After my divorce, five years ago, I wanted the answer to one question. I couldn’t find it anywhere.
Did she like him or did she like the idea of being married to him? Photo by Blake Cheek on Unsplash
First, I saw my problem clearly.
Instead of addressing connection problems with a man I would push for a new milestone, even in early dating.
Even when the reality wasn’t great. Things were not going well on a human friendship level. We had obvious problems. I didn’t feel seen or supported. I was losing respect.
But we would progress, largely through my anxious requests. When I didn’t feel good, oddly, I would pull in more communication, sex and time.
Unlocking next relationship titles, marriage, moving, renovations, vacations and kids seemed to be the core of my connections.
I did this at work as well. I would push projects forward faster in my businesses, when to be honest early testing showed something was off. The few years I had a more traditional job I would seek new roles and advancement in an organization I didn’t want to work in. When I didn’t like how I felt, I would simply look for a new problem to solve.
I was orienting to the future of what could be, across my life. It was as if I was incapable of simply doing more of what was working and less of what wasn’t. Which is how all true success is actualized.
Most of my next step moves, rarely made sense. I remember even in my friendships, I would tend to ignore people that had real availability and alignment with me. I would seek out people that were hard to connect with but fit the storyline I was building of my imagined future.
I seemed to mostly spend my time, energy and attention on things that were not working.
I was always fixing problems and rarely making good things better.
But why?
I could see the pattern, but I didn’t understand why I did this. Why did I ask for more so often when I wasn’t happy with how things were right now? Why did I so often ignore the simple things that made me happy and instead lunge myself deeper into what wasn’t working?
Before I tell you the answer, just think about how insane that is. I was annoyed and frustrated in dating so I would call him up and request he communicated with me MORE OFTEN. Things were tense and hard in my relationship so I would plan a big life change with that person.
It’s like I was an investor who kept putting money into a poorly run company with no track record of success just because I liked MY idea of it what it could be. If it was totally different. Who does that? Who adds more investment to things that aren’t good? Short answer, almost everyone.
While looking back this methodology seems absurd, almost everyone I know models it in their life.
Most of my friends have children when their marriage is in a lull. They are burnt out, disconnected and a little overwhelmed about money. So they have another kid, buy a bigger house, renew their passports and rip up the kitchen floor. I thought this was normal.
The answer is quite simple though.
I now know through embodiment and somatic coaching that most people spend their lives simply avoiding their actual feelings. They write a story of what they think would make them feel the way they wish they felt now. Then they start moving life in the direction of that story. So that they can orient to their own imagination of the future they created instead of what is really going on today. That’s the answer.
I can open this up for you a bit more through an illustration.
Imagine the classic woman that is dating a guy who really is just a let down. He is unhealthy, he gets grumpy over the smallest things and after an initial, short dating period he stops putting much effort into the connection. He shows very little actual interest in her life and seems to mostly want a TV watching buddy. When she asks about doing something she thinks is fun, he trump cards her by saying he is stressed about work.
If this woman was able to feel her emotions in her physical body, in real time and be ultra present with reality she would be annoyed and turned off. She would also be mad that as she became more attached this guy seemed to care for her less, instead of more. She would feel frustrated that he had pretended to enjoy the same hobbies as her. When the reality of his life was that he only does the things he floated on his dating profile a few times a year.
If this woman was embodied, feeling her real time emotions in her physical body, she would pull away from this guy.
She wouldn’t argue with him and press him for more effort. She would just not WANT to be around him, because he is not fun to be around. He is making her life worse. He is causing her stomach to hurt and her throat to tighten up. Her body doesn’t actually want to spend time with him. If she was moving through life with her body, instead of with her mind, she would find herself making plans with people that she enjoyed being around. He body would drift off from him.
Also, If she could live in and move through life from her body, then that dude might realize that women have needs and relationships require time, energy and attention.
He might see that when he shifts women into a mommy role and uses them like a weighted, sex blanket they stop liking him. It might take him a few times, but he would grow up. Real time feedback from your body (instead of lectures) is a gift to people in your life. We write a lot of articles telling other people how to act. We haul each other to couples therapy to teach each other how to act. But we rarely model natural consequences with our embodied feedback.
Instead of pulling away, feeling turned off and getting annoyed enough to just go home early though she does something else.
Something very familiar to me.
The woman in this story uses her thoughts to create a problem to solve. She asks her mind, “why is Tim so disenchanted with me and why do I feel so anxious?” First, she decides if she and Tim could talk on the phone more between dates then she would feel better about him. Second, if they plan a trip then she will get what she needs from him. So she asks Tim, who sucks and has nothing in common with her, for MORE time and MORE energy.
