[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to Sexology, a podcast that untangles the science of sex and pleasure.
[SPEAKER_00]: And now, with this week's episode, your host, Clinical Psychologist, Dr. Naseneen Moali.
[SPEAKER_02]: Hello there, welcome back to another episode of The Sexology podcast.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm your host, Dr. Nazanine Moolly.
[SPEAKER_02]: Before we get started, I want to share something I'm really excited about.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you're single and looking for a long-term partnership, I'd love to invite you to LA Love Lab.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a curated psychologist-led match making experience designed specially for professionals who are looking for meaningful, lasting partnership, not just another dating match.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's co-created by me and my colleague, Dr. Richard Espinellozoz, and we put so much love and thought into it.
[SPEAKER_02]: We host it every few months, and our next one is happening in October.
[SPEAKER_02]: If that sounds like something you would enjoy, grab your ticket now through the link in the show notes.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now let's get into today's conversation.
[SPEAKER_02]: Have you ever found yourself thinking, why do I keep falling for the same type of person?
[SPEAKER_02]: Or maybe you said I Fisher wasn't attracted to emotionally unavailable people.
[SPEAKER_02]: Today, we're exploring one of the biggest questions in relationships.
[SPEAKER_02]: Can you actually change who you're attracted to?
[SPEAKER_02]: We'll talk about the difference between chemistry and compatibility, while butterflies aren't always a green flag, how trauma shapes attraction and what it takes to build healthier relationship patterns.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm joined by Jane Garnett, an Oxford-educated licensed marriage and family therapist, EMDR practitioner, an author of this time with feeling.
[SPEAKER_02]: Jane's work helped people understand why they keep repeating the same relationship patterns, and more importantly, how to finally change them.
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, let's
[SPEAKER_02]: Hello and welcome back to another episode of Essexology podcast.
[SPEAKER_02]: I am so excited to welcome Jane Garnett to our show, Jane Garnett, welcome to our show.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you so much.
[SPEAKER_02]: I am so excited about our conversation today.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're going to talk about our traction.
[SPEAKER_02]: Is that something we have control over or not?
[SPEAKER_02]: So we often hear and I know your fellow therapists from our clients that they say, I wish I wasn't attracted to this type of person.
[SPEAKER_02]: Let me start with asking this question, can we actually change who we're attracted to or basically we are wire certainly?
[SPEAKER_01]: Great question.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you're willing to change yourself, you can change who you're attracted to.
[SPEAKER_01]: The more you fill in your own holes, the less you're going to be looking to someone else to fill in your gaps or overcompensate.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the more balanced you'll be and the more likely you are to attract good things on story short.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm curious about, so we journey of healing is a lifelong process, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: How do we know if our template is healthy for us or not?
[SPEAKER_02]: Are we there at a place that we want?
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, you know, many people want trusting, loving relationship, but sexual attraction.
[SPEAKER_02]: Is it our attachment style, their partner, like, how can we assess those things?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, first of all, it's
[SPEAKER_01]: healthy to want healthy relationships, wanting healthy relationships doesn't mean that we'd know how to have them.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the fact that we might not know how to have them isn't necessarily our fault.
[SPEAKER_01]: You mentioned healthy templates.
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't all have healthy templates.
[SPEAKER_01]: So where do we find these healthy templates?
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's important to search for them instead of blaming ourselves
[SPEAKER_01]: for perhaps being attracted to the quote unquote wrong things or the quote unquote wrong people.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't like to think of it that way.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think through the wrong kinds of attraction.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think we just get stuck in certain patterns that are familiar to us and we don't actually have experiences of something better.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we have to forgive ourselves, whoever wherever we are
[SPEAKER_01]: and understand that wherever we are is the beginning of the adventure to the next place.
[SPEAKER_01]: If all we're thinking is we just need to undo something that's wrong with us, that's just piling more toxicity.
[SPEAKER_01]: into the equation.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, we start by saying, wherever I'm at in this picture is okay, it's wherever I'm at, I don't know more than I know, but am I willing to look at the origin of my patterning and my willing to work on it and am I willing
[SPEAKER_01]: to be open to other people.
[SPEAKER_02]: Beautiful.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I see the Lord with lots of educated, psychologically oriented clients that I work, but especially women, that they know that, they can they want something healthy, they know what healthy look like.
