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Section 9
A guide to practical knowledge on relationship through the eyes of a practitioner.
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Greetings once again, my friends.
This is Mark David, founder of the Institute
for the Psychology of Eating.
Let's talk about this interesting experience
that you might have had called relationship.
In fact, let's talk about relationship
in the context of conscious relationship.
Personally, I have been a fan of studying relationships, um, of all different kinds of human relationships. I think if one is going to understand the psychology of eating, if one is going to understand our relationship with food, if one is going to understand how to help heal, transform our eating challenges of all different kinds, we actually must, I'm saying, must have a good understanding of relationships. And you've heard me say this very simply, because as human beings, we are such intense, amazing creatures of relationship. And relationship is so important to us. It can be so powerful for us. It can take us to so many different places, good and bad, positive and negative, up and down. We can have our hearts just
burst wide open and we can have our hearts broken in relationship. And all of that can drive our relationship with food and our unwanted eating challenges and even our unwanted health challenges. So what I'm saying is the beauty of this work, the beauty of working with somebody's unwanted eating concerns is that it can take us into all kind of juicy and interesting places. And one of the things, one of the places it takes us to is relationship. The more we understand how to approach relationship from a conscious standpoint, meaning awake, aware, present wise from a higher place, a place where we are constantly growing in our awareness of what relationship actually is, the more we can approach relationship from a place of consciousness, I think the more power we have as individuals, the more happiness we can potentially have. And certainly as professionals, the more effective we can be. Okay, I, I've got so much to say about this and in this conversation I just want to give a heads up and say, uh, this is more of a survey conversation. A survey, meaning we're gonna just take a look at the territory from a big picture view. Um, this is such a deep topic, so deep in fact that I created a separate training for it that we deliver here. The conscious relationship training, that's an online training. So I want to begin to touch some of the key points so you can get a sense of what I mean by all this. Now we're talking about this topic because relationship really, it defines us
the way you and I do. Relationship profoundly impacts our life. It impacts our inner world. It impacts our outer success. It impacts our happiness. Whether our degree of suffering, it impacts our health, it impacts our heart. And yes, it impacts our soul and it impacts our relationship with food and body.
You wanna help people when it comes to their food and body concerns, understand relationship better. If you want to help yourself in this life, have a happier journey. Understand relationship better. There's a lot to learn about this topic. In fact, you and I will probably, if we choose, we can be learning about this topic from now until the last breath you take. So as much as I would like to say I am a, um, I'm a deep student of relationship, I would never say that I'm an expert on this topic, uh, whatsoever. I've met a few people in my life in the professional realm who, uh, I believe, um, you know, uh, touch into that expert realm more and more. Esther Perel is one of my favorite, uh, relationship gurus, experts. Um, but if you and I are good students of a topic, then that's a lot. So when it comes to relationship, our primary focus will be on primary relationships. Meaning your relationship, your client's relationship with a significant other, significant other means. Husband, wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, partner, that important life person, life partner, current life partner, significant other. So I think you know what I mean by that. So that's gonna be the focus. However, everything I say about relationship can be applied to relationships with you. Name it. Any others in your life that have some significance? Children, parents, close friends, best friends, your boss, key people in your life who you just happen to be around a lot. Um, any kind of loved ones, any kind of close relatives. I don't care if they're your cousins, your aunts, your uncles. So the same principles that we can apply to relationship with a significant other can very well be applied to all these other relationships. So I want you to hear through that filter if you can.
So to me, the goal of this conversation is to provide an overview of what I think are some compelling and useful relationship wisdoms and distinctions. Um, of course, I want you to come away with some practical knowledge, things that you could start using, tools that you can start using. There's gonna be some good tools here. Um, I believe I wish for you not only to see relationship through the eyes of a human being as we all are wonderful humans, but to also see relationship through the eyes of a practitioner. 'cause when you're with clients, I want you to be able to step into practitioner mode around relationships.
I also wish for us to make some more connections, further connections, or reinforce the connections we've already learned between eating psychology, a person's unwanted eating challenges, person's unwanted food challenges, body challenges, health challenges, and this thing called relationship.
I do wanna say this. When I say to you, I want you to see relationship through the eyes of a practitioner. What I mean is this. Have you ever had the experience where you or talking to your good friend, a best friend, somebody close with you that you care about? And chances are you've known humans in your life, people close with you who are having their relationship challenges and your friend is talking to you about their relationship challenges. And you, from your understanding, from your wisdom, you listen and you look and you give advice or you give thoughts or you give your opinions. Are you a relationship expert? Chances are maybe not. Um, or do you have massive amounts of training when it comes to working with relationship and helping counsel people? Uh, probably not, but some of us are. Um, however, you are a person who has been alive on planet earth for a certain amount of time and you have a certain amount of experience. And we, you and me, we're often very good at helping others solve their problems. So you can offer your friend, I bet you've given some great relationship advice in your lifetime to other people. I bet that you've given some great relationship advice to the people closest to you. Um, and chances are that doesn't mean you don't have your own relationship issues and challenges. So a prerequisite to be a good practitioner and help somebody with their relationship, a prerequisite is not having the perfect relationship.
Not even close. Um, honestly, a prerequisite might be that you've been through some challenges. You have challenges, you navigate challenges. You've been through some heartbreak, you've been through upset, you've been through lonely times. You've had some, some good moments, you've had some successes. Here you care. So once again, we're very good at helping others. We're not always good at helping ourselves. And that's why you and I do the work that we do because we can help others and then we can turn to our experts to help us. Okay? I think you get it. Relationship and eating psychology. Here's my assertion. So, so, so, so, so many of you, our eating challenges are directly connected to our relationship. Challenges in some way, shape, or form. I am not saying our eating challenges are caused by our relationship. Challenges, though, that can happen. I mean, there's some strong direct connections and I'm talking about eating challenges, weight, overeating, emotional eating, binge eating, body image concerns. Um, poor digestion, fatigue.
And these eating challenges, these food and body challenges are often the result. Um, they're the placeholder, they're the symbolic playing out of relationship issues. So some people are literally playing out their relationship issues through the vehicle of our relationship with food.
Okay? I don't know how to deal with my challenging marriage, my hurtful breakup, my deep desire to meet the right partner. And that hasn't been happening. And I'm in pain, I'm in suffering. I'm confusion. So it's easy to go into stress. It's easy to have poor digestion. It's easy to ovre, binge eat emotionally. You name it. It's easy for me to get all perfectionistic about my body and think, well, that's gonna make me have the perfect relationship. Everybody knows that all people who have their perfect body have the perfect relationship. You know, I'm being sarcastic. So again, our eating challenges are often the result of or directly connected to or they're placeholders for relationship issues. And when I say relationship issues, here's what I'm talking about. My friends in general. There's more. There's more. But the common relationship challenges as I have seen them in relationship to our eating concerns, common relationship challenges, loneliness, conflict of all kinds in relationship. I don't care what it is, fighting of all kinds hurt. I'm just bruised. I'm beat up by my relationship or the relationship I'm in, the relationship I had. Abuse in relationship of all different kinds. Past abuse, present abuse, fear of future abuse, lack of intimacy in a relationship, lack of connection in a relationship. Not being in a relationship and feeling this intense sense of lack of intimacy or connection. Being in relationship and feeling a lack of love. Not being in relationship and feeling a lack of love. Having a fear of intimacy, whether we're in relationship or not. That's a relationship challenge. 'cause relationship is intimate. Any kinda loss of love, my friends, that can lead to all kinds of unwanted food, body and health challenges. Any way that you and I have been abandoned at any point. It could have happened in your marriage 30 years ago. It could have happened when you were a kid feeling abandoned by a parent. Um, divorce is a relationship challenge that has all its, if you've been through it, you know how hard it's, a lot of us have unmet or unrealistic expectations in relationship. A lot of us have very realistic expectations and those don't get met. It's okay to have certain expectations, certain agreements in relationship. When those agreements and those realistic expectations aren't met, that's painful. When we have unrealistic expectations and those aren't met, that's painful too. 'cause we usually don't know. Our expectations are unrealistic. A lot of us has have suffered sexual wounding in our relationship or previous to it. And therefore we're enacting our sexual wounding in relationship. Meaning fear of sex, fear of intimacy, fear of pleasure, um, not knowing how to let go, relax, be present, explore in this realm, play in this realm. Um, move forward with a sense of empowerment in this realm. Um, not knowing how to communicate with another in this realm or being around someone who is far more wounded, uh, than we are in this realm. And we have to deal with their upset, their confusion. Um, you and I will have unfulfilled dreams and hopes around relationship, whether we're in one or not. Oftentimes we could have a loss of connection to self in relationship. We could have feelings of unworthiness or unlovability. And if you're single, there's oftentimes people have a ton of stuff around dating, uncertainty around it, fear around it. Some people are in relationship and they feel stuck. They don't know how to get out. They don't know how to make it better. They're stuck. A lot of people are in relationship and they have deep disappointment or they're not in relationship and they have deep disappointment about relationship in general or the one they just had or the many they've just had. Relationship challenges can mean recovering from a breakup so much more. So these are, these are some of the common ones. Did I touch on any that you've ever experienced? Chances are, yes. So let's make some connections between relationship and eating. Psychology relationship, my friends is a primary source of nourishment. You and I get fed you and I get massive amounts of nutrition from relationship. They feed us, they elevate us, they support us. They love us up. They keep us human. They teach us. Now when relationship becomes problematic for any reason, and there's all kinds of good reasons why relationships become problematic, it is easy, easy, easy, easy to turn to food, to symbolically work things out, okay. Can't get pleasure in this relationship, can't make things work in this relationship. And I can't make this relationship feel better, but I can definitely eat food that makes me feel better,
feel bad, eat food, feel better. That is so simple. So many people firmly believe that their problem with food is all about food. And oftentimes it's strongly connected to relationship
or it's directly about relationship.
That's the good news actually, my friends. Because a food issue is not necessarily a food issue.
So you can profoundly help many people because they've been going from practitioner to practitioner, medical expert to medical expert, to health coach, to dietician, to reading all the books to help solve their overreading or their binge eating or their emotional eating thinking they have some willpower issue with food and they're now, they're trying to diet and now they're trying to control their appetite. And meanwhile they're not making the connection that it's all about their relationship challenges. And that is exactly where the action is.
My friends, I've had many clients where after the first session or the second or the third session, it's all about relationship. I identify and my client gets it. This is where the action is. So then all of a sudden I'm becoming a relationship coach. That's fun, quite honestly. Um, to me, you know, and, and you have to navigate your comfort level.
But what I'm saying is the beauty of this work is you need to be, um, and it's best to be, and it's fun to be a quote unquote life coach. Meaning understand aspects of human existence. If I'm gonna work with somebody's food challenges, I need to know about relationship. I need to know about sexuality, I need to know about psychology. I need to understand the work world because people will have connections with their eating challenges and just the work world, career world, money world. So then I get to coach in these different areas. What fun, really? It's fun, it's interesting. It's human, it's real. You being a real person, helping real people with real challenges as opposed to trying to solve a problem where it isn't, oh, okay, we just need to give you kale and that'll make you stop overeating. No, none of it's about relationship. Okay, definitions. I'm gonna just make up some definitions here. Relationship hard, hard to define, but we can say in a sentence, relationship is the state of connection between two people who are choosing
in some way, shape, or form to be in an alliance.
So here I am talking about a more significant relationship. You know, if the relationship is between you and your child, the child isn't necessarily choosing to be in an alliance, but perhaps on a deeper level their soul chose that. Or you have somebody that you work with, that you work with closely at work. Um, you haven't necessarily chosen to be together, but you have to make that ongoing choice every time you're working together. Okay? So when it comes to significant other's, a state of connection, relationships, state of connection between two people choosing to be in an alliance conscious relationship. Let's add that one word, add that one term. The state of connection between two people who are choosing to be in a deeper alliance in a more awake, aware, growthful and transformational way. So that's my attempt to nail down a brief to the point definition between relationship and distinguish that from conscious relationship. Meaning if you look around you, a lot of people enter into relationships and you've done this perhaps in your earlier days, you didn't know what you were doing, you just wanted a girlfriend or a boyfriend, you wanted to have somebody. So we enter into relationship and we learn on the job, so to speak. And then as you get a little older and you get a little wiser and you get a little experience, you start to learn that, oh, there's certain ways that we can be in relationship that are a little bit more unconscious. Ie. We have not matured yet into deeper wisdom.
As we become more awake in this world, we realize that it can be very beneficial to have our relationships between our friends, our family, our loved ones, our children, and our significant other. Let's make those relationships conscious ones. Let's see if at least one of us, you can always choose to be a conscious person, even if the other person isn't, but is great. When two people can look at each other and say, yeah, let us do our best to be awake. Let us do our best to be aware and to grow and transform from all the challenges that we will inevitably face in relationship. You cannot be in successful relationship with yourself without going through ups and downs and challenges. So your relationship with yourself, your client's relationship with themself, your client is coming to see you because they're having trouble being in relationship with themself. They're having trouble being in relationship with food, how they feed themselves, how they nourish themselves. They're having trouble being really in relationship with their own mind and their own heart and their own emotions. So imagine what happens when you throw another person into the mix and then you have two people trying to be in relationship, who it's hard enough to be in relationship with your own self. So relationship ain't always easy,
even though we love the Hollywood endings of yes, they live happily ever after. And we love imagining that there's these perfect relationships and every relationship is work just about. Some are less work than others. Every significant relationship between you and a significant other, your client and a significant other involves work. Correct me if I'm wrong, if you meet the person that's never had to do work in a significant relationship, I wanna know what they're eating. I wanna know how they did it. Okay, my friends. Let's talk about some core principles. I'm gonna mention some, not all, some core principles of what conscious relationship might look like.
Core principle number one,
and I list this as number one because I think it's that important, is that relationship has a higher purpose relationship. Your relationship with a significant other, your relationship with any person who's significant in your life, parent child, best friend, loved one, it has a higher purpose beyond what you and I can imagine.
So in other words, it's not just two, two humans looking at each other and deciding, yes, let's do this, let's do that, let's get together, let's get married, let's share a house and do all these things together and buy tablecloths and dishes and appliances, uh, and things. Yeah, it's that. And relationship has a higher purpose. If you believe relationship has a higher purpose, then whenever a challenge comes up, there's a reason for that challenge. Whenever an upset comes up, there is a reason to move through that upset in a good way.
So in this sense, relationship with people, just like our relationship with food is here to teach us, is here to help us grow. It's help us here to learn stuff that we don't even know we're here to learn.
Let me ask you this question. Can you go back and look at your life and think of relationships that you've been in, or perhaps the one you're in now. So significant relationships where you entered it, having no idea of the important lessons you would be learning as a human being. And it doesn't mean those lessons were easy, but can you say that? Wow, I've grown as a person from being in relationship. I've learned a lot about life, I've learned about myself, and I'm actually a better human. Having gone through certain relationship challenges that I never knew I would have to face.
And you can look back on your relationship life in that way, then you can easily see that relationship has a higher purpose. Now for me, you know, it's nice to believe that the higher purpose is to make us feel good and to just give us all kinds of goodies. And you enter into a relationship and you live happily ever after. And everything is wonderful. And it's of course the perfect relationship that it seems is not the higher purpose of relationship to give you everything you and I want. A lot of people enter relationship in that way when they're young and immature and inexperienced, which is understandable. We enter into relationship thinking, this will make me happy. You don't enter into a relationship thinking, I'm doing this relationship because I wanna be deeply unhappy and wounded by my partner and spoken to in a bad way and mistreated or not understood or or feeling like they don't love me at some point. No, nobody goes into a relationship wanting it to end badly or wanting there to be problems or challenges or conflicts or upsets.
And yet that tends to happen for most human beings that I've ever known.
The good news is relationship has a higher purpose that goes beyond. He said, she said, I wanna do this. She wanted to do that. He wanted to do this. I'm right, you're wrong. It's not that. Yeah, we have been hurt in relationship and still relationship has a higher purpose. Sometimes we're just here to learn certain lessons in life that are heart and are difficult. Sometimes we learn beautiful lessons. Oftentimes relationships is a swirl of all of that. It's a swirl of the difficulties. It's a swirl of the beauty. It's everything.
If you and I are functioning from the place, that relationship has a higher purpose, then we're always listening for what relationship is trying to teach each person in that relationship.
How is relationship? How is this challenge asking my client to grow? How is it asking them to step into a higher place in themselves? How is it asking them to expand? How is it asking them to ship to change, to transform? Do they need to be more honest? Do they need to be more real? Do they need to persevere more? Do they need to leave? Do they need to hang in there? Do they need to learn how to communicate better? Do they need to learn how to let go more open up their heart more, see things from a spiritual perspective more there? There's, it's always gonna be different.
If you enter into a relationship knowing that it has a higher purpose,
then I believe it has a higher purpose.
It starts to reveal itself here and there. You see the learnings, you see the beautiful lessons, you see the gifts that it's bringing, the gifts that are the good gifts that feel good, and the gifts that don't quite feel so good. But looking back on it later, we can go, that was good.
So if you adopt this principle, when you enter into relationship, if you adopt this principle when even if you didn't adopt it, when you enter into relationship, oh, this has a higher purpose. Oh, we're here for a reason, what is that reason? It doesn't mean you have to stay together forever. Sometimes a purpose becomes yes, and we need to know when to end it.
