Relationship Help That Works for Men

I'm Michelle Lizenberry Christensen. Since 1997, I've been coaching powerful, purpose driven, world changing leaders who are ambitious in every area of their lives. My Sex Love Power podcast and my YouTube channel are the go to resources for couples and individuals who want the vision of love they see in their hearts to manifest every day in the ways they collaborate, communicate love and make love. Let's go. In today's episode, we're going to talk about something that can make a huge difference in your relationship. Now, when I do this with couples, we do it in as few as three days or it can take a couple of weeks if we work in a really focused, concentrated way with individual sessions once or twice a week. What I'm going to teach you is something you can actually implement on your own, or it can be a great template for looking at getting help from somebody else for your relationship. Whether you come to me or not, these are the things that have to be part of your process if you want it to actually work. And I created this episode because so many people share with me that what they've tried in the past didn't work. And I think that a lot of what's available out there for helping your relationship be better, your sex be hotter, and both of you to want it at the same time to feel closer, more connected, and feel like you have a really great partnership for getting the things done that make your home and your family run. What it takes to do that, I'm going to share with you today. And the ways that people have tried to get there in the past didn't work. And they often really don't work for men. And if they don't work for the man in a heterosexual partnership, then they don't work for anybody. So this episode, if you've been reading a lot of books or you've been going to workshops that teach you really great skills, and then you're all excited when you walk out, but it doesn't actually stick. It doesn't really land. After this episode, you're going to know why that happens and what to do about it. I'm going to help you overcome the obstacles that you've probably run into over and over in your relationship. Maybe it's conflict, maybe it's a sticky spot in the sexual connection, or maybe you just want to feel closer. We're going to look at this and how to fix it without months and months and months of dredging up painful stuff and then going back to work and life with mascara streaming down your face or your Face all flushed and trying to parent for two weeks and then going back in and starting all over again right from scratch, because you don't remember what you worked on last time. This system is going to get to the heart of things very quickly, and it lets us build a firm foundation to put all those great skills on top of so that you can actually use them to create more love, better sex, better partnership in a solid way. So you keep building and building through the years instead of deteriorating back to the former state you were in before the workshop for the book or whatever. Sometimes when one of us knows that we're frustrated with the relationship, we know that more is possible and we don't really know how to get there. It's because only one of us is really interested in investing. Or maybe we both work up the courage to do something, to try to get help, to do something differently. Read a book, go to a workshop, hire somebody to help us. But then we find that we exhaust ourselves with the actual sessions because they're so painful and so not effective that we've kind of blown our wad. We spend our energy right there and we don't have it to do things any differently in between sessions. Been there. We sure have. At my house. So today I'm going to show you how to best use your energy. We're going to talk about what doesn't work in getting help for your relationship. We're going to walk through the three things that really do make the biggest difference, and then we're going to talk about why, particularly for men, this kind of approach works way better than the other things that my husband and I tried when we saw, I'm not kidding, more than 12 different therapists, in addition to all the workshops, the Tantra retreats, everything we did to try to work on our relationship before we finally found what actually works. I'm going to introduce you to a framework that is tremendously helpful. So whether you work with it or not, it's going to show you the formula. So. So let's dive in. First, we're going to talk about the things that don't work in trying on your own to change relationships. So there are a couple of things I see people do over and over. The first one is the airing of the grievances. I know I'm dating myself, but on Seinfeld, they used to talk about this. The airing of the grievances. You can do this at home, or you can do it in a therapist's office, or you can do it with a coach or wherever you can find a willing professional to just kind of referee your arguments, you bring in your complaints and, and you complain over and over about the same problems. There were so many times it felt to me like we were opening this can of worms. And then at the end of the counseling session, we'd both be more upset than we were before and we'd go home and have to kind of just recover and nothing was any better. That is not helpful. The second thing I think people do a lot of, and a lot of counselors and therapists are bought into is that each problem in a relationship is 50, 50. Like both people contributed to this in equal measure. That's simply not the case. Each person contributes something and each person is bringing something to the situation that probably predates the relationship. So in each dynamic between two partners, they both bring something to it. Because we're always teaching people how to treat us. We're always trying to kind of close the loop on some not in our consciousness. You know, in Sanskrit we call that a samskara that we brought into the relationship or maybe even