The Heart of Intimacy, The Root of Conflict

Creating that clear sense of self and really knowing what's ours and what's true and what's real for us feels like a big, fresh, important piece because those of us who care deeply about other people, who have perhaps been committed to one person for a long time, maybe raising other people, I think it can get very confusing because most of us didn't grow up, you know, because we were raised by humans. We didn't grow up having perfect embrace of our truth throughout our childhood. Hi, welcome to Sex Love Power. I'm your host, Michelle Lizenberry Christensen. This podcast is where I convene the conversations about love and sex that help powerful women and those who love them to create the intimacy and intensity they really want in bed and in life. Together, we navigate the tensions between our desire and our devotions, between our wildness and our security with our eyes wide open. This podcast is designed to help you create more closeness, ease, pleasure, and justice in your relationship. And we do it by blending wisdom from the fields of sexuality and spirituality, trauma and self regulation, and intersectional feminism. I'm so glad you're here. Sometimes I record podcast episodes about things that have come up with clients recently. Sometimes I think about the things that I most often teach clients that make the biggest difference in their world. Sometimes I initiate out of conversations that I feel like we need to have in the culture that we haven't been having. Today's episode is about a topic that is blowing my mind right now, because I didn't think of it this way until I was reading this amazing book, the Audacity to Be youe by Brad Reedy. The subtitle is Learning to Love youe Horrible Rotten Self. And I love that he puts it that way, because I do feel like we all have a real dark side, and integrating the parts of ourselves that haven't been acceptable in our families of origin, in our other relationships is really central to becoming whole, and that being a whole self is really the only way to build the kinds of relationships we really want with other people. So I'm really enjoying this book. I enjoyed Reedy's first book. I don't even know why I read it. I Journey of the Heroic Parent. And so it's about parenting a young person who's going through drug addiction. And it was before I knew I was a food addict. And I certainly didn't have children old enough to be addicts themselves. And I still don't and hopefully never will have addict children. But, you know, if I do, I'm definitely turning to Brad Reedy. For support on that. And he just has an amazing way with words and with his own process. His transparency is really amazing to me. So we're gonna talk today about this device that he teaches in this book called the Three Circles. And I wanna talk about the Three Circles because I believe that this concept is at the heart of intimacy and it's also at the root of most conflict, especially between two people. So I've taught people for a long time about boundaries, and you've probably heard about it on the podcast before if you've been listening for long. Some of the ways that I teach people to ask for what they want to say, what doesn't work for them, to set limits, physically, sexually, emotionally, with their time, with their money. I help people say authentic no's so that they can say full throated yeses. And those interpersonal boundaries and even the limits that we set on our own behavior are really valuable. But Brad Reedish is helping me see something that almost comes before a boundary, a limit. A conversation with another person about what we're going to do. And that is really holding ourselves and finding an authentic and full self. One of the things he says is that a clear sense of self is the first ingredient in intimacy. It cannot be any other way, since intimacy is the connection between two selves. And therefore the quality of the intimacy will be predicated on the groundedness of those two selves. If we are unclear about what we think, feel, believe and value, we cannot be confident whether what we see in another is them or our projection. So today we're going to talk about what lies at the root of conflict in the core of intimacy. This notion of a self, of me having a self, you having a self, and us being able to connect to something in between those selves when they are both intact. We're going to talk about common places that we go wrong things. The lens of this Three Circles model. Places where communication and connection go awry, where we get walled off from one another or enmeshed with one another and tangled up in each other's selves. And where to start to create more of a sense of self and healthier intimacy with other people through the lens of this Three Circles model. And I'm excited to talk with you about it. So let's start with kind of a visual, because the three Circles, and I'm sure Brad Reed's not the only person who's ever talked about this before, because I often hear people talk about, you know, stay out of my hula hoop, so you can kind of Picture your circle like a hula hoop, and you're standing in your hula hoop. And if you and I are