GDC Session 1 with Sarah Burgamy 2021.09.21
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GDC Session 1 with Sarah Burgamy 2021.09.21

 
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Hello, everybody.
Welcome. Welcome to our gender diversity course in children and adolescents with Sarah Burgamy. We're so delighted to have you here with us. We've got Sarah here and my name is Felix. I will be your technical support for the next five sessions I believe. So, yeah, here we go. This is the start of the course. Thank you so much. And I gave you Sarah. So it's morning where I am, but hello, hello. And, I appreciate, Brian reminded me I can say good moments to everyone. It's it's nice to see you all and I really do mean it's nice to see you. It's nice to actually see some faces. Sometimes when we're in webinar mode I just really lament that I feel like I'm talking into the abyss, even though I know there's people on the other end. So good morning from Colorado. I am so excited to launch off onto this whole journey with you all. I was even revisiting my own recorded material this morning, which is an awkward exercise by the way, watching oneself present. And in fact, I thought, well, should I wear the same shirt? Should I change shirts? So you get more blue, but I decided maybe not to inundate you with the same exact shirt lest you think I have no clothing. So I wanted to just start this morning actually, by kind of doing a little temperature check with everyone. And so I'm, you're gonna notice, I like interacting, like if we were actually in a room altogether, which of course this gives us the gift of going across geographic space, which is so wonderful. But if we were in a room together, I would walk around, I would like look at people and interact and ask questions and want you know some call and response from the audience. So I just wanna kind of hear from folks and you can put a, just a Y or an N like I'm yes, feeling this way or no, I'm not into the chat, but I want to see for how many people is just the notion of like meeting with gender diverse folks or the idea of like, I'm gonna have gender diverse or transgender like children and adolescents come into my office or interact with me somewhere. How many people does that just make a little bit anxious or nervous?
Just nod. Yeah.

Great.
Yeah. I appreciate it. Folks are like, I'm gonna just shoot it out there to you, Sarah like, some of you are like, no, I think I'd be good. A lot of you are like, yeah, little anxious, a little nervous. And I think for the most part and whenever a presenter asks me a loaded question at the beginning of a presentation, you can always kind of tell that, you know, there's a certain, certain answer that presenter is probably expecting, and frankly it would have been cool if you were all like, no, I'm good. And I would've been like, oh, great. So you just wanna be here and kind of chat some more. But I can certainly understand if there's just some like flutters and a little bit of like, yeah, I'm here in part because I get, I get a little bit off my game or, and I don't just mean like in a therapy way, in an office setting. I mean, interpersonally, just anything that throws us off and frankly, for a lot of us, because gender diversity maybe hasn't been part of our world forever. We get nervous because we're just not, this isn't a repertoire. So I appreciate y'all already just starting the interaction for me. I decided that, you know, this morning, I think what I'm gonna do, I'm kind of a little bit of a hybrid person. I'm gonna present some of the material, some of you may have already watched from module one. Some of you may not have had an opportunity yet. It won't be a complete exact presentation of module one so that you're not totally getting the same repeat. But I do think some of this bears repeating because it is setting the stage for what does it mean to be in gender land? Like what is this place? So before I even launch into that, I wanted to start and just tell you, I'm kind of a, well, I'm an antiquated soul. So I have this paper newspaper. I know this is, you know, if this is unfamiliar to some of you, I can feel it and touch it. And it has words on it and I can read it and I don't have to plug it in at night. So I like getting the paper newspaper, to me it's sort of a little capture of what's happening sometimes in the world, just in the modern day. So this is from like September 3rd and it caught my attention. And I was chatting this morning with some of the fine folks here with whom I've worked and it caught my attention 'cause it says nation and world. And I was like, all right, I'm I'm reading through here. We've got a whole bunch of things about hurricanes and bad news. And then I see this little thing that says, China bans men it sees as not masculine enough from TV. And I'm not gonna read the whole article to you, this isn't a bedtime story, but it basically says Beijing, China's government banned of feminine men on TV and told broadcasters Thursday to promote quote, revolutionary culture, broadening a campaign to tighten control over business and society and enforce official morality. So I wanna say, I saw some faces that are like, or some people a little, you're a little surprised you're like people do that? They regulate like that? They regulate gender that way? I'm gonna imagine some of you are like, yep, yep. I feel like we live and breathe that every day. But for some of us that may be like that's surprising. Like what is the purpose of needing to in some way, in this case kind of obliterate feminine presenting men from the social landscape so people can not see them. So I'm just gonna leave that there. And certainly, you know, Felix, by the way, feel free to break in if there's some comments that you feel are pertinent and people are sharing in the chat. 'Cause I can see the chat lighting up. We'd love to hear that. And I'm happy to be interrupted. Yeah. Well, Brian posted a link from NPR with the same type of news. Mikayla wrote, I lived in Asia for 10 years. This is not surprising. Okay. So part of the reason I actually wanted to just bring that piece in this morning was I wanna make sure that we understand that even though contextually, I'm gonna be talking a lot about the region in which I have lived and existed, that gender by no means is hemmed in to any one culture. It just so happens the way we interpret it and the way we experience it varies culture to culture, but every society has some kind of idea around a gender system. So I am gonna go ahead and see if I can launch off here with a little screen share and we will start here. So this is title slide, I think we can skip right over that. So this morning, what I'd really like to do, what's different than of course the pre-recorded material is anything that you see that you have wondered about that you watched earlier. I'd love for you just to go ahead, you know, raise a hand or put in a question so that we can really enrich the material as we go, 'cause chances are the kinds of questions you have everybody else has as well. So let's see here. This is something that I kind of just like to set the stage with. When I talk about gender, there's this notion of sort of human geography and that everything exists in communities, cultures, economies, interactions, and time and space. So, you know, it's not hard for me to start thinking about like, when was it that, you know, the United States like women didn't wear pants. I use that as an example because it's one of the ways we've seen gender expression evolve. And you know, I think largely Katharine Hepburn gets kind of credited with like putting on pants. I'm sure she was not the first to wear pants, but because that was what was visual to folks in kind of a popular culture sort of way. So I refer back to this article that I very briefly was giving you an overview of it matters what's visible, what we see as a culture, what we reify as a culture is gonna be very necessarily how we experience a system. And so these are some just magazine covers. There's more of them in the pre-recorded material, but kind of letting you know where we've been, that this has been a conversation that is ongoing. But I will offer in North America, it's really been a conversation we have. I'm gonna say on some level have avoided for a long time. And now it's getting a lot of play. It's getting a lot of visibility out in popular culture, in media, but I think it's also actually set us up to think that this is somehow a new phenomenon. So variety of different covers, just talking about gender not being a binary system, not being something that's immutable that people have internal lives and experiences that may or may not be what other people assume. So more fun time, in prerecorded I asked this question and I don't get to interact with you. So this morning I'm taking full advantage. I'd love to hear from folks just kind of based on where you are right now, how do you know your own gender? Like what information or data do you use to be able to even answer that question if it's on a sheet of paper or it's a check in at a doctor's office, how do you know your gender so you're able to like answer that question?
And again, Felix, while I'm in drive mode here,
if you can let me know, I know you're having a little bite to eat, but if you can let me know what we getting. Yeah, I'm, everyone's really quiet right now. It's what I've been told.
I think this is a tough question.
I'm trying to answer it myself and that seems to hit it. I've done my own exploration and processing around my gender. I feel that's who I am. Mostly feedback from the wider world, very little comes from my own embodied experience. Recently, childbearing has made me feel more female. I guess I fit the box for females so I tick that. I wouldn't know how to answer it. It has been what I've been told. It's my birth certificate, growing up without a choice based on physiology. Yeah. Body has social cues, tasks I get offered and whether I get to drive the car. Right? And there's so much more. So there's gender. I mean, here I'm gonna summarize some of what I'm hearing. I'm hearing everything from like gender roles, like what I'm able to do or what people indicate I should do to information from culture or community. Somebody tells me who I am and I go, okay, that makes sense. I heard some people say there was some kind of internal self-reflection reference to the physical body, to the biological sex of the body, reference to biological properties of the body. Like being able to gestate an infant or be, you know, have reproductive potential. So in some way, I mean, and this is by the way our human brains, this is what we do. We reference, right? We do compare contrast. We say I'm like something. I'm not like something else. I have the good fortune of living with my spouse, who is an early childhood education teacher. So this is a fun house to live in when it comes to breaking things down and then looking at how small children make sense of things that we do in our culture. But, you know, when you walk into like a preschool classroom or a classroom of three, four, five-year-olds, you'll get a lot of what something is like and what it's not like. Somebody, that's a boy like me, that's a girl like me. I'm a girl. I wear pretty things. You will get a lot of kind of definitional thinking. And you know, later in this course, I talk a lot about how that development maps onto how we think about gender. But it starts so early and to be honest with you folks, most of us haven't revised our system of how we think about gender, probably since about that time. And in part that's because we haven't really needed to. If in a basic sense, you know your gender, you're able to answer the question when it's posed and you feel confident in your answer, you probably haven't given this much thought, which is why there probably was a little bit of lag and delay when I ask a question like this, because it's not one that's top of mind. But I will say for a lot of folks who have had some sort of experience of feeling difference than what was assigned to them, they've given this question a lot of thought. And part of the reason I ask you all it's the age old therapist sort of know thy self is to investigate this about yourself even if you never know if you're going to come into contact with somebody who is struggling with gender identity concerns or exploration, because frankly all of us live in a gender world. So it can't help but be helpful to know more about how do you reflect on this yourself. Okay, so in my fancy slides, I got all these nice little effects I learned how to do. Okay. So very basically I like to break gender down into three parts, partially because when you use this overarching title, people are like, I don't know how to answer it. Like, when I say, what is gender? People will give me the answer of biological sex terms. They'll tell me things like it's a social construct, which kind of plays on that whole human geography question of culture and how do we determine things based on the culture we're in. People will tell me it's about pink and blue, it's about clothes, it's about toys, it's about roles. So I'm gonna break it down that we actually are gonna have three different pieces that are gonna be primary components of how we talk about gender. One will be gender, which is gonna be the overarching category. So when you hear me use that term like gender land, obviously I'm not talking about any kind of like Disneysque theme park, although that would be super cool. And I'd be so down to consult on that project. But what I'm really talking about is we are all living, regardless of what culture you're in and where you're from, you're living in a gender land of sorts. Meaning it has certain kinds of probably quote rules or guidelines for how to be, to be designated with a certain gender. Okay. Then there's gonna be this thing called gender identity. This is the sort of who am I internally. The sense of self. It's not necessarily the thing that's visible to other people. It's the thing we know about who we are. So when folks were able to say things like, I just have always known it or people told me this was what gender I was, I kind of can infer when somebody says, I know my gender because somebody told it to me that what happened there was somebody said this is your gender and that person went, works well enough. Okay. So my internal sense of self agreed with what everybody else told me in the culture and we're all good. Which is why sometimes gender and gender identity just get collapsed. People don't think of them separately because they don't need to. And then this thing called gender expression. So I found this cute kind of clip art of all these kids do, my favorite is really the one in the upper right-hand corner who's just giving us that awesome face. But it's basically, you know, people are like, well, how is gender expression different than just self-expression? And I'm like, well, it's got a flavor to it. Obviously self-expression is a whole conglomeration of like, how am I broadcasting to you kind of who I am and you know things about me. But here's the trick about this whole deal, you can perform a gender expression that actually has nothing to do with who you are internally. It just so happens most of us don't do it that way. Most of us kind of, one, decorate ourselves, whether it's hairstyles, clothing choices, the way we move, the way we speak to one another, our mannerisms, the roles we occupy in our lives. We do all of these things usually as a way to let others know this is who I am, and this is how you should interact with me. But I can tell you that working with gender diverse people, not just youth, but people all the way across the developmental spectrum. I happen to work all the way up the lifespan with really the exception of end of life populations. This is true all the way across. And there are plenty of people that will tell you, they have performed this expression piece without any authenticity to their identity for a long time and done it convincingly. So I often bring up to folks, visible kinds of folks in the media. So probably one of the most visible people I can think of where folks were taken by surprise is Caitlyn Jenner. So formerly known as Bruce Jenner. Now a lot of people were familiar with Bruce Jenner because Bruce Jenner was this amazing athlete, this Olympic champion in one of the most prolific sort of Olympic sports of decathlon, where you have to perform all these different kinds of activities and do it with all of his prowess. And so Caitlin has even said, like, I've been performing for you for a long time. I've been playing the role, gender expression. Whereas the internal sense of self was processing gender identity. And then the overarching category of gender is that piece where people go, I know what the rules are and I'm trying to figure out how to fit within them. So I like to hit my space bar and have nothing happen is what I like to do. Let's see here. Okay. I'm not slide advancing. Let me, I have a little a freeze here folks. I'm having a little technical problems. So, oh, there we go. I got it. Solved my own problem. Okay. So this is just how I put them all on one screen together. Just so you can see them differently. This is not a model that somebody else came up with. This is like my own unique way of understanding this. So I will totally, you know, entertain anybody that goes, I don't think this explains it very well because I'd love to hear feedback, but the way I look at it, these different things, we can break them down and make them exist separate from one another but the truth is they play together and there's intersectionality for all of them with each other. So that the social category of gender informs what gender expressions are considered to be in a certain way. Are they masculine or feminine? Are they things we typically would assign to boys and girls, men and women? You'll notice I'm using this very either or category binary language on purpose, because we will talk about when that all breaks down, but gender also intersects with gender identity. How do I see myself? How do I know myself? Well, a lot of times we bounce that off of, it's like throwing a ball against the gender category and going, does it bounce right? You know, when you ask children about kind of like, tell me, you know, you know, generally we ask a binary question, we say to small children, are you a boy or a girl? And they give us some kind of an answer. And they'll say, I'm a boy. And you go, well, how do you know you're a boy? And they'll say, I like trucks. And I wear pants and shirts and have short hair. They give us gender expression. Why? In part, cause they're concrete thinkers and they've also been coached. We've told them what things go in what category. So gender identity also can intersect with gender expression, but I will remind you, I mean, I could draw a bunch of arrows here about how things will or won't relate, but essentially there's some kind of intersection there. I'm gonna have to use my clicker here. There we go. Gendered self. I put it in that little, little tiny amount where all of these things collide because the truth is our experience of our gender is all of these things at once. Whether or not they are all going swimmingly. So I wanna take a moment to see if there've been any questions, Felix or anything that's popped up that I've missed. I see a raised hand, so I'd be happy to entertain that. All right. Let's get Roseanne on here.
