SUMMARY KEYWORDS

attachment style, drinking, women, attachment, relationship, sobriety, recovery, personal empowerment, struggling, parent, insecure attachment, sober, started, starter kit

SPEAKERS: Casey McGuire Davidson + Dufflyn Lammers

00:02

Welcome to the Hello Someday Podcast, the podcast for busy women who are ready to drink less and live more. I’m Casey McGuire Davidson, ex-red wine girl turned life coach helping women create lives they love without alcohol. But it wasn’t that long ago that I was anxious, overwhelmed, and drinking a bottle of wine and night to unwind. I thought that wine was the glue, holding my life together, helping me cope with my kids, my stressful job and my busy life. I didn’t realize that my love affair with drinking was making me more anxious and less able to manage my responsibilities.

In this podcast, my goal is to teach you the tried and true secrets of creating and living a life you don’t want to escape from.

Each week, I’ll bring you tools, lessons and conversations to help you drink less and live more. I’ll teach you how to navigate our drinking obsessed culture without a bus, how to sit with your emotions, when you’re lonely or angry, frustrated or overwhelmed, how to self soothe without a drink, and how to turn the decision to stop drinking from your worst case scenario to the best decision of your life.

I am so glad you’re here. Now let’s get started.

Hey there, if you’re listening to this podcast on the day it launches, I wanted to remind you that you have just one day left to join The Sobriety Starter Kit® and get access to five new bonuses worth $340 for free as part of this special offer for the course. The Summer Bonus Bundle is available until 11:59pm on Friday, June 24th. So if you’ve been thinking about grabbing this offer, I don’t want you to miss out. 

I want you to have an amazing summer alcohol free, I want you to know how good it feels to wake up every day with a clear head feeling confident and proud of yourself and rested. And I want you to know how good it feels to have the extra time, energy and money that you’ll get from taking a break from alcohol. So you’ll have that time, energy and money to spend on other things that actually bring you true relaxation, joy and excitement. 

If you join The Sobriety Starter Kit® in the next 24 hours, you’ll be able to join me on a live Dry July Kickoff Event this Sunday, June 26th at 1pm ET and I would love to see you there live. When you join the course you’ll get instant access to my signature four-step sober coaching framework, eight step by step sober coaching modules with over 60 video lessons, resources and guides that will help you get started right away. You’ll get a mobile app to access support whenever you need it. 

And in addition to that live kickoff event this Sunday, you’ll get four other bonuses. You’ll get the Empowered Boundaries Codependency Workshop with Hayley McGee, which is really powerful, especially if you’re overwhelmed, or you’re a people pleaser, or you have trouble even identifying your own wants and needs much less, making sure you get those prioritized in your life. So if you feel irritation or resentment or guilt, you want access to this workshop with Haley because it’s going to help you so much.

You get The Ultimate Guide to Non-alcoholic Beverages by Zero Proof Nation. And this guide is gorgeous, I cannot wait for you to take a look at it. You get my guide to creating your incredible Sober Summer Bucket List and you get not only my ideas, but the list of 12 other women and what they’re doing this summer to enjoy life and the season without drinking. And you’ll get my Full Diary of Early Sobriety – what I felt and did and wrote about from day one to day 100. 

But all of these bonuses are only available for one more day at no additional cost.

You will save $340 on the course when you get these bonuses for free. So if you’ve been thinking about jumping in to The Sobriety Starter Kit®, if you’re tired of starting and stopping again and thinking it’s not worth it or it’s too hard to try to not drink because you keep quitting on yourself, or if you’re in early sobriety and you want to make this process easier, more fun and more empowering and positive, I’d love you to join the course. So you can go to sobrietystarterkit.com to see all the details of what’s included in the course, to decide if it’s a good fit for you. But if you’ve been thinking about it, don’t wait any longer, you deserve this support. This course is going to help you so much.

And before we jump into this awesome episode on Love and Sex and Intimacy and Attachment Styles in Recovery, I just wanted to share what some other women who’ve done The Sobriety Starter Kit® have told me about how it helped them. 

Krista wrote me and said, “I’m on day 90 today. I’ve had a lot of failed attempts before this, but the sobriety starter kit has been a game changer. I don’t feel like I quit anything. I feel like I’ve found something I’ve lost. Thank you.” 

And Aaron, who just hit a year alcohol free said that after spending 10 or more years of her adult life drinking, it was catching up to her. She desperately didn’t want to quit drinking, but she also knew that something needed to change. 

Erin said The Sobriety Starter Kit® gave her a framework to guide her on her journey and the voice of someone who had been there and who gets it. The course helped Erin get through those difficult first days and gave her solid recommendations that worked for tricky situations like parties and weddings. Erin said she loved that I helped her build a life she didn’t feel like she needed to escape from with sobriety as a study base. 