Just so you know, I'm, I'm not a believer in all relationships. Must be worked through all difficulties must be worked through. I'm all for that. That's the first thing we do. How do we work through what we're going through? And there's always the question of endings and beginnings. Sometimes relationships have an ending
and that by itself can have a higher purpose. To be able to see that, to be able to get that, to be able to know that, and to be able to do our best, to end a relationship from a place of awareness and a place of consciousness as a, as opposed to from a place of beating each other up and attacking each other and harming each other in all different kinds of ways, which is what happens in a majority of divorces. Everybody goes to war with each other. Sometimes we just can't work it out.
But can we agree that okay, we tried, we did our best relationship always has a higher purpose and it's always teaching us.
Here's another principle.
We already talked about how it's here to help us grow and growth here. I wanna again remind you that growth isn't, growth can mean anything. Sometimes you and I have growing pains. Sometimes we grow through heartbreak, sometimes we grow through feeling alone and abandoned in relationship. We can grow through challenge. We can grow through repeating the same mistakes that we seem to be repeating from other relationships. Sometimes we grow through being loved and through loving another. Sometimes we grow through giving ourselves in a way that we haven't given ourselves before. Even if the other person isn't returning what you gave and how much you gave and the way that you gave, at the end of the day you can look in the mirror and say, I loved to the best of my ability. I gave to the best of my ability.
So we grow through the goodness of relationship, through the pleasures of it, through the sweet moments, the magical moments. We grow through the times when we feel loved and supported and noticed and seen and cared for. And we grow through the times when we are hurt or we can grow through that. That's, that's the hard growth. That's where the work oftentimes comes in for us. You know, sometimes relationship is asking us to grow and that growth feels painful, but in truth, it's so good that if we saw it as good, you know, a lot of us enter relationship and we do fear intimacy. We do fear closeness. We do fear connection. We actually fear having the very thing that we want, which is love. So a lot of people who say they want love and who say they're all about love, they're in relationship and they're not receiving the love that's being given to them. They're not receiving the intimacy that's coming their way. They're not. We just kind of shut down because of fear, because of old habit.
And for a lot of people, relationship is just asking them to open up, take out the winning ticket that's in their pocket. It's a lottery ticket. I've met a lot of people who are in good relationship and they're not appreciating it. They're not getting it, they're not capitalizing it. They're just focusing on what doesn't work. Yeah, there's things that aren't working. There's things that aren't perfect. But a lot of times our challenge is we haven't fully celebrated and focused on all the things that the relationship does bring us. So in that sense, relationship is like a journey and there's all different kinds of growth that's gonna happen. So every challenge that happens in a relationship therefore is an opportunity to grow.
Another core principle, I think, of conscious relationship number three is it is often best to focus on our true primary relationship, which is with self.
Now, I mean that in the context of your significant relationship, meaning your relationship with another, your marriage, you have a husband, a wife, a partner, you have a boyfriend, you have a girlfriend, you have your fiance, whatever it is. And yeah, you're focused on the relationship because that's what we do when we're in relationship. We hopefully put some focus on the relationship.
A lot of times, my friends, the best way to focus on the relationship with the other person is by focusing on the relationship we have with ourself.
So what I'm saying, and others have certainly said this, is that your true primary relationship is not with the other person. Your true primary relationship is with you. And as you and I become better at being in relationship with self, guess what makes it easier to be in relationship with other. Doesn't that make sense? I mean, really when we focus on being in relationship with self, it's easier to be in relationship with the other. What a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful thing. What a wonderful bonus that work on self can benefit our relationship. That is profound. My friends, that is wonderful, that is spectacular. That is good. That is important. I oftentimes, the work that needs to be done when it comes to my relationship challenge, we're fighting, we're arguing, we don't get along. She keeps doing this, he keeps doing that. I can't believe he says this. I can't believe she doesn't do that.
Sometimes the solution is found by going within. Do you ever had the experience where you want something in relationship, you want something in your relationship, you want it, you want it, you want it, and you've asked for it and you ain't getting it. It's not forthcoming. And quite frankly, you deserve it. You ought to get it from the other person. You've been a good partner, you're sweet, you're nice, you're wonderful, and you're wanting this thing that honestly is not a big deal, honey. Just like, how come I'm not getting this? And maybe that becomes a bit difficult and we start to stress out about it. We start to get upset about it. And then have you ever had the experience where that's happening? Then at some point you just let it go. You just let go. You kind of maybe you, you surrender. You just let it go and all of a sudden that person starts behaving in the way you were wishing they would behave in.
I'm just giving that as an example of sometimes we need to let go.
No time sometimes. Sometimes we need to say, here's what I want, here's what I'm not getting a complaint, raising my hand, help drowning. That's fair. Sometimes we need to let go. So we just did a little bit of work on self called learning how to let go, learning how to surrender.
There's a magic in that. There's a magic when we work on self in a relationship and you work hard on self work. On self is the hardest work to do, I believe. And that's why not everybody does it. That's Why we often run the other direction.
'cause it's not easy to work on ourself. It's more easy to point the finger.
That doesn't mean your partner's not misbehaving or doing things right. It doesn't mean they don't have all kinds of blind spots and places where they need to grow. A lot of times we just need to look at self. Where do I need to grow and expand here? Put the other person aside for a moment.
What is this relationship asking of me personally in terms of the shifts I need to make inside myself? So this is a key, by the way, for working with clients. So I don't do couples counseling, I do it with friends. I'll sit down with my friends or close relatives who ask me to, and I'll counsel a couple, but I don't do it professionally. But I do couples counseling professionally by working with my client. So everything that I'm telling you, you here, it's not about couples counseling, it's about coaching your client of how to be with their relationship. You can do tremendous relationship work just by working with one person in relationship, meaning your client. So my client comes to see me and I start to learn that their eating challenge is connected to a relationship challenge. I'm gonna help my client explore what can they do, how can they shift, how can they do work on self? And how can they do certain practicalities in their relationship that can help move things forward for them?
So when I talk about you being a relationship coach, that's what I mean. I'm not talking about you sitting down with two people in relationship. I'm talking about you sitting down with your client who's coming to see you for an eating challenge and you've made a connection that they have relationship challenges. So now you're gonna work with your client on how to better understand what's going on in their relationship and look at what does my client need to learn here? Where's life calling them? How is life asking them to grow? What kind of work can they do on self that will help them in their relationship? Make sense? My friends? Here's another principle number four, for many people we must focus on yet another primary relationship that we don't always acknowledge and that's our relationship with a higher power or a higher code. So yeah, you got your relationship with the other person, for sure you have your primary relationship is with self. And for those of you that believe in a god, a higher power, something more, then for a lot of people, their primary relationship is actually between them and a higher power between them and God, them and Jesus, whatever, however you name it, whatever you call it.
Sometimes that's what helps a client move through their eating challenge and their relationship challenge by, by remembering to focus on their relationship with a higher power. So what does a higher power mean for my client in her or his life? How do they relate to that? What do they believe? Are you bringing your beliefs to your relationship? What is your relationship to a higher power to God? What? What? Like, what is that like for you?
How is that relationship with a higher power teaching you? What does it ask of you? How does it speak to you?
For many people, this is the wonderful doorway for them to walk through to help them in their relationship with another human being. Their significant other is to remember that the end of the day people come and go, people will die. I've watched so many of my relatives, you know, my grandparents were married, both sets of grandparents were married to each other for 60 plus years, you know, and one died before the other, and all of a sudden, here they are. And who are you in relationship with? It's always, you're in relationship with yourself at the end of the day. And if you believe in a higher power or a higher code, that's what you're in relationship with.
What is that asking of me? What is that teaching me?
You know, let's take a turn here. I I, I, I mean this is a silly question. On one hand, why are relationships challenging?
But I'm gonna answer it very simply. First of all, it's hard enough to be in relationship with self. And when we're in relationship with another,
we're bringing a lot to the table. Relationship tends to expose our hidden inner world and the work we need to do on self and the work we need to do with others
relationship will expose it will bring out, it will unearth our hidden inner world and the work that we need to do on self and with others relationship will bring up, oftentimes your significant relationship will bring up everything that you don't want. A lot of times it brings up our shortcomings, it brings up their shortcomings, it brings up how we do love, how we do intimacy, how we do sexuality, how we do communication, how we do intimacy, how we do connection, how we do conflict, how we do differences of opinions, how we do differences in the way we understand things and communicate, okay, you want it this way, I want it that way. How do we work this out? That's not easy. So relationship exposes our hidden inner world and the work we need to do on self and the work we need to do to be in relationship with another in a successful way. You know, relationship is also a function of the world. So when you're in relationship with your significant other, you're not just in relationship with them. You are in relationship and you're living in the world and the world is very problematic. The world is difficult, my friends. And because the world is difficult, it's not easy to be a couple in this world. The world might not be supporting you as a couple. The world might not be supporting your union, your marriage, the world, your parents, your friends, your relatives. They might have their issues, some of them people might be trying to, you know, jump in bed with your partner. People might be trying to to pull you apart. Maybe people are supporting you. Um, you have to go off to work and you work and she works. And then we take care of the kids when we come home and we hardly have any time for each other because we need two incomes. And that's a function of the world. And the relationship can suffer because the world is problematic
and it doesn't always roll out the red carpet to have a loving, wonderful, perfect, easy, adorable relationship because the world is asking us to make money. The world is asking us to have our jobs. The world is asking, okay, one of us to work and one of us to take care of the kids or whatever, whatever it is, you are living in the world and the world presents its problems and your partner is dealing with their challenges of being a human being in the world. And then that's gonna be brought into the relationship. So everything you and your partner experience outside of the relationship in some way, shape or form, is being brought into the relationship. We can't help it. If you're closely connected to another human being, they're gonna feel you. They're gonna notice you, you're gonna notice them. We're gonna bring our challenges with the rest of the world. How we do life, what's going on at work, what's going on with your friendships, what's going on with your family, her family, his family, their family. It's all gonna end up in this little container that we call my relationship. Not so easy. Now, just like we have toxic nutritional beliefs or toxic dietary beliefs, there are also toxic relationship beliefs, my friends. And as you can imagine, a toxic relationship belief is an assumption that we hold about relationship that is outdated, that's self-limiting, that is ineffective and may very well even be harmful or toxic.
There are toxic relationship beliefs. I bet you know what they are. Let me name a few, see if you agree.
Here's a toxic relationship, belief relationship. My significant relationship with my significant other must and I mean must fulfill my needs and desires. Did you ever enter a relationship like that when you were younger? When maybe not so young? This relationship is here to make me feel better. How come you're not making me feel better? I have my needs, I have my desires. You are here to meet my needs and desires. By the way, that is what we operate from automatically. Archetypally, when we are in the, especially the younger prince and princess stages, so teens through late twenties,
we will often come into relationship as younger prince and princesses. That relationship is here to fulfill my needs and desires. It's here to make me feel good. Why? Why else would I do it? We've been dating and that feels good. I like dating. We like being together. We like how good we feel. We like the romance, we like the fun, we like the sexiness, we like the love, we like the passion. We like whatever it is that we like that we're doing for each other. We like it. And eventually what shows itself is that in actuality, so I'm gonna counter this toxic belief by saying relationship is not, is not here to fulfill all our needs and desires. It's probably here to fulfill some of them. It's probably here to fulfill a number of them, but it never fulfills all of them. There are certain needs and desires that will not be fulfilled in certain relationships and that is life. No relationship is perfect in that way. No one person can be all things to you. You cannot be all things to your significant other. So to hold the toxic belief with, wait a second, this relationship is here to fill my, fulfill all my needs and desires and you're not fulfilling them, therefore you have a problem. Miss or Mr. Partner, that's where things go south really fast.
That's when people get divorced oftentimes and understandably so. Relationship is not fulfilling our needs and desires. Quite the opposite is asking us to grow that. That wasn't a desire of mine. I didn't want to grow through challenge.
I didn't ask for that. I just asked for whatever it was I was asking for that I seem to be getting. So this is a toxic relationship belief that we need to grow out of many of us. And many people need to go through this relationship belief before they can transcend it or transform it in any way, shape, or form. Now, I'm not saying that relationship is not here to make us feel a little bit better. I'm not saying that. What I am saying is that yeah, you're gonna get needs and desires fulfilled and you are not going to get needs and desires fulfilled. It's both. It's a paradox. Here's another toxic relationship. Belief relationship is here to save me once again, this also tends to happen, tends to happen when we are more in the young prince and princess stage. It is a, especially this belief is ingrained in our princesses because in so many of the princess stories and motifs and archetypes, what do you have? You have a knight in shining armor, saving the princess from the evil, whoever.
So there are many of our young princesses looking to be saved. My life is difficult. This sucks. There's a crazy world. There's a lot of mean people, a lot of nutty stuff going on. Relationship will save me. I want my knight in shining armor.
Men will have this belief as well. And I have noticed that there are people into their forties and fifties and sixties who are still looking for a relationship to save them.
We have to first save ourselves. It is hard to save oneself. It is far more impossible to save another person saving another person. Let's just, let's just save us some time here. Doesn't work. You can do that temporarily in relationship. If a relationship is based on one person saving another person, it will eventually go south. It will eventually have its challenges and its difficulties that will expose themselves and unearth themselves. I believe this is a fact. Relationship is not here to save us. It's here to help us grow. If we think relationship is here to save me, then we are coming from a disempowered position and we are putting an amazing amount of intense and impossible responsibility on the other person that they cannot possibly fulfill.
Again, this is part and parcel, especially of the young princess mind more and more for the princes. And I see it still afflicting every age group.
If you think a relationship is going to rescue you,
disappointment will always be around the corner.
And that's also where a lot of divorces and breakups happen. Here's another one here. I can save my partner.
A lot of people do this. I see men do this. I see women do this. Honestly, I see it in equal proportions. Maybe the proportions are technically different between male and female. But I, I tend to see as many females as males do this, they come into a relationship and the way they do it is they believe I can save my partner.
Oh, he's like this. He's like that. This is going on, that's going on. I can fix him, I can save him, I can make him better.
Or the guy is thinking I can save her, I can rescue her. I can be the knight in shining armor. This is going to work. And so we actually do things that the other person indeed perceives and experiences as I'm being rescued, I'm being saved, you're saving me.
Eventually that ceases to work. It is not a healthy long-term strategy in relationship.
Rescuing another person is not a foundation of relationship. Eventually the person trying to save their partner will begin to get frustrated and they will begin to resent their partner. Especially if they believe I have saved you. I did fix you, I did look at all, hey, here's this long list. Look at everything I did for you. I saved you. Look at everything. Here's a list. It's your turn. You have to help me now you have to do stuff now. And all of a sudden you have all these expectations and the person on the other end was, wait a second, you saved me. That's what, that's your role. You're the save and I'm the save E how dare you ask me to do something for you. That's what the other person's thinking unconsciously. And then what happens is they're gonna start to resent you. Even though you've been doing all the saving and you've been doing so much work and you've done so much for the other person, they will actually resent you if you start to show up with your own intense needs and desires. 'cause they want you staying in that role. Don't ask me to work so hard.
One person saving another is a recipe for just a little bomb going off. At some point, one person will definitely end up resenting the other. If not both will resent each other. That is the logical conclusion of a relationship where one person says, I can save this person. And people do that. And some people are very good at it. They literally rescue their partner financially, personally, emotionally, whatever it is. And when we do that, when we save the other person, we are secretly expecting a return on our investment whether we believe that or not, whether we know that or not, whether we can admit that or not. We're expecting a, a return on our investment. Meanwhile, the other person is not expecting that you're going to ask for a payday. Why should they? They're the one that needs rescuing. I, here's another toxic relationship belief. You know this one. When I'm in the perfect relationship, then fill in the blank, then I'm gonna be happy, then I'm gonna be the real me. Then I'm gonna have my best life, then everything's gonna be wonderful. And I'll never be lonely again. I'll never be sad again. Life will just be great and I will ride off into the sunset. Everybody has all their beliefs, their expectations about what's gonna happen when they're in a perfect relationship, as if perfection is such a thing. And as soon as the relationship that we're in that we thought was the perfect relationship reveals itself to not be perfect, then our heads starts to get very upset. Wait a second, you're not being perfect. You're supposed to do this. The relationship is supposed to be that you're supposed to buy me this. You're supposed to say it like that. You're supposed to know what I want without me saying it. What do you mean I have to ask for it? What do you mean? You should just know that's such a common one. You should just know what I want. No, people aren't mind readers. You are not a mind. You're you're not. Nobody's that good. Um, so a lot of us are, are expecting perfection and relationship. Once again. This is a young princess slash prince archetypal mentality that is built into that archetype. Um, so it is forgivable for that reason. And we have to learn from that. That relationship will not be perfect, nor is our strategy of looking for the perfect relationship and finding the perfect relationship and thinking that it's all going to be happily ever after. That is not a good strategy. Doesn't work. It always ends up in, let's call it a very big juicy and challenging learning experience.
