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Meet a Sex Therapist · Workplace Confessions: Behind Closed Doors

• 0:02
  Speaker 2: Welcome to Workplace Confessions Behind Closed Doors.
• 0:05
  Speaker 2: I'm Elsa Barbi.
• 0:06
  Speaker 2: And I'm Dawn Andrews.
• 0:08
  Speaker 2: We have been friends since sixth grade.
• 0:09
  Speaker 2: Somewhere between a car wash job, a few questionable boy choices, and 40 years of friendship, we became the kind of people who always want to know what was really going on, including at work.
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: Dawn spent 25 years as an employment lawyer digging into workplace drama from the inside out.
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: I built a long career in the beauty industry as a brand educator with a few TV cameos sprinkled in for fun.
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: We came up in very different industries, but we have the same passion, meeting new people and asking how they got their jobs, what they love, what they can't stand, and what happens behind closed doors.
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: Every episode we talk to a new guest about their lived experience in the world of work.
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: And because our guests stay anonymous, they can spill the truth without the fallout.
• 0:54
  Speaker 2: We get into the choices they made, the tiny cruelties, the surprise kindnesses, and some of the moments that never make it into human resources reports.
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: Equal Parts informative and titillating.
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: This show serves up all the tea while honoring the incredible, complicated, often messy work people are doing across the industries and across the map.
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: Welcome to Workplace Confessions Behind Closed Doors.
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: Let's get into it.
• 1:20
  Speaker 2: A brief note before we begin.
• 1:22
  Speaker 2: Today's episode includes discussion of adult themes in the context of sex education and anatomical terminology.
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: The conversation is educational and not explicit, but some material may not be suitable for all listeners or for listening in all work environments.
• 1:41
  Speaker 2: Please engage with care and discretion.
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: Let's start at the beginning.
• 1:46
  Speaker 2: What was your very first job?
• 1:49
  Speaker: I worked at an after-school kind of childcare through the school district.
• 1:56
  Speaker: Um starting, I think shortly after I probably turned 16 is my guess, or maybe like right when I turned 16 is my guess, probably.
• 2:04
  Speaker: So I was working with kids elementary school age after school.
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: How in the world, Doctor, did you end up in your current field?
• 2:16
  Speaker: I always really liked psychology.
• 2:18
  Speaker: I loved, I think that's part of why why I enjoyed working with kids because I liked working with them and kind of just figuring out kind of how to work with them better and like what kind of got them, you know, going or what didn't.
• 2:32
  Speaker: And so I was always kind of interested in that.
• 2:34
  Speaker: And to be honest from the get-go, I just kind of thought I would be a child psychologist, which we all know that I'm not.
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: But was there ever a moment when you knew that that path was for you or when even more so when you doubted it?
• 2:48
  Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I think there's I would imagine in most fields people doubt what they're doing, like at different times, right?
• 2:57
  Speaker: Like, am I in the right field?
• 2:58
  Speaker: I think from the get-go, I I always knew that I wanted to work with people.
• 3:02
  Speaker: What format that would be, I think, kind of evolved for me.
• 3:06
  Speaker: Like I in working with kids after school, I really kind of knew that I really wanted to work with kids.
• 3:11
  Speaker: I think really enjoying kind of classes in psychology really led me to feel like I'd like to do something with that.
• 3:18
  Speaker: But kind of probably the more I got into school, the more I figured out kind of what I wanted to do.
• 3:23
  Speaker: It kind of led to that in terms of schooling and working with people.
• 3:28
  Speaker: It kind of just felt like this sort of natural fit for me to be working with people and um and doing that.
• 3:34
  Speaker: I think I always really enjoyed kind of getting really intimate into conversations with people.
• 3:40
  Speaker: That was something that was very kind of easy that I enjoyed.
• 3:44
  Speaker: So it was kind of this natural fit that kind of all came together.
• 3:48
  Speaker: Um, and I think second guessing it is something that honestly happens.
• 3:53
  Speaker: I and I think for most people in this, in this field, it does.
• 3:56
  Speaker: And it's usually like with with really stressful dates at work where we might ask ourselves, like, what the fuck am I doing?
• 4:04
  Speaker: You know, why am I doing this?
• 4:07
  Speaker: Um, you know, and it's it's just usually indicative of a really stressful day um helping somebody else.
• 4:14
  Speaker: And, you know, life can get really messy.
