Sex Gets Real 215: Shadeen Francis on trust, honesty, & cheating

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What if honesty isn’t the best policy for rebuilding trust?

Shadeen Francis recently spoke at Explore More Summit, and her talk was one of the fan favorites for the entire conference. Her formula for trust challenged many and offered new language and feelings of YES! That’s it!

So, in this episode, Shadeen shares all about how she became a therapist, why sex is crucial for our well-being, how Shadeen’s relationship with self feeds her erotic experiences and how it ties to the work she does, and then we dive into relationships.

We talk about trust, the difference between honesty and transparency, negotiating boundaries, tolerating uncomfortable feelings, and then we field a listener question from Lost Lonnie who is worried that their obsession with cheating is more about a fear of commitment.

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In this episode, Shadeen and I talk about:

• Shadeen’s childhood dream and how she decided to let go of that dream to because a therapist.
• How relationships are integral to who we are as a person.
• Being aware of the impact of our intentions to self and others and what happens when our invitations get declined. Rejection and disappointment can be so challenging and often we’ll do unhealthy things to avoid them.
• Sitting and navigating through our own discomfort.
• Boundary negotiations and how to bring consent into our lives.
• Shadeen’s formula for trust, and why it’s especially critical to rebuilding after betrayal or cheating.
• Recognizing your own wants and needs and knowing that these are not things to be afraid of.
• Understanding what it means to lose trust in something and wanting to rebuild it.
• Knowing how to keep yourself safe and how to show up for yourself.
• Honesty vs. Transparency: The difference between asking for truth and generously giving it.
• Plus, a listener question from Lost Lonnie all about whether or not Lonnie really wants to cheat or if Lonnie is just scared of commitment and all that comes with that.
• The work around nurturing passion in a relationship and accepting when it’s not there anymore.

About Shadeen Francis:

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Episode Transcript

Dawn Serra: This episode is brought to you by the online workshop, “Take Up Space: A Workshop on Boundaries, Self-Worth, & Strengthening Your Relationship With Self,” which is a workshop by me and it drops June 13. If you want to grab your spot now, it’s entirely online and on demand. You can access it as much and as many times as you want, over the course of the year that it’s available. 

It’s all about why your boundaries never have to be justified, about why they don’t have to be rational and why they’re never up for debate. Plus, the complexity of boundaries in relationship to other, which is really ultimately about taking up space and being heard, honored and respected. Also, the ways that we create the things we do want. Our boundaries include our yeses and those places we want to journey to and the places we want to explore. Let’s also talk about how it feels when someone else sets a boundary that maybe makes us feel disappointed. That workshop is dropping in a few weeks. If you want to pre-enroll now, just click the link in the show notes or head to dawnserra.com/ep215 for Episode 215 and click the link.

You’re listening to (You’re listening) (You’re listening) You’re listening to Sex Gets Real (Sex Get Real) (Sex Gets Real) Sex Gets Real with Dawn Serra (with Dawn Serra). Thanks, bye!

Dawn Serra: Hey, you! Welcome to this week’s episode of Sex Gets Real. I am your host, Dawn Serra. This week is an episode with Shadeen Francis. Shadeen is a therapist who was a part of Explore More Summit. We’ve known each other for a couple of years. Shadeen does incredible work in the world. Her talk was one of the fan favorites from the summit. So I thought what better excuse than to talk to her again for the podcast. We go into trust and her formula for trust, which is pretty incredible, especially if you’re someone who has experienced betrayal or cheating. We talked all about transparency versus honesty, boundary setting, the importance of having a variety of relationships in your life, including a relationship to your self. Shadeen even talks about how part of the erotic relationships that she has includes with her work, which totally resonated with me. It’s a really interesting chat. Shadeen has such wonderful stories to share and loads of practical experience and advice as someone who has been a therapist and worked with so many people in crisis around their relationships and their sexuality. 

For Patreon supporters, if you support at the $3 level or above, you get access to every single week’s bonus content, which is usually anywhere from seven to 20 minutes of all kinds of extra conversations that happen every single week. Of course, your $3 help to keep the lights on here at the show because finding advertisers for a show that talks about sex and kink, who are ethical and have money to spend is increasingly rare. So your financial support actually makes this show possible, in a really real way. You can head to patreon.com/sgrpodcast. You have to type in the URL. You can’t search for it at Patreon because it’s considered adult content. 

Dawn Serra: If you are there, if you support at the $3 level and above, you can hear Shadeen and I talk about relationship behaviors that can be super toxic and what to look out for, why often these behaviors are coming from a place of shame. Then we also talk about scorekeeping and how often in relationships, especially relationships that are starting to not go so well, scorekeeping can be a way that we punish and track each other’s behavior. Shadeen has this beautiful reframe for how we can actually use scorekeeping to make our relationship even more bonded and more delightful to be in. And, of course, we talked about play. You can either support it $3 to get that access or if you already support, then head over there to hear it. 

Let me tell you a little bit about Shadeen, and then we will jump into our conversation. Shadeen Francis is a marriage and family therapist, professor and author specializing in sex therapy and social justice. Shadeen has been featured on platforms like 6-ABC, The New York Times and The Huffington Post to share her expertise. She also speaks internationally on topics such as sexual self-esteem, intimacy and inclusivity. Shadeen belief is that the world is built on the strength of communities. This worldview has propelled her to focus on underserved populations, ethnic and cultural minorities, the kinky, poly, queer communities and victims of economic hardship. Her work allows people of all backgrounds to improve their relationships and live in peace and pleasure. As you can hear, Shadeen is incredibly special and does amazing work in this world. So let’s jump in. Here is my chat with Shadeen Francis. 

