Featured in: Practicing Polyamory Podcast

Our founder of Respark, Heather McPherson, was recently featured on the Practicing Polyamory Podcast, with host James @PracticingPolya. The podcast provides insight into the “… perspectives from the imperfect people of polyamory… the mission… is to provide a platform for all of the real-life flawed humans that practice polyamory, so that we might all learn from one another and grow as a community.” Heather talks about her business endeavors on the show, including her founding of Sexual Health Alliance, Respark Therapy, and Practice Outside the Lines podcast!
James intros Heather as a woman who is “ … on a mission to help you be free of how society told you to behave… she is the founder of the Sexual Health Alliance, an ever-expanding organization focused on providing high-quality education in sexual health to therapists and sexual health professionals.” (3:01) For those who don’t know, Practice Outside the Lines is a podcast that “focuses on the business of sexual health.” (3:55) Heather talks about these two business endeavors and how she was able to create SHA, Respark, and POTL, while also being a licensed couples/ sex therapist!

The Journey to Becoming A Sexpert

Heather continues to provide us with some valuable insight on the show, as she details her journey as badass sexuality professional. Heather addresses the lack of sexual education in the medical and psychology field and the struggle of trying to find a coherent sexual education program for health professionals. This issue is what led Heather to found Sexual Health Alliance, effectively creating a resource for access to proper, inclusive sexual education training. After she started practicing couples therapy she “.. started getting a lot of couples talking about sex, and I was like, Woah, we didn’t cover this in grad school!” (4:53) As a direct result of this lack of training, Heather now emphasizes the inclusion of polyamory knowledge training to ensure that all of Respark’s couples therapists are well versed in both polyamory and all other consensual non-monogamy relationships. She notes that “..at Respark we specialize in seeing open relationships, consensual non-monogamy polyamory clients.” (10:27)

Common misconceptions about Polyamory and Cultural Stigmas

Heather and James also discuss a lot of common misconceptions about the polyamorous community and how these misconceptions align with the reality of polyamory. Heather cites some “.. research that people think poly people… don’t do some of these health-conscious behaviors [ ie, brushing your teeth or walking your dog]… sometimes it can come from the idea that they aren’t as worried about STDs or STIs…”. (14:19) In reality though, the members of the polyamorous community care a lot of health-conscious behaviors, and may even take more precautions than those in monogamous communities. This is because polyamorous individuals tend to “…have better skills in communication about you know what they have, what the risk factors are, what they feel comfortable with, negotiating boundaries, all of those different skills.” (14:43)
While there may be great communication skills inside the community, those outside of polyamory have tended to have a hard time with the discourse surrounding polyamory, specifically in terms of harmful stigmas in conservative cultures. Heather thinks “that the stigma is that it’s someone who’s having sex with more than one person that’s what generally the population will think about it.” (21:14) Moreover, individuals associate polyamory with cheating and dishonesty, of course, causes the practice to be frowned upon in conservative circles. In reality, the polyamorous community has an important distinction when it comes to honesty and communication, as the success of the community is contingent on these things. Heather cites Japanese culture and says that “In Japan, some of the students we have there are kind of in the military population, so obviously, that’s very conservative… but I think that in general humans have jealousy typically right and so I think no matter what culture you’re from, it’s really common to feel all the feelings right underneath the rainbow.” (21:41)

Heather’s Message

To end the show James asks Heather an insightful question: “ What impact do you want SHA to have on the world?” (24:37) Heather notes that the main goal of SHA is to provide that progress and radical sex education that she had talked about earlier in the show. She notes how a goal of SHA’s is to prevent that “ shocking or disgusting look on [a health provider’s] face when any type of sex talk comes up in their practice. Sexual Health Alliance is also an organization that plays very close attention to true inclusivity as “historically it’s been very difficult to include sex workers and bodyworkers and all these different types of sexual health professionals into kind of the quote professional world and so that’s… a mission to be all-inclusive truly and invite all different types of professions into our community.” (26:03) Heather closes the show with a very important message, “ I want people that are going to specialize and work with this population to really dive into it and understand you know maybe unknowingly what biases they might have or what religious or cultural messages…check in with themselves and think about some of the ideas and beliefs that they have and how that might come into conflict with uh being in a polyamorous relationship.” (28:37) If you want to check out the entirety of Heather’s feature on the Practicing Polyamory Podcast, you can check out the interview here:
E.27 – Ignite Passion for Life & Re*Spark Your Love with Heather McPherson LMFT, CST