Sex, Secrets, & Sass

What happens when Angie and Krissy record without a guest, an outline, or apparently any adult supervision?

You get sober curiosity, grandbabies, line dancing, ADHD testing, internet trolls, sexual double standards, mechanical boobs—and the world premiere of tit-ography. Obviously.

In this no-agenda catch-up, Krissy checks in on day 44 of her 100-day break from alcohol. (At the time of this airing, she is now 65 days in!!) She shares the changes she’s noticed—including more energy and the realization that drinking and overeating were closely linked for her—and why she’s treating the experiment as information rather than a declaration that she must never drink again.

Angie and Krissy talk about examining your relationship with alcohol without turning it into an all-or-nothing identity. Sometimes the question isn’t, “Do I have to quit forever?” It’s simply, “Is this working for me?”

Angie shares family updates, including meeting her seven-and-a-half-week-old granddaughter, while Krissy talks about the ridiculous amount of joy she gets from line dancing—even when her feet are still negotiating with the choreography.

Angie also describes her three-hour ADHD assessment, complete with puzzles, attention tasks, and the strong preference not to be interrupted while attempting any of them. Results pending, relatable traits everywhere. 😂

Then comes the episode’s most important educational contribution: Krissy demonstrates tit-ography, her self-taught ability to move her boobs to a beat. The origin story involves mechanical boobs, because of course it does. Podcast listeners can hear Angie’s disbelief, but only YouTube viewers can fully witness this highly specialized performance skill.

The conversation eventually turns to the less-funny side of being visible online: hostile comments, personal attacks, and the anger directed at people who create nonjudgmental spaces for women who have betrayed partners. Angie and Krissy also push back on the tired idea that a woman’s sexual history makes her “used goods.” Spoiler alert: women are not pre-owned vehicles.

In this episode, we talk about:

• Krissy’s 100-day sober-curious experiment
• Alcohol boundaries without all-or-nothing rules
• Angie’s new granddaughter and family updates
• Finding joy through line dancing
• Angie’s marathon ADHD assessment
• The birth and live demonstration of tit-ography
• Why this particular talent must be seen on YouTube
• Developing a thick skin when posting online
• Supporting women without excusing harmful behavior
• Sexual history, “used goods,” and persistent double standards
• Why unscripted conversations sometimes go exactly where they need to

Sometimes the best conversations happen when there’s no agenda—just two friends catching up, following the tangents, and discovering that sobriety, ADHD, sexual shame, and dancing boobs can absolutely belong in the same episode.

Connect with your hosts:

Krissy Johnson, LMFT
In The Life Therapy
Instagram: @inthelifetherapy
Website: inthelifetherapy.com

Angie Martin, LCPC, LMHC
New Approach Mental Health
Instagram: @newapproachmentalhealth
Website: newapproachmentalhealth.com

Follow Sex, Secrets, & Sass

If you enjoyed this episode, follow Sex, Secrets, & Sass wherever you listen to podcasts so you don’t miss what’s coming next.

And if something in this conversation made you laugh, think, squirm a little, or text your best friend immediately, we’d love it if you’d rate, review, and share the show. It helps more people find us and keeps these conversations going.

What if the only choices aren’t staying in the same broken marriage or leaving it? What if there’s a third option: starting over with the same person?

In this episode, Angie and Krissy talk with Kameran Alareqi, Certified Marriage Coach, host of the Married and Connected podcast, and founder of Recognizing Potential Coaching.

Kameran shares her path from kindergarten teacher to marriage coach—and the personal story behind it. After infidelity and divorce, she and her husband chose to rebuild instead of returning to the marriage they had before.

She also introduces her baseball analogy for marriage. First base is safety. Second is connection. Third is emotional intimacy. Home plate is the sex life you want. And just like baseball, you can’t skip the bases and expect to score. Apparently, emotional safety really is foreplay. 😂

The conversation explores how partners may experience connection differently, from shared activities to open-ended conversation—and why friendship, private jokes, playfulness, and genuine interest matter more than grand gestures twice a year.

