Podcast appearances and mentions of alex katehakis

Delanie Fischer is joined by Dr. Samantha Harte, author of Breaking The Circuit: How to Rewire Your Mind for Hope, Resilience and Joy in the Face of Trauma, to discuss perfectionism, addiction, and recovery. Dr. Harte shares how her accomplishments masked her struggle with addiction (like getting accepted into a postdoctoral program the very same day she overdosed on cocaine), why her rock bottom actually happened 5 years into sobriety vs. at the height of her addiction, and why she had to reimagine and modernize the 12 steps in order to successfully apply them to her life.Plus:+ The Most Important Amends That Addicts Might Ignore+ Building A New Relationship With The Same Partner+ Healing From Betrayal (And An Analogy You Won't Forget)More episodes related to this topic:7 Shocking Truths About Codependency And Addiction with Heidi Rain: https://www.selfhelplesspodcast.com/episodes/episode/24c74079/7-shocking-truths-about-codependency-and-addiction-with-heidi-rainSex and Love Addiction with Sex Addiction Therapist, Alex Katehakis: https://www.selfhelplesspodcast.com/episodes/episode/316e9795/sex-and-love-addiction-with-sex-addiction-therapist-alex-katehakisExploring Perfectionism with Taylor Tomlinson, Kelsey Cook, and Delanie Fischer: https://www.selfhelplesspodcast.com/episodes/episode/d69d8eee/exploring-perfectionism-with-taylor-tomlinson-kelsey-cook-and-delanie-fischerWorking The 12 Steps with Amanda Hill: https://www.selfhelplesspodcast.com/episodes/episode/237b7862/working-the-12-steps-with-amanda-hillYou can submit and vote on episode topics here: https://www.patreon.com/selfhelplessYour Host, Delanie Fischer: https://www.delaniefischer.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this podcast, Ross interviews Alex Katehakis, a renowned marriage and family therapist specializing in sexual addiction and healthy sexuality. Alex shares her journey, starting with an interest in human sexuality and later focusing on sex and love addiction, as well as sexual codependency. She explains the difference between healthy and problematic sexual behaviors, noting that it's not the acts themselves but the misuse of sex that causes issues. Alex also highlights how childhood trauma and emotional deprivation can distort one's view of love, sex, and intimacy.The discussion touches on challenges faced by people struggling with codependency and self-love deficiency, particularly in relationships with narcissistic partners. Alex explains how early experiences shape the nervous system, leading to unhealthy patterns, where sex and love are often confused to avoid abandonment. Healing, she says, requires therapy, group support, and self-reflection. She emphasizes the importance of addressing trauma to develop a healthy sense of self and a balanced approach to intimacy.Support the show

This week, we have a stacked compilation episode for you filled with life-changing relationship advice from some of our brilliant past guests. NYT bestselling author, Greg Behrendt, Relationship Therapist from Married At First Sight, Dr. Viviana Coles, Sexologist, Goody Howard, Comedian, Ken Garr, Communication Expert from Married At First Sight, Rachel DeAlto, Licensed Therapist, Kati Morton, Certified Sex Addiction Therapist, Dr. Alex Katehakis, and Licensed Psychologist and Sex Therapist, Dr. Kate Balistrieri are sharing their best tips for breaking toxic patterns, cultivating healthy relationships, and healing trauma. Plus:+ How The 4 Intimacy Styles are different from The 5 Love Languages + 4 simple (and free) tips for boosting excitement with a long-term sexual partner + Why you might be stuck in a pattern of getting "the ick" and what to do about it For exclusive rewards and to influence content for the show, join our Patreon community: https://www.patreon.com/selfhelpless Delanie: https://www.delaniefischer.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this flashback episode, Amy Schumer [Trainwreck, Snatched, I Feel Pretty, Inside Amy Schumer, Expecting Amy] joins Anna to talk about her documentary series Expecting Amy, the joys and fears of being a mother, how she met her husband, loving stand-up comedy, The Meisner Technique, boogie boarding, finding unusual animal parts in the kitchen, and more. Later in the episode Anna welcomes back the Clinical Director of The Center for Healthy Sex in Los Angeles, Dr. Alex Katehakis. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of The Real Undressed podcast, host Deborah Kagan welcomes Dr. Alex Katehakis, an expert in human sexuality and relationships. They dive deep into the importance of exploring desires, overcoming common issues, and the impact of culture and technology on intimacy. Dr. Katehakis offers valuable insights and advice on how to have a fulfilling sex life and foster healthy sexual relationships. Discover the surprising truths about human sexuality and relationships in this enlightening conversation.    In this episode you'll get to: ~ Learn how exploring your own desires and pleasures can lead to a fulfilling sex life ~ Discover practical tips for overcoming difficulties reaching orgasm and the use of pornography ~ Find out how technology is affecting intimacy and learn strategies for maintaining connection ~ Explore the impact of culture and family upbringing on attitudes towards sex ~ Uncover the challenges society faces in fostering healthy and satisfying sexual relationships ~ Gain insights into how being in nature can help connect with your higher self ~ Discover how hot water can release tension and create openness for sexual experiences. ~ Find out how witnessing others navigate through pain can bring fulfillment and inspiration. ~ and much more!     Connect with Dr. Alex Katehakis Website |   www.centerforhealthysex.com   Instagram | www.instagram.com/alexkatehakis                   www.instagram.com/centerforhealthysex Tik Tok |  @centerforhealthysex  Youtube |  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC26LSp0dTWsYbfJcQrpEN0g Amazon | https://www.amazon.com/What-Turns-You-Guide-Living/dp/B0BXNK58QD      *****     Deborah's Brand New Book! UNDRESSED: An Invitation to Claim Your Erotic Nature   In my brand new book UNDRESSED, I give you the keys, lived experiences, and practices to be a self-possessed, turned ON, erotically alive woman.   This book is a journey to rip the bandage off the shame of being a turned-on woman   You'll learn how to ride through the seven power centers of the body to harness your erotic nature for true self-expression and embodied confidence   You'll accept that you can be a woman who is unafraid to live out loud   Most importantly, you'll harness your Mojo to be a turned-on woman, self-possessed, and become erotically alive.   And when you claim your erotic nature, you give off a magnetic energy.   UNDRESSED is an energetic transmission for confidently claiming your erotic nature.   Pre Order yours now and get $600 worth of Bonuses immediately:   www.undressedbook.com/podcast     *****   Connect with Deborah Website | http://therealundressed.com/ Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/therealundressed/   https://www.instagram.com/deborahkagan/ Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/mojorecoveryspecialist/     Subscribe to The Real Undressed Podcast iTunes | https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-real-undressed-with-deborah-kagan/id1494643770 Spotify | https://open.spotify.com/show/1eOQaw6kryBsXo7Jb6qEnv   Please remember to: è Subscribe è Rate è Review the podcast. I read every single one and your feedback is valuable.

In this thought-provoking episode of The Real Undressed podcast, host Deborah Kagan welcomes Dr. Alex Katehakis, a renowned expert on human sexuality and relationship issues. They delve into the intriguing topics of love addiction, sex addiction, and the shame surrounding sexuality. Dr. Katehakis sheds light on the concept of love addiction and how it stems from deep abandonment wounds, while also explaining the intricate nature of sex addiction and its link to early trauma. The conversation also explores the rising trend of non-monogamous relationships and the importance of tackling shame around sex and sexuality. This episode will challenge your beliefs, ignite self-awareness, and inspire you to foster healthier relationships and embrace your own desires.   In this episode you'll get to learn: ~ the truth about Love addiction and what to look for if you are concerned you or someone else is struggling with it ~ what sex addiction actually is and how it can manifest  ~ why non-monogamous relationships are on the rise and what's required to explore them without blowing up your relationship  ~ how shame around sex and sexuality is perpetuated and one of the major reasons we struggle with it in our modern day ~ what generational trauma has and epigenetics have to do with the shame we carry and the surprising fact of what we can do about it ~ how overcoming shame requires disentangling from old stories and what you need to accept in order to step into pleasure and power - why the integration of masculine and feminine energies is crucial in breaking free from patriarchal norms that limit all genders ~ and much more!     Connect with Dr. Alex Katehakis Website |   www.centerforhealthysex.com   Instagram | www.instagram.com/alexkatehakis                   www.instagram.com/centerforhealthysex Tik Tok |  @centerforhealthysex  Youtube |  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC26LSp0dTWsYbfJcQrpEN0g Amazon | https://www.amazon.com/What-Turns-You-Guide-Living/dp/B0BXNK58QD      *****     Deborah's Brand New Book! UNDRESSED: An Invitation to Claim Your Erotic Nature   In my brand new book UNDRESSED, I give you the keys, lived experiences, and practices to be a self-possessed, turned ON, erotically alive woman.   This book is a journey to rip the bandage off the shame of being a turned-on woman   You'll learn how to ride through the seven power centers of the body to harness your erotic nature for true self-expression and embodied confidence   You'll accept that you can be a woman who is unafraid to live out loud   Most importantly, you'll harness your Mojo to be a turned-on woman, self-possessed, and become erotically alive.   And when you claim your erotic nature, you give off a magnetic energy.   UNDRESSED is an energetic transmission for confidently claiming your erotic nature.   Pre Order yours now and get $600 worth of Bonuses immediately:   www.undressedbook.com/podcast       *****   Connect with Deborah Website | http://therealundressed.com/ Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/therealundressed/   https://www.instagram.com/deborahkagan/ Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/mojorecoveryspecialist/     Subscribe to The Real Undressed Podcast iTunes | https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-real-undressed-with-deborah-kagan/id1494643770 Spotify | https://open.spotify.com/show/1eOQaw6kryBsXo7Jb6qEnv   Please remember to: è Subscribe è Rate è Review the podcast. I read every single one and your feedback is valuable.

Sex therapist Dr. Alex Katehakis started studying sex in her 30s, after years of struggling to build and maintain romantic relationships. Her early work in the field of sex addiction helped her to work through her own sexual issues and to understand healthy sexuality in new ways, including busting the myth that “penetrative sex is the end-all, be-all to sex and sexuality.” This episode's practice is about learning to talk about sex—with ourselves, our partners and our kids—and how these conversations can lead to better sex.    Want to connect? Join the New Day Facebook Group!  https://www.facebook.com/groups/newdaypod   Resources from the show Read “Sexual Reflections: A Workbook for Designing and Celebrating Your Sexual Health Plan” by Dr. Katehakis  Listen to The Alex Katehakis Podcast  For more information on sex and sexuality, check out the Center for Healthy Sex website - https://centerforhealthysex.com  Click this link for a list of current sponsors and discount codes for this show and all Lemonada shows go to lemonadamedia.com/sponsors.   Did you try one of these weekly practices? We want to hear about it! Call 833-4-LEMONADA (833-453-6662) or email us newday@lemonadamedia.com    To follow along with a transcript and/or take notes for friends and family, go to lemonadamedia.com/show/newday/ shortly after the air date.   Follow Claire on IG and FB @clairebidwellsmith or Twitter @clairebidwell and visit her website: www.clairebidwellsmith.com   Stay up to date with us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at @LemonadaMedia.    Joining Lemonada Premium is a great way to support our show and get bonus content. Subscribe today at bit.ly/lemonadapremiumSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week the girls are joined by Certified Sex Addiction Therapist and Clinical Director of Center for Healthy Sex in Los Angeles, Alex Katehakis. Alex explains the differences between sex and love addiction and hypersexuality, shares what role trauma plays in compulsive sexual behavior, and offers practical tips and steps for individuals and couples affected by sex and love addiction. Tune in for some big truth bombs about toxic behaviors related to sexual and emotional intimacy that we can all learn from. For more info on Alex Katehakis and her work: http://www.centerforhealthysex.com/ For 65 bonus episodes, exclusive rewards, and to influence content for the show, join our Patreon community: https://www.patreon.com/selfhelpless Delanie's comped resources for entrepreneurs: https://www.delaniefischer.com Kelsey's Tour Dates: https://www.kelseycook.com This episode was sponsored by Calm, Dipsea, & Ritual! For listeners of the show, Calm is offering an exclusive offer of 40% off a Calm Premium subscription at CALM.COM/HELPLESS. For listeners of the show, Dipsea is offering an extended 30-day free trial when you go to DipseaStories.com/helpless. Ready to shake up your protein Ritual? My listeners get 10% off during your first 3 months at ritual.com/HELPLESS. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sex therapist Dr. Alex Katehakis started studying sex in her 30s, after years of struggling to build and maintain romantic relationships. Her early work in the field of sex addiction helped her work through her own sexual issues and understand healthy sexuality in new ways, including busting the myth that “penetrative sex is the end all, be all to sex and sexuality.”    This episode's practice is about learning to talk about sex—with ourselves, our partners and our kids—and how these conversations can lead to better sex.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sex therapist Dr. Alex Katehakis started studying sex in her 30s, after years of struggling to build and maintain romantic relationships. Her early work in the field of sex addiction helped her to work through her own sexual issues and to understand healthy sexuality in new ways, including busting the myth that “penetrative sex is the end all, be all to sex and sexuality.” This episode's practice is about learning to talk about sex—with ourselves, our partners and our kids—and how these conversations can lead to better sex.    Want to connect? Join the New Day Facebook Group!  https://www.facebook.com/groups/newdaypod   Resources from the show Read“Sexual Reflections: A Workbook for Designing and Celebrating Your Sexual Health Plan” by Dr. Katehakis  Listen to The Alex Katehakis Podcast  For more information on sex and sexuality, check out the Center for Healthy Sex website - https://centerforhealthysex.com  Click this link for a list of current sponsors and discount codes for this show and all Lemonada shows go to lemonadamedia.com/sponsors.   Did you try one of these weekly practices? We want to hear about it! Call 833-4-LEMONADA (833-453-6662) or email us newday@lemonnadamedia.com    To follow along with a transcript and/or take notes for friends and family, go to lemonadamedia.com/show/newday/ shortly after the air date.   Follow Claire on IG and FB @clairebidwellsmith or Twitter @clairebidwell and visit her website: www.clairebidwellsmith.com   Stay up to date with us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at @LemonadaMedia.    Joining Lemonada Premium is a great way to support our show and get bonus content. Subscribe today at bit.ly/lemonadapremium   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sex addicts who knowingly have sex with their spouses while having unprotected sex with others are violating their spouses by undermining her self-determination over her body.  When the partner of the SA has no idea she's been "having sex" with her spouse's sex workers, a crime has been committed. Listen as Carol the Coach interviews Alex Katehakis, Ph.D, Clinical Director of Center for Healthy Sex, who believes that sex in a relationship where intimate deception is taking place is a non-consensual act and leaves many partners feeling "raped"  having been exposed to multiple sex partners and the potential to contract an STI, some of which can be fatal. Find out why few women get honest enough with themselves about the gravity of this type of gross violation!

Sex addicts who knowingly have sex with their spouses while having unprotected sex with others are violating their spouses by undermining her self-determination over her body.  When the partner of the SA has no idea she's been "having sex" with her spouse's sex workers, a crime has been committed. Listen as Carol the Coach interviews Alex Katehakis, Ph.D, Clinical Director of Center for Healthy Sex, who believes that sex in a relationship where intimate deception is taking place is a non-consensual act and leaves many partners feeling "raped"  having been exposed to multiple sex partners and the potential to contract an STI, some of which can be fatal. Find out why few women get honest enough with themselves about the gravity of this type of gross violation!

Dr. Alexandra Katehakis, world renowned Sex Addiction Therapist and Director of the Center for Healthy Sex in Los Angeles shares a wealth of information today. What is Sex Addiction? Is it real, or just an excuse for bad behavior? She believes that compulsive sexual behavior is a way of masking very deep pain and extreme emotion dysregulation that typically originates in childhood. Dr. Katehakis explains that most sex addicts suffer from an early Attachment Disorder. Case presentations are discussed to highlight the complicated sexual arousal template that develops in the face of early childhood trauma and how shame, humiliation and fear are all fused with sympathetic arousal. The resulting compulsive sexual behavior is sometimes an attempt at self-soothing and sometimes a manifestation of trauma repetition-compulsion. “Shame is both the cause and effect of the Sex Addiction itself.” Dr. Katehakis discusses her most significant contribution to the field…long term psychotherapy for long term change and making the Carnes model a sex positive one. Her ultimate goal for her clients is a healthy sex life and healthy intimate connections. We underline the importance of group therapy as a vehicle to develop a capacity for intimate connecting with others and shame reduction. Other topics of conversation are the difference between sex and love addiction, the impact of sex addiction on the partner, the effect of the hundred billion dollar porn industry on our children and on the sexual functioning of young men, and what kind of conversations parents should consider having with their children about sex and pornography.

What is your relationship with sex? If you have an unhealthy relationship with sex individually or with your partners, this episode will open your eyes to the benefits of sexual therapy and recovery. In this episode, I am joined by Dr. Alex Katehakis, an amazing woman who is a marriage family therapist, certified sex addiction therapist supervisor, certified sex therapist supervisor, and author. She is the clinical director at the Center for Healthy Sex in Los Angeles and Dr. Alex Katehakis has worked with clients on the full spectrum of sexuality, from sexual addiction, desire, dysfunction, therapy, and more. She has successfully ended the sexual addiction of many individuals and couples and assisted couples in reviving their sex life. Tune in to learn about Dr. Alex Katehakis’s experience with grief that led her to pursue therapy, why trust is the most important component in sex, the impact of COVID-19 on couples, and more! In This Episode You Will Learn About Dr. Alex’s background that led to her career (6:50)How codependency influences addiction (15:09)The importance of trust in sex (19:23)How COVID-19 has impacted Dr. Alex’s clients (22:50)About Dr. Alex’s workshops (31:50)Connect with Dr. Alex Katehakis Books on Amazon WebsiteTwitterInstagramPodcast Let’s Connect! The Grief Recovery MethodInstagramFacebookJoin the Grief Recovery Now Facebook Group See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

What is healthy sex? And intimate sex? And how about healthy sex in recovery? Jodi has so many questions for her guest, Alex Katehakis, healthy sexuality expert and author of the book, Erotic Intelligence. In this episode, Alex and Jodi discuss the four cornerstones of intimacy, how stress interferes with desire, sex as a spiritual practice, and so much more. Music by JD Pendley  

Returning to a healthy sexual relationship is complex and often times partners want to know that their spouse will not be triggered by resuming  a sexual relationship. Partners do not want to be compared to unhealthy sexual images or experiences and wish they could "know" what their  husband is thinking while they are being intimate. Today, Carol the Coach is interviewing Alex Katehakis, who has written a workbook for sex addicts  to help them develop a sexual health plan that emphasizes the many dimensions of healthy sexuality. Listen, as they talk about the sensitive subject of sexual reintegration.

 Returning to a healthy sexual relationship is complex and often times partners want to know that their spouse will not be triggered by resuming  a sexual relationship. Partners do not want to be compared to unhealthy sexual images or experiences and wish they could "know" what their  husband is thinking while they are being intimate. Today, Carol the Coach is interviewing Alex Katehakis, who has written a workbook for sex addicts  to help them develop a sexual health plan that emphasizes the many dimensions of healthy sexuality. Listen, as they talk about the sensitive subject of sexual reintegration.

Elizabeth Berkley Lauren [Saved By The Bell, Showgirls, Roger Dodger] joins Anna to talk about the original Saved by the Bell, the new Saved By The Bell on Peacock, career paths, Showgirls, resiliency, the Ask Elizabeth workshop, Hurlyburley and more. Later in the episode Anna is joined again by psychotherapist, author and the Clinical Director of The Center for Healthy Sex in Los Angeles, Dr. Alex Katehakis.Learn more about Dr. Alex at alexkatehakis.comLearn more about Ask Elizabeth at ask-elizabeth.comThredUp Get the styles you love at a fraction of the price. You’ll look and feel good with thredUP!  And for Unqualified listeners, here’s an exclusive offer just for you: Get an extra 30% off first order at thredUP.com/anna. Terms apply.Shady Rays Join the Shady Rays team today and give their shades a risk-free try.  Exclusively for our listeners, head over to shadyrays.com and use code UNQUALIFIED for 50%. off 2 or more pairs. That’s code UNQUALIFIED for 50% off 2+ pairs – redeemable only at shadyrays.com where you can find all their newest and best shadesPlease subscribe to Anna Faris is Unqualified on Apple Podcasts and follow us on social media:Instagram @UnqualifiedTwitter @UnqualifiedFacebook @Anna Faris is UnqualifiedMusic by: Mondo Cozmo @mondocozmoProducers: Michael Barrett, Rob Holysz, Jeph PorterCo-producer: Michael ShermanProduction Services: Rabbit Grin Productions rabbitgrinproductions.comDistributed by: Simplecast

Amy Schumer [Trainwreck, Snatched, I Feel Pretty, Inside Amy Schumer, Expecting Amy] joins Anna to talk about her documentary series Expecting Amy, the joys and fears of being a mother, how she met her husband, loving stand-up comedy, The Meisner Technique, boogie boarding, finding unusual animal parts in the kitchen, and more. Later in the episode Anna welcomes back the Clinical Director of The Center for Healthy Sex in Los Angeles, Dr. Alex Katehakis.Learn more about Dr. Alex at alexkatehakis.comPlease subscribe to Anna Faris is Unqualified on Apple Podcasts and follow us on social media:Instagram @UnqualifiedTwitter @UnqualifiedFacebook @Anna Faris is UnqualifiedMusic by: Mondo Cozmo @mondocozmoProducers: Michael Barrett, Rob Holysz, Jeph PorterCo-producer: Michael ShermanProduction Services: Rabbit Grin Productions rabbitgrinproductions.comDistributed by: Simplecast

Dr Alex Katehakis sits down with us to discuss the effects of shame and disassociation, as well as how the division of intimacy and sex hurts both men and women. 

