Connection, Communication and Consent - Building Skills For Thriving Relationships (2023)

[GENTLE MUSIC PLAYING]

[NARRATOR] Sexual violence response aims to end gender and power-based violence through collective community action at Columbia and beyond. We create social change by building a compassionate and accountable community with a commitment to increasing resources and support for survivors and co-survivors of violence.

[GENTLE MUSIC PLAYING]

SVR provides trauma-informed, confidential support, and prevention programs such as prevention-focused training and education workshops, crisis counseling, intervention, advocacy, connection to resources, online orders of protection, and accompaniment for survivors and co-survivor of violence. Sexual Violence Response is available to all Columbia University community members.

You can call our help line available 24/7 at 212-854-4357. Meet with us virtually or in person by emailing [email protected] or calling 212-854-3500. Drop into our offices at the Morningside, Barnard, or CUIMC campuses. And visit our website to organize or register for a workshop, training, or education program.

Social change only happens when we take action. Partner with us to create an accountable, compassionate community at Columbia and beyond.

[GENTLE MUSIC PLAYING]

[DEBJANI ROY] Thank you everyone for being here. My name is Debjani Roy. I'm the Director of Training and Prevention with Sexual Violence Response, and my pronouns are she/her. We are absolutely thrilled that you are joining us today for this event, Connection, Communication, And Consent: Thriving Relationship Skills with Luna Matatas.

On the backend my colleague, Olivia Warren, will be posting some information in the chat box. Wanted to give her a chance to say a quick hello.

[OLIVIA WARREN] Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you all for being here.

[ROY] Thanks, Olivia. But I want to tell you a little bit first about Sexual Violence Response before we start the program. Sexual Violence Response is a department under Columbia Health. We provide trauma informed, survivor centered, and confidential services and programs addressing power and gender-based violence.

Our three key areas of work are advocacy, prevention, and outreach, and we provide direct support to survivors, including 24, our 24/7 helpline, 212-854-HELP or 4357. And Olivia will pop that in the chat box.

We also host trainings and workshops and events like this throughout the year as well as during awareness months, and you can find out more on our website, which you will also find in the chat box.

So October is around the corner. We're not quite there yet. It's in a few days. But every October, Sexual Violence Response recognizes issues of violence in intimate relationships and the impact they have on all

of us, issues with particular urgency, after three years, of unprecedented personal, societal, and economic challenges on a global scale.

We ask you join us in observing relationship Violence Awareness Month as we remember, honor, and celebrate survivors, advocates, and activists through programming and events that affirm that relationship violence has no place in the Columbia University community. This year's theme, "I Am and I Can," emphasizes each and every community member's agency and ability to make an impact in the work to end gender and power-based violence.

No matter who we are or where we're from, we have the power-- we have the power to make a change. From small steps to big leaps and everything in between, you can help build a compassionate and accountable community where relationship violence can end. We are so excited for this session, and I'm particularly excited to introduce our speaker, Luna Matatas.

I would like to tell you a little bit about Luna first. Luna is a pleasure and relationships educator with over 15 years of experience teaching workshops. Luna loves teaching workshops that help people navigate shame, learn consent, and explore healthy relationships. She teaches her audiences how to get to know their bodies, understand consent, and communicate interpersonally.

Luna has worked internationally and globally to empower youth with self-esteem, empathy for others, and body acceptance. She has taught workshops at universities and colleges across Canada and the US, including the University of Toronto, York University, and here at Columbia University. Without further ado, I would like to hand it off to Luna Matatas. Thank you.

[LUNA MATATAS] Thank you so much for that super warm welcome. I am so thrilled to be able to have this conversation with you and to answer your questions, to hear your experiences, and to talk about how we can all thrive better in relationships as a community of people as well as in our interpersonal relationships. So we are going to be talking about all different kinds of relationships today.

So if you have questions, if you want to share things that are unique to your experience with how you navigate relationships, all of that is welcome. So feel free to pop it in the Q&A if you have a specific question, if there's something that you'd like to share about yourself, feel free to pop that in the chat. I'll be coming back and forth from the chat to the presentation, and also asking you questions about the types of relationships that you desire, and the qualities of those relationships, especially around the challenges that you might face in different relationships.

Oh, I love that there's other folks here from Toronto. Amazing. I love that you are asking questions already in the chat to help you figure out what your needs are in this space. And so let's continue that. If there's something that I say that is a little bit difficult to understand, if you don't know how to apply it to the types of relationships or identities or experiences that you have, please feel free to pop that in the chat or in the Q&A.

I am going to be giving you some-- either questions or polls or things so that we get a temperature of what our experiences are here and likely an experience that you have, someone else has had it or I have heard someone else had it and so there is benefit in you tuning in and tapping into what's important for you as an individual.

All right. I'm just looking at the chat here. So fabulous. So I am going to-- I will show you what's on our menu today, our agenda for the presentation when I share my screen. I wanted to tell you a little bit about who I am as a person. You heard a little bit about my professional bio, but I am also someone who is working to have a better and more thriving relationships and practicing a lot of the skills that I'm going to share with you today.

And I come from-- I've been in Toronto my whole life. I was born in Toronto and lived in many different places. I come from a family of immigrants. My family is from Guyana in South America, and I am a queer, pansexual person, which means that I'm attracted to people of all genders. And I have the cutest cat in the world, which is also a very important relationship to me as well.

So think about what kinds of things shape you. If you were to do an intro about yourself, what kinds of things would you share with somebody? We have gotten used to, as a society, with sharing very little surface kind of information, which is useful when someone asks you, "Hey, how are you doing?" You might say, "Oh, I'm good. How about you?" And we skip over that part of tuning into ourselves.

So I would love for you to also tune in to what's coming up for you today. What's coming up? Is there resistance? Is there excitement? Is there confusion? Do you feel affirmed in a certain way? A big part of relationship building is to be able to observe our own feelings that come up and what responses we default to based on those feelings when we're dealing with other people.

I welcome any kind of conversation today about any kind of relationship. So if you do have questions that are more intimate or sexual in nature, those are welcome in this space, too. Please put them in the Q&A, and be mindful of the ways in which you are sharing. If it's a question that is more vulnerable, that is more sexual or intimate in nature, share in whatever way you need to without giving us explicit details.

So we are in a public shared space where everyone else's needs and boundaries also matter. So I love and welcome whatever you have. Just be mindful that other people might be seeing it or other people are reading it as well.

OK. I am going to share my screen. Actually, I'm going to ask you too, to think about-- before I share my screen-- if there's something that particularly drew you to the presentation today, if there's something that made you really excited or curious about that.

And you can share it in the chat if you'd like to. You can also just keep it top of mind so that we have an idea of maybe what area of relationships we would like to work on today. So thank you all for being here with me. It's going to be a lot of fun. Relationships are definitely challenging, like everything else, but they are also so rewarding when we have relationships that are thriving and that feel like they meet the needs of both people or whoever is involved in the relationship.

OK. I am going to share my screen. Oh, actually, I'm going to look at the chat. I didn't realize you were going to share. That's amazing. I love a chatty group. I love a chatty group! So feel free to drop that in there. So someone's here to-- they were curious about resources to enable conversations about sexuality between parents and middle school children. That's super, super important.

If you have a specific question about that, please pop it in the Q&A, because I'm not going to speak to that directly, but there might be tools that I can help you apply to that topic. Friction with my brother. I know this one really well. I have a little brother, and we have a lot of friction so we can talk about how sometimes the context of relationships like family creates a different set of responses and power structures that might be different than if we were dealing with a friend or a colleague or a mentor. That's a great one.