brought into this lifetime. So of course we are co creating the dynamic. But to unravel a dynamic, we each have to find the deep roots of it inside ourselves. And the deep root might be that your behavior starts the merry go round that you both then contribute to. Other times it might be that your contribution is the way you take the bait when your partner engages you in a particular way. So getting clear on your part is far more effective than just thinking that it takes two to tango. Now, the third thing people often do is just try the same old thing, only try harder. They'll go at it again, try more of what they've been doing to try to get their partner to change or to try to get their partner to quit complaining and just settle for how things are. And that's just digs each person's trenches deeper. Lots of times one partner will say to the other, hey, isn't this good enough? Look at all that I already do. We have it so good. Can you just count our blessings? Can't you just be grateful? Or you might be saying that to yourself, like, you know what? My partner is so much better in so many ways than my friend's partners or than what my parents have with each other. Why can't I just be happy with what we have? But the truth is, if you're not, it's really difficult to just talk yourself into that. And probably there's some wisdom in the hunger inside you to go deeper, to have Something different to iron out some of the places that don't work well for you in your relationship. And just as if you had a particular health ailment, it does not do you any good to look the other way, pretend that you don't have it. What works is to address it. And if somebody's asking you to address something, repeating the same message, you should just be grateful, isn't a great way to improve the relationship. So let's imagine that you have decided to go and get help. There are a couple of things with that that I've seen that don't work very well. Some helpers that my husband Kurt and I worked with said, we're only going to focus on the positive. We're going to make that grow. And you know what? Definitely what we appreciate appreciates where we put our focus. We get more of whatever it is we're focusing on. Wonderful, brilliant. So of course you don't want to focus on the negative and fixate on that and feel worse and worse about it all the time and expect things to get better. That's lunacy. That doesn't work. But when we saw someone who would not let me name what was painful for me in the time since we had last seen this person, I couldn't keep investing. I couldn't keep taking actions myself to make the relationship better, because I never felt heard about the things that hurt for me. I never felt like we were dealing in reality. We were just navigating with this hyper optimism. So what works better than that is to focus on what we want rather than just on the positive of what's been happening or the negative what's been happening. We focus on where are we trying to get to, how do we want to feel, and then we look at what are we doing instead right now. So what would be different if we were actively working toward where we really want to go? And then, as my mentor Terry Real says, progress is anything different. This is where we really focus on the positive. We look for the one thing that we can find that our partner did that we appreciate or that we did that we're proud of this week or today in the direction of what we really want in the relationship. Incremental progress is a beautiful place to focus on the positive, but denying what's happening or where it hurts isn't particularly helpful. Now, the second thing I've encountered in this arena is presuming that everybody has the same amount of contribution to the problem. We just don't. Third, spending time together with a third person to hash out your last dispute is not particularly helpful. So if you're going and meeting with somebody and they just listen and I'm making this motion with my head like they're just watching a tennis match, you know, one of you talks and then the other one talks, and you're doing things the exact same way you do them at home without that person there. Except maybe, you know, sometimes it can feel helpful because you actually have the conversation. Instead of one of you refusing to have the conversation or both of you avoiding it, or instead of getting really verbally violent with each other, you're a little more civil because that person's there. It's not that much better simply because you have a witness. It might feel incrementally better at the time, but you're not really learning how to do anything differently. And you're not learning, more importantly, why you do things the way you do them. You're not getting to the actual brain change that helps you become the people who can have the relationship you really want. So that doesn't work that well. I'm going to share with you in a few minutes what is more effective. But first, let's talk about learning tools. Because we did a lot of reading and a lot of trying to learn new skills. But unfortunately, if you go to a workshop, you go to a retreat, you read a book, you see somebody who can teach you better ways to work on sex or communicate ways to feel closer. You know, I teach people all those things. But if that's where we start, you won't do things differently in a sustainable way in the places you actually need to most, and here's why. The reason we've been doing things the way we've been doing them is because of the patterns we brought into the relationship. We have deep devotion to repeating our patterns because at some point those patterns were survival level necessary. We learned the patterns then, and we have those neural pathways pretty well paved. So we are going to keep repeating those patterns even if good new ideas come in. Because our brains will divert back to what they already know until we really see the patterns, until we come to make conscious that which is unconscious, and then can exert the