Resilient Couples: How to Stay Strong Through Life’s Hardest Challenges (Episode #91)

There's something about you that I can't.

Help but smile when you smile and.

Laugh when you laugh. Welcome to the human intimacy podcast. Dr. Kevin Skinner with Marianne Miklist, licensed clinical social worker. Marianne, I have a question for you. What's the hardest thing you've ever done? Physically, emotionally, mentally?

I did a 52 mile bike ride in Florida, and I also swam across a lake that had alligators in it. In Florida. It's called Lucky's Lake. I swam across Lucky's Lake and back, and it's Florida, so. So you know that there's probably alligators in it. Oh, those are some physical feats that I've done.

Yeah. Okay. So for me, I ran a marathon and I did what was called the Red Rock Relay with some of my friends, and our 12th runner dropped out, so I had to run four legs. And our team ran 186 miles and ups and downs. By the started, the ski resort, ran all the way down, ended up in Zion National Park. Beautiful experience, but man, my body was just, you know, I ran four legs, which was 23.4 miles, and my body was just absolutely exhausted. So to our listeners, we're talking about physical challenges, the hardest things we've done. And if I was to change the question, say, how about emotionally? What's some of the most difficult emotional experiences that we've had? And to our listeners, our invitation today is actually related to resiliency. Our conversation is related to resiliency because what is it that resilient, I'm going to say couples do, not just individuals, but what do resilient couples do? How do they make it through difficult times? How do they make it through times? They're like, this is so hard. Why are we even doing this? And so today, our hope is that we can help you understand what resilient couples do, because I think a lot of you are asking, can we even make this. What's your thoughts, Marianne?

Dr. Skinner? This, that question just takes me back to 2015, when I really dived into my own recovery from betrayal trauma. And really looking at, is there hope for this relationship? And so as you're talking about resiliency, I think probably the biggest question that any couple who's struggling with a challenge is dealing with is, can we get through this? And is there hope?

And is there hope? Or. Or should we have hope? Should I even try? Right? Because we hear individuals often say, well, if people really knew what was going on, they'd tell me to get out. Or, or some people would do the opposite. You got to stay through this, right? Why can't you hang through this? Well, Marianne, I think it's a personal decision, but what I want people to know that with the right information and two people who are engaged in the process, you can do hard things together and you can learn how to bond together. There's something that really amazes me, Marianne, when I watch couples go through difficult times. And I'm not just going to be talking about betrayal, trauma, or dealing with unwanted sexual behaviors. I'm talking about just doing hard things together. Like, I'll never forget a story of a couple. You know, they were struggling in their marriage and, and having a hard time, but every time they did something hard together, it bonded them together. Like, they pulled together through difficult times. Sometimes that had to do with children who were having problems. Sometimes it was related to a family issue that was challenging. Other times it was a family project at home that was really stressful and it pulled them together. Now I see you smiling there. Cause I. I got you laughing there, but maybe you're going through something like that.

Marianne, I really think, like, there's nothing like home projects to test a couple, like, challenges. I had a client just a while ago say, hey, we're going to put together like a fish tank. And boy, like my idea and their idea. When we're coming together and we're trying to work on something, we're two different people and we have two different ideas of how things need to be done. And boy, we hit conflict really, really quickly. And that's. That's pretty normal. But it's figuring out, how do we get through that, how do we get through the conflict together. I think our friend Brett Williams, he always talks about resilient couples. They fight well. They know how to fight. They know how to get through the conflict the right way.

And I think that's an important point because if we're going to start, we have to say, resiliency begins with us figuring out, like, we're going to figure it out. We don't know the answer, but I'm committed and I know you're committed. And that's maybe the foundation of we are committed to figuring things out. And that is a personal quest of I'm going to do the best I can to seek information that I'm going to do self improvement to figure out, you know, if I'm a betrayed partner. You have to ask some really hard questions. Do I even want to stay? If you're the person acting out, am I committed to stopping and resilient Couples, Marianne, what I find is they do that self awareness. And it takes some time, but they're willing to say, I'm going to choose to do this intentionally. And I think resiliency starts. There is this self awareness of why I'm doing what I'm doing.

