Sex Gets Real 263: Aida Manduley on accountability and transformative justice

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

In a Sex Gets Real first, this episode is Part Three of a THREE part series featuring Eve Rickert, Samantha Manewitz, and Aida Manduley.

This episode is my conversation with therapist Aida Manduley. In it, we are building on the previous two episodes which included a conversation with Eve Rickert and Samantha Manewitz as we explore emotional abuse, accountability, and different ways of being in community with each other.

Aida has been a part of several transformative justice processes and has tremendous perspective around how we can center those harmed without throwing out those who caused the harm. We also talk about how white supremacy impacts the ways we show up in life, the false promises made to cis men, and why grief work is crucial to alternative justice practices and accountability.

We dive into why communities are where we should start when we’re considering how harm happened in the first place and why we all need to adjust our expectations for how long these processes take. It’s not a superhero movie where everything is resolved with one fell swoop.

I cannot wait for you to hear this awesome conversation, and as noted in the other episodes, your financial help for the survivor pod would mean so much. Resources mentioned in this episode include:

1. Initial statement on February 11th
2. Update on March 25th
3. Tracking spreadsheet where you can find most of the documents, updates, and conversations happening
4. Survivor pod PayPal where you can donate some money (PLEASE DO THIS) to support the process

If you’ve been accused of consent violations or harm, this piece by Tamara Pincus is a good place to start.

Follow Dawn on Instagram.

About Aida Manduley:

1. Listen and subscribe on iTunes
2. Check us out on Stitcher
3. Don’t forget about I Heart Radio’s Spreaker
4. Pop over to Google Play
5. Use the player at the top of this page.
6. Now available on Spotify. Search for “sex gets real”.
7. Find the Sex Gets Real channel on IHeartRadio.

Podcast Transcript

Dawn Serra: You’re listening to Sex Gets Real with Dawn Serra, that’s me. This is a place where we explore sex, bodies, and relationships, from a place of curiosity and inclusion. Tying the personal to the cultural where you’re just as likely to hear tender questions about shame and the complexities of love, as you are to hear experts challenging the dominant stories around pleasure, body politics and liberation. This is about the big and the small, about sex and everything surrounding it we don’t usually name. The funny, the awkward, the imperfect happen here in service to joy, connection, healing and creating healthier relationships with ourselves and each other. So welcome to Sex Gets Real. Don’t forget to hit subscribe.

Dawn Serra: Hey, you. Welcome to part three of our three part conversation about Eve Rickert’s experience with Franklin Veaux, and the larger dialogue that we are engaging in around things like emotional abuse, gaslighting, community accountability, and alternative justice practices, which is where we’re going today.

So part one, for those of you who haven’t heard it yet, was my chat with Eve Rickert who is the co-author of the polyamory book, More Than Two. Part two was a great conversation with therapist, Samantha Manewitz, about emotional abuse and gaslighting. What you’re about to hear today is part three in our series with Aida Manduley, who is a therapist and an incredible human being who is doing so much amazing work in the world. And one of the many hats that Aida wears is as a consultant in helping communities and groups engage in transformative justice processes and community engagement.

This isn’t about monsters, bad guys, punitive justice or victim blaming. What we’re hoping with these conversations is that it invites all of us into, myself included, examining how normalized abusive behaviors are; in our culture and our relationships, the ways that we subtly manipulate, coerce, and even harm the people in our lives, and how we can start doing better. We’re hoping that we can all start being more critical of celebrity culture, especially when those being centered are able bodied white cis men and also critical of who controls the narratives that are being told and sold. And it’s not that white cis men don’t have things to offer because they absolutely do. But what we’re inviting is how can we center other voices to make space for other stories and perspectives. That’s the only way that we get free.

Dawn Serra: Today, Aida and I are going to dive into why we would even want to engage in alternative justice processes. Lessons that Aida has learned from being involved in multiple processes and accountability groups. Why we need to grieve stories that we carry around urgency and healing, and harm and what justice even looks like. Why vilifying individuals actually can contribute to more harm happening, and how we can bring these ideas into our personal lives on a really micro scale in our most intimate relationships. Because that impacts the macro, that impacts the communities we’re in, the other people in our lives. How can we make this really personal? So much of what we discuss in this episode is about a different way to do relationships and to be in community.

One of the things that Aida says that I loved is that these processes aren’t new, but many of us are new to them, which makes them feel new. But they’ve been around for a really long time. We’re inviting you to ask, who is your community? Who are your people? What kind of accountability do you have in place and how can you start building more accountability into those spaces? So that when harm happens, because harm is inevitable between human beings, how can we create more space for support and healing that doesn’t just make everything crumble, that doesn’t push the people who have been harmed or victimized off to the side? There’s a better way to do all of this. I can’t wait for you to hear this conversation.

Dawn Serra: But before we jump in, I just want to let you know that the July cohort for my Power in Pleasure online course is now enrolling. So emails are coming in every single day from the people that are in the current cohort and it’s – I mean, there have been so many conversations that we’ve had in the group calls that have brought us to tears, that have left me just full of goosebumps and shivers. It’s incredible seeing what’s unfolding. Just this morning someone actually wrote to me and said,

“Dawn, I am loving your course so far. I didn’t realize that we would receive reflection questions every day. The consistency helps keep everything percolating in my brain and I have luckily been able to make a decent amount of time every day, during nap time, to sit and ponder and feel. Thank you for sparking that.”

And even inside the course someone just commented a couple of days ago, “I think this is going to change my life. Thank you, Dawn, for your wisdom on the group call and the breath giving module.” If you want to explore your relationship to pleasure, your stories around pleasure, if you want to release old stories about being worthy and deserving, if pleasure feels complicated for you, then I would love to have you join us for the July cohort of this five week course. You can go to dawnserra.com/pleasurecourse and check out all of the details and the price for the course. It’s super reasonable and there’s multiple price points depending on your needs. And we start July 22nd, 2019. I would love to see you there.

Dawn Serra: So back to my chat with Aida. If you support the show on Patreon at $3 a month and above, then you get access to weekly bonus content that you can’t hear anywhere else. And this week, Aida and I chatted after our conversation for the main part of the podcast and we dove into what helps and what hurts an accountability process. And I just have to say, we can learn so much from Aida, and I suspect you’re really going to like our little bonus chat. So if you go to patreon.com/sgrpodcast for Sex Gets Real, SGR podcast, to tune in. Or if you haven’t already, lend a few dollars every month to show the show some support. You can also support at $5 a month and above and you can help me field listener questions. So $3 you get the weekly bonus, $5 a month you get to help me answer listener questions and the weekly bonus. patreon.com/sgrpodcast.

