Connectfulness Practice

In this episode we’re reframing how to prepare parents for parenthood and dispelling the myth that you can't prepare for parenthood. 

Our last few episodes have been about why relationships are difficult and inherited family trauma and as we dive into this content, we keep coming back to how significant the first 3-5 years of a child’s life and if we’re not preparing parents, it’s rippling … and so, we’re talking about creating a movement, a seed planting movement that literally prepares people to become parents.

Rebecca is joined by Elly Taylor, perinatal relationship expert, author and founder of Becoming Us™ and Barb Buckner Suárez, health educator, writer, presenter, couples coach and Becoming Us™ facilitator and mentor. With Elly’s based in Australia, Barb in Portland Oregon, and Rebecca in NY, we’re literally holding a round-the-world, round-table discussion.

Rebecca leads us into the framework for this round-table discussion with a reading from Elly’s book, Becoming Us: 8 Steps to Grow a Family That Thrives: 

The Becoming Us™ model harnesses the neurological changes that primes parents for bonding with the baby to create an opportunity for couples to more deeply bond with each other. The model also helps parents learn skills that will help them as they cycle through each transitional stage of life to come. And understanding these stages and planting the seeds may potentially have an impact on the legacy of future generations.

Resources: 

Elly’s Book: Becoming Us, 8 Steps to Grow a Family That Thrives

Find out more about Elly’s work on the Becoming Us Family website: https://becomingusfamily.com/

Elly is heading over to the US for a seed planting workshop tour, catch her LIVE trainings in Denver, Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Texas, Portland, and a handful of stops through-out California: https://becomingusfamily.com/live-events

Find out more about Barb’s work at https://bbsuarez.com/

Learn more about the upcoming Becoming Us Retreat

Learn more about Rebecca’s relationship therapy practice and intensive couples retreat experiences in NY at connectfulness.com

Thank you to our sponsor, TherapyNotes. Therapists, you can get two free months of TherapyNotes and a free data import after signing up for a free trial by going to

Have you ever said something like “I’m just wired this way” in response to someone asking why you can’t just relax and go with the flow more? Maybe you’re scared of certain smells, places, uniforms, noises and other common things found in everyday life without knowing where you developed that particular aversion. As we discussed in our last episode, our brains hold onto the negative experiences for survival -- they become a reference guide to navigating life. But what if we don’t know why we’re reacting negatively towards the mere thought of these scenarios?

Recently, I sat down with Mark Wolynn and dove into the topic of inherited family trauma and the science behind epigenetics. You won’t want to miss this discussion as I am sure you’ll be just as fascinated as I was with what Mark shares in regards to where our fears and stress triggers come from and what we can do about breaking the pattern for ourselves and loved ones.

Mark Wolynn is the director of the Family Constellation Institute in San Francisco. He is a leading expert in the field of inherited family trauma. His book It Didn't Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle  is the winner of the 2016 Nautilus Book Award in psychology, and has been translated into 15 languages.

• What happens during a trauma.
• What it means to have inherited family trauma.
• What an inherited stress response is.
• How we can understand what, if any, stress response or trauma response are actually really our own.
• How our own language can affect our personal body response to trauma.
• Breaking down verbal and nonverbal trauma languages into what Mark calls Core Languages.
• How the relationship between ourselves and our parents affect our current relationships.
• The scientific research and studies behind inherited family trauma.
• What an epigenetic tag is & how we can benefit from epigenetic changes.
• “Trigger ages” and “event triggers” that may shed light on your own triggers.
• What this means for people who were adopted and do not have access to their family of origin’s medical/health records.
• How brain development is impacted starting in utero and grows throughout childhood.
• How the amygdala, prefrontal cortex & hippocampus develop & process trauma and what that means for us.
• How we can heal as person(s) suffering from inherited family trauma.
• Tips on how to break the cycle of inherited family trauma.
• Combining our breath with sensation and awareness, we can then weave in meaning and are able to integrate more positive experiences.
• 70% of couples problems have nothing to do with partners.
• The work of opening is YOUR responsibility.

Find out more about Mark’s work at https://www.markwolynn.com 

Mark’s Book: It Didn’t Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle

Read Rebecca’s personal story “Liberation: a love story (and a reckoning)” on how inherited family trauma has showed up in her life, recently published on Longreads.com!  

Learn more about Rebecca’s relationship therapy practice and intensive couples retreat experiences in NY at

If you've ever wondered "why are relationships difficult?" you'll want to catch this episode with Dr. Stan Tatkin. We start with an exploration of how our species’ survival relies on an inborn negativity bias and how this same mechanism makes relationships difficult and more challenging to sustain under stress. Everyone’s experienced some form of relational loss and developmental trauma. And so, with this in mind, we’re also discussing how early development shapes each of us and our ability to self-regulate and foster safe, secure, adult romantic relationships.