I love that you're talking about that underneath that bottom part, that why? And I think it's important to point out that I think we're talking about stages. So I think there's a. There's a stage where for anybody, especially if there's betrayal, but when we're in conflict, a lot of times we are in fight or flight, and we are just surviving. People from the outside can say, oh, wow, how could you do that? That thing that you did was so hard. How did you. How did you do that? And we look at it and we're like, I was just hanging on by my fingernails, just trying to take the next breath. I wasn't thinking. I'm doing this great, amazing thing. We are just surviving. And so if we're in that very initial shock survival state, that's a lot different than we're coming together with my partner and we're problem solving together. So I want to make sure that we're clear just about differentiating these different spaces that we're talking about.

And so resiliency actually begins with me before I can focus on the we. Yeah. And I think that that's a starting point. But one of the interesting things that we find with resiliency is you have to be adaptable. What you once thought may no longer be what you think now. And adaptability is the capacity to be flexible. That's one of the guys I interviewed back when I did Internet radio. Before podcasting ever began, I did years of Internet radio, and I was interviewing. One of my favorite interviews ever was Dr. Al Siebert. He specialized in resiliency his whole career, 35 years as a professional, studying resilient people. He interviewed them, looked at the traits. He was amazing at pulling together people who had been through so much adversity. One of his key findings is resilient people, they adapt to situations and they have to let what they thought the world was go like. I thought people treated each other with humanity and humaneness. He found that there were, you know, individuals who realized there still are humane people, but there are people who are not. There are people who are unkind and cruel and mean. And so it's. It's a both and not a either or.

I have, you know, earlier this week, my Husband was telling me about something he remembered from 1990, when he was in college. And he said that one of his professors drew a line down the classroom, and everybody was sitting kind of like in a horseshoe around it. And then he stood on the line and he went around the room and he asked each student, like, where am I standing? What does it look like to you? And depending on where the students were sitting, it looked completely different in each area as he went around based on proximity. And he did that really to show that our perspective is relative to what we're seeing, to where we're at. Even in a point in time, our perspective is really relative. And I think that's what you're talking about realizing. Oftentimes when we get that really concrete, black or white, this is how it has to be. It's actually like a younger developmental stage of thinking, but we often. We all get stuck there sometimes. This is how I see it. This is how it has to be. And we might have some rigid thinking, and that may be something that we've used to survive. That's a survival tool.

Yeah. And that adaptation or ability to adapt to situations, it is a skill. And that's what Dr. Siebert said. It's not like we inherit it. The ability to see a situation realize the way I thought this was going to go, it's not. But I'm going to have to find a new solution for it, and I will find a new solution for it. And that's what I would say to couples who maybe they don't know what to do or how to move things forward, that we feel stuck in our relationship. Resilient couples step back, and what they do is they, instead of turning against each other, they turn and open up and say, look what. What we're doing isn't working.

Let me pull on a global theme for this, because if we're looking for, how do we connect with this and make sense of this? Where have we seen this before? Right now we're in 20, 25, five years ago, our entire world was. Was dealing with COVID Nobody knew what it looked like. Nobody knew how to do it. And we saw some people that got so rigid that were in this camp of masks or vaccines or not. It was so, so, so divisive and so conflicted for some people, but not for everybody. And there were people that were trying to figure out, how do we do this? How do we still connect? So I think there's a spectrum here that we're talking about.

And so adaptation, flexibility requires us to Be open. It requires us to look and explore different things, maybe things in ways that we've never thought before. I'll give you an example here, Marianne. I've worked with individuals throughout my career who can't understand why their spouse is so upset because of the betrayal. And so their mindset is my spouse is mean or angry all the time. When we start to educate them on normal responses to sexual betrayal, I see there's two groups. One is that's still not okay behavior. The other has an added benefit of thinking through the I've created this pain and they start to have a little bit of empathy for the pain that's been created. That adaptation from my mindset is you're angry to feeling empathy is that adaptation of like, oh, more personal awareness instead of that shame based or very rigid approach. It's this openness to say, I recognize that I've created some pain here and I need to do something to repair this and help my spouse heal.

What I love about what you're saying, Dr. Skinner, is both partners aren't always necessarily in the same space. Because if I am in Fight or Flight, I, I don't have a lot of relational capabilities. I am not in a problem solving, let's come together, let's work this out. I am in a total survival. I like, like I am ducking and covering, just trying to survive and get through this. So if I've just been recently betrayed, even if my partner's saying, let me start to have some empathy, let me, let's work through this. I may just have had a bomb drop. And that's not a place where I'm really relational. Cause I'm looking at the sky going, where's the next bomb coming from? And so we might be in different.

