How to Figure it Out On Your Own
Michele Christensen 0:05
Hey there! Welcome to Sex. Love. Power. I'm your host, Michele Lisenbury Christensen. I'm an intimacy mentor for leaders and this podcast is an ongoing conversation about eroticism, long-term, committed relationship, and the depths of love, devotion and longing, all through the lenses of brain science, social justice, and ongoing spiritual evolution.
Michele Christensen 0:26
This is a two-way discussion with my community-which you can join, for free at society.lisenbury.com. As intense, passionate people who can be highly sensitive and who want a LOT in all areas of our lives, I want us to have a place where we can have the real discussions we need to have about sex and power and love-
Michele Christensen 0:43
I know it's not always easy to talk about sex. If you feel a little, both drawn to this topic, and squeamish about it, you're in the right place. It's safe here. And you know, cultivating your turn on your pleasure and intimacy with another person takes a lot of real intentionality and attention. So this is where we dig in. We give that attention, we set those intentions and we talk about the transformative ideas and the concrete actions that will help you create the love and sex you really want, right inside the life you have. So welcome.
Michele Christensen 1:11
One of the things I hear most about relationship challenges, "I feel like we should be able to figure this out on our own." And I want to talk about that today. Because it causes a lot of problems. If you've ever thought that yourself, or if your partner has said that to you, today's episode is for you. Maybe you think you should be able to solve your relationship problems on your own. And I get why so many couples tell me," Come on. We really love each other, we have a good relationship, we should just be able to work out this challenge". But here's the thing... that belief is rooted in two really painful lies.
Michele Christensen 1:40
The first comes from our puritanical cultures lie that sexuality is shameful and good people hide sexuality away and don't talk about it. And only bad people prioritize sexuality and bring it into the light and talk openly about sex.
Michele Christensen 1:55
The second lie is the belief that we should be able to work it out on our own, is rooted in a myth that if a relationship is good, it doesn't have any problems. It's a fairy tale kind of happily ever after story. If he's truly your prince charming or the king you deserve. If she's truly your princess or your queen, everything will be moonlight and roses forever and ever Amen. So just take a moment and check your own belief storehouse. Can you detect either of those operating inside you?
Michele Christensen 2:21
First is that puritanical, "don't talk about sex, it's DIRTY" story, lurking in your mind and heart, stopping you from bringing more consciousness, intentionality and wisdom to your erotic life? And second is the story that rightness brings effortlessness, that there's a perfect relationship out there without any deliberate work on it? And that if you two were right for each other, you would have that perfect relationship already. Or since you have faith that you guys are good, then the problems you're having are going to be really simple to solve. They're going to work themselves out, you don't need , for sure you don't need any help because it's not THAT bad.
Michele Christensen 2:56
Do you have those? And what do those due to your ability to feel your full range of feelings- comfortable and uncomfortable about your relationship? What happens to your resourcefulness, when you can't talk about certain things? What happens to the flow of ideas and support coming in when you're silent? You can pause the podcast and reflect some more on that or come back later and maybe write a little about anything that's coming up. But for now, I'm going to move on because there's an important caveat I want to give on that thought, "If it's right, you'll live happily ever after". Happily ever after is NOT a myth.
Michele Christensen 3:17
I'm definitely not saying that. Fairy Tale love, I believe deeply is truly available. We can live in ever deepening love with another human, even if they're flawed, and we're flawed. And there are squishy spots between us. We can be like Beauty and the Beast glowing at one another on the balcony as the sun goes down. We're both the beauty. And we're both the beast. And we can bring out the best in one another once we're willing to see HOW we bring out the worst and what each of us can do to USE those moments when our partners triggering the worst in us, to pivot how we can take those moments as opportunities to practice choosing to behave our way into our best selves.
