Why I Do This Work and What is it that I Actually Do
In this, Michelle's first solo podcast episode, she shares about what got her to her life's calling: intimacy. She was always comfortable talking about sex, but safe emotional and physical intimacy has been a struggle in her history. Learn who Michelle 1.0 was and how the journey to the current operating system (Michelle 4.0 or 5.0 - she's lost count) is due in large part to her getting into pro cuddling when she did. Also, a lovely tribute to the healing power of relationship.
Takeaways
Touch workers play a vital role in supporting and guiding their clients on their journey.
Self-care is crucial for healers to maintain their well-being and effectiveness.
Building trust with clients is essential for a successful healing relationship.
Being a touch worker is a privilege and a rewarding experience.
Michelle Renee (she/her) is a San Diego-based Intimacy Guide and Surrogate Partner. Michelle's website is https://meetmichellerenee.com and can be found on social media at @meetmichellerenee.
Links from today's episode (some are affiliate links):
We're Not Really Strangers: https://amzn.to/46MIIfD
Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsay C Gibson: https://amzn.to/3tvGJ0Q
Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving by Pete Walker: https://amzn.to/45JYTtn
Watch our Wedding Vows: https://www.meetmichellerenee.com/blog/wedding
Join my bi-weekly newsletter: https://bit.ly/mmrnewsletter
Check out the Cuddlist Basic Training and get 10% with this link: https://cuddlist.podia.com/cuddle-therapy-basic-training/6dnxo?coupon=REFERRAL
Rough Transcript
Michelle Renee (she/her) (00:01.334)
Welcome back. Oh, what are we going to talk about today? I have an idea of how I want to start.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (00:20.066)
there are lots of ways to create connection. And this is the intimacy lab. And when I think of intimacy, I think of connection, right? Authentic, vulnerable connection. And sometimes we think about that in the realm of physical intimacy, but a lot of times emotional intimacy is a struggle for people. Sometimes when people...
struggle with emotional intimacy, they turn to physical intimacy as their go-to because that's more comfortable for them. And when I say physical intimacy, I think of not just sex, but hugging, holding hands. Gosh, there's so many different things that come to, actually I'm running out of things that come to mind, but let's think about it. I mean.
sometimes it's wrestling or rough housing. It doesn't have to look soft and sweet, right? Physical intimacy is about touch and emotional intimacy is about going somewhere a little bit deeper. And a lot of times that's with our words. So one of my tools in my work is a fun card game. I say fun, let me tell you, I'll tell you how I've modified it. I really love
the card game were not really strangers. I've tried Esther Perel's Where Do We Begin. It's a good card game. In my work, this is the one out of those two. I haven't tried all of them. There's lots of them on the market these days. But a colleague turned me on to this one and it's felt the best in session with clients because there are three different levels to this game.
There's kind of technically four, I guess, but the three levels are perception.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (02:24.75)
connection.
and reflection. And so I think it gives a good variety. The final, the final boss is the final card. And that card is always the same card. There's only one of them. You'll hear me, I'm opening this as I talk to you all. The final card says, each player write a message to the other, fold and exchange, open only once you two have parted. So that's kind of like where you get to really like
Put your words to the test, right? So I use this game as part of my wedding. For the reception, I put one of these cards at every place at the table because I wanted to encourage connection, not just conversation. And so I think this is a new thing for this podcast, is I'm going to pull a card and ask whoever's joining me to answer with me. But I'm here solo today.
So I've pulled three cards out. I'm going to pick one of them that makes sense for me to answer by myself.
Um...
Michelle Renee (she/her) (03:46.918)
Okay, the card I'm gonna go with is a level three card on reflection. And the question is, do you believe everyone has a calling? If so, do you think I've found mine? I'm gonna answer this for myself. And it's so funny, because I just pulled these out. I knew I was gonna come on today and talk about, like, how do I talk about my work so people can understand it, because I struggle with that.
and I was in a workshop today called How to Articulate Your Work. So this is like, maybe it's meant to be. Anyways, do you believe everyone has a calling and if so, do you think I've found mine?
I think I found mine. And I think that everything in my 47 years has brought me here. Like the good, bad, and the ugly.
