Have The Relationship You Want

I asked my friend Lisa Steadman, who’s an expert on breakup recovery, to write a post for us, and here it is:

Lately, I’ve become singularly focused. I want to help as many women as possible heal their hearts by the upcoming holiday season.

Why is this so important to me?

Because I know how energy-depleting life can be when you’re suffering from an extended case of the breakup blues.

And I also know how uplifted, energized, and empowered you can feel when you step out of the pain of the past and into your hopeful future.

Five years ago, I was in the extended throes of my Big Breakup, a misery so intense and addicting that I chose to stay stuck for a good year. During that time, I woke up to the painful truth that I hated my job, where I lived, the man I was involved with, and, in general, my life.

Not only that, but my body started breaking down. I developed tendinitis in both forearms, the kiss of death for a professional writer.

Between the emotional pain of my breakup, the physical pain of tendinitis, and the bondage of my impossible boss, I wanted to give up. I wanted to shut down.

If there had been a reboot button on my brain, I would have pushed it. Repeatedly.

But there wasn’t.

People often ask me how I found the strength to go from grieving the loss of my dysfunctionally addictive relationship, living in a condo I hated, working at my once dream job turned nightmare, in daily physical pain to the life I now lead…

Happily married, living in my dream home, with a fulfilling career as a relationship coach and best-selling author.

Here’s my simple, honest answer…

The day came when staying stuck became more painful than the idea of changing and moving on.

I can’t tell you the exact day when it happened. But it did. And within months of awakening to my truth (that staying stuck was worse than letting go and moving on), I quit my job, went cold turkey with my ex, rented out my condo, and moved to my dream neighborhood. Within a year, I met the wonderful man who is now my husband. I got my first book deal. And I started coaching women on how they, too could walk away from the pain of the past and into their beautiful future. Woohoo!

So back to my singular mission. As I look at the calendar and see that there are just four months left in 2009, I realize that anyone suffering from a broken heart has two choices right now:

- Buckle down, face the pain, and walk step by step through their healing journey
- Or hold onto their ex for dear life, stay stuck, and feel completely lost, miserable, and alone until New Year’s Eve (and into 2010)

It’s as simple as that.

And my mission is equally simple.

If you’re ready to walk away from a life that no longer works for you…

If you’re tired of heartbreak being your best friend, and instead want to step into hope, healing, and happiness…

If you want 2010 to be the incredibly blissful year you deserve, not yet another year you suffer through, because there’s no reboot button on your brain…

Then I urge you to join my mission. Heal your heart by the holidays by following these simple steps:

1. Exorcise your ex from your online and off-line life (completely!)
2. Recruit your Boohoo Crew to support you through 2009 and into 2010
3. Practice self forgiveness daily
4. Create new rituals for yourself so that you’re NOT constantly thinking I wish what’s his name was here…
5. Take your focus off of what’s next for your ex and instead put it on your own hopeful, happy, fantastic future

Lisa has a great free newsletter, and has an 8 Week Heal Your Heart TeleClass coming up. If you’d like to find out what Lisa can do for you…just go here: http://www.lisasteadman.com/breakup-bootcamp. Her promise is that by New Year’s Eve, you will have gone from Boohoo to Woohoo! I’ll be interviewing Lisa for January in my Relationship Expert Series (January is pretty much National Breakup Month…), and I know she’ll be able to help you.

Love, Rori

I love letters with what you and I might call “extreme” situations — where we all gasp and swear we’d never let that happen to us — but we KNOW, deep down, that it COULD happen to us, that we have, and may still be, tolerating things we don’t like and playing “small” when we are, in fact, HUGE goddesses — all of us.

Let’s see how we can use this to help you:

“Dear Rori,
.
I wanted to share with you the wall I’m up against.

Brief intro:

17 years of Bliss, 3 children, were very happy, we moved and all went pear shaped.

He broke up over email and its been texting and emailing and fighting for 3 years. He comes back, he leaves. He spends more time with us than away.

