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Ever feel like there’s a little too much drama in your life? Well, if that’s the case, then you probably have been caught in the Drama Triangle. If you’ve never heard of the Drama Triangle then be prepared - you’re going to start seeing it EVERYWHERE. Today you’ll learn how to spot it - and even better, how to escape it. Our guest is Dr. Stephen Karpman, the creator of the Drama Triangle, and author of the recent book “A Game-Free Life: The Definitive Book on the Drama Triangle and the Compassion Triangle” - which explains how to spot the sources of drama and dysfunction - and what to do to break the cycle. Along the way, you’ll also get clear tips on improved communication, how to deepen intimacy, and what agreements are essential to maintain in any relationship. 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! 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Read Stephen Karpman’s book, “A Game-Free Life” for details on the Drama Triangle, the Compassion Triangle, and more! 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/triangle2 to download the transcript, or text “PASSION” to 33444 and follow the instructions to download the transcript to this episode with Stephen Karpman. 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. Sometimes life can be really dramatic. There can be highs and lows, you can feel like you're the victim with people just out to get you. You can feel like you're doing your best to show up for the people in your life, and they don't appreciate you. In fact, they see you as some kind of enemy and in the end, all of this drama plays out in ways that keep us from being truly connected with the people around us, and these could just be our acquaintances or our colleagues and co-workers, or it could be the people in our lives with whom we're most deeply connected: Our children, our partners, ourselves. Neil Sattin: So I was actually going through a situation about a year and a half ago, and really struggling. And in reaching out to one of my friends about it. She said, "You know, this sounds like a classic Drama Triangle," and I had never heard of a Drama Triangle before, so I was like, "I'm going to have to check that out." I looked it up and there were lots and lots of references online describing what the drama triangle was, and sure enough it felt like that was what was going on in my life, but it didn't necessarily help me figure out how to solve the drama triangle. Neil Sattin: And that's where today's conversation comes in. We have with us an esteemed guest, Dr. Stephen Karpman, who is the person who created the drama triangle, and whose work has evolved past the drama triangle in ways that help us see how to escape from these games that we play with each other, in ways that actually build intimacy and closeness with the people in our lives, or if we're not looking for intimacy, at least they keep us from being caught in a repetitive loop. So Dr. Karpman is the author of the recent book, "A Game Free Life," the definitive book on the drama triangle and compassion triangle and along with many, many other books and papers, and we will talk about that more over the course of today's conversation. If you are looking to download a transcript of today's show, you can visit neilsattin.com/triangle, as in the drama triangle, or as always you can text the word Passion to the number 33444 and follow the instructions. So let's dive in today, Dr. Stephen Karpman, thank you so much for joining us here today on Relationship Alive. Stephen Karpman: Thank you, Neil, for asking me, and I'll do what I can to help people with their lives. Neil Sattin: Great. That's the best we can hope for today. And I just want to note that I'm really excited to be talking to you. What people listening don't necessarily know is that you and I have actually been in dialogue for almost this whole past year and a half, maybe even more. So, it's exciting that we finally made it all work. You're very busy in presenting and getting your books together and I'm glad that we're finally here today to talk. Stephen Karpman: Okay. Neil Sattin: So Steve, Stephen, let's just start... It's probable that a lot of people listening do know what the drama triangle is, at least on some level, but for those who don't, or for those who haven't really thought about it for a while, let's talk about it and enumerate each of the roles in the drama triangle, and then talk about what actually creates the drama. So, can we start there? Stephen Karpman: Sure. The drama triangle is something I created many years ago. Primarily, originally, I was working on a strategy in football and basketball, and I'd do this three-corner triangle of different roles, and then it turned out to be applicable to theater, like there would be a villain, and a hero, and a victim. But eventually, the way I originally drew it is the way that took off, which is a triangle with the point down, which is the victim in a one down position. And the two people in the power position, in the upper left corner had the persecutor role, which is a person who's always blaming, always putting the victim down. And then the other corner on the upper-right is the rescuer position. That person is always helping, and always trying to save and trying to fix the victim who somehow never seems to get fixed and it's a very frustrating for the rescuer. Neil Sattin: So when you're in a challenging situation, at a minimum it can help to step back and say, "Okay, which of these roles am I playing? And which role is the other person or persons playing in this situation?" Stephen Karpman: Sure. Now, there's the difference between a game playing role and in real life. For instance, the persecutor might be an aggressor in real life, and just being an aggressive person who might be critical at times, but it goes into the triangle when they have... They're linked in with someone in a non-ending game. So the persecutor is always blaming, always criticizing the victim. The victim can never do anything right, but the persecutor always has to be right because they don't want themselves to feel like a victim inside, so they always have to win. Stephen Karpman: Now the rescuer had to come in and save the victim from the persecutor, then more than likely the rescuer is a good-hearted person initially, and it's okay to be a rescuer in life, very good actually. But it becomes a drama triangle, when they're involved in an unending game with the victim who's always helpless, always wrong, never can do anything right, and they deplete themselves in their own... Drain themselves in their own light, devoting their lives to saving the victim and meanwhile neglecting their own life. Stephen Karpman: And then the victim is a person who may be from their past, they see themselves as inadequate or insufficient and somehow get into the role of asking for help from people. But eventually, which is okay, but eventually, if they get into a game, then they play the role of a victim. They're not actually the victim, they're playing the role of a victim, which is very manipulative and playing all sorts of games to keep the rescuer helping them and to keep the persecutor criticizing them. So then, you have the drama triangle, that's the drama. When people get into dysfunctional roles and dysfunctional relationships, they get into the triangle. Sometimes they switch around different roles, like the rescuer might suddenly become the persecutor, or the victim might get even with the rescuer by becoming a persecutor, so then it gets complicated, and you get into a game that's... People... That can go on for years, and people can't solve it or get out of it. Neil Sattin: So how do I know if I'm in a game or not? Stephen Karpman: Well, it depends on the role, but primarily it's very frustrating. You're involved with someone else, that's when you're in the triangle, and it's very frustrating because you feel drawn in, particularly the victim will draw a person in. It's like quicksand, you get drawn deeper and deeper, and try harder and harder to fix the person to get them to think, to get them to realize things. The rescuer might say, "I've gotta get you to realize things." And the persecutor might say, "You're dumb because you don't understand anything," so it's one of... The relationship gets stressful, it gets exasperating or gets depleting of energy and primarily nothing ever gets fixed, nothing gets clear, nothing is understood and it just seems to stay that way, on and on. Neil Sattin: So if a situation isn't evolving and it feels dysfunctional, then the odds are you're trapped in some sort of game? Stephen Karpman: And you may not know that you're trapped, you just... You keep wanting to try hard, it's one of the drivers. You try hard to fix things or to be perfect in your answers or be perfect in your feelings so maybe the victim will change, and the person could make the criticism even stronger and stronger, thinking that will teach the victim a lesson, and by... With their strength, they will protect themselves from ever being criticized. So it's primarily... It's a relationship and other people may notice at first and you may not notice it yourself for months and years, and you don't want to leave the other person but you don't know how to make the situation better or to get it livable. Neil Sattin: Yeah, and why do you think that it's not enough? 'Cause this was my experience when this particular situation, and I can't get into the details just out of respect of other people's privacy, but I saw it happening and I was like, "Oh this is very clearly what is going on." And yet, just recognizing that, that I was playing a rescuer role, this other person was playing the persecutor role, and then someone else is playing the victim role, just recognizing that wasn't enough to actually change the dynamic. And I'm wondering if you can give us a sense of why that might be so, that it's not enough to just recognize that this is what's happening. Stephen Karpman: Well, primarily, most of the people that write about the triangle talk about empowering. One needs to feel empowered, that they are successful and if they don't feel that they're successful, that nothing they're doing is working, at that point, they may step back and say, "Well, perhaps I need to change something and it starts by knowing what the roles are in the drama triangle, that there's a persecutor, rescuer, and victim role, and people do get trapped in it and get frustrated. And once they know the roles, then they need to get in touch with their feelings and why they're in that role and what's their pay-off. Stephen Karpman: They're involved with people that they can't control. You can't control the persecutor or the rescuer, or the victim. You can't control yourself. So, at that point, you decide that you will control yourself and decide what to do about the game. Of course, you'll try to discuss it first or you may get into counseling about it, but at some point, you need to decide that the triangle isn't working for you and you move on if you can't make it work better for you or if you can't tolerate it. Neil Sattin: Yeah, and I think one thing that might be challenging is probably most people arrive at thinking about the drama triangle by feeling like they're a victim to someone who's persecuting them and... That would be my guess. 'Cause that's the place where you feel like you're being stuck in a situation of powerlessness, and so it seems like it might be challenging to go to someone that you're perceiving as your persecutor, and say, "Hey, I think... I was doing some reading online and I think that we're stuck in this drama triangle thing, and I'm pretty sure you're stuck in the role of the persecutor and I'm the victim," I don't see that going very well. Stephen Karpman: Yeah, the persecutor would then tell you that you're wrong, and that you're reading all the wrong information and your friends are telling you the wrong things and you got to shape up. The persecutor often is a narcissist or a bully, and they just like bullying people, they just like telling people what to do. And they can get along in life that way, but in the drama triangle, there's actually a link between all the roles and they're actually trapped in that role and they may persecute the rescuer, telling the rescuer that they don't know what in the world they're doing, and they're not going to stop because this is their power position. So how to get the persecutor to back off would be challenging and maybe some insight might get through or it won't get through and then you would face other decisions, whether you need to move on. Neil Sattin: Right, so there is that element, as always, of someone being discerning and trying to figure out like, "Is this person that I'm perceiving to be a persecutor, are they adaptable, are they flexible, are they willing to work with me to show up or not?" Stephen Karpman: Well, also you need to take into account the role of the victim. Are you feeding the persecutor what they need? Are you trying to, as they say, "sail a pizza past the wolf"? The persecutor may not pick up on things because your way of telling the persecutor may be either accusatory which would get the persecutor to fight back or maybe so sympathetic and so helpless that the persecutor would see it as a weakness, so the victim would need to look at their role, whether they're really playing a role that makes themselves irresistible to the persecutor, and then the victim would need to look at whether they need to empower themselves, so they come across as more effective and more worthy of respect and get listened to. Neil Sattin: Yeah and maybe this would be a good time to also talk about what you alluded to a few moments ago, which is that, people often are playing more than one role and can switch back and forth. Or they can perceive themselves as one role while the other person is perceiving them differently, and the example that pops into my mind immediately of that is, you talk about the political system, the political parties in our country, where the classic, maybe Republican postures that they see themselves as the rescuer of the taxpayer, and the Democrat might see themselves as the rescuer of the common person, and both of them perceive the other as a persecutor. And that they're being victimized in some way by them. Stephen Karpman: Well, that becomes a turnoff to the voter when they realize that politics has become a game of accusing people, lying, accusing people of things, switching around and only taking one position and not knowing what's going on on the other side of the aisle. So a person gets out of the political game by respecting both sides, to see that each side has a following and they have a point of view. Now the other question about the switching of roles is very real. The persecutor may decide that they want to win the game and if they're being accused of being a persecutor, they may switch. They may switch over to be a rescuer and say, "Oh, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry, I really care about you. And I didn't mean that... " Stephen Karpman: That could all be a game, it could all be a manipulation. Or they could be... Play the role of the victim in order to win the game and keep things confusing and keep things involved. So they could play the victim of... They never can be understood, they're really trying to help the person with the criticism and they're being misunderstood. So you can wind up switching around the triangle in order to win. In order to not get pegged into one of the roles, you switch around so that you can win. Neil Sattin: Yeah, and what is winning exactly? Stephen Karpman: Well, winning is the excitement, the excitement of the drama of staying involved in some argumentative relationship wherein some problems, problematic relationship, which is very involving, it's... They're standing for negative strokes instead of positive strokes, but some people think negative strokes are just as good or even better, or they don't even know why they're involved, but they are involved and sometimes they don't realize how involved they were until the game somehow ends which could be traumatic sometimes or mind blowing. It could free them, they can all of a sudden feel free. The rescuer would say, "I'd rather be smarter than martyred." Stephen Karpman: They don't want to be a martyr anymore, they want to be smart that they're out of the game and they're free again, and so the victim might say, "I'd rather be mad than sad instead of complaining all the time." They'd get angry at the whole game, saying, "Why am in this game? Why am I playing this silly role of a victim all my life? I can get things for myself." And then they can empower themselves, which is a big part of the drama triangle and getting out as people learn to empower themselves and realize they can't change others but they can change themselves and get what they want in life. Neil Sattin: And where does this all... How did you come up with the compassion triangle as the antidote to the drama triangle? Stephen Karpman: Well, in transactional analysis which started with Eric Berne's "Games People Play," which was a runaway bestseller years ago, 120 weeks in a row on New York Times best seller list, and I trained with Eric Berne, and one of the principles in transactional analysis is that there's three ego states. People can either play the role: The parent, adult, or a child; or be those people to others. And the thing is that the roles can be played positive and negative, like the critical parent role can be played in a negative way, which is always criticizing, but in the positive way, which is a strong leader with decisive... With rules and people follow them, and society is stronger because of the rules. Stephen Karpman: So using that idea from Eric Berne that all these ideas can be seen in a positive or a negative way, I started looking at each of the roles in the drama triangle, can be either positive or negative. So, for instance, the persecutor is very negative 'cause they keep the victim feeling terrible about themselves, but if you get out of the triangle, it can be positive, you can be an aggressive, self-empowering person, who's determined to channel your energies into life and to being purposeful and productive. Stephen Karpman: And the rescuer, ordinarily, is a person who gets walked on all the time, people take advantage of the rescuer. They're always helping, and giving people another chance and then another chance and then a third chance, and... But they can switch that negative rescuing to positive rescuing. They can love themselves and they can actually help themselves and help others. And the victim, instead of being the negative role of always needy, always helpless, never, never learning anything that they need to learn, then they can switch that into the vulnerable role, that they're actually open to helping themselves and hearing other people and changing themselves. So all three roles can be either way. But one day, I developed what I called the compassion triangle, which I could go into more if you want to. Neil Sattin: Yeah, let's do that. Stephen Karpman: Okay. The compassion triangle is, I put that altogether and realize that people are actually in all three roles at once. There's a primary role that everyone sees, but then there's two hidden roles. So, using an example of a boss picking on the secretary would be seen as the persecutor, and people wouldn't like the boss, but secretly, if you want another way of looking at the boss or helping the boss, the boss is also a rescuer. The boss is rescuing the secretary who can't do it right, who can't learn fast enough, so by criticizing the secretary or being a helicopter mom to the secretary, they're really trying to impart information that would help the person. And in a way, they're also helping their own job, because if people don't get their job done, then the boss could get fired. So the boss would also be a victim and say, "Oh my gosh, I'm running ship that's going aground and people aren't doing their job right." So then, it's all three roles at once. Stephen Karpman: And originally, that actually goes back to evolutionary days in which there's, which I called the drama triangle, which is another subject but that's... In evolutionary days, you have to trigger all three roles at once, immediately, in order to save the offspring to go on to another generation. So I've digressed at that into a situation I saw on TV on a Discovery Channel. Neil Sattin: Okay. Stephen Karpman: Where a tiger was approaching a baby elephant and the bigger elephants circled the baby. So the way they're a rescuer, they were rescuing the baby. They were also persecutor 'cause they could chase off of the tiger, and then they're also victim because they saw their own family being threatened, and with empathy, they could feel the threat to the baby elephant. So all three had to be triggered and going through different situations in evolution, all three of those actually started out of instincts. So in a stress situation, all three of those are fired off at once. Neil Sattin: Interesting and why... So why did you end up calling this the compassion triangle? Stephen Karpman: Well, compassion triangle was... I picked that name, somewhat for its appeal, but also because it helps you have compassion for each person. So instead of saying the persecutor is evil and critical and narcissistic, you'd have compassion for the person also being a rescuer and a victim in what they were doing. And same, you'd have compassion for the rescuer, it could be criticized and say, "Oh you're a rescuer. Maybe a therapist is letting their patient call in the middle hours of the night or something, and not paying their bills. They could say, instead of being critical a person who's a rescuer, you could see them as also a persecutor which is keeping someone in the dependent position, and they're also a victim, 'cause they don't know how to get out of the situation because they get so many strokes and purpose out of rescuing people. Stephen Karpman: And the victim, instead of seeing them as, "Oh, you're a victim, you're playing a manipulation game, you're a professional victim," you could see them as also a persecutor that they're keeping other people involved in their game, and they're also a rescuer. They're giving other people what they want, they're giving other people a victim to pick on, so they don't need to look at their own lives. So, It goes on from there. In my book, A Game-Free Life, the first half of the book deals with all the different drama triangles in different situations like the identified patient and all sorts of situations. And the second half of the book is all about open intimate communication and listening and accountability and how to get out of the games. Neil Sattin: Yeah, and so I think that the danger is to start to get confused like, "Alright, well, if the persecutor is also the victim and also the rescuer, then how do those distinctions even matter?" And I think what you're saying is that, thinking about it this way is a good way to stretch you outside of the boundaries of the game thinking, where you're stuck in a particular role or where the other person is stuck in a particular role to develop a little bit more flexibility in how you're thinking about it. Stephen Karpman: Yeah, the word compassion could get people drawn into forgiving other people for their game playing, like forgiving a persecutor, not actually realizing what they're actually doing with all their criticism. So you don't want to get soft, you need to know the games and you need to know the roles and you don't want to first get into forgiving everybody, because that will be a rescue and will keep you the game, but the compassion triangle