If you're dating, this episode is for you! My guest, Kelly Gagalis, recently created a dating safety program called "Swipe Safely" in order to help more women (and gay men) understand how they can take steps to protect themselves so they can enjoy the rewards dating has to offer. 

Kelly Gagalis is a Marriage and Family Therapist with over 15 years coaching experience. For the past 17 years Kelly has been a monthly ABC TV dating and relationship contributor. Kelly successfully helps people create safety navigating online dating and rehabilitate their dating game to find a partner who is a phenomenal fit for them. 

For more information about Kelly and her Swipe Safely program:

Dating safety program: www.swipesafely.com

Website: https://www.kellymariehoffman.com/

Follow Karin on Instagram:

Relationships

Psilocybin Facilitation

 

TRANSCRIPT

Intro:

Karin: This is Love Is Us, Exploring Relationships and How We Connect. I'm your host, Karin Calde. I'll talk with people about how we can strengthen our relationships, explore who we are in those relationships, and experience a greater sense of love and connection with those around us, including ourselves. I have a PhD in clinical Psychology, practiced as a psychologist resident, and after diving into my own healing work, I went back to school and became a coach, helping individuals and couples with their relationships and personal growth. If you want to experience more love in your life and contribute to healing the disconnect so prevalent in our world today, you're in the right place. Welcome to Love Is Us.

 

Episode:

Karin: Hello, everybody, and welcome. Today we're going to be talking about dating safety with my guest, Kelly Gagalis. I'm hoping that I'm pronouncing that right. Anyway, Kelly is a long term therapist and dating coach. She really knows her stuff and she is going to be helping us understand what we might need to know when it comes to dating and dating safety. I think that this is a really good episode for anyone who might be dating, but especially those who maybe have been out of the dating scene for a while. Maybe you were married for a long time or in a long term relationship, and now you are dating once again. And, you know, a lot of us as we get older, we think we know how to take care of ourselves, and we do for the most part. But the thing is, is that things have changed in the way that we date and in the way that we get to know people, especially with online dating. So I think that this is a really good one to listen to. Kelly is also just about to launch her swipe safely dating program, which seems to be very unique and very helpful. So if you're interested in that, go ahead and check out her website and get on her. I think she's got a waiting list for that program at this point. So anyway, in the episode we do talk about dating safety. We also talk a little bit about dating in general. So I think it's a really, really interesting one. And I'm glad you're here. And if you are in the Pacific Northwest or somewhere in the west coast dealing with all this heat right now, it's July as I'm recording this and about to launch this episode. So I hope you're taking care of yourself. I hope you can check in on any elderly neighbors and take care of your pets and kids, and I hope that you are taking care of yourself and staying cool. All right. Thanks again for being here. And here we go. Welcome, Kelly.

[03:00 ] Kelly: Hi, Karin. It's great to be here.

[03:02 ] Karin: Oh, it's so nice to have you here. Kelly and I have been talking about lots of other things other than the topic of the episode today already and having a lot of fun doing it. Kelly's another local, so I'm super excited about that. But tell us where local is for you.

[03:25 ] Kelly: Yeah, local is Portland, Oregon, very close to where you are, which is really fun. We moved here as a family about 17 years ago, and it's just been a really great place. Really enjoyed a lot of what Portland is and is about. It's really safe, really fun, really awesome.

[03:46 ] Karin: Where did you move from?

[03:48 ] Kelly: I'm from Massachusetts. I was in grad school in Utah, and then my former spouse and I moved here after grad school. It had the demographic we needed to start the business he wanted to start, and it's just been really good to us all the way around.

[04:03 ] Karin: Nice. And what do you do for work?

[04:07 ] Kelly: So I have, gosh, like, since I graduated with an MS in marriage and family therapy, and I did that for a little bit, but I transitioned about, gosh, 1012 years ago into exclusively doing dating coaching. So I kind of work with men and women, helping them get their dating life dialed in so that they could find a partner that's usually. People usually want help dating coaching when they can't find someone to be with. Right. It's not like any other situation, so. But more recently, I've transitioned. I still do dating coaching, but right now, my. My message, my mission is the stuff that I've learned over the ten plus years of doing dating coaching for safety. Like, nobody else is teaching it, nobody else is talking about it. And I kind of came up with a system for my clients, and I'm realizing, oh, my gosh, nobody else knows how to do this. When I talk to girlfriends, when I go to parties, people tell me stuff, and I'm like, oh, my gosh, this is so scary. This is not safe, and you don't know it. So that's kind of what I'm doing now.

[05:10 ] Karin: I feel like we need to walk this line of not scaring people about dating, because dating can.

[05:19 ] Kelly: 99% of the people on there are great, normal, you know, with their quirks, people that aren't going to hurt you. Yes. Right.

[05:27 ] Karin: And it can bring us love. So that's really important. And it's important for people to be informed.

[05:34 ] Kelly: Absolutely. And I love that you started with that, because my whole goal is not to scare anyone. It's to move everyone from a an unaware prey mindset to a. Just a grounded, confident. This, you know, it's going to be hard to mess with me mindset. It's really as simple as. And it honestly, it goes hand in hand with getting a better level of relationship when you're harder to access, when you have more boundaries, when you have more clarity, it's going to speak to a higher level of person.

[06:09 ] Karin: Yeah. Yeah. And so you primarily work with women, right. For obvious reasons, yeah.

[06:17 ] Kelly: But a lot of men don't feel the need for a dating coach, which is totally fine. Women are just more open to being coached, I found, anyway. And that's. I've worked with men. I have worked with very coachable, lovely men just en masse, which is kind of what I do. Women sign up, but for safety reasons.

[06:37 ] Karin: It's usually men don't feel the need for any kind of coaching around that specifically, unless we're talking about gay men. And they might.

[06:46 ] Kelly: Yes, gay men. It's very much an issue. There's a lot of unsafety in the gay dating culture, for sure. For men, not as much. From what I've heard from my friends who are lesbian and in the lesbian dating community, it's not as unsafe for the same reasons. It might get unsafe later, but it's not initially unsafe. It's not assault unsafe as much men. It is actually. Men can get stalked and have their life disturbed, but because they're used to being the top of the food chain and they're thinking more about they're safe because they feel physically safe, they're not thinking about what would it be like if this random person that I connected with and gave my information to stalked me for two years and made my life a living hell? Like, they don't. They're not thinking about that because they're not used to being on the receiving end of that, but it is a reality for men. They're just not as aware of it. Yeah.

[07:36 ] Karin: And then I don't know if you've ever seen the mini series or the. What is it? Baby reindeer.

[07:43 ] Kelly: Yes, baby reindeer. That was even better. There's another one on Netflix that's another true story about someone being stalked for 15 years by someone.

[07:52 ] Karin: Yeah, baby reindeer blew my mind.

[07:55 ] Kelly: Yes.

[07:56 ] Karin: And that, of course, is a woman stalking a man.

[07:58 ] Kelly: Yes. Yeah. You can do a lot of psychological damage and create a lack of safety and ruin relationships and make the rest of your family feel unsafe without ever breaking the law. Right. And women that want to do this have the power to do it. So it's unsafe for me