In this episode, Andrew and Barbara talk with relationship coach Lisa Schwaller about why couples lose intimacy and how to bring the spark back.
Note: This podcast was originally hosted on Barbara La Pointe’s website, which has since gone offline. I’ve reposted the episodes here so people still have access to the materials.
Transcript
Andrew Folkler: Welcome everyone to another episode of Broken Families, where we host conversations on divorce, parental alienation, and high conflict relationships. My name is Andrew Folkler.
Barbara La Pointe: And I’m Barbara La Pointe. Today we are going to discuss building healthy relationships, and how to bring back that spark that might feel like a fading romance.
Barbara La Pointe: To lead this conversation, we’ve brought on a very special guest, and she’s going to help us really dive deep into intimacy and relationships. Lisa Schwaller is a relationship coach who works with men and women who want to bring back the love and intimacy into their relationship. Lisa specializes in the Gottman method couples therapy, and is trained to help people work through their traumas in relationships that may block intimacy so that they don’t lash out or act out towards their partners.
Barbara La Pointe: So without further ado, let’s dive in. Welcome, Lisa.
Lisa Schwaller: Thank you so much for having me today. I’m so excited to be here.
Barbara La Pointe: Absolutely. Oh, pleasure. Pleasure. So Lisa, I have to be honest, I looked at your website quite a few times, and one thing I noticed is that you actually talk about why couples lack intimacy.
Barbara La Pointe: And why couples might not be engaging in sex.
Barbara La Pointe: So let’s start there. What are a couple of reasons why a couple might not have sex?
Lisa Schwaller: Yeah. Well, there’s a lot of different reasons, and of course everything can be really on an individual basis. But by and large, what I see as far as the reasons people aren’t having the intimacy that they want is, first of all, there’s a lot of pressure.
Lisa Schwaller: People put a lot of pressure on themselves. Their partners may inadvertently put pressure on them. The second thing is there’s just a lot of expectations about what partnered sex should be like. We’re not taught in school about sexuality and how sexuality changes over time. And there’s just a lot of expectations in our culture around what you’re supposed to be like in a partnered sexual relationship.
Lisa Schwaller: But then the last piece, and this is really where the trauma piece comes in, is a lot of times people are working through some of their own histories. Maybe their sexual history wasn’t what they liked, or maybe there’s even a history of trauma or childhood relationships, and there’s just some individual healing that people need to go through to show up their best selves in relationships.
Lisa Schwaller: So that’s usually where I come in, is to help break that down.
Andrew Folkler: So say that one of your clients has some sort of childhood trauma. How as a partner do you best support them in your relationship to help them either work through that trauma and also build that intimacy with them?
Lisa Schwaller: Yes. So I work with people who either they themselves have childhood trauma or young adult trauma, or their partner does. And I think the answer’s kind of the same for both, is that the more you’re in your own personal strength and you’re really healthy of how you react and respond to what happens, that’s the foundation, is just how strong you are in your own emotional adulthood, is what I would call it.
Lisa Schwaller: But then recognizing that if you’re with a partner who’s had a traumatic background is the more understanding and curiosity. I think curiosity is really the secret ingredient, is just to really get to know your partner and who they are and notice what’s kind of their best self and maybe when they’re in trouble.
Lisa Schwaller: And I think the more you’re just accepting your partner and what they bring to the table, and you’re curious about it, I think that’s the foundation. And then of course I do think it’s helpful. If you have a partner who has a background in trauma, the more you can understand how that shows up.
Lisa Schwaller: I know in my own personal experience, when I was diagnosed with complex PTSD, I was in my mid-30s. I was a mom with two little kids, and I had been through so much care, up through my teen years and in college and through my 20s. But somehow having that label, that diagnosis, it was so comforting to know that trauma shows up in a very predictable way.
Lisa Schwaller: And so learning that for me was transformational, and I think if you’re with somebody who has that in their background, the more you can separate the behavior from the person, the more you can just show up with acceptance and curiosity and support.
Barbara La Pointe: Lisa, you help people, couples build intimacy, but what’s the difference between intimacy and sex?
Lisa Schwaller: Ooh, what a fun question. Well, I think intimacy can mean a lot of things. And it is funny ‘cause people say, “Well, does intimacy equal sex?” And I think culturally, in a lot of messaging, intimacy can kind of be the polite social word that people use as a stand-in for the word sex.
Lisa Schwaller: But intimacy is really, it’s just having that high-trust relationship in yourself and with your partner that you can show up and feel like, “No matter what happens, I can show up as I am and be honest with myself and communicate what’s going on with me,” but then allowing the partner to do the same.
Lisa Schwaller: “Okay, whatever’s going on with you,” that it’s a safe space that people can be intimate or real or connected with each other. I think one of the things that’s really interesting is that for some people, intimacy, that emotional intimacy really needs to be there for them to have a good, connected sexual relationship.
Lisa Schwaller: But the opposite can sometimes be true. People could be having lots of sex and really enjoying it, but they feel like there isn’t that connection or that trust there between the two of them. And so I think it’s really interesting to really think about, for each individual, what are you looking for when it comes to having an intimate relationship?
