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Dossie Easton, LMFT - Guest
Dossie Easton, LMFT is the author of The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships & Other Adventures, as well as four other books on various aspects of BDSM, sex, and relationships, all co-authored by Janet W. Hardy. Dossie is also a licensed marriage and family therapist in the San Francisco Bay Area, specializing in working with trauma survivors. She works iwth alternative sexualities and open relationships, and serves the polyamorous, gender-diverse, and LGBTQ communities. She is also a speaker on the topic of cultural competency with couples and individuals in the BDSM community. Recently, she has been running separate six-week groups for survivors, and transgressors of sexual abuse called Navigating Consent: Helping Build a More Consensual Future. |
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W. Keith Sutton, Psy.D. - Host
Dr. Sutton has always had an interest in learning from multiple theoretical perspectives, and keeping up to date on innovations and integrations. He is interested in the development of ideas, and using research to show effectiveness in treatment and refine treatments. In 2009 he started the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy, providing a one-way mirror training in family therapy with James Keim, LCSW. Next, he added a trainer and one-way mirror training in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and an additional trainer and mirror in Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy. The participants enjoyed analyzing cases, keeping each other up to date on research, and discussing what they were learning. This focus on integrating and evolving their approaches to helping children, adolescents, families, couples, and individuals lead to the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy's training program for therapists, and its group practice of like-minded clinicians who were dedicated to learning, innovating, and advancing the field of psychotherapy. Our podcast, Therapy on the Cutting Edge, is an extension of this wish to learn, integrate, stay up to date, and share this passion for the advancement of the field with other practitioners. |
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (00:24):
Welcome to Therapy on the Cutting Edge, a podcast for therapists who want to be up to date on the latest advances in the field of psychotherapy. I'm your host, Dr. Keith Sutton, a psychologist in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the Director of the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy. At the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy, we provide training in evidence-based models, including Family Systems, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, Motivational Interviewing, and other approaches through live in-person and online trainings, on demand trainings, consultation groups, and one-way mirror trainings. We also have therapists throughout the Bay Area and California providing treatment through our six specialty centers, each grounded in an evidence-based approach, with our Lifespan Centers, Center for Children and Center for Adolescents, where all the therapists are working systemically; our Center for Couples, where all the therapists are using Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy; and our specialty issue centers, our Center for Anxiety, where all the therapists are using CBT and EMDR for trauma; and our center for ADHD and Oppositional & Conduct Disorder clinic, where we're integrating those four approaches.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (01:31):
In the institute, we have our licensed, experienced therapists, and for those in financial need, we have an associated nonprofit, Bay Area Community Counseling, where clients can work with associates, psych assistants, and licensed clinicians who are developing their abilities and expertise. Additionally, as part of our nonprofit, we also have the Family Institute of Berkeley, where we provide treatment, training, and one-way mirror trainings in family systems. To learn more about trainings, treatment, and employment opportunities, please go to sfiap.com and to support our nonprofit, you can go to sf-bacc.org to donate today to support access to therapy for those in financial need, as well as training in evidence-based treatment. BACC is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so all donations are tax deductible.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (00:38):
Today, I'll be interviewing Dossie Easton, licensed marriage and family therapist, who is the author of the ethical, a practical guide to polyamory open relationships and other adventures Dossie has written four additional books on various aspects of, BDSM -- bondage, domination, sadomasochism -- sex, and relationships with her co-author Janet Hardy. Now, as a licensed marriage and family therapist in the San Francisco Bay Area, she specializes in working with trauma survivors. Additionally, she works with clients with alternative sexualities and open relationships, and serves the polyamorous, gender diverse and LGBTQ community. She is also a speaker on the topic of cultural competency with couples and individuals in the BDSM community. Recently, she has been running separate six week groups for survivors and transgressors of sexual abuse called navigating consent, helping build a more consensual future. Let's listen to the interview.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (01:37):
Welcome Dossie.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (01:40):
Oh, good to have you. Good to be here.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (01:42):
Great. Thank you so, so much for joining me today. So I reached out to you some years ago. I had seen a talk that you had done for the Association of Family Therapists, Northern California on cultural competency within the BDSM community. And also I later read your book, The Ethical Slut, about -- well I guess, is it about polyamory or is it about just general positive sexuality?
Dossie Easton, LMFT (02:11):
Well, it depends on the terms you use and that's my first philosophical point. Lots of people want to see pigeon holes and they want to call one thing polyamory and another thing, non monogamy, and another thing swinging, and another thing open relationships. And to me, well, I've probably done all of those things except maybe swinging in my life at some time or another. And so to me, polyamory is an umbrella word that just covers all of it. And slut is also intended to be such an umbrella word. We define it as a person who celebrates sexuality in all its forms.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (02:52):
Yeah, taking back that word from some of its negative connotations that have been used towards women.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (02:59):
Yeah. I'm big on reclaiming language.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (03:02):
Yeah, definitely. Okay, great. Well, tell me a little bit about how you got going, and working as a therapist and how you got interested in this area of the field and the work you've done.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (03:16):
Well, I got interested because it's so necessary. I am myself an abuse survivor, both as a child and as an adult. And so I have a very strong interest in how people recover from those kinds of experiences and how people can develop a resilience and not be governed by that kind of experience. In my classes, I tell the participants, the survivors, I say, you know, they can throw dirt at you all they want, but it's still their dirt. They cannot make you dirty, because it's not your dirt. This is very important right now.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (04:01):
I, for many years, as a therapist, I specialize in working with trauma survivors and working with trauma and issues of that. I have worked in a battered woman shelter. I have worked 10 years in psychiatric halfway house in Santa Cruz where I learned an awful lot. It was a good program. People were really there for the clients. And it was so kind, not that’s uncommon in the mental health system, unfortunately. So it was a great place to train and learn and do work, wonderful work -- in a university town, in Santa Cruz. So yeah, a lot of very bright young people.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (04:45):
What kind of areas were you training in and kind of theoretical orientation?
Dossie Easton, LMFT (04:51):
I'm not aligned to any of them in particular. I certainly am not a sort of Skinner-esque behaviorist. But then, if you work with people's sexual issues, basic principal of sex therapy is that you learned how you are in your sex life in some way, shape or form, you've learned it. This is what you learned, what you're doing now so that means you can learn something different and these are some techniques for learning something different, right. That's a very behavioral approach. And it's encountered to people who used to interpret people who had difficulties with sex as some, you know, profound psychological damage, deep wounding, something's really wrong with you -- profoundly wrong with you -- if your sex life has got problems in it. And that's just, that's cruel, that's wrong.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (05:40):
It hurts people. And it's not true, that's really not the point. The point is that we live in a sex-negative society and the opportunities to learn, to have a healthy, open, explorative, adventurous, exciting sex life, and whether it's with one partner or 12, it doesn't matter. Right? But to have a healthy sex life is I think, kind of a birthright, but our society takes it away. So then we need to go back and learn how to do that. What I'm doing right now, I'm kind of semi-retired. I still see a few clients, but my big project is navigating consent. And this started up around 2017. It's kind of my response to the Me Too part. I wanted to make a contribution there. I was so grateful when Me Too opened up the extent, the abysmal extent of how many people are sexually assaulted in greater or lesser ways, but how prevalent that is, and how common an experience.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (06:46):
And so it's almost normal, and our society normalizes it even worse. And that's a sad thing. And so, I was invited to speak at a conference on erotic hypnosis, and if your listeners have a question about what erotic hypnosis is, it's basically exploring the erotic potential of what you can do with trance states. And of course, when you do that, the issue of consent, a very exquisitely detailed form of consent, because you need emotional consent to do that with trance states. And that takes a lot of thought and carefulness . So I had been asked to speak about consent and it was kind of fraught. People had been accused of various things and this was the first outburst of Me Too.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (07:48):
And nobody quite knew what to do with it. And when I presented that talk, I wanted tell you, I prepared more for that talk than I did for anything else. The possibility of somebody exploding in my face or, you know, people not liking it or people criticizing it, because I don't come from the book on these things. And with this group, I also in particular had a lot of friends in it, but it went very well. There was something like 250 people there. And it was very participatory. And I ended it as I now end all such talks, saying, okay, I want everybody now to close your eyes and think of one thing you can do, not something you wish you could do, not something that doesn't have to be huge or enormous.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (08:38):
It could be a very small thing. The only requirement is something that you can see yourself actually doing that would make a dent in rape culture, and give yourself permission to go do that. And right in there, while I was doing the moment of silence, while people thought about the one thing they could do speak a little truth here, listen to somebody over there, you know, that kind of thing. I thought of these classes, so I have invented, written, created a series. Two series, really. It's the same six classes, but taught in two tracks, the surviving track and the transgressing track.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (09:20):
So that was because the needs of survivors and transgressors are somewhat different. But also having them in the same room seemed not likely to succeed. It seemed like it would present particular difficulties. That was important to make a safe space for everybody, and that includes the transgressors, to explore their vulnerabilities and explore all this really difficult stuff. It's hard enough. So there are six classes in there. We present them. If you were taking your class, whichever track you chose, you'd be coming every other week.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (09:59):
So we teach class one, which is coercion and collisions, and it's getting people talking, and class two is the roles we play in looking at sexism in particular, but also all the roles we play in the world and in our fantasies And the third one is what you'd expect, communication and conflict. The fourth is negotiation and consent. The fifth is making it right, what do we do after a boundary's been crossed? What can we do to regain our balance to make the changes we need to make that this painful experience has brought to our attention. What do we do now in the final class, the sixth class, is recovery and resilience. And you can find our website www.navigating-consent.com. And the classes, now we're starting our seventh round in June.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (11:01):
The last two were online. And it's been great. It's been fabulous. It's palpable. I'm using a lot of techniques from the human potential movement back in the seventies. Because that's when I started with San Francisco Sex Information in 1973. Long time ago, 50 years ago almost. And gosh, half a century. That's amazing. To your listeners in San Francisco, Sex Information still exists and you can look them up and they will answer any questions you may have about sex. They do a great volunteer training too.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (11:41):
Wonderful, answering questions and providing education to those.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (11:46):
