Sex-Positivity: Why Learning to Set Boundaries and Sex Education Matters with Rosalia Rivera
In today’s society, there’s a huge stigma around sexuality and sexual abuse. This week’s guest, Rosalia Rivera, creator of Consent Parenting and host of the AboutCONSENT podcast, is challenging those stigmas by providing the tools and knowledge to take back your strength, and then start teaching your kids as well. She talks about setting boundaries with yourself, educating yourself to educate your children, and why abuse survivors tend to be such high achievers.
Who is Rosalia Rivera?
Rosalia helps busy parents go from fearful and anxious to competent and empowered when it comes to teaching their kids about body safety, boundaries, and consent to prevent sexual abuse. Rosalia is a consent educator, abuse prevention specialist, sexual literacy advocate, speaker, change agent, change the founder of Consent Parenting.
She is the host of the AboutCONSENT podcast and creator of Consent Parenting where she teaches parents, particularly child sexual abuse survivors, how to educate their children on body safety boundaries and consent so that they can empower their families to prevent abuse and break intergenerational cycles. Rosalia is on a mission to end child sexual abuse, dismantle shame and help survivals survivors heal and become drivers.
She's certified through the Canadian Center for Child Protections Commit to Kids Program and Darkness to Light Stewards of Children Program as well as the Human Trafficking Prevention Training Program on Watch by Safe House Project. Although Rosalia was born in El Salvador and grew up in New York, she now resides in northern Canada with her partner and three young kids.
The Decision to Do the Important Work
Before Rosalia decided to pursue a career with Consent Parenting, she spent 18 years in photography and marketing. But throughout those years, she was searching for how exactly she could work with survivors “being a survivor myself, and really having that at the heart of what I really wanted to do with my life. At some point, somehow, I just didn't know exactly how. And then I had kids. And that was like the universe saying, okay, now you're ready to have these conversations because you're going to be having them in your own life.”
When her oldest son was five years old, she noticed that she wasn’t equipped to “educate him on abuse prevention. And I was riddled with anxiety about how to do that because I was never taught that. My mom is a survivor, my sister's a survivor. So this was this is something that was very personal to me, to make sure that I educated my children, but I just didn't know how. So I started educating myself so that I could teach them. And I found myself getting very triggered.” That was when she realized that to be able to have conversations with others, she first had to go on her own journey of healing, to gain the tools and skillset to navigate those triggers, she worked with “a therapist and a hypnotherapist but also simultaneously educating myself, really determined to break the cycle. I was not going to let it happen to my family. And so I made the bold decision of this is the work that I need to be doing and how to help other parents do it, who are survivors as well.”
As soon as Rosalia made the transition, she started seeing the transformation in her kids and knew it was something she needed to share with other parents. Since then, she’s been looking at “how to innovate on what's already out there because there's all of this sort of really great information but the practicality of teaching it is like a whole other ball of wax.” So Rosalia knew she wanted to provide the programs and tools to make it easier for parents and make it so they “don't have an excuse to not do it and to make it less triggering.” Thus, Consent Parenting was born, and the About Consent podcast “was really just a natural extension of saying, like, you know, we need to have these conversations around healing in order to do this really important work.”
Taking Back Your Strength and Teaching Your Kids
Everyone experiences trauma in their own unique way, for Rosalia she experienced a lot of suppressed memories, but she does remember “specifically critical pieces of what happened to me, that helps me to understand like this is an experience that I went through. And then understanding that I am no longer that child, a lot of it was just a reclamation of power, it was realizing that that child is someone that I can care for now, and is no longer in danger. And I can take the steps that I need to, to learn how to set boundaries.” As adults when we start to learn that we are able to set boundaries, it can be an “incredibly empowering experience.” Even when she was going through the process of teaching her kids, she had to learn to develop her own boundaries first “in order to really be able to teach them that and to model it, because children learn so much more through modeling than even through our words.” We are all in control of our own boundaries, we are allowed to have them and allowed to uphold them.
It can often be difficult to become comfortable setting boundaries, maybe it’s because you weren’t ever allowed to set them, or you did but they were consistently crossed, “so we have to almost do a bit of re-parenting for ourselves to go back and say, I'm no longer that child, I have the right to reclaim that power. And then once you do, you start to cultivate that sense of, I own my life and my voice matters, and here's how I'm going to use it. But that takes also a support system, you can't always do that on your own. And I always advocate for people to seek whatever kind of support that is,” whether it’s a coach or mentor or therapist or healer. It’s so important to seek support because we weren’t meant to go through life alone, the more support you have “the faster you can get to that place that you want to get to.” The three most important things for Rosalia when it comes to taking back your strength and your worth are “being willing to take a risk, getting the support that you need to be, you know, to have a net, right. That's your support system. And then ultimately, like, once you step into that power, to be able to cultivate it, and then be able to teach it to your family.”
Rosalia grew up with a lot of shame around her own desires, “when I was growing up as a teenager and really trying to grapple with what does it mean that I feel these things or whatever it was. Particularly, with school also being very abstinence-based and fear-based. I was learning from the media, I was learning from like HBO, and trying to get my hands on whatever information I could. And unfortunately, it led me to make a lot of unsafe decisions in my sexual health and sexual life.” But now, she calls herself a “sexual literacy advocate” because she feels that the more information we can have as adults, the more we can educate our children in age-appropriate ways, “the safer sexual health and sex lives they’ll have. So for me, abuse prevention and sexual health education go hand in hand for adults who feel shame tied to those things.”
