Karen Finch: Listening to the Messages From our Bodies
Sex, Love and Intimacy
Chip August
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Episode 41 - Karen Finch: Listening to the Messages From our Bodies

Too often, when we talk about “couples therapy” we mean “talking about our problems, pain, anger in the hope that talking will make it go away”.  Meet Karen Finch, a marriage and family therapist specializing in Somatic Psychotherapy - an interdisciplinary field involving the study of therapeutic and holistic approaches to the body, the practice of mindfulness, body-oriented experiences, and the embodied self.  Listen in as Karen explains how individuals and couples work through childhood traumas and relationship obstacles in order to embody full adult sexuality, negotiate sexual boundaries in their relationships, communicate about sexual longings, and access their “Sensual Self.”  And remember to listen for Karen’s relaxing and restoring somatic exercise for you to try at home.

Transcript

Transcript

Chip August: Welcome to Sex, Love and Intimacy. I’m your host Chip August. Today on the show we’re going to be talking about marriage and family counseling, we’re going to be talking about something called somatic counseling, we’re going to be talking about something called the Hakomi method where, we’re talking with Karen Finch. Karen’s a friend of mine, and Karen’s a marriage and family therapist in private practice in Berkeley, California.

Karen Finch: It’s really natural of course to be drawn towards yummy pleasurable feelings and to want to sink into them fully and really, really just revel in it, but we humans, we have this actually very complex system developed so that we don’t have to become automatically in fear and in contraction because the more we contract, the less we have options for dealing with stuff.

Karen Finch: Hakomi is a method developed to access the body and it has specific techniques, like the therapist invites the client into mindfulness and does a slightly, oh, hypnotic kind of thing and has the client check in with themselves and perhaps makes a statement and has the client study their reaction to the statement.

Karen Finch: I do believe that the more I embody the things that I believe about healing and communication and connection and attachment, the better my world is, the more satisfaction and pleasure and joy and healing that I experience. Yeah, my goal is every moment to be having a mindful dialogue with myself and to do things and pursue things that give me joy and give me further grounding.

Chip August: Today on the show we’re going to be talking about marriage and family counseling, we’re going to be talking about something called somatic counseling, we’re going to be talking about something called the Hakomi method where, we’re talking with Karen Finch. Karen’s a friend of mine, and Karen’s a marriage and family therapist in private practice in Berkeley, California. Karen holds a Master’s in Somatic Counseling Psychology and she’s trained in the Hakomi Method, which is a mindfulness and body oriented psychotherapy which I’m hoping we’re going to talk a lot about. She works with individuals and couples to access communication and emotional resources to shift toward fully embracing their choices. Karen assists her clients with diverse challenges using knowledge from attachment psychology, neuroscience, spiritual traditions and from the positive transitions and transformations experienced by those she’s counseled. So welcome to the program Karen Finch.

Karen Finch: Thank you Chip, glad to be here.

Chip August: So I want to start just with some of those words, ‘cause some of them I know, some of them I don’t know. Can you tell me, what is somatic counseling, somatic psychotherapy? What, I don’t, I just don’t know the term.

Karen Finch: Well, what it means is an attention to embodied process or talking from a place that you don’t ordinarily talk from when you’re in a conversation with an individual or a therapist. So the therapist guiding you to settle into yourself in a new way, a therapist talking to you in a way that you can access your body’s messages, wisdom, the unconscious, stuff you don’t know because we sometimes ignore our bodies and ignore our sensations, usually at our peril.

Chip August: So is this sort of like I’m just paying attention to my gut feelings by sort of noticing what’s going on in my stomach? Is it more complicated than that? I mean, what do you mean by really, I mean, what do you mean by that?

Karen Finch: It can be as simple as paying attention to your gut feelings. But it can also be sort of a mindfulness process of studying your sensations and studying that tightness in your belly as you talk about something or noticing how high your voice get around, or how fast you talk about some particular thing, and then noticing how that is for you, and so it’s a kind of a process of checking in with yourself that’s somewhat based in Buddhism and sort of meditation of like checking with yourself and feeling into yourself in a way that we don’t usually have time or the training to do.

Chip August: So, I think, I mean I know the answer to this for myself, but I kind of want to hear you talk about it a little bit, I have this experience that sort of in a way I’ve taught my mind to ignore my body, that, you know, sitting at a desk all day is uncomfortable, sitting in freeway traffic is uncomfortable, you know, feeling concern about my job, these are feelings that my, you know, that might have body sensations associated with them and I’ve just sort of learned to turn it all off and be in my mind, and are you saying that’s a bad thing?