Yeah, and sometimes a lot of listening ears, you know? But sometimes they're very simple problems. I remember somebody -- this is perhaps a little close to the bone for your listeners, but maybe not. Somebody sent me a caller when I was on the switchboard saying they couldn't handle it. And it was a gentleman who had been masturbating using twisties.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (12:10):
And that seemed very weird. And you know, people tend to go, God, what? Well, they sell cock rings. I mean, you could go down to Castro Street and find seven stores that have a big display of a hundred different kinds of cock rings.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (12:23):
Because those veins on the outside of the organ that you can see, they take the blood out and if you constrict them, then the blood is coming into the arteries, which are buried deeper, and coming back out, well they can't get out as fast. And so you get a different kind of experience, a different sensation, a different kind of erection. And if any of your listeners feel interested in trying this, let your first cock ring have something like a snap or a buckle or some way that you can take it off.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (12:59):
So they can remove it quickly.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (13:01):
Well, so they can remove it if they have trouble. If you do it too tight, sometimes people can't quite get it off. Your erection doesn't go down. And how do you get, if you use a ring, how do you get it off? But this is way too close to the bone. And so this day I was just delighted. I said, you can go to a store and buy these things. And the people who work in the store will even advise you about what you might wanna try.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (13:23):
Well, that's great. So it's basically getting some of that sex information pre-internet and also I'm sure too, it's a bit more educated than some of the things that people are going to Google and find. So that's a great resource. I didn't know about that.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (13:36):
Yeah. It is a very good resource and they've also kept up with all the current research and stuff like that. But anyway, so the navigating consistent classes are going very well. I have a big teaching team. I have people to lead it and it is now being managed by a wonderful Ms. Wellowcat, who is an absolutely wonderful person who has put wonderful effort and work into the classes. And so I have a teaching team and I have people to lead it too because I'm 77. My health is eh, and I can't guarantee that I'll be there forever.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (14:10):
I think the conversation around consent has been so elevated since the Me Too movement, which has been really good and really important. You know, that there has been different movements where particularly sexual violence against majority, towards women has come up at different periods in the nineties and so on, and workplace, and previous histories of child abuse and so on. But it seems like it's gotten more nuanced in the Me Too movement in a way that's really begun to permeate the culture in a much more significant way of understanding consent rather than just somebody saying no, and then not listening.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (14:53):
Instead, really being able to have that connection, have that consent, really being attuned to the other person and understanding what they want or need, or having conversations. And that's actually something that was really struck by, with the talk you did on the couples in the kink community and BDSM of just the level of communication that's needed to engage in various kinds of scenes that folks are putting together. Also in your book, The Ethical Slut, the communication piece was just so significant to be able to have those kind of polyamorous multiple relationships and really talking about one's expectations and what feels okay and not okay. And coordinating schedules and talking about the different emotions that come up. So it's perfect that you're moving that right into this broader, larger topic of consent on so many levels.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (15:58):
And I'm also, I'm seeing a lot of stuff coming in. I call this the middle ground between don't listen to that silly girl and throw that bum off the edge of the planet. We need a middle ground, and I can see this in some of the movement stuff that's out. People can't think outside those two boxes very well. And then they become opposed and they're pressing on each other, pushing against each other. And that doesn't work. You have to get on the same side to make it work.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (16:23):
I tell all my team members, you know, part of our job is going to be to get on the same side, particularly with our transgressors. Not that we are approving of transgressors, that's not the point, but that we are on their side saying that this is a righteous human being who can participate and have the sex life that they want without oppressing anybody and without trampling on anybody's boundaries.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (16:50):
That's going to be really hard too. I have a colleague Jim Kline, who had worked with sex offenders for many years. And he oftentimes talked about, you know, with all our clients, we have to have empathy and working with an offender is really good and helpful in really making you stretch. Because you have to find a way to be able to and understand your client's experience, even when it has been something so significantly hurtful to another person, to be able to help them, to be able to meet them and connect with them.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (17:23):
Yeah. And we're in a kind of privileged position. We're not doing court diversion or anything like that. I have a friend, Hamish Sinclair who invented a program called ManAlive in '83. And in response to a request to create a course about sexual boundaries for people being used as court diversion, in the sense that they would otherwise go to jail, or if there wasn't some sort of rehabilitation they could do. And so Hamish had created a marvelous program called ManAlive and had trained with him as well. And he's a dear friend. Very, very solid person to do that work for this many years. And it's not easy work. People who are actually in a position where they will go to jail, unless they take your class. We don't set up for that one. I'm not going to do court diversion because --
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (18:20):
Yeah, that's a whole different dynamic than coming in themselves for their healing.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (18:26):
Yeah. But so we see people who want to take the classes. Or who are perhaps, you know, sometimes they've perhaps been told that they need to do something to practice accountability and our classes are on the list of things you could do. As is reformative justice and transformative justice and so on and so forth. There's lots of places you can go. But if you've transgressed, one of the things that an individual or the community has a right to ask for is to say, well, what are you doing to make sure this sort of thing doesn't happen again?
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (19:00):
Yeah. Needing to know that it's being addressed and being understood and really changing. So it's safe. Definitely. Now tell me a little bit about what you're mentioning, you're using some of the aspects of the human potential movement in the groups that you're doing, or the classes. Can you tell me a little more about that?
Dossie Easton, LMFT (19:22):
Yeah. Well, one way to sort of get around a whole bunch of things, we make the classes extremely participatory. And we do not require full confession of either party. We're not requiring the story. It's because it's not about the story. It's about all the stories, it's about the story about what you want your sex life to be like and what your fantasies represent to you and how can you look at them and make sense out of them. So there's a very strong participatory element so that we don't keep dodging off into intellect. I strongly believe that intuition is based for instance, in kinesthesia in the way we experience emotions in the body.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (20:06):
Kinesthesia is actually the sixth sense. It's how I know what my hand is doing when I'm not looking at it and how we feel our musculus skeletal system. And there's something like 26 senses, like how you tell when you're hungry and things like that. If you look at each nervous network that delivers info to the brain, there's quite a lot of them. But this one seems very associated with intuition. So we do a lot of semantics we have, for instance, if the tension in the room goes way up, because we're talking with difficult, hard stuff here, painful difficult experiences. The safe word is this and it means everybody stop and take three deep breaths.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (20:48):
Yeah. So three fingers up is the safe word to stop everything.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (20:53):
And I recommend that to couples who are having problems with conflict as well. I had written a lot of homework exercises for the second edition of Ethical Slut because I had been working. The first edition brought me something unexpected, which was a lot of clients who weren't living in my world, my sex positive, queer positive world. But who were very interested in expanding their horizons. And so I worked with people who came from very different places from where I've lived, and I learned a lot. And I developed a series of sort of homework exercises I would send people home to do. And they've been published now in the second and third editions of the books. So they contain a lot of participatory things. The idea is to, you know, find ways to get yourself involved. And the principles are kind of interesting. If you do a writing exercise, for instance, you could take very scary emotions and if you write about them, you're putting them on a piece of paper, in words, in sentences, even, you're organizing them. Making a narrative. You're putting on something that has a frame -- oh look, it has a margin.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (22:05):
This is very important. So you're putting them outside of yourself. You're putting them into words that you can write down and now you have it framed and contained as if it were a sort of container. That's an example of where writing can become a very strong exercise and actually be a way of managing difficult emotions as well as becoming more aware of them. We do a lot of somatics. When we weren't online -- we still do somatics online, but it's changed the somatics we can do. We're hoping to get back to working in a room with the people, because some of the things, particularly the learning to feel the no in your body. Which almost everybody who works in sexuality does at some point, you know, walk toward each other.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (22:57):
And one person says stop when they're close enough or even step back a pace or two or whatever, you look at what is the comfortable distance and closeness. And so those kinds of exercises. And also, we're writing a book, we're publishing the syllabus and writing a book about it. Requiring a lot of writing, but I'm just into one of my favorite forms of group work, which is called a brainstorm. Which is when you, I'm sure you've done thousands of them, but when you put big paper or a whiteboard or something like that, and you ask everybody to throw out all their ideas about X, Y, Z. About whatever you're talking about. And the first class, it's all the different ways of consent violations and collisions and misunderstandings and intentional rape and you know, the whole long list. Yeah. And we put it again, we've written it down on a piece of paper or on a whiteboard where we can erase it. Look at that.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (23:58):
But we've made this list, and the list, the funny part is it's very participatory. It gets people talking, it gets people putting their thoughts and feelings into words, and it gets a whole range of thoughtfulness, all kinds of different stuff up in one place, the responses people might have to the question we're addressing that day. We do a brainstorm in almost every class because that's a good way to enter into difficult subjects and then people start repeating them and finding their words and finding ways to talk about them. We do the yes, no, maybe exercise. I'm sure you're familiar with it. Doing it in a big group is lots of fun.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (24:38):
Yeah. The, yes, no, maybe exercise is going through different things that somebody might be interested in doing sexually with their partner and then kind of going through which they're okay with and not okay with, and maybe there might be something they might wanna try.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (24:52):
Yeah. On the maybe list, we ask people to find something on their maybe list and then think about what conditions would have to be met before they would be willing to try it. Would you make an agreement about if this doesn't work, I can stop it and then we will do something else that we both know we like. Things like that.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (25:10):
And I'd be interested on your thoughts about, I mean, I have a couple thoughts around sexuality and also around couples. And so I use emotionally focused couples therapy and work with couples around the relationship as well as their sexual relationship. And I also do a lot of work with trauma survivors and complex PTSD. And particularly you know, oftentimes there's folks looking for referrals for therapists that work with polyamory. And I think there's a lot of confusion around, you know, the polyamory and whether it's the antithesis of having an attachment and kind of those pieces. And one of my thoughts, as you're talking about this is talking with maybe couples that were interested in expanding their sexual experience and their relationship. That oftentimes can bring up a lot of anxiety.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (26:03):
