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well hello everybody I am happy to be here with you today I am just popping in here for another impromptu livestream because we got some response from the livestream I did yesterday just announcing the flash so we're running this month on my 101 courses and people asking a lot more questions sort of about the fundamentals of attachment and what exactly is involved in these 101 courses so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna pop in here for the next three days and I'm just gonna give you a little sample and a taste of what exactly is in my 101 courses on attachment and today I wanted to start off talking about the spice of life er which is someone who struggles with the disorganized attachment and that is because it is probably the least most specifically addressed in the attachment literature and I will tell you that's primarily because when you're talking about disorganized attachment you're really talking about trauma you're talking about trauma response you may be talking about a form of reactive attachment so the search terms you are using are probably going to be looking to look a little bit differently but let's talk about it in the context of disorganized attachment so if you are someone who deeply yearns for love but you tend to feel kind of desperately fearful of it of being abandoned or rejected eventually or that you're not somehow deserving of it and so as a result you tend to kind of sabotage your relationships or your feelings tend to go from hot to cold very quickly before a budding relationship can even get up off the ground then it's likely that you are someone that is struggling with disorganized attachment now often times disorganized attachment is referred to as fearful avoidance you might also sometimes hear it referred to as anxious ambivalent but it's more likely to be referred to as fearful avoidance or disorganized attachment and it's a result of what's called unresolved parenting so that means that the parents had a degree were not resolved within themselves around some kind of trauma that they experienced okay so the children end up appearing to be kind of disorganized their behaviors are unpredictable they tend to be become Parente fied children either they're very strict with their parents in a way or they kind of spin off into these sort of unpredictable behaviors all right this is these are the longitudinal studies that Mary Mayne did when she looked at children that had disorganized attachment okay so I refer to individuals with disorganized attachment as spice of life errs why do I do that well because the word disorganized is so critical in judgy right it's very predictive of a negative outcome but it it tends to discount all of the wonderful beautiful things that results of having this kind of contrast in your life experience I actually believe that the greater your conflict the greater your calling okay and so what I would like to do today is offer perhaps a more hopeful and compassionate exploration of three strengths of the spice of life er and in talking about the three strengths we will talk about how sometimes these things can get them into trouble in relationships but I think it's important to approach these things from a strength based attitude okay and so this is this video this live stream again is in promotion of a flash sale we're doing right now it's 30% off my 101 courses and I'm highlighting disorganized attachment today I'll tell you a little bit more about what the course involves at the end of this but I want to make sure we get into some juicy tidbits of what it is that is actually involved in this course so the first thing I want to do is I want to talk a little bit about the spice of life or in partnership so the spice of life are if you are a spice of life or you're probably capable of great empathy and emotional depths but at the same time you might also be overwhelmed by that and so this overwhelming kind of makes it difficult to sort through and really comfortably organize your feelings in your inner states and so as a result you be a little bit of sick of people saying things like oh you're too intense okay and it leaves you feeling lonely and isolated you don't want to burden other people with your problems but you're also probably in kind of a desperate need of connection and you feel that very keenly and so sometimes that leaves you feeling a bit confused about what your needs actually are and if you are just somehow slipping into someone else's needs the boundaries are very confused there and you know at the same time because there's such a sense of boundary confusion the safest thing to do is to slip back into the the most basic simplest form of thinking about things and that is black-and-white thinking right yes or no in or out okay right or wrong and so this tendency to have black-and-white thinking may lead you to become kind of polarizing okay because it produces a powerful critic right there's no gray areas there so as a result you may tend to be kind of a polarizing personality kind of a provocateur in a social situation even if you don't mean to be so for example like a Rolling Stone who is someone who has an avoidant attachment style you could be a great defender of the underdog and and and of those that you feel are essentially good and loving or you might admire like an antihero for example who is a criminal but they have a heart of gold either way you tend to be a really fierce adversary for those that you are adversary to those that you feel are bad and undeserving and you really do not spare the rod in punishing them okay and so it can be really hard even if you are that villain right you punish yourself just as hard and so it can be really hard for individuals to sort of live up to this kind of onion bag ewis standard of perfection and so you might find yourself feeling left out of group or social situations so there's a hungry desire to to belong and to feel seen but never quite feeling as if that is sad I