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Ground Floor: on vaginismus, vulvodynia, and other ways we brace
Ground Floor: on vaginismus, vulvodynia, and other ways we brace episodes
- Why Analogue Feels Like Mothering Myself
Naomi on the link between digital overwhelm and a nervous system stuck on high alert: flip phones, paper books, Swatch watches, and why she quit Instagram all recorded from a beach in Morocco mid-van-life. The deeper thread: what "analogue" actually does for a body that's been bracing for years, and why healing sometimes looks like less, not more.
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Pelvic Healing Journey Here
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33 min - You're Surrounded By People: So Why Do You Still Feel Alone?
It's 2026. We understand the solutions so why aren't we living what we already know? Naomi challenges the idea that women actually want the community they say they want, through the story of "Sophia" (a composite of women she's worked with) surrounded by people, full conversations, a full life, and still lonely, and a real account of a friendship that fell apart mid-van-life the moment the conversation went past small talk. Real community isn't a location problem, Naomi argues, it's a courage problem: what happens the moment someone stops performing "I'm good" and says the actually true thing instead.
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29 min - Meet Jenna: A Body That Closes, a Body That Says No
Meet Jenna, 35: she lives with vaginismus, where the vaginal muscles involuntarily contract, making penetration painful or impossible. This is a fictitious client profile, one of an ongoing series built from a decade of real work with women, showing what actually helps when someone's done the therapy, read the books, and still feels like nothing has landed.
TW: this episode discusses sexual assault and its lasting effects on the body.
Vaginismus isn't a malfunction, it's a protective mechanism, and often a clever one. For Jenna, the pain was the trigger, not the cause: an assault she never told anyone about because it left no visible scars, held instead in her body. Naomi walks through why the presenting pain is almost never the real story, what it means to work with a nervous system stuck in freeze, and what changes when a woman's body finally gets a space to speak instead of being fixed. (NHS has basic information on vaginismus if you want a clinical starting point). Naomi's own experience is that even smear-test clinicians often don't fully understand the term.
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25 min - The Hidden Dissatisfaction of Mothers Who “Did Everything Right”
Meet Sofia: the 'right' education, the 'right' career, two children, a life that looks complete by every visible measure. She's not in crisis. She's in integration pressure: she already has the language, the therapy, the self-awarenes, and none of it has actually landed. This is a fictitious client profile, one of an ongoing series drawn from a decade of one-to-one work. Sofia's trigger to seek this space wasn't a life falling apart: it was sex that had started to hurt, quietly, with no one around her saying that wasn't normal. Naomi on why pain in the body is so often a signal about pace and integration elsewhere, and what it means to look for evidence rather than more answers.
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32 min - Betty Sharpe: Three Years of Unexplained Pain
Betty Sharpe a Kent-based doula and founder of Folkey Birth Club on three years of unexplained vulvopain that every test came back clear for, and what it taught her about how the medical system treats vaginas and vulvas when nothing shows up on a scan. We talk episiotomy recovery and years of painful sex afterwards, the second-degree tears no one warns you about, why "just lie down and rest" is better postnatal advice than most stitches, and what it actually means to be believed by a doctor even when there's no diagnosis to give.
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59 min - Lindsey Isla: Vaginismus, Being Child-Free, and Learning to Track Her Cycle
Lindsey Isla: a content creator across lifestyle, interiors and fashion on developing vaginismus at 16, the doctor who dismissed it because her smear test was pain-free, and years of shame and silence before it resolved on its own in her mid-20s. This episode also covers her choice to be child-free within a marriage where both partners agree, and how cycle tracking changed her relationship with her own mood and body after years on hormonal contraception. Three stories, three real conversations.
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1 hr 5 min - Amber Topaz and normalising singing about the vulva
Amber Topaz: performer, writer and producer working across comedy, burlesque and feminine empowerment on developing seemingly overnight at 15, the eating disorder and body shame that followed, and how burlesque became her way back into her own body rather than a performance for anyone else. We talk about being shamed at her own father's funeral for her stage work, why she wrote a song that simply asks the audience to say "vulva" out loud, and what it's like to tell an all-male cast "I think I'm perimenopausal" and be told to run for the hills. Amber's closing ask, for all of us: don't be a dick: just ask "is there anything I can do?"
Amber Topaz: https://www.ambertopaz.co.uk/
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1 hr 3 min - Alistair and His Wife's Donor Sperm
Naomi's husband Alistair on their donor conception journey: an azoospermia diagnosis, the NHS's BMI threshold that ruled them out of treatment, and travelling to Athens for IUI and later IVF using donor sperm. A rare male perspective on infertility, secondary infertility, and the parts of that process partners rarely get space to process out loud. The episode closes on the "birth" of Naomi's book, and Ali's theory that it may be shadow-banned on Amazon for having "vagina" in the title, while books about "tightening" the vagina apparently aren't.
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40 min - Season One- an intro
Website www.thisisnaomigale.co.uk
Buy In Your Vagina book
Useful social links
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@thisisnaomigale #fannychat
More holding Found Here:
The Vagina Book
Gold Standard Pelvic Journey
Postpartum Care Journey
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Main Website
@thisisnaomigale #fannychat
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2 min - Socialising is not rest
After a socialising-heavy Easter weekend, Naomi hits her limit and loses herself with her son over a lost chocolate rabbit: the flashpoint for a wider point: socialising isn't rest, even when it's fun, even when you're good at it, even when everyone around you assumes you thrive on it. A human design reading finally gives her language she'd never had permission to use: being extroverted doesn't mean socialising is free. On the pendulum between pushing out and pulling in, why saying no is a form of honouring the body, and what repair looks like after losing your temper with your child.
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16 min
About Ground Floor: on vaginismus, vulvodynia, and other ways we brace
From the publisher's feed
Women's bodies were never designed for permanent survival mode. Reasonable women have done the therapy, the books, the pelvic floor work, and still do not feel a sense of home and belonging in…
their bodies.
Vaginismus and vulvodynia are one example: a vagina that closes involuntarily. At the same time, vaginismus is just one way women brace.
This podcast is for women who still feel numb, perform, over-function, hold it all.
Hosted by Naomi Gale, a pelvic health educator, mother and author. Each episode moves between real conversations, named myths corrected with the evidence behind them, and the deeper question underneath: what happens when a woman stops trying to fix herself and starts trusting what her body's been saying all along.
This isn't a conversation on self-help; it's a return to you: a reasonable woman in an unreasonable world. Naomi is the author of Ground Floor and The Reasonable Woman, published by nomestia.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.