Michele Christensen 4:03
The problem with the way we think about fairytale love is that the story usually ends with happily ever after. So we never hear about all the support and the learning and the growth that it takes to create happily ever after. Happily ever after is not automatic. But that isn't the curse of happily ever after, that you have to work for it. The fact that you have to work for it IS its blessing.
Michele Christensen 4:23
Think of it like this, if you had a plumbing problem, could you figure it out on your own? Let's say there's a toilet that doesn't flush quite right, kind of refills slowly. It's always a little clunky. It's not really causing huge problems yet, so you just kind of ignore it. And you're thinking, " One of these days I'll get a plunger or something., I'll figure it out. Could you figure it out? Maybe. But if you try to figure it out on your own, and you waited to solve it until you could figure it out all by yourself, if you waited until you had the time and the bandwidth and the space and the insight and the know-how to figure out why your plumbing was backing up, what would likely happen?
Michele Christensen 4:59
Now I know what the givens are. Your life is busy, problems tend to get worse over time, and when the shit backs up, it tends to spill over into other areas that it didn't threaten at first. It's also a given that you are an expert in what you're an expert in, for your 10,000 hours had been devoted and plumbing ain't it. So you're waiting to solve your plumbing problem on your own until you have the time and attention and know how and wisdom and bandwidth to solve it yourself. And until you're not scared, right? Not scared to get in there and maybe get your hands dirty. So what happens? You wind up with more and more backup. The kind of clog the slow flush turns into a big backup. And then that little, "eehh I will handle it eventually problem, can start to damage the rest of your house. What started out as a sound house with one small problem, literally turns into a shithole.
Michele Christensen 5:44
I'm guessing you don't do this with your plumbing though, right? You know, your lane. We don't have these myths about plumbing. The Puritans didn't teach generations of us to pretend to the rest of the world that we don't have pipes. We don't think that if we were just doing things, right, if we deserved to have a good toilet, it would flush properly. We just say, " Yeah, stuff goes haywire with pipes sometimes. They need maintenance. You got to call somebody who knows about this stuff." So we call them and they come in and they help us. We're not ashamed of calling a plumber.
Michele Christensen 6:10
But somehow there's this widespread shame about calling in relationship help. When I ask people, whether they judge others for getting help with their relationship they say, "No, I really admire their willingness!", but they also say when they learn that their friends have sought help, "I was really surprised to learn that. I didn't know things were that bad." This points out the belief that there's some really high threshold for getting help. It has to be capital R capital B, Really Bad before relationship help is warranted. You have to have one foot in the divorce attorney's office. And that's for the precise reasons that we've been talking about. We think we shouldn't talk about our intimate lives, and we think that if we're having problems, but we're not terrible people or terribly matched, then we should be able to figure it out on our own.
Michele Christensen 6:54
But what if everybody waited to call a plumber until there was water damage and bacteria damage everywhere, and they needed new carpet and new drywall and new furniture as well as a plumber. It's kind of gotten to that point with marriages. A small problem that people don't know how to handle, gets deferred until the partners quote, "Figure it out on our own" and when that doesn't actually happen for months, or years or decades on end, then the problem backs up and it pollutes other aspects of the relationship. And all the while both people are going through those weeks and months and years, missing out on the aliveness and joy and love that come from having a relationship that's got the full expression and is free of no fly zones of these topics we just don't talk about. And of recurring arguments about unresolved issues.
Michele Christensen 7:38
I think part of why it's so uncomfortable to seek help with our relationship problems, is that relationship counseling evolved from the world of psychotherapy. It's not right that mental health problems have carried a stigma, but they have. The ableism in our society tells us that if you have a mental illness, if you need help with your emotional or your mental well being, it means you're broken. It means that something's wrong with you. And the truth is that seeking help with your mental well being is a sign of strength, and it's a good predictor of things going better and better with you over time. And even for people with serious mental health issues that aren't resolvable, getting diagnosed and treated, dramatically improves quality of life and reduces the damage that mental illness can cause to both those who suffer and the people around them.