Let me tell you a little bit about Aida and then we’re in jumping in. Aida Manduley is an award winning LatinX activist, international presenter, and trauma focused clinician known for big earrings and building bridges. Trained as a sexuality educator, social worker, and nonprofit management professional, they’re working to make the world a more equitable place through education, therapy and community organizing. Their perspective centers intersectionality and maximizing kindness while retaining both a sense of humor and a sense of justice.

From the New York Times to the Rainbow Times, Aida has been interviewed by a variety of media outlets. They were even brought on for a debate on the Laura Ingraham show, a popular conservative radio program, and lived to tell the tale. Here is my chat with Aida.

Dawn Serra: Welcome to Sex Gets Real, Aida. I love talking with you always and I’m so excited that you’re going to be here talking about alternative justice with us.

Aida Manduley: Hell yeah. I’m excited to be here too.

Dawn Serra: Good. You are doing work with the pod that’s involved in Eve Rickert’s process. I know you’re helping to consult and offer guidance around the alternative justice process that they’re engaged in. And you have also been a part of a number of other pods. Since this is a process that a lot of us are new to or haven’t had any experience with, I’d love it if we could just start really basic and kind of high level, why alternative justice practices and what can they offer us that’s different?

Aida Manduley: Yes. The biggest question people ask is “Why?” and “Is this something that we’ve done before?” and all these different things. And frankly, the criminal legal system is failing so many of us. I’m not going to say it’s not working because it is working. It’s just working towards some goals that I think are not great for the planet. It’s not great for society. So the criminal legal system, in a lot of ways, is working to incarcerate a lot of folks for nonviolent offenses, especially drug defenses. The criminal legal system has been created in an environment of racism and misogyny, and ableism and all these different structures that make it so that certain people get justice and a lot of people don’t. And not everyone is even operating under the same definition of justice.

So community accountability work and alternative justice systems really are a way to look outside of the criminal legal system and look toward our history, as well as our future and our own communities for the solutions, rather than these power structures that have been in place for a while that are not serving a lot of us. And again, when I say that – that’s why I tried to be very specific – It’s not serving all of us and it is serving very specific aims. Because I think a lot of people get tangled in this argument of, “Well, but do you just not want cops? Do you just not want prisons?” And they a little bit missed the point. At least, to me, the point is how can we find options, right?

We don’t all want to eat the same food. We all don’t want to live in the same kind of housing. Why would we have only one kind of format for justice and seeking healing if in so many ways we all need different things? So to me this is part of that, of providing options for people. To me, part of what they can offer us, that the criminal legal system is not offering us, is a more grassroots approach to healing injustice. If we’re looking at large systems like the criminal legal system, we don’t have as much of a hand in it as individual to dispense justice and to have access to resources that relates to having money, that relates to speaking a particular kind of language and lingo. A lot of laws are not necessarily created with the context that we would want to use them in mind. It’s just insufficient to me.

Aida Manduley: The idea here is that we can create things that are more tailored to us, that have different values systems, undergirding them, and that are generally more compassionate. The criminal legal system is not concerned with compassion whatsoever. And that, I think, is a critical component of being able to fix social harms and address social harms better.

Dawn Serra: Well, I have to say, I am 1000% on board with doing something that’s more about strengthening community and offering more options, and really undermining a system that profits off of vilifying and criminalizing very specific groups of people and types of people; and the ways that power gets distributed inside of that and who profits off of it. So that is really exciting to me.

One of the things that I’m also really interested in, and I’ve seen different versions of this with different community accountability processes over the past couple of years. But how can these types of approaches serve us if, say, the person who’s causing harm doesn’t want to participate? Even vice versa, if maybe the person who has caused harm is looking for an alternative way of doing this work, but then the people who have been harmed don’t want to participate? How can we build processes around different levels of willingness to engage?

Aida Manduley: That’s actually one of my favorite parts of this, you can’t really do criminal legal work if some of those parties are missing. But you can extremely do different kinds of community accountability with missing parties, quote unquote, missing parties. So to me, that’s also a question of one of the specific frameworks that I use, transformative justice, which I super didn’t make up. Right? That’s a framework that has been built upon over years and decades, primarily founded and used by black women, and really in conversation with restorative justice that has way older roots in a lot of indigenous communities here and abroad. And folks have brought it more to the legal system in the seventies and eighties. But with this kind of approach, we just have a lot of different opportunities for engagement. So to me, one of the beauties of it is that, we can look at what conditions caused this harm to happen or what conditions allowed this harm to happen? And how we as a community look to that to change it?

So we’re looking outside of the specifics of a situation while also looking at the specifics. And to me, what that means is we don’t need the humans directly involved to see, “Oh, this kind of harm happened because this person didn’t have appropriate mental health resources,” or, “This harm happened because this person didn’t have access to public transportation options that helped them.” Or, “This harm happened because this person didn’t have X, Y, Z.” And even if we don’t address those people that caused or received the harm, we can still work on getting better access to public transportation for folks in our community. We can talk about what it would look like to create guidelines and community building spaces for people involved in kink so that they have more of a sense of cohesion when harm happens, so that people don’t feel isolated. There’s a lot of ways to indirectly address harm that don’t rely on a victim or a perpetrator coming forth or being involved in a months long, years long process.

Dawn Serra: One of the things that I really appreciate about that or what I feel inside of me when I hear that is, so much of the suffering that I’ve experienced and that I know so many of the people I’ve worked with have experienced is around this good survivor narratives. You have to be a certain way. You have to have learned something from this and you’ve come out the other side, and you’re healed and your shiny and you don’t get upset about it. And there’s this very specific clean narrative that’s about making other people comfortable.

I think one of the things that’s really interesting about what you just said is, one, I think what’s inherent in the good survivor narrative is the flip side of the coin, which is there was some monster you had to overcome. And we’re doing away with that, with these processes of really seeing this as humans inside of communities, inside of systems. Not just, “Let’s put all the bad people over here.” I don’t know – It feels like there’s also more opportunity for some of the nuance around, sometimes the people who have been harmed have also caused some harm. And sometimes the people causing harm are also being harmed.

