Sex Therapy 101 with Cami Hurst
Welcome to Sex Therapy 101 with your host Cami Hurst. This is the sexiest podcast in the west for all the right reasons. Cami sits down with amazing experts in the field of sexual health and counseling to learn, converse and add her own expert voice to the conversation. Cuddle up with your partner and get ready to have your love life feel more complete.
Sex Therapy 101 with Cami Hurst
Unraveling Duty Sex with Shadeen Francis
Research on consenting to unwanted sex reveals surprising trauma symptoms and resentment even without coercion, creating an internal "accountability conflict with yourself" when betraying your own boundaries.
• Shadeen Francis explains resentment as information revealing unmet needs or crossed boundaries.
Shadeen Francis is a licensed marriage and family psychotherapist and a board-certified sex therapist. Her expertise spans the domains of mental health, emotional intelligence, and the intersection of sexual wellness and social justice. A sought-after voice in her field, Shadeen has been featured on major networks including ABC, NBC, and CBS, and has been the subject matter expert for prominent brands such as Essence, Bumble, Tinder, and Teen Vogue. Shadeen's work extends beyond the therapy room, influencing nationally implemented curricula, global media strategies, and public health policies. Known for her signature brand of warmth and humour, Shadeen’s work is inspired by her commitment to helping people live lives full of peace and pleasure. You can find her at www.shadeenfrancis.com
Hello, sex Therapy 101. Friends, you notice I might have taken a break, but we're back and we're excited and I'm really passionate about this new series that I'm going to be offering to all of you. I haven't disappeared. I've been working on some projects that are really going to be offering to all of you. I haven't disappeared. I've been working on some projects that are really meaningful to me, and one of those is a book for the public about my research about regarding long-term outcomes of consenting to unwanted sex, or duty sex as we sometimes call it, and in doing that, adding to my own research over the year, you'll see my hair change, my face change, because these were all recorded over the course of a year and I wanted to talk to experts about the cultural implications or cultural beliefs or the cultural ideas among different communities in the US that might protect people against negative outcomes and that might actually kind of promote people into some of the more negative outcomes. And that is the series I have to offer you. I'm really excited. It's been really meaningful to me, it's been enlightening to me, it's really helped me make sure that this book is what I want it to be for all of you. So, with no ado, here we go. This is going to be the intro for the whole series. Now I'll give you a little bit of a bio for each and then we'll jump into the recording of the interview.
Speaker 1:This interview is with Shadeen Francis, who's a licensed marriage and family psychotherapist. She's a board certified sex therapist. Her expertise spans the domains of mental health, emotional intelligence and the intersection of sexual wellness and social justice. She's a sought-after voice in her field. I can attest to that. I've really enjoyed being taught and led by her. She's been featured in major networks, including ABC, nbc, cbs, and has been the subject matter expert for prominent brands. Her work extends beyond the therapy room. She's influencing nationally implemented curriculum, global media strategies and public health policies. She's known for her signature brand of warmth and humor. Shadeen's work is inspired by her commitment to helping people live lives full of peace and pleasure.
Speaker 1:I hope you enjoy this conversation. Okay, so it was really generous of you in the first place to spend 10 of your minutes to look at this research. This girl did right, so I'm working on getting it ready to publish with Lisa Diamond. We've been working on that. She was on my committee, so thank you for just spending that 10 minutes looking at what we found, which is okay. There's this pattern and women who consent the language we're using right now is consent to sex they don't necessarily want. What are those outcomes long term? And just shocked to find, oh my goodness, they're scoring moderate to high in on this one measure for trauma. They're all saying resentment, lower desire from your lens and your theoretical orientation, your training. How do you interpret that like what's happening and why?
Speaker 2:from my frame of reference and scope of practice, we could talk about this in a few ways I like to orient my work around our emotions as messages for what it is that we are experiencing, such that they can also give us information about what we need. A bias of my work is that, essentially, we experience the world at the level of our nervous system and so I end up saying things like everyone wants to know how to fuck.
Speaker 2:Let me remind you how to feel, which ends up being with my little tagline I like it thank y'all.
Speaker 2:Um, and so for me, part of what resentment is is that it exists on our scale around anger. Lots of people have different, lots of different ways, so this is not the universal way to work on it. This is a way that I approach it with folks, and so when I'm talking with folks about their experience of resentment and its relationship to anger, our angry feelings are the feelings that let us know I have a need that is going unmet and or I have a boundary that's being uncrossed or being crossed. Sorry, I like that. Yep, yeah, um, and so when we have these long-term boundary issues or unmet needs, part of what resentment is we? We think it has a lot to do with the other person.