And Amanda joined the course and said it was the best value for all the money she spent on this journey to sobriety. Over the past several years. Amanda said she’d spent way more money on other programs and they just didn’t work for her. But The Sobriety Starter Kit® course was exactly what she needed. 

So if you’ve been thinking about it, please jump in. I would love to see you on the live kickoff. I want you to get these bonuses, and I’d love to see you in the course.

Alright, today we are talking about attachments and relationships in recovery. 

And my guest is the perfect person to talk about this. Her name is Dufflyn Lammers, aka the cool aunt who took you to rehab and Planned Parenthood but made you tell your mom. She’s the go to relationship expert for women in recovery definitely, is the founder of rockrelationshipsinrecovery.com, where she offers online courses, an online community and one to one coaching for women who want to succeed at sex, love and dating without resorting to tequila. She combines a unique background in tantra attachment repair, intervention and coaching to help women create optimum relational well being. All right, definitely. I am so excited to have you on and talk about this.

 

08:02

Thanks for having me. Casey, I’m really happy to be here.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  08:06

Yeah. And I’m excited to talk about this because single women, women with partners, and who are dating, and women in long term marriages all have questions about what changes in their relationship once they get sober. And what adjustments are there, is not drinking going to affect the relationship in positive ways, and negative ways. And there’s a lot of background, you know, that you’re going to share about different attachment styles and attachment strategies, and intimacy and recovery. So let’s dive in.

 

08:45

Alright, sounds good. 

 

So maybe let’s start with the attachment styles. And we can use that as a basis for everything else that we’re going to talk about. And so essentially, a lot of people have heard about attachment styles at this point. But I want to review sort of what is that? Right from my point of view. 

 

So an attachment style, or strategy is something that’s created, usually in the first two years of our life. And essentially, we’re a baby, someone comes to take care of us. And based on the way that someone comes to take care of us, we develop ideas about what we feel we can expect from the world. So it creates a sort of a paradigm inside us that we will use for the rest of our life and all of our relationships unless we make a concentrated effort to change that.

 

 And so it’s not only about the kind of care we received, it’s about how we internalize that care. It’s about what we made it mean about who we are. And it’s not just about how we behave in relationships. It’s about how we see ourselves and how we see the world so really, it affects everything and about 50% of the people in the Western world are securely attached, which means they feel that they are okay. And other people are okay. And they feel like they can expect for their needs to be met in general. And then the other 50% is the rest of us. And, and this is what we call insecure attachment. And there are several different types of insecure attachment. 

 

So, for adults, insecure attachment can be, we start with dismissive. So for adults insecure attachment can be dismissive, which is the person who has high avoidance and high anxiety. And this person generally has an attitude of I’m okay, you’re not okay. And then we have the person with preoccupied attachment. So that person has high anxiety and low avoidance, and that person generally has the idea that I’m not okay, you’re okay. And then we have the person with disorganized attachment, and this person has high avoidance and high anxiety, and this person generally has the attitude of I am not okay, you are not okay. And that disorganized attachment is about 70% of the people who suffer from addiction. So this is a really important thing to know, when we’re going into relationships, when we’re struggling to love and be loved, that we might want to look at our attachment style, because it’s likely if we’re a person in recovery, that we’re struggling with anxiety and avoidance, and how do we manage that and succeed at sex, love and dating, without relapsing. 

 

And this is part of why it became really important for me, I’m a woman in long term recovery as coming up on 20 years on October 14. And so, for me, in my early recovery, I realized that the thing that threatened that, for me the most was relationships, a dude would break up with me, not call me back, ghost me, whatever it was, it was going on, right. And I would get so emotional and so upset that of course, I wanted to drink because that was how I had been dealing with it. Since I was 14 years old. It made perfect sense to me that if a boy broke your heart, you went out and got drunk with your girlfriends. Right? And maybe for other people, that’s okay. But that had stopped working for me. And, you know, and I needed to find another way to talk about, sit with the feelings. And I needed to find another way to sit with the feelings. But my feelings were really big. I mean, really big. Right?

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  12:40

Yeah, that’s super interesting, because I know that I suffer with anxiety, always had. And, you know, I, I’d be interested just personally to chat about why that is. But that’s me, you know, in terms of my parents, moved a lot. They were, parenting was probably not their first priority. Their jobs were their first priority, their marriage was their second priority, my sister and I had a lot of housekeepers, in different countries, who took care of us a lot of the time. And, you know, not anything related to not caring, but also not there.

