Have The Relationship You Want

There’s a conversation going on here in the comments, and it’s terrific, and I want to thank Daria for starting it, and Matt, for showing up here as such a smart, conscious, good man, and providing such a concrete balance to the perceptions we women develop about men our whole lives – I want to use this to go into this whole issue of “self-centeredness” and “focusing on yourself” and how a man sees all this (taking advantage here of having a man on board for the discussion). Here’s Daria’s comment-> and here’s Matt’s response->and here’s what I say:

Daria – your words – the “fuck you” attitude – is all rage and anger that comes from SOMEWHERE, and every time a man says or does or doesn’t say or doesn’t do something that makes you feel “less” – based on the needs you’ve developed your whole life from your experiences – it triggers you.

And this is what happens to ALL of us.

This would happen to Matt with a woman who triggered him in the unique way that he would become triggered.

Working on yourself has the marvelous outcome of making your triggering experiences less painful and reactionary, and more – well – funny, actually.

When I catch myself going somewhere and talking with someone (especially my husband) and suddenly, internally go to a perception that I’m not being “acknowledged” or “respected” or feeling “second class” in some way – I now can “get” – almost instantly – that my need for approval and to be “superior” and “appreciated” is being triggered.

I notice my body tense up, my face takes on a different feel, and I want to go into some version of defense mode. And I notice that that “defense” mode becomes centered on ME – but NOT in the way we want to focus on ourselves here. My stored up rage and fear has been activated, and whoever is with me at that moment becomes the SOURCE of bad feelings – even if he or she is NOT responsible for that.

What we’re doing here is learning to FEEL to GET – to TRUST – that WE are the Source of all this. And then we can feel for and have compassion for ourselves, and then that moves to a deep ability to feel for and have compassion for others, and then everything flows and all the barriers come down, we all open up…..yeah…

A person can trigger you and still be a fantastic person. That’s why the concept of “The Messenger.” The Messenger is anyone who brings you a message about yourself that can HELP you get a bead on how you operate inside, how you react to being triggered – and that can teach you how to SEPARATE out that “triggering” from your perception of that person.

In other words, a man can do something thoughtless that triggers you. Or he can simply have his own needs or personal rules and tell you something perfectly reasonable within his or her internal system, like not wanting to drive to you all the time. Or he can be triggered himself, and that affects the way he is with you.

There is a HUGE difference between not LIKING what a man does or says, and deciding that you do not wish to invest time and energy into being with him until you feel secure enough in his feelings and intentions for you (driving to him) – and being ANGRY with him for having his own ideas.

When you can separate out that anger from the simple truth of who that person is and the reality of what you’re dealing with – and learn to TALK about that with him – in the way we’re all working here – and in the way you did, Daria, in that fabulous Free Therapy date you had in the car – you’ll see that there is no “fuck you” about this. You see yourself becoming activated, and you process it through, and then you work at seeing the man in the light of WHAT IS – the reality of the situation, the basic simplicity of it – rather than through the lens of your triggered anger.

When I see exactly what’s happening to me, and I can catch it before I’ve shut down too much and gone into my particular “defense mode” – I can work through it – using all the Tools – and in a matter of seconds – the air between us is different. I see the person as the person, instead of seeing him or her as some extension of myself.

I feel my basic feeling – the “I’m not enough” feeling that surfaces whenever I get triggered in this particular way – and I think that’s what Daria is talking about, and what Matt is seeing as the end result in HIS eyes.

That’s what Matt is talking about here – what HE, a MAN sees. He can see your reaction as “self-centered” – and if he likes you, he may see that as a GOOD THING! Or, he can see your reaction as feeling hurt – a defense, a protection. And if he likes you, he may experience that as vulnerability and it may make him want to go deeper.