Speaker 1:It is an accountability conflict with yourself say more, because that was really beautiful and I agree yeah, and so what does that and what does that mean?
Speaker 2:right, that I am doing something that is wrong for me, and so that brings back in the piece that you were naming in your explainer video around where consent the larger conversations around consent can fall short because they are saying yes, but they're saying yes to a no.
Speaker 1:An internal no. Yeah, that there's this boundary conflict with self and the resentment I'm hearing you say is this it's just information, trying to teach us something about ourselves, which is this isn't working for me and so, in the same way that if we had any other recurring boundary conflict, we would experience the relational consequences, they are experiencing the relational consequences.
Speaker 2:They are experiencing the relational consequences and the emotional consequences and likely the spiritual consequences. I imagine lots of your folks would also rate really high around hopelessness.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that was high on one of the scales when it looked at the relationship. There was like really high hopelessness or change in their relationship.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I imagine they would also rank really low around things like self-confidence or beliefs in their own self-efficacy. Right, and from my scope of practice, that has so much to do with I am dishonoring my own, no.
Speaker 1:I like how you're normalizing this and saying this might not necessarily be a sexual conversation, but that this is going to show up anytime. We're ignoring these internal boundary conflicts.
Speaker 2:Yeah and it does um, it's just really sticky in sex and really pervasive in sex, because you did a beautiful job of starting to describe the cycle um this loop that folks get caught into. So I I often, for very good and normal reasons, betray my no and then it complicates my ability to say yes, yeah, and so now when I say no later, it somehow feels worse. And when I ultimately say yes, then I dissatisfied, I avoid, I acquiesce, we are dissatisfied we are dissatisfied.
Speaker 1:I like how you're highlighting that it's also an internal process, not just a relational process, because it did show that even for the women, where there was no emotional or verbal coercion, the guy was like yep, yep, yep, consent, king. You know, they still had this happening inside of them and I loved how you said that, that when we betray our own, no, it's this internal conflict and for a lot of folks when I see that, when I see this pattern in couples.
Speaker 2:A lot of the times the other partner has no idea this is happening.
Speaker 1:I agree, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, my partner has no idea. This is all happening inside of me, yeah.
Speaker 1:My partner has no idea. This is all happening inside of me.
Speaker 2:And especially when it's women. Women believe they're super convincing I was like I do such a good job hiding this and their partners, regardless of gender, tend to pick up on, like there's something up here. But the women are also usually lying about it and this is not to blame folks for being in a difficult position. This is just naming where changes could happen without the partner's buy-in Right, that women are often lying about it when asked. But also a lot of the times the partners are like I didn't even want sex yet. Or like, yeah, maybe that could have gone to sex. I just like wanted to, like be close, right.
Speaker 2:Or I, yeah, asked for sex that this time, but like literally no, no pressure. I just said, hey, do you wanna? You know I was just rubbing her thigh and if it didn't go anywhere, fine. Um, whether or not that's always literally true, you know I'm not laying in bed next to them. They can't afford that. Into this position where, because they do not trust their themselves and or their partner to be able to handle a no grace graciously and gracefully, they would rather not have the conversation at all, right, like, if you know, like I'm going to have to say yes, the next best way to have a no happen is to keep from being asked, right, and so so many folks desexualize their relationships and themselves to keep from having to say no, because they often don't believe that they can, or they don't believe their no will matter enough for a no to happen.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this just made a connection for me with some other research where one of the highest PTSD symptoms was avoidance. And I'm kind of translating what you're saying, as the avoidance is a coping mechanism to avoid having to have the discussion. If I can just avoid this conversation, if I can just never get us in a situation where we might talk about sex or where we might touch or where we might, you know, the avoidance plays a coping role here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, and it's it's kind of classic trauma response, right, because if I one of one of the most likely, one of the things that is common across most traumas is I was in an experience I couldn't get out of right.
Speaker 1:So this is that I felt like I had no choice or no collaboration.
Speaker 2:I can't, I can't, if. If they ask me, I have to say yes, right. So of course I'm going to avoid it, right? I can't get out of that. It is an unwinnable scenario, right? When I get put in that position, I am trapped, I am stuck even if there's no physical trap or physical stuff, right, yeah?
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah, right. And and that often makes the sticking worse, because I either don't recognize that I am stuck in like a tangible way, it just feels like a choice, like, oh, I choose right, rather than this sort of stuck entrenched pattern. Um. But also, when it's a physical dynamic, the other partner usually is aware of their culpability and here partners often don't recognize the impact that they're having. Right, the, the pouting, which is a normal response to being disappointed right.
