Very early on a Monday morning I had the privilege to be interviewed by Maria Appelqvist on her show ‘Things we don’t talk about…’ Maria was at home in Sweden and I was at home in Australia…
I first met Maria on a train whilst travelling in the USA in 2011. It was the first time either of us had travelled by train in the United States and we were both travelling from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Our paths crossed as the Universe knew we were on a similar path and the connection remains and has recently come into closer alignment. I love the way technology allows us to connect!
This video is a bit longer than usual – it’s not really a vlog, but a 30 minute interview. This interview examines what it means to Define Your Inner Diva.
I been looking for the opportunity to talk to you about something that I’ve been reflecting on, I’ve not been home in nearly two weeks and when I returned home my beautiful little dog whom I’d had for eleven and a half years was really sick, he’s been sick for about a year and one of the things that has amazed me was the number of people that have different reactions with regards to grief and loss.
So I came home on a Wednesday night, it was very obvious to me that my dog wasn’t his usual self and I had to take him to the Vet the following day, his issues were not resolvable and we tried all sort of things but his body basically said enough was enough and I had to put him down the next day, which was very sad but he was eleven and a half and had a really good life. I always said that he must have been in his last reincarnation. He must been ready for nirvana because you know your last life, right before you reach nirvana has to be the best one. He had a pretty good life, but the impact even though I knew he was sick, even though I knew that his health was deteriorating and I knew beyond a doubt that I could not keep him in the space where he was suffering.
It still was a really difficult experience and a number of people have reacted to it in different ways. I’m always surprised to find that there is some people who don’t have the same level of emotional connection to animals as I do, and you know some other people who seem to have highly sensitive kind of response to animals, some people have lost horses and had really big reactions to it, some people can’t necessarily understand that because these animals are really big and it’s not like you can have them curl up on your lap but feels a little bit different.
But my main issue around that was to understand grief and loss, grief and loss happens to us regardless of our circumstances. The worst thing that we can do to ourselves is not to take the time to acknowledge that a person or an entity that gives you some level of emotional connection is now no longer available to you in your life. This brings with it the sense of hollowness, emptiness, like something is missing, it’s a key component and something that people just misunderstand and often down play.
We think it shouldn’t be this important or I shouldn’t be so upset about it. In reality a lot of us have a connection with our animals that is very safe. We feel that we can be true to ourselves with an animal and that animal is going to love us anyway. Particularly strong in the case of dogs.
So I just wanted to highlight the importance of recognising that grief and loss is a key component and whether it’s an animal or somebody who you had in your life. We go through a loss and grief process when we lose a partner even if it was just your decision to step back from a relationship, we still go through a grieving process.
That’s just acknowledging that sometimes you just feel a bit flat, you don’t necessarily want to engage in doing things with people, you find that you’re a little bit more sensitive, really easily upset or life just sort of temporarily lost its mojo. It’s a really important thing to be aware of and to understand, give yourself that little bit of space and time to just reflect on a good times. I think about the good times that I had with that beautiful little dog, but also acknowledge the loss, that’s part of the grieving process to allow yourself to reflect back on the good times.
They’re not all good times and I get that – especially in a relationship. But it’s a really important process and if we just try to ignore it and pretend that it didn’t happened and move past it or pretend that it didn’t actually had an emotionally impact, we actually do ourselves a disservice. We make it more difficult for ourselves in the future.
This week I’ve been talking to people about relationships, and the thing I found most fascinating is this idea that love conquers all. The idea that if you just met somebody, fall in love, find that perfect match when we’re young knowing that this is the one, is a crazy notion that we seem to have in our society. And if we don’t connect with that right person or it doesn’t work out, that is somehow the end and we don’t get another opportunity.
I’m here to tell you that the idea of there’s a lot of fish in the sea is real not just because there’s a lot of people out there who are open to having different sorts of relationships but because you can’t always match with somebody just by love. It’s not that you don’t care about them or what happens to them, but in all honesty most relationships are actually some level of business partnership. The notion that moving forward you actually have to have shared goals, shared values and shared idea about where you’re going to end up in terms of where the relationship takes you, you don’t often think about those things. As young person, you must be friends in high school, high school sweethearts caught up in romanticism of it all, the emotional connection. When things change and responsibilities come, sometimes that whole romanticism that was there in your teens actually stops being relevant anymore. You’re growing up you’ve got responsibilities and often we find at this point in time, two individuals who seemingly have this great relationship suddenly start to have issues.
