Be Irresistible, Click Here what is the main thing you would recommend people work on themselves whether in transition of relatio...
what is the main thing you would recommend people work on themselves whether in transition of relationships or in a relationship is there one thing that they could always be working on to improve themselves better for other relationships if their entire story about the relationship that just ended is about what the other person did wrong to them something is missing in the story yeah that doesn't mean that the other person may not have done things that were hurtful to them but add to it who were you in this relationship absolutely what role did you play what did you see that you didn't want to pay attention to what things do you wish you had done differently what pieces do you wish that your partner had seen and accepted from you differently where did you wish you would have said less and where did you wish you would have said more what do you learn from this relationship and if when you see what you learn it's just that i want to make sure that the next person is right gives me what i need you know or is less of this or more of that you know who do you want to be in the next relationship how are you going to add value a relationship is a story of many people it's not even a story just of two who was too involved in your relationship who was not involved enough so it's there's a cast of characters in a relationship and uh and it's all those questions that you want to ask when you are in transition what what i think that's it i mean you can but they are both directions if you find yourself with a spotlight only on the other person and you in a passive receptive um stance you're missing a whole pan of the story yeah and you're probably more of the problem than the of the relationship than them if you're just focusing on them probably a relationship is not about this person and that person the relationship is what happens in between this is my view on relationships it's it's not an essentialist view this is this personality and that personality it's the dynamic right you can have a dynamic with a certain partner you've had dynamics with certain partners and of course it was just the right fit between the match and the ignition and so you had enough inside of you to react with a certain kind of let's put your jealousy but you may meet another person who acts differently and you may still have a little bit of that jealousy inside of you but it doesn't get activated because this person is responding very differently to you and when you say where were you they don't say why do you always have to ask me that question they just say i just want to do this it's all good darling i'm right here i've got you back and then you don't go into your chest pain you know pain so this is very important to understand we are not the same person with with different partners we may have certain things that come out depending on what is being sent over to us so the relationship is a figure eight it's what i do that makes you do something that then makes you react to me a certain way that then draws that out of me that draws that out of you and each one actually creates the other and when you get that view of relationships when you come out you and you're in transition you say to yourself let's say i was with someone who completely disconnected okay they disconnected i did i push them away are there ways in which i contributed sometimes to the disconnection and that is not self-blame that is understanding the dynamic you can take responsibility about things without blaming yourself and you can hold the other person accountable without blaming them it's it's not a blame dance but it is an understanding of what did i do that made you do what you then did to me then then they met that's the relationship yeah and if someone's like you know what i listen to you esther they really want to have an amazing relationship they want to have a rich life knowing it's not going to be perfect but they want to create beauty and adventure and play and go through life through the the sadness and the adversities and all the things that happen in life and they're thinking themselves how much should i pour into myself for my dreams my health my friends and family how much should i pour into the other person into their life that i'm creating a partnership with and how much should i pour into the relationship itself what would you say to that but you ask me it's different questions right how what keeper what keeps a relationship alive is one question how much do you invest in a relationship is a different question so i'm gonna go to the one about what keeps it alive because um it's part of and i'm suddenly watching the box and thinking this this it is what i'm most interested in because i work on i work on eroticism what keeps us alive what keeps us hopeful what keeps us engaged with possibility not physically alive but connected a lot connected to life life force life energy why because because i think everybody understands relationships that are not dead versus relationships that are alive teams that are not that companies versus companies that are alive what is flourishing versus surviving and because it is part of my personal history and i come from a background of survivors of parents who were in concentration camps and i wanted to understand how do people stay alive when they spend five years in a concentration camp so that's why i got interested in eroticism sexuality is a piece of this but sexuality is not eroticism you can have sex every day and feel nothing eroticism is the poetry that accompanies it it's the meaning we give to it yes right it's the story that's attached so eroticism in a relationship is the quality of imagination curiosity playfulness mystery risk taking novelty that people bring to their relationship those are the things that i think bring life to a relationship so in the research of eli finkel it means doing new things together taking risks beyond your threshold out of your comfort zone because if you do pleasant things that are familiar it's cozy it's friendship it's love but it's not exciting it's not erratic it's not necessarily desire it's calibrating your expectations so that you have and that means diversifying your intimate connections or your deep connections doesn't it you know like for me intimacy doesn't mean sexual either it just means people that are important to you that accompany you through the life stages and to the big events in life these tweetings expectations calibrating expectations diversifying your connect social connections and taking risks and doing new things is the research of eli finkel for thriving relationships but then in that piece i think play is essential playfulness it's huge and it is actually the quality of of emotions that is the least talked about how often are you playing in your relationship all the time we have