The Balance Blueprint: Relationship Evolution

Excited to be talking about relationships today. I touch on relationships with your inner landscape, with others both romantic and familial, and with the greater local and global communities. 

Transcript

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Hey everybody, welcome to Centered the Podcast. I'm your host, Leslie Braverman, and I'm sharing holistic content to reconnect you to your most centered self. That place within you that is energized, knowing, and uplifted despite the chaos and demands of life. That space within you that is available to you to connect to, to become that portal of possibility. And today we're diving into the next segment on this mini-series of the balance blueprint on relationships. And relationships, typically, when someone says relationship, they think of romantic relationship. We're going to look at this in a couple different levels: the relationship with yourself, the relationship you have with others, which romantic or familial or whatever, and that relationship you have as a human with your local and global communities. And so starting with yourself, I love thinking about the relationship you have with yourself because in the 20, I think we're at like nearly 23 years I've had of working with individuals at different levels on their transformational journeys. The common thread that I found that is really shifting right now is people's relationship and sense of awareness with themselves. And this is really a lot of the reason that this podcast was birthed, right? Is because we're starting to have greater awareness of our boundaries, our needs, beyond like the Maslove level of hierarchy of needs. You know, we're going way beyond what our lineage looked at as needs, beyond food, water, safety. Safety is still a super key part of relationships. So I do want to talk about that one for a minute. So many of us are still in this relationship with ourselves where we are connected a little bit more to the inner critic than the motivational coach within us. So really activating self-love within ourselves is going to be the key to each of the levels of relationship that we always have: that one with ourselves, one with others, and with our greater local and global communities. And activating that self-love a lot of times is just that awareness of how am I speaking to myself in this moment? Am I doing something new? Am I doing something hard? Is there like a surge of demands in my life? How what gentleness and soothing can I bring into myself? What would someone else be saying to me right now in this situation? Thinking of your best friend or your greatest inspirational coach, what are they gonna say? It's very rarely what that inner critic is gonna say first. So starting to become aware of that inner critic versus the motivational coach is this place where you start to dive deeper into the patterns in your relationships. And that inner critic is always trying to protect you, to keep you small and safe, and to use patterns and tactics that worked really well during childhood, maybe when you needed them and you had fewer tools. And so I really want to bring to light, too, that as you start to let go of that voice, that part of the relation, inner relationship you have, you start to expand into your soul and that place of being a portal of possibility. And as the soul has more room to expand, like literally within you, because that inner critic starts to get smaller. This is when the transformation and all of your relationships really start, because it always starts internally first in your inner landscape. So starting to know your patterns of self-talk and the awareness of, of course, boundaries and safety in a relationship are really key parts of entering into any relationship, whether it's wanting to have or intentionally creating better relationships with your family, with your kids, with your significant other, and then greater than that. So finding these ways of affirmations when that inner critic starts using mantra, affirmational mantras, or using just touching the heart space is huge. But the biggest one is just catching yourself in that act. And then as far as other relationships, I want to bring in a little story. So I'm divorced, but I was married for 19 years and in a relationship for that same relationship. I think we were together 22 years. And I'm very, very proud of that relationship. And I'm also very, very proud of how we uncoupled and how we divorced and still how we co-parent. And one of the things I remember sitting at this restaurant in Brazil, and I was with a friend who asked me, What did you learn in your marriage? And the first thought that came to my head was, I learned more in divorce than I ever learned in my marriage. And so I wanted to bring this episode forward because I really think we didn't start really seriously working as intentional people with each other and the new versions of ourselves that we had turned into, you know, 20 years later, until we decided that we were going to separate. And if you can avoid that, that would be great. It would be really nice to evolve together. But that wasn't my path with this individual, and I'm very much at peace with that. But I want to bring forward one of the things that I learned when we really started working on our relationship. And maybe you already know about this, maybe you don't, but either way, it's a lovely thing to reflect back to. And it feels very foundational and basic. John Gottman, Julie Gottman, the two of them, they worked to create a huge body of work on communication styles. And what they did, so John Gottman was originally a mathematician before became a therapist. And he found in all of the statistical models that he ran on relationships that there were four key markers that led to failure, which is not the word I like to use because I really do believe relationships are an evolutionary process and they do end for specific reasons. But what the language he used was that would predict a relationship failure or predict what I'll call a communication breakdown. And those four are, I just always remember them as CCDS. So criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. And I can tell you that we had that in our marriage for sure. And as soon as we started working on that, the awareness of how we interacted with each other on a daily basis became crystal clear because often when you're in a relationship, at least for as long as we had