The Single Most Destructive Cause of Relationship Stress: Resisting Feelings
For years I couldn’t feel my feelings, and my intimate relationships suffered awfully as a result.
For years I couldn’t feel my feelings, and my intimate relationships suffered awfully as a result.
We men are Angry. Furious. Enraged. Which has nothing to do with Republicans, or Democrats, or the unfair accusations our intimate makes in her (his) moments of upset. No. We’re angry because our fathers left us alone to find our own way.
“Find someone who loves you as you are” is a wise ideal to lean towards, but make no mistake: You don’t get to stay the same person when you decide to build a life with another human being.
For nearly 3 decades, choosing me as your boyfriend was like strapping yourself into a faulty emotional roller coaster whose wheels would scream and spark before jumping the tracks, offing us both towards an awful demise.
When a man (or woman) says “I don’t want drama,” he is essentially saying, “I am terrified of feeling out of control, and I cannot be with anyone who feels feelings or acts in ways that are beyond my current capacity to feel or simply outside my tiny stress-free comfort zone.”
No man can truly be King until he is willing to take responsibility not just for himself, but for the entire world around him. Until then, he might get rich, but all he’ll have is money.
I recently led a 2-day private coaching intensive for a well-intentioned couple who had ignorantly, innocently, conspired together for years to create a tragic mess of love.
There’s a terrible phenomenon that destroys otherwise good relationships. I call it the “Relationship Death Gap.”
No one ever taught me how to “be in my heart” (or what that even means). My relationships have often suffered horribly as a result. Like most men (many women, too) I’ve been conditioned to live in my head, to use my brain to solve any problem that presents itself.
Woman, I know you have been hearing for a lifetime that you’re too much, too needy, too loud, too opinionated, too demanding, too happy, too sad, too large, too emotional, too expressive, too whatever. So you learned to shrink yourself in countless ways.