A Better Love with Dr. Greg Matos

Join Dr. Greg to answer a listener's question about how to navigate the impact of emotional abuse after leaving a toxic relationship. 

On today's episode:
1. The real impact of very unhealthy relationships.
2. Starting places for reflection and action.

Thank you so much for your recent feedback listeners, we appreciate each of you. Send your questions and comments to Dr. Greg @abetterloveproject on TikTok and Instagram. Until tomorrow, love each other fiercely.

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Join Dr. Greg to discuss sexual attraction in long-term relationships and understand the likely case that attraction wanes it's likely a symptom of a systemic problem.

In this episode:
1. Dating someone you're not sexually attracted to, even if they're awesome.
2. Exploring what's changed in a long-term relationship when experiencing shifts in your attraction.
3. Sexual health and interdependence. 

Send your questions about sex, love, and dating to Dr. Greg @abetterloveproject on TikTok and Instagram. Share this episode with someone you love. Until next time, love each other fiercely.

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Today’s episode answer’s a TikTok listener’s question about who I am and why I founded A Better Love Project. I hope I answered your question, let me know.

Today’s episode:

1. Why I got into psychology and founded this non-profit.
2. Our vision: to support the development of foundational relationship skills with 1 million families by sharing science-based relationship advice daily.

If you’re into a growth mindset and loving more fiercely, subscribe to this podcast and share it with the person you love the most in this world.  

I’m grateful that you’re reading this right now and that you spend even a moment with us, each day. Send any questions you have to us on TikTok and Instagram @abetterloveproject. Until tomorrow, love each other fiercely. 

Dr. Greg

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Music:
Happy Life - Fredji
Vibe With Me – Joakim Karud

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Join Dr. Greg and Jenna Carlsson for the last part of a 3-part series on the KonMari Method, decluttering, and joy.

This episode we're diving into:
1. Dating and understanding your partner's values early on.
2. Create shared meaning about your family's relationship with stuff.
3. Finding a new home for things that you don't need.

To connect with Jenna, you can visit her website: thejoyfilter.me and as always, please share this podcast with someone you love if you found it helpful. Send your relationship questions to Dr. Greg @abetterloveproject on TikTok and Instagram, we’ll answer them on the podcast. 

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Join Dr. Greg and Jenna Carlsson, a certified KonMari Consultant, to continue our conversation about decluttering and joy, this is part two.

On today’s episode:

1. Common challenges to decluttering and ways forward.
2. Creating a vision and aligning with your values.

To connect with Jenna, you can visit her website: thejoyfilter.me and as always, please share this podcast with someone you love if you found it helpful. Send your relationship questions to Dr. Greg @abetterloveproject on TikTok and Instagram, we’ll answer them on the podcast. 

Thanks for listening!

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Join Dr. Greg and Jenna Carlsson, a certified KonMari Consultant, to talk about our relationship to material things and their impact on our wellbeing and relationships. This is part one of a continuing conversation with Jenna.

On today’s episode:

1. What is the KonMari method and how does it work?
2. What joy has to do with things in your home.
3. Creating a vision for yourself and your space.

To connect with Jenna, you can visit her website: thejoyfilter.me. As always, please share this podcast with someone you love if you found it helpful and send your relationship questions to @abetterloveproject on TikTok and Instagram, we’ll answer them on the podcast. 

Until tomorrow, love each other fiercely.

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Join Dr. Greg to discuss a listener's question about change, defensiveness, and a partner's reluctance to go to therapy. 

In this episode:
1. The antidote to defensiveness.
2. Change conversations and boundaries.
3. Compassion for the difficulty of vulnerability.

If you have a relationship question, send it to Dr. Greg @abetterloveproject. We'll answer it on an upcoming episode. Share this podcast with those you love. We'll see you tomorrow!

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Join Dr. Greg as we answer a listener's question: Any advice for someone who grew up in a very chaotic childhood so they have learned to feel comfort in chaos and seek it out? I get easily bored in relationships and when things are going very good, and feel very healthy, I feel very uncomfortable. I want to overcome that though.

If you find this podcast episode helpful, share it with the people you love the most. Send your questions to @abetterloveproject on TikTok and Instagram.

Free 15-minute morning practice (Yoga with Adriene): https://youtu.be/r7xsYgTeM2Q

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Transcript

For our listeners who didn’t have childhoods like this but are bored in their relationships, I’d recommend you take the pulse of how stimulating your love is. We’ll do another episode on this later.

For now, let’s talk about loves with folks who may have symptoms of complex post-traumatic stress. The prevalence rate for complex PTSD is .5 to .7%. If you’re listening and you experienced a very chaotic childhood like this listener, your relationship with adrenaline is going to be important to understand. The worst thing, is if this was happening for you, and you ignored it.

As I mentioned on a recent episode about anxious attachment, we adapt for survival and then these adaptations can persist into adulthood. They don’t work well now. 

Hearing you’re feeling bored in day-to-day life isn’t a surprise to me. I'm a combat veteran and have worked with many people who have experienced combat, sexual violence, and unimaginably horrific childhoods. Our response to trauma will be different based on the unique context of a trauma and how long it latest or reoccurred. Earlier trauma is often the hardest because you may have lived in a chaotic, toxic home your whole childhood.

My first suggestion is to you be curious about it and I think you’re in this space now. This will help you move beyond attending to just the boredom and asking yourself, what it is you want or need in that moment? What I mean by this is that your emotional life is likely a bit more complex than just this one dimension. Work to understand the full picture of your physiological and emotional experience.