Ellie Kempter [The Office, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt] joins Anna from her home in St. Louis to discuss why it's frustrating to be labeled as “quirky”, how Midwestern cynicism is different from New York cynicism, why Skip-It was the best toy ever, what meditation apps are helping with quarantine, why you shouldn’t ask for a cupcake’s ingredients, and more. Then Anna welcomes back Dr. Alex Katehakis to talk with Jennifer.ALLBIRDS With the new Allbirds Tree Dasher, feel confident knowing that you can run hard and tread light on the planet. Find your pair at Allbirds.com today.BABBEL Right now, when you purchase a three month subscription, Babbel will give Unqualified  listeners 3 Additional Months for FREE with Promo Code ANNA Go to Babbel.com, and use promo code ANNA on your three month subscription.Resources for those experiencing betrayal trauma:Mirror of Intimacy: Daily Reflections on Emotional and Erotic IntelligenceMoving Beyond Betrayal: The 5-Step Boundary Solution for Partners of Sex AddictsConscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even AfterCenter for Healthy SexPlease subscribe to Anna Faris is Unqualified on Apple Podcasts and follow us on social media:Instagram @UnqualifiedTwitter @UnqualifiedFacebook @Anna Faris is UnqualifiedMusic by: Mondo Cozmo @mondocozmoProducers: Michael Barrett, Rob Holysz, Jeph PorterCo-producer: Michael ShermanProduction Services: Rabbit Grin Productions rabbitgrinproductions.comDistributed by: Simplecast

When it comes to sex, how smart are you? Do you know what it takes to create a good sex life? If you would like to become more erotically intelligent, this episode is for you and my guest has the answers. Dr. Alexandra Katehakis (www.alexkatehakis.com) is a certified sex therapist who serves as the Director of the Center for Healthy Sex in Los Angeles. She is the author of Erotic Intelligence and many other books on sexuality both for professionals and the general public. In this episode, Alex shares concrete and practical information that can help people improve their sex lives. I am confident you will glean lots of new and useful information in this user-friendly and informative interview!

Demi Moore [Ghost, G.I. Jane, Indecent Proposal, A Few Good Men, Striptease, Charlie’s Angels] and writer/director Shana Feste [The Greatest, Country Strong, Endless Love], talk with Anna about female sexuality, orgasms, marriage, fantasy role-playing, their new erotic podcast, Dirty Diana and more. Then Anna is joined by author and Clinical Director of the Center for Healthy Sex in Los Angeles, Dr. Alex Katehakis to give some qualified and unqualified advice to Amber.BEST FIENDS Best Fiends has thousands of levels already, with new levels, events, and characters added every month.  It’s hours of fun right at your fingertips—and you can even play offline!  With over 100 million downloads and tons of five-star reviews, Best Fiends is a must-play!  Download Best Fiends FREE on the Apple App Store or Google Play.BABBEL Right now, when you purchase a three month subscription, Babbel will give Unqualified  listeners 3 Additional Months for FREE with Promo Code ANNA. Go to Babbel.com, and use promo code ANNA on your three month subscription. Please subscribe to Anna Faris is Unqualified on Apple Podcasts and follow us on social media:Instagram @UnqualifiedTwitter @UnqualifiedFacebook @Anna Faris is UnqualifiedMusic by: Mondo Cozmo @mondocozmoProducers: Michael Barrett, Rob Holysz, Jeph PorterCo-producer: Michael ShermanProduction Services: Rabbit Grin Productions rabbitgrinproductions.comDistributed by: Simplecast

In Part 9: Monica & Jess love Love Addiction, M and J chat with author and the Clinical Director of Center for Healthy Sex in Los Angeles, Dr. Alex Katehakis. Dr. Alex talks about the tenants of unmanageability and addiction. Monica wonders if you can be a love addict who’s never fallen in love and Jess asks questions about post relationship nostalgia. Dr. Alex declares both Monica and Jess have some dissociative tendencies in relationships and adhere to fantasy as an outlet. Monica expresses her fears of being replaceable and Dr.Alex thinks Jess uses sex to mitigate anxiety. The three talk about childhood abandonment and how that has trickled into adulthood and she gives both Monica and Jess 90 day challenges to take into the world.

