Darren Jamieson: On this week’s episode of The Engaging Marketeer, I’m interviewing Lissa Aara Gray. Uh, Lissa is going to be talking to me about a lot of personal details. So,
[0:49]
Darren Jamieson: I have to issue a trigger warning right at the start of this podcast. She’s going to be talking to me about a lot of toxic relationships, a lot of abuse, about, uh, pornography and its effect on the young, and also about rape. So, this is going to be, uh, an interesting one.
[1:07]
Darren Jamieson: It’s going to be a deep one, and I’m probably not going to say a lot. I’m just going to listen. Hello. Hello. Hello, Darren.
[1:15]
Darren Jamieson: Hello. Um, I’m loving the, uh, the mix, the red there of the, the glasses, the lipstick, and the top. Is that planned?
[1:24]
Larissa Astara Gray: Yeah, it is.
[1:31]
Darren Jamieson: We won’t go into detail because some people listen to this and they can’t see what you look like. So, uh, that that would be something of me.
[1:37]
Darren Jamieson: So, you go around giving talks about the effect of, um, pornography and sex for teenagers and children. Is that correct?
[1:46]
Larissa Astara Gray: Yes. Nearly. So, nearly. Yes. I’m a positive sex education speaker,
[1:58]
Larissa Astara Gray: and I call myself positive is because what my main aim is to prevent negative sexual experiences. So much of my life was destroyed because of toxic sexual experiences and it caused me such destruction and a lot of my voice taken away and disempowerment that now I want to empower young people to give them their voices, to give them a confidence about it, to educate them on what’s right, what’s wrong, what to put value on themselves the most really and to be able to have those conversations around sex to be able to say no comfortably.
[2:43]
Larissa Astara Gray: Yes, comfortably to know what’s available. And when it comes to pornography, it’s really, it’s not the effects. Some of it is the effects, but it’s guiding them and helping them understand that a lot of what they’re seeing isn’t actually what is a normal sexual experience. And there’s a lot of hidden dangers and truths behind that that they need to be aware of.
[3:04]
Darren Jamieson: And sorry I got a bit something stuck in me throat there which is very this always happens at the start of podcasts which is very inconvenient.
[3:12]
Darren Jamieson: So what made you want to do that, to go around teaching people about that?
[3:23]
Larissa Astara Gray: I’ve really wanted to do it Darren since about 2010. I’ve just had a burning passion to go into schools and teach sex education.
[3:33]
Larissa Astara Gray: But I really thought that who am I to do that? I have no qualifications. I have this, that and the other. And I put up a lot of barriers to being able to do that. And I went away and I got married and I
[3:48]
Larissa Astara Gray: had another toxic relationship. The red flags started to appear. It was another violent relationship. It was another abusive relationship. There was a lot of coercion, gaslighting, um, putdowns. It was, it was hell. And I was, we had a child and he was coming up to two. And I
[4:11]
Larissa Astara Gray: found out that my husband had been cheating on me since two weeks after we got married. And it was kind of like my get out of jail free card because it
[4:20]
Larissa Astara Gray: really pushed me to say, “I’m done. I’m not going to have another toxic relationship. I’m not going to have another unhealthy relationship. I’m not going to let my son see me being called a [ __ ] a [ __ ] and a [ __ ] I’m not going to have him see me being hit or with bruises all over me. I don’t want to ever have him see me being disrespected. And it was my get out of jail free card. And I walked away. I spent the next eight years focusing on being the best mother I could be and giving my son everything that he could and he’s really thriving and nourishing. He’s doing very very well in his life. He plays ice hockey. He has just passed an exam to get in a very good school. But three years ago,
[5:08]
Larissa Astara Gray: I still had this burning need to get my voice out there. And I spoke to a friend of mine who’s a pro professional speaking coach and I said, “David, I need to get my voice out there.” And he says, “Well, what do you want to do?” I said, “Well, I really want to go into schools and teach sex education, but I can’t. I’m not qualified.” And he said, “You don’t need to be. I’ve been speaking in schools for 23 years, and I’ve got no qualifications. I’ve just created the talks, and I can show you how you do it.”
[5:47]
Larissa Astara Gray: He took down a lot of barriers that I put up around myself and he said I’m doing a speaker mastermind come on that which I did and that’s how it all started. I met fellow professional speakers who’d shared their journey who shared lots of wisdom and knowledge how that I could learn the craft and engage audiences you know and be the best speaker that I could possibly be. And I did it because I’ve never been able to have a healthy relationship. Every single one of my relationships since I was raped when I was 13 was very, um, toxic and controlling and you know awful.
[6:23]
Larissa Astara Gray: And because of that, I want to empower young people to be able to have healthy relationships and stop the non-consensual and the negative sexual experiences so that they can have good relationships.
[6:40]
Darren Jamieson: So when you met this person that you married, the second marriage that you said was no… only one marriage. I’ve only had one marriage.
[6:47]
Larissa Astara Gray: So it’s the sorry it’s the second meaningful relationship then. It was the one marriage. Yeah.
[6:53]
Darren Jamieson: Were there any signs in advance that what this person was like?
[6:58]
Larissa Astara Gray: Not till I was in there. And this is what happens with a lot of relationships. There’s a lot of love bombing. There’s a lot of really nice stuff that happens at the beginning and then the red flags start coming. And what happens when I talk about it in college, I call it the worm. And W is if a relationship is making you feel weak, your own feelings denied, repressed or manipulated.
[7:23]
Larissa Astara Gray: Then the worm has started and that’s what happens. They worm their way in and then the red flags start happening and you question your own reality. You question, “Oh no, they couldn’t be doing that. They’re too nice. That, you know, that’s not them.” And you make excuses and you think of all the nice things that they’ve done and you let those red flags go. You let things slide and then you invest more of you into the relationship. You invest more of your time into the relationship. Sometimes even money. Like with my ex-husband, I built a home with him, so I put all of my savings and my money into it. And you don’t want to admit it’s a failure.