So here's, this topic's gonna change. I'm probably just, I'll just change the title of the podcast for this episode.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (05:00.418)
I could write a book on this and that's not what I'm here to do. But I'll give you like the synopsis of like, what was Michelle 1.0 like? And I use the numbers because I think I'm in like, I lately have been saying like Michelle 4.0, 5.0. Cause every time I go through like a major transformation it's like I leveled, changed a level. I got a software upgrade. You know, I'm not running on the same system. The operating system is different now.
So operating system one came from a family that from the outside probably looked pretty traditional. I was raised in West Michigan on the farm where my mother was raised, where her father was raised. And I lived in that same house for all of 18 years until I moved out. Never had to move. Had, you know,
great stability as far as that goes. I was very accepted in my school. I can say that I enjoyed school. I know that's a rare thing to say, but I was an athlete. I played sports three seasons. I did well in school, graduated. I think the top 10% of my class, I mean, to be fair, I lived in a very rural area and I graduated with 100 or 110 people.
Um...
Raised in church, started out in the Wesleyan church that my grandparents went to, and eventually we moved to the Methodist church in town. Cause I think a lot of it was, that was where our friends were. Not really sure. Maybe my mom needed a change. I don't know. But our household, I mean, to sum it up, my father had a temper, a lot of anger.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (07:02.434)
He went to Vietnam by choice. Like he didn't, he wasn't drafted. He signed up, enlisted. Him and my mom got married real quick before he left, if I recall the story correctly. I have her diary. My mother passed away 20, 21 years ago today, the day this comes out from breast cancer.
So I can't really go back and ask all these questions. My father also has passed. So after she died though, I did get my hands on an old diary of hers. And it was the year that she got married. And it was really interesting because she was actually dating somebody else as of like April of that year. And I think her and my dad got married in June. So I think they had dated before then, but kind of interesting.
him going off to Vietnam might have been, I'm almost 100% sure that's the reason why they got married real quick. I didn't come along, I'm the oldest of three girls. I didn't come along for quite a few years after that. So yeah, it wasn't a shotgun wedding, if that's what you're
Michelle Renee (she/her) (08:31.154)
I remember my parents fighting, like scary fighting, for quite some time in my younger childhood. Like I remember just hating the yelling. And we would be the brunt-end of that sometimes. I know one of my sisters has talked to me about maybe coming on here and talking about her journey. And I certainly encourage that because I think it's important.
we all see ourselves in the people around us. And when we hear other people's stories, sometimes it like helps us work through our stuff. We feel like, oh, me too, I resonate with that. Maybe part of their journey will inspire you. This is why I talk about my journey as part of my work. Those moments that resonate in my head when I talk about
Michelle Renee (she/her) (09:32.17)
the negative things that really impacted me. I remember being like five years old and my dad screaming at me to go to hell. Remember we were raised in church. So that actually had meaning back then. And as a five year old, I remember how jarring that was and scary that was. And like, whoo, how does that still affect me today? I have probably could make a list.
In fact, I just ran up against one of them the other day. Other things I remember that really were scary things, like my dad was a cop until I was, I don't know, four or five, and so there were stories that were told in our family, like they were nothing about somebody in town retaliating against our family for being arrested and like...
what I was told as a young, young child. And just imagine this, like I put myself in these shoes now and it's like wild to me, like talk about maybe unintentionally scaring your children. But I remember a story that this man that was arrested by my father was out to get him. And he supposedly, this is all stories from my dad who was quite a storyteller. So I can't say that they're factual. So don't quote me here. The man ended up burning down our barn.
on our property that I know he was prosecuted for. But the story I was told was that he had to decide he was either going to burn the barn down or rape my mother. That was a story that was widely told in our household, which just rattles me, like looking back at it as an adult now, of like, how was I supposed to process that as a young child? As a...
older child, as a young adult, like there's no good time to process that, but definitely as a young girl, like that just, like it just shakes me that was something that was so easily kind of talked about in our house.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (11:53.998)
Yeah, I keep going back to this other thing. Like, I remember waking up, my father clearly had like sleep apnea or something. And I remember waking up to the sounds of him like gasping for air, but it sounded like somebody was breaking into our house. And as a young person, like again, I didn't have emotionally mature parents. And-
Nobody processed these things with us. You know, it wasn't like they asked me, how are you feeling? Do you have any residual fear around this? Like none of that was happening. It was just kind of like, oh, it was just, your dad couldn't breathe. I mean, I hid under my bed thinking there was an invader in our house, which why would I not think that when we've, you know, I've heard stories of, you know, the man that was possibly gonna rape my mother. So.
