Healing Relationships [PODCAST]

[*Automated Podcast Transcript. Typos likely.]

Hi everyone. It’s Amber Desmond, Emotional Awareness coach with Emotional Medicine Coaching. It’s been a little bit since I’ve done a podcast, but I wanted to come and uh, started up again as I just kinda got out of sync with it today. I was, I would like to have kind of a general podcast about a couple of different things that have been coming up for me and for clients and the world and just things that I’m noticing and paying attention to and kind of some patterns that I’m seeing over and over again. And I have to start with relationships. I have known many, many long term, partners ownerships that have ended this year, which is really interesting. I think there’s a very heightened state of stress and pressure and just the collective consciousness of the world right now is really pretty, pretty heavy and there’s a lot, a lot coming to the surface, a lot of things that have been ruining and churning and being able to kind of hide out in these little dark nooks and crannies.

These are just sort of flooding to the surface. I think with all of our media access now and just so many people having voices and so many people having platforms and there being so few places to hide at this point, I feel like just tons and tons of information that’s, it’s not like it’s new. These aren’t new problems that are coming up. It’s just seems kind of like they’re all happening at once because just every like it’s like the flood gates opened and now all of this information is coming up in all these different movements and all these different people fighting for their rights and all of these different energies coming up, like commanding and demanding and stating their presence and they, you know, really I belong here and I deserve this and this needs to be addressed and so on. And I feel like that’s not just happening on a mass scale.

It’s, you know, cause the masses, what are the masses made of individuals. So on an individual smaller scale, you know, it’s like the micro and the macro. I feel like that same thing is happening within more interpersonal, you know, private relationships and I feel that a lot of what’s going in our world collectively is just, you know, healing. And initially just like if anyone’s ever been to therapy, I’m having allergies, so I apologize for the sniffling. If anyone has ever done therapy for any kind of long period of time, they know that the initial phase, once you start to actually chip away and break down and open past those barriers and those guards and those blocks, even the way you know the ones you put up against your own self, not even just to keep others out, but the blocks we create within ourselves to keep parts of us hidden from us.

And I feel that the world is in a collective state of therapy and it’s kind of heightened everybody. I feel like everybody is just triggered. It’s like everybody stuff is out, out in the open. We’re all just like all these raw nerves walking around and it’s like all these mechanisms that we’ve had to kind of suppress this or keep it quiet or only talk about it with certain people. It’s kind of deteriorating. So a new paradigm is literally being born in our lifetime. And I don’t know if I’ll see, I mean, you know, will it ever end necessarily quotes in? No, I feel like it’s going to be, you know, life is ever evolving, but I feel just like the 60s and seventies you know, the sexual revolution and women’s empowerment and burning brides and integration with races and the war and everything was a major time of awakening and shifting and fighting against old paradigms and ways of being. And I feel like we are having a revolution right now, and it’s not just a world revolution. It’s a human collective, individual revolution. So many people that I know are waking up and an awakening, just like I was saying in therapy, we, once we get past those barriers and real therapy starts to happen, it tends to get a lot worse before it gets better.

And with a spiritual awakening regardless of what your spiritual beliefs are. I’m just going to use that term because it’s what I use personally. There’s a spiritual awakening, becoming awake, awakening within yourself, awakening to something bigger within yourself, within the universe, within other people within the collective, within the biggest of all. And seeing that there’s more that is profound and beautiful and it’s also scary as fuck and can be incredibly painful and very overwhelming and very confusing. And there’s not a lot of like, oh, are you having an awakening crisis call this hotline, you know, and it can be really hard to pin down and to explain and to verbalize and to even express with words when these kinds of feelings are coming to the surface. It could be something completely unfamiliar to you. It could be something you’ve been kind of just barely touching on.

It could be something you’ve been swimming around in for a really long time. It doesn’t really matter no matter what. It can feel pretty jarring and it can be a bit of a slap in the face. And I feel like a lot of that is coming up in personal relationships. People who are already in partnerships. I have found that you’re not only have your own stuff to contend with and all the unhealed parts of you and all of these things coming to the surface, flooding you, memories, feelings, questions, ideas, you know, just like holy crap, like maybe life is something completely different than I thought it was. And then here you have a partner and they’re going through some things similar. And even though it can be an incredible bonding experience for people, that can also be really hard for people to hold space for each other in that process because it’s so big and it can feel really challenging for you to process that within yourself as well as holding space for your partner to have that experience as well.