All right Roseanne, I will ask you to unmute,
please click the blue button to unmute. Okay, I just noticed you didn't mention the body in this slide. So is there a difference between, I mean, if somebody, if you said, how do you know you're a boy? And he said, I have a penis? Where would that fit? Yeah. Well, so I'm gonna suggest to you that in learning really how to think about gender very accurately, we have to undo something that we've done forever and that we've taught to really young people, which is conflating biological sex or our assigned sex, our bodies, our body parts, our chromosomes, conflating that with gender. It's a really important component. I'm glad you asked that because it is one of the number one areas where the confusion begins and where we actually have trouble really understanding somebody who's on a gender diversity journey, because we're thinking about those two things as being one in the same. So that's a reason why you're not gonna see body here. There's actually gonna be kind of slides coming up where I'm gonna talk about what's going on, where does the body fit and where have we just kind of said, the two things are exactly the same. And Roseanne, I think one of the things that I see most often is that people go, well, you know, when babies are born and this is a good point, when babies are born, and actually before they're born now, it used to be we had to wait until they were born to kind of figure out what was happening now we can take pictures before they even fully develop, it's very interesting and kind of see monkey ish. But the bottom line is we actually observe, we look for physical characteristics of infants, even when they're gestating to then proclaim whether we're having a gendered child, boy or girl. So we make that, we make that conflation before humans even show up on the earth. So what I'm gonna do is kind of talk a little bit and I think it's coming up pretty quickly. So I'm hoping it's gonna make sense, but please feel free to just kind of jump back in if you're like, okay, I see you're talking about it Sarah, but you didn't actually make it make any sense. So stay tuned is sort of my answer to that. Thanks. You bet.
Is there any other comments or questions, Felix,
that have come up in the chat? Yeah. Basically gender is different than sex. Yeah. I mean that's... And it's something I'm curious about too. That's actually a really succinct way to put that. Sometimes I hit the slide button thinking the next slide is gonna be the one that basically says that sex and gender are not the same, it's coming. But yeah, if you wanted to just kind of get in your mind, like, where am I launching off? Like, this is why we spend this whole first kind of module of this series, talking about how gender is formatted, because it's really hard to understand anything more about how this evolves and people's sense of self if we kind of can't get a common understanding that gender and sex are not the same thing. And frankly, I mean, I would suggest to you even just from the sheer fact that we have different like titles for these things, we know that there's gotta be some reason we don't just say sex and mean the whole thing or gender and mean the whole thing. The fact that these two different terms even exist suggests there's a difference. But if you're like, yeah, but Sarah, I see it all the time. It'll say gender on the form and then it will have a box and it says male, and it has a box and it says female. And I'll say, you're absolutely right. And my little academic self would take a red pencil and circle that and make comments on it and hand it back to the doctor's office and say, you're conflating sex and gender. So I would be super annoying to them, but the premise there is that not every time are we told like this is your biological sex therefore you are supposed to be this gender and perform these roles and be understood in this way. And gender express in a way I can understand when you have people that say effectively, but that's not how this works for me. That's when we enter the zone of like, how are we gonna help people navigate a world that expects this conflation when our experiences that doesn't, that's not how I am. That's not who I am. So just a quick bounce back to, you know, I mentioned to you, culture matters, where you are in the world matters. I am certainly not an anthropologist by training or a sociologist. So I always make that caveat that this is just a little bit about what I've learned of some world culture, certainly not an exhaustive list. But if you do get really interested in how has the world around treated gender over time, you will start running into cultures that have had terminology for things that are not just man, woman, boy, girl systems of gender and things that are not just assigned sex, gender overlay, conflation. So assign male, man, boy, you will find that cultures have had ways to understand the diversity around this for quite some time. So, you know, if you look through here, we have some Northern Plains tribes that have had folks in their populations and communities that are really not considered men or women. So we might try to overlay a contemporary term like non-binary on that I'm gonna offer to you. People have their own terms for a reason. And we can't sort of just draw an arrow and say that's the same thing. But to understand that there are certainly populations and cultures where it's not important that people be distinctly man or woman, that we understand people in this very either or way. Similarly having a third gender. So not having a two-part system saying there are three genders and being able to define that. Having folks that are biologically assigned male, who believe they were born with the souls of women. So in Indonesia, that's a warias, and it basically says it's a melding. So we're really talking about that internal sense of self, not having to sort of quote unquote align with our expectations based on biology. So you'll start seeing this in different cultures. It's not like, you know, we just popped up in north America or Europe or the UK yesterday and said, this is all a thing. This has been going on a long time. Human beings have been exhibiting gender diversity, whether or not we recognize it and we can articulate it to each other or understand it in some way. And then whether or not we quote, approve, right? Remember the article I opened up with, we certainly have a lot of evidence, not just that China's currently banning a feminine presentations of males or men, but even the way we perform it here in the United States, we very much have this system of you're either this or that. And we have a lot of trouble when people say that doesn't work for them. So this is a, not a concept I came up with. In fact, I actually brought the book with me today. It's got a scary title. Most people are like, I don't know, it's called "Read My Lips, it's Sexual Subversion And The End of Gender." Okay, so I don't wanna frighten you too much this morning. What I love about this, Riki Anne Wilchins wrote this whole book in 1997. And by the way folks, I actually think it's brilliant. I think it's brilliant in 97 and I think it's brilliant now because what she does so well is she articulate this gender regime idea. So she basically puts into language, something that we all experience for the most part day in and day out, which is there's this whole two part system, binary system of gender and there's an immutable assumption, meaning it can't change, right? It is just sort of like inborn, can't change. And the gender regime is this. We get these boxes, you go in a box, you don't sit in the middle. So that culture that had a third gender, that doesn't work in the gender regime. That you don't choose, we put you there and you don't change. And the fact that we've kind of lived in this system is part of the real reason I could point to as a clinician and say, why is there distress for people for whom this doesn't fit? Because we've really articulated it in such a way that we're suggesting to you, you can't move. Like if you move, you're like violating the system.
Well, that doesn't feel comfortable.
How does that get told to people? It gets shown to us in every way you can imagine. When I asked you earlier, how do you know your gender? A lot of you commented people have told me, maybe I know it based on the roles I've performed. It's something that gets regulated by the culture in which we live. So one of the most common things I can think of is when, you know, again, when kids are small, very frequently when they're small, they might try to engage in some sort of activity. So let's say we have a child that everybody assumes is a girl. Okay, maybe I'm gonna use the conflation. This child's assigned female at birth. So this is the language I use versus saying biologically female. So if you're kind of like, what does that mean, Sarah? I'm saying that the female designation is assigned to the child based on physicality usually, based on presence of genitalia and body parts. So an assigned female at birth child that we assume is a girl, because we like to just kind of assume our way up the tree, sex, gender, all follows very nicely,
wants to play football
on a team that's mostly occupied by boys or is occupied by only boys. So what's interesting about this is very commonly what'll happen, so small child might say something like when I grow up, I'm gonna be in the NFL, to which the children around that child usually say, well, you can't do that, you're a girl. And only boys play in the NFL. In fact, it's not even usually children. It's often adults. Oh, that's nice. But you can play something else because boys and men play football. You can play soccer or something else. This is what I mean by the gender regime. It's actually a regulation, it's like a self-regulating kind of system because the culture will actually tell people the rules over time. So I gave you that as an example in part, because that little child who wanted to play in the NFL just happened to be me. So I thought that was a dandy goal. I liked sports. I liked playing football. And I thought, when I grow up, that's what I'm gonna do. Now, I wouldn't feel that way today. Something's changed over time, but I can tell you, I certainly heard that pushback over and over again. It didn't matter if I was the best quarterback on the playground I was told that that wasn't my role. Okay. So I like to put this a little differently. I think boxes is sometimes a little too friendly. So I renamed these cages and I gave you this image just so you really can picture what I'm talking about. That when you are placed somewhere that you just don't fit or that you need more room, it's painful. So I often talk about, you know, the gender system. So we have these two boxes, I call them cages and all of us, this is where people are usually like, hold up, Sarah. But all of us are in one. Remember going back to those earlier slides, I said, this is the gender regime, it applies to us all. It's a system. So we're all in it but if you feel comfortable in your gender and it was told to you, and you're like, I've never questioned it. I had trouble answering your question earlier, Sarah, chances are you're in the middle of your cage. You probably don't even notice that there's restriction. You may not even notice there's bars because you're not trying to go anywhere. You're not trying to flex out of that space. That space fits. So you're like, I'm good. I can twirl around in this space. It's got all the room in the world and the person for whom it doesn't work is absolutely probably pressed into those bars, trying desperately to get somewhere else. So very commonly when I'm working with youth, especially, but really frankly, any age range, this is what gets articulated to me, they're in pain, emotional pain, because nobody sees them as they see themselves. And people don't give them ample permission or even help facilitate how they can be more themselves. There's just a lot of correction. That's not for you. That's for you over here. Why are you dressing like that? You know, you're way too feminine. There's an assigned male kiddo who's maybe not identifying with being a boy. It's something where they start to feel that what we call minority stress. Okay. So basically I always say, this area of categorization is really our way of regulating homogeneity. Okay. Lots of multi-syllabic words, it's a little early. The reason why I basically call it regulated homogeneity is because this is the cultural component. This is why I said gender is a culturally relative variable because the culture is gonna dictate what it wants to be true so that basically, so we don't have to think about it. I mean, I'll actually suggest to you that most of us, this is not about being, you know, terrible, awful people who are trying to make everybody fit in a cage. That's really not what it's about at all. It just so happens that these little fancy meaning makers that sit atop our shoulders, our brains really like to reduce things down, to make them as simple and efficient as possible so that we can get on with the rest of the complexities of life. And I don't care if you introduced that in our earliest years as an evolved species or in contemporary time, we are always trying to do the same thing, simplify so we can get on with it. We have complex things to worry about. Back in the day it may have been basic survival. I need shelter. I need food. I need to stay away from beasts that could rip my head off. I got to keep my wits about me. So I can't sit around and contemplate my navel about what my gender is. Okay. Modern day times, contemporary times, most of us are not having the same kind of concerns as our long ago ancestors, I'm not suggesting to you that they're not people that have basic need concerns. There certainly are. But a lot of us have our basic needs met in a relative way. We've got basic shelter and basic resources to be able to feed ourselves, breathe air. And so we start to worry a lot about emotional things, about emotional comfort and discomfort. So the culture really likes to say, if we could just kind of bottom all that down to make it really simple. Well, then you can just get on with life and worry about other things. You know, worry about your job or worry about whether or not, you know, your kid's gonna pull out this year of high school. I mean, you can move on with it, but if you are somebody where this system doesn't fit, you're gonna get really occupied in this space. Okay. How are we doing on that question? I'd like to pop in here a little bit. Paula asks, so what if we're happy with our gender designation or assignment at birth, then are you saying we are still in a cage? And Luca responds, if you're happy with your gender, it probably won't feel like a cage. Precisely. I appreciate that there's almost a conversation going on there. So yes, I am exactly saying that. And actually you might be somebody who is like, maybe I'm more comfortable with the word box in that case, because cage just has that aversive sort of feeling to it. Like you're being restricted, but I'm gonna tell you, you are actually being restricted. You just aren't running into it because it probably isn't really bothering you. Right. And then, Heather, I'm sorry, let me just interject again. Heather says, if you expect everyone else to use your boxes, then maybe yes. Yeah. Well, yeah. So it's, it's something that I very frequently, I feel like I'm like part of the Dar Williams fan clubs. There's a folk artist for people that aren't familiar with Dar Williams, feel free to check out her music, whether you like folk music or not. But I always refer to this song that she wrote called "When I Was a Boy", because it talks about this very thing, but it does it in a storytelling kind of way. And she basically is telling this whole story about being a child growing up and liking to do things that culturally people consider more masculine or things that boys do. Rough and tumble play, riding your bike with your shirt off, getting dirty. Now most of us could probably sit here and be like, that's okay for any kid to do and I would agree with you. I'd be like, why do we have to make that a gendered thing? But we have, traditionally we have. You ever heard somebody say, Hey, do you have kids? And the person goes, yeah, I've got, you know, I've got a boy and a girl. My boy is all boy. And the other person knows exactly what they mean. There's been nothing else said. I mean, what does it mean to be all boy? We know culturally what we mean by that. We go, oh, so your kid's probably like a really active, rough and tumble. You see how I even did the body posturing? Like I know what the rules are. It doesn't mean that I accept those rules as being truth, but I know what they are. So yeah, when you're talking about like, what if I'm perfectly happy with my gender assignment, then I'm like, I'm super psyched for you. And I mean that. Like, it feels good to feel like you have congruence and that you're seeing the way you see yourself and it fits and you don't have to struggle in that area. But you're all around you, there's clues and cues that are suggesting to you that you're in a certain box, but your box fits. So later we talk about that, it's called cisgender. It means same side, congruent. So CIS gender. Okay. I see a raised hand.