Lisa Schwaller: What does that look like? What would that be like? What does it feel like to you? How do you show up? And then how much that informs showing up your real open, high-trusting self in sex.
Barbara La Pointe: Sometimes I think of the word intimacy as into me.
Barbara La Pointe: What about in times where a partner might not be that into you and intimacy.
Lisa Schwaller: Well, tell me a little bit more about that into me as you define that.
Barbara La Pointe: Well, sometimes as you were saying, you might lose the spark in a in a relationship or couples might lose that spark.
Barbara La Pointe: And intimacy goes down or you might feel like your partner’s not that into you and and then those barriers start coming up or the distance, the gap grows, or the relationship as you were saying, becomes sexless.
Barbara La Pointe: I would imagine that’s when couples might think about reaching out to you for some support.
Lisa Schwaller: Well, and thank you for that. That’s really helpful to put the context.
Lisa Schwaller: Because intimacy is kind of an inside job, right? It’s how we feel about ourselves and how we perceive what our partner feels about us. So to kind of bring that to life, for example, I work a lot with people who are... They’re having a whole relationship in their mind with their partner, and it’s like, “Oh, they just don’t seem like they’re into me, they’re not initiating sex like they used to, they just seem very gruff and direct.”
Lisa Schwaller: And they might discover that maybe their partner’s having an issue at work or something else is going on and it’s not about them at all. So I think intimacy is, there’s two pieces. There’s one, what you think about yourself and how you’re showing up, but then that other piece of reading your partner’s behaviors.
Lisa Schwaller: What your partner does is one thing, but the interesting part, the part that I really work with people on, is what are you gonna make that mean? If they say something and it comes in as a situation for you to evaluate, or they do something or they stop doing something, where it gets really interesting is what’s the story that you’re gonna tell yourself about what’s going on here?
Lisa Schwaller: And how much are you gonna tell this story in yourself compared to just showing up to your partner and saying, “I’m observing this. Is something going on?” Again, this coming back to that curiosity instead of assuming that your partner isn’t into you anymore. Maybe they’re just not into their job anymore.
Lisa Schwaller: That’s just one example.
Barbara La Pointe: Absolutely. Big misunderstandings could happen. We had an episode recently on NLP, neuro-linguistic programming, and just there’s a lot of questioning like that. What does that mean to you?
Barbara La Pointe: And not mind reading.
Andrew Folkler: And Carl Jung would say, was it, “perception is projection”?
Andrew Folkler: The idea that, like you were saying, just having a relationship with somebody in their head without even pausing to reflect on what’s the rest of the iceberg.
Andrew Folkler: And so I think that’s a really powerful concept to switch your gears from whether it’s self-doubt or worry and anxiety into curiosity.
Lisa Schwaller: Yeah, and in the training that I’ve had over the last few years, the second coaching certification that I received is all about really taking responsibility for what we’re thinking. Not only just, we have thousands of thoughts a day, and sometimes I think we’re almost trained, and I think that’s where I’m a little bit different than a lot of standard couples therapy, is it’s like here’s your needs, here’s my needs, and then you exchange the checklist and then you’re fine.
Lisa Schwaller: But you have to almost really get curious. When you say you need something, what is that about? What’s underneath that? And almost becoming an observer of all the thoughts that come in our head because, to give a silly example, if we have a thought, “My partner’s not into me,” and we think, “Oh,” we have this feeling of sadness, and then we start making it mean everything they do, we start measuring it against this thought, “He’s not into me,” and we really take it seriously.
Lisa Schwaller: But if we had a random thought like, “I’d love to be a flying unicorn,” we don’t put as much meaning in that because we just recognize it as, it’s just a cloud passing through our mind. It’s just a firing of neurons. But we take certain of our thoughts so seriously. So I think that’s where it can be so fun to help individuals, rather than maybe some of the couples therapy is really having an individual say, “You’re having these thoughts, but do you wanna believe them?”
Lisa Schwaller: And just starting from there can be really interesting.
Barbara La Pointe: It’s really amazing how we make these complex stories in our mind and invest in those. So it sounds like to me that you’re helping your clients also bring a great deal of awareness to their thoughts and stories that are shaping feelings, and behaviors, and outcomes.
Lisa Schwaller: Yes. And I think that just getting really curious about what we think and why, and how we can really evaluate what those thoughts that pop up in our head, and maybe choose some different things on purpose, it transforms relationships because you start just letting things come in and then almost like a scientist you look at, “Oh, what an interesting thing my partner just said.
Lisa Schwaller: Oh, those are just words that they’re saying.” You don’t have to assign a lot of meaning to it, unless you want to. And I think as far as for partners who have a background of trauma, it can really almost let them look back on their past and say, “Oh, that’s a situation that happened to me.
Lisa Schwaller: It doesn’t mean anything about me or my worth as a person.” And it can be so healing internally too to just recognize our thoughts, like that metaphor. They’re just clouds passing through the sky, and we don’t try to lasso every one and turn it into something serious.
Barbara La Pointe: I also get the sense that you’re just being so curious, that you’re helping your clients bring a lot of present moment awareness or mindfulness to just showing up and noticing what’s going on in themselves and their partner truly in the moment. Is that true?