As teenagers, you’re never going to ask the question… do you think that we should actually try and buy a home, or are you happy renting for the rest of your life? Do you actually want to settle down somewhere and have children or are you just hoping that you could travel the world and be a free spirit? Do you want to have children when you’re young or do you want to have them when you’re older and be able to travel and live your life first? These issues are ones that we don’t educate our children about. We don’t teach them about the kinds of things that are going to impact on their relationships when they’re young.
On the flip side of that, when we come out of the relationship and we’re looking to get in another relationship, we often find that we are drawn in the same things that we had on our previous relationships, but somehow package it up as looking different somehow yet often the issues underlying that relationship ended up being the same. For example, my first husband was now alcoholic , when I met my next partner, my big issue was to make sure my partner didn’t drink, but that partner used to smoke a bit of marijuana, his emotional disconnection, a result of his own issue was much the same as it was for the alcoholic. So the difference between the two were really pretty minor, but in my head, they had to be different because they walked and talked different but the underlying issue is still actually the same.
I’ve seen women who come through that midlife phase, come out of their relationship not happy, not getting what they wanted and go straight into a new relationship. They don’t actually sit down and think about what do they want for themselves out of a relationship, what’s that kind of connection that they want, are they prepared to bear their soul and expose themselves in a vulnerable way? A lot of people hold themselves back, they want to talk about the things that they really want or really need in a relationship but fear of rejection and fear of actually exposing themselves and being vulnerable. Brene Brown in TED Talks talked about, The power of vulnerability. It is the idea that you can’t experience joy unless you open yourself up and be vulnerable. Although sometimes by opening yourself up and being vulnerable, you are drawn to the person who has supported that component of your vulnerability and therefore, we feel the need to accept everything that surrounds us as something that even though we might not like it, we have to deal with.
Let me give you an example. I talk in the book about when sometimes you come into a relationship later in your life, you make compromises about the things you probably shouldn’t, I’m not saying you can’t compromise, all relationships are about compromise. That’s actually what makes us human being, but in my situation, my daughters had grown up and left home and I no longer have that responsibility when I’m looking at meeting somebody new. I have been in the situation where I’ve meet people who of the similar age and they’ve got younger children. I’m not opposed of people having children, but the reality is I want to travel. I want to be able to experience other cultures, I want to be able to pick up and take off overseas, live there for several months, if that’s what I wanted to do. I want to go away for weekends, I wanted to be free to pick up and do things that I wanted to do and I don’t want to feel like I have to make considerations for weekend sporting events and all of the things that impact when you have younger children. Share care arrangements you can make allowances for because you might have only them half of time, maybe you can work with that. You have to be clear to what it is that you want for yourself and what the person brings. Just because you met somebody, had sex… you think I’ll just hang out with them, there hasn’t been a better option more recently doesn’t make a relationship.
And a lot of women who I have talked to have been afraid to step back and say this is what I want to myself. I want to meet somebody who is emotionally available, I want to meet somebody who’s secure in themselves and understands who they are as a person, I want to meet somebody who has the similar financial perspective to the way that I approach money. I want to meet somebody who sees that in ten years’ time, when they have grandchildren, that they had to be close and actually spend time to those grandchildren or alternatively, I want to meet somebody whose believes just because they have grandchildren it doesn’t define how they are supposed to live their lives and they can still go on and travel and do other things.
I understand that some point in the future, because it’s in the future and we don’t know what the future brings. We are going to have some compromises and some adjustments, I say to my clients that your future needs to be a bit of a hand drawn map on piece of crumpled paper with the pen on your hand and at some point your goals want to change and its okay, you can change the way your map looks, It’s your map. You can do that but the thing you should not do is to compromise yourself just because you don’t want to be alone, don’t screw up your map and throw it in the bin and completely adopts somebody else’s map, that’s their dream, that’s their life, that’s their goal for themselves and you could choose to be a part of it, but there has to be a marrying of those things. There has to be a shared goals. A shared outcome.