How to be open minded about the external networking and how to find internal connection between-- ooh, I like this! I like this. Networking is so important to building not only your academic career, but whatever you decide to do after your academic career. Building a future with professional relationships is almost or more-- I would say it's almost more important than the skills that you're bringing in.

Someone could come into the same job as you and bring in similar skills, but your relationship building skills could put you ahead of the curve. So that's beautiful. I love that one. Maintaining longer term

romantic relationships because I have very little experience with those. I love that you're asking a question about something you desire that you have little experience with. That's amazing.

Because many of us go into experiences, we realize there's challenges and then we don't have the skills to navigate them. So it's beautiful that you're thinking ahead, you're thinking about what could support you. I have a lot of friends who come from many backgrounds in terms of sexual orientation. I want to learn more in general. Also, I have a disability and always love learning more about finding and maintaining long lasting relationships.

Ooh, these are all so beautiful, everyone. Thank you for sharing these. Love the relationship curiosity and joy that is coming out in your questions. Absolutely. I will talk a little bit about sexuality on the spectrum of what that looks like and gender diversity. If I don't mention it in specific enough skills to meet your need, please feel free to pop that in the chat as well or in the Q&A.

Supporting family members in difficult times. A lot of times, we have to have really difficult conversations, or we might show up in ways, in relationships, during troubled times or times of conflict or times of grief, and it can be difficult to know what's your role, what should you say, how much should you give what space should you allow for people. These are great.

How to know if someone's attracted to you in a good or a bad way. Yes. Yes. Attraction is a whole other level of relationship building and one that so many of us are curious about, and we tend not to see healthy approaches or thriving approaches to attraction and desire presented to us in the media.

So if you've ever watched like Love is Blind or The Ultimatum, all these like relationship, kind of, oriented shows, we tend to see more dramatic, more sensationalized versions of relationships. So a lot of the skills that I'm going to be talking about today around boundaries, around self-inquiry, self-responsibility, those will definitely help you out.

So these are great. OK. We got-- we got two for that one. All right. Someone's upvoting that one. Amazing. These are fabulous. If you think of anything else, keep popping them in here as I switch to the slides. We can definitely cover a lot of these topics in really specific ways and get you the information that you need so you can have those thriving relationships.

All right. Let me show you what's on our menu today, and then we're going to get into how we can take care of ourselves in this space. So I'm going to share my screen. Here we go. All right. So on our menu, we're going to talk about things like how to build new connections. So that new connection might mean you're building a connection for professional reasons. You might be making a new friend. You might be looking to date somebody.

We're going to touch on red and green flags in all types of relationships. So that relationship might be a family relationship, it might be a relationship where you are already-- you've been in it for a really long time. Tools to get to know yourself better. How do we know what our yeses are? How do we know what our nos are? How do we know what our curiosities are?

If you've ever struggled with jealousy, rejection, any kind of shame -- body shame, shame about our sexuality, shame about our gender, shame about sex in general, this part will definitely equip you with some skills on how to navigate those because everyone has that. Tips for setting boundaries and how to respect others boundaries, approaching difficult conversations. What do we say? How do we check in with ourselves? How do we focus on what our intention is for the conversation?

And how to end relationships peacefully. So how can we create environments where we're ending relationships with respect and empathy for the other person and for ourselves?

[ROY] Hi, Luna. I'm popping on super quick. It's Debjani.

[MATATAS] Oh, yeah.

[ROY] We can't see the presentation.

[MATATAS] Oh, really? Damn.

[ROY] We see your website, though.

[MATATAS] Oh, it's because I moved it from my other screen. I'm so sorry, everyone. Here, I'm coming back--

[ROY] Here's the website, though, everyone.

[MATATAS] [LAUGHS] Yeah, good. You got that? But let's give you the presentation too. OK. I'm just going to move my-- oh, no. I'm just going to grab this. Sorry, everyone. Thank you for telling me. OK. I'm going to keep it on my other screen. I was trying to be fancy. Let's go. OK. Can we all see it now? We're good?

[ROY] Yep. We're good.

[MATATAS] Amazing!

[ROY] Thank you.

[MATATAS] All right. Thank you. OK. So we're going to-- we'll continue now that you can actually see the slide. The slide that you were missing was basically just what I said. So in terms of self-care, we are talking about topics that may bring up certain kinds of feelings or experiences for you that bring up intense feelings, and so if you have an intense feeling like frustration, resentment, irritation, guilt, shame, discomfort, those feelings are OK.

There's nothing wrong with you. There's nothing wrong with whatever is happening. But we want to be able to tune into what those needs are. So you might tune in to discomfort, excitement, curiosity, resistance, validation, affirmation. And what tuning in usually means is that we are-- we might feel something and we want to get to know that feeling a little bit, what's happening here?

So that might mean tuning into your body. Do you feel that feeling somewhere in your body? Do you feel it in your chest? Do you feel it in your stomach? Do you feel it in restlessness in your body? And we want to care for our community space by respecting that we're in a shared space, which means that I'm going to do my best to answer all your questions and relate to all of your experiences, but also remembering that everyone here has something that's unique, and I might not be able to speak to everyone's experience specifically.

All righty. So why? Why do we have relationships? Why are we even interested in connecting with people? We have a society that prioritizes and romanticizes romantic and sexual relationships. What that means is you might grow up believing that the best thing that you can do is to get into a relationship that is romantic or sexual.

Romantic and sexual relationships are beautiful. They are not the only type of relationship that are out there, nor are they the most important type of relationship. So because of this standard, many people start feeling like they are not good enough or they are going to be alone forever if they don't have a romantic or sexual partner.

Not everyone desires a romantic or sexual partner. So for example, if you are asexual or aromantic, you might not experience desire for a sexual partner, but you want to have intimate relationships, wanting intimate relationships, wanting to be liked, wanting to feel that we share experiences with someone, that we have supportive networks, that we have common interests or shared values, having fun, building professional paths.

These are all rewards of a relationship. These are all possible things that we can get out of relationships. So when you're thinking about the relationships that you're in, do they meet a lot of these criteria? Are they serving you in a particular way? What is the mutual benefit of the relationships that you're in?

So this is the cutest pack of fries I've ever seen. So I want to give you an overview of the characteristics of consent. A lot of us learned about consent as just the absence of yes or sorry, the absence of no. So we think that if there isn't a no, that means that there's a yes, that consent is about permission to do something.

But actually, consent is about giving and receiving. So at any given moment, in a relationship, you might be giving or receiving different things. And so that might be you are giving and receiving for developing a professional relationship like a mentorship, so you are doing particular tasks for your mentor in order to receive learning, experience, maybe a recommendation.

Many of us also grow up hearing that consent is "no means no" and there are many ways people say no or yes without actually saying the words no or yes. So these characteristics that I'm going to explain, these are ways to think about the quality of giving and receiving in a relationship. So is the giving and receiving freely given? So freely given would mean that it's free from things like coercion, free from bullying, free from power dynamics that are unethical.

So if someone has more money, more power, if they are in an authority position, if they-- even in a romantic situation, there's a power dynamic if somebody likes me more than I like them, and we are aware of that. They might be more willing to do what I want or what I say because of that imbalance of affection.

Reversible. Reversible means revocable, that consent can be taken back at any given time. If I invite you to my house for pizza and you get here and you say, "Luna, I don't feel like having pizza anymore," am I going to say, "You need to eat the damn pizza"? Probably not. Probably not. You're probably-- I'm probably not going to say that to you.

So in many everyday situations, our friends, our family members, our peers -- we see them revoking consent or reversing consent or changing consent. The conditions for giving and receiving might have changed. Maybe you don't feel like pizza anymore, maybe you don't feel like eating at all, maybe you want to eat something different.