Aida Manduley: Yes. And honestly, one of the biggest fears that I hear from people who are not already in a survivor mode, they’re just afraid of being called out and disposed of. They’re terrified. I have so many people – I work as a clinician as well and I have so many people in my office that are just afraid that they’re going to get booted or because they may be work in a very progressive community that is really centering survivors as much as they can. They’re worried that if they cause harm or if they aren’t perfect, they’re going to get cut off from society and cut off from their supports. And on a large scale, we know that that doesn’t super happen, right? A lot of the folks that get accused of harm don’t actually suffer many consequences. But if someone is in a community that is trying to be better about things like sexual assault, that is a possibility that they will be ostracized if they are someone who caused harm or were perceived as causing harm. So what I think these processes give us is a – not just a framework or a path, but also a paradigm shift to understand that there is no such thing as a monster. There is no such thing as a perfect good victim or person. We all hold complexity. But that doesn’t mean then that, “Well, we all cause harm. So everyone should just forgive each other,” and have it be okay.

I think these processes are long for a reason because they’re generally trying to focus on addressing root causes of harm and then trying to help every party involved to transform. The idea is not just, “Let us be survivor centered and help the survivor heal.” The idea is how can the community heal? The harm was something communal. How can the person who caused harm deal with that and be better and themselves transformed, themselves deal with the obligations that their harm caused in the first place? While that also makes it, I think, a little bit easier for people who are harmed to come forth and admit they caused harm because they know that they would be operating in a world or in a community that’s not just going to throw them away. I think it also gives survivors a space to be more complex. You don’t have to participate. You don’t have to be happy. You can be pissed off and you can want your rapist to die in a fire. And that is okay. The thing is, is that the last feeling you have? Is that the last place that you land? Hopefully not. Because living with a ton of anger is exhausting. Having anger is an important part of the process that a lot of people have. And here, we’re back to this question of timing.

We can’t expect survivors or anyone, really, to jump to logistics, to jump to, “How do we make this better?” If we don’t give them time to have a fucking feeling. Any mental health professional worth their salt will know and tell you that. But a lot of us, even when we know that we don’t practice it. So to me, what’s really important in doing these processes and doing them well is knowing that the timelines are going to be different for every process. And that it’s going to be vital that there is space at the beginning for people to have their feelings and have those heard.

Aida Manduley: A lot of people try to just jump to the, “Okay, so how do we fix it? How do you fix it?” Without actually hearing what the feelings are and what people are sorting through. And that, generally undermines the process and it doesn’t make it as long lasting or sustainable in the end. So in our attempt to cut a corner, we actually just messed up the whole process from the beginning.

Dawn Serra: I am interrupting this part of the episode to tell you that is the truth is, I don’t have time in my life to do all the things that need to get done. Finding small ways to ensure that I have plenty of time for play, for sex, for rest, for eating delicious food. It’s an important part of how I keep going while juggling multiple companies and working long, long days. And that’s why I have long been a fan of Lola. Lola is a female founded company offering a line of organic cotton tampons, pads and liners and they now offer sex products too. They are generously sponsoring the show this week. And listeners, you can get 40% off your subscription. So keep listening. Here’s how Lola helps me avoid period and sex crises.

Their subscription is fully customizable. You can choose your mix of products, how many pads, tampons and liners you get, the mix of absorbency you need, the number of boxes that you want, and how often they deliver. Plus, they send them in these super discrete boxes and on the inside everything is so pretty and put together. It’s lovely branding. Lola’s subscription is also really flexible. You can change and skip and cancel your subscription at any time. So if I’m going to be traveling for a couple of weeks, I can have them deliver a little bit more frequently ahead of it and then delay the subscription for that whole time that I’m away. It’s super easy. Plus, it’s not just period products. The Sex by Lola line is available part of the subscription too, so you can add it to your periods subscription. Everything is super conveniently delivered at your ideal schedule. And I love their ultra thin condoms, which is something I’m always on the lookout for. Definitely check that out.

Dawn Serra: You know ethics are hugely important to me. So I also love that every single purchase with Lola does good. Lola donates feminine care products to homeless shelters across the US with each purchase you make. I also wanted to let you know that the FDA does not require brands to disclose a comprehensive list of ingredients that are in period care products, so most of them don’t. But Lola offers complete transparency about the ingredients that are found in their tampons, pads, liners, wipes. You’ve heard me rant and rave about the importance of high quality lube, non porous toys, and now you can be confident about what’s in your period products. Because our genitals deserve the very best.

If you want your period products, and even your condoms, lube, wipes, delivered to your door on your schedule with a company that believes in centering the health of your body, then check out Lola. Listeners, you can get 40% off all subscriptions. Just go to mylola.com and enter SGR as your discount code when you subscribe. So that’s mylola.com. Fill your cart with your goodies and then enter the discount code SGR at checkout to save 40%.

A huge thanks to Lola for supporting the show. It means so much to me and I hope that all of you listening jump on that massive discount. It let’s Lola know that this is a show that they should continue partnering with, which helps me so much. So you get a discount and you help the show when you take advantage of that discount at mylola.com and use discount code SGR at checkout.

Dawn Serra: The time piece is something that I’d love to just roll around in a little bit more. I think one of the things that that’s so important is recognizing that a lot of the mythology that we’ve got right now in the stories that we consume and that we celebrate because of pop culture and Hollywood, there’s this sense of immediacy and one in doneness. The good guy defeats the bad guy and then all is great until there’s another bad guy. And there’s this finality and a very specific timeline. What you’re naming about these processes is that time moves in a very different way when we’re really feeling into feelings, harm, healing, and even changing potentially very culturally prescribed and supportive behaviors. And there’s a lot we have to grieve around that if we’re going to engage in these processes. So what are some of the things you think we need to start unpacking, grieving, and really grappling with if we’re interested in moving in this direction?

Aida Manduley: Oh my god. Great question. Let’s talk about white supremacy for a moment.

Dawn Serra: Yes.

Aida Manduley: As always with me. So white supremacy and white supremacy culture has a couple of tenets. Again, these are not tenets that I made up. You can look up white supremacy culture for more information if you’re curious. But some of the tenets that a lot of us who were raised either directly in because it’s part of our racial legacy, because of our bloodline or we were raised in it because we were raised in an environment where white supremacy culture dominated. There’s a lot of rules and there’s a lot of promises that we were given. We were told that maybe if we were good enough, we would be all set in the world. That if we worked hard, we would be provided for. That if we just tried our best, if we were good, if we followed the rules, if we didn’t deviate from gender, if we were heterosexual, if we were all these particular kinds of things, we would be okay or we would be safe.