energy to make the brain changes, have a transformative experience and see the new pattern. We gain relational mindfulness and awareness. Oh, yeah, that's my old pattern. And here's the new, more mindful, more conscious pattern I'm stepping into. We start to make automatic patterns into conscious patterns. And then from the more conscious pattern we can use skills you'll be able to Use skills you learned 10 years ago that you've never been able to implement successfully. When the chips were down, new ideas have this fertile ground that they can land on and then they sprout. So learning skills is the third phase that's really helpful. If it's put in as the first phase, you can do it again every year and really never see a whole lot of significant improvement. A lot of people have done that. They have a whole shelf of relationship books. They're full of good ideas, but they aren't really benefiting the relationship. And that's why. So let's look next at the three phases of how I work with a couple that make a huge difference. I've been working with couples since my executive clients started asking me to when I was an executive coach in about 2008, more and more clients started saying, hey, you've helped me so much with my leadership. I trust you. We've tried other things. Would you try working with me and my wife? Would you try working with me and my boyfriend? Would you try coming home with me? And every time I was like, pinch me. Yes, please. I just loved the privilege of being invited into such an intimate space with them. You know, it signified so much trust and it turned out that really great things happen. These were phenomenal couples, but I didn't really know a whole lot about helping two people at a time and helping them with each other. And so I went back and got more training and mentorship, specifically in the areas of sex and intimacy. So I learned more from John and Julie Gottman. I've studied with Esther Perel, I've done a whole lot more on tantra and working with Taoist sexuality and some of the deepest sensual practices on the planet, and ways to make sexuality truly, truly intimate. Not just getting it together, you know, finding a way to revive the spark as so many people talk about in a long term relationship, but really make something that is deeply fueling for a couple now, Terry Real I had interviewed in the late 90s when my friend Ed Shea introduced us and I knew his approach was phenomenal. But like I said, I was a leadership coach starting in 1997 and didn't think I needed training in working with couples. But since then I've started working with his approach. And this year I will do the last steps to be certified in what he calls relational life therapy. I'll be leading workshops that he calls relational boot camp, which are the specific skills that create full respect living. So I've been working with couples who on relational mindfulness since 2018. In these six years with Terri's tools, what I've learned is that community makes a huge difference in implementing and really building the rewiring. It's a different way of relating than what most of us saw from our parents and what most of us see around us in our friends, our colleagues and other relationships. Most people don't operate this way. The healthiest, most intimate, juiciest, most satisfying relationships do. So it really helps to have mirrors around you so you can see, oh, yeah, that's what it looks like in action. So that's why I'm bringing forward more and more opportunities, different ways that people can connect with each other, not just with my help, but with peer support from other women and men and couples who are really diving deep into this path. It's not just a path of relationship. This path helps us go deep with ourselves as well as with each other. So here are the three phases. First, we wake up to the patterns in our relationship. We look clearly enough at what's happening to get a new vantage on it. Lots of times we've looked at, here's what I would have be different in our relationship. I wish my partner would do this, I wish they would do that. I wish I would feel more this way. And we might have even given a lot of thought to that. We haven't really stepped out and gone up to maybe a 40,000 foot level and looked down on the relationship and seen, oh yeah, this is what happens every time. There was that other night when we were talking about our child's bath time, or there was the money conversation that went this way, or when we were trying to plan our next trip. You know, the conflicts and the opportunities and the places where we're frustrated, where we want more, and what happens between us in those places over and over. So that's the first step is understand the dance that the two of you do when one of you does that thing that drives the other one bonkers. What does bonkers look like? What does partner A do? First time and again, one partner will do one thing and then here's how the other one reacts. These are the feelings I have, and then here are the behaviors that I go to when they do that. And then when you do that, what behaviors do they go to and when they do that, what do you do? Because if we look at even two or three experiences that were difficult for both of us, we can start to see the pattern. There's a pretty predictable pattern across all these different circumstances. There's a particular place Each of you goes a pattern to how you react to them and how they react to you. But of course, it's seldom the same person who starts it. You know, there's a circumstance often that flips both of you into a pattern. So we're not looking for who's to blame, who started it. What we're looking for is what's the nature of this particular merry go round? Because once we see that it is a merry go round, that we're repeating the same patterns, that we don't know who starts it, that we just want to get off the beauty is it only takes one of you to get off the merry go round for it to stop. You get to have a thousand beautiful