[8:10]
Larissa Astara Gray: That’s a really big part of how, you know, I really didn’t want another failed relationship. I didn’t want to have another failure because when you have a failure you get a lot of people giving you pity and all of that, and that’s a lot of negative energy. So you tend to shut up and put up, and you try and make it right, you try and make it work and you try and make it fit, but it never will. And so when you identify the worm, that’s when you’ve got to go and seek help and get support and start making the moves to get out of that relationship.
[8:54]
Darren Jamieson: And how quickly did it start that you thought, “Do you know what? I’ve made a mistake here.”
[9:02]
Larissa Astara Gray: Probably about six months in. Yeah. But again, I kind of went, “Okay, it’s not too bad. I can work on that. I can change him. I can do, you know, you make up all these scenarios to make it work.” Because at that point you were invested and certain things because the love bombing was so intense and the… well, they were lies. The manipulation of who they really were.
[9:37]
Larissa Astara Gray: You fall in love with the person that you think they are because that’s what you’re hoping for and that’s what they’ve presented. And so you’re constantly searching for somebody that’s not actually there.
[9:51]
Darren Jamieson: So the term love bombing is a relatively new term. Can you give an example of what was done to be lovebombing?
[10:02]
Larissa Astara Gray: Taking being interested in things that I was really interested in, mirroring your core values, mirroring what you like and what you don’t like. You know, I had various certain beliefs and he’d align with those. He would do things that I wanted to do in the early days constantly, buy me things that I really loved, take a lot of, um, pay me a lot of compliments, buy me nice things that I wanted. Really be making me feel like a princess, making me feel like, you know, wow, I’ve really met somebody that loves me and wants to do so many things with me and shares my values, shares everything that I want.
[11:00]
Darren Jamieson: And what was that first sign, you say six months in? What was the first thing that you thought, “This isn’t quite right”?
[11:08]
Larissa Astara Gray: I caught him out on a lie.
[11:13]
Larissa Astara Gray: I was supposed to meet him in Cairo. He lived in Egypt. So I was meant to meet him in Cairo. He said he was in Cairo. He was a tour guide. So he was guiding people around the pyramids and doing some certain things in Cairo. I said, “Well, I’ll come to Cairo. We can go to the pyramids and then we can fly back to Luxor together and do D.”
[11:37]
Larissa Astara Gray: I flew to Cairo. We did what we were going to do. Then we flew back to Luxor together and had a lovely time and then he’d gone out the next morning for something and I was looking for something and I found a plane ticket in his bag showing that he’d flown out to Cairo the day before like I had.
[12:01]
Larissa Astara Gray: So it was a real cognitive dissonance. I was just really confused, like, “Why have you made up this whole story that you were working in Cairo and you weren’t. You flew out there the same day that I did.”
[12:26]
Larissa Astara Gray: But of course, there was a big story and there was a big, you know, apology and you know, it was, and so you start questioning yourself but at the same time you’re getting, again, love bombed with some other stuff and told, you know, this had gone wrong and I, he didn’t want to let me down and, you know, it was all turned on to support me and to help me, but it wasn’t you. You know, there was a lot of things going on under there that I had no idea what he was up to.
[13:03]
Darren Jamieson: And how did it end? What was the final straw?
[13:07]
Larissa Astara Gray: The final straw was, um, a lady added me on Facebook and whenever somebody adds me on Facebook and I don’t know them, I just send them a little message and I say, “Hi, do I know you? How do I know you?” And this lady says, “You don’t know me, but I know you. And I have a child with your husband, and the child needs a bone marrow transplant from Amir. That’s my son.” And I was just like, “Wow, okay. Right.”
[13:41]
Larissa Astara Gray: And of course, I confronted my husband and said this woman from Poland’s got in touch. She says you, she has a baby with you, with and that the baby’s sick and it needs some help from Amir and it went into a massive argument and all of this, that and the other.
[14:07]
Larissa Astara Gray: So I did a bit of Colombo or, uh, CSI or whatever you want to call it, and the photograph of the sick child that she sent me, I reverse first image searched it and I found out it was somebody else’s baby from 2012 in Poland. It was off the internet.
[14:32]
Larissa Astara Gray: And I found out she didn’t have a baby but she wanted to ruin his life. So, she had had a relationship with him that started two weeks after we’d got married and we’d got married, you know, properly in the British embassy in Cairo.
[14:48]
Larissa Astara Gray: Um, because in Egypt you see, sometimes they have what they call business wives, and this is where they, it’s usually a 20-year-old or a 30-year-old young Egyptian male with a 60-year-old woman, and they’ve obviously come to Egypt on a holiday and then they are love bombed by a young man and then they start siphoning off their money.
[15:23]
Larissa Astara Gray: But because there was only 10 years in between me and Hamza, I didn’t think I was a business wife.
[15:30]
Larissa Astara Gray: Um, but, and also business wives don’t tend to get the proper full marriage at the embassy in Cairo, they tend to get something called an orphe, which is just a marriage paper in a local lawyer’s office.
[15:50]
Larissa Astara Gray: So, and of course, I had all of his friends and his family saying that he wasn’t like these men that would do all of this. So, I thought he was different. Um, but yeah, so we were… it was… I don’t know where we are with the question, but I don’t even know what the question was.
[16:15]
Darren Jamieson: Yeah. So, it was two… yeah. So, he’d been having an affair for two weeks since we’d got married.
[16:22]
Larissa Astara Gray: But, but he didn’t have, he didn’t have the job. So, business wives is a thing in Egypt.
[16:27]
Larissa Astara Gray: It’s just a standard thing that everybody accepts that… yeah. Well, I don’t know whether they marry older women on a holiday and it’s just a transactional thing. So,
[16:38]
Larissa Astara Gray: they legally marry but not with full marriage rights.
[16:43]
Larissa Astara Gray: Yeah. Because in the Islam, in the religion, they can marry four wives. So, a lot of the Egyptians will have an Egyptian wife that they will have children with, that’s of childbearing years, and then they’ll have a business wife that will end up paying and supporting them and supporting their Egyptian family. It’s quite a common thing.