• 4:17
  Speaker: And so sometimes we're part of that ride with other people and we can feel right in the mess with them and kind of question ourselves like, what am I doing here?
• 4:27
  Speaker 2: You're a PhD in psychology, right?
• 4:30
  Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.
• 4:31
  unknown: Okay.
• 4:32
  Speaker 2: Tell us about the things that you've done with that degree.
• 4:35
  Speaker 2: How have you worked in that field, in what capacities?
• 4:38
  Speaker: I would say generally, I mean, with a PhD, I feel like it ends up being somewhat general.
• 4:43
  Speaker: You can be a researcher, you can do psych testing, um, you can be kind of more in the legal field.
• 4:50
  Speaker: There's a there's a variety of things that you can be doing.
• 4:52
  Speaker: You could obviously be teaching as well.
• 4:54
  Speaker: Um, but I think initially, because I wanted to be a child psychologist, I I did do a lot of work with children.
• 5:01
  Speaker: So I worked at a children's hospital with a lot of kids with trauma and their families and things like that.
• 5:07
  Speaker: Um, and that very clearly made me make the decision that I didn't want to work with children, actually.
• 5:12
  Speaker: And part of the reason I didn't want to work with children was because I didn't want to work with their parents.
• 5:17
  Speaker: So I loved working, I loved working with the children.
• 5:22
  Speaker: The the work with children and still I think is amazing.
• 5:26
  Speaker: I think that it's very um rewarding and they're usually great participants of therapy.
• 5:32
  Speaker: Um, but the parents can be a challenge because sometimes parents bring in their kids and they want you to fix them, or they, you know, want you to solve something, but they don't necessarily want to have any role in the solving, or they don't want to kind of look at their own parts in the issue of solving.
• 5:51
  Speaker: And that becomes very challenging to help families because really we're helping a system.
• 5:56
  Speaker: We're not just helping an individual when we're talking about children.
• 5:59
  Speaker: And when a parent doesn't want to kind of participate, it becomes very difficult and challenging to help that child.
• 6:06
  Speaker: Um, and and really that's a necessary component of children's work.
• 6:10
  Speaker: So, and not that all parents didn't want to participate, but I found that that challenge was not something that I really enjoyed or that I wanted to kind of push up against that it was, I found it really frustrating.
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: When would you when would you feel that you acquired that special skill to work with parents, especially?
• 6:30
  Speaker: Um, I mean, I enjoyed working with adults, but I didn't enjoy the ones, obviously, like it I didn't feel like I had a neck for convincing a parent that they needed to be kind of part of their children's solution.
• 6:43
  Speaker: Like I found that I wasn't that wasn't a skill set that came easily to me in terms of convincing them.
• 6:49
  Speaker: Um and I think that's where I kind of hit a wall in the frustration of, and that's where I kind of veered towards working with, I could work with individuals in terms of adults and things like that, and I really enjoyed that work.
• 7:00
  Speaker: And that's where I pivoted more to adult work because it felt like here I can help somebody, right?
• 7:06
  Speaker: Like an adult is somebody who can make a lot of decisions for themselves.
• 7:10
  Speaker: They can, you know, be guided in a way that a child can't without their parents' help.
• 7:16
  Speaker: And so it became this sort of where I ended up working in community clinics.
• 7:21
  Speaker: Um, I worked at university settings, which I adored.
• 7:25
  Speaker: I love that because it's a lot of times, you know, early adults, their first experience with mental health.
• 7:32
  Speaker: And there's this sort of enthusiasm that comes along with working with college students and graduate students that you don't really get kind of anywhere else where they're first of all, they're in a place where they're figuring out who they are.
• 7:44
  Speaker: And then being in therapy kind of brings there's like all these kind of like lights going off for them.
• 7:50
  Speaker: And so it's kind of this exciting time to be kind of in as a therapist to be in their lives.
• 7:55
  Speaker: So that kind of started my enthusiasm for working more with adults.
• 7:59
  Speaker: And, you know, I mean, it's like a it's like a lot of times I think we think of college age and 20s as like late adolescence.
• 8:07
  Speaker: So it was a way that I could kind of continue to work with children per se, right?
• 8:12
  Speaker: But it's like late adolescence, and I I really took a love for that.
• 8:16
  Speaker: And that is a little bit where kind of my specialty came into place as well, like where my like I started seeing a lot of kind of sexual issues that were coming up, whether it was like sexual assaults or just problems within relationships and things like that.
