Have The Relationship You Want

If there’s distance between you, there’s anger.

If you’re being “extra nice…” you’re angry.

If you’re giving more than you’re getting…you’re angry.

There are two parts to this puzzle:

1. Whether or not you can touch your anger and how you feel when you do, and…

2. What you do with what you feel.

Let’s say you can’t figure out why you’re “blue.”

Ask yourself…Where am I angry?

You may be surprised at the question.  You may say to yourself…I’m not angry, I’m sad.

Ask again.

Keep asking until you connect with your anger (I can guarantee you’re feeling it…just don’t try to ask yourself - ‘Why am I feeling it?’)…and then follow through with touching it, looking at it, embracing it, admiring its power, and owning it.

You can ask follow-up questions:

Who am I angry at?

What am I angry at?

How angry am I?

Once you’ve just got in touch with your anger…don’t hold it at arm’s length.  Get close to it.  Study it.  Play with it.  Put your arms around it.  Put your heart around it.  Say…Where have you been all my life?

Once you’re all touchy-feely with your rage, you’re going to notice some other feelings show up and try to muscle in on your new relationship.

You’ll notice guilt creep on over.  And then fear.

That’s because anger is such a powerful feeling  (let’s face it, in the grip of rage, we feel like we want to kill someone.  To push him off a cliff or smash him in two.  Own up to any such impulse.  Pretend you’re an actress and you have to find the power in your anger in order to get your much-deserved Academy Award for your “raw” and “authentic” presence in your own life…) — it’s SO powerful, we’re actually afraid we might DO something like that - kill him and wipe out half the planet doing it.

And you won’t.  I know you won’t.  You’re just too fabulous a woman to bother doing that.

So, now you have to accept, look at, embrace the guilt and the fear, too.

And, if you’re doing this right, you’ll also uncover grief.  It may be so intense you blank out and go numb for a moment…so when you touch it, even for a split-second - give yourself a “high-five.”

Okay…first step accomplished.

Now…what are you going to DO with all that emotion?

Are you going to cut loose and wail at a man?  Are you going to demand he change, now, or buddy,  you’re out the door?

Are you going to go the “spiritual route” and play nice?  Get all understanding and compassionate and neutral and try to have a reasonable discussion?

Or are you going to just stuff it down for another day and go about your business?

Here’s where the art of being you works so brilliantly…

1. If you’re by yourself and in your own home where you can feel all private and safe, that’s terrific. You can jump up and down, you can punch the air with your face, you can lay down on the floor and start breathing into all that anger and grief and guilt and everything else you feel until you get so bored you want to turn on the TV and watch something stupid — or even better one a get out and take a nice walk in the neighborhood and look at and kiss some beautiful trees.

You can pet yourself and hug yourself and make yourself some tea and allow yourself to giggle over all this intensity you’re feeling or allow yourself to cry over everything you’re feeling, and shake a bit –  and then you may feel like doing something like dance around the room…

2. But most likely you’re out in public. You’re sitting across from a man in a restaurant. You’re walking with him from the car. You’re stuck in the car with him. You’re in his house or your house and all of a sudden you feel the intensity of how deeply he is ignoring you, dismissing you, not interested in you, or just plain mean.

Well, you first have to do the first part of this which is to figure out a way, logistically, to feel what you’re feeling — especially your anger.

This usually means you have to get up and go to the ladies room. Or you have to turn around and walk back to the car or you have to stop talking and turn your face away from him while you’re walking. You have to sit at the table with your head in your hands blocking out everything and simply tuning in to what’s going on with you and asking yourself questions that you need to ask.

I prefer the bathroom, but I have learned to just sit there feeling my face turn red and my body want to fight or flee, with my face in my hand, in total silence, and process through these questions and my feelings amazingly quickly.

So I know that you can too.

3. Now, here comes the “action” part. What you DO if you’re out in public or he’s right in front of you in your kitchen.

I’m going to have to write a lot of posts about this because there are so many pieces to this, but let’s start here.

If the first part is about “processing” through your feelings, then the second part is how you express that to him.

And to make things simple here again to give you just two options:

1. You speak the truth in Feeling Messages — you sayI. (If you have not finished processing through the truth might be I feel confused, or I feel uncomfortable, or something else that expresses how you feel in a way that makes you feel like you’ve really expressed yourself  (without, of course, talking about him or making him wrong).