[17:14]
Darren Jamieson: And do the business wives usually know that that’s what’s going on?
[17:23]
Larissa Astara Gray: They don’t at first and then it becomes, it gets to a point where suddenly they’ll say, “Oh, I need to have an Egyptian wife. My family wants me to have an Egyptian wife.” Duh.
[17:32]
Larissa Astara Gray: And they have to either accept it or they have to walk away and lose all the money they’ve invested in that relationship.
[17:41]
Darren Jamieson: And I’m guessing the business wives are usually Westerners from the UK or the United States?
[17:50]
Larissa Astara Gray: Uh, United States, uh, Germany, Holland, uh, Poland, yeah, Russia, all different, um, yeah, all over the world, different because Egypt’s a major tourist site, you know, with all the ancient Egyptian stuff. So, yeah.
[18:09]
Darren Jamieson: And do you know if your now ex-husband, presumably?
[18:14]
Larissa Astara Gray: Yeah. Did he have other wives that you knew about or found out about?
[18:22]
Larissa Astara Gray: Well, he obviously had this Polish woman and what he would do was I’d be over there for a month or so and then I’d come back to England for a bit, she would come out and then as she went home I’d come back.
[18:38]
Larissa Astara Gray: So it was, you know, and whether he had other women on the go, probably. I wouldn’t like a time share really. I suppose. Yeah, a little bit like that.
[18:46]
Larissa Astara Gray: Yeah.
[18:47]
Darren Jamieson: So, um, yeah, that’s how, that’s… I don’t know. There probably is more.
[18:55]
Larissa Astara Gray: Yeah, there probably is. I mean, that is a pattern. That’s something I imagine that someone’s not going to stop because it worked for him for a period. He got what he wanted.
[19:07]
Darren Jamieson: Um, how did you, how did you meet him?
[19:11]
Larissa Astara Gray: Um, I had been going out to Egypt for about seven years before I met him. I loved ancient Egypt since I was a little girl. I was fascinated by all the temples and the tombs and all the mythology and I’d studied it for many years and I loved all that side of it.
[19:31]
Larissa Astara Gray: So I used to go out to Luxor and go and visit all the different temples and sacred sites all over Egypt, Cairo, Alexandria, Aswan. And one year I heard all the stories. I knew all the stories of the, um, you know, the business wives and all. You saw them walking down the streets together and some of them looked really, it just looked so wrong, you know.
[19:56]
Larissa Astara Gray: And I swore I’d never have anything to do with an Egyptian because I wouldn’t know whether I, you know, could 100% trust. And, you know, I was a bit wary of the lies and also the Muslim religion because of the multiple wife thing.
[20:17]
Larissa Astara Gray: And Hamdi turned up as my tour guide to take me down to the temple of Aswan one day.
[20:27]
Larissa Astara Gray: And I just had an instant attraction to him.
[20:34]
Larissa Astara Gray: And he just seemed to have an energy that was different to everybody else.
[20:38]
Larissa Astara Gray: And I really believed that he was not like all of those, ’cause a lot of them were very sleazy and it just, it, but he was not like that. So, I really did convince myself that he wasn’t one of them, but he was.
[20:56]
Larissa Astara Gray: And I’m not proud to say it. It’s, it was a very hard lesson.
[21:02]
Darren Jamieson: But it’s a lesson by all accounts you’ve had to learn a few times with the wrong partners.
[21:09]
Larissa Astara Gray: Yeah. A lot. Yeah.
[21:12]
Darren Jamieson: You said that was the second abusive relationship, I believe.
[21:21]
Larissa Astara Gray: No, that was probably about six. Okay.
[21:28]
Darren Jamieson: Relationship. Yeah. What was the first?
[21:36]
Larissa Astara Gray: The first was, God,
[21:43]
Larissa Astara Gray: I’d say it was probably,
[21:51]
Larissa Astara Gray: you know, I was, I was raped when I was 13 and that set up some very deep negative self-beliefs like I was unfit for human consumption, that men just wanted me for sex, that I had to accept violence, that I wasn’t worthy of connection and it also set up deep shame which, again, Dr. Brien Brand says, “Shame is the fear of not being good enough for connection.” It set up, um, no self-respect because I wasn’t respected.
[22:17]
Larissa Astara Gray: Sex wasn’t respected. So, I didn’t have any respect for myself. I felt worthless. Um, so as I got into relationships, I attracted men that fitted those beliefs and those patterns.
[22:33]
Larissa Astara Gray: So at 14, I was at school and I attracted a guy that was very wealthy actually. He was the son of a multi-millionaire, but he was quite a character and a bad boy and a bit of a rogue, and we got into all sorts of trouble together and stuff over time, and that’s when a little bit of violence seeped into that. We’d have quite violent, volatile arguments and things were thrown at each other and stuff like that.
[23:01]
Larissa Astara Gray: And then when I got out of the relationship with him, I went out with this guy Billy that lived in Solihull and he was working in a clothes shop.
[23:30]
Larissa Astara Gray: But he was stealing from the clothes shop and then he stole from me and some of the things that he did to me were quite violent and, yeah, it just kind of went from one bad boy to the next. By the age of 18, I
[23:46]
Larissa Astara Gray: was going out with a drug dealer who was earning quite a lot of money from drugs. Because when you’ve been in lots of toxic relationships, you get a bad reputation.
[24:05]
Larissa Astara Gray: You’re a bit slashed.
[24:08]
Larissa Astara Gray: And when you have a reputation, a reputation is like shame on steroids. You think, “Oh my god, do they know what I was about me? You can’t look at anybody. You don’t feel comfortable in your own skin.” I know girls that have left town to get away from a reputation, start off somewhere new or even go move to a different country. So, in order to feel just okay, you know, I’d have to have an alcoholic drink just to feel comfortable in the pub, you know, a large vodka or something like that.
