Blog and Podcast Recommendations
The official line: I’m a research professor at the University of Houston where I hold the Huffington Foundation Endowed Chair. I am also a visiting professor in management at The University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business. I’ve spent the past two decades studying courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy, I’m the author of five #1 New York Times bestsellers, and I’m the host of the weekly Spotify Original podcasts Unlocking Us and Dare to Lead.
My books include Dare to Lead, Braving the Wilderness, Rising Strong, Daring Greatly, and The Gifts of Imperfection. Most recently I collaborated with Tarana Burke to co-edit You Are Your Best Thing: Vulnerability, Shame Resilience, and the Black Experience.
The bottom line: I believe that you have to walk through vulnerability to get to courage, therefore . . . embrace the suck. I try to be grateful every day, and my motto right now is “Courage over comfort.” I do NOT believe that cussing and praying are mutually exclusive. And, I absolutely believe that the passing lane is for passing only. I’ve been married to Steve for almost 25 years, and we have two amazing kids, Ellen and Charlie, and a weird Bichon named Lucy
FEMINIST SURVIVAL PROJECT
Emily Nagoski began her career as a sex educator in 1995 when she became a peer health educator at the University of Delaware. She was trained to teach her fellow undergraduates about stress, nutrition, physical activity, and, above all, sex. Soon she added sexual violence prevention and response to that work, and suddenly she was a sex educator. The plan was to use her degree in Psychology (with minors in cognitive science and philosophy) to become a clinical neuropsychologist, working with people with traumatic brain injury and stroke. But even though she loved brain science, her work in sex education and violence prevention made her like who she was as a person, in a way the academic stuff couldn’t. So that’s the path she chose.
She went to Indiana University for a M.S. in Counseling Psychology, completing clinical internships at the Kinsey Institute Sexual Health Clinic and the IU GLBT Student Support Services Office. She continued on to earn a Ph.D. in Health Behavior with a concentration in human sexuality. She taught graduate and undergraduate classes in human sexuality, relationships and communication, stress management, and sex education. Her time at IU was characterized by stumbling with unwarranted luck into opportunities to work with some of the greatest minds in the world of sex science, and she will spend the rest of her career trying to earn those opportunities.
For eight years, she worked as a lecturer and Director of Wellness Education at Smith College, before transitioning to full-time writing and speaking. She now travels all over, training professionals, teaching college students and other lay people, and learning more every day about the science and art of sexual wellbeing. She is a trained Gottman Seven Principles educator, with extensive specialized training in bystander intervention, motivational interviewing, and cultural inclusivity, including race, gender, and class.
Emily’s mission in life is to teach women to live with confidence and joy inside their bodies.
Her second book, Burnout: the secret to unlocking the stress cycle, is co-authored with her twin sister Amelia. It’s for women who feel overwhelmed and exhausted by all they have to do, yet worrying that they’re not doing “enough.”
JOHAN GOTTMAN
John Gottman is an American psychological researcher, an award-winning speaker, author, a professor emeritus in psychology and co-founder of the Gottman Institute. John sits down with the Armchair Expert to discuss his research on thin slicing and predicting marital success. He notes how having a daughter turned him into an instant feminist and He talks about the different ways men and women view sex. The two talk about a father’s crucial role to a child, they delve into the four horsemen of the apocalypse and John urges couples to foster curiosity.
Dr. Marty Klein: Changing the Way People, Politics & the Media Look at Sex
For over 30 years, my week has focused on my patients—men, women, and couples. About half have sexual difficulties, such as problems with erection, orgasm, lubrication, scary fantasies, desire (too low, too high, or too unusual), painful sex (both women and men), affairs (their own or their partner’s), or internet pornography. Of course, when people have sexual problems, their shame, guilt, and anger are never far away. Those are part of our sessions, too.
The other half of my patients bring in the rest of humanity’s woes—problems with kids, in-laws, money, drinking, and that all-purpose description, “communication problems.” Actually, I think most couples “communicate” just fine—their disrespect, their anxiety, their boredom, their low self-esteem, their lack of empathy, their unwillingness to change. They just don’t like hearing this “communication” from each other.
My style as a therapist is eclectic. I’m extremely flexible, because every patient is different. Some need information; some need compassion; some need wisdom; some need tough love; some need a little teasing to lighten them up; some need to take their own needs more seriously; and some people just need help growing up.
What I’ve learned over time is that everyone wants to feel “normal,” and too many people are afraid they aren’t. Everyone wants to feel special. And while people say that what they most want from sex is pleasure and closeness, they often focus on other things—how they look, smell, and sound; what their penis or vulva is doing (rather than how it feels); and how they imagine they compare to other men or other women in bed. Absolutely none of that gives people the nourishment they want from sex.