Places here, most likely will be. Right. I was listening to Dr. Stephen Porges at one of his books recently and Dr. Porges said something that really got me thinking about this concept. He said, when we're especially in the dorsal vagal shutdown, connection is the last thing. We really, we don't want connection. So you said shut down dorsal vagal shutdown. I don't want connection. But fight or Flight, I'm not ready for connection. In fact, in that moment, if I'm in Fight or Flight, you try to connect with me, I'm probably going to reject you. I'm going to absolutely turn away from you because I might fight harder with you. Even if you're coming and making what John Gottman calls that bit attempt trying to connect. I'm Here I want to listen. I don't want it right now. And we have to have that awareness in those moments to not take that, so to speak, personally. But recognizing my spouse is in a place right now, they don't want to connect. And I. If I honor that, I could simply say, hey, I'm here if you would like some support. And I realize now is not a good time.

So what. And that right there, Dr. Skinner, if. If you were to say, what's our number one place that we have to start, then for couple resiliency, we have to start with safety.

Oh, for sure. Yeah.

We have to have safety in that relationship. And so if we've got really recent betrayal, both partners may need to do some individual therapy. They may need some tools to work on their emotional regulation. They may need to do a little bit trauma work before we're saying, hey, now let's, as a couple, have you start moving all the way forward. We might need to do some work to create just that safety so we can be able to begin to relate.

Yeah. And that individual work, if we were to emphasize what would happen in it, it would be more of emotional regulation because we understand that resilient people develop emotional resiliency. Dr. Dan Siegel talks about the window of tolerance. And if we look at the window of tolerance, you know, is basically, again, to our viewers, you're going to be able to see this. But if I've got my hands up, you can see the window of tolerance. If it's narrow and, you know, the top and the bottom are close together, your window of tolerance is not very big. And so when something stressful happens, you're going to either go over and get angry and upset, or you're going to shut down on the lower part of this. But we're trying to increase the window of tolerance in individuals.

And I've got a perfect example for that. You think about blowing up a balloon. When you first get a balloon, if you haven't stretched it out at all, it's just stiff, it's so hard, and it just takes so much effort. But when we stretch it a little bit and we stretch it out suddenly, like its ability to hold the air, its ability, the ease of filling it with air, it increases. And there is a point where it's too much and it pops. And if it doesn't have enough air, it stays flaccid. And so, like, if we're thinking about that window of tolerance, just thinking about a balloon, how we need to stretch it so that it can handle more yeah.

And I like that because really, as we improve our own emotional awareness. Daniel Goleman, you wrote a book called Emotional Intelligence. And really, it's learning how to understand emotions, not be threatened by them, but really take them on as our teachers, something to learn from. But when we increase our own emotional resilience, when we have difficult emotions, we don't run to other places. We tune into ourselves and recognize, look, there's a lot going on right now. I might need more support. I might need more friendship and connection. Interestingly enough, as I was listening to Dr. Porges, he was talking about our need for connection. And he said one of the most powerful and almost always powerful, is human connection. He said, when we look at the ability to regulate our autonomic nervous system, it is our connection, our social connections that help us regulate the most.

Right.

And we're living in a society today, Marianne, where we aren't developing that kind of resiliency because we're learning to turn inward rather than outward. I'll give you an example. We raised our kids in an old neighborhood. A lot of World War II veterans. Unfortunately, many of them passed away as, you know, as the years went on. But the lessons we learned from them were absolutely incredible. I remember one time, probably six or seven of the veterans got together, and they talked with our youth about what it was like being a veteran. They talked with them about the challenges. And I flew planes here, and I served here, and the kids are, like, reading about this in their textbooks at school. And here these guys are that were actually in it. Incredible experience. But these were some of the most resilient couples. Some of them were married while their spouse was away, and the resiliency of that and coming home and having to reconnect and how to bond together. But as I'll never forget the story of one of the couples, just the way that they were with each other, Della Wood, with her name. And she said, when I knew he was having a hard time, we went up into the mountains, and he just went for a hike, and he went off for a while. And I knew that's what he needed. Listen to the language. I knew that's what he needed. Right. She wasn't upset by it. It was like, this is his place, and he needs to be able to go to a safe place for him to work through whatever it was that he was trying to work through.

So they had an understanding. She wasn't threatened by it. She knew to give him the space and time, and he knew he needed space and time to work through it. And that was part of their, like, not their contract, but that was their understanding.

