Love Is Us: Exploring Relationships and How We Connect

Love Is Us is a podcast about rebuilding connection where it matters most: with yourself, with your intimate partners, and with the people and communities you care about. Hosted by Karin Calde, PhD, CPC, a former therapist and current relationship coach with a background in Internal Family Systems, the show features thoughtful conversations with experienced practitioners and guides exploring love, attachment, intimacy, and the inner work that supports lasting relationships. Many episodes focus on the unique questions that arise in midlife, when long-standing patterns surface and the desire for deeper authenticity grows stronger. Karin also brings her experience facilitating legal, guided psychedelic work in Oregon into the conversation, offering a grounded, ethical perspective on how expanded states of awareness can support insight, healing, and relational growth when approached with care, integrity, and integration. You’ll hear honest, nuanced discussions about long-term partnership, dating, sex, and self-development, with an emphasis on depth, responsibility, and real-world application.

#80 The Second Worst Thing 01/01/2025

#79: Friendships in Midlife, with Brooke Ledbetter 11/26/2024

#79: Friendships in Midlife, with Brooke Ledbetter Listen to Karin and Brooke discuss the importance of friendships and how to bring more of them into your life. Friendships - including intimate relationships - fortify our mental health and, consequently, our physical health. When we don’t have these relationships, it can have a negative effect on our brain and can become harder to deal with stress and adversity. Hear Brooke talk about how to attract new friendships into your life and why having one deep relationship, such as with a romantic partner, isn’t enough. She and Karin also discuss how women in midlife can manage the discomfort that comes up when trying to make new friends at a time when their lives are changing and have more available time. Developing new friendships isn’t easy. Brooke and Karin discuss the importance of patience, intentionality, persistence, and the need to take risks and be vulnerable. And, possibly, most importantly, the need to be a friend to yourself first so you have a healthy, balanced foundation to start from. Brooke Ledbetter is a writer, coffee professional, dog mom, and aspiring plant mom. She enjoys writing about mental health, spirituality, relationships, and above all, hope. After a seismic displacement of her core group of friends, she began to ask the question: is there a better way to do friendship? Through a lot of searching, healing, praying, and research, her debut book, "Closer than a Brother," was born. It is a celebration of friendship and an invitation to grow in being a friend. Its estimated release date is March 6, 2025 and will be available for purchase wherever books are sold. She lives in Lewisville, Texas with her mini aussie Juniper, where she is actively involved in her church and community. When not writing, you can find her at various coffee shops reading, or at home, trying desperately to keep her plants alive. Success rate is currently 50/50. Learn more about Karin: website: Instagram: Learn more about Brooke: IG: Follow her on /episode/index/show/069df229-18e0-4c38-8f9e-24c9fed2cab8/id/34147295

#78: Why Love Isn't Enough, with Matt Marquez 11/12/2024

#77: Confident Communication, with Tara Alexander. 10/15/2024 10/29/2024

#76: Trauma, Somatic Healing, and Your Relationships, with Robyn Smith 10/15/2024

#75: How the Energy in Your Home Impacts Your Relationships, with Suzanne Roynon 10/01/2024

#74: Women, Microdosing, Addiction, and Healing, with Leslie Draffin 09/17/2024

#73: Heal with the Creative Arts and IFS, with Karen Corona 09/03/2024

#72: Dating After 50, with Deb Dutcher 08/20/2024

#72: Dating After 50, with Deb Dutcher Dating at age 60 is not like dating at 25! Today I talk with Dating Coach Deb Dutcher about how to start the dating process, what dating apps to try, how to find the right partner for you, and how to make it fun. While she focuses on the boomer generation, what she has to say applies to anyone who is over 45, maybe has been divorced or widowed, and for anyone who has been out of the dating pool for a while. Deb Dutcher is a former VP of high-tech and a Certified Health Coach, with a best-selling book to her name. Twice divorced and 70+, She found online dating works if you take it on with a system. She calls her system the Finding Mr. Adorable Journey and built a course called the Boomer Gal's Guide to Winning at Online Dating. Now she has helped hundreds use her system to become online dating rockstars! She was named one of the Top Ten Senior Dating Experts of 2024 by DatingAdvice.com. She has made it her mission to help other lonely, single Boomer Gals find their Mr. Adorable. She runs a free Meetup where she hosts weekly calls, and offers her private coaching and online courses to help folks date online safely, have fun and meet their Mr. Adorable. Learn more about Deb: Website: TikTok: Learn more about Karin: Website: Instagram (relationships): Instagram (psilocybin facilitation): TRANSCRIPT Intro: Karin: This is Love Is Us, Exploring Relationships and How We Connect. I'm your host, Karin Calde. I'll talk with people about how we can strengthen our relationships, explore who we are in those relationships, and experience a greater sense of love and connection with those around us, including ourselves. I have a PhD in clinical Psychology, practiced as a psychologist resident, and after diving into my own healing work, I went back to school and became a coach, helping individuals and couples with their relationships and personal growth. If you want to experience more love in your life and contribute to healing the disconnect so prevalent in our world today, you're in the right place. Welcome to Love Is Us. Episode: Karin: Hello, everybody, and welcome. Today we are again talking about dating. And every time I record a dating episode, I just get really excited and start thinking about doing dating coaching. And I've done a little bit of it, but it is so much fun. And I have this whole course that I've been creating in my head for this last few months or so, so I don't know, maybe that's to come. But today I'm going to be talking with a dating coach, and she calls herself a boomer dating coach. But what she talks about really does apply to anyone who's maybe recently divorced or widowed or they've broken up with a long term partner and they're entering the dating world for the first time in a while. But it's also applicable to anyone who's maybe a little bit older and they've been dating, but dating isn't working for them and they need a little bit more support. And Deb has dating courses and a book, and she's been doing this for a while. And she does have a course that's coming up, I believe, September 3 or fourth or something. So if you go to our website and if that sounds interesting to you, you can check it out. So anyway, I hope you enjoy this conversation. There's lots of helpful information for daters in this one. So again, thanks for being here. And here we go. Karin: Welcome, Deb. [02:22] Deb: Thank you, Karin. [02:24] Karin: It's nice to see you again. [02:25] Deb: Great to be here. [02:26] Karin: So tell us where you are in the world. [02:31] Deb: I'm here in Rancho Cordova, California, which is currently a very calm and not boiling 90 plus day, 95 to be exact. And I'm near rivers and lakes, and I just have a blast. [02:45] Karin: Oh, that's wonderful. That sounds very Oregon like. We're having similar weather. And yeah, we've got lots of rivers around here, too, so. Sounds very nice. [02:56] Deb: It is very nice. Mister adorable lives here very good reason to be there. [03:01] Karin: Is that what drew you there? [03:02] Deb: Oh, no, I didn't know him. I moved here three years ago, and I met him 19 months ago. [03:08] Karin: Ah, okay. So what drew you there? [03:11] Deb: Getting out of the bay area, being able to buy a house by myself as a divorced woman late in life, and wanting something really different. [03:21] Karin: Tell us what you do for work. [03:24] Deb: Currently. For work, I do two things. I'm still a corporate wellness consultant, and I make little forays into corporate culture and give them feedback on how to stay healthy while they're doing all the crazy stuff I used to do in high tech. But I also took on online dating coaching for boomer gals or anyone over 50, because it can be so daunting, and I wanted to give them hope and show them the best ways. [03:48] Karin: Wonderful. So how did you start doing that work? [03:54] Deb: I was up here alone after my divorce at 68, going, what the heck is going on in this world? And I decided, oh, these TikToks look really fun. I think I'll just make a TikTok and tell everybody how I'm feeling, and maybe 50 people will care. And so I made a TikTok, and it was called dating online. At 69, at a time of COVID and I had 110,000 views, and I garnered a bunch of followers really fast. And then it was just constant feedback. I would just pop up a video about my dating experiences and what it was like on the dating sites and what the guys were like when I met them in person. And people were loving it, and it just got bigger and bigger and bigger. And I ended up getting people. People asking me to coach them and teach them what I was doing. And why could I get five dates a week when they couldn't get one a month? [04:49] Karin: So people could really relate or wanted to be able to relate to what you were going through? [04:54] Deb: Yes. [04:56] Karin: Yeah. Wonderful. And I was thinking about this interview, and I was specifically thinking about people who are over 45 or 50 who might be or might have been in a long term committed relationship for 2030 or more years. And at some point, they decide they want to find a new relationship. But, yeah, it can be really daunting for them. So where does a woman start? [05:27] Deb: Well, the first thing I want people to think about is, don't do what I did at 51 after my first divorce, after 30 years of marriage and not knowing how to date since I was 19. And I thought, oh, there's this thing called online dating. Let me try that. And I paid a matchmaker a fortune, and he didn't find me anybody, or that company didn't find me anybody. So I thought, well, let me just see what it's like out there on these little dating app. But they camouflaged it. It wasn't a dating app. It came in as our us scientific Einstein. Take this quiz and find out. And I took this, what was supposedly a personality quiz and ended up giving me my iq and then a list of guys that matched my iq range in my area. And I went, what? So that was my first experience with online dating. [06:17] Karin: And I gotta interrupt, though. So did you end up dating any of those guys? [06:22] Deb: Oh, yes. I ended up with a rebound guy, which is someone I ended up becoming intimate with. After 30 years with one man, I ended up with a rebound guy. He was a teacher, he was divorced, he lived close by. We got along, hung out for six months, and then I realized he wasn't meeting my needs. But I also had been dating multiple other people before I chose him. And so I dated about first dates for about 42. And then I went, if you went on a second date, I got you down to about 17. The top 17. If you made it to a third date, I was down to the top ten. If you made it to a fourth date, I was down to the top five. And I teach this in the course because you don't know what you want. So the first thing about having to come out after a long relationship, a one person, monogamous relationship, is you don't know who you are anymore. You don't know what you want. I pretended I was 19 and I just went out with anybody that asked me. We don't do that anymore. Young ladies, please do not do that because it will get you into trouble. I'm lucky I didn't end up on the side of the road somewhere. I made so many mistakes the first time out. So it's really important to sit back and think about what your relationship was, how much was good, maybe stuff you would have changed what you want now in your life, who you are now, what you want to be and who you want to be that with, because it's very, very different. You come out of a long, committed relationship. [07:59] Karin: Yeah. Yeah, it is really different. And it can feel so foreign when you haven't done it for so long. But also because the dating world is much different than it was when we were 19, of course. [08:14] Deb: Oh, my God. [08:16] Karin: And then that's all we know, many of us know, is the last time we were dating, it was when we were teenagers. And so it can really feel like we're that age again, and yet we are not. [08:30] Deb: It kind of slaps you in the face because you think you can just pull it off. And then not only is it exhausting, but it is demoralizing at times. It's gut wrenching and it's. You almost give up. You're like, why am I doing this? Why am I putting myself through this? When I decided to get divorced again at 68 after marrying a guy that I met online dating, so 14 years later, I'm like, oh, this was a bad move. I need to go away from this. And I started to date again. And it was coming out of the COVID lockdown and people really didn't know who was who. And there had been all the issues with politics. It was another different scene. [09:16] Karin: Yeah, yeah. So a couple of things that you said, one washing something like the number 42. So how did that happen again? [09:31] Deb: I was pretending I was 19, so I just would. If some guy clicked on me, I went, sure, who are you? Let's do it. Blah, blah, blah. I didn't know how to screen, I didn't know how to sort, I didn't know how to qualify. And so I would get on dates where, oh, my God, I might tell you some of them later in this conversation, but I can't believe I allowed myself in those situations or that I still sat in the room across from the guy based on what he was saying to me. I can't contemplate doing that. So the next go round, I said, okay, we're not 19 anymore. Let's pretend we're 39. Just before we adopted our children and everything fell apart in the first marriage, we're 39, we're strong, we're fun, we're sexy, we're exciting, we're professional, we're business, we're a professional woman. We know what we're doing in life. We don't need to settle. We can pick out the right guys for us. We don't need to lower the bar. Which I had done to be married a second time because I really, really wanted to be married and I really wasn't discriminating enough. And so the next time around, I put together my little system. The finding mister adorable journey. I did exactly what I wanted other people to do, that I was coaching. And it worked because I didn't have to date 42 people. I only dated, I think, nine. Now, first there was a mister adorable who won the prize for a year, and before him, I dated 42. But the second go round where I said goodbye to him and said, okay, one more time. You're turning 71. You got to get this right. Do not, on any situation, back down from your standards because you're going to end up pushing him away. So I held my guns, but I was able to attract the right type of people in three weeks of joining the sites. [11:26] Karin: And you did this through online dating? [11:29] Deb: Through the online dating apps? [11:31] Karin: Yep. And are there online dating apps that you can recommend for those of us who are no longer 25? [11:39] Deb: Yes. So it's been interesting because I run a weekly meetup on Mondays, and I have girls from all over the country, and girls, we're in our fifties, sixties and seventies. I've even had an 84 year old join the meetup. And I get really clear, as I hear about where they're from. Minnesota, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Texas, New York. What was the other one? Southern California is different than northern California. So there's multiple apps. There's so many dating apps now. Way more choices than I had back in my fifties. Now, in our later years, they exploded because of COVID for one thing. But they've also exploded because people move around so much. We don't have our centers of connection, have friends that can introduce us. And if we run away from a marriage, we've moved away. We don't have any connections. So you start out with a clean slate. And if you're in an area that's highly populated, like I am, northern California, Sacramento. I used zoosk. Zoosk and silver singles. They were good for me here. But many of my clients in the Midwest or in the south do not find them good. They're finding them full of scammers. I teach people how to spot those people and get rid of them. The next backup is going to be eHarmony, which can be more global. Match is pretty good. Our time hinge has come up. New Bumble is run by a woman. There's a lot of them out there. So part of it is analyzing who you are, what you want, and whether the guys you want are on those dating apps, which is why we do not do one year contracts with those people, those dating apps, because we're going to waste our money if the right guys haven't shown up. [13:42] Karin: Yeah. Yeah. And I think I have a friend who I think she said she met her current partner on our time, and that was created for people who are older, right? [13:53] Deb: Our time was created for people older. There's also elite singles, and they're owned by silver singles. A lot of them are all owned by match, by the way, match owns a bunch of them. That's why I kind of like these little sidebar guys, Hinge and Bumble, which probably will get bought up anyway, but at least they try to retain a little more autonomy around the process. And mainly it's all about you knowing what you want and then creating a profile that portrays you exactly as you are so that you can attract someone who wants what and who you are. [14:32] Karin: Right? Right. Yeah. And that's one of the things that I hear over and over again from dating coaches, is that, yeah, you want to show people exactly who you are. And it's not about trying to catch someone or make yourself look as good as possible, because that's not who you are, and you don't want to pretend to be something you're not. [14:55] Deb: Exactly. There is one caveat to that. Many of us who have been in very long marriages kind of get in a lazy habit. COVID lockdown made it worse, except for Zoom calls. Right. We had to get decent from the neck up or whatever the waist. [15:10] Karin: Right. [15:11] Deb: But my advice to people getting ready to date, especially when you building your profile, is have a makeover, get your hair cut, put on the makeup before you get in front of the camera, get some cute clothes, three or four cute tops, and some decent bottoms, because when you go on the dating site, you are in competition. There's a lot of people that are on dating sites right now. Some dating sites, more women than men. Some dating sites, more men than women. You want to at least come with your best face forward. You want to look pretty. You want to be attractive because you want someone attractive. Why put yourself out there in a less than great state and think you're going to attract one of the really hot, good looking people? It won't happen. So, yes, you can be yourself, but be the best version of yourself. [16:06] Karin: Yes. Yes. Absolutely. I like how you said that. Great. So we're talking about online apps. What about the women that say, no way, I'm not doing one of those dating apps. What do you say to them? [16:21] Deb: Join a meetup. Get out there. If you're an active person like I am. Join a kayaking group. Join a hiking group. Join a walking group. Join a zoo sponsorship. I joined the Crocker Art museum. There's great guys that go there. If I weren't dating my sweetheart, I'd be hanging out at the Crocker. Also Home Depot, believe it or not, Home Depot and Lowe's. And take a cute dog and take your dog through. And my dog is a mantra. [16:54] Karin: Right? Great conversation starter, right? [16:56] Deb: Absolutely. [16:58] Karin: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So finding groups that are organized around a particular interest that you might have. And so all of a sudden you're spending time with people that share your, your interests. And so that can be a great way. [17:15] Deb: And even if there's not guys in the group, you're going to make friends with women who have brothers and uncles and fathers, and you just never know. I say to everyone, never say never, and put yourself out there. [17:29] Karin: Yeah. [17:30] Deb: And my, my gals that are in my meetup and my course, the fun thing is I've taught them, before you walk out the door, just make sure that if you run into someone cool, you're not going to repel them. [17:43] Karin: Take a shower. Usually women are pretty good about that. [17:48] Deb: I wear baseball caps if I'm not wearing a wig because my hair is poopy, especially in this heat, you know, and the right guys don't care. So I even tell people if I'm talking to them on a site and they're like, oh, I like your hairdo. Oh, great, that's a wig. They go, oh, well, do you have hair? Sure. But it takes terrible pictures. So I wear wigs on camera. Oh, okay. Ahead of time. Yeah. [18:12] Karin: Yeah. [18:13] Deb: And I tell them, you don't know who you're going to meet because I might be a blonde or a redhead or a pixie cut or long brown hair. I'll send you a picture the day of the date, and that gets them to send me a picture so I can make sure they're who they say they are when I walk in the room. [18:29] Karin: And I love that because it's, even though you're wearing a wig and that might not be your true hair color, you are very transparent about the fact that you are wearing a wig and you can talk about that. So that's wonderful. [18:45] Deb: And the right guys don't care, especially right now. So many people have lost spouses to cancer. They've seen what it can do to someone so it doesn't scare them. And they'll ask me, well, how did you lose your hair? I go menopause, stress, my kid going to juvenile hall every other month and not sleeping. Oh, I get it. Yeah, me too. My hair is thinning. And then I go, and I'm a health coach and it's coming back, but it's going to take a while. I'm old. [19:17] Karin: So one of the things you said earlier, washington, you're going to run into scammers on some of these sites and you have a way of helping people spot them. Is there one tip you can give us about that. [19:30] Deb: The big tip is, listen to your gut. If he looks too good to be true, he probably is. Every scammer my gals and I have spotted and gotten rid of, they'll call me up. Oh, my God, he's perfect. He looks exactly like what you and I visualized. He's tall, he has salt and pepper hair. He kayaks, he does this, he does that. He has a garden, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I look at the picture, and I go, that sounds like a guy that hit on me in Sacramento. Stefan here's a widower from Finland, moved to x city umpteen months ago. Wants someone to go kayaking with, blah, blah, blah. I go, what name is he using? Oh, that's Oliver. My guy was Felix. I go, I want you to ask him two questions. So I teach them how to drill down. So if someone is claiming I play soccer, great. What position do you play? Where did you play last? Who won that game? Blah, blah, blah. Pretend you're an investigative reporter, because as soon as you start asking the hard questions, they go away. They take themselves off the site, they run for the hills. [20:51] Karin: I'm curious, why would people do that on these sites? [20:55] Deb: Oh, they do it because they're looking for... /episode/index/show/069df229-18e0-4c38-8f9e-24c9fed2cab8/id/32645302

#71: Loneliness in the Empty Nest 08/06/2024

#71: Loneliness in the Empty Nest Are you an empty nester? Are you feeling lonely? Empty nesters often feel lonely, so you certainly aren't alone! But how can you feel more connected in your relationships? How can you feel more connected to yourself? In today's episode I talk about the different factors that contribute to feeling lonely in the empty nest. I also offer a few suggestions for how to feel better, including joining my free, new Women Empty Nesters group. For more information, go to Meetup: Book on developing friendships during adulthood: , by Marisa G. Franco Learn more about Karin: Instagram: @theloveandconnectioncoach Instagram: TRANSCRIPT Intro: Karin: This is Love Is Us, Exploring Relationships and How We Connect. I'm your host, Karin Calde. I'll talk with people about how we can strengthen our relationships, explore who we are in those relationships, and experience a greater sense of love and connection with those around us, including ourselves. I have a PhD in clinical Psychology, practiced as a psychologist resident, and after diving into my own healing work, I went back to school and became a coach, helping individuals and couples with their relationships and personal growth. If you want to experience more love in your life and contribute to healing the disconnect so prevalent in our world today, you're in the right place. Welcome to Love Is Us. Episode: [00:49] Hello, everybody, and welcome. Today I'm going to be talking about loneliness and the empty nest. I've had a couple of episodes so far about the empty nest, one on what happens with our long term relationship during this time. I think it was back in February. And then my last episode a couple of weeks ago was about the change in identity that happens when your role as mom or dad significantly shifts, leaving you wondering who you are and what your purpose is now. I also seem to be attracting more clients who are at this stage of life, which I love. And I love supporting them through this transition, whether they're facing relationship issues with their long term partner, or they're starting to date, or they want to find their purpose in life or some other type of personal growth work. So yes, this is a subject near and dear to my heart, but I'm also really passionate about the subject of loneliness because I was really lonely as a teenager. And every now and then I'll notice that familiar feeling again. And it reminds me that I need to be very intentional about my friendships and other relationships as I get older. And I think largely because of my earlier experiences with loneliness, I put a lot of emphasis on family and my marriage, and that has helped me be really good in those relationships. But I think the flip side of that was that I didn't give as much attention to my friendships until the last, I don't know, maybe five years or so. And it's not easy, but I've learned a lot during that time and I do believe that friendships are really, really important. I've been putting in the work. I talked about loneliness back about a year ago, episode 32 with Laura Giles, and we talked about the rise of loneliness in our world. And we did that just a couple of months after the surgeon general published a report on loneliness. And he talked in the report about the costs to our mental and physical health, our relationships, larger community and a lot more. It was actually really, really interesting. But with that information, some good things have happened. I think there's been more attention put on loneliness, and I think there are more resources available now, and there's more information and studies being done about it as well. So that's the good news. So I'm going to be talking about, of course, loneliness during the empty nest, especially for women. And I'm going to be talking about why women so often do, do feel lonely during this time. And then also offer some suggestions. And if you haven't gone through this, you might be thinking, well, why can't women just reach out to their friends or their partner or other family? But the thing is, is that when you look at it more closely, you'll see that there are a lot of different factors or layers to this that make it a little bit more challenging. So I'm going to be talking today about seven of those different factors specifically, and how all together, they really can make it very difficult to not feel lonely. Not that everyone experiences that, but it is very common. So the first factor is something that I talked about during my last episode, was that loss of that primary role. So many of you who have dedicated a significant portion of your lives to raising kids might experience an identity crisis once your children leave. And this makes sense because your primary role as a caregiver is suddenly diminished, which can leave you feeling a sense of loss and confusion about your purpose. And those types of existential crises can leave us feeling like we're the only ones experiencing that. And it feels lonely. So that is one contributor. The next one is just a change in your daily routine. It once was that your life really revolved, most likely around your kids schedules, and suddenly that's unnecessary. And that can lead to feelings of emptiness. And that lack of structure can add to that feeling of where am I and who am I and what am I doing? And what is my purpose? That can leave you feeling lonely. Number three is the social isolation. So with kids gone, there are fewer ready made opportunities for social interactions. So activities that were once a part of your social life, like school events or sporting events or volunteering at your kids school, they're no longer relevant. And that might have slowly decreased as your kids went from being elementary school students to middle school to high school. But now those social interactions really start to require a lot more, more effort because they're not built in anymore. And that can lead me feeling lonely. The fourth factor is reduced family interaction and specifically reduced interactions with your, with your kids or the number of interactions. So as your kids leave for college or work or whatever it is, those interactions will probably decrease. And it might be that the quality of your interactions decrease. It might be that they're shorter. You don't have longer in depth conversations as you're both standing in the kitchen at night getting a snack at 10:00 p.m. or whatever it is that you used to do. And I do want to urge you to resist that urge to share those feelings with your kids. I mean, it's okay to tell them that you're going to miss them, and that's totally normal and might be healthy for them to know that, but it's not so healthy for you to cry on the phone to them every day or really lean on them heavily emotionally. That's not what your kids are there for. And it can put a lot of pressure on them. At a time when they've got their own pressures, they are, you know, exploring the world and figuring out their place in the world now. And so it's not good for them to then feel like they have to take care of you emotionally. So make sure you get some support elsewhere. That's really important. Okay, so number five, relationship changes when your kids leave. It can also impact your marriage or your long term relationship. And again, I talked about this in a previous episode, but, you know, a lot of couples find themselves having to reconnect and redefine their relationship and maybe even decide whether or not they want to stay together. And that is common for couples at this stage in their lives. So even though you might have a partner around that can actually still be very lonely. Number six, unresolved emotional needs. So this is an interesting time. A lot of women and men find that this is a time when they suddenly have the time and then space to explore some things that they never really looked at. I find a lot of people coming to me sometimes in the psilocybin facilitation space, but just in general, where all of a sudden they want to look at what happened to them when they were kids. Why are they like this? Why is this so hard for them? And it can be an opportunity and a period of significant growth. A lot of women had also been in therapy before this point, but dare I say it, it was probably not enough. And not that I think that you always need to be in coaching or therapy, but I think a lot of people stop when they start getting close to the stuff, or maybe they stop because they haven't found quite the right person to work with. Maybe it was too expensive. Or maybe they just didn't have the time or the energy to really dive in. But this can be such an opportunity. At this point in your life, you might realize that you've set aside your personal goals, your aspirations, maybe your career to focus on your kids, and that was okay. And now you have the time and the space to really do some deep exploring. So even though this might put you in touch with some of those feelings of loneliness and some of those feelings of regret, it's also an opportunity to turn that around. Number seven, aging concerns, or more specifically, menopause. So it seems a little bit cruel. Menopause seems to coincide with all of these changes that are happening in a woman's life. At this point, menopause is like going through puberty in reverse. So you might have some intense mood swings, anxiety, health concerns. You might notice a lot of physical changes happening, changes to your body. That can be a challenge for a lot of women. And the emotional component of this can again amplify by those feelings of loneliness. Now, I want to move on to some strategies to combat this loneliness, and I have four specific ideas. So the first one is the one that you might have heard of, and that is to pursue some new interests, look at some hobbies, some activities that maybe you previously set aside or never had time for explore. It might be that you try some things that don't really fit, and that's okay. You have some time and energy to try on different things. Number two, strengthen your social connections. Reconnect with old friends, make new ones. Get involved in community activities if you struggle with friendships. And again, like I said earlier, it can be hard because there aren't all these built in opportunities. There's not this structure to it. You might need to really put a lot of attention on it and put some energy into it. There's a book that I read called Platonic by Marissa Franco that I can recommend, and that might be helpful. Number three, focus on personal growth. So again, take classes, volunteer, pursue career advancements or that job that you never really thought you had time for as a parent. So think about how you might want to grow yourself. Number four is to seek support, especially if you're really struggling. And there are some women who are going to have a harder time than others, and that's normal, especially if you really struggle with transitions in general. Maybe you had a really hard time when you left home when you were young, and so this can be especially hard for you. So there's no shortcut to all of this. It's a pretty major life transition. I recommend maybe getting some books that can give you some ideas for how to work on yourself. Get a coach or a therapist. But most of all, find community. Find community that revolves around some shared interests. If you love music, I love recommending school of rock. If you want to be physically active, maybe you join a pickleball group. Maybe you love to read. You start a book club. There are a lot of different things on meetup that would suit just about any interest. But if you can't find something that feels really good to you, then start one of those. One of those groups that really fits you. But whatever you do, if you are a woman who is an empty nester or you're about to become an empty nester, I hope that you will check out my new meetup group. So if you go on to meetup, the group is called Women Empty Nesters. We've got over 60 members so far and 14 of us are going to have our first meeting and it will be on Tuesday, August 6 in the evening. You might be listening to this after that time, but no worries because I'm going to be scheduling a lot more of those. So if this interests you at all, I hope that you will come and check it out. I will say that I am planning on making this group private at some point, so I recommend joining sooner rather than later just to make sure that you get in. And of course you can join from anywhere because it's meetup and I am just really excited to see this group evolve. I have grand plans for it so I hope you'll join us and thanks for listening today. I hope you found it helpful and interesting and I will talk with you all again very soon. Take care. OUTRO [14:09] Thanks for joining us today on Love Is Us. If you like the show, I would so appreciate it if you left me a review. If you have questions and would like. To follow me on social media, you can find me on Instagram, where I'm @theloveandconnectioncoach. Special thanks to Tim Gorman for my music, Aly Shaw for my artwork, and Ross Burdick for tech and editing assistance. Again, I'm so glad you joined us today, because the best way to bring more love into your life and into the world is to be love. The best way to be love is to love yourself and those around you. Let's learn and be inspired together. /episode/index/show/069df229-18e0-4c38-8f9e-24c9fed2cab8/id/32450832