And what a lot of people notice as they move through the world and grow up, and discover their identities or discover their lineage or anything like that, is that, that’s a lie. It’s all lies. And it’s only a true promise for a very select few. Even for people who do gain a lot of that safety and gain a lot of that capital and gain a lot of that power, there are still harms that come to them because of how white supremacy works. So everyone is impacted negatively by white supremacy, albeit in different ways. And some of the tenets of white supremacy and white supremacy culture are perfectionism, are a sense of urgency, are binary either or thinking and individualism. And so all of these things give some of us a sense of, “Oh, this is how the world is and I can predict it. There is a right and there is a wrong, and it is very clear and there’s no ambiguity. If I just work fast and work hard, it’s all going to be okay.” and losing that is awful.

Some people were never actually given the chance to even think that they could aspire to it. Because very early on, they were disabused of that illusion. But for those of us who maybe had it for 2-3 years of our lives, 5, 20, 30, 40 years. Some of us are still grappling with it. The idea that the world is not what we expected it to be is really, really hard. If we wanted the either or, if we wanted the simple answers – Basically what I’m saying is we don’t have those simple answers and they aren’t even real. Having to deal with your world getting deconstructed, it’s just a carpet pulled out from underneath you and you’re just stumbling onto the floor, cracking your head. It is painful. It is awful. It feels like you were lied to your entire life. It’s not pretty. And if we don’t admit that, if we don’t admit that there is grief, – I’m glad that you brought that word in specifically – If we don’t admit that there’s grief, the process is going to feel really, really hard and we’re not going to be sure why.

Aida Manduley: A lot of people when they try to engage in accountability or when they try to grapple with causing harm or having been harmed, if they’re working under these rules, they’re going to have a hard time because the rules were not set up to roll around in the ambiguity. They were set up to hide ambiguity and to pretend that it didn’t exist. So we have to grieve the promises of the American dream that a lot of us were given. We have to grieve the alleged certainty that we were promised. We have to grieve the simple world that some of us were told we would have if we were just good enough. And we have to grieve our own sense of self as good people which I think is one of the harder ones to do there.

Most of us don’t want to think of ourselves as monsters. Most of us don’t want to think of ourselves as people who could grievously hurt others. And to do this work and to do it well, we all have to contend with those parts of us that could and will cause harm. Even if it’s not top level murder half the world harm, it’s still harm and it still matters. And that’s really hard to do. To just sit with, “There are parts of me that are not nice. There are parts of me that could hurt other people even unintentionally, but especially intentionally.” That’s not what a lot of us have been trained to do. And there’s not a lot of safe spaces to talk about that. So then we’re asking people, “You deal with that on your own. Do you deal with it in secret? Grapple with the horrors of your soul in secret?” And don’t tell anyone. That’s isolating and, as maybe a lot of your listeners know, isolation is one of the biggest predictors for death, for violence, for suicidality, for depression. Because we are a social species. Humans were meant to be in connection with other people. And if we are divorced from that through choice or circumstance, but especially circumstance, we don’t drive and we fall apart.

Dawn Serra: I think part of what makes that particularly challenging is, so many of us are getting so many of our social needs – I will use the word ‘met’ loosely – with social media. And I think one of the things we see is that it’s rare to find spaces on social media that allow for messiness and uncertainty, and not getting things right. I think that that also contributes to this sense of, “I either have to do the thing perfect or I’m not going to do the thing at all.” And both of those things contribute to the ongoing systems of violence that we’ve already got.

Aida Manduley: Agreed. I mean a lot of those, I think you mentioned, comes back to the community. If we think about community accountability, one of the questions that I asked in my little intensives on restorative justice or things like that is, who is your community? Who would you count as your community or your communities? Are there different definitions that you use for that? Are there the loose definitions that are based on identity? Like “Ah, yes. The queer community.” But is there a more local geographical definition for you around that? Is there a specific online space that is your community? Who are your people, basically. And to have a community accountability, you need a community and you need a sense of community to some extent. Especially for groups that are dispersed across the globe, especially for groups that have tenuous meeting spaces online due to censorship or due to poor wifi infrastructure or natural disasters or things like that.

It can be really hard to create a sense of community that would then provide the foundation for the accountability processes to work. One of the things that I’m exploring a lot, and I don’t have concrete answers for right now, but the thing that I’m exploring right now is how to build sense of community and how to build thus community accountability across a distance and across communities or fields that are not well defined? So how do we build that sense of community and togetherness and care so that then when harm arises, we can actually deal with it as a community? Because community building requires trust and when you’re trying to do community accountability work without trust, it’s extremely, extremely difficult. And so you can see that with some of the more public accountability processes in kink alternative sexuality and sexual education spaces. Because we’re trying to work around issues that maybe we weren’t prepared for. The rise of social media, the rise of technology that allows us to connect over a long distance. We have parts of what it takes to build community but not everything and we’re still trying to figure it out, I think.

Dawn Serra: And I think what’s so important about what you just said, which reiterates some of your earlier points is when harm arises, it’s not if, it’s when. I think one of the things  that we often find ourselves inside of is not really dealing with how to deal with harm until harm has occurred. And then we’re all hurt, we’re all traumatized, we’re all up in our feelings, things are confusing; and we don’t have the tools because we haven’t really felt into, when harm arises and it will, what are some of the things that I want, I need, need to practice, want to talk to others about practicing? I mean, laying some of that groundwork is so crucial. But because culturally that’s not supported, we kind of flail until something happens.

Aida Manduley: I was recently at an advanced circle keeping training with Kay Pranis, who was one of the – sort of the big names in circle keeping work. And one of the questions in that training is not a question that I was unfamiliar with. I’ve thought about it and I’ve talked about it before, but it hit me in a particularly new way at that training. It was a question of, what do we look like when we’re at our worst? What do we look like when we’re at our most triggered? What do we look like when we’re at our cruelest or meanest? Most of us don’t talk about that with anyone. Most of us don’t have spaces where we get to show that quote unquote ugliness or whatever you want to call it. And to me, that is such an important part of these processes. Just acknowledging that that’s there and also being able to communicate it. Because if we can communicate it in a community, that community can then help us – be on the watch for it. It can also help our community better understand when we are in that space, when we’re in that moment.

I’ll use myself as an example, when I get my ugliest version of myself, my meanest version of myself is I am very cruel and condescending, and dismissive and cold; and I’m just waiting for the other person to lose their damn mind. I’m just going to look super cool and calm over here. I’m going to be that logical bro who, “Why are you so freaked out right now?” And that is horrible. I know that about myself. And that is a part of me that I worked so hard to understand and to also ward against because it is a very damaging way of being.

