Sex In The Codependent Narcissist Relationship

[Music] Lori welcome to my video I'm so excited I remember when you know I had my my head in the clouds and and I first wrote the first edition I don't know like 11 years ago of the human magnet syndrome and of course somehow I came across you yeah and we have been connected in a really nice way for the last 10 years and I have to say yes on my radio show and I had you on multiple times and since then your book I mean has been a staple in my library and as a referral because I see so many people who find themselves in the in these codependent narcissists relationships that it has been the Bible for these people and and it has been a game changer I'm telling you this in all honesty and this isn't no no ass kissing happening here this is truly truly really what I believe okay yeah groundbreaking and and when my clients read it they're like oh my God that's me I can't believe that's me and so it's quite validating for you know for a lot of people well thank you so Lori sends me this email and she said of course something about sex and how it impacts relationships and it wasn't until that email I ever thought about addressing sexual matters on a public forum that has not been my you know I spent my last 30 plus years of my career talking exclusively about sexuality in every Forum that I possibly could and all for educating the public and such so I'm really happy that we can talk about this in you know sexuality within relationships and within problematic relationships thank you but before we begin can you tell my listeners and viewers who are you and what do you do so I'm a clinical psychologist I have a specialty in sexual Wellness I have been working for like I said over 30 years I've been in the media a lot so in my local Montreal Canada I did a radio nightly radio program of which you were a guest for 22 years so you know I did over 5 000 episodes wow talking about sexuality I wrote a book called The Sex Bible for people over 50. I do a podcast now called passion with Dr Laurie I've done television shows I am the director for the PornHub sexual Wellness Center which is a sex education site off of PornHub so directing people to real sexual you know information rather than getting their information through pornography only so kind of the uh so that's that was my kind of my the latest uh project that I hopped on maybe I should have asked you what you don't do okay wow yeah you're amazing yeah I'm a busy gal and I have a clinical practice of course a full clinical practice so yeah but what amazes me is you got a heart people are talking to a real person not an academic who right position themselves because of their marketing team to be the shocking sex guru and uh no you you're you yeah that's not me no no and so I never aspired to be anybody than just me you know and if if good stuff happens great but uh there's no marketing team behind me no so one of the things we started off in our introduction and you and I have been emailing about is the connection of my human magnet syndrome work contributions and the discussion of sexuality and I was curious because we've never really primarily focused on this and I think this might be our fourth whether podcasts or interview together yeah yeah so you're my guest which is still I'm getting used to I'm used to being on the other side so that's true and you know my wife said put a stickem or a Post-It note listen and don't have to remember right but you know my work I I am fairly familiar with your work but where do you want to start this conversation what do you think would be the best greatest interest to our listeners and viewers so when people come to me specifically to me they usually come to me because they have a sexual issue okay and they end up in my office the thing is ninety percent of the time it's a symptom of something else and the first thing I look at is the relationship right what's going on in this couple's life right what sometimes I'll just get the a woman coming in saying I you know I have a problem with desire and my husband thinks there's something seriously wrong with me and he thinks I'm this and he thinks I'm that and he's you know telling me I should go get help and and then you know in in talking and exploring her and her connection to the partner and her relationships it's not that difficult to see quickly that this person might be in a codependent relationship or that her partner might be a narcissist right and so of course that's going to have an impact on one's desire for sex it's gonna have an impact on how the partner may feel pressured to have sex how and let's just say in in this case where you know she's she's having like her husband has great desire like puts a lot of Demands on to have a lot of sex in terms of quantity she feels quite pressured does it anyway doesn't get anything out of it right but he doesn't you know oftentimes he doesn't care all that much or she tells me that he you know it's not really about that but she also doesn't want to rock the boat right so um she wants to know like what's wrong with me that I don't I don't desire my husband and it's sometimes very hard when I you know then I look at her and say well you feel abused you feel criticized you fight you know over this that and the other you feel pressured you don't feel heard you don't feel appreciated you don't feel validated how are you supposed to muster up these warm feelings right so that you can open up to be sexual with your partner right so you know and that this is in general when we have dysfunctional relationships or toxic relationships so it's not specific to the codependent narcissist cycle but it is true of most unhealthy relationships let's say so um you know this but I want to remind any new viewers or new listeners that I created the term self-love deficit disorder to replace the term codependency because codependency is just stigmatizing and it was just time to get rid of something yeah so I refer to that as sldd and I refer to the codependent as self-love deficient and sld