Dawn Serra: Welcome to Sex Gets Real, Shadeen. I can’t wait to talk to you today. 

Shadeen Francis: Hi. 

Dawn Serra: Hi. Thank you so much for joining us and for being here.

Shadeen Francis: Oh. I’m so excited to dig in.

Dawn Serra: Oh my, God! Me too. I was obsessed with the conversation that we had for Explore More. I know so many people in the community were minds blown. I’m really excited to get to bring this to Sex Gets Real as well.

Shadeen Francis: Oh. Me too. I loved the conversation that we’ve got to have. I’m so glad that people were getting some juicy bits out of it.

Dawn Serra: I would love to start, for people who aren’t familiar with you, can you just tell them a little bit about how you got here, who you are, the work you do in the world, your favorite places to dig around in and be a genius?

Shadeen Francis: Well, thank you for that compliment you slipped in there. I’m a marriage and family therapist. I specialize in sex therapy and social justice stuff. I had an interesting sort of coming of age story into this work. Those people who followed me for a little while who’ve maybe heard me tell the longer version of the story. But the short version was that I grew up– Really, my only professional plan was to join the X-men. So it was mostly jumping off of high things and hoping that some of my evolutionary genetics would kick in and my survival response would trigger my mutation and that would be that. Put in my application– I had a whole process mapped out in my head for how it would go. I was training in the circus to keep my other skills sharp. I was a pretty pragmatic kid. And so, there was a point in time in elementary school where I started to realize, “You know what? I can no longer guarantee that that’s going to happen to me. I actually might be a normie.”

Dawn Serra: Heartbreaking.

Shadeen Francis: I was like, “Crap. I should probably figure out a paying job.” At that same time, I ended up watching an episode of “Talk Sex with Sue.” Late night, of course. As one does. Someone had called in– For anyone who doesn’t get that reference, if anyone listening is familiar with Dr. Ruth, Sue Johanson is like the Canadian equivalent of Dr. Ruth. Sue had a late night show just exploring sex and would do things like listener questions and demos and all of that. My first exposure to this world, to this conversation at all, is this 60-something woman waving this bright blue, double-headed dildo on television. She takes a listener question and the person says, “Thank you so much for your work. You literally saved my life.” 

That was that for me. That was my application process. That was my welcome to the field ceremony. It was the whole thing. I wanted to be in the X-men because I wanted to help people. I wanted to make a meaningful impact. I wanted to be able to say that my presence on this planet was meaningful to people in a way that helped them be better in some way than they might have been before. To hear that, at that time, someone could have said, “This sandwich changed my life,” maybe I would have opened a deli or something. 

Dawn Serra: That would have been amazing.

Shadeen Francis: But, it ended up proving to me really early on that sex is a transformative part of our being and who we are, as our sexual selves, absolutely matters to how we exist in all of the other areas of our lives. So coming to believe that really early on, really shaped all of the rest of it for me. I’ve never had a backup plan. I’ve never had any other things I’ve been professionally interested in doing. And even the things I enjoy doing for fun really loop around this worldview that our relationships are integral to who we are. So that’s how I live and that’s how I’m here.

Dawn Serra: That is magic. That is a magic. I love the clarity of just, “Yes. Of course. This is how I save people’s lives. So allow me to head in this direction.” And then you made that happen. The beauty that has come out of that clarity is incredible.

Shadeen Francis: Yeah. I think sometimes we really connect with just a heart piece, circumstantially just walking through the world and we have this moment where everything feels just so clear. It just feels like all of the noise is cancelled out and we’ve just distilled on one important knowing. That was one of those moments for me. I don’t actually happen to get those very often being super middle child-y and very much a Gemini that I can argue every angle of every conversation by myself. So to have this moment of perfect truth for me that resonated so deeply with who I want to be and how I see the world was such a gift that I’m just so thankful for. I’m so thankful that I was able to get that in a way that I recognized. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. I really appreciate too the clarity around one, sex is transformative and such a key aspect to ourselves in the way we move through the world and how relationships – excuse me – are integral to who we are. Because I find that, culturally, we devalue so many kinds of relationships. I think that’s one of the big tragedies of so many of the romantic narratives and fairy tale narratives that have that have come to pass over the past couple of generations of just relationships of all kinds are integral to the human experience. I know you and I have talked about the power of community. I wonder, what types of relationships do you experience in your life that really nourish and feed you?

Shadeen Francis: Yeah. For me, personally, I’m currently engaged to my partner.

Dawn Serra: Congratulations.

Shadeen Francis: Thank you. Thank you so much. So that’s a relationship in which I’ve done a lot of growing and coming to know in myself. If I ever needed a personal proof that the relationships that we build and create in the world absolutely define and clarify who we are and who we hope to be, being in a long term monogamous relationship certainly has highlighted how true that has been even in my own life. I’m also a pretty family-oriented person. I’m deeply in love with my family. I call my parents my babies. It’s really uncool. But they’re wonderful people. I have siblings that I adore and I have a niece and nephew that I would love to be in deeper relationships with as they continue to get older. Those relationships, for me, are so powerful.

I think that, also, I consider my relationship to myself as super integral. I see my relationship with myself as a distinct relationship that I have to also schedule and make time for. I have to think about the ways in which I communicate with myself. I check in with myself. I want to know how my day is going. I want to know what I’d like for supper. All of the ways that we will be tender and compassionate with other people, I’m really intentional about doing that with myself. I wish that we made more space to be really thinking about these different ways we connect to things. 