So even in situations that are more vulnerable like intimate or sexual situations, just because we've said we have a plan to do something or a prior plan to do something doesn't mean that we can't change that plan or bring back a different type of consent. We might change up what that looks like. Informed consent. So informed means that we-- we've heard this language actually a lot, right?

We've all lived through COVID and quarantines and vaccines and so we heard informed consent a lot when we had to consent to something that was new to us, something that had potential risks that we needed to be aware of. So informed consent in a sexual situation might look like, hey, we're agreeing to use condoms for our sexual situation, for our sexual activities.

So consent would be changed, it would be non-consensual if in the middle of things, someone decided to change those conditions, so to take off the condom, to not use the condom. That would revoke the quality of informed consent. Engaged. So engaged consent means that we are either enthusiastic or we are clearly agreeing to go ahead.

Now enthusiasm is one way to show engage. So it might be like, "Yes! I want to go to the movies! I'm so excited to go! I can't wait to see you. What are we going to watch?" Engaged consent can also show up

with, "You know what? I'm kind of tired today, but I still want to go to the movies." Or, "I'm pretty nervous about going on our date, but I still want to go. I still want to see you. I still want to meet you."

So it might mean yes but with caution or nervousness. Those feelings are OK. They don't outweigh the yes but the Yes has to be present. So we have to have that engaged yes. And then specific. So specific means the same way that I showed you a menu in the beginning, we have a menu or we have clarity around what specific things we are consenting to.

If I invite you to-- let's say we're going to go hang out. You might want to know what time, what are we going to do, maybe you need to decide on what you're going to wear or what you need to bring, how long we're going to be hanging out together. Are we going to be eating? Is there anybody else that's going to be joining?

So we get specific in our everyday lives all the time and then there's some of us that are reluctant to either give specifics or receive inquiry about our own specific ideas. So how many of you-- think about it. You can tell me in the chat, or you can put your hands up. Just tell me if you're the type of person that if I said, "Hey, let's go out to eat, where do you want to go?" Your response would be, "I don't know, whatever you want to do."

Some of us make it-- yeah, yeah. Thank you. OK. I can see some of your hands going up. I'm going to put my hand up too, because I am also that person. So many of us-- oh, good. There's lots of us here. There's lots of us who are like this. So many of us have either-- some of us don't care. Some of us are open to experiences, but many of us have been told that our needs, our ideas and our feelings are a burden, so we might feel that if we speak up about something as simple as dinner, then we are no longer being agreeable or likable or desirable.

We might want to default to the other person so that they feel more comfortable with their needs. So we might be prioritizing other people's needs over our own. If that's your default-- as some of us who raised our hand, it might be. So if that's your default, there is a challenge when it comes to speaking up about what specifically you need for your consent to be freely given. And we'll talk about how you can navigate that because it's definitely a challenge that many of us face.

All right. So I've put this out here as well. So you'll have this in the recording for sure, so you can remember some of the examples and of the qualities of consent. But I also wanted to give you a little bit of something to reach for. I think this is a great thing to reach for-- to be someone that it's safe to say no to, someone that it's safe to say no to because think about a time when you said no to someone-- it could have been a parent, it could have been a boss, it could be a partner, or a lover-- and they responded in a way that either made you feel bad or they got angry, maybe they guilted you.

Maybe you felt those things without them even doing something. So when we think about these experiences that we've had before, we get to notice what our default response is. So my response is very much like some of you that raised your hand. I'm going to want to be smaller, my needs smaller. I'm going to try to not take up too much space.

And the more that we do that, the more that we say yes to other people, we are saying no to our own needs and our self. This is not black and white. Sometimes we do that out of empathy, out of it's not safe to say no. We might do it because we feel like we are generous, we are giving in a different way.

I want you to bring some mindfulness, some intentionality to think about what does your yeses and your nos actually mean. Like, are we saying them kind of without really thinking? So no isn't the only way people say no. If you could drop for me in the chat, what are some other non-verbal ways that people show displeasure or no?

Like if you were having a conversation with someone and they were saying no, what would that look like? All right. We got one already. Yeah, silence. Absolutely. If we were chatting, and I was going on about whatever and asking you if you wanted to come hang out and you were just really quiet, I might take that, at the very least, as vagueness.

So you're not really giving me that engaged yes about hanging out. So your silence might be something I want to ask about. Absolutely. Oh, you are-- you all are amazing. Look at you popping in here. Someone might say, "I don't feel like it." So "I don't feel like it" is not a yes and it's not quite a no, but it's definitely not a yes, right?

We might need to ask more questions. We might need to leave it alone or tell the other person, "OK, cool, you let me know when you feel like it." I won't ask you again, but you just let me know when you feel like it.

Looking away. Absolutely. For some people, there are cultural norms that are different in different socio-cultural environments.

So eye contact might be something that for you is intimidating, it might be something that is confident, it might be something that shows interest or engagement. Many people with all different kinds of brains and communication styles use eye contact differently, use body language differently. But it's amazing that you dropped it in the chat here because for many of us, there is something that happens when we see that, when we see someone look away.

We might have a moment of, "OK, something has changed." So even just noticing things to be able to then check in about is fantastic. A frown. Absolutely. Someone-- how many of you have RBF? You have resting bitch face? You have a little bit of a permanent frown on you. Yeah, yeah, I do not. When I try to make a mad face, it looks like this. So I'm not good at that frowning.

My face will often look like a yes, but on the inside, I have a no. So definitely, yeah, the frown is a big one. They frown, they grimace, they might try to get away and this can happen online as well. So someone might be saying no to you if you are texting with them and they stop responding. So they might be busy. They might be not into you. They might just like have something else going on and they don't feel like emotionally engaging.

But instead of continuing the same way even though the information has changed in the scenario, we might want to check in. We might say, "Hey, are you busy? Or do you want me to leave you alone for a bit?" or, "Hey, you know what it seems like you're not responding as much lately, so I'm going to let you respond to me when you have time or you feel like it." So we have options when we can check in and how we check in.

Yeah, walking away. Imagine if you're just chatting with someone and they walk away. They're not interested in that. Changing the subject is a good one too. Many people-- especially if you feel shy about speaking up about your boundaries or your nos, we might try tactics that are diverting. So we might try to change the subject. We might take interest in them instead of putting the interest on ourselves.

Ooh, these ones are good. Anxiousness, body language, jittery, the "maybe." The maybe. If someone says, "Maybe," is that a yes? Probably not. At least it's not a yes right now. Leaving. Saying, "I don't know." walking away. These are amazing, you all. These are fantastic. "I'd rather not." Body language. Someone saying that they read that about 80% of communication is non-verbal.

Right. Like, we're just pretty much more complicated animals with feelings. And so if you've ever had a pet; pets are very clear in their nonverbal, especially if you've had a cat. They're very clear in their

nonverbal language and what their boundaries are. Nervous laughter. Oh, these are fantastic. Thank you so much. Ghosting is another way. Oh, amazing. Amazing. These are absolutely wonderful.

Obvious signs like raising their voice or showing signs of being upset. For sure. For sure. These are fantastic. You did such a good job at laying out all of these ways that people might say no. So we kind of know you might be doing some of these. So notice if anything that anyone shared might be something that you are unintentionally doing, which is fine.

We just want to realize that, hey, so if I'm saying "maybe" to this person or I keep changing the subject of the conversation, maybe that's actually a no that's coming up in me that I need to own in a different way or that I just need to notice and keep reinforcing for this person. Amazing. Amazing. The obvious signs like-- oops, sorry. I read that one.