never quite feeling as if you fit in anywhere and it's important to realize that this hard line and critical voice that you carry you probably often turn in on yourself and that makes it really hard for you to see and accept the gray areas and others because you are so hard on yourself and so romantic relationships they tend to offer a sense of solace and excitement and when you feel in sync with your partner it's like the lights have finally turned on and love kind of swallows you up and you're sort of at one with everything and you're really wildly creative in the way that you express your feelings and your partners can be really smitten with stars in their eyes at first and unfortunately often it only lasts so long okay because after that initial infatuation phase the shine starts to wear off and the unavailable sort of boring routines of life tend to step in and they demand your partner's attention be divided eventually and your attentions be divided eventually and so this might send you reeling and you start to question the foundations of the entire relationship and so as the intimacy deepens which is getting into the routines of life and not needing the highs and the lows so much right your partner we might be able to ride that and not think that it's a something's wrong they just think that's the natural progression of things where as you start to think something's wrong okay and so as intimacy deepens the reality kind of reveals itself to maybe be less romantic or dazzling than you'd originally experienced and so then you start to distrust and doubt your partner's affections jealousy might take over and distrust and you find yourself sneaking into their phone or obsessively checking their social media for signs of infidelity right or you start to get bored and then you wonder what was the fuss all about suddenly your feelings have switched from hot to cold okay and then your partner becomes kind of increasingly confused and frustrated by your moodiness right and they don't understand why you can't trust them and so maybe they say things that they don't mean in anger because they're accusing you of being too intense right too much and maybe they actually do some of the things that you are accusing them of doing just to spite you and then that only confirms your suspicions that they are flawed and then you break up only to feel that sense of achy yearning again right maybe it's only even days later and suddenly you regret your decision and so typically when you find yourself caught in that kind of spin cycle there are five ways that a spice of life four copes with those struggles now there are there are 10 ways I refer to them as deactivating and activating strategies I talked about these in the anxious attachment 101 course and the avoidant attachment 101 course for disorganized individuals they tend because they have both almost you know they have higher levels of both anxiety and avoidance which is they have a high degree of ambivalence right high avoidance high anxiety means a lot of conflict and ambivalence okay they can swing back and forth between both activating and deactivating strategies but one thing I will say for all of those put together there are five ways that the spice of life is coping with this and you may see this manifest in in an anxious person as well as a more avoidant person but the spice of life er will really encompass these and it might manifest through activating and deactivating strategies so basically what I'm outlining here for you are five spectrums and you can imagine the the spice of life are sort of floats kind of fast cycles between two ends of these spectrums and the first is black and white thinking the second is omnipotent notions so when I'm talking about omnipotent notions it's this idea that you somehow have control over someone else's thoughts feelings or progression right so they tend to assume more authority than they actually have they kind of fancy themselves a bit like mine readers I'm really I know I'm really good at manipulating people because I'm so empathic but sometimes they have an inflated sense of this to the point where they kind think they're wizards and so they make predictions about a partner's thoughts feelings of verbalizations and imagine what their reactions might be before they ever step into conversation with them because they don't actually want that conversation to be an open-loop they want it to be a closed-loop and so they go through all there's their considerable strengths in order to determine what the outcome is going to be before they even step into it but it's let's say things go wrong then they take too much responsibility for that because they think they should have been able to control it or they don't accept any culpability at all okay so that's what I mean by omnipotent notions the other piece is narrative discrepancies so sometimes people refer to this as like gas lighting or something like that that's really more gas lighting does exist but that's really more where there's a malicious intent okay sometimes spice of life is because they have a disorganized attachment style come from a more abusive neglect romantic kind of background that the the messages that were communicated in their upbringing were very confusing so as a result they may have some selective memory there may be some idealization minimization and dismissiveness that's going on that creates discrepancies in their stories so you might say well don't you remember this and they'll be like I would never say such a thing and you think oh my god they're gaslighting me but it may be that they truly do not remember it that way because it's an unconscious defense mechanism okay so narrative discrepant disease number four is over generalizations okay so that's kind of like where you come to sort of an erroneous conclusion so when one trait thought or action or perception kind of gets over generalized to sort of prove your negative beliefs or expectations about yourself or the possibilities for love and it kind of overlaps