a breakup especially if it was a meaningful relationship or a long relationship or you went super deep with each other a breakup is going to touch those wounds in a very similar way and it is going to feel like death I think we’ve all had that experience of relationships feeling uh like death because of course they are a kind of death but they’re also a way to sort of reignite the um the Deep wounds of our childhood that may have been dormant for years welcome back to the embodied relationship experience my name is John weinland I am your host today today we’re going to talk about the beauty and wisdom of breakups and how breakups can be portals into our deepest growth and our deepest uh elevation and evolution and while it’s true that breakups can be incredibly destabilizing heartbreaking even debilitating in some ways they do provide us with so much information and so much that we can work on in order to deepen as human beings in order to course correct in how we relate and ultimately how we can become better and more Artful lovers and partners ERS today I’m going to discuss why breakups are so painful uh what we can do in order to more consciously end a relationship and more lovingly and artfully end a relationship and then how we can take what we’ve learned in our last relationship and create um a new template and a new depth of healing in ourselves so I invite you to strap in we’re going to get deep to it I know that everybody almost everybody has had the experience of having their heartbroken a love that they had high hopes for didn’t work out and often times they are left U kind of confused and Stranded and a bit lost in life knowing what to do in order to move into the next relationship and I’m going to lay out today some practices and some Explorations that will not only help you end relationships consciously but also give you some tools on how to evaluate yourself um more than your partner but yourself and how that evaluation can really help elevate your relating in the next go round but before we dive in I have a couple pieces of business if you are watching on YouTube please like And subscribe it helps us get the content out please leave a comment you know leave a question uh any thoughts you might have or anything that you would want me to dive deeper into if you’re listening on Apple or Spotify or any other podcast uh format please uh leave a review rate and review it it really helps us get the content out there also we’ve just launched the embodied Men’s Leadership training program enrollment is starting now and it goes through the end of the year and the program is a six-month program that starts in January it is the uh sort of Pinnacle of men’s work everything that I wrote about in from the core and all of the men’s work I’ve done over the last 20 years gets concentrated into this program uh that is really about how to artfully own and embody and transmit uh a deep and trustable masculine leadership so if you’re a man watching this or you know a man who may benefit from uh being in such a beautiful Brotherhood there’s usually 60 to 70 guys we sell this program out every year and uh it’s really one of the most beautiful and deepest experiences of the Year for me every year so if you’re interested there’s a link below and you can learn more so I want to start with the questions of why do relationships end and why are they so painful when they do end and the first thing to note is that you know relationships end usually because of one or two or both of these reasons the first is that your partner was looking look for something that you could not provide it’s it’s really that simple and I’ll get deeper into the difference between why a feminine identified partner versus a masculine identified partner might choose to leave the relationship but it’s just important to know that there was something missing there was something that they were looking for that they just did not trust that you would be able to provide and because we are no longer tied to our relationship ship the way our forefathers were where you know staying married was also a matter of survival but now we have so many choices and so many options if we feel that our partners are not meeting us if we feel that our partners are not elevating or expanding or growing to meet us then we will often leave now if your partner is a masculine identified partner he is usually feeling malnourished in the form of receiving certain kinds of energy from you so where the masculine is really fed in relationship is that there are certain types of devotional energy Sexual Energy uh playful energy there’s certain energetic signatures that he’s looking for from his feminine partner that he may not have gotten from you now I’m not saying that this is your fault by any means but it’s just really good to know and to be really clear that the masculine when the masculine is receiving the kinds of energy that light him up that nourish his heart and his body that support his mission on the planet um chances are he will fight to stay so sometimes the really tough question to ask if you are a feminine identified being whose masculine partner has decided to leave the relationship there’s some really important questions to ask yourself about the kind of energy you were bringing into the relationship and if it was the kind of energy that truly nourished him for example if you are a working mother for example and you have um you know you’re you’re basically managing the house and you’re managing a business and you’ve got this sort of Mogul um thing going on right that is not the kind of energy that will uh nourish him enliven him support him um so it’s not that you uh have to drop any of those things but what I constantly see women struggling with is how do I add the um energy that is nourishing the devotional energy the playful energy the erotic energy how do I bring that into the field so that my masculine partner feels nourished and feels uh fed and feels