close, I'm standing in my hula hoop. And they're kind of like hoop skirts. So we can't get too close to each other. You know, we can get near each other, but there's sort of space around me. That's me. It's my world. So if you want to see this visually, draw three circles on a piece of paper next to each other. They're not overlapping, they're just all three there on the page. The first is your circle, the second is the relationship circle, and the other. The third is the other circle. So we have specific jobs inside each of these circles in your circle. Your job is to know your truth first, what is real for you. Now, your truth is whatever relates to you personally. This is your desires, your preferences, your feelings, your thoughts. Those need to come from you. If they don't come from you, and if the ones that do come from you don't all get known to you, as often happens, because when we grow up, our parents don't like this thing about us or find that thing inconvenient or are afraid of the other thing. They're reactive to certain things. And so we kind of slice those off or push them underground. Not that you have to act out everything that comes up, but if you don't give yourself access to all the truths that arise in you, then you don't have a full self. So your first job is to know that. What do I actually think, feel, believe, need and desire. And your second job is to keep other people out of your circle, just to stop other people from trampling on your body, your physical needs, your desires, your. Your emotions, your thoughts, to have yourself be for yourself. Where do you connect with other people? Well, that's in the middle circle. So that's the circle of relationship. But let's skip over that for a second and look at other people's circle. So think about your partner. What's their job inside their circle? Same as yours. Inside your circle, to know their truth and to keep other people out of their circle. Then outside your circle and outside the other circle, we each have one more job, and that is to limit ourselves in our behaviors and thoughts, frankly, limit ourselves such that we stay out of other people's circles. I don't try to mind read what's going on with you, and I don't try to change your behavior, your thoughts, your feelings. This is a big one for me. This is what's been really helpful for me about this three circles notion is that it's helped me really see where, give you an example. My daughter is in fourth grade, and so she's female and her friends are mostly female. And they're all getting kind of tweeny and having a lot of emotions and social thoughts and interests and tensions run high sometimes. There's a lot of feelings that she comes home with. And I think what she really needs when she's having a lot of feelings or she's had a lot of experiences during the day is she needs to just kind of empty her basket. She needs to tell me what's going on. But I had a pretty hard time at about that age, you know, like sixth grade, I think was when I got kicked out of the group. You know, had just some heartbreak. I can laugh about it now, but girls and me did not go that well in that time period. So I may have some baggage around it that has me reactive, feeling protective, wanting to tell her how to do it, wanting to give her advice that might be pertinent for me, but might or might not be pertinent for her. And certainly in the moment where she's trying to empty her basket, she doesn't need any guidance from me. All she needs is for me to hear her truth. So let's talk now about the relationship circle in the middle. We have two jobs. One is to express our truth, just to share what we know from our own circle now that we know our own truth. And the second is to make requests, share feelings, and offer support. Our job in the relationship circle is not to advise, not, not to fix, not to give the other person anything they haven't asked for. Now, we can offer things that they haven't asked for, but we really have to do that with an authentic notion of consent. Like, if I say I have an idea of something that might help you, babe, in this arena, are you interested in hearing it? If they go, no, then we have to really authentically be able to let that go of like, okay, good. I just need you to know whether that would be helpful or not done. And if you compulsively, like, need to tell your child or your spouse your thought, you know what that tells us? You're not in the middle circle at all. You're over in their circle wanting to manage their feelings, thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, behaviors. And boy, can I relate. So other people's feelings make me uncomfortable. Sometimes I am, you know, sad or scared or angry or upset that the other person's feeling how they're feeling. I'm an empath and I can be really enmeshed. I can get plugged into others feelings. If you're having big feelings, it can be hard for me to not have them too. And what these circles teach me is that I get to remember and come back and just own that know my truth. Oh, right now I'm really plugged in by the story that Mira's telling me. My daughter's experience is reminding me of my own experience. That's all that's