Worrying about unintentional behavior will be considered as disrespectful by a different culture-- in a different culture. Yeah, I think a lot of times our behaviors and just the ways that we've been socialized either from culture, or even just different life experiences. You may have worked in a particular place, and then you work in a different place, and there's different social norms in that environment.

So lots of the skills that we'll be talking about today, but especially the ones around self inquiry, so really getting to know how you are showing up in an environment, how you are responding to that environment. Lots of communication can be cleared up with verbal communication, but oftentimes, we also have to learn to be un-- or to be comfortable with discomfort. So I think that's a really good question.

And it can come up, especially in a place like where you all are, where there's so many different cultures, there's so many different people from many walks of life.

OK. So I want to talk a little bit about what coercion might look like. So if someone brings up these vague types of nonverbal nos or some of them are more overt than others, but a lot of them are straddling the line between yes and no, slightly more on no, sometimes people take that opportunity to practice coercion.

And "coercion" sounds like "I'm going to get you in a back alley and make you eat that pizza I made for you," but it's really not as aggressive usually. Coercion is very subtle in most relationships and people might not even know that they're doing it. They might come from a family where that's normal. They might come from a culture where it's not considered coercive, it's just kind of "I have an overbearing type of family.

They don't ever ask things just once. They're going to keep asking and keep asking and giving me reasons why I should do the thing they want me to do."

So coercion might look like repeated asking or suggesting. So you might have said "maybe" or "no" to something and someone keeps asking or suggesting that you do it or other ways that you do it.

I'm speaking from the perspective of us giving the yes or the no, but remember that we are also people and so any person can potentially create harm for other people, and we might make mistakes. So I've created harm. I've made mistakes. How we respond to those mistakes is how we grow as people and how we grow in our relationships.

Telling you that you're missing out. "Everyone's doing this thing." "Why wouldn't you want to do it?" Like, "All your friends are doing it." "My other partners have done it." Guilt and manipulation. Surprises or unspoken expectations. So this can show up in a way-- if you had plans with-- let's say you had plans with your friends, and they really wanted to go clubbing, and you were like, "No, I feel like going out to something more low key."

On the way to going out to something more low key, your friend says, "You know what, why don't we just swing by this other party, and then we can go do our thing afterwards?" That is going against what you initially consented to do on your outing. It's going against what you originally negotiated. You can renegotiate things, but being in a car on the way to some venue, that has an unspoken expectation about it. It changes the environment where it is not as comfortable anymore to say no or to speak up about your needs.

Exploiting a sense of obligation. How many of you come from families that are very strict? I'm going to put my hand up because I definitely do. Yes. OK, a few of you? Yeah, absolutely. Oh, more. OK. Yes. Yes. Coming from a strict family, you absolutely have dealt with exploiting a sense of obligation. So my family will ask me to do things, and it always comes with guilt, always with guilt.

"Well, if you don't do this, then your grandma is going to think whatever or your brother is going to say blah, blah, blah." And so we might be repeating a lot of the patterns that we've learned in our families, and that's totally normal. Everyone does this. What's awesome about you being here at this workshop is that we have the ability to retrain our brains and to come into a different relationship with our emotional responses.

So you might still feel obligation, but you might now have different choices than when you were more under your parents' care or more under their authority. So different choices responding to the same feeling of obligation. So I could say no to my parents. That's going to mean a little bit more-- I'm going to have to deal with a little bit more guilt. They might be upset with me. They might be uncomfortable with me.

They might punish me in a passive aggressive kind of way, but those are all things that I would have to agree to deal with if I'm going to challenge this response that I have to obligation, which is to always just go along to get along. Born in Canada, family's from India. Family is strict. Yes. Ooh, yes. Heavy on the guilt shaming. All kinds of strictness with a little dash of guilt and shaming on top of it.

You're Caribbean too. Yes, you-- here you all on the same end. Yeah. OK. So we can relate. We can relate to this. And when you were a child, when you're-- even as an adult, having that parental relationship, it can be really difficult to rewrite that kind of relationship to obligation within the family.

So that's a different context than if you find yourself feeling obligated in new relationships like friends or partners, or even mentors or professional relationships, that sense of obligation coming up again, but you are no longer your parents' child in that situation. You might not have the skills that you need to navigate it yet, but we're giving you some of those today.

So you can do this. Even if you feel, "Oh my gosh, I could never say no to my parents," we can find other relationships where you are able to own and be empowered by both your yeses and your nos, which will also make it easier for you to have either more comfort with your family's discomfort, or it might mean that you take different approaches to dealing with your family.

That being said, I'm currently in a fight with my dad right now, so there's-- all this stuff still continues, and it's very much a practice. So the more that you practice, the more options you see for yourself, the more perspective you have. Shaming and gaslighting. Some of you mentioned this. Love bombing and flattery. "Oh my gosh, you are the most beautiful person I've ever seen. I think if we got together, it would be magic. I can't stand being without you."

All these things sound so romantic, and we all want to be liked. We want to be desired. And so many of the love bombing and flattery often makes us feel like if we do the thing that they want us to do, they are going to give us that love, that reward, that respect, that desire, that attraction and sometimes, we get that but we're getting it in a way that is coercive.

Offering drinks or drugs to impair your decision making abilities. "Have another drink, it'll loosen you up. Oh, you're being too serious. Oh--" So any kinds of things that are going to make your consent harder to give in a freely given way, can mean that it might be coercive. Unexpectedly upping or renegotiating agreements when you're vulnerable.

I'm going to use the condom example again because it's a very common example where you might have agreed to something but once things get hot and heavy, someone tries to change what you've agreed to and because you're more vulnerable in that moment, you might be more likely to betray whatever your boundary was at the beginning.

Exploiting common trauma, like withholding affection and abandonment and then threats or blackmail. I put these on here, but I don't know if it's-- these aren't are not usually subtle coercive things. They are more explicit, but they can definitely be a form of coercion as well.

All right. So we talked about no. Let's talk about yes.

Tell me, are there some ways that people say yes that we would think are yes? So put some of them up here, but they don't necessarily mean yes. So when we get something like flirting, drinking, someone's wearing provocative clothing or interesting clothing, affection, maybe they're a very touchy person or we've shared something mild or kissing with them, prior plans to do something, saying yes but then saying no, silence, if there's an absence of no, is that a yes?

Inability to verbally say yes. So either maybe they've shut down due to something like trauma or they are inebriated. So they might be drunk or high and they can't verbally say yes to us. These are some good ones that you just popped in the chat, too. Eye contact. Eye contact doesn't necessarily mean yes.

Many people who were assigned female at birth and socialized as women, we also learn to avoid eye contact in situations where we think it's going to invite attention that we're not interested in. So there's a social aspect to that as well whereas somebody else who didn't have that experience of socialization might think, "Oh, eye contact is friendly, and so they are friendly with me, and maybe that means that they want to escalate into more."

Not everything that is a no or a yes, not everything that happens that's non-consensual is necessarily a harmful situation. So if you made eye contact with someone, they came over and flirted with you, and then you declined their invitation to take that chemistry further, that was a non-consensual experience, but that idea of giving and receiving and being able to navigate that giving and receiving.

This person wants to give you desire, attention, maybe affection, you don't want to receive that. That's the moment where we start to practice consent. Someone just flirting with you and trying to make conversation doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to try to escalate that and it doesn't mean that you have to engage in that.

Every moment is a choice, which is why it makes a lot of this messy, but it also makes it full of possibility for connection to other people and connection to ourselves. All right. I'm just looking-- a smile, but it could be misinterpreted. Yep. Absolutely. If you have New York colleges at your employer, what is their curriculum method? I'm not sure what that one is.

