Libido Lounge: Past Trauma vs. Healthy Relationships

Introduction to Love, Lust, and Libido

Dr. Diane: Welcome to the Libido Lounge where we focus on all things love, lust, and libido. We believe that fabulous sex is as important to health as exercise and good food. Hi everybody, welcome back to another episode on the Lounge. I’m your host, Dr. Diane, your libido expert, and I’m thrilled today to introduce you to a new friend of mine, Dr. Ray, who’s a life and relationship coach and best-selling author. We’re going to get into some really cool topics today, you guys, talking about trust and relationships and safety, and really looking at even different techniques and actionable steps that you can use to get out of that kind of emotional amygdala hijacking scenario that sometimes happens to us as women, as humans in life. We’re going to talk about all of that and more today. So welcome everybody, and a big special welcome to you, Dr. Ray. Thank you for spending time with me today.

Dr. Ray: I am happy to be here, and when you said the amygdala, I went, wow, I love conversations. It’s real important, right?

Understanding the Amygdala’s Role in Relationships

How the Amygdala Affects Trust and Safety

Dr. Diane: So many times, I find in my work that one of the things that breaks down the libido in a relationship, and out of a relationship, no matter where people are in their relationship journey, is feeling unsafe or feeling like they can’t trust, or maybe their intuition isn’t being listened to anymore. I tend to find that this can happen from big trauma events, which is very obvious to people, but also simple little micro-traumas, like the way that somebody says something to us, and we get triggered, or we take it the wrong way, and we hold on to that. Can you start our conversation, maybe since you grabbed onto the word amygdala?

Dr. Ray: First off, the purpose of the amygdala is to assess whether something is threatening or non-threatening, and once it assesses that, it’s very quick to give you some type of appraisal, like this can give us pleasure, or it runs, and therefore there’s this idea that it can hurt us. Where this could create challenges in our life, if a couple is living together and every time she approaches a particular topic or wants to share her heart, and the man reacts, tries to fix it, walks out, or he’s checked out, then in time, that experience itself can feel like, I’m not safe here to be myself. Therefore, what that leads to is that this person, the wife in time, is in a way where she doesn’t feel safe in her environment. So if her amygdala is hyper-vigilant, logically it should not be, but if it’s hyper-vigilant, her want to make love or be sexual would be equivalent to saying, while she’s in a tree and she just escaped a tiger, “Hey honey, do you want a back massage? You want to go out for ice cream?” It’s not going to happen because she’s in this total stress mode, hiding in a tree.

Calming the Nervous System

Dr. Ray: The key thing, through meditation, coaching, and other techniques, is to calm the nervous system, and the nervous system, of course, will calm down the amygdala, so you can experience pleasure and joy again. But not just that, if you have unhealed trauma, your amygdala is going off all the time, probably not for the best reasons. For example, if you were abused as a child, and anytime you see a strong man or a big man, unconsciously it reminds you of your father who used to hit you. Imagine meeting a man for the first time who just happens to be big, and he’s friendly, but because he’s big, your amygdala says, run, hide, he’s unsafe, I’m unsafe. So we have to heal that.

Exploring Self-Sabotage in Relationships

The Cycle of Triggers and Reactions

Dr. Diane: I really appreciate your analogy of the tree example because it’s so easy for us to hear things like, “Well, how is this related? Why would something silly like my partner not taking out the trash when I asked them to, or not calling when they said they’d be five minutes late for work, create this trigger and unsafety?” Your tree example is so important—it might not seem logical based on our current understanding of trauma, but we’re still programmed like we’re running from that tiger or bear. Let’s break this down because what can happen is that people repeat the same patterns over and over again. I’m curious if that’s part of what you mean by self-sabotage, where it’s like, I get this trigger from my partner because they said something in a way, and they didn’t mean it, but it hurt my feelings or made me feel unsafe, and so I react a certain way to protect myself, libido shuts down, sex drive, connection, all the things. Is that what you mean by self-sabotaging, that vicious cycle of response?

Dr. Ray: Absolutely, it’s so most of the time people think it’s a conscious thing, but when I talk about self-sabotaging, it’s definitely an experience separate from who you really are. It’s that darker, unhealed part of yourself leading the show. I’ll give you a real subtle one where I’ve seen women run, and that is when the man actually says, “I love you,” because people who were closer to this woman when she was a little girl died, or people who said they loved her betrayed her. Imagine she has this unhealed trauma, and it’s not like it stops her from working or she’s an alcoholic, but people call her the Runaway Bride. When a man is really serious to be with her, she’s afraid to commit, afraid that she can’t make her own choices, afraid to be hurt again, therefore she runs away, she self-sabotages.