And on a personal level, I don’t really love giving specific. I will help people with their relationships and coaching. I absolutely 100% help people, but I don’t give advice in that like there’s some right way to have a relationship ship because I think that there are infinite ways for people to connect and relate and engage in what feels right and good for them. But I will say that there are some universal things that I have noticed, not just within my own relationships but and everyone else’s that I see. And that I think that there is also a collective awakening of what relationships really are right now. Like what does it actually mean to be in relationship? And I think that’s changing with the shift in sexual preference, our gender preferences, the fluidity, but all these new birth birthing things that are very unfamiliar to us.

And so it’s like literally learning a whole new approach to men, woman connection, even beyond just gay and lesbian and just, just all of this incredible new energy coming in that is just radically changing everything. And that’s amazing. And it can be really scary and really threatening to people who are not ready, who are not interested, who have decided that certain things have to be certain ways. And you know, I feel like we are beyond a sexual revolution. We are just, we’re literally evolving as a species. We are changing what we’re told. We can even be as far as like born a man born a woman and you have a right to change that. And that’s amazing. Like what an incredible just wow experience to be living through right now. To be witness to the birth of this is just incredible to me. But within that I’m circling back around and going off on tangents.

I have found universally, regardless of cross genders cross, you know, whoever’s connecting, doesn’t matter man, woman fluid, identify, you know, whatever, gay, lesbian, any kind of ethniticity what comes up in relationships is you meet yourself and I think that’s something that’s not widely discussed in relationship information. I feel what really needs to be recognized is that you will meet parts of yourself. It’s like having a mirror because it’s really hard to reflect on things about you if you don’t have something reflecting those things back to you, if that makes any sense. So it’s like it’s harder to see something if it’s inside your eye versus if you could take it outside your eye and look at it with your eye. So I feel like that might be a little more clear. So in my own personal relationship, I’ve been in a long term domestic partnership.

We’ll have been together seven years this coming November and currently it is June. And uh, we’ve been living together for about five years and I definitely feel it’s been the best relationship I’ve ever had in my life. But it’s also been one of the most intense and challenging in a different way than my other relationships were challenging. Some other relationships were really toxic and upsetting and more dramatic and nowhere near as long lasting. And with this, I feel like in real intimacy and long-term partnership, especially when you live together and you are just really enmeshed in each other’s existence and you’re sleeping in the same bed every night and that kind of thing in that sort of energy entanglement, it’s takes a lot to hold your own space, hold space for your own energy as well as staying open to letting that other person in without either you flooding them or them flooding you.

And I think that is a major part of, you know, you could call them, I think they’re normally called boundaries. I feel like yes, boundaries are great and that’s a whole other topic. I mean, but basically it’s the same thing. I’m just using a little bit more like fluid Wu type verbiage to explain it, but I, I feel that when someone is reflecting things about you that are hard to see, it’s really hard to stay present with that, to stay open to it Tuesday. Okay. I’m willing to see that. I’m willing to acknowledge that within myself. I’m willing to work on that to say like, is this something that I feel I need to have growth around? Is this something I want to change? Is this something that I feel pretty firm on? Like this is just kind of who I am and I’m not interested in changing this and so maybe they need to work on their reflection of that.

To me with long with longterm relationships and just sharing this planet with other people and I feel like, okay, what’s going on with everything coming up collectively as we are seeing a lot of mirrors of our own shadow selves and all the darkness and all the pain and all the things in this world that exists within each and every one of us, it’s just a matter of expression. It’s a matter of what we choose to do with those energies within ourselves because we cannot see something that we are not. If we can witness it, if it’s like a, there’s a saying, if you spot it, you got it and so if we can see it, it exists within us. That doesn’t mean mean we are that in that we are acting that out in the same manner, but it lives within us in some regard, in some aspect, in some way, way that thing that we don’t like and someone else is something that exists within us.

