This is the conversation that happened after the conversation.

Part one of our Deb Rubin episode covered the foundations: why sexuality is not an emergency, the three things that make kids stop talking to you, and the difference between sexuality and sexualization. This part two episode picks up exactly where that left off, and goes somewhere most parenting conversations don't.

The first thread is clothing. Specifically: what do you actually do when your middle schooler comes downstairs in something that makes your stomach drop? Deb walks us through the questions she loves. Not the panicked parental reaction, but the slow, deliberate, genuinely curious questions that keep the conversation open rather than slamming it shut. Is it weather appropriate? Does it fit? Does it feel comfortable? Is it right for the occasion? And underneath all of those: is my reaction coming from a fear, or from a responsibility?

She also names something that most parents are thinking and nobody says out loud: people make a quick snapshot decision based on how you look. Not fair. Not right. But true, and worth telling your kid directly, without judgment, so they can factor it into their own deliberate choices rather than discovering it the hard way.

The second thread is social media. Deb waited until her daughters were fourteen before allowing any social media at all. She was strict about time limits and relaxed about content, believing that her job was to manage the dopamine delivery mechanism, not to surveil everything her kids were consuming. And then, in junior year, she removed the limits entirely. Not because the concern was gone, but because she had two years left under her roof to let her daughter practice managing herself and discover, on her own, whether she needed limits at all. Her daughter put them back on after a month.

That story, (the limits removed, the daughter who reinstated them herself) is the emotional and clinical centerpiece of part two of our conversation with Deb Rubin. Because it illustrates everything Deb has been saying across both conversations: the goal is not control. The goal is critical thinking. The goal is a kid who, when left to their own devices, reaches for what actually serves them.

Jenni closes the episode with a clinical frame that Deb immediately said she was going to steal: the dopamine toolbox. When electronics are the only source of dopamine in a child's life, the consequences are significant and well-documented. The invitation, for kids and for the adults raising them, is to build a diverse toolbox of dopamine sources. Movement. Connection. Creative work. Real-world competence. Not instead of screens, but alongside them, so that the pull of any single source never becomes the whole story.

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This episode features Deb Rubin on creating a sex-positive home, the three things that make kids stop talking to you, and why there is no "talk", just a thousand small moments.

Deb Rubin is a licensed clinical social worker, psychotherapist, and therapeutic parent coach based in Boulder, Colorado, with over twenty years of experience helping parents navigate the transition from childhood to adolescence. She's also Jenni's longtime colleague and friend, which means this conversation goes places most podcast conversations don't.

The episode opens with a deceptively simple question: how do parents move past their own discomfort to become the trusted voice in their child's life around sexuality? And from there it becomes one of the most practically useful conversations about sex education and parenting that Sex and the Psyche has ever hosted.

Deb introduces a framework that reframes the entire conversation: sexuality is not an emergency. It's not one talk. It's not a checklist. It's short, sweet, and consistent, a thousand small moments of curiosity and honesty that accumulate, over years, into a child who trusts you enough to tell you things you didn't even know you wanted to know.

She breaks down the three parental responses that immediately shut kids down; judgment, over-empathizing, and catastrophic thinking, and explains why the parent who says almost nothing in the moment of a share almost always gets told more. She distinguishes clearly between sexuality (natural, internal, expressive) and sexualization (external, objectifying, worth-based), and explains why conflating the two is one of the most damaging things the culture does to young people.

And she names something that Daniel articulates beautifully near the end of the episode: the difference between parenting from fear and parenting from responsibility. A fear requires you to go inward. A responsibility requires you to have a conversation. Knowing which one you're operating from changes everything about how you show up.

This episode is for every parent who has ever frozen in the moment, said the wrong thing, or wondered whether they've already missed their window. The answer, Deb makes clear, is almost always no.

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No guest this week. Just Jenni and Daniel, two married co-hosts, two therapists, and two people who are very comfortable talking about things most people avoid entirely.

The episode starts where it always does for this podcast: with honesty. A scheduling miscommunication left them without a guest, and instead of papering over it, they open with a real conversation about what rejection actually does to a person. The small sting of a scheduling glitch, scaled up to the much deeper sting of being turned down by the person you love. Because rejection, as Jenni explains, is the opposite of belonging. And belonging, at the neurological level, is survival.

From there, they turn to listener questions. The first comes from a partner who isn't bothered by her person's small penis, but is bothered by the fact that they're working through it in therapy without including her in the conversation. Jenni and Daniel explore body confidence, creative solutions, the power of open-handed poker in a relationship, and why men with smaller penises are often significantly better lovers than men who rely on size to carry the experience.