• 8:30
  Speaker: But that's kind of where some of that started popping up in work as it does with in any therapy at any point.
• 8:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah, tell us more about what you're currently doing and how you got into this specialty.
• 8:45
  Speaker: So I I went and did kind of another two-year degree in sexual health and sexual medicine and education.
• 8:52
  Speaker: Um, and part of the reason I got into this is that kept coming up all throughout my career.
• 8:57
  Speaker: It kept coming up.
• 8:58
  Speaker: I mean, I even in my work with children at at the children's hospital.
• 9:01
  Speaker: I mean, I was dealing with sexual, you know, sexual abuse.
• 9:06
  Speaker: And so things like this were coming up.
• 9:08
  Speaker: And it's something that most therapists are trained in different sorts of trauma work and things like that.
• 9:12
  Speaker: But it was also coming up in my private practice as well, of like people having difficulty connecting with their partners or having issues in terms of not really knowing how to connect sexually or feeling like they didn't have the skill set to do that.
• 9:27
  Speaker: And so it was something that was coming up regularly, I would say, in my private practice.
• 9:32
  Speaker: Obviously, in the university setting, it was something that was coming up.
• 9:35
  Speaker: Um, and so it was something that kept coming back, even in my consultation groups, where I had enough cases in my private practice, and even I think at the university where I felt like I started saying, um, I really feel like I need to do a sex education course for adult females because there's all these questions that are coming up.
• 9:54
  Speaker: And I had already developed a sex education course at one point at another setting where I worked at a private school with children because they didn't have anything developed.
• 10:02
  Speaker: And so I felt like, well, there's this big piece that's missing, kids aren't getting this education.
• 10:07
  Speaker: So I'd already obviously veered towards some of that throughout my training.
• 10:12
  Speaker: Um and that's kind of where the idea kept coming in.
• 10:15
  Speaker: Like it, it just I kept coming back to I have all these clients that are adults.
• 10:20
  Speaker: We don't have great sex education in our country.
• 10:22
  Speaker: And this is something that continually comes up in therapy.
• 10:25
  Speaker: And, you know, I think a lot of people could benefit from this.
• 10:28
  Speaker: So that's that's kind of why I dove deep into more training.
• 10:33
  unknown: Okay.
• 10:33
  Speaker 2: And who who what types of people are you working with now?
• 10:37
  Speaker: Um, a variety.
• 10:38
  Speaker: I would say probably half my caseload is relational work and half is individual work, and anywhere from um people who are kind of having difficulty connecting sexually, either because of pain or because there's just a disconnection or lack of communication in the relationship.
• 11:01
  Speaker: And so sex is not pleasurable or it's not as pleasurable as it could be, all the way to people who are interested in EM, which is like ethical non-monogamy or different kinks and BDSM, and kind of how incorporating some of those things in their life makes sense or doesn't make sense.
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: Interesting.
• 11:22
  unknown: Okay.
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: That's great, Doctor.
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: It's a great insight.
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: Um, what would you say is the best part of your job?
• 11:31
  Speaker: I I mean, I love when people have those aha moments or they're realizing their own kind of progress that they're making towards their goals.
• 11:40
  Speaker: Like I'm not doing any of the work.
• 11:43
  Speaker: I'm I'm a guide.
• 11:45
  Speaker: And so it's really incredibly rewarding when people kind of have those insights, or they're realizing, oh, I am really making a lot of movement towards this, or I am my relationship feels so much closer and I feel so much more intimate.
• 12:00
  Speaker: And I didn't even realize I could get to this place.
• 12:03
  Speaker: Like that is incredibly rewarding.
• 12:06
  Speaker: I it just to hear people say things like that or realize it.
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: What's a myth that people believe about your job that really drives you nuts?
• 12:14
  Speaker: I think the the typical one is always like that.
• 12:17
  Speaker: I can read their mind.
• 12:19
  Speaker: Like it, I rarely tell people what I do because, especially strangers, because usually the next thing out of their mouth is, oh gosh, can you read my mind?
• 12:28
  Speaker: Um You're not clairvoyant.
• 12:31
  Speaker: Yes, yes, I can.
• 12:32
  Speaker: Yes, I can.
• 12:33
  Speaker: I'm not clairvoyant.
• 12:35
  Speaker: Yes, I'm not clairvoyant.
• 12:36
  Speaker: And it and there's just right, there's just this sort of myth that we can kind of understand.
• 12:40
  Speaker: And and yes, is there some intuition that goes into my work?