All right, let's get Josie on.
I'll ask you to unmute, click the blue button. Okay. Can you hear me? Yes. I just have a question because as you talk about throwing the ball against the world, which I love and how it responds, I'm just like digesting because my new little nibbling who is the most physical, active, aggressive, like, absolutely like embodied masculine, little human has been saying now persistently, consistently age three, four, five and now six. Why do people think I'm a boy? Why do people think I'm a boy when I'm a girl? I'm a girl. I wanna be pretty. I wanna have babies. I, you know, so, so girl and yet doesn't match any of, I mean, even my very, very open, very, I mean, still white, cis-gender husband is like, what, Miranda's a girl? You know, we're just having, like, it's just an instinct thing where the way that Miranda's throwing the ball, you'd think it would reflect back to her but it's not, and she's like, but I'm a girl. And it's hard to really kind of scream it even within a really accepting family. And I guess just struggling with that layer and especially how to interact with Miranda, where I allow her to still be flexible when the walls still feel not right to her. Does that question make sense? It does make sense. I mean, I think what you're doing, I mean, you're really articulating exactly kind of what I'm trying to sort of articulate myself, which is, it's so tricky when we have, we have descriptive words, so you used that word masculine and again, masculine and feminine. These are descriptive words that we use. They are culturally relative. Masculinity looks different in, you know, here in Colorado than it even does across another state, much less another country or another culture of origin. So they're descriptive words. But within our culture, we kind of know what they mean. And we usually then assign them to a gender, right? So masculine goes with boy, it goes with man, it goes with maleness. So we sort of lump all those together. And your child is exhibiting what we culturally would understand as masculine type behavior, right? Because we've decided that that physical behavior is somehow something masculine, but we went further, we said it belongs to boys. So I wish sometimes I had like this magic whiteboard behind me and I would start drawing just lines and show you how the web starts forming because we've done it so long and we did it so fast that most of us haven't untangled it down to this level. And I'll offer to you all of you that some of you may be like terribly frustrated that I'm like, we gotta bring it down to the minutia. And you're like, this is mind boggling and also confusing. And I'm not sure what you're talking about Sarah. And do we have to see it this way? And I'm not gonna say you have to see it this way. But if you want to understand the complexities of how people determine who they are internally, getting it down to the functional parts will help you be flexible. So Josie, what you're explaining it would confound a lot of people, right? They would see the gender expression, masculine movement, you know, physical, physical, physical, you know, all boy, right? And then your child is saying something that doesn't match. And so people around your child are probably going, what? Like, you're probably going, what? Not because you don't care for your child, but because it's not the way we're taught, it doesn't make sense to us. Now I will say, you know, we're gonna get into this when we talk about development and gender identity and so forth. Development matters, you know, where your child is in the understanding of like how much complex thought kids can have about things at different ages. So what they say and what they're experiencing and feeling is sometimes hard for us to know the full breadth of it because they have a certain limitation to their skillset until they build abstract thinking and so on. So we're kind of doing a stay tuned while trying to make usually the way we promote this is we say, and I don't mean promote a gender, but promote gender expansive affirmation is we say, let's let this kiddo figure out who they are and tell us, we need to make room for that. Because if I start just making my cage walls more reinforced and I put more of them up and I'm like, no, no, no, you're a boy, see. I'm gonna tell you, we already have some research on this. This is not me guessing at it. This has been a path we traveled. We tried to see if we couldn't get kids to just conform when they started showing us something that didn't make sense to us and I can tell you by and large what they did is they started not looking so good. What do I mean by that? I mean, some kids stopped playing. They stopped playing, they got quiet, they stopped talking. They looked withdrawn. This is research that was done phenomenologically because there was a time period in psychology where we really thought we mostly reared gender. So, you know, Josie, I will say, I think we'll have more to say about all of these things as we go through the course, that'll help you kind of keep thinking about it will help, you know, your husband keep thinking about it. And I will tell you, by the way, I tell folks this all the time, I'm not a future predictor. Like I don't make future predictions about where children are going to end up. I don't tell parents, this is where your child is going. I do not have that information, but what I can do is point to what we have learned about how gender develops in little, you know, young people and how it can continue to develop over time that gives us some clues and cues about how to help that young person have the happiest life they can have. So, cool. Yeah. I gotta do. Happy lives we like, right. That's what we're here for. I always say my only goal, happy, healthy. Happy, healthy kids. And just about, I've never had a caregiver in my office ever say, no, I don't have the same goal. We always have the same goal. We just don't always have the same ideas about how to get there. That's so helpful. Thank you so much. My pleasure. I like how we got a little laughter in the background there too, that was lovely. So this is where I think within I'm gonna get into the, into the weeds of what I was talking about. Oh, there's the little one. There we go. I like that hat. Sorry, I don't know if people can see, Josie's got a little young one and so I get excited. So let's talk about where we're going with sex and gender and gender expression and gender identity and so on. This is where things get, this is where we got confused. So what we basically do, I wanna just, we're gonna leave gender behind for just a moment. We're just gonna talk about sex or biologic sex. So what is it? Well so I'm not a medical doctor and I'm not a biologist, but I sure did love it all the way through college, thought I was going to be a medical doctor, turns out I'm squeamish. Psychology is great for me. This is basically a breakdown of what is biological sex or what we call biological sex. It's primarily in a cultural way, it is primarily primary sex characteristics. What do I mean by that? I mean that most of the time when we decide the sex of an infant, we're only looking at that infant's genitals. Truly. I've done this before, where I've said differently when we're taking pictures, when infants are in utero, we're looking for whether or not we see a penis, is it there or not there? So the assumption is, if it's not there, then there's probably a vagina and that's a female child. That is how we're doing it. Unless you are having blood tests done on the fetus to determine the chromosomes. Okay, that's another aspect of biological sex. Our biological sex is actually made up of three parts. We have primary sex characteristics, structures of our body. We have a chromosomal arrangement. So commonly people think of this as there's two sex chromosomes. Usually you have an X, X for female and X, Y for male. I'm gonna tell you there's a whole another world out there where we have sex chromosomes, sometimes there are three. People can have an X and X and a Y. And that's also about biological sex. Sometimes folks refer to that as an inner sex presentation. It's not discreetly male or female, the way we think of it. And then hormones, another way we think of how do we know our sex? So developmentally, we kind of stay tuned with human beings and generally the way we do things, as long as things are going along swimmingly, we tend not to investigate. So I've often said to people, do you have all this information about yourself at your fingertips right now? Chances are all of have got the first one. You probably have a grip on your primary sex characteristics. Some of you may have had chromosomal testing at some point in your life, and you might know what your sex chromosomes look like. Many of you probably don't. And your hormones, you probably have an idea of what basically is happening in your body based on what happened during your puberty. But you may or may not know the exact levels. How much relative testosterone do you have in your body? How much relative estrogen, because we all have the various sex chromosomes in our bodies at different proportions. So what are we actually talking about with this? What I'd offer you is, we're often talking about just the one category. We just do that genitalia observation. And we decide from there, who we're raising. Does that make sense with folks?
So this is my simple slide.
This is usually my slide where I'm like this one, I call it a simple slide 'cause there's not a lot on it, but to be honest, if some of you were like, I'm gonna need some time to sit with this. I wouldn't blame you. This system that I'm talking about, that I just keep talking about, until you're like stop talking about it, it's been absolutely reified for us. It has been repeated and reinforced and reinforced and it's reinforced at every turn. So it is the way our culture often understands things is we think that sex and gender go together. They're one in the same. Now they're, you know, conceptually, they are not, which is why I've been explaining like sex is about some of these biologic properties. And gender is largely about these different areas that have some kind of cultural component, some sort of psychological sense of self and some part of basically taking ourselves into the world and showing our gender to others through gender expression. So they're not the same thing, but we do put them together a lot. And it won't take, it won't be hard for you to see this put together all the time, all over the place. In fact, that's what I'd invite you to do, especially after we get done today is really take the lenses off and start really paying attention to where all the gender cues are in day-to-day life. It's been interesting of course during COVID because some people, their, you know, just general movements in space were pretty limited. But if you're even so much as going to a grocery store, I'm like, there's plenty of information there. Grocery store, Big Box store, Target, Walmart, doesn't matter where, I guarantee you if you really start looking for it, you're gonna see gender things everywhere, just everywhere.
So this is a case I put it up
on the screen here with you all, because I like to basically just mention it at least briefly, and I'm gonna grab another book here. I've got, this actually, this whole case called "The John Joan Case" was detailed in a book called "As Nature Made Him". So it was the boy who was raised as a girl. It's an entire story of these identical male twins born in Canada. And what kind of occurred that we got some information that we couldn't have gotten any other way than something terrible happening, and then finding out where we go from there. Said differently, the terrible thing that happened was routine circumcision, one of the circumcisions did not go well and most of the penis on the infant was completely ablated. So they were using a Katari knife and somebody did not do a good job. Now we go back to that earlier slide, remember when we're talking about primary sex characteristics being sort of our map, our guide for deciding what's the gender and going from there, we're talking about a child now who is assigned male at birth, who no longer has a functional, a functional penis. So at a young young age, you had a very young couple raising these children, obviously very distressed and basically turned to the experts and said, what are we gonna do? And at the time in the 1960s, the idea was, well, gender is reared. That's the prevailing thought. So don't worry. We will basically manipulate the biology piece and then rear the gender. So we'll have you raise that child as a girl and we will, over time, we'll do some surgical procedures to basically, you know, certainly make it so that the child can urinate and has a functional, you know, has functional genitalia. But over time we'll make that child seem more female and at puberty, we're gonna, you know, we're gonna block the testosterone that's gonna start surging and we're gonna add estrogen. We're gonna have you raise your child as a girl. And if we march along like this, we should be fine. Now, folks, I can't imagine being a young couple, who's new parents to two children and something happens it's terrible. And they're trying to figure out what to do. And experts are saying, this is what you do. When we were in precarious positions as human beings and an expert, somebody who brings expertise and occupies that space comes into the scene, we're bound to listen. The more anxious we are, the more likely we are to listen. So these parents said, that's what we'll do. Now, in science, the perfect, like the reason I call it the perfect test case. This is what people longed for, identical twins. So we have identical genetics. That means we have a subject and the control, it's perfect. Didn't happen on purpose. But essentially John Money inherited this case and John Money was working in this area extensively. And what they did is they followed the kids over time. So they referred to, so in the case, they called it John Joan, really David Reimer was the child that they made, quote Joan. And they actually called David Brenda growing up. And what happened was that over time, Brenda never felt like this was appropriate. Something always felt wrong, but didn't know what it was. Cause nobody told the child and nobody told the child's sibling. And so as they started reaching maturity, at some point, they figured this whole thing out. And at that point, David stops the hormones and did his very best to live as a man. Just, you know, obviously certain things had been done over time surgically, but David did his very best to live as a man and you can see some pictures here of David over time. Unfortunately, both of these siblings are deceased. The sibling who was not the one being raised as a girl developed schizophrenia. And both of them took their own lives. It's not a happy, it's not a happy tale. And it was the only case that a lot of people needed to realize it's not that simple. We don't just rear who somebody is. People have an internal sense of self that even if we're doing everything to suggest to them otherwise it will persevere and prevail because it is strong. It is the thing that says something's wrong. So I bring this case up, not because it's the be all end all, but it starts to give us more and more information about why it might be that the people with whom we work, who are telling us that their internal sense of self is not quote matching with what people tell them. We need to listen. There's something there. How are we doing Felix on questions?
Yeah.
