Woman on Fire (13 page)

If you have a need to release old stuff, it might be stuck in your throat chakra. When you are in a safe place like your home where no one will bother you, you can give yourself space to use your voice, express what feels stuck, and let it out. Let yourself make sound. Use your voice to play, sing, emote, or say a blessing. Sing to the mountains. Dance and play with sound. Play with vowels. Cry. Wail. Release pent-up anger. Say the things aloud that you never let yourself say. Make extra noise when you self-pleasure. Enjoy the playground of sound.

Movement in the body is a great release. We have stuck points in our bodies, and just moving and allowing something new to emerge can be freeing. Dancing, running, yoga, acrobatics, exercise, or other kinds of movement gets you into your body and helps it let go of what is weighing you down. Movement is always a good go-to when you feel stuck because it is the opposite of stuck and unmoving.

Spending time in nature is a great way to release what ails you. Lie in the grass and breathe into the earth. Cry into the earth. Release. Hug trees and feel the energy passing between you and this great living thing. Swim in the ocean, a lake, or a river and let the waters wash over you. I love to get knocked around by the waves in the ocean because I can feel the healing salt water literally take away
the tension in my body and ease the achy parts. Nature is the greatest healer. The earth can hold the things you are ready to let go of. Give it back, ground it, and release.

Bring new influences into your life and remove negative influences that keep you stuck. This book is one such influence. There might also be people you can bring in: friends, teachers, healers, and communities who will support your healing process. Bring in new voices and experiences that will allow you to let go of your old ways of being and step into the new ones. We all need this. Think of it as a sexual support team. Who is on your team? Bring them in and assemble the right team of people to help you move to a new place as a sexual person. Stack your bookshelves with new ideas and beliefs.

As you question and purge what does not serve you, bring in what does. Release is essential so you can have the sexual life and be the sexual person you really want to be. Now let out a great big
breath.

Element 3:
EMOTION

SHOW UP AS EMOTIONALLY POWERFUL

To be a woman on fire, you've got to accept emotional responsibility. It's a part of growing up. To some degree, every one of us learns harmful emotional patterns that do not serve our relationships. You can't skip this part of your development. It's the self-knowing eyeglass, the locus of skilled self-expression that separates the women who are unstoppable in their relationships, in sex, in their work, and in the world, from those women who will keep staying stuck replaying old emotional patterns that don't allow them to be who they deeply want to be.

Some of the hardest work you will ever do in your life lies in Element 3. In order to have powerful and authentic intimate relationships, you must eliminate your destructive emotional patterns—both internally
and in relationships. You have harmed yourself and others with these patterns, and they have kept you in a place of immaturity, smallness, pettiness, unrealistic expectation, and insincerity, and that keeps you from rising to a more exalted level in your relationships. Your emotional development requires attention, yet most people do not put real investment into being emotionally potent.

I hear from women often that they want deeper intimacy in their relationships. They really want a partner who can show up fully and meet them in a place of power. To be emotionally powerful requires skills. You have to develop your emotional skills in order to have more deeply intimate relationships. Skills are something you learn to do well by education and practice. This chapter is about those emotional skills.

This requires tremendous honesty and self-reflection. Most of us have enormous blind spots around our emotional patterns. Typically we are forced to deal with our emotional demons when something big happens: a death, a divorce or breakup, an accident, a health or family crisis. Life tests us, and we have to find out what we are capable of as we face things that can either take us down or make us love ourselves so fiercely that we'll never forsake our own true love again in an unhealthy, toxic relationship dynamic with someone else.

Many people carry an attitude that relationships are just what they are, and fail to see that this important part of life requires conscious effort. It's similar to the idea that we don't have to learn sex. The refrain “It's just the way it is” is thrown around frequently, and yet
nothing
is “just the way it is.” There is a cause and effect in everything. You are the cause: your relationship patterns, your dramas, your upsets, your life circumstances are the effects. If they aren't what you want, then you've got to look at how you are causing yourself pain and turmoil. You have to look at your part, for it's the only part you can change.