It's one of the most difficult things for couples to talk about. And, you know, part of that, I've thought about that in attachment terms, is that oftentimes the fear of saying, well, if I'm interested in this, my partner's going to feel disgusted and they'll be ashamed and that they won't wanna be with me or I'll lose that attachment. And I think that's kind of on one level. On the other level of what I've learned from your writing too, is that with polyamory, there's really oftentimes a primary attachment, I think, from my understanding. And that in part, it almost really reminded me of a Zen Buddhism of really being open to all the emotions that happen through consent. Our partner is with somebody else, or kind of sitting with jealousy or fear or lust for another. And also sitting with the heartbreak, if they do attach to that other person and leave the primary attachment.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (27:05):
You know, I had a book when I was writing the first edition of Ethical Slut. I had a book that was on the table next to the toilet, actually, of sayings from a guru type person, a yogi. And it had one, it had a chapter on jealousy and I opened the chapter around jealousy and it says, suppose you have two children.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (27:29):
I've used that one ever since. It's like, okay, we have all kinds of attachment. We have the attachments we have to our children, we have attachments to our work. They're very different kinds of attachments, but if we work well with somebody and we lose them, that's a loss. We have attachments in our families of origin. We have attachments in our neighborhood. We have attachments in any group. We have attachments in a chess club. I mean, you know, we have attachments all over the place. They, what we call and it's taken from evolutionary biology, curiously enough. But in polyamory, it's called nesting partners. The partner that you live with that you share the mortgage, that you raise children with, that you put each other through graduate school, that kind of thing. And sometimes there's more than two adults in that relationship.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (28:13):
There was a famous family in Boston who ran the potlucks every week for years and years and years. And they consisted of, well, let's see, three men and a woman. The woman was monogamous. One man was bisexual and poly. And two more were gay men who were also poly. The woman was in heaven. She had two extra parents. She had her partner, the actual father of their children, and three kids. I forgot the kids, but there was all this extra attention for the children. Often in gay community, there are men who have been deprived of having children. So there's usually a lot of really positive energy around for children.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (29:03):
And so those are all different kinds of attachments that they had. And so these are different attachments. There is a tendency, I think, in poly communities to form kind of loose knit families. I think of them as families, because I think of them as times when I've had surgery and as a single mom, who's going to take care of my kid, things like that. But also who shows up? Tons of people show up because the family is so extended. So you have a kinship network, you have the you've made the equivalent of, of village James Ramey writes about that in Intimate Friendships that there is intimacy in sex.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (29:57):
I mean, if you, your notion is that any intimacy outside of a primary relationship should be sex only, what I have to say to you is good luck because I don't think that's a really realistic goal. If you find somebody that you enjoy sharing sex with and you keep on with that, you know, you continue with that relationship, then there are going to be emotions there. There's going to be attachments of some form or another and it can be perfectly respectful. I was lovers once with a person who's primary relationship. When there was something difficult going on, they always went monogamous for a few months while they dealt with it. And I'll never forget one Thanksgiving when one of their fathers had a heart attack and it was all very scary and fraught. They had gone all monogamous. And there I was in the house on Thanksgiving day with my kid playing with their kids and me and David making four ducks with orange sauce and elaborate cooking schemes and Lee, the other member of this group, David's partner, setting the tables and setting up appetizers and snacks and things for the kids to snack on before the big dinner or got served and the crazy people roasting the ducks would go through with their very elaborate rituals.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (31:07):
And it was family. And it didn't matter that I was sexually not welcome in for those three months or whatever it was going to be. I was still family.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (31:19):
Yeah. Because that connection transcended the sexual relationship.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (31:23):
Yeah. So when you say attachment, you know, it's like people think that there's only one attachment because they think about what they call romantic, which is an odd use of a word, the modern use of romantic. But anyway
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (31:37):
I guess they think about it sometimes too, especially when some couples are struggling, they think, oh, maybe we could have an open relation or something like that. But oftentimes, you know, there's a lot of fear like that the one is going to meet somebody else, feel a connection and fall in love with that person and thus leave them. And that, you know, that, that kind of anxiety around that. You know, that piece, which I imagine again, it seems like in the polyamory work, it's not necessarily transcending that anxiety. It's learning how to be with it and experience it and in that Buddhist way of the primary pain versus the secondary suffering, of being open to the full range of the experience. And sometimes there may be anxiety or sadness or maybe great joy. There may be jealousness and there may be hurt from a loss of one part of a relationship in the way that it had been and maybe continuing it on, in a different type of way or so on.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (32:37):
Yeah. I also tell my couples who are new to this, I tell them, it's really important that you nourish your primary relationship. New relationship energy is what it is. It's the kind of madness that descends on all of us and we love it a lot and we know it doesn't last. And while it's there, I mean, I'll never say no to it. Let's put it that way, because it's just too wonderful and amazing. And the partner that you had new relationship energy with 10 years ago, since then you've raised three kids and you know, owned, I don't know how many cars and so on and so forth.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (33:16):
I tell my couples, I say, if you don't nourish your primary relationship, you could lose it. You have to feed it. And whether that involves going out and getting a bunch of tickets to theater or dance or music or going camping in the Sierras, you know. But to do things together that are important and to pay attention to your sex life. If your sex life has become dead, think about how you can wake it up again. Because indeed, reincarnation is possible for sex lives. I think people think something is wrong when passion doesn't just sort of flow automatically, but you have to actually do something to make it happen.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (34:06):
That kind of goes away after some time, and it needs to be work. It needs to be. You know, that idea of love as a verb. You know, it's something that needs to be worked on and active rather than something that's just kind passive and that's just going to happen.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (34:22):
It needs to be fed. It needs nourishment. And if you don't, it'll starve. And so, whether we're working to revive a sex life that has gotten pretty dead or whether we're looking at sharing any kind of pleasure, or spending, you know, setting time aside. I often give people the instructions. One of my exercises, I call it a process free date.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (34:46):
They make a date to do something pleasant for an evening or a day. And during that time talking about problems is put on the shelf, put it on the shelf, put it on the shelf. We're not going to talk about problems during our process free date. We're not even going to talk about how bad the president is, even when it was Trump, we're not going to do that. We're going to just have a date where we relate to each other. I'll never forget a couple who went out dancing and pretended it was their first date. They ended up having wonderful sex when they got home. And you know, people open up things and people get created with that kind of stuff.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (35:25):
Now I was wondering about your thoughts on the intersect of trauma and kink or BDSM. I've heard in your workshop as you talked about it, that some people have experienced trauma, some not, but it doesn't necessarily mean that there's something that's happened to the person just because they're involved in kink or BDSM or those are their interests. And at the same time, you used an example of somebody having a corrective experience by controlling the scene and feeling safe and taking back. And I've had a number of clients with, you know, often with trauma, right. There's dissociation and, and disconnected parts. And sometimes the thoughts or feelings of imagining an aggressive sexual encounter with their partner, but not sharing it for, a significant amount of shame. Or really kind of being both attracted to, but repelled by at the same time, a more kind of intense sexual relationship that's not so vanilla. I wonder if you could speak to any of that?
Dossie Easton, LMFT (36:38):
Well, yeah, I wrote an article shop called Shadow Play, and a refurbished version of it is going to appear in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology sometime. COVID interrupted the process of all this happening. But if I take a Jungian approach and I conceive of the shadow as split off parts that are split off from shame or painful emotions, painful history, traumatic emotions, traumatic experiences, those parts that we have split off from consciousness, because they're too unpleasant and very painful to be conscious of.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (37:21):
I make a point that we'd start doing this probably before we're born. But we do this through infancy. I mean much of what is thrown away into shadow, a great deal of it happened when we were way too young to understand what was going on. A lot of times I've opened up shadow things with clients and you open up the can of worm and this little teeny worm comes out and it's like, it only crawls a little bit at a time.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (37:47):
We cut them down to size, you know? So my notion of a conscious healing experience with BDSM, well you give up this notion of some enchanted evening where you meet a stranger. You do this with somebody you know very well, even if they're pretending to be horrible as part of the fantasy. And you make plans and you get to write the story. You get to get that story as close or as far as you wanted. One of the first times I did this we made the story really different. And imagine that my friend was the head of a finishing school for polite young ladies. And I was not being very good at being a polite young lady. And so these were roles that had nothing to do with it. We were both trauma survivors and they had nothing to do with the childhood traumas, but we played into it. And of course it involved caning because there you are in a terrible Victorian type school. And I remember the journey so much. My friend thought it was appropriate to do, you know, I was being punished theoretically for being too outrageous. And they decided that the way to do that was to be constantly holding me. Even while we were doing stuff that was perhaps physically challenging, intense and so on, or punishment.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (39:12):
And got the nurturing in by the back door as it were. And that was so powerful to me. It was a place where I got to where I was just going, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. And a very young piece of me came out. And then it was possible for us to love her over us and to give her some of what she needed to know that she was lovable. And these intimate experiences, they are so intimate. Talk about ways to rediscover passion.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (39:42):
Vulnerability is what creates --
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (39:44):
I was going to say, it's so vulnerable. And so again, just so connected that you have to be and so open. Even taking out the sexual aspect, just that emotional piece is so vibrant and then bringing sexuality also.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (40:02):
Well, you bring it in, you get to write the story, you get to control the story. You get to decide what's in the story. We made me older than I was when I was being abused as a child quite a bit, which gave me more agency. And then when it comes out, chances are what you wanna do when you finally get through this outrageous scene is do some of that nice orgasm sharing sex. And so at the end, what happens is that you each find each other desirable. And this precious inner child, and also this precious inner bully gets seen as desirable. And we eroticize the experience in a life affirming experience like an orgasm. And to my mind, it's like giving them a shot of the life force.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (40:48):
If I could get a little spiritual here, but you know, it's like saying, okay, this is the animating force of the universe. That's what sexuality is at its highest point. And so to shed that light on the traumas of our past is an amazing healing power.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (41:06):