• 12:45
  Speaker: Yes, but am I doing that outside of work all the time?
• 12:48
  Speaker: No, I'd be exhausted if I was constantly walking around in the world and just analyzing people.
• 12:55
  Speaker: It's not it's not something I enjoy to do out in my personal life.
• 13:00
  Speaker: It's when I'm working, I do it because I find it helpful to people.
• 13:04
  Speaker: Um, but I'm not obviously reading their minds.
• 13:07
  Speaker: I am getting to know them and understand them and see how I can best be of help to them.
• 13:12
  Speaker: And I'm not giving people answers.
• 13:14
  Speaker: I think that's a that's another myth, right?
• 13:16
  Speaker: Like that that I kind of tell, like my answers might be right for me, um, but they're not necessarily right for other people.
• 13:24
  Speaker: So it's just about finding what their right answers are, and that's kind of where I can be a guide.
• 13:31
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 13:31
  Speaker 2: What's the hardest part in your job?
• 13:36
  Speaker: The hardest part.
• 13:37
  Speaker: I think honestly, there's there's probably a few different parts.
• 13:41
  Speaker: Um, one is making sure that like I'm not bringing in my own shit into the room.
• 13:46
  Speaker: So I might be having like a stressful week for whatever reason personally, but really kind of being really fully present for whoever's coming to see me is really important so that I can be a guide, right?
• 14:00
  Speaker: It's kind of setting my things aside and really being present for them.
• 14:04
  Speaker: Um, and that can be like a challenge anytime.
• 14:07
  Speaker: I mean, I don't know that it's a regular challenge, but I think anytime I have anything kind of more significant going on, that's always something that I'm really mindful of of kind of setting things aside.
• 14:17
  Speaker: Um but I would say the hardest is when people are struggling, like especially if there's like suicidality or any sort of like difficulty with people being harmed, whether it's themselves, like thinking about harming themselves or other people or anything like that, those are the most stressful and most difficult times.
• 14:37
  Speaker: It's, you know, I think a lot of what I do is very human, right?
• 14:42
  Speaker: And so I'm sitting with people's like pain or suffering.
• 14:46
  Speaker: And that's, you know, not only is it incredibly difficult for them, but it's it's hard.
• 14:53
  Speaker: These are people I care about.
• 14:54
  Speaker: And so it's hard for anybody, any human, right, to see somebody else suffering.
• 15:00
  Speaker 2: What strategies have you found work well for insulating yourself from other suffering so that you don't take it on, make it about you or suffer from it to such an extent you can't really help them?
• 15:14
  Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
• 15:15
  Speaker: I I mean, I think like what I was saying before, even kind of setting aside my my own things, right?
• 15:21
  Speaker: I I tend to do kind of I meditate a lot, I do a lot of breath work.
• 15:26
  Speaker: Um, sometimes even between sessions, I do breath work and kind of clearing kind of previous person's kind of energy out of me and kind of like being done with it.
• 15:36
  Speaker: Kind of there's a lot of visualizations sometimes that I do where I'll tell people to do like leaving things in certain places until they come back the next week or whenever they're coming back.
• 15:45
  Speaker: Um and just sometimes it's taking a little bit of time and breathing through kind of my own feelings about how I felt about their situation after the session, um, and kind of letting it go and kind of knowing that just having hope.
• 16:01
  Speaker: A lot of times, like especially in those situations, I am the holder of hope.
• 16:05
  Speaker: Um, and so I've I've seen people in their suffering and I know that there can be hope.
• 16:11
  Speaker: And sometimes when somebody's really in it, they they don't really see the hope or they they feel really detached from it.
• 16:18
  Speaker: And so that's where kind of my stability, my groundedness can be kind of the voice of hope, you know.
• 16:26
  Speaker: And sometimes it's literally me saying, I know you don't see the hope right now, but I I I'm gonna hold on to that hope for you.
• 16:34
  Speaker: Um, and sometimes I really think that that can be, I know that it has been really powerful um with certain clients.
• 16:41
  Speaker: Um, it's just kind of reminding them and for myself, like clearing out whatever I need too and not bringing it home with me.
• 16:47
  Speaker: And then there's times where it can be really difficult.
• 16:49
  Speaker: And sometimes I do find myself thinking about people later in the day.
• 16:53
  Speaker: And I just again I go through kind of some whatever my practice is um to kind of let some of that go.
