482 - Un-Diagnose Yourself with Todd Baratz
Welcome, Todd!
Todd Baratz, our guest for this episode, is a renowned psychotherapist and sex therapist whose innovative approach to mental health and relationships has established him as a leading figure in his field. In addition to his clinical practice, Baratz is a prolific writer and speaker. His insights are regularly featured in various media outlets, where he discusses topics ranging from romantic relationships to individual mental wellness. He lives in New York City and Los Angeles. Learn more on Instagram under his handle @YourDiagnonsense.
Some of the questions Todd fields in today’s episode are:
Your Instagram account seems to be a response to the rise of relationship advice and mental health advice proliferating on social media. At this moment, is there one piece of advice that you still see floating around that you wish you could just laser evaporate off the face of the Earth?
There is a particular relationship fantasy that is becoming easier to knock down as a straw man: the very Disney, hyperromantic, sweep-you-off-your-feet happily ever after story. But it seems like when you look at internet culture, you’ve identified the rise of a new relationship fantasy, marked by things such as expecting a partner to validate you 100% of the time, or needing a partner to communicate their emotions in the same way that you do. Can you talk more about this new set of relationship expectations that you see people holding?
You argue that society tends to over-pathologize normal day-to-day struggles. What are “cultural diagnoses?”
You have made the argument that we are too quick to judge ourselves for being too clingy, especially early on in a relationship or when we’re in the dating process. You encourage people to be more clingy instead - can you speak to that?
You mention in the book that you often advocate for people to embrace a “good enough” relationship, and that this invites opposition and arguments from people on social media. Can you tell us how you define a “good enough” relationship, and why you think this concept can be so uncomfortable for people?
You share quite a bit about your personal experiences with the pain of cheating and infidelity. And despite having experienced quite a bit of pain, you take the stance that cheating isn’t necessarily something to quickly condemn - that infidelity is complicated, it is here to stay, and that we should work on understanding it first. What do you wish that we all understood about infidelity on a cultural level?
You go deep into sharing the story of a ten year romantic relationship that sounds like it was both life giving and frustrating, both supportive and deeply painful at times. In reading your telling of the end of that relationship and the disentangling process, I really got the sense of your being pulled in two directions. It seems like there were multiple line in the sand moments for you - realizing that there was a point where there was just no trust left in the relationship, realizing that the too of you were too different from each other, too enmeshed – but then you also spend a lot of time recognizing the areas where you could have approached the relationship in a different way, where you could have been more tolerant, and where if you had changed yourself things could have turned out differently. Now that you’re a few years out from that relationship, I was wondering where your heart lands now. When you think about that relationship, does it fall under the category of a “good enough” relationship?
Transcript
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Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we are joined by special guest, Todd Baratz. Todd Baratz is a renowned psychotherapist, sex therapist, and creator of the popular Instagram account, YourDiagnonsense, where he discusses relationships, sex, and all the other nonsense that accompanies the human condition. He is also the brand new author with a new book that's out today called How to Love Someone Without Losing Your Mind. Go check that out and Todd, thank you so much for joining us today.
Todd: Thank you for that really sweet introduction. Yes, my book is out. It's really wild to hear. Thank you, it's really nice to be here with all of you.
Emily: I just wanted to start off real quickly, because I have a dear friend who loves your Instagram, and just really, really loves everything that you have to say and even said to me that he's had a crush on you for the last two years and that you're the blueprint for his next partner because he just got out of a very long marriage.
Todd: Oh wow, oh, God. What a review?
Emily: I know it really was.
Todd: Wait till they actually meet the monster. Do as I say, not as I do but that's it.
Emily: He was very excited to have you on the show.
Dedeker: Your Instagram account, the way that I read it, it seems to be a response to the rise of relationship advice and mental health advice, just proliferating on social media for the past few years. I wanted to start by asking, at this moment in time, is there one piece of advice that you still see floating around that you wish you could just laser evaporate off the face of the earth?
Todd: Yes. The whole thing about self-love is a little frustrating. It's not that self-love isn't important, but the way that it's so reduced and oversimplified, I just feel like it's constantly in my face. Slap a little self-love on it and Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo, you're going to be healed, past tense.
I guess both of them, the concept of being healed, period, done, and self-love as being this majorly crucial ingredient to becoming cured or healed, it's just such an oversimplification.
I don't know anyone that feels particularly seen by it, validated, seen, understood that it's a struggle, self-love, love for other people, love in general, we could even define it, I don't know. Really challenging stuff that's simplified into soundbites.
Dedeker: Sure, of course which is part and parcel of just the whole social media experience. The whole self-love piece, it feels like, at least the way I see it often landing on clients that I work with, is this is just yet another thing to feel like we're failing at at all times.
Jase: I think ironically promoting self-love is this panacea that's going to solve all of our problems just makes us all feel worse because we don't actually experience it or we try to do it and things don't feel better or we feel like we're failing at it so it's like just another thing to be failing at in some ways.
Todd: Yes, built into the conversation of self-love is implied that you don't love yourself and you're not doing a good job so like, figure it out.
