the little black fish

In this dialogue Dr. Blair and I talk about relationships with sleep and discuss how feelings about bedrooms, beds, and bed-partners can impact the quality of sleep. In our society, there is a stigma against couples that sleep in separate beds. The term ‘sleep divorce’ is a socialized term that stigmatizes the practice of sleeping independent of one’s partner. Contrary to popular opinion, most research shows that having a bed-partner can impact sleep quality. Some argue that it does have the potential to lead to a calmer state of mind and body; so you might fall asleep in a relaxed state. However it can also lead to a more disturbed and interrupted sleep. Dr. Blair joins me as a sex therapist and a sleep medicine specialist to highlight the importance of a healthy sleep pattern and its great impact on our intimate relationships and sex life. She invites us to look at our bedrooms as sanctuaries that need to be kept away from heavy conversations and stressful activities. She also offers practical tips for individuals and couples, as well as debunks commonly believed myths about sleep. She explains what disturbed sleeping patterns look like and advises when, where, and how to get help. 

Britney Blair, PsyD, CBSM is a licensed clinical psychologist and is board certified in both sleep and sexual medicine. She is an invited speaker at venues around the globe and has published work in the areas of sleep and sexual medicine for the academic and popular press. Dr. Blair is a Stanford sleep consultant and is on the adjunct faculty at The Stanford Center for Sleep Sciences and Medicine.

Dr. Blair is the Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer of Lover, a digital platform designed to resolve sexual problems and optimize sexual wellness. She is also the Founder and Clinical Director at The Clinic, a multidisciplinary practice with locations across the bay area offering in- office and video appointments serving over 3,000 patients living in the State of California.

Dr. Blair completed her postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University Medical School and her pre-doctoral internship at the VA Greater Los Angeles Health Care System. Dr. Blair received her doctoral degree in Clinical Psychology from the PGSP-Stanford Psy.D. Consortium. She received a bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley.

 In today’s episode, I engage in a dialogue with Rowena Chiu who was one of the critical figures who came forward, and vocalized her experience with Harvey Weinstein’s sex scandal. In this intimate and sensitive conversation, Rowena talks about her private experience of the abuse, the stages of emotions that followed, and how she rechanneled aspects of her experience to become an advocate for those who have endured sexual abuse. As a result of her experience she has become the voice of many, and proceeded to advocate for those who go unheard. We talk about the outcomes that arise from being a voice in this community, and how it can impact experience, as well as aid recovery. 

One of the main objectives of mental health is to find harmony within various roles and identities that we each hold. With this in mind, we discuss how this experience can alter how one proceeds in reshaping and redefining these aspects of themselves. Rowena discusses the intimate details of how her life has been affected by the experience, and how she is managing the upkeep of her multiple roles to keep balance in her everyday life. We talk about hopes and dreams, and share practical tools to help survivors come forward, seek support, and heal. 

Rowena Chiu worked as Assistant To Harvey Weinstein in 1998. After leaving the film industry, she has worked in the fields of management consulting (for Accenture in London, McKinsey & Company in Silicon Valley, and PricewaterhouseCoopers in Hong Kong) and international development (for the World Bank in Ethiopia, South Sudan & Washington DC). Rowena holds an MA in English Language & Literature from the University of Oxford, an MSc in International Management For China from the University of London, and an MBA from London Business School. She lives in Silicon Valley with her husband and four young children.  

In this two-part discussion, Dr. Hansen and I talk about shifts in mental health approaches and offer suggestions to help reframe the subtle yet strategic outcomes. In the beginning portion of our discussion, Dr. Hansen wears her hat as the director of the Stanford’s Well-being Initiative and speaks on her perspective of the ‘pillars of well-being’. She elaborates on her experience by introducing 8 main pillars of wellbeing that focus to offer an approach of holistic care to students and staff. These pillars include, Eat, Connect, Sex, Sleep, Money, Feel, Seek, and Move. As times have changed, so have mental health tactics. When it comes to the discourses around mental health, there seems to be a global shift from a disease-based model to a more holistic, accepting, and integrated model. We used to believe that the absence of disease meant wellness and now we are reframing our lens to look into a person’s overall sense of wellbeing. With this in mind, Dr. Hansen brings her realistic and practical tips to help us look at creating balance amongst all these factors. In the second half of our conversation, Dr. Hansen shifts gears and wears her hat as the co-author of The Ethical Sellout. Through this perspective she guides us to make sense of what may seem as some rather impossible decisions that we have to make in our daily lives. With this frame of reference, Dr. Hansen provides a structure to help us maintain our integrity in the age of compromise.