[24:41]
Larissa Astara Gray: And I’d got such a lot of self-hatred and, um, you know, other toxic emotions going on inside that, you know, I wanted to numb it out with, um, drugs and alcohol. And the rave scene started when I was sort of 15, 16. So that I just got into that because taking ecstasy actually made me feel loved and happy and what I really wanted and it took away all that pain that I didn’t want to deal with.
[25:07]
Larissa Astara Gray: But of course there was a lot of unsavory characters in that world and the drug dealer I went out with ‘cause obviously it was I was given free drugs. I was treated to drinks. I was spoiled and everything and he bought me lots of nice clothes and this that and the other but then the control started and the violence started and I wasn’t allowed to go here or anywhere and I had to be with him all the time and I couldn’t, I didn’t want to be restricted like that and I didn’t want to be controlled and violent.
[25:55]
Larissa Astara Gray: So I ended that relationship but he went absolutely nuts and he made my life hell. I was, um, everybody in the groups around Solihull, they stopped talking to me because they took his side because it was more, it was better for them to, um, you know, be on his side than mine. So he turned everybody against me. I couldn’t go anywhere. If I turned up somewhere around town or something, somebody would let him know. He’d come and pour a drink over me or he’d, um, steal my handbag or something and I tried getting injunctions out on him.
[26:39]
Larissa Astara Gray: Um, that didn’t stop him. Lots of things.
[26:44]
Larissa Astara Gray: And then one day I was at college. I was studying beauty at the time and the security came in and said, “Does anybody own a grey Metro registration?” and I’m like, “Yeah, that’s mine.” And he said, “Oh, somebody’s poured paint all over it.”
[26:56]
Larissa Astara Gray: So, I went down to look at it and by the time I got there, they’d come back and poured paint stripper all over it. And the reason he’d done that was because my car was my only link to freedom and then destroying that, it stopped all of my freedom.
[27:11]
Larissa Astara Gray: And I had no choice but to kind of go back with him because there was no way of stopping what was happening. And I ended up in hospital.
[27:32]
Larissa Astara Gray: Um, I had like stroke pins and needles and weird feelings all down the left side of my body. I couldn’t speak English. I think I had a massive nervous breakdown at that time. But it was safer to pretend to be in a relationship with him than to put up with the violence and the abuse that I was getting from trying to be away. And not just me, my friends were getting it as well. So, they would be tortured.
[28:04]
Larissa Astara Gray: Um, my girlfriends, um, they were sent sex toys and humiliated and it was, it was awful and I wanted to stop all of that. Um, but I had no choice. Yeah.
[28:10]
Larissa Astara Gray: So, I went back with him. Then a few months later, he got arrested and went to prison.
[28:17]
Larissa Astara Gray: But then when he got out of prison, I tried to move on with my life, but I got another, um, let down relationship. Not violent this time, but my dad called him the white knight, like, um, Aean was the black knight and Terry was the white knight, but Terry still used to let me down and go out with the lads and not give me the respect that I really deserved. But he wasn’t, he wasn’t such a bad lad. He was a young guy just wanted to go out and have fun.
[28:49]
Larissa Astara Gray: But when Aean got out of prison and he wrote to me constantly when he was in prison, I, I know his cell was like a shrine to me. There was pictures he’d done art in prison and he’d, um, done pictures, you know, beautiful pictures from my photographs that he’d done when I was young, you know.
[29:13]
Larissa Astara Gray: But I wrote to him and he wrote to me and I used to go and visit him because I was terrified that if I didn’t, I, you know, he’d send somebody round. I was terrified.
[29:20]
Larissa Astara Gray: And when he got out of prison, he’d been using heroin in prison. And so when he got out, he got me. He introduced me to heroin, I believe, because it was a form of control. And then, you know, I thought I could, it took away all the pain. I’d got such a lot of pain inside of me.
[29:42]
Larissa Astara Gray: And, you know, back in those days, Darren, we didn’t know about post-traumatic stress. There was no real counseling or anything like that that I could go to for help. The police that I’d reached out to help me hadn’t, couldn’t, and didn’t do anything to support me. And of course, they get you in a negative cycle. You know, if you talk to the police, you’re a grass. You know, there’s a lot of barriers that are put up to you reaching out and getting support and help.
[30:10]
Larissa Astara Gray: So, um, I became a heroin addict. I thought I could control it at first, but then suddenly it creeps in and it’s a physical addiction. So, your body actually produces heroin and when you actually take it, your body needs more of it to survive.
[30:27]
Larissa Astara Gray: Um, and so then you can become physically dependent. So I was addicted to heroin for about 3 years.
[30:37]
Larissa Astara Gray: Um, he went back to prison but I was still running around. I was working myself at the time. I had my own salon. I used to get up in the morning, take my drugs so that I could operate, go to work at lunchtime. I’d go to a dealer, come back to work, finish work till 8:00 at night, then go and get some more drugs, go home, sleep for a couple of hours, come and, you know, repeat the cycle until I just ended, I just had to… I knew there was some part of me that knew that I wasn’t this bad and wrong person and I needed to clean up. And I went to NA,
[31:20]
Larissa Astara Gray: Narcotics Anonymous,
[31:23]
Larissa Astara Gray: and I did try not rehab, but I tried to get clean a few times. And then a lady at NA took me under her wing and she’d been down the path a lot lower with heroin than I had. And
[31:39]
Larissa Astara Gray: I thought, if she can get clean, I can get clean. And she took me under her wing and she helped me get my life back.
[31:47]
Larissa Astara Gray: I did my detox at her house and that was, um, the start of my new life and actually, that was on 7th of February 2000, so I’m 26 years and a couple of days clean. Well, congratulations.