Recognizing Self-Sabotage vs. Intuition

Dr. Diane: How does somebody know if they’re self-sabotaging? There can be situations where leaving is the right thing, and maybe some women I talk to say things like, “Oh, I’m a bad picker. I keep picking men that are dysfunctional in some sort of way, or there’s a value system misalignment.” Where do they begin to know, am I self-sabotaging myself, or is my intuition right, or am I a bad picker, and I need to switch my strategy?

Dr. Ray: I’m going to make a generalization, which can trigger a lot of women listening to this, and I’m okay with that. I recognize that more with women, and women hearing this might go, “Oh, but I’ve experienced that with boyfriends,” so yes, it happens with men also. If you feel you didn’t do something wrong, you might never say, “I was wrong,” just because you feel that way. If you meet a guy, and your story after each experience is, “He was a jerk, he was this way,” and you’re talking about all that was wrong with him and not how you participated, not what you learned, and how you grew, then you’re not using relationships in the best way they could be to be a reflection of how you can grow. I don’t think women just necessarily choose bad men. I think it’s more that, number one, they don’t have clear boundaries and honor the red flags that come up on the first date or even the first couple of text messages, that you ignore because you don’t trust yourself. Number two, maybe no one has taught you that there are healthy men and unhealthy men, and that there’s a healthy way to discern the difference. If you never met a healthy man, you might not know—that’s why you work with a coach to develop a love map of your values. Number three, Law of Attraction—I believe that we attract what we are. Even if you’re a really loving person, you might be a vibrational match because you’re a people-pleaser, the perfect victim for the narcissist to perpetuate. If you always put out there, “Men are jerks, and I’m not going to find one,” just like a person who is afraid they’re going to strike out before they go up to hit, more likely they will strike out. So we create those experiences, and it takes personal responsibility to go, “Yes, I ignored the red flags. I really don’t trust myself. I don’t even know what a healthy relationship is. How do I share my boundaries and my deal breakers, and how do I start trusting that I can walk away from unhealthy relationships and lean into healthy ones?”

Empowerment and Breaking the Cycle

Flipping the Mirror for Self-Empowerment

Dr. Diane: I’m sure there’s people listening that are triggered by this, so stay here because I do want to ask Dr. Ray, how do we get ourselves out of the cycle? Before we do that, as I hear you say all these things, to me, if we’re going to boil out everything you said into one thing, what I hear is it’s time to be more personally empowered. My question for you is, because my previous question was around, if somebody is a bad picker, how do they know, is it self-sabotage or I’m just a bad picker? What I’m hearing in what you’re saying is that it’s not an either-or, but it’s more around, if things are not working out, then the fundamental thing is that self-empowerment of flipping that mirror around and looking at ourselves and saying, “Okay, why am I stuck in these patterns? Why am I stuck here?” Would you say that’s true, or am I missing something?

Dr. Ray: You are accurate. When I was working on my dissertation, I was single, felt a little bit insecure because I had to write it in a clinical way, which is not natural to me, and I was stressed. I wanted to meet a woman, and it was strange how all three women I met, I was physically attracted to, I kissed each one of them on the first date, so you think, “Oh, it went really well, we had a lot of fun,” but then they disappeared, all three of them. One of them happened to work at Emperor’s College in Santa Monica as an intern, and I decided to get acupuncture, and they set me up with her. Imagine that awkwardness, but it was really cool. She was into spirituality, like all three women I went out with. I said, “I was just curious, what happened?” She said, “Honestly, you were just a rebound person. I had just broken up with my boyfriend, and a couple of days after we went out, my cat was attacked by a dog and was almost killed, so all my energy went to that, and I decided to just stay single and work on myself.” She didn’t owe me a response, it was just one date. I saw it as such a great blast of, “Oh my God, most people never hear what happened.” I took responsibility for this and recognized, I really didn’t want to get a relationship right now. I was feeling really insecure, I had one foot in, one foot out, all these women were the same way—uncertainty. I attracted uncertainty, I attracted those who were not available, I wasn’t available, I was so immersed in my dissertation.

Dr. Diane: What I hear in that is this whole concept that we can turn any story into a story, because you did find out the reason with that one woman, but it would have been so easy to make some story in one’s head around, “None of these people like me because X, Y, and Z,” or “I’m not enough.” This kind of goes back to this self-empowerment thing—in order to have more trust, more depth of connection, or a better relationship physically, sexually, intimately with our partner and with ourselves, it comes down to releasing ourselves from those stories and the self-sabotage.