We all have limitations. Limitations are things we are not capable of doing, awareness we do not have, expectations we can't live up to. You have emotional limitations, and identifying them is the best way to work with them so they stop getting in the way so much. For instance, in my early twenties, I was still in a raw place, healing from my own sexual assault history, and I was speaking the word
rape
in describing my own experience for the first time. I applied to be a hotline worker at a rape crisis hotline. When the director of the program interviewed me and asked me questions, I broke down in tears when my own tender history came up, making it clear I was too vulnerable around this issue and that I was not ready to do the work. I was not invited to volunteer because I was not strong enough to be there for someone else at that time. I needed to tend to my vulnerability and healing first.

Much of the emotional pain and turmoil in relationships relates to wanting things from someone else that they simply are not capable of providing, and taking it personally when they don't. It's not about you—it's about their limitations. It doesn't mean they don't
want
to give to you—it means their awareness or capability is not in a place that would
allow
them to do so. Identifying the limitations in a person you are emotionally close to can help you to stop expecting things they cannot deliver, which prevents you from experiencing so much pain. If you cannot accept their limitations, move on.

You develop your emotional patterns while growing up as your parents transmit daily lessons via their behavior and expectations. You get your patterns from roles you play in your family and how they
play out. You get them from the culture of your family, the way the women of your family behave, and from the rules of these relationships performed each day. Most of this information gets taken into your subconscious, where you store it until you begin to have your independent relationships outside of the family, and bam! There are your patterns.

You practiced these patterns with your family and you learned them well. You discovered that you must defend yourself in some way. You worked hard not to be the thing everyone is convinced you are (pretty-but-stupid, the clown, the fuck-up, the perfect child, the responsible one, the slut, the insecure one) or you go right into proving everyone right because they all think it anyway. You are clever with your self-sabotage either way.

Everyone is emotionally vulnerable, whether you recognize it or not. Yet most people try to hide their vulnerability—either from other people or from themselves. Learning what your emotional vulnerabilities are is a key part of your being able to protect yourself in the right places, make cogent decisions, and show up as an emotionally present person who can have a deep experience with sexuality and intimacy.

There are parts of yourself you protect and that you learned to defend. I was the oldest child in a family of three siblings, raised by my dad as a single parent. I got blamed for things all the time because I was the oldest and “should” be responsible, “should know better.” So in feeling blamed, I learned to put up my dukes and defend myself. I'd spent my life feeling like I had to explain myself by defending my actions and proving that I was not all I was being accused of. I had to realize that these habits and patterns were not useful to me in my adult relationships. I was creating a defensive energy that was not helpful in being closer to the people I loved and who loved me. Instead I created walls in my intimate relationships, which kept me from getting my needs met.

Your vulnerabilities stem from both your past experiences and your current abilities and skills. If you experienced abuse as a child, you probably have some vulnerabilities related to that abuse. If you were sexualized, you might have sexual vulnerabilities. If you were abandoned, you might have a vulnerability around fear of abandonment. If you were bullied and picked on, there could be vulnerabilities around teasing or power dynamics that might engage bullying. People—especially young people—are resilient and can handle a lot more that we often give them credit for, but that doesn't mean that a vulnerability didn't develop. And people can heal and sometimes move beyond it entirely.

When you have a vulnerability, part of yourself is at risk of being emotionally triggered. This will happen in your relationships, which is why your emotional health is so intertwined with your relationships (social health). Without awareness, you will make decisions about relationships based on those triggers and your responses. Learning about your own vulnerabilities is a way of identifying the things that might trigger you before they happen, so that you can prepare yourself for ways to respond and get support when you find yourself feeling vulnerable.

Your sexual patterns will show up in repeatedly similar ways: being defensive about your sexual skills/experiences/abilities/likes, shutting down and withdrawing when sex is wonky, not asking for what you need, or feeling unwanted and therefore unattractive or sexually inadequate.