escape hatches from the frustration that you've been experiencing. So when we do that first go up to that high level and see the pattern, then everything else is a whole lot easier. A lot of times couples will go to try to build skills first and it just doesn't work because we're still in the merry go round of trying to talk differently inside the exact same conflicts that we've always had, and we've got the same level of reactivity. So I encourage you to try to see the pattern first because then you know where to work on the reactivity and that's the second step. So I do this in a very specific way using the methodology of relational life therapy and my own experience. But you can do this inside any process you want. If it doesn't feel resonant to work with me or another alt person, what's essential is that you find the pattern. And then the second step in step two, you want to heal and transform those patterns. You want to find within yourself the self soothing capacity, the mindfulness capacity to give yourself, in a sense, the thing you keep kind of trying to shake the tree to make your partner give you the thing you're reacting to by either going one up on them and talking down at them and telling them how they should do something differently, or by withdrawing, taking your toys and going home until they do things differently, or by going one down and being a little obsequious, or trying to manage them with kindness. Whatever pattern you have been using hasn't been working. But if you really look at what in you is hungry in those moments, what in you is reactive, what in you is wanting to fight or flee, seeing what part of you freezes. If you can learn to really meet yourself there and come to a deeper, more compassionate understanding of your own pattern, then you can have so much More agency inside the relationship. So that's the invitation. Look at the pattern the two of you get into what's the dance? And then what's my pattern underneath that? Maybe you grew up in a family where your needs, your voice, your unique gifts, there all. There wasn't room for them. There were too many kids. There was too much stress for your parents or whatever was going on. You get the message somehow that you don't really matter just as you are. You're kind of wrong or broken in some way. What you need doesn't matter. There's not enough. So you'll bring that into the relationship and into how you respond to your partner. Your reactions will reflect the shape that you took as a kid before. Your prefrontal cortex is mature. You chose a strategy back then, and it worked. It got you through that stage of your life. So it was survival positive then, but it's relationship threatening now. It might not end the relationship, but it's the source of your pain in the relationship. You need a new strategy, but you won't know that until you really look at the whole dynamic from above. So in this second step, you begin to heal and transform those patterns by transforming your relationship with you and then behaving differently. Anything different, any new behavior, creates a wonderful change in the relationship simply because it gives your partner something new to work with. If both of you are looking to appreciate any change you see and looking to find the places where you can respond more effectively to whatever it is that is happening, whether it's old behavior or fresh behavior from your partner, you start to have this virtuous cycle, this positive snowball. And that's where that positivity and that focus on what's working can be really helpful. And then when we've got the clarity about what the dance is first, and we've got the clarity, ah, here's what I bring to this. These are the particular heartaches and patterns I bring, not only here. And clients tell me this all the time. Oh, my gosh, I gotta admit, I'm seeing how I do this at work. I see how I'm like this with my kids. That thing we just uncovered absolutely still plays out with my siblings, even though we're all in our 40s. Whatever it is, this is not just happening with your partner. And that's why swapping out partners, you know, divorcing this person and finding somebody new who doesn't have this particular liability we perceive that they have is not going to solve it. Because wherever we go, there we are. We're going to bring these same patterns with us. So it's so powerful because once we know what that pattern is and we've got the capacity to picture it, almost like a military style obstacle course, you know, we elbow our way up over the wall to this place where we can have more relational mindfulness, where we're in what Dick Schwartz calls self energy. We're in our adult self. We're rooted, we're connected to the divine, to something larger than ourselves. However, we conceive that, and we've got a certain solidity, a kind of calm, even in the face of something we don't like. From that place, we can employ tools. For me, this shows up like I have reactive parts that can go into despair. I'm never gonna get what I need. It's just hopeless. And then another part of me wants to rescue me from that by lurching into action. And I'm gonna fix myself or I'm gonna fix Kurt, or I'm gonna fix the situation. And none of those ever work. Those are the patterns. But when I can lean back into my wise adult, I can withstand the discomfort of not really understanding in the moment exactly how I'm going to get what I need, but trusting that I will, that I can handle discomfort, I can handle disappointment, I can handle not being in control, and I can soothe myself through it. So within that solidity, there's a kind of a calm, even though we're not necessarily getting exactly what we'd like. Once we've got that clarity, then we can pull in the skills. That's the third step. Then it's all about practice. I always say love is a habit. It's not a feeling. And it's not even just a behavior because it's the consistency of repeating loving behaviors. Self loving as well as loving of others. The kinds