taken care of because you know it’s a hard truth but when you’re not getting the nourishment that you need from a relationship you will begin to look elsewhere so a good practice will be to take inventory take stock and we’ll go into a number of different ways to take stock of the kind of energy that you were bringing into a relationship I had this experience myself where I was in a seven-year relationship and the first three years of the relationship we were really in sync and there was a you know she had her own career I had my own career but um she was able to bring all kinds of really beautiful wild devotional incredible energy she was a you know a really beautiful stepmother to my daughter and she was able to bring the energy that just made me so happy to be in the relationship well she then started a business and that business literally took her you know uh out of the energy that that we had been in for about three years and firmly placed her into the position of Mogul she was opening yoga studios and she was traveling around the world and she became a sort of a mogul of yoga and it not that there’s anything wrong with that but it literally took away from the energy that fed us and fed me and so I became you know less satisfied with the relationship um we tried for you know another 3 or 4 years to find ways to make it work but ultimately it was more important for her to to be in the position of of you know driving her purpose forward which was totally within her right but it made the relationship less nourishing to me so I tried for many years to find a way to make it work and It ultimately didn’t and it led to the end of our relationship and you know David my teacher David data has spoken about this as as sort of a way of you know when a feminine partner for example has to live in the more masculine driven work of business and of driving and of goal setting and of getting done that will often uh reflect in the relationship because she’s basically living in her masculine most of the day and unless there is some kind of Artful transition into a more feminine energy uh her masculine partner will Fe feel um a bit neglected and a bit malnourished right and so before you go on and say well you know it’s it should be his duty to support her purpose I agree with that but we have to be really honest with ourselves about the kinds of energy Andor Direction Andor leadership Andor nourishment that we’re bringing into the relationship and what is the impact if you put yourself in your partner’s shoes and I’m speaking primarily to the feminine here if you put your put yourself in your masculine partner’s shoes imagining what kind of energy truly lights him up truly feeds his heart truly makes him feel uh grateful to be alive and you are not bringing that on a daily basis or at least you know multiple times a week it would make sense that he’s going to feel malnourished and ultimately want to find somebody who will give him that uh type of nourishment that type of energy if you are a masculine identified being whose feminine partner has left the relationship or has chosen to leave the relationship it’s usually because she has lost Trust In Your Capacity to lead her into a place where she feels absolutely safe and cared for and cherished right she has lost trust in you and your ability to lead her into a deeper part of her heart in to a deeper place in her life to lead her emotionally to lead her sexually to lead her into these places of her heart where she feels completely cared for and she can trust you with her body heart and soul a perfect example of this is when men lose their capacity to stay grounded and present in the midst of um you know feminine upset feminine storm I’ve certainly had that experience and sometimes it just is impossible to stay fully grounded and fully um open and spacious in the midst of uh your feminine partner’s complaints Andor wounds Andor any other thing right so but oftentimes what I will see happen is that when men lose their capacity or they don’t have the capacity to really hold uh what women would say hold all of me then she loses Trust in you she loses trust in your ability to actually hold her and lead the relationship into a place of Harmony of repair of uh safety of trust and so often times she will start to lose trust and when a feminine partner loses trust she tends to lose attraction and she tends to lose respect and you know I’ve certainly been on the other side of that myself you know I’m a pretty fiery human so it’s a really uh important and difficult reflection for a man to take to be like wow where did my reactivity and my inability to stay grounded present and really lead us into trust and repair where did that lead to her needing to distance herself from the relationship so that’s one very important exploration that you can have as a masculine partner when your feminine partner is losing trust and ultimately losing attraction another example is is when a masculine partner does not uh get the capacity to lead his feminine partner sexually and when I say lead I’m not saying Dominate and basically direct everything what I’m saying is that his capacity to penetrate her heart in a deep way so that she feels safe enough to open completely for him and for love and for the relationship if he hasn’t cultivated the capacity to bring uh heartfelt dark energy for example if he hasn’t cultivated the capacity to um make sex Artful and he hasn’t um developed the capacity for a deep trustable presence then what will happen is that the feminine partner will often lose trust uh will be unsatisfied sexually I see this all the time because she is looking to be taken deeper she’s looking to go deeper than you’re taking her and therefore she will lose trust in Your Capacity to do that and will ultimately lose attraction and may very well end the relationship so those are a couple examples of what I’ve seen happen in relationships when masculine Partners can’t um bring a