It was on a flight to Napa back in June when I first discovered Juliette LaMontagne’s writing. I was immediately captivated by her vulnerability and bold, personal exploration.
Through a combination of psychedelic therapy, sexological bodywork, and other experiences she writes about, Juliette has undergone a profound sexual reawakening in midlife—one that’s ignited a new (and much richer) chapter in her 25+ year marriage.
We see so much of our own stories in others’ lives.
Naturally, I had to share hers with you.
But first—who is Juliette?
Juliette LaMontagne has spent her life redesigning what’s possible in learning environments—first in classrooms, then in startups, and now in the realm of midlife reinvention.
She’s a TED Senior Fellow, former Chief Learning Architect at Bionic, founder of the nonprofit Breaker, and spent 15 years with the New York City Department of Education.
Juliette has generously shared her journey in her substack Touch Me There—Reclaiming Desire, Power & Purpose in Midlife, which I highly recommend binging.
Without further ado, our interview.
Natassia: You grew up in a very Catholic household. Reflecting on your teen and early adult years, what were the key messages that you received about sexuality?
Juliette: It was very much the traditional Catholic, “don’t give it away for free.” Sex was power. You guarded it both because you did not want to be violated–which was a real threat–and because you wanted to secure a desirable partner.
You had to project a certain image and being sexually liberal would put you at risk of violation and decrease your chances of securing a sanctioned relationship–which was the goal, because of course the goal was to get married and have children.
There was no other goal.
And nobody talked about pleasure in that equation at all. It had nothing to do with it.
In fact, there was a kind of unspoken assumption that the girls who might have enjoyed some aspect of sexual relations were…slutty.
Natassia: How did these messages shape your desires and your sense of self as you stepped into adulthood?
Juliette: I feel like I did all the right things: I played by the rules, both the explicit and implicit ones.
When I think back on it, I spent a lot of energy on that stuff. Imagine what I could have otherwise been spending that creative energy on?
But I guess in the end I was successful. I felt like I had a place in the social system. I had a boyfriend who was the quarterback of the football team.
Fast forward, I fell in love with my husband who to me was this incredible person–smart, creative and fulfilling to me sexually.
I bound myself to him in this long-term relationship that became very dysfunctional over time. So although I thought I had “won” the ultimate prize–the husband, the marriage, the children–it was slowly squeezing us.
At that time, unconscious behaviors were killing us and killing the relationship. And I think for many people, it does kill it. They break and either they do their work and recreate something different in a new relationship or they recreate it all over again, right?
That’s what so many people do when they split and divorce: they repeat the same patterns.
Eventually, we split. We separated after a real crisis in our relationship. Somehow, we were able to reinvent ourselves and rediscover the relationship.
Natassia: What made your marriage become dysfunctional?
Juliette: There was something very codependent about our relationship from the very beginning where I was overgiving, overproviding. Because to give is how I receive love and become worthy of it.
That formula was wonderful in the early days, because he loved to accept all the gifts from me. I was a bottomless well of “let me do, be and serve.” And he became reliant on it.
It felt wonderful for a good long time until it didn’t.
It was clear to me that it was gonna suck me dry, especially when the children were born. I had to draw that energy away from what I had been pouring into him, into the kids because that’s what you do when you’re a mother.
And he did not like that. He did not appreciate that shift in focus and attention.
Although he’s a wonderful father and he didn’t resent his own children, I think this happens for a lot of men. There’s just a tremendous shift in focus in the family dynamics.
I wouldn’t change that because I think that there is a period of time where a mother dedicates her life force to her children first. Just feeding them your milk, producing milk and nourishing your children is a massive tax on the body, but it is absolutely one of the most important gifts that you could give them.
After that period of intensive mothering, I felt the need to work again when they started preschool. I wanted to have something that was about me and my own identity.
I pressed forward with my career and my husband continued to feel abandoned.
Things disintegrated, until my husband–who had been sober for our entire marriage, including before I met him–relapsed.
Then he spent four years going in and out of rehab, trying to get himself back on his feet.
We were in the thick of it for quite some time with two teenage kids and it was a very challenging time.