Instead of experiencing her reality she moves her emotional experience to the future she has imagined once they are talking more and going on vacations. Even when the vacation and the phone calls are not that great she can pretend they are because she has moved to total fantasy. She can use her mind and fantasies to self create how she feels. Plus she can ask for more and work on getting that to keep going in the same direction.
This my friends is how we get what we said we wanted but still feel very anxious.
It is how we build lives that are all wrong for ourselves.
Have you asked yourself yet, where are her real feelings? Where is her actual, current day annoyance with this sub-par guy? Feelings don’t go away unless you experience them. So unfortunately they are shoved down into the pit of her stomach.
She has to find ways to silence her real emotional experience. Numb. Buy more things. Do more work on herself. But as they say, the body keeps score, so in this time period she is going to have some weird phantom illnesses show up. Rashes. Headaches. Eye-twitching. Trouble focusing at work. It’s like her body is screaming at her but she’s duck taped it’s mouth.
When she talks to her doctor about this she often gets handed a bottle to make not feeling even easier. When she hires a talk therapist they will help her narrate new stories and create problems to solve that double down on the idea that feelings should be controlled through right-thinking.
Sadly, she will soon start to get confused and neurotic.
Things that are good will feel bad too. People and opportunities that could set her free, but threaten her tightly held narratives, will become the enemy. The longer she lives this way the more neurotic and suspicious she will become. Living life in self-created stories and re-writing past experiences to line things up to what you wish was true makes you neurotic and suspicious. She pushes away all her good connections.
Then the real fun starts.
Because what happens when you shove how you really feel into a dark closet… for years?
Your emotions become very broken, child-like and irrational. In five years she has married Tim and is taking care of their toddler. No surprise, on a core level she still doesn’t like him. Tim sucks with women, but he’s also really never had any actual feedback. His mom and his partners cling to him and push for more when he is distressed through his whole unremarkable life.
Tim has honestly been conditioned by his family, his society and his exes to believe that more connection comes from having a hard time at work or with his health. Because when he has pulled away they have always chased him and offered him more.
But this woman is starting to get ANGRY.
You can’t keep your emotions locked away forever. They break out at very inconvenient times. Since she hasn’t experienced, integrated and matured them they are now pure chaos. Which leads her to believe they can’t really be trusted. Much of her therapy labels support this theory. The meds she has added to her rotation aren’t helping either.
At this point, the relationship with Tim… if there even ever was a real relationship… in not salvageable.
So she has two options:
A. She can divorce Tim. Dive into a narrative of fixing problems that once solved create a future which evokes the emotions she wants to feel. Go back out into the dating pool and meet her next Tim. Use future images, self-improvement and steps forward to distract herself whenever she feels disappointed. Continue collecting real problems she could of solved in a bag that she drags around behind her while she chases problems that she never should of had to begin with, like Tim. Spending her entire life going back and forth between temporary hope and utter despair.
OR
B. She can press a big, f*cking pause button on her life.
Close her eyes and feel. Feeling at this point is going to really suck. Between her f*cked up childhood and her bizarre ability to re-write reality her feelings are kind of like those of a toddler who wasn’t touched and grew up in a third world orphanage. Letting them out of the closet is hard. These feelings have never seen daylight.
Plus she’s going to have to look at the house of cards she built and the crappy trades she made to keep things like Tim alive.
But stories can fall apart and emotions can grow up.
I am embodiment coach and option b is my job. I help people mature emotions. I help them gain the nervous system capacity to experience reality. I teach them how to turn off story. I teach them how to build sensitivity, instead of reactivity. I am like a Kindergarten teacher for emotions. Embodiment and somatic work taught me how stay in my reality and it can do the same for you.
Reality is amazing. You are actually good at things. There are things you actually want to do.
Honest people that truly see you can feel incredible instead of like your enemy. You have motivation and desire, it’s just tucked behind that crazy, abused emotion you locked up in solitary confinement. I coax those characters out and help you hold and heal them. Emotions, once matured and experienced in your physical body (so that your brain can learn to stop signaling they aren’t safe) are the flavors and colors to life.
This story is how you stayed in a relationship that sucked for a long time but you didn’t realize it until the end.
It is how you built a long term career in a field that isn’t suited to your personality. It is why you feel so anxious and tired and all the time. It is also why you can’t enjoy real life. It’s why once a person becomes too real you push them away. Real life shouldn’t feel like it is coming at you and threatening or surprising you. If so, that’s the key factor to know you are disembodied.
Embodied living isn’t shocking or leveraged. Most of life is pretty predictable, if you are watching it unfold in real time.
Stop story. Stop Action. Feel. Keep feeling until you move to maturity, clarity and wisdom. Then take your tiny, true next step. Keep repeating. That’s it. That is it.
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Thanks for your claps, comments and follows. If you want to know more about embodiment this course is the best place to start.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Blake Cheek on Unsplash