Shadeen Francis: It doesn’t just have to be people I have a relationship to the earth and the planet. I have relationships with my work. And I have a really passionate, really just charged relationship to my work. When other people talk about erotic energy, I get that in the intellectual spaces of my life. That sort of intense, consuming, just oneness and connectivity. I get a lot of that also in my relationship to intellectual pursuits, which is why I work so much. It feels almost masturbatory. It feels really good to do things that you’re passionate about, to do things that bring you pleasure. 

So those are the relationships that I tend to center. I do have beautiful, deep friendships that exist in my life. But, as an introvert, the space that those folks hold maybe are less centered as I just don’t always have container or capacity to be pouring out of those spaces. But I think that– As you were talking about community, I think often, when folks come into my office, I see a lot of folks who, by all accounts, and they know themselves are really well-established, super connected, have great people around them, have a professional trajectory that “should” make them feel really great and really centered and all of whatever we’re supposed to be working for, they’ve got it. But their relationships aren’t fulfilling to them. 

Shadeen Francis: Quite often, their relationship to self has taken such a major backseat to everything else that they have been creating that oftentimes, people feel like they’ve been tricked. They’re like, “I was supposed to build this whole life and I did everything I was supposed to and I don’t feel good. All of this was supposed to make me feel whole and happy and it doesn’t feel like I thought it was going to feel.” Sometimes people are saying it doesn’t feel like anything or even worse, sometimes people are saying, “I feel it all the time and it is excruciating.” 

So I really do, again, continue to believe that we are creatures that are wired for connection. That as human beings, our first instinct is around survival and the way we have come to code survival is through our community. I want to know that other people have my back. I want to believe and be able to trust that the people who I have around me are also invested in my success, in my wellness, in my being. When we feel unsure of that, when you the context of life or the decisions that we make or that other people have made challenge that, it can be really, really hard. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. One of the things that I thought was really interesting on a group call that I had recently was, we were talking about how, in a few weeks, in our group call, we’re going to be talking about boundaries and how boundaries are a collection of the things you do and that you don’t want – your needs and wants and how you articulate them and the things that you won’t tolerate or can’t tolerate – and how it’s a collection of invitations and rejections. Somebody on the call said one of the things they struggle with a lot is recognizing that their wants and their needs are valid and that they can’t force other people to give those things to them. That they can’t demand them of others. That they can’t say, “I expect you to do these things for me.” That there has to be this bizarre “and space” of like, “I can say these are my wants and needs and the people around me can say I can’t give that to you or I’m not ready to or I don’t have the spaciousness to do that right now.” And then how do we tend to ourselves around that? 

I think that’s such an interesting question when you’re talking about relationship to self and relationship to community. I think that’s a space that’s really difficult for some people because we hear so much. You are inherently deserving of respect and of love and of pleasure that just comes with being human. And to be in relationship with others is also to have some responsibility and some accountability in how you treat others and show up. So for people who are grappling with that, of, “I’m starting to recognize my wants and my needs and I also have to navigate, now, other people and knowing I can’t demand these things from people,” how do you think we can dance with that ambiguity, that gray space with a little bit more grace?

Shadeen Francis: Yeah. Folks are welcome to differ in their perspective of this. But when I talk about boundaries, when I help folks navigate their boundaries, the thing that I always end up saying really upfront so that people are aware of how I’m going to be doing that work with them, is that I really believe that your boundaries are really about you and for you. And that’s it. That I know boundaries, in a lot of ways, are relational. But part of why they feel so vulnerable is because largely, you’re communicating about self. You really aren’t saying very much about other people. When you recognize that what you’re doing is communicating about your windows of tolerance, your own needs and requirements for you to have a safe experience, it’s largely an invitation. 

So, yeah. People can decline an invitation. That’s going to have an impact on you. So maybe that’s the thing that you continue to negotiate. Or, maybe that means that the person doesn’t get to play in your vulnerable spaces. Because sometimes what we’re actually doing is giving folks access to more vulnerable parts of us. I’m saying, “Okay. Here is the way that you might be able to enter this space.” Maybe that space is a romantic partnership. Maybe while you’re in theB romantic partnership, then you start to negotiate an invitation into a sexual partnership. Maybe in that sexual partnership, you start to negotiate certain behaviors or practices, words, feelings, these escalating levels of invitation.

So I think that sometimes when we talk about boundaries, they sound like declarations or proclamations. Actually, sometimes in my office, folks feel really reactive to setting boundaries because I don’t want to give them an ultimatum. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. 

Shadeen Francis: I’m like, “Well, then don’t.” Don’t give them an ultimatum. Can you give them an invitation? “Hey, if you’d like to come over, here is the information for how to do that. I’m going to give you the directions for how to get there. If you don’t follow the directions, you probably won’t make it. please RSVP if you’re interested.” 

I think that as we think about how do we negotiate boundaries in ways that don’t make it about, “If you don’t do this, then you are blankety blank and you can’t blank blank blank.” Sometimes it’s about shifting the story or the intent behind it. So, yeah. That sometimes will mean that people that you have invited don’t come or won’t come or can’t come into that space at this point in time or really, maybe ever. And to acknowledge that you’re also interacting with other people’s boundaries as you make an invitation. That I could invite you to do something that doesn’t actually feel safe or comfortable for you. So I could say, “Dawn, I would love for you to be really mean to me. Even if I tell you stop, I want you to be really mean to me.” If that doesn’t feel safe or comfortable for you to do, then you’re going to want to decline that invitation.

