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Dr. Tina Schermer Sellers | Shameless Parenting: Breaking the Cycle of Sexual Shame and Raising Kids Who Know Their Worth


Dr. Tina Schermer Sellers | Shameless Parenting


The Talk You Never Got — and the One You Can Still Give


There's a good chance nobody sat you down and taught you about your body in a way that made you feel proud of it.


There's a good chance that the first time you touched a part of yourself that felt good, someone reacted in a way that taught you something was wrong with you — even if they didn't mean to. There's a good chance that the education you got about sex, if you got any at all, was steeped in fear. Or silence. Or both.


And there's a very good chance you've been carrying some of that ever since — quietly, without a name for it — into your parenting, your relationships, and the way you see your own body.

Dr. Tina Schermer Sellers has spent her career giving that thing a name. And more importantly, giving people the tools to heal it.


Who Is Dr. Tina?

Dr. Tina is a licensed sex and gender feminist psychotherapist, bestselling author, researcher, emeriti professor, and founder of the Northwest Institute on Intimacy. She has spent over 30 years training doctors, therapists, clergy, and educators in sexual health — the training that most of them never received in their graduate programs.


Her books — Sex, God and the Conservative Church and Shameless Parenting — have reached thousands of families. And the framework she's built for understanding and healing sexual shame is, in this conversation, accessible and immediately useful.


She also raised four kids who are now in their 30s and 40s. She has two granddaughters. Parenting has been the laboratory where she has tested everything she teaches.


How She Got Here

Dr. Tina grew up in a Swedish household — her mother was a first-generation Swedish immigrant, and Sweden had mandatory comprehensive sex education starting in the 1940s. Talking about bodies, relationships, consent, and sexuality in her home was like talking about recipes. Normal. Matter-of-fact. Woven into everyday life.


She thought every family was like that. She was in her thirties before she realized they were not.

By then she was teaching graduate marriage and family therapy students — and hearing their stories. The fear. The shame. The deep feeling that something was fundamentally wrong with them because of desires they had or choices they had made. And she thought: how did this happen? What have we been doing in this culture that makes people feel this way about themselves?

The answer, she discovered, was layered — and it accelerated dramatically around the year 2000, when she recognized she was seeing the first wave of students impacted by abstinence-only education. Federally funded. Taught in public schools. And 80% medically inaccurate. What it did, in practice, was teach a generation to be afraid of their own desire — and to feel deep, abiding shame about who they were as sexual beings.


What Sexual Shame Actually Is

Dr. Tina shares the clinical definition of sexual shame that emerged from research in 2017 — the first time it had been formally defined in research literature. And it's worth sitting with in full:

Sexual shame is a visceral feeling of humiliation and disgust toward one's own body and identity as a sexual being. It is a belief of being abnormal, inferior, and unworthy. It manifests in interpersonal relationships, having a negative impact on trust, communication, and physical and emotional intimacy — and it develops across the lifespan through interactions with relationships, culture, and society.


That last part is where parenting comes in. Because this doesn't start in adolescence. It starts in infancy.


It Starts Earlier Than You Think

Somewhere between ten and twelve months, your baby is going to find their genitals. In the bathtub. During a diaper change. Whenever their hands happen to land there.


What they need in that moment is exactly what they need when they find their nose or their ears: for someone to name it. Calmly, warmly, matter-of-factly. "That's your vulva — it's a wonderful part of you. Let's finish getting your diaper on." That's it. That's all they need.


What they don't need is a scared face, a slapped hand, a word like "dirty" or "gross." Because a child acting from a place of innocence and discovery doesn't understand what they did wrong. They just learn that something must be wrong with them.


And then they'll keep finding that part of their body — on purpose, because it feels good — and they'll need you to respond the same way every time. Not once. Many times. Like teaching them not to eat their boogers — you say it calmly, consistently, and without shame, until eventually it sticks.


This is the foundation. Everything else is built on what happens here.


The Abstinence Generation — and What It Cost

If you grew up in the US in the 1990s or early 2000s, your sex education was almost certainly inadequate. It may have been actively harmful.


Abstinence-only education was federally funded and implemented widely in public schools. It was not neutral. It was fear-based, medically inaccurate, and deeply rooted in shame — and it reached an entire generation of kids who had no other framework than what they absorbed from media and peers. Which means, as Dr. Tina puts it, they were thrown to the wolves. They had no internal compass to tell them when something didn't feel right, no language for consent, no sense of their own right to make decisions about their bodies.


The ripple effects of that are still being felt. In the therapy rooms. In the marriages. In the parenting — where the shame gets passed down, quietly and inadvertently, to the next generation.


Frame, Name, Claim, Aim: A Path Forward

Here's the good news: you can change your family's legacy in one generation. It's hard work. But it is possible.


Dr. Tina uses a four-part model called Frame, Name, Claim, Aim for healing sexual shame. The short version:


Frame means getting yourself a scaffolding of sex education — starting with Shameless Parenting, which walks you through every developmental stage from birth to young adulthood, with recommended books, conversation starters, and guidance on what's developmentally normal at every age. She recommends reading it for yourself first — imagining someone reading it to your two-year-old self — and noticing what comes up.


Name means telling your story. Finding a trusted circle — even just a few close friends — and talking honestly about what it was like growing up in your particular family around these topics. What was said and what wasn't said. What you were given and what you weren't. Most people in the US didn't get comprehensive sex education. You are not alone in that. And naming it is the first step to moving through it.


Claim means claiming that your body is good. As it is. Right now. Not when you lose the weight or fix the thing or stop feeling what you feel. Your body is good because it is, as Dr. Tina says, the pen with which you write the poetry of your life. And most of us have spent decades believing otherwise.


Aim is the legacy piece — consciously choosing the experience you want your children to have, and working toward it. Not perfectly. Not all at once. But consistently, in the small moments and the big ones.


Raising Kids Who Know They're Enough

The research is clear: children who receive comprehensive, shame-free sex education get involved in sexual activity later, make safer choices, choose more egalitarian partners, and have better experiences when they do become sexually active. They also report being closer to their parents overall.


That last one is the one Dr. Tina always leads with. Because most parents want that closeness. They want to be the person their teenager comes to. And what the research shows is that the path to that closeness runs directly through being a safe, unfazed, non-reactive person for your child to ask questions of — from the very beginning.


You don't have to have all the answers. You don't have to be perfect. You just have to be safe.


The Work Beyond Parenting

Dr. Tina's work extends into territory that deserves its own conversation — and she briefly opens the door to it here. She co-founded Inana Rising, an organization supporting clinicians trained in psychedelic-assisted therapy for trauma. The research behind MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD is compelling: in clinical trials spanning over 20 years, 68% of participants with severe, long-term PTSD showed no evidence of the condition following treatment. The brain, given the right conditions, can reprocess and release what it has been carrying.


She is also clear about the ethics and the access piece. Inana Rising has a patient equity scholarship fund to offset the cost of care for people who can't afford it — and an Indigenous Reparations Fund that contributes quarterly to Indigenous nonprofit organizations, honoring the communities that have held this knowledge for generations.


It is careful, ethical, important work. And it is part of the same mission as everything else she does: reducing the amount of unnecessary suffering humans carry.


The Offer She Made at the End

If you want to do this work but cost is a barrier — Dr. Tina's offer stands. DM her on Instagram at @drtinashameless and tell her what's going on. She will send you a free promo code for the audio version of either Shameless Parenting or Sex, God and the Conservative Church.


Because she means it when she says: you deserve to be free of shame. And your kids need you to be.


HOW TO CONNECT WITH DR. TINA







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