Okay, one more toxic relationship belief. It is a little more subtle. I need to be someone else to be loved and to be in relationship. In other words, who I am is not really good enough. So who do I need to be? Who do I need to be? So this person loves me. Ah, she likes this. She likes that I'm gonna be that person that I think they want. I'm gonna pretend to be this, this, this and this. Pretend to be interested in that, that, that and that. Or I'm gonna just try to be this person that they, I know that they want even though I'm not that person because then that person's gonna love me and then I'll be in relationship and then I'll have somebody because who I am is not good enough. Or that's just how you get a person. You need to be someone else. Well, if you, by the way, I I I hope you can see the logical absurdity here because if you be someone else in order to be loved and to be in relationships, so you've started to become a different person, you try to morph to what you think that person wants, then that person is actually in relationship with someone who you are actually not. So you've actually tricked them on a certain level. Uh, maybe you didn't do it from a bad place, you're just like, hey, uh, what do I gotta do to be loved? Oh, I know you need me to be this, I'll be that. Okay, great. But if it's not truly who we are, then that person has fallen in love or they've married or they've entered into relationship with a person that you are not, and you bet they're gonna resent you at some point and end. You're gonna probably start to resent them at some point because you've done all this hard work to be someone you're not and they're not appreciating it well, it's because you're not really that person and it's not really working. And eventually that all gets exposed.
And truly, truly, truly, at the end of the day, underneath all that is who I am is not good enough.
What I'm about is not lovable. I'm not matchable with anyone. There's not someone for me. I must be someone else. I have to pretend to be someone else, act like someone else, which could mean you go on this intense diet and exercise program, then I lose all this weight. Now I can date really.
Okay, so now you date, so now, so you're basically advertising to the world. I did all this intense work so I can look exactly how you want me to look, but that might not be your body, that's not your diet. That's not the way you really wanna move and exercise. So you haven't been honest.
And we often do that from a place of just wanting love.
And once again, believing who I am is not good enough. And the secret here is to be ourselves. Yeah, of course you want to grow. Being yourself doesn't mean being a jerk 24 7. Yeah, this is the real me, I'm a jerk. Well then nobody's gonna wanna be with you. Um, yeah, you can show your vulnerable side, you can show some of your dark side. You can show your emotional side for sure. Um, being who you really are doesn't mean having full permission to be unconscious and hurtful.
It's just who are you? You're imperfect. You have certain desires, you have certain needs, you have certain loves, you have certain dislikes. You have a certain way that you talk. You have a certain way that you be, you have certain things that you like to do, certain people you like to hang out with. You are who you are. Just be you. If somebody wants to be in a relationship with you just being you, then you have found the right person. If they, they don't want to be in relationship with you, then you cross them off the list.
Goodness gracious, my friends, I have coached so many clients, particularly women clients, particularly women clients who want a relationship and they are busy doing everything they can to be someone else. It is fascinating to me, like no, like stop, just be you and you can have 40 guys reject you. Fine. So cross each one of those 40 off your list. You don't need to marry a thousand guys. You don't need to be. All you need is one guy, just one who cares about you, for you, for who you are. Then you've kind of hit the jackpot. That's what you want, but you have to be you. Here's me. So there's a risk in there and it's a beautiful risk. Ah, there's one more toxic relationship belief I wanna mention. And that's when we go, ah, you know, and this is especially in the heterosexual universe where, uh, you know, women go, you know, all men are fill in the prejudice, fill in the blank. Where men go. All women are just fill in the insult, fill in the blank. A lot of people get stuck in this,
whether it's in the heterosexual universe, whether it's in the gay lesbian universe, God, all men are, all women are. And we make a statement about half of the population of the globe as if it applies to all of them. Yeah, there's certain commonalities a lot of men have. There's certain commonalities a lot of women have. But as soon as you say, well, all men are,
then trust me, you will find a man like that and you will be surrounded by men like that. 'cause that's what you're scanning for. When you say all women are, all women are, yeah, you're gonna, you're gonna be silently, psychically, unconsciously scanning for that. And that's what you're gonna find and that's what you're gonna be in relationship with. And you'll fulfill the toxic belief that you have
as opposed to being open and letting people show up as how they show up. Let people surprise you. All. Men are not what you think they are. All women are not what you think they are. We all different. There's good women, there's good men of every color, shape, size, variety, nationality, you name it. And they're indeed very different.
When we can let go of these global statements that we make,
all of a sudden it is easier to attract good people into our world.
Okay, let's take some time when it comes to relationship and talk a little bit about what I would like to call the mother father code. And what I wanna say about the mother father code is that this is an underlying code, a built in architecture to how our parents live inside us. So our parents live inside us in so many ways, whether they're alive or dead, they live inside of us. Essentially. That's the mother father code. Um, you know something, you have half your mother and half your father's DNA, so you have half of each of their code, their biological code. So this is not a farfetched notion. So right now where you are sitting, you have half of each of your parents' biological code. That's how you exist.
Well, it goes far beyond biology. No matter how different you think you are from your parents, there are certain things that are passed on. There's a built in and invisible architecture to how our parents live inside of us. Another way of saying this is that the relationship we have with each of our parents may may very well be the single biggest hidden driver that we bring into our romantic and significant partnerships.
So how you show up in with your significant other in your significant romantic relationship is fantastically driven by the relationship you've had with your parents.
This is not a bad thing, it simply is. So the more you can notice your relationship with your parents, the more you can notice their relationship with each other.
The more you can notice some of the nuances of how you see your parents, how you experience them, what you believe about them, your withholds about them,
what you know about their journey, the more you can understand that, the more you can have a lot of good wisdom and insight and sharpness in terms of what is happening in your current romantic relationship
or what can happen in a future romantic relationship. So this is a place where it's, it's my friends. Were playing here in a lot of ways this isn't super serious, even though it can get pretty intense. This is a way to play. This is a way to read the universe, read the world. Okay? I'm gonna understand my mother and father, given that they raised me, given that I have half of each of their DNA, there's a good chance that who they are impacts who I am. There's a good chance that their relationship, whatever their relationship was with each other, is going to impact me in my relationships. It happens.
So as we dive into the mother father code, here's a postulation, first postulation I would like to make to help us better understand what this can mean on a practical level. So the postulation about the mother and father code is this first one. We, you and I are the natural and necessary continuation of our parents unfinished business. I say that again. We, you and me. We are the natural and necessary continuation of our parents unfinished business. So in other words, we're looking at the generations that came before us. We are going on the assumption that life progresses and life builds upon itself. And I think it is reasonable to conclude that each generation indeed builds upon itself, builds upon the previous generation, stands on the shoulders of the previous generation, and we inherit the challenges of the generations before us. So the world that you and I have inherited from our parents and our grandparents, that's the world we live in. And we're finishing up some of the unfinished business of what came before us. Sometimes you come into this world and you didn't invent this world, but we have to clean up some of the pollution that came before us. We have to clean up some of the oh harm that came before us. Sometimes our ancestors hurt other people. Sometimes they made mistakes in terms of what they did to the environment, what they did to the land,
or continuing on from the generations previous to us. So in a similar vein, your parents had certain things that they were working on as individuals and as a couple. So what I'm suggesting is that in some way, shape, or form, the next generation is learning some of the lessons that the previous generation hadn't quite figured out or handled or mastered or wasn't quite ready for it.
So as an example, if your mother wasn't able to empower herself as a woman, given her environment where she grew up, the things going on around her and what she was capable of, within all of that, you as a woman might be tasked in your lifetime to step more into your power as a woman. You're finishing up, you're the continuation, the natural continuation, let's say in that sense of your mother's unfinished business. If your father was not able to be present for you, if he was absent in any way out of necessity or because he just was not as emotionally intelligent as many men are today because it's a different time, then you as a man might be the natural and necessary continuation of your father's journey when it comes to being more available and present to your family, to your children. And maybe you are tasked with becoming a more emotionally intelligent man than your dad was.
Here's another thing, if your parents couldn't quite learn how to communicate with each other and share honestly, that might be the very thing that you have to learn in your relationship. If your parents couldn't last in relationship because they didn't, because one or both did not have the fortitude, did not have the depth and did not have the inner awareness to not abandon and not run when things got difficult, that might be your challenge in this life to finish that unfinished process that the relationship wasn't able to do. So there are a gazillion different ways in how you are the natural and necessary continuation of your mother's unfinished business, your dad's unfinished business, or maybe a little bit of each, or maybe one more so than the other. I've seen it work every different way, but that's what I often ask myself. Where, where was my mother trying to get to in her life? Where was life calling her? How was she growing? Where was my father trying to get to? How was life calling him and asking him to grow?
Chances are you're gonna get some clues about where you need to grow and what life is asking of you.
Here's another postulation we tend to model after our parents' relationship consciously and unconsciously, meaning there's a part of you that looks at your parents' relationship and you might say, oh my God, I never wanna be like them. I don't wanna do this, this, this and that, that and that. So you're consciously modeling in a way to not be like them. Or you might look at your parents' relationship and they were so close and so connected and were so amazing and you go, God, I want a relationship just like that. I know people who say that. So you're consciously modeling after them. Now, hard to know because the unconscious is unconscious. But there's a part of us that will model after our parents' relationship even though we don't think we are. And even though we might proclaim to the world that I'm nothing like my mother, I'm nothing like my father. And have you ever said that? Have, have you ever said to yourself or to others, yeah, I'm definitely not like my mother, my father, whichever. And then at some point in life you notice you're being like your mother or your father. That's kind of what I'm saying. So not only do we unconsciously model after our parents in general, just as who they are, as a each one as a person, you'll especially tend to model after your same sex parents. So if you're a woman, you're gonna model more after your mother. If you're a man, you're gonna tend to model more after your father. But we'll take on both our parents' traits to a certain degree. We're gonna model after their relationship. There was a lot of unspoken words between our parents. We will unconsciously oftentimes model that and we'll have unspoken things in our relationship.
If there was a heated tension in your parents' relationship that never got resolved, we might find ourselves in a similar situation.
If your one of your parents left the other one and abandoned ship, huh, you might find yourself doing that or you might find it happening to you. How did that happen? And or you might find yourself really worried about it, even if it doesn't happen to you. So you're being driven by the reality of someone always leaves the other one and what's left is pain and suffering. So you know you're, you know, you don't want that. We can easily live in response and in reaction to it.
So it's interesting to notice what it is about your parents' relationship. You like what it is about your parents' relationship you didn't like. How is your current relationship in any way, shape or form like your parents' relationship?
Are there any similarities whatsoever? Because sometimes it's just the one or two similarities that we need to point out that are useful for us. You could be very different from your mother and father and their relationship in so many ways, but you'll be similar in one or two. And those one or two ways are very key for you in your life.
Here's another postulation. We tend to enter in relation, enter into relationship unknowingly and automatically relating to our partner as if they are our opposite sex parent. So this is for heterosexual relationships because that is what I know and understand best.
We enter into relationship unknowingly and automatically relating to our partner as if they are our opposite sex parents. So if you're a woman, you are gonna relate to your partner as if it's your dad in certain ways, certain ways. If you're a man, you're going to relate to your partner as if she's your mother in certain ways. As an example, if you're the kind of man, let's say, who never fully individuated from his mother, you might have been a mama's boy and maybe your dad wasn't around a lot and your mother did a lot of taking care of you and maybe you were raised a lot by your mother and you've grown accustomed to having a certain level of mothering from women. And oftentimes for a man, if he's being over mothered by a woman, by his mother or he doesn't individuate from her enough when he becomes an adult, when he's looking for a female partner, he's looking for someone like his mother who's going to take care of him, who's going to mother him. Have you ever heard a woman complain about her husband saying, or her boyfriend or partner? I feel like I'm his mother. I have to mother him.
Well, chances are she's correct. He's wanting a mother, he's needing that. He doesn't even know it. He's relating to his wife as if his wife is his mother. So he's kind of wanting really more of a mother than a wife.
Similarly, and these are just examples, if you are a woman who your dad was a very good father figure and he really knew how to take care of you and you were daddy's little girl and he absolutely adored you,
you're gonna look for a man who takes care of you and adores you.
You want that father energy in your partner. Now, if your father was aloof and disconnected and couldn't track you emotionally and was not emotionally available, you might unknowingly find yourself with a man who's kind of that, that same guy. All of a sudden you realize I'm in a relationship with a guy who I don't feel like I have a good emotional connection to.
So this is often, not always, this is not every single person every single time, but it's pretty consistent. You can see this a significant amount of times where we are relating to our partner as if they are our opposite sex parent.
So it's all about getting conscious, it's all about waking up. It's all about seeing ourselves and seeing our behavior, understanding where we came from and eventually relating to our partner for who they actually are on their terms. Meaning who are you? Yeah, we have certain needs, we have certain desires. It's useful for those needs and desires to be made clear and conscious.
And notice the places where we our needs become
goes into the territory called neediness.
Here's another postulation about the mother, father code. We're still living in our parents' house and not fully available to be a true adult partner. As long as we're unresolved with our parents, we're angry at them, resentful about them, unforgiving of our parents. And the bulk of our relationship with our parents is, I disapprove of you, you screwed up. And the bulk of the relationship, more than 51% of our energy in that relationship is unresolved anger, resentment, upset. And we're still wanting our parents, even though we are adults now, we're still wanting our parents to be good parents even though we don't live in our house anymore.
So technically, when you haven't forgiven your parents, when we're unresolved with them, meaning we still want them to show up in a certain way, even though they're not that person, you're technically still living in their house energetically, emotionally, vibrationally, metaphorically. In other words, we are not yet full adult. If you're a full adult, you don't need your parents to be acting in a particular way. They had their run, they had their experience being a parent. They did their best, their best might not have been good enough or might not have been good enough for you. It might have sucked, it might have been great, who os But it almost doesn't matter. You might have a thousand reasonable, truly reasonable complaints and real complaints. And at some point, until we can move beyond that and not hold our parents energetically hostage, were technically living in their house. I've met many people in their forties, fifties and sixties, certainly in their thirties as well, who still want their parents to be someone. Their parents are still alive and they still, they still b***h and moan and groan about their parents not being this, not being that. And it's true their parents are not being this and not being that. But it's done. You're not the child who lives in their house anymore.
So from this place, you are not fully available for your partner because a part of you is still living in your parents' house
at a client once who had a very intense, um, on and off challenge with binge eating. And very smart lady. She was actually a therapist and very well respected therapist. And you know, I'd been in therapy for years and couldn't figure this out. So she ends up working with me, and I'm gonna tell you after about five months of work or so, here's, here's kind of how, how we unwrapped that. Here's what I discovered. So when she was growing up, her mother was a very strong, powerful mother figure. Her mother ruled the house. Her mom and dad are still married to this day. My client, when I first saw her, was in her mid forties. Um, she has a decent relationship with both her parents. She loves them both very much. But her mother was the powerful one. Her mother was, um, just very beautiful, very well educated, and um, just stood out in a crowd. The dad was more quiet, more humble, more humble looking and just not as powerful of a person. And interestingly enough, the mother would always encourage her daughter, my client, to understand that men are, you have to take care of yourself even in marriage and relationship, that men can't take care of you. They're not capable of that. And you have to create your own life. And you have to make sure that you go for what you want and don't let anything about a man hold you back. He can't truly, at the end of the day, give you what he needs. So this is what she was taught from a young age because that was her mother's experience.
Now what's interesting is
what I started noticing was that my client's binge eating, um, would act out, would come up whenever certain challenges were happening in her relationship, her marriage, she spoke very highly of her marriage and her husband actually had a lot of complaints and the husband was not happy in the marriage. And his actually didn't have many complaints. He had a couple of key complaints. And the key complaint was that he felt like his wife just was his housemate and his roommate and not his partner. And that they weren't in alignment together. That he feels like he's in a partnership and he feels like she's not in a partnership. She's just this separate person who lives in a house who has her own life and they both care about each other. They both respect each other. And one day she just realized as we were breaking this down, an ongoing conversation, she realized that she aligned with her mother, not just against her dad in a strange way, but against men and against her husband. And the mother was always critiquing my client's husband and not in a nice way. And eventually he pointed this out to my client and said, Hey, I'm not this terrible guy. And she eventually saw, oh my God, it's true. She was still being a girl living in her mother's house
and she was unresolved in a strange way with her mother. She never individuated from her mother in a lot of ways. She was still being her mother's daughter. And she realized that unless she would align with her mother, her mother would pull away her love.
And she was always hungry for her mother's love. The dad never pulled away his love, but the mother would. So she realized she was keeping her husband at arms length in so many ways, emotionally, physically, um, simply because she had this longstanding belief that men are whatever, not good enough.
As we started unwinding that and as she started talking to her husband about it and acknowledging what she was learning, gradually the binge eating started to subside. Isn't that interesting? That was the key to unlocking it. She was still living in her mother's house.
Okay, there's all kinds of interesting places to go from there, but that's one example I came to my mind. So the way through, the more we see how we're driven by our parents' dynamics, the more facility we have to choose how we show up. And the more you and I forgive and make peace with our parents for whatever reason, whatever bad things they did, the more we can move forward, the more we can have a healthy relationship with the person we're in relationship with.
The more we see our parents as just people, they're just people. I know they're your parents, but they were just a guy and a girl trying to figure stuff out. The more we can see them as just people, the better they were. Two people, guy and a girl. Maybe they were young when they had you, they were just, they didn't know what they were doing. Just like you didn't know what you were doing. At some point, the more we individuate, the more we step into our conscious adulthood and empowerment. Individuate means you become the person you are not the person who your parents want you to be or who you think your parents want you to be or who you think you need to be. So your parents love you.