Unspoken. Unspoken. Yeah, unspoken. And I think that that's awareness of there are things that I need to do to let off the steam, so to speak. Rather than turn to unhealthy habits or unhealthy behaviors that individuals have maybe used for their entire lives, using another reference in the body keeps the score. It's amazing quote. But he said, when you take away someone's crutch, something that they've turned to and they don't have something to replace it with, that's going to create more stress for them. So as individuals learn to overcome unwanted sexual behaviors or unhealthy habits, we almost have to say, what is it that's going to replace it? And how can we practice that? So. So really, as they replace it, it's more awareness. Like, I know that I need to go for a walk or a jog, or I need to go on a bike ride or I need to go for a swim or I need to do something. Otherwise this stress that I'm experiencing, I'm going to turn to unhealthy habits that I've been using for much of my life.

Yes. Because healing is relational. And as you're sharing this, I'm thinking about one of my first clients that I worked with who was struggling with sex addiction with. We were talking about not using the sexual acting out behaviors. And then we started talking about his alcohol consumption. And his alcohol consumption increased dramatically as his sexual behaviors decreased. And so he started saying, you can't just turn from one addiction to the other addiction. There, there's still addiction here. It's still problematic in your relationship. And I remember he looked at me and he was just like, Marianne, you're cutting me off at the knees. I can't even walk. If you take away both of those things, how am I going to function? Because he didn't have the other tools that he needed to be able to cope.

I can hear some people saying, yeah, but if their old coping mechanism is destroying our relationship, do I tolerate that? Do I not tolerate that? And. And that's where we have to understand boundaries and what's acceptable and what's not acceptable. Because there's certain things that we'll say never are acceptable. But learning how to communicate about those things, like I. I'm stressed if I'm the person who's acting out or the person who's been angry, learning how to do that in a way, like, I don't want to be the One acting out, or I don't want to be angry, I don't want to hurt you and the kids, or I don't. Those types of strategies, like, I need to learn how to do this resilience, people recognize I am going to strive to be the person I want to be. Even though I'm not perfect, I'm not there yet. I'm striving for it. And you see that in their actions, Marianne, you see it. And the reason why is because they're committed to growth.

So we might back up. Before I was saying, like, we need safety for that coupleship, that would be number one. But I think we're backing up and saying before we even get to the coupleship, we've got to have that emotional self reliance, that emotional regulation individually before we even get to that step. Safety in a coupleship.

I think because I'm doing my own work, I can make it safe through my actions and through my interactions. So I almost have to say I'm safe with self so I can be present in this relationship. That's how I would say that. Because then once, you know, we've talked about adaptability and the ability to be flexible, that's individually. Because when we're so rigid with ourselves, that's where I see people stuck in their shame. They can't let go of their shame because of their actions. And their shame then becomes their dominant emotion that prevents them from really growing because they're so stuck in the shame. That's not adaptability either.

And take that a little bit further. I also sometimes see clients who get so rigid in their recovery that, that they take it to the other extreme as well. Like I'm holding onto this so tight, white knuckle and, and it's very literal. It's everything, very exact. But it's. I don't even know the word for this. What would you call that, doctor?

Well, what that does is it creates a heightened anxiety. See, the anxiety, interestingly enough, the anxiety could be replacing the addictive behavior, right? And the reason why is because that hyper anxiousness is also an emotional chemical intensity. And so I go from a physiological or behavior into this heightened state of anxiety. That's why learning to regulate your body and learning how to relax the body is so essential for emotional regulation. But for me to stay present with you in difficult conversations. So really resilient couples, if I could just emphasize one thing, emotional resilience or emotional regulation, it's. It's essential. I don't see people healing without that as a skill.

If I'm a listener or viewer, and I'm hearing this conversation, I might be saying, okay, yeah, well, great, like, how do I do that? Where do I start? What do I do with that? You just told me that I have to have emotional resilience. I have no idea how to get emotional resilience. What do I do then?

So we have a lot of skills that we can learn as human beings. And if I could give the world a skill, it would be this one, right? Because we get into arguments, fights, wars. We turn to substances or turn to addictive behaviors because we don't know what to do with difficult emotions. Research shows that people relapse because they don't know how to do a stress. And so this is not just you, our listener, this is all of us, me included. We all get to learn this skill or not. So if I was going to start, I would want to understand what are the common emotions? I mean, we have to start with what are these emotions that we have? Right? Anger, sadness, anxiety, disgust.