is used mostly to understand why the games are played. If you want to do that, the most people just deal with the drama triangle with the roles. I'm in this role, that role. And sometimes they get into the switches, which is what the triangle role change was, the drama of changing roles and getting other people to line up as persecutors, rescuers and victims and getting lots of other people involved. Stephen Karpman: So that's the drama and the switching. But if you want to understand the reasons why a person gets into the game, the compassion gives you three ways of talking to that person, like that boss, you could say, "I know you're trying to rescue a person help them by the criticism, but maybe it's not working." And also the boss saying, telling the boss how they're a victim, you know, you could be victimized, you could get fired, if these people don't learn their job or... Stephen Karpman: So, it's when you want to get into understanding the roles is when you use a compassion triangle, and usually, if you go on the internet to the different blogs and the other books written about the Drama Triangle, they mostly just describe the roles and how people get into the roles and what to do to empower yourself to get out of the role. They don't often get into the switches, which gets into dysfunctional family games. And I have a list in my book of all dysfunctional family games, but they don't go the next step which is to actually understand why people are doing it, 'cause that would get them too soft and they would tend to stay in the game, if they are two sympathetic to the other people. Neil Sattin: Yeah, so when you're, say, working with a couple and let's just choose a typical example, which is like, one person is always complaining, let's say. So one person always has complaint and the other person probably has the story of like I can, it'll never be enough. What I do will never be enough for my partner. How could you help them use the compassion triangle as a way to get out of that dynamic? Stephen Karpman: Well, we look at the three motivations behind each other's point. And I would do an exercise where each one would talk to the other person. One person would say, let's say, the complainer would say to the other person. I know I'm complaining as a victim, but I'm also persecutor and to keeping you feeling guilty about my complaints and I'm also rescuer because I'm turning up the energy between us and giving you what you need in order to feel superior. And then they would do the triangle for the other person. Like I know you're coming on as persecutor, which isn't working 'cause I'll fight it, but I know you're also the rescuer 'cause you're trying to help, and I know you're also victim because you feel this is intolerable, and you're afraid of what the next step would be. So I will do the compassion triangle exercise and I would have both people do it. Stephen Karpman: So the victim would go through their three roles and the persecutor's three roles and then the persecutor would have to tell the other one, here's the roles and here are your three roles. This compassion triangle exercise is very, very moving, and it's being adopted in many many treatment centers. And I just wish more people would know about it, and use it, of course, wishing would be hoping and be a victim positions. So I'll back off that one. Neil Sattin: Well, here we are taking action that hopefully, many of you will go out and grab A Game-Free Life. It's on Amazon, and there's a lot of information in there, there's a lot to absorb and even in just the description of the Drama Triangle, and the compassion triangle. And then, as you mentioned, Steven, you move on to talking about intimacy building and communication and building trust, and obviously, that's a lot of what we're talking about here on my show, Relationship Alive, because those are the building blocks of successful relationships. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Stephen Karpman: Okay. So, the second half of the book starts with the three rules of openness. It starts with the idea of how to set up communication, and the three rules of openness are: Bring it up, talk it up, wrap it up. And I've put a whole lot in there: How to bring up your points so that people listen to it, or how you can bring it up so they won't listen to it. And to talk it up, I talk about all the different games that go on, all the listening problems that go on, all the different blocks that occur to keep someone from listening to your point. And then, the wrap it up, I have a whole different series of how, rather than talk a point to death, you can wrap it up and that would be the goal. And the talk it up, I do a lot about listening, and I have a... A lot of different theoretical ideas I've written through, but they're all practical. And then the example you previously mentioned about the complainer. I have a person learn how to listen to the point the other person made. Stephen Karpman: Now, I have this thing called the listeners loop, which is the four things that ideally a good listener, would do, and it's... I put them on a loop because they're all connected. So it's the letters S-E-V-F. S is for strokes. You give the person strokes for what... For who they are. And then the E stands for encouragement. You give them encouragement. "You can keep talking. You can bring this up to me any time." And that preserves the channel of communication. And the next letter is V for validation. You validate whatever is true that the other person says. And I do have a 10 percent rule, that 10 percent of everything you say is correct and 10 percent of everything you say is incorrect, and 10 percent of the population would agree. [chuckle] Stephen Karpman: And that I use in couples to make sure someone hears at least something that the other person says. And then, so that validates the point. And then, the final is the F for follow through. That validates the purpose of the communication, that you show some results. After the communication, you show some tangible results of the discussion. That, I call that the listeners loop. Neil Sattin: Yeah, it's... Stephen Karpman: There's also... Neil Sattin: Go ahead. Stephen Karpman: There's also a loop of how you block people from ever getting their point across. So I could mention that if you want. Neil Sattin: Sure, let's see that. And just to be clear, we're in the "talk it up" section of your work? Stephen Karpman: Yeah. So there's three letters... Four letters there. In that loop, C-A-S-E, these are the four ways that you can block a person from being effective in their communication. The first C is condescending. I guess, maybe the listeners or you could imagine a situation in which you're really earnestly trying to get through to another person, and that person, in return, first, is condescending, they're looking down on everything you're doing, they're saying, "Oh, this is just your symptom of... You've been talking to the wrong people. You're just the fool. Nothing you say is correct." So they would be condescending and look down on you. The next block would be abrupt. They're just suddenly cut off... Suddenly cut off the communication, "Stop. I've had enough. Stop it." And then, they would walk out the room or hang up the phone or something. Stephen Karpman: That would be intimidating, and that would stop a communication. The next on the loop is S is for secretive. They would withhold all the information that you need in order to hear their point of view, and they would withhold all the information that supports that you heard them. So they keep secretive, and you can't... You don't know where you stand with the person who doesn't give you enough information. But that's an information block, by not giving enough information to let the communication proceed further. Stephen Karpman: And the last block would be the person that you're talking to is evasive. They would talk fast, they would change the subject quickly, they would lead you astray into another subject that's actually more interesting, and you would forget your original point. So that C-A-S-E, or CASE block would keep you from being effective. But if you know the four different blocks, maybe you can address one of them and break it down. If you can break down one of the blocks, then you can... The person will be open to listening to you. And according to the transaction analysis, positive-negative rules, there's also positive C-A-S-E that, instead of condescending, you'd be caring for C; Instead of A, Abrupt, you'd be approachable. Sure, it'd be nice to talk to someone who's carrying an approachable. Stephen Karpman: And instead of S for secretive, the person would be sharing. "Oh, great. This person is sharing information with me. Now, we can move forward." And instead of E for being evasive, you'd say, they're engaged. "Oh, they stay engaged on the subject. We can have enough time to talk it all the way through, rather than suddenly stopping the subject after 30 seconds or five seconds." So, there's a positive loop. And in the workshops that I do, and I do workshops all over the world, workshop... We have that exercise being done. A person practices each of those four negatives, and then the other one deals with them, and then you switch sides. And so, on all these different information and communication blocks, people can practice them. And in couples therapy, you can get them to actually practice the negative C-A-S-E and then switch it to a positive C-A-S-E. And all those can... Stephen Karpman: All those things in the back half of the book and are... Can be practiced. And as social skills. I could mention that originally in Games People Play, the games were spelled out. Eric Berne listed over 100 games and it was a wildly, wildly popular book. But he didn't have a way of getting out of the games. He had something he called an antithesis. Like maybe one sentence or two for about four or five of the games that you could say that would just stop the game right there. But he didn't take it further. I was the only one in transaction analysis field that actually took that further. And my entire book is... It's about what to do about it. Social skills training and relationship building, training, and intimacy building, training, that you can go beyond games with. Neil Sattin: Great. So, let's pull out a few more of those because there are so many in there that are really... Well, what I like about it is that it... In the way that you quantify these ways of being, it makes it really clear in ways that that I wouldn't have thought about before. Before we dive into one of them, there are two important things that I think we should mention. One is, I'm wondering if you, we've mentioned transactional analysis several times, it's been your field. Can you give us just like the 10,000-foot view for people listening, if you don't know what transactional analysis is, this is what it is? Stephen Karpman: Sure. Originally, the psychotherapy field was in the area of what Freud discovered. Freud was a hypnotist and he was a psychiatrist, and he would... With his mind as a hypnotist, he figured that if you could take people all way back to childhood and unleash all the traumas and all the repressed energies of childhood, that this freed up energy would then allow them to be freer in their lives. So this was called the psychodynamic approach or this... Or on a higher professional level, it's a psychoanalytic approach. And all you have to do was going back into childhood and understanding things. Eric Berne came along in a very revolutionary times in 1960s, in San Francisco, very revolutionary times where everything was being rethought and he said, "Why do you have to go back in childhood only? Let's look at what's actually happening on the social level. What's actually happening between people in the here and now that they have to deal with?" Stephen Karpman: Like, you can talk about your childhood all you want, but what if you're getting divorced or what if the boss has demoted you and put your desk in the hallway or something when you were on vacation, or some game you had to deal with? So he brought up the games and he gave very catchy names to them like, "I'm only trying to help you," or "now I've got you, you SOB" or a game of Kick Me. So he came... So the book, of course was wildly popular, of course, people read it to figure out the games other people were playing [chuckle] and weren't necessarily using it to figure out their games. But he brought up the whole level of, of social level. So then transactional analysis had a social level, TA it's called, TA for transactional analysis. And then a psychological level. Psychological level's when you go into the depth, into childhood which is now called scripting, how people write their life scripts when they're young, and then they play out their life scripts as if they're plays. Stephen Karpman: And transaction analysis has a lot about script analysis. And I have a, maybe the middle section of my book is all about script analysis. How you find out what your position is in life? Like, maybe you have an, "I'm okay, you're not okay," position in life or "I'm not okay, you're okay," which was written in Tom Harris's book, I'm Okay You're Okay, which was the other big best-seller back in the '60s and '70s. So transactional analysis became a major force in psychology and psychiatry and it's taught all over the world. We have training centers in 30 or 40 countries and conferences all over the world, so it's a major field in psychology. But because of the dominance of the psychoanalytic approach, some schools actually won't teach it. Stephen Karpman: So that's one of the games people play of being, of protecting your turf. But it gets more and more popular and my book sells, I'm probably selling about 10 a week or so. And there's transactional analysis books and conferences all over the world all the time. So it's gotten pretty popular and more people are looking at what goes on between people, rather than just what went on in your childhood. Neil Sattin: Right, and so the idea is that you're analyzing what is actually happening between two people in the present moment as... Stephen Karpman: Right. And the only precedent to that was back in the early 1960s in the Bay Area, that they started family therapy, and they actually began to have names for what people were doing back and forth in the family therapy circle. Like, people who... There were dyads and triads and certain things like that. But Eric Berne just jumped in way into the future by actually naming the games that each individual person was playing and he brought it up in many different levels. Some of these games, he wrote up about six or seven different levels of why people are playing it. And that appealed to the more depth-oriented people who realized, there's a lot of depths in... Stephen Karpman: There is many depths in what people are doing with each other as they were in what they were doing in their childhood, which I guess psycho-dynamically was like, there's a dozen defense mechanisms that people would employ that was pretty deep, but in TA, you have just as many or even more social defense mechanisms, how you keep people from getting intimate, how you keep people from making their point, how you keep people one-down. So that, sort of TA, primarily, my book, went more in that direction. Neil Sattin: Yeah, and I think that is definitely one of the valuable things is, as soon as you see that you're in a particular game, you talk about the title that could be kind of on the front of someone's sweatshirt like, "This is the game that I'm playing with you," that it gives you a clue of like, "Oh, I'm actually not really connecting with this person. We're just doing this dance that actually prevents us from connecting with each other." Stephen Karpman: Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that. The sweatshirt was an idea that Eric Berne used to talk about in our seminars, and I trained with Eric Berne for, in his weekly seminars in San Francisco for almost six years. And he used to talk about the sweatshirt jokingly, but I've taken it a lot further. It actually tells you what game a person's playing. Imagine you're trying to get through to somebody and you look at their sweatshirt and it says, "I don't care about you or what you're saying," and all of a sudden, you say, "My gosh, look at that." I figured there's a couple... Stephen Karpman: I boiled that down to two sweatshirts. One is the let's pretend sweatshirt, is let's pretend I care about what you're saying. And the other was try and... Try and... Try and make me listen to you. So the "let's pretend" and the "try and" sweatshirt, you're served none. Breaks a game-wide open. Sometimes you don't realize until after you've left and you think, "My gosh, that person had a sweatshirt of I don't care what you say, or I'm never going to listen to anybody," and then you realize, "Wow, that's a game." And so the whole core of a game can be wrapped up in their sweatshirt. And there's a lot of work in TA about intuition, the use of intuition and reading what people are doing, and then also ways of checking out your intuition. Neil Sattin: Yeah, so if I had... Let's say I was with someone, and I thought their sweatshirt was, "Let's pretend that we're... That we're going to work on our problems together," maybe that would be a good one. How do I know if that person is actually just playing the game with me because on the back of their sweatshirt, it would be actually, I'm the one in charge here, or something like that. Stephen Karpman: Well, that was the original sweatshirt of Eric Berne, there's the front of the sweatshirt and what you see and the back is after the switch. The switch is very important in games, like you think you see something and then you get a switch, and all of a sudden, you say, "Oh my God, that's what happened." So that sweatshirt could be an alcoholic wearing a sweatshirt "let's pretend I'm going to stop drinking this time", or "let's pretend that your insights get through to me." And then the rescuer or the co-dependent could say, "Let's pretend I'm going to be effective right now, and you're listening to me," or "Let's pretend we're all going to live happily ever after." But it's an intuition that you might not be able to think of in the heat of the game, but when you walk away the game, you say, "My God, I'm talking to a sweatshirt that says 'I don't care about you,' and I never will," on the back." Neil Sattin: Yeah, how would you test that out? How would you know if... Because I think it can be easy to step back from a person and just say, "Oh okay, I have the story about this person, which is that, they're never going to care about me or they're actually not interested in me." Actually, that might be a good one I'm thinking about going out on a first date with someone and trying to navigate the awkwardness of that and maybe coming away from that thinking like, "Yeah, this person, they just don't care about me." How would you find out if that sort of thing was actually true? Stephen Karpman: Well, probably in time, it'll come out or say... You mention there is this... That if the guy thinks the... Sees the girl's sweatshirt and says, "I'm not a man, I'm not romantically attracted to you," well, then he moves differently. He talks to her in a different way rather than assuming, "I'm a hottie and you're my man," thinking that that's what's going on. So it's a way sort of catching on to what's going on, what's the game that's... Is there a game and what are the real positions? Now, it's okay to be hoping and to wishing and maybe this is going to work out, this is going to be fine, but it's only when there's the game and one way of finding out what the game is to see the sweatshirt and then you go from there, you can bring it up. Stephen Karpman: There's a new type of therapy called relational therapy, in which the therapist shares their feelings with their client and they could actually say to the client, "I feel you're not interested in anything I say," and that could open up a conversation, but it's fine to express your feelings of what you think is going on as long as there's an openness contract... Contract to be open and share with each other without games. Neil Sattin: Oh my goodness, you're just reminding me of so many things that are in your book. Okay, so before we dive in there, just going back to the case, the blocks to communication that you were talking about, C for being condescending, A for abrupt, S for secretive, E for evasive. If I sense one of those things happening in my partner, or the person that I'm talking to, what's a strategy that you've seen be effective in... 