Karen Finch: I’m saying it’s an adaptation that is helpful in some ways but harmful in others. So, there’s ways that we can be with discomfort and pain and be in relationship with our bodies that can actually create more health for us if we’re not cut off from these experiences, if we can be with our discomfort, pain, frustration, stress, in a more creative more resourced way. It can change our relationship, and we’re not ignoring our bodies so much as including them more and letting our sensations become more our friends and messengers instead of being something to be suppressed or ignored.

Chip August: I notice that for many of us we do this actually unconsciously and deliberately when it’s a good feeling. So when we, when we’re happy, we often experience it as a kind of deliciousness in our body. When we’re having sex, I mean, such so much of the sexual connection is just physically what’s going on and we don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, but I notice when it’s like negative things, when it’s things that, when it’s fear or pain or sadness or shame, all of a sudden I just really want to be separate from my body and I just sort of wonder why it is that we have, you know, it’s, I don’t know, I just notice that sometimes we seem really connected and sometimes we seem really disconnected.

Karen Finch: Well it’s really natural of course to be drawn towards yummy pleasurable feelings and to want to sink into them fully and really, really just revel in it but, and it’s very natural to, you know, I mean Ameba’s do this, you know, is that they move away from pain. But we humans, we have this actually very complex system developed so that we don’t have to become automatically in fear and in contraction because the more we contract the less we have options for dealing with stuff, so part of what I try to help people access is this kind of curiosity about themselves and friendliness about, “Ooh, that feels yucky, but how about we stay with it a little bit together”, and also if you do things in relationship it can be a lot different than just feeling your pain all by yourself.

Chip August: Now what is this Hacomi method thing?

Karen Finch: Hocomi is a method developed to access the body, and it has specific techniques, like mindfulness techniques, like the therapist invites the client into mindfulness and does a slightly, oh, hypnotic kind of thing and has the client check in with themselves and perhaps, oh, makes a statement and has the client study their reaction to the statement. Like I might say to a client, “You deserve love, Chip”, and ask you to feel into if that comes into your body in any way, if your mind automatically deflects that, and we sort of really slow down and help the client look at how they’re in relationship with their beliefs and actually limiting beliefs can be discovered by studying the body and when we’re talking about something that, where you feel stuck we can help you get unstuck by discovering, “Oh, this is where I’m stopping myself. This is where I’m not in choice.”

Chip August: I don’t, maybe I just don’t have this, but it seems to me both as a man and just a, from the habit of not feel, of try, you know, trying not to feel what might seem unpleasant, I feel like I don’t have a vocabulary for what you’re describing, so I notice, you know, you’re talking about feeling it, but I just wonder like do people have a vocabulary for this, do they know how to even talk about it?

Karen Finch: Well part of the gift of the Hakomi method is that we offer menus in vocabulary, so I might say, “So how is that tightness in your belly? Is it kind of a twisting tightness or is it a stabbing tightness?” So we start to have specific ways to talk about your sensations, and we also develop a vocabulary together, sort of collaboratively figuring out, how do we be with what you’re experiencing and not run away from it and not just analyze it, but really kind of feel into you and you feel into me so that I can help you to be in almost this sort of magical healing space with yourself, and that’s sort of the goal.

Chip August: And how do, okay, so I think a lot of these, a lot of the numbness, a lot of the ways I disassociate from my body, a lot of the ways that I am not embodied as you describe it, I think I learned them in childhood. You know, me personally I grew up and this is not a secret, I grew up in an alcoholic family and I’m a middle child and a combination of the, my alcoholic dad and being an only child it has some legacies, you know, there are things, they’re sort of, I think, I thought the were survival techniques, but there are things I learned to get me through. My body now knows this, you know, like I know how to do this, this is how I live, how do I change that, how do I release that, how do I make that be different?

Karen Finch: Well a first step is starting to identify all the ways you are living in like a flashback and not living in the present. Like really trying to develop a dialogue with yourself when you feel something uncomfortable, “You know, is this about right now and do I need to attend to this right now? Is there some way that I need to deal with this? Or am I feeling pain from the past or an old neural pathways?” And how you are with yourself about what you experience in yourself can profoundly change the meaning and your relationship to discomfort and stuck ness.