grounded deep non-reactive presence to conflict and when a masculine partner can’t actually take or meet his feminine partner sexually and take her deeper than she she could take herself I mean it it makes sense that um that she is looking for you to take her deeper into her heart and into her body and into her pleasure than she could take herself why else would she need you so it really comes back to this question that I brought up a few podcasts ago about where is your value and relationships will often end when there is not a a deep exchange of value back and forth and so often times we get entitled we get entitled and we think that just because we’re a good human or we’re a great person or we’ve been supporting somebody or we’ve been you know uh with somebody for a long time that that our value is um already should already be accounted for but that’s not the truth in what tends to happen in relationships the the question of am I bringing value and how am I bringing value to the relationship becomes incredibly important because it becomes it start it starts to occur as malnourishment to one or the other partners so this question of where am I valuable and am I bringing a deep value to my partner’s life to her or his life sexually to her or his life emotionally am I bringing the value that actually makes them elevates them makes them a better person now of course there are other reasons why relationships end and often times those reasons have to do with unexamined childhood wounds and so what will tend to happen is that uh when Partners come into conflict uh usually as I’ve said before and has you know fill in the blank on any uh therapist worth their salt will tell you that your conflicts in your romantic relation relationships are literally the byproducts and are directly linked to your childhood wounds and so what will happen often times is that couples will enter into this space of conflict and one or both of them will refuse to do the Deep hard work that is required in order to heal those wounds so that they don’t um taint the relationship they don’t infect the relationship they don’t sabotage the relationship ship so often times what I will see is that one or the other of a of a partnership is unwilling to look at their stuff and look at their patterns and how their patterns are impacting the relationship and when that happens couples will stay stuck in What’s called the power struggle right which usually comes in somewhere between 6 months and two years into a relationship as you’re starting to get more and more committed to each other as you’re starting to intertwine your lives together as you’re starting to become family so to speak right so the more we become family the more our childhood wounds will just kind of waft up into our relationship and start to cause problems this isn’t an issue if we look at them it isn’t an issue if we you know we get help and we start to really investigate and unpack the way that our childhood wounds are impacting our relationships but that is a very tough thing for a lot of people to look at many people do not want to look at that many people do not want to do the hard work and so they just assume that there’ll be somebody next or somebody down the road that will make it easier and maybe that’s true there might be you know a better partner for them or uh there might be a better partner for you if you’re watching this and you’re in the power struggle wondering but more often than not those unexamined wounds will come up in the same way in the next relationship and they’ll be left to deal with them then so it’s really important and we’ll go through how to unpack these things after a breakup and how to really get you know ruthlessly honest with yourself about what happened you know this sort of relationship postmortem that is so crucial to our growth and so crucial to our development as humans another reason why relationships end is that our needs are not getting getting met often times it’s our emotional needs sometimes it’s our energetic needs as I’ve spoken about before or our sexual needs right but at some point if our needs go unmet for long periods of time and our partners cannot meet our needs we will eventually seek relationship elsewhere we will want to go to a place where our needs will get met and so oftentimes this idea of our emotional needs getting met there’s usually a process that successful relationships go through that relationships who that are ending do not and often times when when you’re in a healthy relationship the needs conversation goes something like this I have a need for you not to call me names right I have a need for us to be respectful and to repair quickly right that’s one of my needs right one of my needs is repair and so if my partner is unwilling or unable sometimes your partners are willing to meet that need but when push comes to shove their nervous system will just not allow them to so oftentimes when we present needs to our partners there’s usually two questions one are they willing because if they’re not willing you know we’re kind of screwed but two are they willing and able that willing and able peace is truly important and so when relationships will end it’s because usually one of the partners or both of the partners are unwilling or unable to meet the other one’s needs so a need for repair for example a need for um there to be no yelling for example right maybe somebody grew up in a really violent household and any kind of yelling is very sensitive to them and so whatever your needs are they’re all valid but the question to ask is do they want to meet them and can they meet them and often times when relationships end it’s because we are expecting our partners to meet needs that they literally cannot meet because if they loved us we think if they loved us they would meet them but that’s not the whole story sometimes the story is they love us they want to meet these needs but they literally do not know how or they