How To Have Really Uncomfortable Conversations in Your Relationships

The safety that difficult and uncomfortable conversations demand goes out the window in toxic and unsafe relationships. How can we have uncomfortable conversations? How can we arrive difficult decisions? Let’s explore.

What is your earliest memory of show of affection between your parents? Did you watch them hold hands, hug or kiss each other goodbye before going to work?

Introduction

For me, I never saw any exchange of affection between my parents. My older sister and I didn’t watch movies with any sexual content when we were young.

We went to an Indian school. When we hit teens, the subject of period and sex was completely avoided at home. We were in an all girls’ class from grades seven to ten. In 9th grade, my biology teacher (a woman) fell sick for over a month. The other biology teacher (a man) came into our classroom in her place.

To my belated surprised, this (male) biology teacher completely skipped the chapter on reproductive organs. I can, in retrospect, completely understand the discomfort he would have felt as a man in an all girls’ class walking us through that chapter.

I arrived age nineteen without knowing where the baby “comes from”. When my sister kindly enlightened me, I couldn’t believe it.

Why is the very thing that brings us here on earth as babies a conversation to be avoided? Why does this conversation disgust some people?

So as adults, we get married and have children but we don’t talk about sex without feeling uncomfortable? That doesn’t make sense to me.

A realization

It took me a long time to come to this place where I’m completely okay talking not just about sex, but also having other difficult conversations.

I realized that people who haven’t had conversation with themselves can’t possibly have the same with others.

Both trauma and tantra played important roles in my life that allowed me to question myself and find the answers I was looking for within myself.

Long story short, I was raised by a narcissistic parent who abused me physically, mentally and emotionally. She shamed me and criticized me over everything. I lived life in fear and was completely disconnected from who I was.

When you experience this type of trauma and abuse, you don’t know how to trust yourself because your primary relationship (with an immediate care giver) was an unsafe and dysfunctional one. When you live in an environment like that, you simply disown everything about yourself because if you do otherwise, you will suffer more abuse.

My body graduated to adulthood with the mind of a nine year old who didn’t know much about herself. I was the least confident person in the room.

Needless to say I was unconscious and every decision was made for me by the person who still controlled me.

Deep down I had grown to resent her. But that’s not the worst part. The worst part is that you can’t possibly have a healthy conversation with a narcissist because the relationship with a narcissist is toxic to its core.

The only way to begin the process of healing yourself from that trauma is to remove them from your life.

So who are you going to have those conversations with when you don’t have anyone to blame?

Yourself.

There’s no escaping hard conversations

That’s where I found myself after becoming a mother and fighting to end my arranged marriage — all alone with myself.

You will have a lot of uncomfortable emotions come up for you. I’d say I was blessed because I was never drawn to drugs or alcohol. Being introverted, I was also okay spending time by myself. I liked introspection. It wasn’t easy though sitting with all that anger that came up.

I saw first-hand the damage anger did to relationships, so I was very careful about how I expressed it.

I knew it needed a healthy channel. As I sat with anger, a host of other emotions arrived at my door step. I was hurt. I had a lot of grief that needed an outlet it never got. I had fear of abandonment.

I decided I would no longer abandon myself. No matter where I was in life, I’d be there for myself. I had no one else I could count on.

At some point along this journey, I came across meditation followed by tantra. Meditation helped me face my ugliest truths and embrace them.

I wasn’t going to abandon myself now that I was becoming the only safe person I could have very very difficult conversations about acceptance of who I was after decades of criticism that had converted to self-sabotage.

For instance, accepting a narcissist for a mother figure is simply incomprehensible. The fact that she gave birth to me doesn’t make her a mother, or my mother. That relationship is the most twisted one. All that parenting did was damage me. So my only choice was to reparent myself.

It meant taking total responsibility for myself going forward. It didn’t mean what happened to me in childhood was right in any way.

Making difficult decisions

The difficult conversations I had with myself lead me to make difficult decisions. Self-love is a decision.