Shadeen Francis: So even as I want to invite you into a space for myself, I also am acknowledging that you’re on the other inside of that negotiation with your needs and your wants and your possibilities. So we have to, even as we make a request or an invitation, also be able to hold space for the other person to know because that’s the exact thing that we are asking in that space. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. 

Shadeen Francis: If this is about– If boundary negotiations are still about consent, then even as I make a request of you, if you don’t want to do it, then in some ways, it doesn’t get done. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. 

Shadeen Francis: And so we have to think about what we do with that. Sometimes even just the awareness of that process that, “Oh. As I make a request, this is still consent-based. Then I’m also still responsible for how I negotiate the rest of it for my own safety.” If that means, if I say, “I’d like you to take off your shoes” and you say, “I actually can’t be in a space without my shoes on.” Then I have to say, “You know what, then you can’t come. But I was really in desperate need of someone to be over with me, to be in my home with me.” Then, yeah. It’s really disappointing. And is there any other level of negotiation that can happen for me to be able to get what I need, still? Even if it might not be with this person or in this particular way.

Dawn Serra: I’m so glad you said that disappointment piece because I think, so often, we’re so terrified of sitting in disappointment or even witnessing others disappointment. That we do these mental gymnastics of bending and ignoring our needs or our boundaries or other people’s needs and other people’s boundaries because we can’t tolerate the discomfort of that disappointment. To me, that disappointment is just part of being two or more human beings trying to navigate the complexities of all of our stories. And disappointment is inevitable. So the more we can tend to self around those disappointments, I think the more likely we are to then be really clear in the ways that we ask for things and articulate things. But I think so many of us are so scared of the disappointment and the rejection. Especially if we’ve been in a relationship where we feel like we’re rejected a lot, that we start doing really, really creative but also very harmful often and toxic things. Because we’re just trying to do anything we can to avoid that feeling.

Shadeen Francis: Yeah. I’m so compassionate to the gravity of disappointment. I consider all of our emotions as existing on a spectrum of intensity. So that’s when we can get into some really awesome nuance around the difference between, for example, being annoyed or frustrated versus angry versus enraged, the difference between being surprised or unprepared or startled and being shocked or panicked, that I think that those are spectrums of intensity, of feelings that have sort of a similar quality. 

When I think about disappointment, if we were to take disappointment in my mind and amplify it, the experience that you get is one that most of us, if you’ve ever experienced it, will actually spend most of your life organizing away from, which is depression. The way that I think about depression, it’s not that it’s about sadness. I think we often talk about depression and sad and use them interchangeably. But anyone who’s been depressed can think about times when they were in their depression where they also recognize sadness and they didn’t actually feel like the same feeling. But when I offer that depression is not intense sadness, but actually a ten on our scale of disappointment, a lot of folks really resonate with that. A lot of folks will say, “Wow. Yeah. That is what that feels like. The experience of depression is about this overwhelming sense of disappointment in self, in future, in past, in possibility, in the planet, wherever that sort of sits for people. 

Shadeen Francis: I’m really compassionate and tender with our avoidance or difficulty in navigating disappointment because it feels so unsafe for anyone who’s felt active depression, not just periods of time at which you are depressed. It really does– It’s scary. It’s a really scary place to be, to lose some of our, almost for a lot of us, the hopefulness that we take for granted. So, yeah. From that place, I absolutely get why it can then be really hard to negotiate boundaries when people on some level are thinking, “I am putting myself at risk for this place where I might lose my sense of hopefulness in the possibilities for the future.” 

I think a lot of it comes down to the ways in which in the conversations that you have on this platform and so many other really powerful, brilliant people are having about how we can do boundary negotiations, how we can bring consent into other aspects of our lives, how we can navigate feelings like rejection, which threatens our sense of self, how we can do that more? Because a lot of this is also about the skill. We were never taught how to do a lot of this stuff. But we’re all somehow expected to just turn 18 and here’s a set of car keys and adulthood. Also, you’re supposed to have all of these really difficult skills. Like, “Oh. Now, you’re supposed to understand, not only how to file your own taxes, but how to uproot deep-seated shame in your life.” But we’ve had no experience with any of that before.

Dawn Serra: Yeah. God, that’s so real. I feel like so many of us stumble our way through experiences and mistakes and failures, trying to figure these things out because we didn’t have a chance to practice them before we reached adulthood and we didn’t have someone who helped us to navigate all the feelings around that. 

I know something else that you talk about that was a big yes for me and also for so many others, was in this similar vein of we’re not really given the tools to learn how to practice and feel our way through rejection and disappointment and frustration. Also, there’s this nebulousness around trust. What does it mean to trust someone and what does it mean to lose trust in something, and then want to rebuild it? You have this wonderful formula for trust that I think it’s one of those things where, if someone, when I was really young, had given me this formula and then helped me to examine different relationships in my life using this formula, it would have given me so much more context for so many of the feelings I was so confused about. So I would love it if you could tell everybody a little bit about your trust formula.

Shadeen Francis: Yeah. I would love to. Of course, by being a relationship therapist, trust is the thing that shows up as a major concern because, just like you said, once we lose trust, once trust is impacted, it can feel really hard to get it back. Because we also have no idea, one, where it went. Like where does trust go when it’s not here? It’s like that question, what your toys do when you’re not working? One of those existential crises I used to have a child like, “Are they playing without me?” 