Aida Manduley: A lot of us are told that harm is when you’re violent. Harm is when you’re loud. Harm is when your big. Harm is when you’re aggressive. And a lot of people, and I would say especially a lot of white people, don’t see and don’t understand the harm that silence can bring. The harm that the quiet dismissal can bring. Sometimes that’s even worse because it agitates the other person further. And so if I can know that about myself and if I can tell my community, “Hey, this is what I look like when I’ve lost my entire shit.” They can be ready for it. And they can pay attention to the signs and be like, “Hey, it seems like maybe this is happening. What do you need?” Or they can know how to better deal with it or how to talk to me about it or it can spark further conversation.

So that’s one of the questions that I would encourage all listeners to think about and consider, who in your life could you tell that right now? Who in your life knows that about you already? Do they know because they were told? Do they know because they witnessed and were harmed by you doing that? If we’re able to even just have that as a part of the conversation, it can help us prevent and pre plan for when those parts want to come out. Because we’re not going to say, “Well, we’re just going to keep that. We’re going to keep that monster in the basement. I’ll never get that level of angry. I’ll never feel badly enough to be that level of angry.” Buddy, life takes a lot of turns, life take a lot of turns.

I’m a trained therapist, educator, fairly level headed person, and even I with all my letters after my name and all my training sometimes just want to rip the world in half. So, of course, people with less resources than I, will extremely want to rip the world in half or will want to eject themselves out of the planet. So let’s not pretend that those pieces don’t exist and in fact, try to address them as directly as we can instead.

Dawn Serra: One of the things that’s striking me about that is I’m kind of thinking about the Me Too movement and I’m thinking about how, because of the systems and the cultures we have at play, that there is this sense of entitlement that comes with especially being a cis white man, and how to really be able to find – to, one, be willing to ask the question and, two, genuinely be able to move into that space. There has to be a breaking up with at least a certain level of the entitlement. The, “I deserve these things and it’s not my fault if you can’t deal with that,” kind of attitude. I mean, there is a humbling that has to happen as part of this process. It’s in acknowledging, “I can be terrible and I can hurt people. Now let’s talk about that.”

Aida Manduley: Well, and honestly – So my main demographic in therapy work is not cis straight white men. Most of the folks that fit those markers come to me through other avenues, especially couples therapy. But they end up being some of the clients that I… I’m not going to say they’re my favorites. But…

Dawn Serra: Can be rewarding.

Aida Manduley: Yeah. They’re the most unexpected based on where I’ve gone with my work and the ones where I can see sometimes the greatest community impact when they get it. Because… A potentially controversial statement that I’ve made before is, “Until men, and especially white cis men, get their shit together, no one is safe in the world.” And that doesn’t mean that cis white men have to save all of us because– No, I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that until they have their shit together – loosely defined – The world will have to be working against the harms that they are perpetuating.

I’m not saying that they’re the only ones who perpetuate harm. I literally said that that’s not the case, 20 times earlier. But because of the way that society has been structured, especially in the US, based on how power especially has been structured, they are the ones that are generally at the peak in terms of resources for power, for money, things like that; and are also the ones that are least resourced in a lot of emotional literacy work. If they don’t have access to those resources, it’s very difficult for them to be able to get that humility and leave that entitlement. They’re some of the ones that have to grieve, honestly, the most because they are the ones that fit the criteria for the promises that I mentioned earlier. They are the ones who were told, “You will have the world.” And when they do, but they see that they are harming other people that they care about, or when they don’t get the world or when that is challenged, it freaks them out and a lot of them get angry. Anger is a secondary emotion. Under anger, generally, there’s always hurt or sadness or insecurity. And that is a part that not a lot of folks in power positions get to explore or acknowledged that they have within themselves.

Again, I’ll use myself as an example and I’m not a cis white man. But close enough, I guess. I know that if I feel angry or if – Sorry, if I feel targeted or if I feel unsafe or if I feel like I messed up, generally, my immediate reaction would be defensiveness. Generally, my immediate reaction would be anger. I don’t want to be wrong. I don’t want to be seen as causing harm. Who does? It has taken years of work and messing it up to get to a place where that is not my only immediate reaction. Now, that can be one of them. But I also have thankfulness. I also have surprise. I also have apology. There’s a lot of other options that I have available to me. And that is what I wish for a lot of folks. I want them to have not just their anger. I want them to be able to feel other things and see people calling them to account for harm as a gift, as an opportunity for growth, as an opportunity to make the world better through sheer ripple effect, and I want people to have curiosity. That’s one of the biggest, best tools.

Aida Manduley: If you ask me, “What are the tools you would take to a deserted island where you would have to do this work?” Curiosity would be a huge one. That would be the biggest one. Because curiosity can lead to conversation and honest curiosity can be an antidote to defensiveness because it’s not, “Why would you do that? How dare you do that. You did this wrong.” It’s, “How did this make sense for you?” My favorite question is how did this make sense for that person? Because I assume it will. We don’t do things out of accident. We don’t, “Oops, I just did things.”

There’s reasons that we do what we do, whether it’s conscious or unconscious. And when we build that question in, how did this make sense for you? It presumes a level of giving a crap about the other person. And if you care about me and if you care about why I did what I did, that at least for me and for a lot of people I know, makes them inherently and generally less defensive because I’m not having to fight. I’m giving you my story. That said, for some people, any question will be interpreted as an attack. I have clients where, again, especially in couples therapy, clients where any question that I asked, no matter what tone, no matter what, was seen as an attack on them. And so for those folks, the work that they had to do was start interrogating. Why do I interpret every question as an attack? And honestly, what comes through for a lot of those folks is they’re afraid of being known. They have never been asked truly and honestly, or they have a history where they were often ignored or isolated, and they’ve built up defenses against that. If they’ve built up these wonderful defenses, anyone seemingly trying to tear them down is going to be seen as a threat.

And that’s why, to me, any kind of mental health education that takes into account things like attachment styles, things like trauma responses, things like emotional literacy overall are so crucial for this. And just for being people – like relationships. If you’re in a relationship with another human, whatever that relationship is, you would be greatly improved in your skillset by knowing things about trauma, by knowing things about how to identify emotions, and what the arc of a conflict generally looks like. Because that’s where a lot of us get stuck and we get wrapped up in, “Oh, well, I didn’t mean it.” Or we get wrapped up in, “Oh, they looked at me wrong,” or “Oh, but now everyone will know that I was bad.” And there are so many tools at our disposal, we just need to disseminate and make more available. That’s where I think a lot of the collectivity and sharing comes in. And then that’s why I hop on podcasts like this.