Lisa Schwaller: Yes. So we really get curious about those patterns of thinking. I think a lot of us have experience with the concept of ruminating. Something will happen, and we’ll think about it and think about it, and oh, it just takes so much of our energy.
Lisa Schwaller: And especially when it comes to relationships, we can interpret, back to what we were talking about with intimacy, we can interpret our partner’s behavior and just really get into our mind. And just getting curious about why am I choosing to focus on that so much? What does that mean to me?
Lisa Schwaller: Are there stories here? Does this connect to a story that I heard and internalized from decades ago? And really almost, the way I describe it, it’s like slowing down time. You just really pause and look at what’s happening in your mind, and just bringing those thoughts out for that analysis and that awareness with so much curiosity.
Lisa Schwaller: It just lightens things. I think one of the things that I know I really enjoy and working with different people is the more you can almost lighten these things that feel so heavy, it’s easier in my mind to troubleshoot and solve and be experimental about something that doesn’t feel like such a heavy weight. And curiosity is a great key into that.
Andrew Folkler: It sounds like you want both curiosity within yourself and your own history and stories, and then curiosity within your partner and their stories and their history. So say hypothetically you go down this rabbit hole either within yourself or within your partner, and you’re noticing these either inconsistencies within their stories and their true self.
Andrew Folkler: How do you bridge that? I guess we could split the question in the sense of, okay, if I see something incongruent with myself and my stories, how would I address that within myself?
Andrew Folkler: And then as a follow-up, if I saw something within my partner that was incongruent with them.
Lisa Schwaller: That’s a great question, and one I get often, and I’ll ask, when you ask that, did you have a certain situation in mind?
Andrew Folkler: Well, I could list off something personal of my own if you’d like, as far as for myself.
Andrew Folkler: Let’s see. So growing up I dealt with a lot of frustration within my own relationships because I would keep pushing people away.
Andrew Folkler: A lot of that was due to when I was 16, I broke up with my first girlfriend due to my stepmother intervening. My stepmother threatened my girlfriend at the time, and I knew that she was a violent person.
Andrew Folkler: I knew that if anything were to happen, and I was 16, I didn’t really know what else to think, but I knew if anything were to happen to her, I would blame myself a great deal for it.
Andrew Folkler: And so that relationship ended very prematurely because I couldn’t, I felt powerless. There was nothing I could do about it to to be a decent partner or somebody who would protect her from even my own family. So fast-forward, I’m 26 now. This was 10 years ago. And I haven’t dated since then. I’ve gone on a few dates here and there, but nothing’s ever really connected considering that I’ve been mentally in my head pushing people away, and one of the stories I kept telling myself was I need to resolve my family drama first before catering to any relationship needs.
Andrew Folkler: And it’s only recently I started challenging that story to try and actually live a life worthwhile for myself and not put my relationship status on the indefinite hold because of this one occurrence within my life.
Lisa Schwaller: Thank you so much for sharing that, first of all, ‘cause I think that actually really does bring that question to life. So there’s a lot to unpack there. But first to start with where this story found its origin, right? So you’re 16, and there is an element, legally, there are powers that you did not have, and you were in a family situation where it’s hard to advocate for yourself because when you’re 16, what are your options exactly?
Lisa Schwaller: So you can understand from that perspective, but then also if you look at what is happening in a teenager’s brain when they’re 16 years old, there’s this splitting off from the family of origin, but not yet having the skills to look at things from a very logical or adult way.
Lisa Schwaller: Boy brains, male brains don’t mature until about the age of 25. So you had a child’s brain. You’re in a situation where you’re in a child’s legal situation, right? You’re living with your family. So it makes sense that you’re here, “I want to stand up for this relationship, but I don’t know how, and I can’t,” right?
Lisa Schwaller: There’s certain things to almost have a lot of compassion for that episode of your life. And then it would also make sense, fast-forwarding out to when you were 26 to say, “I have to wrap things up. I recognize that I’m having this pattern, and I wanna resolve it.” And it’s so tempting for us to think, “If only I could get to closure on this pattern, then it’ll be okay moving forward.”
Lisa Schwaller: But the tricky thing about life is that we do learn through experience, and I’d also almost offer that when we put ourselves on indefinite hold while we’re trying to heal, we’re actually bypassing the best healing accelerant, which is practice and being in relationships. And as those things come up, of just recognizing them and working through them, in partnership with someone else.
Lisa Schwaller: I think it’s Gay Hendricks where they talk... Is it the Imago Therapy, where they talk about how we seem to attract people who are our best healing partners, and the best way to learn how to be in good relationships is to practice while in relationship. If that helps answer that question.
Andrew Folkler: I think that’s a very powerful way to explain it, and it was an intuitive realization that I’ve been slowly coming to.
Lisa Schwaller: Yeah, it makes total sense. Our brains, they do not like uncertainty. Their job is to keep us safe, to have as much pleasure as possible, and to do things as efficiently as possible.
Lisa Schwaller: They don’t wanna expend a lot of time. So when you look at... It’s exciting ‘cause our brains, it’s exciting, but it causes us a lot of drama in our modern lives. But our brains are, they’re going to the memory bank and the evidence that we have to make sense of the world. They don’t wanna figure everything out from scratch, which thank goodness we don’t have to wake up every day and figure out how does getting dressed work again.