The only thing that’s for sure, here, is – the LESS LAYERS a man has to see through – the better. If we can just say – “I’m feeling a bit weird. My old stuff is coming up, and I can feel myself not want to put energy out here until I feel more secure…” Or “I’m just feeling exhausted and tired, and I just need to hang back here a bit to recharge…” Or something that is the TRUTH…we’ll move even faster toward what we want instead of being stuck in our old patterns.

What Matt is hearing here is your Riffing words as though you are actually saying them to the Man – but, you’re not. Matt – this is just part of Daria processing the way we’re working to process. AND – the next steps are the ones this post is about – separating out a man’s behavior and the reality of what’s going on and what you FEEL from HIM energy wise, and what you’re feeling because you’ve been Triggered.

When we make the man about what’s going on with ourselves when we’re triggered – the man becomes a kind of EXTENSION of ourselves.

And when a man becomes some kind of extension of ourselves, and then the energy of anger kicks in – we become self-centered in a very different way than we’re working toward here.

This self-centered way is the way of PROTECTION. This is shutting down your heart and going with the easiest feeling, instead of going down inside and finding the REAL feelings. And, Matt, if you knew Daria, and you really liked her – my guess is that you wouldn’t just stop seeing her for this. I believe you’d talk, she’d talk, and then in a matter of moments you’d be laughing over it.

You’d get CONNECTED over this triggering issue. You might even be mightily ATTRACTED to her for responding to her triggering with anger instead of with a typical “doormat” – “oh, okay, sure, whatever you want…” kind of thing – which is, by the way – the way we all STARTED HERE!

Instead of perceiving Daria’s mode of PROTECTION as “self-centeredness” – you’d BOTH get that there’s something going on here. Perhaps a power struggle, perhaps insecurity, perhaps an emotional shutting down from fear.

A woman cannot be truly compassionate until she is first compassionate with herself. And this HAS to be the FIRST STEP.

So – Daria – Riffing along – and moving from doormat to angry woman is a HUGE step UP, here. And know that it’s the ENERGY of it that’s so much better – it’s still simply the other side of the coin of the doormat – we flip from insecure and low self-esteem to “how dare you” and anger.

Just notice how this goes for you.

Anger is HUGE area of potential for you – this is where your treasure is. Follow it around in your life, in your body, in your heart, and go DEEPER. You are angry because of hurt, disappointment and fear – now go find THOSE feelings, and you’ll see all this stuff turn around.

I’m so proud of you, Daria, and thank you so much Matt, and let’s keep going deeper into this, it’s very helpful.

Love, Rori

This fabulous letter is from Pamela Tames, who has a great site http://SeasonedSex.com – and to me – it just speaks so powerfully about how we all go to our “Default” position when we don’t feel comfortable – and how getting aware of what that is for each of us, and using my Tools to experiment with different ways to go “Off Default” – no matter WHAT you think of the results when you first try exploring and experiencing something new – is the way to go here:

I Am My Heart from Pamela Tames:

I spend a lot of time blogging about sexiness. Deep down though I know the more important question is how to do relationships well. Which is why I’m such a Rori Raye devotee. Recently something she wrote in her email newsletter bridged the themes of sexiness and relationships and taught me an important lesson in being myself.

It started with my birthday dinner about a month ago. Half a dozen girlfriends got together at a restaurant including my best friend, Susan. Susan is a professional mom, which means she rarely gets out. This was the first time she was meeting my other friends.

For whatever reason, the group didn’t mesh. I kept thinking our energies would all come together and flow with conversation and laughter but at the last minute, the group kept unraveling. Susan and I left last, walking to our cars arm in arm.

“I’m sorry,”I said, “That didn’t go the way I thought it would. My friends are so different.”

“You didn’t seem yourself,” said Susan. She went on to explain how I seemed to be trying to hard to keep my friends in shock and awe with my sexual adventurer act.

“It’s like you’re afraid to let people see the real you, “Susan summed up. “The real you I know and love.”

