Sex Gets Real 276: Attachment styles, cheating, & experimenting

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On to your emails.

Mare is struggling because she betrayed her partner. He didn’t want to open their relationship and she did, so she betrayed their agreement and now things are terrible. She feels guilty and ashamed, and wants some thoughts on the whole situation.

Anonymous Girl has always considered herself to be straight, but she’s getting bored of sex with men, and is starting to feel really curious about sex with people of other genders. Should she go for it? And how?

Finally, Sydney Faith Rose recently wrote something amazing about how many women are talking about their anxious attachment, but how maybe instead of seeing it as something to fix, it’s instead a huge sign that there are very good reasons to be anxious right now.

I explore some of the limitations of attachment theory and offer some questions for us all to sit with.

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Episode 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.

Hey you! Welcome to this end of summer episode that is dropping over Labor Day weekend. I hope you’re doing something super fun, if you’re in the US or Canada. I know we’re both celebrating it. I am not sure about other places in the world. But either way, I hope you have a lovely weekend as we round the corner towards fall.

Dawn Serra: Before we dive in, I also wanted to let you know that I would love to hear from you. I spent this entire summer going through so many of your emails and I would love to hear more. What questions do you have about bodies and pleasure? Where are you feeling stuck in your relationship or around sex? What would you love to know more about? In whatever ways you could use help, write to me! You can email me directly at info at sexgetsreal dot com or if you want to email anonymously, you can go to sexgetsreal.com and use the contact form there.

As I mentioned last week, my huge rebrand of dawnserra.com is so close to being released and once that goes in, you’ll actually be able to find the podcast at dawnserra.com moving ahead. Of course, there’s going to be a contact form there as well. So depending on when you hear this episode, if you go to sexgetsreal.com, you’ll either be on sexgetsreal.com or it will redirect you to the podcast area of dawnserra.com. So keep an eye out for that.

Dawn Serra: I just want to say I really treasure each and every one of your emails, and I would love to have a big flood of them to come in for me to savor over the coming weeks and months. In fact, that was a huge topic of what Hannah McGregor and I talked about on the Secret Feminist Agenda podcast this week. 

You can hear me over there for really rich meandering discussion with Hannah about all sorts of things related to this podcast, your emails, what it’s been like to grow with you, the change over the years and also setting boundaries and being able to take care of myself as I hold so many of these things around trauma and confusion and struggles and celebrations which is all to say is I love hearing your stories. So check out my chat with Hannah McGregor on the Secret Feminist Agenda podcast.

Dawn Serra: Also, speaking of emails, I had asked for you last week to write in with notes about how you feel loved by those in your life and several of you sent me the sweetest little tidbits. I want to share a few of those here.

Jonah wrote in with an email about a dear friend and it says, “I lived in the Portland area for a number of years, and while there I became close friends with my co-worker Sally. One of our traditions was going for cupcakes to celebrate everything from birthdays to surviving a big project at work. Three years ago, I moved to Tennessee for my partner’s job, and to this day, whenever I have a big exciting thing happen in my life, cupcakes will show up at my house in a matter of days, always from Sally. Making friends as an adult is not easy, and I love knowing Sally is there, even though we’re far apart now.”

Dawn Serra: Yay for cupcakes and friendships! Thank you so much for writing in with that, Jonah. I love it. I have several friends that actually mail cupcakes to people that they care about for birthdays and holidays and stuff so cupcakes are criss-crossing the country all over the place.

This next love note comes from Becca. Becca wrote, “My husband and I have been married for 9 years, though we’ve been an item for over 13. Through that time, we have had ups and downs, including trying non-monogamy for awhile and then deciding we preferred monogamy. There were some dark days through those transitions, a lot of tears and hurt feelings, a lot of not being sure if we’d make it. Through it all, he never stopped his tradition of sending me a little lunchtime text. Even during the periods when we were fighting and losing sleep, every day at lunch, I’d get a little thoughtful note, a silly joke, a picture of something he thought I’d like. That little anchor of love gave me something important to hold, and now we are happier and more connected than ever – and those lunchtime notes still come.”

