Have The Relationship You Want

How can we get fooled – even while we’re living with and alongside a man, day in and day out, for years and years and years?

Is it possible?

Or do we KNOW, on some deep – okay subconscious – level that our man is doing things he’s not telling us – things that would hurt us if we knew?

I’ve thought about this and thought about this. I’ve looked at Christie Brinkley walking out of court with a robotic smile on her face that could not have truly been real given what she’s had to go through – and wanted to judge her. I’ve wanted to call her “unconscious,” or that there must be something wrong with her that she’d choose a man who could lie to her and hurt her like that and not notice that something was off in him and the relationship.

I’ve wanted to think she did know, but just didn’t want to deal with it. I’ve wanted to think she knew, and decided to wait until her children were grown, or to simply lead separate lives with her husband and not go through a messy divorce that would surely cost her money. I’ve wanted to distance myself from her – to believe that I would never, ever be fooled like that.

And I hope I’m right about myself – that I’m somehow so in tune with my husband and the rhythm and realness and intimateness of our marriage that I would simply KNOW if something was off. “Certainly,” I say to myself “I would know if he was spending great sums of money without telling me. I would know that he was sleeping with another woman and lying to me.”

And I’ll bet Christie said the same thing to herself.

And so, when I’m tempted to judge her, I stop myself. I can only say that I hope I would be alert enough to know if something was wrong in my marriage.

If you’ve ever struggled with this – perhaps you’ve been betrayed in the past (I certainly have been thrown for a loop and completely shocked by a man’s behavior) – then let’s look at some ways to avoid ever having to go through it again.

1. Listen to what a man says. Believe him when he says things like “I’m not ready for a relationship,” or “my ex-wife thought I was a real handful,” or “I’m not sure I want kids,” or “I cheated on my last girlfriend, but I’d never do that again.”

2. Look at his relationships with his friends and family, and pay attention to how he talks about women – is he respectful, kind and appreciative, or is he angry, jokey and bitter?

3. Don’t take “intimacy” and “truth-telling” for granted, or mistake “comfort” and “friendship” for a real relationship. Pay attention ALWAYS to how you feel about YOURSELF when you’re with a man.
I’ll be talking in later posts about jealousy, obsession – and how to get over not being able to trust a man because of what’s happened to you in the past – in the meantime, you’ll want to check out my Commitment Blueprint program – it has a special section on jealousy and obsession, and is all about staying on your “Bridge” to Happy Ever After and not letting a man throw you off course.

Love, Rori

I know the whole idea of “saying what you feel” sounds wrong.

Men are supposed to HATE feelings, aren’t they?

A man gets really uncomfortable around “drama” and the kind of emotional intensity we’ve been talking about in this series of posts – where your energy is all bound up in a kind of “push-pull” tension inside you – but he LOVES “feelings.”

He loves to see you “uncovered.” As though you’re a transparent woman and he can see everything that’s going on inside you. Yes, even the “yucky” stuff.

What we’re talking about here is vulnerability, and vulnerability is a RARE thing.

“Fragility” is common, where a man feels you could easily break apart or fly into a rage or into tears at the drop of a hat. And he’s always on the lookout for that. But vulnerability requires inner strength, bravery, and a belief in yourself. In order to let someone see who you are inside – especially a man you love – you have to be “okay” with yourself. Liking yourself is even better. And loving yourself gets you the prize!

Because if what a man sees when he looks at you is that you love yourself – then he feels compelled to love you, too. He can’t help it.

So saying what you feel is a necessary part of being vulnerable. It doesn’t mean you have to say everything you feel ALL the time. (And most of the time we’re actually speaking about what we THINK, and what we think doesn’t count at all for vulnerability – we’ll talk more about that in future posts.) And it doesn’t mean you spew your feelings out in just any old way.

What being vulnerable and saying what you feel means – is that there’s a way to talk about what you feel that works, that’s soft and vulnerable, and there’s a way to talk about what you feel that’s dramatic, “intense” and makes him think you’re fragile and difficult.

In the next posts we’ll get to the exact ways to do it. If you’d like to quickly get my “Basics,” like Feeling Messages, down – try out my ebook, Have The Relationship You Want

It’s not your “negative” feelings that push a man away – it’s what you do with them.

It’s how you LIVE with them – because there are things in this world that Trigger us can make us feel sensitive and sad all the time.

And the way to live with negative feelings that pushes a man away is to RESIST them.

The way to live with negative feelings that BRINGS A MAN CLOSER is to FEEL them.

And that doesn’t just mean just feeling them for a moment and then moving on to something else to distract ourselves…

It means FULLY FEELING your feelings by SINKING INTO them.