I gave her a big hug and thought how lucky I was to have such a loving, honest friend. I’d always struggled with being authentic. I knew she had a point. For whatever reason, I hadn’t been comfortable all night. I had jumped my favorite facade–sexy vixen (albeit now middle-aged).

Flash forward to a Rori Raye’s email newsletter. I’m reading about how to attract men. Towards the end she writes about the heart. I suddenly got it.

It was like the word, “heart,” exploded to life and jumped out of my computer.

The heart is like a magnet with great powers of attraction. My habit of hiding behind masks (or who I thought I should be) was having the effect of blocking my heart’s power. It was as though my heart was hidden behind a lead veil. Nothing got in and nothing got out. As a result, most of my decisions were made in my head, out of fear and insecurity.

Of course, I’ve read all the stuff about the heart and how so many of us live in our heads, our mausoleums of useless ideas. Reading Rori that day, it all just clicked.  I saw how it’s just a choice, as easy as saying I’ll have the bacon and eggs today, not the pancakes. I’ll feel love, not fear.

Cut to the relationship. I’d been in on-again, off- again mode with my boyfriend of over a year. We’d have the same fight, yell the same things, wear each other down, and storm off in our separate directions. All this heart stuff had happened after our last break up, which lasted a month. And then somehow, we got back together.

This time the relationship felt lighter, easier, and freer. I wasn’t torturing him with made up rules in my head and lists of do’s and don’ts. I was just enjoying him, who he was. I was just feeling, not thinking.

I turned to him and massaged his neck as we sat side by side at a Sushi counter.

“You’re like a different person to me,”I said in a whisper. “You’ve transformed into a wonderful man.”

He smiled. “Thank you.”

“Do I seem different to you, too?” I asked curiously.

“Yes,”he said without hesitation. “I feel love. I feel accepted.”

“You didn’t feel that before?”I said.

“No,”he said looking me in the eyes. “I knew it but I didn’t feel it. Feeling it changes everything.”

“I am so glad,”I said beaming. “I feel so happy just being me.”

Thank you, Rori, for showing me the most important relationship is the one with my heart.

***First, Thank You, Pamela, for this gorgeous letter, and for opening up this discussion – I’m going to work a lot with this concept of our DEFAULT POSITION. The emotional and reactive place we go to whenever we feel triggered and uncomfortable.

I know that mine is to first feel sad and a sense of loss and fear and insecurity – then I jump to anger and vengeance and an “I-don’t-care-about-you” independence, then I work my way through to a general feeling of love and okayness for myself and everyone else who was there when I got triggered, or whose consistent behavior is finally triggering me. (My husband, of course, because he’s the one who’s always there…).

So – let’s talk about this.  What is YOUR Default Position? What do you GO TO, a part of your personality that feels “safe” to you – when you’re feeling Triggered and uncomfortable?  – and we’ll work together through all your comments and answers.

Love, Rori , and Thank You again, Pamela

I feel like a just got run over by a truck – on my feet and onstage for 8 hours at my Targeting Mr. Right seminar and product taping yesterday (it will be out in March)…I wanted to answer more and more questions – so you’ll be seeing a lot of talk about Circular Dating here -

I want to be in the business of motivating you and exciting you, and keeping you motivated and excited to get what you want through Circular Dating – even if you’re married (you’ll understand how and why in the product, and we’ll talk more and more about it here…) – and those 8 hours (to produce 6 1/2 hours of DVD and CD for you, with all the stops and starts) were some of the most thrilling I’ve ever experienced.

I could feel the concept behind Circular Dating sinking in – and how it’s so different from the way we usually think of “dating.”

It made the whole concept of “getting Mr. Right” seem like a walk in the park, a slam dunk.  And it is.

I’m going to turn my attention to posting now – I wanted to give you this one to start – it’s one of my favorite pieces, and it kicks off the New Year for me.  It’s called Soft In The Kitchen:

I was thinking about softness, and how it changes your vibe.

We’re all very smart, very clever, very defended. We don’t want anyone to see how films about animals make us cry, or our scrap booking, or all the mistakes we made and continue to make around everything in life.

