Connectfulness Practice

For this final episode of the season, I talk to Julie Lythcott-Haims, who is asking the question “what does it mean to grow up?” For her, it’s about lovingly letting go of your past burdens so that you can be true to yourself – while not trampling on anybody else. Our conversation flows naturally from topic to topic as we learn about how learning mindfulness took her from being a lawyer and dean of a university to becoming a New York Times bestselling author, speaker, and activist focused on helping humans find their true north. Later, we bring these themes into a discussion of inclusion, identity, and intergenerational healing. Julie shares about growing up as a Black and biracial person with a white mother, healing her past to be the parent she wants to be, and widening her scope to community engagement after isolation during COVID 19.

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Julie Lythcott-Haims believes in humans and is deeply interested in what gets in our way. Her work encompasses writing, speaking, teaching, mentoring, and activism. She is the New York Times bestselling author of How to Raise an Adult which gave rise to a popular TED Talk. Her second book is the critically-acclaimed and award-winning prose poetry memoir Real American, which illustrates her experience as a Black and biracial person in white spaces. Her third book, Your Turn: How to Be an Adult, has been called a “groundbreakingly frank” guide to adulthood. Julie holds degrees from Stanford, Harvard Law, and California College of the Arts. She currently serves on the boards of Black Women’s Health Imperative, Narrative Magazine, and on the Board of Trustees at California College of the Arts. She serves on the advisory boards of LeanIn, Sir Ken Robinson Foundation and Baldwin For the Arts. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her partner of over thirty years, their itinerant young adults, and her mother. Learn more and follow Julie at julielythcotthaims.com.

Julie is currently running for office with Palo Alto City Council, support her campaign at julieforpaloalto.com.

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If you enjoyed this episode and want to dive in deeper, consider joining one of Rebecca’s online offerings to deepen your relational skills and expand your Self care. Learn more at connectfulness.com/offerings

Also, please check out our short form weekly WHY DOES MY PARTNER sister podcast.

This podcast is not a substitute for counseling with a licensed provider.

Mentioned in this episode:

WDMP Integrating Heart+Mind

WDMP Integrating Heart+Mind

I'm excited to share this podcast conversation with one of my dearest friends Akilah Riley-Richardson. Akilah has been in clinical practice for 16 years, is based in Trinidad and Tobago, and specializes in work with sexual and racial minorities. In this conversation, Akilah and I talk about relational privilege and the impact historical and race based trauma has on relationships. Akilah teaches to pivot, rumble and imagine to help gain a sense of where the hurt is, what the body needs, and how these needs connect back to the behaviors expressed is relationship…and what is needed now. And we rumble with the politics of interest, the impact of feeling that your experiences in the world matter (or don’t) within intimate relational spaces.

RESOURCES: 

Find Akilah online at akilahrileyrichardson.com, and dive in even deeper to learn more with Akilah in her Academy of Therapy Wisdom course Relational Privilege and Systemic Trauma: Confronting Race and Sex Discrimination in Couples Work

additional resources mentioned in this episode:

Resmaa Menakem

Shawn A. Ginwright’s The Four Pivots

adrienne maree brown’s concept of radical imagination (see this poem)

If you want to dive in deeper with Rebecca, consider joining our Relationship Bootcamp or exploring her offerings to deepen your relational skills and expand your self-care.  Learn more at connectfulness.com

Also, please check out our sister podcast, Why Does My Partner

Mentioned in this episode:

WDMP Integrating Heart+Mind

WDMP Integrating Heart+Mind

Moraya Seeger DeGeare is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, consultant, writer, activist, and mom. We recorded this conversation in-person, meandering in our discussion around moving within a world that tries to adhere to dominant culture all the time. Here’s what we hope you get out of this conversation: if you are someone who’s not walking around in a dominant culture body, we hope you can simply listen and not have to do extra work to find resonance. And if you are someone that's walking around in a dominant culture body (white, cis, heterosexual, able-bodied, neurotypical, etc), we hope we’ve opened some awareness that not everyone experiences the world the way you do. Check in on the people around you.