Speaker 2:We do a lot of like shaming, and maybe this is me protecting it because I'm a powder, I'm, I'm, I. I love a good sulk when I'm disappointed. Um, right, but that, like, it's kind of a normal thing to do, even though it's not the most mature way to handle disappointment. Um, it is normal to act out your feelings and that's not actually causing harm to anybody, right, we talk about it as if it is. But, like, if I'm disappointed and you can see that I'm disappointed I actually haven't harmed you. But that's not how we relate to it Generally, mostly because most of us cannot tolerate our own disappointment, so it's borderline devastating to experience yourself as disappointing to someone else.
Speaker 2:Say that again. Yeah most of us cannot hold our own disappointment, and so it's borderline disappointing, it's borderline devastating to experience yourself as having disappointed someone else. We can handle that, yeah, we. We have such a hard time handling that, and I imagine that that's part of what you were getting over and over in your interviews is this unwillingness to be experienced as disappointing their partners sexually we don't want to integrate that yeah into our self-concept to yeah, yeah yeah, even though they, ultimately, it becomes inevitable right this process, the disappointment, it's the calls from coming from inside the house.
Speaker 2:So to speak you know that by avoiding, I'm disappointing them. If they were to find out that I am saying that, that what they are getting is not good consent, they are disappointed. Were they to know that I'm not enjoying this? They're disappointed. Were they to know that I experience them as unthoughtful or unaware or unkind or not caring about my no or my boundaries or my pleasure? They're disappointed, and also you're disappointed. You do not want to be in this dynamic with this person.
Speaker 1:Many of these relationships, I'm sure, are otherwise deeply loving and a deeply wanted relationship. The disappointment is already here, where there is quite a bit more, maybe blame or looking at the couple dynamic. But I like this piece where you're centering the internal experience of the individual, which I like because it is actually empowering to say, oh, if a lot of this is happening within me, then a lot of change. I have the power to make a lot of change within me too. I don't have to focus my energy on changing the person in bed with me. I like how you're highlighting the internal piece a lot.
Speaker 2:Thank you, right, and this, this for me, does not remove culpability of the partner for whatever role they are playing in it, and for me, I'm just aware that with only one person's story, I don't actually really know what's happening on the other side, and so a bias of my work is like there's not a whole lot that I feel confident in working on there, because I have no idea who your partner is and what they're experiencing at that time, right? So, unless you tell me a story where I can hear some tangible and what did they do? What did they say? How did they respond? What did they initiate with? What have you said to them that you know that they heard and understood and received, right, that we've got such a limited scope of data and I'm also an LMFT and so I am tracking these, right? Um, and it's cut in half because you got one.
Speaker 2:I've got right, so all I can work with is okay. Well, what came in and what went out? Right, I have no idea about about the rest of this, and much of this will end up being gendered, because I imagine that you, in working with women who experienced this, I imagine that the vast majority of the folks were in heterosexual relationships, so partnered with men.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean we I feel oh, I just really didn't anticipate such a homogeneous sample Like my demographic section of the study allowed for, like all the people to show up and say what they wanted to, and I was going to track it and I kind of am blaming it a little bit on the algorithm because social media was my biggest. So I think, like people found it, found like people who found it, sure, and so these 1300 women, the majority of them were white, in the western part of the united states, middle class, educated, christian, and I'm like okay is this a white christian woman problem?
Speaker 1:I gotta talk to some people.
Speaker 2:You know, yeah, I, I think the algorithm is really great for that. You know, showing more of the same. I think also, these are the times when you remember, regardless of like, who you're actually working with, like, oh yeah, there are a lot of white straight people in relationships in the Western part of the country who are Christ followers, right, like it's something that I don't know who you generally work with, but these are times when you're like, oh yeah, there are a lot of those aren't there and they also want to be centered in these conversations and tell their stories. And I appreciate you being intentional about being curious about what this looks like elsewhere. And I don't think that, um, this is a uniquely that slice of the population problem. I think we know that it is not uniquely that slice of the population problem.
Speaker 2:I certainly would be curious around the numbers, the proportions, for other groups, like five percent for people of color yeah, and I'd be so curious how this would line up in almost like a gut punch.