How can you keep things romantic and consensual without making like a protocol to go through steps of consent? That's a really good one. I think that it's really important, when we think about the giving and receiving. That we think about the conditions for mutual safety and pleasure. As soon as those conditions

are not mutual anymore, then that's where boundaries start to get crossed, that's where people start to go along to get along. They might betray their own consent.

So a lot of times people think that asking questions or checking in feels like-- the word that you used is so perfect, it feels like protocol, but actually, it feels like curiosity. So if I'm genuinely curious about what is going to make this giving and receiving, whether it's work, friendship, or romance, what's going to make it most pleasurable for both of us, then I got to stay curious. I got to check in.

If you were all bubbly and giggly when we started making out and then you went kind of quiet, do I know that that's what you look like when you're having a really good time? Maybe you go quiet because you're kind of in your mind, you're in your body. Maybe that's a sign of you shutting down and not being able to tell me what's wrong.

So I think the keeping the spirit of curiosity around mutual pleasure would solve a lot of people trying to look for a script or the word that you used is perfect, that protocol of "OK, I need to ask this at this point, at this point." What many people are doing is they ask at the beginning, and then they forget to continue to check in because this person has consented to opening up the possibility in the relationship for sex or romance.

But once that has started, there are still so many more moments where we can enhance giving and receiving pleasure if we had more information from somebody. So that curiosity is to open up more curious check ins, more curious conversations. So it might look like asking questions that are more specific. So you might say things that are in reference to intensity.

So is this-- do you need this softer or harder? Do you need this slower or faster? Would you like to change things up? Is there something that would give you more pleasure right now? Is there something that you would want? A lot of people receiving those questions, they're like, "Oh my god, Luna, I don't know. I can't think in this moment. I don't know what I need."

So if you have a partner that's like that, you're going to want to give them options. You might say, "Would you like to make out some more? Can I-- or would you prefer me to give you a massage?" So giving options can also help people feel more empowered when they don't feel empowered to speak up about their boundaries or needs on their own. So those are really, really good questions.

OK. I'm going to get back to the presentation, and then at about-- in the next like 20 minutes, I'm going to come to all of your questions. I just want to make sure I give you some of these skills. You're going to have this recorded to go back and look at as well. So I want to take you into the idea of self consent.

That question was perfect for talking about self consent because if I'm not sure how to proceed with somebody, whether it's a friendship or a romantic relationship, am I taking myself into a situation where I'm not comfortable with the person's lack of yes or lack of no? So am I going ahead without the things that I need to be able to consent to doing whatever we're doing in this situation.

So this might show up with somebody else's challenge in communication, and we really either want to lead them, or they've handed over control to us, or they're not sure about what they want. So they're just experimenting. That's all OK but you need to think about, do you feel comfortable going ahead with it?

You might feel OK, but you might also feel, you know what, I need more information. I need to have more conversation with somebody. So what does it mean to understand your yeses? What does that look like? What does yes feel like in your body? Because I know the times where I've preceded in romantic situations where I wasn't sure about the other person's yes but they did-- they didn't give me a no, my body was way more tense.

I was way more in my head than I was in my body. So intellectually, I was still watching for signs of no, or are they not having a good time, and they're just not telling me? And I want you to think about-- you can drop this in the chat as well-- why do we sometimes ignore our yes or our no? Why do we not feel empowered to talk about our yeses? Why do we not feel empowered to talk about our nos? What does that feel like for people?

OK. I'm actually going to-- I'm going to give you-- we've got we've got a poll here. So I'm going to launch the poll as we go into our next few slides because they're sort of-- they're relevant to this idea of self consent and thinking about the times where we might have betrayed our own boundaries. We might have gone along to get along.

OK. The whole thing we're talking about today is how to have thriving relationships. Well, what does that look like? Consent is a big part of having a thriving relationship, but there are other ways or other qualities that we need to have in thriving relationships. So one of them is ethical. So your relationship being ethical means that we are observing any kinds of power dynamics that might be at play.

Now power dynamics can be real time power dynamics. So someone's in a position of authority over me, they're my boss, and so are they asking me to do something and leveraging the fact that they are in a position of authority over me? Power dynamics can also be about social advantages or disadvantages.

So someone being racialized in a relationship with a white person might have a power dynamic that is sort of unspoken, but it might show up in moments of conflict or moments of boundary setting, and it shows up in really inadvertent types of ways. Gender is another power dynamic. For gender queer and trans people, we also haven't seen a ton of relationships that are thriving in mainstream media or anything that we consume as a society that shows us representations of gender diverse and sexually diverse thriving relationships.

I mean, we're starting to see a little bit more now but largely, we've seen examples of heterosexual relationships, heterosexual and cisgender romantic, what that looks like. Like, think of any love song you can think of. It's going to usually refer to a cis man and a cis woman. So for many of us, ethical often doesn't show up in an overt way, but for example, as someone who is a professor cannot date a student. That is an unethical relationship.

That relationship has an inherent power dynamic because the university is employing the professor and the student is in a position of-- under authority of that professor. Another characteristic of thriving relationships that most of us didn't get as we found out from our very strict families is healthy ways of managing conflict.

Now some people are like me, and we are so conflict averse. I don't want any conflict. I'd rather be a people pleaser and that's not serving me in ways that help me show up more authentically in my relationships for myself and for other people. So healthy ways of managing conflict would include things like having difficult discussions or ending relationships more peacefully.

Conditions for safety and joy. Safety and joy. And so not every relationship is joyful 100% of the time, not every relationship is safe in the same ways 100% of the time but what we're looking for is creating those conditions in the relationship so we can always return back to them. If there is no safe place within a relationship, if you always feel like you are on-- walking on eggshells, that your partner at any moment could throw a tantrum at you, or there's a fragility around getting in trouble from your boss or your parents, you always feel on edge, that that's not an emotionally safe environment.

And mutual benefit. So if you are wanting mentorship from somebody. People often come to me who want to be sex educators, and they will want to learn from my experience and exchange work hours in

that exchange. So the mutual benefit is that I get some extra hands. I get some extra support. I get some knowledge from someone, someone who has a different life experience.

I get to teach someone and they get the benefit of learning from me. If they were just doing a ton of work for me and they weren't learning anything, that I was too busy to meet with them or teach them anything, then that's not a mutually beneficial relationship. Sometimes we get into relationships that aren't mutually beneficial because we have different goals.

So that person still might want to be a mentor, a mentee under me because they want to put on their resume that Luna Matatas was their mentor. That's still a benefit for them. It might not be the original benefit, but you get to decide. It's about tuning into what that might look like. All right.

So I think it's so hard to say what we want. Some people are really good at it.

Who are the people that are really good at saying what they want? Who are my like, "Yes, I can say what I want. It's so easy for me." Amazing. We have a few of you. Yes. Yes, keep putting your hands up. I love seeing that we've got folks that are really good at saying what they want. So it might be hard for you to say what you want, because you've been disappointed before, maybe you weren't allowed to express healthy conflict.

You haven't discovered what your needs are. Maybe this is the first time someone has really genuinely cared about what your needs are. You haven't discovered-- or sorry, you worry about being too much. You want to appear easy going or low maintenance. I think that was me when I first got on dating apps. I just wanted to be liked. I did not care about my own needs. I just wanted somebody to like me and go out with me.

And so I actually prized that I was low maintenance and easy going, but what that translated toward-- for me was that I was suppressing my needs so I could prioritize somebody else's needs so that I could make them think that I was easy to be around and then they would keep me around, right? So thinking about some of the patterns that we might have in relationships and how we describe ourselves and what do we really value about ourselves.