How do you know if you, or someone you love, is addicted to sex, or porn? What can you do about it? And along with healing patterns of addiction, what is most helpful for the partners of people with addiction? Our guest today is Paula Hall, one of the world’s leading experts on treating sex and porn addiction, and the author of “"Understanding and Treating Sex and Pornography Addiction” - along with many other books on the topic for addicts, partners, and the therapists who are helping them. Although the idea that people can be addicted to sex or porn is still controversial - we’re going to tackle this topic head-on, so you can identify ways that you might be impacted. And, as always, you’ll learn powerful strategies for how to overcome addiction and get back on track to a healthy sex life. As always, I’m looking forward to your thoughts on this episode and what revelations and questions it creates for you. Please join us in the Relationship Alive Community on Facebook to chat about it! Sponsors: Away has created durable suitcases for the savvy traveler, with key features that help you easily get your stuff from place to place. With a limited lifetime warranty, and a 100-day trial period, it’s easy for you to experience an Away suitcase “in the field”. Away is offering $20 off any suitcase if you visit awaytravel.com/relationship and use the promo code “RELATIONSHIP” at checkout. Beautiful jewelry, exquisite craftsmanship, sustainable sources, and affordable prices. Get $75 OFF your purchase at hellonoemie.com when you use the coupon code "ALIVE". With free overnight shipping and free returns, you can see something online today, and try it on tomorrow risk free. Find a quality therapist, online, to support you and work on the places where you’re stuck. For 10% off your first month, visit Betterhelp.com/ALIVE to fill out the quick questionnaire and get paired with a therapist who’s right for you. Resources: Visit Paula Hall’s website for more information about her work, her books, and her public speaking. Check out the Laurel Centre’s offerings for help with Sex and Porn addiction. Read the Paula Hall books that are right for you. FREE Relationship Communication Secrets Guide - perfect help for handling conflict and shifting the codependent patterns in your relationship Guide to Understanding Your Needs (and Your Partner's Needs) in Your Relationship (ALSO FREE) Visit www.neilsattin.com/addiction to download the transcript, or text “PASSION” to 33444 and follow the instructions to download the transcript to this episode with Paula Hall. Amazing intro/outro music graciously provided courtesy of: The Railsplitters - Check them Out Transcript: Neil Sattin: Hello and welcome to another episode of Relationship Alive. This is your host Neil Sattin.  Neil Sattin: We're going to revisit a topic today that we've talked about before on the show and we're going to take an even deeper dive into the question of addiction. Especially as it pertains to sex addiction, porn addiction, love addiction. How do I identify if that's something that's impacting you or someone that you love? And if the answer is yes, what can you do about it? Is there hope? How do you facilitate change in a way that actually leads you to someplace that's healthier, and not being impacted by addiction? To talk about the topic today, we have with us Paula Hall, who is a licensed psychotherapist from the U.K. and whose book, "Understanding and Treating Sex and Pornography Addiction," is a masterful work on understanding exactly where sex addiction comes from and what you can do to treat it. And her words are based on years of practice with clients and seeing what works and what doesn't. Paula is the founder of the Laurel Center which offers treatment programs in the UK for people and they also offer sessions in the UK and over Skype and Zoom for people everywhere in the world. So it's powerful work that they're doing. She's written a couple of other books. Well actually many other books, but a couple others that are notable in terms of sex addiction recovery one for the partners and one for the couple as a whole, and we'll probably get a chance to talk about that as we go. In the meantime, there will be a detailed transcript of today's episode, if you are interested in downloading that just visit Neil-Sattin-dot-com-slash-addiction. And as always you can text the word "Passion," to the number 3-3-4-4-4, and follow the instructions which will also get you the transcript to today's episode. I think that's it for now. Paula Hall thank you so much for joining us today on relationship alive.  Paula Hall: Hi! Thanks for inviting me.  Neil Sattin: It's really great to have you here. I'm curious to know maybe for starters, what just led you to focusing your work on sex addiction and and porn addiction? How did how did you end up there? Paula Hall: Oh gosh I thought you might start with an easy question, Neil. I guess so I've been a therapist for gosh nearly 30 years, now initially I started in drug addiction, did that about three years and then I trained as a couples' psychotherapist and sex therapist. And it was probably about 15 years ago now I was working in private practice and I had seen a couple of clients, a couple of male clients, coming on their own. Both of them very happily married, young families, devoted fathers but they had these habits. One of them, it was visiting massage parlors. The other one was picking up women in bars basically. And what I noticed was that, being a psychotherapist for some years, I was able to kind of work with these guys to understand why they were doing what they were doing, and in a typical psychotherapy style: How was your relationship with your mother? And you know all of that kind of stuff exploring that. And we were able to kind of find those answers but unfortunately both of those guys, towards the end of the case. they understood why they did it and carried on doing it. I didn't seem to have any tools to help them stop. And then basically what happened was I went to a conference and one of the speakers that a guy called Thaddeus Birchard, also someone in the UK, did a talk on sex addiction. He is one of the very much one of the pioneers out here in the UK. And he talked about a cycle of addiction and having come from drug addiction, all the pennies just dropped into place. I just started seeing how what I had been sitting with those two guys was just like the work that I was doing with drug addiction. But this was around sexual behaviors, and for some reason that penny hadn't dropped before. So yeah, that I guess, failing my clients is what drove me to be so passionate about understanding this problem more, learning more and really developing tools and models and services that could help.  Neil Sattin: And can you talk a little bit about your perspective? Cuz I know you also do couples work and you've done sex therapy with clients. I think in the UK, they call it psychosexual therapy. Paula Hall: Yeah yeah.  Neil Sattin: So I'm curious where does sex positivity intersect with this question about whether or not we can be addicted to sex? Paula Hall: I think it's a completely different thing. In terms of being a therapist and being sex positive, I think it's a bit like you know being food negative if you work with people who chronically overeat. Of course, I think sex is brilliant. It's great. The problem is addiction robs people of their sexuality. I've never met a happy sex addict. Now you could argue that perhaps they're out there but they're not seeking help. So perhaps I'm the wrong person to know that. But my experience has been that addiction and compulsion robs people of their positive sexuality. It takes away their ability to choose the lifestyle they want to lead. It becomes a place where they feel shame, where they feel dissatisfied, where they feel insatiable or where it feels seedy, it feels stolen. It's no longer a pleasure. And I think treating sex addiction is about helping people get their sex lives back. When I run the group so we do a lot of group work over here with guys, and the guys often think I'm kind of joking when I quite often start off by saying, "I'm going to make sure that your sex lives are better than they have ever been, ever." And they kind of look at me curiously and think that's an odd thing to say, but actually I think that is one of the goals of treating sex and porn addiction is helping people have brilliant sex lives and really enjoying sex again, in whatever shape or form that makes. Whether that's within a monogamous relationship, a heterosexual relationship, whether in kink or whatever your taste is, I think that's irrelevant.  Neil Sattin: Yeah. Great. And that seems to touch in to the question about how someone would know whether what they're experiencing is addiction or not. So can we can we steer a little bit towards assessment, and how that how that works.  Paula Hall: Yeah, I think it does lead to that very much so. I think a really critical question is do you enjoy what you're doing? Are you still enjoying it or is it never enough? You always gotta go for the next hit? Are you noticing that your behavior is escalating, that you're preoccupied by it? I think a good sexual experience should leave you with a smile on your face, a sense of wholeness and fullness, and you feel satiated, a bit like a good meal. You're not worried about where the next one's coming from, you're not anxious about it. You're not worried that someone's going to find out. So, if it's a positive experience that you've really enjoyed and then you're probably not acting out compulsively. But if you're preoccupied with it. If it's never enough it is nowhere near as much fun as you thought it was going to be. Then perhaps this has become a compulsive. I think ultimately escalation is the, is the real critical sign of compulsivity, it's when it's escalating.  Neil Sattin: And so just to really be specific about escalation, what are some different forms that that could take? Paula Hall: So, that might be spending more and more time on the activity or planning for the activity or recovering from the activity or needing higher and higher stimulus. So, that might be more hard core porn or taking more risks with sort of cruising or whatever, in order to get the same kind of impact.  I think most of us understand escalation if we think about it around alcohol, escalation might be the wrath of the one glass of wine and it's become a bottle. So it's more and more of it or rather than the glass of wine, it's now become a glass of whiskey, you need something that's stronger and harder to get the same impact.  Neil Sattin: Got it and then there's also, right, the potential for certain kinds of activity to lead to other kinds of activity. So you might start out in an online realm and end up chatting with people, end up on dating sites or visiting escorts, and like there's that kind of escalation as well.  Paula Hall: Absolutely escalation into... Yeah, I mean there's other forms of kind of higher stimulation but they may be ones that are you know going to cause you more and more harmful consequences. If you're beginning to cross your own boundaries. Things that you always said you wouldn't do. Promised you wouldn't do. Never thought you'd even want to do, perhaps. Then again, that's showing that that escalation is is really pushing into your own value system.  Neil Sattin: Yeah. And, is there a point in making a distinction between like, it's an addiction that's pushing your past your values or it's an inability to live according to your values, that's keeping you from sticking with your values? Do you know what I mean?  Paula Hall: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No. Good point. Yeah. Okay, so I think this is where shame comes in. And shame unfortunately comes up a heck of a lot in this work. If you keep crossing your moral values and actually, Hey you aren't really that bothered about it, you probably won't feel any shame. Also, the experience of shame demonstrates that you actually have strong values. If he didn't have strong values you wouldn't experience it, you just wouldn't care. So, if you know your going against your value system and you feel really bad about it but nonetheless you are unable to stop, then it's likely to be addiction. If you're crashing your value system but you don't really care, you may still be an addict, but you've also got a problem with your moral compass. So you know, classically you have kind of sometimes I have a first session with a guy and he'll go," You know, I just, am I an addict? I dunno if I'm an addict, or whether I'm just a bit of a womanizer and I just want my cake and eat it. Maybe that's what it is." And I often say, "Well you know what. You can be an addict AND a womanizer, who wants a cake and eat it. They're not mutually exclusive. You can be both or one or the other." But escalation is the side where it really is addiction, I would say.  Neil Sattin: Yeah so just a quick point of clarification. You've mentioned working with guys a lot. How gendered is this problem? Paula Hall: So, most of the research seems to say, in the research certainly I did for my first book as well on this, suggested that about 30 percent of the people with sex and porn addiction were women. And certainly, if you sort of look at some of the forums, some of the kind of free spaces if you like, you'll see more and more women's voices coming up talking about their problem. But they don't seem to come forward for help and this seems to be something that's international, I've got colleagues delivering programs in other parts of the world as well and obviously there's there's a lot of therapists working in the States. And though, women don't seem to come forward for help as often. And you know, I'm quite curious about that some of that to do with economics, is that to do with different different types of shame that are around for female sex and love addicts? Is it because there aren't enough services offered on a few occasions. We have tried to offer very, very specific female services but still had very little take up. So I think...  Neil Sattin: Yeah, that is interesting because there are so many other realms where I think the women lead in terms of you know, couples therapy or even like personal growth work. There seem to be a lot more women on average in terms of like the demographics of people who are writing me and listening to my show just as one sample group, predominantly women. So it's interesting that that that that would be the case that they'd be less inclined to seek help for sex and porn addiction.  Paula Hall: Yeah, and my hypothesis would be, well, two. One, is I suspect an awful lot of those women who are addicted or using sex compulsively may actually be working within the sex trade. So for them finding help is also going to get in the way of their income stream. But, I think we do still live in a society where the message is about how, dare I use the old fashioned word "promiscuity." Male promiscuity still viewed quite differently to female promiscuity. So you know a man that is sleeping around, has multiple partners, is a bit of a lad, is a bit of a cad, is you know a bit of a womanizer, a bit of a player. The words we use for women are still tend to be "slut," or so much more derogatory. So I do think it's harder for women to come forward. I think there's, I don't know if it's more shame, but a different kind of shame for women coming forward for help. And as I said, I think it's a Catch-22, because in the media, in situations such as this, I find myself talking predominantly about men because that's who we generally work with. Most of my services are targeted at men because they're the people that come. I think that means a lot of women begin to feel increasingly invisible. So I really hope it will change. And yeah, we are going to launch an online group for women because then at least we don't have to worry so much about the geography. So is anybody listening out there who would define themselves as a female sex addict do get in touch because you could join one of our online support groups. And I hope that might begin to get something going and then as we're talking about it, more and more women come forward, and it will make it easier for more women to come forward and get into that positive spiral.  Neil Sattin: Yeah yeah. Great. One thing that I'm curious about is, so we've talked about some of the kinds of behaviors that might fall into this category and in researching for our conversation and also resulting from my conversation with Alex Katehakis before, I've talked to a lot of people about masturbation. More than I've ever talked to people about masturbation before which is in itself been interesting because I think there's so much shame that we hold around self pleasuring. And there's this question about how masturbation can potentially be addictive or can be used as a coping strategy for dealing with emotionally challenging situations or emotionally challenging places in one's life. And so I'm curious about like if someone first, is using masturbation as a way to kind of cope with stress and hardship. I've talked to some people who've said, "Well isn't that normal like, like, that's a mechanism that we have in our bodies to do that." But then if you suggest to someone, "Well how about not doing that?" They would say, "Well why would I not," or, "I could never stop doing that." And then it starts to bridge that question until like, "Well is it an addiction for you to be to be masturbating as a way to cope or is it not?" So there's this gray area here that I'd love to have your insight on because I think a lot of people when I talk to them about it they're like well, "Wow if like that means I'm an addict then I got to think like you know 90 percent of guys out there are sex addicts using masturbation as a way of dealing with their lives and fantasizing and things like that." And overall, I want just people to be pulled toward feeling like whatever they're doing is healthy for them and positive. Can you shine some light on that? Paula Hall: Yeah. So first and foremost I absolutely do not think there is anything wrong with using sex, whether it's partnered sex or masturbation for comfort. I think couples have kissed and made up as we euphemistically call it, for years, centuries people have masturbated to help them get to sleep at nights, masturbating to help them get out to work in the morning, masturbating because they're bored, masturbating because they're sad. That in itself I don't think is a problem at all. It's when he becomes a primary coping mechanism. It's when, if for some reason you couldn't then actually you start feeling worse and worse and worse. And again is when it's escalating. So I think if somebody uses masturbation as a way to get to sleep every night. And if it takes 10 minutes whatever is never escalated it's never got worse than that, it's not getting in the way of their relationship. So let's assume they're single or whatever. It's a habit. There's no harmful consequences, I think the problem is you say, we're trying stop. Well why? Why do that? I you know I watch television quite often to switch off. "Dunno. Well maybe you're addicted, maybe you should stop." Or maybe I just don't have the motivation to try and stop because I don't see why it's a problem?  Neil Sattin: Right.  Paula Hall: I think that's where we start getting into the realms of pathologizing sexuality. For me you know masturbation, it's a physical comfort. Why is that any worse than having a soak in the bath or putting your feet in a foot spa?  Neil Sattin: Yeah. Great. So I think that maybe the question is where it bumps up against your values. And that question of escalation.  Paula Hall: I think in terms of addiction it's about escalation. If there's been no escalation then... I realize I'm being quite categoric and there's bound to be some exceptions. But, on the whole if there's been no escalation I'd say there was no addiction in just because it bumps up against your values. That doesn't make it an addiction. I've had a number of clients come and want to work with me. They've been a people of faith where masturbation for them is a sin, it's something they're not comfortable with but they keep doing it. And they will use the language of addiction. And if there's no escalation and the only problem is that it's against their values, then it's not addiction. Now that doesn't mean that you might not work with that person, you might not help them to find other things to do. So let's say my feet somehow became allergic to my foot spa, so I couldn't use it anymore. Let's find some other ways of getting some physical comfort that aren't going to cause a problem in other areas of my life. But let's not call it an addiction because it's just not accurate.  Neil Sattin: Great. That's a helpful distinction to have.  Paula Hall: And I think it's also important to recognize that as I'm sure you know CSBD, Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder has been accepted by the World Health Organization to go into ICD-11. So it will be, we're not calling it addiction yet, it's going to be called compulsive sexual behavior disorder, which will include pornography. This will be an official diagnosis that can be used but that's coming online quite soon. But very, very clearly in the diagnostic criteria is that it can not be purely a problem caused by morality. It has to be causing problems outside of that. I mean another sort of way I often describe this is if alcohol was against your moral values. So for some people of faith of course drinking alcohol is not OK just because you have a small glass of wine every single evening to get to sleep would not make you an alcoholic, if it's never ever escalated. That would not make you an alcoholic. Even though it's against your values. And you need to stop drinking if it's against your values, and something else. So I'm not saying you shouldn't change but you wouldn't call that person an alcoholic.  Neil Sattin: Really helpful distinctions. And where this I think also gets interesting is because it plays into the partner dynamic. And that question of like well of course I don't have a problem with you masturbating but what are you thinking about and or you're looking at porn like that doesn't seem like it is you know aligns with my values or that sort of thing. So how does that when you look at addiction and that sense of like is what you're doing is causing a problem for you in your life. How do you how do you separate that from those other kinds of conversations that people need to be having with their partners anyway about what's appropriate what is and how to handle it when they actually have differences.  Paula Hall: Yeah absolutely. And of course for up for some couples pornography is just not okay, it's not okay for a partner. And if your partner is looking at pornography something that you are morally opposed to then that is going to create an issue within your relationship. And I would say that's an issue for couples' counseling. So assuming it's not escalating there's nothing to define it as an addiction. This is a couple counseling issue to decide what to do about this. And I think if you're somebody who is just can't stop looking at pornography in spite of how your partner feels about it, then maybe you either need to look at your feelings towards your partner and how much you respect them and their views or you need to look at whether or not this is a compulsion. I think in terms of fantasy, I mean that again is a really interesting one it is perfectly possible to masturbate and not to use fantasy. And of course some partners don't have an issue with fantasy, some partners will thoroughly enjoy sharing their fantasies with each others. Some people use fantasy but it's always a fantasy of their partner so their partner doesn't object. Again and as a sex therapist and I have been a sex therapist for what 18 years now. Talking about fantasies is something that commonly comes up when you're working with couples with sexual difficulties and want to enhance their sex life and every couple is different.  Neil Sattin: Yeah. Yeah. You said something...  Paula Hall: Did I answer your question?  Neil Sattin: Yeah you did. And they're like so many things flying around in so many different directions we could go. I think to ground us, I'm curious like as a partner what are some ways that you might sense that there's something going on that would need to be addressed as an addiction.  Paula Hall: Yeah that that is a tricky one isn't it? I think it's uh... changes in behavior. So someone who might be becoming more and more withdrawn from the relationship. Someone who's becoming more and more secretive. Somebody who's finding more and more excuses or reasons to not engage in activities that they previously would have seen as important. So if they've never wanted to go to the parents evening and are making excuses now then it's probably not relevant. But if they you know, if this is a new thing, if they seem to be finding excuses to get out of responsibilities that they would have enjoyed otherwise, then I think you might question that. Struggling with stress more. I think if you've... It's tricky partners often when they reflect back recognize that there have been changes. It's only in hindsight that they realized why. But there are of course 101 other explanations for why somebody might be withdrawing behaving secretively,  maybe there are issues within the relationship that need addressing that've got nothing to do with sex or porn addiction. Or it may be something else altogether. But yeah I think withdrawing from the relationship, becoming more secretive and changes in character. Behavior. That's really vague, isn't it? It's tough, it's really tough for partners.  Neil Sattin: It's a little vague. And I mean what comes up for me is the sense that if you are sensing something is going on then you want to do your best I think to lean in and to have vulnerable conversations.  Paula Hall: Absolutely yeah.  Neil Sattin: And so that brings up this question of like how can people in partnership particularly, how can they create a context that allows them to talk about this safely? Especially because in partnership so many of the things that happen are are a violation of the integrity of the relationship. So as a partner, I think you ideally you want to, if something's going on with your spouse or your partner, you want to know what's going on. But then once you find out what's going on, and that of course I think is what often keeps these things in the shadows right. Is that someone might be willing to talk about their struggle except knowing the impact that that could have on their on their partner and on their relationship.  Paula Hall: Yeah it is. It is very difficult. I think sometimes as a partner, if you do have a sense that there may be something around this that they don't want to talk to you about, can they talk to somebody else? And that might be the bridge to them talking to you. So, I wouldn't say that that is a lot of alternative of course but that might be the bridge to them being able to talk to you. But it is really difficult and you know I've worked with partners who have you know, tried to say and did that with all integrity and commitment, "I will support you. If this is about this and let me know. Tell me. There's nothing we can't work through." And then they find out something and they are absolutely devastated and the guy feels cheated because he trusted that she wasn't going to react like that, she had no idea what he was going to say when she said that. It's really difficult. It really is. It really is difficult of course that's what couple counseling often comes in,  so it may be that you are noticing there are issues within your relationship, there's issues within your sexual relationship. Also your emotional intimacy and you agree to some couple counseling for that and maybe within that environment it comes out. I mean certainly one of the things we're a training organization as well, and one of the things I say whenever I'm speaking to or training couple counselors, is always ask about poor news, always do individual history sessions and always ask about porn use and compulsive behaviors. Because so often what increasingly, that is at play if not the cause of, that is at least a contributing factor to so many issues for so many couples.  Neil Sattin: What advice do you have for a partner who's in that quandary of feeling, on the one hand the impact of the betrayal, so that betrayal trauma, and somewhere in there saying, "Well I love this person and I do want to help them but I'm I'm really angry or feeling devastated," or all of those things.  Paula Hall: I think firstly be gentle with yourself and give yourself time. It is perfectly okay to be angry. It is understandable to be angry. It is okay to have those feelings, find somebody that you can share those feelings with. Ultimately, if you want your relationship to survive then you need to be at both of you need to get to the place where you're blaming the addiction rather than your partner and you're able to rebuild your relationship from what the addiction has done to you, rather than what your partner has done to you. But that takes time. And initially when there is so much pain around it, and fear, and of course you can't break through that fear unless your partner really is getting into recovery and able to support you in your recovery. But yeah it takes time so often it is just be just be gentle with yourself.  Neil Sattin: I know in your in your book you advocate not making any drastic decisions for a period of time so that you have time to kind of think it all through and regain your footing.  Paula Hall: Yeah, especially if you've got children. I mean there's you know, there's some decisions that are very hard to take back. I think if you've got children then wait... What I often say to partners is: "Don't let what he has done, his complete and total screw up, force you to make decisions that you're not ready to make, or force you to make decisions that you and your children potentially will have to live with forever." His crisis does not have to create urgency for you. It doesn't have to and that's tough to hold on to that. It's true. Neil Sattin: Yeah. And do you have thoughts for someone who's now listening to this and thinking well maybe I do struggle with that or maybe that is an issue for me. How can they come forward in a way that has the best chance of panning out well for them.  Paula Hall:  I think for partners, I believe in connecting with others in all kinds of work. I think recovering on your own is incredibly difficult. Whether you'll be on the addicted partner or the partner. So certainly for partners I'd encourage them to find other partners but do find other partners who, trying think how to say this respectfully, who want to move on from this. Occasionally, I have stumbled across some partner forums or partners who've been on certain partner forums where everything's about staying in the same places, it's a year on, two years on, three years on, five years on, and they still feel completely trapped and burdened by this situation. And I think that is so disheartening and discouraging for other partners. You're not trapped. There may be some very very difficult decisions to make and they're decisions that have been forced on you. But you're not trapped, you do have choices about where you move forward so find support from other people who are trying to find ways of moving forward. Whether, that's together or apart.  Neil Sattin: Great, great. And I think where I was heading was also, you know, we've been talking a little bit about if you suspect something's going on for your partner what can you do and how do you handle the betrayal and all that. If you are potentially the addicted partner, what are some ways to step forward that help you handle the betrayal trauma that your partner is experiencing, or own what's happening for you? That sort of thing.  Paula Hall: Well, you hit the nail on the head there, Neil. Own what's happening. Own the fact that you did cause this and I think that's really, really difficult. I think we've just run one of a couple of weeks ago, a couples' intensive, as the first time we've run the couples program since the book came out for couples and it was so powerful, it was incredibly powerful. And I think the absolute number one tool for helping couples move forward is for the addicted partner to express empathy. As soon as the addicted partner gets into defensiveness, gets into: "Yeah but... " It just all falls apart. Relentless empathy.  I think for the partner, if you try and think about it like this, if your partner doesn't believe that you know how it feels and what you've done. How on earth can they trust you won't do it again? And you have got whether it's something was an accident, whether it's deliberate, whatever it was you have got to demonstrate relentless empathy and drop the defensiveness, of course you can't live in a place of constant accusations, two years, three years, five years on. But if you're in the first 12 months post full disclosure and this is assuming that has been the disclosure that's required, and you are fully in recovery. You have got to just keep taking it on the chin and relentless empathy.  Neil Sattin: Yeah, yeah. And I like how we're bridging and it's starting to get towards recovery and repair. When you talk about the disclosure just so that everyone understands what you're talking about, what are you talking about? Paula Hall: So, we talk about therapeutic disclosure. We recommend therapeutic disclosure. Unfortunately, there are few partners who know absolutely everything. That's not necessarily because they haven't been told, it may be that actually much of what was told was late at night. It was in the height of emotion, a lot of it may have been forgotten. What I've experienced so often as a couple counselor is that if you don't do a therapeutic disclosure then some additional bit of information that either gets discovered, disclosed or remembered, sabotages the healing process. So a therapeutic disclosure is about getting the facts out on the table. And it's important to distinguish between a therapeutic disclosure and a forensic disclosure. This is not every single nitty gritty of sexual position and cup size and place and whatever, that's forensic and completely unhelpful. But a broad brush understanding of the chronology, the dates, the times, the where's, the when's, the what kind of things, the behaviors, are really important.  And really, and in that's between the therapist and the partner to kind of negotiate what's going to be genuinely helpful. Then when you have got that information when you both know what it is you're dealing with, in the couples book I use the metaphor of more of a tidal wave crashing over your relationship. And it's kind of really understanding what that tidal wave is saying, so you know what the damage is so you know what you're repairing from. And I think until that happens you keep getting the aftershocks. So a therapeutic disclosure is a way of putting the past in the past. Assuming of course, no relapses but putting the past in the past so you really can move on from it.  Neil Sattin: Right, and I like the support that you suggest for having that kind of disclosure where you know they're supported by a couples' therapist, and also each by their own therapists, so that there are a lot of people holding the container around the information coming out.  Paula Hall: Absolutely. Absolutely. And you know for some people that there are extra bits of information or things that are remembered or I mean an example it was... In some respects, looking back on it it's almost quite comical. But my goodness it wasn't at the time. I had a couple where the partner knew the addicted partner often acted out. And he said he often acted out, and I just happened to ask the question, "How often is often?" And her interpretation of "often" was... Let's see I can't remember exactly now, but say once a month. Whereas his definition of "often" was twice a week. They both thought the other one knew what "often" meant, this what really was a genuine miscommunication but it caused such devastation and going almost back to square one for that poor partner, again. So again, this is how a therapeutic disclosure really helps people be sure that they have got the story as it were, the narrative, and doing it in a safe way or safe a way as possible. Unfortunately we can't guarantee it's pain free. But having some way to move forward from that as well, a process of moving forward.  Neil Sattin: Yeah and let's let's veer our conversation towards recovery. And what you see as required. I know that you came up with your choices... Is it choice, or choices?  Paula Hall: Choice.  Neil Sattin: Choice model. And that was a little bit of a departure from there's a model created by Patrick Carnes here in the States, and you did some training with him and then decided there was something more that needed to be there. So how is your model different? And then let's let's dive in, because I want to make sure that everyone listening to this conversation feels like there actually is a pathway forward.  Paula Hall: Absolutely. Absolutely there is. And I think that the whole the whole field of sex and politician recovery has grown so much and indeed chemical addiction recovery and the training initially I was doing with Patrick Carnes was oh gosh I think the first course was over 10 years ago that I did and some of his early writings of course a pre internet. Some of those stats still get quoted from a book that was written before the Internet and then clearly the profile of sex and politics has changed considerably. So yeah, I know their training is evolved and their models would have evolved, as well since I did the training. But I think what really changed for me, is understanding how getting into recovery from addiction is about so much more than stopping. There's one of the kinds of sayings of recovery is that recovery is about what you take up not about what you give up. And I think the initial models that I were trained in were all about focusing on stopping your behaviors. And if you stop your behaviors you'll get better, your depression will lift, your anxiety will lift, your relationship...you will live happily ever after. And actually I think it's a lot more complicated than that. I think life is a lot more complicated than that. So for me most addictive behaviors or a lot of them are symptoms of other issues that are going on in life. So you absolutely need to be sure you've identified those, recognize those, and are dealing with those. But even from a simply, from a biological perspective, if you just try and stop your porn use, and you don't replace it with healthy alternative activities that give your life a sense of meaning and purpose, then you just end up with a void. You end up with an emptiness and nothingness. And I work with so many young guys now where the huge chunks of their time is spent on porn, they've never had a partnered relationship and they really need to find a new way of living their life, living unaddicted love. So the "choice model" really is the C, the first is an acrostic, the first C, is all about challenging any unhelpful beliefs, so those beliefs: "I can't change. It's just who I am. I've just got a high sex drive. I'm just a weirdo." The H is about having a vision. And again I think this is something that has really changed for me, understanding how much easier it is to drive people towards something than away from something. Let's focus on what you will gain not what you will lose. The "have a vision." The O is about overcoming the behaviors, now I used to think that was the whole treatment program and now I recognize that's just one part of it. The I is about identifying positive sexuality, as I was saying, right at the beginning of this podcast for me, it really is about reclaiming sexuality from the addiction. The second C is about connecting with other people. And one of the real joys of group work and whether that's within a therapeutic group, a peer support group, a 12 step group, whatever it is, I think is building those relationships with other people breaking through the shame and secrecy and I think you as humans we were created to connect. I think that's so important. And the final E is about establishing confident recovery, that really is building your life well with meaningful other relationships and hobbies and pastimes and career and personal growth and all that other stuff. So I think in my kind of recovery model has become increasingly integrative and has been about changing your life, rather than just changing your addiction.  Neil Sattin: Great. Yeah.  Paula Hall: That was a lecture wasn't it?  Neil Sattin: No. It was perfect. You went right through the entire choice model and of course each of those, you know, we could talk for you know five or ten minutes on and we don't have time to do that. Sadly. I will say that each of your books, they're fairly concise and direct and that's really helpful I think you can dive into understanding and treating sex and pornography addiction and come away with some very practical strategies as well as a comprehensive understanding of what you're dealing with.  Paula Hall: Yeah, very much written as a self-help book as well as a research book. So yeah.  Neil Sattin: Great. Could we talk for a moment about the cycle of addiction that you've identified and particularly, how that can be a way for people to kind of understand themselves and where they are in that cycle and end and how to make different choices depending on where they are in the cycle?  Paula Hall: Yeah, so. Six stages on the cycle of addiction. So dormant phase is where you're not acting out. And some people will might go weeks, months, without acting out. Critically dormant is not the same as recovered. Yeah. A period of abstinence is not the same as recovery. And often what's hiding in that dormant phase are all sorts of unresolved issues that you've not dealt with. You're still lonely you're still isolated you still hate your job you still feel you're trapped in the wrong marriage or feel bad about your sexuality whatever it is. Then, there are triggers whatever those triggers might be, that kind of push you out of that dormant phase and often they're either environmental, and I think we often underestimate just the impact of having the opportunity to act out when it's on the plate and we now really understand some of the neuroscience about why that is so hard to resist, it's not purely psychological. But of course there might be emotional triggers as well so you having  an argument, feeling particularly isolated, rejected, whatever it might be. Then there's often a period of a series of triggers and you thinking should I shouldn't I and all those cognitive distortions. "Yes. But, everybody looks at porn. But does it really matter? It'll only be for five minutes." All the lies we tell ourselves for why it will be okay for us to do it, and we all do this. I have fun when I'm doing public speaking, I'll often ask for a show of hands of anybody who's never broken the speed limit in their car. And of course there's always one person and I say do you drive a car and they all say no, and put their hand. I've never yet met anybody who drives the car who's not broken the speed limit and we all believe that speed limits are right and good. But we make excuses for why on some occasions it's okay. I was late. The driving conditions were perfect. I wasn't going fast as that person. I'm a very good driver. We all have our reasons why we break our own rules, so it's no different for addicts. Then of course there's the actual acting out behavior whatever that might be. Really it doesn't matter whether your thing is a porn or cam sex or sex workers or cruising or whatever it is. It's the way that behavior makes you feel that you are addicted to, not actually what it is.  Period of regret. I think the sort of big difference between my cycle of addiction and Patrick Carnes' cycle that he refers to, is he talks about despair and for an awful lot of people I've worked with, there isn't despair and shame. If you're single and you've been looking at porn yet again, for another night for five hours, and you're not going to get to sleep 'til 1:00 in the morning, you regret it because you're going to be tired and you feel a bit of an idiot. But despair? No. Often despair isn't experienced until much, much later in the evolution of the addiction. But then often there's a period of time in the reconstitution phase of trying to put everything back together again: "Right. That's it. I'm gonna put those blockers back on. I'm going to make more of an effort. You know, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that, I'm going make sure I don't do that." But, what you're doing then is just going back into dormant because you still haven't managed and dealt with those issues that get triggered and set you off going around again.  Neil Sattin: Yeah. One thing that I thought was really interesting you talk about that the preparation phase, like getting ready, that that often is actually what is bringing relief to people.  Paula Hall: Yeah. It's not a perfect model, no models are. It's it's really tricky to identify when something is acting out, because I think often in the seeking and searching phase particularly for example people who visit sex workers, they may spend days and days and days looking at the website, reading the reviews, chatting for a few different people. Really, that is all the acting out. I'm not sure that is the preparation phase that I think the preparation phase and the acting out phase kind of blur. Because often by the time they get to acting out, that's just trying to get the damn thing I've done. It's the window shopping as it were, that really has been the addiction, rather than buying, the being at the till and paying for the item.  Neil Sattin: That's so interesting right because the dopamine is fueled by the seeking, right? Paula Hall: Exactly. Exactly.  Neil Sattin:  Yeah. That's where that addictive biologic cycle happens.  Paula Hall: Yeah. I think that's where people sometimes, and I think that with assessment, that's why the questions are so important. If you just say to somebody how often do you act out? They might say, "Oh I visit a sex work once a month." And it's never escalated it seems, it's been once a month for the last two years. If you ask how much time do you spend online seeking sex workers, looking at sex worker reviews, sending text to sex workers, exchanging messages and pictures with sex workers. You might get quite a different answer and that might be the piece that is escalating significantly.  Neil Sattin: Right. Right. I just want to highlight that you mentioned that along with obviously treating people who have or are struggling with sex addiction and also treating couples and working with partners, that you also train therapists to work with people who are struggling with sex addiction and are impacted by it. So how does that work. Do people come to the UK to train with you or is it online? Paula Hall: Yeah. No. We haven't done anything online yet. Yet. Everything's evolving isn't it. So, we do obviously just kind of you know single day training events and I've done quite a lot in house stuff, as well. So I've been to a few rehabs and done kind of dedicated four-day training programs to really upskill addiction stuff, particularly in sex and sexuality, and working with sex addiction. So I've done that in quite a few places. And we can kind of tailor make those programs, but we also have an accredited diploma. So it's an independently accredited diploma, so one of the professional awarding bodies in the UK has apprenticeships accredited it. And that's a level five diploma and that's three modules of four days. And really what we're teaching therapists is an integrative model. So this is what's also very different from Patrick Carnes model, if you do the Patrick Carnes model, then you're being trained to deliver the 30 task approach. Whereas what we're doing is training you in sex and porn addiction and some of the models we use, but how you then interpret that, there's no set program it's not a manualized system that you're being taught, it's much more about people. For people who kind of work more relationally with clients whether that's in developing programs or one to one to kind of tailor it to the places where they work and their own personal modalities as well.  Neil Sattin: Got it. Well, we only have about a minute left and so if you are interested in Paula Hall and her work I encourage you to visit the Laurel Center website, Paula's website to get one of her many great books on the topic. So whether you're a therapist or someone who's impacted, I heartily recommend her work. We will have those links in the show notes for today's episode which you can pick up if you go to Neil-sattin-dot-com slash addiction or text the word "Passion," to the number 3-3-4-4-4 and follow the instructions. Paula, I'm wondering if you have a minute for one last question.  Paula Hall: OK.  Neil Sattin: And that is, we've talked a little bit about not just stopping things and putting new healthy behaviors in. And there are some great suggestions around that in your book I'm wondering if you can just talk for a minute. Obviously, this is way too short but about the healing aspect of how someone goes about healing the underlying issues that lead to being an addict and acting out? Paula Hall: Yeah. So I think that the model that I used, and I talk about in the book, is now often referred to as "OAT model" there has to be opportunity. And of course this has been the big game change over the years, isn't it, is the fact that we can now access pornography and sex through our mobile phone. Absolute anonymity. It's been the absolute game changer. So there has to be the opportunity for some people there's greater opportunity because of their work because of whatever their personal and private situation is, their financial means whatever they have more opportunity than others. And that in itself of course is a temptation because we all are drawn to sex and sexual novelties, it's part of how we've been wired up. But for some people they're more susceptible to that opportunity, those opportunities, than others are and some are more susceptible because they've experienced issues in their childhood and those issues may be around kind of neglectful or absent parenting. So, they may have been brought up with a sense that nobody will really care for their needs. They can't really trust other people. And what tends to happen in those situations is that you turn to, for comfort, you tend to turn to things rather than people. So, if you've got a history where people have let you down, you may decide to look after yourself in terms of things rather than others. And of course porn and sex are effective comforters but then there's trauma as well. So for some people it's the attachment wounds in childhood, for some people it's trauma. So if you've experienced a significant trauma and that might be in childhood it might be as an adult -- we work with a number of people from the armed forces, emergency services, who had significant traumas kind of later in life and we know that trauma actually impacts the brain directly. So this isn't just a psychological issues then, it's become a biological issue. So we know that the way that trauma impacts the brain makes it harder. You need more comfort because you end up hypersensitive to a lot of cues and triggers. But also it's harder to actually access the self soothing chemicals within the brain because of the trauma, so you're more likely to look to external things to soothe that. But I think there's one other thing I would say Neil, that's why I'm so grateful to people like me for doing these kind of podcasts. And one of the great causes for sex and porn addiction, is naivete, is ignorance, is knowing, is the lack of education. And unfortunately so often we get caught up in the moral debates about pornography and sexuality, and of course those debates exist and I'm not trying to say they're not important ones. But I think often we lose the health issues. And I believe very passionately that we need to start educating people particularly our young people about the potential risks of sex addiction and pornography addiction so they could recognize it in themselves. So many people develop these addictions simply because they didn't know they could become addicted.  Neil Sattin: Well we are undoing the naivete right here. And I so appreciate your time and wisdom today and hopefully we can have you back on it. I know we could easily talk for another hour. And I just want to point out to our listeners that we have had Peter Levine on the show to talk about healing from trauma. We've had David Burns on the show to talk about cognitive distortions. We've had Diana Fosha to talk about AEDP, which is an attachment centered therapy so healing early attachment wounds. So all of this is meant to offer you a big integrated package of healing and hope for you. And Paula thank you so much for being part of that picture with us today.  Paula Hall: You're very welcome. 