with black-and-white thinking so for example you like watching Netflix on Saturday nights well I like going to the club that's it this is never gonna work right or I had a relationship once but I messed it up by being reckless I'll never have a relationship like that again or my partner doesn't like cooking well now they're gonna dump me and go and find someone else better at this than I am right or once a cheater always a cheater my grandmother used to say women mourn men replace right over generalizations the last one is vilification so when a spice of life or a few of Leifer feels stressed particularly around a romantic conflict they have a tendency to kind of exhibit a little bit of the paranoid or defensive position and so as a result they vilify their partners so they sometimes web missus conscious or unconscious presume that at the basis of every partnership there's a power struggle and an unspoken jockeying for emotional control in the relationship so in times of distress they assume that their partner has a malicious intent towards them that their partners trying to exert power or control over them and so they just suit up they armor up for battle and sometimes they even create these conflictual scenarios if they have experienced power struggles and game playing as the only way to actually be connected to the people that they are attached to okay so they may need to create those scenarios in order to feel connected so this sounds kind of like he's just doing that to piss me off it's so obvious she just wants to control me and turn me into her little puppet he just wants to humiliate me for his own gratification and laugh about it with his friends oh no they're not going to get the better of me I'm gonna get them I'm gonna get better get the better of them and make them regret this right so vilification particularly on conflict now the other thing I want to talk about primarily here is strengths so that's sort of how they might manifest in terms of in a conflict xual situation how some of those struggles might pop up in the context of relationship but what I really want to focus on I talk a lot more about that in the 101 course again to learn more about that for 30% off link in the catching the video but for today I really wanted to focus on the strengths okay so there are three major strengths of the spice of life or that I want to highlight here and the first one is that they can be passionately expressive so a spy as a spice of life er if you are a spice of life er you may have a depth of emo and passion that is hard to contain and so creativity is something that may appeal to you even if you wouldn't describe yourself as artistic right so you might really get poetry you really feel the music you can get lost in a painting or a book or a movie and you can understand the layers of meaning that may fly over everybody else's head right you may also be drawn to acting or other expressive forms of art like dance movement for example and you have an ability to really lose yourself in sex if you want to and this gives you also a capability for being and a really really a taste for the sweetness of life the spiciness of life and that's why I that's really why I refer to these individuals as spice of life is because they can tap into that in the way that a lot of other people miss out on now I'm gonna take a glass of water one of the things mmm I would emphasize is that when we have a strength unless we are able to moderate it with flexible personal boundaries oftentimes if we experience a strength within ourselves we over exert it to the point where it steps into the shadow aspect of that so for example the shadow aspect of being very emotionally and passionately expressive is that sometimes passionate feelings can be so big and so overwhelming that we the experience itself kind of loses its form altogether so when that happens it becomes hard to distinguish one emotion from another or stimulation from response okay and it can lead to a sense of numbing out or feeling nothing at all like if you if you squirt a drop of red food coloring in a bowl of water right that coloring expands and it becomes diffused more so in more so and more so and more so until depending on how big that bowl is you can't even determine if there was any color at all in there right so this kind of expressiveness and expansiveness right maybe something that you demonstrate on a regular basis or it may just be an aspect of yourself that kind of worries you that you might feel too vulnerable at times or you might slip into getting kind of locked down with your emotions and get you sort of numb out you go from being highly emotionally stimulated expressive to all of a sudden you're just like numbed out and you don't have any feelings at all and that's that hot to cold because you're either highly concentrated or you're way too diffuse okay and and that can create an internal anxiety in a sense of pressure as well now the second strength is they are highly charismatic okay the spice of life ours are extremely perceptive most likely because they have spent a large portion of their lives to varying degrees of hyper vigilance okay and so they're a bit of a paradox and that they can accurately sense the emotions of other people even if it's difficult to discern their own feelings and internal states so as a result they can read a room like nobody's business and so for some spice of life as they apply that talent towards crafting this highly charismatic persona that they have and of course charisma that's an asset in almost every endeavor that you might want to pursue now the shadow side of that of course is it can be twofold and first is if a spice of life or where's that charismatic mask for too long then they're unable to trust the affections and the attention of the people that they have attracted and so they can't really know do they love me for the mask or they love me for me and you know what I'm not really sure what the difference is anyway okay and so secondly the superpower can