Individuation means you are not depending on your parents anymore to regulate your emotions. Well, my mother never did this and she never did that. And I'm still angry at my dad for this. And if you are 40 or 50 or 60 and saying that you haven't individuated, you're depending on them to regulate your emotional metabolism, you're out of their house. You don't live with them anymore, they're off duty.
Yeah, your complaint might be legitimate, but at some point we gotta let it go because that's gonna help us step into adulthood and empowerment. And when we step into adulthood and empowerment, we're increasing our personal power. And as you know, personal power equals metabolic power. Stepping into our personal power gives us the best opportunity to reach our metabolic potential. Stepping into our personal power gives us the best opportunity to heal our unwanted eating challenges.
You know, when it comes to the inner work of relationship, let's switch gears for a second here. The paradox of relationship is that it's about what happens between two people, but at the same time, it all starts with inside of us, within our own skin, with our own heart and soul. So I said this earlier, oftentimes the best thing you can do, I can do your client can do for their relationship is to do work on self.
Oftentimes, not sometimes. Oftentimes the best thing a person can do for the actual relationship, for the challenges, the problems, the messiness, the stuckness in the relationship is to do work on self plain and simple, my friends.
So in order for us to be on board with that, we have to trust that inner work is good. A lot of people don't get that inner work is good. We have to trust the invisibles. We have to trust the hidden wisdom within our own soul that's guiding us into our potential. Inner work on self
Precedes comes before outer victory in relationship. So you wanna have victory in your relationship. You wanna have a good relationship doing inner work on self that comes first. The more inner inner work you can do on self, the more the relationship can reflect the benefit of that work.
Does it always happen like that? No. 'cause you might be in a relationship where the other person is not on board, doesn't wanna do inner work and is not a good consciousness match for you. And in that case it's frustrating.
But what I'm saying is inner work is necessary work, particularly as it when it comes to relationship with another human being.
Five good places to do some work on self. My friends, number one being right. A lot of us in relationship, we just wanna be right. You get into an argument, I'm right, you get into a conflict, I'm right, she's wrong.
Oftentimes one partner or both partner hold a very strong position of I'm right. There's not a dialogue, there's not a gray zone, there's not an understanding that we are different people and we both can be actually right. And we both see something from a different perspective and we experience it in a different way. When one partner is constantly holding the position that I'm right, things don't always work out so well when both partners are holding that position, there's just the fighting is gonna be continuous 'cause everybody wants to be right. And we would almost rather be right than work things out.
So if you're the kind of person or your client is the kind of person that, that's their posture and relationship, they've gotta work on that.
Avoiding pain. A lot of us are in pain when it comes to our relationship, whatever the pain is. Emotional disconnection, lack of intimacy, lack of romance, lack of love, lack of good communication. And we're in pain. But instead of expressing it, raising our hand, getting any kind of help, we avoid it.
If one is in pain in a relationship, it is important to speak that at least to yourself, number one. And then number two to your coach, mentor, guide, therapist, practitioner who will listen to you and eventually to your partner and not necessarily in that order.
It's whatever it takes. If the relationship is strong enough where a person can say, Hey, I'm in pain here. I'm suffering, something's not working for me. If we constantly avoid pain rather than be real, we will be in suffering. So closely related to that is we often withhold honest communication and relationship because we don't wanna rock the boat. Even though there is pain and suffering and upset and disconnection, oftentimes we don't wanna say what's really going on for us because we're afraid of the repercussions.
What other places in relationship where you need to be more honest in where honesty and truthful communication seems to be necessary? Or it's being called for honest communication. Doesn't mean easy communication, but sometimes it is what the relationship is truly asking for.
A lot of people go into victim consciousness. She's doing this to me, he's doing that to me. I'm the good guy, he's the bad guy. I'm in this relationship. I'm the one that's getting the wrong end of the deal. Yeah, it might actually be true.
When we step into victim consciousness though, we lose our power, we lose energy, we actually don't function effectively and we just live being a victim. Instead of, okay, what do I do? What do I say? How do I speak? How do I act? How do I conduct myself so I can move forward so the relationship can move forward or it can end
and my client is acting victim me in their relationship. I know that is a sign that I have to help my client somehow slowly begin to empower herself himself to realize you're not a victim here. That you can find your power somehow.
Another good place to work on self in relationship is to begin to elevate how we do conflict and fighting. Honestly, letting go of always needing to be right and win the conflict and win the fight. That is key. But it is just our willingness. So we're gonna talk about conflict and fighting in a moment. Our willingness to transform how we do conflict and fighting is oftentimes a key that helps a relationship go to the next positive and powerful and good level.
So three keys to successful inner work is choose to see your relationship as a path of growth. The relationship is not here to actually make you happy day in and day out. It's here to help you grow. Hopefully the majority of that growth feels fun and feels good and feels right and feels and and just has a flow to it. And some of that growth is gonna be challenging because growth can be challenging. But choose relationship as a path of growth. Like choose that. Another successful piece of inner work to do in relationship is always have the ability to put yourself in your partner shoes. Really, really, really, really, really, really. I always have my clients do this. You know, I don't care how bad their partner is showing up, you have to be able to put yourself in the other person's shoes. Why would they behave like that? Why would they say that? What would make your partner get so angry? What would make your partner lash out like that? What would make your partner just close down and be all shut off? Like what, what is it about her, him, how her mind works, how his brain works, how she was raised, what she's been through in life. Put yourself in their shoes. What she has to endure in this situation, in that situation at work with her family. To be able to put ourselves in the other person's shoes means we can understand their experience.
Here is a a final key that I wanna mention to successful inner work that a partner can do in relationship. And this is a big one, my friends. If you've ever said to yourself, I'm kind of the more aware, conscious, or mature person in this relationship, if you've ever said that to yourself, then here's the rule for you and for anyone else, the more mature and conscious person must lead the way.
If you're a parent and you have a 7-year-old and they start to act like a 7-year-old and moan and groan like a 7-year-old, are you gonna act like a 7-year-old with them in return? Is that how you're gonna manage your 7-year-old by you becoming a 7-year-old? No, that would look silly when your 7-year-old is being a 7-year-old. You be a parent, you be a 40-year-old or whatever you are in any relationship, the more mature and conscious person must lead the way. If you identify yourself, if my client identifies herself himself as the more mature and conscious person, then you have a responsibility. That person has a responsibility, like it or not, is they have to lead the way. Because you're the more conscious and mature one. You're the one that's gonna have to come up with the mature perceptions and the good ideas. You're the one that's gonna have to say, Hey, time out. I think we need some help here. You are the one that's going to have to not attack and not take the low road. Just because your partner takes the low road doesn't mean you should take the low road. If you take the low road because your partner takes the low road, what does that mean? It means you're letting the other person regulate your consciousness
and you are choosing to take a low road. Anytime you choose to take a low road, consider that a bad choice. The low road is the low road. It will not advance you in life in any way, shape or form. The high road will high road. It tends to be more difficult, especially if your partner is the one who consistently takes the low road.
So the more mature and conscious person must lead the way, must stay in consciousness as best as possible. I know it's not always easy, I get it. But that person must choose to lead the way, otherwise they're not the more mature conscious one. And their perception about that is wrong.
Believe it or not, a relationship can prosper when the more mature and conscious person decides, oh, okay, I get it. I need to be more of a leader when it comes to maturity and consciousness and taking the high road.
Okay, let's talk about conflict fighting and arguing. You know, I think it's good to have a deeper understanding here. For a lot of people, conflict is inherently stressful. People don't like to do conflict. Most people, and most people have never learned how to fight and argue in a good way. I didn't. Or we avoid arguing altogether and keep things bottled up. Or you, we tend to argue and fight as much as we want, but there's never a good result. Therefore, we're not arguing and fighting in a good way. So the bottom line that I wanna suggest here is we need, I'm, I'm using arguing, fighting in conflict. I'm, I'm saying all those words as if they are the same. So we need some new ideas here. We need a new view.
So this information comes through just relationship work, you know, from different experts, conflict work from different experts. You know, the common misconceptions about conflict is that conflict is inherently bad. Oh my God, we're in conflict. This is bad. Oh my God, we're in conflict. We need to avoid conflict. 'cause if you avoid it, then you won't have it. And if I'm in a relationship and I have conflict, that means there's something wrong with the relationship or it means there's something wrong with the other person. 'cause I'm right, obviously, and they're wrong. And, and indeed in any conflict somebody's gotta be right and somebody's gotta be wrong. And it just so happens I'm always the right person and that guy's always the wrong one.
There are some people in relationship who truly always need to be right. They never apologize. They never admit that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was wrong.
That's a tough relationship to be in. It is. That's hard.
So when it comes to fighting conflict, arguing, again, most people don't really know how to fight and most people don't always know why they're fighting. Like all of a sudden, sudden you're in a fight with your partner in an argument. Like a lot of people don't actually even know how it got there so quick. So I wanna suggest that there's some good rules of engagement for a good fight, so to speak. Fighting in a way that helps the relationship instead of hurting it.
So it's usually the underlying issues that we need to look at, not the surface things that we're generally fighting about. Usually what a couple is fighting about is something on the surface, which makes sense, but it's really underlying issues that are more important.
And for this reason, fighting by itself isn't the real reason why a lot of couples break up. Yeah, people who fight, they fight, they fight and they finally break up. But it's the underlying issues that are driving the fighting, which is why they're breaking up, not the fighting per se. So here's a reframe, and you know, there's not enough time to go into this deeply. I go into this more deeply in our conscious relationship training, but the essential reframe for fighting is yes, fight, but fight for the relationship, not against it, and not against the other person. So when you fight, think to yourself, I'm fighting for the relationship. When you fight, think to yourself, I'm fighting for consciousness. I'm fighting for a better understanding. So you're gonna let go of fighting to win or fighting to prove the other person's a jerk and to prove them wrong. And in the back of your mind somewhere, think every fight is a fight for the relationship. Every argument is an argument for consciousness, for better understanding between these two people, me and her. Me and him. Yeah, of course, initially when I fight, I'm trying to win, but I wanna quickly be able to let go of that fight so I can come out on top and be the winner and prove the other person wrong. And when we do that, the fighting changes a little bit because as a part of us that's asking, okay, what is actually going on here?
You are fighting for better understanding of each other.
You are fighting for better communication. You are fighting for a breakthrough. You are fighting for a way that each of you can feel heard. You are fighting for a way that you feel understood and your partner feels understood. You are fighting such that the fight ends up bettering their relationship,
not harming it from that place. If you are fighting with a sense of, for the relationship, I just wanna say, you will be less prone to use words to harm the other person. If you're fighting to win or fighting to prove the other person wrong, you will use words to harm. You will use actions to harm somebody that will harm the relationship. That is a bad fight, that is a dumb fight. That is a fight that doesn't further the action. It puts a nail in the coffin of their relationship experience.
Stop going for the jugular. Stop using words and actions to harm the other person.
Ask questions in the fight. Why would you do that? What were you thinking at the time? If you're fighting for the relationship, sometimes it is good to have a time out in a fight. If the words are too heated, if the energy is too heated, a fight for the relationship takes sometimes a time out. Hey, you're activated, I'm activated, you're upset, I'm upset. Can we just go to our separate corners for like the next 20 or 30 minutes, we'll come back when we're more cooled down.
Lots more to say, but I'm gonna leave it at that for now. And let's close out our conversation by talking a little bit about soul contracts. And I really wanna pose the question, are there soul contracts? I, I love this concept and I play with it quite a bit. Um, here's the assumption. The assumption here is that there may be relationships, soul contracts, there may be relationships that have a special destiny to them that are a little bit more preordained, perhaps encoded in our soul's journey and life conspires to bring us together. Uh, the implication being is that there's a greater wisdom driving our lives. Have you read a relationship like that? It just felt like a little bit faded.
F-A-T-E-D the fates kind of brought you together, destiny brought you together. Uh, soul contracts, by the way I'm talking any kind of relationship. It could be with a child, a parent, a cousin, a friend, a spouse, a pet, somebody you know, for a, a day, a week, a month or a lifetime.
You had people come into your life even for a short amount of time. And it was so abundantly clear like, wow, this was so meant to happen.
You brought that person or that person, person brought you, or you brought each other a special gift, a special insight, an opening somehow that shifted you or shifted them.
You know, a soul contract can mean, let's say with your partner, we're here to learn some difficult lessons with our partners, with our partner. And it's a relationship that has a lot of challenge and pain. So that could be a sole contract. Some relationships are contracted to have a lot of challenge because sometimes we need a lot of challenge to learn. Some of us have a lot of lessons to learn in relationship. Sometimes a soul contract can mean we're here to receive a lot of goodies from each other. And the relationship has a tone of very, it's positive, it's expansive, it's generative. Have you ever had a relationship like that? No matter how brief with a significant other, it just felt like it was kind of healing or it could be a swirl of both of these, which it usually is.
You got a lot of good things and a lot of challenging things. A soul contract could be a short term one, it could be a long term one, it could be an uneven one. Meaning you might be serving that person a little more than they serve you. Or vice versa, dear soul contract. Like, you know, I've met some parents who are, or you know, they're like expecting your kids to pay them back somehow. I did all this for you, I did all that for you and now you gotta do this for me. You know? Yeah. It's, it's, it's wonderful for our children to follow in the love and take care of the ones that came before them and birthed them. But when there's this intense expectation, um, the reality is the contract between a parent and a child. Oftentimes it's the parent giving more, at least initially,
parents have to be down with that. We have to agree to that. Especially, you know, in the first, at least couple of decades. It's, it's uneven. You can't expect your kids to be giving you what you give to them for goodness sake. It's a whole different role. That whole contract doesn't mean we're stuck by the way. It means we're given a role to play and a destiny to fulfill. It's not meant to stick us. You know, some possible elements of a soul contract might mean you feel a clear and overriding sense that you're somehow bound to this person by more than chance, oh, we just had this chance meeting. Well, maybe it's more than chance you have an invisible and inex unexplainable obligation feeling to help this person or serve them or love them in a specific way. Have you ever met someone like that? You just feel like you're supposed to be helping them or serving them or loving them,
you know, and the other, and the other person might have similar feelings or not.
A lot of times you're in a relationship and everybody thinks you're crazy for being with that person or you're ill-informed. Oftentimes they're right. And oftentimes we're in a soul contract with that person. And it is a bit crazy.
Some people have described a feeling of feeling like they're being assigned to somebody. And soul contracts are never quite what we think. It doesn't mean they're all glorious and wonderful. It just means there's a sense of a higher power guiding things. And there's more to it than chance.
So, you know, pick a person if you feel like playing with this, that you believe you may have a soul contract with. Uh, why do you feel this way? What are you both here to experience together to learn from each other? How are you here to serve this person? How are they here to serve you?
Some powerful questions, especially when you can play with these questions with each other.
Now, if you, if you believe in such a concept as so contracts or considering it, the key ingredient here, oddly enough, is kind of respect, like respecting the full package of their relationship because it's gonna come with ups and downs. Respect the higher power that brought you together. Respect the mystery of it all. Respect your own inner knowing,
respect life on its own terms. Relationship is not here to make us happy. Period. Relationship is a great teacher.
Some final thoughts, my friends, I think you and I are here to be adept at putting our own relationship biases aside. When you're working with a client, whatever you believe, whatever you think you should believe, put your biases aside. And I believe with my client, I'm always looking to be a champion and a cheerleader for relationship for my client, whether they're in one or not. My first move is how can I be a champion and a cheerleader for their relationship that they're in now or for the one that they wish to have?
So I'm not gonna go, oh yeah, men's suck, women's suck, married sucks, suck sucks. This is so bad. Uh, no, no, be a champion. Be a cheerleader for relationship. That's a great way we can support each other because relationships can be challenging enough and they can be powerful.
And I am not just listening to my client about her relationship, his relationship, I'm also trying to listen to the relationship itself. Because the relationship has its own higher wisdom to it. There's person A in relationship and there's person B in relationship. And there's the relationship itself. It's a third entity. It's like a triangle relationship has its own wisdom, has its own agenda that goes far beyond each individual person. So when I'm listening to my client talk about her relationship, I'm trying to listen to the relationship. What is the relationship asking of my client? What is the relationship asking of my client and my client's partner? What is it wanting? What is it needing? What kind of nourishment does it need? What kind of shift or change or insight does it need?
So my friends, those are just a few thoughts about relationship of conscious relationship. And I want to close by saying that there's a secret sauce to success with clients and relationship. And some of the secret sauce, I think is this. You have to trust the wisdom of their journey.
I don't care how, you know, people have some rough stories about relationship. You do, I do. We all do. We have to trust, ultimately the wisdom of of my client's journey with relationship wherever they're at. We have to let go of any need for happy endings.
When I'm coaching my client around relationship, I'm not looking for a happy ending. Of course I want my client to be happy, but to try to force a happy ending is not necessarily listening to the relationship. Sometimes relationships don't want a happy ending. It's not what they're about.
I look to uphold that whatever challenge my client is facing in relationship, that challenge has a higher purpose for them. And that we have to do some work to get in alignment with what that purpose is. What they're here to learn from that,
and I choose to be unwavering in this commitment to the commitment is to use our relationship challenges as a vehicle for growth and transformation. Hard as that is at the end of the day, if you cannot learn from it and grow from it and transform from it, then it's very difficult.
When we do learn and grow and transform from our relationship challenges, then there's a magic that happens for ourself for sure, and oftentimes for the relationship itself.