As young people, if you decide to get married, one of the things you should talk about is how many children do I want. How do I think about private school education or do I want to stay five minutes around the corner from my parents, do I want to live overseas for a while. Does my job mean that I have to travel internationally and that means that my partner is always left with the responsibility of their children, how do I feel about that? The majority of issues that happen in a relationship and lead to divorce are about needs not being met because most of the time, they are never discussed or addressed.
We think we fall in love, this person loves me, therefore everything else is just perfect and we’ll work it out along the way cause love conquers all. It’s all shit. Love doesn’t conquer all. And in fact the idea that love conquers all is actually why most people end up in the situation where they make compromises and stay in relationship that they should’ve never got into in the first place, because they didn’t ever give them what they need. I feel like I’m on my soapbox this week, but I had a really interesting conversation with a couple of women last week around the idea that when you meet somebody, it must be about where you meet them or the kind of work that they do or their background or their life story and there is this idea that if I have success meeting somebody in an online dating site, then if my girlfriend went to the same dating site she could find the same kind of person. No that’s not how it works. You have to be clear with your own issues, resolve them and work them through, know your own foibles because I know my own foibles, I’m pretty clear on what they are but then it’s about when you meet somebody, you have to be honest to those foibles and you need to be prepared to be really upfront about what it is that you want. I’ve met some beautiful people whose life doesn’t match mine, It’s about my life journey and my life stage and if that doesn’t match up to the other person’s life stage, my decision to not enter a relationship with that person, it has nothing to do with them personally, It’s to do with the fact that my life stage and their life stage don’t marry up and can’t, if I compromise myself, to make my life stage marry up on what his is, I’ll end up resenting him. That’s not fair to anybody. Not to you. Not to them.
I hope that was interesting.
I hope it’s something that’s really useful for you and if you found it useful you might be able to share it with your friends.
In the last few weeks I’ve been talking about relationships, how our behaviour impacts our relationships, and not just intimate relationships, it’s also about friendships. I am talking to you about some really interesting things that come up when we have issues in relationships. One of the things that come up for me recently was my own sense of self and how I interact in relationships and bringing baggage into a relationship.
I’m amazed that even though I would consider myself to be reasonably self aware, when I’m in relationship there are still some underlying negative beliefs about myself that get triggered somehow making me think that this relationship is either not good for me or I’m going to screw it up somehow, perhaps I’m not as good as they think I am, and this is even though I’ve done some huge personal development work.
So I just want to share recent experience. I have a new partner we’ve been together now nearly six months and this relationship is amazingly transformational, quite different to anything I’ve ever had before and I’m aware that a huge part of this is because I became very clear with what I want in a partner and what I don’t want in a partner. I became very aware that my choice of partner had an awful lot to do with me feeling like I had to give a lot of myself to somebody else, my value to any relationship was actually about my ability to give. I always end up with partners with issues and those issues strongly impact me and after a while even though you see somebody work through their issues, you become resentful with doing all of the work to support them and to resolve their issues. It seems like they’re not trying really hard to resolve their issues. Now that I find myself in a situation with somebody who doesn’t have any issues I’m finding certain things trigger issues I have within myself not the least of which is somehow I don’t deserve this, that its almost too good to be true. So classic example, couple of weeks ago, a girlfriend of mine lost a partner and I went to the funeral and number of my other friends were there and they were all talking about the fact that my current partner is just lovely. He is, but the issue for me was not so much that they were highlighting that he was lovely. They were asking where we met, questions about him to the point that I had told them a story about something nice that he did for me. They were asking where can we get a guy like that? I went home and I said “hey just so you know when you get sick of me there’s half a dozen woman lining up waiting for this spot to be vacant and they all think that you’re awesome, we had a laugh about it and at that time I didn’t think it affected me, but a couple times that night and then for the next couple of days, I was making the same negative comments “so when you get sick of me”, “when we’re done”, “when you’re over it,” “when you decide to turf me out”. To the point that after a couple of nights he said to me, what are you doing? Is this you trying to push me away? Why are you being negative? I had to stop and think, step back and think about the language I was using and try to understand myself, why would I do that? The next morning I thought, you know what? It’s because when everybody says how nice he is, in my brain there’s some really doubtful part right at the very back or down in my gut that says he’s too good for you and you don’t deserve it.