Lisa Schwaller: So it’s good that they’re efficient and look for that past evidence. But when it comes to looking into the future, and there’s nothing but uncertainty in the future, and our brains are not comfortable with that. So of course, we look at, “Oh, should I get into another relationship?” And the brain says, “Let me check the files.
Lisa Schwaller: No, bad idea. Unsafe. Probably not gonna be fun if that happens again. Let’s just be as efficient as possible and just turn on some Netflix.”
Barbara La Pointe: That’s really neat, Lisa. I noticed that Andrew really smiled when you were nodding, so.
Barbara La Pointe: I guess that part of our brain has been with us the longest as well.
Barbara La Pointe: It’s the oldest part of our brain that’s trying to keep us safe, so it’s very... It really knows what it’s doing.
Lisa Schwaller: Yes, and for people who’ve had childhood trauma, what’s so interesting is that it actually impairs the development of the prefrontal cortex, which is that higher level decision-making part of our brain.
Lisa Schwaller: And one of the things that was so exciting to me, getting my diagnosis is that I was like, “Oh, it’s a brain injury. It’s a gap in the brain development.” And it made me feel like I had something I could work on. And it’s so interesting that we actually... They’ve learned so much about our abilities for our brains to learn new things and to strengthen, and how much really being curious to those patterns and saying, “How much is my prefrontal cortex in charge of what I’m choosing to do here compared to that reactive ancient part of my brain?”
Barbara La Pointe: That’s such a good point. That’s the beautiful thing about counseling or coaching is that we can actually open up those neural pathways in our brain that help us make choices from our higher self or from our prefrontal cortex.
Barbara La Pointe: Just wondering if it feels right for us to go back to trauma, because seems like if we have trauma and we don’t feel safe, we can’t do any of the things you’re talking about, like showing up present or getting curious, ‘cause we’re triggered by our trauma.
Barbara La Pointe: So it seems like there’s a whole layer of barriers when someone’s dealing with early trauma or past sexual trauma.
Lisa Schwaller: Yes. That can definitely be the case. So for a lot of times, and one of the things that I think is really important for people to be aware when they’re looking for someone to work with on this, is that coaching pretty much assumes that someone has a baseline level of functional.
Lisa Schwaller: They’re able to cope with the challenges of everyday life, and it’s about really getting into the workshop of practicing these skills. So if someone is really highly triggered or they’re having trouble functioning, they’re having really acute situations in their relationships or they’re not able to function, with what is happening with work or maybe other, school if they’re students, I think it’s really important that if someone is just having trouble getting through the day, that they work with a licensed therapist who has all of the skills and access to those resources.
Lisa Schwaller: And that being said, the other thing that comes to mind is one of the things that I love about the Gottman method is when you go through their training program, they specifically, at the level two training, address certain other scenarios or comorbidities, like other scenarios that may present for people working on their relationship.
Lisa Schwaller: Addiction, abuse, domestic violence. And then they do address trauma, and I think it’s really important that if you have a background of trauma, that as you’re looking to hire someone to help you walk through your own healing journey, that you work with someone who’s specifically trained in trauma, because it presents in very specific ways.
Lisa Schwaller: And it presents a lot of additional, just challenges that aren’t all necessarily difficult or hard to go through. But I do think it’s helpful to work with someone who is really trauma informed and aware.
Barbara La Pointe: That’s an important distinction to make. But you’re trained in the Gottman method.
Barbara La Pointe: And what... I’m not sure exactly what that is. Why did you select that, and why is that helpful for clients, and what does it offer? What’s it about at its core, this method?
Lisa Schwaller: Yes. So a Gottman method is that there is a married couple, John and Julie Gottman, and John Gottman is a researcher.
Lisa Schwaller: And over 40 years ago, he and a friend of his just were like, “What’s going on with relationships?” And they started a laboratory where they would collect a lot of data on relationships. And then Julie, his wife, is a therapist, and she’s a practitioner, and she brings the clinical application.
Lisa Schwaller: So what really attracted me is both of those things, I’m not a therapist, so I’m not a certified Gottman therapist, but I have been trained in their level one and level two. And what you learn from that is very research-based approaches to how to assess what’s happening with an individual in a relationship as well as the couple, but then also certain interventions.
Lisa Schwaller: So you may have heard things like the ratio of positive to negative feedback in a relationship. They’ve done research through over 40 years now, longitudinal studies, thousands of people having gone through their lab, and they’ve measured that if a couple has at least five positive bids for affection to every one negative piece of feedback, that those relationships are healthy.
Lisa Schwaller: That if you start getting to where the negative goes higher in a relationship, that is where the relationship is in the danger zone.
Barbara La Pointe: So I’m curious, are you supporting clients to shift their focus to that positive zone and those positive thoughts?
Lisa Schwaller: Yes, so there’s a few things that we do is, I’ll first focus on just understand where they are with the conflict.
Lisa Schwaller: What conflicts come up in relationship? Because what the Gottmans have studied is that all relationships have perpetual or unresolved conflicts. So the joke is, you can change your partner, but you’re just going into the grab bag of getting a few new perpetual problems.