Dr. Inge Hansen is a Clinical Psychologist and Director of Well-Being at Stanford University. She is also the co-founder and Director of the Weiland Health Initiative, which is dedicated to promoting mental health and wellness across all genders and sexualities. This initiative has generated a variety of innovative clinical and educational programs at Stanford and beyond.  Dr. Hansen is also a co-founder of Gender-Inclusive Stanford, a campus-wide initiative dedicated to improving the campus environment for trans and non-binary students. Dr. Hansen has developed several new academic courses in the realm of gender and sexualities, including Challenging Sex & Gender Dichotomies in Medicine, Human Sexual Diversity and Health, and Transgender Studies.  She is a popular speaker and consultant on diversity and inclusion topics. Last spring she was the inaugural winner of the Christine Griffith Award for Student Well-Being. For four years she has had the honor of co-organizing and hosting North America’s World Sexual Health Day together with Dr. Sara Nazzerzadeh. Dr. Hansen’s book, The Ethical Sellout, co-authored with Lily Zheng, was released in October 2019

Alcohol has a long known history of serving the way we celebrate, cope, and socialize across many societies. Some individuals have a rather healthy relationship with it, some are struggling to keep the balance, and some are neutral. Alcohol consumption lowers one’s mood and inhibitions, and has three major impacts on one’s personal life; these impacts being physiological, relational, and social. Given the current pandemic, many people turn to alcohol for different reasons which we will discuss in this dialogue. People in recovery are struggling, and partners and parents are concerned. They want to know if their loved ones are developing a dependency on alcohol, or if their consumption is just a temporary escape which will pass as the stress of the pandemic lifts. In this dialogue, Paul and I speak about what constitutes an alcoholic drink, and what the appropriate amount of consumption is in relation to our current context. Paul brings his holistic lens as a professor, researcher, practitioner, and a visionary, to debunk the myths that surround alcohol in a compassionate and non-judgmental tone.

Resources

• Alcoholics Anonymous (AA)
• AL-ANAN
• Drinkaware
• Drink less
• What you need to know about alcohol and Covid - World Health Organization (WHO)
• National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA)
• National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA): +1 (800) 662- 4357

About Professor Paul Wallace
Professor Paul Wallace FRCGP FFPHM is Clinical Director for Digital at the South London Academic Health Science Network and Professor Emeritus of Primary Care at UCL. His clinical academic career spans more than 30 years. During this time, his research has focussed on the promotion of health by primary care physicians and the use of digital technologies to optimise such activities. He was formerly Director of the NIHR Primary Care Research Network and led an international programme of research into the effectiveness of digitally mediated screening and brief interventions for alcohol in primary care settings. He has authored more than 120 papers and book chapters, and has been involved in the development, evaluation and dissemination of digital applications for alcohol reduction in a number of countries. Paul is past President of the Telemedicine section of the Royal Society of Medicine, past President of the European General Practice Research Network and a founding member of the European Society of General Practice/Family Medicine. He is a Fellow of the Royal College of General Practitioners and the Faculty of Public Health Medicine at the Royal College of Physicians. In 2012 he co-founded the Foundation for Family Medicine in Palestine of which he is the Chief Executive Officer. In 2013 he was awarded the RCGP President’s Medal.

Tackling the role and meaning of sex during the lockdown, Doortje and I speak about the meaning and role of sex in times of high anxiety and despair. Working with couples across the world over the past two decades, I’ve noticed that sex is one of the main ways people cope with and manage their stress of various nature. 

Especially in times like these, we are driven to consider basic needs of feeling safe, loved, and achieving agency over our bodies and lives. Some look at sex as a way to be reminded that they are alive, they can still find pleasure in life, and create comfort in the idea that there is one area that they can still control about their bodies and their intimate relationships. Some others refrain from it and need to feel safe first before allowing physical connections as such. 

Doortje draws from her experience of 3 decades as a leader in the field of sexual health and wellbeing by sharing lessons learned from community education, the #MeToo movement, history and experiences of shame. She offers the idea that kindness can serve as a lens through which healing can be achieved. She encourages us to be more compassionate, towards ourselves and others, around our need to express ourselves sexually during this time and have sexual connection as a primal need, a form of coping for many. She reminds us that sex is not just about orgasms but a range of physical touch that could bring one joy. 

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About Doortje Braeken van Schaik

Doortje Braeken van Schaik has more than 35 years of experience in adolescent sexual reproductive health and rights, 25 of which with the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), the largest sexual and reproductive health and rights organisation in the world, with expertise grounded in youth, gender and rights issues. During her career she has strived to include sexual rights and sexual wellbeing in her work, especially in sexuality education and services for young people. She initiated and is the co-author of a series of documents on youth participation, CSE including IPPF’s framework for comprehensive sexuality education. After her retirement in December 2016, Doortje has continued to work as a consultant for UN and international NGOs. She is the co-author of the recently published International Sexuality Education Guidelines by UNESCO. She is Honorary Fellow, University of Brighton, Department of Education, board member of the Global Advisory Board on Sexual Health and Wellbeing and received the golden medal by the World Association for Sexual Health for her contributions to Comprehensive Sexuality Education, in 2014.

Adina is the founder of Stanford’s Resilience Project. She has worked with highly accomplished and ambitious students for years to help them learn, adapt, and excel. Adina and I engaged in this dialogue to discuss the dilemmas parents and their children face in this time of uncertainty. Some children are back home as colleges and dorms are closed, and others are in lockdowns elsewhere. For the first time, parents and children could be a potential threat to one another in a way that has never been experienced before. They struggle to find space and navigate their dynamic while being confined behind closed doors. As a result, children might feel the pressure of being judged for not doing enough and parents might be having a hard time navigating how to take care of their children while trying to keep their sanity intact.

