A Path to Wellness

A Path to Wellness Our goal is to help you find your path to wellness. What you need are a trusted guide and a clear path. That’s where we come in.
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It is our joy to help you nurture areas of your life such as nutrition, sleep, exercise, healthy relationships, community connections, meaning and purpose, and lovingkindness to yourself and the world. A Path To Wellness began for people like you: someone searching for solid guidance toward living a healthy, authentic, and empowered life. The profession is full of providers who focus on the questi

on of “What’s wrong with you?” You want a provider who’s more interested in “What’s right with you?”.

08/28/2026

We constantly tell men to "be more vulnerable." But do we actually mean it? 🤔
As a marriage and family therapist, I see a painful paradox in modern relationships.
Many partners genuinely want vulnerability, but only if it fits their specific, idealized fantasy of masculinity.

Here is the hard truth: A partner might love seeing a man cry at his father's funeral. But if he cries because she hurt his feelings? Suddenly, it can feel like "blood in the water".
When a man breaks his "strong facade" in a way his partner doesn't know how to tolerate, the response can be devastating. As a result, men quickly receive the message that their real vulnerability is unsafe—so they pull back, stop communicating, and withdraw.

True intimacy requires us to tolerate the anxiety that comes with seeing our partner's raw, unpolished humanity. It means moving past the double standards and embracing the total complexity of what it means to be a human being.

👉 Ready to build a relationship that can handle genuine, unfiltered connection? Dive deeper into these dynamics in my book, “Making Nice with Naughty: An intimacy guide for the rule-following, organized, perfectionist, practical, and color-within-the-lines types.”

08/27/2026

Too many men approach long-term intimacy like they are texting for a casual b***y call. 📲♟️
You know the move: walking up behind your spouse at the kitchen sink and whispering, "Hey, do you want to have seggs?"

Then, when they decline, you're left feeling rejected and confused.
Here is what you need to understand: Intimacy is chess, not checkers.

While men are highly familiar with spontaneous desire, many partners experience contextual desire.
Before you initiate, you have to ask yourself a crucial question:

How have I been treating my partner for the last two to three days?
Have you voiced genuine curiosity about their day? Have you actively listened? Have you built an environment that fosters safety and desire, or did you just wait for a sudden spark of your own and expect them to immediately match it?

In a long-term relationship, we have to be far more sophisticated in how we think about connection.
👉 Want to master the "chess game" of long-term intimacy? Start reading my book today: “Making Nice with Naughty: An intimacy guide for the rule-following, organized, perfectionist, practical, and color-within-the-lines types.”

08/26/2026

Are you an overachiever in the office but struggling to turn it off at home? 💼🕯️

The "overcontrolled" temperament is a professional superpower. It is the exact psychological makeup that allows people to survive medical school, pass the bar, build successful companies, and get things done.
You rely on structure, calculated risks, and an invisible audience judging your success.
But what a curse this can be when it comes to intimacy.

Intimacy is meant to be a time for play, relaxation, and vulnerability. Yet, overachievers often treat s*x like just another goal or task on their nightly to-do list. They bring their drive for metrics, zeros, and commas directly into the bedroom—and are left wondering why they feel disconnected, bored, or anxious.

If you are treating your relationship like a boardroom meeting, you are missing out on the actual purpose of connection.

👉 Learn how to step out of the boardroom and bring your authentic self home. Pick up my book, “Making Nice with Naughty: An intimacy guide for the rule-following, organized, perfectionist, practical, and color-within-the-lines types.”

08/25/2026

Most men who think they have Erectile Dysfunction (ED) actually have something entirely different.
I call it Erectile Disappointment.

What’s the difference? If a man is able to ma******te perfectly fine when he is alone, but struggles with er****ons during partnered s*x, the issue is not mechanical or biological.
It is context-driven performance anxiety.

We live in a culture where s*x education is heavily outsourced to po*******hy. This creates a performative, genital-focused expectation where any minor deviation from "perfection" is treated as a disaster. When a partner subtly registers disappointment, a man's anxiety spikes, causing him to pull back and withdraw to avoid "failing" again.

The moment we shift from a performative mindset to a pleasure-based mindset—recognizing that intimacy is about sharing our whole bodies, not just checking a physical box—the pressure vanishes.

👉 Let’s take the pressure off for good. To understand how to rebuild confidence and escape the performance trap, read my book, “Making Nice with Naughty: An intimacy guide for the rule-following, organized, perfectionist, practical, and color-within-the-lines types.”

08/24/2026

Perfectionism is a superpower in your career. In the bedroom, it is a psychological handbrake. 🏎️🛑
In my work with overachieving professionals, I’ve found that s*xual anxiety is rarely physical—instead, it is driven by what I call Sexual Perfectionism.