'cause you mentioned, sometimes you can take on one of those blocks and break it down, and then you get through and then you're back to communicating with that person. Stephen Karpman: Well, the first step in learning the games people play, and learning intimacy communication and so forth, is to identify it. So, if you identify the person as condescending, you would say, "Wait a minute, I need a little more respect from what I'm saying here are my points." So you could go for that. If you heard the person's abrupt you'd say it up in advance, "I need at least five minutes to talk to you. Will you give me five minutes?" So then you have a way of dealing with that. For the secretive block you'd say, "I need you to tell me why you're doing this and I'll tell you why I'm doing it so you set up a sharing substitute for the S." Stephen Karpman: And then for... For the E, the evasive, you say, "I don't want to start changing the subjects," or as soon as they change the subject, you say, "Wait, you're changing the subject on me, you're not here, or you're not hearing me, or let's stay on this one point, it's important." So knowing what the blocks are, you can actually address each one and it'd be more effective than than if you just threw up your hands and say, "Well, you're impossible. I can't talk to you." Neil Sattin: Right. Stephen Karpman: Which might work also. Neil Sattin: Right, well, it would work in a different way, I guess, of keeping things the way they are. I'm curious. You mentioned earlier very briefly, I think you call, they're called the ego states, the critical parent, the nurturing parent, the adult, the free child, the adoptive child, I think I'm remembering those right. And the way that each of those gives us some flexibility and how we interact with other people, and maybe also how we get stuck in one way or another mode. Can we talk about that for just a little bit and then what I'd love to do is kind of bridge that into your map of intimacy and how people can think about the level of intimacy, the intimacy scale between them and another person. Stephen Karpman: Okay. So the ego states was Berne's way of externalizing Freud's super ego, ego and id, which is three factors of the internal mind, a person has a super ego that's critical of themselves or they have an ego which deals with the world, or they have an id which is powerful forces. So, Freudian dynamics was based on that, Well, Eric Berne took it out into the real world and said in the real world, there are people out there you see as your parent, as your adult, or as a child, and that gave you a way of looking at people. So that was the starting point. Now, each ego state, it gets subdivided a little bit, and they can be in a positive or negative way. Like the parent is sort of subdivided into the matrons and patrons, I guess, is the father and the mother, you know, different kinds of systems around the world. Stephen Karpman: So the critical parent would, would be the authoritative one that maintains the rules of society and correctness and ethics. But the negative critical parent would be the one who would just domain and criticize people endlessly. So all the ego states have positive and negative side. Now the flexible person is one who stays in contact flexibly with all of the ego states. They can move in and out easily. And one of Eric Berne's dozen books, half dozen books, it's called The Moving Self. At times. In your talk to someone. If you need to go to the... Okay, critical parent, you say, "Wait a minute, you're breaking our rules." Or you need to go to the rebel child, you might say, "Oh, come on, well, let's have some fun. This is silly." So you need to be able to move around or you can move into the adult and say, "Wait a minute. I'm not sure what's going on. Let's look at the process. And let's see where we're going with the information." So you need to be able to move around all the ego states. And so that's the flexible person. Stephen Karpman: A person who gets locked in, they could get locked into critical parent, locked into only free child, they're only negative free child where they're just silly all the time and you can't ever talk to them. Or it could get locked into the negative nurturing parent that just only wants to rescue victims, all they care about in the world is victims and everything you do is a symptom of something. So you could get locked into a certain ego state yourself. And you can be talked to someone else who's locked into one ego state only, and that's called the excluded ego state. So there's a lot about ego states that Eric Berne writes about in his early books. It's a good way... Neil Sattin: And... Stephen Karpman: Ego states it's a good way of identifying who you're talking to. There's the excellent idea by Dr. Dusey called the egogram and you look at someone and you see this vertical bar graph of how much critical parent are showing, how much nurturing parent is their, nurturing parent, adult reach out, adopted child, and you get an idea of who they are. We're talking to real tough person, a person whose critical parent could be first on the bar graph, their adult could be second, and maybe your free child or they're vulnerable, they have a child that's very low. Or it could be talk with a very flexible, easily manipulated person, they may be all in their child and all either playful or sorrowful or hurtful and they have no parent, no strength that they can rely on. Stephen Karpman: So there's a lot in TA about the ego states and I go into that in my books too, 'cause I have one variant of this option, this article I called, called options, and showing you how you can switch among your different ego states in order to handle the situation with somebody else. Neil Sattin: Yeah, so what would be what would be an example of that? Stephen Karpman: Hmm? Neil Sattin: So if I wanted to, let's say, I was trying to assess if, where someone was at and I like how you brought that up in terms of like looking at them and seeing where they show up on the bar graph, are they high in one dimension or low in another? Do you have suggestions for how you elicit different states from other people? Stephen Karpman: Well, there's two ways. I have a summary of the Options article in my book, A Game Free Life. And then, in my latest book, Collected Papers and Transactional Analysis, I have a copy of the original options article, which gives you all the examples. That's different from the egogram, which is an intuition reading of the other person in which you can tell how much ego state energy is in the other person that you're dealing with. So it's an intuition exercise, intuition reading like the sweatshirt, or just would be the egogram and the sweatshirt would be ways of reading a person that you're talking to. Neil Sattin: Got it. Got it. Okay, let's, if we can... In our last few minutes here. One thing that I think you describe really beautifully in your book are the ways that we construct intimacy in relation to another person, and the two concepts that come to mind here for me are the trust contracts that we create with others. And then the intimacy. I think you call it the intimacy scale, which helps you see where you're at in terms of your levels of intimacy with another person. So yeah, let's dive in there. Stephen Karpman: Okay, thank you for mentioning this. Over the years, I pretty much I've developed a lot of different ideas. I had an older sister who used to teach, have one new idea every year or one new project that you master. She would say, well, one year, you master bowling, another year, you master handcraft. So I set upon myself that each year, I wanted to create a new theory. So both of those are new theories. Stephen Karpman: The five trust contracts for couples are... Might turn out be one of the most popular ideas I've done. And that is, you draw two sets of ego states facing each other, and the trust contract between the okay critical parent, and the okay critical parent, the other person, is the no collapse contract. You agreed to the contracts you've made, you don't suddenly stop working. You don't suddenly stop your hygiene, you don't suddenly break all the rules, you don't... So the no trust contract is between the critical parents, between the two nurturing parents. Neil Sattin: Right. That's also like you don't threaten to leave the other person, or... Stephen Karpman: And between the two nurturing parents, the couple agrees on the protection contract that it's in your mind to protect the other person from putting them to too much stress. Between the adults is the openness contract. Bring it up, talk it up, wrap it up, at a good timing, not just anytime. And then between the free child. It's the enjoyment contract that you really want to give the other person lots of pleasure and whatever you can and the other in their lives, and the two of you. Stephen Karpman: And between the adapted child is the flexibility contract that you agree to give in. You don't have to win 51% of all the arguments. And so this is an ideal that they live by. Each person needs to live by it themselves, and they also look to it being maintained in the other person, but they can all break down very quickly. I had one example of an alcoholic who went out and got drunk, and a restaurant and was screaming. Right away, he broke the no collapse contract. He just broke down and threw a scene. He broke the nurturing, the protection contract. Everyone got embarrassed, everyone's child got embarrassed, and so that was broken, and the openness contract was broken because you couldn't talk things over with him, he was in a don't think mentality. Stephen Karpman: And then the free child, the enjoyment contract, there was nothing enjoyable about that dinner in the restaurant, when he threw a scene with the restaurant that even Jack Nicholson would have been happy with in one of his books, movies. And then between the adopted child, the flexibility contract. There's no flexibility there. He wouldn't yield to people telling him to please stop or anything. So, all contract can be broken. And when a marriage relationship or a long-term relationship is breaking down, sometimes one by one, the contracts are broken. Maybe the enjoyment contact is broken first. They just talk too much about issues, and drag themselves down. Or maybe a no collapse contract is broken. They go out and have a partner somewhere else, so one-by-one, the contracts can be built up but they also can be broken down. And then you also mentioned was it the intimacy scale? Neil Sattin: Yeah. Stephen Karpman: Okay, I cataloged there the subjects that people talk about. I've never seen anyone do that. I go on five levels 20%, 40%, 60% up to 100%. And these are the actual topics that people talk about. Some of the topics can bring people closer, which is on the right of the scale at 100% or they can distance people. Eric Berne once used the example of a very awkward first date. Guy looks around and looks at the room and says, "My, aren't the walls perpendicular tonight?" That doesn't take things very far. So at the first level, at the 20% level, it's silence. Pretty much nothing is said but it could be an okay silence, a break in time, just a breather. Neil Sattin: You could be staring into each other's eyes in silence, which might actually feel very intimate. Stephen Karpman: Yeah, right. But that's a topic of conversation would be no topic but silence. You're not sure what's going on. So it doesn't really build intimacy, maybe it might. The next level will be 40% which is, things objects and places, which is the guy is saying, "My, aren't the walls perpendicular tonight," or people can just talk about the restaurants in town, sort of awkwardly trying to come up with one after another, until the conversation runs down, or he could hear at a diner, the truck drivers talking about the different stop lights and the police... That doesn't develop intimacy. It doesn't get people into who they are and what they believe in, but that comes at the 60% level. And I have several different PI people. You talk about people and ideas or philosophy and issues or psychology, you talk about what people think about and believe in things and they get to get into themselves and that gets a little more closeness going. Stephen Karpman: Now, at the 80%, I have it divided with an M, Y, me or you. You actually interview the other person, find out a whole lot about who they are, what their beliefs are, what their hobbies are, their family is, and they talk about their self a lot. It gets uneven if one person only talks about themselves or they interview the other person, so the other person only talks about themselves. But that gets close when you learn a lot about the person, but it's not the same as 100%. At a 100% level, there is a you, us, talk about us. What do we feel about each other? What happened when we first met each other? What are the things that we are going to do together? What's going on between us? And you talk about at the us level, and you share your feelings about each other and the two of you. Stephen Karpman: So that all can be practiced in workshops or between couples. You can practice each one of the different levels. So you get an idea of conversations. It's mostly useful when people first meet each other when conversations can go dead or they can go right. I mean, some party can jump too fast, a person... A guy at a first date could jump all way over to me and you and us and proposition her or someone could... And then she could bring it back to things, like wallpaper decorations or something. [chuckle] So, it gives an idea of the different topics of people talk about, whether it brings them closer or it brings... Takes them further apart. Neil Sattin: Yeah and I could see that been instructive just like as you're with another person, like, oh, are they in their critical parent? Are they in their adult? Are they in their free child? You could just as easily be like, alright, what are we talking about and what is that, if I want to build more closeness with this person, then I might take this to trying to figure out their philosophies and ideas and interests and eventually, get into our deepest beliefs, what they believe, what I believe, and that actually helps bring you closer in a situation where you're feeling a little distant from either someone you've been with for a long time or someone you're just meeting. Stephen Karpman: Right. Yeah, and by the way, none of this should be called manipulative, but like, "Okay, now I'm going to go to the 20% level, now I'm going to go to 60%." It's actually people are just identifying what good conversations are. Now, of course, a salesman could learn it immediately and go right over to all way up to 100%, and con you into thinking that the new vacuum cleaning device is what brings them... Two of them together. But all these things, you know, options, how to switch ego states, or the different levels of communication, all these things are things that you learn and eventually become part of you. 'Cause there are people out there who automatically know all these things, so it's okay to go to school and learn your social skills if that's what you need when you go into therapy, or you read a book on relationship building, which is my Game Free Life book. Neil Sattin: Yeah, so I want to let you know listening that, even though we've covered so much in this conversation today, it's not even half of what's [chuckle] in this book. And it... I really was struck with every several pages, like, wow, there's another valuable resource, wow, there's another way to think about this and to extract kind of the core of what's happening in every... In a particular given situation to get to something meaningful. So again, Stephen Karpman, he created the Drama Triangle. His book, A Game Free Life, which talks about the drama triangle, the compassion triangle, and then all of these tools for building intimacy and dealing with communication issues. Because this isn't a book that's just for couples, it's about how you navigate the world and stay game free as much as possible. So it's really, really valuable stuff in there. Stephen Karpman: I should put in a plug that it's available on Amazon. [chuckle] Neil Sattin: Yes, yeah. I think I mentioned that earlier and we'll make sure that we have links to all of that in the show notes and transcript for today's episode, which, as a reminder, you can get if you visit neilsattin.com/triangle, as in the Drama Triangle. Or you can text the word passion to the number 33444 and follow the instructions. And Stephen, what's a good way if people want to find out more about your work, other than grabbing the book on Amazon, what's your website? Stephen Karpman: Okay. I do have about 30 papers I've written, which go into much more detail of the ideas that are in A Game Free line. I just recently came out with that. It's called collected papers in transactional analysis, about 280 pages. I sell it from my website, all you have to do is type in my name on Google, and you'll go to my website. And eventually, Amazon's going to have it. But I really appreciate you inviting me Neil and sharing some of these ideas, and I would like people to have A Game Free Life, and that's what I've been working on, and I really appreciate the time you've spent, and the time we've worked on together to make this interview happen, so I really want to thank you very much and thank your viewers who are listening. Neil Sattin: Yeah, my pleasure. It's been so great to have you, and this is stuff you've been working on for decades. So, what a treat to one that you were able to put so much of it into your book, and also that we've been able to meet and chat about it for the people today who are just finding out about your work. I do have one last quick question for you, if that would be okay? Stephen Karpman: No, I'm okay. Neil Sattin: Okay. Stephen Karpman: Thank you. Neil Sattin: Yeah. So when we were talking about the trust contracts, I'm just wondering, if I were listening to that and thinking, "Okay, I'm hearing the contracts that I've navigated really well with my partner, let's say, but I can see that... " Here's a contract. Like the enjoyment contract that I've just let fall apart completely or even that I feel like my partner is sliding on one of those contracts. What would you suggest as a good first step for people to have the "us" conversation that allows them to repair around a broken contract? Stephen Karpman: Well, generally, it would be communication, again, and stating what the problem is and your feelings, and if there's an actual issue or situation, you could do the compassion triangle, and your motivations for that situation, and their motivations. So, it primarily is just identifying the issue and working at what you can do and what you can't do. But primarily, the five trust contract, you should apply to yourself that... And the enjoyment contract that you really won't keep it in your heart, that you want the other person to be happy. And any kind of flexibility you can do on the flexibility contract would be fine. But there's some things you cannot do and you can't be expected to, and there's some things you can do that maybe you might do. Stephen Karpman: But you could be getting more in touch with your free child, a more playful side, self. Or if the other person has trouble getting into their free child and their playfulness, you could stroke them and when they do get into the free child, tell them how much you enjoy that. And I don't have an actual situation to talk about. These are pretty general for people on any of the five trust contracts is it's something to talk about, to talk about it with all the rules of sharing and communication and... You know, I mentioned this: The listening loop. And also, there's a information iceberg I did mention. There's four levels of how you can get your point across, get your... Maybe it's too late in the interview just to go through it, but... Neil Sattin: No, go for it. Stephen Karpman: One is a... One, you get your point across, and then underneath the water of the iceberg, it's the first ice information. You want to give all the information behind your point to support it, and you want to get a chance to get that information out there before the person cuts off the conversation. And then, the next... I... On the iceberg, is importance. You want to be able to get across the importance of your idea, why it's important to be listened to. Like, if you're talking at a board meeting, you want to be able to get across the importance of why your idea needs to be taken up by the business, or with someone you're talking to, why it's important that this conversation is heard. Stephen Karpman: And then, the last I at the... I at the very bottom, is actually a trauma triangle for the bottom of the iceberg, is the intent. You want to make sure you know... People know that your intent is not persecute or rescue a victim, but it's to share information, to move the relationship on in the five trust contracts. Neil Sattin: And you actually made me think of just revisiting briefly a question that we touched on at the very beginning, which is, I'm curious about, in your experience, how do you know when someone is just kinda stuck in the game? And you try all these things and... Is there a point at which you think one can say like, "All right, I think I've given this what I can give it and it's time to move on to a... " You know, "This person is stuck no matter what I do." Stephen Karpman: It takes a while to get stuck. If you're a rescuer and you're persistent, you'll stay in there. If you have the drivers that say, "Try hard and please them and be perfect in how you please them," the drivers can keep you stuck in the relationship a long time. Now, you could, maybe not even be in the game, and you meet somebody for the first time and you just say, "That's it," you just don't want to go further. You may give it a couple of tries, and then it's over. So it's... Getting into the triangle takes a while to get in there, because then it gets complicated because all three roles are beginning to emerge as motivations in each person, and that complicates it, the... But it takes a while to get to the point where we realize, "Hey, we're stuck." And then you could talk about the idea of being stuck. Stephen Karpman: Maybe from the compassion triangle, you could settle on a particular issue, and once you got the issue settled on, then you talk about your three motivations for hanging on to this issue. But, yeah, defining an issue is usually a point to decide whether you can move on or not. Neil Sattin: Got it. Yeah. And you do a good job, at one point in the book, of talking about, it was, I think, in a work situation with two people who are having... It's impossible for them to get along and where one of them simply is willing to listen, and the other one actually does the whole compassion triangle for themselves and for the other person out loud as a way of helping build a bridge of understanding between the two of them. Stephen Karpman: Well, if it's a work situation, you wouldn't necessarily do it out loud with everyone listening, 'cause the boss could lose face or something like that, but it'd probably be in a closed room where people would cheer. Let's look... Is it okay... Well, first, you get the contact... A contract to talk. "Is it okay if we talk about this?" That avoids a rescue victim situation. The person say, "Yes. It's okay. Let's set aside five minutes to talk." Then you say, "Well, I would like to go through what I feel is going on and what I feel is going on with you, and then you can correct me or tell me what is going on with you." But then you share an awful lot of feelings. You can share your persecutor, rescuer and victim, and what you think is theirs. That fix right there. And then they share their persecutor, rescuer and victims of what they think their motivation is. And then there... Stephen Karpman: They got their three, and then there are three about you. So there's actually 12 feelings to get shared. I mean, it can be a huge sense of relief when the compassion triangle exercise is done, but first, you gotta get a contract, an agreement that, "Let's go through it," and how much time to be set aside, and maybe even an agreement of what to do if a communication goes wrong. Neil Sattin: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Well, Stephen Karpman, again, thank you so much for being here with us today. And you've shared so much valuable information, and I'm excited to see what unfolds for our listeners who take this and run with it. So, thanks so much for giving us more of a perspective on how to apply the drama triangle, the compassion triangle, and all these other great ways of building trust and intimacy. Stephen Karpman: Great. Thanks, Neil, and to all your listeners for listening, and we'll talk more later. Neil Sattin: Awesome. Thank you. Stephen Karpman: Again, thank you.

How do you communicate about your feelings in the most effective way possible? While we're at it, how do you even *feel* your feelings so that they can move through you - instead of getting stuck or repressed? And, as you learn how to communicate about your feelings - what does the way that people respond to you tell you about them? In this week's episode, you'll discover some easy ways to touch into your deepest feelings, and to communicate about them in ways that can help connect you to the people in your life. And you'll learn how communicating about your own emotions can help you discern important information about others. In this episode, I also refer to two earlier episodes: 198 - Healing Your Earliest Attachment Wounds - with Peter Levine and  196 - Harnessing the Transforming Power of Your Core Emotions - the Change Triangle - with Hilary Jacobs Hendel 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: 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. This episode is also sponsored by Native Deodorant. Their products are filled with ingredients you can find in nature like coconut oil, which is an antimicrobial, shea butter to moisturize, and tapioca starch to absorb wetness. They don’t ever test on animals, they don’t use aluminum or any other scary chemical ingredients, and they’re so confident that you’ll like their deodorant that they offer free shipping - and returns. For 20% off your first purchase, visit http://www.nativedeodorant.com/alive and use promo code ALIVE during checkout. Resources: I want to know you better! Take the quick, anonymous, Relationship Alive survey FREE Guide to Neil’s Top 3 Relationship Communication Secrets Guide to Understanding Your Needs (and Your Partner’s Needs) in Relationship (ALSO FREE) Support the podcast (or text “SUPPORT” to 33444) Amazing intro and outro music provided courtesy of The Railsplitters

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. 