The second question arrives from a recently divorced woman re-entering the dating scene, asking whether men are biologically capable of casual sex or whether that's cultural conditioning. The answer, as both Jenni and Daniel agree, is both, and the reasoning is genuinely illuminating. Daniel brings in evolutionary psychology, reproductive biology, and a quietly stunning fact about the male body's response at the moment of death that explains just how deeply the drive to reproduce is wired. Jenni brings in the bio-psychosocial frame- the cultural narratives that reward sexual conquest, the way casual sex can paradoxically produce performance anxiety, and the attachment lens.

Which leads to the final thread of the episode: a full breakdown of all four attachment styles: secure, anxious, avoidant, and ambivalent. And how each one shapes the capacity for casual sex, the experience of rejection, and the push-pull dynamics that make relationships so complicated and so human.

This is one of those episodes that covers more ground in thirty-five minutes than most podcasts manage in two hours.

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Brooke Bralove has been doing talk therapy for over twenty years. She's good at it. And she will tell you, clearly and without hesitation, that there are things talk therapy simply cannot do.

That's where Accelerated Resolution Therapy comes in.

ART is a brief, neuroscience-based treatment modality that uses rapid eye movement, similar to what happens during REM sleep combined with a technique called voluntary image replacement, to rewire the way the brain stores negative memories, traumatic experiences, and the body sensations that accompany them. The process is fast. Often remarkably so. Single-incident trauma: rarely more than two sessions. Sometimes one.

In this episode, Dr. Jenni Skyler and Daniel Lebowitz sit down with Brooke to explore one of the most underused and under-discussed tools in sexual health. They walk through how ART works, the eye movements, the desensitization, the director scene, and the brain's extraordinary capacity to store a new narrative without ever erasing the facts of what actually happened. They share clinical stories: a man whose erectile dysfunction resolved after clearing a decade-old stabbing trauma he'd never connected to his sexual functioning. A woman with six years of pelvic pain who immediately surfaced a childhood memory of being beaten- a memory that had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with the body's guarding response. A woman who hadn't been intimate with her husband in six years, whose desire returned after a single session of releasing the accumulated irritation that had been sitting in its place.

And then Jenni shares something she's never shared publicly before. The personal session she did with Brooke at ISSWSH. The image that had been jumping into her brain during foreplay since she was twelve. What the eye movements revealed about a memory she thought was something it wasn't. And the director scene she created, spontaneously, without planning, that left her, in her own words, feeling more alive in her body and her Eros than she had in years.

Daniel brings the evolutionary lens: why predators look around while prey looks forward, what perspective actually does to the nervous system, and the Japanese concept of Kintsugi (filling cracks with gold) as a metaphor for what ART does to a memory. Brooke talks about using eye movements before presentations, during chronic pain, and in moments of anticipatory anxiety. And she makes a quietly radical suggestion: that art as a daily self-administered practice might be one of the most accessible nervous system tools available to anyone willing to look at two spots on a wall for thirty seconds.

The motto of ART is simple. Keep the knowledge, lose the pain. This episode is the best possible introduction to what that means.

https://brookebralove.com/accelerated-resolution-therapy/

https://brookebralove.com/

https://www.instagram.com/brookebralovepsychotherapy/

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When Claire Rumore was lifted into a hospital gurney to undergo her first biopsy, she stepped aside to use the restroom first. And while she was there, she heard a quiet internal voice ask her a question: Do you want to go back to the life you had before? Is that what you want?

Without hesitation, her answer was no.

What followed was one of the most unusual cancer journeys in modern medicine. Claire was 43 years old. She had stage four pancreatic cancer — a diagnosis that typically affects older men, and that her medical team never actually disclosed to her during treatment. She went through two major abdominal surgeries, dropped to 74 pounds, lost her menstrual cycle, lost her libido, and lost the person she had been. And then, slowly, over the course of eighteen months, she found her way back. Not to who she was- but to someone clearer, more embodied, and more deeply connected to her own desire than she had ever been before.

In this episode, Dr. Jenni Skyler and Daniel Lebowitz sit down with Claire for a conversation about the emotional, relational, and erotic dimensions of cancer recovery that medicine almost never addresses. Claire is the founder of Cancer and Intimacy, an education platform built on a three-part framework she developed from her own experience and her work with patients, survivors, and their partners.

The first lily pad is erotic grief, the deeply under addressed process of mourning what's been lost: The body you knew, the sexuality you had, the intimacy you can no longer access in the same way. Claire has written a free ebook on erotic grief and makes a compelling case that this experience is not exclusive to cancer. It's universal to anyone navigating major change.

The second is libido listening. The slow, quiet, inward practice of reacquainting yourself with your own body's signals after illness or loss. Claire describes learning to feel pleasure in the sheets against her skin, in the air in the room, in the gentlest forms of touch, what she calls subtle sexuality. A term she coined to describe the low, soft, sensory orientation to desire that becomes the entry point back to conventional sexuality.