Moraya is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, consultant, writer, activist, and mom. She is the co-owner of BFF Therapy in Beacon, NY and has a monthly sex and relationship column, Can We Talk? with Refinery 29. The connecting line through all of her passions from research analyst to being active on a school board is that she engages in life with an understanding that culture and connection need to be understood first. Moraya is certified in Emotionally Focused Therapy and specializes in mixed race LGBTQIA+ couples and racial identity development. Her activism work encourages intergenerational conversations on systemic issues.

Find Moraya online at bfftherapy.com, PeteSeegerfamily.com, and her monthly sex and relationship column with Refinery29 “Can We Talk?”

If you want to dive in deeper with Rebecca, consider joining our Relationship Bootcamp or exploring her offerings to deepen your relational skills and expand your self-care.  Learn more at connectfulness.com

Also, please check out our sister podcast, Why Does My Partner

Mentioned in this episode:

WDMP Integrating Heart+Mind

WDMP Integrating Heart+Mind

Dr. Han Ren (she/they) is deeply rooted in Liberation-oriented, anti-oppressive, culturally informed therapy. In this time of global upheaval and collective trauma many people have experienced increasing amounts of isolation. Social media is one of the places people turn when they feel alone. Han's widely viewed content on social media centers on liberating the idea that healing has to look a certain way, especially for often historically overlooked people and communities. Normalization goes a long way in undoing our collective experience of aloneness. In this gentle yet confronting conversation, Han guides us towards 3 moment to moment healing practices, accessible to us all: check in with your body, say what you mean/mean what you say, and repair.

RESOURCES: 

Find Dr. Han Ren online at drhanren.com and on all the social channels, tiktok, twitter, and facebook @drhanren, and on IG @dr.han.ren

connectfulness.com

If you enjoyed this episode and want to dive in deeper, consider joining one of Rebecca’s online offerings to deepen your relational skills and expand your Self care. Learn more at connectfulness.com/offerings

Also, please check out the new WHY DOES MY PARTNER short form weekly podcast. 

Mentioned in this episode:

WDMP Integrating Heart+Mind

WDMP Integrating Heart+Mind

Patriarchy, supremacy, and toxic individualism are cultural values that really are at the root of so many social and political problems we face today.  Systemic change can seem overwhelming, if not nearly impossible.  But changing the power structure within our most intimate relationships?  That’s something we can definitely do–starting today.  How?  By shifting from Me vs. You consciousness to Us consciousness and learning to act from our wise adult rather than our adaptive child as we work through hard things with our partners. When we do this, we spark a cultural butterfly effect that ripples outward into the world.  As this episode’s guest, Terry Real, says, “We may not be able to bring peace to Ukraine for example, but we can bring peace to our living rooms and our bedrooms. And why don't we start with where we live?”

Terry Real is the creator of Relational Life Therapy and author of the forthcoming book, Us.  Tune in as Terry shares his insight on speaking to your immature, adaptive child parts vs. speaking to your wise adult parts, key differences in how boys and girls are conditioned to be in relationship and how to relearn what was taught out of us as children, the harm that patriarchy and individualism cause us in relationships and how relationships can upend them, masculinity and the current state of our country, the power in changing the choices we make in relationship in order to get more of what we want (rather than pointing the finger at our partners), plus a relational skill assignment to try in your relationship right now.

Note: This podcast episode was recorded in February 2022, before certain current events in the U.S. took place, such as the massacres in Buffalo, NY, Uvalde, TX, the Depp/Heard trial, and news leaked from Supreme Court of the decision to strike down Roe v. Wade, all of which have roots in supremacy, patriarchy and toxic individualism.  Any omissions of such events in this conversation are not intentional, though we hope the correlations between these events and the issues discussed in this episode come through and further underscore the need for this work at every level from the most intimate to the collective.

Learn more about Terry Real and his work at TerryReal.com.  You can order Terry Real’s new book, Us, here.

If you enjoyed this episode and want to dive in deeper, consider joining one of Rebecca’s online offerings to deepen your relational skills and expand your Self care. Learn more at connectfulness.com/offerings

Also, please check out the WHY DOES MY PARTNER short form weekly podcast.

This podcast is not a substitute for counseling with a licensed provider.