 

13:22

Yeah, and two things, I want to respond to what you were talking about in terms of your own childhood, because one thing I know, when it comes to attachment, the absence of a negative is not a positive. So just because you know, we didn’t grow up in an abusive home, doesn’t mean that we didn’t suffer from some sort of very mild neglect. It may seem very mild, but it’s again, about how we internalized it and what we made it mean, about who we are and what we can expect from the world. And that actually, you know, a parent who is present but not present, can actually cause a lot of damage, surprisingly. So. I think that that was great that you pointed that out, because it’s really important for people to know that just because you didn’t grow up with, you know, somebody throwing punches or dishes or whatever doesn’t doesn’t mean that you necessarily should have secure attachment.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  14:19

Well, that can also be a parent who works two jobs or a parent who had one, you know, who was on their own and had a lot on the plate or a parent whose partner was high maintenance in mental health or physical health or something. So you know, the the idea of sort of adult children of alcoholic who be alcoholics who become caregivers, or trying to make everything perfect, or constantly worried or feeling like their parents can be taken away from them, you know, I assume that they would also develop very similar situations or styles or emotions around this.

 

14:58

Yeah, it’s just that thing of not being present for whatever reason, as you say, there can be lots of different reasons, perhaps a parent is, is very ill, and not present. Because of that, you know, there can be reasons that are perfectly understandable reasons. And yet, they may affect the child in a negative way. And then the other thing I wanted to respond to is what you said about different situations and, and how one person may respond differently to the same situation. So the person who taught me about attachment and the protocol that I use was just called ideal parent figure protocol to repair that because, because the truth is that there actually is another attachment style.

 

And that’s why I say there’s five, the other one is earned secure attachment. And, and this is my favorite, because, you know, as I said, our attachment style will remain constant throughout our lifetime, unless we make a concentrated effort to change it. And if we do, and we use, you know, the tools that are available to us, we can create, earn secure attachment, so we might still have features, we can’t make it like that never happened. But we can create a new internal working model using the ideal parent figure protocol. And I learned that from Daniel P. Brown. And one of the things that showed up also in his research was that, for example, two different men go to war, the likelihood that the one with secure attachment will come back with PTSD is much lower, the one who has the insecure attachment is much more likely to develop PTSD. So yes, you’re absolutely right.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  16:50

Hi there. If you’re listening to this episode, and have been trying to take a break from drinking, but keep starting and stopping and starting again, I want to invite you to take a look at my on demand coaching course, the sobriety starter kit.

 

The sobriety starter kit is an online self study sober coaching course that will help you quit drinking and build a life you love without alcohol without white knuckling it or hating the process. The course includes the exact step by step coaching framework I work through with my private coaching clients, but at a much more affordable price than one on one coaching. And the sobriety starter kit is ready, waiting and available to support you anytime you need it. And when it fits into your schedule. You don’t need to work your life around group meetings or classes at a specific day or time.

This course is not a 30 day challenge, or a one day at a time approach. Instead, it’s a step by step formula for changing your relationship with alcohol. The course will help you turn the decision to stop drinking, from your worst case scenario to the best decision of your life.

You will sleep better and have more energy, you’ll look better and feel better. You’ll have more patience and less anxiety. And with my approach, you won’t feel deprived or isolated in the process. So if you’re interested in learning more about all the details, please go to www.sobrietystarterkit.com. You can start at any time and I would love to see you in the course 

 

That is so interesting to me, completely. So I’d love to hear about both how you develop like the, you know, obviously your work is really in depth and you have a ton to teach but just in a high level way, tell me how you would create earn secure attachment.

 

19:18

So I use Dan’s approach, which is a three prong approach, which includes collaboration mentalization, and the ideal parent figure protocol. Collaboration and mentalization is what we do in therapy and coaching for the most part, right and I don’t think that requires a whole lot of explanation. The ideal parent figure protocol is a meditation intervention for attachment repair, which essentially involves the client. It’s similar to hypnotherapy. So the client is led through a guided meditation which helps them to imagine instead of ideal parents completely different from the ones that they grew up with and ideally suited to them. And in the process of doing that, because imagination creates new possibilities, we’re able to create that new internal working model.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  20:06

That’s really interesting and over, you know, is it over a period of time a number of sessions a number of months.

 

20:15

It usually takes between 30 and 150 sessions, depending on the severity of the attachment, wounding, and how consistent and often the client shows up. Usually, I try to record sessions and the clients that listen to the recording between sessions move more quickly.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  20:32

That’s awesome. So does it matter how you do this? Or the partners that you choose? If you don’t do this work? Whether you have dismissive attachment styles, or disorganized attachment styles, or insecure attachment styles? Like are you attracted to different kinds of partners and have different kinds of relationships based on those differences?