so just those are the terms I'll use but by the way I suck at telling jokes it's like I have performance anxiety whenever I think of a joke it's like I really want to do it and then I freeze so there's two codependents under having sex and after sex I want codependent leans over to the other and says I did it again you're losing it now right you don't want to oh yeah I go okay sex was great but how was it for me and I probably said it wrong but what that joke communicates is sex for slds or codependents often is geared for the other person other person right and there's all sorts of reasons for that that we can talk about later about codependent narcissist human magnet syndrome but what I want to talk about is how a person who is forced to have uncomfortable unsatisfying sex that lacks mutuality lacks tenderness I mean if your lover has a personality disorder is a pathological narcissist they naturally don't have that then they have two choices and I'm being General and that is to dissociate in some manner because I look at dissociation on a continual the worst case is what we call the serious dissociative disorders I'm not talking about that but it's to somehow remove themselves emotionally effectively from the act because they don't have the power to say no they're afraid to say no because of their own codependent inner dialogue or they're afraid of saying no because of the consequences what you're saying is is very true that the problem is over time right that it like builds and what happens over time how does a person feel so I knew this one woman she was she said to me she said unless I was stoned out of my head I couldn't have sex with my partner like there is no way you know and then I would have to go somewhere else like I'd have to think about something else it wasn't there was no connection with the partner but she knew that if she didn't have sex with him every third day he was cranky and horrible and he would say mean things and he's like look okay did the dishes did you why don't you just give me a [ __ ] you know like it was just like just not nasty things um so like for her it was like if I wasn't you know wasted I would I couldn't do it so that was a that's one way of dissociating but for women who let's say don't numb themselves with agents or anything like that over time they start to describe it like feeling assaulted and even the slightest touch starts to feel like an assault so it's not just like the act of of sex but any movement to you know that initiates like uh you know a partner grabs your butt while you're doing the dishes can feel like an assault so because ultimately if you think about what consent is Right consent is not submission consent is given it should be given enthusiastically right so uh and there's a distinction between submission which is not consent if I submit to your pressure and I say yes out of pressure that's not consent so those those individuals are often in those they they find themselves in that position where yes they'll submit for the sake of to keep the peace but what happens over time they feel like they are having non-consensual sex and and let me essentially let me add to that a lot of my clients describe that same type of scenario and then there are the uh the pathological narcissists who might be sex addicted who might have some type of paraphilia and and I differentiate sex addiction of paraphilia from just the wide range of whatever feels good between two people is good you know I have a very wise there's anything people yeah anything they do is is fine between two people but when the narcissist has a sexual preference desire practice that goes against the sld the codependents Comfort level they submit and they also out of fear or out of a learned response that goes all the way back to their childhood give this consent that if you or I would like watch this which would be kind of creepy but just for clinical purpose would watch this happen someone would say hey let's do this let's do a threesome and the sld codependent partner would say oh okay sure but you're looking at her or you know her and you're saying you know she's going oh my God I can't believe this is happening and and so the consent part is even more murky than we think because slds not only are terrified of not obliging the person we're giving consent but there are punishment real punishments and adding a little one more step to that then I'd love to hear your thoughts on it is that their whole life going back to their childhood if they did not consent to picking up the toothbrush washing the laundry driving the kids or whatever there was always a punishment and so the concept of consent often is very blurry to my sld or codependent clients sure because we do learn about consent as kids right like can I may I please play with your toy or you're teaching that that you know you have to say yes and you teach consent with friendships and not just sexual consent then you you kind of grow on that when it comes to consent but yeah it's you know I've seen some ex some very very sad cases over the years some horrific behaviors actually on the part of narcissists that made their Partners do stuff that I can't even I you know I remember one client whose partner sold her to friends you know and you know like would make her have or you know like have sex with strangers and then film it and you know in his mind well you you agreed to do you liked it you know well she was pretending so I mean yeah there's a lot of cognitive dissonance that happens too right it's like I'm saying yes to doing this so now I have to kind of you know explain it to myself that maybe yeah maybe I liked it so maybe it was okay so because otherwise it would just feel like rape time and time again and I'm glad you said that let's talk about rape because there is not a lot of ambiguity of what is and what is not right and please of course correct me um Raiden is forced sex against someone's will that feels aggressive am I simplifying it too much well I mean if we're talking about sexual assault is it more