literally cannot will their nervous system because of their childhood wounds to do that and so that is often times the way that relationships will end in this conversation around hey I really want to meet your needs I just can’t and then we are stuck in this space of asking our partners to do something that they just can’t do and that is often the reason why relationships will end so why does it hurt so much when we break up with a loved one I think that you know beyond just missing them right and missing their good qualities missing their bodies missing the way they smell missing the good times and the fun that you have there are much deeper things going on in your uh subconscious and uh in your Triune brain right your Primal brain because our partners occupy the same space that our caregivers did our good old mom and dad did when there is an end of a relationship it touches those same wounds of Abandonment of rejection of neglect that many of us experienced in our childhoods so a breakup especially if it was a meaningful relationship or a long relationship or you went super deep with each other a breakup is going to touch those wounds in a very similar way and it is going to feel like death I think we’ve all had that experience of relationships feeling uh like death because of course they are a kind of death but they’re also a way to sort of reignite the um the Deep wounds of our childhood that may have been dormant for years another reason why relationship breakups can be so painful is because often times times there was unresolved issues uh one partner or the other didn’t feel seen and heard one partner or the other felt betrayed uh one partner or the other felt uh mistreated right and those unresolved usually unapologize for uh wounds in the relationship again touch the deeper older more Primal wounds of our childhood and it feels again like our lives are threatened like we can’t uh get over it like we’ll have obsessive thinking um we’ll we’ll start to you know we’ll not sleep we’ll not eat you know it’s all the stuff you hear in love songs and poetry right it’s because those unresolved issues in our relationships haunt us because often times the partner that we broke up with did not acknowledge their behavior or didn’t properly apologize for their behavior or you know didn’t um didn’t take any responsibility for their part in the breakup and in those unresolved issues in the relationship all of our unresolved issues from good old mom and dad come back so it leads us into this exploration of okay now what do we do I had high hopes for this relationship this relationship ended I did my best to fight for it and now I’m left with this you know very deep pain or very deep longing and now what do I do with it before we go down the road of what to do after a breakup I think it’s important to talk about uh how we break up because you can learn a lot about yourself and about your partner by how you break up and it’s important to understand some people when things end will blame and villainize some people will self-reflect some people will do a little bit of both I think most of us do a little bit of both um but it really is an important um intention to set that I want to honor and celebrate the love we had even if it ended before I wanted it to end and so I think a couple of things to consider in how you break up is you know how can you guys be supportive to each other through the breakup and I always like to think when I’m coaching people who are going through breakups I always like to to you know set this standard and the standard is if you really loved this person right if you really cared about them then it is your job to help them move into the next phase of their life so sometimes that might mean when I coach men about this that might mean you help her find a place you you might help her financially you might help help her move you might help her you know land on her feet in some way you might give a little more emotional support when you know inside you’re dying to tell her to off you you do anything you can that will help her start her life over again and of course vice versa this is true for any relationship so the first question to ask is how can I how can I leave them uh better than I found them how can I help them if I truly love them how can I help them move on to the next stage of their life right and it takes a a very wide heart and a very mature and deep intention in order to literally help the person that just crushed your heart find a new place right I’ve had guys say like are you kidding me you’re telling me to help her move and I was like that’s exactly what I’m telling you like you help her move you she needs money for rent you help her pay rent you literally help her if you really did love her and it wasn’t just about getting her to validate you through relationship and you really did care then you take the extra step and you do what will help her move on another way to engage in conscious uncoupling let’s call it is for there to be a recognition where each partner gets to say what they need to say both in terms of appreciations in Terms of resentments that are still there in terms of regrets that they may have about how they showed up in the relationship in terms of desires for how to relate in the future whether to be friends or occasional lovers or whatever feels right and so having a conscious uncoupling usually involves some ritual and these kinds of ritual are about learning to let each other go they’re about learning to um to say goodbye in a way that is honoring and loving I remember I went through a breakup a few months ago it was a painful one and and I remember our therapist had us look into each other’s eyes sitting across from each other and Say Goodbye a hundred times and I’ll tell you is one of the deepest most beautiful experiences I’ve ever had with a partner so rituals like that where you are literally saying goodbye to each other and you’re honoring each other