of behaviors that help us feel loved and help us feel generous in our loving behaviors. Those things work well when we repeat them. It doesn't take a gargantuan effort to make a huge change in a relationship. It just takes consistency. So when we've got clarity about the patterns we're engaging in, then we can start to implement new things, like my top five loving habits. We can start to spend specific time together. Now, at first, this may cause a few fireworks. When people start deliberately dating when they have felt really distant, Sometimes there's fodder for more upset. It doesn't really feel better right away, it might feel worse. There's the grief of what has been. And that grief starts to Arise when we're alone together. When people start to deliberately come together in the bedroom in new ways, it can be awkward. Our hungers arise, our disappointments, our frustration, the fear that we've wasted time, or the fear that the best sex of our lives is behind us. Maybe prior to this relationship or early on when we first got together with this partner, and we're never going to have something that good again. Coming back together, leaning into what we're hungry for, when we've been pushing those hungers down can be painful. Our bodies may have changed, our brains may have changed, and we just feel differently about it. So it's so easy to get really frustrated. And that's why, before we move into those behaviors where we're trying to do something differently, I want you to have a clear grasp on your own heart and your own ability to stay with yourself in your own experience. So wherever you're going to learn these new skills, make sure you're doing things in this order that I've laid out in this episode. I know that in our culture, relationships themselves have been coded as feminine inside the psychological patriarchy. Men's relationality may be valuable to them personally, but in some ways, being relational or investing in a relationship can be a sacrifice. In terms of the man code, I'm not saying that all men think this way consciously, but I've heard from my own husband and many other men that there is this yang way of thinking, hyper masculine and way of being indoctrinated that most men have gone through that they might or might not be aware of. But that kind of programming says there's something kind of wimpy or there's some kind of loss of prestige in seeking help for your relationship. According to this code, real men are stoic and they're strong and they don't need help and they know how to do things. So for many men, the thought arises, shouldn't this just work? Shouldn't how I show up already? The ways that I provide materially, the ways I make love to you, the ways I contribute to our family, shouldn't those be enough? If I were a real man, you would appreciate me if you were a good woman. I'm speaking inside heterosexual relationships here because that's most of my audience. But these things definitely play out for gay men as well. The thought is this should be easier. I should get more respect, more care, more help, more appreciation here, given all I do. And if they really start to look at how things might be even better or how they might grow and change, it can be very confrontive with that inner voice that says you shouldn't need help, you shouldn't need to do anything differently. And truly, in its darkest, you shouldn't take influence from a woman. So there are a couple of reasons why the relational life approach works better for men than other approaches. First of all, it's action oriented. And in my experience with my own husband and other men I work with, men really appreciate having specific homework, not just coming home and talking about things like, okay, see you in a bit, you know, see you next week, come back and we'll talk some more. It's not very gratifying to chat over and over, but having something you can go try and then come back and measure is really grounding and reassuring. You know, having some KPIs, some quantifiable progress. The second thing, there's a path to success. We identify what it is you're trying to do, what success will look like, and we can measure your progress on that. That feels really good. It's reassuring, it makes things concrete, and we can feel this part is effective. This is another place where we need more help. Of course, nothing's ever a thousand percent effective across the board. And we can look at, okay, we're winning here, and over here, we've got a real gap. We're stuck over here. We haven't yet bottomed out on what the obstacle is so we can dive deeper there. So it lets us tune in on what needs more help. And then third, I think men appreciate that there's a kind of clarity when we unblend from different parts of ourselves that are having different kinds of reactions. We can see more clearly as an example, that notion of entitlement. When a man can see, like looking at his partner, you know, I hear you, I want to listen to where you feel hungry for more. But there's a part of me that just goes, you know what, I don't have to take this flack off of you. I get so much stress at work all week. When I come home, I just want to relax. I just want to feel successful here. When a man has the opportunity to see both of those parts, the part that's empathetic with his partner and the part that thinks, if you had any empathy for me, you wouldn't ask this of me, he can see that those parts are both valid. When you learn to welcome both of them for yourself, then you can deliberately choose, yeah, where am I going to come from right now while my partner is coming to me with this pain? Do I have it in me in this moment to hear my partner, or do I need to go and restore myself and then at a later time, maybe I'll be able to have empathy for my partner so we can get clear, so that pulling apart of the different parts and being able to make those choices consciously feels really good once we've got the hang of it. Particularly for men who have often only been able to