Why do we repeat patterns even when we consciously want something different?

An exploration of how experiences outside conscious awareness shape our relationships, choices, conflicts, desires, and attempts to change.

Desire reaches far beyond sexuality. What we pursue in relationships, work, success, recognition, and intimacy is shaped by personal history, emotional experience, fantasy, identity, and unconscious meaning.

This conversation explores why wanting something is often more psychologically complicated than simply deciding whether we should have it.

Sexual desire changes over the course of a relationship, sometimes in ways that surprise or unsettle couples.

This topic explores what desire can communicate about intimacy, familiarity, distance, conflict, identity, fantasy, and the evolving psychological life of a relationship.

Infidelity can carry very different psychological meanings.

Drawing from Juliane’s framework of distinct pathways into affairs, this conversation moves beyond one-size-fits-all explanations to explore what betrayal can reveal about the individual, the relationship, and what genuine repair may require.

Why can success feel strangely unsatisfying? Why can greater visibility or authority create anxiety? Why do some people struggle to slow down even after achieving what they worked toward?

This topic explores ambition as a psychologically meaningful part of life, including our relationships with achievement, recognition, money, authority, competition, identity, and the feeling of “enough.”

Many people inherit a narrow definition of what counts as sex.

This conversation explores “outercourse” and erotic connection beyond penetration, opening space for a broader understanding of pleasure, intimacy, sexuality, and what a satisfying sexual life can look like across different bodies, relationships, and stages of life.

Behaviors that feel destructive or difficult to control often serve psychological and emotional functions that are easy to miss when the focus remains solely on stopping the behavior.

Drawing from work with substance use, gambling, sexual and pornography-related compulsivity, and people affected by a loved one’s addiction, Juliane explores what repetitive behaviors may be attempting to manage, express, avoid, or resolve.