Yeah. I'm wondering if you could speak to that inner bully. Because this is actually a conversation that came up with one of my clients, a young trauma client. Over 18, but you know, is finding herself drawn to more violent pornography. And there's a part of her that struggles with this, but also the thought of who would want to be the dominant or the aggressor in that and what is it about them and so on. And so I'm wondering if could speak to that.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (41:34):
Well, you know, it's kind of a truth working with trauma survivors that in a family where there is abuse or a situation where there's abuse, especially through a small child, you kind of have two choices. You can either be a victim or you can be an oppressor. And it doesn't look like there are any other choices. It's not true. There are other choices, but it doesn't look like that. So a lot of times we have the fantasy of being powerful, and having agency is kind of tangled up with the person who victimized us. I don't find that uncommon at all. So having a place in the world both for our precious brat and our precious inner bully is really important. It's like you have a place where you get to be the powerful person. You get to control things and push people around and so on. And it's agreeable and it's sexy to both of you. Because you can raise a lot of energy pushing against each other in this consensual way.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (42:35):
Yeah. And I think too, that expanding that beyond trauma, everybody's had experiences where they felt vulnerable or not powerful. And so trying on those different aspects of oneself or so on is really connecting with all those different parts.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (42:57):
Yeah. It's forbidden to have that stuff in the world. And indeed, if we acted like the bullies of our childhood or if we act like victims forever, it's also very forbidden to be a victim. To be pathetic. One of the things I have very much enjoyed in some of my SM scenes is the opportunity to be pathetic for a while.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (43:14):
And it seems like almost a luxury in a strange way, but these are parts of us. And if we are going to accept all of our parts, I mean, I think of before I knew these things. I had so much disgust really for my child self. I saw myself as such a victim. I was a very unhappy child. My father was violent and evidently it started when I was quite young, four or five years old. I have an older sister who's told me some of this.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (43:47):
And I remember myself, you know, crying and, and being this incredibly vulnerable and incredibly hurt person. And I don't like to remember that. I don't even like to talk about it. Even like this I don't wan to talk about it, but it gives me a chance to have that part of me. And I think of her as my own inner child in the world and in my experience and share it with somebody else, which gives us a sort of a container, but also, you know, gives us a kind of social approval.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (44:25):
Kind of honoring that part.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (44:27):
Yeah. Right, right. And so those have been some very wonderful experiences for me.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (44:35):
Yeah. It's interesting. As I'm thinking about this, I've been learning a bit more of internal family systems lately and those ideas of parts. And I think that makes a lot of sense with you know, the roles being played in the sexual relationship. Being able to bring out those parts and let them have their freedom and have their validation and be seen.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (44:58):
I love those videos of Dick Schwartz working with clients. Oh, my heart.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (45:04):
Yeah. And that's great to be able to do that in the sexual realm. I'm wondering too about, you know, couples. Oftentimes a dynamic that I see a lot, particularly in a lot of the heterosexual couples that I work with, is that, oftentimes there might be a couple that matches up where maybe a powerful woman or a strong personality of a woman and a more kind of laid back guy kind going along and so on. And there's oftentimes a bit of a struggle because oftentimes the male partner will sometimes step back and not initiate or worry about getting rejected or doing the wrong thing or so on. But then oftentimes the female partner is really wanting somebody to take charge, and not have to wear the pants in that sexual moment or so on.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (45:52):
I don't know if that's something that has come up in the work that you've done with other couples, but I guess there's that question about like, they don't want to go into the pool of BDSM kind of dom submissive place. But I think that kind of question about how to help people, whether it be, you know being more dominant or more submissive or kind of even connecting with those parts, how do couples begin to get into that in the way that you work or you think about things? Or being able to kind of go into that space, especially if they maybe have been a bit avoidant around sex and talking about it and just had a kind of narrow experience.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (46:31):
Well, it's interesting. I say that BDSM are the world class experts on consent because we put so many different things on the table with possibilities that you just basically have to talk about it because there's just, you know, did you ever think of being lathered in peanut butter and jelly? Ick! But you know, there's no end to what might be erotic to somebody somewhere, somehow. And so we have to talk about these things and that would be probably the first thing on my agenda. It would be to say, yeah. And, but if you wanna role play and, you know, I'm reminded of a person I knew once who was a bit of a foot fetishist and took care of himself by becoming a real expert in wonderously sensual foot rubs. And everybody wanted his foot rubs. And what he would say when things seemed to be getting to a good point and the breathing's getting a little deeper or whatever, right. He might say, would you welcome it if I got a little more aggressive?
Dossie Easton, LMFT (47:33):
Because he liked to do that too. And he got a lot of yeses. And if he got a no, that was fine. He'd go back to massaging feet and maybe add hands and, you know, have a nice massage session. But the thing about finding some safe word or some indicative word that says, yes, I want this when there's a part of you that wants to pretend you don't want it, or that you wanna be swept off your feet, and then somebody has come up five times and tried to sweep you off your feet while you were brushing your teeth, getting ready to go to work. And it wasn't wanted. So to find a way to signal that, maybe it's the opposite of a safe word in the sense that instead of signaling a no it's signaling a yes. If you were to get aggressive, a little aggressive after dinner, I would like that.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (48:24):
Yeah. And I think that too, it's so hard for some couples to also sometimes shift out of some of their roles. And I think that it creates the vulnerability, which is also really important, although I think it does take a lot of work for some of the clients. Especially like you've got maybe one partner that is a little more aggressive and they want to be more submissive. So they want their partner to be a little more aggressive, but then when you don't do it right, the other one gets frustrated at them.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (48:56):
What we're working against is the biggest aspect of sex negativism. Have you ever read-- there was an old book written in 1953 by a couple of Berkeley anthropologists called Patterns of Human Sexual Behavior. One of the things they said is they defined a sex negative culture as a culture in which a conspiracy of silence exists in which the adults try to prevent the children from learning about sex. And I love that definition.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (49:24):
We are forbidden to talk about sex in any explicit ways. As you see, I'm actually pretty good at-- I have a lot of practice in bringing specific sexual examples into conversations and using language that's not going to have people screaming at me with any luck, or not need to be bleeped out. And this is hard. I mean, developing your sexual language is some of the most important stuff I do with couples. When I do the yes, no, maybe exercise, I don't use a prefab list of sexual possibilities. Many people do that. There's tons of them online. No, I give them a huge piece, you know, big piece of newsprint or something like that and have them speak the words that describe, let's get on this piece of paper, every sexual act you can think of that any human being in someway or somehow could be turned onto.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (50:17):
Yeah, let's do that. Let's make this list ourselves and make sure to put things on the list that somebody else might like, and you wouldn't, because we need things to say no to. And what it really is, is just saying, I'm starting to develop the language that they need to talk about sex. What language do they use? How do they find words for that?
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (50:39):
Yeah. That's definitely something that I took away from the training I went to with you. You know, just again for somebody to be able to say like, oh, I really want to put me in a diaper and yell at me or something like that or whatever it might be, or I want this scene to play out this way. Again, the level of communication and, you know, really discussing. You know, I don't like the word negotiation sometimes, because it's not necessarily a negotiation. It's more of a collaboration, like how do we find something to create fulfillment for each of us in this experience. Find some balance or so on, that rather than one person kind of doing something that they're not okay with, but they're going to negotiate for that or so on. But really that collaboration, that process of the communication is really the foundation to be able to have a healthier sex life, whether it be, you know, very kinky, or it just be, you know extra sexy.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (51:37):
Vanilla is a very good flavor. It's its own flavor, Nothing wrong with vanilla. And yeah, all of us need to develop language to talk about sex, our society forbids it. And I had a radio show for three years on a volunteer station back in the seventies and I learned to talk my way around things in circles. But the importance of it cannot be over emphasized. We need language to talk about sex and without it, we are lost . And with it, we open up a whole range of possibilities. The other thing that is against us, along with that you're not supposed to talk about it, there's a lot of doing what comes naturally. You know, you could do a lot better than that.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (52:27):
I heard, somebody describe it as you know, it's kind of like, as if people didn't talk about what they make for dinner. And the couple notices, the other person kind of turned up their nose at the peas. So they never make peas again. Or the other person kind of like, you know, not doesn't eat all of their pasta, so they never make that pasta again or something. So they end up kind having this very narrow sexual end. Because they're taking these cues from the other, which they may be misinterpreting. And one couple I worked with as they talked, the husband talked about a time where his wife felt put upon early in the relationship and he said, since then, I've never initiated. Because I never wanna make you feel that way again. And she said, oh my gosh, that was 20 years ago. Like, why didn't you talk to me about this? And once they just even talked about that, that just shifted the whole dynamic because they've kind of been, you know, coming to these conclusions, but without actually communicating about it and it affected their sex life significantly.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (53:24):
Which I think now goes back to your piece around consent, because it sounds like you're even now, you know, doing this work of beyond even really just consent within the sexual relationship, but also about consent on, you know, multiple levels, especially again, going back to the me too movement about being able to feel that intuition and be able to set boundaries. Or others understanding about getting consent rather than no means yes or whatever it might be kind of on those brief encounters and different types of relationships all the way down to, you know the sexual relationship between a couple or partners or sexual partners.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (54:07):
We are living in a rape culture in many ways. If you think of books like The Game, this idea that you're supposed to trick somebody into wanting to go to bed with you. That that's your job as a seducer is very prevalent in our culture and it's really sick and it happens all the time. You know, that movie Kids, that horrifying movie. I watched that movie and I thought, oh gosh, why did they set it in the slum? I've had the same thing happen at frat parties at Princeton.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (54:47):
They used to hire buses to send down to Bri Mar where it was at college to pick up women and bring them to their parties and then try to get us drunk so that they could get their hands on us. You know, it was disgusting. It was just so wrong. And, you know, this was all we had. This was all we were offered by way of how we were going to make these important decisions in our lives. It was crazy.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (55:14):
Well, I'm so glad you're doing the work that you're doing. You know, it sounds like it's really great. And actually, I didn't know about this six series class and we'll definitely look it up and and check. It's great that you're doing it online. Also, I imagine that creates more accessibility.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (55:30):
There are people who are getting up at three in the morning and taking our classroom from three in the morning to six in the morning or something .