• 16:59
  Speaker: Or sometimes it brings me some good insights for the next session too, and I might take some notes to let it go until I see them next time.
• 17:06
  Speaker 2: What's something that you've learned from your clients?
• 17:10
  Speaker 2: Oh, so much.
• 17:13
  Speaker: That's a really good question.
• 17:15
  Speaker: Um I would say really trust and vulnerability, like that's kind of what's coming to mind.
• 17:27
  Speaker: I I think it's kind of amazing that we can go to a complete stranger, right?
• 17:33
  Speaker: And sometimes that's what makes it easier a little bit.
• 17:35
  Speaker: Um and we can be so vulnerable.
• 17:40
  Speaker: Um, because especially the type of work that I'm doing now in terms of talking about sex, most of us are not comfortable or taught to talk about sex.
• 17:48
  Speaker: And so it can be incredibly difficult to even find the language or kind of say what is going on or what's kind of difficult about it, or talk about kind of the things that you've been doing or not doing and why.
• 18:04
  Speaker: Um, and people are really vulnerable.
• 18:07
  Speaker: They, you know, they share these things about themselves, obviously for the hope that they can kind of move towards somewhere else or a different place.
• 18:15
  Speaker: Um, but I'm always honored and impressed by people's vulnerability, I would say.
• 18:22
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 18:22
  Speaker 2: What's the wildest, weirdest or most unforgettable thing you have witnessed at work anywhere you've worked?
• 18:31
  Speaker: Overall, I would say the most out there things usually have to do with kind of more emergency style kind of situations.
• 18:39
  Speaker: Like I think about early on in my career, um, where I had a client who was unfortunately um experiencing kind of psychosis.
• 18:49
  Speaker: So they they were actually like seeing and hearing and things that like weren't really there.
• 18:55
  Speaker: And they were in my office.
• 18:58
  Speaker: And I happened to be in an office that was probably within half a mile to an emergency room.
• 19:07
  Speaker: And I didn't feel it was in a place where it didn't feel all that safe for this person to get themselves to the hospital.
• 19:15
  Speaker: And they obviously needed to go to the hospital.
• 19:17
  Speaker: Like this is kind of an emergency situation where you don't really let somebody go home in this sort of situation.
• 19:22
  Speaker: And um, I consulted and I had a I wasn't um licensed yet at the time.
• 19:28
  Speaker: And so I consulted with my supervisor and we kind of made the plan that I was I was going to take them, which is kind of something really inertial for a therapist to do, right?
• 19:38
  Speaker: It's like there's a lot of boundaries in in kind of therapy, in terms of what we would do or not do.
• 19:45
  Speaker: But in this sort of situation, that felt like the safest situation for this per particular person because of a variety of variables in terms of the safety of the neighborhood, the safety that they, you know, could get the themselves there and not run across somebody else that might actually harm them.
• 20:03
  Speaker: And um, and and you know, I could have called the police and they they transport people like this in this sort of situation.
• 20:12
  Speaker: Um, and that would be the more typical route probably to go.
• 20:16
  Speaker: But there was a lot of variables that made it so that it was like you are gonna drive very safely and not break any laws, take them in your car, and you are gonna drive them to the ER and drop them off at the ER and make sure they get into the ER.
• 20:30
  Speaker: So that was probably like, and even I think if any other therapists are hearing this, they might feel like appalled or have a judgment about that decision making.
• 20:40
  Speaker: And I still, I mean, this was years ago.
• 20:43
  Speaker: Um, and I still stand by it.
• 20:46
  Speaker: I think it was the right call in that situation.
• 20:48
  Speaker: Would I typically do that?
• 20:49
  Speaker: No.
• 20:50
  Speaker: Like it wouldn't even cross my mind to do that, to be honest, in most situations.
• 20:54
  Speaker: Um, and was it a risk for me to do as a therapist?
• 20:57
  Speaker: Yes.
• 20:58
  Speaker: But I think I was being, I mean, I was being human in the human situation.
• 21:02
  Speaker: So what's one lesson you've learned the hard way in this field?
• 21:07
  Speaker: Giving people answers doesn't work.
• 21:09
  Speaker: Um, it it it depends on how you approach it, right?
• 21:12
  Speaker: Like it's sometimes it's like giving people options and kind of laying out like these are the options which ones feel right.
• 21:20
  Speaker: Um, but my answers aren't other people's answers.
• 21:25
  Speaker: Just like I'm not the right therapist for everybody, right?