Michele Christensen 8:19
So the stigma is really misplaced. And the stigma itself does tremendous damage with regard to mental health. But we're talking about relationship help. Now lots of us do have mental health issues, unresolved trauma, active addictions, undiagnosed mental illnesses, neurodivergent tendencies, and naturally, those things affect our relationships in significant ways. Understanding the full range of the different factors that might be driving a relationship problem, that fall into the mental health category, now, that's an important part of expertise in helping people with their relationships. But it's also clear to me after 23 years of helping leaders with business and personal and relationship challenges, that most people who are high functioning in other areas of their lives still have meaningful relationship challenges. And I have a simple hypothesis about why. Wanna hear it? It's because living with other people is hard.
Michele Christensen 9:08
People are annoying. They don't do what we want them to do. They need things from us at just the wrong time. And they're doing the things that they do at exactly the time that we need a different thing. It is terribly inconvenient to live with another person and all the more so if they rely on us, or we rely on them for certain needs or wants. And oh man, if it's both, if they are OUR person, and we are THERE person, forget about it. Relationships are complicated.
Michele Christensen 9:37
So relationship health, we're pretty healthy people in pretty good relationships, is in my experience, still really necessary, but it's not at all something where in-depth therapy is required and doesn't belong in that same mental box with mental health care. It's this different thing. As different from psychiatry or psychotherapy as say personal training is from oncology or bariatrics. Relationship help for people who are not in active substance abuse, they're not in domestic violence patterns, and they aren't dealing with untreated mental illness, then it's something more like fitness help, or maybe even more like plumbing. We all need help with relationships, because there's a technology that we just weren't taught as children or young people. That we just didn't learn in our families. A technology for how to create lasting love, and how to cultivate the kind of passion that we can renew again and again, throughout our lives.
Michele Christensen 10:28
Think back to who taught you how to have sex. There was probably a person or a series of people in their teens or 20s. Your first teacher's body was raring to have sex and didn't need a whole lot of help to cultivate turn on. They probably had a heart and a mind that were simply not as mature or as burdened with other stresses as your partner's heart and mind are today, and as yours are.
Michele Christensen 10:51
We need to relearn how to have sex, NOW, in the lives we have now. How to be lovers. How to be good friends and partners to one another. How to communicate well. And we need ongoing support to do that learning. Think about it really, if you try to figure it out on your own for as long as you can, when are you going to get help with your relationship problem, when it's really painful? When it's really intractable? When you've begun to really blame one another? When it is starting to back excrement up into other parts of your connection? When you're fighting about things you didn't use to fight about? When your relationship stress has started to impact your work life? How bad do you need it to get before you're willing to do something about it?
Michele Christensen 11:25
Today, what I want to do is help you turn down the stigma that you may have against getting input, getting support. I want to give you a complete reframe on what support can look like. A lot of people really believe that if you're going to get help with your relationship, it has to be in the format of finding a local couples counselor and sitting down in a room, just the three of you, and dredging up all your stuff. Doing deep, intensive ,eviscerating therapy. If you're like a lot of couples, you've already done that at some point. And it might have done a whole lot of good for your relationship in a particular area.
Michele Christensen 11:54
My husband and I have been to literally more than 10 counselors together, and each of them gave us something. But if you hold it as, "we don't go to counseling until we're really in a lot of pain", what that means is that you come in, as I said, in a dark place, you're already in a lot of pain. It also means that as soon as the itching and burning and swelling go down a little, the instant that you get some relief, you want to leave. Because you're no longer in a lot of pain. You might be in some pain still, but you're ready to wrap up. You wrap up the counseling, and then things have gotten only so much better. You may not have taken the transformation all the way down to the roots of the relationship. So the relationship doesn't actually transform. It doesn't get on to a higher level. You put out the fire, but in these cases we don't really elevate the way we're connecting with one another. And we don't truly rewrite the patterns that drive our frustrations with our relationships in our lives.