 

21:01

The short answer is yes. Yes. And I think how that manifests in different people is different. But you know, we talk in recovery a lot about someone who has a broken picker, this is what we’re saying is that they have attachment wounding. Right, and they’re picking because it’s, it’s normal and natural that as, as children, we model on one of our parents, right, we model on the same sex parent usually, but that’s fluid. And and then we try it out with the opposite sex parent, and then we grow up and right. Um, but when we have attachment wounding, it’s also true that we have a complicated relationship with those caregivers. And so if we’re choosing someone who, because our attachment style is usually based on one of the caregivers, whichever one we chose, so if we have an insecure attachment style, it’s based on that, which means we’re probably choosing someone who has insecure attachment.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  22:06

So you’re choosing someone who has a similar style, or a similar, similar style to you, or a similar style to the parent that you’re that you’re attaching to, often both. But there’s also you know, just sort of this phenomenon where many people who have anxious attachment will choose a dismissive partner. And the opposite is also true, because we’re attracted to each other. And right, and so, if we modeled on, for example, I modeled on my mother, who has disorganized attachment. So I modelled on her, but then trying it out with daddy, which however weird that sounds, you, you, you know, this is this is the first opposite sex person in your life. And so you look at that person, as you know, the kind of person that you fall in love with. Right, and that sort of imprinted and so my father being someone with disorganized attachment, also in my case, and in my opinion, that is who I’m going to look for.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  23:11

Yeah, that’s right. The stain. Yeah.

 

23:14

Yeah, absolutely. And that makes complete sense. And specifically what you described, that when a child expresses emotion and the emotion and they hear that your feelings are not okay, it’s not safe to share your feelings. This is specifically one of the things that often relates to dismissive attachment. And another way to look at it is that someone with dismissive attachment usually has a fear of intimacy, someone with anxious attachment or preoccupied attachment usually has a fear of abandonment. So oftentimes, we have both fears, but one is more primary. So that makes complete sense, given what you’ve said. So as an example, if you had a child and the child has a say, it’s a female child, right? And her mother is disorganized. So she models on the mother and she becomes disorganized, because that’s the style she’s chosen. And her father is dismissive. So later in life, she’s most likely to choose dismissive men.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  24:22

Yeah, does that make sense? Yeah. That’s really interesting. Yeah. And it’s

 

24:27

interesting, too, I think, you know, to just sort of put it out there because really, the only way to, with certainty, determine our attachment style, is to do the adult attachment interview. Right and which is very in depth and and it’s cost prohibitive, which is why a lot of people don’t do it, but the truth is, it happens on a continuum. And many of us, right, so many of us have, you know, like I was saying high avoidance and low anxiety. Well, we, you know, but we can be, I’m moving my hands around, you can’t see me moving my hands. But we can be in different places right on that continuum. Yeah. And there are different types of preoccupy, you can have a controlling, preoccupied and you can have a helpless preoccupied. They’re not the same. Right. So there are definitely refinements to this. So I think it’s difficult when people start trying to diagnose themselves kind of thing. Yeah. And what I think is helpful is to just recognize if you’re someone who struggles to love and be loved, if you identify with having a fear of intimacy and or a fear of abandonment, that it’s possible that you have insecure attachment. And there’s something you can do about that. Besides drinking or using drugs.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  25:45

Yeah. Well, so tell me about you. You said, if you’re open to it, you said, you have disorganized attachment style, and your mother did as well. And maybe your Father, tell me how that presented and developed in you.

 

26:04

So disorganized, the way I like to describe it is, you know, so I would have described myself prior to recovery as someone who had disorganized attachment, which means I had the high anxiety and the high avoidance, and I was like, I’m not okay, you’re not okay, nothing is okay, nobody is safe. And so it’s also sometimes called fearful avoidant. And so within that, you know, the way that it manifested for me was a lot of come here, go away. So I was, right. So I was often in my relationships, doing a lot of behavior that would both drive somebody away and then cling to them, cling to them. And it’s just crazy-making for anyone to be in a relationship with somebody like that. Once I quit drinking, and I quit drinking about eight years before I quit drugs is for me, my disease likes to migrate. My Christian, my disease is a world traveler. So you know, once I finally really, really got into recovery, and started doing some work, I would say, I sort of upgraded to controlling preoccupied, so I’ve made some progress, but I wasn’t quite to earn secure. And, and then it started manifesting a lot with jealousy. And that’s what that looked like. And sometimes in some of my relationships, I was jealous for a good reason, and sometimes not. But I didn’t know the difference. All I knew was that it felt to me like someone was going to take away my security, and I had to do everything I could to keep it.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  27:39

And then how did you upgrade again, to

 

27:43

Yes, thank you. Earn secure attachment, and I did upgrade again. And for me that began with meditation. When I had about eight years of recovery, I started meditating on a daily basis, which really helped me to regulate my nervous system. You talk about sitting with the feelings, that’s literally I was practicing sitting, because we can pause when agitated or doubtful, right, we can pause, but we need to practice that pause. So that’s what that was about for me. Once I started meditating, I was able to see a lot more the thoughts that I was having. And then to inquire with those thoughts. Okay, I have a fear, it’s real, but is it realistic, and, and see, you know, that some of the thoughts that I was having weren’t necessarily true, and that I didn’t have to believe everything that I thought. And that changed a lot for me, when it came to the jealousy that I was able to kind of talk myself off the ledge. 