You get something out of focusing on other people's needs. In that moment, on those dating apps, I was getting that I was getting attention. I might have been getting some form of desire, but if we're not showing up as our authentic selves, who is that person liking? Who is that person liking? Like, am I never ever going to have a need? Probably not. I'm going to have a need, and then it's going to come out of nowhere for somebody.

OK. So here we go. Here we go, my friends. Here we go. We're going to have some difficult conversations. Oops. This is the wrong slide. Sorry. OK. Oh my gosh, my slides are all messed up. I'm sorry, everyone. I'm going to come back and just tell you-- we're going to talk about this as us instead. I'm going to stop the share. OK.

So when we're having difficult conversations, there are some techniques that actually help you manage your own response to the conversation so if you're nervous. I get choked up, and I start to feel my words kind get trapped right here on my throat. For many of us, we might get really excited, we might get very hyper energized, we're like ready to battle in this difficult conversation.

So the first thing that we do with difficult conversations is that we think about, what is our intention for this conversation? What do we want to come out of this conversation? So I'll give you an example. If you want to tell someone something about a boundary that you have, right? So your boundary is I don't want you to interact with me in this way anymore. I'd prefer that you interact in this way with me. That might mean that you're changing the way that the relationship has gone along.

So the relationship might already be doing the thing that you don't want it to do so you have to talk about it. So there's a change in that dynamic. So are you looking to end the relationship? Are you looking to end the behavior? Do you want a different kind of behavior? Do you want maybe no contact with this person?

And I'll tell you about a difficult conversation I had to have recently. So this is a professional conversation, and it was really tough, because I've been working with these people for a really long time, and I didn't want them to think I was being a diva, but it was very much about challenging the dynamic that we had set up with each other.

So there were certain expectations for this company that I was going to show up in this certain way, give this amount of time, be paid this amount of money, and actually, it wasn't really aligned with the work that I was giving. So conversations around money, around professionalism, around romance, these can qualify as difficult conversations.

So my intention wasn't to just speak about my need, but my intention was to negotiate a better professional relationship. So the tone and the approach of what I took to that difficult conversation was very much about having that intention in mind. If I went in there all flaming angry, the way, maybe, I told my best friend about this story, is that going to take me to the destination that I want?

If I want to burn it down, great. Yeah, I could burn it down. But I wanted to create-- my intention was to create a better relationship that was more beneficial for me while still being beneficial for them. So that's the first one. That's thinking about your intention. The second one is thinking about your approach. Are you going to email them? Are you going to request a meeting with them? Are you going to have a phone call? Do you want to do this in person? Are you going to just like go up to them in the cafeteria? Or are you going to request a private time?

It might be different depending on the conversation that you're having. If you don't feel safe with someone, having it in a public space or going over text, that might be the most appropriate way. If you know this person responds with anger or intimidation, you might not feel comfortable being in an intimate private space with them having a difficult conversation. So intention and approach.

The third thing is thinking about the possible outcomes. So what are the possible outcomes of having this conversation or of not having this conversation? For many people, we might think, "If I have this conversation, the relationship is over. We're not doing this anymore." But for other people, having a difficult conversation actually strengthens relationships.

So whether that strengthens the clarity of the relationship, so you are no longer compatible and so you make space for someone who's more compatible, or it strengthens the quality of that mutual, beneficial characteristic of ethical or thriving relationships. So the thinking about is this-- so this person could get mad, this person could be happy I told them, this person might need time to think about what I told them, this person might have a counter argument, they might have something they want to talk about with me.

Going through some of those outcomes in our head helps us get out of a pattern that we might have thought about beforehand. If difficult conversations in your family were met with violence or with abandonment or with intimidation, you might be expecting every difficult conversation to show up that way.

So going through it ahead of time, even talking it through with a friend, role playing, can be really helpful in prepping not only your words, what you want to say, but prepping your nervous system for being able to handle this conversation.

OK. I'm going to take you back to my non-messed up slides now. I'm sorry about that.

But I want to talk a little bit about-- before we get into your questions-- how you can really think about what your needs are and what it might look like to go through those needs, what it might look like to actually pursue those needs. So one of them is thinking about the last time you had fun, the last time you had like a really good time.

So what might that look like? What were you feeling? What conditions were in place? It might have been the activity. It might have been the company. It might have been your mood. It might have been the conditions under which you were having that kind of pleasure. So think about what conditions make you feel relaxed, secure, and safe.

Think about the opposite. What conditions, what things do people do or what situations happen that make you feel anxious, nervous, insecure? Think about being at a party. Are you the person that goes into the party and you talk to everybody? Are you the person that goes to the party and quickly finds like a few people that you know? You're a small group kind of person.

Are you the person at the party who's kind of a loner, but you go between different groups, you might talk with different groups of people? All of us have different ways of approaching social situations, and it might differ when it comes to more interpersonal or intimate situations. So think about not only what is comfortable for you, but how you like to make other people comfortable and what that might feel like.

All right. I'm going to take you to my boundaries slide here so we can talk a little bit about boundaries in the next five minutes. I'm going to share my screen again, and then we'll come to your poll. OK. Here we go. I love how chatty you all are. Thank you so much for being so chatty. So your boundaries. Let's look-- boundaries are hard. Boundaries are hard because of the way we framed boundaries.

So boundaries get commonly talked about as controlling other people, like telling other people what to do. So if I have a boundary, I'm going to tell you how to make that boundary safe for me. That's part of it. You can tell somebody what your boundaries are, but boundaries are much more about your own needs and what you're going to do to honor them because-- just because you have boundaries, doesn't mean everyone is going to respect them or take care of them.

And so at the end of the day, I want you to be able to take care of yourself and to provide support for yourself if all else fails. If someone doesn't respect our boundaries, what are we going to do? So I'll give you an example. I don't answer business emails after 7PM and that's a rule that I have for myself. I can let my clients know, "Hey, I don't answer emails after 7PM."

That's very different than me telling everyone anywhere ever to never email me after 7PM because people are inevitably going to. I could put an out of office. I could spend a lot of time correcting the people who email me after 7PM but for my peace of mind, I just don't answer the emails until after 7PM, and I've set a clear expectation for people who might email me after that time.

So for you, if someone's doing something that you don't like, you can absolutely communicate with them, "Hey, I don't like that you do this because it makes me feel afraid, it makes me feel pressured, it makes me feel obligated." And that person might say, "OK, yeah, thank you for letting me know. I had no idea." People are people, and they might make mistakes again, they might continue to cross your boundaries.

You can end that relationship if it's possible, but you might also want to find a way to still be in the relationship while taking care of your own needs. So boundaries are also on a spectrum. Some boundaries are pretty small like my email one, but some boundaries might be bigger and more intense and have more intense consequences if we don't support them.

Your needs are not the only needs in the room. So at any given time, you might have a need and if we want our need to be respected, other people's needs also have to have space. And so that might mean

that you are in spaces where you feel maybe ignored, unaffirmed, not validated, uncomfortable. Those are feelings that are not great. They definitely don't feel good and depending on who you are, and how often you felt those feelings, they can feel more intense.

But then we also have discomfort. Discomfort is something that we can also learn to determine if this discomfort is something that will help us grow. So think about a time where you might have felt unsafe, but you were actually safe. If you like-- if you like a good horror movie, you might have felt afraid, but you weren't actually in any danger.

If you like roller coasters, you might feel afraid in a fun adrenaline kind of way, but you know ultimately, you're pretty safe. A lot of times in relationships our boundaries actually show up in ways that are about controlling our partners. So a boundary in a romantic or sexual relationship might be something like "I don't like you posting pictures of yourself in bikinis on social media because it makes me feel jealous."