Speaker 1:I was like you know, like it's really hard to generalize, but then I'm like I'm just going to talk to people. I don't want my research to be in a vacuum. I don't want to say I did this research and applies to all people, but I I do want to talk to experts to. I don't want to be my own vacuum of my own making. And so, as an expert in the intersection of sexuality and the black community, you said I don't think this is necessarily. You know, I think that I think I've seen this here too. Yeah, are you able to do? Can you speak to some of that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so what I will also say racially, my practice is super spread, um, I would say these days it's fairly even across folks who are white folks, who are black folks, who are north asian, and I think I only have two south asian folks and one person who still has like reservation connections, feels really tied to their indigenous identity. Um, and some of those folks are also Hispanic, sort of looped into the fold. What I will say about the Black community in particular, because you asked about that specifically in this moment, I'm curious across the board, how the proportions of your findings would line up. I think you would find much of the same and you would probably find some other unique narratives. I'm going to say a lot of things that might sound contradictory here. Okay, I'm not super invested in a tidy story, but wanted to name it up front. Here are some thoughts. One, black women are probably more accustomed to doing shit they don't want to do, just like at baseline.
Speaker 2:I think the experience of giving, saying yes when you mean no, is a really common, not just woman experience, but Black experience, woman experience but black experience when we think of the context of white supremacy and how often it is required to be deferential or permissive or acquiescing in order to get your basic needs met. You talked about safety, and that is a huge safety factor that you learn really, really early in big and small ways, right? Big ways being like how do you interact with police officers, right? Small ways being like how do you interact with your white coworkers? Right, and having those interactions be high risk for your?
Speaker 2:safety and needing, and so I'm curious how much or how little this would relate to, like symptomatology, rather than sort of being experienced on some level as the way things are and say more. Do you think that would be protective, right, by normalizing this level of saying yes when I mean no, there's less conflict around it, because I know why, I know why I'm doing it and it doesn't feel out of alignment with with my values or with my understandings of self.
Speaker 2:Right, I could imagine on yeah, yeah, from the biased frame, from the particular biases that I have chosen to frame this around, um, there's less resent, there's less resentment, there's less internal conflict, right, it's, it's not particularly conflictual, right, but like you want to have a peaceful day, like you engage in chit chat with your co-worker that you don't particularly like but don't want to risk offending her, yeah, it'd be interesting to see if it pops up, but if there's certain elements of various cultures that are protective or I could imagine that for some of my maybe both my north and southeast, south asian clients, um, sort of a greater permissiveness and sometimes pride around deference, potentially also being protective, potentially also being protective, right, yeah, some of this stuff around you know, there there were some quotes that came through around their needs, um, and there can be ways in which, in in collectivist cultures, in which that feels less like a burden of self-sacrifice and more of a way that we move through the world, right, a way that we honor not just the other person but honor ourselves.
Speaker 2:Right, that it is dignifying to me to be deeply invested in your wellbeing with a foundational belief that that is also what you're doing in return. I don't need to track that or measure that or even to know that, but there is some fundamental belief that this is what people do.
Speaker 1:I'm hearing you say I want you to correct me if I'm wrong or keep me centered on where you're going. I'm hearing you say the degree to which a certain culture maybe values collectivism or individualism could also be a factor here, and those who value collectivism may, on their own, find less resentment in meeting each other's needs, and in a more individualized, valued culture there may be more possibility for feeling resentment that we have to meet each other's needs is. That is that where you were?
Speaker 2:at it. Yeah, you know, uh, phrasing that comes to mind in this moment in listening to you reflect what I said back to me is that in a collectivistic culture, it may be less appropriate to trace this along the lines of coercion, because those cultures may not experience folks belonging to those cultures may not experience this as power over rather than power with.
Speaker 1:Okay, writing down power over versus power with yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right that those cultures may not see this as your needs are more important than mine, but that this is what we need.
Speaker 1:It shifts what is otherwise experienced as a power imbalance and we would see the Black community as having more community, more value in the collective perhaps.
Speaker 2:I don't know how well that piece applies to Blackness. I'm thinking in that moment of my Asian clients, both North and South Asian clients. So I have a growing handful of clients who are specifically from India and Pakistan, and then some folks from Korea and Singapore and Vietnam.
Speaker 1:Which are traditionally much more collective.
Speaker 2:Significantly much more collective when we're talking about Black blackness, because the diaspora is so huge, right? Um, it's hard to say, and collectivism has had a complicated relationship with within black communities because of the history, the unique history of enslavement on this land. But it really disrupted a lot of clear ties to collectivism.