Mentioned in this episode:

WDMP Integrating Heart+Mind

WDMP Integrating Heart+Mind

What our culture teaches us about sex isn’t very useful. Many of us have absorbed the message that sex is a means to some kind of end–orgasm, connection, a baby.  We’ve learned that there’s a right and a wrong way to do it.  We’ve even learned that sex is natural.  It’s no wonder then that when our libido doesn’t match our partner’s or our desires don’t match our politics, we assume there must be something wrong with us.  Here’s the real truth:  There is nothing wrong with you.  Or your partner.  So many of us have just been trying to conform to someone else’s narrow version of sexuality (often without even realizing it).  If we slow down and take the time, we can instead get to know the sexuality that is uniquely ours and the fulfillment we all deserve.

This week’s guest, Cyndi Darnell, says in her forthcoming book,  "The body has always belonged to either God or science. There has never been a time in Western history that the body truly belonged to the person who inhabits it."  She says we can begin to reclaim our bodies for ourselves by unlearning the things we’ve been taught about sex that aren’t serving us.  By rediscovering our libidos and desires.  By learning how to show ourselves to ourselves.  By being in our bodies.  Cyndi, clinical sexologist & sex & relationship therapist who works with clients all over the globe, is here to tell us how.

Learn more about Cyndi Darnell and her work at CyndiDarnell.com

You can preorder her book, Sex When You Don't Feel Like It: The Truth about Mismatched Libido and Rediscovering Desire at cyndidarnell.com/book

If you want to dive in deeper, consider joining our Relationship Bootcamp or exploring Rebecca's offerings to deepen your relational skills and expand your self-care.  Learn more at connectfulness.com

Also, please check out our sister podcast, Why Does My Partner

Mentioned in this episode:

WDMP Integrating Heart+Mind

WDMP Integrating Heart+Mind

In Lissa Rankin’s book, Sacred Medicine, she writes,  "We live in a disembodied culture because trauma causes us to leave our bodies. It is a defense mechanism and in extreme cases, a survival skill that can save you. Yet you can't heal the body without being in it."  Our culture encourages dissociation:  Buy this product to feel better, drink this to escape, distract yourself with social media.  Numb out, stay busy, look outside yourself.  And yet, science has enough data to say with certainty that trauma causes pain and illness in the body.  This is no longer a woo-woo idea.  Sometimes, dissociation absolutely saves us. Other times, it keeps us in patterns that no longer serve to the point of making us sick.  

In this rich conversation, Lissa and Rebecca discuss the paradoxes in healing trauma:  trauma is treatable but you have to be in the body to heal it. They discuss the necessary skills in drawing on all of your intelligences—your intellectual intelligence, yes, but also your somatic, intuitive, and emotional intelligences—and why we must stay in our bodies enough to pay attention to them.  They also discuss nuances of power-over/power-under dynamics and the paradox of why the reward of shared-power-with is so unfathomable to someone in a power-over position and yet, the reward is so compelling and full of possibility.

RESOURCES:

Learn more about Lissa Rankin and her work at LissaRankin.com and HealAtLast.org.

If you want to dive in deeper, consider joining our Relationship Bootcamp or exploring Rebecca's offerings to deepen your relational skills and expand your self-care.  Learn more at connectfulness.com

Also, please check out our sister podcast, Why Does My Partner.

Thanks for listening! We invite you to deepen into the discussion with us on instagram and please support the show by sharing and reviewing the episode.

Mentioned in this episode:

WDMP Integrating Heart+Mind

WDMP Integrating Heart+Mind

Dear listeners, for this month’s episode, we decided to do something a little different.  Instead of interviewing a special guest, we’ve turned the tables and your host has become the guest!  Out of curiosity and a sense of play (two things we adore here at Connectfulness), Rebecca agreed to be interviewed by our podcast editor, Al Hoberman, who is also a fabulous music therapist.  Together, they let the conversation meander where it will, delving into topics like why we can never be “healed and ready” for a relationship before entering into it, the importance of knowing oneself (and why it feels so scary at first), implicit and conscious memories, the burden of generational survival mechanisms and why they should be celebrated and released, and the power that lies in letting things get awkward.