Thanks for tuning in my friends. Thanks for being on this journey with me in the big picture and in this particular conversation. Next, we're gonna talk about you as a teacher, you as a leader, you as a presenter. I'll see you on the other side.
Personally, I have been a fan of studying relationships, um, of all different kinds of human relationships. I think if one is going to understand the psychology of eating, if one is going to understand our relationship with food, if one is going to understand how to help heal, transform our eating challenges of all different kinds, we actually must, I'm saying, must have a good understanding of relationships. And you've heard me say this very simply, because as human beings, we are such intense, amazing creatures of relationship. And relationship is so important to us. It can be so powerful for us. It can take us to so many different places, good and bad, positive and negative, up and down. We can have our hearts just
burst wide open and we can have our hearts broken in relationship. And all of that can drive our relationship with food and our unwanted eating challenges and even our unwanted health challenges. So what I'm saying is the beauty of this work, the beauty of working with somebody's unwanted eating concerns is that it can take us into all kind of juicy and interesting places. And one of the things, one of the places it takes us to is relationship. The more we understand how to approach relationship from a conscious standpoint, meaning awake, aware, present wise from a higher place, a place where we are constantly growing in our awareness of what relationship actually is, the more we can approach relationship from a place of consciousness, I think the more power we have as individuals, the more happiness we can potentially have. And certainly as professionals, the more effective we can be. Okay, I, I've got so much to say about this and in this conversation I just want to give a heads up and say, uh, this is more of a survey conversation. A survey, meaning we're gonna just take a look at the territory from a big picture view. Um, this is such a deep topic, so deep in fact that I created a separate training for it that we deliver here. The conscious relationship training, that's an online training. So I want to begin to touch some of the key points so you can get a sense of what I mean by all this. Now we're talking about this topic because relationship really, it defines us
the way you and I do. Relationship profoundly impacts our life. It impacts our inner world. It impacts our outer success. It impacts our happiness. Whether our degree of suffering, it impacts our health, it impacts our heart. And yes, it impacts our soul and it impacts our relationship with food and body.
You wanna help people when it comes to their food and body concerns, understand relationship better. If you want to help yourself in this life, have a happier journey. Understand relationship better. There's a lot to learn about this topic. In fact, you and I will probably, if we choose, we can be learning about this topic from now until the last breath you take. So as much as I would like to say I am a, um, I'm a deep student of relationship, I would never say that I'm an expert on this topic, uh, whatsoever. I've met a few people in my life in the professional realm who, uh, I believe, um, you know, uh, touch into that expert realm more and more. Esther Perel is one of my favorite, uh, relationship gurus, experts. Um, but if you and I are good students of a topic, then that's a lot. So when it comes to relationship, our primary focus will be on primary relationships. Meaning your relationship, your client's relationship with a significant other, significant other means. Husband, wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, partner, that important life person, life partner, current life partner, significant other. So I think you know what I mean by that. So that's gonna be the focus. However, everything I say about relationship can be applied to relationships with you. Name it. Any others in your life that have some significance? Children, parents, close friends, best friends, your boss, key people in your life who you just happen to be around a lot. Um, any kind of loved ones, any kind of close relatives. I don't care if they're your cousins, your aunts, your uncles. So the same principles that we can apply to relationship with a significant other can very well be applied to all these other relationships. So I want you to hear through that filter if you can.
So to me, the goal of this conversation is to provide an overview of what I think are some compelling and useful relationship wisdoms and distinctions. Um, of course, I want you to come away with some practical knowledge, things that you could start using, tools that you can start using. There's gonna be some good tools here. Um, I believe I wish for you not only to see relationship through the eyes of a human being as we all are wonderful humans, but to also see relationship through the eyes of a practitioner. 'cause when you're with clients, I want you to be able to step into practitioner mode around relationships.
I also wish for us to make some more connections, further connections, or reinforce the connections we've already learned between eating psychology, a person's unwanted eating challenges, person's unwanted food challenges, body challenges, health challenges, and this thing called relationship.
I do wanna say this. When I say to you, I want you to see relationship through the eyes of a practitioner. What I mean is this. Have you ever had the experience where you or talking to your good friend, a best friend, somebody close with you that you care about? And chances are you've known humans in your life, people close with you who are having their relationship challenges and your friend is talking to you about their relationship challenges. And you, from your understanding, from your wisdom, you listen and you look and you give advice or you give thoughts or you give your opinions. Are you a relationship expert? Chances are maybe not. Um, or do you have massive amounts of training when it comes to working with relationship and helping counsel people? Uh, probably not, but some of us are. Um, however, you are a person who has been alive on planet earth for a certain amount of time and you have a certain amount of experience. And we, you and me, we're often very good at helping others solve their problems. So you can offer your friend, I bet you've given some great relationship advice in your lifetime to other people. I bet that you've given some great relationship advice to the people closest to you. Um, and chances are that doesn't mean you don't have your own relationship issues and challenges. So a prerequisite to be a good practitioner and help somebody with their relationship, a prerequisite is not having the perfect relationship.
Not even close. Um, honestly, a prerequisite might be that you've been through some challenges. You have challenges, you navigate challenges. You've been through some heartbreak, you've been through upset, you've been through lonely times. You've had some, some good moments, you've had some successes. Here you care. So once again, we're very good at helping others. We're not always good at helping ourselves. And that's why you and I do the work that we do because we can help others and then we can turn to our experts to help us. Okay? I think you get it. Relationship and eating psychology. Here's my assertion. So, so, so, so, so many of you, our eating challenges are directly connected to our relationship. Challenges in some way, shape, or form. I am not saying our eating challenges are caused by our relationship. Challenges, though, that can happen. I mean, there's some strong direct connections and I'm talking about eating challenges, weight, overeating, emotional eating, binge eating, body image concerns. Um, poor digestion, fatigue.
And these eating challenges, these food and body challenges are often the result. Um, they're the placeholder, they're the symbolic playing out of relationship issues. So some people are literally playing out their relationship issues through the vehicle of our relationship with food.
Okay? I don't know how to deal with my challenging marriage, my hurtful breakup, my deep desire to meet the right partner. And that hasn't been happening. And I'm in pain, I'm in suffering. I'm confusion. So it's easy to go into stress. It's easy to have poor digestion. It's easy to ovre, binge eat emotionally. You name it. It's easy for me to get all perfectionistic about my body and think, well, that's gonna make me have the perfect relationship. Everybody knows that all people who have their perfect body have the perfect relationship. You know, I'm being sarcastic. So again, our eating challenges are often the result of or directly connected to or they're placeholders for relationship issues. And when I say relationship issues, here's what I'm talking about. My friends in general. There's more. There's more. But the common relationship challenges as I have seen them in relationship to our eating concerns, common relationship challenges, loneliness, conflict of all kinds in relationship. I don't care what it is, fighting of all kinds hurt. I'm just bruised. I'm beat up by my relationship or the relationship I'm in, the relationship I had. Abuse in relationship of all different kinds. Past abuse, present abuse, fear of future abuse, lack of intimacy in a relationship, lack of connection in a relationship. Not being in a relationship and feeling this intense sense of lack of intimacy or connection. Being in relationship and feeling a lack of love. Not being in relationship and feeling a lack of love. Having a fear of intimacy, whether we're in relationship or not. That's a relationship challenge. 'cause relationship is intimate. Any kinda loss of love, my friends, that can lead to all kinds of unwanted food, body and health challenges. Any way that you and I have been abandoned at any point. It could have happened in your marriage 30 years ago. It could have happened when you were a kid feeling abandoned by a parent. Um, divorce is a relationship challenge that has all its, if you've been through it, you know how hard it's, a lot of us have unmet or unrealistic expectations in relationship. A lot of us have very realistic expectations and those don't get met. It's okay to have certain expectations, certain agreements in relationship. When those agreements and those realistic expectations aren't met, that's painful. When we have unrealistic expectations and those aren't met, that's painful too. 'cause we usually don't know. Our expectations are unrealistic. A lot of us has have suffered sexual wounding in our relationship or previous to it. And therefore we're enacting our sexual wounding in relationship. Meaning fear of sex, fear of intimacy, fear of pleasure, um, not knowing how to let go, relax, be present, explore in this realm, play in this realm. Um, move forward with a sense of empowerment in this realm. Um, not knowing how to communicate with another in this realm or being around someone who is far more wounded, uh, than we are in this realm. And we have to deal with their upset, their confusion. Um, you and I will have unfulfilled dreams and hopes around relationship, whether we're in one or not. Oftentimes we could have a loss of connection to self in relationship. We could have feelings of unworthiness or unlovability. And if you're single, there's oftentimes people have a ton of stuff around dating, uncertainty around it, fear around it. Some people are in relationship and they feel stuck. They don't know how to get out. They don't know how to make it better. They're stuck. A lot of people are in relationship and they have deep disappointment or they're not in relationship and they have deep disappointment about relationship in general or the one they just had or the many they've just had. Relationship challenges can mean recovering from a breakup so much more. So these are, these are some of the common ones. Did I touch on any that you've ever experienced? Chances are, yes. So let's make some connections between relationship and eating. Psychology relationship, my friends is a primary source of nourishment. You and I get fed you and I get massive amounts of nutrition from relationship. They feed us, they elevate us, they support us. They love us up. They keep us human. They teach us. Now when relationship becomes problematic for any reason, and there's all kinds of good reasons why relationships become problematic, it is easy, easy, easy, easy to turn to food, to symbolically work things out, okay. Can't get pleasure in this relationship, can't make things work in this relationship. And I can't make this relationship feel better, but I can definitely eat food that makes me feel better,
feel bad, eat food, feel better. That is so simple. So many people firmly believe that their problem with food is all about food. And oftentimes it's strongly connected to relationship
or it's directly about relationship.
That's the good news actually, my friends. Because a food issue is not necessarily a food issue.
So you can profoundly help many people because they've been going from practitioner to practitioner, medical expert to medical expert, to health coach, to dietician, to reading all the books to help solve their overreading or their binge eating or their emotional eating thinking they have some willpower issue with food and they're now, they're trying to diet and now they're trying to control their appetite. And meanwhile they're not making the connection that it's all about their relationship challenges. And that is exactly where the action is.
My friends, I've had many clients where after the first session or the second or the third session, it's all about relationship. I identify and my client gets it. This is where the action is. So then all of a sudden I'm becoming a relationship coach. That's fun, quite honestly. Um, to me, you know, and, and you have to navigate your comfort level.
But what I'm saying is the beauty of this work is you need to be, um, and it's best to be, and it's fun to be a quote unquote life coach. Meaning understand aspects of human existence. If I'm gonna work with somebody's food challenges, I need to know about relationship. I need to know about sexuality, I need to know about psychology. I need to understand the work world because people will have connections with their eating challenges and just the work world, career world, money world. So then I get to coach in these different areas. What fun, really? It's fun, it's interesting. It's human, it's real. You being a real person, helping real people with real challenges as opposed to trying to solve a problem where it isn't, oh, okay, we just need to give you kale and that'll make you stop overeating. No, none of it's about relationship. Okay, definitions. I'm gonna just make up some definitions here. Relationship hard, hard to define, but we can say in a sentence, relationship is the state of connection between two people who are choosing
in some way, shape, or form to be in an alliance.
So here I am talking about a more significant relationship. You know, if the relationship is between you and your child, the child isn't necessarily choosing to be in an alliance, but perhaps on a deeper level their soul chose that. Or you have somebody that you work with, that you work with closely at work. Um, you haven't necessarily chosen to be together, but you have to make that ongoing choice every time you're working together. Okay? So when it comes to significant other's, a state of connection, relationships, state of connection between two people choosing to be in an alliance conscious relationship. Let's add that one word, add that one term. The state of connection between two people who are choosing to be in a deeper alliance in a more awake, aware, growthful and transformational way. So that's my attempt to nail down a brief to the point definition between relationship and distinguish that from conscious relationship. Meaning if you look around you, a lot of people enter into relationships and you've done this perhaps in your earlier days, you didn't know what you were doing, you just wanted a girlfriend or a boyfriend, you wanted to have somebody. So we enter into relationship and we learn on the job, so to speak. And then as you get a little older and you get a little wiser and you get a little experience, you start to learn that, oh, there's certain ways that we can be in relationship that are a little bit more unconscious. Ie. We have not matured yet into deeper wisdom.
As we become more awake in this world, we realize that it can be very beneficial to have our relationships between our friends, our family, our loved ones, our children, and our significant other. Let's make those relationships conscious ones. Let's see if at least one of us, you can always choose to be a conscious person, even if the other person isn't, but is great. When two people can look at each other and say, yeah, let us do our best to be awake. Let us do our best to be aware and to grow and transform from all the challenges that we will inevitably face in relationship. You cannot be in successful relationship with yourself without going through ups and downs and challenges. So your relationship with yourself, your client's relationship with themself, your client is coming to see you because they're having trouble being in relationship with themself. They're having trouble being in relationship with food, how they feed themselves, how they nourish themselves. They're having trouble being really in relationship with their own mind and their own heart and their own emotions. So imagine what happens when you throw another person into the mix and then you have two people trying to be in relationship, who it's hard enough to be in relationship with your own self. So relationship ain't always easy,
even though we love the Hollywood endings of yes, they live happily ever after. And we love imagining that there's these perfect relationships and every relationship is work just about. Some are less work than others. Every significant relationship between you and a significant other, your client and a significant other involves work. Correct me if I'm wrong, if you meet the person that's never had to do work in a significant relationship, I wanna know what they're eating. I wanna know how they did it. Okay, my friends. Let's talk about some core principles. I'm gonna mention some, not all, some core principles of what conscious relationship might look like.
Core principle number one,
and I list this as number one because I think it's that important, is that relationship has a higher purpose relationship. Your relationship with a significant other, your relationship with any person who's significant in your life, parent child, best friend, loved one, it has a higher purpose beyond what you and I can imagine.
So in other words, it's not just two, two humans looking at each other and deciding, yes, let's do this, let's do that, let's get together, let's get married, let's share a house and do all these things together and buy tablecloths and dishes and appliances, uh, and things. Yeah, it's that. And relationship has a higher purpose. If you believe relationship has a higher purpose, then whenever a challenge comes up, there's a reason for that challenge. Whenever an upset comes up, there is a reason to move through that upset in a good way.
So in this sense, relationship with people, just like our relationship with food is here to teach us, is here to help us grow. It's help us here to learn stuff that we don't even know we're here to learn.
Let me ask you this question. Can you go back and look at your life and think of relationships that you've been in, or perhaps the one you're in now. So significant relationships where you entered it, having no idea of the important lessons you would be learning as a human being. And it doesn't mean those lessons were easy, but can you say that? Wow, I've grown as a person from being in relationship. I've learned a lot about life, I've learned about myself, and I'm actually a better human. Having gone through certain relationship challenges that I never knew I would have to face.
And you can look back on your relationship life in that way, then you can easily see that relationship has a higher purpose. Now for me, you know, it's nice to believe that the higher purpose is to make us feel good and to just give us all kinds of goodies. And you enter into a relationship and you live happily ever after. And everything is wonderful. And it's of course the perfect relationship that it seems is not the higher purpose of relationship to give you everything you and I want. A lot of people enter relationship in that way when they're young and immature and inexperienced, which is understandable. We enter into relationship thinking, this will make me happy. You don't enter into a relationship thinking, I'm doing this relationship because I wanna be deeply unhappy and wounded by my partner and spoken to in a bad way and mistreated or not understood or or feeling like they don't love me at some point. No, nobody goes into a relationship wanting it to end badly or wanting there to be problems or challenges or conflicts or upsets.
And yet that tends to happen for most human beings that I've ever known.
The good news is relationship has a higher purpose that goes beyond. He said, she said, I wanna do this. She wanted to do that. He wanted to do this. I'm right, you're wrong. It's not that. Yeah, we have been hurt in relationship and still relationship has a higher purpose. Sometimes we're just here to learn certain lessons in life that are heart and are difficult. Sometimes we learn beautiful lessons. Oftentimes relationships is a swirl of all of that. It's a swirl of the difficulties. It's a swirl of the beauty. It's everything.
If you and I are functioning from the place, that relationship has a higher purpose, then we're always listening for what relationship is trying to teach each person in that relationship.
How is relationship? How is this challenge asking my client to grow? How is it asking them to step into a higher place in themselves? How is it asking them to expand? How is it asking them to ship to change, to transform? Do they need to be more honest? Do they need to be more real? Do they need to persevere more? Do they need to leave? Do they need to hang in there? Do they need to learn how to communicate better? Do they need to learn how to let go more open up their heart more, see things from a spiritual perspective more there? There's, it's always gonna be different.
If you enter into a relationship knowing that it has a higher purpose,
then I believe it has a higher purpose.
It starts to reveal itself here and there. You see the learnings, you see the beautiful lessons, you see the gifts that it's bringing, the gifts that are the good gifts that feel good, and the gifts that don't quite feel so good. But looking back on it later, we can go, that was good.
So if you adopt this principle, when you enter into relationship, if you adopt this principle when even if you didn't adopt it, when you enter into relationship, oh, this has a higher purpose. Oh, we're here for a reason, what is that reason? It doesn't mean you have to stay together forever. Sometimes a purpose becomes yes, and we need to know when to end it.