 

And, and then I also did something, which is something that I do with all of my clients now, which is we take a history and then we develop a plan, whether that’s about being in the relationship that you’re in, or about dating in order to get into a relationship that you feel good about, or about being single in a way that feels good to you. We create what’s called a personal empowerment plan. And that everything from Okay, these are my these are the things that I absolutely don’t do ever, you know, so for example, I don’t drink no matter what, well, that’s one. And for me, when I first started this journey of recovering from my struggles of loving and being loved, I also had, you know, on my list was don’t call this guy and don’t call that guy. Right. And then I kind of upped my game from there. 

 

And then I had sort of, you know, the next level of things so that was like the red zone, right? And then we have the yellow zone, which is about our, our painful growing edge. And these are the things that if I do these things, it might lead me to a drink or it might lead me to call that guy that I don’t really want to talk to anymore because I know he’s bad for me. So you, so within there was things like I don’t have sex outside of a committed relationship. That was a big one for me, right. And then we move up to exquisite self care. And this is a model, the personal empowerment plan that was developed by Stacey Sprout in Seattle. She’s amazing. And so the exquisite self care is, okay, what are the things that I do need to do, in order to keep myself in a place where I can regulate my emotions, where I’m not going to be, you know, where I’m resourced. And, and then I connect that to my purpose. And I connect that to my vision. So all of these things, right, like, I don’t drink no matter what, and I don’t do these other things. But it’s all leading somewhere to this vision that I have of this life, that’s possible for me, if I can maintain this. And so once I had a personal empowerment plan, and I was willing to follow it, and I had the accountability to be able to do that. That changed a lot for me, which is why it’s a device that I use with all my clients now.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  31:03

That sounds amazing. Really, really good. And as I’m thinking about this, it sounds like that’s something that every person who feels anxious or fine in a relationship, or even is in a good relationship would benefit from. Now, when you talk about, you know, I don’t drink, I don’t have sex outside of a committed relationship, I don’t call these people who are unhealthy for me. And then moving to how do I regulate my emotions? How am I a resource? How do I connect that to my purpose and vision? Does that vary between someone who is single and possibly trying to find their partner, maybe on dating apps, etc., someone who is in the early stages of relationships, someone who is committed with a committed partner, or someone who’s committed with difficulties in their marriage, like looking at separation looking at divorce? I know, that’s a lot of questions. But I’m curious, in your experience working with women, how does the personal development plan differ according to their situation?

 

32:21

Yeah, absolutely. That makes sense. What you’re asking, and one thing about the personal empowerment plan is that it’s flexible. It’s a living document, right? I need to look at it every couple of months and say, Okay, what’s changed since the last time I looked at it? What do I need to adjust? And for me, what that meant is that, you know, because I created the personal empowerment plan, which for me, included a dating plan, when I was single, I now have a relationship. And once I moved into a relationship, yes, things had to change. 

 

So for example, now, one of the things in my painful growing edge is I don’t look at my partner’s phone without permission. You know, so it grows, and it changes with you as you move into a relationship. And if you’re in a relationship that you know, you’re committed to, but you’re struggling, right, this is why I created, I have an online course called Love Him or Leave Him. Because a lot of women have come to me over the last three years, struggling to stay in a relationship and not really sure if they should or not, and, and feeling like well, I’m suffering, I’m putting up with a lot in the name of love. And maybe the thing that used to fit when we were both drinking and using together doesn’t fit anymore, you know, maybe I don’t like my husband better now that he got sober. Or maybe you know, maybe what fit for me when I was drinking, like, I suddenly woke up and I sobered up, and he’s so happy about it. But I’m, I’m not into him anymore, whatever it is, right? So lots of those reasons. 

 

And so in this course, it’s essentially, it’s about looking, how did you enter the relationship? Who were you when you entered the relationship is where we begin. And then we walk through just sort of a series there. It’s a mini course. So it’s actually only three modules. But I think the thing is, we have to get clarity and confidence and then courage to be able to whatever the issues are, communicate about them. We all know communication is so important. And when we have insecure attachment, sometimes the way that we communicate is also related to that. And so that complicates things.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  34:36

Yeah. And is it I know you mentioned originally that attachment styles often develop in your first two years of life, but can they shift later in life? For example, if you are secure and you believe you’re in a really strong relationship, and then you find out that your partner has had an affair or that person shifts based on circumstances or, you know, my parents lived apart for a year where my dad was with a job in Africa, my mom was in a job in Brazil. And I know that was really hard for them. I don’t have a lot of details. But I know that that was a difficult time. So, you know, how does that develop later in life? Or is it pretty static throughout your life? 