Stan Tatkin, PsyD, MFT, is a clinician, teacher, and developer of a Psychobiological Approach to Couple Therapy. He is also the author of several books on aspects of love and relationships, with his most recent one being We Do: Saying Yes to a Relationship of Depth, True Connection, and Enduring Love. Through his clinical practice in Calabasas, CA, workshops, couples’ retreats, and the PACT Institute, Stan and his wife, Tracey, train psychotherapists to use the PACT method in their clinical practices.

• What the Psychobiological Approach is.
• The inability of people to act and react quickly and properly before they launch into a “fight or flight” response---or a collapse
• For the purpose of helping us understand, Dr. Tatkin simplifies how our neurobiology works down to the two areas of the brain: the ambassadors and the primitives
• For optimum arousal, we need all systems online at the same time, which takes alertness and relaxation
• Why we aren’t all set up for adult love relationships
• How we learn to self-regulate to prepare for adult relationships
• Why so many people don’t know how to get to a safe, secure place
• Stan’s “foxhole” illustration: are couples at war with each other in the foxhole or protecting one another
• How a dangerous environment makes people put aside their differences and work together
• How people manage relationships by learning to work together
• How a couple has to live by agreements that are good for both, like, “We protect each other in public and private”
• How memory perception and communication can get us into trouble
• The difference between co-dependency and interdependency
• How our trauma approach can lead to PTSD----and hugs, massage, and acupuncture can help much more than talking
• How people can ease into eye contact with each other
• The importance of play, which comes from feeling safe and secure
• Why people might have trouble with play
• “The window of tolerance” and what it means for couples
• Things that can compromise and narrow the window of tolerance
• How we miss much of the language used when we communicate in ways that don’t include eye contact, like phone calls, texting, and email
• Why experiencing trauma in life means a lot of re-regulating will need to take place
• Why most everything we suffer from is interpersonal

www.thepactinstitute.com  Find out more about Stan’s practice, resources, books, retreats, and workshops

We Do: Saying Yes to a Relationship of Depth, True Connection, and Enduring Love

Learn more about Rebecca’s relationship therapy practice and intensive couples retreat experiences in NY at connectfulness.com

Follow us @connectfulness on Twitter,

Cyndi Darnell is an internationally renowned sex and relationship therapist. Her approach spans the clinical to the esoteric. She’s spearheading progressive sex & relationships seminars and workshops for adults and clinicians that deeply change people’s lives. Cyndi’s on a mission to eliminate stigma from discussions around sex, erotisim and pleasure and changing our fears and transform it into freedom.

• How the sexual revolution missed the boat to discuss pleasure (especially womxn’s pleasure) that center on what each individual’s motivation is.
• Permission to own your motivation.
• Understanding the story that you’re holding onto that’s holding you back and causing you pain.
• Cyndi shares her distinct definitions of love and sex (much like chocolate and red wine).
• Sex changes over time and so we continue to learn about ourselves.
• The more we experience ourselves the more we understand our motivations.
• Internal motivation is vital, know why you want things to change.
• Sex can be an opportunity to live a more visceral and colorful life.
• Erotic pleasure relates back to early childhood before we had stigmas, values and judgements placed upon us and receive the smiling gaze of another.
• Societal misconceptions: the body is inherently dangerous and the intellect is superior.
• How we participate in keeping myths alive by cutting ourselves off from our own bodies.
• How to reconnect the body through a daily practice of tuning into the body.
• Masturbation as a way of integrating erotic pleasure into your life,
• “Erotic Self Care”
• Consent Culture and Sex Ed that goes beyond Abstinence, Reproduction and even Consent and includes Pleasure.
• Tea and Consent video made an assumption that everyone likes tea: oversimplification of consent being yes vs no
• The real question is ‘what kind of sex do you like?’ Cyndi says this is where the wheels come off for most people.
• Making a practice of talking about sex and erotism.
• Cyndi’s erotic awakening story.
• Coming back to the body, that’s where the wisdom is.

RESOURCES:

Find Cyndi Darnell online at www.cyndidarnell.com

Purchase Cyndi’s video series: The Atlas of Erotic Anatomy and Arousal

If you long to know more about erotic desire, passion, what your turn-ons are and how to communicate them with your partner/s – then join Cyndi for The Desire Series.

While these discussions will guide you into the Connectfulness Practice, the podcast is not meant to be a substitute for counseling from a licensed provider. Reach out. Initiate the ripple. Learn more about my connectfulness counseling practice here.

