David Schnarch

Well, then you have another hurdle around this because being sexual... having pleasure can be pretty deeply connected to the experience of an erosion of self.

And so as Dr. Schnarch would often say, we want to belong to ourselves more than we want to be sexual.

This is true for men and women.

But if you think being sexual is a threat to your integrity of self or to your sense of who you are or your sense of safety, often sexual desire is the first to go.

When closeness tips over into emotional fusion, desire can drop off.

So emotional fusion is a term out of Murray Bowen's family systems work and Dr. David Schnarch, who wrote Passionate Marriage, built much of his thinking about marriage and sex around it.

It means the two of you have blended so completely that there's not much of a separate person left on each side.

You share every opinion.

But that was really the driving force between my interest, um, you know, in human sexuality.

And then when I got to graduate school, I read, uh, David Schnarch's stunning book called Constructing the Sexual Crucible, uh, which I imagine you're aware of, and that book just turned my life upside down.

Mm.

I was so moved by that book, and while I didn't fully understand all of it, it really resonated as true for me.

Um, but you certainly have to redefine it in a lot of different ways.

So, um, I just don't want-

Well, I mean, one of the things David Schnarch left us with was that he believed that we had the best sex of our lives in our 50s and 60s.

Mm-hmm.

... things."

Yes, and there's a brightening that comes with that, that term Dr. Schnarch uses-

Mm-hmm

... where it's like you don't feel great because everything's going so smoothly, but you feel brighter, lighter because you can handle it well, and you've gotten to that place 'cause you've worked through it.

Differentiation is what makes deep intimacy possible.

The psychologist David Schnarch built much of his work on this, and he put it bluntly: "What we often call intimacy is really our wish for someone else to make us feel acceptable and worthwhile." He argued that we have to develop and validate ourselves first, and only then can we experience the closeness we actually want, because intimacy built on fear and neediness can never actually fulfill us.

When you can self-regulate, processing your own feelings before you bring them to someone, conflict stops escalating into shared crisis.

When you can hold a boundary, the other person finally gets to meet the real you instead of the accommodating, fawning version.

Because here's, here's the differentiation model which I love thoroughly and have been trained in m- a majority of my career.

The focus in the differentiation world, particularly as it pertains to Dr. Schnarch's training-

Yeah

... is it's on health and growth rather than pathology and clinical labels.

You're always gonna be de- denied the access to your full repertoire of skills.

David Schnarch wrote a book called Passionate Marriage, and he talks about this crucible for learning.

And but there's, there's an image that he makes of, of a person who has a particular power within themselves that wants to escape their historic gravitational field.

Right.