Aida Manduley: The more people know, “Here are some things maybe you should be learning and practicing,” the more we will have that muscle, that collective muscle, in action. We can’t expect ourselves to go from zero to 60 on anything. So why would we expect that we could fix things or we could do community accountability after never having practiced it? We have to practice it in small bits and then that will give us a strength to work on it in bigger and higher stakes situations.

Dawn Serra: That makes me think a lot about adrienne maree brown in Emergent Strategy and how what we do on the micro in our most personal relationships is representative of the macro. I think that’s so important. If we can start practicing accountability and some of these different ways of being with harm and being able to reveal some of these ugly parts of ourselves and have them held with our closest, it becomes so much more likely that we’re going to be able to do that with larger groups and people we don’t know as well and – because we’ve practiced and we’ve developed the skillset.

Aida Manduley: Yeah. Again, the question is or one of the questions is, when I’m angry, What do I do about it? When I’m angry, how does my body feel? When I’m angry, who gets to know that about me? When I’m angry and I want something to change, how do I enact that change on the world? Is it through violence? Is it through a request? Is it through bottling it up? Those questions most of us don’t give ourselves time to mull over. And again, for listeners, give yourselves 10 minutes randomly on a weekly basis, or give yourselves half an hour on a weekly basis to mull over some of those kinds of questions so that you can, A, get to know yourself better, certainly. But, B, see how those work, and are they serving you? Are they serving the people around you? Is there anything that you need support around? And why it’s scary to sometimes open up those questions is because it’s a Pandora’s box.

Sometimes you’ve been suppressing something for so long because you feel like there’s nothing else you can do with it. And again, suppression is one of my favorite defense mechanisms, personally and professionally, but it’s time limited. It’s time limited. We can’t put something in the basement of our brains forever and expect it to not grow and fester. We can’t put it down there unexpected to just be waiting till we’re ready to deal with it for 25 years. Especially because a lot of these things that we repress or suppress end up coming up somatically, they end up coming out through weird things that our bodies do. And a lot of people don’t even realize that they have trauma or that they’ve had something buried in their brain basement until they’re suddenly having a seizure or they’re having a twitch or they’re having deep intense stomach pain that has no medical explanation other than it’s psychosomatic. And that’s where a lot of the psychosomatic stuff comes from. It’s from wounds that we are not looking at and it comes from a lot of suppression.

Dawn Serra: So one of the other things I’d love to explore a little bit is you had mentioned that some of the things that we need to grieve as is not wanting to be bad, but also recognizing it’s inevitable that we’re going to cause harm. And one of the things that I’ve noticed in response to some of the community accountability practices I’ve seen with Eve and Franklin with Reid, with some other folks, is I see this process starting where a lot of it isn’t made public and then people, specifically in social media spaces or in blogs spaces and community forums, coming in and wanting so many different things from the person that caused harm. And I’m really curious about how we can do better around that, because often the demands that are coming at someone are just unfair, unrealistic. It’s not possible to do all the things that are being asked for. But to then explain that often then escalates what’s unfolding in those discussions. So how do we make space for – If we’re engaged in an accountability process, maybe we’ve done harm and lots of people come at us with lots of demands and requests that just aren’t something that we’re capable of doing, what do we do?

Aida Manduley: First step: know that it’s going to be messy. Embrace it. Just know. My Virgo ass hates it. That it’s messy. There’s a part of me that’s like, “Oh, but can it just be orderly and neat, and beautiful and fit in my color coded spreadsheet? Why?” It just doesn’t work that way. And frankly, that’s actually part of what makes it, in some ways, really beautiful and interesting is that it can be so chaotic. But a lot of us don’t thrive on that kind of energy. So knowing that from the get go and saying, “Okay, I know it’s going to be messy. How do I support myself through this mess? Who do I have to call on? What do I have to change in my schedule to deal with the fact that it is de facto going to be messy? So that’s step number one.

Step number two is getting a sense of who you’re counting as community and who are the people that you are counting as stakeholders in the situation, and to what degree are they stakeholders? If you have an issue that’s pretty public, with Franklin and Eve for example, and all the other people that have come forward, not just Eve. There is a wide radiating circle. I’m thinking of like a ripple – a ripple image. There are different stakeholders at play, some that are closer to the issue, some that are further away. And whatever process someone is engaging in, you have to be very realistic about what resources you have and how far in that ripple you can actually make change or if you want to make change across all those expanding ripple sets or rings, know that the resources and that the change will have to be different for each of those. So the change that processes like the one with Franklin and Eve, and the other survivors are doing, they can’t account for everyone’s needs. And so they have to be very clear, or I would advocate, that people are very clear about who they are prioritizing, how they are processing, how they are even listening to people.

Aida Manduley: So if you have more resources, one of the things that can be really nice is having discussion circles or having town halls or having submission forms where everyone who wants to be heard, can be heard. Being heard though doesn’t mean, “And now we’re going to do everything you say,” And to set yourselves up for success when doing that, it’s very important to, from the get go, lay out what the expectations are and what you can actually offer. Because if you tell people, “Come in and tell me what you feel. Blurt all your feelings onto me.” Most people expect something, even if they’re not telling you that they expect something. And if you don’t deliver, then they’re going to be upset and rightfully so.

So instead of, “Just come, tell me your feelings,” you say, “Hey, come tell us your feelings. Here’s what we’re going to do with your feelings. Here’s what capacity we have.” You’re letting people be able to better consent to when their story comes out of them. So if you’re saying, “Okay, this is a listening circle. What we’re going to be doing is just opening up a space for people to be heard. We don’t plan to incorporate this in X, Y, Z way, but we do plan to incorporate it in X, Y, Z way.” That can be really helpful. Because then people know what they’re getting into, basically.

The other part of that, too, in terms of managing all these mixed expectations is, again, here’s me being a Virgo about it. With a lot of processes that I’m in, we have a designated people or a team of designated people that just write down and grab all the different things people are saying. It’s like – get every piece of critique, everything people are asking for. Just like, “Let’s compile it on a spreadsheet or in a document or somewhere. And then let’s take our values, the values that we have as a team for accountability, and let’s take the restorative or transformative justice questions that we’re using as a guide and use those two things as a filter for the requests.” So for example, what that looks like in practice is, in an accountability process I was a part of, we had some meetings from the beginning talking about what are we doing, what are the things that we value? We’re doing specific values clarification activities about harm, about teamwork, all of that stuff for the community building of our own team; and picking, are we trying a more restorative approach? Are we trying to more transformative approach? What’s our guideline here? And then getting all these questions and seeing, “Okay, how do they fit with this?”