Lisa Schwaller: Every couple has one or more things that they’ll discuss, and discuss, and discuss, and it’s not resolvable. So the strategy isn’t how do we make that go away? It’s how do we live with each other and still like each other? So that’s one thing, is just conflict management, how people show up.
Lisa Schwaller: Are they fighting fair? There’s what they call the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse for relationships.
Barbara La Pointe: What’s that? Sounds so cool.
Lisa Schwaller: Yes. So that’s showing up with contempt, “I just dislike my partner,” criticizing them, being defensive, or stonewalling, which is just, “The shop is closed and I’m not participating any longer.”
Barbara La Pointe: Those sound like killers for a relationship.
Lisa Schwaller: They are. They are. And them being present isn’t... It’s not a problem that they’re there. It’s what people choose to do about it that can make the difference. So if you notice that you’re stonewalling your partner, that really means you have to take emotional responsibility to cool down, but then come back and participate in the relationship and not just mentally, emotionally, or even physically bail on the conversation.
Lisa Schwaller: So that’s one example.
Barbara La Pointe: It seems like just in general, especially in relationships, intimate relationships, that we’re just so powerless to resolve conflict. And it seems like conflicts in relationships end relationships. How do you... And how do you assist and support people to resolve the conflicts that are arriving.
Barbara La Pointe: ‘Cause most of us, I believe, probably acknowledge that if you don’t resolve conflicts in one relationship, you just carry on and have the same conflict with your next partner, boyfriend, husband. And sometimes that’s even mirrored in other relationships.
Barbara La Pointe: Work relationships, for example.
Barbara La Pointe: Would you agree?
Lisa Schwaller: Absolutely. And that’s where that old funny saying goes, “Wherever you go, there you are.” That a lot of times this is where... I think it’s so powerful, and I do think it’s important for couples working together to work together and on their own, conflict resolution or building the friendship.
Lisa Schwaller: That’s so important. And just having a shared meaning, like when a partnership feels like they’re working together that’s bigger than just the two of them. All of that is really valuable. But at the end of the day, the one thing that I think coaching can really help with is every partner walks in individually with your own history, with your own beliefs about how the world works.
Lisa Schwaller: And it’s one of those, if you’re like, “My partner’s irritating, and my boss is irritating, and that kid down the road is irritating, and I hear someone playing a horn three doors down, and that’s irritating,” what’s really happening is not those situations. It’s we have patterns of thought. It’s not the situation that’s the problem.
Lisa Schwaller: It’s our patterns of thinking about it. So you’re exactly right that you really have to take a look at what you bring to a situation. And we, again, brains are trying to be efficient. So if they see irritation in one place, and that’s just the template or the filter that we see the world with, it’s amazing how we can replicate those things by just seeing the same things everywhere.
Lisa Schwaller: And then also, and I think this goes back to some of the work that the both of you do, then we find ourselves attracted to or putting ourselves into situations that match the filter that we see the world through.
Andrew Folkler: That just ultimately leads to all those repeated conflict relationships like Barbara was saying or dating people who might carry a certain trait from our childhood that might not be good for us because we’re either expecting an uncaring person to be caring or a neglectful person to be attentive or anything like that.
Lisa Schwaller: And what’s really interesting is to the sexual relationship, that’s also one of the factors of decreased sexual connection over time is a couple of things happen.
Lisa Schwaller: One is proximity can... Sexual desire has an element of novelty, escape from reality, like fantasy, and if it’s just every day, sometimes just that everyday proximity can actually cause a suppression of desire. But the other thing is as well is, what they’ve studied is, and we see it all around us every day, is people have this really a lot of passion and a lot of friendship, and then they get married, and there’s something about becoming family that can really activate a lot of those familial stories in the relationship you’re in.
Lisa Schwaller: Which is really, it’s fascinating.
Andrew Folkler: That’s a linguistical conundrum I didn’t even think of. That’s actually very visual and very powerful just altogether. Thinking about it, wow, that’s impressive. I’d never thought of that that way.
Lisa Schwaller: I will not take credit for it.
Lisa Schwaller: That’s just something that started to come up through the research and there have been some research with different people over the years of what happens to the erotic desire? And part of it is you just lose the novelty, but then also as soon as someone identifies as the wife or husband, then who’s the wife or husband that they are modeled after?
Lisa Schwaller: It’s their parents, right? So it actually makes a lot of sense why you start hearing couples when they’ve been together over time of saying, “When he does that, it reminds me of my father or my mother.” Of just... It’s almost like what you were saying, Andrea, is we tend to, without knowing about it and being aware of it, almost overlay our expectations of what a husband is or what a wife is, assuming a heterosexual relationship of course, on our partners.
Lisa Schwaller: And it’s not, obviously, it’s not done maliciously or intentionally. It’s just our brain trying to be efficient and understand what we’re in in that relationship.
Barbara La Pointe: It’s just such an amazing point, ‘cause that’s a beautiful thing I think about practices like yours and coaching in general, is it can really assist us in separating out all these layers.
Barbara La Pointe: And then when we have support to do that, we can get clarity. ‘Cause that can happen again, in any relationship. I could be looking at someone I work with and thinking, “Oh, that guy is just reminding me of my dad.”