Dedeker: Because you mentioned also, in passing, this concept of healing as being a process that we can get to the end of. I'm wondering about, in your stance, as a therapist, how do you deal with that with clients, because I do think that often clients come to a therapist with a sense of like there's going to be an end point, right?
Todd: Yes.
Dedeker: I'm going to work on this very particular thing, this person's going to help me and then at some point, I'm going to know that it's healed.
Todd: When I do an initial consult, it's usually over the phone and oftentimes, I would be asked, "How long does this take?" I'm like, "I don't know. I don't know how long it takes." Maybe the rest of your life. If it's a specific crisis to work through, until that crisis is over. The idea of when does it end and how do I cure myself is really alluring but depending on individual experience, it's not necessarily the case.
Like I was saying, some things you can get over and we move on and it doesn't really impact us. For the most part, traumas, attachment trauma, childhood issues that we all have because we are all one's children, they stay with us. The suffering might change but the presence of those issues, I don't think, disappear. Change or growth, I think I would rather use than healed. I know that a lot of people get comfort in certain language, so I don't take that away from them so long as we're finding the nuance and the definition of what we're referring to as healed.
Jase: It makes me want to get philosophical for a second, because I think that we can have a similar approach to the way that a lot of podcasts about success, like in an entrepreneur sense or a business sense or something like that is as if it's a goal to be achieved and yet, it's this ever moving goal or there's always going to be new circumstances or new situations. I think to get philosophical, it's like if we did reach an end state. It's like, "Well, then what? Now it's boring, right?"
Todd: Now we die.
Jase: Right. That's it.
Todd: You die.
Jase: I think that applies both in business success or whatever success means to you, as well as relationships or our personal growth. It's like if it's done, then you're dead, there's nothing more to do. I think that's hard for people to wrap their heads around because we're so goal motivated.
Emily: I'm interested to go back a little bit and talk to you about why it was that you wanted to get into this space in the first place, not just the Instagram space and maybe change it up a little bit in terms of how people are looking at it and how people are viewing the pithy self-help/therapy sector, but also just what took you into therapy and into sex therapy in the first place.
Todd: I started therapy very young, I was 10. My family was pretty dysfunctional, but the one thing they did is they put us on therapy, which was great for someone being born in the '80s. I was very lucky.
Dedeker: Early adopter.
Todd: Yes. I started therapy really young. It wasn't until I was 14 that I met my current therapist Derek, who I write about in my book, and he literally changed my life. I would be dead. I had such an impactful experience that I was a musical theater gay and then I realized that I didn't get along with some of the musical theater kids because I wasn't so hyper all the time. I've always liked psychology and reading and understanding myself really helped me.
I was just like, "Okay, I'm going to go to school. I'm going to study this." Then one thing went to another and went to grad school for it. My initial interest was really selfish in terms of learning information, philosophy, psychology, all of this stuff about my life experience and life in general really helped me. It helped calm my anxiety, it helped soothe my depression. It is my spirituality. I'm not a spiritual person, but I do believe in this interconnectedness, philosophical, psychological experience. It's really saved my life quite literally.
Then it's what led to my interest in studying in school and further becoming a therapist and sex therapy because my therapist, Derek, he is a sex therapist. At 14, he was asking me if I was jerking off and if I liked my dick. I just thought that was part of therapy that people talk about sex. Then when I got to grad school, and there was one course on sex including sexuality and queer sex and painful sex, literally anything sex related, I realized that people actually aren't talking about sex and therapy. I always found sex interesting and always had sexual issues. That's what led me to specialize in sex therapy after I finished grad school.
Basically, I have a lot of issues.
Emily: Don't we all.
Dedeker: That's the big reveal that everybody, including many therapists also have a lot of issues and often that's what gets them into this field I think-
Emily: For sure.
Dedeker: -is what I've seen among people. Related to that, I think that I've seen the rise of two competing camps a little bit that there's the camp of, everyone needs to be in therapy, at some point, everyone should do this. Then I've also seen a little bit of the pushback to that of, no, this shouldn't be a requirement for absolutely everybody, maybe therapy is not the thing for everybody. Maybe some people can work through their stuff without a professional, things like that.
I'm thinking a lot about something that you talk about on your account about how, unfortunately, we have a that doesn't really set us up with a lot of relationship skills or emotional skills as it is. I'm curious about where you land on that side of the issue.
Todd: I'm fundamentally biased. I'm a therapist.
Dedeker: Of course.
Todd: I'm like, "Go to therapy, everybody." It's easy for me to say. Like I said, at 10, my parents were like, "You're crazy, go to therapy." I grew up in a place that I don't think many people did in terms of being encouraged to go to therapy. It's really hard to say everybody should go when many people have so much internalized stigma and shame about going to therapy, even still with all of this trending content that we can consume.