been in, you're not always aware of your patterns. And these collectively, the Gottmans call the four horsemen of the apocalypse of relationships. So if this helps, I'm just gonna go through it for another moment because I really do think it's very common to have it in your regular relationships in ways you might not even be aware of. So criticism clearly is gonna be, well, firstly, I want to say too, like often these are the four ways that we respond in our physiology and our kind of survival brain. So there's something in the relationship, if you're using these tactics that are defensive tactics. So once you realize that you know you are safe in your relationship, assuming there is safety, and if there isn't, then that needs to change first. But that you're safe to express yourself, that you're safe to be you. These topics are often responses to something that triggers you deeper in the relationship. But let's get into just some remedies to these four. So criticism would be a form of blaming the other person. So the idea is that you take statements of I feel this when you do that, or I feel this when this happens in our experience. The second one, contempt. One of the ways of expressing contempt is eye rolling. And I didn't know this then. I not that I eye roll, but I see it in my kids, right? It's a it's a often a kid thing to do. So again, this is not just romantic relationships, this is all relationships. And it really contempt really does create a massive rift and trust. So the remedy is appreciation, respect, and trust. And in a lot of ways, allowance, just allowing the other person to do it their way. And there's so much of that in the compatibility of relationships. The next one, defensiveness is really this can be a really big survival physiology too. So taking responsibility for your part, no matter how small, really opens the door to allowing the other person to do that. And if they're just not at that point, then that's a whole different level of maturity in the relationship and awareness. And, you know, gets more into some of the other tactics that you want to use for communication. Last one, stonewalling. This is again a survival physiology trigger. It's a it's a need to stay committed in the communication and perhaps take a pause, recollect, be committed to coming back and reopening the conversation. And for some people who get really like spun up and have a need to stay in that fight and flight, this can really freak out another person and can lead to stonewalling. So again, it all comes back to patterns and communication styles. And if you can keep these four out of your relationship and find other communication pathways, you're already embracing love between the two of you and self-love for being willing to change and adapt. But again, you have to feel safe enough in your relationship and have commitment to wanting to evolve your communication styles together. Because it goes so much beyond, you know, desire and compatibility. It's it really mature love comes into communication styles and commitment, just showing up every day. I mean, with awareness, with presence, with acceptance, and also with your own personal awareness of what you need and your boundaries. And then as far as how that interplays, like with kids and families, some look at kids, for example. It can be really, especially different phases of raising children. I found that again, like I said, there's some of these four horsemen in my relationship with my kids, in the way they interact with me. I, you know, the eye rolling is very much a fifth and sixth grade thing. So there's this level of needing to know the human development and where they are in their human development and what you can expect reasonably at their level of maturity. And that helps a lot. And then huge, huge thing that the Gottmans figured out as well was that couples and families as well that connect at the end of every day are far more successful in their long-term relationships than those who don't. And again, typically when it comes to human relationships, these things apply everywhere to every relationship. And the ones with your, you know, the people closest to you in your home are the ones that can sometimes fall by the wayside in the routine of the day. So one of the things I do in my family and have always done is we do dinner together every night. And if someone is really late, for example, I have a teenager now and a middle schooler, and their events are starting to go late. We still will sit at the table together. I'll sit together at the table with the one who's home. And then I'll sit at the table with the other one when they're home so that there is a point of connection with me every day. And often my kids don't want to talk. They just don't. But a lot of families will play a game, the apple and onion is really common. So the apple is something wonderful or sweet that happened in your day, and the onion is something that didn't that you want to process together. My kids have never liked that. So I mean, good luck if you, if your family, if that works for you, fantastic. I've had to be like become very well educated. I took parenting classes, I had to really figure out the nature of my kids and what they needed. And it's always changing too. But right now, what works with my youngest who's in middle school is what made you laugh today. And for both of them, what made you feel successful today? And it's interesting to watch what that triggers too, because sometimes it'll trigger a huge amount of emotion about what didn't feel successful. And you know, you're really seeing where they are with a growth edge. And the other one, the high schooler, will answer the question directly, but not necessarily go any deeper. So just kind of playing with different open-ended questions that lead to really self-reflective answers, I think has been really helpful for my family as they've grown, because they've always been able, sometimes they don't like it, and that doesn't really matter to me. I still ask the questions, I still stay committed and connected because it's a core value of mine, that commitment, that connection, and intention. So open-ended questions and really then listening. And I don't always rock at this. Like I have to tell you guys, sometimes I'll still put on my superhero cape and want to jump in with like immediate, immediate, such a pattern, immediate responses for how I can support them. And they don't want it at this age, they want to