Fran Frye on Rape Recovery, BDSM Healing, and Why Men Are Taught to Ignore Their Bodies
The Intimacy InquiryShow Notes
Fran Frye https://www.franfrye.com/ is a certified sex educator, counselor, and clinician trained in compulsive sexual behaviours, and a somatic sex practitioner based in Charleston, South Carolina. She holds certifications from the Sexual Health Alliance, the American Board of Sexology, and the Somatic Institute. She also brings to this conversation something rarer: her own lived experience as a sexual assault survivor, a former military spouse, and a hospice volunteer. Fran describes a childhood spent finding meaning through connection with others, often the marginalised and overlooked, long before she understood why. After being raped by an acquaintance, with a friend's involvement complicating the dynamic further, Fran found that traditional therapy did not address her sexual trauma. It was through somatic work, specifically training at the Somatica Institute, that she felt truly heard for the first time. From there, Fran built a life around understanding why people hurt themselves and others. Working in food scarcity, domestic violence, rape crisis advocacy, and human trafficking support, she identifies a single recurring thread: dysregulation. She argues that men in particular are taught that their sexuality is acceptable but their emotions are not, leading the nervous system to route fear, stress, and loneliness through arousal, sometimes with damaging consequences. Fran is sharply critical of the addiction model as applied to sexual behaviour, arguing that labelling someone an addict can entrench the very shame that drives the behaviour in the first place. She introduces what she calls the fifth F, alongside fight, flight, freeze, and fawn, and explains how understanding the body's stress responses can change a person's relationship with their own sexuality. The conversation moves into somatic therapy more broadly: why talking about trauma often isn't enough, how the body holds what the mind cannot process, and why Fran believes reconnecting with physical sensation, including through weightlifting in her own case, was essential to her healing. Perhaps most strikingly, Fran speaks openly about her use of BDSM as a deliberate, consensual way of processing her assault, reframing an experience of powerlessness into one where she holds control. She and Andrew discuss why kink communities often communicate far more openly and consensually than conventional relationships, and why this openness can be transformative. Fran also reflects on staying in her marriage longer than she felt was right, what it taught her about safety, and how the years since her divorce have been spent deliberately exploring her own sexuality without rushing toward a new relationship. She and Andrew discuss whether humans are naturally monogamous or polyamorous, the cultural building blocks, like understanding jealousy and compersion, that Fran believes are missing for polyamory to be widely accepted, and how self-sabotage often shows up as a way of confirming our deepest fears about ourselves. The conversation closes with Fran's hopes for the future: writing about the people she meets through volunteering, advocacy for men's emotional and sexual wellbeing, and a particular interest in death doula work, supporting intimacy, touch, and connection at the end of life, something she says is too often ignored. This episode contains frank discussion of sexual assault, trauma, and adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and via RSS.
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