humor is essential it's an essential solve and bomb in my relationship i can in the middle of an argument and then i start to laugh and then i just get perspective and we just kind of ground ourselves back again it's it's flirting it's teasing it's making fun of it's uh it's it's that whole realm of we're not really serious and we don't take ourselves that serious and what happens when relationships are taking themselves very serious and they're not playing look i had a teacher who once said to me if a couple comes to you for therapy and there is absolutely zero humor left it is diagnostic really now is it true you know nobody has proven that scientifically but what you know is that humor and if you listen to my podcast if you listen to the sessions on where should we begin or on how is work you'll see in the middle of talking about trauma painful event major fights strife i laugh with them i manage to see if they can see themselves if they have a bit of distance of perspective if they understand sometimes the absurdity of the things that we get into the things over which we fight the way we do it and even if it's just a glimmer a smile on the side on the corner i know they know that i know that we know and we and it creates that complicity and it invites a new possibility some people may be resisting the humor they're like they want to hold on to this seriousness yes if you want to hold on to righteousness to i am right to victimization to i have the view that is the right only view that matters and only my perception and my experience is the truth then you are in a polarized system that is rigid and unyielding humor and play is possibility invites change change invites healing yes i want to ask you a few more questions then i want us to play your game for a little bit um over the last two years was there anything that came up for you and personally in your own inner world that you noticed oh there's something like we talked about it created a lot of pressure for people if there were things that that came out was there anything for you that you were like huh there's something i i still need to work on myself or need to continue the healing journey of that came out in the last couple years with being at home and you know not doing things the way they used to be i will answer this in two ways the way that i experienced the the pandemic so in the first in the beginning right after i left you i went back to new york and i went in lockdown and basically it was in the you know we suddenly kind of i got gripped with a bit of a panic and primarily because i thought i can't catch this thing right because if i catch it i am now suddenly considered elderly i'm past 60. 35. yeah yeah for the pandemic it changed it suddenly shifted overnight i became elderly and that meant i wasn't sure if we entered the hospital me or jack that we will pass the triage interesting and he's older than me and i got really really scared i had a lot of post-traumatic stress symptoms that are very much connected to the holocaust and to my family experience that sense that overnight this whole life i have built could just disappear like this and it was irrational i was terrified that jack would die to the point you wanted to know about humor in my relationship so we are in the middle of construction at the time and then workers and at the point he comes to me and he says i asked the workers to create to dig a hole in the garden i said oh yeah why he said so that when i die you can just roll me right in oh my god wow talk about humor and i but i cracked up because it showed me girl you gripped in fear and i just started to laugh and i just realized no no no he's not that because i was ready to stop construction i said we're not making this no one can come here within a thousand yards of no no it's more like we will not survive no way i was i really when it's post-traumatic it's it's trauma it's the worst right so i really was very very very scared and his humor defused it for me and just brought me back and said we're continuing to build we're going to live we're going to survive don't worry girl it's like so this was one and it slowly you know i entered into the into the the long term of the pandemic and it dissolved and that's when i understood this came out of that i missed my friends i missed my dinner parties i missed intimacy and i created a host of different group experiences pods i had a movie club and zoom on three countries oh that's cool i have a book club i had a yoga group that met four times a week still till now that is over two continents wow that's cool and i had a hiking group i had a swimming group in the summer and then one day i said i need to play and i need to continue to have conversations where i learned something new i was so freaking tired of talking about the pandemic sure and i said i'm going to create a game not having any idea of what this thing was going to become and and what it represented i just thought i want to do something creative and i'm going to i want people to be able to talk about something that isn't just like you know when you live six months like this in lockdown you begin to have the same of course yeah yeah of course so i just thought how am i going to make couples and have fun get get get energized you know be curious about each other talk about something else and i thought we need to play because play is a container play gives you the possibility to take risks to talk about things that you would otherwise not talk about because it's under the guise of play play allows you to ask questions that you would otherwise not ask certainly not to your partner because we get more shy with the people that we live with than with strangers sometimes interesting yeah you know you're more daring to ask sometimes questions take strangers you're never gonna see it again or people you've just met right than the person you live with for decades on end i just so play became very very central when when you play you still you still are able to lift yourself from the ground and it means you can enter the world of imagination and where the rules are different and every child at this moment you know around the ukrainian crisis you can see when kids are still able to play it is the moments when they are not in hyper vigilance so it is an essential survival system yes yes underrated and from that place came that's correct where should we be it's one of the key things it's one of the key things in relationship and in life that's what i'm hearing it's ascension it's essential now here's another side question before we get into this place problem solving plays creativity play is risk taking play is spontaneity it's always it's the other side of fear the notion that when you heal it something utterly disappears is one component of healing but the other part is that you need a bigger trigger to reactivate an old wound but there is a whole new range where the wound can live ...