Speaker 2:So it's sort of it's sort of in between right, that blackness in and of itself is a racial identity rather than a an ethnic identity or even really a clear culture. Right, right, but it doesn't get to sit cleanly in individualism or collectivism, because historically there would have been a lot of collectivistic attitudes and when you go back to other places where black people are from, they maintain a lot of that. But blackness in the us is warped around all of these lines.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right, that enslavement did a lot of disrupting around sense of connection and sense of self and even sense of place which is an aside from what we're talking about but sort of complicates the narrative for me around saying having a good imagining for for how it relates or doesn't to black communities in in the us and I should also acknowledge some um autobiography, autobiographical pieces here to also clarify some of the lenses and biases that I have.
Speaker 2:Um, so some identity markers for me I am black surprise. Um, I am queer. I am not american. I'm canadian, um, I've been here for 11 years now, which is non-us citizen, um, and so those things I think will influence how I talk about some of this. I am sort of mid-tier priced in my area. I'm not an insurance acceptor. So it also filters through who I get to see and work with and that I am not among our practice.
Speaker 1:Agreed yeah.
Speaker 2:So I'm not among the folks who are charging what we could be charging in this field in order to remain accessible, and still I am not accessible to a huge segment of the population here. And then I did say that my practice is pretty racially and ethnically spread, almost exactly evenly split around couples and individuals, or not couples I used to say relationships, because I work with a lot of non-monogamous folk but, yeah, those things influence how this shows up for me in my work, and so I wanted to also name and be transparent about some of the biases that I'm introducing here.
Speaker 1:Thoughts on this dynamic of consenting to unwanted sex and outcomes, protective factors, if we look at it through the lens of queerness instead of the lens of blackness. What are your thoughts?
Speaker 2:I would be unsurprised if gay men experienced this less you'd be unsurprised I would be unsurprised if gay men experienced this left on some level, because men are more accustomed to saying no to men. I'm thinking about the couples that I have worked with, and when sex comes in as a problem and it's usually, I mean, it's the same boring problem we see all the time. One person wants more sex, the other person doesn't, um, but they're solidly just not having sex. They're just not having the sex I don't want it, so we're not doing. We're not doing it, and I don't think that's necessarily about inherently being a better self-advocate or about being more boundaried, um, because they play out all kinds of other games with each other um but they are either like we have sex because he wants it and like whatever, um, and so there's not deep conflict around it.
Speaker 2:It's like, yeah, whatever we do it, um, or we're just not having the sex right. There's less of this like muddy, like we do it but I don't want to do it and I feel bad about it, and then I try to not do it next time and I don't know that they're going to listen to me, and then I kind of feel, you know, forced, but they're not forcing me. But they're kind of forcing me because they keep asking me. And why do they keep asking me? Can't they tell that I don't want to?
Speaker 2:more transparent, more bold, more more clear clear more clear, right, um, more decisive, um, and yeah I I just wonder if that is, if that has to do more with men being more accustomed to saying no to other men.
Speaker 2:Um, I think men are less worried about wounding men around sex like the. The sex negotiations and games that men play tend to be much more direct. Women tend to be very worried about, you know, penis ego in ways that gay men just do not attend to right. That's why it's very easy for gay culture, gay men culture, to have like a bathroom hookup culture. I met you in a bathroom and I don't know your name.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a really interesting connection.
Speaker 2:Right, yay or nay. Hey, you're hot, want to make out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what would you think then?
Speaker 2:with women who have sex with women. Women who have sex with women will do this game similarly, but also different. Similarly, but also different. There tends to be less directness compared to gay men, but in my experience, gay women are doing more like tracking, tracking and checking of the cues, like they're very like. The avoidance becomes on both sides I don't want, I don't pursue you for sex because I don't think you want it much, right and right, and I might, you know, whine and complain and feel bad and sad and you might give in, but then I feel shitty about it. Right, there's like a different level of like emotional stakes on both sides. Right, this is very rarely a one-person problem. This tends to be and again, anecdotal from my clinical experience but that they both end up avoiding it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, interesting, possibly eliminate some of the scripts we have about male sexuality, maybe it being dangerous or out of control or a deal breaker, or they'll find it somewhere else or these you know, kind of worries for heterosexual women. But what's going to stay is that, anticipating the emotional disappointment and tracking all of that without conversation, yeah, and I actually don't experience the first part.
Speaker 2:They still do all of that. They still do all of that, worrying that you're going to leave, worrying that you're dissatisfied, worrying that you're thinking about your ex, worrying that you want to go.
Speaker 1:You know, that script might be tied less to men than I'm giving a credit, and it's tied to what sex means in a relationship, much less than what sex means to a man in a relationship.
Speaker 2:Okay, Okay, we believe sex means about my value to you.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, you're saying it could be a lot less gendered here and a lot more about our own insecurities, am I? But am I interpreting you right? No, I I.