#70: Who am I? Identity in the Empty Nest 07/23/2024

#69: Dating Safety, with Kelly Gagalis 07/09/2024

#69: Dating Safety, with Kelly Gagalis If you're dating, this episode is for you! My guest, Kelly Gagalis, recently created a dating safety program called "Swipe Safely" in order to help more women (and gay men) understand how they can take steps to protect themselves so they can enjoy the rewards dating has to offer. Kelly Gagalis is a Marriage and Family Therapist with over 15 years coaching experience. For the past 17 years Kelly has been a monthly ABC TV dating and relationship contributor. Kelly successfully helps people create safety navigating online dating and rehabilitate their dating game to find a partner who is a phenomenal fit for them. For more information about Kelly and her Swipe Safely program: Dating safety program: Website: Follow Karin on Instagram: TRANSCRIPT Intro: Karin: This is Love Is Us, Exploring Relationships and How We Connect. I'm your host, Karin Calde. I'll talk with people about how we can strengthen our relationships, explore who we are in those relationships, and experience a greater sense of love and connection with those around us, including ourselves. I have a PhD in clinical Psychology, practiced as a psychologist resident, and after diving into my own healing work, I went back to school and became a coach, helping individuals and couples with their relationships and personal growth. If you want to experience more love in your life and contribute to healing the disconnect so prevalent in our world today, you're in the right place. Welcome to Love Is Us. Episode: Karin: Hello, everybody, and welcome. Today we're going to be talking about dating safety with my guest, Kelly Gagalis. I'm hoping that I'm pronouncing that right. Anyway, Kelly is a long term therapist and dating coach. She really knows her stuff and she is going to be helping us understand what we might need to know when it comes to dating and dating safety. I think that this is a really good episode for anyone who might be dating, but especially those who maybe have been out of the dating scene for a while. Maybe you were married for a long time or in a long term relationship, and now you are dating once again. And, you know, a lot of us as we get older, we think we know how to take care of ourselves, and we do for the most part. But the thing is, is that things have changed in the way that we date and in the way that we get to know people, especially with online dating. So I think that this is a really good one to listen to. Kelly is also just about to launch her swipe safely dating program, which seems to be very unique and very helpful. So if you're interested in that, go ahead and check out her website and get on her. I think she's got a waiting list for that program at this point. So anyway, in the episode we do talk about dating safety. We also talk a little bit about dating in general. So I think it's a really, really interesting one. And I'm glad you're here. And if you are in the Pacific Northwest or somewhere in the west coast dealing with all this heat right now, it's July as I'm recording this and about to launch this episode. So I hope you're taking care of yourself. I hope you can check in on any elderly neighbors and take care of your pets and kids, and I hope that you are taking care of yourself and staying cool. All right. Thanks again for being here. And here we go. Welcome, Kelly. [03:00] Kelly: Hi, Karin. It's great to be here. [03:02] Karin: Oh, it's so nice to have you here. Kelly and I have been talking about lots of other things other than the topic of the episode today already and having a lot of fun doing it. Kelly's another local, so I'm super excited about that. But tell us where local is for you. [03:25] Kelly: Yeah, local is Portland, Oregon, very close to where you are, which is really fun. We moved here as a family about 17 years ago, and it's just been a really great place. Really enjoyed a lot of what Portland is and is about. It's really safe, really fun, really awesome. [03:46] Karin: Where did you move from? [03:48] Kelly: I'm from Massachusetts. I was in grad school in Utah, and then my former spouse and I moved here after grad school. It had the demographic we needed to start the business he wanted to start, and it's just been really good to us all the way around. [04:03] Karin: Nice. And what do you do for work? [04:07] Kelly: So I have, gosh, like, since I graduated with an MS in marriage and family therapy, and I did that for a little bit, but I transitioned about, gosh, 1012 years ago into exclusively doing dating coaching. So I kind of work with men and women, helping them get their dating life dialed in so that they could find a partner that's usually. People usually want help dating coaching when they can't find someone to be with. Right. It's not like any other situation, so. But more recently, I've transitioned. I still do dating coaching, but right now, my. My message, my mission is the stuff that I've learned over the ten plus years of doing dating coaching for safety. Like, nobody else is teaching it, nobody else is talking about it. And I kind of came up with a system for my clients, and I'm realizing, oh, my gosh, nobody else knows how to do this. When I talk to girlfriends, when I go to parties, people tell me stuff, and I'm like, oh, my gosh, this is so scary. This is not safe, and you don't know it. So that's kind of what I'm doing now. [05:10] Karin: I feel like we need to walk this line of not scaring people about dating, because dating can. [05:19] Kelly: 99% of the people on there are great, normal, you know, with their quirks, people that aren't going to hurt you. Yes. Right. [05:27] Karin: And it can bring us love. So that's really important. And it's important for people to be informed. [05:34] Kelly: Absolutely. And I love that you started with that, because my whole goal is not to scare anyone. It's to move everyone from a an unaware prey mindset to a. Just a grounded, confident. This, you know, it's going to be hard to mess with me mindset. It's really as simple as. And it honestly, it goes hand in hand with getting a better level of relationship when you're harder to access, when you have more boundaries, when you have more clarity, it's going to speak to a higher level of person. [06:09] Karin: Yeah. Yeah. And so you primarily work with women, right. For obvious reasons, yeah. [06:17] Kelly: But a lot of men don't feel the need for a dating coach, which is totally fine. Women are just more open to being coached, I found, anyway. And that's. I've worked with men. I have worked with very coachable, lovely men just en masse, which is kind of what I do. Women sign up, but for safety reasons. [06:37] Karin: It's usually men don't feel the need for any kind of coaching around that specifically, unless we're talking about gay men. And they might. [06:46] Kelly: Yes, gay men. It's very much an issue. There's a lot of unsafety in the gay dating culture, for sure. For men, not as much. From what I've heard from my friends who are lesbian and in the lesbian dating community, it's not as unsafe for the same reasons. It might get unsafe later, but it's not initially unsafe. It's not assault unsafe as much men. It is actually. Men can get stalked and have their life disturbed, but because they're used to being the top of the food chain and they're thinking more about they're safe because they feel physically safe, they're not thinking about what would it be like if this random person that I connected with and gave my information to stalked me for two years and made my life a living hell? Like, they don't. They're not thinking about that because they're not used to being on the receiving end of that, but it is a reality for men. They're just not as aware of it. Yeah. [07:36] Karin: And then I don't know if you've ever seen the mini series or the. What is it? Baby reindeer. [07:43] Kelly: Yes, baby reindeer. That was even better. There's another one on Netflix that's another true story about someone being stalked for 15 years by someone. [07:52] Karin: Yeah, baby reindeer blew my mind. [07:55] Kelly: Yes. [07:56] Karin: And that, of course, is a woman stalking a man. [07:58] Kelly: Yes. Yeah. You can do a lot of psychological damage and create a lack of safety and ruin relationships and make the rest of your family feel unsafe without ever breaking the law. Right. And women that want to do this have the power to do it. So it's unsafe for men, it's unsafe for women in different ways. [08:17] Karin: Yeah. Yeah. So how did you come to do this work? Specifically, what made you motivated to do it? [08:24] Kelly: So when I was a therapist, and I really loved supporting people and helping them through trauma or the things that were holding them back, but we got there pretty quickly, and then everyone that was single would be like, hey, now that I feel like I've really got this under control, I need to find someone. Can you help me find someone? And interestingly, I had developed this way of dating because my dating life wasn't working. And I was like, well, here's what I did. And then over the years, I tweaked it, and I realized when I would meet with couples, a lot of times I'm like, oh, I wish they had done my dating procedure because they probably wouldn't have ended up married. These people are mismatched and misaligned, and that's why they're in, and that's why they're in couples therapy. Not always, but sometimes it just kind of was like this feeling of, I really could do some good if I help people. Your highest indicator for happiness is who you choose to spend your life with, who you choose to partner with. And so to ease suffering and humanity, if I can help people make great choices and stay safe, I'm going to alleviate a lot of potential future suffering. And that was what brought me there. [09:32] Karin: Yeah. And you've heard some horror stories, too. [09:35] Kelly: I have. I don't know how much you want to go into that, but, yeah, there's been some very, very distressing things that I've heard and been witness to and just want to stop with what I'm teaching in. Swipe safely, for sure. [09:50] Karin: Wonderful. So what makes online dating more risky than traditional ways of dating people? [09:57] Kelly: Well, and let's just kind of address the elephant in the room. Dating has always been risky, and as a culture, we've never addressed it. You and I were talking about how date rape was funny, even as far back as the conservative era where people more gentlemanly, quote unquote, like the Annette and Frankie movies had, like, girls, like, trying to get out of the car and men groping them as funny backdrop, as, like, the camera pan. Like, I remember that being something I grew up on loving, like the old. Like, I love the surfer movies and stuff, and there's just this kind of pervasive background, but I just want to interrupt you. [10:33] Karin: And of course, it was. It's not at all funny, but that how it. That's how it is portrayed. [10:38] Kelly: Exactly. [10:38] Karin: In, like, the me in the media. [10:40] Kelly: Yeah. And then, you know, and, you know, through the seventies movies, eighties movies, it's always been portrayed that there's this funny element to a woman being assaulted or uncomfortable. Right. And so, you know, there's that, that underlying prevalence of that in our culture, which is people are trying. Me too, and everything, trying to shift. It's a big thing to shift. But here with Internet, people can be whoever they choose to be for a certain period of time. And the reason why I feel that safety is so important with Internet dating is because you can create a deep feeling of intimacy over the phone and over text with someone, and the person on the other end has no way to validate and verify you are who you are. Right. With normal. So you kind of, you know, you go into a connection from a dating app, or even if you were to meet someone at a grocery store and you're connecting online, there's. We have so much ability to connect with people, but we don't really see, you know, it used to be we went to someone's house, we saw their reality. We met through friends. We could verify if what they were saying was true. Internet dating connections make it so that a veneer can be put up that really masks who somebody really is and what their truth really is. [12:00] Karin: Yeah. And I think about all the people who are really unhappy with themselves or self conscious, and so they pretend to be something they're not because they don't think they'll otherwise be able to find someone. But then, of course, they don't really think through how that's going to lay out. [12:16] Kelly: Right? Yeah, well, no, and, and like I said in the beginning, like, 99% of the time, it's going to be a really great person. Even if they're presenting themselves in a less than honest way, it's. They're presenting who they want to be. They're not. There's no malicious intent behind it. Yeah, it's. It's that, that. So we want to make sure that, like, swipe safely set up so that you can weed out someone that doesn't mean to be a jerk, but is misrepresenting or is someone that is emotionally unstable or unhealthy. You can see that before you put yourself in a situation where they know where you live and have gone on dates and they feel like you owe them something. Right. [12:54] Karin: Yeah. [12:55] Kelly: Or just. It keeps you from even meeting up with that person in the first place. [12:59] Karin: Right, right. So what are some common mistakes that you see women making that they're really not even aware of. [13:08] Kelly: Yeah. So the biggest thing is, you should never go to the other person's house or a house. Hey, come to my friend's house. They're having a party. They're having a bunch of people over. I have a dear friend whose son went on a date and went to pick up the man he was thinking he was going to go on a first date with and was pulled inside and gang raped, and then he was not treated seriously because he was a man and it was gay. And, you know, there's all that prejudice around it. So you're always a public place, and. And that's hard because people want to. People want every. Everyone on dating apps is like, there's got to be chemistry. There's got to be chemistry. And, like, everyone wants to do what they call chemistry checks. Well, you know, you don't want to be making out in public, so everybody kind of wants to go someplace private, but you just have to figure out how you're going to keep from doing that until you really know who someone is. Because once you're behind a closed door, there's really no way anybody can know that you're in distress. And honestly, it would be very easy for someone, if you were in distress, for someone to play it off. Like, for someone to roof you a drink, that's usually someone under 30, that can happen. But you just look like someone that got a little too drunk. You just look like someone that was sick and your caring, loving boyfriend was helping you to the car. Right. So. So really being aware without being scared, just being aware that, hey, these things can happen. And the right person for me is going to respect my boundary when I say, hey, I'm only drinking water. Hey, I'm. I don't feel comfortable going with you, even though it's your friend's party. Maybe after, you know, we. I go out a few times with your friends or something, and, like, then you're kind of verifying they are who they are. [15:01] Karin: Yeah. Yeah. Anything else? [15:05] Kelly: I think the biggest thing is giving. Don't give out your phone number. Do something. Like, do something different. I don't care if it's WhatsApp. I don't care if it's Google voice. Don't give out your phone number. Because the minute you. And this is for you guys, too. There's something called true people finder. If you put in a phone number for a very minimal price, it's like $7 a month or something, you can look people up and see where they live, what their history is. What their job. Find out a lot of information about someone. If you exist, you're on the Internet and there's ways for people to find out about it if you give that personal information. So you don't just. If there's one thing that will keep everyone safe, meet in public for the first month, meet their friends and don't give out your phone number. [15:48] Karin: Yeah, that's good information about the phone number. It's not something I would have necessarily thought about. That they can look you up and get all kinds of information about you. [15:56] Kelly: They can. And the other thing that happens and people aren't as aware of this, and this is a little more like psychological. When someone's name shows up in between mom and your best friend, there is a bleed over of trust that they are earning just because they're a name in between mom and your best friend that they haven't actually earned. And, like, I don't know of any studies on this. I just know that it's happened for me. I've asked my friends about it, and I noticed that if I keep who I'm dating separate, then I'm really more able to evaluate them for who they are. And they're not popping up throughout my day. And you're less susceptible to love bombing. You're just, they're just not showing up as someone that's a fixture in your day that you can get addicted to those little notices. Right. Because every time you get that little ping, it releases. Not serotonin. What's the other one? [16:48] Karin: Oxytocin. Yeah. Sense. I mean, I can understand how that would work. And I don't know what, you know, the word for that or the. [16:57] Kelly: I don't either term for that would be. [17:00] Karin: But, yeah, I can imagine when they just show up on your phone along with all those other people you care. [17:05] Kelly: About that I call it rub off trust. It's just like, it just rubs off, you know, it's like the trust just bleeds over. [17:14] Karin: Yeah. That's so interesting. [17:16] Kelly: You know, and then, and then what happens is if they're not a good fit, then you end up with, like, this cluttered phone list. And it's so much harder because then people are like, they want to block someone versus, if you just have it just like, just keep. Keep it tidy, you know, so it's. It's, it's not this big. Like, it's a big deal amongst your real friends. The people that, you know, to block someone takes a lot of effort, and it shouldn't take that much effort to block or stop responding to someone that you've just met online. But if you put them in your own phone contacts, that reluctance you have to disassociate from someone who's in your true field of friendship is going to bleed over into your and become reluctance to disassociate from someone that really shouldn't have that higher level of connection and trust, but is just benefiting from the fact that, like, they're, they're in the trust box and they didn't earn it. [18:11] Karin: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So what are some red flags? [18:18] Kelly: A good red flag is anyone that has insistence, they insist on doing it their way in a certain timeframe. And one thing as a woman we have to make sure is like, oh, this just happened to me a couple weeks ago. Sometimes I do this so often and I feel like I know what I'm doing and I, what you call it, like, you know, I don't have to question myself. And whenever I feel myself feeling that, I'm like, okay, you need to make sure that you're not just thinking you're better at this than you are. So I connected with two people that I got the vibe that they weren't going to be a good fit, that there was something off, right? I'm like, okay, I'm going to test it. And so I was actually thinking, oh, maybe I was wrong with this one person. We were having a great conversation. There was a couple things that were yellow flags, but I was like, you know, like, maybe, you know, maybe we just meet for a cup of coffee and I just check it out. And maybe, you know, I'm like, you know, I'm just... /episode/index/show/069df229-18e0-4c38-8f9e-24c9fed2cab8/id/32052352

#68: Inside Out 2: Four Lessons for Emotional Growth 06/26/2024

#68: Inside Out 2: Four Lessons for Emotional Growth Have you been hearing the buzz about the latest Inside Out movie? It's not just for kids! In fact, there are some important lessons we can all learn from it about our emotional world and how that impacts our behavior and relationships. Today I talk about 4 of those lessons (plus a bonus) that resonated with me. Learn more about Karin: Website: Instagram: TRANSCRIPT Intro: Karin: This is Love Is Us, Exploring Relationships and How We Connect. I'm your host, Karin Calde. I'll talk with people about how we can strengthen our relationships, explore who we are in those relationships, and experience a greater sense of love and connection with those around us, including ourselves. I have a PhD in clinical Psychology, practiced as a psychologist resident, and after diving into my own healing work, I went back to school and became a coach, helping individuals and couples with their relationships and personal growth. If you want to experience more love in your life and contribute to healing the disconnect so prevalent in our world today, you're in the right place. Welcome to Love Is Us. Episode: [00:49] Karin: Hello, everybody, and welcome. Today I'm going to be talking about inside out two. And unless you've been living in a cave, you probably know that that recently came out. I saw it with my husband last weekend. No kids, just us. And I absolutely loved it and he really appreciated it, too. I loved the first one that came out in 2015. I think I've seen it maybe three times, and the last time I watched it, I just bawled my eyes out. So I was really expecting to cry during this one, but I didn't. I got maybe a little teary. And I've heard other people have really lost it while watching this because it really touches something in them. They recognize themselves in the movie, which is powerful. I mean, it's not that it's necessarily a sad movie, and in fact, there's a lot of really clever humor and so there are lots of opportunities to laugh. It's because they really get to the heart of anxiety and what it feels like to have it. That's the theme of this second one. Therapists, coaches love this movie because they nail it. They really do get it right. They really help you understand how your mind works, why you do the things you do, why you are the way you are. So if you're listening to this podcast, you might enjoy it, too. But then, of course, kids like it, their parents like it, so it speaks to a wide, wide audience. I am going to give away some parts of the movie, so you might want to see it first before listening to this. I'm not going to be talking about the plot in general. I'm just going to be talking about certain aspects of it. But there are some spoilers, so just be aware of that. And I'm going to be talking about the first movie and the second movie because I think when taken together, it really gives us such a rich picture of the human mind and human behavior, human emotions. So I'm going to be giving four lessons today, and I could be talking about 20, probably, from the movie. There's just so much in there, but I'm going to focus on four plus a bonus, one that I thought came through in the movie, but isn't necessarily hit you over the head obvious. So, for a little background, the different parts of Riley, who is a pre teen and is the star of the animated Pixar movie, Inside Out. These parts are portrayed as these extreme little personalities that embody different emotions. There's joy, sadness, fear, and disgust. I think I'm getting that right. And all of these emotions are parts of Riley, and they all do something for her. They're all important. And so this is the first lesson. And that is, we are made up of a range of different parts that feel a range of different emotions. And if we try to suppress the ones that we don't like, then we're also going to be dulling the rest of our emotions. We are human beings, and we are meant to feel the full range of emotions. And suppressing one hard emotion might seem like a good idea, because why would you want to feel that? Why would you want to feel sad? Why would you want to feel angry? The things that we tend to not to not really value or appreciate or really enjoy. But the thing is, is that it doesn't work very well. It ends up prolonging our suffering when we push things down, because it's going to keep trying to push through. And also the feelings will come out in ways that we don't necessarily expect or appreciate. And it might come through at times when it's really not convenient. But if you can just allow yourself to feel those hard emotions, that's the fastest way through. And you will get to the other side if you allow yourself to feel. And I really think that was the main theme of their first movie, because Riley is struggling with something that is happening in her life. And she has this predominant part that feels joy, and she likes that part. And yet, when Joy tries to suppress sadness, it just ends up making things worse for her. And when finally she can tap into that sadness, that enables her to then reconnect with joy. And also when she suppresses sadness, it also cuts her off from other parts of herself. And that is really sad. So allow yourself to feel all of your emotions. That's lesson number one. So lesson number two is also largely from that first movie and is related to this first one. And that is, is that we all have these, you know, what they call islands in the movie. So, for Riley, in the movie, she has a family island friend island. There's honesty, and there's goofball islands. And all of these islands are part of her. They anchor her to who, and they all help her to feel good, to be alive. You know, when I work with anyone, but especially my couples, I really encourage them to develop themselves, to have their own interests, to have their own connect with their own wants and needs, to develop their own friendships, to do the things that they really love to do, to find what lights them up. So it's not just about your long term relationship. It's important. Well, to diversify and to have different things in your life and to not just. Or to not just work. It's really good and healthy to have all these things. You know, maybe you make friends or have a hobby you love, you volunteer, you exercise, and maybe you don't have time for all of that, but make sure you have activities and qualities about yourself that you appreciate. So these so called islands can help anchor you in hard times and also help you enjoy life. And when one thing ends up going away, so maybe a relationship ends, maybe a job comes to an end, you will have other things in your life that will buoy you and light you up. They will help you get through those hard times. Okay, so that's lesson number two. Lesson number three comes from the second movie. Somewhere in the middle of the movie, we come to Riley's imagination. And imagination is a beautiful, wonderful thing. But when it is paired with strong emotions, like anxiety, or maybe grief or anger or envy or another strong emotion, it can end up feeding that underlying strong emotion and make it bigger. And another way that I talk about this with my clients is the stories that you tell yourself when you are triggered by that strong emotion, and that ends up eating that emotion and making things a lot bigger. And it can make it more difficult to keep your perspective and see things for what they really are. You know, I talk about this a lot with couples because this is exactly what so commonly gets couples into trouble, is that, you know, one person does something that triggers the other one. And then the one that's feeling triggered or activated, they start telling themselves these stories, and then it makes it bigger and bigger, and then that can end up triggering the other person. And so they start telling themselves stories, and suddenly you are so far from what originally happened that it makes it harder to deal with that underlying trigger. So, for example, one person makes a big purchase and doesn't tell the other one their partner notices it while looking at their bank account and might not even know what it is, but you can't believe they didn't tell you or check with you. And so you start telling yourself some stories. Maybe you start making things up about what it is that they purchased. Or maybe you start thinking that, oh, my gosh, maybe they're cheating on me and they bought something for somebody else, or they've got this secret life. And then you start thinking about all the ways that you're really not compatible with this person and all you think about all their flaws, and you can see that it just builds on itself, the reality. They made a big purchase and they didn't tell you. That's all you know for sure. Are you allowed to be angry about that? Of course. So feel those emotions. Allow yourself to feel that and then have a conversation. That anger is trying to protect you, so listen to it, but don't feed it. You know, have that conversation. Check in with them before you go down that road of demonizing them. Your partner probably crossed a boundary. They made a mistake. But have a conversation. Let them know how it made you feel, and then talk about what you need going forward. And then listen. Make sure you also listen to them. So the third lesson is, be aware of the stories you're telling yourself, that imagination that comes in that can make things bigger than they really are. See if you notice when you get hooked by those strong emotions. And see if you can stop yourself from telling those stories which are almost always untrue. Okay, that's the third lesson. So, the fourth lesson is an overall theme for the second movie. And what that is is that we don't get to decide who anyone else is. None of us is all good. None of us is all bad. We are complicated, messy creatures made up of all these different, beautiful, complicated parts. And all of those parts try to do the best for us, even though that can be hard to see sometimes. And we also can't make choices for others. So being able to accept someone for all of whom they are is really good for our relationships. But maybe most important of all in this lesson is self acceptance. We are all flawed humans, but if we can come to accept all parts of ourselves and recognize that we have done the best that we can, given the circumstances of our lives, that we all have these different parts, then we're going to be better off. We have parts that might be self critical or judgmental or self absorbed. We might get jealous or envious or yell at others or drink too much. And we have parts that want others to be okay, that value honesty, that love, seeing others happy and want to do good in the world. All those beautiful things and they're all wrapped up together. You might have all of those qualities, or just some of them, and that's beautiful, but the sooner you can accept all parts of yourself, the happier you're going to be. So then we come to my bonus lesson. And I thought the movie was maybe gonna go here, and it kind of did, but it's not, hit you over the head, obvious, but that is the importance of our relationships and how that is tied to who we are. Our relationships influence our inner experience, and our inner experience impacts our relationships. It's a two way street. So when we know who we are, so when we're grounded in our values, we know what matters to us, and we generally feel good about who we are, that it makes it easier to connect with other people and have healthy relationships. And when we have good, healthy relationships with other people, that can help to remind us of who we are, what's important to us, and help us feel good about ourselves and about life. So that's a two way street. That's the last lesson. So the overall takeaway here is that relationships matter and our relationships with ourselves are foundational. Now, I didn't talk so much about the main theme of inside out two, which is anxiety. And they portray it so well and really give you a sense of what it feels like, which can be a lot, but is really insightful. And given how prevalent anxiety is in the world today, especially with young people, I think. I think it's super important for us all to have a good understanding of what that's like and understand how that can affect our behavior and how then we end up interacting with others and the choices we make. All of that. During my internship, when I was training to be a psychologist, I got specialized training in anxiety. So I learned about panic disorder, OCD, phobias, generalized anxiety disorder. And that was really helpful in my work. But also me personally, I have anxiety, too. But what I have learned, I now can be in a room with a spider and not totally lose my shit. I can sing in front of hundreds of people and still feel nervous, but I can do it, and I can have a lot of fun. So that's been super helpful. And as a coach, I no longer diagnose or treat pulp people in general, but it still informs my work and helps support people, and it helps me to recognize how well inside out portrays anxiety. So, anyway, I think it is a movie that is well worth your time. I hope you'll go see it. I hope you like it and let me know what you think. And that's it for today. I am going to be slowing down just a little bit on my podcasting this summer because the new side of my business, the psilocybin and facilitation, is ramping up and I still love the relationship coaching, and so I'm doing lots of that work too, so it's been really rewarding. I love what I do, but I anticipate that once I find my new rhythm, I'll be more regular with the podcasting. So I do love sharing good information with you all about relationships and self development, and I love connecting with all of my guests. So stay tuned and thanks for being here. [16:47] Karin: Thanks for joining us today on Love is us. If you like the show, I would so appreciate it if you left me a review. If you have questions and would like. To follow me on social media, you can find me on Instagram, where I'm @theloveandconnectioncoach. Special thanks to Tim Gorman for my music, Aly Shaw for my artwork, and Ross Burdick for tech and editing assistance. Again, I'm so glad you joined us today, because the best way to bring more love into your life and into the world is to be love. The best way to be love is to love yourself and those around you. Let's learn and be inspired together. /episode/index/show/069df229-18e0-4c38-8f9e-24c9fed2cab8/id/31890222

#67: Betrayal and Forgiveness, with Bruce Chalmer 06/11/2024

#67: Betrayal and Forgiveness, with Bruce Chalmer Today I talk with Dr. Bruce Chalmer, a couple therapist and author of a newly published book about betrayal and forgiveness - a book I highly recommend for anyone struggling with forgiveness. Carrying around anger and/or resentment toward someone is a heavy burden to bear that can sap your energy, detract from your relationships, and steal your joy for life. But how can you forgive someone who has betrayed you? Is forgiveness always possible? Listen in to learn more! Dr. Bruce Chalmer is a psychologist in Vermont who has been working with couples for over thirty years. Through his teaching, consulting, writing, podcast, and videos about relationships, his ideas have helped thousands of couples and their therapists. Dr. Chalmer is the author of "It's Not About Communication! Why Everything You Know About Couples Therapy is Wrong", published in 2022, and "Reigniting the Spark: Why Stable Relationships Lose Intimacy, and How to Get It Back", published in 2020. His latest book is “Betrayal and Forgiveness: How to Navigate the Turmoil and Learn to Trust Again.” With his wife, educator Judy Alexander, Dr. Chalmer co-hosts the "Couples Therapy in Seven Words" podcast, available at https://ctin7.com. Books Bruce mentions in today’s episode: , by Jill Bolte Taylor , by Jonathan Haidt Learn more about Bruce: Book: Website: Podcast: Learn more about Karin: Website: Instagram: TRANSCRIPT Intro: Karin: This is Love Is Us, Exploring Relationships and How We Connect. I'm your host, Karin Calde. I'll talk with people about how we can strengthen our relationships, explore who we are in those relationships, and experience a greater sense of love and connection with those around us, including ourselves. I have a PhD in clinical Psychology, practiced as a psychologist resident, and after diving into my own healing work, I went back to school and became a coach, helping individuals and couples with their relationships and personal growth. If you want to experience more love in your life and contribute to healing the disconnect so prevalent in our world today, you're in the right place. Welcome to Love Is Us. Episode: Karin: Welcome all my listeners. Thank you for being here. Today we are going to be talking about forgiveness. Oof. This can be a really tough topic for a lot of people, no exception to this. But when we hold on to anger and resentment, to that hurt after we've been betrayed, it affects the other areas of our lives and it impacts our relationships, especially when it makes it so that it's hard to trust again, because trust is a fundamental part of our relationships, of healthy relationships, anyway. So I'm really happy to have Bruce Chalmer back. I had him on about a year ago, and he has got so much experience working with couples, and I love learning from him. I read his recent book that he just published. It's called betrayal and how to navigate the turmoil and learn to trust again. And I can say with 100% integrity that this really is a book, and I highly recommend that you read it if you are going through something like this. So I'm excited to have him on. This is a really rich conversation with great information. And again, I'm glad you're here. Here we go. Bruce, welcome back. [02:18] Bruce: I'm delighted to be back. Thanks for having me on your program. [02:21] Karin: Yeah, it's really great to have you back. Of course, you were on my show, I don't know, around a year ago or so, and you were talking about communication and couples. And then you had contacted me a few months ago about this new book that you have out, betrayal and how to navigate the turmoil and learn to trust again. [02:43] Bruce: Yes, indeed. [02:44] Karin: And you would ask me to read it, and I eagerly said yes and really enjoyed it. I thought it was just very clear, easy to understand and digest, and I really appreciated it. [02:56] Bruce: Well, thank you. I appreciate that. And I appreciate the really nice blurb that you wrote that appears in the book, actually on the praise pages in the beginning. You're in there. So thank you for that. [03:06] Karin: I'm famous. [03:08] Bruce: You are. Absolutely. And actually, as of the time, we happen to be recording this on the day after it is the official release. So now it's out there now. So you're getting more and more famous, at least I hope so. [03:22] Karin: Excellent. So we're talking about forgiveness today. And there was a time when I worked in research down at Stanford, and I worked in doctor David Spiegel's laboratory. And so that name is probably not familiar to most people, but he's pretty well known in his field. He does a lot with hypnosis and altered states of consciousness in terms of dissociation. But also, he did this really famous study about how social support can extend your life, especially with a diagnosis of metastatic breast cancer. So that's what we were studying. But anyway, he would have these really big people come in, like, I got to meet Bessel van der Kolk and stuff like that. But one of the people he had come in worked just locally at Stanford, and I think he was kind of new at this time, and his name was Fred Luskin, and he came to talk to us about forgiveness. And I remember David Spiegel going, well, that's. And I hope that my memory is right. I hope I'm saying this accurately, but he kind of had enough of it. He was like, you know, I've worked with all these women who have had these terrible things done to them, and I am certainly not going to ask them to forgive. And I think that influenced me at the time. I was pretty young, but also, I don't think that I quite got it. And I was left with the question for a long time afterwards, like, what really is forgiveness and what is it not? And so maybe we can start there. Maybe you can talk to us about what it is and what it's not. [05:18] Bruce: Yeah. In writing a book, betrayal and forgiveness, clearly, I am more than implying, I'm saying very explicitly, forgiveness is a really important part of healing from betrayal. But, of course, what we mean by forgiveness, it really depends on how you're using that term. And I wrote a fair amount in the book about what, at least the way I use the word what forgiveness is not. And I think there are. I suppose I could boil it down. There's two different ways of understanding the word forgiveness, and I go with one of them. And let me. Let me give you the one that I don't go with. A lot of times when someone says, okay, I forgive someone who hurt me, what it means is they've restored their relationship with them. So if somebody has been, oh, even let's say the case of a married couple and somebody is sexually unfaithful, and the person who was the offended party says, well, I forgave them. Meaning when they say it, they're saying, okay, I restored my relationship with them. We got past it. We're going to continue on with our marriage, or whatever it was. That's one way of understanding what forgiving is. I use the word forgiving in a different way, certainly not that rarer way either. But the way I use the word forgiving is it has almost nothing to do with the person you're forgiving. It's only about yourself. It's an inside job, which is to say, forgiveness is when you give up the preoccupation with the anger, the shock, the trauma stuff, when you've healed from the trauma enough so that you can think about it and be reminded of it and not go into a panic. That's what I mean by forgive. You've let go of that shock reaction. And that doesn't mean that you're going to restore the relationship with someone who betrayed you. You may, but what it means is you can think clearly about it. And that's why I say, well, forgiveness is a necessary part of healing, because you're, before you've forgiven, you're feeling this inner sense of pain. One of the people I quote, and many people when they talk about forgiveness, will quote Ann Lamotte, the novelist, and I think she writes essays as well. And one of her famous quotes, is something to the effect that to not forgive someone is like drinking rat poison and waiting for the rat to die. And as I point out, yeah, what you need to do is get the poison out of you, and then you can worry about dealing with a rat. And from that perspective, you can forgive. The way I'm defining forgiveness, it's possible, at least in theory, to forgive anything, no matter how heinous it is, no matter whether or not the person who hurts you has any remorse or deserves any kind of forgiveness in the former sense. So forgiveness is something you can do for yourself to get past the panic phase, and then you can think about moving on. It's very different from trust. You can forgive someone you don't trust. You can forgive someone that you would still take to court. You can forgive someone that you would still divorce. I even say, you can forgive someone you would go to war against, even though it's a tragedy to have to go to war. But you might feel like, well, this is the only way that we can defeat some sort of horrible thing that's happening. But you don't have to. You don't have to be in shock over whatever it is that your enemy did to you. You can work with them. That's how people are able to make peace after wars. They're able to have a sense that, okay, I don't have to be angry anymore. I can have a sense of mutual understanding. [08:45] Karin: And I love that. It's really about the person who had been betrayed. It's really about, primarily about their healing so that they can move on. [08:54] Bruce: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And of course, usually if it's something, someone who has an ongoing relationship with someone, they're in a marriage or a couple hood or they're in a member of the family or something like that, usually the person who did the betraying wants to be forgiven if they've acknowledged that they've hurt someone. But that doesn't determine whether the person who was hurt is ready to forgive them. And that's something only the really, only they can determine. And lots of people will urge someone because of the very things I was talking about. It hurts. Before you've forgiven someone, you're carrying around a real painful burden. And forgiveness, you give up that burden. So anybody who loves that person is going to want them to forgive if they can, but that doesn't mean that they're ready to do so. Sometimes we are not ready to forgive. Sometimes we need the anger. [09:48] Karin: Yeah. And sometimes it takes a lot of time to get there. [09:51] Bruce: Absolutely. [09:52] Karin: Yeah. [09:53] Bruce: Yeah. And appropriately, you know, it does for good reason. We have the anger for good reason, and it takes a while to get over it for good reason, because it's, you know, it's part of our brains trying to protect us. [10:06] Karin: And I would think then that would also mean that the size of the hurt or perhaps the closeness of the person who betrayed you might determine how long it actually takes. [10:23] Bruce: If it was someone, you would think that, wouldn't you? And I say that by way of saying I'm often surprised in both directions. It's funny, just earlier today, I was meeting with a couple where, and I think it was my third session with them, so I've known them. I dont think weve been meeting weekly, but ive known them for maybe a month or so. And its amazing to me how far they had come in such a short time from some really painful stuff. And conversely, ive met folks who seem to be harboring really painful grudges from an offhand comment 25 years ago. So it is often surprising to me the nature of the betrayal or, or the closeness of the person, it isn't perfectly correlated with how long it seems to take. [11:12] Karin: That's super interesting to me. [11:14] Bruce: Yeah. [11:15] Karin: And it also makes me wonder if it has something to do with past betrayals that somehow triggers and brings up for people that that could be. I wonder why, if that's sometimes why it can be harder in some circumstances. [11:29] Bruce: That's a great point. You know, I don't know. It's an interesting possibility. I don't know that anybody's done specific research on that. You know, everybody's been hurt one time or another in their life to one degree or another. If you've lived long enough, you've probably been badly hurt by someone you love again, one way or another, not always the same ways. And so we all have something of a past, probably. If you're over the age of 20, you've had some past of being, having your heart at least bent, if not broken, to use a silly metaphor, that phenomenon that it's based on past betrayals wouldn't be surprising. I wonder, actually, in terms of what you're saying, I wonder if some of this is like generational. Generational trauma can play a role in this kind of thing as well. It's not just what happened to you as an individual, but the things that your culture is carrying as well can also play a part. [12:23] Karin: Yeah. Yeah, I would believe that, too. And how is it empowering to forgive somebody? [12:31] Bruce: Well, I'll answer that a bit and expand on it. That it is indeed empowering to forgive somebody in the sense that it relieves you of that burden. In the Anne Lamott sense, it's like using her metaphor. It gets the poison out of you so that you're no longer walking around with the sense that anytime you're reminded of whatever happened, you freak out or descend into panic. So it certainly is empowering in that sense. The reason that I like to define forgiveness as an inside job is precisely that. It's because that's empowering. To define forgiveness as dependent on what someone else does or doesn't do is disempowering. So when somebody says, I can never forgive this person who did this terrible thing for me, and they are, anytime they think about it, there's this clutch in their stomach and they can't be in the same space with them. And it's like it renders parts of the world unholy ground where they can't foot because that person is there. And that's disempowering. It seems to me it's much more empowering if you're able to say, boy, that really sucked, but I can get past it. And here we are. And there's somebody else I quote in the book is Carl Pillimer, who is a sociologist at Cornell who wrote a book a few years ago called Fault Lines, where he talked about family estrangement. And what he found was, it was very relevant to the stuff I was writing about. He found that, I think it was, it was interesting research. I think he was able to estimate about 25% of Americans currently are going through some sort of major estrangement from a close family member. And he's not talking about divorce. He's talking about other kinds of estrangements and that. And it's always painful. Thats one generalization he could make its way. Everybody expressed pain about it. And he found that the people who at least tried to reconcile, which was just a subset of them, but he found a subset that tried to reconcile. And everybody who tried to reconcile was glad they had tried. And not all of them succeeded. Some of them realized, okay, this just isnt going to work, and they kind of had to give up on it. But the ones who succeeded often, and I found this fascinating, the way they succeeded was they gave up on what they thought they needed. They thought for a long time, estrangements. People think, I need the other person to admit what they did. I need them to apologize. I need them to acknowledge the pain that they caused. I need them to understand where I was coming from. The folks who were able to reconcile often gave up on that beforehand. They just said, you know what? It's been in some cases like 25 years in some of his examples, it's been a long time or a short time, whatever. Let's just see where we're at now. And often when they would do that and reestablish contact and the walls would come down amazingly, then the apology would happen in one direction or both directions. Somebody would say, I've been meaning to say, I'm really sorry about that, what happened all those years ago. I really feel bad about how I reacted. And the other person, who's apt to say, you know, I am too, I think we both kind of lost our cool, and there they are, and it's fine. So I find stories like that inspiring. Stories like that are why I would write a book on betrayal and forgiveness. [15:57] Karin: Yeah, indeed. So you say in your book that you can't go back to how things were. So I love this concept of being able to accept what has happened, has it happened. But also not wanting things to be different. Can you talk to us about that? [16:17] Bruce: Yeah. Yeah. You know, the scenario that pops in my head when you ask about that is the one where there's been infidelity, where there's been an affair. I see it a lot in my practice. And so, you know, a couple comes in and in the first session very often, I did a kind of seat of the pants guests a few years ago. I think it's like 30 or 40% of the couples I work with in the first session are saying, yeah, what they're there for is because there was infidelity. So a lot of people dealing with that. And some folks will come in and usually by the time they get to my office, the person who cheated has admitted to it. Usually that's the case by then. And theyre very sorry. Theyre really upset, theyre sorry, theyre full of guilt, theyre wanting to be forgiven. All totally understandable. The person who was the one who was cheated on is usually feeling really hurt, angry, confused, shocked, all of the above. And sometimes what they will say is especially the person who did the cheating will say, I just want to go back to how things were before. We had a good relationship before. Lets go back to that. And sometimes the partner will agree and sometimes they won't. But what I do point out, as you're asking about, you can't do that because that was the situation that led you into the problem. And in order to do that, you'd have to somehow manage to forget all the pain you just went through. And you can't really do that. I mean, human beings aren't going to do that for good reason. That's another evolutionary protection we remember when we, so if the couple is going to survive as a couple and want to stay together, they're going to have to learn to not to forget about it or go back to how it was, but learn from it, to integrate it. You're going to say, wow. And this is something I have heard numbers of couples say after a considerable amount of work, they'll say something like, wow, that was really painful, but I'm so glad we went through that because look how much better off we are now. So. And, you know, sometimes they'll say that together. Occasionally they'll say that separately. They'll say, well, we, you know, it looks like we, we were heading for a breakup and this is really what precipitated it. So grateful it happened and here we are and we can take care of the kids if we're okay with each other. Again, we can take care of the kids. Or again, sometimes they'll say, well, we're so glad we can stay together and our love for each other is so much cheaper because we've been through this. [18:47] Karin: Together and it will be different. [18:50] Bruce: And it will be different. Yeah. Yeah. That's, you know, Esther Perel points that one out. Lots of folks who've written about recovery from affairs. I think Janice Spring points it out. I have an endorsement from her on the front cover of my book and she's a bestselling author, so I'm psyched about that. [19:07] Karin: Nice. [19:08] Bruce: Yeah. But lots of folks will point that out. You're going to have a new relationship, not entirely new. You're still the same people, but you're going to have a relationship that has been, you could say, transformed or enriched by going through a crisis together and coming out the other side and having such a better understanding of each other and of yourself or having gone through it. [19:34] Karin: Great. And the... /episode/index/show/069df229-18e0-4c38-8f9e-24c9fed2cab8/id/31684742