They also dig into Gottman concepts like the emotional bank account and Sound Relationship House, why getting help reflects a skills gap rather than a failed marriage, and how couples can reconnect after betrayal or years of disconnection.

Repair requires more than identifying everything your partner did wrong. Kameran challenges each person to unpack their own suitcase, set down the ego, and get honest about what they bring into the relationship.

In this episode, we talk about:

• Kameran’s divorce, reconciliation, and path to coaching
• Starting over with the same person
• Safety, connection, emotional intimacy, and sex as the four bases
• Why you can’t skip directly to home plate
• The different ways partners experience connection
• Friendship, presence, private jokes, and playfulness
• Gottman’s emotional bank account and Sound Relationship House
• Why marriage help addresses a skills gap—not a failure
• Rebuilding after infidelity or years of disconnection
• Looking at your own suitcase instead of only your partner’s
• Showing interest in what your partner loves

A relationship may not be able to return to what it was before betrayal. But if both people take responsibility and do the work, they may be able to build something new together.

About Kameran Alareqi

Kameran Alareqi is a Certified Marriage Coach with Gottman training, host of Married and Connected, and founder of Recognizing Potential Coaching. She helps couples rebuild trust, improve communication, and reconnect.

Connect with Kameran

Website: recognizingpotential.com
Instagram: @married.and.connected
Podcast: Married and Connected
Community: Married and Connected on Skool
Email: [email protected]

Connect with your hosts:

Krissy Johnson, LMFT
In The Life Therapy
Instagram: @inthelifetherapy
Website: inthelifetherapy.com

Angie Martin, LCPC, LMHC
New Approach Mental Health
Instagram: @newapproachmentalhealth
Website: newapproachmentalhealth.com

Follow Sex, Secrets, & Sass

If you enjoyed this episode, follow Sex, Secrets, & Sass wherever you listen to podcasts so you don’t miss what’s coming next.

And if something in this conversation made you laugh, think, squirm a little, or text your best friend immediately, we’d love it if you’d rate, review, and share the show. It helps more people find us and keeps these conversations going.

An open relationship can still have infidelity. Polyamory doesn’t mean anything goes. And queer relationships aren’t exempt from betrayal simply because they don’t follow a traditional script.

In this episode, Angie and Krissy talk with Danielle Robbins, LMHC, a New York therapist who helps LGBTQIA+, polyamorous, and nonmonogamous people navigate infidelity, betrayal, and the loss of trust.

Danielle explains why cheating isn’t defined by one act or relationship structure. For one couple, it may mean sexual contact outside the relationship. For another, outside partners may be welcome—but hiding one of those connections violates an agreement. In a monogamous relationship, emotional intimacy with someone else may feel like the deepest betrayal.

What matters is whether someone crossed a boundary, broke an agreement, or concealed something they knew would matter to their partner.

They also explore that unsettling feeling that something is “off.” Is it intuition, jealousy, anxiety, or paranoia? Danielle encourages people not to dismiss the feeling—or treat it as proof—but to get curious about what may be underneath it.

Betrayal can be especially complicated in queer and poly communities, where partners may share chosen family, friendships, community spaces, or public identities. Support may be harder to find when others respond with, “What did you expect?” simply because the relationship wasn’t monogamous.

Open does not mean boundaryless—and betrayal still hurts, no matter what your relationship looks like.

In this episode, we talk about:

• Defining infidelity in queer, open, and poly relationships
• How broken disclosure agreements can become betrayal
• Emotional affairs and shifting intimacy
• Intuition, jealousy, anxiety, and evidence
• What happens when partners define cheating differently
• Approaching concerns with curiosity instead of accusation
• How chosen family and shared community complicate healing
• The judgment nonmonogamous people face after betrayal
• Why some couples repair while others leave
• Defining agreements before a crisis forces the conversation

Curiosity doesn’t mean ignoring your instincts. It means slowing down long enough to understand what you’re feeling, what your agreements are, and what may—or may not—have been broken.

About Danielle Robbins

Danielle Robbins, LMHC, is a New York therapist who helps high-profile and executive LGBTQIA+, polyamorous, and nonmonogamous clients navigate betrayal and rebuild self-trust.

