Today, I’m talking with Galia – a sexual behaviorist and communication coach. She wrote a guest post a few weeks ago about her work and consent with intellectual disability. Make sure to check out her site and follow her on Twitter.

We also talk about Kate Kenfield’s Tea and Empathy cards – she’s currently running a Kickstarter!

At the end, I suggest learning about trigger warnings. Thankfully, I wrote a post about that!

Transcript

Welcome to the chronic sex podcasts, chronic sex talks about how self love relationships, sex and sexuality are all affected by chronic illness and disability. That’s not all though. We’ll also touch on intersectionality, social justice, empathy, current events, and much, much more. Give you a range of subject matter, this podcast is not suitable for those under the age of 18 and unless you have headphones in, tou probably shouldn’t be listening to us at work. My name’s Kirsten Schultz and I’m your host.

Hey, cuties and booties. Um, uh, welcome to the wonderful month of Halloween, Aka October. This is my absolute favorite month for a number of reasons. Um, I really like when the weather’s switches from being a little warm to kind of cool in the evenings and you can like open your window at night. Um, and I really, really like all the flavors of the season. I love Pumpkin Pie. I love like Thanksgiving meals and Halloween is my absolute favorite holiday in the world.

So this month is amazing to me. I treat each day like it’s a part of Halloween. Um, and it was really fun last night actually a bunch of sex bloggers got together over this program and watched Hocus Pocus, which is my all time favorite Halloween movie. I highly suggest going and watching it. It’s like 1993, 1994, uh, sisters who are witches in Salem. They get brought back to life. There’s a zombie. There’s jokes. Bette Midler sings. Sarah Jessica Parker is sexy. Like I feel like so much of my personality and the things I liked were shaped by that movie. And it’s just wonderful. I’m so highly suggest watching that if you haven’t, I know right now on Freeform, which used to be ABC family. They’re doing 31 days of Halloween and it’s been on there a bunch. Uh, it’s also on their, on demand stuff.

So if you have access to those you can get there. Um, it’s also available on Youtube. I bought it like 10 years ago for $3 on Youtube. So anytime I want I can just go watch it. I’m also toying with the idea of having a movie night one of the weeks this month instead of what, instead of like doing the chat, it’s not going to read today, but I will, um, keep everyone posted on that. I highly suggest paying attention to twitter. The twitter account I use for the show is twitter.com/chronicsexchat. So, you know, keep your eyes peeled on there or instagram or anything else and I will make an announcement once I’ve gotten stuff ready for that. Um, October is also great for sports. Um, I am actually much more into sports than people assume I am. I think uh, right now the Uw women’s hockey season has just started, so we’re season ticket holders for that.

So we go and watch that and enjoy the athleticism because in women’s hockey you can’t check people. So it’s actually much more about speed and agility and it’s just really fun to watch. It’s also a great time of year because basketball is just starting. The Milwaukee Bucks had their first preseason game last night and I’m really excited to see what they’re going to do this year. I really like Giannis as a player. Um, and I think that the team is shaping up to be a potential like playoff contender as long as they stick to doing things right. I really, really liked them for playoffs. They’re also like our teams, so maybe it’s just me. Speaking of playoffs, the Milwaukee brewers are in the postseason and they play their first postseason game tonight against the Colorado rockies. And so they have games today, tomorrow and then Sunday and Monday if they need to do Monday.

Uh, it’s like best out of three or four different games, and it’s just a really great time period. It’s been fun to look back at my like facebook memories and see the excitement over when the brewers made the postseason for the first time in a long time back in 2011. And just to enjoy watching the teams and watching relationship with like the brewers has been really fun because I’ve now been a fan of theirs for a decade. So like April 2008 was my first game, t took me to it for my birthday and then we haven’t been to a game in a while just because like, smells and stuff are just too much for me right now. Um, and it’s like two hours away, but it’s been really fun. I’m just, I know to see my growth as a fan of the team go from like, Oh wow, this is my first in person, like Major League baseball game to a having a baseball themed wedding. Now when I’m just really nerdy about it. Um, it’s also just been really fun because when I opened my mouth and I talk about baseball stuff, I actually know what I’m talking about and it’s really nice to not only have that but also have the brain bandwidth to remember what I want to say because with brain fog that can be really, really hard. And there were a couple of years, there were brain fog just really got the best of me. So it’s nice to have my brain.

