Dr Christian Nelson

David Gray: So I’m with Chris Nelson who’s our international guest, clinical psychologist from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Thanks Chris.

Christian Nelson: Yeah, thank you for having me.

David: You gave a fantastic presentation on Intimacy Enhancing Interventions. The three take home messages that you’d have from that meeting?

Christian: Yes, so I think, you know I think the take-home messages revolve around that probably in intimacy enhancing interventions, but you know men and women probably want different things. And so, I think men will be focused on their sexual functioning, erections and trying to get their erections back. Female partners tend to focus more on the non-sexual intimate contact, the holding hands, the sitting together in the couch, the hugs or kisses goodbye and those type of things. And so, you know when men have difficulty with erections sometimes they not only pull away from sexual contact but they pull away from that non-sexual contact and that’s really where the conflict in the couple tends to start, around those type of things. And so, you know that’s kind of an overview of one of the primary take-aways of the presentation. And so, so that would be kind of I think probably the summary.

David: I remember you also mentioned that it’s worth identifying if there were no issues with intimacy then whether there needs to be an intervention

Christian: Yeah and so that’s right and so you know we need to tell our interventions to the people who need it. And so, if there’s couples who come in then they’re relatively high functioning in terms of communication in terms of intimacy. You know it’s good. I was going to talk with them. I was going to help them along but they might not need as much as those couples who really are struggling with communication and intimacy and a lot of times you know the struggle has to do with you know the men comes in and he is, you know he is upset about his erections and so oftentimes the female partner is you know, their just not as upset about the erections as the man is and so the man then says “why aren’t you so upset about my erections?” and the female partner says “why am I concerned about your erections? I am more concerned about you and about you living” and that’s where the communication tends to get off track and so as even a simple conversation with a couple you know whoever that practitioner is, a simple conversation about this type of intimacy issues, I mean it doesn’t take too long but that type of conversation probably could help a lot of couples out a lot just make sure they’re on the same page.

David: Perfect! Thanks very much Chris.

Christian: Yeah, thank you.