Michele Christensen 12:45
It was THAT difficult pattern that I saw in my own private practice. People were waiting to come to me until they were in a ton of pain. And it drove me to create a better way of working. So for 10 years, I've been helping people create great results, BECAUSE we start early and we don't go for taking the edge off the pain, what we go for is GREAT. My clients know that what they have is good and that things are difficult in one or more areas. And they want to resolve that and use the challenge to make them stronger. They want to make it bulletproof for life to make sure they're having, not just good enough love and sex, but THE best love and sex they can possibly have. Those clients have taught me so much about what it takes to figure things out, whether with help or on your own.
Michele Christensen 13:26
So I want to show you what I've learned, so you can reframe figuring things out. There are three keys to solving whatever relationship problem it is that you think you ought to be able to figure out on your own. Whether you use a book or a workshop, or you work with a therapist there locally, or you reach out to me and use one of my programs, I want you to be able to take these keys and put them to use to make things better for you soon and in a lasting way.
Michele Christensen 13:48
Key number one is to understand self-reinforcing cycles. Every relationship is a system. Without outside input, without outside eyes on the system, your thoughts and behaviors and beliefs are perpetually repeating themselves and reinforcing what you've already been doing. So if you believe that you're doing all the work in the relationship, or if you believe that your partner takes you for granted, if you believe that you are sexually deficient in some way, THAT belief is going to feed your thoughts, those thoughts are going to trigger emotions, the patterns of thought and emotion will form an identity. And every time you get into a situation where that identity gets activated, you're going to trigger that whole cascade of emotions and thoughts, and then the actions that flow from them all over again.
Michele Christensen 14:28
You're reinforcing the pattern and you're continuing to condition yourself to repeat the past. And the story, "we should be able to figure this out", is another way of saying, "We should be able to repeat the same behavior and get a different result." Until you're able to actually see with clarity what the pattern is, "What thoughts am I thinking? What emotions do those thoughts trigger? How am I behaving? What behavioral choices am I making? What words do I use? What do I do with my hands and feet? Where do I put my body? What expressions do I paint on my face? What identity do I align myself with? How do I treat my partner? What kind of energy do I bring to the situation?". If you can get clear on those on your own, then you have a hope of being able to make a change. If you're aware of how you create the results you've been creating, you have a handle on this first key. If you don't know your role in it, you will never be able to change it.
Michele Christensen 15:19
If you aren't able to see through your beliefs to understand that every belief is only one way of viewing reality. I mean, none of us have cornered the market on reality, we're only walking around with particular lenses on, and some of those lenses serve us really well, and others don't serve us well at all. So being able to see past your lenses is a great skill, it's super helpful to have outside input to be able to see past them.
Michele Christensen 15:42
But if you can do that on your own, or if the two of you can sit down together and look at it. "Hmm, what story do I tell about this problem the two of us have. What story do you tell? What kind of pattern does that put us in?" Only when you can do that, are you able to harness that first key. Whatever we're practicing, we're creating more of. Whatever we practice we get better at, we're reinforcing that.
Michele Christensen 16:03
The second key is attention. It doesn't take a whole lot to begin to make a change. But you have to come from a decidedly fresh vantage. To get a new perspective on yourself, you usually need the attention of someone outside yourself. Well, the good thing in relationship is you've got someone outside yourself right there, but we don't always recognize that for the asset that it is. If you can really listen to your partner and have them tell you a new perspective. Have them tell you how they'd like you to show up instead. What beliefs, what thoughts, what behaviors, what emotions they'd like you to cultivate. That can probably allow you to change pretty quickly.