Claire Rumore Website

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Jeff Abraham didn't set out to build a sexual wellness company. He was a semiconductor engineer from a coal mining town in Pennsylvania who sold his business, retired, and got a call from his neighbor, Dr. Ronald Gilbert, the urologist who invented Promescent's delay spray. One conversation, one product sample, and one phone call later, Jeff was all in.

What followed was fifteen years of building one of the most respected sexual wellness brands in the world with over 5 million bottles sold, more than 4,000 healthcare professionals recommending the product, and a mission that Jeff describes simply as helping people. Along the way, he lost his closest friend to an act of senseless violence. And he decided the best thing he could do with that grief was give Dr. Gilbert the legacy he deserved.

In this episode, Dr. Jenni Skyler and Daniel Lebowitz sit down with Jeff for one of the most candid and practically useful conversations about male sexual functioning you'll find anywhere. They dig into the clinical reality of premature ejaculation, the difference between clinical PE and the much larger group of men who simply want better intimacy. Why 75% of women don't orgasm from intercourse alone, and what that means for couples. Why men who struggle with PE often stop initiating sex entirely, and the spiral that follows. How shame, not physiology, is usually the most dangerous factor in the room. And why Jeff's answer to "what's the best thing you can do for better intimacy?" is still, always, communication.

They also talk about the rise of male masturbatory devices, why younger men are increasingly choosing not to pursue partners at all, the engineering logic behind Promescent's patented eutectic formula, and how to "put one in the bank" before intercourse if anxiety is running the show.

This is a conversation for men who have quietly stepped back from intimacy because of shame and for the partners who don't understand why. Jeff is warm, irreverent, deeply informed, and completely unafraid to say the thing most people in this space are dancing around.

Learn more about Promescent

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Dr. Jenni Skyler and Daniel Lebowitz sit down with Zach and Sally Maxwell, relationship thought leaders, executive coaches, and co-founders of The Art of Conscious Love, for a conversation that will change how you think about romance. Together since they were 18, the Maxwells have built a modern relationship framework around a radical premise: love is not something you fall into. It's something you practice. They walk through their eight-pillar approach to conscious relationships covering personal accountability, inner narratives, transparency, desire, conflict resolution, and the art of consciously designing your own monogamy. A masterclass in what it actually takes to make love last.

https://www.max-wellcoaching.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sally-swallow-maxwell/

sally@max-wellcoaching.com

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If Part 1 was about the field of sexual medicine, Part 2 is about the marriage at the center of it. Dr. Jenni Skyler and Daniel Lebowitz return to their conversation with Dr. Irwin and Sue Goldstein, and this time, the questions get more personal. How do you stay married for fifty years? What does great sex actually look like across the decades? And what happens when a woman who has spent her career in sexual medicine starts experiencing low desire herself? Sue Goldstein opens up about her own journey through peri-menopause and the slow erosion of her libido- what she calls "duty sex", and the medications that brought not just her sex drive back, but a playfulness in her marriage she hadn't realized had gone missing. She walks listeners through her menopause toolbox of five treatments, explains why she's "76 and feels like she's in her 50s", and dismantles the lingering fears from the Women's Health Initiative that have kept generations of women in what she calls hormone prison. Dr. Irwin shares his own daily protocols for sexual health, why he believes most older men are leaving capacity on the table, and the surprising data from their own clinic- that more than half the Vyleesi prescriptions they write are off-label for men. They explore why dopamine is dopamine, regardless of gender. The reality of persistent genital arousal disorder. And a remarkable story of a teenage horseback rider whose chronic arousal turned out to be a herniated disc. This episode is full of practical wisdom, clinical innovation, and one of the most real conversations about long-term love you'll hear all year. The Goldsteins' secret to fifty years of marriage? Best friends, good sex, and the willingness to keep trying new things — including a chocolate sauce on the day before you change the sheets.

Irwin Goldstein, MD, IF (he/him/his). Director, San Diego Sexual Medicine 5555 Reservoir Drive, Suite 300, San Diego, CA 92120, Director, Sexual Medicine, UC San Diego Health East Campus, San Diego, CA. Clinical Professor of Urology, University of California at San Diego. Voluntary Clinical Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Services Past President, International Society for the Study of Women’s Sexual Health. Past President, Sexual Medicine Society of North America. Editor Emeritus, Sexual Medicine Reviews, The Journal of Sexual Medicine, International Journal of Impotence Research.

Phone: 619 265-8865 - Mobile: 619 987-7432. Email: dr.irwingoldstein@gmail.com. http://www.sandiegosexualmedicine.com. Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SDSexMed. X: http://twitter.com/SDSexualMed

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