Chip August: Okay, you used a term there, neural pathway, and I know what that means to me but I don’t know what that means to you, so what’s a neural pathway?

Karen Finch: From developmental psychology all the mapping that’s been done about infant brains and the way they develop, we found out that the brain, the most adaptive baby brain has tons of neural pathways and there’s a lot of ways to cope with things, and the way that baby develops all that adaptive ability is by hooking up with the mothers neural pathways, and if the mother has tons of options the baby will likely have similar options or sort of this magical resonant field that’s created between mother and baby. The neural pathways get, well we sort of get in a groove with things and if we, you know, if we always have this thinking that it’s not okay what’s happening and I’m not going to be okay, you know, that’s one neural pathway and you don’t have the other sorts of perspectives to say, “I actually am okay.” Humans have tremendous resilience and tremendous resources that we sort of get socialized out of in our culture because we think we need to behave and adapt in certain ways and we just get stuck in certain grooves.

Chip August: Yeah, I, for me, now I’m no scientist, but from what I’ve read about neural pathways sometimes they call them habituated action grooves, and what I think of as sort of the habituated way that we learn to think about something, and it, rather than having to figure out what our toothbrush is every morning, at some point there’s just an action groove there, sees toothbrush, knows that it’s for the mouth, knows how to brush teeth, you know, so, and I get what you’re, I think what I’m hearing you say is that a lot of our neural pathways are sort of imprinted from our connection with the loving care giving parent.

Karen Finch: That’s correct, that’s where it all starts. And so we have a lot of habituated, what are the, I don’t know that phrase…

Chip August: Habituated action grooves.

Karen Finch: Habituated action grooves that turn into limiting beliefs and part of what we try to access in Hakomi is the limiting beliefs that you might of got non verbally from your experience. And what you can remember, we’d work with what you can remember and sort of who you went to when you were upset and what their response was and that helps us, but we also have to reach back even further to stuff that you may not remember that may be non verbal. And we just have to sort of thing together and collaborate together about how you can be conscious of this material and choose to not listen to that particular story or that particular belief that comes from that.

Chip August: So to remember something as pre verbal as really, I think what I’m hearing you say is really to learn how to feel the feeling residue that’s left in your body and know how to interpret that.

Karen Finch: And that’s exactly right.

Chip August: This is fascinating stuff. We need to take a break. I want to give a chance to support our sponsors and let our sponsors support us. Please do listen to the sponsors ‘cause there’s some pretty good deals you can get just from listening to the show here. You’re listening to Sex, Love and Intimacy. I’m talking to Karen Finch. We’re talking about somatics and the Hakomi method and we go lots more to say. Also at the end of the show Karen’s got an exercise that she brought with her so that we can try at home. So please come on back after the break.

Chip August: We’re back. You’re listening to Sex, Love and Intimacy. I’m your host Chip August. I’m talking to Karen Finch. She’s got a Master’s in Counseling Psychology with a specialization in Somatic Psychology, and we’ve been talking about what somatic psychology is. I want to steer this a little bit and talk a little bit about how this works when you’re working with couples, ‘cause I noticed on your website you talk about negotiating boundaries in your relationship and negotiating sexual boundaries, and I want to kind of move into the whole relationship area here, and so the first thing here is just sort of the idea of sexual boundaries in relationship I think is really, really challenging. What do you mean by sexual boundaries, and then how does, how do people talk about these things?

Karen Finch: Well, we as primates work best in dyads. We regulate in dyads, we feel better in dyads, and so relationships are apart of feeling healthy and feeling good and feeling fulfilled. The challenges come when people have different ways of feeling fulfilled in a relationship. And the most important thing if you, you know, get down the road and you realize you really love someone but you have some very different values, you know, there needs to be an in depth conversation together around what that all means.