I do want to take a minute to think the patrons over on Patreon, um, because I did have to go buy a new mic after the last episode aired. The microphone was just not doing great things. I also need to get a pop filter so I’ll be doing that soon, but I want to take a minute to thank our donors – Andrew Gurza, Dianne Sanders, E Latrice, JP, Roseaboutit productivity and the Pleasure, mechanics for their support and love. If you don’t know what Patrion is, it is like a monthly subscription service. So you set an amount that you want to donate each month. And then, um, you had access to exclusive content. I’m hoping to do some things like Google hangouts or you know, some private live conversations for patrons. And um, they also got this really cute, like two and a half minute clip of the piggies just like drinking water and chomping food, um, as an audio clip because it’s something that I feel is really calming. And with everything going on in the news lately, it’s just been a really nice thing to be able to like sit next to them. And hear them go about their day and be happy and it’s just kind of a nice collection of sounds for meditating. They didn’t really talk that much, but I think that’s okay. Um, they seem to be more selective about talking when I have a microphone in their face. Who knows? It’s just weird.

They’re very cute though. Today’s interview is with Galia Godel. She is a philly based sex educator and also a behaviorist, so she works with people who have intellectual disabilities and helps them figure out what they need, um, and like helps them communicate that to their care staff and things like that, which is really cool. Um, she wrote a guest post about it a couple of weeks ago, so I will put that in the show notes for easy access as well as her site cerebral sexuality and the link to her twitter account because it’s really fun. Um, I, I just really enjoyed the conversation that she and I had unfortunately, the program that I used to record this, I’m cut off the last half hour of our conversation so it ends slightly abruptly. Um, don’t be alarmed like everything’s fine, but you’ll hear my beautiful voice again at the end, uh, to do a little bit of a wrap up after that kind of abrupt stop. Unfortunately, that also means you don’t get to hear like the James Lipton ask questions I ask everyone, but that’s okay. Like I’m trying not to stress about it. I stress a lot about things, trying not to create that here, trying to give myself room and space, especially since it was a technical technical thing and not a oops, I deleted stuff thing. It’s always easier to be kinder on myself for that. So without further ado, here is my conversation with Galia.

Hi Galia, how are you? I’m fine, thanks. For our listeners who don’t know you yet, would you put them up to speed on kind of who you are and all the cool stuff that you’re doing?

Absolutely. Uh, so my name is Galia. I’m a Philadelphia based sex educator and I work primarily as a sexual behavior specialist. So I work sort of in behaviors and sex education for adults with intellectual disabilities. I also work as a communication coach and sort of thirdly, I work as a consultant on both of those topics, so I’ll do things like write a curricula for sex education for learners with intellectual disabilities, or I’ll meet with disability educators to talk about sex or I will do workshops, uh, for caregivers of my clients and I, uh, run around philly doing that all the time.

That’s so fun. And also have a blog. You are a phenomenal writer. Oh my goodness. Thank you so much. You did a guest piece on the site back at the beginning of September about, um, what sexual behavior is and what that means, um, you do with your clients with intellectual disabilities. And it was fantastic. Like, and I’ll definitely link to that in the show notes for people who didn’t catch it. But, um, can you kind of go into what sexual behaviorism is and what that part of your life looks like?

Yes. So working as a behaviorist means I’m approaching learners, generally learners who have intellectual disabilities. Although there’s also solidly a market for behaviorists to work with. I’m just students in the public school system or who have behavioral health problems, but it means looking at folks who have maladaptive behaviors, which means behaviors that are unsafe or unpleasant for the person who is experiencing them, whether it’s the individual I’m displaying the behavior, whether their behaviors are unpleasant for them selves or they have negative consequences for people around them and coming in to try and solve those behaviors and the way that we do that is not through punishing or rewarding the specific behaviors, but by finding out what causes the behavior to occur, behaviorism says that every behavior has a stimulus. The reason that anybody does anything is um, to either go toward something positive or to get away from something negative.

So if one of my clients has a particularly dangerous behavior, I try to find out what they’re getting out of that behavior. Whether it’s the ability to avoid something they don’t like or the ability to get something that they do like and then to try and change that behavior. I try to change the stimulus and I want to be really clear for anyone who’s listening. When I talk about maladaptive behaviors, I in no way me and things that my clients do that kind of annoy people around them. My clients are all human beings who are allowed to display whatever emotions or expressions that they want to display. Um, I’m not here to punish people for expressing themselves, not here to punish people at all. Um, when I talk about maladaptive behavior is I’m specifically talking about dangerous or unsafe behaviors. Behaviors that could result in danger, um, illegal behaviors or harmful behaviors.