general term let's say when we think of rape we think of intercourse but there's so many other forms of sexual assault right but the problem is what is forced because if we look at the definition of consent and we look at submission as not being consensual is it forced that the person who's doing the forcing would would say no it's not you said yes you uttered the words yes this is exactly why I brought it up right because for me it's not a gray area but for I think a lot of people it's a gray area so if a SLB say a codependent woman could be man has an aggressive uncompromising unempathetic and pushy partner who wants to have sex that is humiliating or painful and that person says no and tried to say you know early on the relationship what we'd know about codependents slds is that they learned through either gaslighting or just basic conditioning that it's better to say yes because there's less punishments at least they imagine that whether or not then the consequence of the sexual aggression and so to my clients it is important for me to actually tell them so they can hear it that when I say hmm that sounds like rape and then they'll they'll say really and then I I start identifying you don't like it because it hurts you fought back before and he didn't stop and there was a point when you fought back maybe the last time you fought back you realize that the consequence of any more fighting would cause as much pain than the act itself whether true or not well doesn't that sound like rape and whether it qualifies for the clinical definition it changes it changes the perception that this is just not submitting to a consensual Act because the consensual nature was taken away when any form of Prior resistance was shut down and consequence yeah dismissed exactly and I'm going to give you another example of a recent a recent case which to me was absolutely horrific and this she it was clear to me that I was dealing with an sld and and a narcissistic partner but they came into therapy because to his insistence he wanted more sex and and what have you so I discovered through all through the initial assessment that she had had an abortion not long ago and she had said to me and she was talking about it in a very kind of it was interesting to to hear the tone but she was saying I never wanted children when we met I told him I never wanted children he agreed that we would never have children so we agreed that he would use condoms Zen and that was the agreement okay and so she finds herself pregnant okay and and he nonchalantly says well I I decided I wanted a kid so I um I took the condom off and she didn't know that I took the condom off got her pregnant and you know she you know she didn't want so she went ahead her body her choice she decided to end the pregnancy and I was like uh I I was like speechless right it was like and I I I I I uttered the words that was an assault that was a form of assault right we call it stealthing of course he freaked out on me and never came back but yeah and what I teach my clients or anyone who wants to listen to me that to measure the trauma people like have a good measuring stick for abuse he punched me he punched me hard he punched me ten times he pushed me but trauma that has no physical evidence and it could be neglect abandonment passive aggressive treatment something that has no physical evidence now in this case there's there's there's physical evidence yeah she got pregnant but right right right but what I want to say is trauma is determined not by what happened but by the experience of it and that trauma in my estimation of course I can't imagine this because you know I'm a man and I could try to at least empathize with it but especially for someone who either wasn't ready or had decided to not have a child or just didn't want to have a child with this person categorically very clear she had made it incredibly traumatic right but he decided that he wanted it yeah so it was going to be his way you know yeah and so our sld clients because I I unless you might be you might work with a narcissist that they I don't think they like me very much and oh narcissist yeah yeah they're not yeah they're not they don't like me either and believe me they don't like me they don't come back too often yeah and you know most narcissists don't really go into therapy anyway way so you're you're right but there's another form of this it's not invisible but I'm going to call it amorphous you know this type of trauma that is so real to the person but yet it can't be seen identified or Quantified or it can but the people listening to it can't affirm it we're gonna do this again because it's obviously there's so much to say and uh and I'm getting you on my podcast because it's something I want to talk about is people who like how to live with a narcissist if you choose not to leave right like how how best to handle it yeah because some people aren't ready to leave for for whatever reason so I wanna I got a lot to continue about that I know you do I know you do so and you know I got a lot to say about sex so we could go on all night if we want to but um can you let our listeners know about you and how to find you and connect with you and all that good stuff sure so if people want to find me on social media um they can just go to Instagram which is Passion with Dr Laurie so you'll have news about my podcast and such and you can the passionate doctoral is available on all podcasts platforms if people want to get in touch with me via email they just have to go to my website which is Dr laurie.com that's d-r-l-a-u-r-i-e.com that's it and for me self love recovery.com and everything I talk about I might talk a lot about you know this or that but it's really about helping people overcome codependency and that's the chief self-love so thank you so much and we'll talk soon okay bye [Music]

Channel: Ross Rosenberg

Views: 21,199

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Id: uga8NVQFUEo

Length: 22min 14sec (1334 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 16 2022