That's kind of the younger years. And from what I know, from what I've learned in my work, I did a training about brain spotting a few years back is that we really kind of capture how the world works. And I say this, like works with like quotes, really young. So.
five and under, we decide, we take in all this data and our subcordial brain kind of traps it away as like, this is how the world works. And then we get to adulthood and we are like, why are we having these responses? And it's like, well, because we have to reprocess what we think we know from our childhood. So that's where my childhood started. And...
Michelle Renee (she/her) (13:52.482)
Fast forward, you know, teen years, what have you. I was a really pretty well-behaved kid. I never wanted to disappoint my parents. Also was, you know, in the quote unquote gifted and talented program. So I also didn't learn how to study. I kind of breezed through high school and I met who would be my first husband when I was 17.
And he kind of rescued me from that home life. The home life was weird. I don't even know how to describe it because what I thought was really a dysfunctional family and really fucked up in so many ways, and it was in so many ways. In being in the work that I'm in now, I've seen so much worse that it's just hard to try to like, I can't put it on a scale. As as my experience, it sucked. Like.
It was turmoil in so many ways. There was just this air of competition all the way through our house. My father pitted us all against each other. Even my mother was supposedly in competition with us. I don't know if she was or not. But it made sense when my dad would say that. And we were not like we struggled with money.
We would definitely be considered below the poverty line. I don't know if they had school lunch programs back at the time. We didn't participate in them. If they did, I wouldn't have. There would have been too much stigma. I certainly developed an eating disorder. I remember skipping meals a lot and not because there wasn't food available, but for some reason, I...
decided to and I don't know if it was messaging from my mother or I do know that she had body image issues. There's just all these different ways that you know our parents affect us that carry us into our adulthood. So.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (16:04.476)
Um...
Michelle Renee (she/her) (16:07.922)
I'm trying to figure out like what is important for me to dive into and what is not. I'm trying to really tell you why this is my calling.
And I grew up in a fucked up house, like fucked up, normal fucked up probably. I don't think it was maybe as abnormal as I thought it was before. But if you stick around with me long enough, you'll hear me talk about the book, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. And that was definitely the situation. I never heard my father apologize for anything. My mother was very passive.
We were all just kind of, I don't know.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (16:55.758)
Hmm, there's a part of me that wants to say hostage, but it feels inappropriate in the current stage of what's happening in the world. But we were all under his control. And it was a weird control because I didn't have a curfew.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (17:22.982)
yet it wasn't like I felt like I was supported. There was a time that I told my father never to come to one of my sports events again, because I didn't wanna deal with his critique at the end. So, I end up in a shitty first marriage, which is to say that we both were pretty shitty, was definitely not healthy and how could it be? We both came from our own families.
and we all, nobody comes out of childhood unscathed, right? It's just a matter of what kind of scathing did you have? And I didn't have great role models, so we kind of fell into some really crappy habits. And so I could do a whole other episode of what the issues around that were, but you know, to say, I always felt comfortable talking about sex.
I have a high school friend, maybe I'll bring her on one of these days to talk about those times in my life, but I had a high school friend who said I would become Dr. Ruth. And I had no intention of doing this. I got out of high school. I thought I wanted to be a high school math teacher. I really loved math. I went to college. I failed out of Calc 3. This goes back to that being gifted thing and not learning how to study. I was not.
well equipped to go to college. So at Calc 3, I failed out, went back to community college, almost completed an associate's in accounting, got just enough to where it got real hard and I didn't want to do it anymore. And I had my first son and had enough information to really be able to take care of the books for our family business. So always comfortable talking about sex, having really unhealthy sex.