figure it out and they'll ask if they need to know. And so that's part of me maturing and my relationship with my kids is to really, and it can be the hardest things for moms. Like I know it's a hard thing for me, but I know it's out for a lot of moms. It is the hardest thing to watch your kids struggle and suffer because we also know we feel it in our hearts. We just feel it. A long time ago, one of one of my friends said, it's like we have one of our organs walking around in the world. And it's true because they did grow in us, and for many of us, and not all of us, but you know, and we can still have that heart-centered feeling regardless of how our kids came into our lives. And then the last one I wanted to talk about was relationships in our local and global communities. So this one has always been a big thing for me. You guys know I was I did environmental cleanup for 15 years and environmental education and environmental cleanup for 15 years. And I always was also on the weekends doing beach cleanups, and I always did something locally. And when my life got fuller after having kids, I was donating money to like a local farm that brought food all in alignment with my values. So for me, that's local, organic, and education into the school systems where I was living before. Globally, I was donating money to an organization that did scholarships for girls who wanted education beyond high school, so helped them all the way through. And that was a like a light legacy foundation that I was working with. And there are different, there are always different ways to be part of that, whether you donate your time, whether you donate money. One of the things I've learned is that you don't have to donate a lot. It can really be $5 a month. And while that organization could use more, they could really use a lot more people putting just a few dollars in a month. I mean, it makes a huge difference. What I learned in the local farm that I was supporting that was bringing farm to table into the schools was that they had a grant that if they had participation from everybody in their like their donation community for more than one year every month, they got another grant. So you never know what the organization of the grant structure is of the company that you're supporting. And that is something you can ask so that you can support that as much as possible. But my overall point is doing something local, doing something global in that relationship to give back. And it doesn't have to be money, it can be time, it can be offering to post on social media, to there's so many ways. And it just requires an intention. And part of that intention is how can I serve? So serving others is a huge part of our commit our our global local self-organization to be in relationship with humanity. And again, that self-love has to start from internally. It has to be an intention that comes from the heart, not from the ego. So as you start to recognize the patterns of the ego and those start to dissolve and sh and really shake away, you start to get inspired as to what you can do. There's one more thing I want to mention, which is about receiving. So we're talking about giving in relationships and this evolutionary process of kind of upgrading your communication styles and your intention. The other thing that's really key is making sure you're receiving enough. And what I've seen again with clients over 22 years now is that most of my clients were the givers in all of their relationships, and they didn't really know how to ask and to receive. And this is really big. So starting with that awareness of where can I feel supported in my relationships, in my community? How do I ask for help when I really need it? And then starting to play with agreements, you know, hey, can you do this for me and I'll help you with that? Or just starting to kind of offload some responsibilities so that you can receive more. And there'll be surges in your life where you'll be so grateful for that. And there'll be other times in your life where you're like, I can do more. And so just playing with that balance is a huge part of being centered and being that portal of possibility is having these strong relationships with clear communication and intention and these kind of social contracts or, you know, these agreements, I always call them agreements because I've been working in the Akashic Records for a while. And we really do have contracts and agreements that are in our, you know, they're in our DNA. They're in, this is a metaphysical part, they're in our makeup, they're in our nature. They're we come in, they have soul contracts, we have soul agreements of things and ways that we intend to support others or actually trigger others, which is really a very cool thing when we realize that triggers are to help us evolve. They're to help us release the past and learn new things. Tools for personal evolution. And the Akashic Records are really awesome. And if you do a session with me, I can clear contracts which are no longer serving that. Some people come in with hundreds, hundreds of contracts that they're responsible for. Other people come in with tens of contracts that they're responsible for. And the level of responsibility is usually pretty open. The way we serve each other happens multidimensionally. It happens physically. There's a lot of different ways that it can play out. But when the soul comes in, there's kind of an outline to your life. And of course, you're consciously creating everything in your life. And then you also have these kind of checkpoints of what the soul is here to do because you're multidimensional. You're physical, you're having your physical experience. And then the soul being embodied in this physical expression of you is also having that experience and the contracts that she's responsible for. So putting all that together, you know, we have these relationships with you, and it has to start with you every time. That awareness, intention, and self-love. And then with others, and you know, maybe considering your communication styles and keeping criticism, content, defensiveness, and stonewalling out of your communication styles with your loved ones and even others, and then having some sort of intentional connection to connect and give back and be part of your local and global communities. These are really powerful relationship foundations. So enjoy that and keep up your personal evolution in becoming this portal of possibility. Lots of love.