[32:03]
Larissa Astara Gray: Thank you. Thank you. I treated myself yesterday to some Indian sweets. I do love Indian sweets. Um,
[32:12]
Larissa Astara Gray: but yeah, that was the day I decided to live and I did cold turkey at her house and then I went to a clinic in London and I had Nalrexone implants put in. I put one
[32:26]
Larissa Astara Gray: implant lasts about 5 weeks. So it’s an opiate blocker. So you can’t actually use opium, uh, any, you know, heroin. It won’t work. So it kind of gives you those five weeks to come back to the
[32:42]
Larissa Astara Gray: planet earth and I had five of those implants and then after that I went into oral tablet version of that for about 6 months. So that until I’d, you know, sorted my head out. But I did end up in
[32:57]
Larissa Astara Gray: another kind of toxic relationship with my sponsor’s nephew
[33:05]
Larissa Astara Gray: who was quite a controlling and, you know, a bit of a bad boy and up to no good. So even though I got clean
[33:14]
Larissa Astara Gray: that world had become my normal, you know, robbing, lying, cheating, that was what I was used to. That was what was normal.
[33:22]
Larissa Astara Gray: But it never should have been my normal ever. You know, I was from a nice family in a nice area. You know, my life could have gone that way or that way and it
[33:30]
Larissa Astara Gray: and it went that way. Um so, and of course, I’d had 15 years of
[33:37]
Larissa Astara Gray: quite intense trauma with no support, no help with that. And, you know, people used to say, “Oh, she’s just angry. She’s an angry woman.” But I had a right to all that anger. I’d had such a lot of pain and trauma and suffering. And this is what I show the young people at
[33:53]
Larissa Astara Gray: college. I’d show them a chart called false feelings chart. And on the left hand side, it tells you the false feeling
[34:00]
Larissa Astara Gray: like being cheated on, abused or, um, you know, all the different, lied to or whatever. And then the middle column tells you what the real feelings are underneath that. So there might be anger, distrust, um self-hatred,
[34:19]
Larissa Astara Gray: you know, all the real feelings that are underneath. And then it tells you on the third column what you need to balance that out. What are the needs? And I was having all of the first column happening to me with none of the support or the
[34:34]
Larissa Astara Gray: the needs filled at all. Um, so yeah, 15 years of trauma, I then went
[34:41]
Larissa Astara Gray: into more and more, you know, they were just negative. I was still repeating the negative relationship patterns.
[34:50]
Larissa Astara Gray: But Darren, I was, I kept working on myself and I did I also got he got help when I got off
[34:59]
Larissa Astara Gray: heroin through acupuncture and through energy healing. And that really, really helped me
[35:08]
Larissa Astara Gray: understand a lot of the mental and emotional patterns and stuff that I’d been playing out and helped me
[35:16]
Larissa Astara Gray: understand that I wasn’t wrong. And so then I started to learn some of these things myself. Um so it’s been a long
[35:25]
Larissa Astara Gray: journey of 30 odd years of self-healing and self-work and
[35:33]
Larissa Astara Gray: it’s like me and my friend call it the eternal onion ‘cause I had so many layers and layers of trauma that that it takes
[35:41]
Larissa Astara Gray: a long time to get back to who I really was and to reclaim myself and reclaim my voice. So
[35:49]
Larissa Astara Gray: during this time, relationships started to get a little bit better each one. But
[35:58]
Larissa Astara Gray: in the time I’d have I’d have a toxic relationship and then I’d probably shut down for a couple of years. I remember having what the doctors called me, but I
[36:08]
Larissa Astara Gray: don’t think it was me. I just think it was post-traumatic stress. And I literally couldn’t go out the house apart from to walk my dog and then go
[36:17]
Larissa Astara Gray: back to bed ‘cause I just couldn’t, I couldn’t process everything.
[36:23]
Larissa Astara Gray: Um, but I had a healthyish relationship in 2011, but again, I don’t think he wanted the marriage and the kids that I really wanted at that point. So he kind of had lied and manipulated about that. But
[36:40]
Larissa Astara Gray: that was probably the most healthiest that I ever had. And then I thought my marriage was healthy because it was aligning with a lot of things that I
[36:49]
Larissa Astara Gray: wanted, but if they’d have been true, he would have been amazing. But they weren’t. But they weren’t.
[36:57]
Darren Jamieson: I was going to ask, actually, because you
[37:05]
Darren Jamieson: you mentioned how you didn’t feel worth to yourself of connecting with the right person, which is why you seem to be attracted to the wrong people throughout your life. I was wondering if
[37:12]
Darren Jamieson: perhaps if the right person had come along maybe you would have pushed them away because the qualities in that person weren’t what you felt you deserved.
[37:21]
Larissa Astara Gray: Yeah. And I think you hear it, and now a lot of the time your nervous system doesn’t feel an attraction with the safe person because that’s not something that you’ve been familiar with. So it is a whole process of re-
[37:40]
Larissa Astara Gray: realigning and sorting out your nervous system and getting and clearing all the trauma out and understanding all the different relationship patterns and the relationship stuff so that you don’t
[37:55]
Larissa Astara Gray: make those same mistakes again. I had a brief relationship
[38:02]
Larissa Astara Gray: January last year till June and I really thought that that was going to be a healthy, conscious relationship ‘cause I
[38:09]
Larissa Astara Gray: hadn’t gone near a guy for like 8 years.
[38:19]
Larissa Astara Gray: But unfortunately again a few red flags started to pop up. I mean,
[38:29]
Larissa Astara Gray: not on the level that I’d been used to before, but it wasn’t, it wasn’t right.
[38:42]
Larissa Astara Gray: Well, that’s a positive, I guess.
[38:43]
Larissa Astara Gray: Yeah. But it’s got better. It has got better and, um,
[38:50]
Larissa Astara Gray: you know, now I would, it taught me yeah straight away I need to ask certain
[38:57]
Larissa Astara Gray: questions and I need to trust my intuition a lot more because I didn’t actually ask my intuition
[39:06]
Larissa Astara Gray: if it was completely right for me and my intuition along the way I’ve ignored
[39:15]
Larissa Astara Gray: it and that’s what’s got me into the hell that I’ve been in.
[39:22]
Larissa Astara Gray: And when I split up with Hamdy, my ex-husband,
[39:26]
Larissa Astara Gray: I really made a promise to listen to my intuition and build a new relationship with that part of me, that inner wisdom.