The first thing you have to do to start having those conversations with your kids is have a conversation with yourself about “what your sexual values are, where they came from, and what you want them to be now. Do they still make sense to you? Do you reject them? So I always recommend parents to journal, sit down with yourself, and have a real one on one about where did my sexual values and ideas come from? Was it from my peers? Was it from my parents? Was it from church? What was the messaging that I received? And do I still carry that today? Is it something that still has a hold on me? Or have I let go of those things? What am I replacing them with, that makes me feel, whole and complete? And then seek out the information that you need.”
And then reflect on what values you want to share with your kids. Do you want them to be comfortable having those conversations with you or fearful? How will you respond? You can seek knowledge and support from professionals or from your support system, but it’s important to really do that introspection because “sexuality is such a powerful force, that is part of our humanity that we need to reclaim, and it actually gives you so much more power in all other areas of your life when you reclaim your sexuality. It's almost like reclaiming a part of yourself that you had pushed away. And you can now welcome back in and integrate into your whole self.”
Sexual Abuse and How to Talk About It
So how does sexual abuse really begin? Is it adults seeing boundaries that they can just cross? Is it a lack of boundaries in general? For Rosalia, she’s found that it’s imperative to know, as adults, how to vocalize what your body boundaries are and then teach those to your kids. We can give them examples and teach them “ what it sounds like to have a boundary, what it sounds like to uphold your boundary if someone tries to cross it. So when we have those, we can much more easily teach kids how to have their boundaries, right. So giving them language is key. And we can't give them language if we don't have it, or we don't use that language. So that's why I would say when we're teaching kids about abuse prevention, it really starts with us understanding the facts.”
Sexual abuse has become so prevalent, much more than most people even realize, “it is almost maddening because it's such a silent epidemic. It's happening on such a massive level. But people don't talk about it, because it feels like it's such a taboo topic that they become unaware. And so the broad statistics in the United States, for example, are that 1 in 4 girls, and 1 in 6 boys will be sexually abused before their 18th birthday. And this is based on reported abuse, we aren’t even factoring in the cases that aren’t reported.” Everyone reading right now probably knows someone who’s been abused.
This trauma repeats itself because “of the fact that those people are not educating themselves, or when they try to educate themselves, they get triggered. They have never developed the skills of boundary setting.” A lot of us can get stuck on where to start with this though, what’s appropriate to teach, when’s the right time to do it? But that’s why Rosalia advocates for getting the right education and learning how to set your own boundaries, your own values. It’s so important to have conversations and teach our kids about consent, starting with “the foundation of body rights and boundaries, you’re off to a good start with abuse prevention.”
People with a History of Abuse Tend to be High Achievers
There’s a common stigma around survivors of abuse, or really any trauma, that they aren’t able to function properly anymore, like a “normal” human can. Trauma survivors are seen as broken, the trauma becomes their personality in others’ eyes. But really, people with a history of abuse do tend to be high achievers. On one end, that “aspect of you is trying to cope with the trauma and deal with the emotional aspect of it. And there's the other half that really takes on this other personality of trying to achieve in order to compensate for the low self-worth that the other half of you may be trying to cope with and deal with.” One example Rosalia likes to talk about is 1958 Miss America winner Marilyn Van Derbur who was abused by her father from the age of five until she was 18, “and she basically developed these two personalities of you know, being able to cope. But she went on to do amazing things, she achieved so much in her lifetime.” When you really look at the statistics and the patterns, you’ll notice the trend of “wanting to become good enough.” That idea stems from that abuse, from being made to feel worthless “because of purity culture.”
Rosalia is also super passionate about “dismantling this really antiquated patriarchal construct called the Madonna-whore complex.” Basically, the idea behind this complex is that if you are a virgin, if you’re completely pure, then you are good. But if you have been sexual before marriage or have sexual desires, then you’re dirty and less than. So for survivors, “because of the shame that's attached to it, there's this whole sense of, you know, I need to do these things in order to earn that worth, which is actually already inherently you, you are worthy, without needing to do any of those things. But we, you know, feel that we need to do those things in order to be worthy of love be worthy of affection, be worthy of connection.”
Whether sexual trauma has occurred during childhood or adulthood, it leads to extremely low self-worth, so survivors often try to compensate, but that isn’t always the healthiest coping mechanism because “you tend to burn out, you tend to just live very unhealthy ways of coping with that, you know, stress of overachieving, without really having a good balance, I think it's great to achieve and to seek out and go after your goals. But you need to do it in a way that is good for the whole self, not just for this one part that is trying to attain, you know, validation, really, you know, is what it comes down to. So that's something that I think a lot of survivors don't realize, initially. And when it's pointed out, they realize, like, how much healing needs to be done, and that they don't have to push so hard to achieve those things against their, you know, against their own health.”
To listen to the full conversation click the links beneath the main photo to listen on your favorite platform!
Affirmation
I am empowered to create and set boundaries with full love and total ease.
Links From the Show
Listen to the AboutCONSENT podcast.
Follow Rosalia on Instagram @consentparenting.
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