Yeah, I have a really quick acronym that's really helpful. It's halt bs. So H is hungry, A is angry, L is lonely, T is tired. So H, A, L, T, B is bored, and S is stress. Those are usually the behaviors that when we stop and go, what was going on for me, was I hungry, angry, lonely, tired, bored, stressed. Those are the acting out behavior emotions.

So those are often tied with them when I was lonely or when I was hungry or when I was tired. So that's part of that. And then the dominant emotions that we humans have, the emotions, right? So looking at what you've just described and common emotions, you have that kind of awareness. Like I said, anxious, right? And then we look at disgust, right? We continue down that pathway. Sadness. We feel that if I learn about my emotions and I can't relate, or I learn about emotions and I can't relate with them, then my job would be to learn about emotions in the first place. Like, what is it that I'm feeling at this time? So you, to our listener, you might get a notebook and you might just set your timer three times a day. When it goes off, I'm going to just pause and reflect on what am I feeling right now. You could go through that list that Marianne gave. You could go through the ones that I added as well. And the reason why that matters is because that insight will help you understand more of what you're experiencing. So let's say, for example, that you were feeling lonely. What is loneliness? Loneliness is your body's way of saying I need some kind of connection. Interestingly enough, Marianne, sadness and depression. If I'm really sad or depressed, my body necessarily doesn't want social connection, whereas loneliness, it usually wants connection. So when we look at the research on depression and loneliness, the difference is that loneliness towards people, depression, not necessary. So as I look at this type of a situation, I'm feeling lonely. I need connection right now. Well, who's on my list? Who can I connect with? That is an intentional approach for connection rather than, I don't know what to do. Maybe I turn to unhealthy habits because I'm feeling lonely.

Dr. Skinner, I know in your book, Treating Sexual Addiction A Compassionate Approach. Yeah, I know you talk about taking these emotions and then saying, like, what are five things I can do when this emotion comes up for me? And is it go play the piano? And I know in your example you were talking with the. Or in your book you have an example of that where your client said, oh, I could go play the piano. And you said, at 11 o' clock at night, is that going to work for your family? So we have to really think through what are my five things that I can do with this and make sure that it's not 2 in the morning. And playing the piano is, is my tool that I'm going to.

My kids and wife don't like that very much, by the way. But the point then is having a plan when I'm feeling those emotions, of how to respond to it. And sometimes it's just sitting with the emotion. So emotional regulation, the ability to be with your emotions and just learn from them, what is it that I'm feeling and how do I make sense of this? And was there a trigger? And if there was a trigger, how do I want to respond to it? And notice all the questions. It's like you've become a scientist into your own self. And to me, that's when I do it. Personally, it's amazing what I learn, it.

Really is when I start to go in and say, what is this emotion? It is like I'm exploring something like, what is this? Let me discover what's going on here. And because I'm turning inward and I'm very curious, it's usually a really pleasant. I don't know if that's the right word, but for me it's pleasant because I'm spending time with myself and I'm usually connecting some dots because I'm slowing down long enough to be present. Go, oh, that's what's going on. Oh, and usually this is where self compassion comes in. This is where I can be kind to myself because I'm understanding myself better rather than negating it and pushing it away and avoiding it or shaming myself because of it.

Yeah. And so interestingly, Marianne, the same concept is what we teach couples to do in effective communication. If I can do it with myself and learn from my own emotions, then I'm not so threatened by your emotions, but I'm actually more capable of being with you in your emotions. And so all of a sudden you're upset or you're angry, or I'm upset and I'm angry. And instead of it being a trigger for both of us where we go into fight or fight or fight or flee or just completely disconnect, I'm like, wow, what's, what's happening in between us here? Help me learn, help me understand. What are you experiencing? What am I experiencing? And that's where I see couples really learn how to communicate more effectively. Because instead of it being this, oh, you're, you're attacking me or you're shaming me or whatever it may be, it's like, wow, this is really interesting what we are experiencing here together. Something just happened in between us, and we're able to pause and reflect because we have the emotional strength to not be overwhelmed by the other person's emotions.