#66: Is it Sex Addiction? With Eric FitzMedrud 05/28/2024

#66: Is it Sex Addiction? With Eric FitzMedrud Do you suspect that you or someone you care about has a sex addiction? Sex addiction is a topic that is being discussed more often nowadays, but misunderstandings are common. Listen to this episode to learn more. My guest today, Eric FitzMedrud, is a licensed psychologist who specializes in relationships and sexual issues. His specialty is helping men improve their sex lives by learning to regulate their emotions, removing sexual entitlement, and honing their sexual consent and negotiation skills. FitzMedrud is a member of the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists. He has been published in an academic book an academic journal and has spoken at multiple conferences. He has also trained therapists and taught many graduate courses in psychology. FitzMedrud has a PhD in Clinical Psychology from the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. He is polyamorous and bisexual, and lives with his wife of twenty-three years and his life partner of six years in San Francisco’s East Bay area, California. Learn more about Eric: Website: IG: Book: Learn more about Karin: Website: IG (relationships): IG (psilocybin facilitation): TRANSCRIPT Intro: Karin: This is Love Is Us, Exploring Relationships and How We Connect. I'm your host, Karin Calde. I'll talk with people about how we can strengthen our relationships, explore who we are in those relationships, and experience a greater sense of love and connection with those around us, including ourselves. I have a PhD in clinical Psychology, practiced as a psychologist resident, and after diving into my own healing work, I went back to school and became a coach, helping individuals and couples with their relationships and personal growth. If you want to experience more love in your life and contribute to healing the disconnect so prevalent in our world today, you're in the right place. Welcome to Love Is Us. Episode: Karin: Hello, everybody. Today we're going to be talking about sex addiction. And this is a topic that other people have come to me wanting to talk about and I have turned them away. And that is because it is not without controversy, and we're going to get into why that is today. But it's really important to me that I bring you good information and not information that might be harmful. And I certainly want to bring you the best information, the most accurate information that I can. So I am really happy to have found my guest today. His name is Eric Fitz Medrud and he is a therapist specializing in relationship and sexual issues, and he's based in the San Francisco Bay Area, and he is also a speaker. He is a member of the American association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and therapists. He's been published in academic books and journals, and he also has a book called the Better Man, a guide to consent, stronger relationships, and hotter sex. And he was just really nice to talk with as well. And I really think he knows his stuff. So there's just one thing that I want to leave you with before we start, and that is we didn't talk too much about a term called out of control sexual behavior, and that is an alternative term to sex addiction. And I'm just going to give you quick definition here that I found online. It's from Douglas Braun Harvey, who I believe is kind of the pioneer in calling it this and describing it. He says it is a sexual health problem in which an individual's consensual sexual urges, thoughts, and behaviors feel out of control. And he saw it as a sexual problem, not a sexual disorder or illness. But again, we're going to get into that in this episode. I hope that you get something out of it, and I hope that you will leave me a review that really helps my podcast get out to more people. So I would super, super appreciate it. Anyway, thanks for being here. And here we go. Welcome, Eric. [03:09] Eric: Thank you for having me. I'm really glad to be here. [03:12] Karin: Tell us where you are in the world. [03:15] Eric: I am in San Francisco's East Bay Area, right next to the East Bay hills, which are still green. [03:25] Karin: That's a familiar neck of the woods for me. I spent, really, the first half of my life generally in that area. But how long have you been there? [03:37] Eric: I've been living in the Bay Area since 2002, and I was drawn here for grad school. [03:46] Karin: And then you just never left? [03:47] Eric: I never left. I had children. And like a lot of people, my nomadic days came to a sudden and screeching halt. [03:56] Karin: Right. That happens with kids. [03:58] Eric: It does. [03:59] Karin: Oftentimes. Not all the time, but often. So tell us what you do for work. [04:04] Eric: So I'm a psychotherapist in private practice, I work with individuals and couples, primarily heterosexual and homosexual couples, a few lesbian couples here and there, and some work with non binary trans individuals. And I primarily focus on sex and relationship issues. [04:23] Karin: And what drew you to doing that kind of work? [04:26] Eric: Having some of my own challenges in sex and relationship issues. So, you know, I grew up a Catholic. I experienced a lot of sexual shame as a young man. I also had the experience of a lot of relationship turmoil. And my parents, neither of them, they broke up very early in my life, and then they both had a lot of transitory relationships. And I was really clear that I wanted to do something different with my life. And getting into and staying in a relationship was the easier part for me. But figuring out how to navigate my own sexual desire, how to navigate monogamy for the many years that I tried to do that 18 of our years of marriage I was trying to do, that was very difficult for me. And so as I entered grad school around psychology, I started taking, you know, every course that I could here and there about sexuality to try to learn more about what was going on inside of me, what was going on inside of a lot of the men that I knew in my life. And that eventually created a specialty for me that showed up in my practice and continued to fertilize my own personal development around sexuality and relationships. [05:55] Karin: And I just want to call out, because you said that you struggled with monogamy for many years, and so you then decided to try something else. Isn't that right? [06:06] Eric: I did. I mean, when I say I struggled with monogamy for many years, I don't mean that I was having chronic, constant affairs, but I did have. I did have two affairs very close back to back in the 2002, 2003 time, shortly after I got into grad school, I then really went into a concerted effort to try to maintain my monogamy. I'm generally a very ethical person. Ethics are important to me. Honesty is very important to me, and I'm a very terrible liar. So I don't do affairs skillfully, which, all in all, it was a pretty good weakness to have. And it was several years later that I found myself in my third affair. And most of that time, it's not like I was thinking of myself as having difficulty in the monogamy. But in retrospect, I didn't realize what I wasn't integrating into myself and into my relationship. And so, yeah, after that third affair, I talked with my wife. We considered a lot of different options. I suggested a couple of different things at that point. I said, perhaps what we should do is leave the Bay Area, respecialize in my practice out of sexuality and into something else, and try to maintain the monogamy in a different way outside of community that included non monogamous people, and outside of service in my practice that serve non monogamous people. And bless her in her low levels of jealousy, ease in repair, and just being a graceful and kind human being, she said, but you're polyamorous, so we should probably try that. It took a lot of preparation and work up to it, but after about a year and a half in that conversation, we tried polyamory, and we haven't gone back since then. So it's been about eight and a half, almost nine years since we began that process. [08:10] Karin: Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. I think, if we can, because I don't think that that is such an uncommon experience, and yet there is so much shame and so much judgment around doing it a different way. And so, you know, normalizing it, talking about it, I think, can be really powerful for people. So I appreciate that. [08:37] Eric: That's part of what I decided I had to do if I was going to be speaking on a public stage about these materials. It's one thing to be a therapist, not disclosing your personal challenges. That's kind of what we do all the time. But to speak on a public stage, I think, required a different kind of integrity. I had to be speaking about my own difficulties. And I want to be clear, not advocating non monogamy for other people, that was my path to integrity. What I'm advocating for is that people, and a lot of my work is specifically with men, that men take that path of moving towards integrity, whatever that looks like for each of them individually. [09:21] Karin: Yeah, yeah. And what we're going to be talking about is not unrelated today, and that is about sex addiction. And we came upon this. We originally were going to talk about something slightly different, but then we started talking about sex addiction, and I thought, oh, no, this is really. This is it. What I think would be good to talk about today, because I hear a lot of people talk about sex addiction, and I learned a lot of what I know from a pretty well known psychotherapist and expert in sexuality, and that is doctor Marty Klein. And he's got some very strong opinions about that. And what I learned from him is that it's not sex addiction, it's not sex addiction, and don't treat it as such, or you're going to do harm. And so, and, you know, I listened to him talk about what it really is about, and I think he really has some good things to say about that. But I think it really scared me off of really even talking about it at all because I don't have an in depth knowledge or understanding of it. And so it was really great to hear your take on it and talk to an expert in this area. So I'm really curious what your take is on it. [10:49] Eric: Yeah. When we're talking about addiction in relation to substances, what we're talking about is a neurobiological result of the substance being the body that causes dependence and tolerance. When a person is substance dependent, when they are addicted in the professional sense, they require continuing to maintain their exposure to the substance, and they experience tolerance. That is, they require more of the substance in order to create the same neurobiological high. And there are a lot of complications taking that framework and applying it over to sex and sexual behavior, among other things. There's some research by Nicole Prowse and others that questions whether neurobiological dependence and tolerance is valid at all for when it comes to sexual behaviors. And the notion of tolerance is also problematic in the sense that while many people do experience something that they equate to tolerance, where, oh, I was looking at porn, and the same porn that I was looking at stopped being interesting to me, so I started looking at other porn. It's very difficult to tease that apart from you were interested in other things and you began exploring a new area of your potential erotic landscape. So I agree with Marty Klein in a lot of senses that sex addiction is a bit of a misnomer. I really like talking about sexual behaviors more like we talk about compulsive food behaviors, because we need to cultivate a right relationship with food. We can't be abstinent from food, like an addiction model would present. And similarly, we are sexual beings. And as sexual beings, we can't eliminate our sexuality. We can't eliminate from ourselves what turns us on. There is no known way of eliminating a portion of your erotic map. We can't change people's sexual orientation. We can't change an aspect of their erotic landscape. In Doug Braun Harvey's term, we don't do erotoectomies. We can't cut out something that causes someone to feel erotic pleasure. And so the notion of addictions, a lot of the twelve step principles around that, for example, as well as abstinence guided treatment, engaging with a client in a way or with a person in a way that says, here are your problematic behaviors. Now, these are the things that you need to not do. You need to not think about them. You need to not be turned on by them. And that ends up creating a situation where a core part of the person's being is getting cut off by the treatment. None of that is to say that it's not causing damage in the person's life or relationship, that it doesn't feel out of control, that there may not be an escalating process. But concretely, in the DSM, the manual for Clinicians to diagnose in the United States, there is not a sex addiction diagnosis. There is not a sexual compulsivity diagnosis in the ICD ten, the International Guide to Diagnostic Frameworks, or the ICD eleven. I think we're on now. There is now a sexual compulsivity, a compulsive sexual behavior diagnosis. But the bar for that diagnosis is far above what the vast majority of clinicians encounter when somebody presents with the client saying, I think I am a sex addict. Specifically, it requires that the person is neglecting core responsibilities of daily living, that they're not eating, sleeping, maintaining employment, housing, and things like that. While there are people who engage in compulsive sexual behavior that way, we recognize that as being more similar to obsessive compulsive diagnoses than we do to a sexual issue or a sexual problem, or the kinds of things that we see most often, most of the time. For example, in my practice, when people show up and they say, I would like to see you for sex addiction, what they're talking about is sexual behavior they engaged in in secret, that their partner recently discovered, and that they're seeking treatment because they want to maintain their relationship. And addiction doesn't seem like the best framework to address those kinds of behaviors and problems. [15:53] Karin: And why are people drawn to calling it that? [15:58] Eric: It's a known way of labeling problematic behavior in our culture. Right. We have twelve steps of have seeped entirely into the culture. And it's a wonderful framework. It's very supportive. People in my family have benefited from twelve steps. I'm not anti twelve step at all, and I'm not anti addiction treatment. And I don't think it's the most skillful and appropriate way of addressing sexual issues. So there's a significant gap between people who are researching these issues and people who are on the front lines of trying to address those problems in the culture. And we have this gap. And I think a lot of us professionals are getting onto the idea of like, hey, the term sex addiction is here, and it's probably going to stay. And how we talk about that needs to shift. And we're hoping for the opportunity to shift the cultural understanding of the ways that problematic sexual behavior is different than other kinds of addictive behaviors. Especially when we compare it to substance use. [17:07] Karin: And it seems like it's an issue not just because it doesn't accurately describe what's going on, but because the treatment approach that people then use ends up being not so effective. Right? [17:21] Eric: That's right. Because let's take, for example, a person who has kink behaviors. They like looking at bondage videos. They want to engage in bondage practices with a partner or to be bound. And that is a core element for them of engaging sexually. If we were to label that behavior sex addiction because it took place in a hidden way, because a person experiences some shame about it, and because those two things can often create an out of control feeling for the individual, then the addiction model would immediately recommend a treatment of abstinence, or at least harm reduction. In the more enlightened addiction treatment centers around that behavior. Harm reduction is the idea of, okay, well, do it some, but do it as little as possible in order to cause as little damage. And what this does is that it continues to fuel a shame cycle. It tells the person that this interest is something that is not okay. We know that when we apply that kind of framework, for example, to treating gay men for being gay, that we end up causing harm. We increase the rates of suicide, we increase the rates of other mental health issues. Elements of a core erotic nature need to be accepted and integrated, or we are dividing the person. We are taking our external moral principles and we are imposing them externally on our clients. And we're causing harm. When a person can integrate elements of their sexual identity in their erotic math, then they get the opportunity to begin figuring out, okay, well, this interest isn't the problem. There are people who are gay, who have full, vibrant relationships, who have communities, who are vibrant contributors to their lives. That is also true of people with kink behaviors. This is also true with people who are non monogamous. This is also true of people with high drive, high desire, high frequency sexual behaviors. And so it becomes very problematic if we just use this person presented for treatment for a behavior that they don't like or that the people in their lives don't like. We need a framework for treating this that doesn't make us the moral arbiter of other people's sexual behaviors, or we will repeat the harms of our profession from prior generations on judging and pathologizing members of sexual orientation, sexual and gender identity difference, and sexual or neurotic difference. [20:14] Karin: And I love that you mentioned people who have a high sex drive, wanna have sex a lot. I think that that often gets pathologized. And so could you talk a little bit about that? [20:29] Eric: Yeah, I mean, there's some research that I really love about this that shows that at the high levels of pornography viewing, there are two different categories of people. One category of people does not have a problem with their high pornography viewing practice. It's not a problem for them. They aren't anxious about it. It's not causing any problems in their lives. And then there's another group of high pornography viewers who have anxiety or shame about their pornography use. These are people who view themselves as porn addicted and who may seek treatment for that. The problem isn't literally and kind of objectively the amount of pornography that the person is using. The thing, the factor that seems to make the difference is whether the person has shame and or anxiety about it. This is especially common, for example, among people with conservative sexual religious backgrounds, conservative sexual cultural backgrounds, and or people with a high level of internalized self shaming behaviors. For example, this comes up with OCD. In a practice that we talk about as scrupulosity. A person wants to do the right thing, and then they get certain frameworks in their mind of what the right thing is, and then they stay oriented. That, and they loop on it obsessively, and it creates a lot of anxiety. [22:01] Karin: And what role might hormones play in all of this? You hear a lot of people thinking, oh, it must be high testosterone that's fueling this desire to have sex so often. [22:16] Eric: Yeah. So a lot of blame and identification for male sexuality gets laid at the feet of testosterone in an extremely over simplistic way. Testosterone is not the sex desire hormone that it's played out to be. When testosterone is low, many men still experience sexual desire. When testosterone is high, men may not experience sexual desire. And there are pop up clinics all over the country right now advocating for... /episode/index/show/069df229-18e0-4c38-8f9e-24c9fed2cab8/id/31473907

#65: Jealousy - with Shannen Bryant 05/15/2024

#64: Breaking Free of Your Relationship Patterns 04/30/2024

#63: Navigating Stepfamily Life, with Amy Stone 04/16/2024

#63: Navigating Stepfamily Life, with Amy Stone Nearly half of all people are predicted to be part of a stepfamily at some point in their lives. Starting (or continuing) that journey with an understanding of the unique dynamics of blended families can help smooth the ride, improve your relationships, and help to make it a supportive environment for kids and adults alike. This episode will help get you started. Amy Stone is a mentor and coach for stepparents. She is a mom, a stepmom, and a grandma. She is a certified life coach but it is her personal experience as a wife and stepmom pushed her to create her own unique path to happiness. Today she shares her lessons learned and tools with others who find themselves in a similar situation. When she’s not coaching she’s usually running or swimming or biking - Amy is a 7-time Ironman Triathlon finisher and an avid marathon runner. Learn more about Amy: Website: https://amysaysso.com/ IG: FB: Learn more about Karin: Website: IG: TRANSCRIPT Intro: Karin: This is Love Is Us, Exploring Relationships and How We Connect. I'm your host, Karin Calde. I'll talk with people about how we can strengthen our relationships, explore who we are in those relationships, and experience a greater sense of love and connection with those around us, including ourselves. I have a PhD in clinical Psychology, practiced as a psychologist resident, and after diving into my own healing work, I went back to school and became a coach, helping individuals and couples with their relationships and personal growth. If you want to experience more love in your life and contribute to healing the disconnect so prevalent in our world today, you're in the right place. Welcome to Love Is Us. Episode: Karin: Hello and welcome, everybody. Today we're gonna be talking about stepfamilies, or if you prefer the term, blended families. And this is a subject that's near and dear to my heart. As someone who grew up as a kid in a stepfamily and at a time when there wasn't a lot of good information about how to do that in a way that works best for kids and the adults as well. But also now, as an adult, I have a stepfamily. I'm not a step parent, but my husband is a stepfather to my kids. And so I see that it's really important for us to have more of an understanding of those dynamics and the challenges that come along with it, with the rewards. So when I started coaching, I was working primarily with step families, and I still work with a lot of step families, but have expanded my audience a little bit. But I'm super excited to have my guest today, Amy Stone. She is a stepmother, a long term stepmother, and now is a mentor and coach to stepfamilies, and she was just a joy to talk with. She really knows her stuff, and she's got a great sense of humor, and I felt like we could talk about a million different things. So I hope you get something out of this episode. Perhaps I will invite her back. She also has a podcast of her own called Amy says so. So I hope you like it. And thanks for being here. Here we go. Karin: Welcome, Amy. [02:24] Amy: Hi. I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for having me. [02:27] Karin: Yeah, I'm excited to have you. This is an important topic, and I have been on the lookout for the right guest to have to talk about this, because it's something near and dear to my heart, and I wanted someone who really knows her stuff, and I think that's you. [02:47] Amy: Thank you. Thank you. I accept that compliment. [02:51] Karin: Oh, wonderful. And we'll get into your podcast and everything toward the end. But I just want to start out with asking, where are you in the world? [03:02] Amy: I am in sunny Miami, Florida. [03:05] Karin: And you said it's getting warm there. [03:07] Amy: It is. I mean, this is the time of year. Starting in February is the time of year where people are really drawn to the tropics because it's warm here and that's. So that's spring break. Right. So we're finishing out spring break. I don't know if people saw it, but Miami actually did an anti spring break campaign this year, which it was fine. There were still plenty of people. But now, now that we're recording this, right at this start of April, it is, it's getting tropical hot here. But that, that's what drew me here. I came here for warm weather and I try really hard not to complain about the warm weather. [03:48] Karin: Yeah, I can relate to that. In Oregon, we complain all the time. [03:53] Amy: About the weather, whether it's cold or hot or it's, you know, I think. [03:57] Karin: We have this ten degree window where, where people are happy, right? [04:01] Amy: No, absolutely. And, you know, we sort of on reverse seasons, like, I'm not in the southern hemisphere, but it's, you know, it's delightful here in the winter and then in the summer it gets oppressive. And so, you know, that's the reason the snowbirds are such geniuses. Right. Like, if you have a place to be when it's hot here, that it's not hot. That's like the ideal situation. [04:27] Karin: Yeah. So tell us what you do for work. [04:30] Amy: Okay. So what I do, I'd love to share this with you, is I am a mentor and a life coach for step parents. [04:36] Karin: And how did you come to do that work? [04:38] Amy: So I came to do that work. The way many people come to mentorship and coaching is that I am a stepparent. My step kids are now adults, but when I met them for the first time, they were quite young. So I've been a stepparent for over 25 years and I was doing coaching, fitness coaching and endurance coaching, and I added life coaching. And then once upon a time somebody said, what is a place where you could really make a big impact? And I was like, oh, you know, there is this thing I've done that was tough. That was tough. And I might be able to really support people there. [05:19] Karin: Wonderful. Yes. We do need more people who know how to navigate step family life because it is a higher degree of difficulty. It's different than a non blanded family. There are different things to consider. So I appreciate people like you. [05:39] Amy: Thank you. Yeah. [05:41] Karin: And why is it helpful for people, even those who are not in a blended or a stepfamily, to know a little bit about stepfamilies? [05:52] Amy: So this is a great question, and if your audience doesn't know, you actually, let me have this question with a little bit in advance. So I got a chance to think about it, and the first thing, actually, was a little bit of sort of imposter syndrome, where I was like, oh, is it. Is it important that other people would know? But then I was like, okay, no. Here, let me answer this question. The dynamics of existing in a blended family are helpful for people to know because there are so many people who are living in this situation. So I live in the United States. You live in the United States. The data is wonky. And so, like, I just will be upfront about that. Like that you've always got to question information about this, and I encourage people to just question the life out of any statistics I give. But the estimate that I have recently from Pew research is that four out of ten marriages today include a remarriage. Right? So those are people who are potentially stepparents. Maybe not. Like, it's not. It's not a one for one answer, but there are a lot of people who are engaging in potentially this construct, even if. And the other thing I always point out to people is, even if you don't choose this as your path, your kids might choose this as your path. And interestingly, if you have kids and they get remarried and you are an in law, congratulations, you're in a blended family. It's a very, very similar dynamic between an in law and the new family members that it is for a stepparent. So it's a very helpful set of complexity. And what's super interesting is that that mother in law role is vilified just like the stepmom. [07:33] Karin: Yeah. Yeah. [07:34] Amy: Isn't that crazy? Isn't that crazy? Like we. Yeah, yeah, yeah. [07:38] Karin: And, you know, I also think about, you know, couples who remarry much later in life or who lose a partner and then remarry, and then they have adult kids. And that adjustment is still really hard for a lot of families. [07:55] Amy: Still really, really challenging. And it is a different dynamic, without a doubt. Right. You get a totally different set of circumstances when you're talking about, like, 50 year old children versus seven year old children. Completely different set of circumstances. But, yeah, absolutely releasing the idea that the only kind of family setup is the one where it's a first marriage and everybody is biologically related to the children. Is really helpful in a lot of ways, because even outside of the very common ways that you and I just discussed, there are thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of people who are in the daily work of raising children that they're not necessarily related to. Sometimes these are kinship, custodial things where a relative has stepped in. Other times, it's somebody who's not related at all. And so embracing the idea that a family doesn't always have to look like that is helpful for so many people. [08:53] Karin: Yeah. And there are plenty of people who work with families, such as doctors or teachers, and might not understand that dynamic. And so there are some things that they're going to know, get wrong or miss. [09:09] Amy: Yes, absolutely. This was an old one. It was the census before the last census. But they. So we don't ask on the census, are you a stepparent? But one of the questions, I don't know if they did in this last one, but the one before it, they asked, are you living with somebody you're not related to? An enormous amount of children said, yes. And so if you branch out away from, you know, the mom, dad, stepmom, stepdad thing, it really encompasses a lot of people, and it's. And then a lot of this kind of conversation is always focused on very young children. But I really work in supporting the adults. And the concept of handing adults a toolbox to help them do this in a, you know, have more things to reach for in some of these very hard situations, to me, is a really empowering place to be because whether you're a first time parent, and this is actually something, every once in a while, people will say, hey, is the advice you give, you know, the tools you offer, is it only for step parents? And I don't know. I don't think that's true. I think that a lot of the stuff I offer is very broad, and I just speak directly to step parents, partly because nobody else is. Like, very few people speak directly to step parents, and. But, you know, it's like, the more tools, the better. The more resources, the better. It was way back in the early nineties, I think, that, uh, Hillary wrote that book that was like, it takes a village. And, you know, that's such a beautiful idea that it takes a village. And one of the just earth shattering revelations that most adults who engage in the family ing and adulting and parenting and step parenting space is that, you know, people turn into a joke. They're like, does the village just show up? Like, when do I find the village where where is it? Like, is there a number I can call? And so the more people who are out there are saying, hey, here are some things you can do, and here's some support. I think. I think the better. [11:04] Karin: Yeah, I agree. So for those who might be just starting their stepfamily journey, what might be helpful for them to think about ahead of time so they can be a little bit more prepared if there is such a thing. [11:22] Amy: This is such a good question. One of the things I love about this question is that, truthfully, I thought I was prepared. I mean, I just really. I had this assumption that, uh, that I could. That I was going to be fine. In fact, there were people who, um, who did try to raise the. My awareness that this could be a tough, uh, tough job. Like, I. My mom very specifically said, hey, this. This sounds like it could be a lot. You know, are you sure you want to take this on? And I was like, I. In my youthful exuberance, I took it as a challenge. Her. This is like a highlight of the flaw in our relationship, our mother daughter relationship. I was like, how dare you question my abilities to do this. I think that there's a lot of things you can do. None of them can necessarily guarantee that anything's going to work. But some of the things that are really, really helpful, that are counterintuitive is that I think that the more you know yourself, the better you are going to be at starting a family relationship. And I do think that's probably true for a first marriage in addition. Right? Because I'm upfront with people that a lot of the work that I did that helped me be happy in my family was deeply internal work about what was driving me and what was pushing me and what was allowing my buttons to be pushed. Because it's funny how having those little people around, whether they're your own children or your stepchildren, they push buttons. They. I don't know. Like, it is a special, special kind of thing that kids can do. And so that's something that I think is very helpful. And I offer that with the caveat that I think it's very hard to know that you need to do that or when you're done. Like, I don't know. It's like, I went to therapy, like. [13:18] Karin: Ten years ago, and I did that. So it's. [13:20] Amy: I did it. I did it, and it's done. And that definitely mirrors some of my experience. Like, oh, what is this showing up for? But, you know, having kids around brings up your own stuff from your childhood. If it's there, good, bad, middle, you know, everything from your bad experience at the science fair to being bullied on the playground to whatever came up for you. Seeing kids go through their own experience brings all of that stuff back up. And so if there's anything that was undone or incomplete, there's a chance it'll come back up. And I think that that's good. I think the other thing that is helpful, but also really kind of ambiguous and hard to know, is having a concept of what kind of life you want to create is a really helpful thing, because otherwise, there's a sense that life is sort of running you instead of you being intentional about it. But those are ooey gooey, messy, kind of ambiguous kind of things. [14:26] Karin: But, yeah, creating a vision. This is where. [14:28] Amy: Creating a vision. [14:28] Karin: Yeah, we're gonna go, and this is what's important to us. Yeah, yeah. And I love that you said that. It's really important to know yourself. When I was first starting coaching and working with step families, I did a bunch of research and interviewed people who had, you know, all the roles, all the different kinds of roles in a step family. And the thing that was really clear is that those who either did the work themselves and were parents and step parents, they did well, or those who were kids and had a parent who had done their work by far, they did the best. [15:10] Amy: No, it's like, if you like, it translates really well to other parts of your life. Right. So if you walk into a restaurant and, you know, you are the consumer, you don't feel like you need to jump behind the counter and cook all the food, you know, why you're there and what you're doing, and we don't do that in some places in our adult life. It gets confused. And then when you have these blends where there is. There are legacy roles. Right. There are legacy roles. So my step kids, they have a mom. So when I came in and showed up as another woman, clearly defining for me and them and anybody who happened to walk around, like, how we saw that in my family, was really helpful in making it through the day. [15:58] Karin: Yeah. [15:58] Amy: And I didn't know that I fell into it, so I had been done. [16:03] Karin: Yeah, yeah. But, yeah, I agree. Understanding your triggers and what you do and why that's triggering for you, and then perhaps doing some healing of that old wound, all of that can go a long way. [16:16] Amy: Right. And it can get really complicated, so. Right. Like, the word mom is a really powerful word, has a lot of attachment to people. Right. So, you know, when you take the word stepmom, a lot of people have really strong feelings about that. People actually will change it. They will say, I'm the bonus mom or the bonus parent. There's other. There's other words, and. And that's. That's easy to talk about here on the podcast. But there's other things that happen, right, which make it really throw the power of those words and the power of the triggers in the limelight. Like, so, like, if you've got fertility issues happening in family and you're really tied to what you're going to do, then these things become very messy, and you're craving for certain things starts to show up and giving yourself permission and tools to be able to talk about it and create a safe space to be this person inside your family. The more you know about yourself, the easier that is. I mean, it's a very, very loaded thing for people who deeply, deeply crave something to actually feel like they can talk about it. So, I am not a fertility coach, but I resonate with people who are. It's hard to stand up and say, I'm struggling with this. My concept of who I am is tied to this thing, and when I see these things, and a similar thing can happen to step parents. I'm struggling with who I am in this situation. I have these emotions. I'm not sure it's okay for me to share with you that. I feel, like, a little freaked out right now. You know, it's hard. [17:51] Karin: Yeah. Yeah. And what are some of the struggles that stepdads face? [17:59] Amy: So, stepdad. Never have lived as a stepdad myself, but I'll share some that I hear. Stepdads, it's a. I mean, they have a. It depends on their, you know, view of the world, but a lot of stepdads struggle with what they're allowed to do. Right. So if you walk into a family and your concept is that if you're a man, you're supposed to be the disciplinarian and the head of the household. Right. And there's other people doing some of those things where you're not sure if you can do that, that can really be a tough spot for some men to sit in. You know, like, hey, if I feel these kids are not behaving the way I want to, am I allowed to. To voice my opinion? Am I allowed to be a disciplinarian? What are the rules? What am I not allowed to do? It can be unclear how to demonstrate affection. So it's okay for a woman socially, sociologically, in a group setting. We're pretty accepting of women being physically affectionate to children. It's not as clear for some men. Like, so if I'm living with you, what are the rules? There's that, like, amazing scene in there's an Adam Sandler movie. I'm forgetting the title. And he's like, taking care of a young kid, and he is not bathing. And then he find the kid begins to smell, and he ends up in the bathtub. And the kid looks up and he's like, why am I wearing a swimsuit? And Sandler's like, I'm really unclear on the rules here. And, you know, that's like a, you know, that's one of the things that men really struggle with. But how to hold on to your view as the man and in the family? And what does that mean when you may not be the father of those children? [19:46] Karin: Yeah. And so do you coach people to simply have a conversation and figure out what works for them, or do you have specific guidelines that you recommend? [19:57] Amy: So. I don't have guidelines that I recommend for other people. I'm very an open book about how it worked out in our family. But I do. I suggest that people, and this depends on how old the kids are. Right. Because it's a different conversation. If you're stepping into a family and the kids are teenagers, teenagers are able to share their opinions. But being open about, you know, what are we gonna call me? Am I gonna be... /episode/index/show/069df229-18e0-4c38-8f9e-24c9fed2cab8/id/30817838

#62 Discover the Wisdom of Your Sexual Fantasies, with Artemisia Devine 04/09/2024