Barbara La Pointe: But not bringing consciousness to that and not knowing that, and then through coaching or just a conversation with someone like yourself, you can start separating that out and then taking ownership for it and being able to move past it.
Lisa Schwaller: Yeah, one of my favorite metaphors for working with a coach, a therapist or another, just a neutral outside party is that with our brain, we’re inside the movie of our own experience.
Lisa Schwaller: We’re not able to really get out and also be in the audience. That’s something that coaching can help you learn. But the funniest metaphor I’ve heard is it’s really hard, you can, but it’s really hard to read the words on the jar when you’re inside the jar. So coaching or therapy or even just a trusted neutral friend can really help you read the full label outside the jar and say, “By the way, did you notice this is organic?”
Andrew Folkler: So in relationships that don’t end up developing that curiosity, that don’t end up recognizing their own internal faults, typically in our sphere of the world, our sphere, there’s a lot of leaning towards infidelity. And I was wanting to ask, why is it easier for them to just absolutely demolish their relationship through infidelity rather than just take ownership and try and either realize that the relationship isn’t going anywhere or try and actually do the work and repair it?
Lisa Schwaller: Well, I think that comes back to where... And we’re highly socialized to think that external things, things outside of us control our internal, what we think and what we feel. So we think, “If I get that new job, then I’ll be happy.” “This job is terrible. If I just get a new job, then I’ll finally be appreciated and happy.”
Lisa Schwaller: The same can be true in relationships. The partner who is thinking, who knows what they’re thinking. What they’re thinking is as varied as the individual, of course, but they could be thinking, “I’m not appreciated, I’m bored, I can’t control myself.” Who knows what the partner, who is actually performing the act of infidelity might be thinking and their reasons for that choice.
Lisa Schwaller: But part of that also is thinking that something on the outside will change the state on the inside, which quite honestly, after coaching thousands of people, it’s not true. The call is always coming from inside the house.
Barbara La Pointe: We’re constantly obviously dealing with broken relationships and broken families and broken marriages.
Barbara La Pointe: If you’re not having... I’ve still got them separated, Lisa. If you’re not having intimacy in a relationship could that kill your marriage? And then if you’re not having sex could that kill your marriage or relationship over time?
Lisa Schwaller: Those are great questions. So I think that... Well, to answer that question, I’ll just preface by saying people can stay in a legal arrangement called a marriage, regardless of the conditions within it.
Lisa Schwaller: So there’s the legal container of a marriage, and we’re very much... I believe we’re given a message that a long marriage equals being successful, and ending a relationship is considered a failure, which is interesting ‘cause our lifespans are so much longer than they used to be. People 150 years ago weren’t signing up for the lifespans we are now with their spouses.
Lisa Schwaller: So with that funny thing aside, can a lack of intimacy kill the relationship that’s in the marriage container? Maybe, but maybe not. I think it really comes down to what each individual partner is... what they want. What they want for themselves, the kind of relationship that they want to build.
Lisa Schwaller: For some partners, they just grow apart and their relationship becomes much more about the logistics and the maintenance, and they’re actually okay with that. Lack of intimacy doesn’t necessarily equate to feeling loss over the lack of intimacy. Sometimes for some people, they’re quite content to just cohabitate like roommates, like we’ve all probably heard people say about relationships.
Lisa Schwaller: So I personally don’t think that the lack of friendship is necessarily a death knell for a relationship. That being said, if it’s a problem for someone, I think it’s something for them to take a look at and see, is this the relationship that I want? Do I like who I am in this relationship?
Lisa Schwaller: Can I work on it here? Or does it mean that this relationship has closed, and we should go our separate ways? And then for the second part of that is the same thing with sex. I think one of the myths that I work with people on is that not having sex means there’s something wrong with the relationship.
Lisa Schwaller: And I see over and over that that’s not true. There are people and they love each other. They find each other, they think their partner is hot. It’s just there might be other factors that are inhibiting the expression of communication that we call sex. So if we look at sex as not a barometer of relationship health, but just another form of communication, or even more neutrally, it’s just an activity that partners can elect to share together.
Lisa Schwaller: I think once we turn it from, “Oh no, this is an indicator of a healthy relationship,” to, “Oh, this is an activity you’d like to share with your partner more often,” it changes how fixable people see it. So there are people who have almost by intention, there are people in long-term committed relationships who are asexual.
Lisa Schwaller: There are people who are polyamorous, and they’re in long-term committed relationships, but it’s open. There are people in long-term monogamous relationships who find that their sex life ebbs and flows over the decades. I work a lot with people in their 60s and 70s. You’d be surprised. People are sexy their whole lifespan.
Lisa Schwaller: So I think it’s nothing really signals the end of the relationship but the person’s decision. Which is, it sounds oversimplifying, but if you look at it as just deciding, “How do I show up? What do I want? And is this relationship going to be the place for me to do that?” I think it’s so much more generous is the word that comes to mind.
Barbara La Pointe: That didn’t seem oversimplifying it to me. I actually felt de-escalation of charged emotion when you were saying that. Just so more neutral.
Barbara La Pointe: Become so much more empowered.