In an ideal world, people would have access to a therapeutic space, whether you want to call that a therapist, yoga, meditation, I don't fucking know, something that helps us self-reflect and develop awareness or a connection to something beyond our anxious spirally thoughts in the moment or sadness and really learn about life in general. Again, if that's therapy, I, of course, think that's great or coaching, but some people really don't want to do that. I think reading self-reflection, coursework online, I think some self-exploration is really crucial for living.
Dedeker: I think another dominant theme that you tend to talk about and write about is about how, sometimes, and I think this has come along with the rise of online mental health advice and relationship advice, but sometimes society can over-pathologize struggles that are normal and that are very day-to-day. You've mentioned, sometimes, this idea of cultural diagnosis, and I was wondering if you could speak more about that.
Todd: By cultural diagnosis, I mean the original title of my book, I wanted it to be Undiagnose Yourself.
Dedeker: I like that.
Todd: It wasn't, I don't think, catchy enough, I don't know. Cultural diagnoses meaning people pleaser, toxic. Narcissism is a diagnosis, but everyone now is being expanded jerks-
Dedeker: Everybody's ex is a narcissist.
Todd: -are now included, these labels that have become values that we can stamp a word bad or unhealed or problematic, if you're a people pleaser, or I'm blanking on all of the other cultural diagnoses, but mostly the values that we have about how people should be living their life. There aren't necessarily words, but values about relationships, like if you're getting out of a relationship, you shouldn't get into another one. You shouldn't date, you should be on your own, independence, over dependence.
A lot of these new values about relationships that are cultural-specific is what I refer to when talking about cultural diagnosis. Basically, the value systems that are pretty dogmatic about how we should be living our lives, engaging in relationships, and having sex.
Dedeker: What do you think-- because I see that as, and I think you mentioned this in your book as well, that some of this comes out of many, many decades and generations of not thinking about these things, of not identifying trauma, of not identifying maybe some internalized people-pleasing, as a trauma response, all these things that it's like the pendulum has swung really far the opposite way of maybe being hyper-focused on these things, how do you think we push against that? How do you think we undo yes, find a way to meet in the middle or some middle path there.
Todd: It's different for everybody. Historically, we had no boundaries. People were told to people please, not to feel, to apologize, even if they were abused. It was really problematic and really traumatic for generations. I do see all of these new life values as a trauma response, a cultural collective response to what our parents and grandparents have been through, which is pretty horrific, everybody's individual stories. the pendulum, yes, it's flung completely in the other direction.
Should it go in the middle, I don't know. I think it has to be individual-specific, but I think we have to think people, me, all of us need to reflect and pause before stopping judgments and shoulds and shouldn'ts on how we live our lives. For some people, if they want to, some people really are resistant to the idea of letting go of some of these rules, and that's okay, too. I think pausing and reflecting about how we want to live our lives and the rules we want to live them by is really important. Yes, a middle ground would be nice.
Jase: Always.
Todd: Or maybe just flexibility, I think, would be nice. Because every single person I see and couple I see for therapy, they come in feeling wildly anxious, so insecure, and so scared that they're doing it wrong. It, meaning their relationships, the way they're having sex, the way they're coming, the limit doesn't exist to what people think they're doing wrong. They're in the wrong relationship, they are the wrong-- that's coming from all of these values and so, we, in therapy, talk about their story and try to develop some meaning in a narrative around the insecurity. It's through that narrative that creates nuance and real appreciation for the complexity that some of these values, like 'don't have sex on the first day', have created.
Jase: It's just funny hearing you talk about this and thinking about this constant struggle that we have in making our content, too, where it's like, we want to find the helpful things, and while it would probably do better for our social media presence and maybe for our SEO engagement to be a lot more, 'this is the answer', to something.
Emily: Definitive, yes.
Jase: We just can't, because we have a certain moral compass that's like, "No, don't feed that lie to people." Instead, like you're saying, it is this, 'let's explore, let's open up some willingness to question things', rather than just looking for, "I want the easy answer." One thing that's making me think of is, with diagnosis, in general, that we've seen online a lot of this diagnosing other people, diagnosing ourselves, all these things, and I remember when I first went to therapy as an adult, I went a little bit as a kid, but when I went for the first time as an 'adult', in college, I came in really wanting a diagnosis of some kind because I was like, "I feel bad, this stuff doesn't feel good. Can you help me figure out what that is so then I can start figuring out what to do about it?"
I remember my therapist at the time, who was like a Skinnerian behaviorist type of therapist. He was just really resistant to that. He was like, "I don't think that's helpful for you to just be chasing a diagnosis of some sort. Instead, let's try to focus on what's really going on here." I do think he was helpful, but I remember at the time being very frustrated by that because it felt like if I had a word for it, I could then find things to do about it, I guess.
Now I feel like I see a lot of the dark side of that that maybe he was trying to keep me from, and didn't realize it, but is that by diagnosing myself or getting someone to diagnose me with something, it can be like an excuse to not have to introspect or to not really look at what's actually going on and instead just stick to whatever people tell me I can believe about that label.
