Woman on Fire (17 page)

People show you who they are all the time. Listen and check in with yourself. Is this what I want? Will this person meet my needs for this relationship, friendship, or partnership? Can I accept them now as they are?

It can be quite painful to realize how you have expressed strong emotions in ways that have hurt people you loved. As important, if not more so, is how you have hurt yourself. It's painful to dive down into your isolated hole and separate yourself from the true you that craves connection and authenticity.

An essential component in healing your harmful emotional patterns is forgiveness. You cannot continue to punish yourself for how you have behaved. You have, probably unknowingly, punished yourself and others with your unskilled emotional responses. It's time to end the cycle of punishment that keeps someone (mostly you) always having to pay for whatever it was that made you sad, angry, disconnected, and deprived.

Serious release work, letting go, and forgiveness of yourself and others are absolutely essential in order to move on and create a new way of expressing yourself emotionally and sexually. Guilt for what you've done and have not done will
not
free you from your anxiety. Shame about your behaviors will bind you even more to your pain. It is a process to shift your damaging emotional patterns. Today is a new day. You get to start fresh. You get to love yourself in a new way. You get to release the past and choose to be all of who you are
in the present. You get to choose emotional craft and skill over powerlessness.

It can be hard to do this alone. You may want the assistance of a healer, coach, therapist, or women's circle to work on your forgiveness process. However it happens, I suggest you ritualize it and do it fully and wholeheartedly so that you can clear out what holds you down and set yourself on a path to develop your future relationships consciously. If you decide to ignore this part or pretend you don't need it, it will pop up again. An acknowledgment process that allows you to see where you went off track and to understand how you contributed to unhealthy emotional situations, see the lessons in them, and move wisely forward will ultimately free you.

PERSONAL FORGIVENESS PROCESS

1. Write yourself a letter of forgiveness detailing the behaviors you are sorry for: the ways you have abandoned yourself, not been true to what you really wanted, beat yourself up, your emotional inauthenticity, your defensive patterns—whatever is getting in the way of you being who you really want to be. Say everything that needs to be said and how you want to do it differently in the future.
   
2. You can bury the letter or burn it. You can put the letter in an envelope and send it to yourself or have a friend send it in a month or three, or some other agreed-upon time. Do whatever feels right. And then let the letter and its contents go.
   
3. If you've really hurt someone else with your patterns, write them a letter in the same spirit. You can give it to them, read it to them, or choose to keep it to yourself, but at least write the letter. It's the first step in taking responsibility for the parts of you that need to change. This is emotional empowerment.
   

To know you do certain unhealthy things is one thing. The question is, will you take the next step and work to change them? Few people will choose to earnestly do this work and actively behave in new ways in their relationships. It requires humility, honesty, and a laying down of arms, which means being vulnerable.

Learning to see vulnerability as a strength is a momentous perspective shift that allows us to be far more powerful in our relationships. Brené Brown says it so beautifully: “Vulnerability is the birthplace of everything we hunger for.” Indeed, vulnerability is the cornerstone of both sexual confidence and deep intimacy. As we take the risk to be an open-hearted person, we can be confident because of our presence and honesty. That allows us to be more of our true selves and find the people who love and accept us for who we really are. That means we can develop deeper intimacies.

What feelings are your thoughts creating? We often feel justified in feelings of resentment, anger, vengeance, and getting even. As we justify it, our anger grows and can even turn into rage if we feed it enough. Then what? Keep feeling anger, resentment, or rage, which might seem powerful because we go into a place of superiority as we engage the story about why we are angry. But it's not powerful—it's disempowering, unconstructive, and if it's bad enough, even debilitating. If we're seeing red, it prevents us from functioning well. Reaction reinforces unproductive patterns.

In order to take emotional responsibility, make a conscious action that will allow you to work the feelings into a more productive state. You can choose different thoughts as you question the ones you are having. Oftentimes you've made up your mind in your own internal dialogue, so you leave yourself no room to expand your thoughts or be open to a totally different interpretation. As we discussed in Element 1, ask yourself, “Is this true?” You could take
empowering action with those you love or whomever is a part of the situation you are upset about. If you find yourself saying, “You make me so mad,” or “You made me jealous,” or other similar things, question it. It places you in a victim space where someone else is responsible for your feelings. No one “makes you feel” anything. Each of us is responsible for our own feelings. We can never be fully empowered until we accept that responsibility.

You cannot be fully empowered and be a victim at the same time. They are antithetical. We all have a victim self. That victim self believes that things happen to it that it cannot control, and it does not like to take responsibility for things. Your victim self will put responsibility on others and then complain or want pity when unwanted things happen. People create a victim state in many ways, and it prevents them from taking full responsibility for their life, emotions, and circumstances. It keeps them from overcoming adversity. Most people deny their victim self and have a hard time seeing it.

