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Loveline may contain sexually oriented content.

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Loveline with Dr. Chris starts.

Three, two, one.

Now.

Happy Monday, everybody.

We are back.

Hope you're having a beautiful, beautiful night.

Hope you got through the weekend.

Tons and tons of self-care, and always exploring the different coping mechanisms that we're choosing.

Because, again, one of the things I really want people to be paying attention to are all

the different things that they're using outside themselves to cope and get through this.

And again, it's okay to use food to emotionally cope.

It is okay to use masturbation or sex as a way to self-soothe or to cope.

Because again, if we can go jogging and do yoga and read and take a bath, we can also eat and

masturbate. There's no reason to continue this cultural anxiety around the use of food or sex for

us to get our mental needs met. There's no right way to do that.

We often talk in the field about relationship being where everything should get handled or about having

the internal resources to cope with everything that's going on. And that comes out of the 12-step

world sometimes where there's a pathologizing of any form of distraction or

checking out. And in fact, as humans, we need to have what we call a trauma-informed model.

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