Barbara La Pointe: The neat thing about your practice I was noticing is that you don’t have to go with your partner.
Barbara La Pointe: You can actually just go as an individual. And you don’t need to take your husband. Is that true?
Lisa Schwaller: Yes, my practice is mostly individuals, and I really love working with individuals. I’ve worked with men and women, and what is really great is that when the person decides that they want to change their relationship to sex in general, but then also change the dynamics of their partnered relationship, I think that one of the things that people find consistently surprising is and to be honest, when I started I was like, “I’m not real sure how this is going to work,” working with individuals without having the partner present. Because consensual partnered sex is a two-person electing in. But when one partner makes this a priority and works through their history, for example, with clients of either gender, body image issues, self-worth issues.
Lisa Schwaller: Maybe they’ve had uncomfortable sexual experiences from early in their sexual career that just weren’t processed through. And showing up, really taking responsibility and really healing and learning the skills of arousal, which is the mental, or desire, which is the mental part of it.
Lisa Schwaller: Arousal, which is when your body comes in as well. And all of the things that go into sexuality, I have seen over and over one person completely change the whole marriage, and even show up differently as parents, just for the decision to work on their sex life. It’s powerful.
Barbara La Pointe: Oh, that is so powerful. Just as a collective, as a world, just collectively, do you observe that we need sexual healing in life?
Lisa Schwaller: That’s a beautiful question. I think what’s so intriguing is that we live in a very sexualized society, and yet sex is such a mystery.
Lisa Schwaller: And another way of saying that is... And this goes into that expectation of performance that I think is one of the reasons couples stop having sex over time, is, there’s this vague, fuzzy ideal that we’re consistently measuring ourself against of what does sexy mean?
Lisa Schwaller: What does partnered sex look like? On one hand, kids are told things like, “You should wait until marriage,” but then marriage isn’t sexy. And our brains are like, “I don’t know what to do with this conflicting information.” So I think it’s so interesting that, yes, our society, there’s a whole icons of sex or stand-ins or two-dimensional ideas of what sex is, but we’re not taught how to fully show up intimate, with our lumps and our smells and our weird sounds, and enjoy that part of our lives.
Lisa Schwaller: So I would say yes, that our society collectively could use a lot of sexual healing and acceptance of the human form.
Andrew Folkler: I think that’s a really powerful statement considering, like you said, you have the puritanical values of the Abrahamic religions as a dominant cultural force. And then a lot of the media industry, some of the some counterculture, some reinforcing those puritanical values.
Andrew Folkler: And even things like pornography, for example, presenting a very skewed image of what sexuality is. It reminds me of a TED Talk I remember watching by this... I can’t remember her full name. I think her name was Cindy something.
Andrew Folkler: Where she was presenting her company or nonprofit. I think it was called Make Love Not Porn or something like that. It was like a pro-pornography website, but it was submissions from people who are in intimate relationships to show what real sex would look like. Some sort of social movement thing she was trying to start.
Andrew Folkler: I think just overall what you’re saying with how we need to realign ourselves towards that curiosity and that acceptance of each other is pretty important, and it makes a lot of sense.
Lisa Schwaller: It’s interesting. Actually, what really started my coaching journey, I guess it’s been over five years now, is I mother two sons, and they’re now teenagers, both in high school.
Lisa Schwaller: And I really started to be curious about what it’s like to parent sons in this world, and daughters too, of course. But just there’s... Both men and women have such a limited, flimsy prototype of what sexuality is supposed to be or what their roles are supposed to be in relationship. And society is trying to do all these changes to equalize how people show up in partnerships and how we take care of our families and also have careers.
Lisa Schwaller: But it’s really outpaced a lot of the training and learning. So a lot of what really drew me into this work is really trying to be an advocate for masculinity and femininity as both beautiful and necessary parts of our life, which is why it’s so rewarding to work as much with men because it’s a myth that women, wives don’t want sex and men can’t get enough sex.
Lisa Schwaller: That’s just not what presents to my practice. And there’s so much confusion about how to show up as a man or as a woman, if you identify as those, in a world where it’s almost like there’s no way we can get it right.
Andrew Folkler: One little tidbit. I was curious to hear your thoughts on this.
Andrew Folkler: I’ve always explained to people that masculinity and femininity is within all of us. We each have a... maybe it doesn’t have to be split 50/50, but just like a yin-yang. We each have elements of both forms within us. And a guy is not 100% masculine nor is a woman 100% feminine. Because if we were, we would be losing all the value from the alternative element.
Lisa Schwaller: Yeah, I think our understanding, I feel like we’re at a nascent level of really even understanding how to define masculinity and femininity without it being a limitation in its definition.
Lisa Schwaller: But I think they’re just qualities, like tools. We have so many resources available to us, and there’s qualities that we... Just like we label emotions positive and negative, I think we can almost label certain behaviors or characteristics as masculine and feminine, and I think it’s just about bringing those things to bear.
Lisa Schwaller: And again, just coming back to what am I looking to create in the world, and what’s the best means for me to bring about this positive change in my life? I feel like there’s been so much work on masculinity and positive masculinity, and I think it’s really important that we’ve had a lot of cultural discussion on females and what they’re capable of and what they bring to the table, and I think it’s the same, I think we need to have that conversation about whatever any gender brings to the table.