Dawn Serra: That’d be amazing. 

Shadeen Francis: Where does it go? And then how do we get it back? Because we don’t even really have a sense of how we built it in the first place. So when we’re trying to work on it, what are we even working on? My father is an engineer who’s the sort of dad who if you wanted to get something from the store as a kid, you had to know how much it would cost after taxes. This was before, of course, everyone had a cellphone and you could just sneakily add it up. I had to do the mental math or else, “No. You cannot have that KitKat bar.” Of course, as a kid who liked Kit Kat bars, I needed to be able to do some mental math around this. That put me in a position in the world where I make formulas for things that don’t require them because it helps me understand them better. 

So here is the formula that I came to around trust after working with all of these people trying to help them create this experience. Trust equals transparency plus consistency over time. I’ll say that again. Trust equals transparency plus consistency over time.

We all have heard things like “Time heals all wounds.” Most of us can have experiences where we will be like, “That’s crap. Because Cindy was mean to me in the second grade and that shit still impacts me now.” “I will never wear stripes and polka dots together again because…” There are things that happened to us when we’re really young that still impact us. One from my personal archives, I don’t feel super safe around geese because a goose was particularly mean to me at the zoo one time. So, no. Goose, I do not trust you. I don’t know you in particular, but I’ve had previous experiences that suggests to me you don’t want to be my friend. It’s been over 20 years and that hasn’t gone away. 

Shadeen Francis: Time, by itself, isn’t going to cut it. Consistency matters because we track frequency data. We need things to happen more often than not for us to learn the association between the two. Unless it’s really, really bad and then we only got to do it once. You get bucked off a horse real bad and you don’t need that to happen nine different times for you to have some trepidation the next time you get back on. But some of the relationship science – this comes out of the Gottman Institute – some of the relationship science around what we need around consistency is five to one. So five positive experiences to outweigh one negative experience. If you and I fight one day out of the week, but we have five good days, it was still a pretty okay week. But if we fought, four days out of the week and nothing positive happened or positive things happen, but we still fought three times, it was probably a pretty crappy week. Even though we still had four good days, it’s just it wasn’t enough to outweigh all the times when we weren’t getting along. We need things and people to be consistent with us, so that we have an opportunity to unlearn negative associations or attributions to them. 

And then transparency. I think that sometimes the piece around transparency is the thing that trips people up the most. I’m really intentional about saying transparency rather than honesty. We tend to go to honesty whenever trust is broken because we think that that was the problem. That the person was dishonest. And it is part of the problem. But it ends up being this weird dilemma where honesty actually requires us to have some degree of trust. That if I ask you a question, I have to trust you that you’re going to give me an honest answer. We’ve maybe all been in this situation where we feel like, “Oh. It doesn’t matter what I say because you’re not going to believe me anyways.” That kind of highlights, “Okay to trust… Honesty really isn’t going to cut it when it comes to trust.” 

Shadeen Francis: So transparency is different in that transparency is this generous giving of truth. Honesty requires you to have either trust already built in the person or puts the person who’s requiring truth in a really difficult position of having to know what to ask to be able to get truth from the person. They have to pursue truth in order to get it. If trust has been broken, that also, in some ways, feels unfair on the part of the person who is now looking to rebuild trust in someone else again. That I actually am doing a lot of labor in order to get truth from you. 

The example I often use has to do with food, as most of my life does. Before this call, we were actually talking about french fries, so you can see how deeply my relationship to food goes. The example I often use to demonstrate the difference between transparency and honesty goes like this. Honesty is the experience of you coming back to the table as we’re sharing a meal and you say, “Did you eat some of my fries?” I respond, “Yeah. I did.” Transparency is you getting up from the table and I’m saying, “You know what? As you leave, I’m probably going to eat some of your fries.” Or, you’re coming back to the table and on your way back, I’ll let you know, “Oh. Just so you know, while you were gone, I helped you with your fries.” 

Shadeen Francis: It’s a very different relationship to information. It’s the difference between two partners who live together, who have maybe had a breach in interest, where one partner comes home and the other one says, “Where did you go after work?” The partner says, “Hey. I stopped off at the bar with some of my friends, and then I came straight home.” As opposed to the person who was stopping off with their friends, giving a call or a text message saying, “Hey. Before I come home, I’m going to stop off at the bar with some of my friends, and then I’m going to come straight home.” Or, as they enter the door, “Hey. I’m aware that I’m late. I stopped off at the bar. And then I came straight home.” Those are really different emotional experiences. 

With transparency, the person who is trying to rebuild trust in another person can let go of some of that hypervigilance because when trust is broken, it hurts. It changes how we see the world. So we, on some level, also want to protect ourselves from getting hurt again. They’re allowed to do less of that defensiveness and less of that vigilance because they can put their faith in that anything that I’m supposed to know will come to me, rather than me having to go out and pursue it. The things that are true will be given generously to me, rather than me having to work to earn them.

Dawn Serra: Yes. I love the phrase of just this generosity and giving that comes with the transparency of, “I am offering this to you. If it’s the kind of thing that doesn’t matter to you, you don’t want to know about, you can let me know. But if it does matter, here it is. We can figure out from this place of, ‘Here are my cards.’” I have had that experience, as I’m sure many people have of, “I feel like I should be asking something” or “I feel like something important isn’t being shared with me and I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s important and maybe it’s not. But there’s something that isn’t being shared. The cellphone gets turned over when I walk in the room or the laptop gets closed or there’s a topic that we’re avoiding. That creates so many questions and self-doubt like, ‘Is that really happening or am I being too sensitive? I don’t know. I’ve asked and I’m not sure.’” It starts this whole thing that’s so tough to manage. When you’re like, “I’m pretty sure there’s something, but I don’t know what the thing is,” versus that offering of, “Oh. Hey. I was just texting with my sister. She shared something with me that’s private,” or whatever it is.