Natassia: After you and your husband separated, you write about this beautiful moment when you had an energy orgasm in the sky, after you started psychedelic therapy. Can you share a little bit more about it?
Juliette: The first phase of my recovery was peeling back these layers of armor that I had built up over the years that preceded my husband for sure, and also included the years of being with him.
It was that shedding of the skin. Then on top of being up early for a flight and that rawness that you feel when you’re traveling someplace. I got up at 4:00 a.m. and for whatever reason, I just started to feel this swelling, this movement, this heat, and I was just overcome with a feeling of raw intensity, like there was something that was trying to come out from inside.
It was pleasurable but forceful, almost like it was trying to break me open. I call it an energy orgasm because of its intensity. You are moving, things are changing. Keep going.
It started to feel like a suspended reality and my body was changing then–not to dismiss the power of hormones shifting as well.
So it’s like I’ve got these surges of hormones happening. The world is in upheaval. I’ve started this psychedelic therapy. My whole marriage and home life is rearranging itself and there are all these open questions and it just feels equally scary and welcoming.
Natassia: And was this when you started to experience your sexual expansion?
Juliette: Sexual energy became synonymous with being alive, fully alive.
When you’ve spent so much time feeling numb or angry or resentful or kind of shut down, you just want to keep nourishing a whole part of your life when you start to feel it come back online.
So the hormonal therapy started to clear some space, then the psychedelic therapies started to drop the armor. Each of these layers opened me more to the sensation of my body. I had to understand and seek out more information, because clearly something was happening.
I was feeling myself in a very different way. I kept asking people and trying to talk about it without knowing what questions to even ask. There was a restlessness with it.
It was like this force that wanted to move through me and sex was a portal, you know?
It wasn’t like meditation or pilates class was going to make me feel more alive. No. It was clear to me that sexuality had something to do with this aliveness and I needed to chase after it.
I needed to understand it. I needed to find containers that would allow me to expand into it.
And I still feel that way today. I still like expanding into new containers so that I can keep feeling this force.
My writing is one channel for that sexual energy. It’s a way of expressing and letting it unfurl into the world, into other people’s minds. It’s just energy moving.
Natassia: You moved to California during COVID, after a year of separation from your husband, because you felt it was important to be together as a family with your children. You share that at that stage, you were just friends and co-parents. At what point did that change?
Juliette: I had no interest in having sex with him. I really couldn’t even imagine being attracted to him in that way. But again, all those things are moving in me and you’re looking around like, where do I go with this?
The answer to my question initially was to work with sexological body workers. That was one container in the early days that allowed me to express myself and play, discover, and develop a new language for touch. But ultimately as my practitioner, a woman, pointed out, it’s a one way touch.
There’s a whole world of experience that I was missing because I can’t touch her back and it’s not a shared experience, so my husband–because he really did want to reconcile–was offering himself as a willing partner in these exercises.
I was very reluctant and resistant for a long time, but then ultimately I did say, “Okay, let’s try this.”
It started very, very modestly. But I was absolutely astonished.
I think we both were astonished at how the energetic charge between us shifted as we began to experiment with some of these rather kind of formal touch exercises. Not at all the kind of pleasure that you would imagine.
Natassia: Which touch exercise was it?
Juliette: One of my sexological body workers recommended a book by Dr. Betty Martin called The Wheel of Consent.
The wheel of consent has two types of dynamics and four types of experiences: allow, take, serve and accept.
One dynamic is serve and accept. You can serve the gift of touch and in that case, if I’m serving, the other person is accepting. Then it switches: I accept when the other person is serving.
The other dynamic is allow and take. That’s when one person allows their partner to take the gift of touch.
They all feel quite different and it’s very hard to explain in words how different they are until you practice it.
For people in long-term relationships, you get so into your patterns and your kind of predictable routines with sex.
This is a wonderful way to change the scripts, because it’s turn-taking.
We started with a timer because it felt safer. His service to me was touching my feet for five minutes. So initially it was very, very tame.
Over time, you take greater and greater risks. Asking for what you want is hard for a lot of people to do. Not just to ask for what you want, but then to be seen and felt experiencing and accepting that gift of touch.