So things like, um, uh, some of my clients hit their staff members when they get frustrated and that’s not okay because you can’t hit people. Some of my clients get aggressive when they are confronted or when they have unpleasant experiences. Some of my clients masturbate in public, some of them have unsafe sex, some of them run away. So all of those are behaviors that I am interested in affecting. And I don’t just mean like client cries when upset. Um, yeah, I cry when I’m upset. Also. So this is, this is very different from like the, um, the applied behavior analysis of old that like punished autistic kids from moving their hands. That’s not my jam. So that’s sort of what behaviorism is. And, and I get clients who have maladaptive sexual behaviors but not just sex, also relationships or social or anything interpersonal or even feelings heavy, really.

They sort of giving me the people that have a lot of feelings and don’t know what to do about their feelings and uh, I work with them and they work with their staff members and their family members and their workshops or their jobs to try to find ways to reduce the stimuli that caused them to behave. I’m dangerously or hurtfully. So for example, my client who becomes aggressive when she gets confronted, part of her behavior plan is always speak to clients in a calm tone of voice, never yell at clients. Um, if client gets upset with another consumer at the day program, try to mediate the disagreements as opposed to letting them sort of fight it out themselves. And so I will teach their staff members the information that they need to change the stimuli that my clients are experiencing. That’s so fascinating. Like it feels so scientific and yet so I don’t know, like, so basic.

Yeah, it, it really felt that way to me. Um, I, I sort of started doing it by accident and Grad school and my, my practicum was kind of meant to be an education practicum and it ended up being a behavior, a behaviorist, a practicum. And it felt very intuitive to me. Like, um, you know, residents, uh, screams when people get in her personal space. And they were like, let’s find ways to get her to scream less because, you know, it’s very upsetting to the other residents that live in the, in the hall where she lives. And I was like, okay, well let’s find ways to get people into her personal space less let’s, let’s give this person a place she can retreat to and she doesn’t want to be around other people. And they were like, Oh yeah, I guess that would work. It was like, it seems like it’s pretty clear with this client wants

and they think that’s so important too because a lot of people who have intellectual disabilities have the right way to tell somebody specifically like, Hey, what I need right now is like five minutes of space. How like sometimes everyone has moments too. And so to have a behaviorist as part of a care plan makes a lot of sense to me.

Yeah. I ended up sort of acting as an advocate for my clients with their staff members because unfortunately in the intellectual disability system, frequently folks with intellectual disabilities will say what they want and they won’t say it in a nice way. And that’s not their obligation to say things in Nice ways. But they’ll demand a thing and their staff are like, no, that’s not part of your plan. Like I don’t have to give you that thing or like it doesn’t make sense that you want that thing. And so then they don’t get what they feel like they need. And so if I come in with, you know, the weight of my graduate degree and my training and my position behind me and I say, Hey, client needs this thing, please always do this for client under these circumstances that my client can get the thing that they say that they need, which usually they know what they, what they need to change their behavior. Not always. Sometimes they really need some help and some information, but often it, it’s really just listening to them and then translating the things that they say they want into the sort of official jargon that behavior plans need.

Isn’t that so amazing? It feels similar, like it feels very similar to what a lot of people with disability or chronic illness space where we say, well, we need this, you know, accessible parking placard or we need this space to not be super scented and it doesn’t really get enacted until someone else is able to come in and say, no, actually they do actually know what they’re talking about. They really do need this.

Yes. It’s exactly like that. I think just one of the differences is that often folks who don’t have intellectual disability can verbalize what they need. People are just ignoring them. Whereas sometimes my clients don’t even have the language to discuss what they need.

It really ties into the work that you do as a communication coach as well.

Absolutely it does. It’s all about listening. So my work is a communication coach involves helping people figure out what they want to say and how to say it. So I work in three different capacities as a communication coach. I’ll work one on one with specific clients who have a problem and they feel like if they could just express themselves better that that problem could be fixed. I will also work with people in relationships so far just been dyads and triads. But you know, if a whole polyhouse wants to jump in with me, that would also be fine. And I’ll also do group meetings as a moderator so I can do that for a small business or a nonprofit or I’ll do it for like, um, I’ve done moderating for a couple of kink, a social circles and events who have problems like figuring out what to do when, um, they have a problem with a harasser or to figure out how to change their rules in a way that feels appropriate to everybody. And I can sit down and help moderate that conversation to make sure everyone’s voice is heard. And for all three of those, it really just involves asking the right questions for people to realize what they themselves already know that they need.