also frighten the spice of life er because then they might start to compulsively wield it over others manipulating them to get what they want right now on the one hand they might they could feel terribly you know guilty and shameful about that afterwards but on the other hand perhaps they don't feel so guilty or shameful about it okay in fact they might discover that they don't feel much of anything and that numbness can be even scarier because that creates a sense of derealization kind of like nothing in life is truly real so nothing in life really matters and so if a person gets stuck there it can lead to it can lead to forms of sociopathy or psychopathy and to protect themselves from slipping down that hole then they rigidly hang on to and seek out what are basic but highly stimulating emotions like excitement arousal fear desperation anger resentment even violence and aggression and they repeatedly create scenarios that yield those feelings in relationships and or in their partners okay now the third strength is a potential for deep compassion now while a spice of life errs powers of perception can be used to create a charismatic persona and and potentially manipulate people towards their own ends it also grants them this incredible potential to experience deep compassion for another person and for all living beings especially for example plants and animals I have met many a spice' lifer that feels the most at home in nature and/or surrounded by pets and animals so for example I once met a man who left home when he was 17 and as a middle child he was just tired of being compared to his older brother hated being forced to work on a farm since the age of six and couldn't tolerate his father's oppressive hostility any more so he joined the military wound up in Special Forces and experienced some trauma and around that time of his life after he left the military taught himself second language became an arborist which is someone who who works with trees climbs cuts down trees works on clearing forest areas things like that and he chose that profession at the time because he was afraid of heights and he wanted to conquer that fear which he did and so when asked about his romantic history as a heterosexual man he was mostly reticent except to say that his hotel heart grumbled when he thought about women he said they would visit but they wouldn't stay and although it wasn't really clear to me from the way he expressed himself whether that was because they chose not to stay or whether it was because his feelings faded or both his response was well what's the difference anyway they're not here now so it must not have been real love and so at the time that I interviewed him he was around 40 years of age and he had quit being an arborist and it pained him now to think of how many trees he had cut down in his youth because he had come to think of them as having their own spirit and now he was a driver and he would anytime he would see a tree he would touch it and he would bless it with his hand for all the times he'd cut one down and now as a driver he would often see animals getting hit you know on the side of the road roadkill would break his heart and one time he saw a dog that had just recently gotten hit stop the car got out of the car dragged the dog into the woods to say a prayer and allow the dog to die with dignity right so the you know the point here is that you can have these tremendously difficult experiences in your life and it can give you a level of compassion and potential for deep deep deep deep compassion okay and sometimes we can see this manifest through the ways in which we relate to nature okay as opposed to other people now the shadow side of this form of compassion of course is that unfortunately sometimes for a spice of life er if they become overly identified with animals or pets and sometimes children the aspects help more helpless creatures okay and they project into or onto that helpless creature be it an animal or a child all the weakened helpless parts of themselves that they now detest and reject because it was detested and rejected by their early attachment figures if there is a particularly punitive parent that has been internalized and now they and now they turn that in on themselves they may project it onto helpless creatures and/or children around them and that's when we start to see the transmission of intergenerational abuse okay that can happen and remember a disorganized attachment is the result of unresolved trauma and it there may be a case there may be many circuits chances in which that is because there has been some unresolved issues of abuse in a family system okay all right so that is what I wanted to share today regarding the spice of life are giving you a little bit of a taste of what there is in store in my course disorganized attachment 101 and I'm gonna come back tomorrow on the next day to highlight some content from anxious attachment 101 and avoid an attachment 101 but before I sign off here I of course would invite some questions things that you want to share here in the comments of this video and while you type those in I'm just going to tell you a little bit more about what the course actually entails so there's its I call this course you know a five days to support the spice of life err in romantic relationships and I give you an overview of attachment theory as a whole we also talk about the ten activating and deactivating strategies that disorganized partners use I get a lot more in depth with those five spectrums of coping mechanisms right I also talk about four essential emotional boundaries that help take the spice of life or from confused clear about that line between personal boundaries versus conditions of love which we talked a lot about on this channel I also talked a lot more directly about trauma in the body for spice of life errs talking about how trance how we can transform trauma through body activation and arts based experiential which is my way of working and that is the Mack method stands