Todd: That's cool of your therapist to push back, especially, I don't want to assume how old you are, but at a different time when people weren't maybe thinking as broadly as we do now about some of that stuff. I think a lot of people still do get a lot of relief and do seek diagnosis. Being on social media, I've really learned how diverse perspectives values really are. What am I supposed to say, "You're wrong. You shouldn't want that." People are on their own path and journey.
While I don't want to diagnose these, and I've been given several, all differing, when I was 15, by different clinicians, yes, everybody should decide for themselves. If someone's listening and they're like, "Yes, that's me, I got diagnosed with ADD and it changed my life," which I hear a lot, I think that's great. It sounds like, for you, it was really powerful that he took that position because it sounds like the word you were looking for was you were anxious. You were really anxious about what was wrong with you.
It was helpful that he recognized that as opposed to saying, "This is generalized anxiety because blah, blah, blah," he or she or they, whoever. Many people still find solace in their diagnosis, which is interesting, a whole debate in itself.
Emily: Can we talk about anxiety a little bit? Because you said it in regards to yourself, and it is the diagnosis that I see so many people now having or getting or saying that they are an anxious person.
Dedeker: Or medicating for.
Emily: Yes, that as well, absolutely. It seems as though it's the prevalent thing that especially amongst, I believe, all of our generation, the four of us sitting here, the millennial generation, absolutely, is entrenched in this diagnosis of anxiety. Can you talk a little bit about that? Why is there such a rise in anxiety, for instance? What's going on within our world? I'm sure that all of us can think of some things, but what do you think is the reason why this has become now amongst so many of us?
Todd: Everybody's anxious, actually anxious. I know a few people that aren't in one way or another, there are so many different layers. We could start from inside ourselves and work our way out to global politics, there are just so many different things that are contributing to how much pressure people feel to be a person these days and how unsafe the planet has become both in environment and in politics. It's just really scary. We now have permission to use words like anxiety whereas, maybe 20 years ago, it was really stigmatized and people were immediately put on medication and maybe 40 years ago, if we kept going back, the treatment for people who said they were anxious, even using the word anxiety was really really bad.
It's both in terms of developing a new language and a new system around how we approach our emotions but also all of the cultural issues and pressures and politics and environmental issues and suffering that people are experiencing. Everybody's anxious. I am anxious right now.
Dedeker: I want to bring it back to relationships in particular, because I'm really thinking about what you said earlier about clients coming in that there is just this unending list of the things that we are anxious about especially about relationships, how we worry about our relationships and are we doing it right, is the right person, am I the right person right now, am I ready, things like that? Reading your book was really interesting because I think back to, what to me feels like more old-school relationship fantasies, fantasies that have become a lot easier to straw man, this very Disney hyper-romantic sweep you off your feet happily ever after sort of story that culturally, I think most people on the street would be like, "Yes that's not real, that's not a real relationship. That's very Disney."
Especially when we look at internet culture, I feel like you've identified the rise of a new type of relationship fantasy marked by things like expecting a partner to validate you 100% of the time or needing a partner to communicate and emotionally open up in exactly the same way and exactly the same timeframe as you do. I wanted to hear you talk a little bit more about what you see as this new fantastical set of relationship expectations that people are holding.
Todd: Yes. I would argue that all of the anxiety we experience is all relational anxiety, whether it's at work or on the street or with our partner or our casual sex partner or our dog. I would really argue that it all boils down to relational anxiety and a fear of losing love, feeling shame, losing value, lacking value, et cetera, as it relates to our community, our partners, and our family. Relational anxiety is so prevalent and rightfully so.
Sometimes we talk about anxiety like it shouldn't be there. We should be anxious, relationships are insecure, they aren't that fairy tale and the environment around relationships, the dynamic in relationships it's scary. It's like we're all trying to drive a car without having gotten driver's Ed. Few of us have relational skills and that's not a read, it's just a literal fact that we don't get taught relational 101, NK through 5 or middle school or high school or college. It's usually not until '30s that people are like, "Wait a minute, my relationships aren't satisfying what's happening."
To get to the fairytale thing, it's interesting because I think most of us could say, of course, these things are hopefully most of us 100% validation of course the one doesn't exist. I think many of us still want that, even if we can intellectually and rationally say, "Yes, of course not, relationships are hard, its reality is that there are challenges," whatever. When the challenges occur, it's really interesting when I see couples and disappointment is happening and it feels like it's this mortal wound and it implies that we still, despite being able to admit that disappointment happens in relationship when it happens, it feels like we're in the wrong relationship. When we are invalidated, it feels like our partner can't communicate with us and has communication problems.
We are nonetheless, unconsciously having spent our entire lives internalizing these fairytales are still enacting them. I do it too. I'm in a new relationship and it's hard not to go into the future and think about it, "Is this like forever?" I'm like, "No," to my mind, but I don't want to have to think about the end. It's like these things, I don't believe in relationships being a fairytale but I still wish, it would be so great to just have that one person based on my experience and what I do. That's not necessarily the case anymore.
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Dedeker: It feels like a lot of your voice is about getting people to slow their role and like really check their relationship expectations, would you say that, that's right?
Todd: Yes.