Speaker 2:I think that that's right, because the clients that I experience this with um, those who have kids, tend to do with their kids also. I say yes when I mean no, you want something, and I bend over backwards and I kind of I don't hate my kids, I love my kids, but I hate dancing and I can't figure out why. I just want to like run away, but I love them and so I should bring them with me, but also I just like wish that I was just like by myself on an island and no one could ask me for anything.
Speaker 1:I love that you're taking this experience outside of the container of sexuality to say look at all the ways women say yes when they mean no, and these outcomes are playing out in parenthood and they're playing out in relationships, probably playing out of work.
Speaker 2:It's happening with your friendships, it's happening with your family. I've just so rarely seen this contained well enough for it to. It is a sexual problem, and so there is grounds to address it in sex, because there is something very specific about what's happening here sexually, and there's something about the level of deference and, um fear that women in particular experience sexually with other people. That really needs to be addressed, and I think that it is amplified by how we negotiate conflict outside of sex, especially historically, what we were taught around whether or not your needs matter as much as anybody else's, who you can say no to and what the consequences of that are. And also, when we get into relational dynamics that teach you this hierarchy, you tend to take it it outside. So even if you didn't have that historically or you couldn't trace it for yourself historically, if you learn it in a relationship that feels like the stakes are riding on whether or not you get what you want from me, including my body, when you want it I like this conversation we're having.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because it's really highlighting. When we look at the scatter graph of our research, it was like there was this quadrant of people who clearly there was no coercion and they had high levels of these symptoms, and so you're describing that quadrant where you know in a way that for a minute we were like oh, this is a math issue.
Speaker 2:Can we get a statistician in here please? I know our numbers but.
Speaker 1:But this is that this is where there can be high levels of resentment and avoidance and anxiety, very low levels of external pressure or coercion or emotional but deep beliefs around in order to satisfy this difference between what I want and what you want, or what I think you want.
Speaker 2:Um, I have to give myself away, right, we really struggle. I mean, we could oversimplify this and call this desire discrepancy, but, like we don't know what to do with, I want something that is different than what you want in the context of sex. We just have not figured that out, right, which is why we have the same conversation 90 billion times.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and very little change. I don't know, Maybe that's not fair of me but Very little.
Speaker 2:We haven't figured out how to do that, and the parts of me that are inherently radicalized um acknowledge that we really haven't been able to do that in any forefront. So of course we can't negotiate genitals swirling and rubbing around all over each other because we haven't figured out how to do that in terms of the land. We haven't figured out how to do that in terms of made-up shit like borders. We haven't figured out how to do this right in terms of resource distribution right, we have yeah, it's almost always one person.
Speaker 1:One side wins, one person, one side loses, right I mean you can't cut the baby in half.
Speaker 2:I mean, you could, but you shouldn't. You could, but you shouldn't. You probably shouldn't. You could, but you shouldn't. You probably shouldn't, yeah, and even if you did, people would argue about which piece they get. Yeah, right, we don't know how to reconcile these differences, and we do track fairness, and so for these folks it feels unfair, unfairness. And so for these folks it feels unfair. Many of them are angry with their partners because how could you put me in this position? And all the partner did was want.
Speaker 2:Want. I want to come, I want to touch. I want to be close to you. I want to feel inside your body. I want to experience you in pleasure. I want to kill 35 minutes. I want to sleep well, well, I want to be distracted from my feelings. I want to feel skillful, powerful, desired, interesting, curious. I want to feel brave. I want to feel strong. I want to feel small. I want to feel submissive.
Speaker 1:I want to dominate right, they just want um, and maybe some of that clarifying language would actually help this discrepancy. Instead of the, do you wanna the?
Speaker 2:here's what I'm looking for in it, yeah sometimes it helps, right, but sometimes I still don't want to.
Speaker 1:Right and not help in terms of sway your opinion, but help in terms of clarifying some of the internal stories the partner's making up about what's wanted right, and how do we encounter someone else's desires without feeling pressure to fulfill it, but then also have a satisfying relationship because most of us learn that our relationships are about meeting each other's needs.
Speaker 2:Well, what if you need? And and that's always complicated for me because I don't know how to make a difference what's the difference? Yeah, right, but how do I meet your desires if what you desire I do not want?
Speaker 1:I don't know, I like how you boiled it down to the problem being this. You know you can boil it down to this one question how do we do this?
Speaker 2:well, places we could punctuate it, and I don't claim to know what the actual you know thing is, but for me here some of like the key pieces are like what is your willingness to tolerate your partner's?