Just a couple of people processing that tough story. It's very difficult. And because I just really evidently wanna make you melancholy this morning, I'm gonna also talk to you a little bit about Caster Semenya. Now, honestly, I feel like I should be able to put up Caster's name and have something really celebratory to say. Caster is a South African sprinter, an amazing athlete. Has broken world records. I mean, just absolutely phenomenal athlete. And what happened was that folks were paying attention to this and watching her break these records by huge margins and, you know, in sport, especially Olympic sport, there's always a lot of suspicion around whether people are doping using performance enhancing drugs. Well, with Caster, people started saying, Caster looks manish. I mean, these are actual like quotes. She's too masculine. She's manish. There was a whole onion article spoof. So we know onion is like the spoof publication that was really tearing her apart around her masculine presentation. But what it did was it led to people investigating Caster. They decided that there was just no way that she could be breaking all these records as a female or as a woman in the way that they understood it. And her mother said, I raised her. I know she's a woman. Like, what do you need? Remember that slide? First thing we look at, we look at parts. We look at bits, we look at somebody's body. Well Caster's mom was like, who better to know that than me? Well, what they did is they subjected her essentially to what they called, they called it gender testing. Here's the weird thing folks is we've got two categories in sport, at least the way things exist now. We've got men's categories and women's categories, or boys and girls, unless you're playing coed. And basically people were like, I'm just not convinced she's in the right category because I think she just looks too masculine. And so they basically subjected her to chromosomal testing. And honestly, they kept a lot of this. They tried to keep it out of the media. A lot of it leaked to the media and the bottom line was that people basically discovered that she may have higher levels of androgen in her body than what we would say the typical female might have. Now I'd offer to you this is a person who was not doping. This was not somebody that was adding androgens to her body. Her body naturally produced these levels of androgens. So what the IOC usually does is says, you need to be below a certain range to compete in a certain category. So athletes that have higher levels of androgen and they are assigned female athletes who are competing as women are to suppress their levels until they reach a quote normative level. I don't know where we draw the line. This is just naturally occurring variation in her body? So why do I bring that up? Because this has a lot to do with where sex and gender get thrown together for a variety of reasons and you know, sport, that's something we created as humans. We created as a cultural variable, but it is a strong one, especially in gender land and especially for youth. There's a lot of talk going on right now as people are learning about whether or not it's appropriate, that we have children that have different biology playing on the same team when it's not a coed team. If you have a girl's soccer team and you have a child who's assigned male at birth, but is telling you my identity, I'm a girl. And I want to be able to participate with my gender in sport, you've got parents crying foul and saying, that's not fair. There's a lot going on. So especially in therapy, we need to understand what's happening out in the bigger world, because we're gonna interface with this, working with youth and families and trying to help people navigate. So very basically this is kind of how things go. We basically observe sex. We decide what it is on that observation. We assign the gender immediately, it's a boy, it's a girl. And then we go into nurture, teach and socialized mode. And then we expect what I told you was cis-gender outcome, same side or gender congruent. Except you can see my caveat, gender diversity exists. So I'm gonna pause for a minute and just see if there's questions on that piece before I kind of blow the binary system up.
Seems like a little bit of response
and pushback on Caster's story.
Do they do that with men?
Yeah, you know, that's, I'm actually glad you said that you mentioned whoever had put, like, do they do that with men? Do you think, I mean, I'll bounce it back to you. Has anyone ever heard of a case where somebody looked at an athlete and said that person who was assigned male at birth and competing as a man is too feminine. We better check that out because it may not be fair.
I suspect not
because they expect men's categories to have higher, more outstanding performance. So here's where I wish, you know, if I were a really great statistician, I would go ahead and give you two bell curves, right? I'd give you a distribution of athletic performance. And what you would see is there's an overlap between assigned female people and assigned male people. In other words, not every assigned male person is a more profound athlete than every assigned female person. But there is a modal difference where, I mean, we can see this in elite athletics. Generally speaking, I grew up a swimmer and generally speaking, the boys that swam the people that were the elite swimmers were faster than the elite girl swimmers by some margin. But somewhere in the middle there girls outperformed boys and boys sometimes outperformed girls and it was more of a mismatch. So there's somewhere where it's like, there's a separation at some point, but it's not the whole of the curve. So that's why there's a lot to think about. Do we regulate it at elite levels? Because there seems to be statistical difference. What do we do at youth levels? As I told you, there are plenty of parents and coaches that are crying, foul. What do we do? How do you advise? When frankly I'm gonna tell you, all children really want is to be able to participate meaningfully in a way that they feel good about. So I will tell you you're gonna get my bias every time I'm a mental health worker. I'm gonna be in favor of that. More participation for more kids. Yeah. And a couple of people mentioned for Caster and for themselves that a polycystic ovary syndrome and that... Yeah. PSOS. It's just how their body is. It's natural. That's right. So there's a, there, believe me, if you want a rich area where there's a lot of controversy, but there's also just a lot of good thinking going on and then there's just a lot of everything. Get into the variation on biological sex. We really like the idea that there's just males and females in these really discreet ways in ways we expect. And the truth is there are plenty of people born at a very high rate who show some sort of diversity in their biological sex, whether that's the structure of their genitalia and reproductive organs, whether that's their chromosomes or whether that's their presenting levels of hormones. And there are things like PSOS where people just have higher androgen levels as females. So where do we start saying you don't fit here or you have to do this, or we need to suppress your hormones. Or, these are cultural variables, right? This is where the gender piece comes into play. And I'm using sport as just one example. Okay. Okay. Thank you. You bet. So I'm gonna kind of then break into sort of very specific language. So the word transgender, and we'll spend some more time on this also in the next module, because we'll talk more about terminology, but I wanna just start by saying, this is another kind of laying the groundwork. So the word transgender literally means across gender and people will nowadays say, this is an umbrella term for anybody who doesn't feel like they sort of belong in the binary system of gender as assigned. So all that stuff I've been just beating the drum about basically anyone who feels like that system doesn't work for them as it is, may embody the term transgender, but they may not. So I sometimes offer to you that, you know, as a clinician, I might think to myself, descriptively that somebody fits under a transgender definition, but they may not use that word to identify themselves. So I basically make sure I only use language with people they use for themselves. And I don't tell them they are something, unless they've told me that's what's accurate. So I would not tell a client, oh, well, you just described to me as transgender. You're transgender. I might say something like, you know what you described reminds me a lot of a transgender experience. In other words, I'm not assigning this to you. I'm telling you about the phenomenon of feeling outside of a system that just doesn't fit. Okay. Then we break it down further. There is binary being transgender and there is non-binary being transgender. So binary, we've kind of been talking about this male, female, men, women, boys, girls. If we're talking about a binary transgender experience, we're literally talking about going across binary categories. So said more simply, assigned female at birth child who might identify as a boy, who is a boy in their self concept. We wouldn't have thought it 'cause we assign them a sex that was female. We assumed they were a girl. They say, nope, I'm over here, but it's the still using the two categories. Okay. And there's actually a lot of adults that will come in this and young adults that are saying, I don't want my identity to get washed out in gender diversity because I am a binary trans person and that is important to me. And they might say to you, I don't use the word transgender because I just am my gender. I may have been assigned male when I was born, but I am a woman. Okay. That's still a binary system of gender. And people can feel comfortable in the system. They just might not feel comfortable in the category they were originally given. Whereas a nonbinary sense of gender says exactly that, don't try to tell me there's only two categories. I do not feel like either of those is necessarily appropriate for me or I combine them and I have some way of thinking of them together or a combination of each, but essentially letting you know, I'm not subscribing to that system. And it doesn't matter folks, what they quote, look like. It doesn't matter if your brain says I see a binary gender, it matters what they tell you about who they are. That's why gender identity is such an important thing to investigate because it's internal and may or may not be reflected in gender expression. A little bit of clarification. Tory says they personally feel gender identity and expression as a spectrum. It can ebb and flow freely. Would you say this is accurate, harmful, helpful? I think it's absolutely one aspect of gender. So what you described to me, I would use that term of like almost a gender fluidity, right? The idea that there can be movement. And there are plenty of folks who will also tell you that they use that term to identify themselves gender fluid. They're like, do not try to pigeonhole me anywhere. Some days my internal sense of self is more masculine or feminine or androgynous. And I will even rock my gender expression to match. So one day I'm gonna look really feminine. The next day, I might look to you really masculine or some kind of performance combination. This is one, by the way folks, this will confound your parents and guardians and caregivers and teachers that are trying to understand. When they see the gender expression they go, my child came out as transgender. And I, but, but and they'll say, you know, assigned female birth child, but she is dressing so feminine and she told me that she's a demiboy. I don't even know what a demiboy is. And they'll be like really confused about it. And they'll be like, and she's so feminine, she's wearing dresses and makeup. And like, I just don't get it. But she's been talking about hormone therapy. So that's really freaking me out. This is where we come in. Is being able to say, okay, I mean, I will tell you the number one thing you'll do with parents is take the anxiety down, which is why you're here I hope. Because everybody here was like, yep, I get nervous. Yes, yes, yes. This morning. That's why you're here. We're gonna get you nervous because you're gonna have really nervous people that you're working with because they're concerned, they love their child. They want the best thing for their child, but they don't know what to do. They're confused. You're gonna be that anchor to go, let's start taking these pieces apart a little bit to understand it in all its complexity, that your child's gender expression could be anything. And what they're telling you about their identity is good information. And that expression may or may not align the way you think it should. And that makes it really tricky. Yeah. Yeah. I see a lot of gratitude and response in this, and just to thank you for addressing this. Clients who identify as binary transgender feel like identifying as non-binary trans genders prefer binary transgender folks feel like they're being judged for living in itself. Yes. Yes. And these are all experiences of gender. It's the same thing as when somebody said earlier, what if I feel great in my assigned gender? And I really sincerely authentically mean I'm really glad for you. Like I like people being happy. It's great stuff. It's what I'm about. I'd like to put myself out of business, if at all possible, you know, just have folks take care of the struggles of life and get on with it. But that's, it's giving people enough room that all of these kinds of ways of identifying are legitimate. They're part of a human experience. And we just haven't had good language. And because our culture has basically subscribed to a system we've been very stuck there. Yeah. Oh, you said language, and I see the discussion around the word they. How can you be they? They is plural, they say. Oh, you're gonna, to that I'm gonna say there is a bonus in this series all about pronouns and you are gonna so dig that and we'll talk more about that. I'm not gonna talk about it a ton today. I actually do have something coming up in just a minute that is at least gonna refer to they pronouns. But yeah, all of it, all of it folks, right? You're like, yeah, the pronouns, everything like, it's all coming at me so fast, which is why we're constantly scratching our heads and going, I am having a hard time keeping up and then I don't feel comfortable. And then I don't wanna see people who have diverse identities because I'm worried I'm gonna do a bad job. Which is why I'm glad you're here. So I didn't wanna lose the fact that this is a word that I think a lot of people, you know, I have a tendency to blaze by it. And I wanna just spend a moment on it because it's also in gender land. Sometimes we get a little lost in only talking about folks who have what we call gender diverse identities or what some people would consider minority gender identities. The reality is all of these genders exist and cis-gender, or what people were describing earlier, if I was given a gender, I was given a category. I was given a box and it fits. Then I'm gonna tell you you're cis-gender or you're basically feeling like your gender identity corresponds with the sexy we're assigned and you feel comfortable. That whole system we've been talking about all morning, it all works for you. Okay. So you'll hear people talk about this as a privileged identity. In other words, that you don't have to think about it so that when you go to the bathroom, you don't think twice about which one you're walking into. You don't worry about who's in there because you know everybody will see you exactly as representing the sign on the door. So you don't even think about it. All you think about is I hope it's clean. I wanna get in and get out, hope there's still soap and toilet paper. That's what you're worried about. The person who does not feel like all of that is aligning neatly spends a lot of time thinking about bathrooms. A lot of time and locker rooms and gendered spaces. And every time at school, they make a girl's line and a boys line. This is the world. This is where we run into the problem. And this is why I spend an entire module talking about the gender regime, because there's a lot of things that are happening in our culture that aren't doing any favors to not only gender diverse people, but frankly, to all of us, because it constrains the way we see human diversity. So I always just offer. If you are feeling like all your gender stuff works great. There's a label for you, you are cis-gender. You are not quote normal. You are not, you know, standard. You are cisgender. And then we've got the world of lots and lots and lots of terms. One of the reasons I don't spend any time teaching you every term is because do you see this list? If I backed up even five years, some of these terms wouldn't be on it. And other terms might be on it. The language is moving rapidly and it's moving because the youth are the drivers of the language. So the generations that are coming are the ones coming up with this language, not scientists, not psychologists like me, not the people that write papers, it's coming from our culture. And the generations that are coming up are pushing. And they're not gonna stop folks. This is part of the reason why I've told people there's an ethical imperative here that we all get competent because gender is part of human identity. It's not a specialty. So if folks were able to tune into a webinar I did last week, that was the entire summary of that webinar was that this is not something where we can afford to say, oh, not me, I don't do that. Somebody else can do it. Now, I did have some folks comment during that webinar. It was really great. They were like, you know, I, I hear you. And I also hear you saying there's some special things I need to know. And I will say, yes, there are some things you need to know, but you can't treat it like a specialty, like substance abuse disorders. And even that folks, I mean, so many people are affected by so many things, but this is human identity. You can't opt out or you can't say, I only treat people who fit into a system of gender because ethically it just doesn't work. It's not good practice and it's not gonna help our human beings. So I got a lot of questions and things from people, people were very gracious. I got a lot of really nice emails, too, that I loved. There were, you know, very complimentary, but a lot of people were like, can you treat all the people that are calling me and treat them across state lines and do this? And I'm like, you know, the point I want to make is the folks that are asking me that question. I'm like, no, no, you're the person they're looking for. And we're gonna get you up to speed so you can take care of it. So this is just a graph. This was just within the last year or two about asking young people their identities. And you still had a majority of people talking about binary labels of identity. But then we got into gender queer, gender non-conforming, people that chose multiple identities, they checked more than one box, transgender, binary men and woman, and then different gender identity. That was a 3% at that time, I guarantee you this is growing and off it went into all these terms. So, big world out there. So this is where, does non-binary equal they. This is actually a new slide. I added it this morning 'cause I thought this feels important. So put simply folks, no. So you may have noticed earlier, I was talking to you about how brains work and what our brain wants to do
and our brain really wants to reduce down.