Emily: Yet you have also made the argument that people are too clingy or that we personally are too clingy, especially early on in the relationship or when we're in the dating process. You've encouraged people, instead, to maybe be more clingy, which is really interesting. Can you talk about that? I think of myself sometimes as definitely an anxious attached person, therefore I continually say to myself, "Okay, don't be too clingy, don't be too intense." I've been told that I'm too intense in relationships, especially early on. Talk about the opposite of that because I'm like, "I think I could do that." That sounds good.
Todd: This narrative around not being clingy, not catching feelings, not getting attached is usually in service of discussing a relationship where those feelings aren't reciprocated, or there's a level of insecurity whether from the relationship or past stuff usually both where people are wishing they weren't clingy or anxious or insecure or attached.
The reality is that if we want to participate in relationships, if we want them to feel serious and meaningful over a longer period of time, we have to cling, and I don't mean in an anxious panic desperate way but clinging in terms of turning towards and creating a sense of connection and attachment as opposed to distancing ourself and saying, "No, I'm not going to be clingy." It's just a fuck you to the entire culture around people that say, don't catch feelings.
Emily: Or don't call after the first date, don't text right away, all of those things.
Todd: Maybe let me take that back. It's not a fuck you to that, it's an empowerment to the people that feel like there is something wrong with them for wanting more closeness. I feel the same way. It's really hard for me to manage that and that's about my own trauma and shit. Nonetheless, like the pace that I moved, the way that I cling to my partner, I've been told, culturally, and by people in general, that it's too clingy, it's too much. It's really helpful.
My posts of, "Don't stop being clingy," and I've contributed to a bunch of articles about that was really to myself in terms of normalizing what I was going through and also my clients because many of my clients who were dating were coming in saying, "I'm too clingy, this is my anxious attachment." Then I would ask about their partners and their partners were avoidant, unavailable in some way, adding to a relational environment that was insecure, not texting, not being responsive, not spending time together, not giving them what they they wanted in terms of affirmation, physical, verbal, et cetera.
There's a lot more nuance to the conversation as I've been saying over and over about what it means to cling to somebody. I do think that we've developed it in this avoidant culture, despite everyone talking about wanting a secure attachment, the value system around relationships is pretty avoidant in terms of the requirements that we have of our partners, the pressure we put on our relationships it's not present, it's not connected, it's not attached. I say be clingy and I also integrate that into these values that are pretty avoidant, cold, and distancing.
Dedeker: I feel like you've had a lot of personal experience with that in the past few years as you've been dating. It seems like you've expressed a lot of frustration with the ways that people are just not there. I'm sure that people listening have had their own experiences with this but I would love to hear from you the examples of how you see people acting out in avoidant ways in the dating process? What's the counterpoint to that clingy behavior?
Todd: It's anxiety. People that are avoiding or doing things that present as avoidance, I posted something today that the person who's not responding to your text has a story, that your partner who is not initiating sex has a story. The behavior is the communications of nonverbal or verbal that suggests distancing or some pushback or some avoidance, there's a lot of anxiety. It's not like there is anxiety, in the anxious attachment person and this cool, calm, collected, unbothered person, which I think we all assume our partners if they're not expressing the desire to be together in the same way, that they just don't care. There's a lot of anxiety behind these avoidant behaviors, regardless of what it is.
Maybe avoidant isn't the word I should use because people are so associating that with attachment style. Any turning away from connection, if someone's distancing themselves in any way, whether that's not being responsive on text or not initiating affection, that there's a story there and it's a lot of anxiety, to get back to the relational anxiety.
Dedeker: No, that totally tracks because I think about the experiences-- again, I have so many clients who come in with that same story, that, "I'm starting to date someone, they're not as responsive, they're not texting the way that I want, they're not initiating the way that I want, what should I do, how do I handle this," or I think of how often you might see on dating apps, people talking about how, "I can only do something casual, I don't want a boyfriend, I don't want any drama, I don't want this, I don't want that." That, to me doesn't read as someone who's necessarily super calm, cool and collected.
To me, that reads like, yes, they have a story. Maybe something bad has happened. There's something that they are not wanting. It's not just, "I don't want a boyfriend," it's not just, "I don't want something serious," there's something very specific there. It's also totally fine for them to not want but I think that that tracks, that in the avoidant behavior, there is still this-- it's an engine of anxiety that can be fueling it.
Todd: I'll add that on both sides of the equation, whether it's in the person that's retreating or in the person that's pursuing, most people are really disconnected from the real motivating emotions and the power with which they are pursuing or retreating, meaning the story behind that pursuit or retreat, meaning their traumas, which I feel like is a word is so used and I use it so much, but everybody has some attachment trauma. Not to be so generalized, but I'm going to do it.
Most people are not saying, "Okay, I'm not responding to your text because I'm feeling really overwhelmed because I was recently really hurt and I can't do that right now, but I do really like you." It's really hard to say. Most people aren't saying, "I'm feeling really anxious, I need you to text me because when I was younger, I was abandoned and I'm really having a hard time regulating myself." It's not something that people are openly communicating about, which adds another layer of complexity in all relationships, which is the unknown. There's a lot of unknown. It's a fundamental aspect of relationships, just as there's a lot of anxiety and it doesn't go away. There's no way to make it all go away, which is the hardest part of relationships and why they are a mind fuck.
