That’s what a lifestyle club felt like to me. Eventually.

I grew up in a polyamorous household. I’m a sexually empowered person who has moved in sexually empowered spaces for most of my adult life. This isn’t a story about shock or discovery. It’s a story about finally walking into a specific world my clients have been living in, and finding out what I didn’t know I was missing, and what I didn’t know was still living in me.

Getting In the Room

I was nervous as hell.

About belonging to it. Because a lifestyle club isn’t a bunch of strangers meeting in the dark. It’s a community. A real one. Getting there meant going through a process of being vetted, accepted, and welcomed into a group of people who already knew each other, already had history, already had a thing going that I was being invited into.

I had to become an accepted member of a pretty large, established community before I ever walked through the door. That process alone told me something. These aren’t people who stumbled into something. They chose it, built it, and protect it.

What I Found There

Once I was in, I felt like I belonged.

The room was full of people who weren’t managing their image. They weren’t performing normalcy or bracing for judgment. They were just present, in a way that’s genuinely rare, and there’s something moving about that regardless of the context.

What struck me most wasn’t the sexuality. It was everything around it. People talking about vacations they’d taken together. Wine. Good conversation. Genuine warmth between people who had real history with each other. The outside world flattens the lifestyle into something purely sexual, and from inside the room that framing looks embarrassingly small. This is a community. It has texture and history and care in it.

The consent culture was how people moved. How they made eye contact. How they redirected without making it into something. I watched someone decline an advance and the other person just nod and keep moving. No scene. No weirdness. Nobody had to manage it because everyone already understood the rules.

I had a good time. I’d go back. Honestly, I’d go back for the conversation as much as anything else. There’s something about a space where people have had to get honest about what they want that makes the talking different too. The intimacy of people actually being real with each other was its own thing worth returning for.

I also want to be clear about what else I saw, because the full picture matters clinically. There were couples who came in already carrying something unresolved. Someone who read as anxious in a way that wasn’t excitement. A person who looked like they were accommodating rather than choosing. The lifestyle doesn’t create relational problems. It just gives existing ones a lot of room to move around in.

What Surfaced in Me

Here’s the part I didn’t expect to write.

I thought I’d done this work. I’m a therapist who specializes in shame. I spent my twenties dismantling the messages I absorbed about sex, desire, and what kind of person I was allowed to be. I thought that was behind me.

Walking into that space brought up shame I didn’t know I was still carrying. Fear of rejection. Fear of being seen a certain way. The old stuff surfaced in a completely new container. And I had to consciously push through it to stay present.

That was information. Shame doesn’t disappear because we do the work. It goes quiet, and then a new context wakes it back up. I know this. I just hadn’t felt it so personally in a long time.

What it gave me was a much more grounded understanding of what clients are navigating when they enter the lifestyle, especially early on. It’s a reckoning with every internalized message about who you’re allowed to be and what you’re allowed to want. Even for people who think they’re past it.

What This Changed for Me Clinically

Consent is a culture, not a checklist. Clients tell me the lifestyle has made them better communicators. I used to nod at that. Now I actually get it. When the whole environment is built around visible, ongoing, mutual checking in, people learn things about communication that most couples never have to develop. That’s the culture doing something real.

The emotional complexity isn’t pathology. Even when nothing external is dramatic, a lot is moving through a person in that space. Attachment, desire, security, jealousy, aliveness, all of it at once and fast. Clients processing a lifestyle experience need a clinician who can sit with that without flinching, without pathologizing it, and without redirecting toward whatever feels more clinically familiar.

Shame is doing active harm in the therapy room. The lifestyle community has built real relational sophistication largely without clinical support, and often in spite of it. Clients in the lifestyle have been reading therapists’ faces for years. They know what a tightened expression means. They know what a clarifying question that’s really a judgment question sounds like. That takes a toll. Most of them have just accepted it as part of the cost of being who they are.

You can’t serve what you haven’t tried to understand. Going didn’t make me a lifestyle participant. It made me a clinician who’s been in the room. If your map of the lifestyle comes entirely from what clients have told you, you’re working with incomplete information. You may be pathologizing health. You may be treating the wrong thing entirely.

If You Work With These Clients

Examine your own responses before they land in session. Get genuinely educated through AASECT and Sexual Health Alliance, not just a workshop you took once. Ask what the experience was like for them instead of asking in a way that already has an emotional answer built in. Learn the difference between distress that comes from stigma and distress that comes from an actual relational problem. And when a client walks in with a negotiated relationship structure that’s taken real thought and real conversation, recognize that for what it is. Most couples never do that work at all.

I grew up knowing that people build their intimate lives in ways that don’t fit the template. Going to that lifestyle club didn’t change that. It deepened it. And it surfaced things in me I wasn’t expecting, which is probably the most clinically useful thing that could have happened.

My clients in the lifestyle deserve a clinician who’s tried to understand this from the inside. Actually from the inside.

Ann Russo, LCSW, MA is the founder of AMR Therapy & Support Services and the creator of the Religious Trauma Treatment Model (RTTM). She specializes in religious trauma, identity, sexuality, and inclusive care. Her book Healing Religious Trauma is forthcoming from PESI.