[39:33]
Larissa Astara Gray: And I had been doing that for a long time with different things. And I hadn’t really checked in with it 100% on this relationship because the boxes were
[39:43]
Larissa Astara Gray: being ticked. He was a Buddhist. He was practicing. He was doing all this thing.
[39:47]
Larissa Astara Gray: He didn’t drink alcohol. It was just like, yeah, he’s saying he’s written me love letters saying that he’s not, um, he’s human. He’ll make mistakes, but he’ll learn from those and work for them. So, I’m like, yes, conscious man that’s going to work on their stuff.
[40:04]
Larissa Astara Gray: Yes. Yes. Yes. Um, but that wasn’t the case, unfortunately.
[40:12]
Darren Jamieson: So yeah, things slipped and slided and yeah, so and again the red flags started to happen and I again was like, “No, that’s not happening. He’s not like that. He’s this amazing person. He’s Yes, that wouldn’t happen.” And it was just ignore that.
[40:29]
Larissa Astara Gray: Mmm. Um and I think because my son had been a single, you know, been with a single parent, his dad’s been in a different country, he desperately wanted a father figure
[40:44]
Larissa Astara Gray: and he was getting that and that was lovely for him and he really loved having a man to take him to play
[40:53]
Larissa Astara Gray: football and to do different things. So I kind of just ignored things a little bit and yeah, but it got to a point
[41:02]
Larissa Astara Gray: where we couldn’t ignore it anymore and it wasn’t right.
[41:06]
Darren Jamieson: So now you go around schools and you talk to people, you talk to children, uh trying to make sure they
[41:14]
Darren Jamieson: don’t make the same mistakes you did or make sure that I presume you speak to males as well to make sure they
[41:21]
Larissa Astara Gray: Yeah, they don’t make the same mistakes other people did. Um, you referenced pornography earlier. What’s your
[41:29]
Darren Jamieson: experience with that and how it’s affected you and how do you put that into words for school talks?
[41:37]
Larissa Astara Gray: Well, I think over the past 26 years as the internet has grown,
[41:44]
Larissa Astara Gray: you know, pornography, the word pornography comes from the Greek word pornograph to write about prostitutes.
[41:52]
Larissa Astara Gray: But we no longer write about them or see pictures. We’re now seeing very graphic video images of them. And they have
[42:01]
Larissa Astara Gray: become more and more, um, kind of like a new drug themselves because people watch
[42:08]
Larissa Astara Gray: them and maybe a vanilla kind of scene and then that’s not going to do it for
[42:16]
Larissa Astara Gray: them anymore. So then they go to something a little bit more extreme.
[42:20]
Larissa Astara Gray: They need a little bit more of a fix and a more of a fix. And nowadays, pornography
[42:29]
Larissa Astara Gray: is 88% violence against women.
[42:34]
Larissa Astara Gray: It’s, um, really derogatory. There’s a whole genre on rape
[42:43]
Larissa Astara Gray: and it’s doing a lot of practices which are very toxic and harmful.
[42:48]
Larissa Astara Gray: And young people are seeing that and they’re thinking that that’s how sex should be and that’s how, so to me it
[42:56]
Larissa Astara Gray: promotes non-consensual and unhealthy sexual experiences and relationships and the young people don’t
[43:04]
Larissa Astara Gray: know a lot of the secrets behind it but the children’s commissioner of the UK, so she’s the person that looks after our
[43:11]
Larissa Astara Gray: the well-being of our children, she did a survey. She’d done one in 2023 which brought some horrific stats around the young people seeing porn. 10%
[43:22]
Larissa Astara Gray: at the age of nine, 27% by the age of 11, and 50% by the age of 13.
[43:30]
Larissa Astara Gray: Those stats had gone up in the last two years, and she even entitled her August 2025 report, “Sex is kind of broken now.”
[43:40]
Larissa Astara Gray: So 44% of the young people that had seen porn had seen rape or where the participant was even asleep.
[43:50]
Larissa Astara Gray: And 44% agreed with the statement, “If a girl says no, she can be turned around.” So to me,
[43:59]
Larissa Astara Gray: education around pornography is the first thing that needs to be done because they’re seeing that and they’re thinking that this is normal sexual
[44:07]
Larissa Astara Gray: behavior and it’s not. It’s destroying lives. It’s destroying people.
[44:14]
Larissa Astara Gray: And so I started doing talks on it and I kept being asked for that topic as well that
[44:22]
Larissa Astara Gray: they need, wanted people to expose certain things and talk about the negative side of porn.
[44:28]
Larissa Astara Gray: And because I was so passionate about it, I formulated an online educational platform called
[44:36]
Larissa Astara Gray: Better Boundaries Online. It’s got free resources for young people.
[44:41]
Larissa Astara Gray: So, it goes into, you know, certain things that they need to be aware of if they see, like, 43% of young people now are participating in strangulation.
[44:53]
Larissa Astara Gray: And unfortunately, there have been deaths.
[44:59]
Larissa Astara Gray: And this is a really, really important area. One, it’s your voice. So it’s your consent.
[45:07]
Larissa Astara Gray: So without that shutdown, you cannot say stop if you want to.
[45:12]
Larissa Astara Gray: Also, it’s your breath, which is your life force.
[45:18]
Larissa Astara Gray: And thirdly, it’s your vagus nerve. So your vagus nerve is the master nerve of the whole of your nervous system that
[45:26]
Larissa Astara Gray: controls all of the bodily functions. So that gets messed up and damaged. You know, you’re in fight or
[45:35]
Larissa Astara Gray: flight. You’re in a danger zone. You know that a lot of my life, as we discussed earlier, Darren, was because my nervous system was messed up.
[45:45]
Darren Jamieson: Yeah.