In this special hour-long conversation, John Kim (The Angry Therapist) speaks with Dr. Alex Katehakis about sex and love addiction, unhealthy patterns in relationships and why we do the things we do when looking for love.----  Alexandra Katehakis, Ph.D., MFT, CSAT-S, CST-S is a Marriage Family Therapist, Certified Sex Addiction Therapist/Supervisor and Certified Sex Therapist/Supervisor, and Clinical Director of Center for Healthy Sex in Los Angeles. Dr. Katehakis has extensive experience in working with a full spectrum of sexuality; from sexual addiction to sex therapy, as well as and problems of sexual desire and sexual dysfunction for individuals and couples. She has successfully facilitated the recovery of many sexually addicted individuals and assisted couples in revitalizing their sex lives. You can learn more about Dr. Katehakis here: https://centerforhealthysex.com/ --- John Kim is doing things differently. Therapy in a shotglass. One hour, no filler. Interested in becoming a coach and making a bigger impact in the lives of others, while finding personal freedom? Learn more here. Want texts from Angry? https://www.theangrytherapist.com/texts____ Music in this episode is by Keshco. The Angry Therapist Podcast is Produced and Audio Engineered by Amanda Meyncke, with support from Stephanie Zoccatelli. Want to change your own life, give back to others and change the way others experience the world? Let's talk. Become a life coach.

Sex addicts who knowingly have sex with their spouses while having unprotected sex with others are violating their spouses by undermining her self-determination over her body.  When the partner of the SA has no idea she's been "having sex" with her spouse's sex workers, a crime has been committed. Listen as Carol the Coach interviews Alex Katehakis, Ph.D, Clinical Director of Center for Healthy Sex, who believes that sex in a relationship where intimate deception is taking place is a non-consensual act and leaves many partners feeling "raped"  having been exposed to multiple sex partners and the potential to contract an STI, some of which can be fatal. Find out why few women get honest enough with themselves about the gravity of this type of gross violation!

Sex addicts who knowingly have sex with their spouses while having unprotected sex with others are violating their spouses by undermining her self-determination over her body.  When the partner of the SA has no idea she's been "having sex" with her spouse's sex workers, a crime has been committed. Listen as Carol the Coach interviews Alex Katehakis, Ph.D, Clinical Director of Center for Healthy Sex, who believes that sex in a relationship where intimate deception is taking place is a non-consensual act and leaves many partners feeling "raped"  having been exposed to multiple sex partners and the potential to contract an STI, some of which can be fatal. Find out why few women get honest enough with themselves about the gravity of this type of gross violation!

Dr. Alex Katehakis Ph.D., MFT, CSAT-S, CST-S is the Clinical Director of Center for Healthy Sex in Los Angeles and the author of Erotic Intelligence: Igniting Hot, Healthy Sex While in Recovery from Sex Addiction, Sex Addiction as Affect Dysregulation: A Neurobiologically Informed Holistic Treatment and co-author of Mirror of Intimacy: Daily Reflections on Emotional and Erotic Intelligence. Dr. Alex sits down in the attic to discuss the role shame plays in sexual dysfunction, the indicators of love addiction and the practice of tantric intimacy. She talks about the multiple factors that lead to disassociation and Dax believes dolphins are very sexual. The two discuss the different types of relationships young people are engaging in and they talk about the impact of pornography on developing minds.

Dr. Alex Katehakis Ph.D., MFT, CSAT-S, CST-S is the Clinical Director of Center for Healthy Sex in Los Angeles and the author of Erotic Intelligence: Igniting Hot, Healthy Sex While in Recovery from Sex Addiction, Sex Addiction as Affect Dysregulation: A Neurobiologically Informed Holistic Treatment and co-author of Mirror of Intimacy: Daily Reflections on Emotional and Erotic Intelligence. Dr. Alex sits down in the attic to discuss the role shame plays in sexual dysfunction, the indicators of love addiction and the practice of tantric intimacy. She talks about the multiple factors that lead to disassociation and Dax believes dolphins are very sexual. The two discuss the different types of relationships young people are engaging in and they talk about the impact of pornography on developing minds.

Mirror of Intimacy Podcast Ep 7 - Alex Katehakis & Charlene deGuzman discuss sex addiction, love addiction, and ways to cultivate self-love.

Mirror of Intimacy Podcast Ep 6 - Dr. Alex Katehakis & NY Times Bestselling Author Katherine Woodward Thomas discuss ways to break unhealthy patterns in relationships, how to "work on your 3%", and how to rediscover your identity after a breakup.

Mirror of Intimacy Podcast Ep 5 - Dr. Alex Katehakis & Dr. Emily Morse discuss ways to establish erotic intimacy through self-care, self-pleasure, and self-awareness--whether you're single, dating, or in a committed relationship.

Mirror of Intimacy Podcast Ep 4 - Dr. Alex Katehakis & Professional BDSM Dom Paul Shaw discuss the ways that BDSM can help inform conversations around sex and consent.