Aida Manduley: So for example, if someone is asking “Hey, this person is a teacher and they caused harm of this kind. My request is that they never teach again.” That may not be a fair request, right? Based on the kinds of questions that I use. But what is the kernel of that? What does that person trying to get at with this request? Maybe what they’re worried about is that this person will perpetuate their harmful mentality to other people because they’re a teacher. So what are the safeguards that we can put in place to address the underlying concern without necessarily quote unquote caving to the superficial request? Maybe someone is asking, “Oh, this person needs to never come to these events again.” Again, probably a question of safety. Maybe they don’t want to be triggered when they go to an event. What are other ways that we can actually meet that underlying need rather than, “This person is banned forever.” Maybe what we do is, “This person is banned for a year.” Right? Or maybe, “This person has banned for three years,” or maybe they have to come with a buddy to events or –

There’s a lot of different ways to get needs met. I think sometimes in these processes, we make our requests from a place of fear or scarcity or black and white thinking, and we lose our creativity. And when we can actually tap into the creativity for problem solving, that’s when a lot of the more sustainable and actually transformative options come forth. Because they’re not coming from that place of punishment that most of us were indoctrinated into. So a lot of this is doing deep work and deep self discovery around, what are the tentacles of punitive systems that are in my body and in my thinking that infuse everything I do? I’m not going to get rid of them 100%, but how can I mitigate their effects? If I’m angry at someone, do I want them be gone forever? Cool. That’s probably a more punishment based strategy. Are there any other options? What am I actually seeking? Is there any other way to get at that?

Dawn Serra: So you’ve already been touching on this a little bit. And I’d love to know if there’s anything else that you’d like to expand on. But having been a part of multiple community accountability processes in a variety of roles with different communities and different situations, what are some of the lessons you’ve really learned over being through multiple of these processes? Things that maybe now you think, “Oh, wow. If I had known that in the beginning I would’ve done things differently.”

Aida Manduley: Yes. Don’t go public too soon with your process, which is hard, especially if a lot of the messes and harms were public. I love the Internet. I love technology. I love social media. I love callouts. And I think callouts are really vital and important especially when there’s a power difference that is being addressed because a call in would not be possible. But that said, doing everything in the public eye, especially at the beginning, gets really messy and it can really be harmful to our process. So I advocate for people to try to do some of that work on the back end first before they’re like, “Here’s all that we’re doing. Blah, please judge us.” So that’s one of them.

Another lesson for me is that you can’t skip the community building at all. If you skip it, it’ll come bite you in the butt later. What I mean by that is not just in the larger sense, but if you have a team – If you’re trying to build a pod of folks to do community accountability work, you really need to humanize each other. You need to spend the time getting to know who those folks are, especially if you don’t know each other very well. You have to or you should – You don’t have to do anything. But here’s my suggestion. I would suggest that you get clear on what you, as a team, value and what you, as a team, are trying to do. What kind of community accountability process are you using? What are the, at least, top five values? Is it transparency? Is it sustainability? Is it urgency and speed?

Depending on your values, you’re going to do things pretty differently. And what happens is that in a lot of these teams, people are coming with different experiences and knowledge bases that are not always compatible 100%. Then you have the team dynamics of the push-pull. You have people’s personalities coming into the mix and it getting messy. So if you can try to address that early and try to think, “Okay, what are we trying to build here?” That can save you a lot of grief. Some of that work can look like values clarification exercises, which can be as simple as, “Here’s a list of 200 values. Pick the ones that matter to you and let’s discuss.” It can look like having a communications guide of, “What are we calling what we’re doing? What kind of communications are going to come from the pod versus individuals? How are we differentiating the two? How are we looking at the urgency of emails, if we have a group email? Are we responding to people with 24 hours? Are we responding over the span of a week? Do we have an autoresponder on the email account? Do we have a website where we’re going to put things? Hearing what people feel about it and what they want before you make decisions, again, in that community building stage.

Aida Manduley: Another part of it is these processes will generally take more time than you expect. So some are like, “Oh yeah, this is going to be a couple of months,” and then surprise it’s a year and a half later and you’re still doing the work. Another lesson is people will drop out, sometimes because they misinterpreted what the ask was. Sometimes because they had a life circumstance change. For whatever reason, you will have people that leave.

So when doing anything like this, it’s really important to make it okay for people to leave. You don’t want people in a pod that are hating every second of it. They’re not going to be your best support at that time and it’s not going to be helpful for them. So make it okay to leave, make it okay to ask for support. And think through, “Okay, what do we, as pod members or team members, need to be able to do this successfully? What kind of communication do we need with each other? What kind of support do we need from partners or family members or things like that?” And giving that permission for, “Hey, this is going to change.” We’re not always going to have the same people. That also relates to documentation. How can you ensure that you have the documents that you need accessible to all the people that need them? Because if someone drops and just literally drops off the face of the Earth and they were the ones who had access to all the documentation, you’re going to be screwed.

Another piece here is generally have, at least, two people leading whatever it is that you’re doing. Don’t have one person being the lead on anything by themselves. In part, that’s because of – What if someone dies? What if someone drops? But also, we all have our own baggage that we’re bringing to this and having another human to bounce ideas off of can be really helpful when we are maybe overreacting to something or reacting maybe more from a place of scarcity and things like that. So having multiple people as vectors of information, that’s also really helpful if you have any interviews that you’re doing or if you’re talking to someone who caused harm. It might feel like ganging up on if you do it wrong or if you don’t do it with a lot of care. But it can also mean, “Hey, this is not just going to be a ‘they said they said’ situation. We have a little bit more wiggle room.” Those are some of the bigger lessons that I’ve learned thus far.

Aida Manduley: The other piece here is about not committing to too many of these at a time. I think a lot of people get excited and they’re like, “Ooh, I did one. I want to do more,” and then they are up to their eyeballs in work. It doesn’t serve anyone. And the other piece is, again, a lesson I learned through doing this. I think the more that we do these for quote unquote smaller offenses, the better we’re going to be at doing them overall. So if I had known about this 20 years ago, and I could tell my 20 years ago self, “Hey, you should maybe start looking into this. You don’t think that any of this affects you, but it’s going to. And if you start practicing now, you’re going to have such a better handle on it.” So I would encourage people to, “Hey, did someone gently piss you off in your household or in your community?” Can you try to do a mini version of this? Start practicing now so that it doesn’t catch you by surprise when you have to do it later. Making this a community norm. Those would be, I think, the top lessons that have come to me to doing this work for now.