And that is where shit gets really hard in the world right now and an individual relationships because we want to point our finger out at the thing and say, you, you are the problem. You are the thing and I don’t want you to be this way anymore. And in order for the world to be better, you have to change. And I agree that there’s a lot of shit that’s going on right now that does need to change and we do need to grow. But also recognizing that pointing our fingers outward is not really going to be the answer. What the answer is in my humble, humble opinion is pointing the finger within, not in an accusatory sentence like it’s me, it’s my fault. No, turn the hat, gaze inward. I see the suffering. I see this pain. I see this distortion in the world. How was that in me and how can I shift that in me so I can better shifted in the world outside of me?

Because if you want to get really metaphysical, there is no inside and outside where all in this, this big meshy Jello, jelly, energetic puddle together. It’s ultimately the world is an ocean and we are all drops in the ocean. So we’re individual but we’re all whole at the same time. You can’t separate the drops. They, they are all connected. We are, you can’t take the wave out of the ocean. We are the wave and we are the ocean and we are the drops and everything that we see and accuse and blame in our world are things that the power that we have is individual. It is how can we shift ourselves enough in a way to where we can have an impact for greater good in the external world. I mean, Gandhi summed it up in the most simplest terms be the change you want to see in the world.

So an individual relationships when your partner shows up and is showing you something really painful, something really hard to see about yourself or about them and it’s, it’s making you want to run or question yourself or your relationship or all of the above. I mean, we don’t all have this luxury and not everybody has the emotional awareness or emotional intelligence or the tools to navigate when this level of intensity happens. And I think it’s why a lot of people that’s, you know, the seven year itch kind of thing and why a lot of people break up and buy a lot of things in when we start to see those shadow aspects of our partner and ourselves because they’re uncomfortable and we don’t want to see it. And we’re like, oh, well obviously this isn’t working with you because these things. So I should probably break up with you and find somebody else.

And then you get into the initial fun phase where all the fun, happy, amazing dopamine chemicals and oxytocin are being released in, you’re having sex all the time, which is releasing more of those feel good chemicals and you think, oh, see how much happier I am with this person and things eventually and inevitably will get real. And so it’s a matter of, and I’m not saying stay in toxic relationships. I mean you know, when something’s really, truly, truly, truly wrong. I mean you’ve got to, this is about intuiting what is workable, what is your stuff, what is their stuff, what is manageable? And then also what is a toxic, destructive, poisonous relationship. If there’s any kind of abuse, sexual, mental, emotional, physical, whatever it is, leave. Definitely. I’m not, I’m not talking about those extremes at this time. I’m talking about generally decent relationships that eventually your stuff starts to come up and get in the way.

So it’s really, right now I think we’re all being tested and learning how to confront ourselves, confront ourselves through all that we’re seeing in the world. This is us looking at ourselves. The world is basically just a big giant mirror reflecting back to all of us. This is the underbelly. There’s, it’s also reflecting a lot of really beautiful things to us and a lot of amazing change. We tend to focus on the negative and like what’s going wrong and what’s horrible because that’s a lot of what the news is as well. It doesn’t like to talk about all the fabulous things happening. It’s like, yeah, yeah, fabulous shit. Look at all this darkness. Wow. So to remember that there is both util amazing light and change that is powerful and profound and fantastic that’s going on right now collectively and individually as well as some really heavy, dark fucking shit that we’re having to face.

And I see this as a representation of our evolution as human beings, that the earth is literally showing us these are the things that need your attention and your healing. These are the things that are going really well and you’re doing a really great job. Keep that shit up. Let’s work on this stuff. Let’s heal. Let’s reconnect with ourselves. Let’s learn how to actually be a community, how to communicate. Again, back to the individual relationship. Relationships will not work in any kind of way. That satisfying if you don’t know how to communicate. Uh, I said to a client the other day, I was like, you know, it’s about communicating. They were like, I talked to my partner every day and I’m like, no. Talking to someone is not necessarily communicating. We can talk all day long. I communicate absolutely nothing of actual real value or importance.