Shadeen Francis: Yeah. And not knowing it’s maddening. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. 

Shadeen Francis: And even if someone were to then respond with honesty, it feels different when you had to ask for it. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. 

Shadeen Francis: Because now, we’re not actually in that trust space anymore. In some ways, not that we’ve missed the opportunity for trust, but the thing that we’re doing now isn’t necessarily building trust. We have to work really hard to get back to that place. “Hey. You turned your phone over. Who are you talking to?” “Oh. It’s just my sister.” “So why did you turn your phone over?” “Oh. Because she said something private.” You see how that dynamic now sounds and feels very different than someone comes in the room and you say, “Hey. My sister said something private. I just want to let you know I’m going to turn my phone over,” or “Hey. I’m feeling compelled to turn my phone over because my sister and I are talking about this private thing that I don’t want you to see.”

Dawn Serra: Right.

Shadeen Francis: Or maybe you do that negotiation ahead of time. I always encourage people to not try and solve problems while you’re in the middle of crisis.

Dawn Serra: Oh my, God. Yes, please. 

Shadeen Francis: That’s probably not right. You’re not going to have access to your best creative solutions while you’re in the middle of active just survival mode. As much as possible, when we have these moments where we notice that’s a thing for us to then start doing some strategy around if and or when that happens again, so we have agreements that we can be living into. “Hey. What do I do when there is a private conversation that I don’t want you to see, knowing that we have had breaches around trust with my use of the phone?” And being able to negotiate that. “Well, nope. I always get to see your phone. You say, “I hear you on that and that feels challenging for me. I want to be able to show you my hands and that feels like a place that is complicated because…” 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. 

Shadeen Francis: But we don’t live in a culture that encourages us to be transparent. Even if we think about regular things like negotiating your salary, you’re supposed to know how much money did you make in your previous job? You’re supposed to say 20% more than you did. Or how far are you away from the restaurant.

Dawn Serra: Right. “I’m right around the corner.” 

Shadeen Francis: “I’m on my way. I’m around the corner.” But, truthfully, you’re six corners away from being around that particular corner. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. 

Shadeen Francis: Or, even dating advice. I’ve heard all kinds of wild dating advice, as I’m sure you have. I end up being in contact with a lot of Gen Z folks, who have very different dating landscape than most of the rest of us, just by virtue of how integrated to the technological world that they’ve always been. As a millennial, we had early fluency, but Gen Z have never known a time that wasn’t digital. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. 

Shadeen Francis: So I got Facebook, I think in… I guess I was high school, maybe. Almost certainly too young to be using Facebook, but you lie on your profile and you make page, as one does. My brother was in the second or third grade by the time he started lying about his age on the internet, which is like a rite of passage. It’s just a thing that you do so you could access to stuff. 

It’s an entirely different world. It feels so interesting to me to hear the way they talk about the way you communicate with other people given that most of it is online. You get to do a lot of things that don’t require much transparency. So how terrifying or even just inappropriate it feels for them to be truly transparent. What it means to leave someone unread even though you’ve certainly seen their message and are dying to respond, but won’t because of whatever the reason in particular is. Or, you downplay how you feel about something. Or, you amplify how you feel about something. Just all of the ways that we mask and perform our real experiences to make them more palatable to other people or to try and perform these roles that we feel like we’re supposed to live into or live up to. Most often live up to because we live in a society that has framed it such that we are not good enough as is, which is why we’re expected to work hard. I no longer believe in– I personally don’t– 

Shadeen Francis: I do hard work. Yeah. But I don’t believe that working hard gets you any closer to any desirable outcome. So my challenge to myself has been to try easier rather than to try harder. Because in my personal life, I have heard try harder used to indicate that the reason why you’re not getting the outcome that you want is because you have been insufficient.

Dawn Serra: Yes.

Shadeen Francis: I really resist that. I really resist that as a way of being. This idea that you have to hustle in order to make a living, the idea that you have to earn it, that you get rest when you have earned it. We need rest. We need pleasure. We need leisure as much as anything else. We just did the Explore More Summit, chat and I’m so glad that you centered it around play. We need play. But people will have a reaction to you playing if they don’t feel like you’ve done all your work. But play is developmental.

Dawn Serra: Yes. 

Shadeen Francis: Play is a way that we can heal and come back from trauma. Play is a way we connect to our inner self and our inner world. Play is a way for us to access creativity. So for us to not play, we’re robbing ourselves of a really important human experience. 

Dawn Serra: I think play is such a key to getting unstuck. 

Shadeen Francis: Absolutely. 

Dawn Serra: I mean, I think the vast majority of the listener questions I get– And I’d love to, if you’re up for it, do at least one listener question before we wrap up. I think relationships stuckness is pretty chronic in the types of emails that I get. Often, when I get these questions from people, there is such a lack of play and creativity. “We’ve been doing this same thing for 19 years or for seven years or for a year and it’s not getting better and it’s not getting easier and we’re just like digging our heels in.” I think that play and that creativity is one of the most profound ways for us to just completely shift a perspective and to, “Okay. Maybe I don’t have to focus on the stuck places. Maybe I can focus on the easy places for a while, and then new things will be revealed.”