you’re thanking each other you’re appreciating each other you’re giving each other space to share any pains that are still unresolved because remember you don’t want your partner to be leaving the relationship not being heard like so that they’re the things that really bothered them and hurt them if they leave the relationship without those things being heard and acknowledged it’s going to haunt them and if you want to have a conscious uncoupling you’re going to to have to hear those truths the resentments that your partner still might have about how you did or did not fight for them or about how you did or did not show up in the relationship and honor them and just you know validate them let them know that it makes sense that they’re still resentful about that and um being able to uh clear resentments before you break up is a really beautiful and generous gift to give to each other it’s hard it’s hard I’m not going to lie but it is a really beautiful gift you might also want to share your regrets with your partner um this is where I wish I could have shown up for you more this is where I wish I could have changed this Behavior or fought for us more or been less reactive or been more accepting or cherished you more or worked less or any number of things not use the kids as a as a means to stay separated and so you being able to share your regrets with your partner also eases their heart also eases their nervous system and again we’re trying to allow our partners to leave the relationship without all sorts of unresolved unheard problems and resentments another part of this ritual could be something like acknowledging the magic moments that you shared as sad as that is sometimes it’s a really beautiful way to acknowledge the the ways that your partner showed up for you the way ways your partner gave of themselves to you and and anytime you can share magic moments or praise or deep appreciation for your partner it it absolutely helps the relationship and the uncoupling go much smoother and be much less painful now of course there are some you know there’s you know it’s impossible to have a very difficult breakup and not have you know lingering feelings of dissatisfaction or blame or contempt or bitterness I mean those things are absolutely part of breaking up and it’s part of what I’ll talk about in a few minutes how we deal with this individually but while you’re still uncoupling it’s really important to create some kind of ritual some kind of timeline some practice that acknowledges your relationship acknowledges where you might still have resentments acknowledges what was beautiful in your relationship and then sets them free so let’s say that you’ve just ended a relationship and you’ve done this kind of beautiful conscious uncoupling ritual that I just described and now you’re in this phase of transitioning from being in each other’s lives every day to not being in each other’s lives hardly at all so it’s going to be important for you guys to agree on things like how much do we want to stay in contact do we want to check in um every week for a while do we want to just go cold turkey and not have any contact and this sort of how this intentional and conscious um co-creation of how to end things is very important especially if you have children of course if you have children there’s a lot of complexity to this but I’m just really speaking on the human to human emotional level how is it that you want to spend the next 3 months do you want to talk once do you want to have lunch once a month and then just check in do you want to be available for each other when the other person is hurting do you want to be able to listen to them and and hear that they miss you um that’s something that I’ve done in a relation in a recent breakup that was very helpful it was very helpful for her and I agreed that when one of the other of us missed each other we had the freedom to reach out and just share our missing share our pain and the other held it really beautifully so that was that’s also a way that you can co-create right you can you can literally make up the most loving conscious generous way to break up this is something that a lot of people miss right they think that oh just because we’re ending we’re ending I want to move on get them out of my life etc etc but especially in the first 90 days after leaving it’s a shock to the system it’s it’s almost like you’ve lost your family again for many people and so being able to have some kind of consistency around contact some kind of open communication some way to be generous with each other’s Hearts is also a very very helpful way to transition and then we are stuck in this space of asking our partners to do something that they just can’t do and that is often the reason why relationships will end all right so let’s say that your relationship has ended you ended it as consciously and generously and lovingly as you could and you are now in this space of you’re back with yourself and you’re in this space of deep reflection about what happened and sometimes over the course of months after relationship ends it’s a good idea to do a bit of a postmortem with your partner sometimes that’s possible most of the time it you know there needs to be a good chunk of space before that can happen so the uh space after you’ve separated from your partner you’ve helped them transition into a new life you’ve you’ve you know as as gently as you could you know let them down and helped them back into a new start in life now it’s time to turn the focus to yourself now it’s time to look at what wounds were kicked up in this relationship that are now screaming to be looked at so for example if your partner um broke up with you rejected you for example abandoned you whatever whatever words you want to use but ended the relationship when you did not want the relationship to end and you have abandonment or rejection wounds in your system from your childhood your parents weren’t super present or