Speaker 1:disappointment. I like this. You're almost thinking through like a treatment plan of like what are the skills we've got?
Speaker 2:what are we gonna do?
Speaker 2:so these key points, yeah right what is your willingness to tolerate or your your ability to tolerate your partner's disappointment? How can we create a relationship that is safe enough for the two of you to want different things or the same thing at different times or in different ways? Like, what is our capacity to tolerate that? We are different people? All right, yeah. And what beliefs about sex or about relationships or about conflict do we need to unlearn in order to be able to negotiate better? Because so many of these women, I'm sure, believe, are keeping that, believe that they are keeping, in order to be able?
Speaker 1:to negotiate better, because so many of these women, I'm sure, believe that they are keeping the peace and they haven't had a sainthood about it. And they haven't had a moment of peace in years.
Speaker 2:But I believe that they're saying I don't want to fight, I don't want a conflict. Well, you're not fighting with him, so you're fighting with yourself.
Speaker 1:You're choosing to fight. I don't want a conflict. Well, you're not fighting with him, so you're fighting with yourself. You're choosing to fight with yourself instead.
Speaker 2:A more comfortable playing field, sure, and that's your right to choose that, but let's not equate your distress, your privately held distress as peace, because then there's no resolution.
Speaker 1:I love your language and I'm so glad I'm I'm recording this. All the transcribed turned on because you just said a really beautiful sentence and it's already not right. I already would have misquoted you. Your words were more beautiful yeah, thank you.
Speaker 2:So these are some of the thoughts I have in this moment, and I really appreciate you letting me just kind of like spitball what have I missed what? Where should we go deeper? I know we've got about seven or eight minutes left, and so I want to make sure that I you in the time.
Speaker 1:You are absolutely, really generous and I and I like where the conversation's gone and I'm curious if there are things that you thought of that I did not when I was interpreting this and thinking about this, because there's going to be things that I don't yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:How are you operationalizing? There was a phrase that you were using um social safety? Yeah, and I'm curious what that means.
Speaker 1:Um, in the context of your and lisa diamond's research, um, she, we were using that in the context of a lot of the recent research about not just so the the idea of social safety comes from minority stress research, um, but extrapolating the choices we make to keep our social safety comes from minority stress research.
Speaker 1:But extrapolating the choices we make to keep our social safety, theorizing the, why it's traumatic, is because it feels like there's so much to lose with a no in the way that the relationship is either set up for that couple or for this community or I don't know the USS culture, you know, but for some reason, you know, looking at the risk of a no and that for some people it's much higher than for others. And so the dishonest yes to keep false harmony is an attempt to cope with their fear of losing their social stability. Meet the social of the relationship, their relationship stability would, especially if that relationship is where you get your housing stability or you get your parenting stability or you get your. You know, um these social factors, that if sex ruined the relationship you would be in a difficult position socially.
Speaker 2:For all those reasons, I would argue that this is even though we are social creatures. Largely what you're describing goes much further than social. We're talking about literal safety, right that if I'm counting on for financial security. That's structural, structural right. That literally could be the difference between life and death right and yeah our superficial relationship to social um could diminish that, so I would invite um I like that change in language.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would invite you to literally just call it safety and, to you know, outline all of the ways in which I mean, if you were going to you know, sort of take that angle, because it's going into structural and practical and all these other forms.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for asking that question yeah, I hadn't, of course, thought very long on that you're right.
Speaker 2:Right, and so if we're talking about negotiations around safety, that also makes this larger than a coping strategy. Right, it also becomes, um, I don't I don't exactly know what the word is of what's larger than coping, but it feels the magnitude, also feels different than coping.
Speaker 1:And I don't know that it's true for all of our participants. In fact I know it's not true for all of our participants. When we look at the data, they did say this was my attempt at keeping a co-parent and an income and housing, and for some it wasn't.
Speaker 2:For some it was so. For some folks it's protective, but these are some form of safety negotiation, at least for this cohort of folks, you know, for folks who fall into whatever quadrant you know, you're describing, and I don't know if you have thoughts or theories around what is happening for others, but I do imagine they actually have more in common, these categories.
Speaker 2:they have a lot in common. Even if it's not, I think my partner will take my kid and leave, or that I cannot financially support myself, but there is something that they are unwilling or unable to skillfully address without having to say yes to a no right, and and it is most significantly impacting the folks who are now experiencing distress on the other side of it right if, if I'm understanding the research correctly, what I'm hearing is it's a pretty common experience for women to say yes to sex.