Dedeker: Then I feel-- yes, it is scary to say those things, to be so honest about like, "Yes, I'm having a hard time texting back at this particular frequency because of x, y, and z," because I do think that often the pushback to that is like, "If I'm that real that soon, that's really going to scare people away or that's really going to come across as too serious, too intense, too much right up front. Instead, I guess I either have to play it cool or just sit and suffer," right?
Todd: Sit and suffer, aka regulate our emotions, which is so hard. This applies to people that are dating or in long-term relationship, that we want our partner to manage our anxiety for us, "Text me back so I feel less anxious because of my trauma." That's not to say that our partners shouldn't do certain things for us, but it is a delicate dance. Something that I worked on especially with this new relationship, is that it was throwing up so much shit for me, I was like, "Fuck, what, I thought I was done with this", but it wasn't. I really had to, instead of demand that my new partner be on the same page as me, I really had to tolerate the fact that we were different and that that was okay and I had to manage my own anxiety, which was really fucking hard and is really fucking hard.
It's even harder for people if they don't have access to a narrative as to why they feel so dysregulated and desperate to get what they think they need to get in order to feel whole, secure or calm. The challenge of it all is that it actually works. If you do get that, you're calmed, you get that rush of dopamine, you get that hit and you feel better, but it doesn't solve anything. The real challenge is connecting to the story behind why we are so anxious, scared to connect or disconnect.
Jase: Speaking of trying to find this balance, something else that you talk about in your book is encouraging people to embrace a 'good enough relationship'. I feel like, I think I get what you're going for, and yet, on the other hand, I feel like I see so many people staying in relationships because it's like, "I don't have a good enough reason to leave, even though their partner is not putting in their half of the effort," or like you're talking about with this anxiety and clinginess because I'm actually not getting something back from my partner.
I'm just curious to hear what you mean when you talk about good enough and what do you see that's maybe on the other side where you want to encourage people to not be as-- what is it? Is it picky? Is it demanding? How would you describe that?
Todd: I think some people would say needy, but I wouldn't say that. Therapists have been saying the good enough mother, the good enough parent, the good enough partner, the good enough relationship for decades.
Dedeker: The Gottmans are really big on the good enough relationship.
Todd: The good enough relationship, Winnicott with the good enough parent, I think was who first introduced it. People don't want to hear that. Anytime I say something similar to that, or I've said 'settle down', a lot, people don't want that. They don't want to hear that. They want the best. It's relational materialism. The people often then go to the extreme and talk about how unsatisfied they are and how much they hate their partner and, "Why should do I this?"
The response isn't to settle for a shitty relationship. It's to settle for a relationship that is good enough, meaning where you feel satisfied most of the time, where it checks the boxes that you want to be checked and where there's a normal amount of disappointment and conflict. There's no way to curate a relationship that isn't going to have disappointment, conflict, moments where you want to fucking scream and you're going to lose your complete mind. These things happen.
Most people are taking this evaluative lens when they're saying, "I want something that's better than good enough." It's like, "Then work on your relationship." If you want to improve your relationship, if you want a better relationship, then better your relationship which obviously doesn't apply to everybody, but people are picky.
Jase: I think it's such an interesting thing because when you describe it that way of good enough and something actually that we've been saying to each other, the three of us, when we get anxious about our own, "Am I doing enough, is this perfect enough," is this mantra of good enough is good enough, I think part of that is learning to calibrate what is actually good enough. That's not just the, "I'm settling for shitty," but like, "This is fine," attitude, like, "I guess I can handle this, maybe it's what I deserve."
Versus-- I think what you're getting at is this sense of there isn't a perfect really, but there is good enough, and it's identifying, what is actually good? What is actually good enough? That takes practice.
Todd: It takes practice and it's evolving. The reality is that everybody is really fucking disappointing. Everybody is really fucking hard to be with, including myself. My dog, as I said at the beginning, she's really fucking cute and she's really fucking annoying, no one is perfect. Again, I'm not suggesting people settle for abusive and terrible and awful relationships, but we have to understand that just as we go throughout our days and we're like, "I shouldn't have done that, but I did it anyway." We all are imperfect. Our relationships are going to mirror the same level of limitations that we have. Like the level of anxiety, I feel, I can't expect someone to be cool, calm and collected, I have problems. Everyone going to have problems.
I think if good enough isn't the language, I think we have to also think, what would be good enough for you in terms of how you approach yourself? How much do you allow yourself to make mistakes? How much do you allow yourself to be disappointed while still holding yourself in high regard?
Jase: Zero.
Todd: Most people don't. They say, "I don't believe in perfectionism," yet they hold themselves to a standard that's pretty much perfectionism. I think it's a similar approach where we can't put our partners up on this pedestal and expect them to do all of this shit for us if we can't do it, which we can't. We might want to create more parallels between that.