Connect with Danielle

Website: soulfulharmonycounseling.com
Instagram: @soulfulharmonycounseling
Email: [email protected]

Connect with your hosts:

Krissy Johnson, LMFT
In The Life Therapy
Instagram: @inthelifetherapy
Website: inthelifetherapy.com

Angie Martin, LCPC, LMHC
New Approach Mental Health
Instagram: @newapproachmentalhealth
Website: newapproachmentalhealth.com

Follow Sex, Secrets, & Sass

If you enjoyed this episode, follow Sex, Secrets, & Sass wherever you listen to podcasts so you don’t miss what’s coming next.

And if something in this conversation made you laugh, think, squirm a little, or text your best friend immediately, we’d love it if you’d rate, review, and share the show. It helps more people find us and keeps these conversations going.

This week, Tiffany returns to Sex, Secrets, & Sass for an honest conversation about what non-monogamy actually looks like when real feelings, real partners, and real-life complications enter the picture.

Tiffany shares how her relationships have evolved since her first appearance, including the difference between understanding compersion intellectually and navigating jealousy when a new partner enters the picture. They talk about pacing, communication, and the emotional labor of “onboarding” someone into an established relationship.

Tiffany also reflects on growing up biracial and how moving between white and Black communities shaped her identity, dating experiences, and sense of belonging.

Using the book Untrue as a jumping-off point, they examine stereotypes imposed on Black women—including the Mammy, the “Ho,” and the angry Black woman—alongside colorism, fetishization, dating-app desirability, and unequal pay for Black performers in porn.

The episode takes an extremely important detour into Krissy’s lifelong obsession with her hall pass, Cal Ripken Jr.—plus a special appearance by her Cal doll, best experienced on YouTube. 😂 In a statistically unlikely—and frankly suspicious—twist, Cal is also Angie’s hall pass. Apparently, the women of Sex, Secrets, & Sass share more than microphones and sass.

The conversation eventually returns to aging, menopause, and what happens as women move beyond the years when society considers them most sexually visible. Is aging an erasure—or can it become a different kind of power?

In this episode, we talk about:

• How non-monogamy feels different in practice than it does in theory
• Jealousy, compersion, pacing, and introducing a new partner
• The emotional labor of “onboarding” someone into a relationship
• Tiffany’s experience growing up between white and Black communities
• How race shapes identity, dating, belonging, and desirability
• Attraction versus sexualization and fetishization
• The stereotypes historically imposed on Black women
• Colorism and racial hierarchies on dating apps
• Race, power, and unequal pay within pornography
• Aging, menopause, visibility, and women’s power
• Kyriarchy—and how overlapping systems of power harm everyone
• Krissy’s Cal Ripken Jr. hall pass and the Cal doll you must see on YouTube
• Skirt clubs, play parties, and the adventures Tiffany may report back on next time

Who gets to be desired, believed, powerful, complicated, and fully themselves—and who has historically been forced into a role?

About Tiffany

Tiffany is a licensed marriage and family therapist who brings both clinical insight and lived experience to conversations about non-monogamy, race, sexuality, identity, and relationships.

Connect with your hosts:

Krissy Johnson, LMFT
In The Life Therapy
Instagram: @inthelifetherapy
Website: inthelifetherapy.com

Angie Martin, LCPC, LMHC
New Approach Mental Health
Instagram: @newapproachmentalhealth
Website: newapproachmentalhealth.com

Follow Sex, Secrets, & Sass

If you enjoyed this episode, follow Sex, Secrets, & Sass wherever you listen to podcasts so you don’t miss what’s coming next.

And if something in this conversation made you laugh, think, squirm a little, or text your best friend immediately, we’d love it if you’d rate, review, and share the show. It helps more people find us and keeps these conversations going.

Virginity is not a medical diagnosis, a moral achievement, or a measure of someone’s worth.

So why are girls still taught to treat it like all three?

In this episode, Angie and Krissy sit down with Rachel, a senior and communication major at UC Santa Barbara, whose zine project examines virginity, women’s pleasure, patriarchy, and the moral weight society places on girls’ sexuality.