Are you being true to who you are? What are the ways that you're holding back in your relationship, or compromising yourself? Even if you're single, there might be ways that you're not quite being fully yourself! Not only do you not get to experience life as fully as you could be - the people around you don't get to actually experience3 you in all your glory! Of course, sometimes being "you" is risky - and requires courage and vulnerability. In this week's episode, I'm going to help you diagnose the places where you could be shining a little more brightly - and help you learn how to step back into integrity before your light gets too dim - or the resentment gets too overwhelming! 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: 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. This episode is also sponsored by Native Deodorant. Their products are filled with ingredients you can find in nature like coconut oil, which is an antimicrobial, shea butter to moisturize, and tapioca starch to absorb wetness. They don’t ever test on animals, they don’t use aluminum or any other scary chemical ingredients, and they’re so confident that you’ll like their deodorant that they offer free shipping - and returns. For 20% off your first purchase, visit http://www.nativedeodorant.com/alive and use promo code ALIVE during checkout. Resources: I want to know you better! Take the quick, anonymous, Relationship Alive survey FREE Guide to Neil’s Top 3 Relationship Communication Secrets Guide to Understanding Your Needs (and Your Partner’s Needs) in Relationship (ALSO FREE) Support the podcast (or text “SUPPORT” to 33444) Amazing intro and outro music provided courtesy of The Railsplitters

Conflict in relationship is often viewed as a bad thing. It’s uncomfortable. It’s tense. It makes us feel bad, and often makes our partners feel bad too. But what if you’re missing out on an opportunity? Like two tectonic plates rubbing against each other, two people butting heads in relationship might be just the moment where something new forms within that relationship. And within you. That’s the view of this week’s guest, Viola Neufeld. She’s a coach, educator, therapist and facilitator, and she works to help those stuck in conflict to work through their difficult conversations to a place of profound inner transformation. Viola is also the author of “Grateful For The Fight: Using inner conflict to transform yourself and your relationships.” Her motto? “Don’t waste your conflict.” And today you’ll get a taste of how you can turn your conflicts into building and rebuilding moments within relationship.  Sponsors: 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. Our final sponsor today is Audible. Audible has the largest selection of audiobooks on the planet and now, with Audible Originals, the selection has gotten even better with custom content made for members. As a special offer, Audible wants to give you a free 30-day trial - which includes 1 free audiobook and 2 free Audible originals. Go to Audible.com/relationship or text RELATIONSHIP to 500500 to get started. Resources: Visit Vi Neufeld’s website to get her “enhancing relationship vitality” inventory. Read Vi’s book, Grateful for the Fight. 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/conflict to download the transcript, or text “PASSION” to 33444 and follow the instructions to download the transcript to this episode with Jeff Brown. 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've talked a lot on the show about how to communicate. And we've dipped our toes into the water of how to have conflict in a productive way with your partner. But deep down I don't know about you, but I've always harbored this sense that conflict is best avoided or dealt with as quickly as possible. And yet despite that deep down held belief something in me knew that it wasn't quite right. It wasn't quite serving me. And I've had various attempts to put my finger on the reason why. And then good fortune brought today's guest my way. Her name is Viola Neufeld and she is the author of "Grateful for the Fight: Using Inner Conflict to Transform Yourself and Your Relationships." Her book is truly eye opening, in terms of helping you see how the conflicts that you have in your outer world, the conflicts with your partner, with your family, with your co-workers, or your boss, how all of those conflicts help point to the ways that you can grow within you, and transform your relationships. So it's a very powerful generative way of looking at conflict that almost makes you welcome the chance to have conflict with someone else because you're gonna be holding it in a completely different way. If you are interested in downloading a transcript for today's episode you can visit NeilSattin.com/conflict, because that's what we're gonna be talking about today. Or as always you can text the word "passion" to the number 3-3-4-4-4 and follow the instructions Vi Neufeld. Thank you so much for being here with me today on Relationship Alive.  Viola Neufeld: I'm so happy to be here and I really love the name of our podcast Relationship Alive, because that's what this whole thing is about. It's about, what do you need to do to keep relationships alive over a very lengthy period of time and I know, you know, you were talking about how our natural tendency is to want to avoid conflict and you know that's just makes all the sense in the world because think about each time you enter conflict. It's like you're on this teeter totter and you don't know which way it's going to go. Is it just going to keep getting worse? Or is there a chance that this time you're going to turn around and do it differently and do it better? But we most of us have such a track record already with things going badly, that we're frightened of starting it again, because we know what the chances are we're realistic about the opponent that we have and our opponent gives us a real run for our money because they're able to find those places within where we question yourself. You know I mean it's funny. We often say to our partner you know, "you're pushing my buttons," as though they shouldn't. But interestingly enough it's when they push our buttons that they take us right to that part of ourselves where we find that really restless part. And of course it makes us feel terrible. We don't want to stay there, because we're uncomfortable there already. And yet if we continue to avoid it then it just remains there in a chronic state for many, many years. And we keep having fights over and over. Just on a little bit of a different stage. But the underlying fight is actually very much the same.  Neil Sattin: Right. You talk about it basically being this cycle where each of you is poking at the others sore spots and that there's some way that we magically arrive at this dynamic in, in partnership around those perpetual fights where what they point to it hits us in our in our weakest most vulnerable places and then we in the way that we respond to them you call that "your M.O.," it does the exact same thing for them. And so it creates this vicious cycle that just gets worse and worse or never gets any better.  Viola Neufeld: Yeah, I don't know I was thinking about this yesterday I was thinking about the whole concept of chemistry and you know how we always talk about we, what is love and we have to have this, uh, thing that happens between us. They activate something inside us. And make us come alive. But then what I was really thinking about is like what is the chemistry. The very thing that draws you together. That gravitational pull often has something that also creates conflict between us.  I mean we love somebody because they activate that part of us that somebody else doesn't. And it gets us really, really excited but it also makes us just wild because we don't know what to do and we end up trying to sort through, while we're in the middle of it, this is where it gets really confusing what's your stuff and what's my stuff. But, Neil let me go back to that cycle that you were referring to because how I even came up with that and how I even started looking at things in relation to the book and writing things up was, at one point I had like about twenty 23....nah, it was even more than that. At least 30 different files that I had across my dining room table and I thought what are the similarities here? When do people get into such entanglements with each other that they just can't get out and are there some similarities? What are those similarities where people get stuck and stay stuck for years.  And then that's when I started when I came up with that cycle, and you realized that somebody in terms of what they say or what they do, maybe, they're critical maybe they're passive maybe they're withdrawn, but whatever it is they do, make you go back to the place where you question yourself. "Maybe I'm not enough. Or maybe I'm too controlling. Or maybe I'm too impatient or..." Whatever it is that either they're withdrawing or their attack makes you question yourself and and doubt yourself at very significant levels in terms of who you are as a person. Then when you come out, so you come back out fighting, and whatever it is you do makes the other person now question themselves. And face the part of themselves that they don't want. That unwanted self. And it's looking at how we feed that cycle and keep that cycle going, that I was really intrigued by and wondering how do people get out of that cycle. Because I think that so many of us live with more pain in life than we need to. Like if we could figure this out sooner and face the part of ourselves that causes such discomfort and we'll know, we'll recognize that part because it's always the part that makes us come out fighting. We have to defend ourselves. We have to protect ourselves because we think the other person said something that makes us look like an idiot or that we're unreliable or that we're not a contributor. All the things we don't want to be and that's when we come out fighting. And yet the interesting thing is that really the strange way out of that, is to face the very thing that you don't want to be like for me for a long time. One of the things I had to face was, 'I'm not enough,' and I keep thinking "No, I am enough." Well this is where the power of positive thinking doesn't always work because it can't wipe out truth. And so it's like you almost have to do a back and forth and go, "Where I'm not... Where am I enough and where am I not enough?" Because there are places where I'm not enough and what am I going to do about that. So then the hope lies in kind of finding a bit of a manageable change program. And if I can do more today than I did yesterday or feel better today about myself than I did yesterday, because of what I'm doing differently then that's already growth. I mean it's one of the things I absolutely love about conflict. I never liked to be in the midst of conflict. There's nothing easy about it. But if you can surrender to it and learn what you can then we learn so much more about ourselves. I think that we are all less self-aware than we really think we are. This is a wonderful way of getting to know who you are and who the other person is.  Neil Sattin: Yeah. There's there's so much here that I want to unpack. And I love how rich your book is with like really taking apart each of the dynamics that, that are at work there in conflict and as, um, as I was wrestling with this question of, "OK what is the truth about those sore spots in me?" You know when I look at... You know something I mentioned frequently on the podcast is how I'm maybe not the cleanest person. So what is the truth around when when someone approaches me, or when Chloe my partner approaches me and says like, you know, "This place is a disaster like you have to do something." And for me like the natural tendency being you know all these things that I saw spelled out in your book like I would get defensive or I'd have I just have excuses maybe I wasn't getting defensive, but I'd be like you know I was really busy recording that episode of the podcast and I didn't get that chance to do the dishes like I said I was going to. And then there's that uncomfortable place of recognizing, "OK there is some truth here. And one of the questions that comes up for me is how you arrive at the balance of when it when it's actually healthy for you to look at, let's say a criticism from your partner and to not like focus on the fact that they criticized you and they could have said it better, but just to say like alright, I'm going to take a step back and see what's true here. What's the balance between doing that, in a way that's healthy, and then it becoming its own negative cycle and your relationship where you just get victimized by a partner who isn't doing their part to shift? Viola Neufeld: Yeah. That's a really good question because you know I think it's almost like the sequence that's the most important. The natural tendency is to go back and start fighting immediately or protecting and defending self. Except that if you continue to do that it gets you nowhere.  Okay. So the first step is always going in and looking at what did they say about me? So that's true. Maybe I, you know I am messy or I am a control freak, or I'm a clean freak, or whatever it is. Whatever they have said about you, the first step, I mean this is a very courageous step right because you have to go inside and you go. How much of that is true. And once you start to look at that then you're no longer fighting or like pushing it away because you've actually brought it close. And I don't ever want to minimize the difficulty of this because the same way as a child balances down on heat and pulls their hand away we do the same thing with emotional responses. When something is uncomfortable we want to balance away but this is what is required is to actually stay there longer and go, "Is this true about me? Yeah you know what sometimes I am this way," or "Sometimes I'm not this way." So you're going back, you have to do a bit of an assessment, all along recognizing that you don't see everything about yourself, the other person is actually telling you something about how you are impacting them. And we're not always aware of our full impact on the other. But then after you've gone in I think that it's important to go up and you from a bird's eye view, you look down, and you go wait a minute what do I know about the way that the two of us interact? What do I know about when my partner is feeling uncomfortable, what do they do? And if they get to a place where they're blaming and I'm now feeling like a victim and this is I recognize this. This is, I easily fall into a victim. My partner usually blames that I go, Wait a minute what I've already looked at what's going on inside of me and what I need to do differently but now I'm also from the bird's eye view from way up top I'm looking down and going: I see this pattern between us and I know that my partner is doing that out of their own discomfort then because you're not being just reactive you are much more equipped to stand up and say, you know what you're going into a blamer, and you're doing the very same thing again, you're wanting to make it look like it's my fault and you're so, so it's a matter then of holding onto yourself and you are not as reactive. So you have a clearer mind and you can see what the pattern is between the two of you and begin to shift your pattern.  Neil Sattin: Right. I loved in one of the chapters where you were talking about ways to shift the interactions like once you've done the inner work and I want to spend of course a little bit more time on that process of of the inner diagnosis. But you were talking about like once you've done that work and then you face into a conflict with your partner or anyone, really, you might ask a question like, Are you... it seems like you're trying to blame me right now are you, is that true? Are you trying to blame me right now for what's going on? And how asking the question invites them to take a deeper look at what they're doing and they may say they may say, Yes. You know they may be like, "That's exactly what I'm doing because this is your fault." Or they may say, "Well I'm not trying to blame you. I'm trying to just show you the impact of..." And you get further than you would get if you were just like, you know, stop blaming me and you're always blaming me. And then you're off to the races with your typical relationship pattern or conflict pattern.  Viola Neufeld: Yeah, see, I love that because once you have looked at yourself and you've really seen it, when you go out now, because I think there's three steps you go in, you go up, and then you go out. When you go out you grow up very differently. So, my husband and I, we had this cycle that went on for many, many years and and it would be that I would end up feeling like I was, you know, how did I have to raise another issue? I'm a malcontent. I'm a flake for what I'm saying. And then what I noticed and I would go into a blamer, because I didn't want to be that person but once I got to see that it when I experienced his criticism I, would go to that very same place. It kind of just made me chuckle because I go, "Wait a minute. I'm here at the same place. And yes I realize that sometimes I caused trouble but I also don't want to be the person who sees trouble and doesn't do anything about it." And so then I was equipped to just stand there and go, "No no. We do have an issue with this. But I gotta find a way of doing this and be lovable at the same time." So going inside what it helps you do is, it equips you and you feel more confident to stand on your own. To speak from your truth. And the fight changes because it's not like you're just defending yourself. You're actually talking about what goes on between the two of you and what you'd have to do to change that pattern so that it becomes a healthier pattern.  Neil Sattin: Yeah let's go up even further for a minute and talk about differentiation, and the reason why conflict is so crucial for true intimacy.  Viola Neufeld: Yeah. Differentiation. I mean it sounds like a big concept but, but it's so it's what you have to do in conflict all the time, is that... And conflict takes you to a place where you have to be willing to stand on your own and for a little bit. I mean it's almost like you disconnect with that other person, because you're so connected with who you are, what's important to you, and then you also have to hold the other at the same time. So it's being detached and involved. Standing alone and standing together. Lot of people get that part confusing because they think that you know they'll say, many couples will come in and one person will say, "No, I have to leave this marriage because I can't be myself." Well, if you have to leave a marriage to be yourself. That's not differentiation. It's individuation. That's about you being able to hold on to yourself. Differentiation is much more difficult because how do you end up holding on to yourself, and being a full self when you're connected to the other who is different than you, who thinks differently who wants different things. And that can be a big challenge. But ultimately I think it's only when we bring our full selves to the marriage, and freely being who we are even when the other person doesn't get who we are, that's the best chance that we've got of having real intimacy and vitality. I think way too many people give up intimacy because intimacy is hard. Intimacy means that you have to be able to state what do you want. What's important to you. What you value even when you think that the other person doesn't get it. So one of the ways that I've described it over the years is that I think one of the hazards of a long term relationship is a, is a shrinking pie. And initially you came together and the two of you were you flowed freely and you were all you brought all of which you were what you are. And so when you bring the full pie it just feels really intoxicating because you're free to be yourself the other person is free to be yourself. You don't have the baggage. But then what happens over the years is that let's say, there's something that's really important to you. Maybe it's something that you value. Maybe it's it's what you want sexually or who you are spiritually or you know what you're looking for,  you need emotionally. And let's say the other person isn't there doesn't meet your needs and so, or even they think you're less than for some reason because you're too emotional or not emotional enough or whatever. And so slowly we start pulling back pieces of the pie and we no longer bring them to the relationship. And if we don't do that sure we've got less conflict. But you know what: we have a whole lot less vitality, a whole lot less intimacy. So the challenge is even when you don't we don't think the same. I got to tell you this is who I am. And remember that other person fell in love with you in the first place because you so freely flowed with of everything that you were. But just now you've got some challenges.  Neil Sattin: Yeah so the idea is that through this process you get to know yourself more. You get to grow yourself more. And then you get to bring that back to the conflict in a way that really it's like having the same conflict, but from a completely different place. So it's it's not gonna be the same conflict at least on some level.  Viola Neufeld: Neil, and that's true because you went once you've done all this inside work you go, and as soon as you get back out there with the same person you go, "Wow this is the same stuff." But then you notice then it actually feels so differently when you're in it because you're not being triggered. So the same conflict. But now you're responding differently within it which means that nothing can be exactly the same. You know how they tell you you can never change the other person and there's a part of that that's true but it really isn't the whole truth. You know because how do we change the other person we change the other person by changing ourselves. If I change my pattern my husband could no longer do the same thing and that's the way it is in all relationships. And therein lies a huge amount of hope.  Neil Sattin: Yeah. In fact I just released a communication course that is all focused on the things that one person can do, like, basically all the places where we alone have influence when we're communicating with another person, since that's really the only thing we can change in effect.  Viola Neufeld: Yeah. And also because like I think of, I don't know if you can visualize steps, you know, like, let's say you you enter at one level, but there was an action that came before. There's always an action that comes after. So think about how you change things. Because if you respond differently then the other responds differently to you as well and you get out of the vicious cycle and into a more virtuous cycle. And the power lies in one.  Neil Sattin: Right. Right. I am I'm getting this image in my mind of you know someone kind of going to battle and over and over again, with the same opponent, the same foe and they have, I mean let's just use Achilles right. So that we'll take a myth. So this dude has a weakness in his heel, it's the only place that he can be killed, because that was where you know he was held when he was dipped into the pool of immortality or whatever it was. And it's like, imagine him going into battle again and again and he's like fighting and all doing well. And then what do you know, like the person like, pinches his heel and he's like down on the ground again. And thankfully the person isn't actually trying to kill him. But no matter what, there he is helpless down on the ground and it's like if all he focuses on is like, "How do I keep people away from my heel?" Then the heel is always going to be there as a weakness. And everyone's going to keep going for it. Whereas if he gets to know that spot intimately well and you know, I'm talking about Achilles, but it could easily be "Achillia” - you know some women as well. You know like, then once they realize like oh this is my weakness and they really get to know it intimately. And then when, the other person goes for it, they actually have a way of responding that they never had before. That's part of what changes the whole dynamic. So, I'm wondering if you can talk for a moment about that process of going in and and I love the way in your book you have these great questions that help you kind of peel away your self delusions and denial in a way that's not destructive. You know that's constructive. Maybe you can talk a little bit about that process of you know, asking yourself maybe you've asked yourself what's true about this which is what you offered earlier. And then what's the next step? Like where do you go when you when you realize like well you know what, it's true that I don't prioritize the dishes and that is just true about me or whatever it is.  Viola Neufeld: Yeah. You know to even to go one step further back, because it's understanding. You know, I often think of that part of us that we don't like the unwanted self. I often think of that more and I relate to it as I would to a little child or to me as a little child because we all make sense. And that part of us that still needs healing was wounded somewhere along the line. And what I actually love about conflict is that conflict gives us a method to heal those parts that are the most sensitive. So so when we come to the self to the unwanted self in that way, and we warmly try to understand where the hurts lie, where the woundedness first started to show up, then it's a way of kind of... I don't know... embracing it really it really is... I don't know taking it on your lap and now you're not, you're not harsh with it which means you're also not unrealistic in what you're expecting of it.  So I understand that, "OK. Why is cleanliness not important to me? Or why is uber cleanliness important to me?" For instance. And I come to understand things that have happened in my life that have made me come to that conclusion. And the thing is that many times what worked earlier in life doesn't necessarily work anymore. So taking that cleanliness thing you know, before it was not a problem there are many other things that were more important. However if it becomes a problem, with your spouse, then yeah. Then it's something that you start looking at and you go, "Well, maybe now I would actually feel better if I had things a little more cleaned up or if I contributed more by getting the dishes done or any of those things. So. So, it's a matter of really first warming up to the unwanted self because you understand what role it played or how it came to be. And in facing that there is some healing and there is some freeing going forward.  Neil Sattin: Yeah. And I'm wondering when you look at yourself in that way like, what I'm hearing are these questions that help you get the underlying motivation. So if what you're looking at is a specific behavior that you do or don't do, what the motivations are beneath that to help you get more clarity on what, what's really driving the way that you act. Am I getting you? Viola Neufeld: Yes for sure. Because we always have... And making that connection is sometimes difficult. Because we have these behaviors that we do. But then you have to kind of go underneath and go, "Why is that important?" Now, the why question is always a bit dangerous right because it can take you into rationalization which is not where we're going. It's more of a question of what? What is it that's actually driving that. So...  Neil Sattin: Yeah. And I'm thinking about your chapter on I think you call it "self tripping." Maybe you can describe what that is before I say what I'm gonna say. So what's self tripping?  