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (55:38):
Well, thank you so much for spending time today. This is all so interesting and I love the work that you're doing. And thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (55:46):
Well, thank you for inviting me and I hope that you're listeners enjoy it and get something out of it.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (55:52):
Okay, great. Take care.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (55:53):
Take care. Bye bye.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (55:55):
Thank you for joining us today. If you'd like to receive continuing education credits for the podcast you just listened to, please go to therapyonthecuttingedge.com and click on the link for CE. Our podcast is brought to you by the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy, where we provide trainings for therapists in evidence-based models through live and online workshops, on-demand workshops, consultation groups, and online one-way mirror trainings. To learn more about our trainings and treatment for children, adolescents, families, couples, and individual adults, with our licensed experienced therapists in-person in the Bay Area, or throughout California online, and our employment opportunities, go to sfiap.com. To learn more about our associateships and psych assistantships and low fee treatment through our nonprofit Bay Area Community Counseling and Family Institute of Berkeley, go to sf-bacc.org and familyinstituteofberkeley.com. If you'd like to support therapy for those in financial need and training and evidence-based treatments, you can donate by going to BACC’s website at sfbacc.org. BACC is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit so all donations are tax deductible. Also, we really appreciate your feedback. If you have something you're interested in, something that's on the cutting edge of the field of psychotherapy, and you think therapists out there should know about it, send us an email. We're always looking for advancements in the field of psychotherapy to create lasting change for our clients.
Welcome to Therapy on the Cutting Edge, a podcast for therapists who want to be up to date on the latest advances in the field of psychotherapy. I'm your host, Dr. Keith Sutton, a psychologist in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the Director of the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy. At the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy, we provide training in evidence-based models, including Family Systems, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, Motivational Interviewing, and other approaches through live in-person and online trainings, on demand trainings, consultation groups, and one-way mirror trainings. We also have therapists throughout the Bay Area and California providing treatment through our six specialty centers, each grounded in an evidence-based approach, with our Lifespan Centers, Center for Children and Center for Adolescents, where all the therapists are working systemically; our Center for Couples, where all the therapists are using Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy; and our specialty issue centers, our Center for Anxiety, where all the therapists are using CBT and EMDR for trauma; and our center for ADHD and Oppositional & Conduct Disorder clinic, where we're integrating those four approaches.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (01:31):
In the institute, we have our licensed, experienced therapists, and for those in financial need, we have an associated nonprofit, Bay Area Community Counseling, where clients can work with associates, psych assistants, and licensed clinicians who are developing their abilities and expertise. Additionally, as part of our nonprofit, we also have the Family Institute of Berkeley, where we provide treatment, training, and one-way mirror trainings in family systems. To learn more about trainings, treatment, and employment opportunities, please go to sfiap.com and to support our nonprofit, you can go to sf-bacc.org to donate today to support access to therapy for those in financial need, as well as training in evidence-based treatment. BACC is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so all donations are tax deductible.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (00:38):
Today, I'll be interviewing Dossie Easton, licensed marriage and family therapist, who is the author of the ethical, a practical guide to polyamory open relationships and other adventures Dossie has written four additional books on various aspects of, BDSM -- bondage, domination, sadomasochism -- sex, and relationships with her co-author Janet Hardy. Now, as a licensed marriage and family therapist in the San Francisco Bay Area, she specializes in working with trauma survivors. Additionally, she works with clients with alternative sexualities and open relationships, and serves the polyamorous, gender diverse and LGBTQ community. She is also a speaker on the topic of cultural competency with couples and individuals in the BDSM community. Recently, she has been running separate six week groups for survivors and transgressors of sexual abuse called navigating consent, helping build a more consensual future. Let's listen to the interview.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (01:37):
Welcome Dossie.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (01:40):
Oh, good to have you. Good to be here.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (01:42):
Great. Thank you so, so much for joining me today. So I reached out to you some years ago. I had seen a talk that you had done for the Association of Family Therapists, Northern California on cultural competency within the BDSM community. And also I later read your book, The Ethical Slut, about -- well I guess, is it about polyamory or is it about just general positive sexuality?
Dossie Easton, LMFT (02:11):
Well, it depends on the terms you use and that's my first philosophical point. Lots of people want to see pigeon holes and they want to call one thing polyamory and another thing, non monogamy, and another thing swinging, and another thing open relationships. And to me, well, I've probably done all of those things except maybe swinging in my life at some time or another. And so to me, polyamory is an umbrella word that just covers all of it. And slut is also intended to be such an umbrella word. We define it as a person who celebrates sexuality in all its forms.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (02:52):
Yeah, taking back that word from some of its negative connotations that have been used towards women.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (02:59):
Yeah. I'm big on reclaiming language.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (03:02):
Yeah, definitely. Okay, great. Well, tell me a little bit about how you got going, and working as a therapist and how you got interested in this area of the field and the work you've done.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (03:16):
Well, I got interested because it's so necessary. I am myself an abuse survivor, both as a child and as an adult. And so I have a very strong interest in how people recover from those kinds of experiences and how people can develop a resilience and not be governed by that kind of experience. In my classes, I tell the participants, the survivors, I say, you know, they can throw dirt at you all they want, but it's still their dirt. They cannot make you dirty, because it's not your dirt. This is very important right now.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (04:01):
I, for many years, as a therapist, I specialize in working with trauma survivors and working with trauma and issues of that. I have worked in a battered woman shelter. I have worked 10 years in psychiatric halfway house in Santa Cruz where I learned an awful lot. It was a good program. People were really there for the clients. And it was so kind, not that’s uncommon in the mental health system, unfortunately. So it was a great place to train and learn and do work, wonderful work -- in a university town, in Santa Cruz. So yeah, a lot of very bright young people.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (04:45):
What kind of areas were you training in and kind of theoretical orientation?
Dossie Easton, LMFT (04:51):
I'm not aligned to any of them in particular. I certainly am not a sort of Skinner-esque behaviorist. But then, if you work with people's sexual issues, basic principal of sex therapy is that you learned how you are in your sex life in some way, shape or form, you've learned it. This is what you learned, what you're doing now so that means you can learn something different and these are some techniques for learning something different, right. That's a very behavioral approach. And it's encountered to people who used to interpret people who had difficulties with sex as some, you know, profound psychological damage, deep wounding, something's really wrong with you -- profoundly wrong with you -- if your sex life has got problems in it. And that's just, that's cruel, that's wrong.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (05:40):
It hurts people. And it's not true, that's really not the point. The point is that we live in a sex-negative society and the opportunities to learn, to have a healthy, open, explorative, adventurous, exciting sex life, and whether it's with one partner or 12, it doesn't matter. Right? But to have a healthy sex life is I think, kind of a birthright, but our society takes it away. So then we need to go back and learn how to do that. What I'm doing right now, I'm kind of semi-retired. I still see a few clients, but my big project is navigating consent. And this started up around 2017. It's kind of my response to the Me Too part. I wanted to make a contribution there. I was so grateful when Me Too opened up the extent, the abysmal extent of how many people are sexually assaulted in greater or lesser ways, but how prevalent that is, and how common an experience.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (06:46):
And so it's almost normal, and our society normalizes it even worse. And that's a sad thing. And so, I was invited to speak at a conference on erotic hypnosis, and if your listeners have a question about what erotic hypnosis is, it's basically exploring the erotic potential of what you can do with trance states. And of course, when you do that, the issue of consent, a very exquisitely detailed form of consent, because you need emotional consent to do that with trance states. And that takes a lot of thought and carefulness . So I had been asked to speak about consent and it was kind of fraught. People had been accused of various things and this was the first outburst of Me Too.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (07:48):
And nobody quite knew what to do with it. And when I presented that talk, I wanted tell you, I prepared more for that talk than I did for anything else. The possibility of somebody exploding in my face or, you know, people not liking it or people criticizing it, because I don't come from the book on these things. And with this group, I also in particular had a lot of friends in it, but it went very well. There was something like 250 people there. And it was very participatory. And I ended it as I now end all such talks, saying, okay, I want everybody now to close your eyes and think of one thing you can do, not something you wish you could do, not something that doesn't have to be huge or enormous.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (08:38):
It could be a very small thing. The only requirement is something that you can see yourself actually doing that would make a dent in rape culture, and give yourself permission to go do that. And right in there, while I was doing the moment of silence, while people thought about the one thing they could do speak a little truth here, listen to somebody over there, you know, that kind of thing. I thought of these classes, so I have invented, written, created a series. Two series, really. It's the same six classes, but taught in two tracks, the surviving track and the transgressing track.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (09:20):
So that was because the needs of survivors and transgressors are somewhat different. But also having them in the same room seemed not likely to succeed. It seemed like it would present particular difficulties. That was important to make a safe space for everybody, and that includes the transgressors, to explore their vulnerabilities and explore all this really difficult stuff. It's hard enough. So there are six classes in there. We present them. If you were taking your class, whichever track you chose, you'd be coming every other week.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (09:59):
So we teach class one, which is coercion and collisions, and it's getting people talking, and class two is the roles we play in looking at sexism in particular, but also all the roles we play in the world and in our fantasies And the third one is what you'd expect, communication and conflict. The fourth is negotiation and consent. The fifth is making it right, what do we do after a boundary's been crossed? What can we do to regain our balance to make the changes we need to make that this painful experience has brought to our attention. What do we do now in the final class, the sixth class, is recovery and resilience. And you can find our website www.navigating-consent.com. And the classes, now we're starting our seventh round in June.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (11:01):
The last two were online. And it's been great. It's been fabulous. It's palpable. I'm using a lot of techniques from the human potential movement back in the seventies. Because that's when I started with San Francisco Sex Information in 1973. Long time ago, 50 years ago almost. And gosh, half a century. That's amazing. To your listeners in San Francisco, Sex Information still exists and you can look them up and they will answer any questions you may have about sex. They do a great volunteer training too.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (11:41):
Wonderful, answering questions and providing education to those.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (11:46):
Yeah, and sometimes a lot of listening ears, you know? But sometimes they're very simple problems. I remember somebody -- this is perhaps a little close to the bone for your listeners, but maybe not. Somebody sent me a caller when I was on the switchboard saying they couldn't handle it. And it was a gentleman who had been masturbating using twisties.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (12:10):