2. If you’ve done this more than a few times with a man, if you’ve had to express the same thing to him over and over (for instance, he’s asked you not to do something so that he can do it for you himself,  only he hasn’t taken the time to do it and you’re finding yourself waiting… or he’s dismissed your feelings and you’ve told him many times how bad you feel when that happens) — then you WALK AWAY.

Simple… you just turn around and go in the other direction.

You go find the ladies room in a public place, or you go home in a taxi or your own car, or you take yourself to a bedroom and close the door. You can say This feels bad and I don’t want to feel this, and then walk away, or you can say I don’t want to do this right now and walk away or you can just say I want to go home and walk away, or you can even just turn and walk into the kitchen and not say anything.

What ever you do — you have to feel this:

You have to feel as though you have HONORED your anger.

This doesn’t mean you have to feel like you hurt him, or a person at work or another circumstance who has hurt you. It doesn’t mean you have to do damage. It doesn’t mean you have to have revenge. It doesn’t mean you have to have some kind of physical or emotional effect on him. It does not mean you have to have a result of any kind.

Honoring your anger feels like you are WHOLE

It feels like you are in one piece. You don’t feel shattered, you don’t feel disconnected from yourself, you don’t feel conflicted — you don’t feel like your anger and your guilt and your grief are all pulling on each other from different directions.

You feel all of a piece. You are you. Whole. Complete. Beautiful. Angry.

Don’t look for a result of the feelings going away. That’s not the point. Feelings are powerful things and they keep moving around all the time. They move through your body.  The more they change, and the more you attend to them with the intention of honoring them and ALLOWING them to move anyway they choose, they will begin to morph into better feeling feelings.

And, as a bonus, when the anger gets felt and expressed — when YOU can do it FIRST — everything will open up in a relationship.  Love comes back from behind the barricades set up by the effort, on both your parts, to make the anger “behave.”

I love your anger. I love all of you. I love all of me. Let’s rock.

Love, Rori

If you’ve ever wondered why you’re finding yourself anywhere you don’t want to be…let’s talk about it.

Why do we cause ourselves so much pain?

There is a reason we’re attracted to and attract men who are not good for us — from simply “not into us” or “just not right for us,” all the way to abusive, mean, neglectful and disinterested.

The reason is in a pattern that got started long ago.

One day, at “crossroads” moment of our lives, we made an internal choice to “frame” what “reality” is. We made an internal choice about what “love” was — what it meant to us, what it looked like, what it was supposed to feel like. We made up “rights and wrongs” and “rules” around that choice, and learned to fit everything that came along for us into those rules. We created a belief in that “reality” we set up.

And all this was happening “underground.”

It wasn’t a “conscious” choice - we weren’t aware of it, and we fought against it and resisted it and suffered with it whenever it showed up. This underground belief became the foundation of our experience. It led us from one experience to another, where each one felt kind of the same, and had the same tinge of “pain” around it.

The way this all happened, the reason this underground, foundational belief became a pattern in our lives, is because at that moment when it all started, we truly WERE in a helpless situation. We were powerless.

We may have been very young, or overpowered physically by an accident or a person. It may have happened over and over again, or it may have been a one-time experience. And it created a full, complete picture for us of what life is and what LOVE is.

Because POWER is a huge theme here — the quality of our entire lives has a HUGE effect on the power we feel in relationships.

In other words, you may be struggling through horrible relationship after horrible relationship — and then, once you get your career together, and are doing work you love, and start loving yourself and feeling good about you — your dream man just shows up and it’s easy sailing from there.

For now, though, let’s just talk about love.

To many of us - Love is simply “pain.” Without discomfort and pain and misery, it doesn’t feel like Love. Without having to WORK hard at it — it doesn’t feel like love.

Because this is usually so far beneath our waking “consciousness” - because on a conscious level we would never KNOWINGLY choose a “bad” man for ourselves, we’d never knowingly make ourselves unhappy — we WRAP a man or an experience like this we’re involved in in a pretty package of some kind.

We make up excuses, we paint the whole thing in a way that LOOKS — if only to us — good. Or at least okay. Or, if necessary, we say it’s fate, or chemistry, or that we’re in an impossible situation beyond our powers to change.