Recently he has said he loves me and ‘ maybe’ wants to come back. He wants total freedom to come and go as he pleases. Me to ask no questions, For starters we stay in separate houses, and take it slow, he can still flirt and go out with other woman, and if I get upset the that goes against me and him getting back together.

He doesn’t want a jealous wife. I am not to question his behavior or where he goes, if I have a complaint I should tell a girlfriend not him. that will go against me. Over the next few weeks, he will judge me and my behavior and attitude toward him as to whether he thinks he wants to come back to me and his kids…

So I will be on trial – and I will be judged on behavior, attitude. etc. There is no problem with physical attraction, for my age and 3 kids I look great…

He will be flirty and being smutty on facebook etc with other woman and if I complain that will go against me.

Here’s the great bit, If I use – I feel, I felt, I am feeling with him .. that will go against me. If I try to play him with all the junk he says he reads on these web sites. .. so he’s across all of this..

How do I deal with this. i am not good at playing games, and he’s onto all these methods…

What do I do ? No Bliss”

***Here’s my answer:

Basically, No Bliss – What are you DOING???? (This is going to be tough love – don’t read if you don’t want to hear it.)

If you think that by allowing yourself to “be on trial” and wait for him — you’ll get him back, you are dead wrong.

The only way you have a chance of getting this marriage back (and I can’t imagine why you’d WANT to now –there are all kinds of great men out there who’d want you 3 kids and all…) is to put your wedding ring on your right hand, and START DATING. Break up with him. Tell him this is a separation, and so that you will be dating also. Period. If you can’t do this, then, please, get some therapy to help your self-esteem –and get my Targeting Mr. Right program – it will help you date without all the weirdness attached…

AGREE with him. Tell him that you don’t want the marriage at this point while you’re both discovering what it is you really want (this is not a game – this is TRUE for YOU, if you’ll let yourself see this…).

Good luck! You can DO THIS!!!

***Okay, now let’s see how we can use this…

For most of this letter, it sounds like No Bliss is joking, doesn’t it? Like she sees the humor in his ridiculous demands and behavior, and is almost about to wipe her hands of him…but then…you know she’s not joking at all. No Bliss is really caught up in all this.

And it’s so easy for us to say “ewwww” – but after 17 years and 3 kids and “bliss” — any one of us would feel invested and, well, caught up.

And this brings me to the hard question: “What do you do when things change? Unexpectedly. Suddenly. Seemingly without warning. What do you do when your man goes berserk all of a sudden?”

And my answer is: Unless there’s instantaneous dementia from a physical accident or a drug reaction — there’s no such thing as “all of a sudden.” There’s no such thing as a surprise that’s this huge. No way.

This kind of thing has to be growing. Gathering steam. It could be underground, where you don’t want to look. It could be right in front of your face, where you still don’t want to look.

You could be feeling your reaction to it, and not know what that reaction’s about. This is where we women can get “tunnel vision” and just look at everything and everywhere except at the exact spot where everything’s going wrong.

So much is subconscious – where we can’t see it –so let’s say we go into a temporary state of being where we’re not aware of what’s going on around us.

So — let’s say that when we get “unaware,” it’s not our fault.  BUT — if we don’t choose to LEARN from that unaware experience — then we embark on the non-stop beating up of ourselves that I FORBID you to do!

So, along with everything else we’re going to do here, I want you to EMBRACE and LOVE even your passing unaware moments. Let’s just say that the unaware moments describe not seeing what’s right in front of us just because it’s hard to see.

Now…The man just up and walks, he runs around, he blames you, he puts you in a cage of behavior with one THREAT: He will get mad, and then he will walk even FURTHER away.

And this threat is the one that decks every single one of us.

Even if we don’t want a man anymore, the moment he threatens to GO – we want him back.

It’s like LOSING is worse than being unhappy.

Well – sometimes losing is “loosing” — just opening our iron grip and letting a man do whatever he wants to do.

