Brave Enough To Be Bliss

Chapter 12 — A Human Problem

“No matter how happy someone may seem, they have moments when they question if they can go on. No matter how confident someone may look, there are times when they feel unsure and insecure. And no matter how strong someone may appear, they have days when th ey feel like they’re falling apart. Never think for a moment you’re alone in your struggles. You’re not a mess. You’re human.” Lori Deschene I’m again going to ask you to check yourselves for visceral responses while reading this chapter. Please trust me. I’m not trying to convince you of anything, I’m simply sharing things I have experienced or heard from both men and women, and asking you to read with an open heart instead of a guarded, defensive, and scared brain. I’m hoping it will open your hearts and minds enough to ask yourselves some hard questions and reflect on some of your own patterns of thinking and behavior that might have led to disconnection in your relationships. Without allowing fear to drive your thoughts, ask yourself what people can do to open the door to better interpersonal relationships. And then over time, explore how men and women could better relate to one another and how that could impact societal norms. This needs to be the baseline understanding for this chapter, that all humans are created equally. If you’re not coming from that perspective, it’s unlikely you would have ever started reading or definitely would still be reading this book, so I’m going to assume that moving forward you’re coming from that baseline belief. I originally wrote two separate chapters to cover this topic, but I decided to combine them into one. Like many places where there tends to be conflict and misunderstanding, the issue lies in the separation, the lack of connectedness in our shared humanity. Because women and men have continued coming together to create new life, our species exists today. In the whole scheme of history, we are still in the very early stages of men and women both working outside the home while living together and raising families. In my lifetime, I have witnessed increased division, conflict, resentment, animosity, and lack of loving behavior between men and women overall. And that concerns me for future generations because without intentional effort, I anticipate things will get worse, not better. It will be important to remember as you read this chapter that societal conditioning molds and shapes our views of the opposite sex as we grow up, and that unhealed traumas will affect how our bodies feel and react while reading this chapter. It is normal and natural to feel whatever we feel when we have been hurt by the opposite sex and have become fearful of “them.” The thing to remember is that hurt can go both ways. Even if a man has hurt you, that doesn’t mean all men are bad. And if a woman has hurt y ou, that doesn’t mean all women are bad. And even if you intellectually know that, I think there has been a tendency in recent years for those conversations to lead to generalizations that have hurt our society. There are many issues, and I certainly won’t be able to touch on them all. My point in this chapter is simply to give some examples of how we send messages to each other that can be damaging our relationships. If I can help you notice the words you use, the words you hear and what impact they can have on you and others, perhaps we can begin to collectively understand that blaming and shaming the other sex for “their” issues only perpetuates the misunderstandings that happen every day in interpersonal relationships. For example, in my relationship with John, I can look back now and see clearly how there were times I unknowingly used my “power” at work to “punish” him for things I wasn’t even aware of at the time. While many couples don’t work together, there are still ways that women have and use “power.” An example is when I withheld affection and/or sex from my husband when he did something I didn’t like or he didn’t do something I wanted him to do, whether I had communicated that directly to him or not. Knowing me, I likely didn’t communicate it at all and thought he should just know. “Whether women are better than men I cannot say - but I can say they are certainly no worse.” Golda Meir

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