going on inside my circle. So I can know that. And when I know that, then I can take care of myself, which is what's actually needed rather than trying to fix or change her or her feelings or her skill set or her attitudes or whatever. And then when I know how to take care of me, I'm a way better mom for her because I can just hear her. So she gets to be welcomed in herself rather than invaded. Right when I go into her circle, I'm telling her, it's not okay for you to be sad. It's not okay for you to be, to have your feelings hurt. It's not okay for you to be scared or frustrated with your math homework. You have to have it together because otherwise mom falls apart or mom gets plugged in or mom invades you. So it's really pertinent for parenting if we want to raise people who are whole, people who can have their own opinions, people who can resist peer pressure and, and chart their own path to the authentic career and life and relationships that they really want. We have to stay out of their circle when we're their parents. Now that doesn't mean we don't have boundaries, that we don't require things of them or set limits with them or give them guidance. But we do it consensually and we do it from inside our circle rather than inside their circle. We put one foot into the relationship circle and they put one foot into the relationship circle. And in that space, standing as separate individuals having a relationship, we can healthfully nurture them. But when I invade my daughter's or my son's or my husband's space, I'm only creating conflict because I'm stepping on their toes out of my own fear and anxiety. So that's a little introduction by way of that story to the three circles. There's my circle, your circle, and the relationship circle. Let's talk a little bit about common things that go wrong. The very most basic is that we don't connect to our own truth when we're not aware of our feelings, when we have distanced ourselves from our desires, when we don't know what we really think and prefer, then we don't have a whole self to come from. You know, if you picture a circle that's kind of gotten down to just a sliver, then we aren't bringing a full self to the situation. The other things that commonly go wrong have to do with connecting with other people. We sometimes can stack up all three circles together, you know, get overly enmeshed and not be able to draw the line between where I end and you begin, not honor that. Other people have their truth. I don't know what it is. And I would need to go into the relationship circle and invite their expression of their truth to really know what it is. And then I would need to attend caringly to that, to what they're expressing, rather than to my own projections or anxieties in order to truly know them. And it's very simple really. When I am in my own circle and I just put a foot into the relationship circle, it's far simpler to see the other person just as they are. What gets complicated is when I get tangled up in trying to change them or fix them. So when my husband is in a bad mood, for instance, my anxiety goes up. If I'm not attending to my own anxiety level, I'll skip over the awareness of it, I'll skip over tending to myself, and I'll go straight to trying to manage him. If I can manage his mood, then I don't have to feel so anxious. But that's not a conscious thought. What goes on is, what's the matter? What's going on? How can I help? And I begin shucking and jiving and jamming around trying to make him feel better so that I don't have to feel so anxious. If I really stay in my circle and know my truth, I can say, wow, he's really affecting my mood right now. But that's about him. So what do I need right now? Do I have enough resilience right now to stay near him? Or do I need to move into a different space until he's in a different space? So do you hear how much more control I gain over my own well being and how much less energy I waste if I'm not going over into his circle trying to manage his mood, his feelings, his thoughts? Another mistake that people make is getting walled off. That's where I don't put a foot into the relationship circle. I don't express my own truth. And I don't respond to other people's truths. So they might be expressing themselves through caring acts toward me, through sharing their feelings, sharing their thoughts. And if I'm not responsive to that, then I'm walled off. Or if I'm not expressing myself through actions, sharing words that describe my thoughts or my feelings, then I'm walled off. And I'm not making my authentic self available to them to relate to. So our walled offness means that we're not bringing our truth and we're not attending to or noticing the truth that our others are bringing as well. So denial is obviously a form of being walled off. It's a way where we take what we see and ignore it. We don't look at the expression of another's truth that we're actually getting. Or we deny the truth in ourselves that's trying to arise, and we pretend it's not there. So we've talked a little bit about being enmeshed. We've talked a little bit about being walled off. Those are the sort of the biggest mistakes that people make in interpersonally