Because I can tell you this — if a man doesn’t want to be with you –he’s nothing to you. Period. He’s a drain on your energy, your spirit, your heart, your health, and “loosing” a man like that is the only thing that will serve you.

(Also — it’s the only way to invite him to come and get you. (After he cleans up his act, of course –because who would want a dreadful man in the state that this one is in?)

Waiting around for a man who is acting like a single man, jerking you around and daring you to “start something” is hardly worth even a moment to “contemplate.”

The answer is NO.  No, I don’t care if you get mad. No, I don’t care what you think.  No, I no longer care what you do.

The only thing you have here to say YES to is shared parenthood.  That means you stay civil, you stay calm, you refrain from arguing.  You work only for the good of your children.

You consider yourself separated, tell him so, and go about building a new life for yourself.  Should he ever regain his senses and want to come back (and the fastest ticket to that is to forget about him and get a great new life), then you’l think about it.

This letter riled me up, and No Bliss, I hope I was able to give you a bit of a push to discover your own sense of being “done” with this man for now, except as the father of your children.

And while you’re creating this new, fabulous life (right NOW, please) – you will be working with my Tools to undo whatever your part is in this.  Even if the only thing you can put your finger on is “unawareness.”

You will be discovering how you got here, and how you can have something blissful again – even if it’s not with this same man.

Love, Rori

This fabulous article is really getting around…by Laura A. Munson,  a woman who prevented a threatened divorce that seemed to come out of nowhere…if you haven’t read it yet…read it now and we’ll talk about it:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/fashion/02love.html

What this woman did worked.  Here are some thoughts on why it worked:

1.  It’s much easier to repair damage while he’s still in the house.  Once he moves out…it’s much harder.  Living separately becomes “the norm” – even if he doesn’t like it at first, he’ll get used to it.

2.  She had so much confidence that it carried him through his own lack of confidence…

3.  She created and allowed so much distance, space, “room” for him to do “whatever” — that he no longer had to create distance himself…

3.  In the end, he wanted to come back more than he wanted to leave…

What this brave, amazing woman did was stick to what she wanted and stick to her plan.

Now — here are some of the questions I would love to ask her:

>>I’d love to ask about the “hard conversations” they had after he came back fully into the life of the family.

>>I’d like to ask — was this absolutely all about “him” — or was it about her, too?

>>I’d ask: How is it possible to be married so long and not know your husband is unhappy?  I’d ask: What did she discover, in talking later, that led to the emotional separation and his seemingly out-of-the-blue anger and immaturity?

And then, what I’d like to talk about with you is — what, if anything, could she have done or not done that would have saved her 6 months of horror and pain, and got him back into “conversation” sooner, so that if you find yourself in anything like this situation, you can fix it faster?

Let’s look at what she did:

1. She stepped back. She stopped doing anything that could push him further away. She stopped asking for things, she stopped trying to talk about the relationship, she stopped any kind of expectations so that she never was disappointed, and she completely avoided making him wrong for his behavior. She gave herself a time line to stick with her plan so it wasn’t just open-ended. She took control of HER side of the situation, without trying to take control of HIS side of the situation.

2. She invited him to join in the life of the family, without expectation, without agenda, without comment, without management and without complaint for his bad behavior. And she handled her own emotions, which kept her from making the situation worse.

These two steps could be translated simply to: Strong on the inside, Soft on the outside. This could be inner boundaries and outer openness.

So let’s just flesh this out:

1. Stepping back, leaning back, walking away from arguments, and keeping the distance rather than trying to step forward and fix the situation is ALWAYS the way to go when a man is behaving badly. When you want something that he isn’t giving. When he’s doing stuff you don’t want him to do, and when he’s not doing stuff you want him to do.

I have pretty much nothing to add here to what she did because she really executed this step totally brilliantly.