Chip August: So just a little parenthetical note, I’ve been reading a whole bunch of research, particularly by a guy named Art Aaron, Dr. Art Aaron who’s going to be a guest on the show soon, about actually first that throughout his, like he showed me a survey of like a hundred and ninety cultures or something, and a hundred and sixty of them or a hundred and seventy of them that two ness, that coupling, that dyad  that you talk about is just the common unit, this is what human beings want, so I just want to say to people who had that moment of, “Wait a minute, are we, you know, what do you mean primates are dyads?” There’s just a lot of evidence to support it. And then the other thing that I was reading was all this research about what is happening in our brain when we have that closeness, when we have that intimacy, and it’s pretty clear, we’re wired to have that intimacy and closeness have us feel good about ourselves so that it, it turns out it’s not just, it’s not just, “Oh yeah, I absorbed that in society”, there’s a whole brain chemistry about this whole thing that really supports the thought that we’re meant to be in twos. And, that said, so there I am with my partner and I, you know, lets start with the easy stuff. I want sex everyday, my partner wants sex twice a week, you know, or I want a kind of sex that, you know, oh, it’s kind of out there and it isn’t kinky but I’m, it’s really exciting to me and my partner is completely, you know, that is just, she feels not respected, you know, like “Oh my, how can you even ask for that?”, how do you negotiate this stuff, how do you talk about this stuff, and how does somatics relate to any of this?

Karen Finch: Really there are no easy answers in those kinds of challenges, but having heartfelt conversations and somatically based conversations about those challenges can really open the door. So there are no easy answers to, you know, what you do when you have a huge difference in desire and wantings and needs. But a clear communication and ability to not make the other person wrong about what they want, and an ability to really hear in a full way what it is, what it means, the kind of the complexity of what the person’s wanting as opposed to just dismissing out of hand the other person’s needs can create openings to find ways to be with very kind of huge differences in a couple.

Chip August: So, so we need to talk and somewhere in all this you need to help me sort of feel what I’m feeling in my body and help my partner feel what they’re feeling in their body and somewhere in this accessing of what we’re actually feeling, what, we begin to have more compassion for each other, is that kind of what happens, is it…?

Karen Finch: There is, the more empathy that you develop for your partner around what they’re longing and what they feel like they’re not getting, the more closeness you guys will be able to have. And so, part of it is just having a really healthy process, an erring, a naming, a respect, and, you know, you being interested in your partners inner world as I invite you to feel into what happened for you when your partner said there’s no way they’ll ever do that and you notice, you know, what tightens up in you and what it evokes from your childhood. The conversations are really rich and can help you get to a different place.

Chip August: I hate to say this this way, but as a guy I’m having this moment of, ooh, that feels like the thing women are much better at than I as a man am, you know, that it just feels like all my ‘be a man’ training doesn’t include anything about like going inside and noticing what my body feels when I’m making this decision, so it feels like I’m at a disadvantage in this, you know, it feels like you just want me to act like a girl, you know.

Karen Finch: So I’ll give you some girl training if you’re in therapy with me and I’ll help you to listen to yourself and I will give you suggestions for what I imagine you might be feeling, so you can actually teach yourself to be more in touch with your responses to others and to your intuitions and to your, sort of do this multitasking thing, listening to yourself, feeling into yourself, looking at the other person, catching what’s going on for them, attuning. And so it’s really just men haven’t been trained, it’s not that it’s just girl stuff, so I think that it’s a really beautiful thing for men to have a compassionate and listening and attunement with themselves because that means you can, you can operate from a very authentic place, and also you operate from a place of “Oh, I’m taking care of myself”, and if you’re taking care of yourself and you’re attuned with yourself, that gives me more space to attune to myself and that we’re having an authentic conversation and we’re not expecting the other one to figure out the other ones stuff.

Chip August: Yeah, well I think there’s a, sort of a corollary truth to all that which is that, that effort that I as a man expend trying not to feel or blocking or, it actually has me feel vulnerable rather than invulnerable. I have this experience that I’m building this armor, you know,  so I don’t go there, yeah, but that armors pretty fragile, and then when that armor breaks apart I don’t really have very much tools, that there’s more strength in not building that armor in the first place.

Karen Finch: Right, and all of us are really impacted by the emotion of shame, and a lot of times we’ve, you know, we’ve gotten to a place where we can’t feel it ‘cause it’s so unbearable to feel shame. And so, when we start to go, “Oh, that’s shame that’s making me withdraw, that’s making me not want to feel, that’s making me run into thinking”, we can be with same in a different way and shame has less power.