Rachel shares how a college course on sex, love, and romance led her to bigger questions: Who created the rules around virginity? Why are women expected to “lose” something while men are praised for “taking” it? And why is a woman’s perceived purity still treated as evidence of her value?

The conversation becomes deeply personal as Rachel discusses surviving sexual abuse in childhood and how that trauma shaped her relationship with intimacy. She explains how academic language helped her understand virginity as a social construct—not a verdict on her body, history, or worth.

Angie and Krissy also reflect on their own first sexual experiences, religious messaging, consent, and the shame many women inherited before they were old enough to question it. Together, the three compare generational experiences of sex education—from silence and purity culture to classrooms where masturbation, pleasure, and power can finally be discussed out loud.

And yes, they revisit the infamous purity-culture gum analogy—because apparently having sex once made a girl a piece of gum nobody else would want to chew. Charming. 🙄

In this episode, we talk about:

• Virginity as a social construct rather than a measure of worth
• Why girls are taught to connect sexuality with purity and morality
• The double standard between women “losing” virginity and men “taking” it
• Rachel’s zine on women’s pleasure, patriarchy, and sexual shame
• How childhood sexual abuse can shape intimacy and self-perception
• Finding language that separates trauma from identity
• Religious messaging, consent, and shame around first sexual experiences
• Generational differences in sex education and conversations about pleasure
• Why women are often doubted when challenging patriarchal narratives
• Feminism, wedding traditions, and questioning the rules we inherit
• The power of women supporting women across generations

Your sexual history is not a character reference. It does not determine whether you are pure, damaged, desirable, respectable, or worthy of love.

Content note: This episode includes discussion of childhood sexual abuse, trauma, religious shame, and first sexual experiences.

About Rachel

Rachel is a UC Santa Barbara senior and communication major whose zine explores virginity, patriarchy, women’s pleasure, and sexual shame.

Connect with your hosts:

Krissy Johnson, LMFT
In The Life Therapy
Instagram: @inthelifetherapy
Website: inthelifetherapy.com

Angie Martin, LCPC, LMHC
New Approach Mental Health
Instagram: @newapproachmentalhealth
Website: newapproachmentalhealth.com

Follow Sex, Secrets, & Sass

If you enjoyed this episode, follow Sex, Secrets, & Sass wherever you listen to podcasts so you don’t miss what’s coming next.

And if something in this conversation made you laugh, think, squirm a little, or text your best friend immediately, we’d love it if you’d rate, review, and share the show. It helps more people find us and keeps these conversations going.

Let’s start here: having a fantasy does not make you a bad person.

What matters is how you explore it and whether everyone involved is informed, consenting, and genuinely on board.

In this episode, Angie and Krissy sit down with Goddess Hecate, a professional switch and fetish content creator, for an honest, funny, and uncensored conversation about BDSM, polyamory, sex work, pleasure, and building a life that actually feels authentic.

Hecate explains what it means to be a switch - someone who enjoys both dominant and submissive roles - and how professional BDSM differs from lifestyle kink. She also takes listeners inside the structured world of Sanctuary LAX, where clear boundaries, communication, and consent shape every professional session.

Raised in a strict Christian environment, Goddess Hecate moved through monogamy, motherhood, postpartum depression, atheism, polyamory, kink, and witchcraft as she began questioning the beliefs and rules she had inherited. She also shares how ketamine therapy became a turning point in her recovery and opened the door to major life changes.

The conversation explores how desire sometimes speaks through the body before we have language for it. For Goddess Hecate, tattoos, piercings, intense sensations, and curiosity offered early clues about interests she didn’t yet know how to name.

And yes, they talk about sadism, masochism, power exchange, lactation kink, content creation, and why pretending to enjoy something for money is not the same as building work around genuine interest.

In this episode, we talk about:

• What it means to be a professional switch
• The difference between professional BDSM and lifestyle kink
• How structured dungeon settings support safety and clear boundaries
• Consent, negotiation, power exchange, sadism, and masochism
• Recognizing desires before having words for them
• Hecate’s path from Christianity and monogamy to polyamory, kink, and witchcraft
• Creating fetish content rooted in genuine interest and pleasure
• Exploring new kinks without abandoning your boundaries
• Finding supportive communities where curiosity is welcomed
• Why fantasy alone does not make anyone dangerous, broken, or bad

You do not have to act on every fantasy. But you are allowed to become curious about what it means and whether there is a safe, consensual way to explore it with other adults.