My response to that is to start pushing him away. There’s something about this relationship that seems to have no issues, nothing that I can fix. I’m not doing anything or contributing a huge amount, the fact is I like to be with this person but somehow just being with them doesn’t seem enough to me. Why would he stay around? I really don’t quite understand what I think is wrong with just being myself in a relationship. It still is one of those things that even though I’ve learned to accept it at the top thinking level, I still feel somewhere inside that I don’t deserve love and a huge part of that is probably to do with the rejection from my father.
I just thought that you might find it interesting that even though I sit here and do these videos and I have a background in psychology and everybody thinks that I must have all my shit together that I’m just a normal ordinary everyday human being like everybody else and as I say to my clients I have issues too. I still consult somebody else to help me understand myself. Sometimes the perspective we get about people its not always correct but it’s about our ability to be able to learn from our experiences and be more self aware and the ability to share that in a way that my partner can understand. So I hope that was useful gorgeous.
I can’t believe that we are getting to the end of 2017. It’s been a hectic year for me and I know many others, so I thought I would talk to you about an area in the book that I mentioned about spirit. It’s important that we connect with something that replenishes our spirit regularly, to maintain balance in our lives.
We regularly give our energy to other people through listening to friends’ problems, supporting others through life and through your regular day to day activities. Because we spend so much of our own energy on other people, we must have a way of being able to get that energy back in. In the book, I talk about several things that you can do to replenish your spirit.
Firstly, you need to find out what nourishes your spirit. This is something that makes your spirit pool feel full again, and lets your mind feel refreshed and balanced. This means that this ‘something’ is something that you choose to do only for yourself.
I find the best way for me to replenish my spirit is to spend some time at the ashram. There are a couple of Satyananda ashrams in Australia and in for several years I’ve been doing Satyananda yoga and I found it to be right for me as it covers all the seven areas of yoga. I find that just being there and being disconnected from the world (my mobile phone stops working about a kilometre from the front gate) and I find that it gives me this sense of disconnect that’s awesome. It makes it easy for me to relax to unwind, and just take time to focus on putting some positive energy back into my body.
If I go on a Saturday night, they do a vibrational chanting ceremony. As a psychotherapist, I understand the importance of vibration, and how vibration impacts the in the limbic system – where the amygdala is. The amygdala is the part of the brain that is involved in arousal (mainly your fight or flight instincts). Chanting, just in its vibration, helps to balance and settle that area down quite a lot. People who are highly anxious, who do chanting or vibrational work, tend to find that it really helps a lot in reducing their arousal, making them feel calmer and more settled. There is also a fire ceremony they usually do on a Saturday night in the ashram, which I enjoy because it helps me to be able to feel myself bringing in some positive energy, build up the vibration in my body and helps me replenish my energy.
As a psychotherapist, I spend a lot of my working week giving my energy to other people. While this is quite rewarding to see the positive return, I still need to remember that I have to replenish myself – something we all need to remember to do. This allows our energy flow to come in and out, similar to a flowing pool, rather than a well that can just run dry.
That’s why I talk about the importance of trying to find the thing that replenishes your spirit. It’s about doing things that allow me to stop, and in lots of ways just experience pure joy from doing something that I love to do.
I’ve taken time to reflect lately, and I’ve realised its been a while since I’ve been to the ashram and really done something to replenish my spirit. I’ve been really noticing it lately, where I’m starting to feel like I’m missing something, which means I’m not going to be able to keep doing what I’m doing. I have learnt through my own personal spiritual journey, that it’s important for me to be able to go to a place where I feel like I can have that input into my energy space. This time also allows me to reconnect with my intuition and to my own body. Through time I have built my awareness of how important it is, and I get to a point where I’m yearning for it.
So, as we head into the silly season, I just wanted to reinforce the importance of remembering to connect with your spirit, finding something in your life that allows you to give back to yourself in a way that renews on invigorates you, so that you can continue to connect with other people going forward.
I wanted to take this opportunity to have a quick chat with you about “stress at Christmas.”
Christmas has many expectations imposed upon us by society such as “Christmas is family time, everybody gets together, people buy gifts because they care about you and you are important to them.” If you feel that you don’t have that connection it can cause stress, or if you feel that somebody should want to have that connection with you and they don’t it can cause stress. A huge part of the stress that we experience around Christmas is really because of the expectations that we have of others.