Dawn Serra: Thank you so much for sharing that, Becca. Those little, little things that let people know we’re thinking about them, that they’re on our minds is so important and it’s also so easy to overlook. I know we all have very different ways of communicating love and appreciation to each other. It’s not always acts of service that work for someone. But in all of those little things that we do, big and small, it’s just so meaningful.

Then, I got one more little love note that I’ll share this week. It’s super short and sweet. It comes from Ambrosia and it simply says, “She gives me a long foot rub after my work day and asks about my day.”

Dawn Serra: I would love to hear more of these from you. More of us sharing appreciation and love and recognition. From little things that your partner does to rituals with your friends, your colleagues, your neighbors, to your family, let me know. The things that really feels wonderful to receive, that feel thoughtful and share it with me. You can email me at info at sexgetsreal dot com. I would love to keep the little love train going.

Speaking of love, if you want to help support me keep the podcast going, you can do that by supporting the show on Patreon. From $1 to $3 to $5 and beyond each month, every single little bit helps. You can go to patreon.com/sgrpodcast to sign-up and to support the show and also to grab your bonus content. There’s a huge backlog at this point.

Dawn Serra: This week there’s actually going to be two bonuses going up because, sadly, last week’s bonus did not record or load correctly and I had to re-record it. So I’m just going to completely redo the whole thing. One bonus is me answering a question from someone whose partner lied about getting STI test and now they feel really betrayed. The other bonus, that’s going up on Monday, is all about arousal and why this person who wrote in only wants to be penetrated some of the time. If you don’t yet support the show, throw a few bucks my way! It makes such a huge difference and grab your bonuses now, patreon.com/sgrpodcast.

So, let’s jump into your emails and questions. Mare wrote in and it says, “Hello Dawn, I’m writing because I am struggling to find peace with heartbreak I have caused. I am a cheater and a liar. I deceived someone who I cared very much about. I wanted an open relationship and he did not, and I didn’t know how to go about doing so without losing him. I often think how different it would be if we were raised to see different relationship styles. We are raised that cheating is the worst thing you can do to someone and it’s almost ingrained in us to hate the cheater and that you must pick up and leave. I just wish we had a better way of dealing with hurt and pain. I am not saying my actions weren’t selfish, and wrong. I feel so much grief, heartache, anger, sadness, and hatred towards myself for not being selfless and for not being honest with my partner. I wanted him so badly to stay in my life . But I should’ve let him opt in or out of the lifestyle I wanted and if he didn’t opt in, I should’ve let him go rather than destroying the beauty and the love that we had. I don’t know if you have any response or recommendations on how to get through this. Thanks, Mare”

Dawn Serra: Oh. Mare, what a tough place to be. That sounds like there’s some big hard feelings coming up and a lot of ouch. I think the first thing that I just want to offer is that whatever comes next for you really entirely depends on you and this person that you hurt. Does he want to try and work things out? Does he want to move on because he doesn’t feel like he can rebuild? What do you want as far as repair work goes?

I do agree with you that it would be awesome if we had more modeling of different ways to be in relationships, not only romantically and sexually, but also platonically and creatively and communally. I mean, the hierarchy of romantic love that we have in our culture can be really limiting. But that said, even if we lived in a world where all sorts of different relationship models were woven into the fabric of our culture, there’s still going to be people who feel more comfortable in certain relationship arrangements, of certain types of relationships in their lives over other relationship styles. When we have all of these beautiful options modeled for us, it doesn’t mean we necessarily want or support all of them. It simply means we know they’re available and that we can still choose within that. There will still be people who want to be monogamous even if the world were to burst open with beautiful, creative possibilities of being in relationship with other humans. There would still be people who didn’t want romantic relationships at all.

Dawn Serra: Our responsibility though is to really honor the spoken and unspoken agreements that we enter into with the people we care about and to really talk through things as they change if we need or want something else or even if we just want to be witnessed around the feelings we’re having about something. We don’t want to always have to take action on our desires but being able to validate them is important. 