About Goddess Hecate

Goddess Hecate is a professional switch and fetish content creator. Her approach centers consent, communication, authenticity, and helping adults explore power, sensation, and fantasy without shame.

Connect with Goddess Hecate

Website: goddesshecate.com
Instagram: @goddesshecatereigns
LoyalFans: @hecatereigns
X/Twitter: @hecatereigns

Connect with your hosts

Krissy Johnson, LMFT
In The Life Therapy
Instagram: @inthelifetherapy
Website: inthelifetherapy.com

Angie Martin, LCPC, LMHC
New Approach Mental Health
Instagram: @newapproachmentalhealth
Website: newapproachmentalhealth.com

Follow Sex, Secrets, & Sass

If you enjoyed this episode, follow Sex, Secrets, & Sass wherever you listen to podcasts so you don’t miss what’s coming next.

And if something in this conversation made you laugh, think, squirm a little, or text your best friend immediately, we’d love it if you’d rate, review, and share the show. It helps more people find us and keeps these conversations going.

A diagnosis - or even the possibility of one - can divide life into a before and an after. It doesn’t just change a medical chart. It can change how you relate to your body, your identity, your sexuality, your partner, and the future you thought you understood.

In this episode, Angie and Krissy sit down with NARM Master Therapist Sara Champie, LCSW, for a deeply personal conversation about developmental trauma, hereditary cancer risk, and staying connected to yourself when your body changes the entire damn map.

Sara shares her experience of losing her mother to ovarian cancer at age 10, receiving her own BRCA1-positive genetic results by mail with little support, and living for years with elevated cancer risk. She also opens up about choosing a prophylactic double mastectomy—on her timeline and according to her values, rather than being rushed into someone else’s plan.

Together, they explore what serious illness can awaken: old survival strategies, guilt about burdening others, the reflex to caretake everyone else, and the pressure for women to remain healthy, attractive, capable, and “whole.”

They also talk honestly about intimacy after illness and surgery - including body image, dissociation, scars, hormonal changes, surgical menopause, and reconnecting with a body that may no longer feel familiar.

At the center of it all is one powerful question: Who are we now?

Not who were we before the diagnosis, surgery, or loss - but who are we today, and what do we need now?

In this episode, we talk about:

• How illness can reactivate childhood survival strategies
• The “woman who holds everything together” and the cost of caretaking
• Guilt, self-blame, and believing you should have known something was wrong
• Sara’s experience with childhood loss, BRCA1, and hereditary cancer risk
• Making medical decisions at your own pace and from your own values
• Cultural messages about health, femininity, aging, and being “whole”
• Body image, hormones, and sexual connection after treatment
• Reconnecting with a changed body through curiosity and compassion
• Trusting yourself as part of informed medical decision-making

About Sara Champie

Sara Champie, LCSW, is a psychotherapist and NARM Master Therapist specializing in developmental trauma, grief, cancer, hereditary genetic risk, and life-altering medical decisions. She also hosts Walking the Genetic Line, a podcast exploring hereditary cancer risk, trauma, identity, and healing.

Connect with Sara:

Website: sarachampielcsw.com
Instagram: @sarachampielcsw
Podcast: Walking the Genetic Line

Connect with your hosts:

Krissy Johnson, LMFT
In The Life Therapy
Instagram: @inthelifetherapy
Website: inthelifetherapy.com

Angie Martin, LCPC, LMHC
New Approach Mental Health
Instagram: @newapproachmentalhealth
Website: newapproachmentalhealth.com

Follow Sex, Secrets, & Sass

If you enjoyed this episode, follow Sex, Secrets, & Sass wherever you listen to podcasts so you don’t miss what’s coming next.

And if something in this conversation made you laugh, think, squirm a little, or text your best friend immediately, we’d love it if you’d rate, review, and share the show. It helps more people find us and keeps these conversations going.