So part of what I see happening now is that people are trying to get prescriptive about gender identities and pronouns. So people are going, okay, so binary people go with he and she, non-binary people all use they. And I'm like, no. Remember, don't conflate things that are not necessarily related. You may find people that talk to you and say, I have a non-binary gender identity I use they, them pronouns. Those are my pronouns. There may be a lot of people who tell you that, but do not assume that just because someone has a nonbinary identity, that these are their pronouns. They may use other pronouns. It might be the ones we're really familiar with like she and he and him and her. It may be what we also refer to as sort of like, I mean, newer pronouns, people call them neo pronouns, but there's other pronouns that people do use things like Ze, either spelled with a Z and an E or an X and an E. There's a lot of different kinds of Neo pronouns that people also use. It just so happens our culture is not in a place at this time of really seeing all those pronouns. But we have gotten really kind of wise to the fact that they, them, theirs are showing up for single people. So I'm pretty much putting this slide in as a teaser because we're gonna spend more time on this another time, but I just wanted to make sure that as we're going along, pay attention to when your brain really, really wants to make rules and get prescriptive. And the reason it's doing that is 'cause it wants to make it simpler for you so you can understand and move on to thinking about other things. Okay. So I'm not gonna basically spend tons and tons of time on some of this material that you're gonna see, you know, in depth in the pre-recorded module, but you know, pink and blue, these are more kinds of indications of the way our system of gender works. I do always like to ask folks, I mean, have you noticed, anybody notice that some of the stores, I mean, Target was one of them, decided to take down their signs in the toy aisles. They were catching on that people were like, oh, I don't like that you've labeled aisles, like girls toys and boys toys, but they didn't move any of the toys. They just left them where they were. So they basically looked exactly the same they just took down the signs and it was just kind of interesting 'cause it's still saying, and it makes sense from a marketing perspective that if you're looking for a doll, they want all the dolls on one aisle, but they don't actually package dolls for basically more masculine presenting people. It's interesting. When you go down the aisle, it's always just pinked up the wazoo, no matter what doll it is, because we don't call masculine dolls dolls, we call them action figures. You see the gendered nature of everything. And yet what are they? Pieces of plastic, maybe some polyester hair, something to play with.
Comments or thoughts about the world of pink and blue,
'cause this is something I just run through a few things about gender reveal parties. Lately these have been hitting the news mainly because people have been using exploding things and starting forest fires and people are getting hurt, trying to celebrate the gender of people. I see a hand up, I'm gonna pause there and see if we can tune in. Hi, so I'm not sure how to ask the question, but yeah so gender reveals, it's always pink and blue, right? So, when you have a child, like how should someone dressed the child I guess? When they are a baby, they're unable to say, oh, I wanna wear these clothes or those clothes, like what would be the, I guess, best way to go about it without putting them into the pink box or the blue box? So thank you for asking that. And I actually, this is, I often joke it. You know, friends of mine will be like, you must be like the ultimate party pooper. Like, does anybody even invite you to a gender reveal party? And I'm like, actually they do. And we have interesting conversations on the side before I get there, they're usually my friends, right. Bottom line is, I make the point in the module prerecorded too. It's exciting when you're welcoming a new family member. It's nerve-wracking, it's exciting, your nervous system's just all aflush. And it's fun to get everybody on board with you excited about the new little one coming. We so happen to pick gender as our most salient category when in reality, we could just be really excited we're having a baby, right. We could just be super pumped and just everything could be themed baby without all the pink and blue. But when they're little and you're just trying to get them dressed. I mean, I will say I'm pretty functional and if you go back in history, they used to just put these white gowns on babies basically to just cover them up, right. And then you could bleach them. So you just throw everything in with bleach. So they didn't really decorate their kids very much. They just kinda threw them in these like things they could crawl in if they needed to, they couldn't really get into much trouble, but there's a lot of cute clothes out there. And I'm also not gonna shame anybody for getting excited and also being like, I wanna dress my baby in the cutest stuff I've ever seen. I think what I would reflect to people is just remember who it's about. It's actually about you because at that stage, you know, infant development, there ain't a whole lot going on there folks, not a lot of self-concepts. For a while your baby doesn't even know they're a separate organisms. They really don't. They're pretty much dialed into am I cold, am I hungry, do I have to go to the bathroom? Like am I comfortable or uncomfortable? Am I with my safe, warm person or not? They're basically sensory creatures. So it's at the point at which a child starts to dial in that I would suggest you're gonna just wanna kind of keep things, I would hope flexible. I've had folks ask me the question before, do you support the folks that try to raise their kids with no gender so that they can have a tabula rasa and just choose the gender when the time comes. And I would offer to you that I don't think that really prepares kids very well for the world as it currently exists. And that's part of the challenge is the best we can do when we're raising human beings is prepare them for the world they're in while trying to change the world to where we would like to see it be. But you kind of need both skill sets. You have to understand there is a gender regime while you're understanding that there's movement and evolution and it's not the only way to be. So to answer your question, Melanie, is like kind of a non-answer right? So I don't have a recommendation for folks. 'Cause I don't think people are damaging children by dressing them in cute outfits, whether they're pink, blue, purple, mint green and yellow. I really don't mind much of anything 'cause your child's gonna let you know who they are if you allow them to. And if you give them space, they'll go ahead and perform that for you. And sometimes that looks like some pretty wild outfit. So then you just have to have a conversation about whether that outfit works for where you're going. So people sometimes are like, well, should I let my kid wear the Halloween costume every day of the week to school? And I'm like, well, no, if you think that's not a good outfit for school and it doesn't work for playing on the playground, let's not do that. So other images, there's actually a gender reveal, a cabbage pouch doll. My friends are so good to me that I actually didn't even take this picture. My friends saw it in the store and said, I thought you'd enjoy this.
So little self exposure briefly as we're getting to the end.
So this is me
a long time ago.
I had a lot of hair and it actually looks reasonably similar to the way it is now. I feel like I'm just going back in time, just restyling. But the basic idea is I was born way early in the morning, my poor parents, in 1977. And that's the first thing they declared. It's a girl back in the day we didn't have the pictures. And I asked you, wait, what's a girl? After everything we've talked about today. Some images of me kind of through some years. Now, as just a matter of, I use myself in context a lot because I'm sort of an androgynous individual. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this because this is the kid I was. I was wearing my brother's, Aaron's, sweatshirt because, well, I liked quote boy things. And that's how I understood them because people kept telling me the things you like are things boys like, but you may also notice I was just a really expressive child, like the outfit in the bottom corner I probably just put that on, marched downstairs and unassumingly walked around like it was normal waiting to see what people would do. The picture in the top, I'm wearing spaceship pajamas and I was given a miss piggy kind of embroidered ice skating sweatshirt from a grandparent. I'd like you to dial into that facial expression. That's not happy, because I knew someone would make me wear it. Put it on your grandma wants to see you in that. Then this happened. I call this the gender conformity years. So I'm gonna offer to you that I live in gender land just like all of you do. And I knew what the rules were and I thought I better try them out. So I got a nice big perm, I tried to work it. I said, look out project runway. That is a shimmery topless shoulder pads, keep in mind I was born in 1977 and on we go, I was a swimmer. I was a debutante. I tried it all. I can Kirksey and pull off a dress just like the best of them. But that's gender expression folks. For me, it's almost like wearing a costume, but this is how I felt most reasonable to be honest was in my swim gear. It's kind of like second skin. This is my mom. This is like my last day of college competing. And I went on, graduated. The hair got shorter and shorter.
I found it interesting 'cause this was,
I got an opportunity to go to Kenya and how people would interact with me based on my gender expression in cultures where the gender valence is very different, was pretty fascinating. On the one hand, some people understood me very much as a woman and kind of made jokes about, Hey, would you like to be another one of my wives? And I thought that's a good one. On the other hand, people kind of didn't know what to do with me in some respects. I'm just a hopeless westerner as you can tell with the ball cap and the sleeveless shirt there. But effectively folks, I went through a process of figuring out who the heck am I?
There's a reason why I got into this work.
I could feel those bars and so forth even without being a transgender individual. And I started thinking, what is everybody else experiencing? And who's there to help. So it's the whole reason why I'm super psyched you all are here. I'm super psyched that people wanna learn, that you just wanna get, even if you're just here to think about this and expand your mind a little bit to think about it differently and then you come back to a center where you decide what works for you, but I can promise you that at the end of all this journey, you are gonna feel a lot less anxious 'cause you will have a lot more terminology, understanding and ways to conceptualize what are happening for not just gender diverse people, but anyone. These pictures I did take. Grocery store, even the antiperspirant aisle, you can tell which side is for who. But on the back, I think there's somewhere around 14% of that aluminum tri whatever, take your pick is all the same stuff, just smells different and it comes in a different color. So I wanna see if there's any kind of questions as we're wrapping up today. You'll also see this in the prerecorded material. This is my reminder at every turn that because I'm belaboring gender so much does not mean people do not have very multiplicitous, intersectional identities that matter, especially in gender also. The culture of origin, where you come from, where you're raised, how you're raised, what happens, your religious background, indigenous heritage, and so on will mutually influence everything. I'm gonna zip it and see where we are.
Wow, thank you very much, Sarah.
A lot of people are very excited for this information they got today and moving forward into the course.
If it's all right, I'll stop your share.
It's okay.
If you need me to stop it, I could stop it.
Oh, yeah, go ahead. Thank you There we go.
Thank you all. This has been great.

Thank you very much Sarah.
I'm so glad I'm here. I'm glad to have you here. I really, it really it's exciting to me that so many folks want to learn. I'm from Guatemala. We're in so much need of this, Thank you. Excellent. So glad you're here. Thank you. Oh, what was the final, what was the final thought? It was, when was the last time you tried something for the first time? It's my parting thought to walk out into the world and think, Hmm, I've been on autopilot around gender. What does it look like when I shift into gear? Wow.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much, everybody. So this recording will be posted within 48 hours, so you can rewatch and comment together, but also there's a forum on the membership site to discuss this with each other. And so I encourage you to take a look at that and chime in if you've got an opinion or a question or curiousness share it and we can dialogue about it. Thank you all so much. If you have any questions, please, if you have any questions after the call, please email us at support@therapywisdom.com. And bring it next week. We're back live again next week at the same time on Tuesday, and we'll be continuing the journey and you can carry over some of your questions if you have them, I'd be happy to take them then too. Alright, thank you all so much. Have a great week and we'll see you next week. Bye. (soft instrumental music)
Bonus Interview - Boundaries + Sex = Pleasure with Jami Lynn Bula
play-sharp-fill
 
(calming music)
Hi everybody.
I am so thrilled to introduce you to a dear friend and colleague of mine, Jami Lynn Bula who specializes in pleasure which is a really unique specialty,
really about sexuality and sexual pleasure
and help finding healthy pleasure in yourself and in your coupleship. And so for those of us who are here, who are therapists I think you have so much to offer and help people think through how boundaries actually make pleasure way more likely to happen. Oh yes, absolutely. And thank you for having me. I love talking about boundaries in sexuality because it's actually the thing that allows us to create the best sexual relationships we possibly can with other people. Yeah, okay. So slow down and say that again because I think that's not actually something that people talk about a whole lot in our culture about how boundaries are gonna bring more closeness and more pleasure to people. Absolutely. Blow that out. Absolutely, so the first gonna start with what made that click for me. I have been interested in sexuality and relationships as long as I can remember and I've always known I wanted to do therapy. And so whenever I started to like research and understand, okay, so what's going on with sexuality? The piece of research that actually made this click for me was about children. So there's a study from Germany where they were watching children play within a playground. And there was one playground that they would study where the children did not have a fence around them and what they found was that all the kids would stay really close to each other and they would not explore very much. And then there was another playground that had a fence and whenever they would track the kids movement they would go all over the place. They went every single area in the playground rather than staying in a little pocket together. And that made my mind go, oh when you know your boundaries sexually you have more space to play.