Barbara La Pointe: Well, Lisa, we have had such a rich, rich conversation with you, and I’m just noticing that we’re closing in on that hour mark. So if it’s okay with you, I’d like to close with a little question, and just read you something that I read from your website.
Barbara La Pointe: So you asked your clients to just listen to themselves as if something amazing, even life-changing, was about to happen. You asked your clients to turn their mind off and you asked them to open their hearts and really listen.
Barbara La Pointe: And I thought that was so beautiful. And I... Maybe if we were all just listening and opening our hearts some great outcomes would happen.
Barbara La Pointe: What might be some beautiful outcomes you would want for anyone, your client or sharing time with you, Lisa?
Lisa Schwaller: Well, thank you. I love the idea of... And that comes from a short course I took from Michael Neal, and he was talking about, and it just was so profound, this idea that we very much often listen to fix, and we see that a lot in partnered relationship is, someone’ll bring their partner and the other one’s coming up with the 10-step strategy to fix it.
Lisa Schwaller: Or we listen to argue, and that’s where defensiveness can really show up in a relationship. But the metaphor he used that I thought really can stretch people’s mind is, what if we listened like our Zoom camera was listening to us? Just present, no judgment, open. But with that human element of being really open-hearted.
Lisa Schwaller: And I think to answer your question, what I’d love to see is, first of all, I’d love for people to stop listening to all the voices in their head. It’s like those little chattering teeth. There’s so many thoughts coming through our head. They’re just characters, clouds, whatever metaphor works.
Lisa Schwaller: And when you can almost turn the volume down on the thoughts and just listen, listen to your intuition, listen to your deeper wisdom. Your inner wisdom is not in a hurry. Your life is timeless from your inner wisdom’s perspective. And if you really listen, there’s so much love and self-confidence in decisions when you really listen to yourself.
Lisa Schwaller: But then to the work that I do, the more you can just, what your partner says, they’re just words. Who knows where those words come from? Maybe they didn’t mean those words. But just almost listening underneath the level of verbalization for the intent of, “While my partner’s saying this to me...” that’s their thoughts that are coming out, but what’s the feeling?
Lisa Schwaller: Can I listen for the feeling and take it subverbal? So that’s what I’d love to see, is that people just take it from the brain and bring it down into the heart and the gut and listen with their whole body. ‘Cause we’re so encouraged to use our brains to solve problems instead of our whole bodies, which have so much intelligence.
Barbara La Pointe: Thank you so much, Lisa. That’s a really enjoyable podcast, and so rich and generous. Really beautiful.
Lisa Schwaller: It was so much fun talking to you, and thank you so much for asking beautiful questions and sharing of yourself personally so that I had something to kind of live coach against absolutely. That was fun.
Andrew Folkler: Absolutely. Before we wrap up, was there any final pearls of wisdom or anything that you feel was left unsaid that you’d like to share with the audience before we wrap up?
Lisa Schwaller: Yes. I would say what I would leave people with is that miracles happen.
Lisa Schwaller: When you’re in a healing journey, a personal healing journey, or you’re in a healing journey in your relationship, the beautiful ending that you’re looking for may not look exactly like you hope, but I think there’s so much more that we’re capable of with our own healing and healing relationships.
Lisa Schwaller: I know I’ve experienced it personally. I can’t begin to describe how much different I feel and how much more joy I feel in my life compared to the person that I was 30 years ago, for example. But then in relationships, I’m sometimes astounded at what one person or a couple can do.
Lisa Schwaller: So yeah, I would just leave people with, if you want something and you’re willing to work to create it, even if you don’t get what you want, you’re gonna really like who you are at the end of that commitment.
Andrew Folkler: 100% agree with you there. Lisa, if guests wanted to reach out to you or learn more about your practice, what would be the best way for them to contact you?
Lisa Schwaller: The best way is just to go to my website, which is lisaschwaller.com, so my first and last name. And I’m on Instagram, Facebook, even LinkedIn. So I love LinkedIn. It’s a fun place. But yeah, on my website is probably the best place to go and learn about my practice. I have been working with people in sexless relationships, and I’m actually looking to what I really want is for people to just be the best relationship partner that they can be. And that’s so much fun. It’s just, it’s so expansive.
Andrew Folkler: All righty. And that is all we have time for today. Once again, thank you everyone for taking the time to be with us. And if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our channel either on YouTube or to our podcast via the various podcasting streams.
Andrew Folkler: Don’t forget, we include everything we talked about in a downloadable document. It’ll be on Barbara’s website at barbaralapointe.com/podcast. It’ll be great for you and your loved ones to build those healthy relationships and channel that curiosity. Barbara, if listeners wanted to reach out to you, what would be the best way for them to do so?
Barbara La Pointe: Barbara@barbaralapointe.com.
Andrew Folkler: Absolutely. And if you want to email me, you’re free to email me at startnow@andrewfolkler.com. As always, everyone, thank you for taking the time to be with us at the Broken Families podcast, where we discuss and help you find solutions to divorce, parental alienation, and high-conflict relationships.
Andrew Folkler: Have a wonderful day...