Dawn Serra: Oh, such a big yes to all of us just starting this sooner. God, yes. So the last question that I’d love to ask you for this main part of the episode is around the fact that this is a process. And I think, culturally speaking, and I’m sure a lot of this is deeply informed by white supremacy and capitalism. But we tend to want answers, solutions, and points. We want to know that if we go through this program, we take this course, we do this process, that at the end, we’re fixed, we’re healed, we’re done, we’re the expert.

One of the things you mentioned before we hopped on is that going through this process doesn’t mean that on the other end someone is all of a sudden A-okay or knows all the things. It’s an ongoing process that’s going to have all kinds of things on the other side of it. So what are some of the things you think you either just want to share around that or that you’ve even had to kind of feel into and grapple with around, when we engage in community accountability processes the end of the process doesn’t mean the end of all the work.

Aida Manduley: And again, that’s another piece to grieve, I think. Since some of us really like it when things are tied with a neat little bow. For me, a big part of that has been shifting my value system, frankly. I know that in a lot of ways I was raised to value certainty. I was raised to value science and objectivity, and values neutrality, which I think is a scam, but okay. And thinking about all these ways that we were taught maybe to believe and considering that there are other ways that we can look at the world, considering that there are other options that we can, at whatever age we are, hold on to instead. So for me, embracing a mentality of possibility, embracing a mentality of growth, embracing the mentality of change, has been really important.

When we’re doing that work of shifting what our values are or shifting what we think the end goal should look like, it’s important to why we’re doing that. It’ll be like, “Okay, if I’m going to give this thing up that has given me a lot of security, why? Why would I do that?” And to me, A, it’s more realistic. B, if we want to look at the work of adrienne maree brown, a lot of what she talks about is that that’s how nature works too. Nature has a lot of lessons for us in terms of structures for community building, structures for not just being individualistic overall and thinking differently. And there’s this piece also around – I’m trying to figure out how to phrase it – possibility and growth are more forgiving. For me, that’s where a lot of this makes sense and why I gravitate toward it. I also don’t want to be punished and thrown away. And I don’t want to be just flat out wrong. So if I can have a mentality that says, “Hey, it’s okay to be wrong sometimes and it’s okay to change. You always have another chance.” That, to me, is really attractive. The idea of we can grow, we can evolve. We’re never done, which means there’s always room to fix things. There’s always space to be better. We don’t have to be stressing out over, “Did I do it perfectly enough? Did I do it and am I done?” And I can see why it’s scary because if we’re never done, it means that we can always mess up. Well, double edged sword here. Everything is a double edged sword. So let’s at least pick the cutest sword in the bunch that can give maybe more of us a chance for healing.

Aida Manduley: This piece around – we were talking about earlier, people having expectations that are calibrated to the criminal legal system. Those don’t have a place, frankly, in this kind of work. Because with the legal system, generally, there is a, “Well you did the trial. You did the time, and now you’re done.” You can’t be tried for the same thing twice duh duh duh duh… I’m also… I’m not a lawyer, but here we are. There’s these expectations that, “Oh, the trial happened.” You can appeal, I guess, but there’s only so much you can do. And that kind of thinking is really limiting. That’s some of what we have to remove to be able to do this work and show up for it fully.

Knowing that if we do this work and if we dedicate ourselves to it – in whatever ways we can – What we have on the other end of it is a world that is more resourced. A world that is more nourished, a world that is more liberated. While that can be terrifying to a lot of people, having that is beautiful. Beyond the fear or beyond the anger or beyond the, “Oh god, what do I do with such freedom?” There’s a lot of choice and there’s a lot of expansiveness and a lot more opportunity to get our true needs met, and not have to settle and not have to make ourselves small. Because we only have two options and this goes also for things like gender. If we only have two options, that makes it simple, which can be nice. But also, we lose on such variety. We lose on such depth and creativity that could actually be really amazing. I encourage us all to move away from this kind of binary thinking about justice or binary thinking about love and abundance and gender, because there’s so much more available that a lot of us have not either experienced or allowed ourselves to experience. So that’s what I would invite people to open themselves up to, what are other ways of seeing the world? What have I been told that might not be the only way of seeing how I exist in this universe?

Dawn Serra: Well, we are going to continue the conversation for a few minutes for our Patreon supporters. But before we do that, can you share with people how they can find you online and stay in touch if they want to see all the amazing things that you’re up to in the world?

Aida Manduley: Yes. It is ridiculously easy to find me on the Internet. You just have my name. So my website is www.aidamanduley.com. I am on Instagram (instagram.com/aidamanduley/) under that same name on Twitter (twitter.com/neuronbomb). I am neuron bomb. I have a newsletter that has not launched yet, but will be launching soon. I’m on social media. That’s a great place to stay on top of my going ons. And I present and work all across the country though I’m based in Boston. So for clinical work, I’m here. I’m extremely not taking clients right now. I’m up to my eyeballs with requests. But you can always ask and I can always let you know what’s up. But online is probably the best way to find me. That’s the place where I am most consistently in existence.

Dawn Serra: I will have all of those links in the show notes and at sexgetsreal.com for this episode. Plus, links to the accountability pod around Eve’s process, the survivor pod, and the Paypal (paypal.com/pools/c/8cEq8gX1q1) so that we can all help financially support the people who are putting their time and energy and labor into doing these processes differently. Thank you so much for being here with us, Aida, and being so generous in sharing your perspective and your experiences.

Aida Manduley: Thank you. It’s always a pleasure.

Dawn Serra: Yes. To everyone who tuned in, please keep in touch. You can email me at info@sexgetsreal.com or head to sexgetsreal.com to submit a question. You know I love hearing from you and until next time I am Dawn Serra. Bye.

Dawn Serra: A huge thanks to The Vocal Few, the married duo behind the music featured and this week’s intro and outro. Find them at vocalfew.com Head to patreon.com/sgrpodcast to support the show and get awesome weekly bonuses.

As you look towards the next week, I wonder what will you do differently that rewrites an old story, revitalizes a stuck relationship or helps you to connect more deeply with your pleasure?