Michele Christensen 16:37
But most people won't really take on their partners' perspectives on the things that are truly sticky. If you can accept your partner's influence in this way, there is a wealth of transformation available to you. It takes a lot of detachment from ego, from trying to be right to really ask your partner earnestly. "In this thing that we don't see the same way. I want to see it from your vantage, tell me and I'll take on your vantage." That is pretty dang humble. This is a lot of what people pay couples counselors for, the assistance in getting their partner to look at things from their standpoint. It would be amazingly effective and so much faster if YOU went in and asked for help, NOT in bringing your partner around to your way of thinking, but in getting to see yourself, how they see things. If you earnestly ask, "help me see things the way my partner does," that would be phenomenal.
Michele Christensen 17:27
Or in the DIY department. If you can truly endeavor each day to take on your partner's thought process, their values, their feelings and the meanings they assign in the situation that you share, you'll become much more open to their influence, and that will give you a tremendous amount of the kind of attention I'm talking about in the second key.
Michele Christensen 17:44
Your partner's attention is the most precious attention of all. The problem is, as much as we love our partners and trust them with our lives, we don't trust them enough to let them straighten us out, when we see a shared situation differently. We're afraid of losing our own sovereignty, or being made wrong or losing control. But try this wherever you can. It's a tremendous spiritual practice as well as being very practical inside your relationship challenges. But if you feel like neither of you has a good handle on the particulars of your situation, or we have a hard time even talking about it. Or you want some more educated insights into the dynamics between the two of you, the cultural context, the neurobiological patterns, the familiar patterns, seek outside support.
Michele Christensen 18:22
That's what my programs are designed to do. They give you those expert eyes on how you're relating and put them inside frameworks that help you hit a bar of a new way of relating. So you can see, "Oh, these are the behaviors. These are the beliefs, the thoughts, the emotions, I wasn't even aware I was running repeatedly." You'll be able to see where your resentments are, where your entitlements are running you, whether you're withholding or you're overexerting yourself in other parts of life and then coming to your relationship empty, looking to be filled up, but with very little to bring in offering. I help my clients identify those patterns.
Michele Christensen 18:55
Then we go to the third key. The third key to figuring things out in your relationship is sustained effort. The reason many people who THINK that they can solve relationship problems on their own don't succeed in doing so, even if they've gained enough insight to be able to change it, is that they have a hard time sustaining the effort required to actually change their behavior. Our brains are tremendously plastic. We are able to create second nature. We're able to build new pathways in our brains, new behavioral patterns, new emotional patterns. A new normal is always possible throughout our lifetime. But what has been normal in the past has been grounded to your neurology. Those neural pathways are super highways through your brain right now. To override them, you've got to turn untracked forest into a footpath first and then a trail and then a road and through practice and repetition and repetition and repetition, that old superhighway gets less and less myelinated and the new pathways get more and more mile and lay down on them, and that's how we create second nature or a new mind.
Michele Christensen 19:55
Right now the new way is the road less traveled. Initially it is way bumpier there on the new path. It is way easier to go back to the old way. It feels like a shortcut, and the brain loves shortcuts. To repeat new thoughts, behaviors and chosen feelings and replace the old patterns with those, you got to keep your attention focused over time. To keep your attention focused for sufficient time to change your patterns, you need new cues, you need new supports, and you need to sustain that transformative focus.
Michele Christensen 20:21
Seldom do we sustain anything new. Whether it's an exercise routine, or picking up the ukulele and trying to learn it or nurturing a new friendship. It's really difficult to sustain a new pattern unless we build in a sufficient set of cues and supports. So what do cues look like? They could look like post it notes on your bathroom mirror, reminding you that you are loved, and you are love. Appointments in your calendar for a date night, for a stress reducing conversation with your partner, for erotic playtime together. The new cues could look like a piece of jewelry or clothing that you wear as a talisman to remind you of your aliveness. To remind you of who you want to be and how you want to be showing up. Your new cues could look like an alarm you put in your phone to remind you to text your partner with something connecting or amusing or flirtatious. It takes an entire ecosystem of cues to turn around something in your life that you want to have be different.