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We often don’t communicate these expectations because we think other people should know, we want to be connected to them (it’s Christmas), we want to spend time with them because they’re our family, or our friends. I think what’s really important to remember is that sometimes the stress that’s induced by big family event like Christmas is because of our expectations of what should happen around that point in time, even though sometimes we don’t expressly ask for what it is that we want.
Essentially what happens in many interpersonal relationships with family and friends is that we have expectations of them and they don’t meet these expectations. We think that they don’t meet them because were not good enough and that makes us feel bad. In reality most people are caught up in their own stresses and never realise that what they do is actually having a negative impact on you.
So we wait for someone to invite us to Christmas lunch, we wait for someone to ask us what we want for Christmas or assume that they’re going to give us a gift. The problem comes in the assumption. You already feel rejected if you don’t get what you want. So what’s the harm in expressing what it is you want, if you ask, and you get a rejection, you know exactly whether or not you’re going to get what you want as opposed to assuming and never getting it. (To ASSUME makes an ASS out of U and ME). It’s easier to assume that someone is going to give you what you want because you fear the rejection.
What I would encourage you to do is to take control because when you’re empowered you own the situation, your decisions and your feelings. I’m not saying you wont still feel bad but at least you’ll be clearer in the fact that you ask for something and you didn’t get it. Otherwise, we just spent all of our time feeling really bad for something that often the other person has got no idea that that’s what you wanted. Alright, and this is the main source of conflict between people around this time of year.
So ready to reduce your conflicted Christmas?.
From the Ms Pink team and myself…
May you and yours have a lovingly ‘connected’ holiday season…
I was reminded this week about judgment and why is it that we actually want to judge others. We look at what other people are doing and feel the need to put them down, put them in their place or make a judgement about something that they are doing.
The main reason that we do it is actually to feel better about ourselves.
When you notice, that you actually spend quite a bit of time critiquing other people, picking at certain things about how others behave, how they dress, the sort of car they drive or anything really about another person’s life – it is important to understand why we do that.
Who would do that? I wouldn’t do that!
It’s important to note that we need to use judgement in terms of working out what we want for ourselves. You can’t move forward in life without some level of judgment, because you’re trying to decide what’s good for you and how you’re going to get there and what is it that you really want for yourself.
When we use judgement to actually compare ourselves to another person and trying to elevate ourselves above them, in most cases, this is not actually useful. One of the things that’s important to understand is that when we are judging other people, we are doing it because there’s usually something about that person thats making us feel insecure, inadequate or it triggers something within our own negative belief system. We make ourselves feel better by looking at that person and denigrating what it is that they’re doing in order to elevate ourselves above them, making us feel better in comparison.
However it is actually about trying to get the feelings you have about yourself out, externalising them and projecting them onto somebody else, so that you don’t have to feel them. Instead you might wonder what it is about that person that makes you feel not good or inadequate. What is it that they are triggering within you because theres something about them that makes you feel threatened, inadequate or compared in some way.
So I want you to think about this the next time that you observe somebody, in your workplace, some other area of your life, or just a random stranger in the street and you notice that you feel the need to pass judgment on them I want you to stop and actually think “what is it about that person that makes me feel not so good about myself,” I want you to examine that and actually take a little bit of time to understand it, and if it’s something that’s been with you for a really long time then I would absolutely encourage you to try and get some therapy around that issue and try to resolve it for yourself.
Life is so much nicer and it is much moreenjoyable to spend your life hanging around with great people, without feeling the need to judge them, or being judged by them.
If you stop and think about the process in reverse. If people are judging you, they are doing it to make themselves feel better their judgment of you is not really fair. Their judgement of you is based on their own feelings of inadequacy. In reality, they should be pitied for their need to constantly criticise others.
A great quote I have always loved “Your opinion of me… Is none of my business”.
I hope that was insightful… Until next time Gorgeous…
I often talk about financial management as a single woman. Interestingly, I find that as an independent, self-employed business owner, I find that banks don’t think I have any real value.
I find that extremely frustrating.
In a recent dealing with the NAB, five months after being promising that all of these things would get sorted, even to the point where I was being given “yes everything is ready to go ahead as agreed” and then, I get an email. No real preliminaries just saying, “We’ve changed our mind about the way we want to do this”. Now they’re still going to proceed but as a women I will need a guarantor! I have not had a guarantor since I was 17 years old for my very first car.
There was not really an explanation they just seem to make a determination that said they thought I should do my consolidation in a different way than what we had agreed.