Apparently, being a woman comes with a preassigned life plan: want babies, become a mother, change your last name, absorb most of the invisible labor, and eventually answer to “Grandma.”

Angie and Krissy would like a word. 😂

In this episode, they get honest about motherhood, choosing to be childfree, and the deeply annoying assumption that every woman either wants children or will eventually “change her mind.”

Krissy shares that she knew from a young age she didn’t want children - partly because she watched how hard her mother worked as a single parent. She also talks about being told she wasn’t maternal, as though not wanting to raise children means being incapable of nurturing anyone.

Over time, she recognized that her own nurturing instincts show up through her clients, relationships, and the dogs who absolutely became her babies.

Angie offers a different perspective: she always wanted motherhood, loved pregnancy, and embraced staying home with her children. Together, they make room for both truths - because feminism isn’t about deciding which life women should want. It’s about women getting to decide for themselves.

Then the conversation takes a very on-brand detour: Why is there a familiar word for male sexual vigor - “virile” - but no commonly used female equivalent? Why does language give men potency and women…“womanliness”? Seriously?!?

From there, they dig into the expectations women inherit around names, marriage, family roles, caregiving, and the invisible work of remembering and organizing everyone’s lives. They even tackle the very serious question of why Krissy will be called Kiki and Angie plans to be Gigi - because neither one is answering to Grandma, thank you very much.

In this episode, we talk about:

• Knowing you don’t want children - and being told you’ll change your mind
• The difference between wanting motherhood and having nurturing instincts
• Why childfree women are often assumed to dislike children
• Making room for both the freedom and the occasional grief of the road not taken
• Angie’s experience of wanting and embracing motherhood
• Why feminism must include the freedom to choose either path
• The missing female equivalent of “virile”
• What language reveals about attitudes toward female desire and power
• The identity shift and emotional weight of changing your last name
• The invisible labor women often absorb in marriage and family life
• Rejecting titles, roles, and traditions that don’t fit

Whether you became a mother, chose not to, couldn’t, are still deciding, or built a nurturing life that doesn’t fit neatly into any category, your womanhood was never supposed to depend on checking the right boxes.

Connect with your hosts:

Krissy Johnson, LMFT
In The Life Therapy
Instagram: @inthelifetherapy
Website: inthelifetherapy.com

Angie Martin, LCPC, LMHC
New Approach Mental Health
Instagram: @newapproachmentalhealth
Website: newapproachmentalhealth.com

Follow Sex, Secrets, & Sass

If you enjoyed this episode, follow Sex, Secrets, & Sass wherever you listen to podcasts so you don’t miss what’s coming next.

And if something in this conversation made you laugh, think, squirm a little, or text your best friend immediately, we’d love it if you’d rate, review, and share the show. It helps more people find us and keeps these conversations going.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: understanding why someone cheats is not the same as saying nobody gets hurt - or that anything goes.

But reducing every affair to “a bad person did a bad thing” is lazy, and it leaves out nearly everything worth understanding.

In this episode, Angie and Krissy take on infidelity through a sex-positive, nonjudgmental lens. They explore why women have affairs, how two people can have completely different definitions of cheating, and what secrecy may be trying to provide when someone feels unseen, unwanted, disconnected, or obligated in their primary relationship.

They also revisit the internet’s very calm and rational response (LOL 😂) to the suggestion that women may want sex as much as men. Because having sexual desire is not the same thing as wanting sex with your current partner. Desire can disappear inside a relationship where someone feels emotionally neglected, pressured, resentful, unsafe, or reduced to a role.

Krissy shares her own experience of an emotional affair that began with flirtation and validation during a relationship in which she felt unattractive and sexually disconnected. Angie brings in patterns she hears from women who describe affairs not simply as sexual escape, but as a response to feeling chronically unseen, unheard, or obligated.

None of that erases the hurt caused by betrayal. But shame and labels rarely tell us why something happened, and without understanding the why, real repair is pretty damn difficult.