It is just fascinating to me how much everything that we do throughout the day or throughout our lives really hinges on a good communication. And how many of us are socialized as we grow up as we’re young to keep the things that we need on the back burner so that we’re not a admitting it to ourselves or be communicating it to other people. I’m going to propose like a hypothetical situation where there’s two partners and one is experiencing pain during sex and has had it instilled in them that they don’t get to say that they are having pain during sex and that, you know, communicating during sex at all is some sort of reflection on you as a sexual individual that like you’re failing because you have to use words. What would you kind of do with that partner to help them get to the point where they’re able to have a real conversation with their loved one about what’s going on.

So it’s all about taking small attainable steps. In an Ideal universe, they would immediately march over to their partner and say, ‘Hey, I’ve been experiencing this thing for the last three years and I didn’t know how to tell you about it, but now I’m telling you about it and we need to do something about it.’ But that’s a very unrealistic thing to expect someone to, to who has been taught their whole life. That communication in that manner is unacceptable. So the small attainable steps might be starting with just, um, making suggestions during sex to modify an activity. So if a particular position is very painful, just turning down that possession for the next several bouts of sex and, and just starting there, let’s start with damage control so you don’t have more pain. Um, as, as quickly as possible. Let’s, let’s stop your pain. And if you’re in pain during this position, find a way to gently turn down that position like you can even I, I, I’m, I encouraged my partners to, to fib in comfortable ways.

Sometimes like instead of saying, Hey, this hurts. Say Actually, I’ve really been craving a blow job lately. Can we do that? You know, that’s what I’d really like. Or Ooh, you know, what we haven’t done, why don’t you try, if you like, fuck me from behind, that seems kind of exciting. If they don’t feel ready to say, you know, when you penetrate me from the front, it’s very painful. And, and once we’ve stopped the pain, once they feel able to sort of take a step back, they’re not always thinking about sex with this a worry that they’re going to experience pain, terrorism times like sex will become this very upsetting and traumatic experience. If every time you have sex, you have pain, then broach a conversation with their partner, like, Hey, you might have noticed that I haven’t really been asking for this particular position lately, or, or in fact I’ve been asking you to not do this position.

It’s because I, I actually, uh, it feels pretty uncomfortable when we have sex and that position and I think it’s because you have such and such diagnosis about myself or I don’t really know why. I’ve been looking it up on the internet and I can’t really figure out what it is about my genitals that’s causing this pain. But I wanted to let you know that it’s not that I don’t enjoy this activity with you. It’s that there’s something going on with my body and I’m not sure what to do about it. Could you join me in the experience of finding a solution or talking to a doctor? Could you support me and sort of bringing their partner on board the solution train or the mitigation of pain train. I’m so their partner feels involved with the experience as opposed to feeling blindsided that the first conversation that they had is like, oh my God, I had been hurting you this whole time.

How could you have not told me? Or like I’m a terrible person that the first conversation is, hey, you know, partner person that I’m, I’m in this together with, can you help me with this thing I’m experiencing? And then from there there you know, a number of paths that it can take, but I think that’s probably the, just off the top of my head, the, the path that I would take with this client to a stop their pain and then the start communicating with their partner. That’s fantastic. And also feels really attainable, right? Because you are setting these very small actionable steps that you can take a couple of weeks to comfortable with

and then move on.

Yes. My my ideal sort of client timeline and tends to be a meeting and then maybe a month or two before our next meeting where I go, hey, you know, we, we set something up. How did that go? And, and often the second appointment is it didn’t work. I couldn’t do it. It was too hard and I’m like, great. You tried. Like we, you know, I, I gave you an option, it didn’t work for you. That’s wonderful. Now we’ve checked something off the list that we know doesn’t work. Let’s go to the next thing on the list and sometimes we’ll even come up with a list and the first or second appointment and I’ll be like, try this first one because that’s the best option, but if that doesn’t work, let’s try one of the next one and see where that goes.

I like that too because it feels like you have something to fall back on. There is a plan b. just because one way of communicating something for you didn’t work doesn’t mean that you are inherently horrible at communicating. Just that sometimes things work better for people.

Right. I’m a very explicit verbal communicator. That’s absolutely my style of communication generally with some very humorous personal exceptions. Um, but I really recognize that that doesn’t work for everyone. So a little bit of my job is curbing the internal voice that’s like, just use your words, but that’s obviously not gonna work for most people, let alone all people. Um, so I, I, I worked very hard to listen and let my clients tell me how they have communicated in the past and then to build off of those existing communication patterns, tips or strategies to either communicate the thing that they’re avoiding communicating about or tips to build off of that existing communication strategy to become a better communicator in general if that’s someone’s goal as opposed to like fixing one specific problem.