Now, please remember I have been dealing with these people trying to resolve this for five months so my immediate solution, find a new bank! I was tempted to walk away from the big four because quite frankly, I have never found them to be supportive of women.
I have said on multiple occasions that two of our four major banks ANZ and the Commonwealth Bank that both have a focus on women. However, the ANZ’s approach is more at the lower end, they make the assumption that all we do as women is nurture children, and that our financial needs, in general, are less complex. So, they focus on superannuation products and life insurance and number of other things, but they don’t really look to empower women.
Now the Commonwealth Bank, on the other hand, have a program called Women in Focus which is specifically about supporting business women. So I wanted to see if the Commonwealth Bank would put their money where their mouth is and actually look to provide financial support to a woman in business. I’ve been to a number of their lunches, talked to some senior management, and they are really nice people. I used to work for the Commonwealth Bank many years ago, but were they really going to come through?
I had a conversation with a number of people by telephone and was put in touch with what they call a ‘Business Personal Lender’, so this is somebody who specialises in assisting me with my personal lending needs, but they have a good knowledge of business and they take the time to understand my business. So, when I was contacted by Leah (my local Business Personal Lender) and I was able to have a conversation about what had happened with the NAB for the previous five months, she was able to assess my business and my personal situation and she came back to me and said “Actually Kerry, there is no reason that we can’t do all of this and more.”
Maybe, just maybe, there IS a bank who is really supportive of women in business, that will actually put their money where their mouth is.
I wish to absolutely maintain my financial independence, I haven’t got this far being reliant on a man and there is no reason that I should ever have to be reliant. It would be different if I choose to go commit myself with a man to do something that I wish to do and we wish to do that together, but that is a very different proposition to somebody telling me that I need a man to give me value in this world.
Yet – that is exactly what the NAB did, which is why they are history, written off, never again to be considered!
In fact, I really must give kudos to the young man from the NAB who was doing all of this work with me over five months, when I told him exactly what I thought of his approach in an email, he rang me to apologise. So, I then told him again, over the phone, exactly what my concerns were, what I thought the problem really was, and advised him to learn from the mistake (Thanks Matthew). That might be one lesson he needed to learn on his life path. Hopefully, he’ll remember next time how he should speak to a strong empowered woman who manages her own business, and has built an asset base without his help in the past and without the help of any man.
I hope that this highlights the benefits of maintaining your independence as a women and encourages you to take charge of your own finances. Inspiring you is what I am aiming to do here and I am really glad that you are still reading and I hope this inspires you into action.
I hope that was helpful, until next time Gorgeous….
This week I have been discussing some of the more challenging parts of relationships between members of the opposite sex and laughingly noting how women behave in situations they are unhappy about, and how this can perpetuate issues in the relationship!
In this short video I highlight how men and women communicate differently – the perceptions of the ‘others’ motives are really prominent in our thinking, but often completely wrong! This musing comes from – Delectable Diva.
If you have a partner, or if you have been partnered previously, you’ll know that what I’m about to outline is something that happens on a regular basis in relationships, and it is the core difference between how men and women approach a problem.
When a woman gets upset about something… Let’s say your partner has said something or done something that has upset the female in the relationship, often she will just withdraw, and she might start stomping around or banging doors in the house, to let her partner know that she’s upset, but often she doesn’t quite know what the problem is.
It’s really interesting that when women withdraw, they have an expectation that their partner will pursue them to find out what the problem is – and men usually don’t pursue. So, there ends up being a situation where a problem has occurred, as a woman I have withdrawn and I am expecting my partner to come and say “Darling, what’s wrong”? Sometimes they do approach, they may come and ask “Are you okay”?
This is where our No.1 problem starts… As what, as women, do we always say? “Nothing’s wrong – I’m fine”! Yet, you’re actually not fine at all! It makes me laugh…
Why do we actually do this to ourselves?
The reason is that you, as a woman, expect that you shouldn’t have to tell your partner what’s wrong, that he should know what’s wrong. So, when he comes to you and asks “What’s up”? (Because he’s male and actually doesn’t understand what happened in your head that made you upset). You downplay your frustration and say “Nothing. I’m fine”! We do ourselves such an injustice and we cause more problems in our relationships than we need to.