in my marriage because I didn't have any education or encouragement around bodily autonomy. My mom did not practice saying no. She modeled avoiding. So the story in our household growing up was mom put on extra clothes so that dad wouldn't touch her when they went to bed. Like there's more layers between her and him.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (19:49.046)
The other running joke was that she didn't shave so that he wouldn't want to touch her. And that was not modeling great things for myself. I don't know what my sister's relationships with that turned into in adulthood. But for me, I took on sex as an obligation. It was part of what I would do to keep the family happy.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (20:19.07)
wasn't always terrible, but I definitely wasn't present. I remember there was a point in time where before the marriage ended, where I actually went, oh my gosh, I'm actually present for this. Because normally I'd be in my head making my grocery list or what have you. It wasn't fair to my husband either. He was pressuring me. I know he just wanted connection, but there was definitely pressure. And I...
Michelle Renee (she/her) (20:49.63)
I didn't have a trustworthy yes either. It's so hard to talk about. You guys don't even understand. It took me some time in therapy to really let go of the shame of here I am now. I teach consent and communication and the people in my life now would probably really struggle to see me in that situation or to hear the story of where I came from. But that's why I'm here.
That marriage ended in 2014. And if you listen to episode one, you heard the story of kind of how I got here and finding Betty Dodson and working on my orgasm and my body image and whatnot. But then like, I knew I wanted to do sex education and I show up at Madelon Guinazzo's door.
in December, like December 1st, 2015. And I came out a Cuddlist on the other side. Now mind you, training has changed so much since then. But I thought I was just going to become a professional Cuddler because I wanted to do sex ed and this was something I could do that was body work at least. But it quickly became really clear to me that I was teaching people sex ed.
in a platonic clothes space because it started with helping them learn how to say no and how to ask for what they want and how to identify what they want. And here they thought they were just coming for cuddling, right? And the most important part was I was getting to practice my boundaries and I fucked those up a lot in the beginning. Maybe I'm just allergic to authority.
But that code of conduct for cuddlist was to me something I needed to know like, but why? Or why can't I? Why can't we cuddle with less clothes on, right? And so I pushed all those rules. And those sessions back in the day, they were not enjoyable like they are today.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (23:15.71)
What I learned was like, it feels really yucky to be in a space where energies don't match. I come in wanting to have a platonic cuddle session with a client and the client comes in wanting to have sex with me if they can get me to say yes. Right? That does not feel good. That doesn't feel good if it's coming from a client. It doesn't feel good if it's coming from your partner. It doesn't feel good if it's coming from your friend or a date or anyone.
If you aren't interested and it keeps getting like.
I don't want to say pushed at you because it's low key. It's more low key than that. And I remember coming out of a session back in the very beginning and I came, I got on Facebook and I said, okay, my woo people. And I don't identify in the woo world.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (24:12.114)
and we can figure out what woo-woo means. I don't feel like defining it right now. But I said, okay, all you woo-woo people, what do I gotta do to get rid of this ickiness that I'm feeling right now? And I got a reiki session. People were telling me which stones to put in my bra to help with the negative energy in session. I should always wash my hands right after session. How do we clear the energy out of the space? Like, it was like,
people were on the spot on that and they gave me all these suggestions and I started doing it. And I don't do any of those things anymore. I mean, I wash my hands, but I'm not carrying, I think it was like obsidian or something. I was like putting gemstones down in my bra. I don't do any of that anymore because I don't have that problem anymore. And that was at a time when I was just coming from a place of scarcity. And it wasn't just scarcity in my work, but scarcity in my life in general.
I wanted people to love me. I wanted people to want my service. I wanted to be able to fit everyone's needs in my personal life, in my business life. This was all an evolution for me. And so fast forward, it's 2023, I'm turning 48 years old.
People now think of me as having really strong boundaries. I have colleagues that are like, oh, this person needs a strong practitioner that can really put them in their place. They think of me and I'm not a heavy. Like I am such a kind person, but.
And it's so weird to say this, I have great boundaries. And that was not my story for such a long time. But I've gotten to see the benefits. I've gotten to see how I can be closer to people when I have strong boundaries. I can give more when I have strong boundaries. I'm taking care of myself first. As they say in the book Untamed.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (26:26.546)
My job is to never disappoint myself. My job is to always disappoint other people before I disappoint myself. And that is not the way I was raised. That is not the way most people socialized as female are raised. And sometimes that is not the way that people socialized as male are raised.