Jase: Dan Savage calls it the Price of Admission, just meaning there's always going to be something that is going to piss you off about a partner in some way, even if it's just the fact that they put their dishes in the sink instead of the dishwasher and leave it there all day and that's really fucking annoying. There's always something that you're going to say, "Okay, in order to be with this person, I have to deal with something like that," and that's okay. That's the Price of Admission.
I guess it is just that question of how many of those things are you really willing to live with and deal with versus, "No, this is not enough, the Price of Admission to what I'm actually getting here isn't worth it to me." I guess it is that question of, how long do you wait? How much do you go through? How much do you deal with? I agree with you to not throw the baby out with the bathwater if it's getting a little ugly. Maybe also, I don't know, don't stay in a relationship for nine years if it's not great for you.
Todd: I love the Price of Admission, I love Dan Savage. You're right, you don't want to stay in a relationship if you're feeling unsafe. You don't want to stay in a relationship if it's really unsatisfying, but, as you're saying, you were in it for a long time, and so it's not sometimes so easy to just leave. That's something I talked about a lot. It's something that I went through in my last relationship and something I wrote about in the book and ending a relationship that doesn't feel good enough is so fucking hard. Many people stay in relationships, and then they feel they're not good enough for not being able to end the relationship. It's just an ongoing-
Jase: It's this unfortunate cycle.
Todd: -thing, it's non stop. Yes.
Jase: You also did a post recently that my friend who loves you posted, and it really resonated with me and with him about how, even many years after the facts, you're like, "Shit, I still miss that person," or "I still feel bad."
Todd: Yes, grief, loss can last a shockingly long time depending on many things, though, which is often discounted. Many things being how close are you to your family, in the book, I call it your equation, meaning, social stuff, community, work, family, finances, health. Depending on all of those things, loss is going to hurt more and more and be prolonged. People often assume and associate those prolonged feelings only with that person when it's really about our entire life experience.
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Dedeker: What was surprising to me is, you share the story of your 10 year relationship and also the ending of that relationship in the book. Then after the official 'end of the relationship', that you still stayed in contact with your ex because your ex is family, right?
Todd: Yes.
Dedeker: I never really connected the dots on this before, that you highlight this pressure that we put on people, that you have to cut out your ex immediately, you have to go, no contact, as soon as you possibly can. That can be surprisingly heteronormative, actually. Can you talk about that?
Todd: Yes, many queer people are disconnected from their families. When we form relationships with somebody and you spend a long time with them, they become your family, they become your chosen family. For many people, including myself, it really wasn't a matter of-- it didn't even feel like a choice that I could just say, "Okay, bye, we're never going to see you again," because I was caught off from my family and disconnected from them and he was such a central part of my life.
For me, that was something necessary to continue. As I talked about, it went a way that wasn't so great in the end, but nonetheless, it is a super heteronormative idea in terms of move on date someone next get married again.
Jase: It's interesting because within the non monogamous community, which is a lot of our audience, I feel like there can be this pressure on the opposite side of, "You have to always stay friends." If you're an evolved, mature person, you should always be able to just transition to some amicable friendship, maybe even a close friendship afterward. It happens sometimes. The three of us are examples of that. Definitely the minority of the relationships I've had, have actually been able to work out that way.
Emily: Definitely this way.
Jase: Yes. Within this micro culture, there's this pressure on the opposite side, actually like, to stay closer when maybe that's not actually the healthiest thing.
Dedeker: Yes, for you, Todd, looking back on that particular period of acknowledging that your ex was very much your family, but also staying in contact brought a certain amount of pain as well. With that particular period, would you have done anything differently?
Todd: Yes, he became then a stand in for my family, and I clung, and not in the sense of clingy, maybe in the sense of clingy, whatever. I clung to him, which I learned afterwards in an effort to really avoid dealing with my family laws. If I could go back, I would have had better boundaries with him. We were still enacting a level of intimacy that was not necessary and really was a barrier, I think, to me finding someone else and just feeling self sufficient and also to dealing with the shit that I needed to deal with. I don't regret it, because I don't really believe in regret, I'm totally fine today, it's fine, I didn't murder anybody, but I do wish I had a few more boundaries.
Dedeker: Good enough.
Todd: Yes. It's good enough, I was good enough. Yes, a few boundaries, like, we were talking every day and still sexting, and it was just not-- it wasn't good. It was tough, but I learned a lot, and I grew a lot, and I don't hate myself for feeling ashamed for it. Many people do. Whether it's staying in contact and feeling shame for that or not being able to and feeling shame for that. There's a lot of anxiety and shame around what do we do with the relationship once it ends? How do we get there, how do we end it, then what do we do?
There's just so much anxiety regardless of the structure of your relationship. Again, it's because one fundamentally, it's just sucked. It's really just hard. It's lost. There's nothing to do with it but to work through it, to feel it. Secondarily, we don't get any information about what relational endings feel like, how to go about it, how to end it nicely with somebody you've spent a long time with. It's just so hard. It's so, so hard.