Communication means people learning how to hold space for their partner to hear active listening, hearing, sitting in the discomfort, sitting with whatever they’re saying. We don’t let someone sit there and attack you obviously, but knowing how to let someone share their feelings and their stuff, even when it’s painful for you, even when it’s hard, even when it’s something you don’t want to hear about yourself or you don’t like it. Learning how to actively hold space for them to share that because that is so vital. We need in our world and in our individual relationships, the ability to speak our truth, even if it hurts other people, even if it’s something that other people don’t want to hear and they don’t want to know it. No. And they want to push against it. It’s, it’s, you know, we can’t not say things to make everybody else happy and to make everybody else comfortable.

And I feel like we’re really in an interesting place with that on a collective scales. There’s a lot of movements for new language and rights over being able to speak your truth. But then those same people I see just really fighting for their truth, shaming other people for not using the language that they have deemed acceptable. And I mean, and I’m not talking about people intentionally saying hurtful things and they’re being upset. I’m saying just people maybe using things in a way that this other group doesn’t think is the right way to use these terms. And that’s not freedom of speech. It’s not acceptance. It’s not. It’s like we have the right to say whatever we want it to speak and to be heard and to be seen, but you don’t have the right to say anything about it. And that’s not really how things work in relationship with other people in this world.

We all have a right, even if it pisses you off, even if it sucks, even if it’s against everything you personally believe in, we’re not going to all agree. It’s never in my personal opinion, going to be a Utopian society where we’re all like, we agree with everything each other’s Fez, like no. A part of life is contrast. That’s how we grow. We learned from the conflict, we learned from challenge. Sometimes the universe chickens you to awaken you and sometimes to wake up you have to have a wake up call and that means sometimes hearing something you don’t want to hear and that can be in our media and that could be in your home with your partner, with your family, with your friends, with that, whoever. I mean, and part of this process is I really feel like we’re in state of like learn how to communicate, learn how to listen, listening.

I can’t fucking emphasize listening more to anyone listening to this. Listen, listen to people. Don’t just hear them listen, still breathe while they’re talking. Don’t sit there thinking about what they’re even saying and if you have feelings that are coming up, you’re like, oh, they don’t want to know. As they’re saying, it’s just breathe it. You don’t have to suppress. You don’t have to not say what you feel. Let them talk, let them talk. I partner and I had to have a very big conversation the other day and I think we have great communication, but apparently I was a little wrong about, I think we do have great communication in many ways, but it wasn’t quite as good as I thought it was and you never know what someone’s hearing or what stories someone’s telling about things that you’re doing and you don’t know what’s really going on with people if they don’t really tell you.

And we came up against some things that I really realized that there was a lot of cross wires and things that were not being communicated, communicated and misunderstood. And it was a really hard conversation and there was a lot of stuff that came up that was really hard to hear. But ultimately, as much as it sucked and I hated that conversation and it was very painful and I wanted to just storm out and scream and cry and throw a Tantr I did my best to really hold space and hear my partner and I asked that he did the same. And you know, it’s not easy. It’s not easy, you know, there can be crying and just you have to be patient with each other and breathe and the willingness, willingness to show up, show up, not just have your body there. Torturously being, you know, talked to but being present.

This takes practice. Got To practice this with the people in your life and with yourself. If you don’t show up for your own, if you don’t practice listening to yourself, honoring how you feel, your thoughts, your needs, it’s going to be really hard for you to let someone show up for you in those ways to maybe show up for other people in that way. Sometimes we don’t know how to do that for ourselves and we only do it for other people some to, and we won’t and can’t receive. But practicing showing up in your life, in all your relationships, show up for yourself in the same way you’d show up for your partner if you would give your partner everything in the world and you give yourself everything in the world because it’s all, it’s all balance and it’s all one relationship. Our relationship with ourselves is emanating out of us until all of our relationships with other people.

If we can’t have clear connected relationship with ourself, it’s going to be really hard for us to have clear and connected relationships with people in our lives. And this is on the micro and the macro and right now I feel like our work as human beings is to learn how to be present with ourselves so we can begin to even hear other people clearly really learning how to listen, how to feel, how to intuit, how to tune in to ourselves, how to hold space for our own feelings while letting somebody else have their feelings. This is an impossible and it doesn’t have to be a monk up on a mountain practicing bear entire life. It’s a day to day practice. It doesn’t have to be huge. It doesn’t have to be all consuming. It doesn’t have to be your entire every minute of every day, but it is a lifestyle.