#62 Discover the Wisdom of Your Sexual Fantasies, with Artemisia Devine Your sexual fantasies contain wisdom. Tune into this episode with Artemisia de Vine to learn about your sexual fantasies and how listening to their innate wisdom can help you change your life in ways you never imagined. Artemisia is a Certified somatic sexologist, BA in anthropology and former sex worker and professional dominatrix. She’s also a sexual fantasy expert who teaches the world's leading sexperts the meaning of our sexual fantasies, and how to bring them out of our heads and into our beds. Understand how stories work and you understand why we have sexual fantasies - and how to create powerful, real-life transformative sexperiences that satisfy the real desire behind the story symbolism. Artemisia de Vine is the author of upcoming book: The Spirituality of Smut: The surprising wisdom of sexual fantasies. Learn more about Artemisia: Website: Instagram: Facebook: Learn more about Karin: Website: Instagram: TRANSCRIPT Intro: Karin: This is Love Is Us, Exploring Relationships and How We Connect. I'm your host, Karin Calde. I'll talk with people about how we can strengthen our relationships, explore who we are in those relationships, and experience a greater sense of love and connection with those around us, including ourselves. I have a PhD in clinical Psychology, practiced as a psychologist resident, and after diving into my own healing work, I went back to school and became a coach, helping individuals and couples with their relationships and personal growth. If you want to experience more love in your life and contribute to healing the disconnect so prevalent in our world today, you're in the right place. Welcome to Love Is Us. Episode: Karin: Hello, everybody. As you begin to listen to today's episode, I want to urge you to put aside all your judgments and tap into your curiosity if at all possible. Now, if you struggle with that and you notice a critic or judgmental part of you popping up, just notice that and see if that part of you or those parts of you can make some room for you to listen to this episode with an open mind. Because my guest today, Artemisia divine, is onto something big here. And I think there's a good chance you're going to learn something today that, for some of you at least, could be life changing. I certainly learned something from talking to her. She is so smart and insightful. This is about way more than sex and sexual fantasies. But by tapping into them and really listening to them, you just might unlock something really important for yourself. I am grateful for her and the work that she's doing. I hope that you will let me know what you think of it by visiting me on Instagram where I'm the love and connection coach. Where you can leave me a message as well. And you can also let me know what relationships and self development topics you'd like me to cover in upcoming episodes. I would love to hear from you. So thanks for being here. [02:11] Karin: Buckle up. [02:11] Karin: And here we go. Welcome, Artemisia. [02:16] Artemisia: I am delighted to be here with you. [02:19] Karin: All right, people might have already guessed, but tell us where you are in the world. [02:25] Artemisia: My accent gave me away. Did it? I am in Australia. I'm in rural Victoria, outside of Melbourne. So right down the bottom. And I live in the future because it's already tomorrow for me. The time's over. There you go. [02:44] Karin: And have you always lived in that region of Australia? [02:49] Artemisia: Oh, I've lived and worked all around Australia. But probably this has been one of my main homes. This and Sydney probably feel like my homes. Oh, my goodness. I've got a croaky throat. First thing in the morning, it is early because we have different time zones. Yeah. [03:08] Karin: And what keeps you in, Victoria? What do you like about it? [03:15] Artemisia: I'm in a beautiful space. This is. We're going in again on the flip side of the other side of the world. We're in the opposite seasons to you. So we're just entering into autumn right now. And this is one of the most beautiful magical places with so many autumn leaves and gorgeous mists that make you believe fantasies and an awful lot of interesting fungus that grows around here. [03:39] Karin: So tell us what you do for work. [03:42] Artemisia: So I am a sexual fantasy coach. I am an expert that teaches the sexperts in how to understand and engage sexual fantasies. Because really, if you want to have mind blowing sex, you have to understand the role the mind plays in sex. So I am somebody who has created an entire system around understanding and being able to bring fantasies out of your head and into your bed. [04:13] Karin: So how did you come to do that work? [04:16] Artemisia: It's not exactly typical work, is it? Being a sexual fantasy coach, how did ask that question? A lot. And it's a good reason, I think I actually. Well, initially I started because I was afraid of sex and I had my own sexual fantasies that seemed to go against the way that I wanted to be treated in real life and the way that I wanted to treat other people in real life. And I couldn't make sense of them. To be honest. When I very first became interested in fantasies, I was trying to solve the problem about what they were about. And I actually have spent over 30 years now delving into the erotic and trying to understand the erotic. Partly because I was confused about my own thoughts, but partly because I was experiencing desire as something that was taken from me for somebody else's benefit, not something that was for my benefit. And I was experiencing. I was hurt. I wanted to understand why on earth this was happening, why did we have this disconnect between what we were fantasizing about and the actual humanity relationship that was going on. And that took me on all sorts of adventures. And I worked in sex shops and became a certified somatic sexologist. And I learned from some of the most amazing sexperts from all around the world, read everything I could get my hands on, and had a lot of sex in my personal life. And eventually I decided to become a sex worker. And the most powerful, powerful time for me to understand the erotic psyche was the twelve years that I spent as a full time sex worker and as a professional dominatrix, where I was paid to live out the sexual fantasies of thousands of people, which gives you an entirely different perspective than learning about it at university. And what made me interested in it was my client's reactions when I actually trusted their fantasies the way that they are and created a really safe consensual container to live out the essence within them. Notice I said essence within them, not literally live them out. Notice that they would start to have these really powerful experiences that were far more profound than either of us expected. So, you know, it's not like you're expecting a smutty fantasy of using strap ons and threesomes and forced bisexuality to end up in a spiritual experience with your heart expanded and your mind expanded and feeling one with the universe. But it kept happening. And I was like, what is happening here? This is. What is this? And so I set out to try and understand what sexual fantasies were, and how could we actually harness them to get the most out of them. [07:20] Karin: So maybe we can go there then, at this point. What is a sexual fantasy? [07:26] Artemisia: Well, let's just start with what it is on a practical sense first. So a sexual fantasy is anything that you think about that gets you sexually aroused. So it can be a full blown story of thinking about, you know, you're threesome or you're having sex with a girl next door or whatever it is, somebody with a particular body type. Or it can be, you know, being rescued from, by a excellent fire person, you know, or a martial artist from some villain and being swept away. It can be all sorts of different things. It can be the whole story, but it could also just be you remembering having different kind of sex than you're currently having with the same person that you're having sex with right then. So you're same lover, but you're remembering what they did last Tuesday. And that was super exciting to you, and that gets you excited now. Or you could be imagining what you might be doing together this Friday night, on date night, and you're starting to imagine that and get yourself starting to get worked up. That's also part of being a sexual fantasy. So people have more sexual fantasies than they think they do. Even people who think they don't, they really do. [08:41] Karin: There really is a wide range of fantasies. I mean, it can run from seemingly mundane to something really exotic. [08:50] Artemisia: Yes, yes. You can have talking parrots and everything. It's quite. There's such a richness in the human mind. I tell you what, it's wonderful, but really what I've discovered is sexual fantasies are just stories and stories, they're transformational stories, they're designed to actually overcome fear of vulnerability so that we can open to the moment, we can actually connect intimately. We can just let go into the flow and have sex. Well, you know, like dance like nobody's watching, have sex like no one's watching, except they are, because that might be exciting to you, but. [09:34] Karin: Right, so that's one kind of fantasy, voyeuristic one. What are some common themes that you notice in people's fantasies? [09:45] Artemisia: There is a lot of. Well, the themes actually come through because of how fantasies work to transform us. What they do is they have to include our fear of being vulnerable and resolve that fear for us so that we can let go from being standoffish and lose ourselves in the moment, lose our sense of self and connect to a bigger sense of self and just become pure experiencing in the moment. So the themes about sexual fantasies tend to be all centered on our fear of vulnerability, our natural, normal fear of vulnerability. What I do that's different is it's very common for people to immediately default to thinking, oh, fear of vulnerability. That must be about something that's about my unfairness finished childhood business or my adolescent business. I must go and get some therapy then, and fix it, and then I'll be able to have sex without fantasies. I'm having this kind of fear of vulnerability because I've had this kind of life experience. And yes, absolutely true, these things do influence our sexual fantasies 100%. But what I do that is different is non pathologising. Those ones are kind of making it a little bit wrong. It's focused on something that needs healing or changing what I'm looking at and what I'm got this piece of it that has not been talked about before, which is the sexual fantasies are actually resolving a natural double bind mechanism that's just inherently in the sexual experience. So it doesn't matter what kind of childhood you had, you could have had the perfect childhood sexual fantasies. You'll still have sexual fantasies of non consent or power dynamics, or being turned on by being dominated or doing taboo things and being naughty or having more than one lover or even cheating, even if you had the perfect childhood and you have nothing to resolve, because there are inherent psychological mechanisms that need to be overcome to move from being closed off to open to another state of consciousness. And being sexually aroused is another state of consciousness. You think about things in a different way, you experience yourself in a different way, your nerve endings respond in a different way. Meaning making is done in a different way. When you are sexually aroused, but horniness is just the beginning of the whole umbrella of erotic states of consciousness that are possible. And when you understand the story of sexual fantasies, you understand that it's giving you the perfect map. It's giving you exactly what your particular ego fears about vulnerability and the exact antidote to that particular fear so that you can resolve it the way that's a way that's going to make sense to you in particular. So there's common themes that you can recognize. Like there's a lot of people, it's really recorded now, but there's a lot of people who have big fantasies about some form of non consensual sex where they're forced to experience the pleasure that they really want to experience. Oh, poor victim. There's a lot of themes around multiple people. There's a lot of themes around being used. There's a lot of themes around using somebody else objectification. And this is not how we want to be treated in real life or how we want to treat other people in real life. So there is an art form to understanding how these poisons and antidotes create this transformation of consciousness and bringing that psychological mechanism out of our heads and into our bdsm or sexual play experiences. [13:50] Karin: So, you know, you talk about these, these fantasies of things that are not allowed in society, right? And so when someone has this fantasy of, oh, I want to be overcome, I want someone to overpower me. And, you know, there might even be sexual assaults going on, something like that. What is the typical response you see in people when they have that kind of a fantasy? [14:21] Artemisia: Well, they're probably both very excited by it and also confused by it and having no idea how to actually bring it out, out of their heads and into their beds, they have no idea how to live it out. And often the first attempts to do that with a trusting partner have gone pear shaped because they don't understand what their fantasy is really trying to say. So they might, for instance, have a fantasy about, oh, I get ravished, I get tied up, and you have lots and lots of sex with me, and there's three of you, and you have lots and lots of sex with me, and I can't help it, and it's not my fault. In their fantasy, all of those characters, those three characters are actually just another aspect of them. And they're simply. They only exist to support your own psychology. And changing a real life person has their own agenda going on. So if in the fantasy, those three people end up touching you in exactly the way you want to be touched, for as long as you want to be touched and being. Being forced to take. It relieves you of any guilt of being too big and taking too much and taking up too much space. It relieves you of any guilt of focusing on yourself rather than trying to look after everybody else in the room. It relieves you of any guilt of being a slut because it's not your fault they made you do it. So now you can be a primal lusty being. And so, in reality, in the fantasy is actually being a kind story that is literally just creating the ingredients you need to give yourself deep permission to let go. But when they try and live that out, they say, well, what's your fantasy? Well, it's. My fantasy is just being used by three people and being tied up. So they try and go, okay, well, let's just do that then, shall we? And when the real people do it, they go, okay, well, she wants to be used, so I'll use her. And they do it literally. They include the poison, which is the fear that they're using. They have not included the antidote, which is being used in exactly the way she wants to be used for as long as she wants to be used. Right. [16:30] Karin: So there's. So I think that that's a really important thing to say, is that in the fantasy, it's really important that the person actually be the one to have the control over the situation ultimately. Would you say that? [16:43] Artemisia: I think that we really need to set a container where they. Absolutely. The thing is, the whole event is actually created to support their psyche. Whoever's fantasy it is, you're creating the experience to support their psyche. And they absolutely have. It's so important to create a safe, solid container around that and have safe words in place so that if anything goes a little bit unexpected and wrong, you can immediately stop or slow things. But it's also simultaneously just as important to genuinely let go, because if you are the person who is trying, if you're in too much control, you don't surrender. And the only way to get to those expanded states of consciousness is to surrender. So there's a real art form in being able to hold somebody in the right level of risk and safety at the same time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [17:39] Karin: And I want to go back to this idea about it not being literal, because I think a lot of people, they have these fantasies and they feel so guilty. They're like, but I believe in, you know, equal power for. For all genders. And yes, I want to be controlled by a man in the bedroom. What is wrong with me? Or I am someone that likes to make all these decisions and to be in control. And so why is it that in the bedroom, I want someone else to be in control and to be helpless? Okay. And then they often have these feelings of guilt or they're conflicted about it. [18:19] Artemisia: Yes, you ask brilliant questions, by the way. This is a lovely conversation. Okay. I would actually like to ask you a question at this point. So you have some experience with deliberately creating safe spaces for people to go into expanded states of consciousness in ways that benefit them. Are you aware that there is a transition phase moving from one state to the other and that there is internal resistance that needs to be overcome to move from one state to another? [18:47] Karin: Oh, absolutely. [18:49] Artemisia: What's your experience around that? What have you noticed? [18:52] Karin: Well, there are different ways to explain it or frame it, depending on what kind of tradition you come from. But you're essentially moving through these states of consciousness. [19:02] Karin: And there are a lot of levels, ranging from being here, being fully present, being aware of who you are, and that you're in your body to a complete ego death. And not everyone goes through all of those levels. But in order to have this experience, you need to be able to let go and have some trust and safety that you will be okay if you let go. And for some, especially for those who are new to these kinds of different states of consciousness, it can be really uncomfortable and scary. And. And another way that I often talk about it is, you know, with parts, there might be parts of us that come up that get in the way of us transitioning. So it might be you have an anchors part or an analyzing part or something like that that says, you know, no, I'm not ready for this. So that's part of the work, is working with those parts and working with a person to figure out how they can trust and let go and get the most out of the experience. [20:08] Artemisia: Yeah. And one of the ways that has been in the psychedelic assisted therapy community has that transition. That resistance has been described as ego resistance, or as a part, at least the part of you that creates and defends your sense of self, your sense of identity, self identity, self worth and social status, they can get in the way of this surrendering and the natural mechanism of moving from one state or another. It means that those things, the social status, the self worth and the self identity, need to be addressed and released so that you can move through. So a sexual fantasy is the exact story that includes your natural fear of your threats to your social status and your self worth. And your self identity, and it resolves them for you so that you can then let go of your normal sense of self and expand into this bigger sense of self. Once your ego mechanisms are in the backseat of the car or sometimes even right out of the car, and with these expanded states of consciousness, you're right. Sometimes you can go so far beyond that, you don't even have a body anymore. But sometimes you can go so deep into having a body... /episode/index/show/069df229-18e0-4c38-8f9e-24c9fed2cab8/id/30739218

#61: The Power of Breathwork, with Brenda Winkle 04/02/2024

#61: The Power of Breathwork, with Brenda Winkle Learn more about Brenda: Website: Podcast: Instagram: Facebook: Learn more about Karin: Website: Instagram: TRANSCRIPT Intro: Karin: This is Love Is Us, Exploring Relationships and How We Connect. I'm your host, Karin Calde. I'll talk with people about how we can strengthen our relationships, explore who we are in those relationships, and experience a greater sense of love and connection with those around us, including ourselves. I have a PhD in clinical Psychology, practiced as a psychologist resident, and after diving into my own healing work, I went back to school and became a coach, helping individuals and couples with their relationships and personal growth. If you want to experience more love in your life and contribute to healing the disconnect so prevalent in our world today, you're in the right place. Welcome to Love Is Us. Episode: Karin: Hey, everybody. Today we're going to be talking about breath work with my friend Brenda Winkle. And Brenda had been on my show back during episode number 38 where we talked about boundaries. And I'm so excited that she agreed. Come back and talk about her work as a breath work facilitator. And the reason I'm so excited about this and the timing is that I've been learning about breath work just in small bits over the past few years. You know, one step at a time. And the more I learn about it and the more I experience about it, the more I appreciate it and can see how powerful it can be for a lot of people. So the timing of this episode is really interesting because during, during my practicum training in becoming a psilocybin facilitator, we had four days of the practicum, and for an hour and a half each morning, we did breath work. This facilitated breath work experience, and it was a little bit different than I think Brenda does. It's called Vivation. There are lots of different kinds of approaches you can take, but it was incredible to hear everyone's experience of it. You know, people talked about their back pain disappearing and feeling like they were in this state of bliss. During the experience, you know, someone else talked about how they were able to relax for the first time in months after some really difficult experiences. I felt like I was able to let go of some of the trauma that I had experienced back in January, and it was a very physical release and it felt incredible. And then someone else talked about how there was, you know, this thing in her childhood that always upset her and nod at her, and it just seemed to not bother her anymore after this. So it was really incredible to hear people's experiences and, you know, it can be used in different ways. It doesn't have to be that you do it for an hour and a half or even an hour. It can be just a simple technique, like Brenda walks us through toward the end of the episode. So I hope you like this one, and I hope you will leave me a review. I would love to get some more reviews, and I really appreciate, appreciate you being here. So here we go. Welcome back, Brenda. [03:13] Brenda: Hi, Karin. Thank you for having me. [03:16] Karin: I'm so glad I get to be able to say welcome back. I think you're the. My second repeat guest, so I'm excited to have you back and talk about breath work this time, because last time we talked about boundaries, right? [03:33] Brenda: Yeah, that's right. I'm excited to talk about breath work, too. So thank you for having me back. It means a lot. Well, good. [03:39] Karin: I'm glad to have you here. In case someone missed the last episode. Tell us where you are in the world. [03:45] Brenda: Well, I live in Lake Oswego, Oregon, which is a suburb of Portland, which. [03:50] Karin: Is really close to me. [03:53] Brenda: In fact, that's how we met. We were on your podcast the first time and realized that we were, like, 20 minutes apart. And so we became friends in person after that podcast episode, which was so fun. [04:06] Karin: Yeah, super fun. And you even got to come over and spend Christmas with my family. [04:12] Brenda: That's right. It was so nice. [04:14] Karin: Yeah. We've gone on some adventures together since that time, so that's really fun, too. [04:19] Brenda: It is. It's been great. [04:20] Karin: Tell us what. What keeps you in Lake Oswego nowadays? [04:25] Brenda: Well, I don't know what keeps me here. That's a really interesting question. Um, I have a dog. His name is Bentley, and he's about a year old, and he is a greyhound, an italian greyhound mix, and he loves to run. So it's interesting that you ask me what keeps me in Lake Oswego, because right now, what's alive for me is Bentley really wants to run in a yard. And so I don't know for sure if Lake Oswego is the. Is the ending place, because Bentley needs a yard. So we'll see. [04:58] Karin: Yeah. So do you think you'll stay in the Pacific Northwest? [05:02] Brenda: I think so. And also, I'm open to something different. If something different were to present itself, I'm trying not to control outcomes. And, you know, whenever I get ready to embark on something that's a change, I have to remind myself not to control the outcomes, because it's really easy for me to think I'm not going to control the outcomes. Except for this one and this one and this one. Ah, yeah. [05:30] Karin: I can relate to that. So tell us what you do for work. [05:34] Brenda: I'm an energy healer. I work with high performers, helping them set better boundaries, take on less from other people so they can determine what's theirs and what's not. And I help people heal their nervous systems, and I do this through somatic coaching, breath work, and energy healing. [05:50] Karin: Yeah. And so that's what we're here to talk about today. [05:53] Brenda: Yeah. [05:54] Karin: And tell us how you came to do breath work. [05:57] Brenda: Well, so this is such a long, twisty story. You know, the short answer would be that I met my mentor at a retreat and decided, like, what is this? I have to have more. I have to learn more. But the long answer is, I was an educator for 26 years, and in 2008 or 2009, I discovered this new classroom management methodology called Yoga for editing. And a lot of it I didn't end up implementing in my classroom. Some of it I did. But one of the things that made me really curious as a practicing yogi was, could I incorporate the breath part in my music classroom? And so I started to incorporate the breath part mostly as a way to manage my own stress, and realized that not only did it help me manage my stress, but it helped my students manage theirs. So in 2008, I started to use breath, not knowing there was a term for it in my classroom. And I carried that up until I ended my career up in 2022, which is also when I began to get training as an official breath work facilitator. And if you would have said you're going to be a breath work facilitator, I would have laughed at you, because I would have said, that's a job. Like, someone's job is to help do breath work. And yes, indeed, that is a job. [07:21] Karin: Yeah. Yeah. And you said that you started noticing it for yourself and for your students. What did you notice in your students when you did breath work? [07:32] Brenda: I noticed that, number one, any unwanted behaviors started to dissipate, which was a real surprise. I was doing the breath work in my classroom to manage my stress. I was going through a divorce. I was navigating, being a single mom of a really young kid, and I just needed some relief. And so it was really, it was really self serving. I just knew I needed to breathe. And what I saw was that the behavior started to go down. I saw that the student engagement started to go up. And then the really interesting thing was that I only had to request them to do the breath patterns one or two times. And then for the rest of their time with me, they would walk in and request it. They would say, I've had this kind of day, can we do this thing? And so they began to use the breath as a tool. And even then, I didn't know it was called breath work. I just thought it was something we were doing, you know? But breath work is any time that you take control over what is an autonomic nervous system response, we don't usually think about breathing. And so when we start to think about breathing, we can call that breath work. [08:49] Karin: I love how it also really fits in well with the kind of teaching you were doing, like, what you were teaching as well, right? [08:58] Brenda: That's right. I was a music teacher, a choral music teacher. And so when we think about the breath, we have to breathe in order to sing. And so we talk a lot about diaphragm, which is the muscle that is in your belly that connects to the bottom of your lungs. And it's the. The muscle that's shaped a LIttlE bit like a bowl. And when you use the diaphragm to breathe in, it pulls the lungs down and out, creating more space. And when we use the diaphragm on the exhale, or if we're singing or vocalizing or speaking, that diaphragm turns inverted. So it's like an upside down bowl forcing the air up and out through the lungs as the lungs, it contracts the lungs, because the lungs are tissue, not muscle. So the diaphragm is the muscle that makes the lungs work, so to speak. [09:50] Karin: Maybe you can expand a bit more on what breath work is so people have more of a feel for it. [09:57] Brenda: Yeah. When we take control over the autonomic nervous system through the breath, we're practicing something called a somatic experience. Soma is the root word, the greek root word of SoMAtic, meaning in the body. So we're getting into the body, and this is known as a BoTToms up approach. So talk therapy or behavior cognitive therapy, I might have that, those words mixed up in order, but that's considered a bottom or, excuse me, top down approach, where we're starting with the mind, with breath work, we start with the body. We know that our bodies store experiences, whether they're positive, negative, or traumatic. And when we go into the body using the breath, we can help move that energy. [10:47] Karin: Also, the nervous system has everything to do with this as well. So maybe you can give us just a little bit of an orientation to the nervous system. [10:56] Brenda: Absolutely. So your nervous system really has one job, and that's to keep you alive. So when your nervous system's one job to keep you alive, it's going to do this in one of two ways. It's going to either activate the sympathetic nervous system or the parasympathetic nervous system. So the sympathetic nervous system is the nervous system that comes online when our body or our mind perceives a threat. It could be something like we're running from a tiger, or it could be preparing for a major presentation. When our body perceives stress, we go into what is known as a stress response, fight or flight. And so that would be the hyper activity of the nervous system would be fight or flight, hypo activity. In other words, an underactive nervous system would cause us to go into freeze or fawn, fawning, being people, pleasing, like your life depends on it because your body thinks it does. And so when we're in a stress response, our body is trying to conserve resources. And in order for our resources to be conserved, a lot of the normal systems go offline, like our digestion, like our conscious ability to make decisions using our whole body. That's why we can make really crazy decisions when we're under stress, is because we don't have access to our whole mind. So the stress response is something we all experience, whether it's fight, fight fees or fun. And interestingly, we don't get to choose. We don't get to say, I'm going to, I'm in a fight today. That's what my nervous system is going to do. No, that's not how it works. Your body is just going to respond to whatever other load it has and then make a decision from there. So what we would love to do is to bring ourselves into homeostasis, into the parasympathetic nervous system, which is really related to the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is the largest, longest nerve in the body. But it's not just linear, it's like a tree. It starts at the base of our spine and it goes all the way up to the base of our skull, like in those little lumpy things at the back of your head. And it has like tree branches that go all through your body, regulating literally everything from your voice to your digestion, to your sexual function. So when your vagus nerve is online, you have access to all of those body systems. When you're in a stress response, the vagus nerve goes offline as a way to conserve resources. And so when we are engaging in breath work or other somatic practices, the end goal is to bring back the vagus nerve so that we can activate the parasympathetic nervous system or homeostasis. And sometimes that's known in a yoga class as rest and digestion. [13:53] Karin: How does breath work tie into all of that, and how does breath work impact the nervous system? [13:59] Brenda: Breath work is really nourishing for the nervous system. So I'm a trauma informed breath work facilitator, and that's important to name because breath work can activate a nervous system as well as soothe a nervous system. And so there's not a one size fits all breath pattern or approach, because every body is unique, and the body that you have today is not the body that you had yesterday is not the body that you'll have tomorrow. And so there's not going to be a one and done formula. But in really general terms, breath work helps the body bring the vagus nerve back online to reduce the stress response. And we also know there's new data being, I mean, there's. There's scientific research happening all over southern California in particular, that suggests that we can reach non ordinary states of mind using breath work that are very similar to different types of micro dosing. But it's with only the breath, like. [15:01] Karin: Holotropic breath work, right? [15:02] Brenda: Exactly. [15:03] Karin: That's right. Yeah. That's something I'm familiar with, with the work that I've started doing lately. But maybe we can get into a little bit of a personal story. So, as some of my listeners might know, a tree fell on my house in January, and I watched the whole thing happen. It was really traumatic, and Brenda was a really wonderful source of support for me. So maybe you can, you know, tell people what was happening and what we did to help with that. [15:35] Brenda: Yeah. So when you're in a stress response, especially caused by trauma, and the trauma is active in your body. And before we go too much further, let's define trauma. Trauma, according to me, is anything that's too much, too fast in a way that exceeds our nervous system's capacity to cope. In our bodies, there's no hierarchy of trauma. We try to create hierarchy, and we try to talk about big t and little t trauma. And really, the only thing that that refers to is how long it's going to take you to heal the trauma. But your body just doesn't care whether it's big t, little t, or anywhere in the middle. If your body experiences trauma, your body is experiencing trauma. The end. So this was a traumatic experience because you watched a tree that you love fall, and not only did the tree fall, but there was, you know, animals that no longer had a home, and that was very, very emotional. And then your. Your house was damaged and I thought I was. [16:33] Karin: I was done. You know, as it came toward me, I did think I was going to die. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was pretty big. [16:40] Brenda: It was really big. And so what we did is we just took some slow, deep breaths, in through the nose, out through the mouth. And when we put presence on the breath, we can begin to slow the thought process that's in the mind sometimes. It's like a boulder rolling down a hill. And so if we can begin to slow that boulder rolling down the hill just a little bit with the breath coming back into the body, it can help us release some of the energy behind the boulder rolling down the hill. And the boulder is usually emotions. And we're so scared. And I'm saying we, because this happens to me, too. When we're really experiencing strong emotions, our first go to, if we think about, like, our ability to process pain, our first go to is to push it away. I don't want to feel it. I don't want to know it, I don't want to see it. And if we can allow ourselves to get present with what is, and experience the pain, whatever that looks like emotionally, we know from lots of scientific and neurological research that the emotions will last around 30 seconds. Excuse me, 90 seconds. And this isn't to say that in something like this, that 190 2nd thing of breath is going to heal you. That would be a lie. That's not true. But 90 seconds of breath can release some of the emotional charge, and then another 90 seconds can release a different level of emotional charge. And so if we think about, like, grief, for example, is a really big emotion, we're not going to solve grief in 90 seconds, but we can get through this wave of grief in 90 seconds, and we can use the breath to get to the other side of this wave of grief, because when we. [18:33] Karin: Skip over the body's need to regulate, we really can't process even at any other level. [18:42] Brenda: Right, right, exactly. Because it overrides our thinking brain. And so then we're in total survival, and we make decisions based on our survival. We're not making decisions based on anything other than how can I stay safe right in this moment? How can I stay alive right in this moment? And that's why we say things we don't mean to the people that we love. That's why we make decisions that aren't in keeping with how we really feel about things when we're in those stress responses and we're only using our brainstem. [19:16] Karin: Yeah, and I just want to make the connection to relationships like you started to do as well. That is, you know, when we're in conflict with someone, especially with someone we love, we can feel really triggered, and that can activate our nervous system, put us in that sympathetic mode, and then it's hard for us to think and communicate and connect because our bodies are too activated. And so that's why, you know, one of the things that I often do with couples that I work with is teach them a breath pattern and recommend that they do that together and co regulate, and that can be really helpful so that they can then connect and work through conflict and. Yeah, feel. Feel a lot better. [20:08] Brenda: And, you know, the institute of Heart math has done thousands of studies on heart coherence. And the way that we create heart coherence with another person is through the breath. So when you're telling couples to breathe together or it's so healing on every level because it creates that heart coherence, that co regulation. So that's so, so important. And such a good, good tip. [20:34] Karin: Yeah. And I'll recommend that couples, you know, practice this regularly and try to practice it together at least once a day. And if they can do it holding hands, great. But if they can do it heart to heart, even better. [20:46] Brenda: Yeah, I would love that. [20:48] Karin: Yeah. [20:48] Brenda: That's amazing. [20:50] Karin: How can people incorporate this into their daily lives? [20:55] Brenda: It's really easy. So, you know, let's say you had something kind of upsetting happen. You got an email that just made you feel upset. The next time you have three or five minutes, whether it's you're at work, you're in an office, you're in a cubicle, or whether you're at home, go walk. And as you're breathing, create a pattern of your footsteps to your breath. So maybe you're. You're taking four steps on the inhale and forceps on the exhale. Breathing in through the mouth. Excuse me. In through the nose and then out through the mouth. So you can just... /episode/index/show/069df229-18e0-4c38-8f9e-24c9fed2cab8/id/30632563