It’s a decision that came from choosing between blaming her and empowering myself. I couldn’t expect my abuser to be the one to do me any good. I realized that I couldn’t expect her to change.

Once that choice was made, that decision was simple. I had to learn to love myself. Which meant that I was no longer going to let her words, ideas and criticism of me decide who I was going to become.

This brought me to the question — “Who am I?”

Who am I? If I’m not just a daughter, a friend, a mother, a wife, a sister, who am I?

Who am I when I’m not all things to other people? No one ever introduced me to that part of me.

That was the first time I realized my individuality. I’m an individual with my own thoughts, beliefs, dreams, goals and desires.

This realization was profound. Okay. So what are my likes and dislikes as this individual that I am?

I had to deeply listen to myself. After years of feeling unseen, unheard and being invalidated, this was my time to be completely present with myself and ask myself and educate myself about myself.

Meditation certainly helped me reintroduce myself to myself. The next thing that came was tantra.

It was time to listen to my body and get answer to questions Google didn’t have answers for. Besides, if you’ve been in a relationship with a narcissist you have been gas-lit enough times to not trust anyone, and to learn to love and trust yourself from scratch.

Discovering myself through tantra

Coming across tantra was a blessing. It’s one of the paths of yoga. I had been exposed to yoga and meditation. I had nothing to lose by being curious about myself.

You’re encouraged to practice tantra on your own before you can practice tantra with a partner. Tantra is a path you choose to use your (sexual) for spiritual evolution.

Tantra, as I discovered, is a tool that helps you release these energetic blockages. I had plenty of unblocking to do. I share my entire solo-tantra journey in the below story.

I quote myself from the above story:

When you understand yourself through being present in your body, you relieve yourself of the burden of carrying negative emotions. Can you imagine how freeing this is? This allows you to take ownership of who you are, what you like, what you don’t like and stand in your truth. Then when you ask for what you want, you’re coming from a very different energy in to your relationships.

For someone whose boundaries have been violated through physical and/or sexual abuse, they have some serious thinking to do with regards to how they like to be touched and shown love.

They have to release the stuck energy by showing themselves it is safe to first and foremost be in their body. There’s really nowhere else to go. The sensations they feel in their body will communicate the truth that will question the beliefs they hold.

You can’t escape from yourself. And if you want to have difficult conversation, you can’t give yourself the choice to escape from whatever comes up — anger, fear, frustration, loss, regret, pain, hate, shame. Followed by love, love for your own abused body and yourself. A lot of love of the right kind.

The one that feels good to receive, and safe as well.

Touching yourself in a loving way will tell you what you can communicate to someone you enter into a relationship with. The energetic blocks will remove shame or guilt and quickly allow you to explore pleasure in the safety of your own hands.

Note: Orgasm is not the goal in tantric self-pleasure. The goal is to be present to your energy and its communication and flow.

What I learned from witnessing these uncomfortable conversations unfolding in my body was how to be with myself, and how to listen deeply.

I didn’t know that I was training myself to have difficult conversations in my relationship with my child, my ex, my new partner, my clients and colleagues.

Without having those conversations with myself I don’t think I’d be able to face difficult questions in my relationships. In fact, the conversations with myself were the more difficult compared to the ones in my relationships.

In conclusion

There’s a reason why condoms are available in a supermarket. In your relationship, you should be able to talk about your sex life as easily as an item on your grocery list.

When you make it okay to talk about difficult things, you don’t just have less problems in your relationships, you also remove any shame and taboo around it.

Thank you for being here. I look forward to our conversations in the comments. The below story further demonstrates an element of safety in relationships

—

This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

***

You Might Also Like These From The Good Men Project

Compliments Men Want to Hear More Often

Relationships Aren’t Easy, But They’re Worth It

The One Thing Men Want More Than Sex

..A Man’s Kiss Tells You Everything

—

Photo credit: Shutterstock