There's more room to get creative
and do new things with your partner that are exciting and fun because now, you know, okay, this is our safe space. We can play inside the safe area. These are all the boundaries and we can have as much juicy fun in here as possible. I love it. So if an individual comes in to you and is talking about issues that are coming up, do you wait for them to bring up boundary difficulties or are you pretty quick to jump in with boundaries? Because that is an important part of pleasure and exploration. Right, right. When I first start talking to people about sexuality in the back of my mind, I'm holding the reality that most of us are not exposed to really good sex ed. (laughs) I just had lots of thoughts go through about like in my home and school, it was not good. (laughs) I'm from Texas my public education sex ed was all about scaring the students. It was not about educating us or talking about pleasure and why everyone would want to have sex and why people were having sex. And instead it was just the, if you do anything sexual this bad thing will happen to you. So scare tactics, I don't actually think works. What works is healthy boundaries. And so whenever my client comes in the first thing I say is actually a boundary statement. I can sum up sexual wellness in six words. It is the balance between safety and pleasure. Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa say that again. Mm hmm, so I can sum up sexual wellness in six words. It is the balance between safety and pleasure. Wow, I'm just letting my body feel how true that statement is. Yeah, yeah. So when we're talking about the balance between safety and pleasure, when you're talking about the safety side, that's where the boundaries come in. Exactly, exactly. And I actually also think of pleasure as a boundary because if I'm listening to my body and my mind, and I'm following pleasure as this is not only my goal, but also like the direction I'm going to follow, it's my path, that's actually going to create boundaries too. I'm gonna follow what feels good to me. Yeah and I'm thinking about physical boundaries and how physical boundaries will show up in clients that I work with. And you and I have different areas of specialty 'cause I specialize in trauma and trauma recovery and you're specializing in pleasure. And so it feels like, oh, I I have a little bit of a pain focus. (laughs) Right? And you have more of a pleasure focus but I'm thinking about how true that is, so let's say I'm working with somebody who is having difficulty with sexual experiences with their partner because they have trauma in their past. Well, what's gonna feel good to them, what's gonna feel pleasurable to them is gonna be inside that safety zone. And so it's really, almost
like both of them tell you, it's like one side
tells you what your inner core needs your boundaries to be. And we can listen to that in our wisdom. Like the pleasure is the space that's gonna tell you what's right for you. And then the safety is gonna be established by executing those, doing practices that actually keep boundaries in place and that sort of thing. Yeah and also knowing the different aspects of safety. So when I think about safety and first I start with the individual and then I moved towards couples. So we can talk about the couple later, but individually safety looks like taking care of my mind and taking care of my body. So if I'm taking care of my mind first, am I following my values around sexuality? Am I being open and honest with myself about my own sexual interests? And then whenever it comes to the body, am I protecting myself from harm? So I'm thinking about clients who come in and there's a particular kind of like sexual stimulation that they really like. The one that came to mind was sounding some people won't know what sounding is but it's inserting usually metal into the urethra and that can be incredibly pleasurable for people, that can feel really good. And there's a safe way to do that. There are medical tools that have been created particularly for sounding. And then there are some times whenever people wanna use things that are not medical grade and it can actually harm your body. So finding that place of safety in the pleasure of, okay my mind likes the sound of this, is it actually good for my body? Will I continue to have pleasure even after I do this? Or is it only gonna feel good while I'm masturbating or whatever the case might be. Right, right, right. Yeah and I'm thinking of it, so I work with people who probably have way more tight needs around sexual safety, because I do work with a lot of trauma survivors. So it may be like, is it gonna be hurtful to my body to be an X, Y, or Z sexual position? Because I have this trauma history, maybe psychological even maybe physically as well. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so then it's also- A note of that would be a really important part of them creating a boundary around not harming my body. Right, absolutely, absolutely. So with the individual the boundary exploration starts out with some education. And my favorite way to talk about sexual safety actually comes from Doug Braun-Harvey. His work with the six sexual principles are fabulous. Love him, for anybody who doesn't know the six sexual principles, do you know them off the top of your head? Can you spell- I do, yah, yeah, absolutely. And this truly is one of the first things I do with every client who comes to me wanting to work on sexuality because having a framework around, okay what does safety actually look like, helps so much. So it's consent, having enthusiastic consent from all parties involved that what we're about to do is exciting and it's a yes. Non-exploitation or making sure that there are no power dynamics involved that would make it impossible to have true consent. So if there's a boss and employee, a teacher and a student, an adult and a young person, like all of these power dynamics, not okay, cannot give consent if that is happening. After non-exploitation is honesty. Being able to be really honest with yourself and your partner around what are your sexual desires. And then it's protection from STDs and unwanted pregnancy, and so that physical health of your body. Shared values. So if having sex to me means that we're going to be connected for life, but I'm having sex with a person who's like, oh cool, we're having sex, it's a Tuesday night, this is great. We do not have shared values and it is very likely we're going to get into problems (laughs) around those differences. So that's another part of safety. Totally, and when you talk about shared values do you think of them kind of like I do like a Venn diagram like it's rather unlikely that I have all of the values of my partner, but I want enough overlay. Helping people reflect on their own minds and be really curious about their path around their boundaries. One of the things I'm curious about is, oh is there enough overlay in your value systems that it's a match? It doesn't have to be identical, but some closeness is helpful. Right, it's almost never identical. It's very, very infrequent that people have the same values and ideas and beliefs around like, this is what it means to have sex in this particular way. So yeah definitely like you, I look for the overlap. Is it close enough? Can we find the area in which both of us are satisfied and feeling really happy about the match here? Right, right, right. So when you start, you probably start with psycho ed, and part that here's what I'm hearing is part of that is working from some clarity around psycho education around sex is probably something that most of our clients don't have. True, yeah. And then you're gonna be bringing in some education around boundaries and some education like to define what is healthy sexuality. And Doug Braun-Harvey's work is huge for you in that one. It's so helpful. And then there's one more in his work, mutual pleasure, mutual pleasure, rather than just pleasure which I actually really liked this whenever I think about relationship, this is the place I go to. I'm thinking about an individual, follow your pleasure. But if you're wanting to connect with others and have a great sex relationship with another person then it needs to be mutual and you might not get the exact same thing out of an sexual experience for one person what they get out of it might be an emotional connection and the other person might be the like sensations that excite them and make them feel joyful. But so long as it's mutually enjoyable, that's what matters. Mm hmm, yeah, yeah. So when an individual comes in, you're gonna first start with psycho ed. You're probably gonna talk about health and you bring boundary, work into it really early. Mm hmm. Okay, so you're not waiting for them to talk about it. No, no, definitely not 'cause people aren't taught how to talk about this. And I think that as the clinician it's my responsibility to help lead the discussion because they don't know what to talk about yet until I start giving them the framework of here's the safety side of sex, here's the pleasure side of sex. You probably have some sense of the pleasure already because it lives in your body and mind but very little direction of how to explore that side of yourself and still take care of you and the people you wanna be sexual with. Yeah, yeah. You know what just occurred to me? I'm thinking about the therapists out there who are watching this and certainly pointing them to Doug Braun-Harvey's work. I like Emily Nagorski too especially for women's psycho ed on sexuality. That's a good one. Absolutely, if you're working with people around sexuality get some education around this so you can talk to them and educate your clients. The other piece that I'm thinking about is how do we know when someone's having boundary difficulties? Like what different stuff are they saying? 'Cause they're probably not saying Jami Lynn, I'm having boundary difficulties with my sexuality. Could you help me with that? Right, (laughs) absolutely. So there's so many different ways in which boundaries can be an issue, but in my mind, I conceptualize them as two broad categories and they're the ones I'm looking for first. And I know that people in this training have gone through your boundaries work. I think about boundaries very similar to you. And so one of them that I'm always looking for is the containing boundary. If there's a hint of forcefulness, coercion anything like that in the way that they're talking about sex, my antenna go up. And then the other thing I'm looking for like broadly is if a person sounds as though they don't want something to happen sexually but they don't know how to communicate that. Or they feel like it's off and they don't know why it's off. I wanna be with my partner. I know I love them. Sex is still really hard for me and I'm not sure why, can you help me with this? And so those are like the two big, broad categories I'm looking for is the person who has trouble saying no or communicating what it is that they want and the person who knows what they want and does not hear their partner expressing, oh, that might not be what I want. Mm hmm, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, okay, so let's say you you're antennae are up, okay, how do you start that conversation? I think a lot of our therapy, a lot of us don't have a lot of sex therapy training, sex in reality, sex is a subject that comes up often in therapy not even necessarily 'cause our clients are bringing it in, in an overt way, but it's actually the big unspoken thing in the room a lot of times. And so I'm wondering, so, and, how would you start the conversation? Let's say your antennae are up, okay. Right, right. And my guess is it's different depending on what kind of boundaries. Absolutely, absolutely. And I have it a little bit easier than most because on my website, in my branding, people know me as a sex therapist. And so they come to see me particularly for sex and they're more open to immediately talk about it. But before I started marketing myself that way, before I really said, okay I'm gonna specialize in this and not just working with couples, when I would see couples one of the first questions I would ask them would be are you having sex?
I'd start there like, are you having sex?
Okay, how do you feel about your sex life?
Are there things that you really enjoy
about your sex life together or there're things that you want to be different.
And so that's how I begin the whole conversation.
And for people who have something that they wanna change they'll share it. And usually it sounds like, a lot of the time people talk about frequency, right? I wish you were having more sex and sure that could be true some of the time but I actually do not believe that that's usually what people are wanting. What I find is that what people are usually wanting is to feel happier when they are having sex together, they want it to be a more joy-filled, connected, turned on experience. And then frequency doesn't matter as much because the need to be sexual is fulfilled whenever you are really turned on with your partner. Right, it's almost like frequency like wanting more frequency would make up for less fulfilling sex. Like if I'm not having as fulfilling sex as I'd like sometimes I'll up the frequency in order to help with that. Right, absolutely, absolutely. Whereas like in the beginning of a relationship, whenever things are really hot and exciting and you might see each other once a week and you have sex and then maybe you go two weeks and you don't see each other and you talk on the phone and it's all really just like electric and pulled in. That's what people are craving. They're craving that feeling of intimacy. And if you're having sex that doesn't have that same like pull to it, most people keep trying to recreate that feeling and over and over again, they're attempting, Okay, let me try again, let me try again, I want more, it's still not satisfying me. Whereas if you have more satisfying sex, regardless of frequency, then usually people are incredibly fulfilled by what's happening between them. Yeah, yeah. You know, what I was thinking about too was if I'm working with an individual, I often will ask people about how they experienced the relationship with themselves. And a lot of times the answer I get is I have no idea what you mean. (laughs) Totally get that. And then I'm just checking it out with them and I'm checking out with multiple levels, like, well how do you talk to yourself in your own mind? Do you ever find yourself like calling yourself names or are you pretty sweet to yourself? Are you kind of perfectionistic with how your inner dialogue is going? How do you feel towards your body? How does that show up for you sexually, how this relationship is with your body? So I might be checking it out with an individual about like how is the relationship on many, many different planes? So that's another way into it. Absolutely and- Yeah, go ahead. Body is a huge one so sex is an embodied experience. And if you have anger or dislike towards your body, it does make it hard to be really free and open and turned on. The other place is the mind. So the two areas that I'm always thinking about with sexuality is the body and then the mind cause eroticism and turn on actually comes from the brain even as our body feels good. So what kind of values do you have about sex? Were you taught that it was enjoyable and exciting and something you do with people you care about? Or were you taught that it is sinful unless done in a certain way. Or sinful period. Or Sinful period. That or some people are taught not that it's sinful but that it's dirty. That they should be embarrassed. Right, right or that it takes away their value. Mm hmm. Yeah, so you're really looking at, okay, so how has your mind been taught by your culture? And does that show up? I guess I'm curious that brings me into cultural differences and I'm curious how you hold it when you're working with people from a variety of cultural backgrounds, who maybe have very different values than you do personally about sex or with the client that was in the hour before them or? Right, right, absolutely. So in that case, it's getting curious it's exploring, being aware that every single person on this planet actually gets a different message about sex because we all come from different families. And even if you're in the same family you might be a different gender. And so every single one of us culturally, in our families, in our relationship with peers we all get different messages.
And so I'm just going to be curious about, okay
so what did you learn? What does sex mean to you? When you even hear me say the word, what happens inside? Does it feel like, oh, I'd love to talk about this or does it feel more like, ooh, I don't (laughs) I don't think I can even say that to you. (laughs) Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's where my family comes from more of that space. So I think it's taken me a while to be able to like talk in therapy about it with my own therapist and be comfortable bringing it into clients. Because I think I grew up in one of those spaces where it wasn't really a subject that was okay to speak about. And so I think my map is just, you don't. You don't talk about it. Right, right. And I like to give space for people who are not as comfortable. Like I am very comfortable. And I even tell my clients that this is a subject I feel very comfortable with. And please know that if I ever say something or ask you something that you don't wanna talk about just tell me.
Yeah, I love that containment too.