A lot of times when people come in for any of my work, and I'll go back to talk about what that looks like in a second, a lot of times it's women wanting to learn how to have boundaries, and they have a hard time when I say, how do you want to connect today? They go, I don't know. And a lot of times the cis men that come in, they have way less trouble asking for what they want.
like special, it's something to do with that kind of, I don't know, alpha male bullshit, whatever. Like there's something they've just been trained to ask for what they want. And I mean, I'm a product of the eighties, you know, there was a culture at the time of like, you know, don't take no for an answer. I don't think we ever thought about it from the space of sexual conquest.
But I think it quietly was there too. Think about the movie 16 Candles, which is one of my favorite movies. Except now it's really hard to watch because there's that whole storyline of like, oh, she's drunk, you can do whatever you want with her. It's appalling that was completely normal, normal to say something like that in the 80s. We've...
come a long ways. I wanna give us all a big high five that is not, I don't care who you are. Like there's a lot of nuance to consent culture and I don't care who you are, but that is one that does not fly anywhere. I get poked at it a little bit because I will do things like ask for consent to have a conversation, right? Like it feels like to some people, that feels like too much. To me, if I...
Michelle Renee (she/her) (28:44.97)
If I have an option to give someone the option of opting in or opting out, I'd rather have them opt in on their own accord. So
Michelle Renee (she/her) (29:00.862)
I hope you can see why this is my calling. This is where I came from. My mother needed this work. I needed this work. My guess is my grandmother needed this work and her sisters needed this work. Like, I didn't wanna focus just on women because I work with plenty of men. I work with all genders. But for me personally, this is a generational thing. This is a generational healing. And I have two boys, two...
to men at this point. And it is changing their generation also. I was the emotionally immature parent. I learned emotional maturity through my work with Cuddlist, through the colleagues that I had at Cuddlist. And then I added to my repertoire by becoming a surrogate partner. So what do I do? I...
support people with emotional and physical intimacy struggles to become more comfortable connecting with the people around them. And that can look like platonic work. That can look like erotic work. I work in the full spectrum. But the thing is about people, or the thing I think I know about people, is it takes...
a lot for them to seek support.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (30:30.914)
For whatever reason, sex is the thing that makes them seek support a lot of the time.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (30:42.69)
They come to me for support. A lot of times it's to fix my dick.
and they get real confused when I try to help them fix other things because the dick is just the symptom, right? The inability to orgasm, it's just the symptom.
the, I don't, what's one that I want to think of? I'm afraid to be in relationship. That's a little broader one that I can say, yeah, it makes sense.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (31:31.385)
I'm trying to think of the different kinds of people that I've worked with.
that really stand out to me.
A lot of times people that come to see me have had a big T trauma, meaning they've had this big event that it's happened and trauma meaning, I would kind of screw it up a little bit. Trauma is not the event, it's how it's stored in your body. So some people will go through traumatic things and it not gets stored in their body. For whatever reason, they've got, they're well-resourced or...
they move that through, they don't hold onto it. But a lot of times people hold onto it and then that kind of stops them from moving forward. But also the little t's I have this conversation a lot. People of my age, I can only speak for myself. My parents were very, go to your room.
I'll give you something to cry about. I remember my father could look at us, like let's say we were about to walk into church. He would just shoot us a look and we would like be completely quiet. Like you don't even wanna breathe quiet. There's a lot of fear-based parenting.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (33:07.918)
And I know that continued because I did a lot of that with my kids. My kids were, you know, I was so proud of the fact that I was a cry it out mom. I remember when my baby sister had her first child and she was so frustrated and our mom was already gone at this point. So she wasn't getting the benefit of having our mother's wisdom.
like I did with my first child. And so I was kind of oldest sister. I'm the one that has a child. And I said, oh, you've just got to get her trained. You got to let her cry it out. It'll get better. Just get them on a schedule. And she was the attachment-based parent. And to me, that just seemed like, why would you go through all that work? And then now, as a practitioner who works in attachment,
Oh, if I could go back and do things over again. I'll just go back to my own story. What does it do to a child when you say, I'll give you something to cry about? It totally erases our feelings. Like our feelings are not real, they're false. They're not worthy. I remember when I got into the BDSM community.
