Photo by Wesley Davi
When love doesn´t feel attainable or sustainable to a woman she usually doesn´t realize that it´s an unresolved stress response coloring the lens through which she sees relationships and love.
She has an emotional baseline around how much love and support is available to her at any given moment.
When we start working together for the majority of women love feels elusive and they believe they need to change to get it “right” and have love. Often they feel like they have tried everything and they don´t know what else they need to „DO“ to have love. This emotional state is in and of itself a stress response.
The stress-response of I need to DO more/try harder to get love makes love feel even more elusive to her and it reinforces the coping mechanism of overworking that is protecting her from accessing her true feelings.
When an emotional pain is making her feel like her heart´s desire is not attainable, a woman gets stuck in a loop of doing more to compensate for the feeling of hopelessness and frustration around love, closeness, and connection.
A woman is “working hard for love”, for instance when she cancels her plans to accommodate a date or instead of making plans for herself that bring her excitement, joy, and fun she is putting her life on hold and making space in her calendar in case a man she´s gone out with a couple of times wants to ask her out.
For women in a relationship, it shows up as a feeling of needing to put their needs aside or “shrink” (perform) when being with their partner. In their inner world, they were led to believe that they won´t receive love and attention when needing support or experiencing uncomfortable emotions like sadness.
In both cases the emotional pain in the form of a belief “If I tend to myself and my needs, I´ll miss out on love/attention” is in the driver´s seat.
When growing up love, warmth, and safety should be readily available to us. They are our birthright. They should not have been fluctuating based on how we felt or what kind of needs we had at any moment.
Otherwise, a woman´s focus and attention will be on the man (hypervigilance) through learned codependency instead of on herself and her needs.
Some of the signs a woman has disconnected from herself (her heart and needs) are:
– a feeling of living in her head, not knowing how she feels, what the next best step for her is, and what makes her happy
– pushing herself physically and mentally and swinging from high achievement to exhaustion
– engaging in addictions (social media, overeating, obsessing over a specific man,…) to fill the void of emotional disconnection and longing
– feeling emotional charge, irritation, and heaviness in most of her relationships
The process of dissolving the painful emotional nod of not feeling loved and supported starts with noticing that she doesn´t need to try harder or “perfect” herself.
What she actually needs, and what she learns to create in the 10-week program, is time, space, and gentle guidance to start feeling safe in her body again and to learn to connect with her feminine needs and feelings.
Together we help her build skills that allow her to create intimate connections that don´t require her to overwork and where she can freely express how she feels from a state of self-ownership and sovereignty (tending to her reactivity first).
She learns to tend to her emotions with gentle care and understanding, which melts away the reactivity and creates a deep and secure attachment with her heart and in all of her relationships.
We take time to connect her with her body and what I call her inner landscape (emotions, sensations, coping mechanisms, relational patterns that she took on,…) and we lay solid sustainable foundations for healthy and fulfilling relationships that feel supportive, warm, and safe.
In the 10-week program (and in The Sanctuary – self-study portal) she learns skills that help her access her own home – her heart and the feeling of warmth and safety. She learns to stay there (embodies this new emotional baseline) consistently.