[SPEAKER_02]: But when someone that they have those potential comes to their life, if they don't find themselves attracted to them,
[SPEAKER_02]: The sexual attraction only comes through those relationships that are potentially not healthy.
[SPEAKER_02]: How can we settle that dilemma, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Because it's hard to be in a relationship that you're not sexually charged.
[SPEAKER_02]: You don't have that yearning.
[SPEAKER_02]: And also, you don't want to repeat your past.
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think we need to find these new places on the map, and maybe it's through fantasy or TV shows,
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, one of those rare couples who you admire, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: It's easy to look around and see all the couples where it's not working.
[SPEAKER_01]: But who does actually have that sweet spot?
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, that is, you know, a supportive relationship that still feels alive.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that's a sweet spot, a sexy relationship that still feels relaxed.
[SPEAKER_01]: that's a sweet spot.
[SPEAKER_01]: And by the way, I don't think any of these relationships are that way all the time, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Because relationships have their cycles.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sex has its cycles, relaxation has its cycles.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think we want to be very forgiving about the whole, the whole picture.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I think it's important to use our creative energy towards, you know, creating pictures that involve
[SPEAKER_01]: is a very easy split to get into if you don't know any better right, just like, oh, the avoiding bad boy unavailable man or the boring and the reliable, you know, and I'm not saying there isn't some truth in it, but but some of this is cultural conditioning and a lack of imagination as well.
[SPEAKER_02]: We would tell us more, how can we change that, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Like that, that sounds a lot of defeat experience on one boring and like their defeat, that criteria.
[SPEAKER_02]: How would you change that dynamic?
[SPEAKER_02]: Like we would invite people to change it internally.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, there's an idea that whoever we're meeting in a relationship is really just us.
[SPEAKER_01]: So if we see the relationship as a mirror,
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, you see that quote unquote boring person as a way to meet your exciting self that might be one way to look at it or you see that exciting person who's maybe a little toxic as a way to meet your exciting and toxic self.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's one way to look at it is relationships as a mirror.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're not static.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're relative.
[SPEAKER_01]: So everything we're seeing is is a version of us.
[SPEAKER_01]: Another angle on this is programming.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was thinking about this recently because I used to binge on romance novels.
[SPEAKER_01]: I like high literature, but I also like that kind of pulp.
[SPEAKER_01]: fiction that is designed specifically for women and it's very basic stuff and at least when I was growing up, I don't know what it's like now, but all the men who were the heroes were basically avoidance.
[SPEAKER_01]: We didn't use that terminology at the time.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was just like, oh, he's got a strong jaw and, you know, he's wealthy and he's
[SPEAKER_01]: they were always unavailable until they weren't and that was what the whole structure of the romance novel was, was the the needy woman trying to get the attention of the unavailable man.
[SPEAKER_01]: That was programming.
[SPEAKER_01]: We didn't call them avoidance.
[SPEAKER_01]: We call them hot guys.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's only being rather recently that we started to dismantle this kind of programming.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, do you think
[SPEAKER_01]: The bad boy, the unavailable man, was, you know, sold to us as sexy.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was the erotic fantasy based on the idea of patriarchy, which is, you know, will be protected by the boring guy, but we secretly want to have sex with the other guy.
[SPEAKER_02]: So these are just all like old cliches, you know, who do you?
[SPEAKER_02]: I didn't think about it that way, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Like an armed generation.
[SPEAKER_02]: That was what what the template that you were handed, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: You got to change someone's attachment.
[SPEAKER_02]: So because all of the sudden for the perfect person, these people were like available under the secure attachment, which in reality, that's never the case.
[SPEAKER_01]: That takes like decades of therapy to arrive.
[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think the real question is, is the other person willing to work with you?
[SPEAKER_02]: But you also see that people get blindsided is when, like, they are in a relationship and they find attraction with someone else.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's unexpected.
[SPEAKER_02]: That has that sexy,
[SPEAKER_02]: energy and it's not even like you're going out looking for it but it seems like it's somehow it pulls you in and I also know that for some people it's for at least for my clients that's being connected to their trauma histories yeah and trauma impact our desire can we confuse like make chaos feels like you can trauma can feel chaos as chemistry well there's a few paths to this
[SPEAKER_01]: chaos is chemistry.
[SPEAKER_01]: So is calm.