#60: Is Psilocybin Right for You? With Michelle Harrell 03/26/2024

#60: Is Psilocybin Right for You? With Michelle Harrell Are you curious about psilocybin (magic mushrooms)? There's a lot of compelling research being published about their potential benefits, but are they right for you? Today I talk with Michelle Harrell, a licensed facilitator in Oregon, who has been facilitating sessions for the past six months. We talk about how psilocybin can help you, how to make the most of your experience, and a lot more. Michelle Harrell is a licensed psilocybin facilitator who is committed to helping others connect with their own self-healing capabilities, creating deeper connection to self and source. Prior to training as a psilocybin facilitator, Michelle enjoyed a successful international corporate career in Human Resources and Information Technology. For over 20 years, Michelle supported global teams through various change programs. Through her work, she realized how difficult change is for most people and she enjoyed supporting others through their own life transitions, big and small. Living and working abroad while raising two children overseas provided an opportunity to work with individuals of all backgrounds, cultures, and nationalities. She aims to bring this passion for diversity and personalized service to her facilitation practice. Learn more about Michelle: Website: https://www.treeoflifefacilitation.com/ Instagram: Learn more about Karin Website: Instagram: TRANSCRIPT Intro: Karin: This is Love Is Us, Exploring Relationships and How We Connect. I'm your host, Karin Calde. I'll talk with people about how we can strengthen our relationships, explore who we are in those relationships, and experience a greater sense of love and connection with those around us, including ourselves. I have a PhD in clinical Psychology, practiced as a psychologist resident, and after diving into my own healing work, I went back to school and became a coach, helping individuals and couples with their relationships and personal growth. If you want to experience more love in your life and contribute to healing the disconnect so prevalent in our world today, you're in the right place. Welcome to Love Is Us. Episode: Karin: Hello everybody. Last week, I announced that I was finishing up my training to become a licensed psilocybin facilitator in Oregon, currently the only state in the country where that's now legal, although Colorado is not far behind. And this week I thought I'd invite my colleague Michelle Harrell to speak with me. Now, for those of you who don't know what psilocybin is, I recommend you go listen to my previous episode where I give you the details. Michelle is currently licensed and has been facilitating sessions with people for the last six months or so, and I anticipate having my license by late May or early June, depending on how long it takes for the Oregon Health authority to process my application. So just a few things we talk about on today's episode include the ways that psilocybin can be helpful for you and your relationships, how you can get the most out of a psilocybin experience, how likely it is that you'll have the experience that you really want for yourself. And Michelle also talks about some of the changes that she has seen in her clients after they've had a psilocybin session. So I hope this episode gives you a better feel for whether or not this might be an experience that you might want to have. Michelle is currently taking clients, so if you think you might want to work with her, go ahead and check out her information, which I'll put in the show notes. I really appreciate the response that I've gotten so far to my announcement. I've had a lot of people who have expressed interest, so I'm planning on offering a free informational webinar about psilocybin. So let me know if that's something that you would be interested in attending. Send me a message on Instagram where I'm @theloveandconnectioncoach, and please share this episode with others who might appreciate it. All right, thanks for being here. And here we go. [02:46] Michelle: Welcome, Michelle. Thank you, Karin. Thanks for having me. [02:50] Karin: I'm so glad to have you. I want to dive into how we met and how this all started, but why don't you just start by telling us where you are in the world? [03:02] Michelle: Sure. I am in Portland, Oregon. And yeah, that's also where I work. And I love it here. [03:11] Karin: And what keeps you here? [03:13] Michelle: What keeps me here? I just love Oregon. I think it's beautiful. I love the green spaces that we have. I love the fact that we have mountains and forests and ocean and even desert. It's just a beautiful part of the country to live in. I love the Pacific Northwest. And, yeah, I can't imagine myself leaving anytime soon. [03:36] Karin: Yeah, I love it for all those same reasons, too. [03:40] Michelle: Yeah. [03:41] Karin: And we met at a business networking event last year. [03:47] Michelle: We did? Yes. [03:49] Karin: And you got me going on my. [03:51] Michelle: Current project, which I love. So it's really fun to have you. [03:58] Karin: Here and to hear about what you're now doing for work. [04:02] Michelle: Yeah. So I am a state licensed psilocybin facilitator. Anyone who may not know what the word psilocybin means, those are psychedelic mushrooms. And Oregon is the first state to actually legalize any kind of psychedelic program in the United States. So it's really exciting to be a pioneer in this new industry that is slowly emerging. Colorado will be the next state to go live with their legal program in January of 2025. So, yeah, Oregon was first, and I launched my business in September and have not looked back since. It's been fantastic. [04:42] Karin: And I just want to say that of course, there is a thriving underground psychedelic community, but this is just a little bit different. And it's a way to kind of influence and shape how we do things going forward because I don't think that Colorado will be the last. [05:02] Michelle: I think you're right there. [05:04] Karin: This is the beginning of a trend, or hopefully not a trend, but of how we do things going forward. And I'm really hopeful that we can do it well. There's lots of things I think we can still work on, but, yeah, I. [05:20] Michelle: Think one of the advantages of being first is we get to kind of see what works and what doesn't work. And then one of the disadvantages of going first is trying to figure this out where no one has in a space where no one has been before and making sure that clients are safe, that facilitators are safe, and that everybody can get access to these kinds of services when they need them is the biggest challenge. But yeah, it's been going well. I think the majority of my clients are from out of state, which is surprising. I knew that I would have some out of state clients when I started, but I never expected the majority of them to be from out of state. So who are needing these services are finding us, which is pretty amazing. [06:15] Karin: So great. And how did you come to do this work? [06:20] Michelle: Well, I think like many people, I came to do this work through my own experiences with psychedelics. I was going through some normal life transition stuff back in 2019. I was starting to date for the first time after my divorce, which was in 2017. And I was also starting to feel a little bit cynical and discouraged and unhappy in my career after being in corporate spaces for many, many years and really just kind of in search of, like, what's next. My kids are getting older. They're about to be an empty nester. My youngest child is a junior in high school. My oldest is already in college. And so just all these kind of big transition questions that many of us have in midlife were kind of on top of my mind. And then I happened to meet someone who introduced mushrooms into my life and had some amazing experiences with mushrooms myself, which really were transformative and helped me to find forgiveness from all kinds of things and processing of past traumas and things that we all have in life, and really helped me to find focus about what I wanted to do going forward. And so once I had those experiences, I wanted to know more. I dove into all the research. I read every book, I watched every podcast and show that I could find on psilocybin and was just very fascinated with the success rates that many of the research trials were having. And my biggest inspiration was the Johns Hopkins research that they were doing with terminally ill cancer patients. And the success rates there were quite astounding, with folks really coming to terms with their own mortality and the anxiety and depression that is involved with that. And my own stepfather passed away in 2014 of prostate cancer. And it was just really difficult for the whole family, but especially my mother. In the same year. My grandfather also passed away. So my mom lost both her father and her husband in the same year, and I lost my grandfather and my stepfather. And it was just really tough on the whole family. And my mom dealt with depression afterwards and grief. And I just thought, man, if we had known about these little mushrooms back in 2014 or had access to them, maybe things could have been different, right? Maybe we could have dealt with that situation differently. And I just think it's beautiful if you can help someone really appreciate the life they have left, rather than focusing on the death that is impending, I just think that's a beautiful gift that you could give somebody. And so that's really what inspired me to want to get involved. And then in the fall of 22, my boyfriend actually texted me and said, hey, I just saw in the news that they're going to be issuing licenses starting in January. You've been talking about it kind of like, where are you going to put your money? Where your mouth is? Kind of thing? And so I decided to do it. I dove in and decided to leave my job that I was at at that time and dove in full time. And I know that was a very privileged position that I was in, that I was able to afford to do that. I know not everyone can do that, but that's kind of how I started. [09:47] Karin: Oh, wonderful. And I love that you mentioned the studies that looked at how psilocybin can help people with end of life. I found that the most touching out of all the things that they can really help us with, and there are many, that really affected me deeply as well. People can really see the beauty of life and appreciate what they have left and the people that are in their life for that time, rather than on the fear. [10:15] Michelle: Yeah, exactly. But also while really recognizing the fear because it's real, that's one thing we all are going to do, is we're all going to die. We just don't know when. Right. But I always challenge my clients, no matter what their intentions are or what they're hoping to gain from these experiences, I always challenge them to try to find gratitude. Even in the darkest moments or in their greatest fears, can they find gratitude as well? And I think that with impending death, on the one hand, of course, many of us don't know when we're going to die, so it's very easy for us to just ignore that. But if we know we're going to die, in a way, it can be a gift. Like how many of us get to really say goodbye to our loved ones before they die, because we don't know when it's going to happen. But if you know when it's going to happen, that could actually be a really beautiful thing, to end life with dignity in life, with closure and all the things that come with that. So it's just all about how you. [11:16] Karin: Look at things, and so it can help with end of life anxiety. What are some of the other things that psilocybin can help people with? Based on research or experience or what you've witnessed. [11:29] Michelle: Yeah. I mean, the number one reason that my clients seek me out is for depression and anxiety. That is by far the number one reason that many folks reach out to me. But I've also had a handful of folks that are dealing with trauma or PTSD. I've had folks who are dealing with addiction, rehabilitation or recovery. I've had folks who are just looking for a mystical or religious experience or spiritual experience, and then a handful of folks who are also just really curious and looking for just, like, heart opening or curiosity or added playfulness or creativity in their lives. So really, there's no right or wrong reason. I think if you're called to do this, you should explore it regardless of the reason. But for sure, the number one reason is anxiety and depression. And it's definitely a tool that it's not going to fix everything, it's not going to cure everything. It's not going to give you all the answers to all the questions you've ever had. Nothing's that easy. But it definitely can be a catalyst to open new perspectives, new insights, new ways of looking at yourself and looking at the world. And that often helps people shift out of these negative thought loops that we all kind of get into in our own head. Right? Yeah. [13:06] Karin: And the way I look at it is that it kicks off your work. [13:10] Michelle: Exactly. Yeah. No, you're 100%. And I tell people that all the time that the real work starts after. With integration, for sure. [13:19] Karin: Yeah, because you can learn a lot during a session, but then it's about how do I integrate this into my life? [13:28] Michelle: Exactly. And how do I cultivate and maintain this newfound perspective or newfound insights and build new habits, build new routines for myself? [13:39] Karin: How might it help people with their relationships? [13:43] Michelle: Where do we start? It starts with self love. Number one. That's been my answer before I knew about mushrooms. If you don't love yourself, it's very difficult to love another. And I think that that is a common struggle that connects all humans, that we all struggle with self love and self worth. And I think until you can really heal yourself, it's very difficult to have a healthy relationship. And I know it's very cliche, but it's true. Hurt people. Right. And so as long as you're hurting and you're not fully aligned with your truth and with your self worthiness and your self love, then again, it's very difficult to offer that to somebody else. To me, the base of a good relationship starts with you, right? Not with the other. [14:42] Karin: Right? Absolutely. And do you ever see couples? [14:47] Michelle: I do, yeah. I love working with couples. I have not actually had a couple actually do a session together yet. I know that some that have with other facilitators, but I have definitely had couples where they do sessions back to back. And when a couple reaches out, that's one of the first things that we talk about is, what are your intentions for this work? And if the intentions have something to do with the actual relationship, or maybe they just want to have an experience together as well, then I think it's fantastic to do it together. However, most of the time, as you start talking with a couple, they realize very quickly, oh, no, I really need to work on myself. I want to do this or that or the other. And then if that's the case, I do recommend doing it yourself, because, again, if you're both in the room can be a little bit distracting, and you might tend to want to put your focus on the other rather than on yourself. And this kind of work is very internal and very internal work. And so when other people are in the room, it may be a little distracting and you might end up putting your energy somewhere else rather than working on your own intention. [16:04] Karin: Yeah. And as you know, as part of our education in becoming psilocybin facilitators, we do a research project. And so mine has been on relationships and how this can help people in long term romantic relationships specifically. And there is a lot of good data coming out in support of psilocybin for relationships. Research so far is showing that it really helps with empathy and communication and sexual satisfaction and function, openness and openness to new experiences together, also a spiritual connection to one another. So there are some really exciting things and exciting research that's continuing to be done so we can learn more. But, yeah, it's looking really good for helping people in that area as well. [17:02] Michelle: Yeah. No, I mean, anecdotally, I think just in my own experiences as well, it helped improve my relationships, not only my romantic relationships, but when you talk about communication and things like that, I'm much more able. And many of my clients describe this after their experiences in some way, shape or form, that it helps give you space to kind of view yourself and your ego and things that may not serve you. Right. It's not to say that your normal triggers and your normal behaviors might still flare after a session, right. Because we are habitual creatures. But when those things happen, after you've had an experience like this, you're much more able to take a pause and kind of go, wait a second, like, what's going on here? I feel my anxiety flaring, or I feel my triggers being triggered. But give yourself pause to actually choose a different course of action or a different reaction. One of the very big common themes that I see with many clients and myself included, is some kind of acceptance and surrender of what will be, will be, and how can I actually choose a different reaction. And the only thing that I really control is myself. Right. I think many folks come into this work. The biggest struggle for most of my clients is the surrender piece, because it can be very scary, especially people who've never done any kind of psychedelics. It can be very scary for them the first time. Even if they want to do it, they're very nervous and anxious about it. And this perceived lack of control that they might have during the session, it can be very scary. But I tend to try to coach and talk with them in preparation about surrender and about what that looks like and what that means, and the fact that we really aren't in control of anything other than ourselves. We're not in control of other people. We're not in control of the weather. We're not in control of any kind of outside influences. All we can control is our own reactions and our own emotions, to a point. And I think that that becomes something afterwards, through integration, that people become very aware of and are much more able to kind of sit with their own feelings in a moment where anxiety might be flaring or their normal reactions are coming up and they can kind of go, wait, why am I reacting like this? What's going on underneath this anxiety? And how can I choose a different path? And that's all about integration. But that really is, in a nutshell, what a lot of folks find. [19:50] Karin: I imagine that when people come to you, they're seeking a certain kind of experience, and yet, do people always get the experience that they want? [20:00] Michelle: No. I mean, yes and no, but, yeah, that's, again, a really huge part of our preparation time together is helping them and coaching them to really look at themselves pretty deeply and try to really be honest about where their ego might be tied to certain outcomes and expectations. I think, on the one hand, it's great that we're having this culture shift around psychedelics. And there's so much out there in the media and podcasts and TV shows and Netflix. There's so much out there that people can watch and see and hear about others experiences. And so I think that's fantastic to be well informed. And obviously, it's helping to shift the culture to be more accepting of these types of medicines, but it also kind of can set expectations in people's minds. And we do love to compare ourselves to others, and we love to say, oh, I want that kind of experience. And sometimes your experience can be very negative... /episode/index/show/069df229-18e0-4c38-8f9e-24c9fed2cab8/id/30513998

#59: Psychedelics, relationships, and personal growth 03/19/2024

#59: Psychedelics, relationships, and personal growth I'm excited to announce my new role as a soon-to-be licensed psilocybin (magic mushroom) facilitator in Oregon. This will supplement my work as a relationship and self-development coach. If you're feeling stuck in your life, you might be particularly interested in this episode. Listen for more details! Learn more about working with Karin: Karin's website Karin's Instagram TRANSCRIPT Intro: Karin: This is Love Is Us, Exploring Relationships and How We Connect. I'm your host, Karin Calde. I'll talk with people about how we can strengthen our relationships, explore who we are in those relationships, and experience a greater sense of love and connection with those around us, including ourselves. I have a PhD in clinical Psychology, practiced as a psychologist resident, and after diving into my own healing work, I went back to school and became a coach, helping individuals and couples with their relationships and personal growth. If you want to experience more love in your life and contribute to healing the disconnect so prevalent in our world today, you're in the right place. Welcome to Love Is Us. Episode: [00:50] Karin: Hello everybody. I have been looking forward to this episode and making this announcement ever since I made the commitment to this new training program that I've been a part of recently. But I wanted to make sure that nothing got in the way of my completing it because as we all know, life happens. But if you are listening to this episode, that means I'll be less than a week away from completing the program. Earlier this year, I started an accelerated program to become a licensed psilocybin facilitator in the state of Oregon, and I will be done as of March 24, and hopefully I'll be licensed and ready to see clients sometime around the end of May or early June. Okay, so what does that mean? First of all, if you don't know, psilocybin is the psychoactive ingredient found in 200 different species of mushrooms growing around the world. So you might otherwise know them as magic mushrooms. And while there is an active underground psychedelic community in the state, it's now legal in Oregon if you use a licensed facilitator in a licensed service center. So it's open to anyone over the age of 21 who doesn't have significant risk factors. And this is not going to be replacing the work that I'm currently doing. It's going to supplement it. My practice is thriving. I love the work I do with my clients, helping them with their self development and their relationships. And I'm so excited to jump into this new way of helping people because it can be life changing. So why am I doing this? So I've got a few reasons, but I'm going to tell you two of the biggest ones. One, I love to help people become more compassionate, loving, connected, and satisfied with their lives. And yet there are those who get stuck. They might try all the things, coaching, therapy, breath work, meditation, somatic work, whatever it is, and they still feel like they can't move forward in the way they want to. Many people who do psychedelic work get unstuck and have profound experiences that change their lives for the better as long as they put in the work. So my work in the psilocybin space will largely be for people who feel stuck in their lives, whether it's feeling stuck in depression or anxiety or in their relationships. If they're stuck because they can't figure out why they get triggered so easily, or they don't feel like their life has meaning or purpose, or because they can't seem to habit like smoking or drinking or shopping or scrolling on their phones or stepping out in their marriage, or perhaps they feel disconnected, disconnected from themselves, their emotions, other people, the planet, or spiritually. So the second reason that I'm doing this is because psilocybin has changed my life. So just a little bit of my story is that when I was younger and up until only about ten years ago, I had no interest in psychedelics and really no clue about them. My brother had used them and really loved them, but I thought he was office rocker. I didn't know why anyone would want to do them. But then I started having conversations with my brother and I started getting curious, and I read Michael Pollan's book called how to change your mind. I then joined a local psychedelic group. Might have found them on meetup, I can't remember, but now I've had several experiences, a couple of them really challenging, and a few others that were profoundly beautiful and inspiring and all helpful. So those experiences, paired with follow up work changed my life. I have felt a stronger connection with myself and with everyone and everything. I have felt the bliss of self love and a deep connection and appreciation for my time on this earth. I got guidance around what was triggering me and holding me back. I saw my strength. And all of this has helped me to dive into my own work because I learned where to go and how to do it. That is how psychedelics at a high level has helped me. And I'll also say that the combination of psychedelics and ifs internal family systems has had a profound effect on my life. And I want to help others have their own experiences that might help them. I have training now in both psilocybin facilitation and ifs, and that's just like a dream come true for me. I want to take a moment, talk a little bit about the history of psychedelics, because I just feel compelled to honor this potent, naturally growing substance and the people who have shown the rest of the world what it can do. So psilocybin and other psychoactive substances have been used probably throughout time by humankind. Some groups of people we know have used them as important parts of their cultural traditions, including Aztecs, Zapotech, Mayans, the Masetech people, some of them for thousands of years. And cave paintings indicate that psilocybin has been used around the world for likely much longer. They grow prolifically on every continent except Antarctica, and there are even some interesting theories about how they might have helped us develop as a species. I'm not going to go into that, but if you want more information, I can point you to some resources. Now, here in the US and in Europe, we often ignore this history and what happened before. 1938 and 1938 was the year that Albert Hoffman, a swiss chemist, first synthesized LSD. And then in 1957, Gordon Wassen, who worked in the finance industry in New York at the time, and his wife Valentina, visited the now famous Maria Sabina in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico. Maria Sabina was a local healer and shaman and introduced the couple to the wonders of psilocybin. The couple then brought their stories back to the US, and Time magazine published their story, leading the way for many Americans to make their own trek to visit Sabina. But some did that without the reverence for her and the mushrooms and her town. So there were some serious consequences for Maria Sabina and her village. And that's the point that I want to make here, is that psilocybin mushrooms really are a sacred substance that has a rich history, especially with indigenous people who have treated them with a respect that they deserve. And the earth has gifted us with these substances that, again, these indigenous folk have long since recognized. They've been an important part of their cultural practices. So I want to honor those who have paved the way for us to enjoy the benefits of these mushrooms and the actions of many people from North Americans and Europe ignorant about their sacredness and what they can offer us have had some serious ramifications, especially for indigenous people. So there's a lot more to this story, but I'm going to leave it at that for now. Now, in modern times, since the mid 90s, when the research field was allowed to reopen, the research on psychedelics has ramped back up. Now, there were thousands of studies done on LSD and some on psilocybin as well, before they were classified as schedule one drugs, along with mescaline and DMT in, I think it was 1968, which was largely a political move and kicked off the disastrous war on drugs. And now there are research centers at NYU, Columbia, UC Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, the University of Texas at Austin, the Imperial College of London, UC San Francisco, and many, many more. And it's so exciting to see all the research that's being done on both psilocybin and MDMA specifically. So, MDMA assisted therapy has been given breakthrough status by the FDA because it's been shown to be more effective than any other treatment out there, specifically for PTSD. And this has the potential to benefit so many people who are suffering. And I'm specifically thinking of all the veterans, those who have survived sexual assault and so much more. And it's expected that the federal government will legalize MDMA assisted therapy sometime this calendar year. So what that would likely mean is that you could get a prescription for it so that you could use it in conjunction with therapy. But the details are unclear at this point, and whether or not I would be able to use it with clients is also unclear. I think it's maybe unlikely, but I'm not sure. It's also being studied in those on the autism spectrum to help them with social anxiety, and it's frequently used by couples to help them with relationship challenges and just to feel closer. It's also used by people who are just seeking self understanding. But again, it's not legal yet, so please be aware of that. And I'm not advocating for you to run out and pick up some ecstasy. But anyway, I got sidetracked by MDMA, and it's hard for me to say what the rules are going to be around that. But currently it's psilocybin that I'll be working with once I get my license. Again, I'm hoping that happens by the end of springtime. Now, studies have shown that psilocybin is effective for things such as treatment resistant depression, anxiety, trauma, including PTSD, end of life anxiety, addiction, particularly alcohol addiction, body image, spirituality, relationships. Evidence. There's evidence now that it can increase empathy, reduce anxiety for those who have anxious attachment styles, increase feelings of closeness with your partner, improve communication, increase a person's interest in trying new things. A study published just last month showed that psilocybin increased sexual functioning and sexual satisfaction. So amazing. Psilocybin helps to rewire your brain, the neuroscience of it and how it helps with neuroplasticity. Sorry, neuroplasticity and neurogenesis is fascinating, but I'm not going to go into that here. Now, for those who have these bigger, transcendental, mystical experiences on psilocybin, where they lose their sense of self, they can have a spiritual experience that is especially powerful and helps a person feel self love, feel connected with nature and everything else in the universe, and feel a connection with something beyond. And yet, you don't necessarily need a big mystical experience like that. And many people who don't still reap psilocybin's benefits. Okay, now for a reality check. Psilocybin doesn't help everybody. And while the effect sizes in research studies are impressive, and the percentage of people they do help is equally impressive. But there are very few studies that it helps everyone. And while these studies indicate that you can take psilocybin while using antidepressants, it does make dosing a little bit trickier, and it can be hard to predict how much you'll need. Also, psilocybin experiences can be overwhelming and really scary. It causes perceptual changes. You can have ecstatic moments. You can have really sad things come up for you. It can feel like a lot. It can bring up painful events from your past and other things that you don't expect. It's important to remember, though, psilocybin presents no major risks to the body, it's probably the safest psychoactive substance out there, much safer than alcohol. So that's what research is at least telling us up until this point. So if you decide to go forward with one of these experiences, how do you make the most of it? There are a lot of things you can do, but what I'd probably recommend most is learn as much as you can. Read books and blogs, listen to podcasts, interview facilitators, meditate, start a mindfulness practice, get outside and get into nature that can actually help. And you certainly don't have to do all these things, but any and all can help. And there are other things you can do, too. That's just a sample of things. It's also important to set an intention for your session. Intentions and mindset are even more important than how much you take. And your guide can help you with all of that, and then let go and trust. And it's really important that you can do those things so that you can have a good experience. And also, psychedelics aren't a magic cure. They can give you really important insights. But it's what you do with those insights that will help you grow and help you make any changes that you want to make in your life. So your integration sessions that follow your experience are vital. Even if you don't have experiences that you think were very enjoyable, positive, or what you wanted. Your brain is especially open to making changes and forming new neural connections during your experience, and for about really at least 72 hours afterwards. It might be closer to a couple of weeks or even a month. So make good use of this time, especially so that you can strengthen any neural pathways that you want to keep. So the other thing I want to mention is that this is not cheap, and when MDMA is illegal, it too will be expensive. So this is significant, especially when it comes to psilocybin, which grows naturally around the world. It doesn't feel great to me that people can't access it without fear of legal repercussions. That being said, when you sign up, you're paying for the service center for the space, you're paying for the mushrooms, you're paying for me to meet with you for a couple of prep sessions, sit with you all day while you have your psilocybin experience, and then have at least one integration session. Most facilitators in Oregon currently charge between about 1200 and $800 and up, and considering all that's involved, it's actually not that unreasonable if you have a guided experience with someone who has good training, but it can be hard for those who could really use it and can't afford it. I don't know what the answer is, but I'm hoping we can get to a place where there are financial supports in place for people, and I'll be offering a bit of a discount for my coaching clients, and I'd like to work with some clients at a reduced fee if I have enough of a client base to do that. But there are still the service center fees and medicine fees, or I should say psilocybin fees, possibly travel costs. Another thing to consider, there are certain conditions that might make it unsafe for you to use psilocybin, and while psilocybin does appear to be the safest drug out there, research is still being done to help us get clarity around what truly is unsafe. If you have a predisposition towards psychosis, it might trigger a psychotic break. It's also not recommended for those who have high blood pressure or arrhythmias and possibly other forms of heart disease, but not likely at this point. I would also not do this with someone who is pregnant or who has bipolar disorder, so things to consider I personally am also not willing to work with just anyone who comes my way. I'm not going to work with those who have complex PSD, likely because I think you'd be better served by someone who has more updated training and experience in this area. I primarily see myself working with women and couples over the age of 45. But I'll be considering each person on a case by case basis, at least to start. And I'd recommend you only work with someone that you feel like you can really trust. Listen to that inner voice of yours. It needs to be a good fit for both you and the facilitator. Okay. Phew. That's a lot of information. I didn't go into much of the brain science or psychopharmacology or microdosing or group experiences, and those group experiences can make it more affordable. But I think that's probably enough information for now. I want to let you know that I currently have a list of people who are interested in having a psilocybin experience with me. So if you'd like to get on that list without any obligation or pressure, go ahead and send me an email to Karen, that's karin@drcaldi.com. D r C a L D e.com or message me on Instagram where I'm the love and connection coach and when I've secured my license, I will reach out to you to see if you'd like to learn more. Again, no pressure. So next time, next episode I'm going to have is my guest Michelle Harrell, who became a licensed facilitator last year and has been busy. She's going to be talking with me about her experiences as a facilitator, share some insights and stories with us and talk about what's involved in a psilocybin experience. It's going to be a really fun part two to help make this topic come alive for you. So I hope you'll join us and share it. All right. Thanks for being here. That's all for now. I am so, so excited, and if you'd like to learn more, please do reach out. All right, take care, everybody. See you next time. OUTRO: [53:13] Karin: Thanks for joining us today on Love is us. If you liked the show, I would so appreciate it if you left me a review. If you have questions and would like to follow me on social media, you can find me on Instagram where I'm the love and connection coach. Special thanks to Tim Gorman for my music, Ali Shaw for my artwork, and Ross Burdick for tech and editing assistance. Again, I'm so glad you joined us today because the best way to bring more love into your life and into the world is to be love. The best way to be love is to love yourself and those around you. Let's learn and be inspired together. /episode/index/show/069df229-18e0-4c38-8f9e-24c9fed2cab8/id/30381838

#58: Exploring Polyamory, with Leanna Wolfe 03/12/2024

#58: Exploring Polyamory, with Leanna Wolfe Are you curious about polyamory? If you want to see if it's right for you, or if you simply want to understand why others would want to explore a different relationship structure, this episode is for you. Dr. Leanna Wolfe’s sex research was spirited by coming of age in the thick of the 1970s sexual revolution and feminist movement in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her curiosities and academic appetites led her engage in field research in Mexico, Africa, India and Papua New Guinea, earning an MA in Anthropology from the New School for Social Research and a PhD in Sexology from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality. From 1980 to 2018 she worked as a university professor teaching and researching topics ranging from orgasm, multiple partner sexualities and sexual assault. In 2016 she launched Wise Woman Sex and Relationship Consulting, providing counseling through her unique lens of Sexual Anthropology. Learn more about Leanna: Book: 25% Discount Code: RLFANDF25 Website: Learn more about Karin: Website: Instagram: TRANSCRIPT Intro: Karin: This is Love Is Us, Exploring Relationships and How We Connect. I'm your host, Karin Calde. I'll talk with people about how we can strengthen our relationships, explore who we are in those relationships, and experience a greater sense of love and connection with those around us, including ourselves. I have a PhD in clinical Psychology, practiced as a psychologist resident, and after diving into my own healing work, I went back to school and became a coach, helping individuals and couples with their relationships and personal growth. If you want to experience more love in your life and contribute to healing the disconnect so prevalent in our world today, you're in the right place. Welcome to Love Is Us. Episode: Karin: Hello, everybody. I am really excited about this episode. Today we are going to be talking about polyamory, and I've been wanting to find a guest to come on and talk about this subject for many reasons, but mostly because I've had quite a few clients bring this up to me or approach me as wanting to some coaching around this topic, and I've learned quite a bit about it over the years, starting when I was a therapist in private practice and a man saw me for a few sessions and he had an open relationship. And at the time I didn't know a lot about it, but I was fortunate that I had a supervisor during that time who did, and so I started learning about it, and yet I still wouldn't necessarily call myself an expert, and I wanted to have someone on to talk about this subject who really had some deep knowledge, and I was glad I waited for the right person. So my guest today is Dr. Leanna Wolf, and she is a sex and relationship specialist. And she started out as an anthropologist studying different kinds of relationship structures. And so she has a really good understanding of social, cultural, and family structures, and she understands sexuality, gender, marriage, partnering patterns, all of that kind of stuff. And she comes to it from a really non judgmental place. So she's got a lot to offer us on this episode. She also has a book, if you want to check it out, called the 177 Lovers and counting my life as a sex researcher, and I'm super excited to check it out. She also is offering listeners of this podcast a 25% discount. So if you want to get that discount code, you can go to the show notes and get that. Also, I just want to say that this episode is really great for people who are curious and might want to explore polyamory. It's also great for people who just want to understand it a little bit better and maybe think that it sounds a little scary or weird or whatever it is, we really cover a lot of terrain in this episode, so I hope you like it, I hope you'll share it, and thanks for being here. Karin: Welcome, Leanna. [03:10] Leanna: Thank you. [03:11] Karin: It's great to have you here. So tell us where you are in the world. [03:14] Leanna: I'm in Van Nuys, which is part of Los Angeles, and I'm in a private home that I've had for a number of years, and underfoot are a couple of dogs and a number of cats. Nice. I love it. Great. [03:34] Karin: Well, what brought you to that area? [03:36] Leanna: Well, I been teaching anthropology at one of the local community colleges, and I needed to find my own home, and this house was for sale, and it was close to the school, and I thought, hey, that'll work. And I continued to teach and have students come by here for events for quite a few years, and then eventually I'd had enough of teaching, and I kept the house because it was a great place to have my animals. And I've been involved with studying and looking at and experiencing polyamory for a long time. But I must say, somebody once pointed this out to me, and it's quite true, is that I'm probably more poly with animals than with people. [04:35] Karin: I love it. [04:37] Leanna: I have my dog, and then I have a tenant who brought in a dog, and so we have senior dog care here, daycare for senior dogs. And then I adopted two cats a couple of years ago, and I tried to keep them outside, but they would have nothing of it. And after about a year, I just opened up all the doors, and then two of the semi feral cats who had been living in my yard started coming inside regularly, so now they sleep inside, along with my slightly more domesticated cats. And I have two additional tenants. So it's three humans and four cats and two dogs. [05:27] Karin: So there's never a dull moment, it sounds. [05:30] Leanna: Oh, no, there's always animals to analyze and people's projects to discuss. Everybody here is involved in some kind of arts and creativity, and so it's been a good place. [05:46] Karin: Nice. Well, tell us what you do for work. [05:50] Leanna: At present, I'm super busy promoting my new book, which came out quite recently. It's called 177 Lovers and Counting. My life as a sex researcher. And this came out of teaching anthropology, where I was teaching a course called gender, sex, and culture. And one of the class assignments was to do one sex history. And I realized in teaching it and in looking over my students histories, that I really should do my history too. And as I started doing it, I faced that so much of my life had been that of a sex researcher, where I wanted to find out everything. Whether I was going to incorporate it into my own personal life or practices was irrelevant to finding out about it. So that's what I ended up with in my history, was a huge amount of observation, a huge amount of research, and some of the observation was participant observation, where I personally had to experience it in my body or interact with folks that were part of a particular lifestyle that interested me. Yeah, the book has taken up a lot of time, both in thinking through it, writing it, designing it, getting it published by Roman and Littlefield, and now promoting it. And one of my methods of promotion, which has been so fun, has been doing a solo show. So I took some of the funniest and most poignant parts of the book and made it into an hour long show. And I've been performing it at theater festivals and at professional conferences and anywhere where they'll have me perform. So that's been just great. As for making money, we hear that the book is selling pretty well, and I certainly sell a bit of copies of the book after performances. And then I have a practice. It's basically a sex and relationship consulting and counseling practice where I work with individuals who are trying to make sense of such things as identity, sexuality, and partnering patterns, especially things like polyamory. And so, as it is, I did a doctoral dissertation on polyamory and jealousy back in 2003, and I have taken all that research and made a living off of it in helping other people make sense of the very invented and intriguing and ethically honest culture of polyamory. [09:19] Karin: So many people don't know a lot about polyamory, but I think there's also a fascination with it. How did you decide to learn about polyamory? I mean, was that the goal, or did you start out in anthropology and then you ended up getting more interested in learning? [09:36] Leanna: It's a complicated story, and I'd love to tell you all about it. Back in my early mid twenty s, I was living in New York, and I ran into a woman in my neighborhood who told me that she was living with two guys, and this must have been like the late seventy s. And I just thought that was so weird that I had to find out more, out more about it. And at some point after that, I was in a relationship that was open because we just did not want to control each other. And moreover, I'd had a previous lover who I wanted to keep seeing, though I was never going to be living with him. And so I was part of an ad hoc polyamory lifestyle before it really had that name. And then as for how I got involved in what's called polyamory today is, I guess, in the early ninety s, was when polyamory got a name. And I got involved with some of the folks who were part of the early movement to educate and generate theory and practice around polyamory, including Deborah Annapole and Ryan Nearing. And I published some articles in their magazines and spoke at their conferences. They had a conference called loving more, and I would offer research there and then. It was in the late ninety s. My partner, unbeknownst to me, got involved with someone else, and he believed that I was involved with somebody, even though I wasn't. But he really wanted to have this woman in his life, and thus in my life, because he didn't want to end our partnership and at a loss for how to share him with another woman, I went to Africa, where there was a long standing tradition of polygamy, or largely their polygony, one husband and multiple wives. And so everybody I met in Africa, whether they were taking me on a safari drive or letting me stay in their house or whatever it was, I asked them, how am I supposed to share my partner with this other woman? And so I came with such a need for help that they felt that kind of like we were on equal grounds. I was needing their help, and they tried to offer it to me. But they would also say, you know, you have divorce in your country. You don't have to put up with this. You have an education. You could earn a living. You don't need your husband's money. You're not in the same situation that we're in. [13:08] Karin: So their reasons for it are different. [13:11] Leanna: Yeah. And then around that same time, President Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky was getting major attention worldwide. And these folks were giving me their opinions and they were saying things. Know, the president only has one daughter, and maybe his wife Hillary doesn't have the capacity to get pregnant. Know, this girl Monica looks young and fertile. She should be able to have a son for the president. This man has no sons. All he has is one daughter who's going to carry on his legacy. So these were very practical and fascinating observations that they shared with me. That to me, really exposed the weirdness of my culture, because for them, if a man added another wife, he continued to be with his wives that he already had. He wasn't leaving behind those women. He continued to support them. The children that he had with them continued to live with him. And it made divorce here in the western world seem so horribly messy and dark for children as well as for wives that continued to need assistance. And so that layer too was just utterly useful and of course, fascinating for me as product of western culture. So I took all that research and wrote an essay called adding a co wife, and I compared what was going on in Africa to what was going on in my life. And that essay got published in many anthropology and polyamory journals. And I presented the findings at quite a few conferences. And some of that set of thinking and writing and such is part of one of my chapters in my book, because that was certainly part of my sex research. [15:32] Karin: And then, of course, polyamory in north american culture and european culture is different than. [15:40] Leanna: What did you say? Polygamy? Is that what you call one husband and many wives, or polyandry with one wife and multiple husbands? Yeah. So here in the western world, it's very different because it's not resource based the way it is in Africa and New guinea, where also did some research and contexts like that, where the wealthier men are considered more desirable husbands because they can fund the education of their children and give them more opportunities. So women are happy to marry into a substantial man's household rather than to partner with a young man who doesn't own anything and have anything financially to offer. In the western world, it's very emotion based, and people get involved with somebody because they experience usually something that's referred to as NRE or new relationship energy, or what relationship psychologists might think of as the attraction phase of romantic love, where someone is so compelled about a new person that they must spend time with them. And so what polyamorouss often struggle with is how to sustain their home or ongoing relationships that are not so full of passion as they once were while enjoying the intense passion of someone new. [17:27] Karin: So how would you define polyamory? [17:30] Leanna: Well, this is really a fun question, because when I did research on polyamory, and I did quite a bit, as I may have mentioned, my doctoral dissertation was on polyamory and jealousy. And when we did surveys, everyone had a different definition because these were very self styled people who were each doing it in their unique way, and these ways were certainly co creations based on who their partners were. But generally, polyamory is consensual, non monogamy, meaning that folks are not trying to be emotionally or erotically monogamous with one person. They're open to having that be with more than one. And it can involve in terms of, let's say, one couple where they could be monopoly, where one person does not want to have outside lovers, but accepts that their partner does. More often, it's a situation where both partners, let's say, if they're couple based, are being poly and entertaining additional lovers. And so this is one style which involves a couple being the kind of what is often referred to as hierarchical polyamory. Because they're living together, they may be married, and they think of polyamory as an add on to what they have with each other. Now, there are other folks who are much more drawn to a more communal form of polyamory, often referred to as a polycule or practicing something called kitchen table polyamory, where a group of folks are all committed to each other and don't necessarily think of one person as being more important to them than any other person. And so their commitment is to the whole group or the whole polycule. There's also folks who are aligned with something that's called solo polyamory, where they don't have the goal of sharing a home or a home life with another person. So at that level, their primary relationship is with each other, with themselves, rather. And nonetheless, they're different than being single and dating, in that people who are single and dating typically have the goal of finding one other person to be their partner and then become monogamous with them. But if you're solo, Polly, you have no such goal like that. You simply are in integrity with all the folks you're dating or partnered with. [20:43] Karin: And so that seems like a really important word that you just used. There is integrity, and I see that is such an important part of this kind of relationship structure. Can you talk a little bit about that? [20:57] Leanna: Yeah. Well, basically, what goes on with folks who are committed to integrity is being truthful as much as each other wants to be truthful. They may have a don't ask, don't tell an understanding, but nonetheless, they are not keeping secrets from each other about their dreams, activities, et cetera. They are living in honesty and transparency as best as each of them or all of them want to do. [21:37] Karin: Yeah. And so that brings up for me something that you also mentioned that you looked at for your dissertation, and that is jealousy. And I'm sure there are a lot of people who are listening now going, oh, my gosh, I could never do that. I would just feel so jealous. So what can you tell us about that? [21:54] Leanna: Right. Well, basically, what I came to see is that polyamory is an invented culture. All cultures, to some extent, of course, are invented, but polyamory is very specifically invented at the level of engaging a concept called conversion, where one has the goal of feeling positive about their partner getting love, attention, and sexual ecstasy from others. And that it's like akin to like, you're really happy if your kids graduate from high school and become valedictorians or get into exciting colleges, or you're happy if your friend gets cast as a leading role in a play or whatever it may be. So here you're happy that your partner has other partners that are bringing them pleasure. And so it sounds like this is a really hard thing for most people to swallow. When I've done research with people who are not signed on to polyamory, this thing is just untenable. It's nothing that they would ever want to do or hear about. But for people who embrace the integrity notion of polyamory, they get themselves to embrace conversion and to find value in this. Now, there's certainly folks who just love the thought of their partner being sexually exciting to other people. And this can take the form of swinging, where they could go to play parties together and watch their partner be engaged by others, or engage their partner along with someone else or several someone else's. And this could elevate their partner's desirability, since other people want them. [23:59] Karin: So what it really sounds like is that polyamory isn't necessarily for everybody, and that that's okay. [24:05] Leanna: Oh, absolutely. And at different times in people's lives, it may be more valuable than at other times. And it's really interesting how this value of it can change. Some of it is simply situational, where at sometimes one has more than one person that they want to be in partnership with, and sometimes it may have to do with whatever else they're focusing on. Let's say they're focusing on building a family. Maybe they just want to do that in a monogamous context and don't really want to have other people involved in raising their kids. Or maybe they do, and they think that a village would be useful in helping to raise their children. It could be also a time of life situation where many older folks are finding that there aren't very many men left who behave in ways that they find appropriate. So they're happy to share the remaining men with all the women who would like access to some amount of male companionship. One thing that's really unique about poly is the issue of disclosure, because what's a much more common practice amongst humans is cheating. And cheating has been around forever, and humans are not a monogamous species but with cheating, one doesn't hear about it, one doesn't see it, or not supposed to. And it's not supposed to disrupt the primary relationship or the family life of the couple. And it's just seen as something, typically for women, where they're getting some level of attention that they're often not getting from their home partners anymore. Or for men, more often than not, it's to engage in erotic activities that their home partner may not be interested in. [26:20] Karin: And how would you differentiate polyamory from swinging? ... /episode/index/show/069df229-18e0-4c38-8f9e-24c9fed2cab8/id/30295693