 

35:29

Well, the attachment style probably stays the same. But what we can have is attachment wounding that happens in adulthood. This is basically what you’re referring to. So it just has a different name, we call that a core conflict. And so, you know, there’s different work that we do around the core conflict. I think the difference is that usually it’s easier to solve that with traditional talk therapy. Yeah, whereas the attachment style, if you want to change that it’s pre verbal. When that happened, you didn’t even know how to describe what’s happening to you or to speak about it, because you were, you know, a baby, whereas the core conflict is, is easier to resolve with conversation with the collaboration in the mentalization.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  36:20

That’s super helpful. So is, that sounds like the time where you can decide is therapy, the talk therapy, or couples counseling, or whatever the right path to go down versus doing this really deep? attachment style work?

 

36:42

Yeah, I mean, this is why taking the personal history is really important. So that’s where I usually begin, if someone comes into me, and they’re like, you know, I’m really struggling in my relationship, I’m not really sure what to do. What I’d like to do is I’d like to begin with, I have a series of six worksheets that I take people through, that takes them through a history where they answer a bunch of questions, they do a lot of homework, but if they’re willing to do the homework, then they’re going to find out at the end of that, where they’re at, and they they end with the personal empowerment plan. And then we see, can they do it? Can they stick to the personal empowerment plan? Because the people who cannot? Oftentimes what that indicates to me is okay, you need to do the IPF, you need to do the attachment repair work?

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  37:30

And do you do that deep assessment of attachment styles? You mentioned, you mentioned, it was a little bit cost prohibitive and, and deep work. But is that something that you do or something that someone else does?

 

37:43

I have people to refer to. 

 

Perfect. 

 

Yeah. So if anybody listening wants to know that I can refer you to someone. Great.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  37:50

And so tell me about like, if you’re, I know you have a course, which sounds incredible. But if you’re working with women, one on one, what does that look like? Over what period of month? What types of women do you work with? Are there different situations that bring them to you? All that good stuff?

 

38:11

Yeah, absolutely. So sometimes I think a lot of women come to me because they’re newly sober, and they’re struggling with relationships, no matter what stage they’re at, because there’s attachment issues often come up in early recovery, because it may or may not be one of the things that we were drinking and drugging over, right? So women in early recovery, early sobriety, I sometimes work with men, but mostly women and women who are in a relationship, and they can’t decide if they should stay, or they should go, but they’re struggling. And then women who have a spouse, lover, boyfriend, who’s not yet in recovery, but who they feel has an issue, has a problem. And how do they resolve that? How do they either live with it? Or, or not? Right, because I’m also trained in intervention. Yeah, and so that’s kind of where that comes in. 

 

And then sometimes I also work with women who are just really struggling to get their mojo back and and struggling with intimacy, right and loving their bodies and being available for sexuality, especially and this is usually women who are either in a long term relationship or they can’t get into a relationship and they’ve been single for a really long time. I myself was single for 12 years in sobriety. And I’ll tell you, I struggled like I did not want to be and I dated a lot, and I just kind of couldn’t figure it out. And it was really hard for me because I didn’t want to have sex outside of a committed relationship. That was not my value. I have no judgment against that at all, each woman and each person needs to decide what’s right for them. But it wasn’t what I wanted. And yet 12 years by Like, you know,

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  40:02

like, I’d like to have sex.

 

40:04

I yeah, I was in my early 30s. And I was like, Bring it on, you know? And so I, you know, so I really struggled with that. And I was like, how am I going to figure that out? And how do I do this without compromising my values? And for me if that meant I needed somebody to hold space for me, I needed somebody to tell me, you know, it’s okay to get your needs met. And here’s how you can do that in a way that’s going to honor your values. And here’s how you can do that in a way that’s not going to lead you back to a drink?

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  40:34

Yeah, I’m really glad I asked that question. Because I didn’t know that you also work with women who are struggling to be intimate or struggling with body image issues, you know, to feel good as they’re having sex. And that’s something that I know so many women struggle with, especially since we’re immersed in this diet culture, and this idea that bodies that are thinner or look a certain way are more attractive than bodies that aren’t so will you tell me a little bit about how that works? Done?