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Join Dr. Greg to discuss the challenges of long-distance relationships and potential opportunities to deepen your love before reuniting. Covered in today's episode:

1. Clarifying what you need.
2. Breaking up the separation with short trips to savor physical and sexual intimacy.
3. Determining what you're willing to accept.

Share this episode with someone you love and ask your relationships questions @abetterloveproject on TikTok and Instagram.

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Transcript:

For those of you who are listening and have ever been in a long-distance relationship you know for yourself the limitations and perhaps some of the benefits.

The benefit of physical distance is that you'll learn a lot about what a romantic relationship means to you. What are the most important parts? One study I looked at suggested 60% or more of respondents who have been in a long-term relationship report that the lack of physical intimacy is the biggest challenge, with 31% saying they were missing sex the most. It's definitely not surprising that physical intimacy was the biggest challenge, and I'm also not surprised that sex and sexual intimacy was as low as it is because any relationship that lasts pass in 3 or 4 months long distance is likely between two people With greater willingness to sacrifice this essential part of a fierce love.

Set for my listener who's struggling with this long-distance situation, I would have the following recommendations:

1.  Define an end date for the physical separation.  Now, I know this isn't as easy as I suggest. There are many couples, I've worked with some, who have very specific professional requirements that have them in other countries living in other countries working in other countries so the amount of options you may have is likely Limited because you're physically separated in the first place. Still, have a sense of when the separation will end.
2.  Ask yourself what do I need right now? If you really love the person, want to stay in the relationship, and the only issue to you is the physical separation, then perhaps scheduling some time to spend with that person to break up the period of separation would be a straightforward way to address that issue.
3. And lastly, ask yourself what am I willing to accept in this situation? If you're not willing to experience whatever discomfort comes up from this distance then acknowledge that, honor that, and communicate what it is that you desire and want with your partner.  Perhaps, there's room for compromise or an option that you haven't considered yet 4 getting to the same apartment or condo or home, or maybe just the same city.

For those of you who are considering a long-distance relationship here are a few things that I wanted to share. First, for you high school sweethearts who experiment with a long-distance relationship oh, it's very common for college students to have a long-distance relationship oh, and it's also common for those to end at some point during the College Years. 

For those of you who met online and wonder how many of those relationships persist into marriage, it seems that about 10% of marriages in the US started as long-distance relationships.  

And for those of us who may have been dating during the pandemic and still now, it's more and more likely that you initiate romantic relationships in digital ways, connecting on dating apps, dating websites, etc.

It’s possible to have a fierce love that either begins online or with distance and has a period of physical separation.  They include a very strong friendship building a deep understanding of one another, admiration fondness, effective conflict management and communication skills, lots of these things can be communicated effectively through video and voice and all the other ways that we...

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Join Dr. Greg for today's audience-inspired episode about body image, feeling attractive, and how we can avoid critical and contemptuous conversations with our long-term partners.

Send your questions to @abetterloveproject on TikTok and Instagram! Love each other fiercely.

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Transcript: First, I want to acknowledge that there is a lot of suffering in our world today related to body image. It is disproportionately impacting women and young girls. However, young boys and men are not immune to having body image issues.

My professional views on how to navigate these issues in a healthy way are directly informed by the fact that I was trained as a psychologist by the military. I spent 4 years on active duty in the Marine Corps and another 3 years in the Navy.

The Marine Corps and navy as well as the other branches of the military have very specific height and weight requirements that will mean something very different to each and every service member. Yet, the overall mission of the military demands a level of physical fitness including strength, endurance, good nutrition, etc.

The bottom line is when I'm talking about anything related to one's body in couples therapy.  I'm talking about it in the context of Health, Wellness, and my clients' values.

Yet, recent reporting on the impact of social platforms on particularly young girls and women, calls each of us to consider our own relationship to our body and its impact on our overall health. Why?

Let's start with the message we communicate in our own home around food, nutrition, eating, body weight, and all the other things related to body image.

And I want to focus on right now, even though I know for many of my listeners it's the case that they themselves heard critical messages around either their bodies or other people's bodies. If that is the case, are you currently talking about and thinking about these things differently? In a way worthy to be passed on to your kids or those who look up to you?

If we think poorly of ourselves when we look at ourselves, how could we not be shaped by that? I’ve worked with many who restrict themselves, who binge, who sometimes are only drinking water. It’s so important that we understand the mind x body connection here and get medically evaluated and commit to individual therapy to address these issues.

In our relationships, we need to understand our partner's experiences. If her husband or wife struggled with being picked on in high school or middle school for their weight, for instance, we’ll more easily understand the importance of our words, how we touch, how we love. Sadly, that’s often not the case.

With some of our listeners on Tik-Tok and definitely with folks that I've worked within the past, partners can be cruel. They can be insensitive. They can be unthinking. The worst:  making their love conditional, predicated on the partner going to the gym or losing weight or whatever.

In my view,  it may be in foreign 4 that a partner who is feeling less attracted to their wife or husband gets some emotional validation around that experience from maybe a close friend or an individual therapist. Yet, when it comes to the relationship, it's critically important that conversation around this be contextualized within the couple’s values about living a long, healthy life centered around a lifestyle they both value. If that includes cooking healthy meals together, going on Long hikes throughout the week or running together, going to the gym together, then cool. But if that's not you, it's okay too. These things will likely lead to many psychological and physical benefits, including balanced nutrition, better sleep, better sex, etc.

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