Through my clinical experience, I've identified that this mental block shows up in 4 distinct "flavors":
1️⃣ The Self-Imposed: "I have to perform perfectly."
2️⃣ The Partner-Directed: "My partner has to perform perfectly."
3️⃣ The Perceived Expectation: "I think my partner expects me to be perfect."
4️⃣ The Societal Pressure: "Society (and media) expects me to be perfect."

When you fall into these traps, intimacy ceases to be about pleasure and connection. Instead, it becomes a performative task where you are constantly grading yourself.
If you're spending your intimate moments worrying about your "score" rather than enjoying the experience, it’s time to rewrite your internal rulebook.

👉 Are you ready to retire from being a bedroom performer and start being a partner? Learn how to dismantle these 4 perfectionism traps by grabbing a copy of my book, “Making Nice with Naughty: An intimacy guide for the rule-following, organized, perfectionist, practical, and color-within-the-lines types.”

08/23/2026

I can predict the quality of your intimate life with just one simple question:
Are you a "be careful" parent or a "have fun" parent? 🧗‍♂️

If you are a "be careful" parent—the type who constantly worries about risks, hovers near the monkey bars, and values safety above all else—there is a high probability that this same anxiety is showing up in your bedroom.

People who struggle with intimacy are often highly risk-averse, threat-sensitive, or rejection-sensitive. They struggle to "make nice with naughty" because they treat the bedroom like a zone of potential failure rather than a space for playful exploration.
In my practice as a certified s*x therapist, I've seen that the exact same overcontrolled temperament that keeps you safe and secure in daily life can easily act as an anchor on your s*xual satisfaction.
If you want a deeper connection, you have to learn how to tolerate a little bit of calculated risk.

👉 Want to transition from "be careful" to "have fun" in your relationship? Discover the practical blueprint for breaking through these subconscious barriers in my book, “Making Nice with Naughty: An intimacy guide for the rule-following, organized, perfectionist, practical, and color-within-the-lines types.”

08/21/2026

Some people are allergic to awkwardness. Dr. Tom Murray jokes that he needs EpiPens to hand out, because the reaction is that strong.

It usually starts early. If you grew up somewhere strict, where there was a right way to do things and a punishment for the wrong way, you learned to stay inside a narrow lane. Kids who don't know how to do something just try it. Adults who were taught to get it right stop trying.

That's what shows up in the bedroom, and in the living room too. You want to reach for your partner's hand and don't, because it might land wrong.

So reach anyway. Then do it again. The clumsiness is not the failure, it's the whole point. That's where the playfulness lives.

08/18/2026

Here's a pattern Dr. Tom Murray sees over and over: a man has no trouble with er****ons on his own, and consistent trouble with a partner.

That's not a plumbing problem. That's performance pressure. He calls it erectile disappointment rather than erectile dysfunction, because the body is working. What's failing is the expectation that it should perform on command, every time, on cue.

Some of that pressure is self-imposed. Sexual perfectionism, the belief that you have to get it right. Some of it comes from a partner who has their own version of the same belief. Either way, the anxiety about the er****on is usually what ends the er****on.

As Murray puts it, dicks aren't di**os. They're not always hard just because you want them to be.

*xtherapy

08/17/2026

You've read the books. You've saved the podcast episodes. You can name your attachment style and explain your partner's nervous system.

And nothing has changed.

Dr. Tom Murray calls this psychological obesity. You keep taking information in without ever acting on it. Same as calories: if more goes in than gets used, it doesn't sit there neutrally. It builds up. The reading starts to stand in for the doing, and the problem it was supposed to solve gets a little worse.

Insight is not the same thing as change. At some point the question stops being "what else should I read" and becomes "what is there for me to learn here, and what am I going to do about it."

Full conversation with Dr. Ginger Garner and Dr. Tom Murray, author of Making Nice with Naughty, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1VsEqSIOhE

08/16/2026

Do you need to be liked, or do you need to be right?

Control doesn't always look like control.

Sometimes it looks like agreeing. Going along with it, faking it, keeping the peace, then quietly needing your partner to notice what it cost you.

Sometimes it looks like a rule. "We should be having s*x three times a week," followed by three days of moodiness when it doesn't happen.

Dr. Tom Murray names these as the two subtypes of an overcontrolled temperament. The overly agreeable need to be liked. The overly disagreeable need to be right. Neither one is asking directly for what they want.

So which is it for you: do you need to be liked, or do you need to be right?
Full conversation with Dr. Ginger Garner and Dr. Tom Murray, author of Making Nice with Naughty, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1VsEqSIOhE

*xtherapy

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