[SPEAKER_01]: Everything is chemistry.
[SPEAKER_01]: Everything has its chemical imprint.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yes, but of course chaos is a very kind of a big deal kind of chemistry.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's an eye-catching chemistry.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a chemistry that's going to make you pay attention.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I would say pay attention.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, if you feel chaos in your system, because you're suddenly super turned on by something,
[SPEAKER_01]: pay attention.
[SPEAKER_01]: That doesn't mean going sleep with them right away.
[SPEAKER_01]: It means what is activated in you?
[SPEAKER_01]: I really researched that and researched the fantasy.
[SPEAKER_01]: I feel that people are afraid of their own fantasies because they're afraid that sex will disrupt their life.
[SPEAKER_01]: But sex is much less likely to disrupt your life if you're willing to understand it and
[SPEAKER_01]: and might take on chemistry and that kind of chaotic traumatic chemistry is that it is looking to find its way home, it is looking to heal something.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the best way to deal with that is to take the ride in your own imagination.
[SPEAKER_01]: What's the charge here?
[SPEAKER_01]: What is so exciting?
[SPEAKER_01]: What's the fantasy?
[SPEAKER_01]: Where do you think that sex with this person will lead you?
[SPEAKER_01]: to another life?
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you want to have another life?
[SPEAKER_01]: Another experience of yourself?
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you just want to feel more alive?
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you feel that if this person wanted you, then you would be more valuable?
[SPEAKER_01]: What is the gap?
[SPEAKER_01]: What's the gap that this fan to see?
[SPEAKER_01]: is rushing in to fill, because it's almost guaranteed to be different than what is actually going to be when you start having sex with that person.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think what's interesting is that you're mentioning the second of invitation.
[SPEAKER_02]: Instead of I know some people will kind of try to manage it, pushing it away.
[SPEAKER_02]: But in a way it seems like an invitation
[SPEAKER_02]: What do I want more?
[SPEAKER_02]: What do I want experience more?
[SPEAKER_02]: Why this person?
[SPEAKER_02]: I know for many of my clients, sometimes they saw people that they were not even as healthy as their partner.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like I said, there was an element of trauma, reenactment in their experiences.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the person that they...
[SPEAKER_02]: chose.
[SPEAKER_02]: They told me that they had better sex with more connect that sex with their spouse, partner.
[SPEAKER_02]: So with this other person, it was an element of detachment.
[SPEAKER_02]: So sometimes we will be able to get affairs, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: They think about like the other partner is probably better, or like it's better sex, or better relationship, but sometimes that is not the case.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, absolutely, I think having an affair is splitting.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the oldest difference in the book having affair.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's cutting all life into a split screen.
[SPEAKER_01]: And splitting is a way to manage overwhelmed difficulty, depression, anxiety.
[SPEAKER_01]: So having an affair is a way to to
[SPEAKER_01]: and to try to make a hole, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: It's sort of a way to kind of cheat your way into a hole.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not saying that, you know, people should only have one partner.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's everybody's decision.
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you're, if you're lying about it and you're hiding it, then you are actually spitting your own.
[SPEAKER_01]: consciousness in half and and in a way you're depriving yourself of the possibility of having a fuller picture of connection.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think it's interesting to look at that angle as well, which is our own actual tolerance for connection and human connection within committed relationship.
[SPEAKER_01]: I spend a lot of my life
[SPEAKER_01]: craving, attention, and love from an avoidant man, I still work with avoidant man, but in a different way now, because I understand my part in it, because I understand that there's a part of me that secretly avoidant and it's so much easier to fantasize about this person who's going to meet all your needs if you actually know that they're not going to come that close to you.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So often we construct these whole sort of fantasy pictures along with the pain of feeling like, oh, it's never going to happen, but I wish it would.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's something very safe about that.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's very different, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: If you're in a marriage with someone who's willing to work with you're willing to show up again and again and have bad sex with you and have good sex with you and have no sex with you and see you without makeup and you know, it's it's a whole different story.
[SPEAKER_02]: such a wonderful point that you brought up is kind of like sometimes in relationship, it can't feel too vulnerable, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: And that kind of like feeling too vulnerable.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like it gets in the way of people really
[SPEAKER_02]: can tolerate it and sometimes seeking these relationships is a way to tolerate that intimacy, as we said, we're kind of like spreading the energy, we're splitting and also I know many, many people have this internal belief that if the person truly knows me, they wouldn't want me, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think now then we kind of have that in the mix.