Chip August: Okay, so, you know, as long as we’re in shame here for a moment, I’ve read quite a bit about it, I’ve studied it, I’ve looked at it, so, you know, at the heart it’s that “If you knew this about me or if you really saw this in me, I’d be thrown out of the tribe, I’d be shunned, I wouldn’t be able to survive”, that’s a extraordinary, it’s an extraordinarily powerful and powerfully motivating feeling, how does one learn to mediate it, how does one learn to let go of shames that we’ve carried, you know, about our sexuality or about our desires or about our thoughts that, you know, we have carried for twenty, thirty, forty years, how does one learn to stopped being ashamed?

Karen Finch: Well it goes back a little bit to that inner dialogue that I encourage people to have with themselves, which is “Is this shame serving me right now? Is there something I need to be ashamed of? You know, am I transgressing? Am I doing something wrong? Or is this shame just an old feeling that is shutting me down for, you know, no relevant reason?” So it’s about the compassion, that inner dialogue, it’s about the mindfulness again. And so becoming, making friends with shame and helping, and not letting shame run you, but not ignoring it either is an important balance and a very challenging balance for all of us adults because shame is hard wired in us in a way that just makes us feel terrible and a lot of times it paralyzes us.

Chip August: Now I notice in your literature you talk about that it’s not just your client that you’re inviting to go to this mindful place, it’s not just your client that you’re inviting to be aware of their sensations and be aware of their body, but that you’re at the same time going there. How do you keep from getting lost in all that, you know, how do you keep from getting lost in what’s yours versus what’s theirs?

Karen Finch: Well I’m sure there are times when I don’t keep myself totally separate from projections and emotions and experiences that are going on with my client. There are times when I feel huge sadness and share that, and… So being in mindfulness doesn’t necessarily mean staying totally separate. I think that the healing process of psychotherapy, the healing process of being in a twosome is a lot about having a shared experience. But if we have a shared experience that’s sort of talking about something that’s external to us, whether it’s compared with having an experience of both being deeply immersed in something, but me having the grounding of knowing that we are big enough to contain whatever the challenge is, the whatever the scary feelings are, whatever the sad feelings are, that it’s, you are not your overwhelming and scary feelings, you’re much more. And sometimes I’ll be a little scared by things that come up for people, but my experience over and over again is big feelings come and big feelings go. They don’t stay and they aren’t who the person is. And so we have a resource and a resilience in ourselves that I will keep in mind and I will remind the person I’m working with to be able to access so that we can do this safely going into really intense areas and feeling into stuff that feels unbearable.

Chip August: You know, is this just sort of the way you are all the time? I mean, I’m sort of having this moment listening to you, picturing your household, you know, and I know you have two grown kids, and, you know, I just, I’m just sort of picturing sort of every time there’s a moment of tension everybody sort of stops, breathes a little bit, you know, says, “Well right now my belly feels…”, “Well right now my shoulders feel…”, I mean, you know, is that kind of what life looks like with you?

Karen Finch: I wish. I wish that I lived constantly mindfully. But I do believe that the more I embody the things that I believe about healing and communication and connection and attachment, the more, the better my world is, the more satisfaction and pleasure and joy and healing that I experience. And so, yeah, my goal is every moment to be having a mindful dialogue with myself and to not be in automatic limiting beliefs and to do things and pursue things that give me joy and give me further grounding, that sort of goes to the spiritual practice thing. I encourage my clients to find something that means a lot to them and to participate that, you know, and find balance so that their life is not all work or that some of it is nurturing themselves with some kind of joyous spiritual undertaking.

Chip August: Like what?

Karen Finch: Oh, like Yoga, like dance, like some people who love to meditate. I’m not a serious mediator, but finding, being in that conversation with yourself in every moment like, “How am I doing, you know? Is this what I…”, you know, sometimes we have to do things and so how are you with what you have to do. And so if you’re seized up and just gritting your teeth, you know, they may not be so good for you, but if you’re breathing and you’re saying, “Okay, well I’m doing this thing right now. It’s, you know, it’s not very fun, but oh well. Sometimes things aren’t fun, but I love you Karen. You know, it’s okay that you’re doing this and lets, you know, lets kind of…”, it’s a lot about being in this really sweet relationship with yourself, being loving, being attentive and not dismissing bad feelings, not dismissing, you know, just being present with yourself.

Chip August: I kind of wanted to stop that sentence at ‘just being’, cause ‘just being’, yeah. We need to take a break, give a chance to support our sponsors and have our sponsors support us. Do come back ‘cause Karen’s got an exercise for you to try at home. You’re listening to Sex, Love and Intimacy and we’ll be right back.