And then on the other side, to ask to take something from someone else for your pleasure and have them allow it and have them see you in your “taking” energy is a whole other experience that is quite unique.
So there’s a lot of room to play.
There’s a tremendous amount of imagination and there’s a relational dance that begins to shift when you take turns. So I think it’s great practice.
It has taught me so much. It’s allowed us to revive our sexuality and, quite frankly, it saved our marriage.
Natassia: That’s so beautiful. I love the wheel of consent. It can be very jarring in the beginning to think about what you want and ask for it. When did you start exploring sexual touch in the wheel of consent?
Juliette: It didn’t take long for me to recognize that I was seeing him differently.
I want to preface this by saying that after that period of spiraling through relapses, my husband had to build himself up again and did so through the 12 steps, which are such a deep practice of humility and building of integrity.
As I was watching him do that for himself, with himself, separate from me, I could observe from a distance the way his core self was changing.
And then we started to relate to each other again physically. So these things were coming together in a symbiotic way. In other words, when I saw him in his “take” energy, it was a different perspective on him than I’d ever seen.
It wouldn’t have been possible without the foundational piece of the 12 steps that he was standing on, which I had honestly never seen in all of the years of us being together.
Natassia: That makes sense.
Juliette: He was just in a totally different place in his life, as was I. So, we’d gone off and done these separate journeys of development, and we were finding a way to relate to each other again.
I have this particular memory playing the wheel of consent: it was his turn to take, and he had this stance. It was literally just in his posture. The way he stood in space and didn’t need to perform, didn’t need to grasp. It was just the power of his energy in that stance.
I also have a memory of him using his power in a sexual dynamic. He just said, “Wait.”
That one command is incredibly charged.
It’s indicative of both where he had come from in his journey, and also the strength of these exercises to change the dance steps that we’ve been trapped in for decades.
Natassia: Oh, that’s so hot. It’s the building of anticipation, the slowing down. And that is what I feel like so many couples are missing in their process of relating to each other sexually.
Juliette: Yeah. It doesn’t have to be toys and scenes and some kind of high drama. It can be as simple as “wait.”
Natassia: In this “new” marriage, have you then maintained a level of individuality that has allowed you to coexist better?
Juliette: Yes, that’s the amazing thing. You can recover from codependency. In fact, we are better differentiated and feel more foundationally sound than we ever have been.
We talk about it all the time, like how the hell did we make it through? Thank God we did, because we are truly best friends.
We have such a lovely family and feel so nourished by the friendship and the foundation that underlines us, as well as being able to have this sexual relationship that we never had when we were younger. Even though it was, you know, the height of passion and romance and all that, it’s like, no, it’s actually better now.
Natassia: How else do you stay erotically connected in your daily life?
Juliette: It’s all energy. Sex is energy. Art, culture, relationships, politics, it’s all energy. So it’s about what energy I am paying attention to that is going to expand me.
Part of cultivating my sexual energy is attuning myself to nature, to fine art, to music, all the cliches, all the things that people have been saying forever, I feel the truth of.
And I think that’s part of the gift of midlife: all the things that are patently obvious and truisms that have existed since the beginning of time, you actually understand.
You’re like, “Oh, this is what they mean.” So I have deepened my pleasure practice by attuning to music in a way where I just let it move through me almost like an orgasm.
Certain music will just captivate me and turn me on in every part of my body.
Natassia: I love that. I too practice that almost daily.
Juliette: Yeah, I can tell.
Natassia: Thank you so much, Juliette. You are radiant.
Juliette: My pleasure.
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Couples Intimacy Card Deck - Turn each other on, one question at a time. I created this for you and your partner to bring more connection, curiosity, and play into the bedroom. Get 10% off with code LUST.
Book a 1:1 Session - I help individuals and couples in long-term relationships find more desire, confidence, and connection—in and out of bed. One private hour, and you leave with a clear plan for what to do next.
Thank you for reading Lust in Translation. If you think anyone else would enjoy reading this too, please share it with them.
another lovely journey of discovery captured 👏