Dedeker: Yes. I feel like everybody is just desperate for a blueprint, for sure.
Emily: In your relationship that you talk about in the book, you talk about the fact that you went through infidelity with that relationship that you were cheated on, that you felt a lot of pain and that was really challenging, and yet you are not in the camp of, if somebody cheats on you, get rid of them immediately, they are gone and fuck them forever, they're terrible, horrible people. You're a lot more nuanced about it.
I was sitting with my friend recently and she said to me, cheating never happens just in a vacuum. It never just happens because somebody walks into a bar and decides they're going to have sex with somebody else. It happens, most likely, because something is happening in that relationship that's unfulfilling in some way. I do wonder, what is it that's happening in infidelity, why is it so complicated, why should we understand it differently on a cultural level than maybe, I think the narrative has been for so long.
Todd: Yes, there's so much there. People approach infidelity like it as this hugely moral issue and really condemn people for infidelity. It's ignoring what you're describing, which is the context that shapes why people cheat and why people have affairs, why people don't open the relationship first or whatever. There's a huge context and it is often, maybe it's unfulfilling, maybe it's something specific to how one expresses themselves sexually. Maybe the relationship is fulfilling but there's something dead inside someone that they're looking to find. There's so much context to why someone cheats, has an affair, whatever words you want to use, which is really important to understand. When my ex cheated on me, there was a really big context. After I got over the fuck you's, we talked in therapy and we really began to understand that we were in a long distance relationship because I left, he didn't talk to me about his feelings about it, but I left.
Then I asked him to open the relationship and then I wanted to close the relationship. I didn't really treat him with care. He wasn't one to communicate or I think, have access to words to communicate. He enacted them behaviorally. It's often what happens, but not always. Like I was saying, sometimes people love their partner and they're fulfilling relationships and they're monogamous and they-- it happens.
Then there are the few cases where someone is just an asshole and they just don't care about their partner and have no remorse or guilt and they just suck.
The reality is that's actually rare. That there is always a very complex story and really meaningful. Working through it was really hard and rewarding until it happened again. Meaning not the active cheating, but the active lying, which is really what was challenging for me, the dishonesty. It's really complex. It happens. I don't want to say most people, but the estimates of people that have affairs and cheat or whatever, infidelity, so high, 50% to 75 %, who knows what-
Dedeker: It's pretty striking.
Todd: -are people even going to be honest about it? It's here to stay, as Esther Perel says. I think it would be best to understand it rather than to just condemn it and judge people for it.
Dedeker: That seems like a really hard pill to swallow, though, for anyone who's in the midst of that pain, or hasn't resolved that pain if it's been in their past.
Todd: If you're there, you don't have to think about the context just yet. People can go through an emotional roller coaster, and then once they're feeling somewhat grounded, then start to unpack it and start to discuss with their partner and to talk about it and to create meaning. If you're there right now and you're listening, you don't have to do that just yet. I do encourage any couple that I'm seeing to work through it. Many people they end relationships that have gone on for decades, they feel betrayed, they can't do it. There's really no right way to do it, but it can be really impactful and powerful to work through. For sure.
Dedeker: Your book, much like your Instagram account, I feel combines just this really wonderful cocktail of both tough love and also a lot of care and compassion and also a lot of vulnerability. I just want to hear from you. Why was it important for you to share your story, why is it important for you to keep doing this work?
Todd: I initially wasn't going to share my story, mostly because I was told that no one wants to read a memoir. I was like, "Oh, no, I guess I shouldn't be too memoir-y." It's not a memoir, but the idea of story is really compelling to me, especially as a therapist, because that's basically what I do. Any therapist or coach or person that works with persons helps people create stories.
Every day, I talk to my clients about their stories, and this is what happens with content I create on Instagram as well, is that I realize that their themes are all the same, that we're all going through, very similar things in our relationships. It felt really relevant for me to do what I do on Instagram, which is many of the posts I write are about myself. Many of them that I write are about my clients.
Many of them are about my family and friends. It felt important, if I was going to spend all of this time to write something, it felt important for me to weave all of those stories together along with some philosophical analysis of the whole thing.
As a therapist, like I was saying at the beginning today, many therapists are not sharing their personal stories, yet they've been through so much. When my therapist shared his personal stories, it was really impactful for me to know that therapists, too, have problems and that therapists go through things. I don't have it all figured out. I felt like that was a really important piece, especially working and living in a field that's really shamed me for the level of disclosure sometimes that I use.
Jase: Wow. If our listeners are intrigued about this, want to learn more about you, want to get your book, of course, which just came out today, where can they do that? Where would you like to send them?
Todd: You can go to my website, which is toddsbaratz.com, or pretty much any major retailer, and just search my name and the book, How to Love Someone Without Losing Your Mind, and you can find it, or you can go to my Instagram at YourDiagnonsense.
Jase: Awesome.
Dedeker: We'll have links to that in the show notes as well.
Jase: Todd, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today and for taking the time to write this book and to share that with the world. Thank you so much.