By Maryanne Comaroto
The podcast currently has 14 episodes available.
While LGBTQ marriage is on the rise, unfortunately so are the divorce rates. It can get complicated: multiple partners or parents, varying divorce and child custody rules and processes, and the surrounding political and cultural environment. Here, Maryanne has a fun, freewheeling, practical conversation with Prof. Abbie Goldberg, author of LGBTQ Divorce and Relationship Dissolution: Psychological and Legal Perspectives and Implications for Practice. She'll share concrete tips as well as stories from those who have gone through this...as well as their children. An awesome community resource!
Couples fight. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. Sometimes these fights provide comic relief, or they can threaten the very survival of the relationship.
Psychologist and relationship consultant James Creighton wrote Loving through Your Differences: Building Strong Relationships from Separate Realities to help bridge our different perceptions or experiences of reality. He shares some of his eleven ways to express feelings with minimal blame and accusation, listen with empathy, stop behaviors that make fights escalate before they spin out of control, and much more. We can live happily and productively together and find excitement and fulfillment, rather than disappointment and frustration, in our differences!
“Trying all the approaches discussed in this book may take weeks, months, or even longer. Some of us who started down this path are still on it years later. But it has been worth it,” writes Creighton. “To understand and gain control over the meanings you attach to life is a constantly fulfilling process. It begins with understanding and accepting responsibility for creating your own reality.”
Most of us know a thing or two about leadership. We have led and been led, whether being a parent, partner, an employee, boss or a citizen. Leading is part of daily life.
What we seem to know less about are the unconscious influences of leadership; how cultural and inherited archetypes shape and move us. Being aware of these shadowy influences has never been more crucial; we can see what is at stake when we do not inquire into what moves us to lead.
I have the privilege of sharing my interview with my mentor and colleague Dr. Arthur Ciaramicoli, Harvard Med. School psychologist, whose latest book is The Soulful Leader: Success with Authenticity, Integrity and Empathy. He shares his own personal stories of discovering how to shift away from a power-based model using divine feminine principles of empathy, interiority, vulnerability, and soul. He makes you not only want to be a better leader, but shows you how.
Pharmacist turned inspirational speaker Dr. Dravon James says that we are all asking that question most of the time. How do we move from that anxiety to a feeling of reliable peace? She and Maryanne discuss the importance of being internally referenced, and how this interior cultivation impacts all your relationships. You’ll hear cool ways to get to know yourself with love and devotion. You can put boundaries on learned behaviors of fear and come out powerful…nothing missing, nothing broken!
Cultivating peace just may be the answer ....
It’s clearly not festive to talk about date rape, but I would rather you be safe and educated this holiday season, given the relentless current cultural and political swirl. This month alone I have been witness to an unprecedented number of people breaking the cultural trance of female sexual objectification and abuse, divulging their debilitating traumatic stories of rape and beyond. You might also find yourself in the position of being another's confidant, witness to one or more of the droves of victims finally coming forward to share the burden of sexual assault and worse. Today we will address the young people on college campuses struggling to cope.
The latest research reports 1 in 5 females will experience sexual assault, attempted or completed rape. The definition of rape being “sex you don’t agree to, including forcing a body part or object into your vagina, rectum (bottom), or mouth. Date rape is when you are raped by someone you know.” Given there are currently 19.9 million students enrolled in colleges today, this means just this year more than 2.4 million students have been assaulted. Title 9, the federal civil rights law passed in 1972, was created to ensure that male and female students and employees in educational settings are treated equally and fairly, yet here we are situated within a culture that has normalized rape. This month's newsletter is dedicated to a deeper inquiry hoping to help finding solutions for addressing and healing this pandemic social atrocity for all concerned. Please tune in here to my podcast interviewing two young people living on campus who courageously share their experience about what it is like for them navigating relationships in this rape culture.
What are the unconscious influences on our health and relationships, and how can we change those beliefs? Did you know that helplessness triggers genes that express illness and shame causes molecular secretions that lower your immune system? Dr. Mario Martinez, clinical neuropsychologist and author of The MindBody Code: How to Change the Beliefs that Limit Your Health, Longevity, and Success, has found out that longevity is learned and the causes of health are inherited. Listen in to his own stories about how our relationships can affect our health, how our immune system responds to our cultural premises, and how 50 milligrams of love can help you have better relationships!
Divine masculine, divine feminine…these forces influence our lives at every level, yet most of us only think of sex and power rather than the divine aspects. Maryanne talks with her husband—a man who was given a “front-row seat” as a white male of privilege—about his journey from the emptiness of cultural stereotypes to a truer connection with the Divine masculine. How can men tap into that for guidance on how to be sons, brothers, fathers, friends, partners? He shares the spontaneous offer he made Maryanne, a major piece of work around forgiveness. And gently suggests ways for us, both men and women, to heal and embrace their best versions of themselves.
In recent years, I have noticed many of my friends and clients complaining about a steady decline of satisfying physical intimacy and yet an increasing longing for connection. This is among solo and partnered people alike.
My search for answers to this intimacy paradox led me, surprisingly, to Tantra. Part of my work is helping people explore and heal issues related to sexual objectification and abuse. Tantra always seemed like an excuse for sexual predator types to prey on vulnerable people in the name of spirituality.
But I kept coming across people who credited Tantra as a way to reconnect with their sexuality in a healing way. To learn more, I reached out to Niyaso Carter, a Tantra guide who has been teaching about sacred sexuality for 25 years.
Listen in on our conversation as we discuss
The benefits of tapping into your sexual energy for your relationship, creativity and energy … and why this can be particularly hard for us now.
How responsible practice of Tantra opens both the physical body and the heart
What the ancients were thinking when they devised Tantra 5,000 years ago
How Tantra can bring unresolved experiences up to the surface for healing.
You may already know that meditation has amazing physical and psychological benefits. What you may not know is how this 5000-year-old practice can help your relationships! I never thought in a million years I would start and end my day meditating in a relationship. My husband is right by my side and we support each other in our practice :)
Psychotherapist and moving meditation practitioner Christine Havens joins me on my latest Realtime Relationships podcast episode to share how meditation can help us all have deeper, more meaningful relationships starting with ourselves.
Here is a sneak peek of the mindful and nourishing topics we covered:
Do you prefer women or men or both? How do you describe your sexuality these days?
Listen in as Maryanne and a person go deep, delving into the current constellation of our cultural psyche as it relates to sexual identity.
Asking the questions:
* What are our choices around sexual identity?
*How do we choose?
*What informs our choices today and what price are we paying for this freedom?
*How does having greater range of choice inform our behavior and relationships?
*What if sex was not a "drive"?
Real experiences and realizations from a person who has gone through the cultural expectations that tried to limit their sexuality...and come out in a centered, heartful, expressive way!
The podcast currently has 14 episodes available.