maybe your dad left when you were young or any number of things you know that are your or you deep abandonment and neglect wounds then your partner’s leaving is of course going to trigger those wounds going to trigger that deep often um often preverbal and sometimes even um in utero wounds so now you have a really beautiful opportunity to take the pain that’s coming from your now ended tragic relationship and go deep into the wounds that you may or may not have fully felt and this will often require some therapeutic support there’s all kinds of really beautiful uh spaces like Hoffman Institute uh there’s a lot of really beautiful therapists that will help guide you back into the traumas of your childhood and where you were neglected or where you were abandoned um where you were rejected and really help you get into why this is so painful right why this 2-year relationship has literally debilitated you for 6 months right it’s not the relationship that’s doing all the debilitating it’s not your partner that left even though it’s very easy to blame them it is a it’s pulling on the string of a deeper older wound that you now have the capacity to take a look at so one of the first things that I always recommend people do after a relationship ends is take a break you know take don’t you know don’t just go back into dating you know take 3 months or 6 months sometimes even longer off so that you can really feel what the just happened right how did this love go wrong where did I where did my childhood wounds sabotage this relationship where did my um uh rejection wounds or neglect wounds or withdraw wounds um make me a difficult partner where did my avoidance maybe you have an attachment style that you haven’t looked at maybe you are anxious or you are avoidant and that became an impediment in the relationship so having some space after a relationship ends and after you’ve you know found a way to generously separate from your partner it’s now time to look at yourself and start asking these questions what are the wounds that I need to deal with what are the pathologies maybe that I brought into that relationship was I practic iing certain addictions in the relationship was I bringing certain attachment uh styles to the relationship that made it very difficult for the relationship to succeed um is there some very deep form of trauma that was triggered by my partner that I refus to look at and now they’re gone so now I can actually take a step into it and really look at these wounds and what I’ve seen both in myself and in in many couples that I’ve worked with and many people that I’ve sort of helped through conscious separations what I’ve seen is that it’s in the diving into these original wounds that true transformation happens and that we get to attract new partners from a more healed place within ourselves one of the great mistakes I see people make after breakups is that they they tend to fall into this belief that it was just the wrong partner they tend to fall in belief that you know if their partner was just different or if it was somebody else or there’s somebody else out there and like I said earlier that is rarely the case because our patterns will follow us no matter how perfect our next partner is um they will um fall into the patterns that we bring to the relationship so it it is really unproductive to just look at your partner and go oh well the next one will be different the next one will be better better because chances are they won’t chances are things will repeat sometimes sometimes that’s the case sometimes it was just you know somebody else is much better suited to you but more often than not there is a need to deeply reflect and one of the ways like I said is to reflect on the wounds that you that are now active because of the relationship you might dive into the relationship itself and take a look at where your anger got triggered and what what wound that is a what that is attached to where did your avoidance or withdrawal get triggered and what wounds are that are that attached to where your um uh addictions got triggered or your lying dishonesty got triggered or where your um selfishness got triggered and what wounds are that attached to um so there is a a process that I I take many of my long-term groups through I’m going to give you an abbreviated version of it here but it is meant uh to be a very deep inventory of your part in the relationship ending and um and also you can you know track this back over multiple relationships and really start to see the patterns that you’ve brought into not just your most pre your current relationship or most previous relationship but all of your relationships because these patterns tend to repeat as I’ve said so we call this the m masculine and feminine reconciliation and we really try to frame it from this place of you know a lot of different you know kind of including everything that I’m talking about here and there are questions on it like um where did you withhold your devotional energy where did you where might have you have castrated or punished your masculine partner for perceived or real wrongs um where did you withdraw and refuse to um repair or create safety in the relationship where did you not cherish her heart where did you abdicate leadership and expect her to lead the household and Lead everything in the relationship where might you have pushed away their attempts at loving you where did you make it very difficult for them to give the gifts that they were trying to give where did you ignore your pathologies things you knew were you know active in past relationships and when they came up in this relationship where might you have ignored it and just once again made it their fault so there are a number of questions in the reconciliations that I think are really helpful in getting you the information that’s kind of like a road map of what you need to work on in yourself so that you don’t repeat these in you know the future relationships