Viola Neufeld: "Self tripping" is when you keep doing something that you know isn't getting you where you want to go and yet you can't leave. You can't let it go. So, in the book it was Nadia and her negativity. And so she recognizes that even though she doesn't like her negativity, that it also plays an important role in her life. It's where she feels like she makes a valuable contribution. It's part of her sense of identity. She thinks that people who just are always happy are people who just skate through life and don't have enough grit to face reality as it is. And it's so become woven into her sense of who she is that if she if she didn't be negative some of the time or you know bring out the umbrella that she wouldn't even know who she was anymore.  Neil Sattin: Right.  Viola Neufeld: Cuz of the roles. It was a role that she played growing up in her family and it's how others have come to know her.  Neil Sattin: Right. So if it's okay, I'm just gonna go through these questions that you ask.  Viola Neufeld: Sure. Yeah.  Neil Sattin: So just to give you listening a flavor for this kind of inquiry. So, you identified the behavior then you might ask yourself why do you dislike this behavior? Because after all we're talking about the unwanted self, like this is a part of us that we don't necessarily feel good about. But we've come to accept it as just maybe just the way we are. Or just the way we're going to be. We haven't figured out a way out of it. What do you like about this behavior? And why are you attached to it? If you tried to change it what would you lose? Or how would the change destabilise you internally or destabilise your relationship externally? And how is it working for you to repeat this pattern over and over again? Is there anything else that holds it in place. So, you're really able to to look at it like almost a scientist would or at least an observer from another planet, who's really trying to get more familiar with what's, what's going on here? And do you find that that process of creating that insight in itself is what generates change? Or are there other things that you think are required for people? Viola Neufeld: Well for sure what it does, like, it's the second step right? It's of going up and looking at it. So what it does is, you see the patterns, it loosens it inside and then I think going out is actually that you have to end up implementing that and realize how different it feels, and actually be surprised by how good it feels. And it doesn't mean, and like Nadia for instance might never give up all her negativity but she might be thinking differently about how often she's going to use it or whether it's going to be a comfortable blanket. She's going to recognize when she's using it illegitimately and she'll open up options. That's the whole beautiful thing about looking at, or engaging conflict differently is that you recognize that you have a whole lot more options than you believed you had earlier.  Neil Sattin: Yeah. Yeah. It really frees you up in that way. And I'm just thinking about how once you're in that place with a new like trying something new on, you talk about not necessarily going for the big shift. "Well, I'm just gonna be positive all the time." Like, that's not gonna be Nadia's approach, right? Viola Neufeld: No, no, no. I mean that has to be, it has to be, little, little steps. And I think you always measured today compared to yesterday. Are you happier with who you are today than yesterday? Oftentimes when I work with couples and I usually take the last 10 minutes to work on what kind of homework do they want to do and it's about together we figure out the homework, or they figure out the homework on their own, but oftentimes after a session people will be pretty motivated and they'll go, "Oh, I'm going to do this, this, this, and this." And I'm like: "How about we think about one thing you're going to do? So that you can be convinced, so that you know that you are going to actually succeed rather than setting yourself up for failure?" Neil Sattin: Yeah, yeah. And I'm thinking now of that way of reflecting on changes in conflict with another person that you mentioned, where you might even say it's like in Nadia's case like, "Wow,, when's the last I was just positive, like when's the last time I was positive in the middle of a conflict that we were having?" As a way of helping your partner see that you are trying to make shifts in the dynamic. When you when you are trying to make those shifts, what are, what are the common obstacles that you find when someone brings kind of a renewed sense of who they are? They've gone, they've done the deep dive. They've gone up, they've gotten some perspective. They really want to shift this pattern for themselves and for the way that they have conflict and then, let's talk about kind of taking it into the arena with their with their partner? And how do you do that in a way that's most likely to be generative? And how would you know? Because we're talking about stepping into conflict which by its nature is uncomfortable.  Viola Neufeld: Yeah, yeah. You know what I think, for one, being really realistic about change and how it happens. And know that the old is like a magnet and it just sucks you back, so quickly, and so powerfully and I think the important thing is not to get down on ourselves when that happens just to kind of look and kind of chuckle a little bit, and go, "Oh, my goodness, it's happening. The same thing still has some power." But even the fact that you can go up and recognize it, that means you're not functioning totally from your alligator brain, your amygdala, you're actually operating. You've invited your neocortex in and you're recognizing it even if you catch it after the fact and you go, "You know what, I just did the same thing again." But that's more than you were doing previously, because previously you didn't even see it. So kudos to you. And then the next time when it happens you'll probably see it while you're in the middle of it, and go, "OK, just wait a minute. I got to do something differently."  And when sometimes, when people get lost I'll say to them just do something which is 180 degrees from what you normally do and see how different, it feels and see what the impact is. Because it's all about experimenting and then recognizing that the person who got to you before, when you are making changes, whether it's your spouse, whether it's a colleague at work. If you make a change know that the other person is going to continue to do more of what they did before. So you're actually going to up the ante. Be prepared for that. Not because they're wanting you to still do what you did before, but just because that's what they know. And so your commitment is to yourself, more than to the other person to stay the course. Just focus on who do I want to be so that I can sleep comfortably in my own skin. And what is another good thing is that life keeps giving us one opportunity after another. If we miss this one there's another one right around the corner. And again just keep practicing on being the person we want to be.  Neil Sattin: Yeah, yeah. I like that image of your two brains learning how to work together because we have spoken a lot on the show about your limbic brain taking your neocortex off line basically for in favor of fight or flight. And so bringing your attunement, like your attunement within, to a conflict, that allows you to to bring them both online at the same time and to recognize your boundaries to recognize where you truly aren't safe vs. the illusion of not being safe which is often what your amygdala is responding to, right?  Viola Neufeld: Yeah. And that's what I love is because when you invite your brain back in, you can see that some of the things, cause conflict is all about your threats center going wild. And yet, when you bring your neocortex in then you can actually look at those fears and go, "Ok, they were real at one point. Are they still real? You know? I thought I couldn't do this on my own. And back then I couldn't. But can I do it now? Have I developed further? Or, I thought that you know I was not enough? Or, I thought that I spoke way too much. Do I still do that? I thought I was a drama queen. Am I still that or have I shifted? I thought people would reject me. But is that true?" So yeah it's always a question of checking where you are now compared to where you were then. And the many of the fears that were there don't need to be there any longer.  Neil Sattin: Let's talk for a minute too about how we might... Because I agree with you that so often we we start changing and the whole thing shifts. But are there ways that you find with your clients that are particularly effective for inviting your partner to notice, along, apart from what I mentioned earlier, to notice like the dance is shifting here. Or, hey, like this is this is me stating my truth and you can make a choice about that but I'm really clear about what I believe in this moment or who I am in this moment. What are some ways to help invite your partner to change their steps in the dance? And maybe the last part of that question, is how would someone recognize if that wasn't going to happen and whether or not that's truly, you know, you talk a little bit about the times when it's actually healthy to disengage.  Viola Neufeld: Yeah. Because you know I mean here's the sobering thing, is that we only have in our life what we tolerate. And so at a certain point it is that we go: This is who I am or I want to be sexually active, and that's really important to be in an intimate relationship. And if you're not there if that's not what you want, we're in real difficulty and I don't know what to do. Or let's say, "I want to be in relationship with somebody when I know that I have reason to trust them and I can believe them. And you have shown me on numerous occasions that I don't have evidence to trust you. And we are in a situation that I don't know if we can continue to go forward because this is what I need in my life." See, then you go back to differentiation where you really hold your own and you go. This is what I need from a partner. And if you're not that person, then I don't know where we're going to be in the future. So then there are other ones where, let's say you know, you know that the other person continues, regardless of how many times you say what's important to you and what really matters, it actually seems like the other person, if they really if that really doesn't matter to them then you are in a situation where you have to go, "OK. Am I going to continue on with this person or am I not?" Because you can't continue... Or let's say somebody continues to be hurtful and harmful in their actions towards you. And regardless of what you said they don't make the changes. Well then the writing is on the wall as to your future. You have to make decisions for your own safekeeping and for your own health. Going forward.  Neil Sattin: Yeah, and I think one place where that can get tricky is: I think we can be too quick maybe to make that decision, if we're in pain and that's the interesting thing about what we're talking about. Is like just because you're having conflict and uncomfortable that that isn't necessarily a sign that this isn't a healthy environment for you to be in. It may be that there's more healing for you to do or more growing for you to do. And I think that can be tricky to know, like, actually this isn't about me growing or healing something this is just about kind of a core place where I stand.  Viola Neufeld: Yeah, I mean, that's where it can get confusing for people to know whether it's just that it's theirs or if it has to do with the other person. I lost it there when I was going to say you and I'm sorry. Neil Sattin: That's OK. And I'm wondering if you have any hints for how someone can do that diagnosis about like have they gone deep enough in terms of their own inner work? Viola Neufeld: Yeah. So Neil I know what it was I was going to say because, what's the reason for moving on? So if you have not looked at your own stuff and you just think it's the other person then maybe moving out of the relationship is premature. If however you've actually looked at your part of the problem, your contribution, and still you're not getting from your partner what you need, then that's a different thing because you're not just leaving because of hurt and because of self blindness. You actually see it. You're doing the work. But the other person is not in a place where they're wanting to see more of themselves. And then maybe it points to a different future, but it's why are you leaving? Have you really seen what you need to see about yourself? Because then you can make a clear decision.  Neil Sattin: Right. I love what you just said how crucial it is to identify your contribution and to change to address that. That is what we've been talking about all along. It's the ways that we show up and we create the dance that's happening or do our part to create the dance that's happening.  Neil Sattin: Well Vi Neufeld it's been so great to chat with you about conflict and I feel like we should have argued more or something like that. I'm really appreciating your work. And so can you just tell us a little bit more about the different kinds of things that you offer? Obviously your book grateful for the fight is there for people on Amazon, it's a great read and really a useful tool for self discovery and transforming your approach to conflict. And I don't know about you, but if you can imagine like how tense and how much it can shake up your inner world to know that you're heading into conflict and just how different it can be to imagine stepping into a conflict knowing that you've got you, and that you can take care of yourself. This book is a really helpful part of creating that experience. So I appreciate your work in that way. But, what else are you doing with people? Viola Neufeld: Well I was just going to say that I think one of the real benefits of doing this work is that you end up liking yourself more and you have better relationship. That's the end result. So yes, you know if you... Other things I mean there's all kinds of work. It's always having to do with sorting through relationships and extended families and with couples and in organizations. If some of you want to have a little scale that you can work through and it would be a little handout on enhancing relationship vitality, if you want to do that you can contact me and I'll send you a concept or I'll send you a handout if you like to do that. It would be a way of, you know how you always have ideas about who you think you are in relationship and then who your partner is. This is a way of actually going through a number of indicators and you can do a scoring at the end, which will tell you you know it'll shine some light on who's contributing in what areas and see if your yourself perceptions are accurate or not.  Neil Sattin: Well I'm definitely going to to take your quiz. So, make sure that I get my hands on that as well. Yes. If you want to get a copy of the enhancing your relationship vitality inventory, then you can visit Vi Neufeld's web site which is transpectives.com, and I will have a link to that in the show notes, which you can get by visiting NeilSattin.com/conflict or texting the word "passion" to the number 3-3-4-4-4. And following the instructions.  Neil Sattin: Vi Neufeld thank you so much for being here with us today. It's been such a treat to chat with you.  Viola Neufeld: Thanks so much Neil.  

It’s easy to talk about “Self Care” - to pay lip service to it - but what does it really mean to take care of yourself? In today’s episode, we’re going to get back to basics to ensure that you’re actually nourishing the most important person in your world - you! Because if you’re not, then how are you going to show up for the people around you? By the end, you'll have a sense of exactly what's essential for keeping you at your best. Come see Relationship Alive - LIVE! with John and Julie Gottman, on October 12th in Portland Maine. You have the chance to ask us *your* questions - and get answers. Visit neilsattin.com/liveshow for more information. 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: Audible Escape transports you into the world of love and romance - unlimited love stories to enjoy. Choose your own emotional experience! To get your first month free, visit audible.com/lovealive 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: I want to know you better! Take the quick, anonymous, Relationship Alive survey FREE Guide to Neil’s Top 3 Relationship Communication Secrets Guide to Understanding Your Needs (and Your Partner’s Needs) in Relationship (ALSO FREE) Support the podcast (or text “SUPPORT” to 33444) Amazing intro and outro music provided courtesy of The Railsplitters

There are ways to communicate that keep you stuck, or that make things worse - and there are ways to communicate that foster the healthy development of your relationship. So how do you avoid the pitfalls, and reconnect with each other in spite of your differences? Or even in appreciation of your differences? In today’s episode, we have a return visit from Ellyn Bader and Peter Pearson. They are co-founders of The Couples Institute, one of the leading centers for training couples therapists and helping people find practical solutions to relationship issues. Their book “Tell Me No Lies” describes how to create a culture of honesty in your relationship (and why that’s so important) - while their work on the Developmental Model of relationships gives deep insight into why we do what we do. Today we’ll get theoretical, we’ll get practical, and you’ll walk away with some new ways to communicate about challenging topics in ways that encourage the healthy development of your relationship. Visit neilsattin.com/institute to join their free “What do you do when” 4-part series! If you’re curious to hear our first episode together, about shaping a culture of honesty in your relationship, you can also check out Episode 24 of Relationship Alive - Why We Lie and How to Get Back to the Truth And you can listen to our second episode together, which was about Relationship Development and getting unstuck in your relationship, if you click here. Meanwhile - come see Relationship Alive - LIVE! with John and Julie Gottman, on October 12th in Portland Maine. You have the chance to ask us *your* questions - and get answers. Visit neilsattin.com/liveshow for more information. And 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: 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. This episode is also sponsored by Native Deodorant. Their products are filled with ingredients you can find in nature like coconut oil, which is an antimicrobial, shea butter to moisturize, and tapioca starch to absorb wetness. They don’t ever test on animals, they don’t use aluminum or any other scary chemical ingredients, and they’re so confident that you’ll like their deodorant that they offer free shipping - and returns. For 20% off your first purchase, visit http://www.nativedeodorant.com/alive and use promo code ALIVE during checkout. 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: To join Ellyn and Pete’s free “What do I do when” series, follow this link here. Visit The Couples Institute website to learn more about Ellyn and Pete’s work with couples, and with helping therapists help couples. 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/development2 to download the transcript, or text “PASSION” to 33444 and follow the instructions to download the transcript to this episode with Jeff Brown. 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. On today's show we are going to have a return visit from some of my favorite guests; Pete Pearson and Ellyn Bader. They are here to dive even more deeply into the developmental model for relationships and why it is so important for you to understand where you're at in terms of your development, both as an individual, but definitely as a couple, and also to talk about a new series that they're offering for therapists that will be great for you if you're a therapist in terms of boosting the way that you work with couples in your practice. Neil Sattin: We're going to talk more about that, but I know that they elicited feedback from their audience of therapists about some of the toughest issues that they deal with, in sessions with couples and they put together a free series around that. So we're going to talk about that and we're going to ask them some questions about how to know where you are in the developmental status of your relationship and we're also going to give you a very valuable way to structure how you communicate with your partner around a sensitive topic, something that we haven't covered in quite this way on the show before. Ellyn and Pete have both been here before. If you want to listen to their episode about lying in relationships and how to cultivate a culture of honesty you can visit neilsattin.com/lies. Neil Sattin: If you want to hear more about the developmental model, you can visit neilsattin.com/development. Those are the two episodes that they were on prior to today. And if you want to download a transcript of today's episode, then visit neilsattin.com/... Let's see, what should we call this one? Let's call it development2. I know that was really tricky. So, you can visit neilsattin.com/development2, the number two, and that will take you to this episode where you can download a transcript or you can always text the word Passion to the number 33444 and follow the instructions. That is it for this moment. So let's dive into the conversation with Ellyn Bader and Pete Pearson. Thank you so much for being here with us today. Ellyn Bader: You're welcome, it's always fun to talk to you Neil. Peter Pearson: It's good being here Neil, thank you. Neil Sattin: Yes, and I should know this by now, but Pete, is it okay to call you Pete? Should I be calling you Peter or should I be calling you... Peter Pearson: Pete is fine. Neil Sattin: Okay, great, Petey... So let's start with just this... I want to give a quick overview of what we mean by the developmental model. If people really want the nitty gritty, then you can go back and listen to the first episode, but just so... Just to give us some context, the two-minute elevator pitch, that's a really long elevator ride if you've ever been in an elevator for two minutes. But anyway let's start there. Ellyn Bader: Sure. So we look at relationships, and healthy relationships as going through a series or potentially going through a series of developmental stages and I'm going to give you the really short-hand version of it. But people will meet ideally often they fall in love, they have what I call a temporary psychosis, where they just focus on each other and the grass is green, and the sky is blue, everything is wonderful. And I know all relationships don't start out that way, but many, many do, and others start out more gradually. But the developmental task of that first stage is putting a boundary around the two of us as a couple and making the decision to be a couple, whatever that means to the two of them, but it's a commitment to that relationship. Ellyn Bader: And then after people are together for a while and we see this happening, generally anywhere from about six months to two years, the partner gets taken off of that magical wonderful pedestal, and people start to see their differences, and that's a good thing, that's a healthy thing, it's not a bad thing. Many couples get scared when this happens, but it's inevitable that you're going to see more aspects of the other person. I use a disco ball in my office when I'm talking about it with couples because all those mirrors on the ball represent different facets of ourselves and those facets get shown to each other over time. And so this is a stage of differentiation, it's a stage where differences arise and the task is to learn how to be open, and authentic with each other about what you think, what you feel, what you desire and to be able to hold still while your partner does the same thing, and then to learn how to manage those differences successfully. And so there's... That's a short version. We can go into a lot more detail but basically there's a lot that's going on in terms of the personal growth of each partner during that stage. Neil Sattin: Yeah, so this actually brings up a question for me around this process of differentiation because I think that in that psychosis that you mentioned that often a lot of partners they start making agreements or presenting ways of being that maybe, when it comes right down to it, aren't truly authentic to who they are. They do a lot of compromising, for the sake of the relationship. And then when they come back around to this process of differentiation, there's this sense of coming into integrity with each other and with themselves around what they really want. What are the ways that they signed up for the relationship that actually haven't been working for them? So I'm wondering how common it is for you to see people going through healthy differentiation really getting clear on who they are, on what their authentic truth is, and then looking at the person that they're with and saying, "Wow, I'm actually not sure that we're meant to be together, now that I'm differentiated, now that I'm not in the psychosis, wow there are these things that maybe are... Represent ways that we're not compatible." How do people frame that? Yeah, go ahead. Ellyn Bader: Well of course, that happens, and ideally, probably that happens a ton when you think about people who date and they get really excited about each other and then a few months later they realize, "Oh well, this is not really the relationship for me." Neil Sattin: Right? Ellyn Bader: So there's some of that going on there, it's much... Peter Pearson: Sometimes I will ask a couple because they are challenged when they come into the office and they talk about all the differences that they have and the problems those differences create, I will ask them, I say, "Hey would you like to be married to a personality clone of yourself where all of the differences just magically disappear?" The vast, vast majority of people say, "Actually no, I would not want to be married to a personality clone." And one person said, "I would have all my problems times two. I don't think I want that. Neil Sattin: Yeah, so there is first recognizing the value in the difference, but I'm wondering within there is something about learning how to love another person in the way that they're different from you and to feel like in the ways that it jars you that it maybe isn't in total alignment with what you would want, or who you are as a person, but there's some way to navigate that that's healthy, versus just kind of exploding it into, "Well, I guess we're just not meant to be together." Ellyn Bader: Right, I mean the challenge you mentioned what goes on when people are developing a... What I call emotional muscle or a stronger backbone where they can hold on to their authentic selves, but it also means being able to do what we call other differentiation. It's what enables you to learn more deeply about your partner, be more giving at times when it isn't convenient. But it's not compromising core aspects of yourself. And that's why some couples especially in the differentiation stage, but even later, too, will have a really tough conflict to handle and deal with and some people will want to run and flee really quickly instead of hanging in there and learning how to stay open to yourself and to somebody else, which is something that most of us have never learned or never been in relationships that are interdependent and require you to be open and giving at the same time. Peter Pearson: Actually Neil, there's two examples of this. One is couples will often say, "Well, we don't want to argue in front of the kids, we should have a united front." And the downside... I can understand their intention behind that but the downside is, the kids then do not see how their parents disagree and work it out in front of them and that is such a priceless gift when parents finally get it, "Oh, we can disagree not only in front of the kids, but they can watch how we come to a resolution on that." And boy, if that's not a priceless gift. The other one is just in our relationship, Ellyn between the two of us, Ellyn is a lot more organized. She likes more consistency going through life and I can get a life-changing idea every time I take a shower. Now what could possibly go wrong with that system? Ellyn Bader: Yes so we have to... We've had to learn how to navigate our differences, for sure. Neil Sattin: Yeah, I wish you could see the look that Ellyn gave Pete when he started talking about this. Peter Pearson: But see, here's the key, when somebody has differences is if I have to tone down my life changing ideas, am I compromising a set of values in me? And the answer is really no, it's more like a series of interests, what I'm drawn to, but it's not... I don't organize my life around creativity much more expensive visionary thinking, etcetera. It's an interest, it's a concern, but it's not a core value, which then makes it easy there to create adjustments when there are differences. Neil Sattin: Yeah, I'm wondering if you have any hints on in a circumstance like that, how could I as the person who's thinking like, "Wow, I wonder what Pete's going to say the next time he comes out of the shower." Ellyn Bader: Well, what I... I'll answer that 'cause what I had to learn was how to give him positive recognition for great ideas and still say to him, "Focus Pete, stay focused." Peter Pearson: And then, I had to learn how to hear Ellyn telling me to focus without feeling like I was being controlled. And I also had to learn that when I have a new idea, I will say to Ellyn, "Now wait a minute, this is just a brain storm idea." So if I go to Ellyn and I say, "What do you think about moving to Australia? 