How to do it? You’ll find a Tool specifically for the feelings of anger, jealousy and obsessive thoughts about a man in my Commitment Blueprint program, and in my new Modern Siren program, there’s a full set of Tools for sadness, and a way to handle that “wave” of feeling that sometimes hits us just when we wish it wouldn’t. You can look at both of the programs here: [catalog]

For now, try this:

When you’re feeling “negative,” and you’re afraid your “vibe” will push a man away – notice what you do – notice if you start TALKING (what so many of us women do when we’re uncomfortable).

Notice if you start all of a sudden getting “cheerful.”

Notice if you suddenly start trying to make things “okay” in your mind and smile.

Notice if you move TOWARD him – touch him, talk to him – in an effort to make the “bad” feelings go away.

And then stop yourself. DON’T DO what you INSTINCTIVELY want to do to feel better.

There’s a MUCH better way to feel better.

SINKING IN feels like this: It feels like you just “give up.” You just give up on trying to hold back the feeling.

Usually – when we stop holding back, all kinds of things happen – most often with results that aren’t what we wanted. It’s like a rubber band you’ve been pulling and pulling apart until it reaches maximum tension and then you let go and SNAP – it flies (and usually hits our man right in the face).

So try this: instead of “letting go” and letting fly, hang onto yourself in a simple way – don’t DO anything – just give up trying to hold it back. This way, the “rubber band” just returns to its limp, graceful shape without a reaction that creates a whole new set of issues and moments and feelings for you to deal with.

As you “go limp” and “give up” you’ll feel a whole bunch of things loosen in your body. Your shoulders will drop down, and what might have felt like an iron grip around your heart will lighten up a bit.

Now, let’s say you – like I was – are stuck in a car, or in a restaurant, or in a room with your man, and you can feel your resistance tightening in your shoulders and in your heart, and you feel like talking to relieve the pressure.

Step 1 – You notice what’s happening.
Step 2 – You do NOTHING
Step 3 – You FEEL whatever feelings you’re feeling, give up trying to hold the feelings back, and sink into them – as though those feelings are your deepest friends (they are).
Step 4 – Now you use Feeling Messages to communicate with your man, and we’ll talk about that next.

If you’re feeling afraid that your “down” and “negative” feelings are going to push a man away – and so you keep a “stiff upper lip” – here’s some help.

I know this inside and out – because I still get triggered ALL THE TIME in just this way.

I was brought up to avoid conflict at all costs, and so my first instinct is ALWAYS to create PEACE, no matter how much it costs me emotionally.

But I’ve learned how to recognize when it’s happening to me, and how to stop RESISTING the feelings I’m feeling – no matter how uncomfortable or “inappropriate” they may be.

Even just last night, stuck in the car with my husband, there was a wave of discomfort in a discussion, in something he said to me that “triggered” me.

What we were talking about is pretty much not important – it was the feeling I had when he got a little “hot-tempered” and it just started to feel like “too much” for me.

And when you’re stuck in the car you really can learn quickly how to TOLERATE feeling your feelings so you can feel better quickly.

When this kind of thing happens to me, it’s like a tug-of-war starts inside me. The feelings of resentment, anger, frustration, sadness, weirdness and plain old discomfort well up inside me – but I’m instinctively afraid to express them. Even though I have my “word” Tools to speak what I’m feeling, I can feel this fight inside me.

Part of me wants to keep quiet. Part of me wants to change the subject into something “light.” Part of me wants to make a joke. Part of me wants to yell and scream and tell him exactly what I’m thinking and feeling and what an “idiot” he’s being at the moment. Most of me just feels “dread,” and wants to forget that I’m feeling what I’m feeling, wind back the clock to BEFORE this all happened, and STOP myself from feeling at all.

Sound familiar to you?

That’s RESISTANCE. Trying to erase what you’re feeling.

And that just doesn’t work.

Resisting our feelings makes us sick. It makes us TENSE. It makes us “intense” in a “draining” way. It keeps us stuck in one place our whole lives.

And– it PUSHES men AWAY!

So – it sounds like a no-brainer to just STOP this RESISTANCE thing, but that’s easy to say.

Because we resist ourselves and our feelings for a reason. We do it because of fear, and because in the past, when we DIDN’T resist ourselves and our feelings – we might have had a bad result.

We may have been punished. We may have been dismissed. We may have been criticized. And so we have to start all over again – baby-step by baby step, to tolerate the fear that comes up when feelings come up – and practice NOT RESISTING, so we can learn to feel again – in the presence of a man.

It would be easy for me to say – “Stop resisting your feelings, use my Feeling Messages, and just BELIEVE ME that your man will come closer. BELIEVE ME that making yourself VULNERABLE will create MORE love for you.”

And though I DO want you to believe that this is true and that it can happen QUICKLY for you – it’s the BABY-STEPS I’m going to ask you to take that will change everything for you and get you what you want.

So – first Baby-Step is to NOTICE that you’re feeling strong feelings, that you don’t really know what to do with them, and that you’re RESISTING THEM.

Next, you have to SINK INTO them…and by the end of this week you’ll have a step-by-step process to help you, so keep reading…