Chip August: We’re back. You’re listening to Sex, Love and Intimacy. I’m your host, Chip August. I’m talking to Karen Finch. She’s a counseling psychologist with a specialization in somatic psychotherapy and the Hakomi method. I love to say Hakomi method, I don’t know what it means exactly, but I like it. And Karen if people wanted to get in touch with you, if they wanted to learn more about what you do or work with you or just, or have questions, how can people get in touch with you?

Karen Finch: I have a website. It’s www.turningleaftherapy.com, and I have, my office phone is 510-334-7482, so you can contact me and learn more about me. But I also sometimes do special seminars and workshops to help people access some of these resources in themselves and live more heartfully and soulfully. The web address is www.turningleaftherapy.com.

Chip August: And Turning Leaf Therapy is all one word, right, no periods or hyphens. Great, terrific. Also listeners, as I’m sure you know if you just go to www.personallifemedia.com, the, our home for the Personal Life Media Network and our shows, you can find text and transcripts for this show and also links to get to Karen’s website so, and by the way, text and transcripts for all the Personal Life Media shows. While I’m, while I’m on that subject if you want to get in touch with me the easiest way to meet me is [email protected], all one word, personallifemedia.com. Love hearing from you, love hearing your comments, your ideas and I have gotten several really good shows from listener advice, you know, I wanted to talk to this person, so if there’s somebody you’d really like me to talk to let me know and who knows, maybe you’ll hear that person on the show a month or two later, so. If you prefer leaving phone messages rather than sending email, there is a voice mail system, you can leave a voice mail for Chip August by calling 206-350-5333. Please leave your name, please leave my show name, Sex, Love and Intimacy, and your question or your comment, please leave your phone number and or an email, and remember that when you leave a message it indicates your agreement for Personal Life Media to use your message on air if it’s, you know, if it’s appropriate to use it as part of a promotion or to, or to just do a show where we answer listeners questions, so just know when you leave the message you’re telling us we have permission to do that. I always like to ask my guests to come up with an exercise, something people can do at home that might sort of emphasize some of the points you’ve made today or give them a taste of what it is that you do, and I know we talked about this on break and so I know you have one and I’d like you to do that now if that’s okay.

Karen Finch: So I’d like to invite you to, not if you’re in your car, but if you’re some place that you’re able to either sit or lie down and close your eyes a minute, invite you to close your eyes and just feel your sensations, just feel where your body’s touching the furniture or the floor, and just sort of start to kind of pay attention to your body’s movements, and you’ll notice with your breath that your ribs are moving a little bit. And invite yourself to breath in a full and easy way. And then invite you to take a little inventory of what you notice in your body. And, you know, there’s probably areas of tightness, areas of aching ness, areas of ease, numbness all sorts of a whole variety of feelings inside you. And just gently trying to develop names for what you notice inside and maybe refining your language a little bit and noticing pulses and sparkles and streams and different types of ways that you are noticing. So you’re really being present with yourself right now and feeling your body. And if you notice your mind wander off to other things or the meaning of what you’re noticing, just gently invite yourself to just feel what is in this moment. I invite you to find a place inside of you that feels safe, feels content. And then create an image for yourself of home or safety. It could be you create an image of nature, of what it’s like to be on a warm beach or what it’s like to be in a fragrant forest. Or it could be you create a room for yourself with a fireplace and a really comfy chair. And then just notice how you’re feeling as you access the imagery. And then as you stay with this imagery and these feelings that come from this imagery, let yourself ask yourself a question about something that’s puzzling you or something that you need. And then let some kind of answer or response bubble up in yourself. Try not to think, try not to effort. Might be a word, might be a phrase. And then know that you have this place to visit and return to, and I invite you to come back to ordinary consciousness, but remember that you can take this journey inside and be with yourself in a maybe a new way and experience new, new grounding in yourself, new trust for yourself. Thank you for listening.

Chip August: Well that was wonderfully refreshing, wasn’t it. Yeah. So Karen you’ve been a great guest. I really appreciate you taking the time to come and talk. I think there was a lot of really powerful things that you said today and I just want to thank you for being here.

Karen Finch: Thank you too. It was really fun.

Chip August: And I want to thank you listeners for listening in. I really appreciate your support. I guess that’s it for now, so you’ve been listening to Chip August, Sex, Love and Intimacy, and join us next time. That’s it for now.