'cause I just saw a National Geographic special on Australia." And I say, "Now wait three days from now, I'm not going to want to move there, but let's just talk about it. It might be interesting." Neil Sattin: Yeah, so Ellyn, for you in this... How do you... It feels a little challenging as an example, because it seems obvious how this doesn't conflict with your core values but I'm curious to know how would one sit in a moment of tension and decide, "Is this about my core values?" And that could be true for either person, right, or, "Is this more about something that can be adjusted or worked around?" Ellyn Bader: Well, let me say that I think... First of all, that sometimes people jump to that question that you just put out too fast. It's like the more that I am sure that I won't compromise on core core values, the more open I can be to any of Pete's ideas because I know I'm not going to get completely caught up and swayed and go down certain paths that I don't want to go down. So the ability to really explore the other person's world and the other person's reality, is dependent on how centered somebody is themselves or how differentiated they are themselves. Ellyn Bader: I mean core values tend to be things like, "I don't believe in hitting kids or I'm not going to discipline my children by hitting them," whereas somebody might say, "Well, for me it's fine, to spank, and whatever," those kinds of things you're not going to get a compromise on. Religion is one that very often, you're not going to get a compromise on but there are so many things that people think. One other quick example I had a couple that I was working with, where he desperately wanted to live on this beautiful island, off the East Coast where they built an incredibly unbelievable place that they lived and she wanted to live in California where she had lived before and they were at a stand-off for probably 13 or 14 months about where they were going to live. Ellyn Bader: But I kept saying to them, "We're going to stick with this and find out what matters to each of you so much about each of these places and that there is a solution. I have no idea what it is. You have no idea what it is, but there are core values that are embedded in this that matter to each of you a lot, and that's what we need to uncover to make a good decision," and it's that ability to live in the uncertainty that's so hard that leaves people to quickly get divorced or give up or throw their hands up in despair. Neil Sattin: Yeah, yeah, and so I'm hearing in there like a really valuable question such as what is it about this thing that really matters to you that might help people unearth the values embedded in something like a choice like where to live. Ellyn Bader: Yeah that's the agreement. Peter Pearson: That's right Neil and when you say, "What are the values of that and often there are multiple nuanced layers to that question, but people want to rush to the answer because it creates anxiety or tension to live in that pressure so they want to hurry up and rush to it but there are a lot of nuanced layers to that question, about why something really matters to me. Neil Sattin: Yeah, yeah, awesome. And so that leads me to something that we had chatted about maybe sharing with our audience which is a tool that you use as therapists and it's also a tool for people in relationship around how to communicate around a particularly challenging thing that involves these prescribed roles. The initiator and the inquirer. And I'm wondering if we could just take a few minutes to describe that process, which seems like it would be so powerful for people having that exploration with each other. Ellyn Bader: I'd be glad to... I'd like to frame it first by saying that the most common problem that couples come to therapy with is the problem of saying, "We can't communicate, we have a communication struggle or a communication issue." Neil Sattin: Great. Ellyn Bader: As a therapist, I know that it's not just a simple behavioral change that's going to make them be able to communicate more effectively. And so, the reason Pete and I developed the initiator inquirer process is it is designed purposely to do two things. One is to help communication but the other thing is it does help people develop new capacities, new abilities in themselves that they didn't have before that make them a better communicator. Neil Sattin: Got it, right, it requires you to be more differentiated in order to even engage in the process. Ellyn Bader: To engage effectively, yeah. Peter Pearson: Yeah, in that sense, it goes way beyond just a technique or a tool to talk about things. Neil Sattin: Great. Ellyn Bader: So basically we teach couples two very different roles and when you say... When kids go to kindergarten you learn to take turns, but as adults, when we have stresses, or problems we don't take turns we're both like hammering at each other. And so we divide it up into one person is the initiator and the other person is the inquirer. And the role of the initiator is to bring up one issue and only one issue at a time, and to say what they desire, to say what they feel when they bring it up, and to avoid name-calling, to avoid blame, to any negativity. And then the most important part of that role is to be open to learning more about yourself by the time you're finished talking than when you started. Peter Pearson: Now that's pretty unusual. If I have a conflict with you, I'm not interested in learning more about myself. Ellyn Bader: That explains why it is hard for you to be an initiator for a while. Peter Pearson: Or an inquirer. Ellyn Bader: Yeah, as Pete just said, it's not easy for people who... 'cause it's more natural to just blame and want the other person to change and not be open to learning about yourself. So that's the initiating role, the inquiring role is the role for the listening partner. And when I'm teaching this to a couple, I'll say there are real challenges in this role. The first thing you gotta do is listen, and that means you're actively listening to understand, you're not listening but all the time you're thinking about how you're going to prove your point. So you listen. We teach people to be curious rather than furious. Ellyn Bader: So you ask questions and the questions are designed to have a... Like if I'm asking Pete it's to get a deeper understanding of what he's communicating to me. The third piece, which is really hard but is to respond with empathy and to be able to stay with empathy until you get what we call a soothing moment or that moment of connection and contact where Pete feels like I really get him or I get what he's communicating to me and I've let it impact me 'cause I can be empathic about what's being communicated. Ellyn Bader: And then we recommend a break and then you can switch roles but you don't want to mush everything together so, there's not clarity about what belongs to each person. So that's a quick short hand. We work with continuum so we help people see what they're developing in themselves to get better at it, and... But it's... The process is used by therapists all over the world and it's probably the most widely-used part of our model because they get to see how powerful it is for couples. Neil Sattin: Yeah, so I'm seeing as the important components from the initiator's side being willing to really get to what you want or what your issue is from a self-perspective, so not being in a position where you're blaming the other person, but focusing in on what is going on within you that's a challenge or problem, and... Peter Pearson: That's extremely difficult Neil, what you just expressed right there is to get clearer and clearer about what's important to you and why. And so many people grow up with almost nobody encouraging or supporting the expression of what you want, or why that's important. And so as adults, it just gets layered over and layered over and it's surprisingly difficult for so many people to be clear about what it is that they really want. Neil Sattin: Yeah, and so the flip side of what's so important about this is that the person who's the inquirer, along with the empathy that you named which is clearly really important is this sense of like, "I'm asking you questions so I can understand you better not so I can pin you down, not so I can get my point across." It's not... I'm not asking you questions to make a case about something else, I'm asking you questions that are about really unearthing... Helping you dive more deeply into who you are and like we were talking about before, what it is about this thing that really matters to you. Peter Pearson: And also Neil, what you're saying right there is on that side of the coin, extremely difficult. A lot of people think, "Well, jeez, if I really start knowing what's important to you and why, then I'm going to have to give up what I want or change what I think or change what I feel." And so that feels, it almost is like there's a self-preservation against knowing much more about what it is that your partner wants. They are simply afraid it will intensify the conflict and sometimes it does. Ellyn Bader: But... And getting to that empathy pushes development, it pushes people to get out of themselves and understand another reality. Neil Sattin: Yeah, it makes me think too of your work around lying and your book Tell Me No Lies because this is one of those moments where it seems so important to be fostering an atmosphere that invites truth-telling, so that when you're asking your partner questions they feel like they can answer... Answer you honestly, without being beaten over the head by what they're saying or the person's response. So there's that aspect that's challenging as well of hearing things and learning how to not take it personally or to deal with the emotions that arise when you're hearing things that are challenging. Ellyn Bader: Yup, yeah, I mean relationships are a place where an enormous amount of growth takes place and if you have the expectation that your primary relationship is always going to be easy, effortless, and enjoyable all the time you're in for a tough ride. Neil Sattin: That doesn't happen? [chuckle] Ellyn Bader: Not too often. Neil Sattin: So, you alluded earlier to the series that you're doing, and we've been talking about communication and you said that one of the biggest things that comes to a couples' session is when couples think that their problem is that they're not able to communicate with each other, that all they have to do is learn how to communicate better. And that's one of the topics that you're going to discuss in this five day... Five part series, and I happen to have the list of the other topics in front of me, so I'm just going to name them for people, so that they can hear. Ellyn Bader: Do you want me to do it or you want... Neil Sattin: Yeah, go ahead, 'cause you can probably talk about it with even more intel. Ellyn Bader: Well, yeah, let me just create a context. As Neil said earlier, I surveyed therapists about tough things that they struggle with. And then I wanted to put together this five part... Well, a series of training that would help therapists learn more about what the developmental model can do for them and why. And so I'm doing three live webinars starting a week, starting Monday, September ninth and going through that week. And the first webinar, the point of the first webinar is really clients don't always tell us what we need to know about why they're having trouble. Ellyn Bader: They'll present a problem like we fight about clutter or he's never home on time, or whatever it is, but you don't have a window into seeing their developmental stage and the level of differentiation. And so the first webinar is designed to help you with an exercise that will show you how to see better what you need to know. And I'll be showing a video of a couple that I worked with using this particular exercise. The second day is actually an article and a clinical transcript. And it's about power struggles because so often, people get stuck in a power struggle. Ellyn Bader: And this particular one is a case that Pete worked with and it is power struggling over parenting and how to parent. And then the third one is that we can't communicate. It's a video example of showing how to work with a couple when they come in and they believe their problem is communication and you want to take it further and deeper and more vulnerable and more open. And how do you get there and how do you help them see that it's more than just communication. Neil Sattin: And I just want to mention too that being able to see you work with other couples is so valuable I think as a therapist, and a training exercise but also as a couple being able to see how another couple responds in a similar kind of situation, and how a therapist interacts... Just there's so much juice there, in terms of informing how we respond in a relationship as well, along with how we respond as counselors, and therapists. Ellyn Bader: And yeah and we try to pick some cases that have common problems so that people who watch like you're saying Neil can benefit. In the first case, it's a blended family who are struggling with blended family issues. This case, I just mentioned is one where they say, "We can't communicate," but they've had some alcohol problems, they've had some other deeper issues that weren't on the surface. The fourth day is another article and transcript. And it's with me working with a narcissistic husband who had really dominated most of the sessions and was not somebody who had been willing to look at himself. And so I chose the transcript of a session where I was really pushing him around being open and looking at himself, and not being... Not externalizing everything onto me and onto his wife. So that's the fourth day. Neil Sattin: Cool. Ellyn Bader: And then the very last day is another one that I get asked about a lot and that is in the aftermath of infidelity, you often have one partner who is obsessing about all the details of their partner's affair, and they want to know, "Where did you meet, and where did you sleep, and how much money did you spend?" And that constant kind of obsession it can be very hard to deal with in sessions. And so it's an example of me working with a couple where the wife was doing that and how to turn that into a positive direction rather than having it undermine your work. Neil Sattin: They all sound like super powerful things to witness and to learn more about. If you are interested in participating in this five-part series that Ellyn is doing, are the two of you doing that together or is it just you, Ellyn who's... Ellyn Bader: I'm doing the webinars, but like I said, Pete did one of the transcripts for one of the article. Neil Sattin: Oh right, right, yeah. So, you can visit Neilsattin.com/institute and it's institute because Ellyn and Pete together run The Couples Institute, which is their center for information for couples, for therapists and their training course that they do because they have a big course that they do for therapists to help them learn how to work with couples around this developmental model. Ellyn, can you give us the full name of the course? 'cause it's... It gives you a lot just hearing the name you know what it's about. Ellyn Bader: Sure. Just one thing before I do that, this series that I'm... That Neil was just talking about will be available online until September 22nd. So, if one of your listeners hears this a few days after we've started, they can still sign up and get what they missed up until the 22nd of September. Neil Sattin: Great. And I think it's important to mention too, that this five part series is free. So anyone can sign up, neilsattin.com/institute and you'll be able to get access to these trainings for free. Ellyn Bader: And the name of the course is the developmental model of couples therapy, integrating attachment, differentiation and neuroscience in couples work. And it's, of course, I love doing this training, it's an online program, there's therapists in it from all over the world, coaches too from all over the world, believe it, there's people from 35 different countries. And it's designed to help you learn to benefit from knowing the developmental model and using concepts to get you unstuck and to keep forward progress happening in your couples work. Neil Sattin: So, very powerful and I'm always amazed as even when I re-visit your work in preparation for one of these conversations, I'm always pulling new stuff out and being like, "Oh I know, I read that before but there's another gem of information that... " So there's so much depth to what you're offering and you can tell just from the title of the course that it's very comprehensive in terms of merging development, attachment, neuroscience in a way that's really practical in the therapists or coaching office. Well, I... Ellyn Bader: Thank you Neil. Neil Sattin: One quick question going back to the initiator inquirer model, I was wondering if you have any suggestions for people on how to switch directions 'cause I think that can sometimes be one of the troubles where one person feels like, "Well, I'm always the one who's trying to understand my partner and I want them to understand me for a change." So are there ways that you found that work to invite that switch? Ellyn Bader: Well, first of all, one of the things I like to say to people is that the person who actively initiates the topic and that can be to say to your partner, "Is this a good time to talk?" Or, "I have something I want to talk about." The person who takes the risk of initiating ideally is the initiator. Then when they're finished, you can take a 20 minute break up to a two or three-day break to come back and do the other side. But if there's somebody who's never initiating as their therapist, I'm going to be working with them on what's getting in the way of you initiating because there are many people who are just reactive and they wait for their partners to bring it up, and then they say, "But wait, I want to go first. There is my turn," but they won't do that active initiation. So I try to cut that out by really getting people to take that accountability and ownership to initiate for themselves. Neil Sattin: Yeah, it almost seems like then the real potential issue is helping get the inquirer to really want to sign up for asking questions that are about unearthing understanding as opposed to just reacting responding. Peter Pearson: And ironically, the initiator could say to their partner if this person does most of the initiating, "Honey there's something I would like to talk about, which is, it seems to me, I'm the one who continues to bring up... And it would mean a lot to me if you brought up stuff about yourself for example... And I want to be in the role of listening and being curious and understanding your struggles a little more comprehensively than I do. That would help us, I think, create a stronger union, may be a stronger team and work more collaboratively shoulder-to-shoulder going forth in life. So, knowing more about you, I think could help us short-term and possibly long-term as well." Neil Sattin: Perfect, well I see that we're bumping up against our hard stop for time. And even though I would love to chat with you more, I think I'm just going to have to save my other questions for the next time that we talk. But in the mean time, it's always such a pleasure to have you both here with us. Pete Pearson, Ellyn Bader of The Couples Institute. If you want to take part in their free series you can visit neilsattin.com/institute or to download the transcript of today's episode, visit neilsattin.com/development2. That's the word development and the number two, or text the word Passion to the number 33444 and follow the instructions, and you'll have all the links for you that we talked about today on the show page. So that is for you Ellyn and Pete, thank you so much for making it work today, it's such a pleasure to talk to you. Ellyn Bader: Well, thank you Neil, it's always enjoyable to talk to you. And yeah there probably will be a next time sometime we get together again. Peter Pearson: Yeah, I hope there is a next time, Neil. It's like Ellyn says it's always good talking with you. The time goes fast and I just want to give another shout out to you Neil for all that you're doing, bringing these messages to the professional and to the public lives. So shut out to you for doing all your work Neil. Neil Sattin: Thank you so much, I appreciate that reflection, a lot!

In what ways are you being controlled by your partner? In what ways are you controlling them? How does it help you? And how does it hurt you? In today’s episode, we’re going to dive deep on this issue of control, and see if we just can’t dismantle the ways that it’s holding you back in your relationship. By the end, you'll see exactly what structures of control you've put into place in your relationship, understand why they're there, and have a path towards greater freedom to be yourself in your relationship. Come see Relationship Alive - LIVE! with John and Julie Gottman, on October 12th in Portland Maine. You have the chance to ask us *your* questions - and get answers. Visit neilsattin.com/liveshow for more information. 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: Audible Escape transports you into the world of love and romance - unlimited love stories to enjoy. Choose your own emotional experience! To get your first month free, visit audible.com/lovealive 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: I want to know you better! Take the quick, anonymous, Relationship Alive survey FREE Guide to Neil’s Top 3 Relationship Communication Secrets Guide to Understanding Your Needs (and Your Partner’s Needs) in Relationship (ALSO FREE) Support the podcast (or text “SUPPORT” to 33444) Amazing intro and outro music provided courtesy of The Railsplitters

Is it possible to be a spiritual being in a human body? Transcendent, yet grounded? And why is that so many “spiritual leaders” tell us to leave our feelings behind? How is it possible to be truly connected to another person - including on the spiritual level? To get to the heart, body, and soul of these questions, we’re having a return visit from Jeff Brown, author of the recently released book “Grounded Spirituality”. Jeff’s work is focused on connecting you to your precious, unique divinity - in a way that’s practical, connected, and...real. Or as Jeff Brown might say...enrealed. If you’re curious to hear our first episode together, you can also check out Episode 118 of Relationship Alive - Crafting an Uncommon Bond and Soulshaping with Jeff Brown. 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: 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 Jeff Brown’s website to learn more about his books and his other projects. Pick up a copy of Grounded Spirituality by Jeff Brown on Amazon. 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/grounded to download the transcript, or text “PASSION” to 33444 and follow the instructions to download the transcript to this episode with Jeff Brown. 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  It's always a thrill to get a return visit from a particularly awesome guest. And today is going to be one of those days. Here to talk about the, his new book "Grounded Spirituality," is Jeff Brown, who is also the author of "Soulshaping," and "An Uncommon Bond," and in fact we had him here on Relationship Alive, I guess it was probably about a year and a half ago, maybe, to talk about those two books. And if you're curious to hear that episode you can visit Neil-Sattin-dot-com-slash-soul-shaping. All one word. And today, we're going to talk about this approach to living a spiritual life that allows us to be fully grounded in who we are as humans in terms of our unique existence on this planet right now. I'm not going to try to describe the whole thing that's what I'm here to talk to Jeff Brown for. However I just want to say that for me personally this book came at a really challenged time when I've been going through a lot in my own life and I found some of the exercises in this book to be really helpful. And some of the viewpoints represented to help dispel some of the myths that I've been carrying around with me about what it means to be a spiritual being in a human body. And and helped me integrate in a in a new way that's been really helpful and transformative in terms of my day to day life right now. So I found the book to be really inspiring and that's why I'm so excited to be sharing it with you along with Jeff Brown it's auth, it's author.  Neil Sattin  So if you want to download a transcript of today's conversation, which promises to be quite far reaching, then I encourage you to do so at Neil-Sattin-dot-com-slash-grounded, as in "Grounded Spirituality," not as in your grounded for being a bad human. And you can always text to the word Passion to the number 3-3-4-4-4 and follow the instructions to also get access to the transcripts and show notes for today's conversation. I think that's it for starters. So Jeff Brown, welcome back to Relationship Alive.  Jeff Brown  Great to be with you Neil. It's good to be here.  Neil Sattin  We're here to talk about "Grounded Spirituality," and I gave my off the cuff definition in the intro but I'm wondering if you might be able to give us a quick synopsis of what you mean by a "grounded spirituality," and maybe contrast that with what people tend to talk about when they're talking about spirituality and why this distinction is so important for you? Jeff Brown  So let me just read from the book the grounded spirituality definition then go into the second part of your question.  Neil Sattin  Sure.  Jeff Brown  "Grounded spirituality is an all encompassing experience of spirituality that is rooted in and thread throughout all aspects of our humanity and earthly experience. We begin and end our spiritual quest within the ground of our being, our embodied humanness, as both interpreter of experience and as our individuated portal to divinity we don't look outside of our human form for spirituality we look deeper with a name and form, cultivating a more refined understanding of the divine reflection that exists right in the heart of our selfhood. We honor its sacred qualities and transformative properties celebrating it as the perfectly constructed laboratory of expansion that it is. With our feet rooted firmly on Mother Earth and in daily life, we become grounded in reality in all its identifiable forms. We expand outward and inward from there. In essence grounded and spirituality are synonyms. They both mean reality. The more deeply grounded you are in your body and selfhood, the more fully you are here. The more fully you are here, the more spiritual your experience. It's from the depths of your being that you have the greatest access to the everything."  