So in that conversation, talking about my jealousy is one way of approaching that conversation but coming up with a demand to have someone change the way that they are governing their autonomous body is not a boundary, it is possession. So it is possession and control over somebody else.

You might want your partner to behave in certain ways that make you feel more secure, but remember that coercion slide I showed you? That's a form of subtle coercion. You're withholding affection or relationship from somebody because of how their behavior, that's autonomous to you, is making you feel.

There are situations where you have to talk about your partner's behavior, but you talk about them in a way that is from the perspective of what you need and also thinking about, well, what are you willing to do? Like maybe I can't be in a relationship with this person because they're-- the posting of their social media pictures is making me uncomfortable, and I'm not willing or unable or able to manage that discomfort.

So it gets a little bit-- it gets a little bit messy when we start to really think about other people's needs and other people's autonomy in the same space as our needs and our autonomy as well. OK.

I feel like there's so much in the chat that I'm missing. I only have two more slides for you, but they are your ending slides, they are your homework slides.

So I will pull them up after we answer some questions, and I check out your poll, and then you'll get some bonus information and the website that I was showing you instead of the presentation. You will also have some more language, some tips for approaching people, 10 ways to ask someone for a kiss, and some of the consent language that I talked about in different scenarios are up on that resource page for you, which I'll drop in the chat.

All right. OK. So I'm actually going to read the polls out here for you. So I'm going to end the poll. Actually, I'll just share the results. So we've got-- have you ever said yes when you wanted to say no? Oh my gosh. 80% of us. 80-- I fall in that 80%. I would have voted there as well. So you can see how overwhelming it is for many of us.

And not every situation is we could have said yes. You might have had to ignore your yes for safety or your no for safety or obligation or something but just to be aware that we do this quite often. How do you feel when you're rejected? Some people-- we've got 32% feel disappointed, 32% feel sad. The 3% of you that feel happy, more power to you.

So whenever I ask this question in person, there's always one person who's like, "I love rejection," and I'm like, "Why?" And what I've learned is that so many people or many-- some people. So let's say-- let's go with some. I don't think it's many. Some people like rejection because it's clarity. It's very clear

communication. There's no guessing. There's no interpreting the maybe. There's no interpreting the vagueness. It's very, very clear.

When you get rejected, you might have feelings like anger, sadness, afraid, lonely come up. That's perfectly normal. It's a shared set of feelings amongst anyone who's been rejected from a job, from a date, from family, whatever it is. And what we want to do in those moments, to deal with our rejection, is not make other people responsible for our feelings.

So sometimes we chase people for closure or we want to tell them how angry we are. Instead, I want you to turn to yourself and your community of other relationships. So we want to find gentle support for our feelings of sadness, loneliness, abandonment, rejection. So that might mean immediate support. It might mean take yourself out on a solo date. It might mean talk, and gripe with a best friend who's really going to listen and affirm your feelings.

It might mean do something that you've been putting off doing because you've been focusing so much on this relationship, but this other thing will also bring you joy. We want to remind ourselves that we have other ways to support and soothe ourselves in relationships. I love these. Thank you so much for answering these.

Ooh, 92% of us have experienced jealousy. Jealousy is a totally natural emotion. Underneath jealousy, there's often information for us about our needs, about our boundaries, and about other insecurities. So anytime I felt jealous, especially in a partnership, I've often felt that it was because I'm not good enough. So I'm comparing myself to the other person. I think they're better than me. I think that they're hotter than me.

And so that comparison, of course, is going to make me feel not good enough. So instead of that, I want to look towards where I am being affirmed. I might want to think about, are there certain behaviors that are happening that are making me feel jealous? What's the story that the jealousy is telling me?

What kind of relationships are most important to you? 79% of us want friendships.

We've got-- a good chunk of us want long-term dating or professional or academic relationships. Family is a huge one. And then casual dating at the end. These are great. Those are amazing. There might have been some relationships that I didn't capture on there for you as well so that might not be-- that might have not been up there for you as an option.

But you can see how despite what society tells us around romantic relationships, that actually the majority of us are looking for solid friendships, the people who are going to have our back, the people who are going to support us and understand us. That's where we're looking to build relationships. When you build those friendships, when you build that connection through shared interests, through like minded values, through also having friends who call you on your stuff, right?

The friends who never say no to me, I'm like, "How can I trust your yes if I've never heard your no?" So we want people that we can be vulnerable and intimate with in addition to feeling like we've got desire and attraction and all that other kind of stuff working. On your friendships as a person, working on being empathetic and authentic with somebody else will make you a better partner when you decide-- if you decide to have a partner.

It will make you a better employee or the boss. If you are in your academic and professional pursuits, having those interpersonal skills about being able to identify boundaries, being able to have difficult conversations and being able to sit with your own feelings and observe what comes up for you. MWAH! [KISSING SOUND] That's like chef's kiss. You're going to be able to navigate relationships with so much more ease and compassion for yourself.

OK. So there's like-- on my chat, I can see 51 messages. I'm going to-- I'm going to go through a couple of them that I think I can answer within the time that we have left, but I just want you to know that whatever questions you submitted, absolutely valuable, absolutely important. I'm going to pick ones I think that I can cover.

All right. So we've got-- I'm scrolling up here. I'm scrolling up. So feel free, if you've got any questions still, pop them-- pop them in there. Q&A is best because then I'm able to see them a bit clearer, but I'm also going to go through the ones in the chat here for you.

[ROY] Great. Luna, just want to say there are about four in the Q&A box--

[MATATAS] Oh, there are?

[ROY] --that have come in throughout. And as I said, we're going to hold them 'til the end, so that might be easier because in the chat I've been following and there are a couple maybe but more in the Q&A.

[MATATAS] OK. Perfect. Amazing. Thank you for that.

OK. Let me see here. OK. So we've got one not quite a relationship question, but rather, "An experience I had last week, which I would like to share. I was at a business investing conference last week in Cyprus and someone at that conference disrespected me for no reason at all. Honestly, I was shocked, fuming and very angry. Didn't know what to make of it. Wanted to get out physically, but decided not to do anything.

And that experience ruined my whole trip. How would you go back and handle a situation like that? Thank you for your feedback."

Yeah, I think I probably would have done the same thing. How many of you have had like an interaction with somebody and then it keeps running in your head all the way 'til bedtime? You're like having comeback arguments in the shower with this person.

So many of us experience not knowing what to do in the-- OK, good. Some of you relate to this. Amazing. So you can relate to not knowing what to do in the moment. So I would ask you, "Did you not respond in that moment because there was also consideration of being in a professional environment?"

So maybe if someone had said something to you on the street, you wouldn't have been in that mindset of being very professional. And so sometimes our mindset, where we've pivoted to or shifted to can influence how and when we-- or how we choose to respond. I think that if this person, if you had a chance to go back and do it differently, you could have said something very simple like, "Wow, that's really disrespectful," and not have to explain yourself. You could have checked out of that situation.

So there are things you could have said in the moment, but I think because the moment has passed, we actually still need to take care of that anger, that shock, that fuming that we have to carry away that it had nowhere else to go. So you might want to take some of that, if it's still alive for you, and get it out of your body in some way.

Some people use journaling, some people use role play to get one of your friends to be this person so that you could say what you would have said to that person, some people also use meditation to visualize the anger, the fuming leaving your body, and I'm going to give you the one that works for me with anger.

I need to punch a pillow. I'm going to have to punch a pillow and that pillow-- it's not so much about the person, it's about those feelings of anger that came up, rightfully so, and that didn't have anywhere to go. Because if we don't get them out of us in some way, it actually just stays in us, and it builds resentment, it builds illness, it builds fatigue, so being able to find a way to get it out.