Just so you know, I'm, I'm not a believer in all relationships. Must be worked through all difficulties must be worked through. I'm all for that. That's the first thing we do. How do we work through what we're going through? And there's always the question of endings and beginnings. Sometimes relationships have an ending
and that by itself can have a higher purpose. To be able to see that, to be able to get that, to be able to know that, and to be able to do our best, to end a relationship from a place of awareness and a place of consciousness as a, as opposed to from a place of beating each other up and attacking each other and harming each other in all different kinds of ways, which is what happens in a majority of divorces. Everybody goes to war with each other. Sometimes we just can't work it out.
But can we agree that okay, we tried, we did our best relationship always has a higher purpose and it's always teaching us.
Here's another principle.
We already talked about how it's here to help us grow and growth here. I wanna again remind you that growth isn't, growth can mean anything. Sometimes you and I have growing pains. Sometimes we grow through heartbreak, sometimes we grow through feeling alone and abandoned in relationship. We can grow through challenge. We can grow through repeating the same mistakes that we seem to be repeating from other relationships. Sometimes we grow through being loved and through loving another. Sometimes we grow through giving ourselves in a way that we haven't given ourselves before. Even if the other person isn't returning what you gave and how much you gave and the way that you gave, at the end of the day you can look in the mirror and say, I loved to the best of my ability. I gave to the best of my ability.
So we grow through the goodness of relationship, through the pleasures of it, through the sweet moments, the magical moments. We grow through the times when we feel loved and supported and noticed and seen and cared for. And we grow through the times when we are hurt or we can grow through that. That's, that's the hard growth. That's where the work oftentimes comes in for us. You know, sometimes relationship is asking us to grow and that growth feels painful, but in truth, it's so good that if we saw it as good, you know, a lot of us enter relationship and we do fear intimacy. We do fear closeness. We do fear connection. We actually fear having the very thing that we want, which is love. So a lot of people who say they want love and who say they're all about love, they're in relationship and they're not receiving the love that's being given to them. They're not receiving the intimacy that's coming their way. They're not. We just kind of shut down because of fear, because of old habit.
And for a lot of people, relationship is just asking them to open up, take out the winning ticket that's in their pocket. It's a lottery ticket. I've met a lot of people who are in good relationship and they're not appreciating it. They're not getting it, they're not capitalizing it. They're just focusing on what doesn't work. Yeah, there's things that aren't working. There's things that aren't perfect. But a lot of times our challenge is we haven't fully celebrated and focused on all the things that the relationship does bring us. So in that sense, relationship is like a journey and there's all different kinds of growth that's gonna happen. So every challenge that happens in a relationship therefore is an opportunity to grow.
Another core principle, I think, of conscious relationship number three is it is often best to focus on our true primary relationship, which is with self.
Now, I mean that in the context of your significant relationship, meaning your relationship with another, your marriage, you have a husband, a wife, a partner, you have a boyfriend, you have a girlfriend, you have your fiance, whatever it is. And yeah, you're focused on the relationship because that's what we do when we're in relationship. We hopefully put some focus on the relationship.
A lot of times, my friends, the best way to focus on the relationship with the other person is by focusing on the relationship we have with ourself.
So what I'm saying, and others have certainly said this, is that your true primary relationship is not with the other person. Your true primary relationship is with you. And as you and I become better at being in relationship with self, guess what makes it easier to be in relationship with other. Doesn't that make sense? I mean, really when we focus on being in relationship with self, it's easier to be in relationship with the other. What a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful thing. What a wonderful bonus that work on self can benefit our relationship. That is profound. My friends, that is wonderful, that is spectacular. That is good. That is important. I oftentimes, the work that needs to be done when it comes to my relationship challenge, we're fighting, we're arguing, we don't get along. She keeps doing this, he keeps doing that. I can't believe he says this. I can't believe she doesn't do that.
Sometimes the solution is found by going within. Do you ever had the experience where you want something in relationship, you want something in your relationship, you want it, you want it, you want it, and you've asked for it and you ain't getting it. It's not forthcoming. And quite frankly, you deserve it. You ought to get it from the other person. You've been a good partner, you're sweet, you're nice, you're wonderful, and you're wanting this thing that honestly is not a big deal, honey. Just like, how come I'm not getting this? And maybe that becomes a bit difficult and we start to stress out about it. We start to get upset about it. And then have you ever had the experience where that's happening? Then at some point you just let it go. You just let go. You kind of maybe you, you surrender. You just let it go and all of a sudden that person starts behaving in the way you were wishing they would behave in.
I'm just giving that as an example of sometimes we need to let go.
No time sometimes. Sometimes we need to say, here's what I want, here's what I'm not getting a complaint, raising my hand, help drowning. That's fair. Sometimes we need to let go. So we just did a little bit of work on self called learning how to let go, learning how to surrender.
There's a magic in that. There's a magic when we work on self in a relationship and you work hard on self work. On self is the hardest work to do, I believe. And that's why not everybody does it. That's Why we often run the other direction.
'cause it's not easy to work on ourself. It's more easy to point the finger.
That doesn't mean your partner's not misbehaving or doing things right. It doesn't mean they don't have all kinds of blind spots and places where they need to grow. A lot of times we just need to look at self. Where do I need to grow and expand here? Put the other person aside for a moment.
What is this relationship asking of me personally in terms of the shifts I need to make inside myself? So this is a key, by the way, for working with clients. So I don't do couples counseling, I do it with friends. I'll sit down with my friends or close relatives who ask me to, and I'll counsel a couple, but I don't do it professionally. But I do couples counseling professionally by working with my client. So everything that I'm telling you, you here, it's not about couples counseling, it's about coaching your client of how to be with their relationship. You can do tremendous relationship work just by working with one person in relationship, meaning your client. So my client comes to see me and I start to learn that their eating challenge is connected to a relationship challenge. I'm gonna help my client explore what can they do, how can they shift, how can they do work on self? And how can they do certain practicalities in their relationship that can help move things forward for them?
So when I talk about you being a relationship coach, that's what I mean. I'm not talking about you sitting down with two people in relationship. I'm talking about you sitting down with your client who's coming to see you for an eating challenge and you've made a connection that they have relationship challenges. So now you're gonna work with your client on how to better understand what's going on in their relationship and look at what does my client need to learn here? Where's life calling them? How is life asking them to grow? What kind of work can they do on self that will help them in their relationship? Make sense? My friends? Here's another principle number four, for many people we must focus on yet another primary relationship that we don't always acknowledge and that's our relationship with a higher power or a higher code. So yeah, you got your relationship with the other person, for sure you have your primary relationship is with self. And for those of you that believe in a god, a higher power, something more, then for a lot of people, their primary relationship is actually between them and a higher power between them and God, them and Jesus, whatever, however you name it, whatever you call it.
Sometimes that's what helps a client move through their eating challenge and their relationship challenge by, by remembering to focus on their relationship with a higher power. So what does a higher power mean for my client in her or his life? How do they relate to that? What do they believe? Are you bringing your beliefs to your relationship? What is your relationship to a higher power to God? What? What? Like, what is that like for you?
How is that relationship with a higher power teaching you? What does it ask of you? How does it speak to you?
For many people, this is the wonderful doorway for them to walk through to help them in their relationship with another human being. Their significant other is to remember that the end of the day people come and go, people will die. I've watched so many of my relatives, you know, my grandparents were married, both sets of grandparents were married to each other for 60 plus years, you know, and one died before the other, and all of a sudden, here they are. And who are you in relationship with? It's always, you're in relationship with yourself at the end of the day. And if you believe in a higher power or a higher code, that's what you're in relationship with.
What is that asking of me? What is that teaching me?
You know, let's take a turn here. I I, I, I mean this is a silly question. On one hand, why are relationships challenging?
But I'm gonna answer it very simply. First of all, it's hard enough to be in relationship with self. And when we're in relationship with another,
we're bringing a lot to the table. Relationship tends to expose our hidden inner world and the work we need to do on self and the work we need to do with others
relationship will expose it will bring out, it will unearth our hidden inner world and the work that we need to do on self and with others relationship will bring up, oftentimes your significant relationship will bring up everything that you don't want. A lot of times it brings up our shortcomings, it brings up their shortcomings, it brings up how we do love, how we do intimacy, how we do sexuality, how we do communication, how we do intimacy, how we do connection, how we do conflict, how we do differences of opinions, how we do differences in the way we understand things and communicate, okay, you want it this way, I want it that way. How do we work this out? That's not easy. So relationship exposes our hidden inner world and the work we need to do on self and the work we need to do to be in relationship with another in a successful way. You know, relationship is also a function of the world. So when you're in relationship with your significant other, you're not just in relationship with them. You are in relationship and you're living in the world and the world is very problematic. The world is difficult, my friends. And because the world is difficult, it's not easy to be a couple in this world. The world might not be supporting you as a couple. The world might not be supporting your union, your marriage, the world, your parents, your friends, your relatives. They might have their issues, some of them people might be trying to, you know, jump in bed with your partner. People might be trying to to pull you apart. Maybe people are supporting you. Um, you have to go off to work and you work and she works. And then we take care of the kids when we come home and we hardly have any time for each other because we need two incomes. And that's a function of the world. And the relationship can suffer because the world is problematic
and it doesn't always roll out the red carpet to have a loving, wonderful, perfect, easy, adorable relationship because the world is asking us to make money. The world is asking us to have our jobs. The world is asking, okay, one of us to work and one of us to take care of the kids or whatever, whatever it is, you are living in the world and the world presents its problems and your partner is dealing with their challenges of being a human being in the world. And then that's gonna be brought into the relationship. So everything you and your partner experience outside of the relationship in some way, shape or form, is being brought into the relationship. We can't help it. If you're closely connected to another human being, they're gonna feel you. They're gonna notice you, you're gonna notice them. We're gonna bring our challenges with the rest of the world. How we do life, what's going on at work, what's going on with your friendships, what's going on with your family, her family, his family, their family. It's all gonna end up in this little container that we call my relationship. Not so easy. Now, just like we have toxic nutritional beliefs or toxic dietary beliefs, there are also toxic relationship beliefs, my friends. And as you can imagine, a toxic relationship belief is an assumption that we hold about relationship that is outdated, that's self-limiting, that is ineffective and may very well even be harmful or toxic.
There are toxic relationship beliefs. I bet you know what they are. Let me name a few, see if you agree.
Here's a toxic relationship, belief relationship. My significant relationship with my significant other must and I mean must fulfill my needs and desires. Did you ever enter a relationship like that when you were younger? When maybe not so young? This relationship is here to make me feel better. How come you're not making me feel better? I have my needs, I have my desires. You are here to meet my needs and desires. By the way, that is what we operate from automatically. Archetypally, when we are in the, especially the younger prince and princess stages, so teens through late twenties,
we will often come into relationship as younger prince and princesses. That relationship is here to fulfill my needs and desires. It's here to make me feel good. Why? Why else would I do it? We've been dating and that feels good. I like dating. We like being together. We like how good we feel. We like the romance, we like the fun, we like the sexiness, we like the love, we like the passion. We like whatever it is that we like that we're doing for each other. We like it. And eventually what shows itself is that in actuality, so I'm gonna counter this toxic belief by saying relationship is not, is not here to fulfill all our needs and desires. It's probably here to fulfill some of them. It's probably here to fulfill a number of them, but it never fulfills all of them. There are certain needs and desires that will not be fulfilled in certain relationships and that is life. No relationship is perfect in that way. No one person can be all things to you. You cannot be all things to your significant other. So to hold the toxic belief with, wait a second, this relationship is here to fill my, fulfill all my needs and desires and you're not fulfilling them, therefore you have a problem. Miss or Mr. Partner, that's where things go south really fast.
That's when people get divorced oftentimes and understandably so. Relationship is not fulfilling our needs and desires. Quite the opposite is asking us to grow that. That wasn't a desire of mine. I didn't want to grow through challenge.
I didn't ask for that. I just asked for whatever it was I was asking for that I seem to be getting. So this is a toxic relationship belief that we need to grow out of many of us. And many people need to go through this relationship belief before they can transcend it or transform it in any way, shape, or form. Now, I'm not saying that relationship is not here to make us feel a little bit better. I'm not saying that. What I am saying is that yeah, you're gonna get needs and desires fulfilled and you are not going to get needs and desires fulfilled. It's both. It's a paradox. Here's another toxic relationship. Belief relationship is here to save me once again, this also tends to happen, tends to happen when we are more in the young prince and princess stage. It is a, especially this belief is ingrained in our princesses because in so many of the princess stories and motifs and archetypes, what do you have? You have a knight in shining armor, saving the princess from the evil, whoever.
So there are many of our young princesses looking to be saved. My life is difficult. This sucks. There's a crazy world. There's a lot of mean people, a lot of nutty stuff going on. Relationship will save me. I want my knight in shining armor.
Men will have this belief as well. And I have noticed that there are people into their forties and fifties and sixties who are still looking for a relationship to save them.
We have to first save ourselves. It is hard to save oneself. It is far more impossible to save another person saving another person. Let's just, let's just save us some time here. Doesn't work. You can do that temporarily in relationship. If a relationship is based on one person saving another person, it will eventually go south. It will eventually have its challenges and its difficulties that will expose themselves and unearth themselves. I believe this is a fact. Relationship is not here to save us. It's here to help us grow. If we think relationship is here to save me, then we are coming from a disempowered position and we are putting an amazing amount of intense and impossible responsibility on the other person that they cannot possibly fulfill.
Again, this is part and parcel, especially of the young princess mind more and more for the princes. And I see it still afflicting every age group.
If you think a relationship is going to rescue you,
disappointment will always be around the corner.
And that's also where a lot of divorces and breakups happen. Here's another one here. I can save my partner.
A lot of people do this. I see men do this. I see women do this. Honestly, I see it in equal proportions. Maybe the proportions are technically different between male and female. But I, I tend to see as many females as males do this, they come into a relationship and the way they do it is they believe I can save my partner.
Oh, he's like this. He's like that. This is going on, that's going on. I can fix him, I can save him, I can make him better.
Or the guy is thinking I can save her, I can rescue her. I can be the knight in shining armor. This is going to work. And so we actually do things that the other person indeed perceives and experiences as I'm being rescued, I'm being saved, you're saving me.
Eventually that ceases to work. It is not a healthy long-term strategy in relationship.
Rescuing another person is not a foundation of relationship. Eventually the person trying to save their partner will begin to get frustrated and they will begin to resent their partner. Especially if they believe I have saved you. I did fix you, I did look at all, hey, here's this long list. Look at everything I did for you. I saved you. Look at everything. Here's a list. It's your turn. You have to help me now you have to do stuff now. And all of a sudden you have all these expectations and the person on the other end was, wait a second, you saved me. That's what, that's your role. You're the save and I'm the save E how dare you ask me to do something for you. That's what the other person's thinking unconsciously. And then what happens is they're gonna start to resent you. Even though you've been doing all the saving and you've been doing so much work and you've done so much for the other person, they will actually resent you if you start to show up with your own intense needs and desires. 'cause they want you staying in that role. Don't ask me to work so hard.
One person saving another is a recipe for just a little bomb going off. At some point, one person will definitely end up resenting the other. If not both will resent each other. That is the logical conclusion of a relationship where one person says, I can save this person. And people do that. And some people are very good at it. They literally rescue their partner financially, personally, emotionally, whatever it is. And when we do that, when we save the other person, we are secretly expecting a return on our investment whether we believe that or not, whether we know that or not, whether we can admit that or not. We're expecting a, a return on our investment. Meanwhile, the other person is not expecting that you're going to ask for a payday. Why should they? They're the one that needs rescuing. I, here's another toxic relationship belief. You know this one. When I'm in the perfect relationship, then fill in the blank, then I'm gonna be happy, then I'm gonna be the real me. Then I'm gonna have my best life, then everything's gonna be wonderful. And I'll never be lonely again. I'll never be sad again. Life will just be great and I will ride off into the sunset. Everybody has all their beliefs, their expectations about what's gonna happen when they're in a perfect relationship, as if perfection is such a thing. And as soon as the relationship that we're in that we thought was the perfect relationship reveals itself to not be perfect, then our heads starts to get very upset. Wait a second, you're not being perfect. You're supposed to do this. The relationship is supposed to be that you're supposed to buy me this. You're supposed to say it like that. You're supposed to know what I want without me saying it. What do you mean I have to ask for it? What do you mean? You should just know that's such a common one. You should just know what I want. No, people aren't mind readers. You are not a mind. You're you're not. Nobody's that good. Um, so a lot of us are, are expecting perfection and relationship. Once again. This is a young princess slash prince archetypal mentality that is built into that archetype. Um, so it is forgivable for that reason. And we have to learn from that. That relationship will not be perfect, nor is our strategy of looking for the perfect relationship and finding the perfect relationship and thinking that it's all going to be happily ever after. That is not a good strategy. Doesn't work. It always ends up in, let's call it a very big juicy and challenging learning experience.