And I think it’s interesting how you say cheating is the worst thing you could do to a human. I would argue there’s a lot of other things like abuse and physical harm and emotional harm and manipulation that people would consider worse. But I do think one of the reasons why cheating gets such a bad rep is because it is a betrayal.

Dawn Serra: Betrayal hurts because it really suddenly thrusts us into a place of losing trust in someone that we thought was trustworthy. Whether it’s someone stealing money from us or someone cheating, to have trust betrayed can really be deeply destabilizing and unsettling, especially if we were particularly sure about this particular relationship or person.

I think having received so many emails over the years and worked with so many people, there’s one thing I wish I could get more people to understand is that it’s so, so much harder to recover from a breach of trust or a betrayal than it is to just take some time in having some conversations and exploring possibilities even if it means maybe, putting some things on hold for awhile. 

Dawn Serra: But I think, sadly, so many of us are so averse to uncertainty and rejection. We’re so either unskilled or afraid to actually share our feelings, to ask questions that we end up causing way more hurt by doing something that just destroys the trust we’ve built. And rebuilding trust is messy and ugly and hard work that doesn’t have a guaranteed outcome.

I think for you, Mare, at this point, the damage has been done. You did what you did. It had the impact that it had. The work you have ahead of you is to really to contend with one, why you didn’t have those conversations and give him a chance? Why you felt like you needed to control the outcome the way that you did? And to also really ask what kind of support and reckoning you need to do so that you can build your tolerance around having those kinds of conversations and to do relationship differently down the road. What do you need to forgive yourself so you could really compassionately turn towards those decisions and to think about how you’d like to do it differently in the future.

Dawn Serra: I think you also need to decide with this person you hurt whether the two of you want to commit to the uncomfortable work of rebuilding something together. I think one of the things it’s so hard after some type of betrayal, after trust has been broken can we often then want to rush trying to make things how they were before that happened. But that’s just not possible. What we can begin rebuilding from that place might look nothing like what you had before, but that’s the reality. This thing did happen, so what would you both like to do now? He is allowed to say, “No. I don’t want to work on this. It hurts too much.” Then I think what comes next for you is probably grief work and really working through how you got to where you were and what you’d like to do differently next time and what would help you to be able to do it differently next time.

If he says yes to working on it, then you’re also going to have to reconcile with the fact that he may not trust you the way that he did for a very, very long time and that rebuilding trust usually takes a shit ton longer than it did to build that initial trust. So what kind of support will you need so that you can show up really transparently and openly and patiently and generously knowing this is going to be a challenging, awkward period?

Dawn Serra: I think what’s really important is just to reckon with what’s done is done. The hurt is true. The guilt is true. The betrayal is true. There’s no undoing that. So what do you need in order to start growing from this place towards something more meaningful down the road?

I’m so sorry this is so hard, Mare and I hope that you find ways to take care of you and to find some forgiveness in what has happened so that you can move forward towards something that feels more spacious and meaningful for you. Thank you so much for listening and for writing in.

Dawn Serra: This week’s episode is generously brought to you by LOLA. The truth is, you’ve heard me talk about this on the show before, I don’t have a lot of time in my life to do all the things that need to get done. Finding small ways to ensure that I have lots of time for play, for rest, for sex, for eating good food is such an important part of how I keep going while juggling the podcast and the coaching and all the other things that I do. That’s why I have long been a huge fan of LOLA. LOLA is a female-founded company offering a line of organic cotton tampons, pads, and liners. They offer sex products now too, which is really exciting. They are generously sponsoring the show this week and listeners, you can get 40% off your first subscription, too.

So here’s how LOLA helps me to avoid period and sex crises. Their subscription is totally customizable. You can choose your mix of products – pads, tampons, liners – the mix of absorbency, the number of boxes, how often they get delivered in their super discreet and really cute little boxes. I love them! LOLA’s subscription is really flexible. You can change, skip, or cancel your subscription at any time, so if I’m traveling for a couple of weeks and I won’t need it that month, then I adjust my subscription and they take care of the rest. 