[SPEAKER_02]: for people who are curious to understand their pattern.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, what are my patterns, how, what's my part and all of this?
[SPEAKER_02]: What do you recommend them to do?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple of ways of doing if you're already partnered, then you look at your partner and try on the idea of your partner being a mirror.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if that doesn't make any sense, try on your partner as the idea of being like the opposite.
[SPEAKER_01]: But try on the idea that your partner is in some way,
[SPEAKER_01]: reflecting you.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you're not partnered, you can look at your past attractions and your past relationships and study them.
[SPEAKER_01]: Look at what your complaint was about the other person and then look at what you were doing there.
[SPEAKER_01]: There've been so many people that I've worked with so many women in particular who have complained endlessly about being with these narcissists men.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was asked them, what's going on here?
[SPEAKER_01]: Why are we giving this narcissist?
[SPEAKER_01]: Who is already very good at getting attention?
[SPEAKER_01]: So much attention.
[SPEAKER_01]: What's that about?
[SPEAKER_01]: There's something in there.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a structure in there.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's an unmet need.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a jealousy.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a desire to conquer something impossible.
[SPEAKER_01]: which might look like reinforcing low self esteem.
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's some, there's usually some hunger in these difficult relationship patterns that relates to an unmet need and unfortunately there's a lot of shame around this.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think the most important thing is to really, even if you don't believe it, just try on for a minute the idea that nothing is fundamentally wrong
[SPEAKER_01]: you've just got fed certain things and the were certain gaps and you're still trying to fill the gaps.
[SPEAKER_01]: And once you understand that, it just gives you a lot more power to ask for what you want to try and fill up those gaps yourself or maybe just to grieve them, just to grieve that you have these experiences of loss or hunger inside you as do most human beings.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't mean you're a bad person or that you're never going
[SPEAKER_02]: For people that they noticed that the desire to be chosen, I see it so often, like even people told me like the reason I chose that a fair partner was like the person didn't like anyone and they chose me which is as kind of can be rooted in our trauma history, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Like that feeling of chosen.
[SPEAKER_02]: And
[SPEAKER_02]: Can we do to change that, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Like I'm understanding that now we have don't understanding of this is my pattern.
[SPEAKER_02]: What would you invite people to look at next?
[SPEAKER_01]: I would invite them to imagine what it would be like if they really chose themselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: If they really believed that they were valuable through and through.
[SPEAKER_01]: If they really lived life in that way.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's so common to desire being chosen.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you think about it again, chemically, like when you're chosen as a kid, it gives you a kind of a chemical hit, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: I want you on my team and what is that hit, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Is the feeling of like, oh, I get to belong, I get to be in connection.
[SPEAKER_01]: I exist.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, some of it's that feeling of just getting to feel alive.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's a lot of why people have affairs.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're not feeling alive and
[SPEAKER_01]: But if we see a liveness as a choice and I'm not saying it's an easy switch to switch on if it's been off for a long time, but it is a switch we can switch on ourselves, but it does mean confronting the real map.
[SPEAKER_01]: you carry internally about your own value.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is I know that we see that every time in therapy, like every, every, every, over an or an therapy for for people are willing to do the work.
[SPEAKER_02]: But how is it possible?
[SPEAKER_02]: Is that something that you think people can change that internal resources?
[SPEAKER_02]: Because sometimes, as he said, it's more about their inner way nervous system, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: That, like,
[SPEAKER_01]: EMDR, which is what I practice attachment-focused EMDR, works directly with the nervous system, and the idea of resourcing the nervous system.
[SPEAKER_02]: I love that tell for people who don't know about EMDR, tell so a bit about how does that work.
[SPEAKER_01]: EMDR uses bilateral stimulation, which if we're doing it on Zoom is tapping one side and other side, you can also do it visually by watching something go from one side to the other side or audibly by hearing an always go one side to another side.
[SPEAKER_01]: It gets the brain into a kind of meditative state that is great for processing traumatic material.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when I say traumatic,
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, piece of sexual abuse, or it could be a relational trauma, like a parent who didn't give you enough attention, all traumas affect the nervous system.