#57 Men: How to save your marriage, with Amrit Singh 03/05/2024

#57 Men: How to save your marriage, with Amrit Singh Learn what it takes to change a relationship dynamic and improve a marriage in this conversation with Amrit Singh. Amrit has been studying Kundalini Yoga for over 30 years which gives him the ability to deeply understand and connect with his clients. In 1999 Amrit Singh decided to move to India to deepen his exploration of yoga and meditation. After 20 years in India, he recently moved to Valle de Bravo in Mexico. During all these years his true passion has always been in helping people through individual and group coaching, with a special focus men and their relationships. TRANSCRIPT Intro: Karin: This is Love Is Us, Exploring Relationships and How We Connect. I'm your host, Karin Calde. I'll talk with people about how we can strengthen our relationships, explore who we are in those relationships, and experience a greater sense of love and connection with those around us, including ourselves. I have a PhD in clinical Psychology, practiced as a psychologist resident, and after diving into my own healing work, I went back to school and became a coach, helping individuals and couples with their relationships and personal growth. If you want to experience more love in your life and contribute to healing the disconnect so prevalent in our world today, you're in the right place. Welcome to Love Is Us. Episode: Karin: Welcome, Amrit. [01:43] Amrit: Thanks for having me. [01:44] Karin: Yeah, I'm glad we could make this happen. I know we had to reschedule once, but glad we could finally get it done. So tell us where you are in the world. [01:53] Amrit: I'm in Mexico, near Mexico City, up in the mountains. 6000ft with beautiful spring weather all year round. So it's like beautiful 75 degrees all year. It's perfect place to live. Highly recommend it to move to Mexico. [02:12] Karin: I tell you, that is so tempting. As someone who's just been through a horrible winter in Portland, Oregon and the US, that sounds awfully tempting. Yes. So tell me what brought you there because I know that you are quite the international traveler. [02:31] Amrit: Yeah, my wife is mexican and she left Mexico when she was 17 and never really been back to live here. And that was always one of her dreams for her kids to experience that and to just be in the culture here in Mexico. And it's so different. Right? So we lived in India for 20 years and that was certainly different. And then after we left India, we went to Germany because we're like, okay, we got the whole world open. What are we going to do? For some reason we thought Germany would be nice. We went there in the summer, which is one of the things. It was beautiful and everything so lush. And she very quickly realized that she was missing this close connection of friends and community and the open hearts. And then Covid hit and just made everything worse. And so the first moment we had a chance, we packed up and ran. [03:26] Karin: And you've got two. So that really was an adjustment. It was very. Right? [03:32] Amrit: Yeah. Oh, was huge. I mean, the shift between India and Germany was already massive. And then to come to Mexico was just another level to, you know, fun and bet. [03:46] Karin: I bet. So tell us what you do for work. [03:50] Amrit: I'm a life coach, and I focus on working with men who are struggling in their marriages because I found that so many of my individual clients who were men were saying, like, oh, I'm doing great with this and that I'm doing good in my health, I'm doing good in my business. But the one thing which I just can't figure out is how to get along with my wife. And I love her. We've been together for 20 years, but I'm seeing this drift apart. And so I did a lot of work one on one with my male clients on that, and it changed their lives because it was just so profound to have some simple tools on how to communicate, do some things you would never do if you were married to another guy, but if you're married to a woman, so you do some other things. And we just had huge success. And so I came up with this program to work with men in a group setting where we're all supporting each other. And it's been amazing. I mean, really rewarding work. [04:56] Karin: And, of course, I'm a big proponent of men's groups. So I love that we get to talk more about this, but perhaps you can tell us first a little bit about what brought you to say coaching. [05:11] Amrit: Well, it's interesting because when I look back on my life now, I've been coaching people since I'm 15. I just didn't know I was coaching people. And I always had little meetings here and there with the people I was working with. When I was in India, worked at an international boarding school. I worked with a lot of the kids there in that way. And I always realized that I like the difference between being a teacher towards being a coach. And I like being a coach much better because a coach asks questions and lets you find your answers. A teacher tells you what you should think and what the answers are, and it doesn't really matter what you're thinking. So when I really went into it full time now, a couple of years ago, I had so much fun with it. And that was the best part for me. That was, for me, the reminder of, you're going in the right direction, and this just has to build up, and it takes time, but it's just what I enjoy doing. [06:13] Karin: And the men that come to you, you said that they feel like they're drifting apart from their partners and they need some communication tools. What else are they seeking? [06:24] Amrit: They're seeking this connection. They are seeking intimacy again, because that's one of the first things that goes out the window. And they just want to be happy and enjoy and really show up as a more authentic version of themselves. They don't know that quite yet. When they come to me, they come to me as, oh, I want to save my marriage. But really what we're working on is, how can you be happier with yourself? How can you show up more authentically as a true version of yourself, where you're radiant, where you're happy, where you're fulfilled, and guess what? Your partner will be excited in wanting to be in a relationship with you because you are in this state of radiance and happiness, and that's a person someone else wants to be with. And it's not so much about what can I do to change my partner, but what can I do to change myself so I'm happier, I'm more fulfilled. And then that just ripples through the relationship. And then after six to eight weeks, they come to me and they're like, oh, my God, my wife changed. She's doing things differently. And it's like, yeah, this was the miracle. [07:40] Karin: And, yeah, you know, the truth of it, it's really that they, that not their wives, that have changed to a. [07:47] Amrit: Certain degree, the wife does start changing, and it is so powerful to watch because now suddenly she's around this really upbeat, positive, high spirit guy who is, like, asking her for her needs and what she wants and what's important to her and takes her out for dates and does the right things, and she gets inspired by it, and she wants to just also raise her vibration. And so then it becomes this Tita Todd a game, right, where both just start expanding, and then they suddenly look at it and say, like, oh, my God, my relationship hasn't been this good since the kids were born. [08:25] Karin: Yeah. And yes, when you changed part of a system, the whole system changes, but you're really starting with the man who's coming to see you. And I think that's where a lot of people don't understand the value of working on a relationship when it's just one person initially doing the work. And yet when that one person starts working on themselves, it really does have a big effect on everything else in their life, too, right? [08:56] Amrit: Yeah, huge ripple effect. And it goes into everything, and then from there, it expands in their work, into their business, into their health journey, into their spiritual discovery. I mean, it just ripples everywhere because it all starts with you yourself. And sometimes people have this misconception where they think, oh, a marriage should be 50 50, right? I did my 50%, and now she has to do her 50%. And if she only does 49, then I'm going to be upset. But it's a little bit like if you're on a football team and you're playing with your other players, you're not just going to play at 50% because someone is not going all out, right? You're going to give it your 100%, and that's how you're going to win the game. So it's really not that difficult to understand. But the other interesting thing, too, is, like, the moment you give 100%, you're taking 100% responsibility and you're really showing up for yourself, for your marriage. Not because she had a good day or she had a bad day or she said something nice or she didn't or whatever, but you're showing up because you want that, and that's when it gets real. [10:08] Karin: Yeah. Rather than scorekeeping, right. We're saying, okay, I've done my part, now you do yours. Does that ever work? [10:16] Amrit: Yeah, we talk about that. We talk about scorekeeping because it's a tendency, and it's something we all carry from our childhood where we're like, oh, I carried the trash out three times, now it's my siblings turn. Right. But that's not how it works in a relationship, and that's not how it works when you want to expand your love and really live in a fulfilled relationship. [10:40] Karin: And you talked about being authentic. How do you define being more authentic? [10:47] Amrit: To get to know yourself better and really what makes you tick and really what's going on inside of you. So we talk a lot around emotions, and where do those emotions of anger and frustration come from? What's behind that? We talk about needs and wants. And so many men never ask themselves what they truly need, what they truly want. We live in a society where women for thousands of years had woman circles, right? Where they come together and they would meet with each other and they would support each other, and they would spend time together, and they would process together, and man would just all walk by themselves through the forest and go try to hunt a deer. Right. When man came together, historically, was always like, okay, let's drink a lot of alcohol and not talk about anything which could set one of us off. But to really like this new generation of us men now, and it's cool to see because this is already now happening much more with a younger generation, is they really want to connect to what's going on inside of them. They want to talk about it, they want to come together, they want to share. And I think it's a beautiful time for the world of us men to really grow into that and learn how to do it well and learn all the benefits that come with it. [12:14] Karin: And you talked about exploring emotions, and I'm guessing that there are some men that really struggle with that in the beginning when they start to work with you. [12:23] Amrit: It's super hard for us men because the problem is we are all generationally connected, right? We're connected to our lineage. And so for us men, our fathers, probably in my age especially, did not do a lot of with emotions, right? Maybe a little bit like 5% emotional involvement. But then our grandfathers were even further disconnected from it, and then the great grandfathers even further. And it keeps going back generations and generations before us. So it's really, really challenging for us men to become vulnerable and to open up and to just admit to, oh, yeah, it's not just that. I know only frustration and anger. There can be emotions below that. And I have feelings and I can get hurt, and I can be vulnerable. And just this understanding of it is so powerful and really helps a lot of men to open up and realize that there's a whole other life there. [13:26] Karin: And what does that emotional work have to do with sex? [13:33] Amrit: It has so much to do with it. And this is actually something we cover in the course because I take them through the whole process. Right. We start with taking responsibility first, then we start with building trust. Then we learn about communication, and then it goes into emotional connection, because unless you can establish an emotional connection with another human being, sex will just be superficial, will be basically two people masturbating with each other, because it's just this superficial thing. Right. But the moment you have that emotional connection, that's when you can create that physical connection. And then sex becomes something most men haven't even heard about. How expansive and how uplifting it can be. [14:21] Karin: Yeah. And how as you get older and deepen your connection with your partner that just gets better and better. [14:31] Amrit: Exactly. Yeah. And that's another concept which blows some of my clients minds where I'm like, I've been married for 20 years. I don't think we'll ever have good sex again. I'm like, no, it's opposite. Now is the beginning. Now it's going to get so much better because you have that depth. But you do need to establish trust first. You do need to establish the emotional connection first because you need to understand this just doesn't happen by itself. [14:57] Karin: Yeah. And you need to be a team. You're in this together. [15:01] Amrit: Yeah. [15:03] Karin: So what else do men get wrong about sex? [15:06] Amrit: Men get so much wrong about sex. I think it has to do with the fact that women almost have that advantage of being able to warm up much slower. Right. It's a process for a woman. For a woman to really become sexually engaged, it takes time, it might take hours, it might take days to really get to the point where you can really open your heart for men. We are trained since childhood that you can get excited with porn in three minutes, and then it's over two minutes after that. And so this programming kind of gets carried over into sex. And we think we have a fulfilling sex life because we had an ejaculation, but it's like 2% of what it can really be. And so it's like such a deep misunderstanding. And so I would really encourage all the listeners who are men to study tantric practices. The Kamasutra people have been talking about this for 5000 years. This is not something new. There is so much out there to learn. There's so much out there to learn about how our body works, what we can do differently, and how we can get in tune with another person's body and find that balancing point where things just start flowing and expanding. [16:33] Karin: Yeah. And it's perfect because just last week I talked with someone about Tantra. So this flows very well. How do you define spirituality in the context of the work that you do with men? [16:47] Amrit: For me, what it always comes back down to when I talk about spirituality is this quote I heard from my teacher 30 years ago, and I loved it. And it's very simple. He said, we're not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. And that just did it for me. That was the whole explanation I needed for spirituality, for how to integrate that as being a human being where I was now, not searching for it in the outside world anymore. But I really started finding my spirituality inside myself. And another big thing, to be reminded that every other living thing has a spirit. And so every other living thing on this planet is just as spiritual. But for us as humans, we have this ability with this human body, with this chakra system, with our aura, with all these extras we have going for us to really go to an amazing high level of connection in our spirit and with the universe while still being in this physical form as a human being. Very grounded, very connected with the earth. And that's why religions have been so successful over the last 3000 years, because they took this concept of connecting with spirit, which is everything, and just said, oh, here's a couple of rules. And if you follow these rules, and if you grow a beard or put a turban on or don't put a turbine and shave your beard or whatever, the thing is, that's when you're doing the right thing. So, for me, I lived as a Sikh for many years, and I really connected deeply to the sikh religion until I got to the point where I was like, I want spirituality. I don't want religion in my life. I don't need these limitations. I don't need this. Oh, my religion is bigger than your religion, and my God is stronger than your God. Right? We did that when we were five, talking about our death. Right. For us guys. And so this is something where I kept my beard on my turban just because I love it so much, and I connected with it on such a deep level. But I wouldn't really call myself a Sikh anymore because I feel it's so limiting. I'm a spiritual being. I'm a spiritual seeker. I love connecting with other people from other religious traditions who also have an open mind and who can see beyond their horizon because they use their religious practice, their religious connection, to connect with their essence and connect with spirit, rather than get stuck in it and get kept small by it. [19:43] Karin: So it sounds like you're really open to working with people from all kinds of backgrounds and that you're not trying to bring them into one kind of religious practice, but rather connect them with their own and what's really real for them. [20:01] Amrit: Yeah. And honestly, it doesn't even matter. You can be religious. Be not be religious. You can believe in God. You cannot be believing in God. All that doesn't matter, because ultimately, again, you're this spiritual being, having this human experience. If you want to connect to that spiritual essence inside of you, there's thousand different ways. And we live in 2024. I mean, you can learn new ways to connect spiritually on TikTok, and there's great stuff on that. And so we're living at a time, and I love talking to teenagers about this, because for them, when you talk to them about spirituality, they're all like, oh, yeah, sure, of course they understand this. When I was a teenager, less than 5% of the other kids had, like, a relation with spirit. The only people who had a little bit something were the people who were religious, but they were kind of stuck in their thing, right. But time has changed so much in the last 40, 50 years, and I think it's this deep connection with spirit within, and I think that's where we're going as a human race. So all the religion is just going to fall to the wayside, in my opinion. [21:18] Karin: So why do you think that kids nowadays are more connected that way? [21:23] Amrit: I think it's a whole nother generation. I think it's much bigger picture. It's a whole nother breed of souls that have incarnated in the last 1520 years. And I love talking to kids because it is so fun connecting with kids. They have so much capacity. They're not influenced by what should be or what should not be. And they have such a deep understanding of themselves already, especially this new generation, that I have big hopes for the future because they're going to take over from all of us at some point, and that's going to be good. [22:04] Karin: I love hearing that. So how do you help people connect spiritually? [22:09] Amrit: There's so many techniques. The one I like to use is meditation, because I find that when you go inwards and you get quiet, everything up, everything is there. And there is a couple of different meditation modalities you can use. You can use a guided meditation, you can use some mantra or some sound, but these are all just tools to come to yourself. When I started practicing, I started practicing with kundalini yoga because I was not able to meditate. If you would have sat me down, say, meditate for five minutes, my mind would have been all over the place. I couldn't do it. But then when I... /episode/index/show/069df229-18e0-4c38-8f9e-24c9fed2cab8/id/30226713

#56: Connect Spiritually with Tantra, with Hannah Spanke 02/27/2024

#56: Connect Spiritually with Tantra, with Hannah Spanke Join me in a conversation wtih Hannah Spanke to learn about Tantra and how it can make you feel more connected to everyone and everything. Hannah Spanke is a relationship coach, clinical sexologist, and passionate advocate for authentic happiness and sustainable, healthy relationships, starting with the one we have with ourselves. She has numerous credentials and styles of training under her belt, from years of study after nearly a decade in the adult entertainment industry. She is a Licensed Authentic Tantra Practitioner, Board Certified Clinical Sexologist, and Relationship & Life Coach specializing in helping individuals become their happiest selves through inner & outer work, while learning to understand and relate to their partners & family in the best ways possible. Learn more about Hannah Website: https://www.hannahspanke.com/ Instagram: Learn more about Karin Website: Instagram: TikTok: TRANSCRIPT Intro: Karin: This is Love Is Us, Exploring Relationships and How We Connect. I'm your host, Karin Calde. I'll talk with people about how we can strengthen our relationships, explore who we are in those relationships, and experience a greater sense of love and connection with those around us, including ourselves. I have a PhD in clinical Psychology, practiced as a psychologist resident, and after diving into my own healing work, I went back to school and became a coach, helping individuals and couples with their relationships and personal growth. If you want to experience more love in your life and contribute to healing the disconnect so prevalent in our world today, you're in the right place. Welcome to Love Is Us. Episode: Karin: Hello, everybody. Today I'm going to be talking with my guest about kind of a different topic, something that we haven't really talked much about but is absolutely applicable to both self development and our relationships. So there are lots of different frameworks that we can use when you talk about these subjects. And one way we can do that is think about the different things that impact them, including our emotions, our mental capabilities and our mental status, social impacts, the environment, our physical health, sexuality, but also spirituality. And we have touched on spirituality in different ways. But I would just want to make clear, I'm not talking about religion. I'm talking about that sense of having meaning in your life, purpose in your life, of feeling connected to something beyond you, to feeling connected with everything and everyone on this earth. And I find that when people have a well developed sense of spirituality, a lot of other things also fall into place. So today I'm going to be talking about one model of spirituality, and that is Tantra. And so Hannah Spanky is my guest, and she was my guest back on episode number 34 when we talk about sexuality. And if you haven't listened to that one, I do recommend. It was a really fun conversation, but I really learned a lot during this conversation because I knew very little about tantra before today. So I hope you dive in. I hope you get something out of it. I think the best part, or for me, maybe the most interesting part, was at the end when she talks about the five different elements. Anyway, I hope you like it. And here we go. Karin: Welcome back, Hannah. [02:41] Hannah: Thank you for having me, Karen. I'm so excited to be here. [02:44] Karin: Yeah, it's great to have you back again. I'm so glad that we got to connect last summer and also stay in contact. When it was time for me to bring up this subject, I automatically thought of you and was so glad that you wanted to come back. So welcome back and perhaps you can remind people where you are in the world. [03:07] Hannah: Yes. So thank you for the reminder that it was last summer when we last talked on the show, because so much has changed drastically multiple times over since then. I've moved, I think, probably three times since last time I saw you. And currently I'm in Carson City, Nevada. So, like, Reno Tahoe area. So that's where I'm at as of Christmas ish time. And I'll probably be here for the next, maybe the rest of the year. We'll see how antsy I get. [03:37] Karin: Yeah. I do remember you were in transition. You were, I think, staying with your sister, and there were a lot of dogs. [03:42] Hannah: Yes. Yes. I was with my sister in central Coast, California, for two months, and then I was in Joshua Tree for six months, and then I came here, where I also have family in the area. So it's been good. It's been nice. I met a boyfriend, so that's been lovely. I think that's why I was brought here, but we'll see how long I stay. [04:01] Karin: Okay. All right, well, we'll have to talk about that later, but tell us what you do for work. [04:09] Hannah: Yes. So I'm a somatic healer. I'm a relationship expert, relationship coach, intimacy expert, and a clinical sexologist, as well as a tantra teacher. So I like to kind of lump those things together, the clinical sexology and the tantra, because they absolutely support each other. However, they are different. And I think that this will be the first note I make on that difference and probably 100 more times throughout this conversation that tantra does not mean sex necessarily. You can have tantric sex just as easily as you could have a tantric dinner. It doesn't necessarily mean sex. It's a certain approach to the way that you're doing that thing. And so I incorporate tantra as far as the spiritual, emotional, mental support to help people in their intimate lives, as well as that more clinical side of things with the sexology approach. [05:05] Karin: Okay. And we're going to get into that. But first, I want to ask, we talked a little bit about this last time, but how did you come to. [05:13] Hannah: Do this work so shortest? What I feel currently, the truest answer is soul contract esque. I came here to do this, and so I found my way one way or another. But summary version just in this lifetime. Snapshot is I experienced my fair share of childhood trauma, a lot of separation in the home, a lot of issues that led me to being available, to stepping into the sex industry as a teenager. I was 16, freshly 16, and I was in that world for about seven and a half, almost eight years. And then stepping out of that industry was really a huge bomb to my life. Like, earth shattering kind of transition phase had started. My spiritual awakening had begun. Officially, that was what I consider my first dark night of the soul, probably about five years ago and maybe a little bit more now. And I started on my healing journey very quickly and eagerly. And like a fire hose approach, I did everything at once as fast as I could. All kinds of different cognitive therapies, different somatic work, different shamanic, spiritual type healing retreats, in person stuff, virtual stuff, and just, like, hit it from every single angle. And then as I shed layers and layers of the things that I needed to let go of, I kind of awoken or got more in touch with the wisdom that I uniquely carry, as well as the things I learned through my own process. And then that turned into me having more and more clarity on how I wanted to help people, others on their own journeys, and naturally, just with the way that things unfolded. And like I said, very soul contract. The theme has been undeniable my whole life. I knew it would be something to do with relationships, relating, intimacy, sex, taboo things in that realm. And that's exactly where I'm at. Through the last five, six years, I have, like I said, done the fire hose approach for my own healing, as well as really taken my time and gone deep into a few different modalities and tools, less techniques, different lineage things like the tantra that I'm trained in to just continue to evolve my own journey, as well as add to my repertoire of tools. [07:39] Karin: Wonderful. Why don't we go ahead and get into it? So maybe you could start with telling us what tantra is. [07:47] Hannah: Yes. And I am so happy to answer that question because it feels like, I don't know, it's like the opportunity to debunk so many myths every time somebody asks. Because I know for myself even, and I say this in hindsight, I say it shamelessly now, but I was a little embarrassed about it for a while. When I first started my journey with tantra, it was personal only. It was for my own healing. And then it all aligned quickly, that this is something that I was going to teach, and this was going to be part of my practice or my offering to the world. And even a year, maybe eight months into that journey, I was like, what is tantra? What the fuck does tantra mean? It feels like this very elusive term. It's like there's no concrete definition that is mainstream, at least. And so I think we all make whatever we think it means up kind of based on social media or media contexts and stuff. So a lot of tantra in the western mind is thought of as sex, sexual things, kamasutra type stuff. At least that's what I hear from people mostly. However, tantra is an ancient science, an ancient tradition. I think of it really as like a family of spiritual science where its roots are traceable all the way back to one origin. But there are many, many different branches of it at this point, over many thousands of years. It can be traced all the way back to people migrating, like, 13,000 bc esque time, like, long, long time ago. 15, 17,000 years ago. It can be traced back to when, like, prehistoric, when an enlightened master, who, I cannot remember his name at this time. You can google it. He traveled from India. India. Africa is really, like, the origin place of Tantra. In the very beginning. Indian is obviously the hindu tradition. And then it was brought north to the himalayan region to, like, Tibet, Nepal, baton, those areas where it was differentiated once again, and it became more of, like, the hindu version. And then the off branch there is the, like, more asian expressions of the tradition. And so up until that point in that region, the himalayan region, the people there practiced something called bonpo. And Bonpo was just the most ancient tradition religion of that area. That was one step more organized than what basically everybody on the planet practiced up until that point, thousands and thousands of years ago, which was animism, which is basically the recognition that all things have spirit and being in union with all things in life. And so it went from that, like, ice age people animism up to the Bon pro tradition, up to the very first expression of tantra in that buddhist region. And then the buddhist influence and all of that was kind of developed and interwoven. And so the lineage that I'm trained in specifically is a lineage of tibetan buddhist tantra that can be traced back about 1200 years. And it's called the Shankpakagi lineage, and it was originated by two women. And so it is a feminine lineage as well in Tantra. I know, there's so many questions. I'm probably. [11:12] Karin: This is so interesting. [11:13] Hannah: Yeah. [11:14] Karin: I didn't know it had the relationship with Buddhism, which I love. That's so interesting. Okay, I'm sorry, I interrupted you. [11:22] Hannah: Go ahead. No, it's totally good. Your excitement face is exciting me. So this is great. But, yeah. So depending on, really, the origin or which lineage you are called to or practicing or whatever it has different roots, slightly. So, like, what I practice is tibetan buddhist tantra. So its roots are associated with Buddhism versus if it was an indian tradition, it would be associated with, like, Hinduism. So tantra has a lot of different expressions in the world. But I, to make it super simple, kind of put it into two categories. There's classical tantra, which to me means it's tied to a lineage that can be traced. And lineage just simply means passed down from enlightened master of some sort to student master to student, master to student in an unbroken chain that can be traced. And so if you are studying something that has a lineage, it has some sort of roots that is classical. And if you were studying something that doesn't necessarily have roots in the same way I put that in, like, the neo tantra category, I am biased, and I say that openly about this because I've studied and trained the last three and a half years in a specific lineage based tantra. So not to discredit the value of neotantra, because I think there's value in everything. Truly, that's part of the tantric worldview I have, is that there is value in everything. However, I wish there was a different name for it. It's like people who get upset that almond milk is called milk because it's not milk. I wish that neo tantra wasn't called tantra. I wish it was called something else, because it just paints a very different picture of what tantra is compared to classical lineage based approaches. It all has value, but without the tradition aspect to it, it, in my opinion, kind of takes away a bit of the reverence and the sacredness that I find is very important. To really honor those traditions and embody the teachings, it has to be done with a certain level of reverence for it. And if there's no roots for it, and it's just because I want to decide, I want to write a book today about how to eat pussy or something and call it a tantra book. That can happen. And so I'm like, God, no, it's not the same. So that's my two cent on those differences. [13:51] Karin: It's interesting. Would you say that the neotantra is kind of white appropriation? Is that true? [14:00] Hannah: I think it definitely just speaks to sort of like the cultureless plague of the western world, that we don't have roots. It's like the melting pot for a reason, because there's just a whole bunch of everything. And so, so many of us, we all have tradition. We all have roots somewhere. And even if we're all in America. We all have roots from somewhere. And with just living in this culture, I think we get very much disconnected from that in a collective way. And so the importance of tradition and those roots is just a lot less in our culture. And so I think it kind of permits different behavior that wouldn't be the same somewhere else. [14:39] Karin: Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. And how did you learn and learn tantra? Where did you learn it? [14:44] Hannah: Yeah, occult. So that's a different story. Yeah. So, long story short, I found my way to this institution. This school. They're based in Canada, and it was a two and a half year unfolding. Essentially, the school itself is rooted in the traditions that I am speaking about, the specific lineage of tibetan buddhist tantra. However, the school teaches their own version of tantra. There's a specific name. I'm not even going to give energy to it. But they teach that version of tantra that is rooted in what I'm talking about, just completely distorted the sacredness of these teachings. And they were leveraging the teachings for their own self service, manipulation, control, power, those types of things. [15:45] Karin: Okay, so even though this institution was questionable, they still had a lot to offer that you were able to take in and learn from and then figure out how to make it better. [16:00] Hannah: Yes. Lots to unlearn as well. But, yeah, it was both, because in this world, we learned through that contrast. So it was what it needed to be, but it was the gateway for me to step back into connection with that lineage that I've personally been tied to for a long time. [16:22] Karin: Yeah. Okay. All right. So perhaps you can get a little bit more into the nitty gritty of the different aspects of tantra. [16:33] Hannah: Yes. I want to be just, like, extra clear that what I am talking about is the lineage that I'm trained in, tibetan buddhist tantra. So I'm definitely not, like, a self proclaimed expert on tantra as a complete whole or, like, hindu tantra or other things that I haven't studied to the same degree. So to start that, what I can really name is a couple of things, three things specifically that make tibetan tantra different from other lineages. So number one is the motivation for practice compared to a hindu tradition, the motivation for practice in most hindu traditions, as far as I know, and this could be butchered a little bit, but as far as I know, is more self oriented and not in any negative way, but it's like, for that individual to achieve enlightenment. It's for that individual to ascend, to heal, to grow, transform, whatever with the tibetan lineage, it has that budhist influence. And so it says, instead of just for me to reach enlightenment, it's for the enlightenment of all beings. And so at the end of every single one of the formal practices I do, you dedicate the merit of the practice. And it's kind of prayerful. You can do it to whoever you want. But traditionally, it's like, I dedicate the root merit and virtue of this practice to all living beings. May they reach enlightenment. So it is, and so the purpose behind it is a little bit more global. It feels like it's more obvious with its interconnectedness. And so I really appreciated that aspect of it. And then the second difference is the central channel placement. So if you've ever seen any sort of chakra system picture, you see the Chakras all the way up the center of the body in a hindu tradition like Kundalini yoga and different traditions that recognize the central channel as being in the spine. Like, if you do Kundalini yoga or something, that's that hindu tantric tradition, it's all about awakening that Kundalini energy at the base of the spine and allowing it to rise up the spine. In the Tibetan traditions, that is a no. That's like a hard no. It's like, specifically taught not to see, visualize, acknowledge the central channel in the spine because of some energetic conflict between your nervous system and your energy body. And so the way that the Tibetan Buddhist lineages practice is placing the central channel literally in the center of the body, like in front of the spine, behind the sternum. So that placement is different. Well, this goes hand in hand. That third piece that's different is the chakra system. So in a Hindu tradition, which is what we're mostly familiar and comfortable with in the western world, is like root, sacral, solar plexus, heart, throat, the standard ones that we all are used to. It feels so standard because we're so used to it. Yeah. [19:33] Karin: And I just want to say, for those who aren't familiar with the chakras, that's what we're talking about is these chakras that we try to open up and access that they go all throughout the center of the body there. [19:45] Hannah: Yeah. Just for a little bit of clarity on that, the word chakra, in its root, the sanskrit word, it means wheel. And so basically, it's acknowledging a wheel of energy in the center of your body, where it's like a hub for that specific type of energy, like you have one in your heart. And so that's your heart chakra. You have one in your throat. That's your throat chakra, and it's a wheel of energy, and then the central channel that those wheels are all aligned with. I think of it as like an invisible nervous system, sort of where it's like, in the nervous system 3D body, you have a spinal cord and a network of nerves that goes all the way out in all directions to the surface of the skin. In your energy body, you have that central channel that holds the chakras, just like your spinal column holds your spinal cord. Your central channel holds the chakras. And then those wheels spin, the energy that flows through your body all the way out through the surface of your skin, just like nerves. And so this is why when you feel like you have to cry or something and your throat's clogged up your throat, like you're holding something back, because that wheel has an input of energy... /episode/index/show/069df229-18e0-4c38-8f9e-24c9fed2cab8/id/30120503