Dawn Serra: Plus, it’s not just period products anymore. The Sex by LOLA line is available for subscription, too. You can add that to your period subscription, so then everything gets conveniently delivered in this one little box on your ideal schedule. I love their ultra thin condoms, which is something I’m always on the lookout for. So definitely check that out.

And of course, you know, listening to the show, ethics are hugely important to me. So I love that every single purchase allows me to do good, too, because LOLA donates feminine care products to homeless shelters around the U.S. with each purchase you make.

Dawn Serra: I also just want to say the FDA doesn’t require brands to disclose a comprehensive list of ingredients in their feminine care products, so most of them actually don’t. LOLA offers complete transparency about the ingredients found in their tampons, pads, liners, and wipes. You’ve heard me rant and rave about the importance of high quality lube, non-porous sex toys, and now you can be confident what’s in your period products, too, because our genitals deserve the best.

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Dawn Serra: Thank you so much to LOLA for supporting the show. It means a lot to me and I hope every single one of you listening jump on that discount. It not only saves you money, but it lets LOLA know that they should support the show down the road, which helps me a lot, too.

This next email comes from Anonymous Girl who writes: “Hi Dawn, I’ve been listening to your podcast for a few months now and I love it! I’m learning so much! So, I’m a cis woman and for the first time in my life I’m questioning my sexuality. Right now, I believe I’m mostly straight. But, for most of my life, I’ve noticed that I tend to look at other women’s bodies pretty frequently. I’ve only had crushes and relationships with straight, cis men. I used to think I was jealous of how these other women looked and that maybe I just wanted to have the kind of body I found more attractive than mine. Part of it was due to my own body image issues, but I’m working through them.

Dawn Serra: But, when I reached high school I realized that lesbian porn really turns me on! I tell myself that I have no physical desire to be with another woman, but I’m really not sure that’s true. I still find myself looking at women and experiencing some sexual attraction. I really enjoy sex with men, for the most part. I do need to work on communicating my needs more. But I’m also wondering if maybe I’m getting bored of having sex with just men.

Honestly, I’m not sure what to do. A part of me kind of wants to explore being with a woman now that I’m more sexually active and in my late twenties, why not now? But the other part of me is too afraid to even consider doing it. How would I even go about doing this? Who would I talk to? What if I end up hating it? Or even really, really liking it? What does that even mean? 

Dawn Serra: I have multiple friends and family who are a part of the LGBTQ community and they would totally be supportive of me, but I still feel way too nervous and awkward to even tell them about this. I’ve told one person I trust, but I left out the part about actually thinking of exploring it. I really thought I was 100% straight for my entire life! I would love to know your thoughts. It’s something I’ve been wondering for a while. Please and thank you! Anonymous Girl”

Thank you so much for writing in and for listening to the show, Anonymous Girl. I appreciate it. Here’s where I want to start: it’s completely normal to question our sexuality at various points throughout our lives. I mean, we are growing and changing all the time. Our bodies are changing. Our hormones are changing. We’re meeting new people. We’re learning new things. Our experience of our lives is impacted by all of that,which means it’s also going to impact our sexuality.

Dawn Serra: There is nothing wrong with being curious and with wanting to experiment. In fact, I think one of the things that’s so important for us to name is that experimentation doesn’t define our sexuality unless we want it to. If you’re straight and you have sex with women, you’re still straight unless you realize, at some point, that you are sexually attracted to women and you don’t want to identify as straight anymore. But that doesn’t require sex in order to validate it. We can know we’re gay or we’re bi without having had sex with another person at all. We can have sex with people of all genders, but still really only be sexually attracted to one gender or to maybe a couple of genders. 

I think maybe another way to look at it– It’s oversimplified but I personally identify as a vegetarian, but sometimes I eat vegan meals. It doesn’t mean I’m vegan unless I decide that I want to identify as vegan and then I’m vegan. But I’m a vegetarian and I just happen to sometimes eat things that are vegan just like everybody else does.

Dawn Serra: I can be sexually attracted to women, identify as a lesbain and choose to have sex with men. I can even enjoy sex with men, but fundamentally, if deep down my identity is that of a lesbian and my sexual attraction is primarily with women, then it’s true, even if I have sex with men.