think in terms of one sort of internal perspective at a time, even the conflicts that were inherent in our mixed motivations can be very frustrating when you think there's only one you. So inside that frustration, it's hard to get very far in any conversation that's trying to improve the relationship because we have so much ambivalence about it until we get clear. Oh, yeah, I feel two different ways at once, or three or four different ways. The fourth thing that this gives men in particular, but everybody that I work with is that there's real accountability. Rather than trying to create rapport with you by sort of buttering you up or making you feel good or making sure that I don't touch on anything that's going to upset you, I create connection with my clients through the truth. They learn, even in the first consultation session, that I can see things they couldn't see before and that I'm going to shoot straight with them. I'm going to point out those pieces so both they and their partner are going to get the kind of feedback they probably haven't gotten before. And as we work together, they're going to come to be accountable. I'll hold both partners accountable for, for instance, the consistency between the thing you say here and the thing you say there, or what you said you were going to do and what you did do. And you're going to learn how to hold yourself accountable on how to lovingly hold your partner to account. We've learned from our parents, from employers, from lots of places what accountability can look like. And a lot of times accountability comes out with a whole lot of harshness. We're either lax and permissive with each other. We kind of look the other way, or we're harsh and we hold each other to account in a way that is painful and doesn't feel very loving. So neither of those approaches to accountability actually feels very good. Having loving, clear boundaries and accountability, a rooted way of knowing who you want to be and then holding yourself to being that is so nourishing, it just makes every day feel better, regardless of the circumstances of that day. And then the fifth thing is that whereas A lot of times men have felt ganged up on. Clients tell me that in the past. You know, they'll say, like, I felt like our therapist or this counselor we had or whoever ganged up on me. They and my partner were like enemies, and I was alone in the room with two of them. And what people tell me is different with me is that both people are accountable. They feel like I get their permission to give them direct feedback, to hold up the mirror, to show them the darkest or the least functional part of how they're showing up. It's not always comfortable. It won't always feel like I'm just your cheerleader, because I'm not. But what people find is they feel like, oh, yeah, my partner's gonna get called out on their shit too, and called in, you know, I don't call anybody out for the sake of punishing or rubbing anybody's nose in anything. It's always really an invitation to see that everything you want lies on the other side of this particular awareness. If you can become aware in this moment that right here is where you contribute to what you don't want, then all the doors open to you. And it's so much fun for me to help people with that, to see the delight and kind of the chuckle, you know, when I can name something with their permission that they really kind of didn't want me to name, but deep down, they really, really, really did. They've been waiting for somebody to be able to point this out, to stand toe to toe with them and see it and help them unlock that latent potential in their relationship and in their lives. It's so delightful. So that's how I see this work, and that's how I see that it is better for men than other things they've tried. And I hope, too, that just like the three stages I introduced earlier, I hope you can map this over. I only want to work in my individual work and my group programs with people for whom I'm the perfect match, where they just go, yes, that is who I want in our corner, and I want both of you to feel that way. But if you don't, there's lots of other great help out there, and I hope this episode helps you see. Oh, yeah. These are the criteria we want to be using here at our house. We're looking for the right Labrador puppy for us, and our puppy might not be born yet, might not even be conceived yet. So we're just gathering all the information about how do you find the right breeder? How do you pick the right dog for your family. What are the criteria? You know, learning how to shop is a really important part of finding the right fit, because once you've got that dialed in, then you'll know what you need when you find it. You know, yeah, that's the right thing. And you know why that is. You won't have to go through three more approaches. You won't have to waste time and energy with something that's not the right fit. So that was my intent with this episode, and I really hope that it served you well. It has been a joy for me to explain it and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thank you so much for listening. And remember, as Bruce Coburn sings, if you love, love, love loves you too. I'd love to hear what you're going to take away from this episode and what questions you have. Where do you feel this conversation in your body? Drop me a DM on social media anytime. Links are in the show notes. You know, reviews are really what help others recognize how this podcast is different from other relationship and sex podcasts. So thanks in advance for leaving a review right now in your podcasting app before you move on with your day. And hey, have you subscribed? Hit that subscribe button in the app so you'll always get notifications of new episodes when they drop. Thank you so much for being here. I'm Michelle Lisenberry Christensen, and this has been Sex Love Power. I'll see you on the next episode. And until then, may the light within you illuminate the world around you.