• 21:28
  Speaker: Like we all like we have to find kind of, we have to find our own answers, we have to find our own people, which includes finding our own therapist that's a good fit, you know, and our answers aren't other people's answers.
• 21:42
  Speaker: And so, yes, that that sometimes does come up.
• 21:44
  Speaker: And there's some people who really want answers and they really just want you to give them an answer.
• 21:50
  Speaker: And that if if you kind of fall into that trap and you do give an answer, it usually comes back to bite you in the butt.
• 21:57
  Speaker: Like it's it usually is not helpful, just like even like self-disclosure is not usually all that helpful either.
• 22:05
  Speaker: So some people really, really want answers.
• 22:08
  Speaker: Um and it's but the problem is it's not their answer.
• 22:13
  Speaker: It's just my answer, like for my life or what I think or my view of the world, right?
• 22:20
  Speaker: And I'm not in like that's why my answers don't work for everybody.
• 22:24
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 22:25
  Speaker 2: I imagine sometimes if if they feel like you're giving them direction, then they feel accountable to you to do what you told them to, a whole other thing.
• 22:35
  Speaker: Absolutely.
• 22:36
  Speaker: That's that's the other problem.
• 22:37
  Speaker: Like it creates so many issues, right?
• 22:39
  Speaker: So not only like is your answer potentially not the right answer, but then if it isn't, like, are they gonna actually come and tell you?
• 22:46
  Speaker: And maybe actually now they feel kind of differently towards you because gosh, did does my therapist really even know me?
• 22:53
  Speaker: This is like this answer sucked, or it was like awful for me, or so it creates all these dynamics within the relationship and within the therapy that create really kind of it, it starts to kind of really interfere, I think, finding the right fit and therapist.
• 23:10
  Speaker: All of that is very important, I I believe, in therapeutic work, is which is why not everybody is the right therapist for everybody.
• 23:19
  Speaker: And even some of my approaches might not be the right fit for other people, and why I'm fairly eclectic in kind of my approaches to different things, because one thing like CBT, which is like something that's most people know about, is cognitive cognitive behavioral therapy, um, is a great fit and works really well for certain things, but it doesn't work for everybody.
• 23:42
  Speaker: And there's a ton of research on it.
• 23:45
  Speaker: Um but not everybody likes it and not everybody does well with it because each of us is unique and individual, and everybody kind of has to find their their way to get different places.
• 24:00
  Speaker 2: Uh Doctor, I've been reading recently that um there's some debate about the efficacy of talk therapy, and I wondered what your viewpoint is considering you've devoted so much of your time and energy and attention to talk therapy.
• 24:20
  Speaker: What I think is, I mean, like I said, the toolbox, I think that we as a society can sometimes think that there's only one right way.
• 24:30
  Speaker: And so there's a lot of ways for people to heal or to process or to um deal with different um issues that come up in their life.
• 24:40
  Speaker: Talk therapy is one of them.
• 24:42
  Speaker: Um is it efficacious in every um with every person in every environment?
• 24:49
  Speaker: No.
• 24:49
  Speaker: But I kind of I would kind of say that about most things.
• 24:53
  Speaker: We can find one thing, but there needs to be continuous research, and some of that research can evolve.
• 24:59
  Speaker: Um and so one treatment or one way of dealing with an issue is not necessarily efficacious for everything.
• 25:08
  Speaker: AI is one of those examples, right?
• 25:10
  Speaker: Like I actually have clients who have used AI for therapy.
• 25:14
  Speaker: Um, and and in some ways, I, you know, I'm not totally opposed to people, especially because there's some people who will never go to therapy.
• 25:22
  Speaker: And does AI have an access to like a million resources from therapists, from research, from all these things that that help work, or even like some of the grounding techniques of like, you know, how to calm yourself, how to ground yourself, some breath work, some visualizations, different things like that that AI can give them?
• 25:41
  Speaker: Absolutely.
• 25:42
  Speaker: Um but we are humans.
• 25:45
  Speaker: We are meant, we are meant to connect with other people.
• 25:48
  Speaker: And I and when I was talking before about the relationship, like the therapeutic relationship, I do think for some people, the therapeutic relationship, and what I mean by that is the relationship that you have with your therapists, the ability to be vulnerable with them, the ability to kind of talk through your most vulnerable fears or whatever it is that you're talking about, like sex, relationships, feeling lonely, depression, any of that.
