:So nuanced you note that you've taken a deep dive into meditation and mindfulness in psychotherapy. Can you talk about that? Expand on that a little bit?
JESSICA LEVITH:Oh, okay, so during the pandemic, like many people, that was actually only a couple of years after my realization. So then we went into lockdown, and so I was just like losing my mind, and I had a small child, and I took a deep dive into meditation. I had avoided it my whole life, and and meditation is very hard for people with trauma, you know. So I learned that meditation doesn't have to be sitting like this, you know, there's walking meditation, there's lying meditation, and it's and it's more mindfulness work that I do, you know. So so I took a really great course out of the bar center for Buddhist studies, and it was like a nine month course on psychotherapy and meditation and learning the neurobiology behind all of it with, I mean, I'm talking Rick Hansen, Chris Germer, like everybody did a week there. It was amazing.
JOE KORT:That sounds so nice. Yeah, and I like that. You're saying that because mindfulness for me, and maybe it's because of my or meditation. I mean, with my own trauma, I can't just sit there, I'll fall asleep, I'll self pleasure, I'll do something I don't know, but I can't I need somebody talking to me, or I need to be walking, or I need to be doing those things. A lot of people don't understand that. That's also meditation.
JESSICA LEVITH:That's a safety thing, man...
JOE KORT:Yeah.
JESSICA LEVITH:You know, like, I have so many clients, I didn't do it for decades because I thought you had to go like this. And my body was saying, No, yeah, right, yeah. So when I gave myself permission to maybe think about it a different way and just think about it as bringing back. And when you when you go away and you bring it back, that's the work. You know. It's not about how long can you stay in Zen. It's about bringing it back when you know it's going to go off.
JOE KORT:Totally. Wow. This has been very helpful, very good information, very different, you know, and but aligns so much with my stuff, and I have learned some things that expands on the work I do. If people want to hear more from you, where do they go?
JESSICA LEVITH:Well, if, if you have an interest at all in sexual context, I really hope that you can follow me on Instagram, because I really want to get this work into the right hands so that it can get into the right hands. So my Instagram, I is @JessLevith_CST.
JOE KORT:Good. And we're going to make sure that they see that also. We're going to, when we put this video out there, podcasts out there, they're going to see all that too. So good. Thank you. Would you want to leave them with any last thought?
JESSICA LEVITH:Sure, just understanding what sexual context is, which is just our unique way of how we've come to see the world sexually, how the world does or does not see us sexually, and how we see ourselves, you know, and really going on that Hitchhiker's Guide adventure.
JOE KORT:I love it. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure having you on my show.
JESSICA LEVITH:Bye.
JOE KORT:So before you go, you can hear more of my podcast at www.smartsexsmartlove.com, and also you can follow me on Twitter, Tiktok, Instagram and Facebook, and I'm growing on YouTube, so come and watch me on YouTube, or go to my website, Dr. Joe Kort J, o, e, K O, R t.com, thanks for listening, And until next time, stay safe and stay healthy.