[45:45]
Larissa Astara Gray: And so this is what has been encouraged through that. So then, Better Boundaries Online also has downloadable
[45:54]
Larissa Astara Gray: resources for parents, which are a couple of pounds. How to talk to your child about pornography, how to what to do if your child’s seen porn, how to
[46:02]
Larissa Astara Gray: approach it, that kind of thing. But there’s also subscribable, um, resources for schools, colleges, universities, young offenders units,
[46:11]
Larissa Astara Gray: um, anybody working with young people that want to really deal with this
[46:18]
Larissa Astara Gray: because it is the elephant in the room and it does need to be dealt with. And then Better Boundaries Online launched Porn Education Awareness Week in January
[46:27]
Larissa Astara Gray: which focuses on five areas that young people need to be educated. So the first day was on the effect that porn has on the viewer.
[46:37]
Larissa Astara Gray: Body image, incorrect sex, violence,
[46:41]
Larissa Astara Gray: that kind of thing. Then day two was about excessive and problematic use. So some people say it’s porn addiction. Um,
[46:50]
Larissa Astara Gray: as I interviewed a poor guy that was porn addicted who also had ADHD because that’s really important for people to
[46:58]
Larissa Astara Gray: know that when you have things like ADHD, you can become obsessive with things and, um, especially pornography.
[47:05]
Larissa Astara Gray: Then day three was about the hidden truths and dangers of the actors and actresses and I interviewed, um, an ex
[47:15]
Larissa Astara Gray: actor called Christopher and he exposes a lot of things that you wouldn’t even think of, you know, as a viewer, uh, that
[47:23]
Larissa Astara Gray: are going on. He was hospitalized three times, uh, because of erectile drugs.
[47:31]
Larissa Astara Gray: He, the erectile drug stopped working. So he started having injections to give him an erection and then the scar tissue was
[47:40]
Larissa Astara Gray: building up and he was told that if he didn’t stop that he probably would never get an erection again. And he goes into a
[47:49]
Larissa Astara Gray: lot of things in that interview that, um, even I didn’t realize, you know. So, and I’ve been studying sexuality for,
[47:59]
Larissa Astara Gray: you know,
[48:01]
Larissa Astara Gray: 16, 17 years. So, because I’ve studied it to heal my own
[48:08]
Larissa Astara Gray: and I’ve followed a lot of, um, sex educators and people for a very long time. And then
[48:17]
Larissa Astara Gray: day four is about social media’s, uh, role in this and how they’re feeding
[48:25]
Larissa Astara Gray: negative content and grooming and sextortion prevention and then also the
[48:33]
Larissa Astara Gray: false promises of OnlyFans and the regrets that some people have around that because, you know, even Channel 4
[48:40]
Larissa Astara Gray: recently have done a documentary about Bonnie, promoting her as a businesswoman, which
[48:48]
Larissa Astara Gray: is not what we want a role model for our young women. You know, that that girl,
[48:54]
Larissa Astara Gray: I’ll put money on it, will have a very, a fall at some point, a mental breakdown or something.
[49:02]
Darren Jamieson: Right.
[49:02]
Larissa Astara Gray: So, and then day five is the ethical side of pornography. So, you know, what we’re finding now is it isn’t just
[49:10]
Larissa Astara Gray: prostitution. It’s estimated that up to 50% of porn on the internet now is human and sex trafficking.
[49:16]
Larissa Astara Gray: So for that day I interviewed a woman that was, um, trafficked into porn at 14,
[49:23]
Larissa Astara Gray: into hardcore porn and some of the revelations she gave were, you know, very, very just, you know, sad.
[49:35]
Larissa Astara Gray: So there’s a lot of things that it’s education and it isn’t just for the young people, it’s for everybody.
[49:41]
Larissa Astara Gray: You know, recently in The Guardian, uh, there was an article that 53% of therapists are saying that their work is
[49:51]
Larissa Astara Gray: because of problematic porn use and the effects of that.
[49:56]
Larissa Astara Gray: In the UK recently, um, the government blocked Pornhub’s access to the UK. Um,
[50:06]
Larissa Astara Gray: But I’m technical. Teenagers are technical. Anybody with even the slightest knowledge would be able to get
[50:14]
Larissa Astara Gray: around that with a VPN. It would take 30, maybe 45 seconds to circumnavigate that.
[50:22]
Darren Jamieson: How do you think the government and the lawmakers in the UK are doing, uh, or are
[50:29]
Darren Jamieson: they doing enough to pull what’s actually online?
[50:35]
Larissa Astara Gray: That’s it. I think the online safety act’s a good start and, but safety and education, it needs to be a two-pronged
[50:43]
Larissa Astara Gray: effect because we’re kind of sending out a message that pornography is okay,
[50:52]
Larissa Astara Gray: but you can’t watch it till you’re 16 or 18 or whatever age it is. But it’s really not.
[51:00]
Larissa Astara Gray: It’s destroying a lot of people’s lives and it’s, and it’s encouraging very, very toxic practices.
[51:07]
Larissa Astara Gray: So they’re the things that need to be educated on and prevented at. And like you said, young people, if they’ve seen it once, it’s going to make them feel
[51:16]
Larissa Astara Gray: good because it activates their sexual energy and your sexual energy feels good. Alright. So, but they don’t
[51:23]
Larissa Astara Gray: understand that that activation of it feeling good will have an internal conflict with it because there’s
[51:30]
Larissa Astara Gray: something going on in the screen that actually they’re probably thinking this feels good but that I’m not sure whether that’s right.
[51:39]
Larissa Astara Gray: But if nobody’s telling them that it isn’t right, then they’re just going to think, “Oh, well that’s okay for when I’m 18 or I’m an adult or I, you know, that’s normal sexual practice.”
[51:52]
Larissa Astara Gray: And you know when I was talking earlier about going from the vanilla and needing more and more and more with people that have been addicted
[52:00]
Larissa Astara Gray: to porn, what their stories that they share say is they would even go to watching porn of a different sexual
[52:09]
Larissa Astara Gray: orientation to get the fix. And then they would feel shameful for watching that because it wasn’t
[52:17]
Larissa Astara Gray: something they really wanted to do. And that can even go to very, very extreme and very strange things but involving
[52:26]
Larissa Astara Gray: animals and all sorts of things which is paths that people never really, they needed that escalation. They needed that step up in order to make it work for them.