Practical Steps to Break the Cycle

Dr. Diane: Where do people start? How do people break this cycle? I see people in my community date, and they can go mad over, “I’m just not good enough, this person doesn’t like me for all these reasons,” and it could be as simple as they just have their own story that has nothing to do with us, but we create our own self-deprecating story out of it.

Dr. Ray: In my book, All It Takes Is One, it’s a simple, matter-of-fact read that breaks down consciousness in a layman’s way to understand how it shows up psychologically, emotionally, and how it can run your life. There’s an exercise called The Return of Love, where you answer questions as quickly as possible, like free association: “Love means… My family taught me that love meant… I received love when I… I didn’t receive love when I…” The response might be, “Love equals pain to me. My family taught me that love has to be earned. I received love when I achieved good grades. I didn’t receive love when I disagreed with my parents.” This simple technique helps you recognize, “Maybe I have a bad idea about love and relationships I never knew.” Self-sabotaging is an unconscious mechanism to protect you, to avoid pain, and move you toward pleasure, even if it screws things up after the fact. It’ll continue to operate that way until you feel good about love and have a clear relationship with how you want to show up. It’s got to be beyond the basics, like, “I want a man who is handsome, we have great sex, he listens to me.” It has to be, “I want a man to love my light and dark—do I love my light and dark? I want a man who can hold space for emotions—how comfortable am I with feedback?” You have to become the version of what you expect, and that takes introspection.

Dr. Diane: I say in my work, if you can’t name it, you can’t change it. What I hear in what you’re saying is, one of the first simple things is to actually understand what’s going on—name your tendencies, your beliefs. If you believe on a subconscious level that love is pain, there’s the initial problem to change. In your book, do you talk about action steps from there?

Dr. Ray: In my book, it gets into peeling the onion apart, discovering the deep hidden beliefs controlling your life, and reframing them so you can start living that way. For clients I coach for eight sessions, the first four might be healing a trauma, recognizing that what they experienced wasn’t love, it was manipulation. The next four sessions might be, now that you know what you want, how do you show up and practice that every day? For example, “I want to be more open and friendly,” so you practice that by going to the grocery store. When they start dating, they have a coach to talk to, where they might say, “I felt that same feeling I had when I was with my ex-husband.” It’s not that they’ll end up with a partner, but they create a new understanding of how they show up in relationships, so they feel more secure and confident.

Resources and Final Takeaways

Dr. Ray’s Offerings

Dr. Diane: You have a free giveaway for everybody that we’re going to put into the show notes. It’s your Relationship Roadmap Course Guidebook. Can you tell us a little about that?

Dr. Ray: The Rapid Relationship Rescue Master Class has videos and a cheat sheet, but it basically takes you through an experience where you break down your belief system about relationships, similar to what we did in this podcast, but in your home, creating a sacred container to peel back patterns and beliefs that don’t serve you. The other thing is my book, All It Takes Is One: Drop Your One Big Hidden Belief and Master Your Life. A lot of psychologists, therapists, and coaches have bought the book because it’s a simple manual, very accessible, and you can apply it quickly without getting lost in details. The Amazon reviews have been exciting—it’s a simple guidebook that opens people up to quick breakthroughs.

One Actionable Step to Stop Self-Sabotage

Dr. Diane: If we’re going to leave everybody with one actionable step around something that can help stop self-sabotage and get back into more connection with themselves or their partner, what would you break it down to?

Dr. Ray: If you have a negative thought about yourself, a person, or a situation, and in that moment you feel resistance, anger, or pain, ask yourself these questions: Number one, is this true? Number two, who do I become, or how do I act when I have this thought? Number three, how would I be if I didn’t have these thoughts? You’ll probably say it’s not true, point out a behavior you don’t like, and if you didn’t have that thought, you’d be getting your nails done, taking a walk, laughing, enjoying life. Life is defined by the questions we ask ourselves.

Closing Remarks

Dr. Diane: Thank you so much for being here. Just as a reminder to everybody listening, this year of 2024, we are doing a promo at the end of the year where if you guys rate, review, and download the episodes, whoever gets the most downloads, ratings, and reviews, we will invite them back at the end of the year for a super-duper deep dive to really pick their brain. I would love to have Dr. Ray back, so please do download this show, share it with your friends. Thank you again for being here, everybody. Dr. Diane signing off, always reminding you to stay classy, stay sexy, and always be a little badass-y. See you next time. Thank you for listening to the Libido Lounge. Please don’t keep me a secret, please share this with your friends. You can find me on YouTube, on Instagram, and check out our Modern Libido Club for so much more!