If you had to think of something where sexual behaviorists and communication coach of have a situation where they’re complete, they would completely, I’m having a brain fog moment, um, or they would completely like react in different ways? Can you think of any? Just cause they seem so similar.

One really strong way as I give my clients the opportunity to lie if they want to and I put it right out there on the table. Um, so sometimes my clients don’t actually want to have sex but they don’t know how to tell their partners that’s. And as opposed to forcing them to tell their partners that which might not happen. Like my clients don’t always have the cognitive ability to like force themselves to go through with something they don’t want to do. They’ll have sex with, they don’t want to have. And so I will often lay out on the table for my clients. I’m avoidance strategies for them to get out of situations. They don’t want to be in a like this one actually very funny. I use it very frequently. It comes from my mother who’s a wonderful, very supportive person that when I was a kid, if I ever didn’t want to do something with someone else, like not like an adult or a family member, but like if a friend invited me out and I didn’t want to go, I could blame anything on her.

I could be sitting right there at the table with her and get a call that was like, hey girl, you want to come out to play? And I know my mom’s making me like stay in and clean the living room. I’m really bummed about it. My mom would sit there across from me and given me like the thumbs up. Yeah, that’s great. And so I’ll set that up with a lot of my clients. I’ll talk with their staff members. And so like if they, one of my clients, he a fight with them girlfriend a lot and he loves her. He doesn’t wanna break up with her, which is totally his right. That’s fine. Um, but she really upsets him and he gets really agitated. So he now has. One of the strategies he has in place is saying like, Oh, my staff member is calling me.

I have to go take care of something. And that is, I would never say that so explicitly to my communication coaching clients because while avoidance is a valuable, short term coping mechanism, it doesn’t fix the root of the problem. But with my behaviorism clients, sometimes we can’t fix the root of the problem, like I can’t, I can’t fix my clients’ girlfriends, nor can I make him break up with her, therefore I’m going to give him the strategies to like take the space he needs away from her or um, what’s another one? I guess if, if a client and also there’s a big difference between the two people conversing as equals and someone with an intellectual disability being spoken to by their staff members. This is a complete power differential there. So if two people in an equal relationship or having a problem with each other, I need to, they both need to address the root of the problem together. Whereas if one of my clients is having a problem with their staff members, that’s generally their staff member’s job to fix if, if my client feels um, if my client always gets into screaming fights with her staff members and her staff members need to communicate differently with her. And that’s just how it is. So there I think is a really big difference. I think those are the two biggest difference maybe is like the power differences and also my, um, my encouragement to avoid for avoidance with my clients is much greater.

I do like a, you know, the reinforcement of avoidance strategies. I think it’s something that is super powerful, uh, you know, for, for us to be able to have to use as an excuse nine is usually a or Guinea pigs. They’re, they’re very attention needing A. I’ve been yelled at all day because I didn’t give one of them the right snack. Every time he’s seen me, he’s like tittered at me. So, you know, it’s, I, I almost always feel that when I’m doing avoidance strategies, it’s somewhat based in truth. Like the Guinea pigs do need a lot of attention, so it’s, it doesn’t feel as bad as like just pulling out, you know, oh, this partner wants me to like, go do this with them tomorrow. Sorry, I can’t.

Right. Uh, sometimes we’ll even come up with things to avoid with, like, if I really don’t want to go to a party, I’ll schedule a client appointment. She’d be like, Oh, I’m really sorry. I can’t make it to your party, I’ve got to see a client. There’s something going on. There’s also, I think a really big difference in how we deal with problems that are permanent, such that they need to be dealt with and problems that are temporary. So one of my clients is having a really miserable time at her day program because she came out as trans and now nobody talks to her and it’s, it’s really horrible actually. And um, there are a lot of things that I could try to do with her to try to make the experience more palatable for her. But we’re applying to different day programs so she can get out of there.

So like every time she texts me every other day or so and it’s like, I can’t take this. I’m leaving, I’m going home. And I’m like, okay, you know, there isn’t, this isn’t the situation we need to fix. We’re getting you out of here. So that’s a fine avoidance strategy if you’re miserable. I don’t need to make you like, confront these staff members who are having a bad time. I don’t need to like, uh, you know, walk down there in the middle of the afternoon and like change this program. She really does want me to. It. I’d love to by the way, but she doesn’t want me to because she’s leaving. Avoidance is a perfectly legitimate strategy here.