for mastery awareness and creativity and that is comprised of three basic steps which is the cognitive reframing body activation and arts based experiential right and I also talk a lot more specifically about narcissism borderline personality disorder and I also kind of help you tease out the fact that attachment styles are not disorders and disorders is a different way of organizing symptom clusters okay I'll talk about that more in a separate video but I get much more in depth with that when we talk about disorganized attachment because when we start talking about these things I always get questions like but aren't these the symptoms of narcissism aren't these the traits of someone with borderline personality disorder you mentioned sociopathy isn't that what this is so there's a lot of confusion about that stuff and so I in this particular course I delve into that a lot more specifically it's a topic I don't like to talk about too much in the online space because there's so much confusion around it and sometimes it leads to a witch hunt and that's that's not how I want to approach these topics okay but I do discuss it more specifically in the course on on disorganized attachment because you know I think it's important that people have enough of an awareness that they can open up their minds about how we construct these things and the fifth one is we do a focus wheel it's a seven step focus wheel and a guided visualization to transform the fundamental fears of the spice of life so this is where I start getting a lot more into the Mack method and how it is that I work with these things from a conscious of the level of consciousness arts based interventions and body activation because if there's anything that we know about trauma it is that it requires body activation and so just in a more concrete sense with this course you walk away with an 80 plus page downloadable workbook with activities assessments and assignments in it there's more than 13 downloadable audio lectures there's three experiencial video tutorials there's lifetime access to all of this content and you also get access to the monthly live Q&A is in my private Facebook group and if you want to check it out there's a few testimonials on the sales page I put a link to that in the caption of this video I see a couple of questions popping up here oh okay Margie says every single time I watch I learned so much that's great Thank You Rebecca thank you for joining me here today yeah I mean even if you don't have anything to comment if if you want to just give me a like to let me know that you even like these live streams or this content is even useful to learn about but you don't have maybe you're processing it you don't know much to say about it right now that's okay but he didn't just give me a thumbs up then I know that you'd like to hear more but stuff like this I have a strong attachment to my therapist I get intrusive thoughts it's upsetting to me and brings me to tears okay well so in a Sarah situation you know when we're talking about being in a therapeutic situation theoretically speaking when you enter into a therapeutic situation the idea is that therapy works because you are trying to in some some way recreate the original wound and the idea is that when you can bring the wound into the present moment and into the room with you then you are creating opportunities for not only you but also for the other the other whoever the other is to respond differently and ideally that's going to create a different scenario so if if those are upsetting thoughts I would recommend you share them with your therapist even if it's difficult to share because it may be that the part of you is is wanting to witness a different response and/or wanting to discuss that as something you're struggling with in that space and maybe the difficult thoughts are being conjured because it's trying to prevent you from really bringing it out into the open particularly if it's a topic around which there may be some shame right so that becomes actually a ripe moment for what they call that like a breakthrough in therapy right processing for now I'm using your material for disorganized attachment it's so helpful oh good I'm glad to hear that thank you for commenting with that I've discovered your recently really insecure relationships and found your content great I'm learning to be less than secure that's wonderful thank you for sharing that great live chat thank you so much I'm glad that's been helpful let's see over here we have you're talking about me exactly me I'm glad it resonates what would you say is the main difference between an open heart and a spice of life er I'm just not sure I understand and therefore not which course I should go for thank you for your work that's a great question okay so when we're talking about attachment styles it's important to realize that these are all on a spectrum so if you've been watching me for a while you know that I actually think anxiety and avoidance are actually two sides of the same coin so what we're talking about really is degrees of ambivalence so ambivalence is when you feel high levels of anxiety and high levels of avoidance now if you have if you have a spice of life for attachment style you have a high-end bevel ins which means you have a lot of conflict so you might find yourself one minute feeling like yeah I really I'm obsessed with this person I'm all-in I really want to be in this relationship I'm totally preoccupied with them and what they're doing and that might be a more what we might qualify as a more open-hearted way of being kind of an anxious way of being and then it's almost like you flood yourself with that and then and then all of a sudden like they respond to you they're responsive they want to be connected with you in that way and Ellison you're like like out of nowhere your feelings switch you're like really what's wrong with you that you would be that attracted to me you're boring you're not that much of a challenge I don't even really understand why it