Women who chase men

Today I'm especially thinking about women, anger and the disconnection from our bodies that make us susceptible to

• romantic relationships in which we suffer

• not setting boundaries but pleasing

• looking for approval from anyone (no matter their behaviour)

• chronic self-doubt

• shame

etc.

In a podcast-episode of "In this Body" by Ailey Jolie I hear: in this culture, girls and women are primed to preoccupy themselves not with how they feel, but with how they look.

I can subscribe to this a 100%.

We are not taught to check with how we feel inside our bodies. We are not taught to listen to our so-called somatic markers - which appear as a cumulation of life-experiences - and trust them. We are not told to notice these markers and leave the person/situation when something feels off. Or at least pull back and double-check. Or go slow - until, maybe, at some point, the body has that trust.

This morning I met a friend who has a connection to a guy who once is warm and caring - which lights her up. And then distant, cold. The typical hot-cold. He doesn't want a relationship, at least not a monogamous one. While she deeply wants it, including children. How to let go of him, she contemplated in her journal while I was reading in "Women who run with the wolves".

I don't know what she'll need to experience until she's turned around this pattern - the same that has been following me all my life, until a few months back since where I feel a real shift inside...:

[It's like I can scan these people* now and know where they're at. I don't feel attracted to them anymore (instead, I'm now in the phase where I'm moreover enraged - a phase I know is important for me to feel my strength, and eventually come to acceptance with my own sense of betrayal, my own wounds...).

That - and I feel so certain that the 'explorations', the 'oh but it makes me happy at least at times' and the 'I'll still be ready when someone comes who means it seriously'... do not bring me any closer to what I truly wish. Convinced that these dynamics, in fact, divert my energy to them - who offer little in return -, and lead to an increasing sense of unworthiness, self-disrespect and self-doubt.

Such dynamics have been sapping my energy for decades!]

And what has helped me shift to a next stage, what can I recommend? Look, as I started to write before: I don't know what my friends needs for this pattern of pleasing, overgiving, performing for love, to shift...

For me, I ascribe it largely to the continuous practice (for which I've been taking therapy, somatic experiencing ;) of interoception over the last two years.

Interoception: awareness of what happens inside my body. The sensations. The somatic markers.**

When one of my colleagues at the somatic experiencing training a few weeks back asked: "Where to start with my client? She is numb in her body, has big issues with her husband, and some loverships going on simultaneously...", our teacher responded:

• Work on somatic tracking aka sensational awareness

• This will tell her who she is and what she needs and wants (in life, in love)

• Then help her navigate what arises from this within her marriage

• And if still needed, you then may work at these other men she's entertaining romance with.

  
  

Ough! How wise my teacher is! If my friend would have asked for advice, I'd have told her this: Learn to be - really be - in your body. You'll feel your anger. You'll learn to not turn that anger inward anymore, but direct it outside in the form of boundaries. You'll learn what feeling good in your body feels like - and will want to keep this peace. Everything else will slide away pretty naturally, like a raindrop on a leaf of a tropical, fleshy plant.

At least that's what comes when I put words to my own journey. What impact my fathers' recent death and the process around this - with feelings of love, guilt, grief, anger, gratitude... what this all has done to me and my romantic behaviour - is less easy for me to grasp (yet). But from what I've learnt of family constellations, it most probably has been having quite an impact, too.

Take care of your heart.

Us drinking tea and picnic-ing. And some bali-ducks:

*people, assumingly, with a mother-wound, who keep living in a boyish fantasy that at some point they'll meet the perfect female who can fulfil all their needs. Needs that their mother didn't meet. At least that's the archetypal view portrayed by Moore and Gillette in "King, Warrior, Magician, Lover".

**along with: Learning to stay in the body also with the discomfort of anger, of fear. Which in turn has been allowing me to say or embody uncomfortable No's (and stay with the anxiety that can creep in as an after-effect). Ohh, by the way, here's another podcast ("Embracing Her") episode that I shared with all my close girlfriends lately: "Female Rage – Why embracing your anger is essential!" by Nathalie Nimah - a VITA Sex Love Relationship Coach, like me :).