Have you ever felt compelled to jump into a new relationship a little too quickly? Is it possible that you’re actually addicted to love and relationships? How would you know? This week, our guest is Sherry Gaba, best-selling author of The Marriage and Relationship Junkie and The Law of Sobriety: Attracting Positive Energy for a Powerful Recovery. Sherry is a Psychotherapist, Life Coach, and Certified Recovery Coach specializing in individual, couples, family, and group psychotherapy - and she is also the editor of Recovery Today magazine. In this episode, you’ll learn what it means to be addicted to love and relationships and where it comes from. We’ll also dive into how you can tell if you’re addicted to love and relationships and what you can do to start on your path toward healthier relationships and connection. As always, I’m looking forward to your thoughts on this episode and what revelations and questions it creates for you. Please join us in the Relationship Alive Community on Facebook to chat about it! Sponsors: Along with our amazing listener supporters (you know who you are - thank you!), this week's episode is being sponsored by two amazing companies with special offers for you. First are the folks at TakeCareOf.com. Through a unique online quiz, they help you figure out exactly what vitamins and herbal supplements you need to achieve your optimal health. They use high-quality ingredients and can save you as much as 20% over comparable store-bought brands. On top of all that, they are offering you 25% OFF your first month if you visit takecareof.com and use the coupon code “ALIVE” at checkout. RxBar.com makes a whole food protein bar that’s super-tasty – Chloe and I almost always have these with us to help us stay nourished on the go. They’re healthy, easy to digest, and have simple ingredients with no added sugar – plus they’re gluten/dairy/soy-free. You can get 25% OFF your first order by visiting RxBar.com/alive and using the coupon code “ALIVE” at checkout. Valid in the US only.   Resources: Visit the website for Sherry Gaba’s book, The Marriage and Relationship Junkie, to learn more about how to break the cycle of marriage and relationship addiction and live fabulously on your own or with a partner. Visit Sherry Gaba’s main website FREE Relationship Communication Secrets Guide - perfect help for handling conflict and shifting the codependent patterns in your relationship Guide to Understanding Your Needs (and Your Partner's Needs) in Your Relationship (ALSO FREE) www.neilsattin.com/gaba Visit to download the transcript, or text “PASSION” to 33444 and follow the instructions to download the transcript to this episode with Sherry Gaba. Amazing intro/outro music graciously provided courtesy of: The Railsplitters - Check them Out   Transcript: Neil Sattin: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Relationship Alive. This is your host, Neil Sattin. We're here to talk about relationships and yet what brings us into a relationship? Why are we there in the first place? So many of us enter relationships for awesome reasons, sometimes it's less than awesome reasons, and sometimes it's a combination of the two. You feel some magnetic spark with a person, but at the same time, maybe they support you in ways that aren't necessarily healthy for you, or you get trapped in some dynamic that doesn't really make for the best relationship possible. And then you might feel like, "Oh, okay, this relationship ended," and you're ready to go into another relationship, maybe even a little too quickly. And it wouldn't be that uncommon for you to wonder, "Is there something about this? Am I actually addicted to being in relationships? Am I addicted to love? Is there something... What is it that's compelling me to do this?" And I think it's interesting to tease apart what it is that might compel us in an unhealthy way, to enter into a relationship with others, and what's healthy about it? 'Cause when we're talking about addiction, there are positive addictions, as well as negative addictions. So how do you find the balance, and how do you figure out you where you land in terms of your approach to the relationship? Neil Sattin: So we're going to tackle this question about whether or not you might possibly be addicted to love and relationship, how to know and what to do about it. And in order to have that conversation, I have with me today, yet another esteemed guest, her name is Sherry Gaba, and she's a therapist who is also the author of "The Marriage and Relationship Junkie." A book that is available on Amazon, and talks all about this question of how do you find your own path to health in terms of how you relate to others? And of course, that's a conversation we're having all the time here on Relationship Alive because hey, I'm just... I recognize that just like you, there's work to be done. And so, we're going to dive deep into this question around addiction and obsession around love and see if we can come out the other side with some answers. As always, we will have a detailed transcript of today's episode and to download that, all you have to do is visit neilsattin.com/gaba, and you spell that, G-A-B-A, as in Sherry Gaba, our guest for today. Or you can always text the word, "passion" to the number 33444, follow the instructions and I will send you a link where you can download the transcript for this episode. Alright, I think that's all I have to cover today at this moment. Let's dive in. Sherry Gaba, so great to have you here with us on Relationship Alive. Sherry Gaba: What a fantastic introduction, thank you, Neil, that was amazing, and I love what you're doing in the world and loving just getting to know you, I love your energy and I'm just grateful to have this platform today to talk about this really important subject. Neil Sattin: Great, well we're off to a good start then. Sherry Gaba: Yeah. Neil Sattin: So it is a complicated question whether we're drawn into relating with another person for the right reasons or the wrong reasons. Maybe you can help us start to tease that apart, how do we know if the reason that we're seeking out someone else is something that ultimately is going to support our health and growth, and thriving in the world? Sherry Gaba: Well, let's look at addiction in general, if you look at the broader sense of addiction, and love addiction and relationship romance addiction is our subject today. If you look at the broader definition of addiction is when your life is out of control and it's becoming unmanageable and underneath that, you're making choices based on emptiness a feeling of lack, a feeling of not wanting to be alone, that would be a love addiction, feeling like the world is just a really scary place almost terror that, "If I'm not in a relationship, if I'm not connected or hooked up to somebody, then I'm going to "dies," literally. And so, love addiction is really under the umbrella of addiction. Sherry Gaba: It's a process addiction, it's a lifestyle addiction, so think about binge eating, or sex addiction, or being addicted to exercise or internet addiction or gaming, or shopping or spending, those are all lifestyle addictions. So, you're becoming addicted to a mood-altering activity, in other words, your brain really lights up when you're hooking up with whatever it is that you're needing to hook up with, whether it's the food or the love, or the sex or whatever your addiction is. So the relationship for a love addict is the only person's identity. And then if a breakup occurs, the addictive lover is longing for the attachment and the pleasurable feelings of that lost relationship. So just like the drug addict may be withdrawing from his or her drug needing that "fix," the love addict is needing that fix of attachment. Sherry Gaba: And underneath all of us, all of us as human beings we all want to attach, we all want to bond, we all want to connect. But when it becomes unhealthy, and we start making really bad choices around that, then we're stepping into love addiction. For instance, you step into a relationship 'cause you're afraid of being alone like I mentioned earlier, or you're afraid of the unknown, or you get into a relationship where you're trying to change them or fix them and not accepting them for who they are. Needing someone to make you feel whole, because like I mentioned earlier, you feel empty if you're not in a relationship. Looking for others for affirmation and self-worth and for validation rather than already having that within yourself. Being terrorized of abandonment, having those withdrawal symptoms that I mentioned earlier that if a relationship ends, you are in complete withdrawal. And then really giving up who we are out of the fear that we might lose someone or someone may not approve of us. So, if any of those things sound familiar, you may be dealing with love addiction. Neil Sattin: Yeah, and I'm reminded of when Helen Fisher was on the show, she has this viewpoint that in some respects, all love is addiction and that's why when we break up, we go through symptoms and pain that's very similar to what any addict would go through when they are in withdrawal from their partner. But I like the distinction that you're making around how... And this is I think, why love can be a positive or a negative addiction, because you could be addicted to love with someone who's really good for you, and where you actually really support each other and there's a lot that's beneficial going on, or you can be addicted to love with someone where you're just fueling the dopamine rush. Sherry Gaba: Yeah. Neil Sattin: And I think that is... Go ahead. Sherry Gaba: Well, if you're feeling the dopamine rush, it probably isn't you're addicted to a healthy relationship. Because yes, in the beginning, there's that fantasy, there's that attachment, there's that goo-goo ga-ga feeling. Sure, that can happen, but healthy relationships really move into a more mature growing state of being. I'm not saying you can't have that goo-goo ga-ga come up at times, but I think if you're constantly in that state, I think then it becomes more obsessive and then it becomes more unhealthy. I can't speak to all relationships, but I think healthier relationships change, they morph into other things, they morph into healthier love, they morph into other things like respect and nurturing, and it isn't just fueled by that, "Oh my god," goo-goo ga-ga feeling, you know what I'm saying? Neil Sattin: Yeah, if we look at the addiction cycle, and we had Alex Katehakis on the show to talk a little bit also about sex addiction. That what we're really doing, the reason we show up predictive behaviors, and you mentioned this a moment ago, is to help us with our own feelings of dysregulation and discomfort, we turn to the thing that gives us that pleasurable sensation for comfort. And I think you're right, all relationships are going to do that at first to some extent. And as I was preparing for our conversations today, it just occurred to me like, Oh, right, so if you're in a relationship, like most relationships where after a certain period of time, the dopamine energy starts to fade a little bit, and you haven't necessarily figured out how to build health into your relationship, and those healthy bonding behaviors foster lots of oxytocin which is another, a pair bonding hormone, then you're going to be missing the effects of the dopamine, not because there's something wrong with your partnership necessarily, but because you tune back into what's wrong with you, and those feelings of discomfort. And so then you have to chase the dopamine whether it's escalating the drama or ditching someone for someone new so that you can get that because you're not equipped at that moment to actually deal with your own dysregulation and discomfort. Sherry Gaba: Right. Well, you're addicted to the high, so to speak. You're addicted to the romance, you're addicted to the newness factor. I am a love addict, the best time for me is that first falling in love, that's the part where I'm just... That's where I'm most comfortable, that's my go-to. The problem with that is, you're picking from a place of need versus a place of healthful being. In other words, you're picking from a place of emptiness, you're picking a place of, "This person's going to fill up this need that I have, that I don't feel whole already, that I need somebody else to fill me up to feel good about myself." And hopefully, we can lead into a conversation about early trauma because that is a huge piece to this subject. Sherry Gaba: And often I'll share my own story because I think people underestimate what early trauma does and why that is a huge piece in the love addict behavior or the need for that high, that initial high. We're always chasing that early high, we often say with addicts, they're chasing that first high, that first crack experience or that first alcoholic experience, whatever, heroin experience. Well, the love addict is chasing that first high of falling in love, that's where everything... That is it, this is utopia, this is where it all is, and unfortunately, it isn't sustaining and when it does change, hopefully, it'll change into something healthy, but for the love addict, it generally does not turn into that something healthy. And usually, what they... The love addict picks people that aren't healthy for them. That's another piece to this, is that love addicts tend to be attracted to love avoidance, they're attracted to people that are unavailable, they might be attracted to people that are abusive and they don't care because they want that high no matter what, and they're picking what they know rather than what's good for them. Neil Sattin: Right. Right, so if you're in a relationship, what are some of the signs that you might see happening in your relationship if you've veered into addictive territory? Sherry Gaba: Well, I think if you're putting up with abuse, of course, you may be with a narcissist. I think we talked about this a little bit earlier, but over-adapting to what others want, losing yourself in the process, having no boundaries, always saying yes when really, “no” is not even in your vocabulary. This terror, this fear of letting go, fear of the unknown, so you stay because it's better than what might be out there. At least you know what you're getting here, even if it's unhealthy. You're always trying to fix and change your partner. That person is what makes you feel whole and complete, you're absolutely empty, you're in the ethers of emptiness without that person or in relationship, and then that person is all that you are in terms of, you're seeking their affirmation, their validation, their acknowledgment, all your self-worth is based on being with that person. You're petrified of abandonment. You might have some of those withdrawal symptoms when they're not around, you only are comfortable when they're in your space, but if they're off to work or off with other... Doing other things, you feel completely lost, and you give up who you are out of fear that they may not want you. You give up who you are, you lose parts of yourself to be with this person. Neil Sattin: Got it. So I'm feeling a pretty... I'm doing the diagnosis here on myself even and thinking about how even relationships in the past that have started out healthy, they can veer into this territory if you're not careful. Sherry Gaba: Sure. And then we're talking maybe more about a codependent relationship. And I hate throwing out words like codependent or even a love addiction word, because people... It becomes very cliche, because what you said earlier in the call, and I really picked up on that was that some of these things you have with your relationship but they're healthy. And in other words, you love that person, you respect that person, and sure, that person on some level maybe completes you on some level. But the question is if that relationship wasn't there would you be okay? Sure, you might be sad and you would grieve, and you would miss that person terribly, but would you be completely lost? I think of my own mother, my father passed away and they had a 60-year romance. And when my father died, and again, this is part of grief as well, but it was a little more pathological than that. My mother picked up the first man that looked at her. And he's a very bad man. She picked somebody that really is a predator per se, and he knew exactly what he was doing. And she's in a relationship with... In a very unhealthy relationship with someone that's completely taking advantage of her, because she is petrified of being without somebody. She just can't even function. And so that's when we're really getting into territory that's dangerous. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Sherry Gaba: Because you're actually being taken advantage of. And that's a whole other conversation, there is a whole world out there, there's... Just in LA alone, there are probably 10,000 predators out there picking women that just will believe anything that they hear, just so they can couple up and partner up and bond with somebody. Neil Sattin: Let's... Sherry Gaba: I use that example because you never know, you could have a listener right now, a call that's in a situation like that. Neil Sattin: Yeah, yeah, I'm glad that you brought it up. And yeah, what it makes me curious about, I picked up on the sense of not being okay if you were to be alone. And because I think that it's so important to have that sense of okay-ness, that brings with it so much freedom to really see your relationship clearly, to see your part in the relationship clearly. So if we were to take a listener on a step or two down the road, toward... Like, if they're looking at themselves right now and saying, "Wow, yeah, I'm not sure I would be okay if this fell apart." There may be some practical considerations to that, maybe their livelihood is dependent on their partner or something like that. But I think you're talking about, even more, the existential sense of like, "No, my life might fall apart if I weren't with this person or... " How does someone go about starting to restore that sense of inner safety, so that they can bring that to the relationship? Sherry Gaba: Well, maybe that... This is a good time to talk about early trauma because if we grew up in a situation where our parents were really unavailable, maybe they were addicts, alcoholics themselves, maybe there was a divorce, maybe were raised by a single parent and they were busy working and you felt invisible because your needs weren't being met, maybe you were in a situation where you were almost parenting your parent. Maybe you were abandoned by a parent. There's this panic that sets in. And then what happens is, you're looking for anything outside yourself to fill up that pain and that panic, and you'll cling to anything and anyone. You're craving for something else to make you feel whole. So the question is, if you're already in a relationship, what draws you to this person? Is it because this person adds to your life? You feel like it brings joy to the joy that you already are as a person? Did you already feel whole as a person? Were you ever successfully single and just loving life as a single person? Or your whole basis was, "I need to attach to someone because without attaching to someone, I am lost. I'm like that child that didn't have a parent that was available to me." Sherry Gaba: Do you feel like you're not enough without that relationship? Do you feel enough anyway? Yeah, do you feel good enough even without a relationship? Are you unconsciously attempting to satisfy that developmental hungry, so that hungry ghost that people talk about, Buddhists talk about, are you trying to satisfy that? Or does that person, again, add to your sense of being, and sense of self, or are they just completing what you are not? Sherry Gaba: And are you always looking outside yourself to fix yourself, your fear, your pain, your discomfort? Or do you have that safety within yourself to... That's a great word, are you able to self-regulate yourself? Are you able to be alone at any time? I don't know if that answers your question, Neil, I think it's so great that we're diving into the fact that if you're already in a relationship, do you have these things? And I don't want people to freak out and think, "Oh my God, I'm a love addict, and I'm in a relationship, I better get out because I gotta find myself." No, no, no, no, it's not about that. But I think there are ways to start creating... And see, do you have early trauma? Were you abandoned? And then if you were, how to start healing from that. For me, my trauma was so early, it's unbelievable, I was in an incubator for two and a half months. So I started out in the world unregulated. I started out not having that early bonding with my mother, she didn't hold me for two and a half months, and then even when I came home, she went to work right away, so she was unavailable. And I didn't get what I needed, and so I was always looking for something outside of me to fill me up. I was always looking for that "breast," so to speak. Sherry Gaba: That's kind of a metaphor, but it's... I was always looking for something else to completely... 'Cause I felt complete, I didn't get that mirroring, I didn't get that bonding, I didn't get that security, that safety. So those are some things to think about, what was your early childhood like? Did you go through any of the things that I mentioned earlier? And if you did, how do you work on those issues? For me, I got into therapy with someone that does what's called somatic experiencing, and now, I'm a practitioner of that, and it's getting back into your body and being able to be okay within yourself, instead of always running away from yourself. Always thinking something else can complete you when everything you have is right there within you. Neil Sattin: Great, and yes, we've had Peter Levine on the show actually, to talk about somatic experiencing. Sherry Gaba: Oh fast, you've had some amazing guest. Neil Sattin: Fortunately yeah, I'm so happy that he was willing to chat and I do believe that that, in particular, is such a powerful modality for healing early traumas. And what I love about it because it's based on your sensation, you don't necessarily have to know what it was. It goes by this theory that the trauma is just stored in there and so you're giving your body a chance to process things that are stuck, that it should have processed through whenever the trauma, and it could be a "big-T" trauma or "little-T" trauma, whenever that occurred. So there's nothing abnormal about you or anyone with having something that might be stuck within you that just needs to be healed. Sherry Gaba: I love that. I want people to know that there is nothing wrong with you. There might have been something that happened to you as you said, a big trauma, or little trauma, and let's discharge that energy that's been built up so that we can get unblocked so that we can bring in health and wholeness. So that you can feel complete just within yourself, so you don't have to seek outside yourself to feel good. The truth of the matter is just being on this call right now, is the first step because people are going to become aware like, "Oh, this is interesting, let's get curious about this." And then from there, make a decision to change, learning to stop looking for external solutions for problems that can be solved within. Sherry Gaba: Really explore their personal fears, and really get out of the denial, that's a huge piece with addiction. Addiction is the only disease that says, "I don't have a problem." So really, open yourself up to, "Yeah, there might be something here." And really examine those early suppressed traumas that might have occurred early on in life that we just talked about. Maybe go ahead and listen to your Peter Levine interview, so you can understand trauma a little bit better. Start self-parenting yourself. Really look... I sometimes suggest to people, "Find a photo of you when you were a child and stick that photo right next to your bed, and just start loving that inner child that maybe didn't get what they needed." Become really a loving, forgiving and compassionate person to yourself. Sherry Gaba: You didn't just wake up one day and go, "Oh, I want to be a love addict. I want to feel pain all the time. I want to feel like I have to be... " You have to completely or I feel like nothing. No, that isn't what you... You didn't cause anything, it's just from your experiences in your history, this is what happened, that energy never got completed, as you said. And just use the pain to grow and prepare for a healthy relationship or the relationship that you're already in, and just really begin to trust in yourself and to let go of what no longer is serving you and find a really great therapist, find a really great coach but somebody that really understands perhaps, trauma work. I don't know if coaches really do trauma work, some may, but you want to make sure they understand the trauma piece. Maybe, find a sex and love addicts anonymous meeting. There's so much support out there to begin working on these issues. Neil Sattin: Right. And in your book, "The Marriage and Relationship Junkie" you do offer some great tools for people who are looking to rebuild, and you don't have to be alone in order to go through them. So I'm glad that you qualified that earlier on, where you said, "If you're in a relationship, you don't have to panic and abandon just to find yourself." Sherry Gaba: Right. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Sherry Gaba: Exactly. And you know what you said too earlier, it's such a great feeling, and I think you said it, I think you used the word, extreme. I divorced my... I've had multiple marriages, multi-relationships, I divorced my ex-husband, he was an alcoholic and he couldn't get sober, and I really gave it my best. And I was lost when that relationship ended because it was a very codependent, obsessive relationship, but once I healed and I started doing things for myself, I joined a great 12-Step Program, I took up canoeing. I started really finding myself, I was able to then hopefully pick somebody else that was much better for me because I knew that no matter what, I could be on my own. And I have to be honest, I never felt that way before. I had never been able to really be alone successfully and be happy, and I truly was happy and single. And that brings me to another topic which would be as changing your verbiage around it, instead of saying to yourself, "Oh, I can't be alone. Oh my God, I can't be alone." It's like, "I can be single." Doesn't that sound a lot better? "I can be single" rather than, "I can't be alone"? Neil Sattin: Yeah, so much better and it just makes me think of how very few of us truly are alone, ever. I suppose that is true for some people but if you're listening to this podcast, you're here with me, at this moment. And odds are that there are other people in your life who care about you and who want to support you, and not see you in pain and not see you suffering. Sherry Gaba: Right, exactly. We all want to bond, we all want to connect. The opposite of addiction is connection, but the point of this call is really healthy connection. That's the point of your podcast, healthy relationships. And so that's... But it's not about stigmatizing you if you are in a codependent relationship. How great that you're on this call and now you can start changing things up a little bit and loosen up that codependent relationship, find other things in your life that help you feel good about yourself. And if you have that trauma, really start working on that trauma 'cause that's really where it all begins. I do some coaching, I'm a psychotherapist, but I can't tell you how many times I'll have a coaching client and they're just stuck. And that stuck-ness... They paid for every class, they listened to all of the podcasts, they bought all the books, but there's something inside of them that's stuck. And so to me, it really begins with moving that trauma out of your body, so that you can have a purposeful life and a meaningful relationship. Neil Sattin: Yeah. So a couple of things, first, let's just regroup, and I want to mention to you listening, I've mentioned a couple of other episodes, if you want to check out the Peter Levine episode, he's been on a couple times, but you definitely want to hear episode 29, which was the first one that he was on, to talk specifically about trauma and healing trauma. The other episode he was on, he was talking more about building resilience which is also important, but not as relevant to what we're talking about here. Also, the episode with Alex Katehakis, talking about addiction and what's involved in our neurobiology of addiction and how to heal that. That is episode 116. So I just wanted you to have those so you can listen to them later. And Sherry, I'm really curious because so many of the tools that you offer in "The Marriage and Relationship Junkie" are very practical, and I hear you as a strong voice of support for someone getting help, and I'm always talking about that here on the show. That there are some things where it's just easier if you're not trying to do it by yourself or trying to wing it, or reading a book and trying to put it into practice. That being said, I would love to offer our listeners something really powerful here that they could do or they could try on their own, that would give them a taste of the kind of healing that we're talking about, a taste of the personal empowerment and freedom that we're talking about. Neil Sattin: And so I'm wondering if just speaking those words, if there's anything that comes to mind for you that we could offer our listeners as a way to get started, to jump-start the process, whether they're single or in relationship or if you have a different idea for both, then that's good too 'cause there are plenty of single people who are also listening to the show. I hear from you, but all the time to learn so that when you're in your next relationship, you're prepared, and I so appreciate that. I wish I had had a show like this, honestly to listen to way back when... Sherry Gaba: Well, I think in the beginning, is just to see if you have this issue, is to maybe take my quiz, if you go to sherrygaba.com, I have a love addiction quiz. And that's just a first step in seeing if you are a love addict. I also have a quiz at sherrygaba.com on whether or not you're codependent. Because you can be codependent and not be a love addict. A codependent may be someone who's always trying to fix, control everything outside themselves, addicted to controlling people, places, and things. But a love addict is a little bit more specific, and that is that you are addicted to love, relationship, romance and feel empty if you're not in a relationship or with somebody. So that's a great place to start, is to take those quizzes, and see if it applies. I have some free ebooks that go along with those quizzes. My book is almost like a workbook, every chapter has questions for you to answer, to journal on. It's really... It's years and years of personal and professional experience in a book. Neil Sattin: Yeah, I found that it was really a great synthesis of lots of different modalities, and you talk about inner child work which you mentioned a few moments ago, you talk about healing trauma, you talk about taking proactive steps in your own life so that you're building your own strength and presence in the world. Sherry Gaba: And even talking about the law of attraction, on how to attract somebody in a healthy way. Because energetically, we attract what we are. I'm sure you've had conversations with people related to positive psychology or law of attraction, and the truth of the matter is energetically, we're going to attract exactly where we are in our life. When you're in a healthy place, you're going to attract healthy, when you're not, you're going to attract not healthy. Neil Sattin: Right. I would love it, and I'm putting you on the spot here, so I'm admitting, freely admitting that there's maybe a little bit of pressure here, but I'm curious, yeah, if I've listened to this conversation and thought, "Yep, that's me. Like I don't need to take the quiz, I know it's me, and oh my God, with what Sherry just said about attracting what is within, is what we attract without, now I'm really screwed." What can we do to help someone experience a shift even around that? How do you experience that shift in who you are, let's say... What's coming to me is like who you are energetically and what you want to be in the world, in such a way that you can feel what it's like to see the world with different glasses on? Sherry Gaba: That's a very broad question. I don't even know how to answer that because I think it's a process, I don't think there's an instant fix. Neil Sattin: Yeah, of course not. Sherry Gaba: I think the only thing I can say is the fact that they're on this call and they're hearing things that feel like that could be me when they're actually moving out of denial and that's the first step. I suppose, what I would say is, the first step is waking up to the truth. Waking up to the truth and "Oh my God, this... I realize that I am not complete unless I'm coupled up." And just knowing that is the first step. And then the next step is to... As you said, you can read a book that doesn't always do the magic. I'd love for people to pick up my book and dive deeper into even my story to see if they can relate and all the exercises. But hiring somebody like yourself who does relationship coaching or maybe working with someone like me who dives more into love addiction piece, I'm not sure exactly what you're asking. You definitely put me on the spot. Neil Sattin: Okay. Well, I feel like this will take form, this will take shape, so I'm not worried. Sherry Gaba: Yeah, one thing I could do with everybody right now, which might be a way to metaphorically move to the other side in the moment, is I can do some positive affirmations right now on the call. And then, we know that positive affirmations change the wiring within your brain, and if you keep doing it it's going to keep changing the wiring in your brain of how you see things from negative to positive. So I'm going to say some affirmations maybe Neil you can repeat after me and everybody listening, and this might answer your question of, what would that feel like if we were in the middle of that transition from emptiness to wholeness? Does that... What do you think? Okay. Okay. So repeat after me, I'm a lovable and valuable person. Neil Sattin: I am a lovable and valuable person. Sherry Gaba: I am deserving of a healthy partner. Neil Sattin: I am deserving of a healthy partner. Sherry Gaba: Who is capable of loving, respecting and honoring me as a person. Neil Sattin: A healthy partner who is capable of loving, honoring and respecting me as a person. Sherry Gaba: Withdrawal will not last forever. Neil Sattin: Withdrawal will not last forever. Sherry Gaba: My needs and wants are important. Neil Sattin: My needs and wants are important. Sherry Gaba: All my experiences contribute to my growth. Neil Sattin: All my experiences contribute to my growth. Sherry Gaba: I am learning to let go of dependencies on others. Neil Sattin: I'm learning to let go of dependencies on others. Sherry Gaba: And relying on myself for happiness. Neil Sattin: And relying on myself for happiness. Sherry Gaba: I walk away from toxic people. Neil Sattin: I walk away from toxic People. Sherry Gaba: I create my own truth in love. Neil Sattin: I create my own truth in love. Sherry Gaba: And that's that. And so maybe there is a little energetic shift that people might be experiencing right now. Again, I'm not about instant fixes but this is a beginning point, this is a starting point, and that's really all we have is a starting point and then we transit, we grow from there. Neil Sattin: Yeah, one thing that I really love about that exercise and the practice of positive affirmation, yes, there's the way that it reinforces a different neuro pathway within us and a different energetic pathway in terms of what we project into the world around us. Sherry Gaba: Yes. Neil Sattin: On top of that, I feel like I got to recognize, "Oh these are the places where there's a little bit of dissonance within me, like when I say it, I can't say it with 100% conviction. And so if that's true, that I'm not able to say it with 100% conviction, then to me that indicates a place where there's some work to be done. Sherry Gaba: Yeah, that's so true, because for the law of attraction to work or to attract what it is that you desire, you have to be congruent with what you're saying and believing and what you're actually doing on the outside. So, that's exactly true. There is a dissonance, if you're feeling any kind of like, "Oh, that's not completely true," then there's a really good chance that how you're acting in the world, how you're behaving in the world or being in the world is not a match to how you really feel. You need to work on that a little bit because the congruency is what allows you to attract either the healthy relationship that you desire or the one that you're in. Neil Sattin: Right. This reminds me a little bit of what might be the next step in this process. It's not the next step necessarily, but a lot of times with my clients, there can be this moment where you realize like, "Oh." For instance let's say, this wasn't true for me in this moment, but it has been true in the past, where I might say, "Oh, I'm worthy of being loved and I'm lovable." And I think I've even shared with my audience in a past episode, a time when that actually didn't really feel true for me. And so when that's not entirely true for you, the choices that you make are totally different than if you are to... If you recognize, "Oh, there was a little bit of a hitch when I said that statement out loud," or it could have been one of the other things that Sherry just offered you, then you can ask yourself, "Well, if I did think that I was lovable and worthy of love, how does that act? How would I act in the world from that perspective?" You get to try on that lens... Sherry Gaba: Yeah. Neil Sattin: Once you've identified where it's missing, You can be like, "Well, if I were that what would the world look like?" Sherry Gaba: And even more important is to make friends with that intuition that you know to be true. In other words, don't run away from what you know to be true, because then you're stepping into that denial lens again, is where, "Oh, I feel this, and I know it's not right but I don't care, I'm just going to close my eyes." And my whole mission in life is to keep people awake to their truth. So not to be afraid of the truth, the truth doesn't mean you have to break up with your partner this minute, it doesn't mean that you have to spend the rest of your life soul searching, it doesn't mean that you have to go get a divorce, it doesn't mean that you have to get off that dating app, it just means you need to just become aware and to stay in truth. And as long as you do that, the transformation is possible. Neil Sattin: Yeah, I take a really strong stand for the process that we go through as individuals and the effect that that can have on our partnerships. So lest do you think that if you're in a dysfunctional relationship, the whole point of this show isn't that it's perfect, the point is, it probably isn't perfect. And so you get to take steps that help you transform you and thus transform the whole dynamic. Sherry Gaba: Yeah, and not be afraid, let go of that fear, just welcome up the chance to transform. Welcome up that the exactly that life is messy and as long as you stay away and you're willing to grow... We're all growing, we're all changing, we're all making better choices, hopefully, learning from our mistakes but it's not about beating ourselves up, it's about having the great compassion of humanity that we are, that we're just humans doing the best that we can. That was one of the points of writing the book, "The marriage and Relationship Junkie" was that I really wanted to eradicate the stigma around someone like myself who's been married multiple times, who's had multiple relationships instead of walking around thinking "I'm a failure," or those that read my book think that they're a failure because they just couldn't get it right, is to just have an understanding of where that began and how can I change that the trajectory of the future? Sherry Gaba: So that I, maybe, do things in a different way and make different choices, 'cause life is filled with choices. And to own up to those choices, not to beat yourself up because of those choices, because there was a reason you made those choices. My choices were already paved for me when I was born two and a half months early, there was nothing I was going to be able to do about that. I had separation anxiety, I had abandonment issues, and that was going to be... Those feelings were going to be based on the decisions that I made in relationships. Neil Sattin: Right, and they were nobody's fault. Sherry Gaba: Nobody's fault. So we're not victims, we're just people that come from different histories, different experiences, and there's a reason why we are. I did one podcast with a woman who's been married six times, she had no idea, she started hysterically crying on the call. She was the host, because she goes, "Oh my God, you have labeled what I've always known, but didn't know what to call it, that's me." And it's like, "Okay, that's me? Okay great. So let's get curious about that." Doesn't mean we have to divorce our sixth husband, it just means, "Am I in a healthy relationship? Did I make a good choice and what can I do to heal all of that that brought me here today?" Neil Sattin: Right. They say the sixth time is a charm for a reason, right? Sherry Gaba: I think it's the third one. [chuckle] Neil Sattin: I'm just kidding. Sherry Gaba: Oh, okay. [laughter] My attitude is, do until you do it right, I don't think I ever... I won't say never, I'm not really interested at this point in my life, getting married again, but I certainly... I'm enjoying a healthy relationship, and I think that anything's possible. Anything's possible. Neil Sattin: Yeah, so one important thing that I'd like to chat about before we go, because I think one of the hesitations that people have around labeling and use that word a moment ago, labeling themselves as an addict, is the stigma that comes with it, the sense of, "Oh, this is inescapable, if I admit that I'm an addict then... " You hear the talk about a cliche like, "Once an addict, always an addict." And I'm curious for you, what's the truth in that versus that there is a true path for healing and... 'Cause I like that sense that the truth will set you free. If you're willing to look at your patterns, then that gives you a whole lot of power to make different kinds of choices for yourself and to heal the dysfunctional ways that you're looking for connection and regulation in your life and create positive ways of doing that. Sherry Gaba: Well, I think if you are a love addict per se, let's say, I'm not going to address substance abuse 'cause that might be a different... That goes a different way. That's a whole other topic, but if you feel that you might be a love addict, and you feel like you've had early trauma, I highly, highly recommend getting the support you need around that finding a really great somatic experiencing practitioner, reading up on Peter Levine's work, maybe even getting EMDR, that's another modality. I think that really healing that early trauma is important because, without that, I don't think you can make choices that are going to be in your best interest 'cause you haven't healed what is already inside of you that needs to be discharged in order to bring positivity back into your life. That work was the greatest work that I ever did in my life, join a sex and love addicts anonymous meeting, do that work, so you can bring healthy love into your life. I can't emphasize that enough because once I did that work, my whole life changed. Am I still a love addict? I guess is what you're asking, yes, I have to always be mindful for the rest of my life about love addict codependent behaviors. If I start getting obsessive, if I start just focusing on the person I'm with, start giving up my friendships, there's a... Sherry Gaba: I have to be continually vigilant at those things. And what I'm here to say is, once you do that work of trauma and self-regulation, you're less apt to become codependent again or making someone else your whole life, because you don't need to do that anymore because everything that you know and feel is within you, you feel whole already, so there's no need to be attached to just that one person, but I still have to be vigilant about it. Does that make sense? Neil Sattin: Absolutely, and the question, it's kind of a rhetorical question that comes up, is like, "Why wouldn't you want to be vigilant about those things?" I would want to know, first thing, if I'm starting to sacrifice my friendships and disappear into my relationship, I would want to know that, at any point in time, addict or not. Sherry Gaba: A few are an example of raw and real. You actually have a boyfriend and he's going to be going away for a couple of weeks, and that early piece of trauma comes up and goes. "This feels a little bit scary," like, "Oh, am I being abandoned?" And then I just... But because I've done the work, I can sit with that and I can be with it, and notice it and feel it and discharge it instead of becoming needy and obsessive and go into fear, "He's going to leave me," all of those things that I would have done in the past. Instead, I can just be the curious observer of the feelings and the thoughts and I can let it go. And that's a real example. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Sherry Gaba: That I'm still that baby that was born two and a half months early, but I have tools and ways to deal with those feelings that might come up rather than act out on them. Neil Sattin: Yeah, yeah, that's great, that's great. And I'm reminded too that it clicked into place for me actually, when you were describing that, which is that I think probably, part of that, the dopamine rush that we were talking about earlier and that pleasure, it actually is creating the illusion of safety. And I think it's been theorized, maybe John Gorman was even talking about this, that if we didn't feel that temporary love blindness at the beginning, we might never get into a relationship anyway. You almost need that to jump-start you into connection. But that being said, there are so much healthier ways of developing safety, and you were just talking about that inner safety and then there are also, of course, the healthy ways of developing safety in your relationship so that when your partner goes away for two weeks, there's true safety there. So you can counterbalance your inner safety with, "And we've created a container that actually I can rely on and I trust." Sherry Gaba: Exactly, a container within and maybe a container in the relationship. But certainly, that container within is vital, or you're going to do behaviors that... You're going to start doing all those obsessive behaviors, those needy behaviors that are not going to help the relationship. Neil Sattin: Right, they're crucial, crucial stuff. Well, Sherry Gaba, thank you so much for being here with us today, what a far-ranging conversation we've had. And of course, I feel like we could talk longer, but I want to respect your time. Your book, "The Marriage and Relationship Junkie" is a great read full of very practical stuff for you if you're thinking that this is something you identify with on some level and there's a path towards recovery in the book, so I highly recommend that. Sherry, you mentioned your website sherrygaba.com, and it's S-H-E-R-R-Y. I guess we should clarify that. We'll have links to all of this in the transcript for the show, which as a reminder, you can get if you visit neilsattin.com/gaba, G-A-B-A, or text the word "passion" to the number 33444 and follow the instructions. Sherry, I really appreciate your time today. Sherry Gaba: Oh my God, I love... This is probably one of the best interviews I've had. You truly know your subject, and you've obviously done a lot of homework and work on yourself and your relationship and I'm really grateful for your platform and for giving me this opportunity today, thank you so, so much. Neil Sattin: You are so welcome.  