Jeff Brown  So for me you know I mean, my journey really began in the psychotherapeutic process. I didn't really have any idea of this thing called spirituality so I really... And, and as I went through that process and moved from more of a talk therapy model to working with Al Lowen and doing other somatic psychotherapy techniques, I found that the more deeply I opened and released the more expanded my vista. I felt like at the end of sessions or at the end of holotropic breathwork, I felt completely and deeply here in a unity consciousness field. And, but it happened through my body and it happened through the psycho emotional release. It didn't happen through anything separate from or distinct from my day to day experience. It was all coming through and threaded through my humanness. So I think I carry that forward and then began to explore this thing called spirituality and it began really with the love experience I wrote about in "An Uncommon Bond," and coming into a unified field or what I called the Unified Field from the love experience again through my heart and through my body through my being and then I began to encounter people like Bhagavan Das, and made Karmageddon and all kinds of other people in social media that were defining spirituality in a way that seemed to be devoid of humanness. I mean, it seemed to really be about something called transcendence. Something about finding selfhood finding spirituality independent of self, body, ego, feelings, stories -- everything about my humanness, everything difficult and uncomfortable was dissed. And spirituality was some awakened consciousness and an absolute consciousness field outside of my localized experience. That wasn't where I found it. I found it inside of my localized experience and so I, you know, as I've continued to work in the area and write in the area and develop ideas in the area, I began to realize that there's this thing called patriarchal spirituality. There is this thing I call the "new cage movement" there's this whole industry, industrial notion of spirituality that people are economically dependent on that tries to set off our humanness from our spirituality and that's just simply has not been my experience, and I feel as though that's one of the reasons why our species is in trouble because this way as in many other ways we continue to dissociated from our humanness in quest of something outside of it without understanding that the true integration happens has to happen right in the heart of it.  Neil Sattin  I love that. And I'm thinking now of like the first place that I want to go with this, is, uh, that notion of transcendence and how helpful it has been for people to explore that to, to explore witness consciousness and, to in some senses let's just use the phrase rise above their, the drama and the chaos of human existence in order to get some perspective some peace. And your book is written as a dialogue between yourself and this character named Michael who is really rooted in this sense of spiritual journey that's all about transcending. Transcending reality or being far enough above it that you're you're not drowning in the chaos of it. And I think that's why it's so alluring to people because it, it's can feel easy to drown in the chaos of, of life and emotions and circumstances. So. Um.And you of course talk about Eckhart Tolle as a great example of someone who is you know the figurehead in some respects of the modern western transcendence movement. And so I'm wondering for you, where's the value in learning this witness consciousness and being able to take perspective vs. living there? Jeff Brown  So the simple way I put it is that detachment is a tool. It's not a life. So for me... And transcendence can be defined you know, definitional stuff is very important and we won't go too far into it here. But you know what one person calls "transcendence," another person call something else. So the whole language of rising above being heightened all of that for me is part of the patriarchal bypass movement. That's not to say that being able to pull up and out and look at your localized self through various meditative and other techniques gain perspective on your habitual range of emotion, on the stories you tell yourself, and the way you move through the world on the various forms of anxiety that operate within you, is a good thing. It helped me enormously to be able to pull out of my very localized experience of Jeff Brown, from that super crazy childhood, and begin to witness myself and recognize and excavate parts of me that I didn't have access to in my habitual way of moving through the world. I have no issue with it. If Tolle  had written, "Power of Now," a book that I call the "power of self-avoidance." If if Tolle had written that book and he had said, "Look, I..." As he said in the beginning I think he said, he was suicidal and very troubled. If he'd said, "Look, I had all kinds of problems. And one morning I woke up and I developed, had developed some kind of a technique or access to a particular consciousness that gave me access to my material." Don't call it a pain body, don't talk about it like you're talking about a car part, acknowledge your tender woundedness, and then he said, "And I spent a lot of time out there getting perspective on where I'd been. Understanding my ancestral context, understanding how this painful material wove its way through my ways of being, and then I developed techniques for coming back down into that material," as though the material is in fact quite true and quite real and no illusion, no bashing of the ego, no bashing of the self, no bashing of the feelings, no bashing of emotions, no bashing of anything human. Acknowledging it, recognizing it, and understand that you needed to bring another consciousness into it in order to find the balance. The weave. The Holy Holy. That you need to move through the world with a connection to a more unified field and a profound and deep and worked through awareness of the localized self. If he had said that, I got no problem with that book. But he didn't.  He called that a, what'd he call it "a guide for enlightenment" or something in this, in the sub header? When you present the detachment or that as something that is the end of the story essentially to me that's just dissociative and that's not going to serve this humanity. We know why people want to do it. They're uncomfortable here. It's painful here. So they use the meditation as a drug or they use witnessing consciousness as a drug, and they convinced themselves they've gone to that superior place because they're numbing and detaching from all that material that's stirring up inside of them. It's still in there. It still shows up in their personal life. None of these teachers tell you about their personal lives, but you find out things about a lot of spiritual teachers' personal lives and you realize that this is an industry and they're telling you a story about their lives that isn't the whole story. Their stuff is still activated, their stuff is still working on them. They have not resolved work through all those pieces. And so for me what we need to do is develop a spirituality that acknowledges the wisdom and brings techniques to bear on people to be able to pull up and out, to pull back and look at themselves, to do the witnessing consciousness trip, to have a taste of something called "unity consciousness," and then to come back down into the body with that wisdom and find the weave between transcendence and imminence. That for me is the truest human experience.  Neil Sattin  So let's contrast that with maybe some of your experience around the more human material. So when we come back in and write about how much is tends to be locked in the body and we've had right, Peter Levine on the show several times so that's that's I think, hopefully a level of discourse that listeners are familiar with, this idea that we're storing trauma in our body and if we're not dealing with it, then we're gonna have to stay in this dissociated state in order to feel like we're somehow coping, and I could, I could see like the freedom the illusion of freedom in that for people because we can't live there, there's that reality of your back in your, within your human form and there's still some shit to work through.  Jeff Brown  Absolutely. It's, I mean trauma. It's encoded in the body. Its stored in the body. It's in the body. So I knew this in a very palpable way, when I shifted from being a talk therapy client to being a body centered psychotherapy client, and I would sit with Alexander Lowen for who was the co-founder of Bio and I would sit and talk for 15 minutes with him and he'd just be looking at my body and he'd be engaging my mind because he knew I needed that to feel safe, and I knew what he was doing but I needed to do it. And then he would say, "All right, you ready to work? You ready to get to work?" And so to get undressed, so I get into my underwear, my shorts whatever I would do and he would start working me, in the body, grounding me in the body, going over the stool, tantruming, kicking, and all of a sudden I would have access to a completely different experience of reality than my waking consciousness. It was painful. It was horrifying. There were memories that I had no conscious connection to in my day to day life, and understandably, I had to survive and get through my life. I couldn't be in touch with all that trauma but my experience of deep inside of my body was radically and remarkably different than who I thought I was. And I had tried going up and out I had been around the bypass movement I had attempted to be a bypasser. I would love to be a bypasser. But I just can't be a bypasser, it's just not, it, it's not in the way that I'm organized internally. But you know at the same time I was living kind of in between. I wasn't a bypasser but I wasn't going deep into the caverns of my own body consciousness. So Lowen, by going to Lowen, manifesting Lowen, what, however we characterize it, I was forced to go back down into that material. I chose to go back to into that material and and then I began to understand this deep and profound connection between this thing we could call imminence, the localized the day to day, the mundane whatever we call it and this thing called transcendence or unity consciousness field or the non-dual world, and then I would encounter it the spiritual world, they were talking about non duality and they all seem flatlined. They talk like automatons, they were they were addicted to meditation, you know, TM-ers, I knew so many TM-ers, who were like yogic flying and their personal lives were utterly insane, you know, there was no bridge. So I began to understand that my body was the bridge. My body is the bridge and it's the way that I try to make sense of how I can hold all of these threads of consciousness at the same time. And so. And Peter Levine is one of the great brilliant pioneers, and I noted him in the book. So his John Perocco, so is Wilhelm Reich. So is, you know, David Berceli is doing great work. Lowen, of course, did utterly brilliant work these people to me are the true spiritual teachers, because I define spirituality as reality, Neil. So the one who guides us or supports us in a movement towards being in touch with all threads of reality which must begin within the self it has to begin within the self, itself. To me those are the true spiritual teachers, not the ones who master a singular thread of consciousness master witnesses master meditators masters at the art of our premature forgiveness. There's a million of them out there calling themselves spiritual teachers to me there's nothing spiritual about them because all they've done is perfected one thread and they're not able to function within all of the threads of the human experience.  Neil Sattin  That's one thing that's so appealing to me about your, your writing in "Grounded Spirituality," is this way that you continue speaking to "integrating." Integrating the spiritual awareness, integrating what's happening within your body, integrating your emotional awareness, integrating your intuition so that it it all becomes part of you as an alive, dynamic being. And what I've seen, what I've witnessed, it feels kind of funny to use that word, with lots of my clients who have been going through this sort of thing is that when people are totally focused on the meditative path, it actually creates a lot of challenges in relationship, because there's all that unconscious material that's still running them in the ways that they interact with each other or conversely they're they're kind of not really interacting with each other. They're, they're like two dissociated beings, or more likely one dissociated being, and another, who's like trying to call them back and then both of them of course have their work to do in order to to arrive at this place of being more integrated and unfolding in that way because I think it's it's not a static place, right? It's this dynamic place where you continually arrive again and again.  Neil Sattin  Absolutely. I mean this is why the mindfulness revolution is dangerous. This is why the, you know, the society wide industry now really related to meditation is dangerous. I mean I get that meditation can be a wonderful technique for connecting to the self for pulling away from the localized material for periods of time, to getting a break from what it means to be a human being, you know, or at least to get a break from some aspect of that. But the problem is again, if it's not also coupled with some kind of re entry process and reintegration process, it's like we're moving towards inclusivity with respect to gender, with respect to sexuality, certainly with respect to race, you know, ethnicity, all kinds of ways. But I believe because the spiritual community is the one area in society where nobody's allowed to critically review it. It's amazing how well, how effective patriarchal spirituality in its origins has been at preventing us from deconstructing. You just got to go on my Facebook wall, when I put up a post where I'm critically reviewing a teaching, and how many conscious people even, really people who've really done work on themselves say, "Oh my God. How can you do that. You have no right to critique that person's teaching. You have no right to critique that experience." They're OK if we critique politics. They're OK if we deconstruct legal decisions. They're OK with us critically reviewing religion, but not spirituality. And this is the biggest part of the problem. You know if we're going to move in the direction of an inclusive world we have to allow for the critical review of everything that is not inclusive and that really includes spirituality because spirituality is growing in popularity, religion is becoming less popular worldwide. And if we keep moving in the direction of this protectorate this nonsense about certain spirituality as being a sacred cow we're leading humanity away from inclusively while at the same time pretending that we're moving them in the direction of something more advanced it's not more advanced if it's not inclusive.  It can't be.  Neil Sattin  I suppose the one thing that really speaks to me in your writing is that sense of the imminence that you talk about being here, in the here and now, partly because I feel like that is really the place where relationship actually springs from at least springs from in its most, most healthy manifestation. You know, it's two people who are actually being fully here and alive to what's happening within themselves.  Jeff Brown  Right.  Neil Sattin  And, and. That's the thing that I think scares me a little bit about the spirituality movement is the way that it's discouraging people from actually feeling their full experience here with another human. Because that of course is what propels the growth that happens in relationship with another person.    Right. Well you know this is the trick of patriarchal spirituality to talk about the now, while leading you away from the now. That's the whole game. "The Power of Now," that's a very powerful sounding book title. "Be Here Now." Wow, what a powerful concept. But what are we really talking about we're talking about a notion of now-ness that is bereft of individuation. That is not connected to what I call the power of then, that is the true material that you're holding within your beingness unresolved, traumatic material, unresolved memories, unresolved events and experiences that completely inform your experience of the moment. Can you be fully in the moment if threads of your consciousness and threads that are somatically embedded in structure to defend and in armored ways of functioning, actually prevent you from being here in this moment? How could I be?  Neil Sattin  Right.  Jeff Brown  If I'm holding onto all kinds of stuff. And as a result of that early stuff I shallowed my breath. I pulled my head up and away from my body I tighten my hips, I rigidified my system, can I say that I'm actually in the now, in a full and complete sense? Of course not. So most of the people who are teaching now-ness are actually tricking you, they uh, or they're tricking themselves or both. They are the farthest thing from being in the moment because their version of the now is this patriarchal, cave dwelling, meditative absolute consciousness field, where you diss the self, you diss the story, you diss the ego you diss your body sometimes, you diss your feelings. All of that is an illusion, all of that is misidentified. But what's real is some version of the nowness where you're floating in the clouds scapes like we're birds or something? And you're having some experience of this absolute field of enlightenment, as though there is such a thing, as though we're not in process, as though it's not a relative experience? To me it's a big lie. So then people are going, "Wow, I get to be in the now." It gets... And the trick is we do get a little bit of relief when we get access to these techniques because they do pull us up but out of that worry-mind. Alright, I get that. But you have to look a little closer because then they go farther, they're actually taking you farther and farther away from your humanness and it's particularly dangerous for trauma survivors who really need to have a sense of intactness and integration and we're being led in the direction of dissolution of the ego, denial of the story, um, dishonoring of their feelings, all of it is unreal and untrue. And you know what,  what really got me going in this in 2013, someone I new on Facebook hung themselves after they'd bought into all these new cage and patriarchal notions of spirituality, fired their therapist and when their stuff kept haunting them in the middle of the night, they had nobody to turn to because now they had dissed all of that, and then they ended up hanging themselves and they announced it in advance, it was very clear what was coming. And I called the cops and tried to get them to go and they went and they couldn't do anything and then they hung themselves and that's when I really began to understand, and I'm understanding in my "Grounded Spirituality" discu-discussion group on Facebook. You hear these stories about how these bullshit versions of spirituality have damaged and destroyed lives, you know, and then you, you feel, I have felt compelled to find a voice that I'm not comfortable sharing in an effort to try to encourage us in the direction of a new spirituality not one that was fostered by men who couldn't admit their fucked up ness and had to go into meditation caves and convinced a village that they were the enlightened masters, that we're bringing great wisdom for twenty years sitting in a meditation cave being served by the villagers. That nonsense is ridiculous, that doesn't bring us into integration with ourselves or with humanity and now I think we need to move in the direction, as sacred activists, to bring ourselves into integration spiritually just like we're trying to bring everything else into integration.  Neil Sattin  Can you draw a distinction for me, between what, how what we're talking about is spiritual, and sacred, since you just used that word vs. just, I'm going to a body centered therapist healing my old traumas.  Jeff Brown  Mmmm, reframe the question?  Neil Sattin  So in other words. How is what you're talking about different than, like if I were able to go to see, I know Alexander Lowen is no longer with us, but if I were able to go with him, is that in and of itself a spiritual experience? Or is there something more that's part of the spirituality that you're talking about? The grounded spirituality.  Jeff Brown  So, so, I'll give you my Alexander Lowen moment because I was beginning to now to question the very beginning of, what is spirituality? So I brought it to him. I think it was in our last session I said, "So, Al, what is this thing they're talking about? About spirituality. What does this even mean?" You know, and he went: "UFFF." Like he was annoyed by the question and he said, he said, he said, "Going into your body, enlivening your body, getting your body grounded, and spirited. That's spirituality." So I think for me anything that we do that brings us into a more complete experience of reality, I would call a spiritual experience. I mean everything is spirituality. Spirituality is reality for me.  My opposition is simply to anything that's calling itself spirituality because of the way that I define it as reality. Those things that are only limiting our experience to certain elements of the human equation while dissing and disconnecting and boundarying themselves against the other part of it, to me are not actually part of the spiritual experience. So, the real spiritual teacher, if anyone is a spiritual teacher and really I say later in the book really nobody is. But you know for me somatic psychotherapists came closer to that because I felt that because they were taking me into my body and into the body of my experience and through that portal I had more access to a broader and inclusive experience of reality that felt more like a spiritual teaching than going to a non dual meeting and sitting in a Satsang, and accessing one very particular, elitist notion of what it means to be a human being while disconnecting from and dissing all the rest.  Neil Sattin  Got it. I'm wondering if you could offer one of the exercises from your book, so that our listeners can get a flavor for the kinds of experiences that we're being invited into.  Jeff Brown  Yeah, I have one called the excavation meditation. In "The truth is the gateway to the moment," chapter so I'll read that.  Neil Sattin  Okay great.  Jeff Brown  Great. Maybe you can do it, Neil. "Sit on a chair on the floor or on a cushion in whatever position feels most comfortable. While sitting do not close your eyes or focus your gaze directly ahead or above you. Instead keep your eyes opened and focus downward looking directly and with great curiosity at your body temple. Gaze at your body as you would a loved one. Begin to make contact with your breath, inviting it into awareness, feeling it move through you. First, start with gentle breathing as if you are gradually warming up. Then, invite your breath to move strongly and pointedly throughout your body infusing your body with life force, pushing into and beyond tightly held regions if you feel resistance do not hesitate or recoil. Breathe even stronger. If you feel emotions do not merely watch them as they float past. Instead immerse yourself in them deepen into feeling, inviting all held emotions and memories to be fully felt. Use the breath as an excavation tool. With your breath purposefully dig deep. Your aim is to bring repressed material to the surface, where it can be released and reintegrated. Allow this meditation to become a kind of visceral physical landscape of feeling and sensation. If there are tears, feel into and move them, to the extent that you can. If there's anger feel into and move it, to the extent that you can. If there are words or sounds express them fully. If you find yourself turning toward your habitual meditation style that includes a focus on the sensations of the body, return to the breath and intensify it. If you find yourself getting distracted by thoughts return to the breath and intensify it. If you find yourself wanting this exercise to end, return to the breath and intensify it, whatever arises return to the breath and intensify it. Your breath is your excavation tool and your guide. Now you are not just watching the body as it contracts and expands, you are fully experiencing and inhabiting the body, feelings, emotions, sounds, sensations, textures, roars, all and everything. Stay with this process until you have fully abandoned the watcher and have become a full bodied total experiencer feeling, moving, expressing and releasing as fully as you can."  Jeff Brown  So I think for me you know this notion of monkey mind was very interesting, you know, it was like, OK I've got a monkey mind and I, so, when I wrote "Soulshaping,"  I was kind of a little bit more in that version of spirituality and talked about the monkey mind, and then I began to realize that really it was a monkey heart. You know, that focusing on the mind, getting inside of the mind, witnessing the mind, having various meditative, meditative techniques within the mind itself didn't seem to get me anywhere. I was just sort of going into one part of the mind to try to calm down another part of the mind. It felt like a very safe and irrational way to go about it, because when I went down into the body when I opened the material in this this armored temple of mine, I excavated feeling. I excavated sound. I excavated the need to rage or cry or whatever came through me. At the end of those discharges, I felt as though my mind completely calmed down. So it seemed very clear to me that this notion, this patriarchal notion, that everything is happening up high, and the mind is to blame for everything, which seems to be at the root of almost all of those spiritualities, if you read them, they're always blaming the mind, seemed to me to be a very safe and convenient thing, it was like talking to Michael, it was like Michael was at a safe place, was like how women have been perpetually frustrated by men who haven't accessed their feelings -- it was all the same thing.  Jeff Brown  It was like a little boy who, who, who had pain and and didn't want anyone to know he was in pain so he, he picked up the Captain America shield and said, "I am Captain America," became a master. To me all of this mastering the mind nonsense didn't seem to get me anywhere. The only way that I ever changed anything inside of my mind really fundamentally was to change something inside of my heart and I think at the heart of patriarchal -- grounded spirituality is the belief not only that we live inside of the body, and through the body is a portal to all of it, but also that we understand the importance of clearing this emotional debris that obstructs our, our lense, that obstructs our presence. That makes it impossible-possible for us to actually be in the now. We could be in the now in a cerebral sense. We could be in the now in a tangible literal sense, but in a felt sense if we're not in the now we're not in the now at all.  Neil Sattin  So I'm sitting with all of your words and also just with my experience from being guided through that process earlier and. And it rings true for me on the show I've recently had a triumvirate of AEDP therapists. I'm not sure if you're familiar with that modality but it's, I wouldn't, it's not body centered, per say, but the whole focus in that modality is on healing early attachment wounds relationally, through, with your therapist and they, they bring this whole skill set of co-regulation that I've found really helps me access these deep places, these deep wounded places, and heal in relationship with another person.  