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Table of Contents
- Tools For Developing Rock Spaces
- Feeling Reduced And Minimized
- Fear Of Other Peoples’ Opinions
- The Need To Toughen Up
How To Reclaim Self-Love When It Goes Away
How To Find Your Sense Of Self
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Hello and welcome to the Deeper Dating® Podcast. I’m Ken Page, and I’m a Psychotherapist. I’m the author of the book Deeper Dating® and the Cofounder of DeeperDating®.com, which is a site where single people can meet in an environment that is fun, inspiring, kind and respectful. Today, I’m going to teach some tools for handling those times we feel we just can’t navigate love and relationships. This week and every episode, I’m going to share the greatest tools that I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing, and heal your life in the process because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love, which are the greatest skills of all for a happy life. If you want to learn more about the Deeper Dating® path to real intimacy, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com. You can sign up for my mailing list, get free gifts, and see transcripts of every episode. I also just want to say that everything I’m going to share in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice, and if you’re experiencing any serious psychological symptoms, please seek professional help. Of course, if you like what you’re learning here, I’d love it if you could subscribe and leave me a review. Thank you so much for that. You can stand on a rock in this moving current of river called life and still have yourself. Click To Tweet Today, I want to speak about the experience of not having a self or more specifically, having a hole where our sense of healthy self is supposed to be. It’s not a good feeling. It’s something we think we shouldn’t have, but it’s so much of what we do end up having in the course of this strange life that we live and in the course of learning the skills of love. There are pockets where we just don’t know, and even worse than just not knowing, there’s a “missingness” inside. Today I’m going to offer some tools for healing those places of “missingness” inside, of emptiness, of feeling like, “I just can’t do this. I’m missing a piece of me. There’s something defective in me. There’s something broken in me. I don’t have the skills.” I think in the face of this strange and treacherous life, and in the face of the strange and treacherous, often, experience of intimacy, and the mystery of what happens in love, we’re so often confronted with that experience. I think as we grow, we learn the skills to lose ourselves less. Even when we don’t know who we are, even when we’re bewildered and in pain and stuck, we learn these skills. I think of it as trying to cross a wide river and that experience like, “There’s no way I can do this. I can’t do it. There’s no place for me to stand. I can’t get through.” In my life, there have been so many of those times and there still are many of those times, but especially when I was younger, that terrible place of, “I just don’t know. I don’t have the tools. I don’t have the ground to stand on.” After so many experiences of confronting that very painful place, and finding the tools of discovering myself, the image is like this river that I need to cross and all of a sudden, there’s a rock underneath my feet. I can stand on that rock in this moving current of river and still have myself. What I want to teach today is some wonderful tools for how to build those rock experiences, these rocks that we can stand on in the river of this mystery of love and life, and feel a sense of wholeness and connectedness.Tools For Developing Rock Spaces
I don’t know and I don’t think any of us ever have an experience where the path across that river becomes one that we could just simply walk across. There are these places where the water is rushing and we can’t get through. If we’re lucky, there’s a rock that we could step on to of a sense of self, a memory of self, a tool that we’ve learned, something that we can do so that we can move further on the river, but there’s always this rushing river of not having ground to stand on and not knowing ourselves. That’s just so much a part of being human. By the experience of self-honoring, we can cultivate the experience of having rocks beneath our feet that we can step on in love. I’m going to share some tools for developing those kinds of rock spaces. I’m going to ask you to remember times when there wasn’t ground for you to stand on, that you figured out a way to create ground to stand on. That became a rock for you. What kind of wisdom tool that you had in your life? Guaranteed, every one of you has those. When we see what those are, they come together to form a mission of our deepest life lessons, the things that get us through the river of life with wisdom. I’m just going to share a few that I know, and that many people I know have experienced. I just want you to remember and we’re going to start with that experience of, “There’s not a rock for me to stand on here.” There’s not a steppingstone. There’s just a sense of not rightness, not “okayness”, emptiness, “flawedness”, brokenness. Have you ever been in a relationship and had a really bad feeling of suffocation, and then felt like, “What’s wrong with me? Why am I feeling suffocated? I should really be fine in this relationship. My partner is fine. Why do I feel like I can’t breathe? Why do I feel like there’s no air for me? Why do I feel like I want to flee?” Maybe a feeling of numbness where the other person is feeling, but you are kind of feeling nothing, and you feel bad that you’re feeling nothing. These are places that have been groundless places for me in my own intimacy journey. I’ve had to learn such important things about those places. Have you ever experienced those things? Highly sensitive people often feel a sense of suffocation or needing space. Click To Tweet The feeling of suffocation in an intimate relationship for me is a big one. When I learned about Elaine Aron‘s work with highly sensitive people, and I learned that highly sensitive people often feel that kind of sense of suffocation or needing space. That was really helpful for me to begin to understand who I was, when I realized and I could admit that my suffocation was a sign. It’s pretty obvious but to me, it just felt like a defect. It was a sign that I needed more space. Something was happening inside me or in my interaction with the other person where I literally didn’t have enough space, and I needed to somehow reclaim that sense of space. That insight gave me ground to stand on instead of just feeling like I am just so dysfunctional with love. That’s one example.Feeling Reduced And Minimized
Have you ever felt that kind of sense of suffocation in a relationship and learned a skill, and actually through your interactions with yourself or the other person heal that, fix that and get past that? Just take a minute to think. Here’s another one. Feeling somehow “less than” because of who you are in an intimate relationship. That experience of feeling reduced, less than, minimized, maybe because you had a need that was not being met, or maybe because the other person was somehow degrading you, controlling you, somehow dishonoring you or not honoring you fully enough, or you were doing that yourself. That feeling of being less than, that horrible feeling of being less than. Have you ever experienced that and been able to get past it, get through it and get out of it?Fear Of Other Peoples’ Opinions
When we ask that, we make room for our humanity. All of a sudden, it’s literally the feeling of ground beneath our feet. Here’s another one. What will people think of me? These are all such human ones, but I think you could sense that when you get lost in them, it’s just that feeling of a lack of ground beneath our feet. What will people think of me? The replacement for that is, what do I think of this? Whatever it is that I think or feel about this, how is that authentically a part of who I am? I remember a moment in therapy. I was with a therapist who, ultimately, I was not so thrilled with and was not a great therapist for me, but there was one thing that happened. I was in a relationship with the boss, and I talked a lot about what she thought of me and how she saw me. My therapist said to me, “Well, how do you see her?” I thought that that was a great question, but then she went further and she explained to me, “The minute you disconnect from your eyes and how you perceive the world, you will be prey to this experience of a terrible sense of vulnerability to how other people see you. The healing from that is the going back to what you see, and what you notice. The lack of being able to do that creates a vacuum inside, which always gets filled with masochistic situations where we over worry about what other people think of us.”The Need To Toughen Up
Here’s another one. I need to toughen up. I am too sensitive. Just take a minute to think about the times that you may have felt that. What if that was replaced with, I’m actually not going to toughen up because this is how sensitive I am. This is what I feel. What if my strength was a more flexible strength that came from honoring that vulnerability, and then making choices that took care of it? Instead of trying to get rid of it, step on it, suppress it, bury it or make it tougher. It’s in that act of self-honoring, of finding the spaciousness to self-honor, the room to self-honor that so many of those deep and strange hole spots inside of us are healed and soothed and changed. That is about honoring self. That terrible painful space is about the dishonoring of self. It's in that act of self-honoring those deep and strange whole spots inside of us that we are healed, soothed, and changed. Click To TweetWatch the episode here:
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