Mentioned in this episode:

WDMP Integrating Heart+Mind

WDMP Integrating Heart+Mind

Join Annie Schuessler and I, April 25-28, 2019, at Menla Mountain Resort for a transformational heart and soul business retreat. 

Your Signature is the work you’re known for, your most important message, your unique contribution to the world. Before you can expand, you’ve got to cleanse, simplify, and make space for your next vision. You can’t get where you’re going next by pushing harder or doing more. Part of your signature is the way YOU do business, NOT the way everyone else does it.

Gather with a group of powerful entrepreneurs for 4 days of transformation for your business and life. Learn more at connectfulness.com/signature-retreat

Mercedes Samudio, LCSW is a parent coach, speaker, bestselling author, and founder of the Diversity in Parenting conference who helps parents and children communicate with each other, manage emotional trauma, navigate social media and technology together, and develop healthy parent-child relationships. She started the #EndParentShaming movement and coined the term Shame-Proof Parenting — using both to bring awareness to ending parent shame. Mercedes is on a mission to empower parents in believing in their innate ability to guide and raise healthy, happy children. 

• Mercedes' message and passion and how it’s deeply tied to her own healing and her ability to reconcile healing her inner child and how not being scared to discuss her own healing has enabled her to feel more connected to and assertive of her overall message.
• Dispelling the myth that once you become a parent you’re something/someone else.
• Parent's internal struggles to heal their own childhoods and how we don’t tend to give parents the space to heal, which is the same space we heal intergenerational traumas. 
• Parenting identity is all the stuff that comes with the term parenting that you’ve created and held throughout your life: the parents you had, the people you watched parent, what culture and research says about parenting, what society says about parenting… and why it’s so important to reckon with these messages.
• The ongoing struggle to sit with our own imperfections, to-do lists, navigate parenthood and hold it all everyday and how to manage the complexities of deepened awarenesses. 
• The myth we've bought into: that parenting has to mean something and the guilt, shame and fear that comes with that. 
• Mercedes' book, Shame Proof Parenting, and the journey that writing the book has taken her on. There is no A-Z process of raising a human because there is no A-Z process to being a human. And how the book is starting to shift mindsets. 
• Representation — the parenting world is predominately made up of White women and many modern parenting methods require you to be a part of a culture that sees you. When BIPOC, Adoptive, LGBTQ and Special-Needs mothers try to enter popular modern parenting realms, she may be the only one there, and the only one in her family/community that’s doing it and it can be really difficult to continue on in a space where there is no one else there that looks like you/understands your struggle. 
• We talk about how frustration fueled Mercedes to create the Diversity in Parenting Conferenceand what the conference is all about: if you’re a parenting or mental health professionals who is looking for more skills in how to work with diverse parents and family populations. 
• Deeper messages about why representation matters to help everyone feel validated and seen. 

RESOURCES:

Find Mercedes at shameproofparenting.com 

Learn more about the Diversity in Parenting conference September 13-14, 2019 in Anaheim, CA at diversityinparentingconference.com (early bird tickets available through March 2019).

Join Annie Schuessler and I for the Signature Retreat April 25-28, 2019 at Menla Resort in NY, learn more at

Dr. Stephen Snyder is a sex and relationship therapist, Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, and the author of the acclaimed sex and relationship book, LOVE WORTH MAKING: How to Have Ridiculously Great Sex in a Long-Lasting Relationship.

In this episode, Dr Snyder and I discuss:  

• The nature of desire and why you don’t need it. 
• Why we make ourselves crazy trying to cultivate desire instead of a-tuning ourselves to our long term partners through mindful moments of inspiration. 
• Why frustration is a good thing in relationships.
• Why your goal should be to get dumb and happy with your partner (according to Dr. Synder, this is the ticket to keep a long term erotic connection simmering).
• How to be seen, speak up, and find your voice. 
• Selfishness + making it easy. 
• Focus on wanting to consuming your partner — eroticism is about taking selfish joy in the other person’s existence inside the bedroom. And outside the bedroom, being able to assert what you need, think and feel even when the other needs thinks and feels something different; this is what creates the core of the couples confidence and creativity together. 
• Why pressure tends to make the erotic mind rebel. 
• Dr Synder says “given that our erotic selves are ultimately such small children, what we really want to do is be good parents to our erotic children.” 
• And we also touch on setting limits for ourselves in the 21st century, especially when it comes to enactments.  