We don’t want anyone to see that we’re lonely, or frightened, or exuberant about the simplest things. We don’t want anyone to see us being childlike and hopeful. So we cultivate our intellect, our opinions, our thoughts on where we’ve been and where we’re going.

Today I was in the kitchen eating what I’d cooked, when my husband walked in. I have a horrible history of burning food. There was the time several months ago when I retreated to the microwave, defeated, afraid my absent-mindedness would burn the house down (talk about repressed rage).

In the last few weeks I’ve been trying the stove again – scheduling cooking time, staying put in the kitchen, turning on the timer, sharpening my attention, and not burning anything! I’m cured! I’m a cook! I’m not a menace, I can do this! And the ground turkey I cooked in the pan smelled very nice on my plate.

And he says, alarm and accusation in his voice, “Did you burn something?”

“No!” I look up at him in shock.

“It smells like you burned something. Something’s burned.” and he walks into the kitchen.

“No, no!” I defend, going for the pan, picking it up to show him, feeling five years old and incompetent. “It’s just nicely brown, see?” I say forcefully, totally righteously. It’s his nose that’s wrong.

“Well, it smells like something’s burned.”

All of a sudden I get what I really feel. Yes, I’m five. I screw up my face and do big time mock crying and whining. “But I didn’t burn it!” I wail. “I didn’t….” and I go all gooey, pan in my hand, miserable.

And in that second, my husband does a 180. His eyes go deep and very blue-green, he smiles so fast I’m taken aback, and he comes towards me, arms around me, “Ohhhhhhh,” he says. And that’s the end of it.

“So, how’s your day?” he skips right to his next thought, and he’s standing right up against me, and we’re connected, and I leap from five-year-old to grownup, from lump to goddess.

Long ago, whenever this happened, I used to think it was because he was competitive and didn’t want me to be big. I thought he liked me girly and the loser at chess and gin rummy. I thought he was scared of my fortitude. Now I know that’s not it at all.

He just likes me better soft. He likes me better where I am than where I wish I was. He likes me better human than mistake-proof. And by liking me better this way, he encourages me to rise to the ultimate test of any relationship: He inspires me to say that I like myself best when I’m with him.

***I wrote this at a stage in my marriage when we were just beginning to communicate on a deeper level – where we were getting past using our daughter and the amount of our focus we reserved for her in a subtle way to KEEP DISTANCE between US.

Intimacy is scary.  The dynamics of a family are somehow orchestrated to keep a balance, a status quo.  The idea is- underneath, subconsciously, where we can’t even get at our motives – to keep things the same.

We do as much to KEEP from Rocking the Boat of ourselves as we do to stay connected within the family.

Everyone triggers everyone else, and no one likes to be triggered.  So we try to avoid doing anything different from what we feel comfortable with.

But that’s a path of STUCK.

It’s not even a path.

It’s some kind of going in circles designed to make sure you always end everything that happens at the beginning.

That things inside us NEVER CHANGE.

And when I wrote this – I WANTED things to change.

Not because they were bad – because they WEREN’T.  We had a TERRIFIC relationship – exactly as I talk about and write about and teach about.

But I wanted to go FURTHER.

I wanted to shake myself up. I wanted to have all the adventure, intimacy, excitment, scariness of love and life that I’d missed out on my whole life by always trying to keep things the same.  I wanted NEW.

I wanted to explore myself – and I knew the way to do that was through our relationship.

So I experimented.  I talked.  WE talked.

And this was at the beginning of that – when I started talking.  When I started letting myself hang out – even when it looked BAD to me.

I always prized myself for keeping myself together – no matter what.  I “could handle anything.”  I could “make lemonade out of any lemon thrown at me.”

And I didn’t want to do that anymore. I wanted to be SEEN.  And it was my husband who was going to be SEEING me.