I wanted to see how much pain I could take. I'm not that person anymore. That was Michelle 2.0. And I wanted to be pushed. And I had this guy really give me a really painful scene. And I cried. And I remember looking in the mirror at myself and I thought, this is worth crying about. This is legitimate tears.
And thankfully I've evolved past that. I think it was part of my journey. It was really important part of my journey. But I don't need to legitimize my tears. My tears are wonderful and they are helping me continue to move things through my body, right? They are not to be sucked in and held back. They are welcome. And in my space, you know, clients, you know, come to me to have a safe place to cry or.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (35:29.058)
The tears hit them when they're here sometimes. Sometimes they don't cry and I'm the one crying. Like it is something that I try to really normalize in my space. So where was I? People that come to me, why do they come to me? I'm sorry.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (35:49.846)
This is the space, the intimacy lab. You're listening to the intimacy lab podcast, but I got this name because that's what I call the space that I work in, because it's a laboratory. It's a space that is safer than say out in the regular world. It's a place for you. It's a place to work through the fear or the barriers or...
whatever is holding you back from experiencing or moving towards physical or emotional intimacy. So we get to take chances here because I can hold the space. I'm not gonna let you like flail. I'm not going to, I'm gonna be in it with you and it's really important to be, to be
seen in that space to be seen with unconditional positive regard. There is just a love and appreciation that I feel for my clients that you get to feel. You might not have felt that from your parents. You might not have gotten that loving gaze from your mother. You may feel like you've never been held.
And I get to do all those things because it's not too late. So I like to say that a lot of my favorite, I hate to hierarchy my work, but I'll just say that some of my favorite work, because I've done some really great sexual healing work with people, but.
Some of my favorite work is being part of their reparenting journey, my client's reparenting journey. There's a wonderful book called Complex PTSD from Surviving to Thriving by Pete Walker. And in that book, and we're gonna do an episode on this book, but in that book they talk about, you know, needing to build good enough safe relationships.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (38:10.39)
to start to heal, to reparent by community or reparent by committee, sorry, reparent by committee. And I get to be one of those people, one of those safe enough people. The talk therapist, a lot of times my clients are in talk therapy. The talk therapist is one of those safe, good enough safe people. And then you start to be able to build good enough safe people outside of the professional container.
So much of my life changed, like really changed inside of my relationship with my current, hopefully last husband. Such a weird thing to say, current husband. It sounds like there's a next husband. I don't know. With my husband, that relationship was hard in the beginning. I was coming in with a lot of baggage, right?
Oh, the negative self-talk and the feeling, the feeling that I had to be worthy of being in relationship, right? I had to be the best girlfriend. I had to do all the things. I had to make them, I had to make myself indispensable, right? I needed to have some value that I clearly didn't see that I had just for being me. Like, I look back at it now and it makes me really sad.
I have these beautiful lanterns that I hang in my office that are the same. I have three of them. My old talk therapist of mine had one of them. And in one of our later sessions before we stopped working together, partially because I felt like I'd run my course at that time and we were also moving, he showed me this lantern and he said,
Do you see the jewels? It's like a kind of like a
Michelle Renee (she/her) (40:18.638)
I don't know if you call it a Moroccan lantern. It's a jeweled lantern, so it has all these different facets of different colored jewels. He said, these jewels are your gifts. And my job as your therapist is to light the candle for you so you can see them until you can light that for yourself. And something shifted for me that day. And it really gave me like permission.
light that candle for myself and it still took some work after that but there was a shift that day. It was such a shift that I went home and reversed image search, not reversed image search because I didn't have an image of it but I started googling jewel lantern like anything I could and I finally narrowed it down. I'm like a dog going after a steak with this stuff.
I finally narrowed it down and it was being sold at Pier One of all places. And so I went out and I bought one. I had one in my hands probably within a week or two of that session. And since then, I've seen them for sale. I picked up two more on Facebook marketplace and I'll probably keep picking them up. They're they're really pretty. And they tell such a great story because they're so connected to my story. And my story is so connected to my clients stories.