This episode was really fun to record.  We hope it’s equally fun for you to listen in.  Should we do more of these?  Do you have questions you’d like us to unpack?  Let us know by emailing us at [email protected] or through our contact page.

If you want to dive in deeper, consider joining our Relationship Bootcamp or exploring Rebecca's offerings to deepen your relational skills and expand your self-care. Learn more at connectfulness.com

Also, please check out our sister podcast, Why Does My Partner.

This podcast is not a substitute for counseling with a licensed provider.

Mentioned in this episode:

WDMP Integrating Heart+Mind

WDMP Integrating Heart+Mind

“I can’t adult today” makes for great social media fodder. But as with all humor, there’s a nugget of truth in there.  How many models do we have for adulting that is healthy, balanced, secure and relational? Our culture has sold us quite a bill of goods: Independence and “rugged individualism” as an indication that we’ve become successful adults. Perfection or mastery as the ultimate goal.  Self-care has become “treat yourself”.  The pop psychology idea that having boundaries means you get to tell someone else what they can and can’t do.  Even the idea that objective reality not only exists but should rule over all else.  The truth is, none of these concepts are serving us very well because there is a whole lot of nuance and self-attunement missing.

Terri Delaney is here to debunk all of these ideas.  Disrupting our old programming won’t necessarily make life easier, but it does offer each of us more grace, a chance to heal, and the power to get out of our own way.  This delicious conversation contains so much.  Terri and I discuss the unicorn parenting most of us never got and why there’s still hope if we didn’t, how to use the “full apology” and why it works, and the overlap in understanding our inherent worth, our subjective realities, and having good boundaries.  Terri illustrates what listening and containing boundaries look like and why protecting ourselves is our responsibility, not anyone else’s.  She differentiates between wants and needs, and explains why both matter.   We muse on the spiritual component of this work and why moderation is actually a form of humility.  She even turns anti-dependence on its head by explaining how it’s actually a covert form of dependency in a way that might blow your mind.  Join us as we unpack what it really means to operate from our functional adult selves and what a work-in-progress we all are.

Learn more about Terri Delaney and her work at relationalskillbuilding.com and terridelaney.com

Book mentioned: How to Become the Parent You Always Wanted to Be by Adele Faber 

You may also want to listen to episodes 18 and 25.

And if you want to dive in deeper, consider joining our Relationship Bootcamp or exploring Rebecca's offerings to deepen your relational skills and expand your self-care. Learn more at connectfulness.com

Also, please check out our sister podcast, Why Does My Partner.

This podcast is not a substitute for counseling with a licensed provider.

Mentioned in this episode:

WDMP Integrating Heart+Mind

WDMP Integrating Heart+Mind

So often, many of us are still just waiting on our parents to show up for us in the way we needed them to when we were little.  Sometimes we’re consciously aware of this, oftentimes we’re not.  And it can continue long after our parents have passed, if we haven’t made the unconscious conscious and learned to reparent ourselves.  Otherwise, we often unintentionally seek this fulfillment from our most intimate relationships.  In this episode, I chat with fellow Certified Relational Life Therapist, Shane Birkel, who is able to take these big concepts and ground them in very clear language and context.  

If you’re new or feeling resistance to the idea of Relational Life Therapy, this episode is a great point of entry. Tune in as Shane and I discuss families of origin, healthy versus toxic shame, the importance of compassion and grief work during conflict, and what healthy relationships actually look like.

RESOURCES:

For great little relational videos, find Shane Birkel on Tiktok.

You can learn more about Shane's work at ShaneBirkel.com. 

You can also check out Shane’s podcast, The Couples Therapist Couch.

If you enjoyed this episode and want to dive in deeper, consider joining our upcoming Relationship Bootcamp or one of Rebecca's online offerings to deepen your relational skills and expand your self-care. Learn more at connectfulness.com/offerings

Also, please check out our sister podcast, Why Does My Partner.

This podcast is not a substitute for counseling with a licensed provider.

Mentioned in this episode:

WDMP Integrating Heart+Mind

WDMP Integrating Heart+Mind