Together. A Podcast About Relationships

Erik talks relationships with fellow podcaster Andy Horning, host of the Elephant Talk podcast.

Erik is back with updates and a brand new season of the Together Show Podcast.

Today’s Episode – number 131 – is the last episode of season two, which means we’re off for the summer! We’ll be back in September with more interviews! Our guest today, Rachel Dwight is a self described super fat, queer, transgender, disabled superhero. And I’ll add that they’re a force of nature as well! We discuss all of those identities, and we cover a fundamental truth we should all internalize: everyone is entitled to pleasure, no matter their body type.

Today’s conversation is about shame and how we can use it to explore the darker corners of our relationships. Our guests today, Megan and Brave have done some very useful work in this area - and specifically on what they refer to as “male shame.” Listen in to hear what they mean by that!

Today's episode is about a couple you would never expect might have a secret life. Penn and Page, our guests today, grew up Catholic, married young, had six kids, and were perfectly content living a predictable life, until one day Penn had an idea...

A cultural conversation has been simmering recently about the concept of emotional labor.  It’s a critical conversation to our relationships, but not many of us know what it means. Today on the podcast, we learn all about what it is, and what to do about it from our guests, Gemma and Rob Hartley.

Our guest today - Iris McAlpin is a survivor of multiple experiences with sexual abuse, and having recovered from those, she has some unique ideas about how we all should be relating to the perpetrators of these kind of abuses. She also has quite a bit too say about the healing process that’s available to all of us after abuse.

Our guests today, Ned and Dorcas share a story about a depression that lasted nearly five years. They not only survived that depression as a couple, but built a massively successful company during that time and started a family that’s thriving. This episode is about the tools they used to manage. 

The title of this episode says what’s it’s about: rape and reconciliation. If rape is a topic you find difficult to hear about, you might want to take it easy with this episode.  But know that this story is also about reconciliation. It’s about the healing process that’s available to all of us.

Our guest today, Nenna Joiner, is an African American Lesbian porn producer and sex shop owner in downtown Oakland. Our conversation ranges all over the sex universe from impotence, to getting on your knees in church and in sex, to whether Lesbians are the new gay men, to - of course - toys and porn.

We are community. We are our friends and family, and we cannot know ourselves without them.

Today’s episode kicks of the first of several stories on the topic of pornography.  Today, we’re hearing from Nate and Angilyn. Nate is the founder of a website and a podcast about marriage called First7Years.com. He’s also done a lovely TedX talk about love. He and Angilyn are both lifelong Mormons. They were both raised to believe that porn was inherently evil. They have a different view about it now, but I’ll let them tell the story.

The thing about the choice to stay or to go in any given relationship, is that we can never know what might have been. There’s no control group to test against for happiness in our life choices. We only know what’s right here, right now. Our guests this week – Thomas and Lauren – are facing that question of choice. How do you know when it’s right, and how do you know when it’s wrong? In some sense, you can’t know - you just have to take action.

Our episode today is about the unpredictable results of difficult conversations. There’s gold in those hills for your relationships if you have the courage to dig. Our guests today are avid prospectors, and they have a lot to teach us about the process of emotional inquiry.

Last week during our interview with Michael and Sara, you may remember they told us about a therapist they had worked with over Skype named Al Turtle. Well I reached out to Al, and today we’ve got him on the show! It was a long interview. The portion of the conversation we’re playing focuses mostly on a specific debate: is all the inquiry into childhood trauma really necessary, or should we focus instead on behavior? Al’s answer is a good one. Listen in to find out what he says.