Mirror of Intimacy Podcast Ep 3 - Alex Katehakis & Sahar Pirzada discuss ways to better educate young Muslim women about sex and sexuality.

We have the fortune to sit down with Alex Katehakis again (we interviewed her in Episode 64) to talk about her new book Sexual Reflections: A Workbook for Designing and Celebrating Your Sexual Health Plan.   You won't want to miss this one- Alex brings her signature wisdom, warmth, and intelligence to a conversation packed with ideas to help you experience your sexual self as an integrated, shame-resilient person.   You can get your copy of Sexual Reflections from Amazon.com https://www.amazon.com/Sexual-Reflections-Workbook-Designing-Celebrating/dp/1717166121/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1528494124&sr=8-1&keywords=sexual+reflections   You can learn more about Alex and her work at: www.centerforhealthysex.com  

We have the fortune to sit down with Alex Katehakis again (we interviewed her in Episode 64) to talk about her new book Sexual Reflections: A Workbook for Designing and Celebrating Your Sexual Health Plan.   You won't want to miss this one- Alex brings her signature wisdom, warmth, and intelligence to a conversation packed with ideas to help you experience your sexual self as an integrated, shame-resilient person.   You can get your copy of Sexual Reflections from Amazon.com https://www.amazon.com/Sexual-Reflections-Workbook-Designing-Celebrating/dp/1717166121/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1528494124&sr=8-1&keywords=sexual+reflections   You can learn more about Alex and her work at: www.centerforhealthysex.com  