Just yesterday, I had a client who shared her impact letter. After a disclosure, she shared an impact letter with her spouse. And what was fascinating, she was so vulnerable, so courageous, she just dumped everything into this letter. It took her a while to put it together, but it was really beautiful, the work that she shared. She didn't hold back. She found ways to be really, really honest. And as we processed afterwards, it was amazing to see the eye contact between this couple. She had her eyes just glued to him, and they were just so big. And he was just looking at her. And as we processed a little bit afterwards, he had really been focusing. His therapist had been helping him really work on attunement, attuning to just be there with her. And he said there wasn't anything really deeply that she shared that I hadn't heard before, except she told me all of this, and before I hadn't heard it. She had said all those words before, but he hadn't necessarily been in a space where he was attuned to hear it. And if one instrument is off, playing with the other one sounds awful, like it's jarring. It just doesn't go together. And I think that this concept of we have to attune to each other. We have to zero in or dial in. For those of you who are old enough to remember the old radios that you had to really tweak to get that sound just right. That's what attuning is. And a tuning it, it's not just like, okay, I'm there and it's fixed, I've got it. It's constant, constant fluctuation of, are you there with me? I'm here with you. And it usually comes through eye contact. It comes through slowing down. It comes through being in a state right now where I'm not in shame, I'm not shut down. So I can be open and curious and just open to whatever it is that you are experiencing.

Yeah, I love it. Absolutely love it. So, Marianne, to me we've talked about just a quick summary of some of the key principles of resiliency. One is that personal work that needs to be done which incorporates emotional regulation and emotional self awareness. But we then shift into, now we're in this relationship, we're using the same principles, same concepts, curiosity, openness, trying to learn. We look at adaptability and flexibility. The way we thought our world was going to be might not be the way it's going to be right now. So resilient people, couples, they're flexible and adaptable. And you're going to have to interpret that to our listener the way that works best for you, because you still have to have boundaries. But there is an adaptability. Because I've heard people say, I'll never tolerate this, I'll never accept this. And then as they start to understand stories and experiences, they're like I said, I would never. And I'm realizing that was too finite. That was, that was that that had too many limitations. It's hard to acknowledge I didn't ever want to be in this situation. That's true. That's absolutely true. I don't ever want to be in situations like. And I don't want to be. And I won't be there again. Right. That's a boundary, but it's an awareness. And so we see resiliency in couples. And when I hear couples say, I would never wish this on anybody, but we're stronger than we've ever been now. That's the resiliency we're talking about. But the journey to get there, it requires that effort. We're talking about the adaptability that we're talking about and the hope. And we haven't really spent a lot of time with hope. So I'D like to close with hope. The hope that we can do this. The hope is a creation. Dr. Martin Seligman, in his book the Hope Circuit, he talked about this concept of hoping. And when we have that, it's actually a part of our brain. We typically find solutions when we have this concept of hope inside of us.

I think I would love to close just with that idea. I know when I started my real recovery from betrayal trauma, that hope was such an important aspect for me. Are there couples who have gotten through this? Is it possible to get through this? I didn't know of anybody. All I knew was people get divorced from this. That's what I. That's what I knew. Oftentimes, couples who have gone through this, most of the time they're not telling everybody about it. And oftentimes it's an ongoing process. Yeah. But I would like to close just by sharing that there is hope, there is hope for. And it comes through that, that finding your why underneath. Like, is this. Why is this important to me? Why am I willing to. Or wanting to fight for this? What's my why underneath? And finding that, that shared goal together. And it does come through work and finding safety. But the hope, I think, is. Is what we all tie everything onto.

I agree. When we have hope, we keep fighting for a reason. There's purpose to our listeners. A couple of really cool things coming up. First and foremost, we're going to be announcing the second Human Intimacy Conference. I'm excited. We've already been putting our experts together. We have some phenomenal experts that are going to be joining us this year, in addition to many that were with us last time, in addition to that conference, which will be March 13th and 14th, so put it on your calendars. And we're going to be putting it up on the site soon so you can register. There will be a discount for those who register early. That's coming up, so look for that. If you want more information, go to our website, humanintimacy.com and go to the companionship course. For this podcast, we're going to start putting the show notes and the assignments, but we'll be putting up coupon codes there. So if you go to the companionship course for this, you'll get the coupon codes. If you haven't been listening, our new podcast, Arise Hope and Healing from Sexual Betrayal and Reclaim Healing from Pornography. That's ultimately what we are offering right now, Marianne. And I'm excited for all the things going on.

I would also just add we have companionship courses for those. So especially if you've just found out that you've been betrayed, you're still trying to figure out how to make it through. We've got some excellent content, really great resources for you to understand yourself, begin understanding yourself and working through that. And if you have liked this podcast, if it's been helpful for you or any of the others, we encourage you to share them and to hit, like, just to help the algorithms. Our goal is to help as many people as we can, so we ask for your help in doing that. Thank you for being here today.

Thank you. It's like you're shining, you're siren.