Jeff Brown  Great.  Neil Sattin  And at the same time what that process is with those, with that therapy has helped me see is just how much I am carrying around at any given moment. And you know I'm 45 years old. I've got probably, at least 45 years of things coming at me crosswise and it's not that everything has come at me crosswise, there, I've had a lot of blessed experiences in my life as well.  Jeff Brown  Right.  Neil Sattin  But those crosswise experiences I wouldn't say that I had the proper support as a kid to really handle those big feelings and I don't think many people do.  Jeff Brown  Right.  Neil Sattin  And so the technique that you just offered with connecting with the breath and, and you know, I loved how it started and even though I read it in your book I still like, when you said, when you invited me into the exercise, first thing I did was close my eyes you know and then the next thing you said was, open your eyes, and it was just like pretty amusing for me. And, and then I felt like by going through it, it really did help me access something that's here within me now. And you know for me it was this sense of, "Oh there are some tears there." Like I said I've been going through some challenges right now, some personal discovery that that's been like really eye opening for me as I look back over the landscape of my life. And so here in this moment I was super present to some, some grief and, and it was mixed with love that invitation to be looking at my body temple, as you name it. I think how also helped me connect with not only the sadness I was feeling in that moment but also the love that I had for this vehicle, this vessel for my, for my earthly experience. So I'm, I'm really just appreciating I, I felt within me like, OK if I weren't sitting here talking to you for the purposes of having a podcast like there, there are real deep aspects of that experience that I could have gone into and that moment right.  Jeff Brown  Right. Right. And end of an end for all kinds of various reasons we, we don't you know or we can't. Even though I could probably easily hold the space for that. And as you could for me, I think. You know we our adaptations and you know survivalist tendencies and practical response, all that stuff. You know, one thing I understand, it's very simple in a way when I think about this thing called spirituality, is that everybody I've ever known as part of this human collective at this stage of human development is carrying an enormity of unresolved individual, very personal and ancestral material collected material and you know we approach this question of, What is Enlightenment? What is awakening? All these kinds of things. And it seems kind of preposterous to me, and I actually mean that with some compassion, that we try to answer these questions when we're not actually fully inhabiting our bodies. When we're walking around in these deeply armored and obstructed temples and then trying to ask the question, what has meaning? You know, what has, what is awakening. What does it mean to be an enlightened or enlightening consciousness? What is enrealment? All these things if we don't begin within clearing the emotional debris that obstructs us and affects our beliefs and our behaviors and our energies and our, and our relationships. I mean we see this all over the relationship field where at this stage of human development it's all most people can do to figure out who they are individually, let alone try to work it out with another person in the room for 30 years. I mean if you think about it it's a great miracle when two people can survive 30 years or even 30 days together given the amount of material we're carrying. And so for me and it's kind of simple. Before we go farther into the question of what is the most expanded consciousness, we need to clear the debris.  You know it's like trying to see what a room looks like when the room is completely filled with garbage, you can't. You can see the dimensions, maybe the size of it, but you can't really get a sense of that room. And I think that that's where we are. And I think that the more techniques we develop, not to pull us up and out, sure, for survival purposes. Sure, when we need to disassociate because sometimes we do, and I honor that and I've employed those techniques. I still do, I'm employing them right now in the last couple of weeks but at the same time until we start to develop takes to techniques, like Peter Levine's work, like Logan's work, that really bring us down into the truth of what we're holding not calling it a pain body like it's a car part, but acknowledging our tender woundedness and the tender woundedness of the collective. Finding ways to get into that material, to hold it safely, individually, collectively, therapeutically. Move it through so that it's resolved transformed whatever can be healed, can be healed, whatever can't be healed is managed. All of that, I don't think we even know what we're talking about when we talk about awakening. I think we're just full of shit to be honest.  And I think that's because we're literally are full of shit and we need to move that debris but before we can begin to access the truer and deeper questions of our lives.  Neil Sattin  How would you suggest someone know whether or not, because this, this experience of accessing, the, you know, let's say you rise above, you see the, the garage full of boxes and boxes of old stuff and then you're like, Okay, I'm not going to stay in this risen above state I'm gonna go back and I'm going to start cleaning things out, I'm gonna clean house. When do you think someone needs help and support in that realm? Because I think that's you know the illusion that we have about big feelings and this is, I think, part of the cycle is when we're young those big feelings, especially when we're not given a safe container for them. They do feel like they're there too big they overwhelm the system and our nervous systems aren't, they aren't essentially capable of handling them. So, so then we have this irrational fear as an adult that we can't move through them when in fact like going into a feeling like that it does... It comes on strong and then it does subside and leaves you in a better off place, at least that's been my experience. And yet at the same time, I also have this feeling that for some people they may need a container or someone who's there to kind of help hold the space for them to have those kinds of experiences and so how in your opinion how would I know where I was landing on that spectrum?  Jeff Brown  I mean, I don't know that you would. I mean a great many -- most people walk around you know living far distance from their body. Was that a line from I think it was, Walter Mitty or something: "He lived a fair distance from his body." Um. You know, I feel like what has to happen is this conversation has to be normalized and, within society. And I think it's beginning to happen and I think that it needs to begin to happen in the school system, where, there's some forum created for emotional attunement because we're talking about not being attuned at an early age for a healthy emotional release for supported release within the school, within the classroom, with teachers, with practitioners that are part of that. I think it has to happen in corporate environments where we learn how to attuned to and move material that's preventing us from being most effective. I think we need to have some kind of release chambers on street corners, where people can go inside and smash a cube with a baseball bat and normalize it, normalize healthy anger release, because it's, anger has been so deeply stigmatized that now all of it's restrained, repressed, and gets acted out in all kinds of weird passive aggressive, inappropriate ways. I think we just have to make this part of our every part of society so that attunement and release are normal and are considered to be healthy steps towards a healthy society. And, and then people will be able to gauge themselves. So right now you have people walking into a b- a body centered psychotherapist room who've never really enlivened their body. Who've been adapting, amoring in a million different ways. All they know is that consciousness. That's how they've organized themselves to survive in the crazy world and and then they have the super extreme experience of grounding, opening it. "Oh my God, what is this?" And many of them leave. Many people will go to somatic psychotherapy sessions and never do more than one, because it's, it's not normalized within society. It's startling. It's stigmatized and it's a radical experience of opening in a system that's been closed. So I think it's on all of us to create some kind of a reality where the conversation about how angry I am or I'm at level four in my anger quotient, or I've got grief at Level 2 or however you want to language it, begins part of our day to day conversation. So when people cry in a coffee shop people don't look at them and make faces. They come over and they sit around them and they hold the space for them. Those kinds of things need to happen. I believe they might happen and they are beginning to happen in some ways but not happening quickly enough.  Neil Sattin  Yeah. Yeah. I agree.  Jeff Brown  So you and I, so you and I are good examples. So you know it happens between people you know. I mean we're damaged in relationship and we heal in relationships, so here are you and I. I read the meditation not even thinking you might be having an experience of it. You have an experience of it. So then the question is how can I hold the space for that experience for you, so that you actually make some progress internally, resolutionally in a 10 or 15 minute period and model that to humanity and then as we model that to humanity, especially as men, which is so important to model this to men, in particular. And not only but in particular, then we begin to make progress.  Neil Sattin  Yeah. Yeah, I think that's really true. That's really true. And it feels true also in terms of my experience. You know when I take something like a moment like this and then go out into the world then I start feeling those innately, I'm putting, I'm making the little quote marks with my fingers, those spiritual unity consciousness type experiences and I think they emerge from being really deeply in touch with...  Jeff Brown  Your feelings.  Neil Sattin  Yeah. My feelings these real parts of me.  Jeff Brown  Yeah. This is... I'm not opposed to unity consciousness but I'm not interested in a unity consciousness experience that is limited to a transcendent field. I want my connection to the everything to come from the heart of the body itself and the emotional body. And then it feels like a more sustainable experience. And it actually feels like a more expansive experience for me. And I also feel safer because I haven't had to bifurcate my consciousness to have that experience. So now I'm afraid to come back down to earth and I'm going to crash at some point because you know I'm not bridging the two. If I start from within the body... So, so you know in interacting with Michael in the book was a kind of one of my struggles. It was like, what he's calling awakening or transcendence is something that's very different, may be very different from what I experienced as awakening or transcendence. Because I did it from within my body, my feet grounded on the earth plane. So are we even talking about the same experience? His feels flight, you're more kind of motivated by or intended in the direction of getting away from something, whereas mine felt like it was about really trying to be here for all of it. You know the real "Be Here Now" the one that actually starts within my body, not renaming myself, as Ram Dass did, but as Jeff Brown. Jeff Brown with Jeff Brown story. With my bubbie Frannie Perlove . With my grandfather Zeyta Deela Perlove.  Neil Sattin  I'm just laughing...  Jeff Brown  With my very difficult mother Barbara Brown. All of that is real. That is not not spiritual. That is so spiritual that's my lineage. That's my ancestry. That's my flesh and bones baby. And if I'm not in my flesh and bones there's no possible way I can access an awakening consciousness.  Neil Sattin  I'm just laughing because I'm thinking of the place in the book where you talk about Eckhart totally changing his name and then...  Jeff Brown  Yeah his name is Ulrich. Neil Sattin  Right. And then like if names aren't important, then why are people changing their names?  Jeff Brown  Yeah yeah. He's got this quote about like you know "formlessness over form," it's like, well you know, and "ego is the enemy of the sacred," whatever all these people are talking about. And then they change their names. Well clearly it's important enough for them to take on another name in order to disconnect from their birth -- their name of origin. And you know, I understand the purpose that serves it gives a lot of people a break from what it meant to be, their, their origins. But because their origins are them and their origins are encoded in their bones and in their cells. Changing the name can be a temporary reprieve. But ultimately you still got to come back down to do the work inside of "Ulrich Tolle" and, Ram Dass has to still do the work that is Richard Alpert and Ram Dass  wouldn't disagree with that, I think. You know and that's everywhere in the community. Bhagavan Das's real name was Kermit Michael Riggs. He's walking around carrying everything that's Kermit Michael Riggs. He can call himself whatever he wants, he's still carrying Kermit Michael Riggs and he is Kermit Michael Riggs. So I think you know, if we're going to go down into the body, into the feelings. And I realized because we don't have templates we only have a few models, a few techniques developed, it's very difficult to invite people in this direction because then how do we get them there to stay there because there aren't that many integrated models, most of what we've been calling spirituality is bifurcated and if you really look closely, even yoga was... If you look at its origins it's called "Yoke"  It means unity. But really what they're talking about is a version of unity that gets you away from and perfects the toxic body beast again. It's still dissociative. It's still the bypass. And what we need now and what I try to ignite and support in the call to action is: people, all the people, young people out there who were interested in somatic psych, a lot of them going into inclusivity, begin to co-create models that unite these various techniques that pull us up and out or in a way to look at ourselves through a more expansive lens, whatever we call it, with the desire to be deeply living within our body and healing the trauma that obstructs our consciousness. And finding a way to weave transcendence and imminence into the holy holy what I call a "We-stern" consciousness. The quest for unity consciousness and essence fundamental to Eastern traditions and the quest for a healthy self concept, and a work through, an embodied experience of the moment, that's more fundamental to Western consciousness. And when we find that weave, then we're really going to be here for our awakening.  Neil Sattin  So I'd like to spend. Our last few minutes together today bringing this into the realm of relationship. And what I'm thinking of is how, in your book, The Evolution of this starts with being in the body and and there are a few other exercises that you offer that are all about accessing what's happened, the material that's happening within you now. And then that leads to this place of that being able to fuel a sense of who we actually are, beyond who we think we are and and mining ourselves for that, the uh, I forget the term that you use for it. But for those aspects of us that are about who we are uniquely able to be in this lifetime in this body. And I think for a lot of people there's this question of their journey found them, let's say to this place of relationship with this person, and then they start wondering well how do I know if this is a true connection, where we can grow each other, versus one where we're just going to be trapped in our woundedness together? So I'm curious to know how you would connect this body centered awareness with that question of: Is this the right person? Is this the right choice? Is this like, is this the work worth doing? Because we have all our own material that's right there for us, and then we're in, we can be in choice about the material we want to work on with another human.  Jeff Brown  Yeah I mean, I mean so the distinction let's say between "woundmates" and "soulmates," or something. Yeah, I mean, I think that you know, I think one of the dangers of the therapeutic revolution with respect to the shadow work that I am encouraging people to do, is that we make the mistake of thinking that every trigger filled connection is worth our while. I don't believe that. That has certainly not been my experience. There, you know, there are certain criterion that would determine whether or not it's worth our while and whether it isn't. And one of the most obvious ones is whether both people are willing to do the shadow work, is the most basic level question, you know. Because if, if they're not if one of them isn't, then you have a problem. You either adapt your consciousness kind of lowest common denominator to the vibration of the person who doesn't want to do the work or you walk away. But even in an experience I've been in experiences where there was a willingness for two people, myself and the other to do the deeper shadow work. But the relationship was like a nexus for so many triggers, both very obviously, individually rooted in individual experience, and all kinds of inexplicable... You know it's so difficult to language collective, ancestral, familial material, that it didn't matter how much work we did therapeutically, there was no way it was ever going to become anything other than painful. And I do not believe that we need to perpetually live in suffering in order to become conscious. I mean, we have to do work within the pain material for sure. So, I think that you know as you move into this kind of consciousness, authentic relating more deeply attuned to your material and the others, you have to ask the question, is this the kind of experience where for whatever reason without having to judge it, perpetually, we're not going to be able to move our way through this to transformation in a way that feels healthy positive and forward moving? Or is this the kind of connection that has the hope of becoming what I call a "wholemate," you know a connection that really has that more subtle, essential, soulful quality to it. And the same time is grounded in the real world in the day to day life experience and also in the working through the shadow material in a way that's forward moving. And you have to always ask that question, because not every connection, even with the best of intentions is a connection that's going to allow you to grow and evolve.  Neil Sattin  In your book you offer "the beloved meditation exercise" and I don't think we necessarily have the time and space to go through that whole thing right now. But I think it's it's actually a great, it's a great way I think to explore that question from a centered place.  Jeff Brown  Yeah. And from an embodied place. Not as a concept. You know, I had a cousin who kept asking me if a relationship, every relationship he'd say he'd asked me if it was a fit. Like I knew I would say, well you know I'd say I don't know, how do you feel? He go, "Well I think..." And I'd go: You're not answering it from I think you keep trying it's not working you need to go into your body. He didn't want to go into his body. He was very, very detached from his body and only when he finally did have a forced, kind of a forced embodiment experience, as the trauma built and built and built into kind of like a breakdown. Did he actually come to access the answers that he actually had and always knew and always carried as to whether a particular connection he was in was a fit for him. It has to happen all of it inside the body so with the beloved meditation, my effort in a way was to try to invite people inside of that temple in order to ask that primary question whether or not that connections really a fit going forward.  Neil Sattin  Right. And it's questions like, now I have it in front of me: Is this person still part of my future? Are there still lessons we need to learn from each other? Or are we complete together? Are there lessons I now need to learn on my own outside of this present relational form? Are we meant to walk together in the coming moments? Or is it time to take leave of each other? I mean these are great questions and they have to be answered from a place where you're fully...  Jeff Brown  Feeling.  Neil Sattin  Exactly. Like if they're, if those answers are coming from a place of fear then we already know what the answers are gonna be.  Jeff Brown  You can, you can answer a question about whether someone's a fit for you from your mind if you want to do a practical pros and cons list or something. But if you're asking the question of how you feel you can't answer that question conceptually, you have to enter into that very scary terrain for most of us which is the emotional and physical body. And to me, they're kind of synonymous, and drop down into that and let your body tell you what your answers are. And that's why a lot of people remain stuck, you know, and then they go and they go to a workshop experience, that has in it a body component at the end of it they know whether or not to end their relationship or not, or to go deeper because they finally access their body which is very hard to do in our cultural, overstimulated, survive, by your wits, culture. We have to have an experience of the body in order to figure out what direction to walk in our lives.  Neil Sattin  Yeah and I'm... It's interesting for me. We, Chloe and I, actually have this whole practice of using muscle testing and kinesiology to to tap into the body wisdom. And at the same time, I'm, I'm curious to see how these deeper and deeper emotional excavations will inform the body's wisdom, when we're asking those questions.  Jeff Brown  Yeah. Yeah. There's such important questions and they're not just about relationships. They're about, you know, I use the term, "truthaches," in the book, in "Soulshaping," because there are many indicators we're off-path and the way we again determine that, is we do something embodied, whatever that happens to be. Osho's dynamic meditation, holotropic breathwork, some Somatic Experiencing work. You know, bioenergetics your core energetic sessions, core energetics is amazing also and something you know that allows you to really enliven the body and let the body speak its truth. It wants to. And that's what it's built for.  Neil Sattin  Right you've got to help your body speak, and then tune yourself so that you're actually listening to what your body's saying.  Jeff Brown  Right on.  Neil Sattin  Well, Jeff I really appreciate you're here being here to join us again on Relationship Alive to talk about your work the book, "Grounded Spirituality," is a fascinating journey of a book and I appreciate that you gave me the time because we were actually in dialogue about when to do this conversation, that you gave me the time to really explore it, and try things out and it was helpful for me in my personal life and in being able to have this conversation with you. Of course because it's a really long book we could talk a lot longer, but I think I always have that feeling with you honestly that there's, there's always more to say which leaves me excited for the next conversation.  Jeff Brown  Great.  Neil Sattin  So thank you so much for joining us here today. And if people want to find out a little bit more obviously, they can pick up the book "Grounded Spirituality," and how else can they find out about you and your work?  Jeff Brown  They can check out soul-shaping-dot-com, my older site. There's some course downloads and things there are lots of stuff to read. Soul-Shaping-Institute-dot-com. I've got a couple of writing courses coming up writing your way home courses and my new Jeff-Brown-dot-co, web site will be up soon. I'm very excited about that and start doing a lot more video, start a podcast and all that and just join me on Facebook and Instagram and there all the time and interactive. And thank you Neil. I appreciate your support.  Neil Sattin  My pleasure. And just a quick additional plug for your writing course. Those are all about using writing as a vehicle for healing and finding your authentic expressed, grounded voice, right? Jeff Brown  Absolutely. I hold a very tight and safe container for people to excavate their material and write through it, and bring it in the direction of healing without any emphasis on perfect writing or perfect grammar any of that stuff. It's... There are some people who do the course and don't join the Facebook private group and go off and write and write books and a number of my students have been published but the Facebook group component, which is about 60 percent of the student body for each course, is really focused on helping to support one another to just say and to express the things they've never ever felt permission to express before so it's a really beautiful experience.  Neil Sattin  Such important work. And again if you are interested in finding out more, you can get all the links to Jeff's websites etc. through the show notes page which you can get at, Neil-Sattin- dot-com-slash-grounded, as in "Grounded Spirituality, where you can text the word "Passion" to the number 3-3-4-4-4 and follow the instructions. And thanks again Jeff for being with us today.  Jeff Brown  Thank you Neil. Appreciate it.   

Can people really change? And how do you know if someone *will* change? It's a good question, especially if you're dealing with some significant challenges in your relationship. You might be wondering about your partner - or you might be wondering about your own ability to do things differently, especially if you feel stuck in a rut. In this episode, we'll tackle how change works. What are the requirements for creating changes that actually stick? What's realistic when it comes to the pace of change? And how can you tell if someone else is truly going to do what it takes for change to happen? I want to inspire your hope and faith, while at the same time painting a realistic picture of what change looks like, without the hype. Come see Relationship Alive - LIVE! with John and Julie Gottman, on October 12th in Portland Maine. You have the chance to ask us *your* questions - and get answers. Visit neilsattin.com/liveshow for more information. 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: 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. This episode is also sponsored by Native Deodorant. Their products are filled with ingredients you can find in nature like coconut oil, which is an antimicrobial, shea butter to moisturize, and tapioca starch to absorb wetness. They don’t ever test on animals, they don’t use aluminum or any other scary chemical ingredients, and they’re so confident that you’ll like their deodorant that they offer free shipping - and returns. For 20% off your first purchase, visit http://www.nativedeodorant.com/alive and use promo code ALIVE during checkout. Resources: I want to know you better! Take the quick, anonymous, Relationship Alive survey FREE Guide to Neil’s Top 3 Relationship Communication Secrets Guide to Understanding Your Needs (and Your Partner’s Needs) in Relationship (ALSO FREE) Support the podcast (or text “SUPPORT” to 33444) Amazing intro and outro music provided courtesy of The Railsplitters