Speaker 2:That is a no for them and for many of those folks that just like is a thing yeah, I have sex, that that I don't otherwise want, and I would imagine that's true across genders. Right that, yeah, people, people do that, I know men yeah, it does, yeah, yeah, um but that we're zeroing in on.
Speaker 2:For some of these folks, like this is like a huge thing, like this is a problem and it's creating significant levels of distress. Um, or it's creating distress and for a subset of those folks, the distress is like significant enough to garner ptsd status, yeah, and so it sounds like we're looking at how do we understand what's happening here so that we can especially take care of these folks yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah, exactly yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm not like ringing this bell. That, stopped doing this. It hurts everyone. It's like ring this oh, for some people in this group, this is not a good strategy. You know, we've got to. We've got to. Yeah, um, so this is helpful. Any other like just op-ed comments of, as your, if you're unique, yeah, in the world.
Speaker 2:I think this is a place that could be intervened on with different relationship ed especially around conflict resolution. Of course, this is a place that would benefit from sex ed because most things do.
Speaker 2:I think that this is, as you really wisely put like, not only a consent issue and still also a consent issue, if we acknowledge that a lot of the framing around consent is around not just like whether or not you give a yes, but I think that's what enthusiastic was trying to get at like. Is this an? The word I often use with my clients is embodied yes, you can say yes to anything, right? Do you feel yes right in?
Speaker 1:whatever way you feel things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the research is trying is kind of calling that wanting, because they're saying consenting and wanting are two different right experiences, and so I think, for the folks who are talking about consent and using words like enthusiastic, I think that is what they are trying to get at. Do you want to?
Speaker 1:Do you agree? Not? Are you willing? Not, do you?
Speaker 2:allow Right and there is room for all of that If that is an experience that you can give a genuine yes to, can give a genuine yes to right. If I can borrow another minute and a half, it makes me think of the work of Betty Martin. Yes, we talked to Betty last week. She's amazing, but I think about the three minute game. Yeah, one of my personal favorite roles is allow.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love a good allow, I would take. Take it, unless it pops you out of that circle, right? That's what I'm still wondering is like is this pattern pushing a safe allow into beyond that boundary and what we're hearing?
Speaker 2:is yes right that you are taking more than I want, or I don't want to give that, or whatever the case is. But a lot of the conflict begins with how well do I know where my line is and do I advocate for that?
Speaker 2:Because beyond that, it's actually not my responsibility If you take something from me. I wasn't giving right Like, yes, I'm going to feel the consequences of that and that can be traumatic, but I don't have something to reconcile with myself around it. If I truly believe that I've done everything that I was meant to do to keep myself safe, right. But if you're taking from me things that I haven't told you you cannot have or that I'm not actually intending to offer, I didn't know that I was giving you that or I don't really want to give that to you.
Speaker 2:I really want that one. That's my favorite one. That's my best one that's my best one yeah, you can have a bite, but I didn't want you to have that bite yeah, I've been saving it.
Speaker 2:Right now you're hoarding your food because you like don't want them to see it, because you don't want them to want some, because you don't trust that they're going to interact with it. Well, yeah, that like there's. It feels like there's something there, right, and meanwhile partners think that they're like serving. I'm giving you something that you want, you know are you having a terrible time?
Speaker 1:Why are you having a terrible time when I'm giving you.
Speaker 2:Or they don't know that you're having a terrible time. But why is it so? Hard to get you to do this with me all the time, if you're like, yeah, I like like sex, or you used to like sex and now you hate it. And why do you hate it now, right, when we've had all these great experiences, but all of a sudden you're just like don't want me anymore. Yeah, so those are some kind of amorphous thoughts that I'm glad that it is your responsibility to figure out what to do with it.
Speaker 1:I'm just starting a conversation. I'm trying to make it clear in my book that I am not like that. I'm that this is the start of a conversation, that the book is not like an end all be all the conversation, because I just, I just think we haven't quite looked at this from this angle and it's interesting to me, and I think we all run into it and haven't quite known what to do and why the heck are the desire interventions not working for this couple yeah, yeah, and they won't yeah, sensei phone, not gonna happen, not gonna happen.
Speaker 2:Yeah, she doesn't want this.
Speaker 1:Why are you touching me? Go away. Yeah, because because now she's trying to please the therapist. This was an assignment, so I'm still having the same experience, where I'm saying yes to the thing, my body is saying no to, you know, and I want to want it. I want to want it. Yeah, you know, this was so good. I really appreciate your time. And I think yeah, I love today, I really appreciate it. Okay, thanks so much for the conversation and for your thoughts, really valuable. Talk soon. Bye-bye.