Since then, we’ve slowly worked with each other in this way – making sure that we don’t bust through each other’s walls (though they are so much shorter and more transparent these days) – but just feel our way through, and – well, it’s kind of magical.

You can do this every day of your life.

Circular Dating will give you an opportunity to interact with man after man after man – to slowly allow them to peer through your walls, and for you to practice actually letting those walls down a bit at a time.

You can do this – and even the men out there who you are not attracted to – or who seem unable to even hold a conversation with you – even those men can be “practice partners” for you.

Wishing you love, practice, and magic – and blowing them your way.

Love, Rori

 When you’re sick, you feel Vulnerable.

I’ve had a cold for a few days, and though it’s slowed me down some, there’s something about being “under the weather” that can really work for us, here.

This is what usually happens to us when we get a cold or flu: We don’t have the energy we need to get through a day easily – to be pleasant and upbeat, creative and productive, sexy and at our best – so we work extra hard just to do what we normally do – sometimes just what we have to do.

Most of us start off dealing with it by taking enough over-the-counter medication to stop our noses from running and take the edge off the aches and pains, and then we push ourselves to get out there and accomplish as usual. We step-up even more, slogging through the heaviness we feel in our bodies and over-compensating for our low energy.

And if we’re dating, or in a serious relationship or marriage, we don’t want to be a “drag,” so we work extra hard to be “perky” and “upbeat.”

Well, if the key to connecting with a man is Vulnerability – then even a cold can be useful if we practice surrendering to it instead of fighting against it.

If you can practice experiencing that “under the weather” feeling, and all the feelings of frustration and sadness that come with it, and practicing loving the feeling of softness that comes over you when you surrrender to not feeling good instead of fighting it – it will help you tremendously with a man when you’re feeling well and good.

Start this way (this can work even when you have a headache, or a bruise, or cramps or hot flashes…):

1. Notice how you feel. For instance, I notice right now that I’m very, very aware of how every inch of my body feels, how my breathing goes, how the murkiness in my head and my lack of energy feels in my arms and legs. I’m aware of wanting to just sleep all day and how part of me is still fighting to stay productive

The trick here is to use being “under the weather” to experience being Vulnerable – and to still function pretty well – at the same time. The secret to it is to:

2. Accept the way you feel. Notice if you’re Resisting the headache, the hot flash, the runny nose. Notice if you’re tensing up your body against it or making a negative comment about it. Say to yourself: “This is what I’m feeling right now, and it’s okay…”

When you feel like you have no energy – part of what’s happening is that so much of your energy is tied up in fighting the sickness. ( And I don’t mean here the forces your body is marshalling to fight the sickness, but the tension, the mental energy we use to RESIST the feeling of being sick.)

When we stop resisting, denying and acting as if we’re not feeling bad – we free up a whole bunch of energy to get done what we have to do (sometimes things even turn out to be more fun than you thought – like all of a sudden having an hour or two to finish that terrific novel you started reading weeks ago) – and as a bonus, our bodies get more of our energy to fight off the sickness, and we get better faster!

3. Don’t try to hide how you feel. Be willing to simply say to everyone around you – including children – “Hey, I’m not feeling so good. I have a cold, I feel sleepy and tired.”

This is completely different from “complaining” about the way you feel (remember step 2. of Accepting how you feel…) This is simply being able to share your Feeling State in a spirit of openness, warmth, acceptance, and – yes – letting people know you have a cold in case they want to stay away from you! And then you get to experience how that feels (and sometimes it feels disappointing – all of which is good practice for later on when things feel good…)

If you can share with a man, “I’ve got a cold. I feel all soft and gooey and tired and don’t feel much like even getting dressed and going out…,” you might get a surprise.

He just might show up with food, make you some tea, and sit and watch a movie with you on TV while you blow your nose and curl up in a robe. It can happen just like that – so start with loving feeling Vulnerable, even when you don’t feel at you’re best – and I look forward to hearing how it happens for you.

Love, Rori