Shadeen Francis: Yeah. Absolutely. A thing I’ll just add quickly to link the two pieces of conversation that we just had, was that when folks are not feeling very trusting, it really shuts down their willingness to engage in play. When we think about the origins of our relationships, the point in time at which we started to trust one another, a lot of that was manifested in our playfulness with one another. 

Dawn Serra: Yes.

Shadeen Francis: So it’s a way that we can really come back to the authenticity and the origins of our relationships. This idea that we are deserving of levity and play and that transparency is necessary for that.

Dawn Serra: Yeah. Oh, my God. So, so important. And I know people have feelings about being transparent because it requires vulnerability and taking a risk. But the payoff to both transparency and to play I think is tremendous.

Shadeen Francis: Absolutely.

Dawn Serra: I would love that you just said this thing about when we’re new in relationships, there’s all this play. One of the questions that I wanted to go over with you is from someone named Lost Lonnie. They talk a little bit about how amazing things were at the beginning of their relationship and how, now, they’re feeling very different. So if you’re up for it, I’d love to read the question for everyone and then to explore it a little bit with you. 

Shadeen Francis: Yeah. 

Dawn Serra: Okay. So Lost Lonnie wrote in and the subject line is, “Cheating as a fetish or non-committed.” “Hey, Dawn. First off, I want to say I love the podcast. I’ve been binge listening to all of them. I learned so much these past couple of weeks. So my problem is I’ve been with my partner for four years. I love her so much. She’s the love of my life. When we first got together, the sex was amazing. But this past year, my sex drive for her has gone down so much. I never want to have sex with her. I’m just not sexually attracted to her anymore, but really mentally attracted. In my past relationships and situationships, I’ve been the other woman. We’ve tried having her cheat, but now I don’t want it because boundaries were crossed. On the other side. I want to cheat. I masturbate almost daily thinking about a girl I used to sleep with that had a boyfriend. We’ve also tried different things like kink or penetration and I’m not into it. I just seem to only be super turned on by cheating. I don’t know if the cheating thing is me not wanting to fully commit or something that’s okay that it turns me on. Please help, Dawn. I don’t want to do anything dumb because we’re not having sex. Lost Lonnie.” I would love to know what you think about Lonnie’s situation.

Shadeen Francis: Yeah. So, as a typical therapist, of course, my first… My brain first goes to questions rather than answers. Always, I’m really fascinated or interested in getting to know people’s definitions for things. So there’s a point in time where Lonnie said, “We tried her cheating and it didn’t help. Talking about cheating, I’m mostly interested in cheating. I’ve been the other woman.” So I’m really thinking about or hoping to understand more about what Lonnie is describing or defining as cheating. Is it about the other person not knowing about these external relationships? Is it about connecting with people outside of the relationship? I would love for Lonnie to think a little bit about what that means for them and how they’re defining that word. So that’s where my brain goes first. 

I also think about is this something that they were thinking about before sex stopped being a thing that they were having or wanting to have with each other? I think sometimes that makes the difference between, “Oh. We’re doing this to solve a relationship issue,” versus “Oh. This is my actual fetish or a thing I’m actually into on a bigger scale.” This might be, on the one hand, that could be true. Or, “This is just something that I’m into. This is a way I prefer to exist in the world. This feels good to me. This feels safe to me. This feels comfortable to me.” If I were to do some work around destigmatizing what that means, maybe there’s a way for me to do that healthily and respectfully. 

Shadeen Francis: On the other hand, it could be, “I have reached this impasse in my relationship and the only way I have known how to negotiate this space before was to experience folks in less consensual ways, either by being the other woman where, ‘Okay. I’m in a consenting relationship with one person, but they are breaking boundaries on their relationship.’” Or, I don’t know if this is true for Lonnie, but for them to be breaking consent boundaries on their relationship and being sort of the affair person rather than the affair partner.

Dawn Serra: Yeah. I love your questions around what do you mean by cheating? What specifically are the behaviors, the feelings, the actions that are coming up there? Is it the risk? Is it the fact that it is lying and taboo and so the stakes are really high? What is it specifically that you mean by that and that you are fantasizing about and getting off on? I really love your question of, “Was this something that you wanted before your feelings about the sex changed?” Because I think you’re so right. If you had this agreement and experience of here’s how the relationship is going to be, and then now your feelings about how sexually attracted you are to your partner have shifted, and now you’re trying to find bandaids for the situation or trying to just find any way to not feel that stuckness and this seems to be the way you’re doing it, I think that’s a really important thing to note. I also think that there’s a lot–

Shadeen Francis: And I– 

Dawn Serra: Oh. Sorry. Go ahead. 

Shadeen Francis: Oh. I would love to hear the rest of your thoughts. I just got excited about an idea.

Dawn Serra: Oh. Yeah. Tell me the idea.

Shadeen Francis: No. I was just thinking about– I’m sort of a believer that most things can be negotiated. It doesn’t mean you just keep pressing the issue until the other person assents or dissents. But I think, oftentimes, we’re so afraid to have the conversation that we lose the possibility to negotiate. So I would love if they could consider exploring, “Okay. What would make this possible in our relationship?” Because it sounds like a big part of Lonnie wants to stay in the relationship that they currently have and that the sex piece is feeling challenging. 

