Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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Because no matter how many times she tells you how good you are, you will be unable to receive, perceive, or internalize what she actually believes and feels if there is no place to connect it to inside you.
✏️ Shame acts as a filter preventing you from perceiving reality. I think of it as what’s basically blocking what she’s saying from connecting to something inside you.
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You can always express that you need others to tell you their needs in a constructive way, and an emotionally mature partner will always work on doing this, but if your inner landscape holds a lot of unquestioned shame, you will receive both kinds of communication the same way. Her distress, however she expresses it, will feel to you like an accusation. She may in turn feel utterly powerless to reach you, even when she sees your goodness at a time you do not.
✏️ Doesn’t matter if she expresses need or normal hurt lovingly, cries, yells, criticizes… shame will make it all sound like accusation and that you’re not good enough.
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the shame over not being able to provide what someone needs is massive, and apparently that’s a big thing for men. However, underneath, there is a complex operation of shame going on in masculinity. If you have shamed yourself for having perfectly normal needs, you may not realize that you are doing so, and instead may perceive those same needs as shameful when they appear in other people. You may then actively shame people when they express those same normal needs you have internalized as shameful for yourself. So let’s say you learned very early on that needing to be held tenderly and gazed upon lovingly is shameful. You put it away, and can’t access it or even remember it. When someone you are lovers with has that very normal and healthy need, instead of comforting her appropriately, you may treat her as shameful and confusing, or become angry and withdrawn, and then blame her for this tension by calling her ‘needy’ or ‘unreasonable’ – when really it is your own denied need that you are seeing.
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When you cause harm and then recognize it and apologize, a process of forgiveness and repair may be attempting to move inside her. When someone has been hurt by a person they trust who realizes belatedly the harm they have caused, a genuine apology initiates a cycle that must be allowed to run its full course. Panicking and freezing it in the middle by becoming defensive is like turning off the washing machine when it is on agitate because you believe it will be on agitate forever. Panicked thoughts freeze one moment in time and do not know what comes next. You must wait and be calm and loving and stay genuinely present, connected, and remorseful while the cycle runs. Stay with it until it arrives on its own at the rinse cycle and then the spin cycle, when clean clothing – trust – becomes available to you again.
✏️ Don’t interrupt the cycle of forgiveness, even when it gets scary (e.g. stored up tension from the time of harm). Any wave of hurt that comes your way is her absorbing your apology and finally feeling heard.
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The key to nurturing is to give it because you love giving it. It does not take effect if you nurture while waiting to see if some expected result will emerge.
✏️ You can’t game the system. It has to be authentic and for its own sake. If you’re doing it to get a result, then basically you’re saying “Feel safe now! Or else the safety goes away.”
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If in a heated moment your body’s fight or flight response tells you to take off, and you have an understanding created in advance, you can go. Just go, even without a word if you need to, and then within 20 minutes (or a time lapse you mutually agree on well in advance), connect back in either in person or by text or phone to say “I love you, I’ll be back in a bit, I just had to take a time out.”