Even going for a walk and intentionally saying I'm going to let this go. I'm going to give this back to the Earth. I'm going to put this out into the world. I'm not carrying this with me anymore to feel a bit more empowered. So hope that helps a little bit.

"What happens if you are afraid to say no?" Yeah, very good question.

If you feel afraid to say no in a situation, it might depend on the situation. So let's take a friendship, for example. Maybe your friend is-- really wants you to come to her birthday party and you're like, "I'm tired, but I feel like I should go." If you notice there's a should or a feeling of obligation, that's a place where you can make a decision from so you can decide.

If you feel you can't go because your friend is going to be so angry at you, you're going to have to deal with this conflict. They might end the friendship. They might tell everyone you know how terrible you are that you didn't go to the birthday party. Sometimes we fear saying no because of physical safety reasons.

I've definitely been on dates where I didn't feel comfortable saying no because of the dynamic of the relationship, and it was mostly if I was on dates with a cisgender heterosexual man where we know that there's a social advantage of them over me. So if you feel afraid to say no, once you notice that feeling coming up, because it's usually swirling in the background and our mouths are saying yes but we're feeling something, we might feel it in our chest, in our stomach, in our throat, in our restlessness.

We might start to notice we're zoning out, we're checking out, we're changing the subject. In those moments, call a break, whatever's happening. If it's a romantic situation, call a pause. Take a pause. Take a break. Take a deep breath. You might need to go to the bathroom and just look yourself in the mirror and check in with yourself.

These moments of pause often give you a chance to find perspective on different options, different possibilities. You might still go back and go ahead. You might decide to call it a night. You might say to someone, "Hey, you know what, I need more time to decide." So if a pause is not available, even asking for a delay. "Can I get back to you?" "Can I say yes now, but I need to check in somethings and confirm with you?"

So giving yourself the space to feel exactly what your intuition, your gut is telling you and then to check in on how you want to proceed can be really helpful.

"What if I'm someone that tends to over perceive rejection? I think I have a rather anxious attachment style. Would be interested in tips or ideas that you have."

Yeah, absolutely. So just for folks who aren't aware, attachment styles are-- they were actually developed out of psychology research about how parents and children attach to each other. So depending on how the parents parented, children learned specific ways of coping with that type of parenting or responding to that type of parenting that either resulted in secure attachment, insecure attachment, avoidant, or anxious attachment.

There's actually no research for adult romantic relationships. It's all based on parental stuff. So remember, when we talk about our parents, when we're in different environments, we have an opportunity to retrain our brains, to retrain and give ourselves new experiences in order to get the kind of relationship that we want.

So it's amazing that you already know that this is your style, that this is what your tendencies are. Your tendencies are not your ingrained fabric. They aren't something that are immovable or that they're set in stone. We can absolutely change them, but we have to know they're there, we have to observe them.

Anxious people or anxiously attached people tend to worry about affection or intimacy or the relationship ending at any slight change

affirming, we assume it's about us and that someone no longer likes us and that we are going to be alone and then it doesn't stop there. It starts to spiral into, we might be alone forever. What if no one likes us? What if we're just unlikable? What if we're unlovable? And so it's really easy to get into that thought spiral.

So one, when you start to feel that come up, it is OK. Those feelings are coming up because they have something to say. So we want to give them attention first. We want to say, "OK, is there evidence for this? Like, is our partner packing up their stuff and moving out or were they just busy today?" We want to look for evidence in reality of whether or not the thoughts that we are having are affirming. Are these true? Are they actually happening? So we can do that through observation first.

You might want to ask your partner. You might say, "Hey, look, I get really anxious about things. It's nothing you're doing, but I just might need to check in with you about some things as I get more comfortable with you, as I build more trust with you." That trust that you're building with your partner is also trust that you're building with yourself, it's that self-trust with who you are and how you show up in relationships.

So checking in with yourself, checking in with your partner. Checking in with yourself might even include journaling so that you can go back and look at similar patterns and moments where your rejection starts to come up. The last thing I would recommend for rejection is that you get used to it because it is a part of life.

So think about what is the worst case scenario if my partner is actually rejecting me? What's the worst case scenario? What's happening? And is that happening right now? Because in that moment, there's also room for reflection about your responsibility. Maybe you are doing something that is causing them to withdraw from the relationship. Maybe they feel insecure about something, and we need to offer affirmation or validation.

So there's always that giving and receiving happening in those moments and becoming aware of what they feel like when they're super intense in us, can give us more choice.

OK. I'm just going to check in with time. There's about-- there's one more question. Do I have time to answer the one more?

[ROY] Yeah, I think so.

[MATATAS] OK, I'll be quick.

[ROY] Very quickly, though. Before folks leave, we have popped the survey in the chat so if you have a chance to fill it out before you go. And for those who can stay behind, Luna is being kind enough to stick around and answer your questions so feel free to stay back with us. Thanks.

[LUNA] OK. Fabulous. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you so much. There's just one more here, and I'm just popping in the chat. That's-- oh, I didn't put the HTTPs. We've got the extra resources for you that you can find. And your homework is going to be to find a baby boundary. You're going to find a tiny little boundary.

If it's something like you never send your food back at a restaurant-- that's me-- because you don't want to be a burden to the server, if it's about speaking up in a relationship where you feel comfortable. So I just want you to test what is it like when you speak up about what you want? Pick something low stakes. Like, don't go for your parents. Go for-- go for a relationship where you feel it might be OK if you assert a yes or a no. All right. Baby boundaries. I want to hear all your baby boundaries.

OK. So the last question in that we're going to close up with is, "I accidentally surprised a friend with the presence of someone she didn't want to see, and I was-- or I was preoccupied and forgot to tell her. He

decided to attend the event at the last minute. How do I go about apologizing and readdressing that harm?"

Yeah, that's a beautiful question because, like I said, many of us, all of us, we are going to create harm at some point unintentionally. This is just who we are as people. If you want to apologize to your friend, I would find an intimate time, so not when you're out with a bunch of other people. So maybe a phone call, however you think that your friend might communicate.

Some people like communicating difficult conversations over text. If you don't know, then I would suggest a phone call, and I would prep your person. I would say, "Hey, can we have a chat. I really want to apologize for bringing him to the event. I wasn't thinking, and I'm so sorry that it made you uncomfortable."

And so having that conversation isn't so much about you feeling better about the harm, it's about actually giving something to somebody so that the harm is amended. Now your person-- I don't know if your person is mad at you still or kind of was irritated in the moment, but brushed it off, so it might depend on how they feel about it how the conversation will go.

But in moments when we're apologizing for harm, we're focused on the other person. If you need to deal with your feelings around feeling like you're terrible because you created harm-- you're not-- you go to another friend to take care of that, to take care of you that made a mistake. All right. Thank you, everyone.

Thank you for these a fantastic questions. You had so much liveliness in the chat, and I'm so, so honored that I was able to come and teach for you. So thank you so much to the team for inviting me and for creating this space for all of you so that we can thrive in our relationships, we can thrive in however we want and support each other as well.

Oh, thank you for all the love in the chat. Thank you.

[ROY] Luna, I wanted to thank you so much for speaking to our students and our community. The feedback is amazing so far. I think people have really benefited from the conversation. Can you start an advice column, please? I think--

[MATATAS] Yes.

[ROY] --Luna Matatas advice column. Thank you, everyone, for attending. We appreciate your participation and stay tuned for more of our events coming up for Relationship Violence Awareness Month. Thank you, everybody