In order to become fully empowered, it's essential to stop feeding and placating your victim. It's also important not to feed the victim in other people because it really doesn't help them. You can be compassionate for things that are difficult without fueling the fire in the victim self with messages of “poor you” or by taking pity on a person. That never empowers them to change what is happening and to step up.

Examine how your victim self shows up emotionally, sexually, financially, and in other parts of your life. Where your victim is running the show, you've not stepped into your power, and there are things to unpack. Until you overcome your victim, you'll stay stuck.

I believe the most fundamental human developmental task is to learn to love oneself fully and deeply. We often have blind spots about how much we love or don't love ourselves. We show our self-love in how we treat ourselves.

Are you kind and compassionate to yourself?

Do you forgive yourself?

Do you lovingly correct your negative behaviors and work on doing it better the next time?

Do you beat yourself up or can you let things go?

Do you plague yourself with shame and guilty feelings or do you love yourself even when you are not at your best?

Do you have a sexual relationship with yourself?

Do you engage in healthy self-care practices?

How do you show up for
you
, especially when you feel vulnerable?

If you don't express self-love, you can't possibly express it to others. A great way to identify your own blind spots is to notice your complaints about how other people treat you. These complaints give you a clue. Take a look at those same emotional patterns in yourself. You are bound to see connections. Do you complain that other people aren't there for you and yet you put others first over and over again, failing to be there for yourself? Do you complain that others don't follow through on what they said they would do for or with you and yet you don't follow through on your own commitments? These things bother you because you are actually not doing them for yourself.

If you have codependent patterns, it's important to spend some time with you, focused on loving you and practicing your own self-care. Love is active—there are many actions you can take to show yourself how much you love yourself. Can you be with yourself? Can you be alone? Can you shut off the gadgets, television, and noise, and
just be with you and love you in whatever emotional space you are in? Can you be totally present with yourself? That is where true self-love spreads its wings. When you are totally happy with you, you show up as that self-fulfilled person in relationships, and it makes you an amazing person to be with.

How do we show up as emotionally powerful? Here are some ways to step it up.

Learn how to directly ask for what you need and desire without attachment to what the person will say. Practice asking for what you want and accepting “no” as an answer. If someone says “no” to you, a great response is one taught at Cuddle Party events: “Thank you for taking care of yourself.” Removing your defensive patterns from your communication will help you to be clear and clean in your communication by stating what you want without expectation, guilt-tripping, or other kinds of manipulation. If you are not used to getting your needs met and have felt deprived in your relationships, it may be hard to remember that someone is not actually trying to deprive you. Train yourself to believe they are taking care of themselves in saying what they can or cannot do. Trust that they want to be giving to you and that when they do give, it's genuine.

Are you being giving in your relationships emotionally? Do you expect things from others without giving of yourself? Do you show up emotionally for people? Do you listen attentively without being out
to lunch or checking your phone? Do you respond when they make requests? Do you ask what they need when they are having a hard time? Do you show up when you say you will? How do you show up? Being giving emotionally means being emotionally present and willing to go the little extra mile for the people you care about when they need support. It also includes being giving to yourself and to them by saying “no” when you need to. Your “no” honors yourself. You can still be giving by saying what things you
can
do, even if the thing they asked for is a “no” for now.

Dealing with rejection is part of life. Internalize the idea that someone's “no” indicates they are taking care of themselves, which is about
them
—not
you
. Stop seeing a “no” as a hurtful rejection and start seeing it as emotional honesty, which is far healthier than an empty or inauthentic “yes.” The sooner you get over your fear of someone saying “no” to you the sooner you'll start going for the things you most want in life. It's not about you. Say, “Thank you for taking care of yourself” and move on.

When a small feeling about something gets bigger, and still bigger, and turns into overwhelming emotion that overtakes you, your emotions start to run you and you can quickly spiral emotionally. You start to criticize everything. You think nothing is right. You become reactive. It's an unproductive spiral. It's dark and dank and you don't want to stay there. Learn your triggers and patterns and work earnestly on them so you can stop an emotional pattern that is a disservice to you and your relationships. Don't let yourself spiral down into an emotionally obsessive, unhealthy place that's difficult to emerge from.

People often have a lot of shame around their jealousy. Yet jealousy is a common emotion. Jealousy is a sign there is something you are insecure about, oftentimes nothing more. If you begin to feel jealous, you are either insecure in yourself or insecure in the relationship. Identify which one it is so you can address your jealousy appropriately.