#55: Befriend Yourself, with Rachel Astarte 02/20/2024

#55: Befriend Yourself, with Rachel Astarte Befriending yoruself is part of self-development work. It's about learning to like and love yourself through building self-trust, self-acceptance, developing intuition, communcating boundaries, and connecting with others. My guest, Rachel Astarte, talks with us about the benefits of becoming your own best friend, whether you're in midlife or at any point in your life. Rachel Astarte is an author, holistic psychotherapist, and transformational life coach. She is the author of "Celebrating Solitude: How to Develop and Honor Your Highest Self." She is also the host of the podcast, "Self Talk with Rachel Astarte." Learn more about Rachel: Website: http://rachelastartetherapy.com “Self Talk” Podcast: http://rachelastartetherapy.com/podcast Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rachelastartetherapy Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rachelastartetherapy LinkedIn: Learn more about Karin: Website: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theloveandconnectioncoach TRANSCRIPT Intro: Karin: This is Love Is Us, Exploring Relationships and How We Connect. I'm your host, Karin Calde. I'll talk with people about how we can strengthen our relationships, explore who we are in those relationships, and experience a greater sense of love and connection with those around us, including ourselves. I have a PhD in clinical Psychology, practiced as a psychologist resident, and after diving into my own healing work, I went back to school and became a coach, helping individuals and couples with their relationships and personal growth. If you want to experience more love in your life and contribute to healing the disconnect so prevalent in our world today, you're in the right place. Welcome to Love Is Us. [00:50] Karin: Hello, everybody. Today I'm talking with Rachel Astarte, and she is a holistic therapist out of New York. And we're going to be talking about self development. Now, I talk about self development a lot, and it's a really big part of what I do with clients. And today we're going to dive into what it really is. It's about figuring out who you really are, learning to connect with yourself. And when you do that, you become your own best friend (which is the of a program that Rachel actually runs). And when you do that, that in turn helps your relationships get stronger, too. But what does self development really mean and what does it entail? So that's what we're going to talk about. We're going to talk about self compassion, intuition, the self critic, and how they're all intertwined and so much more. And then toward the end, we move on to talking about women in midlife and the unique challenges that they face and how this all applies to them. There are so many gems here. So I'm glad you're here. If you like the episode, I hope you'll leave me a review and share it with others. All right, here we go. [02:04] Karin: Welcome, Rachel. [02:05] Rachel: Thank you so much for having me, Karen. It's great to be here. [02:09] Karin: So, first of all, tell me where you are in the world. [02:13] Rachel: I'm located just outside of New York City, about a half an hour outside of, yeah, New York proper. And, yeah, having a snowstorm. Well, it's just finished now, but it was very beautiful earlier. [02:29] Karin: And what keeps you there? [02:32] Rachel: Well, I love New York. I mean, I was actually born in Illinois, but I have no recollection of that because my parents moved when I was about six months old and my father got a teaching position in western New York and we stayed there. But when I was 14 years old, I took my first trip to Manhattan and I fell in love. So what ended up happening was after I graduated from university, I went to a state school, and I said, I want to move to New York, down into the city, and with a couple of forays elsewhere, I spent most of my life, my young adult life there, 22 years in New York City. And then in 2009, I moved outside. But I just love the state so much, and I get so much energy from it, so much creative energy from the city. But the state itself is so beautiful, and it just feels like home to me now. I also lived in New Mexico, so that's the only other state so far that I've ever lived in there. I felt like that felt like home, too. But New York, I'm just completely drawn to the city, and so that's what keeps me here. [03:56] Karin: It's wonderful to feel so connected with where you live. [03:59] Rachel: Yeah. [04:00] Karin: And I have the Billy Joel song now in my head, that New York state of mind. So tell us what you do for work. [04:09] Rachel: Well, I am a holistic psychotherapist, transformational life coach, author, and educator. So those are the things that I do the most. Yeah. [04:21] Karin: And how did you come to do that work? [04:24] Rachel: Well, I started as a writer. I started very early in my career. My father was a poet and a professor of literature and poetry. My mother is an actor, still is. She does more directing now. She's 85. So, so impressed by her all the time. But that's how I got started. I got started in the arts, and then I really loved the connection that I felt with other human beings by communicating through those art forms, and I got kind of addicted to that. But I also grew up around a lot of psychology and a lot of spirituality. So I was just, from a very early age, fascinated by why human beings do what they do. And at some point, I realized that writing, performing wasn't exactly giving me the connection, like the kind of connections I wanted to have with people, which was more personal. So that's when, shortly after my son was born, I went back to school and became a transformational life coach. And that was a lot of fun. I had a great time doing it. But then I realized I am getting dangerously close to doing talk therapy with my clients, and that's not legal. So I decided it would be a good idea for me to go back and get a master's in marriage and family therapy, which is what I did, and went through the internship and the associateship and got all my hours and got licensed in New York state as a therapist. So that's what brought me to the work that I do. Hmm. [06:12] Karin: We have this kind of an opposite story. You started as a coach and then became a therapist, and I did the opposite. Wonderful. So who are the people that you tend to work with most? What are they seeking when they come to you? [06:28] Rachel: Well, the people that come to me most are the people who are stuck, and. And usually that can manifest in different ways, as I'm sure you know as well. But the overriding issue that I find with people is a sense of an unbalanced and underappreciated self that somehow they've lost connection with their true natures. And that's what we focus on, is helping them to build a strong foundation of self so that they can manage whatever comes their way, whatever challenges they may encounter in a grounded and whole way that allows them to be who they truly are in the world. So the issues can look like anything from depression, anxiety, impostor syndrome, wonky boundaries with people, people pleasing, all of that low self esteem is a big one. So everything that we encounter just kind of comes back to the self. Something's going on within us that's out of alignment, and that's what I work with clients on. [07:56] Karin: And you talk about self development, right? And it's such a big topic. I think if you talk to ten people, you get ten different definitions of what self development is, and I think that you and I probably have a very similar idea of that, but I'd love to hear you talk about how you understand it. [08:18] Rachel: Well, the way that I look at self development is that self development is one part of the work that I do. So I talk about doing socially conscious self development. In other words, it's wonderful to be our best self. It's wonderful to work on our issues and live the best life we can live. But that's not enough. Once we are living our best life, that can also tend to cause more problems down the line. There's still a question of why don't I feel gratified, satisfied, contented in my life? And the reason usually is that we are not meant to just improve our lives for our own benefit. We are meant to improve our lives so that we can contribute to the rest of the world by being our true selves. And so looking at it from what energy are we putting out in the world? When we're in a bad place or in an uncomfortable place, our energy is going to reflect that. When we're feeling more balanced and contented and in control of our behaviors, emotions, actions, then we put out a very different vibe, for lack of a better word, so, really, when we do this work on ourselves, we're actually doing it. Yes. So we feel better, but we're also doing it because we want to contribute to the collective in a positive way. So, literally changing the quantum field or affecting the quantum field and in a way that is helpful for us as family members, because that's what we all are when we think about how everything is interconnected. So, yeah, that's how I define self development. It's that it's taking what is out of alignment, getting it back into alignment, and then going out into the world and living as our true self. That affects the tapestry of humanity in a really beautiful way. [10:45] Karin: So it sounds to me like you help people connect with themselves, and then you help people connect outwardly with others. [10:53] Rachel: Is that Right? Yeah. It's about relationship, but not just with other human beings. It's with all of life around us, which is also our siblings. They're also our siblings because everything is connected. So, in fact, when you look at the world that way, it's very hard to feel lonely because there's so much life around us all the time. So, yeah, that's another part of it, too. There's a lot of pressure we put on ourselves to live our best life, whatever that might mean. But when we take the pressure off and we say, well, I'm doing this, yes, because I will feel better. But to know that my feeling better helps others as well, it's easier for us to think about others before we think about ourselves. And that can make it an easier pathway in to doing self work. [11:59] Karin: So do you do that concurrently? Do you help people work on themselves, but also their connections with others? [12:06] Rachel: Well, life is back and forth in that way. So while you're working on yourself, at the end of a session with me or at the end of a class with me, you still have to go out into the world and deal with your spouse or your mom or your kid or your colleague, for your boss, for your friend. So you're learning tools about how to pull your energy back in and be solid in who you are so that you can interact with other people in a helpful and functional way. Yeah. So I guess that probably answers it, is that it's congruent. Absolutely. [12:46] Karin:: And how do people get so disconnected? [12:49] Rachel: Well, I blame the parents. No, I blame society. I think that, well, we start out as these beautiful beings when we're born without any needs beyond the immediate of being warm and fed and changed and loved. And then when we have interactions with other people, we begin to learn that maybe who we are isn't enough. When you're a child and you're just full of the energy of the world and you're playing and screaming and be quiet, be quiet. We like, oh, I'm not allowed to do that. And we begin to doubt ourselves. We begin to doubt our beautiful energy. And so over time, and then we have teachers who are telling us, oh, you did this wrong, or whatever it is, we start to take the viewpoints of other people and then, yes, we'll bring society into it, too, not to mention social media. But when I grew up, it was television and magazines and, oh, I'm supposed to look like that. I'm supposed to own that car. I'm supposed to drive or have this house and do these activities, we begin to question ourselves. And that really causes a disconnect with our true nature, which we had from the beginning. Now, it doesn't mean the true nature is gone. It's just kind of buried under all of this stuff. And so the work that I do with clients and with students is to help sort of unpack all of that and get back to true nature. [14:40] Karin: And it's a lot of work, isn't it? [14:42] Rachel: Yeah, but I even hate the word work. I use it….We have to do our self work. I've been calling it more of an adventure, right? Because it's like the hero's journey, and we're venturing into this unknown and we feel ill prepared. And in fact, that's the first thing that the hero encounters when presented with the adventure, is the refusal of the call. Like, I'm not worthy. I'm not. Okay, I don't have time to do this. It happens in every movie now. You'll never not see it. Every time the hero is presented with the journey, they're like, no, I don't think I'm going to do that. And so, yeah, it's a process. So once we get past that and we jump in and go on the journey, it really is an adventure of learning yourself. And the very first thing that I tell my clients or invite my clients and students to pack on that journey is non judgment. Right? Don't judge yourself for what happened in the past, and don't judge yourself for what's going to happen on your journey. Just accept it as part of the learning process. So, yeah, it takes a while, and also, it's ongoing for the rest of our life. So if we said, oh, I got to work on myself my whole life, that doesn't sound fun to me at all, but I love the idea of being on a life adventure, of what does it mean to be Rachel in this life? What does it mean to be Karen in this life? That's a great adventure to me. Karin: And it's a continual self-discovery where there can be so many, aha! Oh, now I get it. And that can be really those moments of inspiration, I think can really bolster us and help us to move forward, because when you put together the pieces of the puzzle, it can be very connecting and inspiring. So what are some of these pieces that you work on with people? What are some of these things that people benefit from learning when they work with you? [16:58] Rachel: It's a process. Right? In fact, right now I'm teaching a course called be your own best friend. And this really is a comprehensive course in how to develop that foundation of self. And what we want or what we need in order to really, truly befriend ourselves is self-acceptance. And in order to do that, there are three areas that we really need to work on along the path, which is, first of all, self awareness. Being aware of what we do, what we think, how we behave non-judgmentally, being aware. Right. We don't want to judge ourselves once we turn the focus on our awareness. And that's the mind part. Right? So, as a holistic therapist, I work with mind, body and spirit. So the mind part of it is that self-awareness, then we need self-compassion, which includes self-love. And that's more of a spiritual thing. This compassion, this love, this desire to accept ourselves where we are, but still honor the fact that we want to shift or change or improve or alter a few things in our life. And having that self compassion not only helps us, and this is what you were talking about earlier, it really helps us to turn compassion toward others. Once we can start to feel it in ourselves, we naturally want to share that with others. And then we also need self-trust. And this is more. I consider this part of the body aspect of the work, because trust requires us to know who we are, where we are, how we think, and that involves a lot of internal, physical, somatic work, which is to say, when I'm feeling something, where am I feeling it? What is it trying to tell me? How can I look at my body as an ally when I'm having these big emotions that seem like they're carrying me away? What if I know when I'm feeling shame, I feel that in the pit of my solar plexus, right at the base of my stomach, or maybe at the top of my stomach, I start to feel, oh, I know what that is. The self part of me is hurting right now. And to be able to trust that I understand that about myself, to trust that my body will take care of itself, knows how to self-regulate, which is one of the things that I work on with clients and students is how do I manage those feelings so that I can begin to trust. Right. So there are many different tools and modalities that I use to help us to sort of light up these aspects, the awareness and compassion and trust so that we have, ultimately, self-acceptance. And when we have self-acceptance, it's much easier to accept others where they are on their path. [20:20] Karin:: Yeah, absolutely. It does start with us. So there's so many directions I would love to take. You know, one of the books that I recommend to just about all my clients is Kristen Neff's Self Compassion. So I love that that's an important piece of the work that you do. What gets in the way of people showing themselves self compassion in your experience? [20:47] Rachel: Well, again, I think it's that self-talk, the dialogue or maybe monologue that runs in our head that's just designed. You know, it's not even real. It's just the. The information that we've been fed that we don't really pause and question, and that can cause a lot of obstacles to appear on our path. It makes it very difficult for us to be self-compassionate because we're still believing this crap message that we're no good or that we're not good enough. Right. It's much easier to show compassion toward others. Right. So when we think about what is compassion? Well, compassion is empathy plus the desire to help or to assist someone through pain. And it's so much easier to do that for others. And so I was just on a call Today, and we were talking about this very thing where one of the students was having an issue with her personal self-image. And she said, if I had a friend who was going through this, I would be very caring and loving toward her and gentle toward her. And I said, well, what's the difference between you doing that for her and doing it for yourself? Dead silence, right? It's a hard question to answer, and I didn't say this then, but a little bit tongue in cheek. What makes you so special that you deserve to be crapped on? Why are you the only one in the whole planet who does not deserve compassion? It's very silly when we think of it that way. [22:41] Karin:: Right? People tend to hold themselves to a higher standard. No one can be as bad as I am. There is something really bad about me at my core. And we hold that so strongly oftentimes. [22:58] Rachel: Yeah. [22:59] Karin:: So it sounds like you're talking really largely about the self-critic that just about all of us have running through our minds, telling us these stories about ourselves. Right. [23:11] Rachel: Right. And remember, when we apply non judgment to the critic, the critic can become an ally. Right. So when we're not judging that voice that says, you're no good and you're not good, you'll never get that job. That guy or that girl is never going to love you. When we don't judge the voice, but when we listen and discern, that's the difference. Right? The difference between being judgmental and discerning. We could say, well, how true is that statement? How true is it that I'm never going to get that job or I'm not good or smart enough to get that job? Maybe that's not my decision to make. Maybe it's the people who are hiring me. They get to make that decision. Right. And so when we calm down and just literally, and I say this to my clients and students all the time, talk to yourself when you can talk to yourself out loud. I am a proponent of full on dialogue with your highest self. Inquire, what do you mean, I'm not good enough? Tell me, how are you not good enough? How am I not good enough? I want to hear. I'm all ears. Give me the list. And then the list will come. And usually it's... /episode/index/show/069df229-18e0-4c38-8f9e-24c9fed2cab8/id/30003618

#54: Avoid the Friend Zone While Dating, with Magda Kay 02/13/2024

#54: Avoid the Friend Zone While Dating, with Magda Kay If you're dating, you’ve probably had the experience of being “friend zoned.” And, perhaps, you’re someone who relegates others to the friend zone. Friends are great to have, but if you’re looking for true love, you might want to understand how to avoid this from happening. In this episode we talk about how to avoid the friend zone. We also talk about boundaries, sexuality, body language, why chemistry can be a red flag, and to bring sexuality into your daily life (trust me, this is a good thing!). I’m glad you’re here! Biography: Magda Kay is an intimacy expert, certified Tantra teacher, speaker, and author on a mission to help individuals around the world experience more love, pleasure, and intimacy. For almost a decade, her advice on relationship dynamics has helped countless singles and couples alike live more fulfilling and authentic lives in and outside of the bedroom. With a degree and background in business, Magda has a natural gift for translating esoteric concepts into practical, easy-to-understand ideas so that everyone can enjoy the fulfilling intimate life they deserve. Magda is the founder of the School of Intimacy, an online academy that teaches people essential skills for building happy, passionate relationships with others and themselves. This year, she published her first book, No more Faking It, a guide for women to living a more fulfilled life. She also works one-on-one with individual clients both online and in person. How to learn more about Magda: Website: https://magdakay.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/magdakayofficial/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/magdakay How to learn more about Karin: Website: Instagram: TRANSCRIPT Intro: Karin: This is Love Is Us, Exploring Relationships and How We Connect. I'm your host, Karin Calde. I'll talk with people about how we can strengthen our relationships, explore who we are in those relationships, and experience a greater sense of love and connection with those around us, including ourselves. I have a PhD in clinical Psychology, practiced as a psychologist resident, and after diving into my own healing work, I went back to school and became a coach, helping individuals and couples with their relationships and personal growth. If you want to experience more love in your life and contribute to healing the disconnect so prevalent in our world today, you're in the right place. Welcome to Love Is Us. Episode: Hello, everybody. It's February and I am longing for spring. I don't know about you, but it is Valentine's Day week and I thought about doing a special episode for Valentine's Day. But the thing is, every day is Valentine's Day on this podcast because we're always talking about love. So I'm just going to keep going. And today I'm going to be talking to Magda Kay, who is a relationship and intimacy expert. So imagine this. Imagine you're in the dating world and you are seeing someone and you really like them, but then all of a sudden they start dating somebody else and you realize you've been friend zoned. Or perhaps you're a woman and you've been dating men and they're all just too nice to be in a relationship with and you haven't been able to find that true love. So on today's episode, we're going to be talking about this. We're going to be talking about the friend zone and how to avoid it. And this is for men and women. All right, I hope you like it. And here we go. Welcome, Magda. [02:10] Magda: Wow. Thank you for having me. [02:12] Karin: I'm really happy to have you here. Thank you for making the time. Tell us where you are in the world. [02:18] Magda: Well, at the moment, I am in Poland, which is my home country, and it's very, very cold. I'm not used to this anymore because I spent over a decade in Southeast Asia, living in tropics, in fact, on small tropical islands. And then I decided to come back to Europe and it's minus twelve and it's really cold and my body is like, what are you doing, you crazy woman? [02:44] Karin: What is going on here? Yeah, now that as we're recording this, it's the beginning of January, so I can imagine you must be in the heart of the cold. [02:56] Magda: I'm handling it. [02:58] Karin: Good. And what drew you there? [03:04] Magda: Well, so I am from Poland. I was born and raised here. But you know what? When I was a teenager, my dad went bankrupt, and I just so happened to be doing a high school exchange in the US when that happened. And so I went through this weird association in my mind that Poland equals poverty and all the problems and just all the bad things. And the host family I was staying with in the US, they had this massive house, they took me to Hawai. So I just associated being abroad with a better life. So ever since I was 17 when that happened, ever since, I honestly have been just trying to run away from Poland. And yes, like I said, I spent over a decade in Southeast Asia, which is a lovely place. I lived in Malaysia, Thailand, Bali, but I was feeling more and more that I am missing the western drive. I'm missing being around ambitious people a bit more business and money focused, because I was living in a. We'll get into this. But I was living in a yogic tantric community, which it's a bit know the hippie world, and I was missing this western mindset. So I decided to come back to Europe. But I will be honest with you, discovering that I actually want to stay in Poland, that was a surprise, because, like I said, I spent half of my life trying to escape this country. I still don't really know what this decision is all about. And honestly, it would seem so easy to just, yeah, let me go back home. For me, it is really a big decision. I feel like it's clearing a lot of things. A lot of things, yeah. [04:46] Karin: Good for you. It sounds like a good growth opportunity for you and an opportunity for self discovery, that is for sure. [04:53] Magda: Yes. [04:54] Karin: That's great. Good. Well, tell us what you do. [04:58] Magda: So I am an intimacy coach. So what I do is I help people have better love and sex life. And my work is about combining tantra with psychology. So, like I said, I lived over a decade in those crazy yogi, tantric conscious communities that are very unique. To be fair, I can just say it was a sex cult, because pretty much it was. But I dove very, very deep into tantric teachings, the teachings of sacred sexuality and yoga and energy work and meditation. But I always loved human behavior. I always loved psychology. So I combine these two words, making it on one hand, making tantra more accessible to an average person in the west. But also what I see is that usually in the west, if you have anyone talk about sexuality and intimacy, these are sexologists, and they have this very medical approach to intimacy. And I feel like we are missing a more subtle, spiritual aspect to it. So I try to blend these two words in my work. So that's what I do. [06:08] Karin: Beautiful. And what I have been learning is that tantra is not just about sex, it's about so much more. And that's not the focus of our conversation today. But I do want to say that out loud for the people listening, because I think that especially in the US, it's come to be synonymous with sex. [06:29] Magda: Yes. Unfortunately, I get asked very often, what is tantra? Is it just about sex? And I think tantra is a spiritual path. And like you said, it's so much more than sex. But what happened is the same that happened with yoga. We took this profound, complex spiritual path and we just took one bit of it. And now everyone wears leggings and goes to yoga studios and stretches their body and we call it yoga. That has 8% to do with yoga, maybe. And it's the same with tantra. It's a much more complex path. But our society just took one bit that we're most interested in, which is sex, and we're focusing on that. So unfortunately, if you search Tantra online, a lot of things you're going to get. It's going to be erotic massages and some form of sex work. So I will tell people that, yes, tantra is more than that, but a lot of erotic services use tantra as branding because it's popular now. So just be mindful. When you search for something and for some coaches, just be mindful. You may get some strictly sex offers. [07:35] Karin: Right. Okay, well, thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah, that's definitely a future topic of conversation on this podcast. But today we're going to be talking a little bit more about the dating world and specifically about something called the friend zone. So maybe you can tell us a little bit about what that is. [07:59] Magda: Yes. So, you know, when I talk about intimacy, what is intimacy? I always explain it like this. We know what it means to be a friend, and we know what it means to be lovers. But intimacy is somewhere in between these two relationships. So we have the friendship, we have the depth, we have sexuality, but it's this area that not many people talk about, and that is really intimacy. So if you end up being friend zone, you're not in intimacy, you're not in an intimate relationship with the person. You get stuck a little bit out of it because some of it overlaps, but you're kind of not playing the game that you probably want to be playing. And unfortunately, it is a big issue these days because the society has changed a lot. The dating world has changed a lot. There's so many global changes. We let go of gender roles, and we don't yet know what to replace it with. But people feel lost because they don't have a new sort of guideline to follow. We have dating apps, which, if you think of it, it's like a modern way of matchmaking, which we always had, but our society didn't really have matchmaking for a few generations. So now we're just, like, finding ourselves in this dating environment, which is very new, and we don't yet know how to navigate it. We lost a lot of confidence because we're online all the time, and we don't develop social skills the way we used to. We're extremely suppressed sexually. So then you like someone, but all you know is either how to hook up with this person or how to become friends. And so we end up usually on one of these extremes, while what most of us, both men and women, want is that intimate relationship. So friend zone is one of the extremes we fall into when we really want to be in an intimate relationship. That's how I like to look at it. [09:58] Karin: Oh, that's so interesting. And does it tend to happen to men, women, both? What are you seeing? [10:04] Magda: So, definitely men have a big problem with this. And I think for many, it's just a different situation because we live in a post me too movement, and men are really afraid of showing their sexuality too much, of showing their desire. It's also really interesting what's been happening to men, because men are expected to be emotional, considerate, basically. They're expected to be more like women, and they don't really know how to be. So men are very, very scared to show desire, to show this animalistic self to women, and so they end up being friend zoned almost all the time. But maybe that's a surprise for some people. But women can get friend zoned just as well. And I think I would have a guess that every woman listening can think of at least one time when she really liked a guy, but she was unable to move from the friendship to something more. And maybe you don't realize, but what happened is that you got friend zone. There is a few things that happened that got you stuck in the dynamic that you don't actually want to be in. So, yes, it does happen to both men and women. [11:21] Karin: So how does it happen? [11:23] Magda: So here is what we're doing, and I think both men and women, a lot of it comes down to being afraid of our sexuality, because if you think of it, this is what I tell my couples when I work with them. Sex is the foundation of your relationship because if you take away sex, you have friendship. Right? So I'm not saying this is the only thing that matters and that this is the only thing you need for a good relationship. But the difference between a romantic relationship and a friendship is really the presence of sex. So sex is important, but we feel so uncomfortable talking about sex. We feel uncomfortable flirting, and so we try to connect, but because we don't include the element of sexuality, we end up forming friendship. Now look what's been happening historically. So in the past, women were not allowed to show their sexual desire. Right. We're just like, no, nothing. Me, no, I'm a lady. And men were the leaders. Men would always pursue a woman. Now, that role for men has been changing a lot. A lot. One of them being is that women started saying, hey, there is such a thing as boundaries and consent, so maybe don't be so pushy. So then men stop pursuing women sexually to the degree that it used to be. But women, we haven't fully stepped into our position of expressing our sexuality. So now you have these two people kind of like. So who should kind of bring the sexuality into this conversation, and no one does because both people now are uncomfortable. That's kind of how it happens. [13:04] Karin: So we don't know how to initiate. [13:06] Magda: Yes. And by this, I don't mean sex. By the way, when I say sexuality, I do not mean sex. I don't mean about jumping into the bed with each other. I mean allowing that sexual energy to flow between you and. You guys know what I'm talking about, right? It's this chemistry, this tension, the polarity. You feel that, like, when you're with someone, you don't just want to feel comfortable and happy and joyful. You want to feel a bit of the tension. You want to be, like, teasing each other, building this anticipation of something. And that requires a lot of confidence. These are proper flirting skills that a lot of us just don't have anymore because we communicate via these little computers that we all have in our bag. So we kind of lost the art and then. Exactly. We try to flirt and we just end up being friendly. So we're missing that ability to flirt in a more sexual way to bring the tension that is really what puts both men and women into the friend zone on a bigger scale, of course. And then there are specific things we say and we do that don't support us. [14:18] Karin: Do you think it's mostly an unconscious thing that happens or do you think that people are deliberately thing, you know, they're not a mate for me, they're a friend. [14:28] Magda: Okay, this is a bit tricky. You know what? Because if you think of dating, sometimes you meet someone and you're not really sure how you feel, and so you just go ahead and you want to see, will this evolve into something more or not? And I think one of the difficulties here is that we don't have strict boundaries, that this is just friendship, this is just a relationship. That's how we have friends with benefits. That's what I was looking for, right? When suddenly the boundaries of these different relationships, they kind of blend. So I don't think it's necessarily intentional, but there will be cases when it absolutely is. And I've done this when I met a guy and I see that he's into me and I see that he's flirting and I just feel uncomfortable and I don't want it. I'll do a few things to very clearly establish that this is just friendship. So I think it's both. [15:23] Karin: What are those things that send that message? [15:28] Magda: Well, okay, I'm going to tell you just a story first. That's just something that came to my mind because what are the things that we say? Because you never know how it's going to be interpreted. So many years ago, when I was living in Milan, that was already in the phase. When I was running away from Poland, I moved to Milan, Italy. And many years ago, I used to party and drink. At that time, I don't now. So we're out in a club and I was done. I was ready to go home. So I'm sitting in a chair with my jacket, waiting for my friend to get her thing so we can go home. So I'm sitting there and there's a chair next to me, and I see this guy coming up to me. And Italians especially can be like a lot. So I see he's approaching me and I'm just like, oh, goodness. Just, no, I'm not reacting, right? He sits next to me, I'm not reacting. And he's trying to pick up a conversation. And I just like, I don't really answer. I just say, like, yes, no, that's it, right? And then he says, I like such mysterious women. I'm not trying to be mysterious. [16:38] Karin: Trying to send you a message. [16:41] Magda: So I will say that our intention of communicating something may not necessarily be the same thing that's being received by the other person. [16:52] Karin: Right. [16:52] Magda: Things that I usually try to do is I would maybe speak about a guy that I like. I will be very careful not to talk about sex, nudity, or nothing of that sort. So there are just, like, certain conversations that are off topic. I'll keep a bit more physical distance from the person. I'm naturally pretty touchy, very affectionate. So I'm just like, okay, I need to be mindful here. And to be fair, when I meet with these people, I try to dress in a bit more conservative way. I love summer dresses that show my back and everything, but I may just be a bit extra careful how I dress when I meet with someone that I am not interested in, just so they don't think that I'm making a special effort for them. Usually that would be for me. Stay away from the conversations about sex and nudity. Dress in a bit of a modest way, and I would often just mention some other guy that I like. But again, some men may consider this green flags. And, yes, she's into me, so. Right, I can't be responsible for. [17:58] Karin: But it sounds like you're trying to be careful about the messages that you send in those cases. [18:03] Magda: Yes. And I think you know something that I would say that is easy, probably, to recognize. If you want to, like, you got to want to look for signs, not like this guy who thought I was just being flirty with him because I didn't want to answer his question. If you tune into the other person, you can see how comfortable they feel. Is their body and their energy open and towards you, or are they slightly shut down and trying to find a bit more space between you? If you pay attention to the person, you can say it. You can feel it. So am I opening myself to you? Right. Like, is my chest moving towards you, or am I trying to shut down a little bit and pull away? So reading the body and reading the energy honestly is the best. So I just say, try to do this, because, again, we may do something, we may say things, and we may really mean totally different things. [18:58] Karin: Yeah, and I agree with that. Body language is so important, and I think that once people learn a little bit more about that, it becomes easier to figure out if someone is interested in you. [19:12] Magda: Yes. And it's a skill. So maybe for now, it just seems, like, impossible to do because these are subtle moves in the body. But like you said, if you practice, you will pick it up pretty fast, because this is unconscious, and it's a natural skill that we have. Just like, we can read emotions based on a person's facial expression. There's actually parts in the brain that are responsible for that. So you're built to recognize whether a person is open or if they're contracted. It's just about bringing back sensitivity to that awareness. [19:49] Karin: Tuning in? Yeah, absolutely. So in talking about the friend zone, so it sounds like you're seeing a lot of women relegating male partners to the friend zone lately. [20:06] Magda: Yes. [20:07] Karin: So it seems a little bit like self sabotaging behavior. [20:11] Magda: Or is it? Look, I will say this with a lot of shifts in the dating world, I do understand as a woman that for many women, the kind of a partner we want, it may be difficult... /episode/index/show/069df229-18e0-4c38-8f9e-24c9fed2cab8/id/29918993

#53: Preparing the Empty Nest 02/06/2024

#53: Preparing the Empty Nest The transition from parenthood to the empty nest can be a challenging one for many reasons. While some might revel in their new-found freedom, for many others it can send them into a tailspin as they grieve their shifting roles and loss of purpose. It's also a time when many couples divorce. Add menopause into the mix and it can feel overwhelming. This transition can, however, be an opportunity if you want it to be. Take a listen for my recommendations. Karin's website and Instagram: TRANSCRIPT Intro: Karin: This is Love Is Us, Exploring Relationships and How We Connect. I'm your host, Karin Calde. I'll talk with people about how we can strengthen our relationships, explore who we are in those relationships, and experience a greater sense of love and connection with those around us, including ourselves. I have a PhD in clinical Psychology, practiced as a psychologist resident, and after diving into my own healing work, I went back to school and became a coach, helping individuals and couples with their relationships and personal growth. If you want to experience more love in your life and contribute to healing the disconnect so prevalent in our world today, you're in the right place. Welcome to Love Is Us. Hello everybody. Today I'm going to be talking about one of my favorite subjects, the empty nest. Now, there's something in this episode for anyone who is a parent, whether or not your kids have left, it's ideally for those of you who have a partner and your kids are about to leave in the next few years or so. But if your kids have already taken flight and you're struggling, there's good information here for you. And while I'm going to be talking about couples and their relationships, there are lots of takeaways here for the single parent as well. Finally, while this is addressing those who are about to embark on this life transition, this is good for parents of young kids, too, because the patterns that I see with midlife couples and those who are about to experience the empty nest are often established years beforehand. So I'm working with couples on this, and I tell you, there is so much you can do around this if you're both willing and committed to the process. And it can be a lot of fun. And it can be a really joyous time for couples as they rediscover one another, have more time to do things they never had time for before, like travel, go to concerts, start new hobbies, go back to school, volunteer, make a career shift. Now, this is not to guilt you if you don't have this experience of joy, because the Reality is that it can be a really hard time for one or both of you. It can be both of these things at the same time. It can be difficult and it can be joyous. It's a time when you say goodbye not only to your only child or your youngest child, but you also might experience a loss of purpose when they leave. So it can be really hard. And I'm going to address that issue when I give you recommendations toward the end of the episode. Now, a lot of couples split up during this time, so I want to address that and address the reasons why this can happen. Now. There are many more reasons that I'm going to offer. These are just some of the things that I see with couples. One, there's a growing distance. You feel like roommates. This is really common. You just get really involved in other parts of your life and you just think your partner is going to be there or that's not your current priority and they can wait. Another reason is that there was something that happened or maybe a series of things that happened that caused you to feel really hurt and decided, and you decided to check out of this relationship, but you stayed for the kids. And then a third thing that I see is that you've just completely grown in different directions and your lives just no longer converge. And it is okay for couples to decide that they want a divorce, that they don't want to do this anymore. That's okay. And everyone needs to make their own choices around that. But for those of you who really want to try to make this work, there's lots that you can do. Something I see with some couples is that they put their relationship aside for the sake of their kids. So that was that number one reason that I see that people split up. It's understandable that they do this. You love your kids, you have limited time with them. You want to be the best parent you can be, and this is your life too. You don't have to sacrifice your life for your kids. You can be good parents and look after your relationship with your partner. It's also important to recognize that when you make your relationship with your partner a priority, you're doing something good for your kids too. They want you to stay together. I believe it's also good for them to see that your life doesn't end once you have kids. You can still have friends, hobbies, a career, time for fun and relaxation, time for your relationship with your partner so that they don't view getting married or having kids as a time when they have to end the other parts of their lives. Now, you might be the parent who never wants to leave your child or teen to go on a date or a vacation with your spouse or partner, but that sends a subtle message that you don't trust that your child will be okay without you. That can add to their anxiety about doing things on their own and to an unhealthy sense of dependence on you. And I think you want your kids to grow up and have healthy, happy lives where they can be independent and fully engaged in life and in the opportunities that it presents to them. And believe it or not, investing in your relationship with your partner has a strong influence on that outcome. So, just to summarize all that, your kids seeing you invest in a relationship with your partner benefits them in different ways, including, it gives them a sense of stability, it models what a healthy relationship looks like, and it gives them confidence in themselves. Okay, now I want to talk about something I feel really passionate about and that I bring up with most of the women in my life, whether they're friends or clients, and it's something that tends to coincide with that time when you're transitioning to an empty nest. Now, most people who become empty nesters are typically mid forty s, to mid 50s or better. And that is precisely the time when women, on average, start perimenopause and menopause, with the average age of menopause being 51. So that's menopause is defined as going one year without your period. And amongst women, suicide rates are highest for those between the ages of 45 and 64. And I'm not saying that this is because of menopause or because of becoming empty nesters or even because of relationship issues. I don't know that we have a good enough data to point to causation. I do think that menopause has a lot to do with that. But again, I can't say that for sure. But all of those things happening at approximately the same time can be really challenging, and they can certainly feed into each other. Some of the common symptoms of menopause include, and this is an abbreviated list, night sweats and hot flashes, which interrupt sleep. And of course, sleep is foundational for feeling good, being able to focus, and a lot more. So, this is big. There can be pain with sex, which might add to relationship stress, but also decreases your ability to feel pleasure, unexpected weight gain, which can contribute to body image issues, headaches, joint pain, brain fog, forgetfulness, mood changes, and an increased risk for heart disease, osteoporosis, and a lot more. And the thing is, there's something fairly easy that can make this all better. If it doesn't make your symptoms go away, it can at least reduce your symptoms, and that is hormone replacement therapy, or HRT. Now, if you're scared to go on it because breast cancer runs in your family, please go see a menopause specialist who is up on the latest research and can give you guidance. There are many, many doctors who are uninformed about this subject, and it puts women's lives at risk. They just don't have the training and they haven't kept up on the research. The current research is showing that estrogen does not cause breast cancer. There are a lot of studies that support that. And that original study that came out, I think it was in 2002, there are lots of problems with it. I just had a client that I work with who has worked in the medical field for all her life, and she saw a menopause specialist just last week and was so grateful for the experience because they talked about things that no other doctor has ever discussed with her before and she got on hormone replacement therapy. The sooner you do this, the better off you'll be, the lower risk you'll be for all kinds of diseases, and of course it'll improve your mood. But once you hit a certain age, HRT might not be the best option for you. So look into it now. If your current doctor's first line of defense is antidepressants, ask them, why not HRT first. I'm not a medical doctor, and I know there are some women for whom HRT is not recommended. So absolutely go see a specialist. But from what I'm learning, most women do well with it. So go online to the menopause society and they have a directory you can use to find someone who has specialized training in this area. Getting effective treatment during this time will likely make becoming an empty nester easier. It will also likely benefit your relationship with your partner, and it's not hyperbole to say that it just might save your life. I now want to talk about finding your purpose during this time. Your role as a parent is only partially who you are. You have many other roles, and more importantly, you are bigger than the roles that you take on. You are certainly bigger than your role as a parent. Roles shift. That's inevitable. But you stay you. So who are you? This might be your task during this time in your life, and you can absolutely do it. And if you struggle with it, I recommend that you get some support. But I will give you some ideas for steps you can take in a moment here. But this is, like I said, often a big part of this transition for people and why it can be so very hard, but it is not something that you can't handle. It absolutely is. Now, I want to give you some action steps. One, allow yourself to grieve. If you ignore your feelings or try to push them down, they'll just pop up in other places and they'll be out of your control. Acknowledge your very normal feelings. You are human and you're not exempt from emotions. Take comfort in the fact that you're not alone in your grief. There are lots of other people going through similar experiences and know this is part of what connects you with all the other empty nesters and all the other people going through hard things. If you're afraid that if you start crying or grieving that you won't be able to come out of it, that you'll cry forever, I want to reassure you that that's not the way it works. Emotions are like a wave. They build crest and fall off. But if you find it overwhelming and get stuck in your grief, get some support because it's available and it can really help. Also related this to this is do not put your grief onto your kids. It's not their job to take care of you emotionally. It's okay to let them know that you're going to miss them and you're sad. That's good for them to hear and to see. But it's not okay to tell them that you don't know how you're going to live without them and to tell them that they need to call you every day. And that is just a lot to put on a kid who is also going through a lot. This is a big transition for them too, so don't make it about you. When you're with your child, it's your job to be their parent and be their support system. And you will be in a much better position to support them if you take care of your own emotional needs and use other sources of support in your life. Okay, so on to couples. Spend time together daily. At least ten minutes of facetime at least. And this can be doing anything, but hopefully not when you're distracted doing anything else. Really put your time and attention on your partner. If you're not sure what to do during that time, have it be a time when you ask about their day and just really work on your listening skills. Really be present. The next step or the next tip is also around relationships and can help you during that time together. And that is to get curious about one another. You probably don't know your partner as well as you think you do, even though you've probably been with them for several years, even decades. A lot has happened since you first got together and fell in love. So get curious about one another again. Ask each other questions. Ask each other about those stories that you've heard before, but ask them a different question about it so that you can learn something new. Next step, rediscover one another in the bedroom. Now this is a big topic, so I'm not going to go into detail today, but you can always listen to episode number 43 with Alexandra Stockwell. But it does start with curiosity. Okay, the next step is to get in front of this as much as possible. Don't wait until your child is out the door before you start paying attention to your relationship with your partner and your relationship with yourself. Do this now. Don't wait for your child to leave and then realize that you're in crisis, because it'll be much harder that way. And if you're in a relationship, have a conversation with your partner about how you're feeling and how you care about your relationship so that you want to take steps to make sure you can weather the coming life transition. So I'd recommend you do that. Okay. On to finding you new purpose. What moves you forward and gets you out of bed every day? It might have been your kids up until this point, and that's changing. But it starts with identifying your values, which shift over time. So it's good to revisit those periodically, especially when you're in transition or you've experienced a significant shift in your life. Values are your anchors. They're who you are at your core. And they can guide these next steps, which are to identify something new that you want to do. Focus on your friendships. Take guitar lessons. Take a pottery class. Start a community garden. Start meditating. Start a book club. The possibilities are endless, but line them up with your values so that it feels good to you. It feels in line with you and authentic. Ask yourself, what would light you up? Perhaps there's something you've always wanted to do but never gave yourself permission to. Even speak out loud. And write these down. Set some goals for yourself. Have something you can look forward to. Okay? And then my last recommendation is to create a vision for what you want your life to look like, whether you're on your own or you have a partner. And if you do have a partner, I would recommend you do this in two ways. You do it on your own, and then you do it with your partner. So what do you want your life to look like in ten years? Where are you living? What are you doing? What are you feeling with your financial situation? All those things. And I do have an exercise for this, so let me know if you're interested in that. You have spent over four, five decades building your life. If you haven't started really enjoying it and all that you've built now is the time. Change is inevitable. Everything is always changing. And for you, coming to accept that, inevitability might really help, but it's time to enjoy all the fruits of your labor. And yes, you deserve it. And this reminds me of this book that I recently read. You might have heard of it. It's by Pema Chodron, and she's a well known American Tibetan-Buddhist, and she's written several beautiful books packed with wisdom. So a book I just finished reading is, I think, her most popular one. It's called when things fall apart. And I couldn't find the quote that I was thinking about around this, but it's essentially, it's this thing that Buddhists are always trying to get you to wake up to, and that is that your life is now. So don't wait until tomorrow to make that change. Don't wait until tomorrow to pay attention to your partner and make things better. This is your life now. And then finally, I want to leave you with a quote also from Pema Chodron's When things fall apart. And I think it's just really a great one to think about. She says, I used to have a sign pinned up on my wall that read, only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us. It was all about letting go of everything. All right, everybody, thanks for being here, and I'll see you next time. Thanks for joining us today on Love Is Us. If you like the show, I would so appreciate it if you left me a review. If you have questions and would like to follow me on social media, you can find me on Instagram where I'm the love and connection coach. Special thanks to Tim Gorman for my music, Ali Shaw for my artwork, and Ross Burdick for tech and editing assistance. Again, I'm so glad you joined us today, because the best way to bring more love into your life and into the world is to be loved. The best way to be love is to love yourself and those around you. Let's learn and be inspired together. /episode/index/show/069df229-18e0-4c38-8f9e-24c9fed2cab8/id/29812148

