A turned-on woman can be frustrating and quite a force to be reckoned with, but the challenge is definitely worth it.
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A turned on woman is a rare breed of woman. She operates at least 51% from desire, rather than fear. The founder of OneTaste, Nicole Daedone, wrote a beautiful manifesto on what defines a turned on woman. It underlines the fierce commitment to truth, freedom, and unconditional love that a turned on woman embodies.
She can be frustrating and quite a force to be reckoned with. The shadow side of the turned on woman is stubbornness, control issues, or appearing uncaring at times. In the face of these behaviours, what will help you have some compassion is to remember the immensity of everything she is holding responsibility for. She may be the power source behind a business, a movement, or a family. When she gets tight, ask yourself whether it’s because she sees something important that is being overlooked? Or does she feel overwhelmed? It’s likely that a little bit of attention and “baby, I got it, you can stop worrying” would go a long way.
The trials and challenges she puts you through will ultimately make you both better people. So why not learn how to support her? And in doing so, help her to learn to yield her power gracefully, which she ultimately wants to do anyway.
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When a turned on woman is learning to yield her power, she may still rely on force to make things happen. Not trusting her own inherent power; that she has more than enough influence or magnetism to move people naturally, without force. That truly the depth of her ability to receive is her greatest strength, and her pure enjoyment of what another offers, their greatest reward. A turned on woman’s ultimate lesson is that her capacity to love people is where her true power comes from, this takes time (and a lot of mistakes and amends made) to learn and full embody.
In the mean time, while she is unskilfully bludgeoning you over the head with her high expectations – what you need to change, do better, or pay more attention to – there are ways that you can support her that will turn her perceived “bitchyness” into openness and tenderness (thereby making it a whole lot easier to be with her, and making your life feel a lot smoother in general – like that old adage “happy wife, happy life!”)
You may protest; why should I be the one to have to change in order to make life easier? Shouldn’t she just recognise her behaviour as rude and ineffective and do it differently? And the answer is probably yes. However, you could sit around lamenting her behaviour towards you, resenting her for not acknowledging how hard you’re working, and for not loving you in the way you want to be loved. Or you could leave, but if your heart has been capture by a wild woman like this, chances are you are unlikely to do that – she is the wave you can’t outrun; a love so big you are consumed by it, no matter how hard you thrash it is almost impossible to disconnect. And would you really want to? The trials and challenges she puts you through will ultimately make you both better people. So why not learn how to support her? And in doing so, help her to learn to yield her power gracefully, which she ultimately wants to do anyway.
Here are a few hints on how to support a turned on woman:
Let go of competition in favour of team work
There is a meme in society that we have to compete with each other in order to get what we need. This manifests in the work place as the alpha-beta dynamic. If one person is the top, then the other person is the bottom. Between men and women, this competition dynamic makes it hard for a man to accept a powerful woman, because if she’s powerful within this paradigm, it must mean he is somehow less than – a dynamic most men will buck against.
An alternative way of viewing the world is that we are actually on the same team. Within this paradigm you want to create or be part of the best team possible. So if she’s a powerful player, then you’re both more likely to get ahead. Seeing your woman from this perspective will help you to not feel confronted or emasculated by her strength and instead be able to celebrate it and expand it further.
Handle the structure, so that she doesn’t have to
Woman have a meerkat in their minds. An endlessly vigilant voice that’s constantly assessing how safe any given situation is. It’s the voice that wonders whether it’s safe to walk down an alley way, or whether she’s showing too much cleavage. It’s also the voice that remembers the person she was supposed to call back and that the clothes need to be picked up from the dry cleaners.
It’s called the centre of vigilance, and when it’s super active she feels like she can’t relax and let go. Instead of soft, open and calm, she gets a tight, rigid and strung out. Her vigilance centre activates when she feels like something is not properly handled. It kicks in to solve the problem. It’s like panic mode. When she starts barking orders at you or asking you sharply about whether you handled something you said you were going to handle, remember that this is just her fear. Fear that one of the many plates she’s spinning is going to drop and come crashing down.
What you can do for a woman that you recognise as hyper-vigilant, is let her know that you’ve got it handled. The more that you step in to handle the structure, the details, the systems, the implementation, the more that she can relax into her feminine. When she feels supported, instead of carrying everything on her own or having to fight to be heard, what you’ll experience is a very different flavour of a woman. Suddenly sweetness will arise where there was harshness. Here is a brilliant article by Ruwan Meepagala on how to relax a woman’s vigilance centre.
Remember that she loves you (and take it all the way in)
The extent to which you are insecure about how much she loves you, is the extent to which you will feel resentful and resistant to her feedback. If you can remember that she bothers to put enough attention on you to notice all these little things because she loves the shit out of you, it will help you not feel so defensive.
A turned on woman has high expectations. She sees the greatest in you, and her quality taste had her choose you but it will also have her only accept the best from you. In the beginning, this may make you feel like less of a man or inadequate. This insecurity may even make you more prone to jealousy or emotional outbursts, as you feel like the ground beneath you is unstable. This is called thrashing. You won’t feel that way anymore as you do the personal work required to build genuine self esteem that isn’t based on outside approval. When you learn to take in and integrate feedback without taking it personally, her adjustments won’t feel so critical and domineering, and more like a woman who wants the best from her man. And when she does genuinely hurt your feelings, or you feel like she’s being controlling rather than loving (i.e. using force rather than power) say so, but do it from the framework of reflecting her impact back to her rather than blaming.
It’s likely that all of this sounds like a whole lot of hard work. Why would you go through all that to be with a turned on woman? Well, aside from the fact that the process of learning how to be with her will change your life for the better, a turned on woman will love you like no one else could. The kind of love that transforms you, propels you and makes you great. Isn’t that worth the cost of entry?
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Photo: Ally Aubry/Flickr
What about accepting your partner as they are and not what you think he should be?
You say ‘turned on’ I say controlling and verbally and emotionally abusive.
Out of curiosity, I flipped the genders on this entire article. It sounds like something written in the fifties.