Adina brings a positive light to this heavy conversation by inviting us to slow down and reminds us that everyone is impacted by these unforeseeable circumstances (not only you). Therefore you cannot possibly fall behind by being patient and just focusing to take care of yourself. She emphasizes that to learn, one needs to have perspective which seems to be an impossible way of coping in this era of uncertainty. She warns that with the current level of anxiety and rich resources that are out there one might feel pressured and confused. To untangle this confusion, she recommends that we look into resources that offer us validation of how we feel and where we want to be at this moment in time. She frees us from the misconception of seeking resilience while you are still in the midst of the crisis, and offers reassurance that it will come when the time is right.

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About Adina Glickman

Adina is a Certified Integral Coach who has helped thousands of students at large research universities, community and state colleges, and small liberal arts schools, achieve their academic and personal goals through her Resilient Learner coaching model. During her 18 years at Stanford University, she founded The Stanford Resilience Project and created The Duck Stops Here, an academic skills blog for Stanford students that is open to the public. She co-founded The Academic Resilience Consortium, an international collective of faculty and higher education professionals from 250+ schools in sixteen countries. Adina is the author of The Resilient Learner: Eight Pillars of Student Success (in press), and is the co-author of “Over the Influence: A Harm Reduction Guide to Managing Drugs and Alcohol” (Guilford, 2003). Adina received her BA in Music from Reed College and her Master’s degree in Social Work from New York University and worked in community mental health for ten years before moving into educational consulting and coaching. More about Adina here.

the little black fish: Moving from contraction to expansion and connection. 

Dr. Sara Nasserzadeh is a world-renowned social psychologist and psychotherapist. She has worked in 40 countries to help individuals, couples, leaders and communities from bedroom to the boardrooms. Growing up her nickname was the little black fish for her deep curiosity to look beyond what was obvious and available. As “the little black fish” she takes you along to streams that are novel and overlooked. Along the way you will connect with parts of yourself that were forgotten, acquire new lenses to view people and the world around you anew and collect wisdom that help with your relationships on many fronts. This podcast is a compilation of unfiltered dialogues between Dr.Sara and various thought leaders around the world.

Julia worked with unimaginable form of loss for the past 25 years (loss of children). She has several pearls of wisdom to share with us in this time of uncertainty when one cannot imagine a tomorrow (literally).

In this dialogue, Julia and I talk openly about the shocked of our current circumstances in the face of Covid-19 pandemic. Living losses that people are experiencing (jobs, finances, personal freedom, mind-space, relative certainty, our partners as we knew them and so on). We acknowledge that while we are all in this, everyone’s experience of it is different and equally valid. We are all in shock and are experiencing fear on so many levels. As humans, whenever we face an unknown stimulus, we experience a rush of fear. That is usually the initial reaction we get. We each learn how to cope and manage this feeling based on our mental capacities, sociocultural context, resources available and belief system. In the midst of this global pandemic, one can only image different shades of emotions including anger that are present as we are experiencing the ultimate threat to our mere existence. We talk about how to be responsive as best as we can rather than stay in a reactive state.

Julia invites us to be kind to ourselves, take it one day at the time and shares parts of Niebuhr’s serenity prayer “Accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, Courage to change the things which should be changed, and the Wisdom to distinguish the one from the other”. She wants us to slow down and first notice whatever that we are feeling, then naming the emotion and through this offering the release that we need to come out of our tunneled vision that is focused on the current disaster around us. She talks about giving permission to yourself and others to be, to experience and express their emotions the way they is meaningful to them without judgement and without trying to make meanings or sense of the current situation. Julie has worked with hundreds of people through various losses and knows that some of the coping mechanisms that encourage us to look away would be harming us in long run. She invites us to gently step into the pain that we are experiencing to be able to gradually name it, feel it fully, express it, release it and move forward with it.

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About Julia Samuel, MBE, Msc,  MBACP (Snr Accredited) UKCP Registered Psychotherapist 

Julia was Psychotherapist for Paediatrics at St Mary's Hospital Paddington, the post she established in 1992, where her role for 25 years involved seeing families who have children or babies who die, and where she trained and supported the staff. In 1994 she worked to help launch and establish The Child Bereavement UK and as the The Founder Patron was involved and in many aspects of the charities work, having a key role in fundraising, strategy and training. She has stepped back from active involvement now. In 2016 Julia was awarded an MBE in recognition of her services to bereaved children and in 2017 Middlesex University awarded her an Honorary Doctorate. In 2017 Julia published Grief Works which was a bestseller in the UK and has been published in 17 countries. In March 2020 she published This Too Shall Pass: stories of Change Crisis and Hopeful Beginnings and is a Sunday Times bestseller. She also has a private practice where she sees families and individuals for many different issues.