 

41:11

Yeah, essentially, because here’s the deal, the way that we feel about our bodies, and contributes a lot to how comfortable we are being intimate with somebody, right? Being physically intimate with somebody, because if I don’t love my body, it’s going to be really hard for me to let somebody else love my body, right? And love on me and give me pleasure, and giving and receiving pleasure, you know, it requires a certain amount of sexual competence. And right, like, I mean, I don’t know about you, but especially when I was new in recovery, and for a long time in recovery. I didn’t know who I was, period, much less who I was in the bedroom. And how was I going to tell somebody else what I wanted, I didn’t even know what I wanted. Right? So I had some learning to do. And I had to get curious about that. 

 

And so inviting women to, you know, make friends with their body again, there’s lots of different exercises we do. And some of them, they seem really simple. But I’ll tell you, just like, a couple of days ago, I did this and I’m a tantric guy. I’ve been doing Tantra for over 10 years now. So this is where that part of my training comes in. Which is what Tantra is a type of yoga, but it’s specifically focused on sacred sexuality. So I did this exercise, and I’ve done this exercise with a roomful of people. But I did this exercise where I took off my clothes, I stand in front of the mirror, and I name everything that I see that I like. It’s a beautiful way to just like it’s so powerful, it seems super simple. But it’s so powerful. And, and then just coming to understand that like, turning you on is not your partner’s job. It’s yours. Right? And discovering that right? And leaning back into that and being like, Okay, well, what does turn me on? You know, that’s not to say that you and your partner can’t have a conversation about it, please do, but starting to learn about, you know, what turns you on, what feels good to you and getting really comfortable with that, and then getting comfortable communicating that.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  43:17

Yeah, you know, it’s really interesting. And this is one of the reasons that I love getting together with women who are in recovery, because we talk about everything. So I went on a Mexico retreat, which she recovers, I went to Miami and we’re all just sitting around a cabana talking. And you know, when we were Mexico, we were talking about sex and sex with your husband? And what if you haven’t had sex in a long time? And how do you think about it, or whatever it is? And one of the women suggested this app called Dipsea. Have you heard of it?

 

43:54

I don’t know it, it

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  43:55

is D-I-P-S-E-A, a download. And what’s super interesting about it is it is audio. So you obviously can read erotica or whatever, you know, light or not like, by the way, I am absolutely not a sex expert. And I’m not totally comfortable talking about it. But like porn, God help us. I find it like ridiculous, you know, it’s always like focused on blow jobs and that kind of stuff, which I’m like, seriously, this is supposed to turn me on. Whatever it is. And so this is audio and you can pick, you know, her, him, her, him, him, him, him, her, her whatever it is. And it’s, you know, stories that you’ve listened to if you’re not as visual and different situations, but like seriously, you can get a guy with an Irish accent or there’s like all the plants hear their voices super nice so you can hear it from the woman’s perspective from the man’s perspective. It is interesting and by the way, I occasionally, we’d listen to this before have sex. My husband knows nothing about this. I’m just like, Yeah, okay, you know, whatever it is, but I just learned about this in Miami. So it’s like, what, a month ago. And I was like, Dude, this is cool.

 

45:14

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And a lot of women, you know, they say a man falls in love with his eyes and a woman falls in love with her ears. So that makes complete sense to me. That this is the kind of erotica that women would choose. Right? And absolutely, I agree with what you said about pornography. It’s been very damaging to both men, women, non binary, like every human on the planet. It’s been damaging, I think, to the universal sexual psyche, if you ask Yeah.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  45:44

And I didn’t obviously growing up, I mean, pre iPhone, pre internet. Not a lot of pornography out there. I mean, I think the only thing I ever saw, you know, in someone else’s house was, you know, a Playboy magazine, and my son’s 14, and I’m terrified. I’m sure he is. God help him. Hopefully, you’ll never listen to this pod. But like, watching all that stuff, I’m like, do you know as I’m listening to Dipsea, I was like, Oh, honey, I want you to like listen to this to know what a healthy sexual experience it is, which he would kill me. And I’d never suggest it. Poor, Poor kid. But it’s really interesting, you know, because I’m like, Oh, dear God, don’t watch that. And think that that’s what you’re supposed to look like, sound like, do, experience, like, you’ll never, you’ll never have a good relationship with a woman if you’re like, This is what happens.

 

46:37

Thank you. Yeah, exactly. And you know what this comes back to what we were talking about before, too, which is ultimately about embodiment. Right? Because a lot of times, this is, when we talk about attachment disturbances, this is complex PTSD. And a lot of us get knocked out of our bodies when this happens, right? And we’re not feeling really present in our bodies. And then on top of it, we’re seeing these images that tell us, Oh, here’s what you’re supposed to be looking like, you know, and here’s what it’s supposed to look like when a woman has an orgasm. And the fact is that it’s only maybe the, I think, 35% If I’m not mistaken, 35% of women that can reliably have an orgasm with intercourse with penetration. Where’s the rest of us? We need some other kind of stimulation, right? And yet, what pornography displays is definitely male centered, right? And right, so we get all kinds of ideas about that. And we become very performative. We’re more worried about what we look like, while we’re having sex than we are about whether it feels good. And you know, if you ask me, those priorities are a little turned around.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  47:56

Absolutely. That’s really interesting. And separately, what if you look at yourself in the mirror, and you’re like, Okay, I like one thing about my body, or whatever it is, like, how do you get over that?