I think something that’s so important for all of us to remember is when we’re experimenting, that we are upfront with the people that are potential partners so that they can opt into being a part of that experiment. Some people really love that. Some people love getting to being someone’s first or helping to teach someone, taking on that mentorship role. There’s some power in that. Other people really, really hate it. They’ve been burned by it before. So being able to really articulate what it is you’re interested in, what you haven’t done before, where you’re curious or where you’re scared, means that you can build really consensual, supportive exchanges. And people can opt into that. There are so many people in the world who are bi-curious or queer-curious who would be super eager to experiment with you, too.

Dawn Serra: And a part of getting to be really open about the fact that you’re not sure, that this is new for you and you want to give it a try, it means that you don’t have to love it. You’re truly going in with this curious experimenting mindset. The person or the people that you’re doing this with know that this is a new experience for you, something you’ve never done before. So, they can calibrate their expectations and feelings depending on your response. Then you do what feels fun to do. As soon as something doesn’t feel right or feel good, you stop. 

I also just want to note, context and the individuals that we are entering into exchanges with can make all the difference in the world. I’ve certainly had those experience and I meet lots of other people have where maybe we’re really pretty damn homosexual, I’d say. But then, this one person comes along that lights us up in all these ways and we realize we’re sexually attracted to this person. It’s not about our identity. It’s not about our identity being invalidated. It’s not about this person and needing to take on this whole new other label. We can simply be attracted to an individual because of their charisma or how the two of you connect or a thousand other things.You can want to explore that and honor it, regardless of their gender without it having to mean anything about your identity.

Dawn Serra: I think this is why it’s so important for us to really work on having a clear sense of self and also having lots of social support because then that can give us a sense of safety and permission to be so much less rigid about these labels and to really be more flexible with the potential for joy and pleasure in our lives. I mean, whether you’re straight or you’re gay or you’re queer or any of the other things, you’re allowed to have sex with whoever you want to have sex with. Be in a relationship with whoever you want to be in a relationship with. It might look one way to the outside world, but only you know who you are on the inside and who you’re primarily sexually attracted to, who you really want to have sex with. I mean, it really does come down to being able to decide.

I’d much rather that we allow ourselves the opportunity to really open to the potential for experiences, to the people that feel like a big pleasurable delicious yes – whether it’s friends or creative pursuits or sexual partners or romantic partners – rather than cling to this identity and then preventing ourselves from turning towards those connections that feel really yummy and important because we’re afraid that it will invalidate that identity.

Dawn Serra: So, to you Anonymous Girl, maybe you’re straight and you simply get off on lesbian porn. The porn that we watch in no way has anything to do with our sexual identity unless it has something to do with our sexual identity. I can watch all the lesbian porn in the world and totally get off to it and still be fundamentlly straight. You might be straight and just really appreciate the look of certain bodies. And maybe you’re mostly straight and certain kinds of people really turn you on. Or, maybe you are bisexual or queer or any number of sexual identities. I think what’s most important is that you validate whatever your truth is and to honor that part of yourself. 

You don’t need to define yourself as heterosexual or lesbian if you’re not sure. You can be totally heterosexual and experimenting because it’s fun to try new things. Maybe there’s someone that you’re really connecting with even if that’s not the thing that generally turns you on or aligns with how you move through the world as a general rule. I think as human beings, we’re just way too complex with this really rigid definitions so they can be helpful in giving us a sense of understanding about ourselves, in helping us define community who gets it. But I think sometimes we cling to them so tightly that it really cuts us off from our humanity, from our desires, from all the things that might be waiting for us in the world. 

Dawn Serra: I also just want to mention, you said you might be getting bored of sex with men. I did want to just zero in on that because I’m curious maybe is it the men who are boring or is there an opportunity for some more expansive experiences and definitions of sex. If you’re having the same kind of sex with men whenever you have sex, who’s to say that you won’t end up having the same kind of sex with women and finding that boring, too? Maybe having sex that involves less genitals and more hands and more massages and dirty talk and fantasies would feel really excitinbg. Maybe more mutual masturbating or kink or erotic reading or toys would feel fun.