It sounds like they’ve tried a number of things that were not cheating, but if cheating is sort of the thing, how close can we get to that with both people feeling safe? Could it be about flirtationships? Could it be about, “Okay. Let’s role play. So you be this whole other person that I don’t really know and we’ll meet in some different place and we’ll talk about your partner” and whatever cheating looks like or feels like. But how could we introduce some degree of play and creativity into figuring out, “Okay. If cheating is really the thing that that is taking up a lot of space in my sexual desire and I want to figure this out, what can we negotiate for?”

Dawn Serra: I really like that creative approach of, “I definitely love you and I want to stay. I want us to find a way to make this work. So what are the creative approaches that might open us up to new possibilities and new feelings?” I love that so much. I’m also wondering just for Lonnie to sit with it. 

I’ll never forget there was a period of time several years ago, where I was having an affair with a married man. Our time together was perfection. Like absolute perfection. After a few months of that, we had started reaching a point where it was having an impact on his marriage. We had always said, “If there starts to be an impact on your marriage, of course, we’ll end things and you work on your marriage.” But the reality of that moment when that choice had to get made was horrible. My therapist at the time said, “The two of you are in love with the fantasy of each other. But you don’t actually have the lived experience of being around each other when you’re not in this fantasy world. You only ever meet up at hotels. You only ever meet up when you’re like frenzied. You only ever meet up when it’s been super planned and had all this build up. So, of course, every single minute together is explosive and charged and exciting because the stakes are super high and you don’t have to deal with any of the nose blowing or the socks or the anything else that comes with sharing space in a very real way with another human being.” 

Dawn Serra: That just really made an impact on me because I’ve certainly had clients in my practice too who, as soon as the deeper kind of uglier vulnerability, of being in relationship with another flawed human being really sets in and that NRE – that new relationship energy – starts to shift, there’s this, “Oh shit. Things are about to start feeling different. And I’m scared of that. So I’m going to do what I can to get out of that situation. Either because I don’t want to be seen that way or because I can’t tolerate seeing others that way. So I’m going to either end the relationship or do something super destructive to make the other person end it so that I can then move into something that feels new and exciting all over again.” 

I also think just asking yourself. What is your tolerance for what it might mean to be in a sexual relationship – or not – with someone with whom you share life with where there’s going to be stress and responsibility? And the challenge, the very real and sometimes delicious challenge of talking about who’s going to make dinner and who’s going to make the dishes wash the dishes and who’s going to do the laundry and who’s going to scrub the toilets and when the bills get paid and how do we nurture this erotic energy for each other amidst all that?

Shadeen Francis: Yeah. Passion over time is often something that we have to be working at right in the beginning. It gets to, for a lot of folks, be really spontaneous and self-manifesting. And then, over time, we often have to be doing things to continue to have that relationship energy present. So people who have passionate relationships over time are still doing things to continue to have that be. That’s the thing for Lonnie to be thinking about as she processes those questions that you were asking. Have you may be exhausted that early relationship energy where the passion takes care of itself? Maybe there are things that could be done or could be revisited that might bring that back. Also, maybe it’s run its course. I want to acknowledge that as a very real possibility as well. That sometimes we’ve sort of done the thing. That could be very real. Maybe there’s part of Lonnie that knows that maybe part of Lonnie really is done with the sexual piece of their relationship. So what might that mean?

Dawn Serra: Absolutely. I love that permission because I think it was Bex Caputo who said this around… They were talking to their therapist about whether or not they wanted to go on testosterone and they were saying, “I don’t hate my body and I’m not miserable in this gender.” Not the gender, but just being in this body as it is right now. Their therapist was like, “But why do you have to be miserable in order to make the decision? Why can’t it just be, ‘I like things the way they are and I might like them even better, if I do this other thing.’” We don’t have to wait until we’re miserable to make a change. 

So I love this permission you’re offering Lonnie of, “We can still deeply love someone and deeply care for someone and recognize maybe this isn’t the the version of the relationship that I want to stay in anymore.” I don’t have to wait until I hate you. I don’t want to be with you in order to start transitioning that relationship into something else. It might hurt a lot. But that doesn’t mean that’s not the right decision. Sometimes stuff just hurts. So I really appreciate that you offered that that permission slip, too. 

Shadeen Francis: Of course. 

Dawn Serra: So, Lonnie, thank you so much for writing in. I hope this gives you lots of things to think about. I know, I’m all thinking now. Shadeen, I just want to thank you so much for joining us this week for all of your– I really want people to sit with your trust formula and the difference between honesty and transparency. I have a feeling I’m getting a flood of emails, questions now from people who are like, “Oh, my God.” For people who want to stay in touch with you, how can they find you online and follow along with your adventures?

Shadeen Francis: Yeah. I am on Twitter at my name. So @ShadeenFrancis. You can also find me on my website, shadeenfrancis.com. Those two places are where I tend to post where I am and what I’m up to. If folks have further questions or would like more on any of these topics, those would definitely be great places to reach out to me.

Dawn Serra: Yay. Thank you so much for being here, Shadeen. I cannot wait to hear how people are thinking and feeling about all the things that we discussed. I love your brain and the way you think about things. So thank you for bringing your wisdom.

Shadeen Francis: Oh. Thank you so much for letting me have these conversations with you.

Dawn Serra: To everybody who listened, be sure you head to dawnserra.com where you can, of course, write in with your questions, your comments, your stories. Also, you can get all the links for Shadeen in the show notes as well as at dawnserra.com. Don’t forget, if you’re a Patreon supporter, we’re going to have a bonus chat. So pop over to patreon.com/sgrpodcast to get your weekly yummy bonus conversation. Until next time. I’m Dawn Serra. Bye.