Meet your Play Professionals

Meryl Victoria is a somatic sex and intimacy coach. Lauren DeRusha is a breakthrough doula and retired professional dominatrix.

We believe that shame is the most painful force in our lives, and that it shows up most reliably in the vulnerable arena of sex. Sadly, there’s a dearth of safe containers for people to explore their sexual shame so they can heal it.

We created Shameless Coaching to fill that gap. We bring a unique cross-section of skills that allows us to work with people around sexual breakthroughs in relationships from a holistic perspective.

To actually level up your sex life in relationship is to activate your attachment wounding. That means if you want to go there with your partner, it’s going to challenge you. Why shouldn’t you do it with loving support?

We focus on play and pleasure in our coaching because healing is hard enough work; we don’t believe it should be miserable. We promise to care deeply for you, hold you gently, remind you that shame doesn’t get to win, and cheer on your discovery of a sex life that’s finally worthy of you.

The Shameless Methodology

  • Phase One: Roadmap to Regulation

    Showing up in healthy relationship with your partner requires you to be in healthy relationship with yourself. Phase One teaches you how to bring your body into regulation and alignment, which is the only way to create a different outcome when you fall into familiar patterns.

    Then we’ll introduce our unique parts work process designed to help you get in touch with the needs and desires that you struggle to name for yourself, much less articulate to your partner.

  • Phase Two: Witnessing

    There are spots you avoid addressing altogether because you dread the inevitable conflict that follows.

    We’ll approach these spots gently and with great care. Each of you will have the opportunity to witness each other’s healing and expression of vulnerable truths, opening up new pathways to connection.

  • Phase Three: Intimacy Lab

    Phase Three is a series of playful experiments we call Playdates. After setting you up for success by anticipating and mitigating the “usual” challenges, we’ll send you off to play on your own.

    Whether exploring a fantasy that always gets sticky, or doing an activity together that used to cause trouble, we’ll be right back to debrief with you and workshop exactly what’s happening in your systems and who needs what to return to safety.

  • Phase Four: Good Loving

    In the first few phases, you’ll witness your partner’s vulnerable parts and watch us give loving care and validation from a place of regulation and unconditional love. In phase four, you’ll practice overcoming your own dysregulation on the battlefield of shame and take turns giving each other what you most deeply need.

    This skill is the gold you’ll take with you for the rest of your lives.

What is it made of?

  • Nervous System Care

    Your nervous system is a key player in your holistic wellbeing. Breathwork, mindfulness, and targeted nervous system practices in an environment of secure attachment brings your body into homeostasis & regulation.

  • Somatic Awareness & Healing

    Your body communicates with you in so many ways beyond what you’re habitually aware of. Deepening your sense of your body helps in everything from emotional regulation to accessing pleasure. New embodied experiences of love and acceptance give you a reason to believe you’re lovable and safe.

  • IFS-Informed Parts Work

    All of the parts that make up your inner world are vital players in shame and the ways it shows up in your sex life and relationships. Getting to know them and learning how to love them changes everything.

  • Gentle Reparenting

    Part of the new way of being with yourself is to give voice to your scared, shamed parts and allow them to be witnessed in their pain. You get to tell us all about it and have an embodied experience of being met with compassion and unconditional love.

  • Talk Sessions

    Sometimes you need to slow down and talk it out. We open up space to process, unpack, and debrief your experiences and coach you on integrating your insights back into your daily life.

  • Kink Exploration

    For those who desire, we’ll help you explore BDSM consciously. Going deep into the realm of emotional safety, we’ll support you to create a sandbox of safety around the places you’ve been too afraid to touch.

  • Playdates

    While we’ll be there to support you before and after, we’ll always send you off for alone time so you can explore fantasies and try out your new skills together.

Guiding Principles

  • Our shame spots almost always show up in our sex lives, so we find that aiming at sexual shame inherently addresses the other places in our lives where that shame pops up. Less shame means better sex and more pleasure everywhere.

  • We've all been told the story that deep healing work is hard and scary and will drag you through the mud. We believe that healing is just as possible through play. If laughter is the best medicine, why can't that be true for all of our pains?

  • The inner critic doesn't get to run the show here. When difficult feelings or protector parts show up, we take them seriously. We believe they are younger, frightened versions of yourself who are trapped in an old Hellscape, and we're delighted to stop and take the time to give them safety and bring them up to speed about the new, safe reality you're creating for yourself.

  • What's missing for so many people is a safe space to explore, try new things, make mistakes, and figure it all out. Our pleasure-centered coaching right-sizes shame and provides a safe, even delicious environment to explore and take the shamey edge off of your secret, painful inner world. Let’s rewrite the old stories about what you don’t get to have and turn directly toward your desires.

  • Our goal is to give you an understanding of your inner world of parts to foster deep self-compassion, and a lifelong toolkit for how to be in a more loving, kind, gentle relationship with yourself and your partner. As soon as you right-size the shame that has held you down, you create room to invite in the things you desire most.

Read our Ethics Statement here.