I wonder is it the gender of the people you’re having sex with that’s boring or is it the limited nature of the sex that you’re having with them that really needs to be questioned. Maybe asking for more creative sexual experiences, regardless of the gender of your partner, would give you more of what you’re craving around sexual satisfaction and pleasure.

Dawn Serra: I was thinking that could be something really interesting to investigate and I’ll bet that there’s a lot of men that you would meet that would be really game for doing all kinds of different exchanges that felt really erotic and sexual that would be utterly different than the kind of sex you’ve been having to now. More permission, less boxing yourself in, be really upfront about what you’re interested in trying so people can opt in, and have fun. That’s what this is all about, right? Thank you so much for listening, Anonymous Girl. I hope you enjoy whatever comes next and that it’s delicious and pleasurable and fun!

Several weeks ago, a post came across my feed on social media by someone named Sydney Faith Rose and it spoke so loudly to me for so many reasons because of so many of the questions that I get and the conversations that I have that I wanted to share Sydney’s words and expand on it a little bit. I think there’s something really powerful inside of this for all of us. Here’s what Sydney had to say: ”All week I’ve been seeing women writing about how their ‘anxious attachment’ and how it led them to do things that are 100% normative in our society and have been for years. Things like: 

1) assuming that white male doctors have a value as humans that is magical and healing, especially when they talk in absolutes about the nature of reality, 

2) being insecure about your physical body while dating a man who publishes books about how you need to earn your carbs by having ‘penis skin’ on your abs, especially in a world that constantly polices women’s bodies, 

3) moving for men, which until a couple of decades ago, was a thing that was assumed for women to do, 

4) thinking about doing kind things for your partner… 

Dawn Serra: The list goes on and on. Maybe the entire world of women are ‘anxiously attached,’ but I also want to say that if men are in the front of the room performing power, discouraging you from engaging in other healing modalities, using their authority to tell you what’s true and false in an absolute way as opposed to showing you the research and asking you for your experiences, asking for demonstrations that require public vulnerability and reinforce their status as wise healers and the audience as needing to be healed instead of empowering people and reminding us of our own wisdom, if they’re amping up the emotional volume so that they can stand there calm, even if they’re doing it unconsciously and are also kind, if everyone around them seems to fall apart, but somehow they look put together, it makes sense to be anxious. You might be sensing that something is off and this person still needs some healing or power needs to be redistributed. I’ve had so many ‘healing’ men who tried to ‘heal’ this anxiety out of me when anxiety was the wisest embodied response to those dynamics. 

We have fight or flight reflexes for a reason. We want people to be a bit uneasy around charismatic power that lacks self-awareness. If your partner actively body shames you, is a public figurehead for optimizing bodies, believes that people have value according to the amount of thin skin on their abs, keeps you on the edge of your chair about whether they want to date you, marry you, be around you publicly, compares you to a literal list they made of the kind of women you want to marry, etc… and your body tells you to run: listen. Stop running marathons and run away from that guy and towards your life. 

Dawn Serra: You might have an anxiety disorder or anxious attachment, but you do not have an anxious personality just because weird power dynamics make you anxious. Even if being in a patriarchal, homophobic, white spremacist world makes you anxious, these dynamics are normal and they should not be. Our obsession with eliminating valid fear instead of learning how to recognize and respond to it as a society is how we end up with a dictatorship and a global warming crisis where half of New York will be underwater in 30 years.”

Oh, Sydney! So much truth in that. What if we’re anxious because there’s a million reasons to actually be anxious? What if we’re detached because there are a million reasons to actually be detached? 

Dawn Serra: Attachment and attachment styles have been getting so much attention and air time for the past little bit, and their often generously swirled together with talk of codependency, but so much of what is being pathologized by these labels and this language like “anxious attachment” or “codependent” are actually normal responses to horrible conditions.