Ironically, subconciously we think these patterns help us by protecting us, but they actually keep us from getting the things we most want. It's hard to see what you are doing when you are in the midst of it. Usually someone else will point it out or it will create conflicts. If you continue to defend yourself, you'll keep creating the same dynamics. We all have to learn to be less defensive or self-protective if we want to be close to other people.

What I've seen many women do is this: she starts with a story she tells herself and it upsets her, makes her angry, afraid, or sad, and she spirals out of control with the story, becoming obsessed, and then she projects all the meanings she's created about that story onto others. She goes deep into defending the sad story where she feels smaller and her view becomes more myopic. She can't see any other possibility for what's really true outside of this story she's made up. The deeper she goes, the harder it is to get out, and the bigger the lesson becomes. We could call this an emotional spiral.

When I teach classes on communication I ask people to raise their hand if they grew up in a family where there was healthy, respectful communication, and almost invariably no one raises their hand. So how do we learn something we never had modeled for us? We were all taught disempowerment. Claim this work of empowering yourself into a new way of being so you can show up powerfully in your relationships and have the clarity and happiness you really want. Realize you have different choices for how you want to be in your relationships. You can choose to develop an understanding of your own defenses and vulnerabilities and change your defensive behaviors because you can handle yourself in a different way.

We defend ourselves in an array of ways. Any defense mechanism you have emotionally will also show up sexually. Let's look at some common defense mechanisms and some examples of how they might show up specifically around sexuality. Ask yourself if you engage in these defenses either often, sometimes, or never. Be honest in your answers, and don't be surprised if you find that you engage in many defensive patterns. Most people do.

DENIAL:
Ignore or pretend things are not really happening so you do not have to deal with them

Examples:
“Our sex life is amazing! I couldn't be happier”
(inside you are really unhappy) or
“My partner would
never
cheat on me.”

REPRESSION:
Bury painful experiences or even “forget them” because they are so painful

Examples: Forgetting that you were sexually abused or raped. Drinking or other behaviors that can keep you from remembering painful events.

PASSIVE-AGGRESSION:
Rather than ask directly for what you need, you slam doors, get sarcastic, or expect people to figure out what you want; use the silent treatment when you are upset with someone

Examples: Huff and roll over dissatisfied after sex, but tell your lover everything was great. Get up and shower after sex without a word. Storm around when you feel sexually rejected. Be cruel sexually (verbally or physically) to act out your aggression. Manipulate someone else sexually.

DISPLACEMENT:
Having a difficult feeling about one thing and then “taking it out” on someone else

Example: You have a hard “mom” day, and when your partner comes home and wants to be close to you, you pick a fight and get angry with them. (This can also be passive-aggressive.)

PROJECTION:
Attach your feelings, experiences, or stories onto others (who do not have that experience or feeling), as if to convince yourself they are not yours so you do not have to feel them

Example:
“You just don't want to have sex with me, do you?”
(When
you
don't want to have sex.)

RATIONALIZATION:
You make excuses and logical arguments to avoid taking responsibility for inexcusable actions

Example:
“I'm just not feeling very attractive, so when I slept with that other person it was because I needed to feel sexy, not because I wanted to hurt you.”

SUBSTITUTION:
Things get difficult, so you replace a goal or a person with a new one so as to avoid dealing with the original situation

Example:
“He just wasn't meeting my needs, so I broke up with him and now I have a new boyfriend.”
(Same pattern ensues.)

WITHDRAWAL:
Disconnect from people when you feel challenged or overwhelmed

Example: You pull away affectionately, sexually, and/or emotionally from your partner, shut them out, and quietly deal with your emotions.

WITHHOLDING:
Withhold love, attention, sex, or resources from those you love as punishment when you feel hurt

Example: After a fight or when your partner doesn't do what you want, you refuse to have sex, maybe pretend things are fine, but internally you are still upset and unwilling to give.

CONTROLLING BEHAVIOR:
Try to control everything and everybody by telling them how to do/not to do things and impose your way (and likely get frustrated when it doesn't work)