They need to hear this too. So back to my relationship. I came in with really hefty baggage and Paul came in with almost no baggage to a fault. He hadn't, he was young. I was 40. He was just about to turn 28. It was just a casual fling at first. You know, we were just having a good time but we kept seeing each other.
And every time I came up against a problem, something I needed to talk about, I did it. I didn't hold that back. I didn't keep it in because we had this incredible gift. Shortly after we started dating within like maybe three months or so, he knew that he was going to lose his job and he would need to move. And his industry was not.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (42:39.742)
it was almost impossible that he would even be in the Midwest, let alone in Michigan, let alone in West Michigan where we were living at the time. And so there was kind of an expiration date to our relationship. And I asked him when he brought this information to me, hey, I'm gonna have to start looking for a new job, probably not gonna end up here. I said, what do you wanna do? Do you want to keep dating or should we just stop? And he said, oh.
Why not just keep going? Which is his naivety, right? Like, looking back, nobody signs up for a long distance relationship, and I should have known better. I did a long distance relationship in high school. But, needless to say, we treated it as like, there's nothing to lose. He was gonna move. I wasn't thinking long distance relationship at that time. I was thinking, I'll just keep seeing him until he leaves. And so with nothing to lose, I kind of just,
I quit holding myself back. I'm a pretty intense person. And I just decided to just love him very openly, like not minimize myself, not minimize my feelings. And that means my hurt, my love, my fear, my anger. Like I let all of that come through to him and it was really great practice. And...
Maybe there was a part of me that was trying to push him away, like test him. Will he be how much can he handle? But he kept working on things. He wouldn't say, Lady, this is too much. I did not sign up for this. I'm out of here. He really wanted to learn how to be in relationship with me. And when he moved, we just kind of slid into a long distance. And we've been long distance twice in our almost eight years together.
And, um, hmm.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (44:44.228)
He's healed a lot of me through love.
He's never tried to change me. He's never been embarrassed by me. Like my authentic self is what you're getting on this podcast. There's not a lot that I keep to myself. I don't hold things in like privacy. I see my life as an example for other people to learn from. And I talk really candidly.
And he's never told me I couldn't do that. And he could have, like he has a right to privacy and that wouldn't be a bad thing. But like even, I remember being at a party with him in the very beginning of our relationship and I was telling some story about us and my ex was really a private person and he would have chastised me. Why did you have to say that?
I remember saying something really funny. I love to pull a joke. I love to get a laugh, right? And I quickly looked over my shoulder in like a, oh shit, and I'm like, locked eyes with him and expected a scowl and a what are you doing? What are you saying? And he just goes, you're so fun. And like that's kind of continued. He's, I was not even doing professional cuddling when I first met him. I've built this entire career.
with him.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (46:22.707)
I couldn't show up for people.
as fully as I do without him showing up for me. Because we don't do this, we can't do this work with an empty cup. We have to have our cup filled.
and he...
Michelle Renee (she/her) (46:45.762)
He's always this calm. He's not anything close to my father. There's no temper in him. And it felt really, really boring at first. And there was a disinterest. I remember a lot of times being like, don't you care? There's no intensity here. You're not...
screaming at me. And I would lose my stuff every once in a while. When parts of my past would get poked at accidentally, I would lose my shit and he would look like a deer in headlights. And I was completely in trauma response. And I just remember pacing. I remember hearing that like zoo animals sometimes they just pace, right? It's a stress response. Yeah.
I remember some of those nights and they were not fun, but we always worked it out. Lots of communication, lots of really vulnerable shares.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (48:00.47)
and lots of growth. It wasn't for nothing. And when I think about my work, what I want it to be is me being able to show up with that same kind of love for my client so that they know what it feels like. That's healthy. I want people to know what it feels like to be in a supportive relationship to be in a supportive relationship, but still in your autonomy.
Right? It's not about having to be in codependence or all the way to the other side of like independence where you're so independent that you can't even function in relationship. There's interdependence and ultimately we're both in our autonomy, but we really value each other. We really want each other in our lives. And...