At bottom, what we’re actually doing is USING a man - just going out and flat-out HIRING him - to HURT us. We don’t know we’re doing it, because we BELIEVE this is RIGHT for us. We believe this is all we can have, we EXPERIENCE it as love and almost ignore the pain.

Some of us ignore small things, some of us ignore major things. And it’s so easy to judge another woman who’s allowing major unhappiness, even though we are doing the same thing ourselves - just on a smaller level. And, in my experience — the WORSE things are for you, the FASTER and more amazingly you can experience a total turnaround in your life with just tiny, baby-steps.

That’s why you ALWAYS have HOPE!!!

The worst Overfunctioners (like I was) turn their relationships around the fastest when they stick to my 4 Rules.

Learning how to use Feeling Messages completely turns around the entire LIFE of a woman who is always in her brain, and pushing men away by trying to control them.

And stepping away from a painful MOMENT — even just one MOMENT — can change your life if, deep in your subconscious, you believe that love, to you, is supposed to feel like pain.

Here’s a comment on this blog from Sarah, who’s in an extreme, painful situation:

“Rori, I am in a terrible place right now. I am in love with a toxic man, and don’t know what to do about it. He has a fetish, and it rules his life. I do this for him all the time, but it is still not enough. I found out he is now meeting other women in secret to do his fetish and lying to me about it, saying he is working late. Now, he takes care of himself during this, so there is no sex going on, but the fact that he is meeting these women is killing me. He is just really selfish.

I do love him, but am incredibly betrayed and hurt, as he promised me he would never see anyone else. We are not married, but we do live together. We’ve been together 15 months. A lot of times we are together, he is nice and sweet, but then sometimes he is not. I don’t know how to tell him I know about this, because I found out by looking at his email. I am afraid to confront him, but I know it needs to be done, as I can’t live like this anymore; I am always jealous and paranoid. I want him to change and not do this anymore so we can be happy, but I don’t think its possible. I am afraid to leave. Thanks, Sarah”

Sarah, Welcome, and thank you for your heartfelt comment.

I wish I could be with you in person, take you by the shoulders, shake you, hug you, and help you get a sense of yourself. You are lost in a sea of toxicity - this one man is just the “agent” you “hired” to hit you over the head and inject you with poison.

It’s YOU poisoning yourself…and we have to work really hard here to get you some self-respect and self-love, and I know you are in the right place with all these fantastic women. (I’m always very tough with this at first…so you can SEE what’s going on, because your tolerance for punishment is so high, I have to really go heavy-handed here, so sorry, but it’s the only way I’ve experienced that works — “tough love.”)

You must dump this man, now, forever, and do not look back. Period.

Now, it’s easy for me, a friend, a family member, a counselor to tell you that…but I want you to listen here.

The fetish isn’t the problem. Everyone’s got something going on, it’s a matter of the basics of relationship - loyalty, attraction, feeling good.

You CANNOT be IN LOVE with a man who lies to you. You BELIEVE you are - but you’re wrong.

You’re ADDICTED to him. You are like a junkie — and not just for love, but for punishment.

I know you must have a seriously painful childhood behind you, with lying, abuse, distrust, pain…and THIS is what we must address. You are staying with this man to KEEP yourself from dealing with what’s really underneath, and as you peel back the layers of how you’ve been protecting yourself from inner pain by heaping MORE pain on yourself…things will get clearer.

Please read EVERYTHING on this blog, in my newsletters, and anywhere you can find about increasing your self-esteem. Start here with the Power & Self Esteem category. Self-love is your work right now.

This man is NOTHING.

He is NOTHING to you.

I’m telling you the truth…please consider what life would be like if you believed what I’ve written here.

What I want for you is HOPE - but a different kind…not hope for this relationship, this man, but for your LIFE.

You are in a position now in which you must stand tall and RESCUE your own life.

***Now - for all who are in much smaller versions of this pattern (and we ALL have this going on about all kinds of things - our work, our daily life, our health, our love lives - no matter how small…):

Take a moment to ask yourself  What if everything I believe about love is completely made up — and I made it up — and I can unmake what I made up and make up something new?

This whole blog, and all my work is about making up something new.  Something that feels good.

As we make new things up, and take baby steps AS IF those things we just made up were REAL — that’s when magic happens.

This post has a lot of themes, ideas, and Tools…I’ll put them in step-by-step form in the next posts…Love, Rori