And that seemed very weird. And you know, people tend to go, God, what? Well, they sell cock rings. I mean, you could go down to Castro Street and find seven stores that have a big display of a hundred different kinds of cock rings.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (12:23):
Because those veins on the outside of the organ that you can see, they take the blood out and if you constrict them, then the blood is coming into the arteries, which are buried deeper, and coming back out, well they can't get out as fast. And so you get a different kind of experience, a different sensation, a different kind of erection. And if any of your listeners feel interested in trying this, let your first cock ring have something like a snap or a buckle or some way that you can take it off.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (12:59):
So they can remove it quickly.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (13:01):
Well, so they can remove it if they have trouble. If you do it too tight, sometimes people can't quite get it off. Your erection doesn't go down. And how do you get, if you use a ring, how do you get it off? But this is way too close to the bone. And so this day I was just delighted. I said, you can go to a store and buy these things. And the people who work in the store will even advise you about what you might wanna try.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (13:23):
Well, that's great. So it's basically getting some of that sex information pre-internet and also I'm sure too, it's a bit more educated than some of the things that people are going to Google and find. So that's a great resource. I didn't know about that.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (13:36):
Yeah. It is a very good resource and they've also kept up with all the current research and stuff like that. But anyway, so the navigating consistent classes are going very well. I have a big teaching team. I have people to lead it and it is now being managed by a wonderful Ms. Wellowcat, who is an absolutely wonderful person who has put wonderful effort and work into the classes. And so I have a teaching team and I have people to lead it too because I'm 77. My health is eh, and I can't guarantee that I'll be there forever.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (14:10):
I think the conversation around consent has been so elevated since the Me Too movement, which has been really good and really important. You know, that there has been different movements where particularly sexual violence against majority, towards women has come up at different periods in the nineties and so on, and workplace, and previous histories of child abuse and so on. But it seems like it's gotten more nuanced in the Me Too movement in a way that's really begun to permeate the culture in a much more significant way of understanding consent rather than just somebody saying no, and then not listening.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (14:53):
Instead, really being able to have that connection, have that consent, really being attuned to the other person and understanding what they want or need, or having conversations. And that's actually something that was really struck by, with the talk you did on the couples in the kink community and BDSM of just the level of communication that's needed to engage in various kinds of scenes that folks are putting together. Also in your book, The Ethical Slut, the communication piece was just so significant to be able to have those kind of polyamorous multiple relationships and really talking about one's expectations and what feels okay and not okay. And coordinating schedules and talking about the different emotions that come up. So it's perfect that you're moving that right into this broader, larger topic of consent on so many levels.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (15:58):
And I'm also, I'm seeing a lot of stuff coming in. I call this the middle ground between don't listen to that silly girl and throw that bum off the edge of the planet. We need a middle ground, and I can see this in some of the movement stuff that's out. People can't think outside those two boxes very well. And then they become opposed and they're pressing on each other, pushing against each other. And that doesn't work. You have to get on the same side to make it work.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (16:23):
I tell all my team members, you know, part of our job is going to be to get on the same side, particularly with our transgressors. Not that we are approving of transgressors, that's not the point, but that we are on their side saying that this is a righteous human being who can participate and have the sex life that they want without oppressing anybody and without trampling on anybody's boundaries.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (16:50):
That's going to be really hard too. I have a colleague Jim Kline, who had worked with sex offenders for many years. And he oftentimes talked about, you know, with all our clients, we have to have empathy and working with an offender is really good and helpful in really making you stretch. Because you have to find a way to be able to and understand your client's experience, even when it has been something so significantly hurtful to another person, to be able to help them, to be able to meet them and connect with them.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (17:23):
Yeah. And we're in a kind of privileged position. We're not doing court diversion or anything like that. I have a friend, Hamish Sinclair who invented a program called ManAlive in '83. And in response to a request to create a course about sexual boundaries for people being used as court diversion, in the sense that they would otherwise go to jail, or if there wasn't some sort of rehabilitation they could do. And so Hamish had created a marvelous program called ManAlive and had trained with him as well. And he's a dear friend. Very, very solid person to do that work for this many years. And it's not easy work. People who are actually in a position where they will go to jail, unless they take your class. We don't set up for that one. I'm not going to do court diversion because --
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (18:20):
Yeah, that's a whole different dynamic than coming in themselves for their healing.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (18:26):
Yeah. But so we see people who want to take the classes. Or who are perhaps, you know, sometimes they've perhaps been told that they need to do something to practice accountability and our classes are on the list of things you could do. As is reformative justice and transformative justice and so on and so forth. There's lots of places you can go. But if you've transgressed, one of the things that an individual or the community has a right to ask for is to say, well, what are you doing to make sure this sort of thing doesn't happen again?
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (19:00):
Yeah. Needing to know that it's being addressed and being understood and really changing. So it's safe. Definitely. Now tell me a little bit about what you're mentioning, you're using some of the aspects of the human potential movement in the groups that you're doing, or the classes. Can you tell me a little more about that?
Dossie Easton, LMFT (19:22):
Yeah. Well, one way to sort of get around a whole bunch of things, we make the classes extremely participatory. And we do not require full confession of either party. We're not requiring the story. It's because it's not about the story. It's about all the stories, it's about the story about what you want your sex life to be like and what your fantasies represent to you and how can you look at them and make sense out of them. So there's a very strong participatory element so that we don't keep dodging off into intellect. I strongly believe that intuition is based for instance, in kinesthesia in the way we experience emotions in the body.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (20:06):
Kinesthesia is actually the sixth sense. It's how I know what my hand is doing when I'm not looking at it and how we feel our musculus skeletal system. And there's something like 26 senses, like how you tell when you're hungry and things like that. If you look at each nervous network that delivers info to the brain, there's quite a lot of them. But this one seems very associated with intuition. So we do a lot of semantics we have, for instance, if the tension in the room goes way up, because we're talking with difficult, hard stuff here, painful difficult experiences. The safe word is this and it means everybody stop and take three deep breaths.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (20:48):
Yeah. So three fingers up is the safe word to stop everything.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (20:53):
And I recommend that to couples who are having problems with conflict as well. I had written a lot of homework exercises for the second edition of Ethical Slut because I had been working. The first edition brought me something unexpected, which was a lot of clients who weren't living in my world, my sex positive, queer positive world. But who were very interested in expanding their horizons. And so I worked with people who came from very different places from where I've lived, and I learned a lot. And I developed a series of sort of homework exercises I would send people home to do. And they've been published now in the second and third editions of the books. So they contain a lot of participatory things. The idea is to, you know, find ways to get yourself involved. And the principles are kind of interesting. If you do a writing exercise, for instance, you could take very scary emotions and if you write about them, you're putting them on a piece of paper, in words, in sentences, even, you're organizing them. Making a narrative. You're putting on something that has a frame -- oh look, it has a margin.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (22:05):
This is very important. So you're putting them outside of yourself. You're putting them into words that you can write down and now you have it framed and contained as if it were a sort of container. That's an example of where writing can become a very strong exercise and actually be a way of managing difficult emotions as well as becoming more aware of them. We do a lot of somatics. When we weren't online -- we still do somatics online, but it's changed the somatics we can do. We're hoping to get back to working in a room with the people, because some of the things, particularly the learning to feel the no in your body. Which almost everybody who works in sexuality does at some point, you know, walk toward each other.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (22:57):
And one person says stop when they're close enough or even step back a pace or two or whatever, you look at what is the comfortable distance and closeness. And so those kinds of exercises. And also, we're writing a book, we're publishing the syllabus and writing a book about it. Requiring a lot of writing, but I'm just into one of my favorite forms of group work, which is called a brainstorm. Which is when you, I'm sure you've done thousands of them, but when you put big paper or a whiteboard or something like that, and you ask everybody to throw out all their ideas about X, Y, Z. About whatever you're talking about. And the first class, it's all the different ways of consent violations and collisions and misunderstandings and intentional rape and you know, the whole long list. Yeah. And we put it again, we've written it down on a piece of paper or on a whiteboard where we can erase it. Look at that.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (23:58):
But we've made this list, and the list, the funny part is it's very participatory. It gets people talking, it gets people putting their thoughts and feelings into words, and it gets a whole range of thoughtfulness, all kinds of different stuff up in one place, the responses people might have to the question we're addressing that day. We do a brainstorm in almost every class because that's a good way to enter into difficult subjects and then people start repeating them and finding their words and finding ways to talk about them. We do the yes, no, maybe exercise. I'm sure you're familiar with it. Doing it in a big group is lots of fun.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (24:38):
Yeah. The, yes, no, maybe exercise is going through different things that somebody might be interested in doing sexually with their partner and then kind of going through which they're okay with and not okay with, and maybe there might be something they might wanna try.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (24:52):
Yeah. On the maybe list, we ask people to find something on their maybe list and then think about what conditions would have to be met before they would be willing to try it. Would you make an agreement about if this doesn't work, I can stop it and then we will do something else that we both know we like. Things like that.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (25:10):
And I'd be interested on your thoughts about, I mean, I have a couple thoughts around sexuality and also around couples. And so I use emotionally focused couples therapy and work with couples around the relationship as well as their sexual relationship. And I also do a lot of work with trauma survivors and complex PTSD. And particularly you know, oftentimes there's folks looking for referrals for therapists that work with polyamory. And I think there's a lot of confusion around, you know, the polyamory and whether it's the antithesis of having an attachment and kind of those pieces. And one of my thoughts, as you're talking about this is talking with maybe couples that were interested in expanding their sexual experience and their relationship. That oftentimes can bring up a lot of anxiety.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (26:03):