2. Being an invitation. There is no way to know here, because she doesn’t talk about it, but I wonder how emotionally open she was able to be with her husband when he was behaving so badly and she was feeling so many powerful, unpleasant feelings — anger, resentment, fear, grief… that she was not showing him. She doesn’t say how many feelings and exactly how she was handling her emotions. Was she stuffing everything down? Was she talking to a therapist? Was she talking to her friends? Or was she sharing bits and pieces of how she felt to her husband as they went along so that she could stay sane?

If she had USED her emotions to help the situation, what would that have looked like? If she had used Circular Dating, what would that have looked like?

I know that the article focuses on her man’s loss of “pride,” as the primary cause of that horrible moment when he wanted to walk away from everything.

But my question would be about what I think is the primary cause — and that’s anger. I’m certain that they talked over all of this later on, and, hopefully, got all the anger out into the air and cleared up and things shifted in the relationship. So…

What would’ve happened if, instead of just doing step one brilliantly, she had expanded on step two? What if she, herself, had become an invitation for the release, finally, of all the emotions that BOTH of them must have been stuffing down for a long time? Would that have facilitated a faster resolution?

Does a man going through his “Dark Night of the Soul” necessarily mean he needs to run away? Like a child’s running away to join the circus? Is this the only possible result of a man’s “mid-life crisis”?

Is our only option to give him and distance and room to work things out on his own?

If you are just beginning to date a man, and he starts going through something like this in his life, I would hope for you that you are Circular Dating up a storm and could simply let him do what he does — without investing any of yourself and him.

But if you’ve been married to man for a very long time, and you still have feelings for him, and you have a household you love and children you love together — you are invested. Can you do more here then Step One and the part of Step Two Laura tells us about where she invites him to participate in the life of the family in a “logistical” way?

What would have happened if she had said to him Wow I can feel how angry you are? What would have happened if she had said I’m feeling scared, actually terrified, bad because I had no idea you were so unhappy and I wonder how I could have missed that, and I wonder how angry you must be to want to just leave…?

There is no doubt that Laura is a Warrior. Strong as steel. And she’s also the woman this man really and truly wanted to be with forever. Despite his meltdown.

And I wonder — I would love to speak to her about this and open up the floor to you, too… how much more quickly he might have turned around if she had been willing to say: Well, perhaps some of this is about me. Perhaps there’s something I can do here.

Most of the comments I’ve read in forums that are not 100% “You go girl!” about this article focus on why she bothered to stick with a man who was behaving so badly.

I look at this in just the opposite way. To me, if you are that invested in a man, then there’s “stuff” going on in the relationship — and not just about “him” — that no one’s talking about. And the secret of getting reconnected to a man is all about unearthing that stuff that no one’s talking about — WITHOUT leaning forward, trying to get conversations started, and generally pushing him further away — but doing it in a “feminine,” feeling, open way that is an irresistible invitation.  Even to a man in a deep funk.

This is an art. This is the art we are all working on — the art of being strong on the inside and soft on the outside. About having boundaries on the inside and openness on the outside. This is the art of being able to step away from the man, and yet open your heart to the man. This is the art of being able to FACILITATE a healing.

To facilitate a healing, to re-create trust and openness, to make it okay to be exactly who you are in a relationship — even if you’re in the middle of a Dark Night of the Soul — that’s something WE can DO!

By learning to be exactly who we are on the deepest level, and to let that be seen no matter what the situation — without even needing to talk much about it — just letting it be there, we create an environment and an atmosphere where everybody can start to tell the truth.

I am so happy for Laura that she was able to reconnect her marriage and to open up the truth and heal her relationship.

And for you — If you are in anything like the situation,  I want that reconnection to happen as quickly as possible.

So.. use my Tools to drop deeper into who you are, to share the truth about who you are, and to facilitate your man having confidence in your ability to handle your OWN truth.  Whatever it is.