that you have high hopes for and so there’s a link in the uh we have a we have a link in the uh description the show notes below and that’ll take you down to the embodied relationship experience platform and there you can get the feminine and masculine reconciliation format it’s a it’s a deep dive I won’t lie it’s a deep dive into how to reset your relationship with the masculine or the feminine as you see fit right based on taking a really hard look at all of the ways that you did or did not show up in the relationship a final piece of reflection that I want to give about relationships that survive versus relationships that don’t at some point we become devotional to our partner’s nervous system over our own protective mechanisms and when we fail to do that our relationships will become unstable so if my devotion is to beautifully activate soothe nourish my partner’s nervous system whether we’re in conflict or just having a a mundane day if my devotion if my intention is about soothing their nervous system about activating and enlivening their nervous system above and beyond the other things that I have to do in the day above and beyond um being right in a conflict above and beyond um you know whatever my hurt feelings are in that moment if my if my devotion is to their nervous system then I am being devotional to loving them and when I see relationships end it’s usually because people are just kicking each other’s ass nervous system wise they are lighting each other’s nervous system up with contempt they’re lighting each other’s nervous system up with a lack of presence with a lack of open-heartedness with complaint with criticism which is basically just like poking their nervous system with a little knife with a little shiv and so if you are in a relationship that is might might be Rocky right or you’re in a relationship that may have just ended you can ask yourself this question like how devotional was I to their nervous system right maybe I wasn’t perfect in the moment but how quickly did I try to come back and repair with them how quickly did I take a a look look at what their nervous system needed in order to feel safe and again you might not be able to meet their nervous system needs sometimes that happens sometimes your capacity is just not to the level of what they really need but are you trying is that your intention are you really committed to soothing relaxing downregulating your partner’s nervous system so that your relationship space is a safe place for them from there virtually anything is possible and when I see couples going through conflict no matter how intensely triggering the conflict is when their devotion is to soothing each other’s nervous system grounding each other letting each other know hey we’re on the same team hey I’m not going anywhere hey I love you I’m here we’re going to work this out like all of those things are ways that um that people can soothe each other’s nervous system and I think I’ll I’ll do it podcast just on that right just on how to take care of your partner’s nervous system during conflict because it it is to me the biggest problem that I see and the biggest reason why I think relationships end over time and to note if you’re entering into a new relationship or you’re in a relationship that’s going really well and there’s just you know maybe a couple cracks you know in the uh container something to consider is to take a look at these questions that I that are in the masculine and feminine in reconciliation and start applying them right away start applying this uh idea of being a healing and soothing agent for your partner’s nervous system try and um take a look at where you may be withholding your truths and then getting resentful or where you might not be setting boundaries and then getting resentful or where you are you know unable to ask for the things that you need or you you’re willing to meet a Partners need but you just can’t seem to make your nervous system and your body do it when the time comes you know all of those things having an open lines of communication having an intention to um really take a look at what you are bringing to the dance it’s so I think the most important thing I would love for you to get from this podcast is to keep the focus on you to keep the focus on what’s happening in you because most of the time our partners are not meaning to hurt us of course there are you know narcissists out there and there are out there and there are people that are selfish out there right we’re all we’re all narcissistic selfish at some level right but you know what’s important is that we focus on ourselves and how what they’re doing is impacting us emotionally and then we take radical responsibility for the healing of our self and then in doing that we are actually helping to relax and heal their nervous systems so the you know final thought on this podcast is no matter where you are in your relationship journey and no matter what conflicts that you may come up against to really keep the focus on what what it is evoking in you versus what they are doing now of course if there are you know inappropriate behaviors and boundaries that need to be set of course you know those can be stated but again if you don’t change the way that your nervous system and body reacts to them right and how that stemmed long before you met them right the the origins of our reactivity of our uh addicted behaviors of our AP of our pathologies all of those Origins started way before you met your partner and so just recognizing that recognizing that the mommy wound and the daddy wound which seem to be coming up a lot these days uh predate your partner and you meeting and so if you want to really have not just a you know a healthy relationship but a thriving and healing relationship one that actually heals each other then these kinds of Explorations are needed all right thank you very much for joining us we’ll see you next time on the embodied relationship experience.