When you start a relationship, something special becomes possible, something unique that the world has never known before. However - how do you figure out what that “something special” is? And how can your love be a vehicle for actually helping us evolve? This episode is an invitation to you to step into an experience of “shared consciousness” - what happens when you’re able to explore the space created between you and another person. Our guest is Patricia Albere, founder of the Evolutionary Collective and author of Evolutionary Relationships: Unleashing the Power of Mutual Awakening. Patricia has been guiding others on this path for years, exploring the edges of how consciousness shifts when two (or more) people step into it together. In her book, and in this episode, we talk about the practical aspects of her work - how it translates into higher levels of connectedness, personal growth, healing, feeling supported, and supporting others. And we also talk about some of the fundamental principles that are required when you want to explore and experiment with your partner (or others in your life who are up for the journey). Here is a link to the first appearance of Patricia Albere on Relationship Alive: Episode 6 - How to Deepen Intimacy through Shared Consciousness. And, as always, I’m looking forward to your thoughts on this episode and what revelations and questions it creates for you. Join us in the Relationship Alive Community on Facebook to chat about it! Resources: Check out Patricia Albere's website Read Patricia’s new book, Evolutionary Relationships: Unleashing the Power of Mutual Awakening FREE Relationship Communication Secrets Guide www.neilsattin.com/patricia2 Visit to download the transcript, or text “PASSION” to 33444 and follow the instructions to download the transcript to this episode with Patricia Albere Amazing intro/outro music graciously provided courtesy of: The Railsplitters - Check them Out Transcript: Neil Sattin: Hello and welcome to another episode of Relationship Alive. This is your host, Neil Sattin. What we're trying to do with this show is create a change in culture, and for the purposes of our conversation here, most of that change has to do with how we relate to our partners, our lovers, our spouses, our boyfriends and girlfriends and other friends. That's the foundation of the conversation that we're having here, and we're part of a larger conversation about how we relate to each other in the world in general. Neil Sattin: In order to talk more about that and where our relatedness is going, how to take conventional relationships and actually turn them into something that's deeper, more fulfilling, more enlivening, and part of the evolution of our species and our culture, I brought in someone really special who was here in the early days of the podcast. Her name is Patricia Albere and she is here on the heels of releasing her new book, Evolutionary Relationships: Unleashing the Power of Mutual Awakening. Neil Sattin: She was on Relationship Alive way back in episode six, and if you're interested in hearing that episode you can go to neilsattin.com/patricia and that will take you there so you can hear what we talked about the first time she was on the show. We may take a moment this time around to talk a little bit about mutual awakening and how to do it, which is something that we talked about back then, but otherwise we are going to dive even more deeply into the skills of relatedness and how to create something even more amazing as you explore the shared consciousness created between you and your partner, or you and someone else with whom you feel that spark of an evolutionary relationship. We're going to talk about what that means in just a moment. Neil Sattin: If you are interested in downloading the transcript and action guide for this episode, you can do that at neilsattin.com/patricia2, that's the name Patricia and the number 2, or as always, you can text the word PASSION to the number 33444 and follow the instructions, and that will get you all the information that you need. Okay, I think that's it for now. Patricia Albere, thank you so much for joining us again here today on Relationship Alive. Patricia Albere: I am just smiling, I'm just so happy to be with you and to be able to have another conversation about something that we're both passionate about. Neil Sattin: Yes. I don't want to set an unrealistic expectation but I will say that after our last conversation, I just remember this so clearly. I got off Skype and I went and found Chloe, my wife, and I was just like, "That was probably the most powerful conversation I've had up until that point." You know, it was just so expansive and it's such a treat to be able to have you back here today. Patricia Albere: Thank you. Neil Sattin: The title of your book, it's called Evolutionary Relationships, and I don't think we can really talk about the practice of mutual awakening and all of the activating principles - we will hopefully cover some of those on today's conversation - without talking about what you even mean about evolutionary relationship. How is that different than the kind of relationships that we're used to having and why is it so important? Patricia Albere: Great question. Evolutionary relationship, you can approach it from a couple of different angles. One is evolutionary. We are lucky enough as human beings to be conscious of the fact that evolution exists, that we're actually headed somewhere. For thousands of years no one had that concept at all. I mean basically we were just on the planet, we were living, we were doing whatever we were doing, and for the most part time and the movement of time was very ... It looked like things weren't even changing. Like most people's children did the same thing they did. Patricia Albere: If you think of thousands and thousands of years, the sense of no change was pretty strong. For us, we are now living at a time where the quality of change and how everything is moving is so crazily intense. Every day scientists are discovering things, there's technology. I mean it's like the newness of what is occurring and how we are hooking up and even consciousness itself is evolving, that to be connected to the fact that your relationships too are evolving, love is evolving. Patricia Albere: We think love is just some eternal expression between human beings that has been the same forever, and actually love itself is evolving. For relationships, the evolutionary quality of relationships, I talked about in the first chapter, first or second chapter, I can't remember, talking about Maslow's hierarchy. If you look at relationships from Maslow's hierarchy of needs, some relationships, none of it is bad or good, it's just different. You can have a romantic or a marriage type relationship where in a way it's at the basic needs of Maslow at the bottom, it turns into logistics. Patricia Albere: Sex is kind of very basic, you have a home together, you take care of things, you get food, you have meals, you get a new car, there can be a quality where much of the relationship starts getting devoted to just the survival needs of what it means to live together. Just even saying that sometimes you're like, "Ooh". You can feel when your relationship is sort of slipped into, that that becomes the dominant. Patricia Albere: Even if you're doing it at a high level of going on vacations and getting another fabulous car, or something else, it becomes kind of on a survival level and the relatedness is not very awake and expanded, and there aren't tons of potentials that are going to show up between you. Patricia Albere: Next level up you would move into safety and security. Most people navigate that in their relationships to feel safe, safe psychologically and physically with each other, and secure and able to trust. Next level up is belonging, a sense of being loved. Some relationships never get beyond sort of like third level up which is just that just to be loved and to feel like you have a sense of belonging, you belong to one another, is the scope and the territory of the level of relatedness which is also important and wonderful, but it isn't on the edge of evolution. Patricia Albere: Evolution is always pushing into the newness into what's possible for human beings. An evolutionary relationship is like where our human potentials and possibilities are evolving into, moving into. As you move up the scale, I went through the whole thing, but on that higher levels, there's the two higher levels, one is called actualization. You can be with a partner where you experience empowering one another to really actualize your potentials to both be successful in the world, to make a difference or whatever it is that you have a value for in that way, and to love each other from more of a place of abundance rather than need. Patricia Albere: Instead of just "I need this" or "I need a relationship for the various things", you start to feel like an overflow, like you actually have a lot to give and you can give to one another. Neil Sattin: Right. In our first conversation we talked about how in that kind of relationship you can even be taking a stand for each other, like, "I'm taking a stand for you being the best you could possibly be." Patricia Albere: Yes, definitely. I think a lot of the current things, you know, the courses and conversations, and the things that you can do are very much about empowering that sense of actualization where you have two independent human beings who are self-authoring. They're trying to really fulfill themselves, their higher purpose, their sense of self, their interior sense of self, and that you have two people loving each other from being more actualized whether it's in the world or also in your own consciousness and development. Patricia Albere: The evolutionary relationship is taking it a step further which is something that not everybody needs to do but some of us need to. If evolution is going to continue to move, the thing that is worth knowing is that it isn't just about relationship, evolution itself is happening through human consciousness and human relationship at this point. We aren't creating new creatures, in fact we're eliminating many of them. Patricia Albere: Evolution isn't fooling around with "how do we have new species", where it's interested, where the push is in the entire movement of billions of years of evolution is human consciousness is where it's happening. Where it's happening in human consciousness is no longer with just people's individual consciousness, that's been being worked with for the last few thousand years. Individual enlightenment, personal transformation, individual salvation through like religion and stuff has been - Neil Sattin: Right, that's old news. Patricia Albere: Kind of. The way I see it, that's been going on. We've been doing that for a few thousand years, somewhat, I guess okay, and we're failing in a lot of it, but that's not new. Science is pointing to that we're not separate objects, that actually the only thing that's real is exchanging. There's no there there, there's no atom. We think there's little billiard balls that we're made of. When they go down to the root of the root of what's there, they don't find anything, what they find is exchange. These little balls of exchanging energies. If you want to translate that, that is relating. What that is, is relationship and relating. Patricia Albere: Ultimately, all there is, is relating on the most fundamental levels, and the way that humans can begin to push the consciousness, awaken to and begin to be a part of, being able to manage the kind of consciousness that we need to start to get access to, kind of like atomic fusion, is what is the space between us, what is actually happening in the space between humans and how can we lean into and become awake to, and sensitive to reality together. Neil Sattin: I'm curious to know a couple of things, one is do you recall when you first became aware that that was what was happening? That there was this space between a shared consciousness that was where evolution was taking us. Was there like an "aha" moment for you around that? Patricia Albere: Yes. I didn't know about the evolutionary part until later, but my path has always been I'm like taken into experiences and then 10 years later I understand what happened. I guess I'm mystic at heart, I'm willing to not know. I'm sure I probably shared a bit of it on the first conversation that we had, but it happened in a relationship. There was a man named Peter who was a beautiful German mystic, and we fell in love and came together. His obsession for awakening and for enlightenment was from the moment he woke up all the way through his sleep. He never was interested in anything other than that and he never stopped paying attention to awakening, to consciousness, to being fully present in every moment. He was pretty obsessed. Patricia Albere: For me, I had had a background of working with thousands of people and I think my heart, my ability to love was very developed. I had a childhood that ... A great mom. My heart was very available. When we came together and I am convinced that he is my twin soul, it was one of those things that you couldn't not recognize and you couldn't not be in. The magnet that pulls us together was not ... There was no choice, it was choiceless. Patricia Albere: Our being together, what happened was was as we said yes to one another and we were so focused on each other and the space that was happening between us, and with his meditative consciousness and my capacity and attunement to love and the energies and what's going on there, and then just the way we felt about each other, we were so made one, and 24/7 we were always aware of what was happening. There was never a moment where he was unaware of what was happening with me, what was happening with us and vice versa. We never were separate, we never went in to like, "I'm just me over here, and he is just him over there, and I don't really know what's going on." Patricia Albere: Most relationships, if people look are pretty separate. There's times of relating, it's always sort of there, but a lot of the time we're functioning on two separate tracks a lot. Especially in that actualized level, you're very focused on your own separate track even though you love each other and you're supporting each other. This was being what I call interpenetrated, like we were completely inside each other and inside of this relatedness that we were together. Patricia Albere: I had four years of that before he was in a car accident, and he was brain injured, then eventually he died. I was in something where we were opening and being taken somewhere. Evolution was definitely having a field day with us. I felt it, I felt like I'd look at him sometimes like we'd make love or something would happen and I would look at him and I'd go, "Oh my god." I felt like love itself had just gone some place where it had never been before. Patricia Albere: Sometimes it felt more like it was just beautiful, and full and amazing, but there were times where I could actually feel the newness of existence finding new pathways because we were so available. Just like if you were two great tennis players, like if you're two genius tennis players, sometimes tennis goes some place where tennis has never been before. It was pretty exciting to have that in the level of relatedness. Patricia Albere: For me when I later found out many years later about evolution and about the edge of evolution, and about consciousness, I could see that what I had experienced with him was part of the future of where we were headed. Where not just couples were headed, but that the multiple beloved. There is a way to be connected that has that mystical dimension, that has our divinity being evoked as much as even more than just our humanity and our limitations. That's pretty exciting. Neil Sattin: Yes. When I hear that what I am brought to is thinking about the capacity that we have to experience the miracle of life, the blessing of interrelatedness to bring that into even just our simple day-to-day interactions which brings a quality of aliveness that once you experience it I think it's challenging to be like, "Yeah, I'm just gonna go back to paying the bills and pretending this doesn't exist." Patricia Albere: It's true. There's even a more, to me, kind of exciting opportunity in all of it for those of us who are drawn to love, drawn to pay attention to relatedness as you are, as we are, and I'm sure the people that are obviously listening to this. The thing that's so exciting that I didn't know when I was with Peter was the quality of the consciousness that we were developing was different than nondual consciousness. Those people who have done a lot of meditation and a lot of work in nondual quality of consciousness which is usually what people consider being enlightened or awake. Patricia Albere: It's completely different than that. There's actually a new kind of consciousness that's absolutely enlightened but it's not that. When they do brain studies they can actually see that when you're meditating which is by yourself with your eyes closed in silence, you are learning how to let go of thinking, you're learning how to move into a certain state where they find that the mind when they measure it, you're letting go of your particular relationship to the world. You go into a deep state of relaxation and the brain goes into a certain place. Patricia Albere: When you're doing the kind of practices that we're doing, that I'm practicing and working with people where it's like super focus with the other, with the space between, your brain goes into this amazingly other place, it ignites different lobes and parietal. I don't remember the names of all of it but it activates your brain in such a way that it goes into a place of flow, it goes into a place of like joy and positive love, like different kinds of experiences and energies that lift people. Lift their mood and lift their stabilization there, and it also allows them to be incredibly engaged in the world. Patricia Albere: Like you're in contact with this kind of intimacy, and love and care for the trees, for your kids. The feeling of intimacy, like everything is touching everything, like you feel like you're inside your cat when your petting their fur, like you're both the fur and the cat. It makes sense because ultimately with love or lovers, people that have studied tantra, you experience your lover, you're like inside them experiencing their experience, your experience and then something else simultaneously. This consciousness is that. Patricia Albere: I think it's way more attuned to eyes open, moving around in this world, and it is what is necessary. It's a kind of flow state rather than just being in yourself, focused on your higher purpose, focused on how you feel, grounded in your body. All of that is good but it's so separate, and it's not like, "You know, as long I am completely focused on my own subjective experience, and how I feel, and how I'm moving, and what I want and where I'm headed and all the rest of it", I'm not all of that related. Patricia Albere: That makes a certain kind of flow not possible, it also makes the fact that 7.5 billion people right now moving towards 10 billion in 2050, to me, evolution is not that interested in everyone individually really knowing themselves only, it's not going to really work. Neil Sattin: It's going to be a lot of life coaches. Patricia Albere: Oh my god, we're going to have a problem. We need to learn how to be like those sports teams, and the people that, well we see them become like one organism, and then spectacularly empowered to be individuals within it. Like the way basketball team that's really got that oneness, all the team members are like knocking it out of the park but they're not operating individually, there's this oneness of the way that they're flowing and moving together that's tastable. My work is about ... We've hacked into how do you bring people into that level of consciousness and relatedness without having to have like a basketball or a violin. Neil Sattin: There are two places I want to go right now, one is giving you listening a taste of what we're talking about, like how this actually happens, and then there's the question that's in my mind around like how do you know if a certain person that you're interacting with, how do you know if this evolutionary potential is there between the two of you? Patricia Albere: Interesting. The first thing would be, as we've talked about, people can download a couple of chapters of the book in evolutionarycollective.com. You personally need to first go, "What is she talking about? And who am I in relationship to this?" If it starts to make more and more sense, if you feel like you're a candidate or maybe you're quoted for this edge of evolution, to understand more about it and to begin to experience it for yourself. Patricia Albere: There are ways that we take people into the practice. There are certain practices like meditation that give you a very powerful experience of being in this consciousness with another human being who's also interested in being the consciousness with you, because you need two people that are mutually interested which is one of the great things and it's one of the problems because you can't do it by yourself. You can't just do it with anybody. If you have somebody sitting across from you who's kind of going, "I don't really wanna do this and I don't really wanna be here", it's not going to work. Patricia Albere: The first thing is find out for yourself, then from there ... You read the book together, you could start to do the practices, you could then begin to invite someone into like, "Would you be willing to experiment with me and see, and see what happens for us?", like you and your wife, and start to see if something begins to open in a way that is compelling for both of you. Neil Sattin: Actually you were just mentioning talking about the brain activity that might be involved in this kinds of practice. We just released an interview with Alex Katehakis who, she focuses mainly on addiction, and sex, and love addiction, and the power of relatedness in healing the pathways that went offline and that created an opportunity for addiction to emerge in a person. I can imagine this practice will have an enormous healing potential for connection, like if you're in a place that feels really disconnected from your partner if you can invite them into it in a way where they feel like, "Yeah, I'm willing to give that a whirl." Neil Sattin: The kind of presence with each other that we're talking about, and we'll get a little bit more into that I think, offers a healing experience when you're bringing those parts of your brain back online. This is total speculation, but it must be that when you set up that kind of resonance that's what allows this shared consciousness to happen. Patricia Albere: Yes, definitely. It was so amazing. I just came from teaching for like almost eight days or nine days which isn't usual, I mean normally I have some breaks in between. We have the people that are very, very interested in what can happen between people who are really inside this way of practicing and want to work together instead on their personal work. We have 100 people who are doing these kinds of practices with each other and just spent five days together in a retreat. Patricia Albere: They're practicing all year long and we meet a couple of times a year, so we're building this quality of the beloved, of this amazing ridiculous-like levels of our nervous systems getting hooked up. What you're saying is, like the people that understand attachment theory and the various kinds of ways in which people develop, this is first of all like when people are inside of something that's large like that and the level of connectedness is so absolute, the pathways around not having had healthy attachment, and not being able to trust, and not being able to relax literally start getting handled without even paying attention to it. Patricia Albere: So you're not actually processing that stuff, you're actually in a larger nervous system that's already stabilizing and harmonizing and regulating you which is crazy powerful as far as healing people. We're not doing it for that reason but that is happening. The other thing ... One of the most exciting things that's happened at least up until this week, the group is from all over, everybody came. There are people from Japan, and Australia, and Europe, and New York, and Vermont, and California. Patricia Albere: We were all together and we've all been working together for anywhere as from one to eight years, there are people that have been in that. What started to happen, we were all together is you know how like when you're working with someone, and consciousness-wise, they can all of a sudden shift their consciousness and become totally silent or totally focused, or they could drop into a certain kind of depth reliably? You can just point the there and they go, "Whop", and they kind of go there. Patricia Albere: Our collective being, because it actually feels like something that's bigger than us, literally has new skills. It was amazing. We could be in this powerful sense of unification, and focus and depth of love, and then if I said something you could tell if somebody started to think, there was a tiny bit of fragmentation, I could just point to it and it would just be like, "Woo." Patricia Albere: The level of unity. One of the women shared this morning, we had a call earlier, she said she's always felt like a little bit afraid to speak up for herself in certain situations that are challenging. She always thought she should and blah, blah, blah, and she said there is something that is so powerfully in her now that she can't not. Almost like something was, some strength was placed - in her level of not being alone, her level of this consciousness connection that we have, she's standing on something that she never stood on before and it's changing her behavior. Which is kind of cool! Neil Sattin: Yes, very cool. Bringing that back to the context of romantic relationship, it's very common that the battles that emerge are around actually fighting for connection, fighting to prove that you're not alone, and it can feel like you're really alone. Again, I can just imagine how creating a backdrop of connectedness has such a powerful impact on the level of trust in relationship as one example. Patricia Albere: Yes. Part of what the practices are, I mean there is a main one but there are some different things, is where you learn to make the connection is not on the surface, it's not on the personality level, it's not even on that subtle connection level where you're feeling your heart, and there's like a deeper place that people usually are trained to connect from. We're actually moving it from the subtle to this causal dimension which is the deepest origination point of that particular human being and yourself. Patricia Albere: When I can work with people I can get them to drop into this place, and from that place you're not solid. You're like this opening of who you are that's very particular but it's not a solid object, it's like what the scientists are saying - you're like this space of potential as Neil. When you and I connect from that deepest opening that you are, and you can see into the deepest place of where I am, and we literally start to connect from there, two spaces could connect, two fragrances can connect, two stones can't. Things that are solid can't actually interpenetrate. Patricia Albere: When you start to build that level of the we, like you literally become a new kind of wine. Your grape and my grape, we become Merlot. When you're deepening and deepening into that, now does it mean that your personality and the crazy things that drive each other crazy go away? No. We still have separatenesses that are still going to operate but we have that to ... That becomes louder and louder and a place to return to and stand on. So that when you're dealing with the things that are different and challenging, you don't lose each other, you do it from being connected instead of separate. Patricia Albere: Most arguments are completely separate. That's why people love having fights and making love because when you make love and you all of a sudden go, "Oh, it's you, it's me. You know, I remember you. You know, you don't look like the evil guy who's making me crazy." You go back to that place where the real connection is, and we have a very sophisticated but powerful way to just have humans find that, nurture that, deepen that because that's also where divinity arises from. Patricia Albere: We include our human limitations and failings, but there's some source that I know Peter and I found where I felt myself as more beautiful, and more powerful. It was like I was almost witnessing her as he was. It was like some way of me being myself that I had never experienced nor had I ever been received in that way. My work is really devoted to deepening that for people, exploring that not as a spiritual bypass kind of thing but as making that louder and louder, and clearer, and more rich and substantial so that the other levels of us are kind of put more in their place. They're not everything. Neil Sattin: Yes. We have had Jett Psaris on the show, one of the authors of Undefended Love, I'm not sure if her conversation will have aired by the time. We may do this one first. One of the places that she comes from, I'm not sure if you're familiar with her work at all is basically getting couples to the place where they're able to be totally open and vulnerable with each other. Neil Sattin: When we're young we start out from a place like that and then we end up suffering some wound or something happens that creates a crack in the veneer of everything being one and perfect which gives us a really hard emotional internal experience. From that our personality emerges which she talks about as basically all of our ego structures that are about protecting us from the experience, from what we're afraid will happen if we're that vulnerable again. Neil Sattin: Her practice is a lot about going inwards when you feel that fear happening, that closing happening. I love that this is almost like the equal and opposite approach to very similar way of getting at the essential self. Like what is there beneath the veneer of personality. Patricia Albere: Yes. It's interesting because as you're speaking I'm realizing the direct access to the core which actually is findable  - interestingly -  I don't know why but it's almost like giving people ... Like if you're doing remote viewing and you give them coordinates. The coordinate of finding this deepest place in oneself is actually findable even though people think they can't, they find it. Neil Sattin: Is that something we could talk about now? Patricia Albere: I'm just saying when you find that and you deepen into that then when stuff comes up there's a way in the way that we practice where we turn towards whatever is there together. If I'm feeling defended, I'm feeling hard like cardboard, and I'm sensing into like the phenomenological reality of feeling separate. That would happen with Peter, sometimes we'd go, "Wow, it feels really flat." We'd go, "Yeah, it does, doesn't it?" we were like kids, like we were so curious about whatever was there, we didn't have like a certain kind of preference that it had to be always profound or deep. Patricia Albere: Whatever was there, we were like we wanted to be close to that, and we wanted to be close together with it. When you turn that way towards whatever is there even if it's a weird defensive thing, it seems to unravel, it tends to show itself without you trying to do anything, and it tends to, in my experience, the power of things dissolving in the face of "the two" being with it instead of it's just my process and and it's my stuff. It's exciting because it moves very quickly and it feels different when you're not just by yourself working on your stuff. Neil Sattin: Yes. It feels to me like there's alchemy in the space. Patricia Albere: Yes, that's a good way of saying it, interesting. Yes, definitely. Part of what I'm excited about too, I mean I've worked for 40 years with people with their individual work, and I love people, and I've always been committed to people being able to express their highest, deepest selves and why they're here. For the people who are able to not make it all about them and want to explore the edges of where evolutionary relationships could go and what's possible together, what I find is that the kind of activation and healing, and empowering people to move forward is just a hundred times more powerful, and it makes sense. Patricia Albere: If I was creating the universe, instead of having everybody selfishly working on themselves individually forever as the fastest mode, that wouldn't make sense. It makes sense that if we somehow find a way to come together that everything goes faster, that we're rewarded for that makes sense to me. Neil Sattin: Yes. Patricia Albere: It's more efficient, it's kind of like I can't build a house by myself, if we're like a hundred people we can do it. Neil Sattin: Honestly, I'm also thinking about the power, like in the power of relatedness. I was just reading a book by Deborah Tannen about friendships among women, and it was talking about this girl who, she was on the autism spectrum, and seemingly incurable and getting worse. No amount of therapy, no amount of intervention from a teacher, like nothing was helping, and then she made a friend who actually accepted her. I think they connected around horses or something like that, and did this amazing turnaround where she went from being completely shut down to being open, socially engaged. Neil Sattin: It was like the power of healing that was there in the relatedness versus trying to fix something, or cure something. Patricia Albere: That's so beautiful. Here's another thing I'll throw in that you'll probably appreciate. I don't know if everyone will appreciate this. In this evolutionary piece, when you think about evolution there are jumps to evolution. We went from nothing to matter, so there was geosphere, there was just this dead planet here, and then from a dead planet life showed up which is kind of crazy, like how did that happen. There are jumps that just are completely miraculous. From dead matter to life, and then from life, from single celled creatures, we have Einstein, we have geniuses and human beings, and plants, and birds and everything come to life, and then humans with consciousness which is just a miracle. Patricia Albere: From humans, we have what he calls the thinking layer. Teilhard de Chardin called that the noosphere , he said we go from the biosphere which is life and human life, to the thinking layer which is the noosphere which is all of culture, and language, and art, and philosophy, and psychology, everything that you're talking about on your show, and love. All of that he called the noosphere, and you can see it in the internet, you can see the physicality of this noosphere, hooking up, hooking up, hooking up, so that we have omnsicience. We can know anything anytime, we can contact each other. Patricia Albere: If the aliens land outside my house like in the next five minutes, if I captured it on my phone, the whole world will know in about 10 minutes. If it was real, but it was compelling enough, billions of people would be focused on the same image and the same words in a heartbeat. It is unbelievable. That didn't even exist 10 years ago, and we are hooking up, hooking up, hooking up, right? People have it on their phones. Patricia Albere: The noosphere was the next layer that evolution was innovating and is obviously pretty excited about. The next one is what I'm going to call the spondic sphere. Spondic love, the term is this experience of I am, may you be. In the way that we practice there's this experience of love, and when you love someone, it comes from some place that's deeper than your personality loving them. There's almost like this cosmic energy that wants to just go, "Ha, I want you to have everything. You know, like I love you, I love you." You just want to imbue them with everything. We feel that for our children. Sometimes our heart bursts into this kind of empowerment that is deeper than just human love. Patricia Albere: You can feel it when you're on the other end of spondic love, it is palpable, you actually feel like part of your life just got made because this person loves you from a place that they're in and for you in a way that's real. This mutual spondic love which is also part of the consciousness that we're working with and the consciousness that I think is next, I think that the next place of innovation will be that kind of love where we, instead of being separate, instead of not being even neutral towards each other and just surviving on our own, or competing or actively using each other and stomping on each other. Patricia Albere: This spondic quality of love and connectivity will be the foundation for a ridiculous amount of miracles, innovation, creativity, coming together, working together, doing things that can't be done, et cetera, et cetera, that's going to be the next explosion of where evolution is going to be working. Neil Sattin: I'm going to ask a hard question here which is what's the place of monogamous relationships in the birthing of this interconnectedness and this evolutionary consciousness. Patricia Albere: I think when you are in fact with your twin soul, it doesn't happen a lot, but when it happens, there is nowhere to go, there really isn't. Even if they ended up marrying someone else they are yours. You are so one and there is nowhere you want to be. The kind of sexuality, the kind of love and the depth that's shared, there's no desire for anyone else because the newness of love, and the depth, and the profundity of what's there is just crazy unfolding between you. You'd have to be crazy to want to actually go and try to be with someone that you didn't have that with. Maybe you eat the best food in the world and then you decide to go have a- Neil Sattin: Have a burger. Patricia Albere: McDonald's hamburger. I don't know why did I even want to do that. Neil Sattin: It's just interesting because it sounds like the experience, because we're talking about being able to evoke this kind of consciousness in an exercise with a partner, and yet it is creating the experience of deep, deep love and interconnectedness. Patricia Albere: There is still a discernment. The thing that I find with the groups of people is, what happens is because everyone is so starving for being seen for any kind of real depth and relatedness, the moment someone sees you deeply you think you want to have sex with them or that you love them. It's so pathetic, I mean we're so starving as humans, and it's nobody's fault. We live in a world of separation. People don't look at each other, we literally live in so much separation and isolation that we don't even realize that it doesn't have to be normal. Patricia Albere: What happen is is like in the people that I'm working with intensively, I remember two people and they're both married to other people, they did a practice and they went somewhere, and they both came out and you look at them and you were like, "Whoa, what just happened?" They've gone to a level of love and depth that they didn't ever even experience with their partners. Patricia Albere: Initially they were kind of like, "I don't know, you know, what do I do with that?" It was a man and a woman, and I just said keep allowing it, keep holding, and then more of that started to happen in the group. Part of what comes through then as you begin to create these deeper connections and you're being so nourished and so seen and you realize how abundant that is, you can then bring that to your partner. You don't have to go being, what do they call it, polyamorous. Patricia Albere: Polyamory is a lot of work, to try to juggle. You have to have no life I think. To navigate one relationship is hard enough as you know, if you're trying to navigate with depth, and with openness, and transparency and honesty, two relationships or more, that takes a ridiculous amount of real energy and work. I respect it, I think that there is some newness, something that's opening there and people are learning and growing within that, so I'm not condemning that, I'm just saying I don't think that ultimately that's where we're headed, not at all. Because you can experience profound connection without having to have sex with everybody. Neil Sattin: Thank you. Patricia Albere: You're welcome. Neil Sattin: This really makes me want to dive in to some of your activating principles. Neil Sattin: Great. Patricia, like I mentioned in our first episode together, we talked about the mutual awakening practice. Could you give us just a quick like 30 second rundown. If you're going to try it with your partner, this is how you try it. Then we can talk about some of the principles that make it so unique in terms of your approach and how to really deepen in that experience. Patricia Albere: I honestly, I can't do a 10-minute version of how to do it, I can't because it wouldn't really help and if people tried to do it from there it wouldn't work anyway. You need to know enough of where to come from, you need to take the time because otherwise ... People do it from the superficial level of self, it's pointless, it wouldn't do anything. Again, if they just go to evolutionarycollective.com and they at least download the first three chapters that will start them on their way. If they listen to the other interview that we did that will help as well. If they're genuinely curious, they're going to need to invest some time and energy in actually discovering what this is and how it works for real. Patricia Albere: The activating principles which are in the book, the chapters in the book are basically mostly dedicated to not only how to do it but then how do you turn it on, how do you continue ... If you were to do it with your wife you would start to learn how to do it and then you could take a chapter and work with that for awhile to open it, to make it even more full, and to continue to work through the pieces. Patricia Albere: One of them is engagement. It's simple but when your turns towards each other, to really recognize how fully engaged are you and how much more can you open and give yourself into the connection. If people just think about that for a moment, the next time they listen to their small child...how engaged are you? Are you just sort of passively listening, being polite, being a good parent and hoping that it won't take too long, or do you actually go over where their enthusiasm is, get inside their little six-year-old consciousness, try to really enter into them and engage fully in what it is that they're actually experiencing? That's one of them. Patricia Albere: In life, you don't have to know how the practice works, to just pay attention to the engagement not as someone as separate but can you get inside them, can you be inside their world and then connect. That turns something on. When people are, when you're inside their world with them and then getting engaged, something happens that's different than if you're just listening from over where you are. Neil Sattin: Can you talk about how that interacts with the next activating principle of commitment in terms of your committedness to staying inside as you work through whatever comes up. Patricia Albere: That's a little bit bigger. If you created an evolutionary relationship, if you are practicing with each other, if you're entering into this interpenetrated consciousness, consciousness where instead of ... Most people have a subjective experience where "I feel this", and if I'm vulnerable I'll let you in on how I feel, I'll share it with you and you compassionately listen and usually relate to it from yourself - from the way you feel like that - which is still we're very separate. Patricia Albere: Interpenetrating is where you learn how to place your consciousness. This is like against all the boundary stuff, but you actually go inside and you feel the other as they feel themselves. You feel me as I actually feel myself. There's a way that I guide people into how do you actually do that. When that level of relatedness is being developed and built, from there and from a commitment to each other, then the committed-ness make sense. Patricia Albere: Like if something happens or if you do something that's driving me crazy, instead of me working it out in my head by myself and then announcing to you how I'm going to deal with it, or announcing to you that I'm leaving you, I'll let you know what I worked out for myself. I stay inside with you and I share with you, and we kind of go in together into what the resistance is, what the concern is. We do it from being inside the commitment to each other, and to the relationship, and to the experience that's actually there. I don't do it as a separate something. Does that makes sense to you? Neil Sattin: Yes. What you're committing to is that you're involved in a process that you're co-creating, and so the act of going off on your own to figure something out is a step away from what could emerge if you gave that thing to the process that you're in. Patricia Albere: Yes, right, and that we'll share it. It doesn't mean anyone is going to be perfect, it doesn't mean that we won't disturb each other in different ways, but that we bring it forth, and we bring it in, and we bring it towards, instead of that it's a function of separation. When you have that spondic relationship too, when you activate that in and for each other, that also makes it a lot safer. Neil Sattin: Then you can actually be invested in the truth without it being something that's about separating. Patricia Albere: Yes, totally. Neil Sattin: Obviously we won't have time to talk about this whole topic but I didn't want to end this conversation without being able to talk for a moment about trust. I love the way that you articulate the different levels of trust. The level that you call basic trust, how that feeds into the way that we trust each other, and then the generative trust that leads to your trust growing and the expectation of it being potentially a little messy that's included there. Neil Sattin: I'm wondering of you could just explain, because I think what would really be helpful for our listeners is if they could come away from this with a sense of what basic trust is, and then let's see where that takes us as we wrap up this conversation. Patricia Albere: You keep asking me for the one-minute version of something that takes like- Neil Sattin: I'm bad, I know I'm so bad. Patricia Albere: The basic trust is obviously - there's one of the chapters that goes through that, relative trust and generative trust. There's a course that I have online that's in evergreen that people can buy that has two whole sessions dedicated to the basic trust part. To do the very simple version is basic trust is something that we have when we're born, until it's disturbed there's this sense of being connected to the flow of life where we feel like ... It's without thought, it's like things are going to work out. Patricia Albere: If you get fed, you get off, you get a little frustrated and you get fed, and somebody picks you up. Different things are happening without too much frustration, you tend to grow up to be a human being who has some sense of being relaxed in life. Even if something is hard that's happening, you kind of sense that it's going to work out or you're going to figure out a way through it. Patricia Albere: The people that have basic trust interfered with, they constantly are not getting what they need, they tense up and their egos are wired to try to make it all happen themselves. Ultimately, when basic trust is restored, you relax and life unfolds. Actually, faith, true faith, the kind that saints have, is basic trust restored, and that's full relaxation. You actually feel utterly okay being in the world that even when things don't go well. Patricia Albere: It's unbelievably important, it shapes your relationship to absolutely everything, and it's one of those concepts that when you find out about it and you begin to work with it, it can change your whole life. It's super important. Obviously with the hundred people, that is what is partly being restored. Neil Sattin: Right. That feeds into, if you can operate from that place then it makes that that much easier to have relative trust which you talk about as the way that two people learn to trust each other based on their agreements, and their humility, and their expectations. Again in your book, Evolutionary Relationships, it's such a compelling read because for one thing, it's not like an entire book about trust, but it also distills it in such a way that I think makes it really real and practical for you to examine. Neil Sattin: This is an area like for instance, "my relationship has tons of trust based on our commitment, but we don't actually have the capacity to communicate in order to keep our trust intact", and so we have to increase our capacities. I love how you do that. What I love too is how it evolves to this generative trust and I think this is one of the hardest things in relationship because people expect like, "Oh, we're going for it and we're really deep and we're connecting, and we're interpenetrating with each other, then all of our problems are gonna go away." Patricia Albere: Yes, not so. Neil Sattin: How did that emerge for you, that concept of generative trust and why that's so important. Patricia Albere: Having worked with people forever and just having been in relationship, I mean the clarity around that was just given. Because you have to manage all of it. The relative trust is also important. If you have somebody who never keeps their word no matter how deep the connection is, you're not going to trust them and you shouldn't because they're not trustable. Neil Sattin: Right, or if they don't have the humility to be open to influence. Patricia Albere: Absolutely. People have to also take responsibility for having character, and I think that in some of the post-modern work everybody's working and dealing with their limitations. We get to a point where we just assume everyone is doing the best they can, and people are following the flow. They are following their subjective experience individually, but they're not taking responsibility for being related and actually showing up and having character, and dealing with the impact of a certain lack of integrity in certain ways. That definitely gets addressed in the book. Neil Sattin: Yes. It's funny that there are people like Dale Carnegie who write on and on, and on about how to become trustworthy, how to be someone that other people will turn to for influence. You sum it up pretty well in one chapter. Patricia Albere: Cool, thanks. Neil Sattin: Well, Patricia Albere, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today on Relationship Alive to dive more deeply into the question of what makes an evolutionary relationship, what's possible. Again, you can visit her website, evolutionarycollective.com where you can download the first three chapters of Patricia's book, Evolutionary Relationships, and also find out more about her work and her trainings. We will have links to Patricia's book and website in the detailed transcript and action guide for this episode which you can get at neilsattin.com/patricia2, or you can text the work PASSION to the number 33444 and follow the instructions. Neil Sattin: Like I said, our first episode together, episode six, we do talk a little bit more about the actual mutual awakening process and I encourage you to check out that episode that we did together as well. In the mean time, thank you so much for joining us, Patricia. Is there anything else? Maybe you could just mention you do in person intensives where people can come and learn this. Patricia Albere: Yes. People that are intrigued by the possibility of being with a cohort of other human beings that are really interested in this quality of relationship, there will be a three-day in New York in April, the 13th through the 15th, we only do those twice a year, it's kind of special. If they sign up for the book, they'll have access to knowing what's happening and then people can, from the menu of what's there, see if something serves them. Thank you and thank you Neil, you do such a good job with this and with bringing just a myriad of ways to empower people with relatedness which I really respect. Neil Sattin: Thank you, I appreciate your saying that. Resources: Check out Patricia Albere's website Read Patricia’s new book, Evolutionary Relationships: Unleashing the Power of Mutual Awakening FREE Relationship Communication Secrets Guide www.neilsattin.com/patricia2 Visit to download the transcript, or text “PASSION” to 33444 and follow the instructions to download the transcript to this episode with Patricia Albere Amazing intro/outro music graciously provided courtesy of: The Railsplitters - Check them Out    