If we can take the time when we get upset about something, as women, to retreat but utilise the time to consider ‘What is it that I’m actually bothered about’? You may discover your thinking has led to particular feelings coming up and this then impacts your behaviour. ‘Oh, actually, he said ‘this’, and that reminded me of when somebody else (previous partner or parent) said ‘that’, I suddenly feel like I’m unimportant, or not wanted’! Or, when he says something that surprises you, you think ‘Oh, really? Is that the sort of person that he is? Wow! I didn’t pick that. Does that mean I’ve chosen for a partner somebody that I thought I knew, but I didn’t expect them to behave that way, so maybe I don’t know them at all’! ‘Oh great here we go again, I can’t trust my own judgement’!
I know that’s what goes through your head… Because that is exactly what happens with me, and many other women tell me that this is also their experience.
So, when there has been an issue in my relationship, I get to a point where I’m aware that I’m being short or quiet around my partner, I will stop myself at that point and think ‘Hang on! I’ve withdrawn… And I know I must have withdrawn because I’m angry about something, or I’m upset’. So, I spend that time trying to ask myself ‘What is it that my partner said, that caused me to be upset? I think I understand, but what it is that when that person said ‘blah’ (insert any words here), and I got upset about it… Why? What is it about me and my perception of myself’?
We always try and externalise the blame. That is why you get into arguments. You get into a space in which you’re thinking ‘You upset me, because you said ‘blah’ and you are the problem’! You get upset and you throw it all back onto your partner.
We only do that because internally we don’t feel good. Something in the interaction, has made you feel bad, so you try to offset that by throwing ‘Molotov Cocktails’ at the other person. “It’s your fault, you did this, you did that”, instead of looking at what is going on inside of yourself.
If you can take the time to look inside yourself, before you throw your Molotov Cocktails, and ask yourself ‘What has this activated in me? What is it about what they did, that makes me feel bad about myself’? Trust me, it’s in there! Something that they have said or done has made you feel invalidated, or like you did something wrong, that you can’t trust your own judgement, or that you are not important to them, or you’re feeling inadequate and not good enough for them. The result? You get angry and you start throwing that stuff back at them.
If you want to ensure that an intimate relationship can survive, the main thing that you need to when you become aware of those conflicts, is to pull back and ask yourself ‘What is it that just happened, that made me feel this way about myself’? Once you are clear about what it is, you then need to be able to have a sit-down conversation with your partner, where you’re actually taking time out to have a connected communication about the issue. This needs to be at a point in time when there is no active confrontation or argument, so once you have calmed down.
You need to frame it in terms of “Okay, I got upset when this happened. When you said ‘blah’, what I heard was something else”, or “What I heard, activated something in me that didn’t make me feel good about myself and that is about my own past, or my own history. I need you to know about it, because when you say those things, this is how I respond and this is how it makes me feel”.
If you can do that, if you can take responsibility for your own feelings and be able to communicate them to your partner, without blame, you will find that something miraculous happens… There won’t be an argument because they don’t feel like they have to fight back, as you’re not attacking them. They feel like you’re able to explain to them what it is that you got upset about.
Honestly ladies, most men don’t understand. They think that if you have an argument at night and you go to bed cranky, that when you wake up the next morning, you’ll be fine. Let’s just forget about it, and move on! Isn’t that how most men manage their lives? It’s true! Most men just think you can go to sleep and when you wake up in the morning, you should be okay… But you’re stillbloody cranky!
You still want him to make some effort, show you that he loves and cares about you, and pursue you to find out what your problem is! Yet, when he pursues you and asks you what’s wrong, you say “Nothing”! Because you think he should KNOW what’s wrong…
Honestly Gorgeous, we are our own worst enemy at times!
I always find it useful to take the time to first try to understand myself and my own behaviour. Especially in relationships, because there is always that challenge of connecting and communicating.
I love being in a relationship, but far out… It’s a lot of work!
I hope that was helpful. I’m interested in your thoughts on my view of relationship communication issues…. Please let me know them in the Comments section below…
This week I been talking a lot about the pursuit of goals and how we often perceive we will be Happy when we reach a particular point!
It is really important to understand how we often place our life on hold whilst we Endure until we can achieve Happiness. This musing comes from the first in the Diva programs – Delightful Diva.
I’m interested in how as humans we often see happiness as a destination…