Dr. Chris Hoff, who you may know as The Radical Therapist, has a great piece called “The Myth of Codependency,” which I’ve shared before and I’ll link to it again. Essentially, in the piece, he explores how so many of the behaviors that we would label as supportive and loving, if someone had cancer or some horrible accident become behaviors of “codependency” when the person we’re supporting is struggling with substance misuse or trauma instead of cancer. I think as Sydney writes in that post, so many people are rushing to label themselves and the people in their lives as having anxious or avoidant or secure attachment style, without considering the context of our lives.

Dawn Serra: Dr. Michael Aaron wrote a piece on Psychology Today called “Why Attachment Theory Is All Sizzle and No Steak” and I think it’s pretty fascinating so I’m going to link to that in the show notes and at sexgetsreal.com for this episode. In it, he talks about how research has shown that our attachment styles vary from person to person and relationship to relationship. I can be securely attached to Person A and anxiously attached to Person B. And maybe, I’m anxiously attached to Person B because Person B has a history of hiding things or turning their phone over when you walk into the room or not being transparent or maybe because they remind you of a person who hurt you deeply in the past. Context matters.

Also, culture matters. There have been studies that have shown that political affiliation, culture, religion all impact attachment styles, which means that maybe I’d have a more secure style of attachment to people I love most if I lived in a world that didn’t literally tell me I was unsafe every time I walked out the door or if I wasn’t constantly being gaslit by my government and by doctors. Maybe we feel anxious because we have a reason to feel anxious. Maybe we’ve withdrawn and cut ourselves off from our feelings because we have a reason to withdraw.

Dawn Serra: I think what’s so important is we all have a personal responsibility for the ways we behave, for the ways we treat ourselves and the people around us. I also really hope that we can start taking a look at the systems and cultures that we move inside of the water and the air that we’re literally swimming and moving through. These things have a significant impact on our lives. When the only way to get ahead at work is to put in an 80 or 90 hours a week and to do it with a smile, we’re going to do what we have to do to normalize this thing that’s actually deeply unfair and inhumane. We adapt because we want to belong. Maybe we’re terrified of being seen as needy and too much because we secretly realize the depth of our needs are going unmet by the world at large and it’s too much for any one person to try and carry alone. 

I really appreciate Sydney’s words and I wanted to offer them for us because I want us all to think about the ways we move through the world and to consider not only ourselves and our immediate family and relationships, but also the context of that world that we move within. Lots of us are anxious because there’s so much to be anxious about. 

Instead of pathologizing ourselves, I wonder if maybe we can look at the world and say, “This isn’t right. This needs to change.” So we can put our energy into changing the conditions that led us to this constriction and this fear in the first place instead of feeling like we’re the ones who are fundamentally broken. If the systems were inside of are broken, what does that mean? 

Dawn Serra: I want us to hold that because I see a lot of people talking about attachment styles and I do think that they can be really helpful for giving us some language and some ideas about how we do relationship, how we’ve been impacted by the families that we were raised inside of and the culture, but I also don’t want us to feel like it exists entirely on us to carry. It’s not only me, it’s also the culture I’m inside of. The toxic masculinity, the patriarchy, the capitalism, the transphobia, the ableism – all of it! It’s going to have an impact on whether or not I can really settle in to this time and this place with this person I love and to be able to thrust into it. Plus, of course, the actual dynamics of that relationship and how people are showing up inside of it. But all of that matters and I hope that all of us can really hold that tenderly and think about the complexity of it instead of really trying to make things super simplified and blaming all of the things on only our parents. 

That is it for this week! I hope you enjoyed those things. I would love to hear from you. Please, please, please! Not only send me your little love notes about the things that make you feel loved and seen and appreciated, but send me your questions. I’ve moved through so many of your emails over the summer, but I would love more from all of you. So info at sexgetsreal dot com, if you want to email me directly, or go to sexgetsreal.com and use the contact form there if you want to send it anonymously. I will be back next week. Bye!

Dawn Serra: Thank you to everybody who watched. I hope you had a great time. We’ll have links to Meg-John’s site and social media so that you can find them and stay tuned for more interviews. This is Dawn Serra with the Explore More Summit and we will see you next time. Bye.

A huge thanks to The Vocal Few, the married duo behind the music featured in 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?