• 26:19
  Speaker: Um, there is something about being able to share that with somebody and really feeling truly cared and listened to by somebody else.
• 26:27
  Speaker 2: But if there was one other modality that your patients could add to talk therapy that you think would really help them move along in their journey, what would you recommend?
• 26:39
  Speaker: Oh wow.
• 26:39
  Speaker: It would be all be somatic work.
• 26:42
  Speaker: So somatic, whether it's with a somatic therapist, whether it's going and doing sacro cranial work, whether it's like really deep diving deep into yoga and meditation.
• 26:53
  Speaker: Um, we're a society and as humans, we really want to stay very heady and think.
• 27:00
  Speaker: And I am somebody within that field, right?
• 27:03
  Speaker: That allows you to kind of really think through things and um help you analyze.
• 27:09
  Speaker: And I'm constantly trying to get my clients actually back in their whole system, which includes their whole body and not just their thinking mind.
• 27:19
  Speaker: Um, and there's a lot of information if we really kind of honor and tap into our whole body, into our whole system that I think is incredibly wise.
• 27:31
  Speaker: And sometimes our mind is actually um blocking the clear answers and the clear guides that we need to move towards.
• 27:40
  Speaker: And that is tapping into our system, into our nervous system, into our body, into whatever you want to call it in terms of your whether you're spiritual, your soul, like that is the piece that would be incredibly complimentary or and just another avenue to get to healing.
• 27:59
  Speaker 2: There seems to be a belief that if you tell children something exists, whether that's you know, actual sexual in exchange or um something along the LGBTQ plus uh continuum or spectrum, they'll become it or they'll do it.
• 28:22
  Speaker: And I wonder what your views are on yeah, this is unfortunately and and sadly controversial.
• 28:30
  Speaker: Um what I'll start out by saying is there's plenty, there's actually an abundant amount of research that not talking about it is doing us more harm.
• 28:42
  Speaker: And a sex therapist, and I talk to people about this, I see actually the whole other negative side of what's coming into my office.
• 28:50
  Speaker: So people who have been raised highly religious, who have been told that they are sinners, who have been told that they are doing, like they shouldn't be engaging in sexual practices or they shouldn't be doing all these things.
• 29:03
  Speaker: And they have they're they're actually some of my clients with the most amount of trauma, I would say.
• 29:09
  Speaker: And ultimately, when we teach people about such sex education and about sex, and literally thinking penis in vagina, right?
• 29:18
  Speaker: Like all of us like immediately have that image.
• 29:20
  Speaker: Like, why would we ever talk to a child about a penis in a vagina, right?
• 29:25
  Speaker: And of course, that's not what we're talking about.
• 29:28
  Speaker: What we're actually educating, talking to our children about is about how their bodies function.
• 29:33
  Speaker: When we have a toddler or like a very young child, we immediately start to teach them about this is your fingers and this is your hand and where's your face and where's your nose and where's your belly button?
• 29:46
  Speaker: Well, it's very interesting that we tend to completely like not address their genitalia, which is part of their body.
• 29:55
  Speaker: It is addressed, it's usually just addressed as this is your private part.
• 30:00
  Speaker: So we've already excluded it as this kind of different part of your body, which anatomy-wise, it's really not, right?
• 30:08
  Speaker: It's like just part of our body.
• 30:09
  Speaker: So we we immediately start to build this sort of like this part of my body is different from me, which goes along with our society's view that that our genitalia is shameful, that sex is shameful, that all of these things.
• 30:23
  Speaker: So it starts to feed into this whole narrative that this part of myself, I'm not allowed to talk about, I'm not allowed to potentially touch if I but giving people the option of understanding themselves and understanding their bodies is really just a helpful thing to understand when people do finally want to connect and want to have sex, because the not talking about it and then coming together and having sex with somebody and not really understanding your own body and how it works really limits your ability to connect with somebody else.
• 30:57
  Speaker: So going to the LGBTQ plus kind of topic as well, you know, it's it's about kind of ignoring.
• 31:07
  Speaker: There's a natural we live in a binary society where we want to say you are either like heterosexual or not, or you're a or a female or you're a male.
• 31:16
  Speaker: Like it's all very binary.
• 31:18
  Speaker: And really my true belief is that everything in this world is on a spectrum.
• 31:23
  Speaker: And we are who we are.
• 31:26
  Speaker: And whether you tell me that I have that option or not doesn't really change my true internal like system of what really is real within me.