RESOURCES:

Find Dr Snyder online at loveworthmaking.com and sexualityresource.com

Sometimes a change in surroundings can make all the difference. Come away with your partner and combine the core elements of a spa retreat with a personalized deep dive into Connectfulness® couple therapy, and return home restored and deeply aware of your relational patterns. I’m booking one Private Couples Intensive Retreat Experiences per month. Learn more at connectfulness.com/intensive

Learn more about my relationship therapy practice in NY at connectfulness.com

Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook

Mentioned in this episode:

WDMP Integrating Heart+Mind

WDMP Integrating Heart+Mind

Susan Piver is a New York Times bestselling author of 9 books including her latest, The Four Noble Truths of Love: Buddhist Wisdom for Modern Relationships, and a renowned Buddhist teacher. 

Susan joins me to talk about how to survive the inevitable discomfort of relationships and how she discovered what she’s called the Four Noble Truths of Love during a rough patch in her own marriage while thinking they might be through and not knowing where to begin. Which is when a voice whispered to Susan “begin at the beginning, at the beginning are four noble truths.” 

In this episode, Susan Piver and I discuss:

• How to work with discomfort.
• Discernment is the byproduct of awareness, provides a sense of guidance and clarity.
• “I spent too many years trying to be a different kind of person.” --Susan Piver
• Awareness is an operating system that can help us to accept one another and make room for differences.
• I read and we discussed this passage from Susan’s book The Four Noble Truths of Love: Buddhist Wisdom for Modern Relationships, “Love seems custom made to evoke the deepest woundings and thereby forces you to choose over and over between you puny fearful self and your heroic genius self. The closer you get to another person the louder your sorrows shriek, the more frightened you become. The more you scare each other. All resulting in some very weird battles that have nothing to do with what’s actually happening.”
• The Four Noble Truths of Buddhism
• Life is suffering. 
• The cause of suffering. Grasping.
• The cessation of suffering. This condition can be alleviated.
• The path to no suffering. The noble eightfold path will lead you out of suffering. The eight steps are: Right View, Right Intention, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, Right Concentration
• Susan’s Four Noble Truths of Love:
• The truth: Relationships are uncomfortable.
• The cause: Trying to make them comfortable is what makes them uncomfortable.
• The cessation: Meeting the discomfort together is love.
• How to work with it all: The eightfold path
• Compassion helps us to not see others behavior as a threat.
• Relationship suffering exposes everything about you.
• How to soften into self and let yourself be as you are.
• The importance of working on ourselves as individuals, how our minds mix, and why the way you talk to yourself is likely to bleed over into the way you talk to others.
• “The more human I am, the more genuine I am, the less likely I am to weaponize my way of being against someone else.” --Susan Piver
• This is not a way to fix the mess, rather a a way to enter the mess.
• What happens when we feel our feelings of unworthiness, stop fighting the feelings and relax with it and why doing so can help us to be more effective. 
• “Root of fearlessness is curiosity. Everybody knows how to be curious. Everyone can be fearless.” --Susan Piver
• Being really human in relationship with another person while you tolerate the discomfort, while you learn to soften and be kind towards yourself and one another even when you’re having all the big feelings.
• Susan’s

Welcome to the Connectfulness Practice Podcast. Here we settle in to the murky, tangled, and freaking hard parts of life to restore our relationship with the self, so it can ripple out to the people we love, the work we do, and the world around us.

We can’t fix what’s wrong if we can’t talk about it. We can’t move the conversation forward if we’re not willing to be real about where we are now. And unless we push the edges of what it means to connect, nothing will ever change. I’m your host, Rebecca Wong. Every month I invite a fabulous, big-thinking guest to join me to talk about what it means to be human together. We’ll have deep conversations about the big stuff –– life, love, and legacy –– and how you can foster connection for yourself. Let’s start to reconnect the world, one conversation at a time.

What to expect in future episodes:

We’ll be exploring how we talk to ourselves affect the world we live in and the relationships we have and stories we tell ourselves make up who we are how we show up in the world and how we continue to show up and the choices we make. They make up the biosphere, the air we breathe.

How to soften our own edges and create space for growth and intimacy.

I share a story about lobsters and how discomfort precedes growth, vulnerability, strength, confidence and intimacy.

I outline themes and topics we’ll be exploring in future episodes including the deep work of looking at ourselves in relationships, remembering who we are, exploring how do these ideas of who we are get formed, transgenerational trauma, epigenetics, neuroscience and creativity.

My vision is to create a community to learn together, you’re invited to join the connectfulness® community.

Expect new episodes to be released once-a-month.

Write me and let me know what you’re thinking about and want to hear in future episodes.

RESOURCES:

Learn more about working with me at connectfulness.com

Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook

MY GRATITUDES:

Sarah and Chris Faris and Kidneystone Studio for our delicious soundtrack music.

Cover-art design by Blue Rabbit Studios, photo by Craig Strahorn.

Mentioned in this episode:

WDMP Integrating Heart+Mind

WDMP Integrating Heart+Mind