It's one of the most difficult things for couples to talk about. And, you know, part of that, I've thought about that in attachment terms, is that oftentimes the fear of saying, well, if I'm interested in this, my partner's going to feel disgusted and they'll be ashamed and that they won't wanna be with me or I'll lose that attachment. And I think that's kind of on one level. On the other level of what I've learned from your writing too, is that with polyamory, there's really oftentimes a primary attachment, I think, from my understanding. And that in part, it almost really reminded me of a Zen Buddhism of really being open to all the emotions that happen through consent. Our partner is with somebody else, or kind of sitting with jealousy or fear or lust for another. And also sitting with the heartbreak, if they do attach to that other person and leave the primary attachment.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (27:05):
You know, I had a book when I was writing the first edition of Ethical Slut. I had a book that was on the table next to the toilet, actually, of sayings from a guru type person, a yogi. And it had one, it had a chapter on jealousy and I opened the chapter around jealousy and it says, suppose you have two children.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (27:29):
I've used that one ever since. It's like, okay, we have all kinds of attachment. We have the attachments we have to our children, we have attachments to our work. They're very different kinds of attachments, but if we work well with somebody and we lose them, that's a loss. We have attachments in our families of origin. We have attachments in our neighborhood. We have attachments in any group. We have attachments in a chess club. I mean, you know, we have attachments all over the place. They, what we call and it's taken from evolutionary biology, curiously enough. But in polyamory, it's called nesting partners. The partner that you live with that you share the mortgage, that you raise children with, that you put each other through graduate school, that kind of thing. And sometimes there's more than two adults in that relationship.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (28:13):
There was a famous family in Boston who ran the potlucks every week for years and years and years. And they consisted of, well, let's see, three men and a woman. The woman was monogamous. One man was bisexual and poly. And two more were gay men who were also poly. The woman was in heaven. She had two extra parents. She had her partner, the actual father of their children, and three kids. I forgot the kids, but there was all this extra attention for the children. Often in gay community, there are men who have been deprived of having children. So there's usually a lot of really positive energy around for children.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (29:03):
And so those are all different kinds of attachments that they had. And so these are different attachments. There is a tendency, I think, in poly communities to form kind of loose knit families. I think of them as families, because I think of them as times when I've had surgery and as a single mom, who's going to take care of my kid, things like that. But also who shows up? Tons of people show up because the family is so extended. So you have a kinship network, you have the you've made the equivalent of, of village James Ramey writes about that in Intimate Friendships that there is intimacy in sex.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (29:57):
I mean, if you, your notion is that any intimacy outside of a primary relationship should be sex only, what I have to say to you is good luck because I don't think that's a really realistic goal. If you find somebody that you enjoy sharing sex with and you keep on with that, you know, you continue with that relationship, then there are going to be emotions there. There's going to be attachments of some form or another and it can be perfectly respectful. I was lovers once with a person who's primary relationship. When there was something difficult going on, they always went monogamous for a few months while they dealt with it. And I'll never forget one Thanksgiving when one of their fathers had a heart attack and it was all very scary and fraught. They had gone all monogamous. And there I was in the house on Thanksgiving day with my kid playing with their kids and me and David making four ducks with orange sauce and elaborate cooking schemes and Lee, the other member of this group, David's partner, setting the tables and setting up appetizers and snacks and things for the kids to snack on before the big dinner or got served and the crazy people roasting the ducks would go through with their very elaborate rituals.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (31:07):
And it was family. And it didn't matter that I was sexually not welcome in for those three months or whatever it was going to be. I was still family.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (31:19):
Yeah. Because that connection transcended the sexual relationship.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (31:23):
Yeah. So when you say attachment, you know, it's like people think that there's only one attachment because they think about what they call romantic, which is an odd use of a word, the modern use of romantic. But anyway
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (31:37):
I guess they think about it sometimes too, especially when some couples are struggling, they think, oh, maybe we could have an open relation or something like that. But oftentimes, you know, there's a lot of fear like that the one is going to meet somebody else, feel a connection and fall in love with that person and thus leave them. And that, you know, that, that kind of anxiety around that. You know, that piece, which I imagine again, it seems like in the polyamory work, it's not necessarily transcending that anxiety. It's learning how to be with it and experience it and in that Buddhist way of the primary pain versus the secondary suffering, of being open to the full range of the experience. And sometimes there may be anxiety or sadness or maybe great joy. There may be jealousness and there may be hurt from a loss of one part of a relationship in the way that it had been and maybe continuing it on, in a different type of way or so on.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (32:37):
Yeah. I also tell my couples who are new to this, I tell them, it's really important that you nourish your primary relationship. New relationship energy is what it is. It's the kind of madness that descends on all of us and we love it a lot and we know it doesn't last. And while it's there, I mean, I'll never say no to it. Let's put it that way, because it's just too wonderful and amazing. And the partner that you had new relationship energy with 10 years ago, since then you've raised three kids and you know, owned, I don't know how many cars and so on and so forth.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (33:16):
I tell my couples, I say, if you don't nourish your primary relationship, you could lose it. You have to feed it. And whether that involves going out and getting a bunch of tickets to theater or dance or music or going camping in the Sierras, you know. But to do things together that are important and to pay attention to your sex life. If your sex life has become dead, think about how you can wake it up again. Because indeed, reincarnation is possible for sex lives. I think people think something is wrong when passion doesn't just sort of flow automatically, but you have to actually do something to make it happen.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (34:06):
That kind of goes away after some time, and it needs to be work. It needs to be. You know, that idea of love as a verb. You know, it's something that needs to be worked on and active rather than something that's just kind passive and that's just going to happen.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (34:22):
It needs to be fed. It needs nourishment. And if you don't, it'll starve. And so, whether we're working to revive a sex life that has gotten pretty dead or whether we're looking at sharing any kind of pleasure, or spending, you know, setting time aside. I often give people the instructions. One of my exercises, I call it a process free date.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (34:46):
They make a date to do something pleasant for an evening or a day. And during that time talking about problems is put on the shelf, put it on the shelf, put it on the shelf. We're not going to talk about problems during our process free date. We're not even going to talk about how bad the president is, even when it was Trump, we're not going to do that. We're going to just have a date where we relate to each other. I'll never forget a couple who went out dancing and pretended it was their first date. They ended up having wonderful sex when they got home. And you know, people open up things and people get created with that kind of stuff.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (35:25):
Now I was wondering about your thoughts on the intersect of trauma and kink or BDSM. I've heard in your workshop as you talked about it, that some people have experienced trauma, some not, but it doesn't necessarily mean that there's something that's happened to the person just because they're involved in kink or BDSM or those are their interests. And at the same time, you used an example of somebody having a corrective experience by controlling the scene and feeling safe and taking back. And I've had a number of clients with, you know, often with trauma, right. There's dissociation and, and disconnected parts. And sometimes the thoughts or feelings of imagining an aggressive sexual encounter with their partner, but not sharing it for, a significant amount of shame. Or really kind of being both attracted to, but repelled by at the same time, a more kind of intense sexual relationship that's not so vanilla. I wonder if you could speak to any of that?
Dossie Easton, LMFT (36:38):
Well, yeah, I wrote an article shop called Shadow Play, and a refurbished version of it is going to appear in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology sometime. COVID interrupted the process of all this happening. But if I take a Jungian approach and I conceive of the shadow as split off parts that are split off from shame or painful emotions, painful history, traumatic emotions, traumatic experiences, those parts that we have split off from consciousness, because they're too unpleasant and very painful to be conscious of.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (37:21):
I make a point that we'd start doing this probably before we're born. But we do this through infancy. I mean much of what is thrown away into shadow, a great deal of it happened when we were way too young to understand what was going on. A lot of times I've opened up shadow things with clients and you open up the can of worm and this little teeny worm comes out and it's like, it only crawls a little bit at a time.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (37:47):
We cut them down to size, you know? So my notion of a conscious healing experience with BDSM, well you give up this notion of some enchanted evening where you meet a stranger. You do this with somebody you know very well, even if they're pretending to be horrible as part of the fantasy. And you make plans and you get to write the story. You get to get that story as close or as far as you wanted. One of the first times I did this we made the story really different. And imagine that my friend was the head of a finishing school for polite young ladies. And I was not being very good at being a polite young lady. And so these were roles that had nothing to do with it. We were both trauma survivors and they had nothing to do with the childhood traumas, but we played into it. And of course it involved caning because there you are in a terrible Victorian type school. And I remember the journey so much. My friend thought it was appropriate to do, you know, I was being punished theoretically for being too outrageous. And they decided that the way to do that was to be constantly holding me. Even while we were doing stuff that was perhaps physically challenging, intense and so on, or punishment.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (39:12):
And got the nurturing in by the back door as it were. And that was so powerful to me. It was a place where I got to where I was just going, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. And a very young piece of me came out. And then it was possible for us to love her over us and to give her some of what she needed to know that she was lovable. And these intimate experiences, they are so intimate. Talk about ways to rediscover passion.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (39:42):
Vulnerability is what creates --
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (39:44):
I was going to say, it's so vulnerable. And so again, just so connected that you have to be and so open. Even taking out the sexual aspect, just that emotional piece is so vibrant and then bringing sexuality also.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (40:02):
Well, you bring it in, you get to write the story, you get to control the story. You get to decide what's in the story. We made me older than I was when I was being abused as a child quite a bit, which gave me more agency. And then when it comes out, chances are what you wanna do when you finally get through this outrageous scene is do some of that nice orgasm sharing sex. And so at the end, what happens is that you each find each other desirable. And this precious inner child, and also this precious inner bully gets seen as desirable. And we eroticize the experience in a life affirming experience like an orgasm. And to my mind, it's like giving them a shot of the life force.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (40:48):
If I could get a little spiritual here, but you know, it's like saying, okay, this is the animating force of the universe. That's what sexuality is at its highest point. And so to shed that light on the traumas of our past is an amazing healing power.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (41:06):
Yeah. I'm wondering if you could speak to that inner bully. Because this is actually a conversation that came up with one of my clients, a young trauma client. Over 18, but you know, is finding herself drawn to more violent pornography. And there's a part of her that struggles with this, but also the thought of who would want to be the dominant or the aggressor in that and what is it about them and so on. And so I'm wondering if could speak to that.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (41:34):