• 31:35
  Speaker: Um, it doesn't make me gay, it doesn't make me heterosexual, it just makes me hide away from my true feelings and create all other sorts of psychological issues because I am not allowed to honor who I really truly am inside.
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: Are there any dangers when it comes to somebody who is solely basing their problems and their answers on a computer-generated piece of software versus seeing a therapist like yourself?
• 32:02
  Speaker: I think what humanness brings to therapy is that at some point AI starts to know who you are.
• 32:10
  Speaker: And it because it wants to please you, it gives you answers that you want to hear, right?
• 32:15
  Speaker: Um, and so that's where like the biggest danger comes, right?
• 32:19
  Speaker: It starts giving you the answers you want to hear.
• 32:21
  Speaker: And that's not always like as a guide.
• 32:24
  Speaker: Sometimes I am there to challenge my client.
• 32:26
  Speaker: So I might gently try to kind of point out the discrepancies.
• 32:30
  Speaker: AI is never going to do that.
• 32:32
  Speaker: And so unfortunately, AI isn't necessarily going to help challenge where you need to be challenged.
• 32:39
  Speaker: And then as we know as humans, we're always constantly looking for the data that validates our thinking.
• 32:44
  Speaker: And sometimes our thinking is what the is the problem, right?
• 32:47
  Speaker: We need to want parasocial relationships.
• 32:50
  Speaker: You know, there's pros and cons, right?
• 32:52
  Speaker: Like obviously, I think people having relationships um with non-humans um can ease loneliness, right?
• 33:02
  Speaker: I'm gonna go for the positives, right?
• 33:04
  Speaker: Like ease loneliness for people who might feel really isolated, especially after COVID, right?
• 33:08
  Speaker: Like a lot of people have remained very isolated and they don't have a lot of social connections.
• 33:14
  Speaker: And um, and so all of a sudden somebody feels seen, they feel like they have a connection with someone else.
• 33:22
  Speaker: And so that could be actually very rewarding, right?
• 33:26
  Speaker: And even sexually, right?
• 33:28
  Speaker: Maybe they don't have experiences and we're talking about robots, and I mean, we're talking about, I mean, we can get into sex toys, right?
• 33:34
  Speaker: That's not a real human, right?
• 33:36
  Speaker: So, and is there a place for some of that?
• 33:39
  Speaker: And as a sex therapist, I I kind of think there is a place for some of that.
• 33:44
  Speaker: Um, but like with everything, and this is a bit of a personal belief, um, I think there needs to be some sort of balance, right?
• 33:52
  Speaker: Because I think what happens if we start moving towards everybody being or lots of large percentage of the people being in these sorts of relationships.
• 34:02
  Speaker: And and really what's the ultimate, like how fulfilling do they become, right?
• 34:06
  Speaker: Like for not being able to have sex, but maybe at some point you can with a robot.
• 34:12
  Speaker: Um, but is it fully one-sided?
• 34:15
  Speaker: And how how does that shape humanity too, right?
• 34:19
  Speaker: There's these kind of existential questions that come up in terms of if we're no longer interacting kind of with other humans and each other and we're interacting with non-humans, how does that start shaping it?
• 34:30
  Speaker: So, what do we start losing as humans in terms of that?
• 34:34
  Speaker: And what's the potential downfall and what are what are the potential positives?
• 34:38
  Speaker 2: I'm curious if you've ever had a patient tell you, you know, you talked about BDSM and you talked about ethical non-monogamy.
• 34:44
  Speaker 2: Have you had somebody tell you about something or be interested in something and you didn't know what it was?
• 34:50
  Speaker: There's so many things, there's there's such a plethora and variety of things out there.
• 34:55
  Speaker: And I am pretty well aware of most of it.
• 34:58
  Speaker: Um, but there's like little nuanced things sometimes where sometimes it's like I I remember the term, but I don't remember what the term means.
• 35:07
  Speaker: And most of it is not um surprising because I I kind of know the variety, the kind of indefinite amounts of variety that's out there.
• 35:18
  Speaker 2: Well, let that wrap.
• 35:20
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much for your time, Doctor.
• 35:22
  Speaker 2: We so appreciate you.
• 35:23
  Speaker 2: This has been so informative.
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: And with that, Doctor, thank you for sharing your story with us.
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: You've officially joined the ranks of the brave and the bold.
• 35:37
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• 35:39
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• 35:43
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• 35:50
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• 36:05
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