Okay, one more toxic relationship belief. It is a little more subtle. I need to be someone else to be loved and to be in relationship. In other words, who I am is not really good enough. So who do I need to be? Who do I need to be? So this person loves me. Ah, she likes this. She likes that I'm gonna be that person that I think they want. I'm gonna pretend to be this, this, this and this. Pretend to be interested in that, that, that and that. Or I'm gonna just try to be this person that they, I know that they want even though I'm not that person because then that person's gonna love me and then I'll be in relationship and then I'll have somebody because who I am is not good enough. Or that's just how you get a person. You need to be someone else. Well, if you, by the way, I I I hope you can see the logical absurdity here because if you be someone else in order to be loved and to be in relationships, so you've started to become a different person, you try to morph to what you think that person wants, then that person is actually in relationship with someone who you are actually not. So you've actually tricked them on a certain level. Uh, maybe you didn't do it from a bad place, you're just like, hey, uh, what do I gotta do to be loved? Oh, I know you need me to be this, I'll be that. Okay, great. But if it's not truly who we are, then that person has fallen in love or they've married or they've entered into relationship with a person that you are not, and you bet they're gonna resent you at some point and end. You're gonna probably start to resent them at some point because you've done all this hard work to be someone you're not and they're not appreciating it well, it's because you're not really that person and it's not really working. And eventually that all gets exposed.
And truly, truly, truly, at the end of the day, underneath all that is who I am is not good enough.
What I'm about is not lovable. I'm not matchable with anyone. There's not someone for me. I must be someone else. I have to pretend to be someone else, act like someone else, which could mean you go on this intense diet and exercise program, then I lose all this weight. Now I can date really.
Okay, so now you date, so now, so you're basically advertising to the world. I did all this intense work so I can look exactly how you want me to look, but that might not be your body, that's not your diet. That's not the way you really wanna move and exercise. So you haven't been honest.
And we often do that from a place of just wanting love.
And once again, believing who I am is not good enough. And the secret here is to be ourselves. Yeah, of course you want to grow. Being yourself doesn't mean being a jerk 24 7. Yeah, this is the real me, I'm a jerk. Well then nobody's gonna wanna be with you. Um, yeah, you can show your vulnerable side, you can show some of your dark side. You can show your emotional side for sure. Um, being who you really are doesn't mean having full permission to be unconscious and hurtful.
It's just who are you? You're imperfect. You have certain desires, you have certain needs, you have certain loves, you have certain dislikes. You have a certain way that you talk. You have a certain way that you be, you have certain things that you like to do, certain people you like to hang out with. You are who you are. Just be you. If somebody wants to be in a relationship with you just being you, then you have found the right person. If they, they don't want to be in relationship with you, then you cross them off the list.
Goodness gracious, my friends, I have coached so many clients, particularly women clients, particularly women clients who want a relationship and they are busy doing everything they can to be someone else. It is fascinating to me, like no, like stop, just be you and you can have 40 guys reject you. Fine. So cross each one of those 40 off your list. You don't need to marry a thousand guys. You don't need to be. All you need is one guy, just one who cares about you, for you, for who you are. Then you've kind of hit the jackpot. That's what you want, but you have to be you. Here's me. So there's a risk in there and it's a beautiful risk. Ah, there's one more toxic relationship belief I wanna mention. And that's when we go, ah, you know, and this is especially in the heterosexual universe where, uh, you know, women go, you know, all men are fill in the prejudice, fill in the blank. Where men go. All women are just fill in the insult, fill in the blank. A lot of people get stuck in this,
whether it's in the heterosexual universe, whether it's in the gay lesbian universe, God, all men are, all women are. And we make a statement about half of the population of the globe as if it applies to all of them. Yeah, there's certain commonalities a lot of men have. There's certain commonalities a lot of women have. But as soon as you say, well, all men are,
then trust me, you will find a man like that and you will be surrounded by men like that. 'cause that's what you're scanning for. When you say all women are, all women are, yeah, you're gonna, you're gonna be silently, psychically, unconsciously scanning for that. And that's what you're gonna find and that's what you're gonna be in relationship with. And you'll fulfill the toxic belief that you have
as opposed to being open and letting people show up as how they show up. Let people surprise you. All. Men are not what you think they are. All women are not what you think they are. We all different. There's good women, there's good men of every color, shape, size, variety, nationality, you name it. And they're indeed very different.
When we can let go of these global statements that we make,
all of a sudden it is easier to attract good people into our world.
Okay, let's take some time when it comes to relationship and talk a little bit about what I would like to call the mother father code. And what I wanna say about the mother father code is that this is an underlying code, a built in architecture to how our parents live inside us. So our parents live inside us in so many ways, whether they're alive or dead, they live inside of us. Essentially. That's the mother father code. Um, you know something, you have half your mother and half your father's DNA, so you have half of each of their code, their biological code. So this is not a farfetched notion. So right now where you are sitting, you have half of each of your parents' biological code. That's how you exist.
Well, it goes far beyond biology. No matter how different you think you are from your parents, there are certain things that are passed on. There's a built in and invisible architecture to how our parents live inside of us. Another way of saying this is that the relationship we have with each of our parents may may very well be the single biggest hidden driver that we bring into our romantic and significant partnerships.
So how you show up in with your significant other in your significant romantic relationship is fantastically driven by the relationship you've had with your parents.
This is not a bad thing, it simply is. So the more you can notice your relationship with your parents, the more you can notice their relationship with each other.
The more you can notice some of the nuances of how you see your parents, how you experience them, what you believe about them, your withholds about them,
what you know about their journey, the more you can understand that, the more you can have a lot of good wisdom and insight and sharpness in terms of what is happening in your current romantic relationship
or what can happen in a future romantic relationship. So this is a place where it's, it's my friends. Were playing here in a lot of ways this isn't super serious, even though it can get pretty intense. This is a way to play. This is a way to read the universe, read the world. Okay? I'm gonna understand my mother and father, given that they raised me, given that I have half of each of their DNA, there's a good chance that who they are impacts who I am. There's a good chance that their relationship, whatever their relationship was with each other, is going to impact me in my relationships. It happens.
So as we dive into the mother father code, here's a postulation, first postulation I would like to make to help us better understand what this can mean on a practical level. So the postulation about the mother and father code is this first one. We, you and I are the natural and necessary continuation of our parents unfinished business. I say that again. We, you and me. We are the natural and necessary continuation of our parents unfinished business. So in other words, we're looking at the generations that came before us. We are going on the assumption that life progresses and life builds upon itself. And I think it is reasonable to conclude that each generation indeed builds upon itself, builds upon the previous generation, stands on the shoulders of the previous generation, and we inherit the challenges of the generations before us. So the world that you and I have inherited from our parents and our grandparents, that's the world we live in. And we're finishing up some of the unfinished business of what came before us. Sometimes you come into this world and you didn't invent this world, but we have to clean up some of the pollution that came before us. We have to clean up some of the oh harm that came before us. Sometimes our ancestors hurt other people. Sometimes they made mistakes in terms of what they did to the environment, what they did to the land,
or continuing on from the generations previous to us. So in a similar vein, your parents had certain things that they were working on as individuals and as a couple. So what I'm suggesting is that in some way, shape, or form, the next generation is learning some of the lessons that the previous generation hadn't quite figured out or handled or mastered or wasn't quite ready for it.
So as an example, if your mother wasn't able to empower herself as a woman, given her environment where she grew up, the things going on around her and what she was capable of, within all of that, you as a woman might be tasked in your lifetime to step more into your power as a woman. You're finishing up, you're the continuation, the natural continuation, let's say in that sense of your mother's unfinished business. If your father was not able to be present for you, if he was absent in any way out of necessity or because he just was not as emotionally intelligent as many men are today because it's a different time, then you as a man might be the natural and necessary continuation of your father's journey when it comes to being more available and present to your family, to your children. And maybe you are tasked with becoming a more emotionally intelligent man than your dad was.
Here's another thing, if your parents couldn't quite learn how to communicate with each other and share honestly, that might be the very thing that you have to learn in your relationship. If your parents couldn't last in relationship because they didn't, because one or both did not have the fortitude, did not have the depth and did not have the inner awareness to not abandon and not run when things got difficult, that might be your challenge in this life to finish that unfinished process that the relationship wasn't able to do. So there are a gazillion different ways in how you are the natural and necessary continuation of your mother's unfinished business, your dad's unfinished business, or maybe a little bit of each, or maybe one more so than the other. I've seen it work every different way, but that's what I often ask myself. Where, where was my mother trying to get to in her life? Where was life calling her? How was she growing? Where was my father trying to get to? How was life calling him and asking him to grow?
Chances are you're gonna get some clues about where you need to grow and what life is asking of you.
Here's another postulation we tend to model after our parents' relationship consciously and unconsciously, meaning there's a part of you that looks at your parents' relationship and you might say, oh my God, I never wanna be like them. I don't wanna do this, this, this and that, that and that. So you're consciously modeling in a way to not be like them. Or you might look at your parents' relationship and they were so close and so connected and were so amazing and you go, God, I want a relationship just like that. I know people who say that. So you're consciously modeling after them. Now, hard to know because the unconscious is unconscious. But there's a part of us that will model after our parents' relationship even though we don't think we are. And even though we might proclaim to the world that I'm nothing like my mother, I'm nothing like my father. And have you ever said that? Have, have you ever said to yourself or to others, yeah, I'm definitely not like my mother, my father, whichever. And then at some point in life you notice you're being like your mother or your father. That's kind of what I'm saying. So not only do we unconsciously model after our parents in general, just as who they are, as a each one as a person, you'll especially tend to model after your same sex parents. So if you're a woman, you're gonna model more after your mother. If you're a man, you're gonna tend to model more after your father. But we'll take on both our parents' traits to a certain degree. We're gonna model after their relationship. There was a lot of unspoken words between our parents. We will unconsciously oftentimes model that and we'll have unspoken things in our relationship.
If there was a heated tension in your parents' relationship that never got resolved, we might find ourselves in a similar situation.
If your one of your parents left the other one and abandoned ship, huh, you might find yourself doing that or you might find it happening to you. How did that happen? And or you might find yourself really worried about it, even if it doesn't happen to you. So you're being driven by the reality of someone always leaves the other one and what's left is pain and suffering. So you know you're, you know, you don't want that. We can easily live in response and in reaction to it.
So it's interesting to notice what it is about your parents' relationship. You like what it is about your parents' relationship you didn't like. How is your current relationship in any way, shape or form like your parents' relationship?
Are there any similarities whatsoever? Because sometimes it's just the one or two similarities that we need to point out that are useful for us. You could be very different from your mother and father and their relationship in so many ways, but you'll be similar in one or two. And those one or two ways are very key for you in your life.
Here's another postulation. We tend to enter in relation, enter into relationship unknowingly and automatically relating to our partner as if they are our opposite sex parent. So this is for heterosexual relationships because that is what I know and understand best.
We enter into relationship unknowingly and automatically relating to our partner as if they are our opposite sex parents. So if you're a woman, you are gonna relate to your partner as if it's your dad in certain ways, certain ways. If you're a man, you're going to relate to your partner as if she's your mother in certain ways. As an example, if you're the kind of man, let's say, who never fully individuated from his mother, you might have been a mama's boy and maybe your dad wasn't around a lot and your mother did a lot of taking care of you and maybe you were raised a lot by your mother and you've grown accustomed to having a certain level of mothering from women. And oftentimes for a man, if he's being over mothered by a woman, by his mother or he doesn't individuate from her enough when he becomes an adult, when he's looking for a female partner, he's looking for someone like his mother who's going to take care of him, who's going to mother him. Have you ever heard a woman complain about her husband saying, or her boyfriend or partner? I feel like I'm his mother. I have to mother him.
Well, chances are she's correct. He's wanting a mother, he's needing that. He doesn't even know it. He's relating to his wife as if his wife is his mother. So he's kind of wanting really more of a mother than a wife.
Similarly, and these are just examples, if you are a woman who your dad was a very good father figure and he really knew how to take care of you and you were daddy's little girl and he absolutely adored you,
you're gonna look for a man who takes care of you and adores you.
You want that father energy in your partner. Now, if your father was aloof and disconnected and couldn't track you emotionally and was not emotionally available, you might unknowingly find yourself with a man who's kind of that, that same guy. All of a sudden you realize I'm in a relationship with a guy who I don't feel like I have a good emotional connection to.
So this is often, not always, this is not every single person every single time, but it's pretty consistent. You can see this a significant amount of times where we are relating to our partner as if they are our opposite sex parent.
So it's all about getting conscious, it's all about waking up. It's all about seeing ourselves and seeing our behavior, understanding where we came from and eventually relating to our partner for who they actually are on their terms. Meaning who are you? Yeah, we have certain needs, we have certain desires. It's useful for those needs and desires to be made clear and conscious.
And notice the places where we our needs become
goes into the territory called neediness.
Here's another postulation about the mother, father code. We're still living in our parents' house and not fully available to be a true adult partner. As long as we're unresolved with our parents, we're angry at them, resentful about them, unforgiving of our parents. And the bulk of our relationship with our parents is, I disapprove of you, you screwed up. And the bulk of the relationship, more than 51% of our energy in that relationship is unresolved anger, resentment, upset. And we're still wanting our parents, even though we are adults now, we're still wanting our parents to be good parents even though we don't live in our house anymore.
So technically, when you haven't forgiven your parents, when we're unresolved with them, meaning we still want them to show up in a certain way, even though they're not that person, you're technically still living in their house energetically, emotionally, vibrationally, metaphorically. In other words, we are not yet full adult. If you're a full adult, you don't need your parents to be acting in a particular way. They had their run, they had their experience being a parent. They did their best, their best might not have been good enough or might not have been good enough for you. It might have sucked, it might have been great, who os But it almost doesn't matter. You might have a thousand reasonable, truly reasonable complaints and real complaints. And at some point, until we can move beyond that and not hold our parents energetically hostage, were technically living in their house. I've met many people in their forties, fifties and sixties, certainly in their thirties as well, who still want their parents to be someone. Their parents are still alive and they still, they still b***h and moan and groan about their parents not being this, not being that. And it's true their parents are not being this and not being that. But it's done. You're not the child who lives in their house anymore.
So from this place, you are not fully available for your partner because a part of you is still living in your parents' house
at a client once who had a very intense, um, on and off challenge with binge eating. And very smart lady. She was actually a therapist and very well respected therapist. And you know, I'd been in therapy for years and couldn't figure this out. So she ends up working with me, and I'm gonna tell you after about five months of work or so, here's, here's kind of how, how we unwrapped that. Here's what I discovered. So when she was growing up, her mother was a very strong, powerful mother figure. Her mother ruled the house. Her mom and dad are still married to this day. My client, when I first saw her, was in her mid forties. Um, she has a decent relationship with both her parents. She loves them both very much. But her mother was the powerful one. Her mother was, um, just very beautiful, very well educated, and um, just stood out in a crowd. The dad was more quiet, more humble, more humble looking and just not as powerful of a person. And interestingly enough, the mother would always encourage her daughter, my client, to understand that men are, you have to take care of yourself even in marriage and relationship, that men can't take care of you. They're not capable of that. And you have to create your own life. And you have to make sure that you go for what you want and don't let anything about a man hold you back. He can't truly, at the end of the day, give you what he needs. So this is what she was taught from a young age because that was her mother's experience.
Now what's interesting is
what I started noticing was that my client's binge eating, um, would act out, would come up whenever certain challenges were happening in her relationship, her marriage, she spoke very highly of her marriage and her husband actually had a lot of complaints and the husband was not happy in the marriage. And his actually didn't have many complaints. He had a couple of key complaints. And the key complaint was that he felt like his wife just was his housemate and his roommate and not his partner. And that they weren't in alignment together. That he feels like he's in a partnership and he feels like she's not in a partnership. She's just this separate person who lives in a house who has her own life and they both care about each other. They both respect each other. And one day she just realized as we were breaking this down, an ongoing conversation, she realized that she aligned with her mother, not just against her dad in a strange way, but against men and against her husband. And the mother was always critiquing my client's husband and not in a nice way. And eventually he pointed this out to my client and said, Hey, I'm not this terrible guy. And she eventually saw, oh my God, it's true. She was still being a girl living in her mother's house
and she was unresolved in a strange way with her mother. She never individuated from her mother in a lot of ways. She was still being her mother's daughter. And she realized that unless she would align with her mother, her mother would pull away her love.
And she was always hungry for her mother's love. The dad never pulled away his love, but the mother would. So she realized she was keeping her husband at arms length in so many ways, emotionally, physically, um, simply because she had this longstanding belief that men are whatever, not good enough.
As we started unwinding that and as she started talking to her husband about it and acknowledging what she was learning, gradually the binge eating started to subside. Isn't that interesting? That was the key to unlocking it. She was still living in her mother's house.
Okay, there's all kinds of interesting places to go from there, but that's one example I came to my mind. So the way through, the more we see how we're driven by our parents' dynamics, the more facility we have to choose how we show up. And the more you and I forgive and make peace with our parents for whatever reason, whatever bad things they did, the more we can move forward, the more we can have a healthy relationship with the person we're in relationship with.
The more we see our parents as just people, they're just people. I know they're your parents, but they were just a guy and a girl trying to figure stuff out. The more we can see them as just people, the better they were. Two people, guy and a girl. Maybe they were young when they had you, they were just, they didn't know what they were doing. Just like you didn't know what you were doing. At some point, the more we individuate, the more we step into our conscious adulthood and empowerment. Individuate means you become the person you are not the person who your parents want you to be or who you think your parents want you to be or who you think you need to be. So your parents love you.
Individuation means you are not depending on your parents anymore to regulate your emotions. Well, my mother never did this and she never did that. And I'm still angry at my dad for this. And if you are 40 or 50 or 60 and saying that you haven't individuated, you're depending on them to regulate your emotional metabolism, you're out of their house. You don't live with them anymore, they're off duty.