I think that’s so important too. When we, um, you know, are doing things like going on dates. Sometimes there’s this expectation early on that like when the other party proposes a date, you automatically say yes and go on the date. Um, when like a, maybe that’s not something that fits in your schedule and be, maybe you’re just don’t really like them enough to go out on another date with them and it’s totally fine to just be like, you know, I’m really sorry. Things are just really busy right now. Let’s raincheck and then just don’t check like I am so much for ghosting in that kind of a manner when it’s a relationship that isn’t like viable in some regard.

I have a lot of thoughts about what we owe other people and how, uh, and my thoughts on that or how we don’t actually owe other people very much at all that there’s sort of three tiers of obligation. Tier one is if people are literally dependent on you for life, whether it’s animals or your children or people that you have signed a lease with or something, then you owe them. I’m your efforts to sort of keep them alive while you disentangled from them. Perhaps you know, if you can’t take interacting with this person anymore, this animal anymore, you need to put some work into setting that up in a situation where they won’t die if you leave or be horribly bereft. And so those are people that you owe action too. I believe that people that have put a lot of positive energy into you, like chosen family, that you owe an explanation to.

If you’re going to do something, you should let them know that you’re going to affect their life in some way and everybody else, you don’t owe them anything at all. Not An explanation, not your actions, not your time. Not your energy, nothing, and there’s this sort of like a. That being said, um, know that’s super cold to, to here, but it’s true. You don’t, you’re not obligated to spend your time and energy on anyone. And then there’s the, you know, that being said, if you refuse to spend time and energy on anyone, you won’t have friends and no one will like you and you’ve got to put energy into get energy. You won’tto end up with any friends. If you refuse to spend energy on anyone but you’re not obligated to give it, you get to choose who you give energy to and if you don’t give energy to anyone, you’ll get a reputation for being like a cold person or a jerk and no one want to be your friend.

But if you stop giving energy to people that you don’t care if they give energy back to you. It’s a really freeing experience. There’s so many people in my life that I felt like they had reached out to him a couple of months and they’re like, oh yeah, I haven’t seen you in forever. Let’s hang out. And I was like, oh, I guess I should add, it’s been four months since I’ve seen you. All right, let me, let’s go out for coffee or something. And then eventually I was like, wait, I want this person to stop reaching out to me. Hanging out with them makes me miserable. And so I stopped putting energy into those people at all and it was kinda great.

I’m so proud of you for taking that step because even if we’re in the position that we get to share that, that’s empowering with other people sometimes that’s really hard to practice what we preach. Oh my goodness. Yes. So I’m very proud of you for doing that. Um, and I absolutely agree. I think that there’s something to be said with kind of our current culture where people are like, bad talking ghosting or ‘oh you owe explanations to your family, why you won’t talk to them. Things like that. And I think that especially like if somebody is dealing with an illness where their energy is extremely limited, it’s important for us to spend our energy on things we want to spend it on.

Yeah, absolutely. You are the, you’re the controller, you’re the person in charge of yourself, be in charge of the things you want to be interacting with

and, and sometimes that can mean also like in our current political state, turning off the TV, like it’s totally okay to not watch that address, read people, snarky takedowns of it on twitter instead.

I do want to continue to sort of emphasize the other half of that, which is if you have to cut yourself off from things, you’re also going to lose the benefits of those things. But that’s a choice you’re allowed to make. It’s not, it doesn’t make you an inherently bad person to choose the time alone versus prioritizing a friendship. You don’t care very much about, you might lose that friendship, but you get to make that choice.

Do you feel like if, if we are talking about the friendship, right? Um, do you feel like it should be emphasized that someone should at least say, hey, like not feeling this so much anymore? Or Hey, we’re kind of growing apart. Like do you think that that, you know, quote unquote ‘should’ is a good should? Is a bad should? Are they just different shoulds?

I think it depends a lot on how much you respect the person that you find yourself growing apart from. There are people that I deliberately grew apart from. Um, I didn’t want to interact with them anymore, so I pulled back my energy and I never told them. I really just sort of ghosted on the friendship and they. Yeah, I guess that does seem like the right word. They probably saw that I wasn’t investing time or energy into them and chose to not reach out to me anymore and that was fine. Whereas I’ve had other friendships that I didn’t have the energy for and so I never reached out to them and I’m actually that, that really happened to me a couple weeks ago. My, my best friend of 10 years, the person who moved across the country to live in the same city as me. The person I have a tattoo with reached out to me and said, hey, you know, um, you haven’t reached out to me in the last three or four months. And every time I reach out to you, you sort of put off making plans with me and I, I wanted to check in and see what was going on because if you are worried about losing this friendship that I’d like to encourage you to put some more energy into it. But if you really feel like you don’t have the energy for this friendship, let’s make it a deliberate choice as opposed to an accidental or like unacknowledged widening Gulf.