Well, you know, it's kind of a truth working with trauma survivors that in a family where there is abuse or a situation where there's abuse, especially through a small child, you kind of have two choices. You can either be a victim or you can be an oppressor. And it doesn't look like there are any other choices. It's not true. There are other choices, but it doesn't look like that. So a lot of times we have the fantasy of being powerful, and having agency is kind of tangled up with the person who victimized us. I don't find that uncommon at all. So having a place in the world both for our precious brat and our precious inner bully is really important. It's like you have a place where you get to be the powerful person. You get to control things and push people around and so on. And it's agreeable and it's sexy to both of you. Because you can raise a lot of energy pushing against each other in this consensual way.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (42:35):
Yeah. And I think too, that expanding that beyond trauma, everybody's had experiences where they felt vulnerable or not powerful. And so trying on those different aspects of oneself or so on is really connecting with all those different parts.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (42:57):
Yeah. It's forbidden to have that stuff in the world. And indeed, if we acted like the bullies of our childhood or if we act like victims forever, it's also very forbidden to be a victim. To be pathetic. One of the things I have very much enjoyed in some of my SM scenes is the opportunity to be pathetic for a while.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (43:14):
And it seems like almost a luxury in a strange way, but these are parts of us. And if we are going to accept all of our parts, I mean, I think of before I knew these things. I had so much disgust really for my child self. I saw myself as such a victim. I was a very unhappy child. My father was violent and evidently it started when I was quite young, four or five years old. I have an older sister who's told me some of this.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (43:47):
And I remember myself, you know, crying and, and being this incredibly vulnerable and incredibly hurt person. And I don't like to remember that. I don't even like to talk about it. Even like this I don't wan to talk about it, but it gives me a chance to have that part of me. And I think of her as my own inner child in the world and in my experience and share it with somebody else, which gives us a sort of a container, but also, you know, gives us a kind of social approval.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (44:25):
Kind of honoring that part.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (44:27):
Yeah. Right, right. And so those have been some very wonderful experiences for me.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (44:35):
Yeah. It's interesting. As I'm thinking about this, I've been learning a bit more of internal family systems lately and those ideas of parts. And I think that makes a lot of sense with you know, the roles being played in the sexual relationship. Being able to bring out those parts and let them have their freedom and have their validation and be seen.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (44:58):
I love those videos of Dick Schwartz working with clients. Oh, my heart.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (45:04):
Yeah. And that's great to be able to do that in the sexual realm. I'm wondering too about, you know, couples. Oftentimes a dynamic that I see a lot, particularly in a lot of the heterosexual couples that I work with, is that, oftentimes there might be a couple that matches up where maybe a powerful woman or a strong personality of a woman and a more kind of laid back guy kind going along and so on. And there's oftentimes a bit of a struggle because oftentimes the male partner will sometimes step back and not initiate or worry about getting rejected or doing the wrong thing or so on. But then oftentimes the female partner is really wanting somebody to take charge, and not have to wear the pants in that sexual moment or so on.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (45:52):
I don't know if that's something that has come up in the work that you've done with other couples, but I guess there's that question about like, they don't want to go into the pool of BDSM kind of dom submissive place. But I think that kind of question about how to help people, whether it be, you know being more dominant or more submissive or kind of even connecting with those parts, how do couples begin to get into that in the way that you work or you think about things? Or being able to kind of go into that space, especially if they maybe have been a bit avoidant around sex and talking about it and just had a kind of narrow experience.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (46:31):
Well, it's interesting. I say that BDSM are the world class experts on consent because we put so many different things on the table with possibilities that you just basically have to talk about it because there's just, you know, did you ever think of being lathered in peanut butter and jelly? Ick! But you know, there's no end to what might be erotic to somebody somewhere, somehow. And so we have to talk about these things and that would be probably the first thing on my agenda. It would be to say, yeah. And, but if you wanna role play and, you know, I'm reminded of a person I knew once who was a bit of a foot fetishist and took care of himself by becoming a real expert in wonderously sensual foot rubs. And everybody wanted his foot rubs. And what he would say when things seemed to be getting to a good point and the breathing's getting a little deeper or whatever, right. He might say, would you welcome it if I got a little more aggressive?
Dossie Easton, LMFT (47:33):
Because he liked to do that too. And he got a lot of yeses. And if he got a no, that was fine. He'd go back to massaging feet and maybe add hands and, you know, have a nice massage session. But the thing about finding some safe word or some indicative word that says, yes, I want this when there's a part of you that wants to pretend you don't want it, or that you wanna be swept off your feet, and then somebody has come up five times and tried to sweep you off your feet while you were brushing your teeth, getting ready to go to work. And it wasn't wanted. So to find a way to signal that, maybe it's the opposite of a safe word in the sense that instead of signaling a no it's signaling a yes. If you were to get aggressive, a little aggressive after dinner, I would like that.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (48:24):
Yeah. And I think that too, it's so hard for some couples to also sometimes shift out of some of their roles. And I think that it creates the vulnerability, which is also really important, although I think it does take a lot of work for some of the clients. Especially like you've got maybe one partner that is a little more aggressive and they want to be more submissive. So they want their partner to be a little more aggressive, but then when you don't do it right, the other one gets frustrated at them.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (48:56):
What we're working against is the biggest aspect of sex negativism. Have you ever read-- there was an old book written in 1953 by a couple of Berkeley anthropologists called Patterns of Human Sexual Behavior. One of the things they said is they defined a sex negative culture as a culture in which a conspiracy of silence exists in which the adults try to prevent the children from learning about sex. And I love that definition.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (49:24):
We are forbidden to talk about sex in any explicit ways. As you see, I'm actually pretty good at-- I have a lot of practice in bringing specific sexual examples into conversations and using language that's not going to have people screaming at me with any luck, or not need to be bleeped out. And this is hard. I mean, developing your sexual language is some of the most important stuff I do with couples. When I do the yes, no, maybe exercise, I don't use a prefab list of sexual possibilities. Many people do that. There's tons of them online. No, I give them a huge piece, you know, big piece of newsprint or something like that and have them speak the words that describe, let's get on this piece of paper, every sexual act you can think of that any human being in someway or somehow could be turned onto.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (50:17):
Yeah, let's do that. Let's make this list ourselves and make sure to put things on the list that somebody else might like, and you wouldn't, because we need things to say no to. And what it really is, is just saying, I'm starting to develop the language that they need to talk about sex. What language do they use? How do they find words for that?
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (50:39):
Yeah. That's definitely something that I took away from the training I went to with you. You know, just again for somebody to be able to say like, oh, I really want to put me in a diaper and yell at me or something like that or whatever it might be, or I want this scene to play out this way. Again, the level of communication and, you know, really discussing. You know, I don't like the word negotiation sometimes, because it's not necessarily a negotiation. It's more of a collaboration, like how do we find something to create fulfillment for each of us in this experience. Find some balance or so on, that rather than one person kind of doing something that they're not okay with, but they're going to negotiate for that or so on. But really that collaboration, that process of the communication is really the foundation to be able to have a healthier sex life, whether it be, you know, very kinky, or it just be, you know extra sexy.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (51:37):
Vanilla is a very good flavor. It's its own flavor, Nothing wrong with vanilla. And yeah, all of us need to develop language to talk about sex, our society forbids it. And I had a radio show for three years on a volunteer station back in the seventies and I learned to talk my way around things in circles. But the importance of it cannot be over emphasized. We need language to talk about sex and without it, we are lost . And with it, we open up a whole range of possibilities. The other thing that is against us, along with that you're not supposed to talk about it, there's a lot of doing what comes naturally. You know, you could do a lot better than that.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (52:27):
I heard, somebody describe it as you know, it's kind of like, as if people didn't talk about what they make for dinner. And the couple notices, the other person kind of turned up their nose at the peas. So they never make peas again. Or the other person kind of like, you know, not doesn't eat all of their pasta, so they never make that pasta again or something. So they end up kind having this very narrow sexual end. Because they're taking these cues from the other, which they may be misinterpreting. And one couple I worked with as they talked, the husband talked about a time where his wife felt put upon early in the relationship and he said, since then, I've never initiated. Because I never wanna make you feel that way again. And she said, oh my gosh, that was 20 years ago. Like, why didn't you talk to me about this? And once they just even talked about that, that just shifted the whole dynamic because they've kind of been, you know, coming to these conclusions, but without actually communicating about it and it affected their sex life significantly.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (53:24):
Which I think now goes back to your piece around consent, because it sounds like you're even now, you know, doing this work of beyond even really just consent within the sexual relationship, but also about consent on, you know, multiple levels, especially again, going back to the me too movement about being able to feel that intuition and be able to set boundaries. Or others understanding about getting consent rather than no means yes or whatever it might be kind of on those brief encounters and different types of relationships all the way down to, you know the sexual relationship between a couple or partners or sexual partners.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (54:07):
We are living in a rape culture in many ways. If you think of books like The Game, this idea that you're supposed to trick somebody into wanting to go to bed with you. That that's your job as a seducer is very prevalent in our culture and it's really sick and it happens all the time. You know, that movie Kids, that horrifying movie. I watched that movie and I thought, oh gosh, why did they set it in the slum? I've had the same thing happen at frat parties at Princeton.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (54:47):
They used to hire buses to send down to Bri Mar where it was at college to pick up women and bring them to their parties and then try to get us drunk so that they could get their hands on us. You know, it was disgusting. It was just so wrong. And, you know, this was all we had. This was all we were offered by way of how we were going to make these important decisions in our lives. It was crazy.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (55:14):
Well, I'm so glad you're doing the work that you're doing. You know, it sounds like it's really great. And actually, I didn't know about this six series class and we'll definitely look it up and and check. It's great that you're doing it online. Also, I imagine that creates more accessibility.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (55:30):
There are people who are getting up at three in the morning and taking our classroom from three in the morning to six in the morning or something .
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (55:38):
Well, thank you so much for spending time today. This is all so interesting and I love the work that you're doing. And thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (55:46):
Well, thank you for inviting me and I hope that you're listeners enjoy it and get something out of it.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (55:52):
Okay, great. Take care.
Dossie Easton, LMFT (55:53):
Take care. Bye bye.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (55:55):
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