Yeah, your complaint might be legitimate, but at some point we gotta let it go because that's gonna help us step into adulthood and empowerment. And when we step into adulthood and empowerment, we're increasing our personal power. And as you know, personal power equals metabolic power. Stepping into our personal power gives us the best opportunity to reach our metabolic potential. Stepping into our personal power gives us the best opportunity to heal our unwanted eating challenges.
You know, when it comes to the inner work of relationship, let's switch gears for a second here. The paradox of relationship is that it's about what happens between two people, but at the same time, it all starts with inside of us, within our own skin, with our own heart and soul. So I said this earlier, oftentimes the best thing you can do, I can do your client can do for their relationship is to do work on self.
Oftentimes, not sometimes. Oftentimes the best thing a person can do for the actual relationship, for the challenges, the problems, the messiness, the stuckness in the relationship is to do work on self plain and simple, my friends.
So in order for us to be on board with that, we have to trust that inner work is good. A lot of people don't get that inner work is good. We have to trust the invisibles. We have to trust the hidden wisdom within our own soul that's guiding us into our potential. Inner work on self
Precedes comes before outer victory in relationship. So you wanna have victory in your relationship. You wanna have a good relationship doing inner work on self that comes first. The more inner inner work you can do on self, the more the relationship can reflect the benefit of that work.
Does it always happen like that? No. 'cause you might be in a relationship where the other person is not on board, doesn't wanna do inner work and is not a good consciousness match for you. And in that case it's frustrating.
But what I'm saying is inner work is necessary work, particularly as it when it comes to relationship with another human being.
Five good places to do some work on self. My friends, number one being right. A lot of us in relationship, we just wanna be right. You get into an argument, I'm right, you get into a conflict, I'm right, she's wrong.
Oftentimes one partner or both partner hold a very strong position of I'm right. There's not a dialogue, there's not a gray zone, there's not an understanding that we are different people and we both can be actually right. And we both see something from a different perspective and we experience it in a different way. When one partner is constantly holding the position that I'm right, things don't always work out so well when both partners are holding that position, there's just the fighting is gonna be continuous 'cause everybody wants to be right. And we would almost rather be right than work things out.
So if you're the kind of person or your client is the kind of person that, that's their posture and relationship, they've gotta work on that.
Avoiding pain. A lot of us are in pain when it comes to our relationship, whatever the pain is. Emotional disconnection, lack of intimacy, lack of romance, lack of love, lack of good communication. And we're in pain. But instead of expressing it, raising our hand, getting any kind of help, we avoid it.
If one is in pain in a relationship, it is important to speak that at least to yourself, number one. And then number two to your coach, mentor, guide, therapist, practitioner who will listen to you and eventually to your partner and not necessarily in that order.
It's whatever it takes. If the relationship is strong enough where a person can say, Hey, I'm in pain here. I'm suffering, something's not working for me. If we constantly avoid pain rather than be real, we will be in suffering. So closely related to that is we often withhold honest communication and relationship because we don't wanna rock the boat. Even though there is pain and suffering and upset and disconnection, oftentimes we don't wanna say what's really going on for us because we're afraid of the repercussions.
What other places in relationship where you need to be more honest in where honesty and truthful communication seems to be necessary? Or it's being called for honest communication. Doesn't mean easy communication, but sometimes it is what the relationship is truly asking for.
A lot of people go into victim consciousness. She's doing this to me, he's doing that to me. I'm the good guy, he's the bad guy. I'm in this relationship. I'm the one that's getting the wrong end of the deal. Yeah, it might actually be true.
When we step into victim consciousness though, we lose our power, we lose energy, we actually don't function effectively and we just live being a victim. Instead of, okay, what do I do? What do I say? How do I speak? How do I act? How do I conduct myself so I can move forward so the relationship can move forward or it can end
and my client is acting victim me in their relationship. I know that is a sign that I have to help my client somehow slowly begin to empower herself himself to realize you're not a victim here. That you can find your power somehow.
Another good place to work on self in relationship is to begin to elevate how we do conflict and fighting. Honestly, letting go of always needing to be right and win the conflict and win the fight. That is key. But it is just our willingness. So we're gonna talk about conflict and fighting in a moment. Our willingness to transform how we do conflict and fighting is oftentimes a key that helps a relationship go to the next positive and powerful and good level.
So three keys to successful inner work is choose to see your relationship as a path of growth. The relationship is not here to actually make you happy day in and day out. It's here to help you grow. Hopefully the majority of that growth feels fun and feels good and feels right and feels and and just has a flow to it. And some of that growth is gonna be challenging because growth can be challenging. But choose relationship as a path of growth. Like choose that. Another successful piece of inner work to do in relationship is always have the ability to put yourself in your partner shoes. Really, really, really, really, really, really. I always have my clients do this. You know, I don't care how bad their partner is showing up, you have to be able to put yourself in the other person's shoes. Why would they behave like that? Why would they say that? What would make your partner get so angry? What would make your partner lash out like that? What would make your partner just close down and be all shut off? Like what, what is it about her, him, how her mind works, how his brain works, how she was raised, what she's been through in life. Put yourself in their shoes. What she has to endure in this situation, in that situation at work with her family. To be able to put ourselves in the other person's shoes means we can understand their experience.
Here is a a final key that I wanna mention to successful inner work that a partner can do in relationship. And this is a big one, my friends. If you've ever said to yourself, I'm kind of the more aware, conscious, or mature person in this relationship, if you've ever said that to yourself, then here's the rule for you and for anyone else, the more mature and conscious person must lead the way.
If you're a parent and you have a 7-year-old and they start to act like a 7-year-old and moan and groan like a 7-year-old, are you gonna act like a 7-year-old with them in return? Is that how you're gonna manage your 7-year-old by you becoming a 7-year-old? No, that would look silly when your 7-year-old is being a 7-year-old. You be a parent, you be a 40-year-old or whatever you are in any relationship, the more mature and conscious person must lead the way. If you identify yourself, if my client identifies herself himself as the more mature and conscious person, then you have a responsibility. That person has a responsibility, like it or not, is they have to lead the way. Because you're the more conscious and mature one. You're the one that's gonna have to come up with the mature perceptions and the good ideas. You're the one that's gonna have to say, Hey, time out. I think we need some help here. You are the one that's going to have to not attack and not take the low road. Just because your partner takes the low road doesn't mean you should take the low road. If you take the low road because your partner takes the low road, what does that mean? It means you're letting the other person regulate your consciousness
and you are choosing to take a low road. Anytime you choose to take a low road, consider that a bad choice. The low road is the low road. It will not advance you in life in any way, shape or form. The high road will high road. It tends to be more difficult, especially if your partner is the one who consistently takes the low road.
So the more mature and conscious person must lead the way, must stay in consciousness as best as possible. I know it's not always easy, I get it. But that person must choose to lead the way, otherwise they're not the more mature conscious one. And their perception about that is wrong.
Believe it or not, a relationship can prosper when the more mature and conscious person decides, oh, okay, I get it. I need to be more of a leader when it comes to maturity and consciousness and taking the high road.
Okay, let's talk about conflict fighting and arguing. You know, I think it's good to have a deeper understanding here. For a lot of people, conflict is inherently stressful. People don't like to do conflict. Most people, and most people have never learned how to fight and argue in a good way. I didn't. Or we avoid arguing altogether and keep things bottled up. Or you, we tend to argue and fight as much as we want, but there's never a good result. Therefore, we're not arguing and fighting in a good way. So the bottom line that I wanna suggest here is we need, I'm, I'm using arguing, fighting in conflict. I'm, I'm saying all those words as if they are the same. So we need some new ideas here. We need a new view.
So this information comes through just relationship work, you know, from different experts, conflict work from different experts. You know, the common misconceptions about conflict is that conflict is inherently bad. Oh my God, we're in conflict. This is bad. Oh my God, we're in conflict. We need to avoid conflict. 'cause if you avoid it, then you won't have it. And if I'm in a relationship and I have conflict, that means there's something wrong with the relationship or it means there's something wrong with the other person. 'cause I'm right, obviously, and they're wrong. And, and indeed in any conflict somebody's gotta be right and somebody's gotta be wrong. And it just so happens I'm always the right person and that guy's always the wrong one.
There are some people in relationship who truly always need to be right. They never apologize. They never admit that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was wrong.
That's a tough relationship to be in. It is. That's hard.
So when it comes to fighting conflict, arguing, again, most people don't really know how to fight and most people don't always know why they're fighting. Like all of a sudden, sudden you're in a fight with your partner in an argument. Like a lot of people don't actually even know how it got there so quick. So I wanna suggest that there's some good rules of engagement for a good fight, so to speak. Fighting in a way that helps the relationship instead of hurting it.
So it's usually the underlying issues that we need to look at, not the surface things that we're generally fighting about. Usually what a couple is fighting about is something on the surface, which makes sense, but it's really underlying issues that are more important.
And for this reason, fighting by itself isn't the real reason why a lot of couples break up. Yeah, people who fight, they fight, they fight and they finally break up. But it's the underlying issues that are driving the fighting, which is why they're breaking up, not the fighting per se. So here's a reframe, and you know, there's not enough time to go into this deeply. I go into this more deeply in our conscious relationship training, but the essential reframe for fighting is yes, fight, but fight for the relationship, not against it, and not against the other person. So when you fight, think to yourself, I'm fighting for the relationship. When you fight, think to yourself, I'm fighting for consciousness. I'm fighting for a better understanding. So you're gonna let go of fighting to win or fighting to prove the other person's a jerk and to prove them wrong. And in the back of your mind somewhere, think every fight is a fight for the relationship. Every argument is an argument for consciousness, for better understanding between these two people, me and her. Me and him. Yeah, of course, initially when I fight, I'm trying to win, but I wanna quickly be able to let go of that fight so I can come out on top and be the winner and prove the other person wrong. And when we do that, the fighting changes a little bit because as a part of us that's asking, okay, what is actually going on here?
You are fighting for better understanding of each other.
You are fighting for better communication. You are fighting for a breakthrough. You are fighting for a way that each of you can feel heard. You are fighting for a way that you feel understood and your partner feels understood. You are fighting such that the fight ends up bettering their relationship,
not harming it from that place. If you are fighting with a sense of, for the relationship, I just wanna say, you will be less prone to use words to harm the other person. If you're fighting to win or fighting to prove the other person wrong, you will use words to harm. You will use actions to harm somebody that will harm the relationship. That is a bad fight, that is a dumb fight. That is a fight that doesn't further the action. It puts a nail in the coffin of their relationship experience.
Stop going for the jugular. Stop using words and actions to harm the other person.
Ask questions in the fight. Why would you do that? What were you thinking at the time? If you're fighting for the relationship, sometimes it is good to have a time out in a fight. If the words are too heated, if the energy is too heated, a fight for the relationship takes sometimes a time out. Hey, you're activated, I'm activated, you're upset, I'm upset. Can we just go to our separate corners for like the next 20 or 30 minutes, we'll come back when we're more cooled down.
Lots more to say, but I'm gonna leave it at that for now. And let's close out our conversation by talking a little bit about soul contracts. And I really wanna pose the question, are there soul contracts? I, I love this concept and I play with it quite a bit. Um, here's the assumption. The assumption here is that there may be relationships, soul contracts, there may be relationships that have a special destiny to them that are a little bit more preordained, perhaps encoded in our soul's journey and life conspires to bring us together. Uh, the implication being is that there's a greater wisdom driving our lives. Have you read a relationship like that? It just felt like a little bit faded.
F-A-T-E-D the fates kind of brought you together, destiny brought you together. Uh, soul contracts, by the way I'm talking any kind of relationship. It could be with a child, a parent, a cousin, a friend, a spouse, a pet, somebody you know, for a, a day, a week, a month or a lifetime.
You had people come into your life even for a short amount of time. And it was so abundantly clear like, wow, this was so meant to happen.
You brought that person or that person, person brought you, or you brought each other a special gift, a special insight, an opening somehow that shifted you or shifted them.
You know, a soul contract can mean, let's say with your partner, we're here to learn some difficult lessons with our partners, with our partner. And it's a relationship that has a lot of challenge and pain. So that could be a sole contract. Some relationships are contracted to have a lot of challenge because sometimes we need a lot of challenge to learn. Some of us have a lot of lessons to learn in relationship. Sometimes a soul contract can mean we're here to receive a lot of goodies from each other. And the relationship has a tone of very, it's positive, it's expansive, it's generative. Have you ever had a relationship like that? No matter how brief with a significant other, it just felt like it was kind of healing or it could be a swirl of both of these, which it usually is.
You got a lot of good things and a lot of challenging things. A soul contract could be a short term one, it could be a long term one, it could be an uneven one. Meaning you might be serving that person a little more than they serve you. Or vice versa, dear soul contract. Like, you know, I've met some parents who are, or you know, they're like expecting your kids to pay them back somehow. I did all this for you, I did all that for you and now you gotta do this for me. You know? Yeah. It's, it's, it's wonderful for our children to follow in the love and take care of the ones that came before them and birthed them. But when there's this intense expectation, um, the reality is the contract between a parent and a child. Oftentimes it's the parent giving more, at least initially,
parents have to be down with that. We have to agree to that. Especially, you know, in the first, at least couple of decades. It's, it's uneven. You can't expect your kids to be giving you what you give to them for goodness sake. It's a whole different role. That whole contract doesn't mean we're stuck by the way. It means we're given a role to play and a destiny to fulfill. It's not meant to stick us. You know, some possible elements of a soul contract might mean you feel a clear and overriding sense that you're somehow bound to this person by more than chance, oh, we just had this chance meeting. Well, maybe it's more than chance you have an invisible and inex unexplainable obligation feeling to help this person or serve them or love them in a specific way. Have you ever met someone like that? You just feel like you're supposed to be helping them or serving them or loving them,
you know, and the other, and the other person might have similar feelings or not.
A lot of times you're in a relationship and everybody thinks you're crazy for being with that person or you're ill-informed. Oftentimes they're right. And oftentimes we're in a soul contract with that person. And it is a bit crazy.
Some people have described a feeling of feeling like they're being assigned to somebody. And soul contracts are never quite what we think. It doesn't mean they're all glorious and wonderful. It just means there's a sense of a higher power guiding things. And there's more to it than chance.
So, you know, pick a person if you feel like playing with this, that you believe you may have a soul contract with. Uh, why do you feel this way? What are you both here to experience together to learn from each other? How are you here to serve this person? How are they here to serve you?
Some powerful questions, especially when you can play with these questions with each other.
Now, if you, if you believe in such a concept as so contracts or considering it, the key ingredient here, oddly enough, is kind of respect, like respecting the full package of their relationship because it's gonna come with ups and downs. Respect the higher power that brought you together. Respect the mystery of it all. Respect your own inner knowing,
respect life on its own terms. Relationship is not here to make us happy. Period. Relationship is a great teacher.
Some final thoughts, my friends, I think you and I are here to be adept at putting our own relationship biases aside. When you're working with a client, whatever you believe, whatever you think you should believe, put your biases aside. And I believe with my client, I'm always looking to be a champion and a cheerleader for relationship for my client, whether they're in one or not. My first move is how can I be a champion and a cheerleader for their relationship that they're in now or for the one that they wish to have?
So I'm not gonna go, oh yeah, men's suck, women's suck, married sucks, suck sucks. This is so bad. Uh, no, no, be a champion. Be a cheerleader for relationship. That's a great way we can support each other because relationships can be challenging enough and they can be powerful.
And I am not just listening to my client about her relationship, his relationship, I'm also trying to listen to the relationship itself. Because the relationship has its own higher wisdom to it. There's person A in relationship and there's person B in relationship. And there's the relationship itself. It's a third entity. It's like a triangle relationship has its own wisdom, has its own agenda that goes far beyond each individual person. So when I'm listening to my client talk about her relationship, I'm trying to listen to the relationship. What is the relationship asking of my client? What is the relationship asking of my client and my client's partner? What is it wanting? What is it needing? What kind of nourishment does it need? What kind of shift or change or insight does it need?
So my friends, those are just a few thoughts about relationship of conscious relationship. And I want to close by saying that there's a secret sauce to success with clients and relationship. And some of the secret sauce, I think is this. You have to trust the wisdom of their journey.
I don't care how, you know, people have some rough stories about relationship. You do, I do. We all do. We have to trust, ultimately the wisdom of of my client's journey with relationship wherever they're at. We have to let go of any need for happy endings.
When I'm coaching my client around relationship, I'm not looking for a happy ending. Of course I want my client to be happy, but to try to force a happy ending is not necessarily listening to the relationship. Sometimes relationships don't want a happy ending. It's not what they're about.
I look to uphold that whatever challenge my client is facing in relationship, that challenge has a higher purpose for them. And that we have to do some work to get in alignment with what that purpose is. What they're here to learn from that,
and I choose to be unwavering in this commitment to the commitment is to use our relationship challenges as a vehicle for growth and transformation. Hard as that is at the end of the day, if you cannot learn from it and grow from it and transform from it, then it's very difficult.
When we do learn and grow and transform from our relationship challenges, then there's a magic that happens for ourself for sure, and oftentimes for the relationship itself.
Thanks for tuning in my friends. Thanks for being on this journey with me in the big picture and in this particular conversation. Next, we're gonna talk about you as a teacher, you as a leader, you as a presenter. I'll see you on the other side.
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