I was just thinking about how containing boundaries show up for us as therapists around this issue. And certainly I think the pendulum can swing back and forth for us too. So let's say we got into to talking about sex and I'm gonna go on this journey of sex therapy. And now I'm like bringing it up all the time in ways it's making my clients uncomfortable or not reading signals, right? But I think that's actually not most of us, most of us are probably on the too contained side, a little bit too rigid. Where we're likely not to bring up things that we're thinking about or not ask questions that we're thinking about. Right. Yeah, so when you're working with like a therapist who's in consultation with you and they may be more on that side, how do you help them hold that? Yeah, so again, first it's like, know yourself what did you learn about sex? Because that will play into how you talk to your clients about it. So first is the self-awareness piece. How comfortable am I? And it's okay if you're not comfortable talking about it that can grow, especially as you get more knowledge. But I would say the main things are, I start with the education pieces, sexuality and wellness looks like finding the balance between safety and pleasure. Here's a framework for talking to your clients about the safety side of things. Not only keeping their mind safe through like shared values work and honesty, but keeping their bodies and other people's bodies safe, the protection from STIs and unwanted pregnancy, really understanding consent. Like once you have those pieces, once you have that knowledge, it becomes easier to talk about sexuality. Knowledge first, if you have comfort without knowledge, I actually think it's out of balance. (laughs) Right, you're likely to go more to the uncontained side. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely knowledge first. And then once you know, more about, okay here's my framework for talking to people about sex, then you can move into just getting curious. And most people don't get to talk about this and when they have a space to do it, they're like, oh, okay, wonderful. I've never been able to be so free and open about this aspect of life that almost participates in. Right, right, yeah, yeah. So, okay. So when you're, when you're working with an individual that's what it looks like. What if you're working with more of a couple and you see lots of different kinds of couples and I'll get a little bit, I'll poke you a little bit about that later, but just generally couple. So you're with a couple, you're probably gonna ask them about their sex life early on. Even if you're not a sex specialist, how are (indistinct)? Yes, yes. So that's definitely gonna be one of my questions even with couples who come to me and they're not interested in sex work like if they're wanting to work on communication, or they're wanting to work on, we just had a baby and we don't know what we're doing anymore. Like, even if it's not sexuality that they come to me interested in working on, I'm going to ask them the question, are you having sex? How do you feel about your sex life? And that's always a good segue into what could be happening in that area because one of the ways in which adults play is sexually, one of the ways in which we connect most deeply is through sex, that's not true for everyone but that is true for the majority of people. And so I'm always curious, okay, how has this aspect of your life going? That and I'm a very sex, positive person. I actually believe it's good for most people to move into that space when they want to and when their body communicates, hey I'd like some pleasure now, please. (laughs) I'm always keeping in the back of my mind, okay, sexuality is natural and healthy and most people would like to have a sex life that brings them joy. I'm gonna ask them, do they feel that way about their sex life? And then most of the time, the issue that shows up is either, I wanna be having more sex and one of them will say this or we're not having sex in the way that I'd like. So if I'm thinking about it, I see people of all different gender presentations and people who are in all different kinds of relationships. And I tend to see some people who are in straight couples, but a lot of people who are not,
when I think about it,
it can be either gender who says this statement but it tends to be more often men who say I wanna be having more sex.
And then it tends to be females who say,
I wanna have different sex. And I think the reason why females tend to say different sex is because there's a cultural idea that women's bodies are hard to figure out. And I know, (laughs) and that it's- I think there is a cultural idea that women are hard to figure out. Right, right. The female orgasm is this mysterious thing and it's hard to make happen. And there actually isn't a ton of education around, okay, how do vulvas like to be touched? And so often I hear more women saying, I'd like a little bit different sex and I hear more men saying, I'd like more sex. And when I hear either one of those, I'm just going to get curious about, okay so what exactly are you looking for? And what would that do for you? Mm hmm, yeah and how do boundary issues show up in each one? Mm hmm, yeah, yeah. So for the people who are asking for more sex the biggest boundary issue is the containing boundary where they're breaking out of their containing boundary and they're letting their frustration and hurt and anger out on their partner.
And I find that this is something that's really hard
for people to work with because we're coming into a space where everyone is valuing consent so much more. And so even the client who is upset, and wants more sex they don't want to be pressuring the partner. And if you were to bring up, like do you know that you're being coercive right now? A person's going to pull back from that. That is not going to land well with any client even if it's true, even if it's true that there are being coercive towards their partner about sex, I want sex and you're not providing it for me and this is not okay. And so I'm going to either tell you that it's not okay or I'm gonna be cold to you or I'm going to leave and get sex with somebody else. Yeah, I think too about Tori real often says it's somebody could be pouting or putting out a stink or be really upset until they get sex. And this way of pressuring the partner. Absolutely, absolutely. Get sex and there's a pattern that can go through a relationship where the partner who's being pressured knows, oh, I can get out of this hell all I have to do is have sex. (laughs) But what if I don't want to? And then there's- But what if I don't want to? Yes, yes. So how do you help people come to terms with that? So my very first move always is to talk to the person who's holding the boundary of I don't want to. And usually the way I talk to them is I know that that is really, really difficult boundary for you to continue to hold. And there are probably times whenever you haven't because that's been the easiest way to get peace between y'all and I'm so sorry that happens sometimes, I know it's really hard.
How confident do you feel that you can say no
and can you tell me about what happens if you do? Like, I want the whole picture, I wanna know from their side, what is going on in your relationship whenever you hold your boundary which is your choice, it's your body, you get to say no whenever you want to say no? Yeah, you and I are on the same page about that. People get to say no to sex at any moment, any time for any reason, period. Absolutely, yes, yes, absolutely. So that, that is my first move is to align with that person make it really clear that you get to say no whenever you want, because it is your body. Would you share with me what happens when you do say no? And once I have the information about how their partner reacts, whether it's they get angry, they get cold, whatever the case may be then I'm gonna start talking to that person. Okay, from your side, do you experience it similar to how your partner is describing? What does happen whenever you're not having sex and you really want to? What's going on in your mind? What are you telling yourself about either the relationship or you? And a lot of the time in loving relationships, what's going on with the person who wants to have sex is something along the lines of my partner does not want me, my partner does not find me attractive and the way that I can know my partner loves and wants me is if they have sex with me. So like they're attaching the meaning of sex to being wanted. And then you're working with uncoupling those. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely, absolutely. And so that becomes the work with them and for helping them to get on board with this idea, are you interested in doing this work? Some of what I share is, I wanna be clear and honest with you. If we do this work together, it does not mean that you're going to get sex anytime you want. My goal with you is not actually to make your partner have sex any time that you were interested in it. But what I am interested in, is helping you and your partner create the best sex life you can possibly have, where you're really excited and turned on, and they're really excited and turned on and you know about it. Are you interested in that? That's a good sales pitch. I would say yes to that sales pitch. (laughs) Well, I was just thinking Tori Olds recently did something with Therapy Wisdom, actually, where she was presented some research and I went back and read the research and having a good sales pitch is actually one of the things that is making therapy successful. So I think like in a emotional embodied reason why we would do a hard thing. Right, absolutely. Why would I choose to do this hard thing? Why would I choose to do this hard thing? It's actually a really important part of our job. Can we help someone hold that and embody the why, deeply enough, that they're willing to do the hard thing that there's a good reason inside, 'cause our brains don't like to do hard. They're kind of designed not to do hard things (laughs) if we can help it. Absolutely, and sex feels good. I wanna have sex when I wanna have it. Why don't you? Right? That's one of the parts that are working in this person's mind Totally, why doesn't my partner wanna have sex whenever I wanna have sex? Right, so then I'm thinking about the other ways boundary issues show up
which you were talking about wanting different sex.
Yeah, so how do you see boundary issues showing up when there's often a female though not always. Not always. Is saying, I want our sex life to be different. Mm hmm, yeah, yeah. So I'm thinking of many couples actually. So many flashed through my mind just now where what I hear one partner saying is I wanna be touched more. If you go straight for intercourse, it's actually such a turnoff for me. I'm not interested in that. And I don't wanna have sex with you whenever you just come up behind me and grab parts of me, right? Grab my breast or whatever. Right, exactly. That's not exciting to me. And so instead, what they're wanting is I'm wanting lots of connection. I'm wanting lots of eye contact. I'm wanting lots of touch. Why isn't it happening even though I'm telling you, I want this, right? So that's often what I hear whenever it comes to like different kinds of sex. Yeah, you know what else I hear a ton? Is why isn't it happening and it turns out when I ask, the partner has not said anything about what they want and what the hope is underneath it is longing to have their partner mind read them or read their body language. Maybe they do really consciously allow themselves to stiffen or to turn away. And they're hoping the partner reads that and sees what it is they're wanting but without them having to speak it. Which for me is one of those containing boundaries again but it's the too much containment. So it's on the rigid side of containment. So if I'm letting myself act out basically as retaliation or punishment to you, because you didn't have sex with me, that's a containing boundary issue. But on the more porous side. Whereas the ,I haven't said what it is I want is a boundary issue but more on the rigid side. Yes, yes, absolutely. Because it is one very vulnerable to make the request, will you change the way in which you're touching me? And then the other is there is a possibility that when I asked my partner to do sex differently they will take it personally and they will think they are a bad lover. And then eventually I'm just gonna become frustrated because they're still not getting it, right? And so in that case, I'm thinking more in terms of, okay, we also need to do a little bit of psychological boundary work. That's exactly where I was going. So you must do psychological boundary work so that when someone shares their truth, it isn't taken as like, ooh,
it means I'm a terrible lover or whatever.
I'm not ever gonna be enough for my partner or anything like that. So a lot of the work whenever it comes to making these vulnerable shares about what you want first is opening up enough,
letting yourself be more open,
rather than the rigid holding back that people will tend to do. And one of the reasons why they might be doing the hold bag could be that they're worried that partner's gonna have their feelings hurt. Which happens. Which happens. And so then the work is turning towards the partner and helping them with that psychological boundary of knowing what my person is asking of me is about their body and their needs. And I am not gonna do it immediately right because I do not live in their head. Will take time for me to practice until I understand, oh, this is what you want. Great, now I get it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's true, people do take it personally. The client, your client is not wrong to be worried about that, (laughs) that it could totally happen. And it's really, when I think about working with an individual around this stuff I think about having a really good psychological boundary, maybe opening up that containing boundary I'm willing to share more and maybe even doing that executed boundary work where we go through the six steps and I'm thinking, I especially do this with individuals around well, okay, so how would you say this to your partner and what is the clarity about why it's so important to say it? So let's get in that and let's figure out how you're gonna say it and you're gonna say it with your relational hope leading and then you're gonna say the thing and then you're gonna anticipate what's gonna happen and you're gonna sooth yourself so that you can say that thing again. (laughs) Right, so I was just thinking like, oh yeah boundary work goes with every thing you're talking about, about all these different difficulties that's gonna be part of the solution. Right, right, absolutely. Right, right, right. So what about if you're working with a couple and boundaries around sex or like agreements that we've made need to change? So I'm thinking about what if, this happens all the time with couples I work with who are getting older and sexuality does change what my body's physically capable of, are changing. I'm thinking about what if somebody has surgery, or what if somebody has an injury? Or even childbirth. Childbirth for sure is gonna be a huge difference. Having young kids will often change what agreements we can have. Another place it might show up is if there is a trauma and we're already in the relationship, or I even have this happen with people who have never done trauma work but maybe they're in therapy and they're doing trauma work and all of a sudden they're aware of wanting something really, really different sexual life with their partner for that period of time, or maybe forever. I guess I wonder, so how do you work with couples who have, who need to make a shift? Yes, yes. So some of it is boundary work, but in this case I actually think that the bigger piece is the grief work. There's so much grief around our sex life is now different.
There's the first step.
First you have to hold the grief and the loss because it is a loss. And then- And I talk a lot about that about how a lot of times boundary work or the need for boundary work will emerge out of the grief work. So sometimes as I'm doing boundary work, grief work is part of that. Like it comes out of the boundary work and other times it's the grief that comes first. That comes out of that. I love that you're saying that Yeah, yeah. And then after coming into a space where the grief is not as big as it was, then I'm thinking about that playground again, right? We have a new boundary, there's a new fence around what will be possible for us because we care about each other's wellness and each other's minds and bodies. And I don't wanna do anything that would hurt you. So we have a new boundary. And my job then as a clinician is to start helping them explore what is possible now because a lot of the time people have had sex in the ways that they have seen sex happen. There isn't a whole lot of variety that we see in media or even porn, unless you're seeking that out in particular. And so most of the time, people don't actually know what is possible, all the different ways that you can experience pleasure in the body that aren't just intercourse. And so now that we have this new container, the new fence that we get to play in, I'm gonna actually start helping them figure out how to play. And that's just following your pleasure. Yeah, so (indistinct) all the therapists who are listening to this a little tidbit of what's one exercise you might give people to help them have pleasure? So I'll make it a really clear example. If I have a couple where a woman has had either like a traumatic birth or she's had a surgery and it's painful to have intercourse, it's painful to have any kind of insertion, then I'm gonna be suggesting exploration that is not insertion. So I would actually be throwing out different things that they could do together. I'd be giving them ideas and letting them feel in their bodies what sounds exciting to you? Let your mind play with it. So I might be saying, okay, picture this she's on her back. Her legs are on your shoulder next to each other, So her legs are here crossed and you actually have your penis in between her thighs. And she's also using hands and there's this engagement in this way picture that and see how that feels in your body. Is it scary at all for you, as you think about the pain that you've had in your vulva and vagina or does that feel comfortable and safe? It sounds safe? Awesome, start there. Just do that. And then continue to build from there. Yeah, yeah. And I'm, you know what I'm catching is really filling in the blanks because people maybe have not thought about anything other than whatever point they've been exposed to whatever media they've been exposed to. And so if we said, well, sex doesn't have to look like that. Well, then I just said there was a blank box. So some of your work will be filling in what that picture might look like. Right, absolutely. I was thinking about a couple who did she had a traumatic birth and they focused on breast play and play with hands only because any touch to that part of her body did not feel to her. And so they did it really, really differently than maybe what they were expecting sex to look like the first time. Right, you see that's- And sometimes it's forever cause sometimes injuries are permanent. Right, right, absolutely.