 

48:11

So you, I think, you celebrate that one thing to start with, like, celebrate that one thing. And, and I think also, that’s part of the value of having a coach, right, and part of the value of doing something like Tantra is working with someone who can help you beach a little bit like, I love this exercise. It’s called the gratitude bomb. And you start with like, several little categories, right? But you’re, the idea is you got to fill that whole page with writing, you got to fill that page and it’s extend, intensify and enlarge whatever it is that you do, like, and expand it out and see, okay, you like that one little part of your body? So say, for example, you like your eyes. Okay, great. What is it that you like about your eyes? And what do your eyes bring to you? And what have other people said that they like about you? What have other people said about your eyes? Right? So it’s a way of sort of intensifying that and allowing it to grow. And yeah, and then the more that you can get in your body in a way, like whether it’s dancing, we love Peyton with her dancing, right? And whether it’s dancing,

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  49:29

She Recovers, and She Recovers Dance, which is amazing. And I believe there’s even a free online She Recovers Dance event weekly. I’ll put the link to the She Recovers online gatherings and how to learn more in the show notes of this class because that’s a great idea of this episode.

 

49:49

Yeah, fantastic. So yeah, whether it’s dance or it’s yoga, it’s Tantra. It’s breathwork. It’s somatic experiencing it. You know, there are lots of different modalities. Whatever floats your boat, and but consciously being in your body, I think can help you begin to appreciate it more and appreciate not only what it looks like, but what it does for you.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  50:12

Yeah, that’s awesome. And I had one more question, which was, I work with women who’ve tried to moderate for a very long time, and haven’t been able to stop drinking. So they’re in that difficult cycle of starting and stopping and starting again, and maybe getting four days, two weeks, a month, three months, and then diving back into that really hard cycle. I have talked to other coaches, other therapists on this podcast who have said that, if you really need to get out of that drinking cycle and be away from it before you can do for example, shame work, or other work, do you work with women you said newly sober, who have quit drinking or drugging or whatever they do? Do you work with women who are still doing that and need to deal with that? Or do they need to be past that phase before they’re able to dive into this work?

 

51:07

I don’t have any, like set requirements about a minimum number of, you know, months of sobriety. But I feel like, you’re absolutely right, that the primary addiction needs to be arrested before we can address these deeper issues. Because it’s just not going to, it’s not going to function. If somebody comes to a session, you know, hungover, well, then we need right, then we’re, well, then we’re going to talk about that. Yeah, we’re gonna go back, and we’re gonna talk about that. And we’re gonna resolve that primary issue, because this is sort of like if you go to a treatment center, and you say, Well, I have an eating disorder, and I’m addicted to cocaine. And I have issues with my mom. Right? They’ll start asking you, well, when did you first experience these things? And you’ll go back and you’ll look at, okay, where did this come from? And all of those are connected, no doubt, right. But the first thing we’re going to address is what’s killing you the fastest?

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  52:09

Yeah, yeah, that’s really great to learn and to hear about. So. I feel like we’ve covered so much. I’ve learned so much. I’m like, Alright, I need to dive into all the things. But tell us about women who are listening to this, women who are like, Yes, I need to do this work. How can they get in touch with you?

 

52:29

So I’m really easy to find. I’m like Rumpelstiltskin. If you can spell my name, you can find me it’s Dufflyn and my website is dufflyn.com. And if you don’t remember that you can go to rockrelationshipsinrecovery.com they both lead to the same place. And there you can find out about the Love Him or Leave Him course you can find out about one to one coaching. And I also have an online community called Heart Spring, which is a weekly online group and that’s also a great place to start and just kind of dip your toe in the water.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  53:02

That’s great. And I know you’re working on a podcast yourself that’s going to begin at some point in the future. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

 

53:11

I’m doing that with a partner. His name is Gavin Sharp. He’s a certified sex addiction therapist in Monaco so far, tentatively, it’s called Loving Me Loving You. It’s for couples. And so talking about, you know, he works with a lot of couples and I usually work with a woman and many times I work with women who can’t get their partner to go to therapy, but want him to hear that. 

 

Yeah, I

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  53:37

yeah, I know lots of men like that, including mine. So that is great. Thank you so much. I truly have loved this conversation.

 

53:48

Me too. Casey, thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  53:53