Use my Tools of “language” to help a relationship heal so that — should he decide to open up and let you know the truth about what’s going on with him he’ll KNOW that you will not judge him, you will not correct him, you will not make him wrong, you will simply allow the connection to happen.

Let me know how you feel about all this… Love, Rori

This is a jump off from a question from Robin -

“My pattern seems to be getting put in the ‘friends’ category. When I was a teenager, I thought this was the way to go, because I always heard from people that you want to “marry your best friend.” Or that you have a better chance of being with someone if you are their friend first.

Looking back, I can see how I came to this conclusion; my grandparents were best friends, and theirs was the healthiest of relationships I could observe at that time in my life.

And even that was not all that healthy and not completely what I want for my own life…

I really value a friendship element in a long-term relationship, and can see from others in my life that this is important for marriage, BUT…

I’m missing something if I keep getting put in that category. And I can’t quite figure out how to undo this pattern, because I formed this pattern, thinking it was a good thing to go to one extreme of the spectrum.

Is there a specific way to break this pattern all at once, or is this something for baby steps??“

Here’s my answer:

The truth is – we KNOW a friend from a lover.  Hanging out with a male “friend” can be fantastic.  My men friends saved my emotional life countless times, and those memories are some of my best.

Unless a man is gay, however (which is why gay men are often the best friends) – you can TELL if he’s hanging out with you because of genuine friendship or if he’s “interested” in you in more romantic ways.

And it feels GREAT if a man is “interested” in you and wants to be around you – especially if he’s romantically interested in you, because that adds another dimension that makes you feel attractive and sexy in his presence – not just like a “pal” – and if what you pick up from him is that he’s not romantically interested – as long as YOU don’t have those kinds of feelings for him – it doesn’t MATTER!  You can enjoy being with him no matter WHAT his level of interest, as long as it feels like fun – and as long as you don’t CARE.

The reverse is completely NOT GOOD for you – where you are hanging out with a man who has expressed “friendship” in words, deeds, and energy – and YOU feel MORE.

Just don’t do that.  Don’t hang out with men friends when you wish there were more.  Just don’t do it.

Now – here’s a wrinkle.  We’re friends with people because we feel attracted to them. This includes the “geeky” guy we know who’s funny and makes us laugh.  This includes our girlfriends.  Anyone we feel good around, anyone we want to talk to, be with, stand near – we feel attracted to.  And I don’t just mean “platonically.”

I know this is hard to embrace.  But the truth is – there is an erotic component to this attraction.  The next time you find yourself talking with someone you couldn’t IMAGINE feeling erotically attracted to – a homeless person, a person you might label as “ugly” – or the wrong gender – if you can embrace the truth that you are erotically attracted to that person as well as attracted on intellectual and emotional levels – you will get this so much faster.

In other words – if you like being around a person – there is a part of you that feels erotically attracted to them. It doesn’t mean you find this person appropriate for a relationship, and it doesn’t mean you feel romantically attracted to them.  It just means you feel sexually, erotically attracted.

And what happens with most of us?  When we’re faced with an erotic attraction to someone “inappropriate” – we shut down.

And I don’t want you to do that.

I want you to stay open to ALWAYS feeling erotically attracted to YOURSELF – and so you will ALWAYS be radiating a sexual, sensual, erotic vibe. We’re all afraid of what will happen if we open ourselves up like that – and I want you to embrace that fear and open up anyway.

So – what you may feel from a man who says he wants “friendship” is that EROTIC component he also feels.  You may just hook it up to your OWN feelings for him, because these energies bounce off of each other, or you may mistake that erotic energy for ROMANTIC feelings.

This is how it gets so confusing with a man who says “friends” but feels like more than that to you.  This is why a man can sleep with you and still consider you just a “friend.”

It’s not cruelty.  He’s not trying to hurt you.  It’s just simpler for him than it is for you.

So don’t go there.  Just say NO to “just friends.”

Circular Date.  Do the Whole Targeting Mr. Right “Diva” stuff – and it will get clear to you…Love, Rori