And it was just a very kind thing for this friend to have done to put that energy into reaching back out to me. Um, because that’s the person that I really did want to acknowledge the dynamics of our friendship. And it ended up being that they didn’t realize how August was, was a really terrible month me for a lot of reasons and they didn’t realize how bad things had been for me and because I was too exhausted to explain them. But that meant that they didn’t know what was going on and they just sort of felt resentful. So that communication was very valuable. But there are other circumstances where it has felt more valuable to just be quiet and let the friendship die. So I guess that was very long winded way of saying it depends how much you respect the person that you’re trying to disentangle from.

I think too when we’re dealing with outside pressures, mutual friends with somebody or another family member or something like that. It also depends on how much that third party respects you and your decisions. I contact with my mother 4 years ago and when I did that, one of my grandma’s brothers, you know, was one of the people I kept in my life. I love him. He’s kind of like a surrogate father to me. He’s fantastic. And when I explained why and only going into detail about a couple of things and said, you know, like I would be happy to share more if you’re in the space for that. But this is all like heavy shit. Don’t want to like throw that at you. He kind of went from, oh, like I hope some day you guys can rekindle your relationship and be friends to ‘Oh my God.’ You know, I didn’t share any of that with an intent to like quote unquote get them on my side or anything like that.

Just letting him know what the, what the lack of communication meant to me and freed me of and, and letting him kind of have all this information ready to access so that he could make his own decisions on whether he was still fine, you know, being friends with me and my mother on facebook or talking to me over talking to her, not so much making him make a decision, but again, just giving him information so that he could act accordingly. Um, if he was someone I didn’t respect and didn’t care about, um, I probably wouldn’t have put that much effort into it. As heavy as it is to share with someone super close. It’s also really heavy stuff to bring up with a even like further tangential third parties. I think. Yeah, it’s interesting. It’s an interesting balance of how much you value the relationship, how much you value your energy, and then how much you value other people kind of move in similar circles and conversations that you might have with them about the decisions that you’re making. I’m actively or subconsciously.

Yeah, that sounds like such a well spoken way of doing what I have to do on paper a lot, which is sort of sit down and write pros and cons lists of how much energy I want to spend on a person or whether or not I want to interact with them at a specific way. I really appreciate the way you phrased that. It flows a lot more nicely than my, my graph paper

lists. I really love the photos of flowers that you use on your blog.

Oh, I’m so pleases. It makes me so happy. So a lot of friends and I, uh, I’m, I’m friends with a lot of people on my secondary twitter. Oh, it’s so funny. I just swapped them. I used to call cerebral sexuality, my secondary twitter. Anyway. Um, I’m friends with a lot of local folks and we did something called flower twitter for several years, which was just like, the news is terrible, let’s share pictures of flowers. And it was just us getting ridiculously excited about each other’s flowers. Someone was like, look at this tiny flower and it would be 12 people being like, no, it’s so small. How dare that flower be so tiny, um, or like that flowers as big as your hat impossible! Um, and so I just have like a huge folder on my phone full of all these flower pictures. I’ve taken a and it felt like the right thing to do with them.

You just kind of the conversation we’re having and knowing how much into feels you are. It’s starting to sound a little like talking to Kate Kenfield. Uh, do you know kate? I do not. I will have to send you the link to her work. She is absolutely fantastic and I think the two of you would get along so amazingly. She made these cards. Uh, it’s called Tea and empathy and it’s a card game that’s so exciting. Each card has a feeling on it, like a primary feeling and, and also lists a three secondary feelings related to that primary feeling. Oh my gosh. To help people work on naming their emotions more clearly. It’s so delightful. And the card game, the way it works is, um, let’s say you and I were playing, you usually need three people. Well, I’ve got like Rainbow Dash Stuffy over here. You will will say Rainbow Dash is playing with the two of us, let’s say that she is explaining a situation that she feels emotionally kind of like upheaval about or maybe she’s distressed about and as she sharing the situation, we each have like part of this deck of cards and we go through our cards to see what feelings we think might describe what she’s going through.