It is a practice of tuning in and becoming aware and the more clearly we love ourselves and hold space for ourselves, the more that that impacts the world around us. It’s not trapped inside of us. When we love ourselves, that goes out into the world. It’s not just limited stuck inside of our bodies. Our hearts literally have an energy and I’m not just talking about like woo energy. I’m talking about measurable frequency of energy that can be measured like hundreds of feet outside of the body, so it’s literally heart, energy, heart connection, heart to heart. When you have a heart to heart with somebody, when you get within someone’s heart space, you feel into each other. This is, that sounds all fruity hippie stuff, but this is healing. When we let ourselves feel someone else’s heart and we let them feel our heart even when they might be really hard to love, at least holding some space for that person, knowing that there is a human being here, there is somebody who has their own staff, who is a person who has needs and feelings and love and wounds and if we can have love and compassion for those dark, twisted, broken, scared, hungry, angry, lost, betrayed, all the parts of us that hurt and that suck and that we just wish would just go away and leave us alone.

If we can’t embrace love, honor, respect, communicate, acknowledge, look at those parts of us and learn how to integrate, how to communicate, how to connect with those parts of ourselves. We’re not going to be able to do that for the world at large. We want the world to heal, but we don’t want to do the individual work and that’s where it starts. I’m going to say it boldly. I’m going to say it like it is the absolute fucking truth because that is what I know. That is what I feel. That is what I witnessed within myself, within my life, within this world is that healing starts when we, you can begin to have compassion, understand, sanding, slow down, listen to ourselves and really start to be able to listen to other people some more clearly. We know and understand, have awareness about who and what we really are.

That is when we are able to even begin to see other people more clearly. They are not seen through these distorted, confused, hazy, you know, circus tent, crazy mirror room distortions of everything because that’s what happens. We’re just seeing wounds and fears and prejudice and it’s all this increase z distorted glass and like Mad House Mirror House, freaky horror movie stuff and it seemed like that couldn’t be me. That could it be me. There’s gotta be something wrong with them. And that is not where healing begins is in blame and shame and accusation. No what power you do have and know that it is infinite and that that power, the power of loving and understanding, and that doesn’t mean tolerating and accepting abuse or saying, oh, we’ll just love them. And so they can go on and do sex slave trafficking with children. No, of course not. You know, but I’m saying begin to practice learning how to hold space for all the dark parts in you so you can more clearly create change and hold space in this world.

When you see that darkness in the world, if you’ve embraced it in yourself, venue have true power over lasting change in this world because you are not lost and sucked into drama and fear, then you’ll have the true clarity to step into that situation and know what needs to be done, where the healing work begins. You’ll have more clear understanding in your own mind. The answers will come to you. Take this step and move in this direction. You talk to this person, you show up in this way. This is awareness. This is emotional awareness. This is mindfulness. It’s not woo woo shit. It’s what people are made of. We are emotional beings. We spend so much time working on our physical bodies and what we eat and exercise, but we rarely barely acknowledge the emotional body, the emotional realm and what impact that has on every single thing in our life.

It’s like this giant blaring, blatant missing piece of our world, of our medical institutions, of our mental health institutions, of the education institutions. This giant gap, I mean political stuff. Oh my God, I don’t even get into the political lack of like understanding that emotions are guiding every one of these people. Every one of the Donald Trump’s emotions, his wounding, his beliefs, his traumas, his bullshit is, is creating his decisions, but we don’t see that and I’m not saying so then that’s an excuse and we just then excuse him like, oh, well then that’s just whatever. It’s about understanding, okay, if I understand this, if I can hold space for that in myself, then how can I approach this with clarity, with real power, not power through force and accusation and plain, but empower meant embodying my own power, not being afraid of my own darkness so I can face it in someone else. That’s it. People. I’m good. I’ve said what I needed to say and that’s all for today. Thank you everybody. Have a great week.