[SPEAKER_01]: And a lot of the time what we're doing is we're looking at life through a tangled up, tangled nervous system.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not our fault.
[SPEAKER_01]: We didn't have another template.
[SPEAKER_01]: We didn't have another experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: but we're making decisions about life from a place that isn't relaxed, essentially.
[SPEAKER_01]: That doesn't feel okay, that doesn't feel safe.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's gonna be making weird decisions and probably bad decisions right if you, or just limited decisions, if you think about, you know, I don't know, I was just thinking about rats, you know, how they're just, they just scuttle in one direction.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, that's got a, that's the scared mind, you know, it's like, ah, I'm making mistake.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm with the book, wrong person.
[SPEAKER_01]: I should be in a fair.
[SPEAKER_01]: I should be this right and what EMDR is really gets into that root system that is in the body, you know, and you get to grieve the old longings and you get to reimagine because both of the size of the brain are getting stimulated at the same time.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what the tapping does.
[SPEAKER_01]: You get to reimagine.
[SPEAKER_01]: What a different story would look like if your nervous system is relaxed like what would a healthy relationship look like, you know, like if I if you and I are out having a cocktail like I could, you know, I can say a few things about it, but if I'm in my EMDR session.
[SPEAKER_01]: I can really imagine that and then my therapist can say, oh, how does that feel to you and I can be like, oh, well, I feel so relaxed and excited at the same time.
[SPEAKER_01]: Really relaxed and excited.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, like I can feel like my janitor's online, but I also feel like I could just like,
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, lie back on the couch and like look at the sunlight, you know, and it's like, oh, that suddenly these these new possibilities stuck coming online.
[SPEAKER_01]: Where do they even come from?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, they come from the body getting more relaxed and the imagination getting stimulated.
[SPEAKER_01]: that is a lot more productive than scanning the bar for the next guy who or woman or whoever, right, might fill in that gap.
[SPEAKER_01]: So what we can do in the NDR that is harder to do in traditional, you know, to just talk therapy is actually generate experiences, the felt sense.
[SPEAKER_01]: So even though we might not have gotten it from our parents, there's somewhere in us that we carry these kind of
[SPEAKER_01]: visions of wholeness and satisfaction, according to what is authentic to our actual body, you know, on an actual mind.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I think it can be very, very helpful with the, with the relational field.
[SPEAKER_01]: And another way of looking at it more scientifically is it really practicing neuroplasticity so you're trying on different possibilities in real time.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I appreciate that you're bringing that out, because sometimes people say, I, okay, it doesn't work for me, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, and there, but when you say, there, it doesn't work for me, saying that I don't like food, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: There's so many different type of cuisine, different experiences, different flavors, and as you mentioned, that
[SPEAKER_02]: Sometimes for some people purely talk therapy is helpful for some people they need to be able to have somatic experience seeing perhaps EMD or different ways that you can find healing but what I love that you mentioned that it's not like your broken, it's more about what is my path to to help as and cultivating a life that I desire.
[SPEAKER_02]: For people who are interested to learn more about you, the resources you have, your practice, what are some of the places they can find you?
[SPEAKER_01]: Hmm.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, my website is my name, JaneGoneck.com.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm on Instagram at the BananaJane.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I've written a book recently called This Time With Feeling, which is about coming alive in your own story, and you can find that on Amazon or Barnes & Noble online.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you so much for your time for all this wonderful information you shared with your old audience.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you so much for having me, such a pleasure.
[SPEAKER_02]: I want to leave you with this.
[SPEAKER_02]: A traction isn't your destiny.
[SPEAKER_02]: The people you're drawn to it today don't have to be the people you're drawn to forever.
[SPEAKER_02]: As you heal, build self-affirnness and create more emotional safety in your life.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's completely possible for your traction patterns to evolve too.
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you are ready to date differently and looking for a meaningful relationship, don't forget about LA Love Lab.
[SPEAKER_02]: Our next psychologist, let matchmaking event is happening this October, and we'll love to have you there.
[SPEAKER_02]: You can learn and reserve your spot through the link in the show notes.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you in the next episode of the
[SPEAKER_02]: Thanks for listening to Sixology Podcasts for more great content visit www.sixologypodcast.com Please be advised that information presented on this podcast is not a substitute for seeking help from a licensed mental health provider