was all that into you like this is your inner monologue you might not be that outwardly expressive with it but you might do things to sabotage the relationship and try to get them to think it was their idea to break up with you when you'd kind of already reached that place right and then later and then they then they do they give you an ultimatum and you're like well I'm breaking up with you because you're giving me this ultimatum meanwhile you kind of backed them into a corner so that they had to do that and then they break up with you and you know and then they find someone else to start dating and all of a sudden your pride is wounded and suddenly they start looking good to you again and your cycle I want to get that person back but really it's more it's more about power dynamics and it's it's kind of like and it's it and then when we become preoccupied with power dynamics it's because we only understand connection in that way and and when someone responds to you and you suddenly shut down like you suddenly your feelings disappear it's it's because there's such a deep sense of threat that you're that it's unsafe to be in a reciprocal relationship okay it's much safer to be in the power dynamic drama game drama cycle drama game and that's exciting okay so so if you're someone who's more of a spice of life er then then it's not just that like you're anxious but you're afraid of getting rejected so sometimes you kind of put you've kind of suppress it a little bit you try not to act anxious and so maybe you withdraw and you're you're saying that the withdrawal is kind of an avoidant behavior so you must you're wondering if you're struggling with avoidance that's still anxiety that's still just the heating anxiously it's just a punitive withdrawal but if you are but if you internally viscerally feel like shuts off one minute you're obsessive the next minute could give a [ __ ] that's more spice of life er okay what's the typical dynamic between two spice of life errs male dismissive avoidant and female fearful avoidant two decades special friendship okay so so again really what you are attracting to one another is the dimensions within you so when you have someone who's dismissive avoidant okay what they are drawn to what they are drawn to in someone who has more anxiety so if you're saying they're fearful avoidant fearful avoidant is another term that could be equated with disorganized attachment but someone who's fearful avoidant may have more sort of outwardly displayed Aang's anxious symptoms and so that person when you have so the person who is dismissive they are drawn to someone who's more expressive they're drawn to someone usually who's kind of Sparky you know they're they're drawn to someone who can hold and express all the aspects of themselves that they have dismissed for whatever reason because when they are with that person that person can hold those aspects that person they can kind of vicariously experience those aspects of themselves through that person and because it is through that person they can give themselves permission to habit but the paradox is that because they have dismissed it within themselves for so long as they start to become closer to this other person that they've given permission to express them and they've given themselves to permission to express it through them they will start to eventually dismiss them - right they will start to eventually dismiss it and dismiss them - they dismiss it in themselves they will dismiss it in them too and they will be annoyed by it in the same way that they might be annoyed by it within themselves it's the same mechanism it's like I cannot allow it within myself I can our partners give us permission to allow it in them up until a certain point but the closer you get the more we start to self identify with their partners we stop seeing our partners as someone who's separate from us we start getting comfortable we stop dropping our bond we start dropping our boundaries and now we start to think of our partners as just an extension of ourselves right this is what I mean by sometimes we get we sort of do this form of self abandonment so he starts thinking of our partners as extensions of ourselves and then we start projecting onto them the same critical voice that we that we zap ourselves with so now we started dismissing our partners as much as we dismiss things within ourselves and our partners aren't going to take it in the same way that you accept it within yourself and that creates conflict in the relationship right but I actually believe that all open-hearted individuals anxious individuals are equally as avoidant because they often chase partners that they know aren't going to give them what they want because they think and they believe if I can just get that curmudgeon to love me then I will have proved to myself and everyone else that I am worthy of love but the back side of that is they don't think they're worthy of love so they keep chasing someone who's gonna keep reinforcing that belief because that's arousing to them because it reminds them of those original pathways that were carved in childhood when they grew up with conditions of love you had to earn it right if you didn't earn it then it's not exciting and so that's it's the same spectrum it's the same spectrum and dimension okay thank you so much thank you for all your help thank you Lisa Thank You Renee for joining and Navy for joining wonderful we have a few more comments here i'm living in holland first time i watched live was able to integrate parts of your vision thank you wonderful thank you for joining Rudy safe is to run away from growth growth is when we are ready for it until then from any of us is to confronting to look in that mirror I would say that's very true say that's very true you got to be ready for it but there's no right or wrong here I think everybody is where they are in in their process and you got to be allowed to be where you are in process and I released a video I think it was this past month about