In this episode, we talk about:

• Why wanting sex is not the same as wanting sex with your current partner
• What actually “counts” as cheating: sex, kissing, texting, secrecy, or emotional connection?
• Why couples should define infidelity before they are in the middle of a crisis
• Emotional neglect, resentment, desire, validation, and other motives behind affairs
• Krissy’s personal experience with an emotional affair
• How cheating can function as self-soothing, escape, or compulsive comfort-seeking
• Why women are often judged more harshly than men for the same behavior
• The difference between understanding infidelity and excusing it
• Why curiosity creates more possibility for repair than shame
• The importance of having somewhere safe to tell the whole truth

If infidelity is part of your story - whether you cheated, were betrayed, or are still trying to decide what happened - you deserve a place where you can talk about it honestly without being reduced to the worst thing you’ve ever done.

Connect with your hosts:

Krissy Johnson, LMFT
In The Life Therapy
Instagram: @inthelifetherapy
Website: inthelifetherapy.com

Angie Martin, LCPC, LMHC
New Approach Mental Health
Instagram: @newapproachmentalhealth
Website: newapproachmentalhealth.com

Follow Sex, Secrets, & Sass

If you enjoyed this episode, follow Sex, Secrets, & Sass wherever you listen to podcasts so you don’t miss what’s coming next.

And if something in this conversation made you laugh, think, squirm a little, or text your best friend immediately, we’d love it if you’d rate, review, and share the show. It helps more people find us and keeps these conversations going.

What if talking about sex didn’t require awkward euphemisms, blushing, or waiting until your relationship was already in trouble?

This week, Angie and Krissy are joined by therapist Amy Henderson for an open, funny, and very personal conversation about sex, intimacy, consent, and all the shame-filled messages many of us absorbed long before we were old enough to question them.

Amy shares how she begins conversations about sex with teenage clients, why adults often say “intimacy” when they really mean sex, and how that one word can mean completely different things to two people in the same relationship. For one partner, intimacy may mean intercourse. For the other, it may mean emotional connection, affection, or—God forbid—helping with the dishes.

The conversation gets personal as Amy reflects on growing up in a sex-taboo household, her first sexual experiences with the man who became her husband, and later recognizing her attraction to women. Angie and Krissy join in with stories about shame, masturbation, first orgasms, and learning far later than anyone should have to what the hell was happening in their own bodies.

They also explore consensual non-monogamy, threesomes, kink, and why exploration can be healthy when everyone involved feels informed, safe, and genuinely on board. Because there is no single “right” way to have sex—but consent is never optional.

In this episode, we talk about:

• Why therapists should talk openly with teens about sex, consent, sexuality, and safety
• The very different meanings couples attach to the word “intimacy”
• How childhood and cultural messages create sexual shame
• Amy’s experience of recognizing her bisexuality later in life
• Navigating attraction and curiosity within a monogamous marriage
• Why consent and emotional safety come before exploration
• Normalizing non-monogamy, threesomes, kink, and sexual curiosity
• Using a yes/no/maybe list to start conversations without pressure
• Talking about pleasure both inside and outside the bedroom
• Why your sex life does not have to become stagnant
• The wildly different ways masturbation is discussed with boys and girls
• Why couples who can talk about sex can usually talk about almost anything

About Amy Henderson:

Amy Henderson, MA, LCPC, CTRT/C, is a therapist who works with teens, adults, couples, and families. She believes sex belongs in the therapy room when it matters—and that honest, shame-free conversations about consent, intimacy, identity, and pleasure can help people create safer and more connected relationships.

Henderson Counseling
Website: hendersoncounseling.org

Connect with your hosts:

Krissy Johnson, LMFT
In The Life Therapy
Instagram: @inthelifetherapy
Website: inthelifetherapy.com

Angie Martin, LCPC, LMHC
New Approach Mental Health
Instagram: @newapproachmentalhealth
Website: newapproachmentalhealth.com

Follow Sex, Secrets, & Sass

If you enjoyed this episode, follow Sex, Secrets, & Sass wherever you listen to podcasts so you don’t miss what’s coming next.

And if something in this conversation made you laugh, think, squirm a little, or text your best friend immediately, we’d love it if you’d rate, review, and share the show. It helps more people find us and keeps these conversations going.