I'll link to our wedding vows in the show notes, cause they're.
It's real real. It's real lovely. It's such a shift from the first time I got married when I didn't really understand what that could have been. And so I'm very proud of them. I'm very proud of him and I'm very proud of us. And I'm very proud of the work that I get to do and the space that I get to hold and share with my clients. And so you might still be going.
What is it that you do, Michelle? It's the intimacy lab. It's the space to take chances and to feel loved and to feel okay when you don't know what that feeling, like you don't know what to make of that feeling. I remember a client one time and I don't hold love back. I remember a client one time, I often tell my clients I love them because sometimes I've never heard that. And...
Michelle Renee (she/her) (50:05.534)
I say that shit is free, pass it around. And I remember telling her, and she said that makes me incredibly uncomfortable. I can't have you say that. And I said, okay. And so many, many months later, it got revisited and she could hear it then. And it's about meeting you where you are. And where you are is like, at that time, it's okay. It's understandable. And...
Michelle Renee (she/her) (50:32.978)
My goal is to build a secure relationship with you so that you can then recognize those feelings, those feelings of safety, those feelings of respect, those feelings of love in the rest of the world. No matter where your background is from, you might come in with all the trauma and you might come in thinking that there's none and maybe there isn't, but for whatever reason, you need a safe space to get it figured out.
Woo, do you believe everyone has a calling? And if so, do you think I found mine? I know I found mine and I could not be more satisfied in how this 40, almost 48 years have turned out so far and I'm really excited for however many I have left. So thanks for joining me.
I know the outro is going to give you some instructions on, you know, leaving a review,
Michelle Renee (she/her) (51:40.458)
your feedback means the world to me. And so if you've got, if you wanna give me five stars, that would mean a lot. Let the world know, you know, you can read my testimonials on my website. You can join my newsletter, my mailing list. You can come work with me. I know if you're not in San Diego, it might seem difficult and complicated, but...
Michelle Renee (she/her) (52:13.528)
I have launched more details on an immersive weekend I call Destination Intimacy. And that can be done from a place of strictly platonic, and it can be done from a place of we need to work through the full spectrum. So if you want more information, you know how to reach out to me.
You can find me at meetmichellerenet.com. Lastly, if you have a calling to do work, anything close to what I'm talking about today, I really want to do a little self-promotion here and say that Cuddlist changed my life. I just told you my story. I am unrecognizable.
And I'm also the director of training there now, so, which is such an honor, right? You heard where I came from.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (53:18.478)
It means so much to me to be so involved in this organization. And we just launched a new training, an updated training, that I really believe I'm watching the first cohort go through it now. And I think that the trainees on the other side of this are going to have such a deeper understanding of the power of this work in professional cuddling.
And we can call it something else if you want to. You can call it, you know, touch therapy. You can call it...
Michelle Renee (she/her) (53:56.25)
you know, I call it human connection coaching in a lot of ways. Like I have lots, we have lots of different ways to talk about it, however it resonates with you. If you're doing other modalities, this just might be an additional one that will improve all of your modalities. But the Cuddlist training is really powerful. It's really changed my life. And it has given me the opportunity to really change the world.
My partner says that I always like hush him because it feels overwhelming, but, um.
I get to have an effect on people.
And there was a time where my biggest fear was that I wouldn't be remembered.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (54:46.631)
Speaking of this being the 21st anniversary of my mother's passing, she had a big wonderful funeral. It was really much larger than I expected and I know she wasn't forgotten.
And I had a fear that I would be forgotten. I was a stay at home mom for so long and didn't feel like I had really contributed to the world as a whole, but you know, to my household, which is enough, it's enough, but it certainly left me worried that I would be forgotten. And...
I won't be forgotten. I can toot my own horn now and say that I'm not a healer, but I am the scaffolding for my clients and for their journey. And I feel so privileged to be on the ride along with them. So you all got my tears. I got to, you know.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (55:59.27)
I have to, what do they say?
Michelle Renee (she/her) (56:06.122)
not pop that cherry, but, uh, ah, I'm at a loss for words. Anyways, it had to happen on this podcast eventually. And so why not episode three? All right, everybody, I love you all.
Thanks for listening.