[52:35]
Darren Jamieson: You know, and the thing is, you know, you’re techy yourself. You can have three or four screens going and we’re
[52:42]
Darren Jamieson: not built for that. You know, that kind of sensory overload of seeing all these sexual things happening all at
[52:50]
Darren Jamieson: once. It’s the way I see it as well. I mean, the government making the decision to block Pornhub is like blocking Vanilla Ice
[52:58]
Darren Jamieson: Cream because you want to stop people eating ice cream.
[53:04]
Darren Jamieson: Yeah. It’s the most famous one that exists,
[53:12]
Darren Jamieson: but it’s probably also the most regulated. And the actors and actresses on there will be of age because they
[53:19]
Darren Jamieson: have to be for legal reasons. There’s far worse. Pornhub is way less regulated. Believe me, Darren. No,
[53:28]
Larissa Astara Gray: I’ve been following a lady called Laya Mithlweight. Her book is called Take Down Pornhub. She spent 15 years working
[53:34]
Larissa Astara Gray: with this. And the company that owns Pornhub is called MindGeek.
[53:44]
Larissa Astara Gray: And the content, anybody like me or you could upload onto Pornhub like any clip and it wouldn’t be tested or verified.
[53:51]
Larissa Astara Gray: Yeah. So, it could be of a non-consensual experience or thing.
[53:59]
Larissa Astara Gray: There was a lot, there was a lot of content. She spent years and she got them to remove 94%
[54:08]
Larissa Astara Gray: of their content. There was only, I think, 9% left or something. And even in that percentage that was left, there was still abuse.
[54:13]
Darren Jamieson: Alright.
[54:09]
Larissa Astara Gray: Yeah. So, it’s not regulated. None of it’s regulated.
[54:22]
Larissa Astara Gray: But it does have a spotlight on it. It is very easy to find. Whereas there will be corners of the internet which are far worse,
[54:30]
Larissa Astara Gray: which there will be the most atrocious stuff. I think that’s really where the government should be looking, not at
[54:40]
Larissa Astara Gray: something that everybody knows and sees anyway. And blocking it from the UK is like putting a piece of paper in front of a door.
[54:47]
Darren Jamieson: Yeah.
[54:47]
Larissa Astara Gray: It’s not going to stop anybody from accessing it. It really isn’t. Other than the elderly that don’t know how to use a VPN anyway.
[55:00]
Darren Jamieson: Yeah. And my son, he’s 11, so he’s just coming into that danger zone,
[55:09]
Darren Jamieson: but he knows tech on a different level. Like I bought him a Switch for his seventh. He was seven
[55:19]
Darren Jamieson: at Christmas, um, a few years ago. I think he was seven at the time. And on Boxing Day, I came down and I said, “Are you
[55:30]
Darren Jamieson: playing online?” He said, “Yeah.” He said, “I couldn’t do it on my account, so I went on yours.”
[55:39]
Darren Jamieson: You know, they’re set tech-savvy on a different level.
[55:43]
Larissa Astara Gray: Yeah. And what they found in Louisiana in America, when they put age verification on porn, porn use went down 80%, but dark web activity went up.
[55:53]
Darren Jamieson: Of course it did.
[55:54]
Larissa Astara Gray: So that is not a place we want our young people on at all. So yeah, there needs
[56:03]
Larissa Astara Gray: to be a different way and, you know, education around it like there is around drugs. You know, we have to tell them
[56:10]
Larissa Astara Gray: this is a harmful drug and this is why and this is what it can do to you and this is how it can destroy your life.
[56:16]
Larissa Astara Gray: You know, sex is the most beautiful, powerful thing in the universe. It created every single
[56:25]
Larissa Astara Gray: one of us, but it has been so disrupted and distorted that instead of it enhancing us and bringing us a lot of
[56:33]
Larissa Astara Gray: joy and pleasure, it’s been used as destruction. And porn is a big part of why that is happening and it
[56:41]
Larissa Astara Gray: needs to stop because it’s just encouraging so much toxic behavior. Yeah,
[56:47]
Darren Jamieson: that’s a beautiful message. Um, in some ways to end on because we are out of time. Would you believe we are out of time? I feel like
[56:57]
Darren Jamieson: we’ve only just scratched the surface of what we want to talk about. Yeah.
[57:01]
Darren Jamieson: But here we are. Um, for anyone listening to this who thinks, I would love to know more. I would love to speak to Lissa or
[57:09]
Darren Jamieson: I would love for Lissa to come in and talk to my students. What is the best way for someone to reach out to you?
[57:16]
Larissa Astara Gray: Through my website, larissa.co.uk.
[57:21]
Larissa Astara Gray: I have a big presence on LinkedIn as well. So you can find me Lissa Astara Gray. I’m the only one on LinkedIn. And
[57:28]
Larissa Astara Gray: then betterboundaries.co.uk is the online educational platform and
[57:33]
Larissa Astara Gray: there’s all the information on there for subscriptions and stuff like that. So, and all my details are on all of those.
[57:39]
Darren Jamieson: Okay. I will make sure the links for those are popped below the podcast. So,
[57:45]
Darren Jamieson: if you’re watching on YouTube, it’ll be in the description below the video. If you are listening on iTunes, Amazon,
[57:51]
Darren Jamieson: Audible, or Spotify or any other platform, it’ll be in the show notes below the podcast. You can click on any of those links and you can go through
[57:58]
Darren Jamieson: and connect with Lissa. Lissa, thank you very much for being a guest on The Engaging Marketeer. I feel we could have gone on for two, maybe three hours
[58:07]
Darren Jamieson: and it’s been a fascinating conversation. Thank you.
[58:10]
Larissa Astara Gray: Wow. Thank you, Darren, for having me on. Yes. Thank you.