Alex Katehakis is a licensed Marriage, Family Therapist, Certified Sex Addiction Therapist and Certified Sex Therapist in Los Angeles. She has extensive experience in working with a full spectrum of sexuality from sexual addiction to sex therapy, and problems of sexual desire and sexual dysfunction for individuals and couples. Alex has successfully facilitated the recovery of many sexually addicted individuals and assisted couples in revitalizing their sex lives.Dr. Katehakis is the Founder and Clinical Director of the Center for Healthy Sex in West Los Angeles, CA. She has lectured for the U.S. Journal Training Conference series, the Society for the Advancement of Sexual Health, the UCLA Annual Attachment Conference, the Psychotherapy Networker Annual Conference, Women’s Association of Addiction Treatment, Mt. Sinai Medical School, AIDS Project LA, Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society, Phillips Graduate Institute and Pepperdine University. Dr. Katehakis earned her PhD from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in 2017.She is the author of Sex Addiction as Affect Dysregulation: A Neurobiologically Informed Holistic Treatment (2016), Erotic Intelligence: Igniting Hot Healthy Sex after Recovery From Sex Addiction (2010), the co-author of Mirror of Intimacy: Daily Reflections on Emotional and Erotic Intelligence (2014) and a contributing author to Making Advances: A Comprehensive Guide for Treating Female Sex and Love Addicts (2012) — all available on Amazon.www.centerforhealthysex.com

This topic has started a national conversation for people in all walks of life.  Jackie and Jon sit down with Alex Katehakis, founder of the Center for Healthy Sex in LA (centerforhealthysex.com) to talk about the months of allegations of sexual misconduct in the news the last few months.  This is a moment in our national dialogue that pricks the sex addicts and partners of sex addicts that we work with.

This topic has started a national conversation for people in all walks of life.  Jackie and Jon sit down with Alex Katehakis, founder of the Center for Healthy Sex in LA (centerforhealthysex.com) to talk about the months of allegations of sexual misconduct in the news the last few months.  This is a moment in our national dialogue that pricks the sex addicts and partners of sex addicts that we work with.

Can you be addicted to love, or sex, and - if so - what does that mean? How does the way that your parents raised you - especially when you were really young - affect your sex life? How do you define your own version of healthy sex - so that you’re not just following along with what culture has handed you? And finally - how do you step away from the dopamine and novelty-seeking of dating - and, when you find someone, make the switch to a monogamous relationship? In today’s episode, we are speaking to one of the world’s experts on sex and neurobiology - and especially the treatment of Sex and Love Addiction - Dr. Alexandra Katehakis. Alex’s book, Sex Addiction as Affect Dysregulation, is a must-read for therapists looking to understand the latest on how to approach sex addiction treatment in therapy, and her work at the Center for Healthy Sex in Los Angeles fosters a sex-positive approach to re-discovering sex in a way that’s right for you. Alex is also the author of Erotic Intelligence: Igniting Hot, Healthy Sex While In Recovery from Sex Addiction. Noticing addictive behaviors: An addiction can be defined as something to which we have a strong predilection for and have little control over our actions in relation to the desire. We may find ourselves preoccupied in our thinking, and find that much of our time is spent either engaging in the addiction or in preparation for the experience of it. Furthermore, unlike other things which we strongly enjoy, an addiction has a certain secrecy and shame surrounding it. This is especially true when the behavior we are engaging in violates our own personal value system. Love as an addiction: Love is an addictive process. This makes sense in evolutionary and biological terms as it ensures that we bind together with a mate in an intense enough way as to invest in procreating and raising a family. The profound longing and desire that can be involved in falling in love is not necessarily problematic, however thinking about love through the addiction model can help shed light on the pain of breakups, divorces, and endings. Love withdrawal: How many times have you said, or heard a friend say, that it feels like a limb has been cut off when we lose someone. During endings many people experience the emotional and psychological distress as physical pain- as if their heart is actually breaking. This is true because the same neural pain centers in the brain involved in physical injury are involved in our attachments to others. While it can be very helpful to create boundaries with exes through such actions as blocking and/or deleting numbers, the pain can be visceral. Changing our automatic patterning: People realize they are in the cycle of addiction when they find themselves doing things they do not want to do anymore and yet, can’t stop engaging in the behavior despite wanting to. It is important at this stage to understand that 1) you do have the capacity to change and 2) it will be a slow process. Changing our automatic patterning is not like turning a speed boat around, rather it is more like turning around a large barge. Neuroscience research validates that this shifting is possible through repeated behavior. The saying is that ‘neurons that fire together, wire together’, meaning that you must do something over and over again to build new neural pathways, and thus, new patterns. The more you engage in the new behavior the more tenacious the neural networks will become and the more integrated this way of being will feel- to the point that it will become the new automatic. As you focus increasingly on the new behavior, the old neural pathways associated with the negative addictions will begin to prune. This is the beauty of neuroplasticity- have some patience with it! Attunement is essential in building secure attachment. The predilections for addictions of all kinds are often established in early childhood. This is true because, human beings, more than most animals, are nearly entirely dependent on their caregivers for survival. As we now understand from the research on attachment, the first few months of a child’s life are critical in setting up a healthy nervous system. It is the job of the caregiver to be an interactive regulator- giving opportunity for attunement and safe interactions so that the right brain can develop over the first 18 months. There are many ways that parents fail to attune to their child- the severity of the impact depends on frequency, intensity, and ability to make repairs. Depending on the type of engagement from parents children will develop a tendency towards high sympathetic arousal (fight or flight responses) or parasympathetic responses such as freezing, collapse, and dissociation. This dysregulation can then lead to a higher dependence on external supports- thus helping to explain how addictions often stem from an attempt by an individual to regulate affect. Adaptive strategies for soothing. Early childhood experiences of attachment lay the groundwork and the wiring for lifelong relational patterns. Children who were not met with regulated and present caregivers inevitably find strategies in order to survive and often carry these patterns into adulthood when it comes to handling arousal state throughout their lifetime. Insecurely attached individuals either experience 1) a constantly seeking mentality and dependency on external soothing and/or 2) a high distrust that others will ever meet their needs. Trapped by the ‘rescue fantasy’: If you had a parent who was dismissive, or avoidant, you likely learned at a young age that you had to manage yourself, by yourself. You may have resorted to creating a rescue fantasy in which someone came to rescue you from the chronic emptiness and loneliness you were experiencing. This may have been a coach, a teacher, a rockstar, a neighbor, or a fairy princess- someone outside of yourself and your family who had the power to alleviate your pain. This is a brilliant soothing strategy in childhood, however it becomes increasingly maladaptive in adulthood in that it creates unhealthy desires and harmful expectations in our relationships. In cultivating the ability to imagine the ideal caregiver, a child feeds their need for attunement, however adults who idealize their lovers as saviors tend to miss critical cues that allow them to assess whether the person they are attracted to is available, safe, and stable. Need for reinforcing attachment: Only 54% of people in our culture today are securely attached- and this number is likely to shrink further as more families experience increasing stressors and there are fewer two person systems raising children. The fullness, high speed pace, and distraction of daily modern life is making it increasingly difficult for parents to insure they are able to provide their children with adequate attunement. Note that the majority of insecure attachments are not caused by outright abuse or neglect, but rather from an accumulation of misaligned and misattuned moments- microassaults that go without repair or acknowledgment. Human beings need other human beings for regulation: One thing we know from the accumulating data is that people can develop a secure attachment in a love relationship. It is in our relationships where we a second chance to practice getting our needs met in healthy ways. With a present, grounded, and  growth oriented partner it is possible to become more securely attached, love more fully, and have deeper intimacy. That said, long term relationships are not flower fields! As many like to say, if you want to not have any issues then it is best to live alone! Relationships turn up the heat on our underlying issues and bring our habits, patterns, and old beliefs to the surface. While much of our healing, especially of childhood wounds, are our responsibility to mend and tend, this does not have to occur prior to entering a relationship. In fact, some aspects of deep healing depends on the relationship given that we need coregulation to repair. Be on the lookout for a partner who does not have a martyr complex, nor a need for you to be helpless so they can be the ‘fixer’. Look instead for someone who shares your values and is willing to stay present through the pain and discomfort of growing. How do you switch from courtship into monogamy? We live in a culture that provides ample opportunity for novelty, and relies on a promise of more and better. This creates excitement, yet havoc in the dating world as there is a tendency to doubt what is in front of us in hopes for the newest and shiniest thing that may be waiting around the corner- or one more tinder swipe away. If you are interested in moving from dating into a longer term committed relationship, it is critical that you get clear with yourself about your values. Can you make a list of your top 3 non-negotiables? Example: education, spirituality, wants kids, doesn’t want kids, sense of humor… Get super clear with yourself. This clarity will help you to recognize when a person who fits these values shows up, and will help to ground you in the reality of the person in front of you, thus helping to alleviate the gnawing and often overwhelming urge to keep searching for some fantasy version of a partner. What to do when you are jonesing… Dating apps, along with porn, offers a dopamine rush that is hard to compete with. When you begin to shift towards wanting to dive deeper into a relationship you may struggle with feeling a lack of this exciting surge. Learn to be fully present with your somatic experience- noticing what is happening for you, what you are craving, and in what ways this helps show you that you are dysregulated.  Own your internal experience, and then commit to being more present to your partner. Let the distractions and urges be reminders to yourself to come back to your present experience- there is a plethora of feel good hormones (including dopamine) that can be released when you connect in with your partner and spend time finding out who they are without making assumptions, and getting that juicy surge of oxytocin that comes with intimate connections. Putting bodies, hearts, and souls together: We need each other to regulate. People know, at least technically, how to have sex- there has been enough emphasis on this throughout our culture- however they may not know how to have quality and truly connecting intimacy. We can put our bodies together, but are we capable of putting our hearts and souls together in a way that has meaning, promotes a sense of safety, while also being arousing and erotic? In order to move into a fuller experience of intimacy, we must learn to track ourselves and our partners. By paying close attention to our internal experiences we can learn to notice moments of dysregulation and from this becoming curious about the underlying need that is being somatically communicated. Once we notice this, we can name it to our partner and from this learn that we can in fact, get our needs met. The experience of getting a need met not only leads to healing, but also to an incredibly erotic, arousing, and passionate sense of deep connection! Multidimensionality of healthy sex: Healthy sex requires a thorough investigation of who you are sexually at this moment in your life, what you like, and from this putting together a new roadmap for yourself. What is healthy for you right now is likely to be different not only from other people, but even from yourself at an earlier point in your life. Get raw and honest with yourself. What feels good? What kind of touch turns you on? In what ways is the sex you are engaging in a celebration of your sexual values, and in what ways is it not? Look at the multidimensionality of sex- the physical, emotional, relational, and spiritual aspects. Tune into your arousal cycle, your current genital functioning, and any other physical cues that need to be paid attention to. Your sex life will not be fulfilling unless the sex practices you are engaging in aligns with your personal and sexual values. Get support and go on a sexual diet. If you suspect yourself to be in an addictive cycle when it comes to love, sex, and/or dating apps be sure to reach out for support. Find a therapist, a sex therapist, and/or a support group in your area or online. Love and sex addictions are the result of attachment wounding and thus, are best healed in relationship. Seek out safe others. There may be a time in your healing process in which you may benefit from taking a break from your compulsive patterns (even consider celibacy) in order to gain perspective on your own urgings. This pulling away time is a raw state as you will feel the void of not having ‘that thing’ you are so accustomed to running towards for relief. In these times fellowship can be incredibly helpful- search out people to surround yourself with that know what you are going through. And remember- the brain is capable of rewiring towards healthier habits if you are able and committed to putting in the time and effort needed to refocus your attention and train your brain! Sponsors: Talkspace.com - Online therapy that matches you with your perfect therapist. You can communicate with your therapist daily - so they can be there for you during the moments you most need support. Visit talkspace.com/ALIVE and use the coupon code “ALIVE” for $30 off your first month of online therapy. Resources: Check out the Center for Healthy Sex Read Alex Katehakis’ newest book Sex Addiction as Affect Dysregulation: A Neurobiologically Informed Holistic Treatment Find more about Allan Schore’s work here www.neilsattin.com/healthysex Visit to download the show guide, or text “PASSION” to 33444 and follow the instructions to download the show guide to this episode with Alex Katehakis Our Relationship Alive Community on Facebook Amazing intro/outro music graciously provided courtesy of: The Railsplitters - Check them Out

Dr. Drew and Mike Catherwood talk with Alex Katehakis about Healthy Sexual Education

Alex Katehakis is a licensed Marriage, Family Therapist, Certified Sex Addiction Therapist and Certified Sex Therapist in Los Angeles. She talks to Dr. Drew about sexual perversions/addictions as well as the influence of porn in today's society. DrDrew.com

Carol the Coach interviews Alex Katehakis, CSAT, who has made it her mission to help sex addicts and their partners to find healthy sexuality again. Mirror of Intimacy contains a year's worth of daily reflections that explore and support the range of human sexualities as a divine gift and a human right. The reflections reference a rich array of approaches: attachment theory, mind/body nexus, neurobiology, 12-step principles, meditation techniques, Eastern and Western philosophy, and ancient world myths. Unfettered by cultural, social, or religious norms, we set our intention to examine 366 topics related to sex and sexuality.  A reader writes,"As a psychologist, I am happy to have this magnificent creation to use with clients and patients leading to their enrichment, joy and celebration of life. The book will soon be one of the important therapeutic tools in our field." It's a promise--these pages will erotically enlighten you and your world!    

Today's guest is Alex Katehakis. Alex is a Clinical Sexologist with a doctorate in human sexuality. She's also the Clinical Director of the Center For Healthy Sex in Los Angeles, California. Alex has written several books - Sex Addiction As Affect Dysregulation, Erotic Intelligence, and Mirror Of Intimacy. Episode link>>>> www.theaddictedmind.com/87 ( http://www.theaddictedmind.com/87 ) In today's episode, she shares her wisdom and insight about recovery and we have a great conversation about the root causes of the addictive process. We focus on the early developmental trauma and the way that it affects the ability to regulate our affect, and how addictive substances or processes are used to escape from those feelings. Alex has always been fascinated by human sexuality. After practicing as a licensed marriage/family therapist for twenty-five years, she decided to dive deeper into human sexuality, rather than psychology. In addition to human sexuality, Alex has also been studying with Dr. Allan Schore for the past twelve years, looking specifically at developmental neuroscience and how the early formation of the infant impacts on the developing brain, nervous system, and mind. Talking about affect is referring to emotions. These emotions live deep within the body, and they only come forward when they are registered by the brain as feelings. When a person is dysregulated and stressed out, their affect becomes dysregulated. When a child feels threatened, perhaps from an alcoholic, raging, shut down, or mean parent, their affect becomes dysregulated and they will always find themselves looking for something to make them feel better. In their waking life, a dysregulated person will feel anxious, depressed, dead internally, or dull. There's a general lack of feeling vitality in the body. Dysregulated people say they don't feel joy states, or they are super anxious, so they have to drink to make the anxiety go away. They may use sex to make themselves feel powerful or good about themselves. Anything that we're doing outside of ourselves to make ourselves feel 'right internally' speaks to affect dysregulation. Someone who is securely attached, and has a good heart-rate variability in general, doesn't have to reach for anything to change their internal state or mood. Love addicts, and some sex addicts, learned very early on that they had to get their needs met by themselves, so they used fantasy, which is a form of mild to moderate dissociation. This makes it difficult for them to connect to another person, as an adult, and to have intimacy or closeness. People often don't know this about themselves until their lives become unmanageable. As humans, we are highly adaptable creatures, so we can adapt to just about anything, even something dysfunctional that feels better than the problem we're living in. This can create patterns that are difficult to change. Change is possible, however, it takes time. Willpower is difficult for people experiencing a lot of stress. It's not the best way to change long-standing patterns that people have developed over time. Long-term psychotherapy can help people feel into their bodies, and it allows them to feel the things they could not feel, as a child. The therapist's nervous system can soothe and regulate the nervous system of the patient in the same way as it would with a healthy mother and a child. This is known as a co-regulatory process. With a healthy person, their brain circuits are all online and firing. With someone who has been abused, however, their circuits are not coupled. They are down. This creates a deadness at their core. It requires the care of other people to get their circuits to come back up. Twelve-step programs help people change because they are inclusive and non-judgmental. As humans, we all need other people to survive. In her book, Sex Addiction As Affect Dysregulation, Alex looks at the underlying mechanism that drives problematic behavior. It helps people to see sex addiction in a new way, and it offers hope for the people who are struggling with it. Sex addiction is being recognized more and more by the scientific community as a bone fide problem. It was first recognized in about 1978, although people were talking about it as an affliction as early as in the 1800s. In 2011, the American Society of Addiction Medicine made a public policy statement, in which they included sex as an addiction. In 2018, a proposed diagnosis of compulsive sexual behavior disorder was established for the international coding book, the ICD. Willpower can be used to show up to people who care, and in that way, it can help to heal from sex addiction. Remember, it's never too late to take a step in the direction of health! *Links and resources:* To find out more, go to www.thecenterforhealthysex.com ( http://www.thecenterforhealthysex.com/ ) Alex also has a Youtube channel with hundreds of videos from sex-experts around the world. Alex's books: Sex Addiction As Affect Dysregulation ( https://amzn.to/39BV7VY ) Erotic Intelligence ( https://amzn.to/2SMERec ) Mirror Of Intimacy ( https://amzn.to/2OWgidu )