the truth about unfulfilled potential and and that is you have to think of you have to realize that just because there may be unfulfilled potential in a partner or in a relationship doesn't mean that the potential didn't serve its purpose so I'll show this metaphor here and then I will sign off for today but this is to say imagine that there are two seeds right and one seed manages to grow and sprout and bloom and the but the other seed doesn't and so we have a tendency to think oh well this seed that sprout and that's proud it and grew and bloomed that that fulfilled its potential it was enlightened you know it would had personal growth it was became the best version of itself but what we didn't see is that at some point a squirrel came along and dug up the seed out of the ground and then a bird swooped down and plucked the seed with its beak right and then it went ate the see flew up to its nest and regurgitated the seed to all its baby chicks and then the baby chicks grew up and they ate another seed and pooped it out somewhere else and then and then there same process happened and so maybe that second seed didn't turn into a floury blossom but it did feed a family of four so maybe it didn't fulfill its potential so to speak but it did serve a very important purpose all of which contributed to the the entire ecosystem so even if you have a partner who for whatever reason you're not able to make it work right you're not able to make it work with them and you see so much potential in them and they're not able to meet you where you're at it doesn't mean that and if they never do there are people their whole lives who what I call remain in the wandering phase of romantic partnerships this I think there's four phases of romantic relationship and it's the wandering exploring discovering and loving and the wandering is when you're kind of responding to stimulus and you don't really think about why you feel the way you do you're just preoccupied with the fact that you feel it and you need to express it and you need to kind of like bounce off things sort of aimless in your environment and you also have a tendency to think well I don't know what I really want in partnership but I'll know it when I see it so you tend to just welcome everything and anything into your sphere right there's not a lot of discernment going on as a result lessons learned in the wandering face are pretty painful because you tend to live them over and over and over again and some people will remain and not place their whole lives their whole lives they really will because we spend a lot of time with our energy just in our heads even if they learn about why it is that they're doing the things that they do they may never lift a finger to change it and here's the thing you can't get caught up in that story for somebody else because it may be that that's them fulfilling their potential that may be what it looks like for them to be the seed that gets dug up and fed to a family of four their job may be simply to to rattle you enough that you bloom who knows but you you you you you cannot preoccupy yourself by forcing someone else into a state of awareness or consciousness that may not be their reason for being here on earth right in fact the fullest potential is potential maybe just to serve that purpose you can't know that that's beyond your capacity to know okay so it's important to keep that in mind the other the other piece I would share here is that let's say you have someone who's very critical and maybe this is for the spice of life or in particular let's say you had a really critical parent a family member or lover and it's driving you crazy because you're stepping in you're watching these videos and you're stepping into a layer of conscious awareness that you're just like oh I just and now it's like you're starting to learn how to better create boundaries for yourself but as you're creating boundaries you step back into certain circumstances and it just drives you crazy now because you can see so much clearer how poor their boundaries are or how much they're not honoring themselves or how detrimental it is that that they said that to someone you know and you just want to educate them so bad because you think if I can just help them with this then maybe they can live a better life and by they're living a better life and I will feel more purposeful and like I help them our life and I can live a better life right but realizing that what I have come to realize and what has helped me a lot is witnessing someone in their process whether it's a process that grates you right or it frustrates you realizing that Wow like living an existence where you are struggling so much with that much judgment within you or that much criticism within you or that much rigidity and disallowance within you I am so awed and inspired and admiring of the spirit and the soul that would choose to live a life as difficult as that to to be a sounding board for individuals like me and others like me who are willing to whose job it is it shouldn't say willing to whose job it is to to step into those deeper layers of ourselves and let them unfold because without one you cannot have the other without that contrast you cannot have you cannot have that experience right so so so rather than being frustrated by those individuals looking at them and admiring them and thanking them and being grateful they are willing to live that existence so that they can serve a purpose and that you can experience your potential in such a way because who knows in the next life you may come back as the seed that gets eaten right so I just want to offer that as a reframe and yeah so I wanted to offer that any thoughts questions watching this on the replay would love to see them again if you want if you're interested in the one-on-one courses all of them are on sale until September 1st for 30% off links in the captions video I'll be back tomorrow on the next day to talk about anxiety and avoidance a little bit more in depth and yeah I hope you enjoyed