Couples arrive carrying the portable version of their problem. He is not spontaneous. She cannot decide about children. They have stopped having sex, or they have it on a schedule. A few questions in, the portable version gets heavy, because it was never the whole load.

Dr. Emma Smith and Dr. Alivia Stehlik finally watched Couples Therapy, four years late by Emma's count, and this episode follows what each of them saw: Alivia's verdict, thirty seconds in, that a couples therapist is underpaid; Emma's ball, which a therapist holds just long enough for a couple to readjust their grip; and the way a complaint about spontaneity descends, layer by layer, into aloneness against connection.

Along the way they compare what it costs to carry two people's pain at once, and where a therapist puts it down: in consultation groups, in supervision with someone who started practicing in 1982, and inside an ethics code strict enough that Emma cannot ask a client for a Google review.

From there the conversation moves through why therapy begins in the middle of the fight, why the best therapists keep consulting other therapists, and what a sex therapist adds that the series does not, including one firm clinical line: abuse is an individual problem, and couples therapy is not where it gets treated. It closes on the partner who is waiting. Emma's argument is that when sex is off the table, people narrow what counts as being chosen to a sliver, and the narrowing prolongs the disappointment it is trying to escape.

The question left open: if the one thing you count as proof of being wanted went missing for a year, what would you have to start counting?

Full show notes

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Purity culture promised a body that had been told to stay silent for years that it would speak fluently on the wedding night. Many couples are still waiting.

Dr. Laura Anderson has spent her career at the point where that promise fails. A therapist, trauma recovery coach, and author of When Religion Hurts You, she founded the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery, created the Certified Religious Trauma Practitioner program, and works with people on nearly every continent on religious trauma, coercive control, sexualized violence, and the nervous system. Her view, offered plainly in this conversation, is that purity culture is a form of sexual abuse, and that the body holds that whether or not the person still believes it.

That claim organizes the hour. We begin in Nashville, where a stranger's second question is often which church you attend. We move through what purity culture actually contained, which was far more than a pledge card, and why its aftermath can resemble the aftermath of sexualized violence. We ask what the old rules do to desire inside marriage, why a patriarchal arrangement leaves even its men without a victory, and where a wife is supposed to find room to want when her husband asks her to want it. Laura describes her starting point for rebuilding a relationship with a body that was taught to be an enemy, and it involves the restroom. We also talk about deconstruction inside couples therapy, and about midlife, perimenopause, and why old material resurfaces when it does.

If you came out of a high-control environment, or love someone who did, this conversation offers vocabulary and leaves the verdict open. The question it returns: if a body can learn to treat itself as dangerous without anyone laying a hand on it, what exactly are we calling the injury?

Full show notes

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Michelle Dovey spent twenty years as the painter of oak trees. Then, sketching classical statues in Florence, she looked down and found she had drawn an entire male figure except for one region, left blank without meaning to. The next afternoon she drew nothing but the genitals of Michelangelo's David. Within a year she had drawn more than seventy naked men, in a project she designed as an act of permission.

In this episode, the internationally exhibiting artist and author talks with existential sex therapist Dr. Emma Smith about what that year taught her about shame, and about the skill at the center of her work now, the shameless ask: sensing what you want, trusting it, and naming it clearly.

The conversation starts with the blind spot, the thing in plain sight that your conditioning won't let you see. From there it moves to the friends and family who begged her to stop, and to the men who told her it was the first time they had ever felt seen. Its hinge is a question the models kept asking her: how would you like us to pose? Michelle found that asking made her feel fantastic whether or not she got what she asked for, and that not asking left her irritated and tired. Dr. Emma brings it home to long-term couples, for whom asking is harder precisely because their partner knows them, and to the men in her practice who want, more than they can say, to feel desired. They also talk about the female gaze, a tantric gazing practice, and Michelle's retreat in Venice this November.

If the person you love asked you tonight how you would like them to be, would you have an answer, or would you hand the pencil back?

Full show notes

Michelle's Venice retreat, November 4–8: https://venice.michelledovey.com/unedited

More from Michelle: https://invitation.michelledovey.com

Support for the show: Nine to Kind Planners, the planner Dr. Emma actually uses. Code EMMA20 for 20% off → https://ninetokind.com/

If this one stirred something up, tell Dr. Emma: http://forms.gle/sS7z5AFH1DohJjAU6