And I think that's important to be aware of too,
like this will change. What you're doing now will grow and shift. And this time is all about taking the baby steps towards finding that pleasure sweet spot where I have not pushed my body too far, but I'm always playing with the edge of like, what new can we do that would be fun and exciting that's a yes? A definite yes. That goes back to Doug Braun-Harvey's work around an enthusiastic yes from both parties is gonna be that number one. (laughs) Yeah great. So can I ask for you to share your expertise around this particular area of your practice? You work with open couples with poly couples and there are a lot that's tons of people are working more with that. And so I was wondering if you could just share what does boundary work start looking like when we're talking about a couple that doesn't have traditional monogamous boundaries? Right, absolutely. This is always such fun work. So there's definitely a spectrum, right? There are some people who are completely monogamous and they really have no interest in being with another person. They're like, I've got my partner, I'm truly happy and I'm good. There are people who are not only thrilled to have multiple partners, but they enjoy the idea of their partner, having many other partners as well. This idea of compersion in open relationships where it's like as much love as we both can experience is what we want, lets have it all. And I don't feel jealousy about it, I really just feel like open and excited. Those are the extremes. And most people actually tend to live somewhere in the middle. (laughs) I love that you put most people in this category. (laughs) Most people are somewhere in the middle where you might choose a monogamous relationship but you both still know that the other person is like, ooh that guy on TV, or lady on TV is hot and we can talk about it. Or you might be in an open relationship where it is an agreement between you and your partner that you are going to have some kind of relationship whether it's emotional or physical with other people. And yet there's still jealousy and worry and an idea in your mind of like, ooh, but I know I want this open relationship is what I want but it's still scary for me. I find that actually a lot of people live in that space in open relationships. And so then first I think of these differently. To me, there's a difference between boundaries and the rules that people come up with around like, you can do this with partners, but not this. Yeah, yeah, okay. Separate those out for me. 'Cause I think most people who are watching this would have put those into a single thing. Yes. So, okay. How do you think about that? The reason I personally separate them out is because I think rules are more about here's what I'm telling you to do with people so that I feel okay. And so that I can continue to be in relationship with you without being too triggered and rules actually tend to change as people continue on their journey and exploration in non-monogamy the rules shift. I have never experienced a relationship that I've worked with where they have not changed over time as each partner becomes more comfortable. I see, I see. And could you exchange the word rules for agreements? Absolutely. Kind of the same thing. Same thing, yeah. These are- Talk to me about, yeah, I was just thinking about like if I'm in an open relationship and somebody says these are the rules you have to live by would feel really different than we came to an agreement that yes, these are the, these are gonna be the things we say yes and no to, as we work on, maybe opening up. I love that you said that, my language, the language I prefer is agreement. And a lot of the time, what you hear in non-monogamous couples is rules or at least initially. But like I said, they tend to change as the couple becomes more comfortable and they tend to start with many, many different agreements and then they lessen over time. That's usually how it goes. Not always put a lot of the time. I actually think that boundaries are different. So boundaries in my mind have to do with we have agreements about what we do with other people. They are in order to protect each other's feelings and keep us from being triggered. But in the end, the thing that actually matters is the boundary that we create around this relationship. The agreements are a facilitation of the boundary we decide on. Okay? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That feels really clear. Yeah and the safety is actually gonna be established by the boundary we're creating. And these agreements are just supports of this structure. Right, exactly. So I actually, I personally think that the boundary needs to be the most clear thing and then you can make agreements to protect that boundary. So- The order, you're putting this in. So if somebody is out there there may be new to doing open relationship work but they have a couple who's considering it, one read, read, read, read, read. (laughs) Yes. Yes. Absolutely, "More Than Two," "Opening Up" like there's great books out there. (laughs) Yep, "The Ethical Slut" is the original like old school version. I love, I love "Opening Up." I love "More Than Two." So if you're interested in working with this population, for sure read that, and if your clients are into it I'd recommend them actually reading 'cause there can be some guidance into how to do this in a way that doesn't end up hurting everybody. But something I really wanna highlight about what you just said is, oh, we're gonna we're gonna start with the boundary and then we're gonna create the agreements out of that knowing, and I think people actually, their instinct is to do it the opposite way. Absolutely, yes. Yeah, yeah. Because I think, again, like in my mind (laughs) adults are still children on the inside like our emotional beings is a little child just trying to move throughout the world not being hurt or upset. And so we try to do the agreements first. Don't do this thing 'cause I know it's gonna hurt or upset me. Don't do this thing 'cause I know it's gonna hurt or upset me. Rather than what is it that we actually really want to hold together in this relationship? What really matters to us, the boundary. And then how do we protect that? Let's create agreements so that we know, okay, this is how we're going to protect that. I'm gonna make it more clear. The boundary is like, what's important to me is that you and I are committed
to each other and that we spend the most time,
financial energy and resources on each other. That is the most important thing to me. You can do that with others. You can have time with them. You can have intimacy, you can even use some financial resources with them. But if you were to start living with another person or you took more trips with them than you took with me or y'all have two date nights and we have one. Right, now we're into the agreements land. Right, that no longer works for me. (laughs) Yep, yep. Because we're making and this also is an agreement about what the boundary is that we're both so, I'm thinking about a couple I worked with who was really interested in what's called hot wifing. So that just means that one partner the wife and this couple was gonna expand and have other partners. But the male in the couple was not. So they were interested in this idea but we were creating boundary around it and one of the things that was really important for them was that the romantic connection stay here and that this other experience was not so much about romance. It could be intimate, it could be close but it wasn't about loving, romantic connection. So would that be an example of what you're talking about? Yes, so the boundary is romance stays with us. The agreements would look like, okay so then feel free to have sex, exciting, tell me about it. I don't want you going on dates with people 'cause that to me would step into the romance realm. Right, so the agreements that we're making, these rules would fall, it would then follow in order to support this space. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, great. That makes sense. Yeah, so where did boundary stuff get sticky? Let's say you're with a poly couple. They've been with living that more open space for awhile. Okay, where are they gonna get stuck? Oh man, let me think of them all in my mind 'cause there's so many places where you can get stuck.
I think one of the biggest ones is first,
like a lot of people wanna protect the primary relationship and as you start to play and you become interested in others, what does that actually look like? So we have the boundary in mind. We wanna protect the romantic, our romantic relationship. This is the primary and we hold it as primary. And now that we're dating other people and I'm actually really excited about this person and you're not feeling like my primary because I'm having more sex with them right now, like that's where it starts to get sticky is whenever you start practicing all this stuff, even if you've been doing it for a long time, instances will come up that cause uncertainty, wait, is it still true that our boundary is set around this primary relationship? So the most common one that I can think of is right in the beginning, one of you meet a new person and it's really exciting. And there's a little bit of like a frenzy and you're having lots of sex and you're thinking about them a lot and you're flirting and stuff like that is a really threatening moment for a lot of people in open relationships. And so I actually like to create a different internal psychological boundary. And it's a little bit of psycho ed but it's something that the person can use later whenever the thoughts come up saying they like this other person more. So the psycho ed is, you know, one of the things that causes our entire nervous system to act differently is novelty.
And so when a person meets a new partner,
the excitement all of that, that actually has more to do with novelty than anything else. If it truly is a relationship where both people are holding the boundary, there is a possibility though that one partner might not be holding that same containing boundary around the relationship where they made the agreement, yes, you are my primary person. I'm going to be in this relationship above all others. And then they begin to not act that way. That happens. And so then my work is one, to start getting really clear with the person who is saying, hey, this is not okay with me. What are you willing to do about it? Because you're right, this isn't along with your agreement and we can talk to your partner about this, they might choose to change, but there is a bit of a risk. They might also not choose to. This does not happen real frequently but it happens sometimes where one partner has started to go outside of the original boundaries of the relationship. And they're being more involved with someone than what they said they would. And then it's also worked with them around, okay, this is exciting and new and it's jeopardizing the relationship that you had said you wanted. And I think about holding the reflection up and just noting, like, okay, so you did this and this and this. And here's the agreement that you said you had made are those in alignment? So, just asking them to watch their own mind is something I might do. And I wonder, so there are plenty of people out there who might have open relationships come in and they've never been part of an open relationship before. That's not their world. Do you think it's okay for them to keep working with them? Or do you feel like it has to be somebody who has like personally in polyamory to work with this? I personally do not think that you need personal experience being poly in order to work with folks who are in an open relationship. I don't think so. I think you need to be open-minded. I think you have to get educated. So if you're not in one, it doesn't mean you can't work with that, it is showing up more and more. I think in our younger people, it's showing up more and more 'cause it's become part of the larger, I know I'm just thinking through cases and people who are in that younger spectrum are more often. More open to this idea because it is more prevalent in the younger generations. More and more people are in open relationships. Yeah I think the two things- I'm not in an open relationship but I do work with people who are, and I found education was a huge piece of it. Absolutely. Education was a huge piece of it. And then just keeping, going back to watching their own mind, it's not my job to say what your boundaries should and should not be, my job is to help you gain clarity on what you want for yourself. Yes, yes, absolutely. And there is so much nuance in openness
that the agreements might change
or you might decide to close your relationship more for a period of time while you work on things and then open it back up like the degree to openness can shift. And I don't know if I know without the education you would not be able to talk to clients about that. But I don't know if a lot of therapists think about that. Like either the thinking I'm gonna help you stay open or you're gonna close your relationship and that's not true. Yeah, when actually it can be kind of flexible back and forth between slightly tighter boundaries around the and here you are talking about the boundaries around the relationship like, oh, we're gonna change the agreements because we're changing the boundaries. We're gonna close partially for a little while. I'm thinking about a couple I worked with where they went from a more open stance with physical contact to it's okay to flirt with other people. But until we work this out, it's not actually okay to kiss anyone or make out in any way or right? So they closed down that boundary around it. Not that they were saying it wasn't okay to have the flirtation, but that it was something they didn't want to move past until they had worked out some internal stuff in themselves and between each other. Is that kinda what you're talking about? Absolutely, absolutely.
So other hiccups people might run into,
one is just this idea of my partner is excited about a new person and a lot of the time that just has to do with novelty and they're actually still super committed to the primary relationship, but sometimes it doesn't. And in that case, you're just reflecting to them. Like you said, here's what's happened. Is it in line with your agreements? Or is it not? Let's talk about that. And it's an internal reflection. The other thing that often happens is when you're in an open relationship and your partner is excited about somebody, the psychological chatter becomes I'm not good enough, I'm not attractive enough, they don't love me as much, right? So one side of it is more about the agreement and what you're doing with others, but then this side of it is about the individual experiencing not enoughness. And so then the boundary work there becomes a couple of things, actually. So in my mind, some of it is creating a psychological boundary between the parts of them that are saying these things that are not true and then the other piece of work is less about boundaries and more about like self-worth and recognizing my worth and value does not change simply because my partner is excited about someone else. I don't need to compare myself to them 'cause we are different Yup, yup. Yup and I'm thinking about how much those are intertwined. So when I'm doing boundary work with someone, what's happening is I'm getting clear on who I am and how to treat the world because I'm living in my integrity. I'm living in my value system which is amazing self esteem work (laughs) to reflect that I am making choices that align with my value system make me feel very good about my own integrity. Right, and then, so I'm just thinking about like, oh let's say I am having those self-worth worries. And I stopped myself from acting those out with my partner. That would be excellent containing boundary. You'd be living in more in the integrity. Yay! Here we go. And we just increased our self worth. And then the psychological boundary where understand it's okay for you to be different from me. It's benevolent and respectful for you to have your emotional journey in this world and I'm only gonna let in what's true and not true. Right, so I'm gonna put that my partner is more attracted to that other person than me. I'm putting it on the outside of that boundary. True or not true, right? And I'm doing and this may be okay, I'm doing that work that's gonna help with that self-worth work. You know, the other person I go to for this is Sonya Renee Taylor. We celebrate for a minute. Yes. (laughs) (indistinct) she's amazing, she wrote "The Body is Not an Apology." She talks about radical self love starting with body love.
Yeah, absolutely.
Oh, so I bet we're right at the end of time. I haven't even been typing yet 'cause I've been so with you. That's so, so, oh my gosh. Thank you. Absolutely, this is so much fun. (laughs) Yeah, just thanks for sharing your thoughts. And if people wanted to find out more about you they can check you out, Ii your, jamilynnbula.com is your website? jamilynnbula.com and then I also have a lot of online resources under Practice Intimacy. That is the company I founded to help educate people about relationships and sexuality. And so there's free resources online. I was gonna say, and most of them are free. So it's awesome resources share with clients. Yay! Yes, yes. Yes, oh, thank you my love. Thank you. I so appreciate you coming. Yes, thank you so much Jules. Yeah, for sure, anytime. Bye everybody. (calming music)
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