#52: The Power of Men's Groups, with Jason Lange 01/30/2024

#52: The Power of Men's Groups, with Jason Lange Jason Lange is a men's embodiment coach, group facilitator, and evolutionary guide. He helps men drop in and wake up to deeper clarity in their life's purpose and relationships. He believes every man should be in a men's group for the growth and support opportunities they provide. Jason is a certified “No More Mr. Nice Guy” coach, and has trained and studied with leaders such as John Wineland, Dr. Robert Glover, Jun Po Roshi, Tripp Lanier, and Ken Wilber. Men's Groups to checkout: Learn more about Jason: Website: Instagram: Learn more about Karin: Website: Instagram: TRANSCRIPT Intro: Karin: This is Love Is Us, Exploring Relationships and How We Connect. I'm your host, Karin Calde. I'll talk with people about how we can strengthen our relationships, explore who we are in those relationships, and experience a greater sense of love and connection with those around us, including ourselves. I have a PhD in clinical Psychology, practiced as a psychologist resident, and after diving into my own healing work, I went back to school and became a coach, helping individuals and couples with their relationships and personal growth. If you want to experience more love in your life and contribute to healing the disconnect so prevalent in our world today, you're in the right place. Welcome to Love Is Us. [00:49] Karin: It is Saturday night and I have been burning the midnight oil this week as I work through this new training program that I'm doing and get this episode out to you by Tuesday because I'm so excited to share it with you all. So in this past year, I've put a lot of time and energy into learning more about men and working with them. I want them to feel respected, heard, and seen, just like the women that I see when they meet with me. I'm sensitive to the reality that most therapists and relationship coaches are women and that can make men feel like they're at a disadvantage or even ganged up upon during sessions. And sometimes they are because many therapists don't really understand the male experience. So that's something that I've been working on. Also, when it comes to most of the couples that come to me, the men haven't done a lot of their own work, and this might be their first time when they're really looking at their emotions and expanding their self awareness. And the women in my practice have done at least some of this work, even though they still have work to do, too. So men often are playing catch up, which can add to their feelings of being the problem. But it's usually both parties that need to work on the relationship. It's not generally just the man that is the source of the problem. What we're going to talk about today can help men tremendously. Not only those who are doing couples work in therapy or coaching, but also they can help men in all areas of their lives and can certainly help them improve their marriages and their relationships. That might be a bold statement, but I really believe it. So my guest today is Jason Lang, but I'm going to let him tell you more about himself and the work he does because this episode is a little bit long, but it's definitely one to share with other men and with those who are in a romantic relationship with a man. So thanks for being here. And here we go. Episode: Karin: Welcome, Jason. [03:06] Jason: So excited to be here. [03:08] Karin: Yeah, it's really great to have you. So tell us where you are in the world. [03:12] Jason: Yeah, so right now I'm located in Los Angeles, California. [03:17] Karin: And you actually have some rain. [03:20] Jason: Yeah, we've had yesterday, actually rained quite hard, which was super nice. Just nice to have those in days. [03:26] Karin: Yeah. Now, have you always lived there? [03:29] Jason: No, I've been out here about 14 years now. I lived in northern California for a while, Colorado for a while, and then I grew up outside Chicago, so I've kind of bounced around a little bit. [03:42] Karin: Yeah. What keeps you in LA? [03:44] Jason: I certainly love the weather. It's just easy after having grown up in the midwest and the culture, just an awesome culture here. So much diversity, so many great people just gotten immersed. [03:58] Karin: Great, great. So tell us what you. [04:02] Jason: So, you know, kind of took some wines on the way here. But these days I'm primarily an embodiment coach for men that also facilitates specifically men's groups. And I help men in their growth and their journey in all the ways that I needed help, unsurprisingly. And that having gotten through not of all, but certainly some major issues in my life, I feel really lucky to be able to give back now. And it's kind of what I was doing for myself and just enjoyed putting all my attention on. And then I kind of shifted gears and. Okay, well, I could also help other people doing that. So I'm one of the lucky people that how I sustain myself and my passion are aligned. [04:48] Karin: Yeah, that's wonderful. It does feel good to be able to do this work and do it from the heart, right? [04:54] Jason: Absolutely. Yeah. [04:56] Karin: So you said a little bit about how you got here. Is there anything more you want to say about that path and why specifically you run men's groups? [05:06] Jason: Yeah, I mean, I think I have a similar story to maybe lots of different men in that, and I work with guys on this now, but that phrase, like I had a pretty good childhood, is always points, oftentimes to some things underneath. And for me, I grew up in kind of lower middle class white man in the United States of America in the 80s. So had a lot of privilege and continued to have a lot of privilege. And my basic needs were met in terms, know, housing, food, all that kind of stuff. But my inner world was what was pretty neglected in terms of my family. Did not really have much emotional presence with each other, physical presence as well. There wasn't a lot of touch in my household, which I didn't know till I got older and kind of uncovered some things. And it was like, oh, wow, there's like massive gaps there for me. And my journey really started because as I went through puberty and kind of my sexuality came online, I found I was just deeply uncomfortable in my body and got very anxious when it came to thinking about talking to women and didn't know what was going on. And it caused me a lot of pain and a lot of loneliness. That really kind of kicked off my personal growth journey in a lot of ways. Like, what's going on here? Why is this so easy for, so to speak, so easy for other people, but not for me? And that kind of kicked me off on a journey that took me first more into kind of philosophy and meditation. But then in my twenty s, I was lucky enough. I moved to Boulder, Colorado, which is kind of a nexus of a lot of personal growth and spirituality. And it was there I went to therapy for the first time. I got exposed to my first men's group, and this whole idea of kind of actually doing inner work came online for me. And I consider myself so lucky. A couple of key relationships that formed there really changed the trajectory of my life. Probably most importantly was being in a men's group, getting in a men's group with guys, a lot of whom were actually a little older and more mature than me in different ways, that gave me access to something I just hadn't had before. My dad, bless his heart, he did a lot for our family, but he wasn't really able to provide me any kind of masculine guidance in my life. So a lot of my life was just like, feeling frozen in my body, afraid of what to do next. Like, I don't know, do I do this? Do I do? That created a lot of anxiety. And so landing in a place where I was around men who were just relaxed in their bodies, very present, and were curious about me and how to support, really tipped the needle for me towards my transformation finally taking root and really sustaining itself. [07:59] Karin: Wonderful. I love hearing all of that. Thank you for sharing. You said something about there wasn't a lot of touch in your home growing up. And you also mentioned when you first introduced what you do is that you're an embodiment coach. So can you tell me a little bit about what those two things have to do with one another? Because I think there might be a lot of people that don't really know what an embodiment coach is. [08:27] Jason: Totally. Yeah, they're absolutely obviously related in my own journey, which is now why I'm so passionate about them. But like I said, part of what started to happen for me in my teens and well into my 20s, honestly, was my body would get really uncomfortable with touch. I actually was pretty lucky in high school in that I was kind of an academic nerd, super into computers and stuff. But I found a little cohort of guys that I was really close with. So I had, like, five guys. I've always kind of had my group of men, which is something I've been so lucky, but I was never one of those wrestle kind of horse around guys with other men. I felt really uncomfortable when it came to touch around women or just hugging in general. And it was because my nervous system just was not conditioned for it. It was not something it had received. And so when I would receive it, it would actually kind of put me in a little bit of a threat state. I'd be like, what is this? What is this? I don't feel safe. So I learned to cope by withdrawing into my head, like so many men, and then learning to kind of try to regulate myself. For me, it was primarily porn. Masturbation and food were, like, the ways I tried to co regulate my nervous system, because I had never received any touch to co regulate me growing up. So that was how I adapted to the system. [09:49] Karin: And which is true for so many men, right? [09:52] Jason: So many men. And, yeah, I mean, a big thing. I tend to work with a lot of men, I think, for a lot of humans these days, but men in particular is we're not taught how to be in our bodies. We're not taught what our emotions are. We're not generally encouraged to feel them. So we have all this stuff inside of us, and we don't know what to do with it. This is the thing I see with a lot of they don't know what to do. Like, where do I put my feelings? What do I do with my feelings? So we try to discharge them or numb out to them, right through substances, through external stuff, through dissociation, is something I would often do, is just kind of withdrawing into my head. So embodiment, as I coach men now, is really just the practice of coming into direct contact with the sensations in our bodies, including, at least in my kind of belief system, emotions generally start as physical sensations in our bodies. So another reason a lot of men don't want to be in our bodies, because that's where we have to feel grief or anger or loneliness. So we eject out as fast as we can. Oftentimes but embodiment is the process of, okay, can I come into contact with all that in a very direct way? And I support men in doing that because I needed a lot of help doing it myself in terms of rewiring my nervous system. And that impacted my intimate relationships and it's also impacted my relationships with other men. Right. I think a lot of men are, in my experience, very touch deprived, particularly these days with post Covid remote work and just kind of the dissolution of so many things. There were guys I was working with, with COVID during COVID that if they weren't on a Zoom call with me, they had no social connection during that time because of the way they were coders or stuff like that. And that's, I think, pretty common, let alone getting active touch, which as you know, does so much to regulate our nervous system. I also try to help men learn, hey, you can get some of your touch needs met from other men too. [12:00] Karin: Yeah. And then there's of course, that fear of, well, they're going to think I'm gay. And so that belief has come up and grown over the past, I don't know, century or so where you can't really totally have those relationships or touch because then that's bad. That's also associated. Gay is associated with bad for so many hetero men as well. [12:23] Jason: Yeah, that ties right into this idea of the man box. Right. That has kind of formed, which is the set of do's and don'ts that men are expected to be in, that are often enforced by other men. Like a man is someone who, x, y or z doesn't show weakness, doesn't show vulnerability, doesn't touch other men. Here in the States, I think it's particularly hard for us men because we're fed this, what I kind of call this, excuse my language, but the bullshit narrative of kind of the rugged individualist cowboy, pick yourself up by the strappy your boots, the lone wolf. He's tough, he never shows any weakness. And it's just not sustainable. The thing about those guys is often they're addicted to all kinds of substances. They end their lives with heart disease. This stuff has such an impact on men and fighting against that man box, which is that. Yeah, us men, we're allowed to have emotions. It's okay to not always be strong. It's okay to touch other men and receive that kind of platonic love is such a transformation. And as I often say to guys now, like, well, tell me, who do you think is more afraid? The man who feels his feelings or the man who's afraid to feel his feelings, and that always kind of, like, kicks them up. It's like, oh, that tough guy. He actually isn't willing to go there, so he's afraid to go there. Whereas, as we learn in the culture, I like to try to create with men, it's like, yeah, the brave thing is always just to go into the feeling in a responsible way. [13:53] Karin: Yeah. And then how does that help men to be able to be with their feelings for one? [14:02] Jason: I think what I found is the space, particularly in a men's group. I mean, I do one on one work with guys, but I really come alive. And I love the power of a group because there's just something so potent there of safety that we can create. And specifically, it becomes a place where we're allowed to be messy and not have it sorted out and be reactive, even in ways we're sometimes not allowed to, where we can kind of get in touch with what are our wants, what are our needs, what are our hurts. And other men can hold space for us in that. And then what I found is, as we get in touch with that inside the group, it makes it a lot easier to bring it back outside the group in very direct ways. Like, yeah, I'm hurting because I'm feeling this, or sometimes guys don't even know that. And what I've also seen is, like I said, I got lucky in that I got to experience men who were modeling this. It's one of the fastest tools I've seen is when men see other men stepping bravely into their truth, their authenticity, their vulnerability, their emotions. It's like a quick download of, oh, that's what it looks like to be in healthy anger, right? Not overreactive or destructive, but not collapsed. That's what it looks like and feels like. Or, wow, that man is in tears right now, and he feels so strong to me. Right. I have no doubt that's an incredibly strong man. Again, there's that kind of felt in the body sense, that transmission that can happen in the group very fast. And then the other key thing I found is, I sometimes call it the vortex, particularly in groups, is every time one man steps into that space and kind of goes for it, of like, I'm going to really go to the place I'm scared to, it kind of makes it easier for the other men to go. And suddenly it's like one man goes deep, then another man's willing to step in, and then that man's work actually reminded another man of something. So he gets all lit up and wants to go in, and the whole group continues to deepen and deepen. And it's been so powerful in my life to experience that and now to also witness other men having that experience. [16:17] Karin: Wonderful. So great. What kind of men benefit from men's groups? [16:24] Jason: Yeah, I'm going to argue any man. So part of my mission is every man should be in a men's group. And I've worked with guys and been in groups with guys across the board. And what I mean by this is young guys who have barely entered the adult world, all the way up to mature men that are retiring and winding down their lives everywhere in between. And one of the things I love about these groups, like I said, is as a lot of the kind of social structures that did connect men have evaporated in a lot of ways. It's one of the only places I have actually seen intergenerational contact, like connection. Someone older and someone younger, like, coming together. And they both often have something to offer the other one, the youth, offers some kind of vitality, or just seeing the world in a fresh way. And sometimes the older, more mature guys, a little bit of wisdom of like, yeah, man, I've been there. And here's what helped me. [17:22] Karin: I could also just imagine, because there's, I think, a lot of this misunderstanding between generations, too. Like, oh, Gen Z is this and millennials are that and Gen X are that. And being able to get to know people of other generations, I bet, really build some bridges and understanding and compassion. [17:44] Jason: Yeah, it's been amazing to witness and see that, because I think what it does is it humanizes, right? So suddenly it's, oh, this is a human, not just a label, like all those young kids or those old people. It's, wow, you have your pain and I have my pain, and we're both really trying hard to make this all work, and suddenly there's that feeling of we're on the same team. Yeah, I've seen young guys, old guys, single guys, married guys in particular. I think often fathers, as the research is, it's something like over the age of 30, it's like men really struggle to create new friendships with other men, particularly as they get into long term relationship or become fathers. Some of it's just bandwidth, timing. Some of it's, again, not knowing how to do that. And so I've been in a men's group here of my own in LA since 2015, maybe. And we've met every other week like clockwork, just boom, boom for a while. It was virtual and Covid, then it was in backyards, and then now we're still in backyards. But that has sustained me through a lot. And for me, one way I often talk about this is it's also just super efficient. I'm a father. I run my own business, live in LA, where it's hard to get around and see people. So it would be hard for me to actually see seven of my best male friends every month if it wasn't for this group. But there's just like, we're here no matter what, and it keeps those connections alive in pretty powerful ways. And it gives me somewhere to go and process and be with myself and get feedback from other people, which is also very valuable to my relationship. So then not every single thing is having to be processed between me and my wife. If there's a charge or I didn't show up in some way or different things, my group is a place where I can kind of work some of that and get some feedback, oftentimes in that, oh, there's more for you to look at than you thought about in yourself there, right? Instead of just, it's always my partner's fault or whatever. Men's group is a great place where I get to kind of sort through that in some powerful ways. [20:01] Karin: So I'm going to be the devil's advocate here and think about the people who are listening, who are thinking. A bunch of guys getting together and crying and feeling sorry for themselves. Is that what's going on? So maybe you can speak to the accountability piece, the growth piece, how this might affect marriages and parenthood, all of that. [20:24] Jason: People often ask me like, yeah, what do you do in a group? And sometimes they joke, yeah, we get together and cry, and sometimes we do. Sometimes men really do. Right? They just need a place where they can fully collapse. I think that's... /episode/index/show/069df229-18e0-4c38-8f9e-24c9fed2cab8/id/29677158

#51: The Role of Intuition in Relationships, with Kristen Bush 01/23/2024

#51: The Role of Intuition in Relationships, with Kristen Bush What role does intuition play in our lives? More specifically, how can it serve us in our relationships? Kristen Bush, MS, CPC, and I get into the nitty gritty about how our intuition can make our lives better. We talk about intuition can help us with our boundaries, Kristen also gives some practical advice about how to access your intuition. Kristen Bush, MS, CPC, is an interdisciplinary life coach, which is a fancy way to say she holds multiple fancy degrees and certifications that are in support of helping people take scary, bold actions to re-create their lives. She’s REALLY GOOD at it when it involves getting to the core of what's holding us back. Integrating best practices and principles from Positive Intelligence, Energy Coaching, Psychology, Social Work, Mindfulness, Spirituality, African-Centered Practice and other indigenous healing practices, Kristen helps purpose-driven professionals gain insight, breakthrough blocks, and develop the mental muscles that create sustainable momentum and change. Learn more about Kristen: Website: Instagram: Learn more about Karin: Website: Instagram: TRANSCRIPT Intro: Karin: This is Love Is Us, Exploring Relationships and How We Connect. I'm your host, Karin Calde. I'll talk with people about how we can strengthen our relationships, explore who we are in those relationships, and experience a greater sense of love and connection with those around us, including ourselves. I have a PhD in clinical Psychology, practiced as a psychologist resident, and after diving into my own healing work, I went back to school and became a coach, helping individuals and couples with their relationships and personal growth. If you want to experience more love in your life and contribute to healing the disconnect so prevalent in our world today, you're in the right place. Welcome to Love Is Us. Episode: [00:49] Karin: Hey, everybody. Thanks for being here. Today I'm going to be talking with Kristen Bush, who is a coach, and one of the things she specializes in is helping people connect with their intuition. I don't think intuition really gets its due. It can really be a powerful way for us to engage in our lives, engage in our relationships, connect with ourselves, make good decisions, and so, so much more. I loved hearing Kristen's perspective and her wisdom on this topic and just loved connecting with her. As you'll notice, there's lots of laughter during this episode. It was a lot of fun for me. So we talk about, again, intuition and what that has to do with relationships and what that has to do with boundaries in relationships. And we talk about how people pleasing can really get in the way of intuition. So you'll learn more about that. You'll also get a lot of really practical tips toward the end, Kristen makes some really great suggestions and so I hope you'll stick around for that. I thought they were really fabulous and ones that I think I will use for me and my clients, too. So take a listen. I hope you'll share. And thanks for being here. Karin: Kristen, welcome. I'm so happy to have you here today. Thank you. [02:17] Kristen: I'm happy to be here. Excited to be here. [02:19] Karin: Actually, people don't know that. We've actually been talking for almost 15 minutes now. We're just talking about all kinds of stuff that's been coming up for us in the other realms. So it's been really fun to connect already. But tell people where you are in the world. [02:37] Kristen: Yeah, I was looking at that question. I was like, well, this is a deep question, but I am in my boyfriend's house, his family home in Houston, Texas, Sugarland, Texas, to be exact, in the United States. [02:53] Karin: Why did I think you were in New York? [02:55] Kristen: Because I lived in New York for, like, ten years. Yeah. And my whole calendar is East Coast. Based. And most of the folks that I work with are still in New York. So in some weird way, I'm kind of bicoastal. [03:08] Karin: Okay, that makes sense. So was it your boyfriend that drew you down to Texas? [03:14] Kristen: No, I met him when I came to Texas. Funny. I had been single for ten years in New York, and I moved to Houston and within three months I was in a relationship. And you do relationship coaching, so I don't know what that means, but. [03:32] Karin: I. [03:33] Kristen: Was just at a place where I was looking for a certain level of rootedness and connectedness and support. I was the only person in my family, close family anyway, that lived in New York. And it's challenging. And at the pandemic time, when you're in a house by yourself, I can't even call it a house in a tiny little box apartment. A tiny house by yourself. I really had to think, is this sustainable or do I want a different level of connection? I felt like I needed to be a part of a community where if I wasn't present, I would be noticed, I would be missed, and I was like an essential unit. It wasn't just like, you're nice to have, but you're needed and essential. [04:21] Karin: Yeah. It sounds like you were searching for a sense of belonging, perhaps. [04:25] Kristen: Yeah, deep belonging. [04:28] Karin: That's great. [04:29] Kristen: Yeah. [04:30] Karin: So tell us what you do. [04:33] Kristen: So I am both a life coach and I have my whole little thing written out here, but I'm a life coach and I'm a diversity equity and inclusion consultant. And so I realized for the first time this year, I'm like, you have two businesses, not one. Yeah. And really, in terms of life coaching, the folks that I work with are really people who are unconventional change agents and need a space to not feel crazy. Need a space where they actually can articulate all of the feelings, the thoughts, the divisioning that other folks have labeled delusional or crazy. Right. And are also looking for the mindset, the energy, you know, energy, coaching, and also the spiritual framework to support that level of calling. I would say so. [05:33] Karin: I love that term, unconventional change agents. Tell me more about that. [05:41] Kristen: It's funny because I came up with that this week because I was like, what is the common denominator in every single person I'm working with? I have person who's working in a male dominated industry that is very, let's just say emotions are like, what that doesn't really exist in that industry. And what she's desiring to bring into that industry is unconditional love. Right. Knowing full well that she's going to be laughed out of the room, but knowing full well that that's what's needed. And so she's created spaces where people can have these conversations around. What does it actually look like to center people in an industry that thinks this is laughable or thinks this is, like, superfluous, but yet and still she's doing that work. I have another client who is really meant to do work of public health, but right on one side of the world, and right now is on the completely opposite side of the world, and everyone in his world is telling him that it's virtually impossible to do that. Yet in his spirit, his intuition and gut is telling him to actually create that dream. Right. And he knows it's possible, but is dealing with the sabotage. Right. The sabotaging thoughts, and we're really doing work to shift his mindset around that. Yeah. And then I have other clients who have lost. They've known that they're change agents. They've been doing that work, but then their light has dimmed. Right. Maybe they've been in spaces for so long that have told them they're crazy or they're wrong, or it's just not that they feel kind of lost, like their light has dimmed, and it's really about coming back to themselves. So I have several clients who are in that space and state, and I've recognized that with all of them, they need a space that validates this very unconventional thing that they're trying to bring to the world that says, you're not crazy, you're not delusional, that says everything that you're thinking actually makes sense, because it does. You know what I mean? And there's actually tools that you can use to really support you when you're outside of this space, because it's hard. It's hard to hold a seed. Right, when everything in it is trying to abort it. Everything outside in the world that you're walking around is trying to abort it. It's hard to hold division, and that's really the space that I provide. [08:15] Karin: I love it. [08:16] Kristen: I love that. [08:16] Karin: It really talked about intuition, and it sounds like you're really helping people stay connected with who they really are at their core, and then listen to that intuition. [08:29] Kristen: Absolutely. And know that that's actually something you should be doing. [08:35] Karin: Yeah. Because we're taught from a young age not to. Right. [08:40] Kristen: Oh, my God. I think one of the questions you sent me was like, why is it so hard to trust your intuition? And I was thinking, I was like, I can't think of one institution, including the family system. Right. In which you're taught to prioritize your internal knowing over some external knowing. I can't think of one. I mean, I really want to ask your. Luke, can you even name one? I can't think of one. [09:15] Karin: Yeah. I think of maybe these really evolved preschools that try to help kids get in touch with their emotions and express them. And those are usually kind of thought of as the fringe thing, but it's like, I want you to. You need to conform to our values and our standards, and that's usually how it's done. Right. [09:43] Kristen: Yeah. Every single one from health care. Right. So much of it is like, listen to the expert. Right. And even when you know your body. I think about Serena Williams, like, almost died. And if she hadn't have listened to what she knew about her body, she would have. Right. To school. Absolutely freaking lootly. Religious institutions as much as I grew up Lutheran, which I have to say, out of all the christian traditions, I think is one of the most open minded. It's, like, all about having your own relationship with God, which shouldn't be a wild concept, right. And yet it is even still that you're taught about the Holy Spirit, but you're not taught what that looks like in practice. You're not taught what happens if the message you're getting inside of you is different than how this other person, how this authority has interpreted that. You know what I mean? You're not really taught that kind of stuff. So I just think in every single phase of life, we're taught to override that voice and listen to some external voice. [10:57] Karin: Yeah. And I think about anyone who is part of the marginalized communities, and then they get that tenfold. Right. [11:06] Kristen: Oh, my God. This is what we were talking about. And the reality is, I honestly think every single person has experienced marginalization because you've had to override your internal. Right. Your internal voice. But you're absolutely right. I'm only now thawing out. There are so many ways that I've had to numb to conform to a standard or an experience that is not the experience I'm having. And only now, like, 39 years in the game this week, starting this week, am I like, oh, my God, this is what's been underneath here. So, yeah. Even more so if you are in any group, that is not the standard. Right. Even more so, yeah. [12:08] Karin: Okay. I could go down this road, but. [12:11] Kristen: I want to also make sure we. [12:12] Karin: Talk about what we're here to talk about today. So maybe you can just offer us a basic definition of what intuition is. [12:20] Kristen: Yeah. And I was all in my house, like, should I give her the formal definition? But I'm just going to answer from my definition of intuition. I love a pragmatic thing. I'm pragmatic. I'm raised working class. I'm african American. It's like, if you can't break this down so we can do something with it, it ain't really useful. So for me, intuition is. It's your gut. It's your inner knowing. It's the holy spirit. It's that part of your stomach that gets that queasy feeling when you're doing something that you know is not in alignment, that you know you really don't want to be doing. Intuition is the still small voice that people talk about. Intuition sometimes is that loud voice that's like, no, I don't want to go to this event. Stay home. [13:09] Karin: Sometimes our intuition screams at us, doesn't it? [13:12] Kristen: Right? I love the things that are like, I'm so tired that I need to meditate and tap into my intuition. I'm like, maybe your intuition is telling you you're tired. Maybe that's actually where you need to start. Right? Yeah, it's all of that. It's your gut. I think gut is the thing that most people, when you say that, they instantly say, I know what that is. So it's your gut. It's that gut feeling. [13:40] Karin: Yeah. And we've talked about intuition and getting to your true self. How are those two things, intuition and an authenticity, how are those connected? [14:00] Kristen: From what I've experienced and what I've seen with the clients that I work with, to me, your intuition is your north star for authenticity. I don't know how you get to true authenticity without intuition, to be honest, because your intuition is what tells you when you've met the mark. You know what I mean? The other thing I'll say, I just want to just add this. I feel like authenticity is one of those words that we like it on the surface, but there's a whole lot more to it. I didn't know when I first started talking about authenticity. It sounded really cool being your cool inner self, bringing out your marvel geek, you know what I mean? But more and more, I'm like, oh, crap. You mean it's the secret self. It's the self that I don't show anybody. It's the self that I edit out and filter out. You know what I mean? Oh, that's authenticity and authenticity. Like living an authentic life is having one face every place. It's like really integrating, not compartmentalizing, not having 15 different versions of yourself that you pull out at certain occasions or in certain environments. And again, to me, the North Star, to even discerning what's truly you versus what Martha Beck would call social self or what is the self that pleases everyone is your intuition. I don't know how else you could discern. [15:39] Karin: Yeah, yeah. And that word authenticity is definitely a buzzword these days, and yet it really does get at something important. It's about who we are at our core. Like we kind of mentioned earlier, is that we're taught from a young age to suppress that, and so we can get really far removed from who we are, who our authentic self is. So much so that a lot of us can't even identify who it is. Who are we at our core? Who is our authentic self at our core. [16:14] Kristen: Yeah, that's true. [16:16] Karin: And that takes some work. [16:19] Kristen: I think it takes work to start identifying who are all the voices in your head and which are yours and which are other voices. Right. That you're just so used to listening to. I think it does take work, and not just work in terms of at the mind level, but in the body. I really think for me, I don't know, for other people, their experience, but for me, body work is also essential, because the body don't lie. [16:49] Karin: Right? [16:50] Kristen: Yeah. [16:53] Karin: The more I learn and grow in this profession and just personally, the more I realize the fundamental truth of that statement, how so much of us lives in our body, we tend to overemphasize the head and the thinking and intellect and the rationalization, but that's just a part of us. [17:16] Kristen: I wanted to stop my foot and say amen. And for me, again, so much has been coming up for me this week, but I've spent so much time in mindset work. Like, the mindset work. The mindset work. The mindset work. And while there is no replacement for mindset work, the body work is very important, too. You know what I mean? It's not just about mindset work. You got to do some body work, too. [17:44] Karin: Yeah, so much for me, I end up getting a little bit repelled when I hear about mindset work, and that's not really fair because it is a really important piece of it, but it often tends to disregard the other important pieces of who we are and we are body. And so much of, I think about our nervous system and our emotions and how that is all part of our bodies. And if we don't feel safe in our bodies, then it's really hard to go to our head if we don't feel safe in our bodies, it's hard to express the emotions that are stored in the body. I mean, there's so much richness there. [18:30] Kristen: I wanted to park, curl up with a blanket, and just sit in that statement. Yeah, that's so much truth. And I feel, at least for me, what's also been helpful is being able to locate my intuition in my body. Right. And locate. I love this. Remember as a kid playing that game, hot, cold, and it's like there's an item that somebody identifies in the room, and you have to try to guess it, and you're just kind of walking around. They're like, hot, hot, cold, cold, cold. Being able to identify that in terms of emotions, being able to identify that in terms of literally having a physiological response to the hot and cold of your intuition, I also think is extremely helpful. Yeah, the body is very important in it, too. [19:22] Karin: So how does it help people to connect to their intuition? [19:27] Kristen: For me, your intuition holds the answers to every question you have in life. And I know it sounds like this is crazy. How can you be so sure of that? That's such a big, bold statement. But I've tested this. Let me tell you, when I decided to go into this whole journey of entrepreneurship, it was number one. I said, I want to see if these things are true. I want to see if these spiritual principles are true. I want to see if this crap people are telling me is true. I'm tired of reading about it in books. I want to actually test this for myself. And the reality is, there are some questions in life. In fact, I would argue every question in life. But it's certainly the question of fulfillment that nothing outside of you can tell you how to get there. I've tried it. Yeah, nothing outside of you can tell you how to get there. I think it's why you can be doing all the things. I remember all the moments when I finally had the money that I wanted to make. I finally had the title that I wanted to be in. I finally had my own New York City apartment. I checked all the things, and I still had as much anxiety, know, unhappiness as I had before. And I was like, what now? You know what I mean? I think that's part of why we have that experience is because we're following these external standards that really may or may not have anything to do with what genuinely fulfills us. And I think it's a blessing to get to the place where you've tried it all and it didn't work because then you're willing to try something else, try something that's out of your comfort zone. But to me, intuition is the thing. It's the only guide to your fulfillment, right? Because there's so much nuance. There's so much nuance in this thing. Fill in the blank relationships. Where are my boundaries? What do my boundaries look like? What do they feel like? When are they getting crossed? When are they not intuition? Intuition is going to tell you every time, should I stay in this relationship or should I go, how do I know I'm staying in it for the right reasons? Right? I was literally asking myself. I said, kristen, I was in a relationship that my family and friends, well meaning, they knew my goals, my goals, and this person's long term goals at the time did not align. And they were like, you need to leave this not, it's not aligned. Other people were looking at all the checkboxes and saying, it's not aligned. And yet still my gut was telling me, stay. And I thought to... /episode/index/show/069df229-18e0-4c38-8f9e-24c9fed2cab8/id/29596958

Love Is Us: Exploring Relationships and How We Connect

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