Michele Christensen 21:11
So if you want to make a change on your own together, sit down and look together at what old cues you have for unwanted behaviors. Rewrite your old habits using the same cues but this time use them to trigger new behaviors. Charles Dewey in the Power of Habit writes about this. He says,"we can very easily add new behaviors into your routines, we just have to recognize that our old cues will continue to trigger some behavior". So the easiest way to create a new habit is to replace the unwanted behavior but keep the cue that has triggered that unwanted behavior in the past. If you're used to putting the kids to bed, and then right after that going back onto your laptop to answer emails and what you want is to have more intimate time with your partner, then use the cue of putting the kids to bed to trigger you to go be alone and horizontal with your beloved. If you want to go check email after that that's fine, but replace the next behavior after the cue of putting the kids to bed with the behavior you actually want.
Michele Christensen 22:06
I hope this episode will help you figure this out on your own. If that's really something that the two of you want to do. If you have the capacity to create the level of perspective and sustained effort that you need in order to make this change, I think that'll be amazing, and I can't wait to hear about it. But for many couples, the consequence of trying to figure it out on their own is that it does back up and it creates a bigger problem over time that's then harder to fix, even with outside help, because the negative patterns are more firmly ingrained, the pain is higher, the resentment, the mistrust, the fear, the sadness of all grown and their energy is depleted and their love is weaker and positive action feels more vulnerable than ever and riskier.
Michele Christensen 22:44
So whatever you do, whether you do it on your own, or you reach out, I beseech you, do not wait. Don't let your relationship be like a house with deferred maintenance. If you neglect a building over time, yeah, you save money each year, not fixing little things. But through time those little maintenance tasks that you skipped, turn into major renovations that are needed. And the same holds true for our marriage, you might think you can handle it on your own. And if you can handle it, if you're really DIYers, build your own palace, that's awesome. But if you can't actually handle it on your own, don't just do nothing while your house deteriorates slowly around you. Get some help. It'll pay returns every single day. The ways that I help couples, or just the one person who's ready, are imminently fun and pragmatic. They're not eviscerating. We get deep lasting results and we have a good time doing it. So if you'd like to talk with me about our working together, you can schedule a consultation at https://lisenbury.as.me/consultation
Michele Christensen 23:37
Whether you do it on your own or you get help, remember the three keys to creating a change in your relationship: perspective, attention and sustained effort.
Michele Christensen 23:45
I really hope this is just the beginning of our conversation about this topic. The secret society of turned on women over at society.lisenbury.com is a great place to ask your questions, share your experiences and join the conversation about creating the kind of love and sex we really want inside the relationships we already have. It's all happening at society.lisenbury.com. That link is in the show notes at lisenbury.com/episode/013. You're always invited to ask questions and share your reactions and results from each episode. You can post in the question thread in the private community or leave us a voicemail at 206-659-9865.
Michele Christensen 24:23
If you've enjoyed this or other episodes, what would help me in the podcast immensely is if you would leave a review, particularly in Apple podcasts because reviews are a huge help in finding new listeners and growing the positive impact that these conversations have. So please go leave a review right now. But just a few words about what the show gives you. I would so appreciate it. And Hey, have you subscribed to the podcast? You're gonna want to so you'll never miss an episode. Please go to Apple podcasts or wherever you listen and hit that subscribe button so you always get notifications of new episodes each week.
Michele Christensen 24:51
That's our show for this week. I'm so grateful for the chance to support you in quote, "figuring things out", whether it's on your own or with support and structure to guarantee your success. I'm thrilled that you're committed to cultivating your aliveness in love and sex and that we are engaged in this conversation. It is my greatest joy and privilege.
Michele Christensen 25:08
I hope this episode has helped you find new ways to get support and perspective for your love and sex challenges. I'll see you back here, same time next week, and until then, I'll see you in the secret society at society.lisenbury.com. Or you can leave me your stories and insights at that link is written in the show notes too. And in the meantime, may the light within you illuminate the world around you.