And it’s all very consent based because kate is also a sex educator. So what we would do is, you know, hold out the existential angst card you are, is this what you’re feeling right now? And she said yes it is and take it or no it’s not. And, you know, she could either explain why it is or why it isn’t. Um, so by the end of that, she’s got cards in front of her that map out her emotions currently. Just really cool. Um, and then we do it again, but with more positive emotions, there’s not really a better way to say it than that. All emotions are good emotions, but I’m productive emotions. Yeah. Uh, maybe more pleasing emotions. Oh yeah, that’s a great word. Um, and so she would explain what she would have liked to get out of that situation instead of what happened. And then we can pick out those pleasing emotions and say, would you have liked to feel supported in that time?

Um, so then by the end she has a nice little word map of what she would have liked to have felt as well. And it can be really useful, um, for couples communicating their emotions for people who don’t have a, maybe as large of an emotional vocabulary or things like that. I use them a lot to just check in with myself about how I’m feeling. Um. Wow. That sounds fantastic. Oh, it’s so great. They’re beautiful. I need to put these on my wishlist and ask someone to buy them for me. And would you like to know something very funny. Two,

I am extremely reluctant to speak about my own feelings with my partners. I am so good at getting other people to talk about their feelings and to facilitating my partner’s speaking about their feelings, but when it comes time for me to talk about my feelings, I make a wrinkly little muppet face and I look at the floor and I say no. And they’re like, okay, Galia, but you know, you have to now and I make my wrinkling up muppet face and I say I don’t want to. It’s not fun. I don’t want to do it for me. So exactly. We are all very well versed on the irony that is the communication coach who doesn’t like talking about her feelings

or the person that will tell people how to have better sex lives but doesn’t like, you know, actively practice those.

Oh, but gosh, yeah, Me too.

There seems to be kind of a running theme I think in sex education. And communication around sex that those of us who do it really well don’t teach it, and those who do it really poorly teach it. Know what that is.

I wonder if that’s a little bit. I’ve actually thought about that a bit where I for a long time felt very

embarrassed or guilty that I have such a complicated relationship with sex despite being a sex educator. And I was like, it’s so unpleasant and ironic that I teach people how to have good sex and rather I teach people how to have good relationships with sex and their bodies and I have a, a pretty tumultuous relationship with sex and my body. And I was like, aren’t I? I’m a broken sex educator. My bad sex educator. I’ve got to, I’ve got a graduate degree in sex and I am not using it for myself. And a very dear metamor and friend of mine who also went through the same graduate program as me sort of gently pointed out that, you know, that wasn’t true and I’m not broken. And what I sort of have realized is that I think those of us who are very good at communicating about things or have the information about things are perhaps better at recognizing our own complexity and that might be a nice way of putting it. It’s not that I’m broken. I said I have the information to vocalize what is confusing for me

and unfortunately that’s where the audio ends. I did take out a couple of sidebars that we had that were really funny and I might go stick those on Patreon for people who are interested in hearing those, um, because they’re just buddy and we talk about like penis flowers, like phallic shaped flowers, um, which is just a joy and I really, really liked Galia. She is really fun to talk to and listen to and it’s really great to read her stuff. So I definitely think you should go check it out. Again, I will put those things at the show notes for now. I know that current events are really heavy and I just want you to make sure that you are taking care of yourself. Um, have you had water in the last, I don’t know, two hours? Have you eaten in the last four hours?

Have you changed your underwear today? Things like that are really easy to forget when things are really heavy. Um, I know, at least for me, it’s really difficult to remember to do that. So I really hope that you are taking the time to practice some self care, um, and, and practice active care for others, like putting up trigger warnings on a triggering content, etc. I think is really important at this point. We don’t need to, um, retraumatIze ourself and others to get a point out there right now. I think there’s so much conversation that everything is very saturated with trauma and we can create our own social media spaces or you know, in person spaces that are less traumatic and more focused on healing. Um, and I think that’s gonna be our way forward through all of this crap. For now. Take a deep breath and remember that you are important and you are worthy of all the love in the world.

Chronic Sex is produced every two weeks by me first and it gives me the from Paddington bear because they’re awesome. You can find show notes and more over chronic sex dot org feared, enjoying listening to the show. Please subscribe and that way you won’t miss a single episode on itunes. We really chill. If you take a minute to read the show to not only does it give me great feedback, but it also helps the podcast get seen by people who may not know it exists and that’s pretty cool. You can support us over at patreon.com/chronicsex. As always, you can find links to everything @ chronicsex.org, from social media accounts to resources, sex, toy reviews, and more. Until next time, please take care of yourself. Remember that you are a freaking bad ass.