with regard to the three circles. But creating that clear sense of self and really knowing what's ours and what's true and what's real for us feels like a big, fresh, important piece. Because those of us who care deeply about other people, who have perhaps been committed to one person for a long time, maybe raising other people, I think it can get very confusing because most of us didn't grow up, you know, because we were raised by humans. We didn't grow up having perfect embrace of our truth throughout our childhood. There were definitely things in just about everybody I've ever met where their parents didn't have room for how big they were or how big their feelings were, or their anger or perhaps their sadness or their fear or some other response they had in their childhood. And so we each learned to cut off parts of ourselves. So the inner work of being an adult is to find those pieces of ourselves that we've disowned, that we thought weren't lovable, that we thought that no one could both see and care about us. And to bring those back up, to be able to be with them ourselves and to be able to reveal them to others so that we can be loved fully for all of who we are. You know, kind of warts and all. Or as Brad Reedy is saying, with our horrible, rotten self present as well as our presentable self, the self that worked just fine when we were growing up or worked just fine in Our relationship to date. So coming to own and hold and believe that it's safe to be my horrible, rotten self. The parts of me that are envious, that bear ill will, that are greedy or selfish or deeply erotic. There are lots of ways that I have messages from the culture or from family or whatever that, oh, you can't be that way and be loved. You can't be this way and be included. So I invite you, if this notion intrigues you, to just draw a big circle on one piece of paper and begin to take some notes on your truth. You might start the sentence, I am, and another that says, I feel, I need, I desire. List out a bunch of your preferences. Brad Reedy talks in the. In the book about he doesn't like mushrooms. He Sundays, I'm over 50 years old, and people are still trying to tell me what to like. Oh, well, you would like mushrooms if you ate them in this dish or, well, you got to try it this way. What if he just doesn't like mushrooms? Could you be okay with that? You know, and he says, by all means, take this as your shorthand. It's kind of shorthand in our family and among my friends now, too, when we recognize somebody's getting somebody else's circle, like, telling them, no, don't think that way. Change your belief to this, or I'm going to convince you, you know, or don't feel that way. Come on. You know, the bottom line is I don't like mushrooms. So you can use that as shorthand yourself, like, you just don't like mushrooms. Right? You know, you might say that to your spouse as you remember, like, oops, I don't need to tell you how to feel. What I need is to come back over to myself and soothe myself in the face of how you're feeling right now. It's okay that you're feeling that. That's your truth, and I embrace that, and I feel pretty anxious about it. So I'm gonna go ahead and take care of myself inside that rather than trying to change you. I'm gonna stay inside my circle and stay out of yours. So this is a different kind of episode. I started from the book the Audacity to be you by Brad Reedy. And what it's teaching me about staying in my own circle with my people and really beholding and celebrating theirs, who they actually are, the authentic self of each of us. And it's messy. We're human. And if we're really bringing our full, authentic self forward to ourselves and then bringing it into the relationship circle and sharing it with each other. It's going to be pretty multidimensional. You know, there's going to be a lot of emotion, both positive and less desired emotion. And yet that's the only way we can have real intimacy. Otherwise, it's this tug of war of trying to control and manage one another. And there's a lot of fakery. There's a lot of unnecessary conflict. There's a lot of pain because ultimately no one feels truly accepted if they don't feel fully seen. We don't feel entirely loved. If what we're bringing forward to ask for love for isn't our full self. We know that we're still hiding the things that we're afraid aren't lovable. We know we're not being fully loved because we're not even revealing our full selves. So it's obviously a work in process for all of us and it's absolutely worth spending our lifetime on. I deeply believe that this is how we create a magnificent legacy love. We spend an entire lifetime doing our own inner work and doing this work in community with one another, especially inside our marriages and with game friends and family and offspring as well. So I hope that this conversation has been helpful for you. I hope that you'll continue it. I want to hear from you what you notice and as you think about stepping in just with one foot to that relationship circle so that you can express your truth, receive the expression of the other and make requests, share your feelings and offer support always consensually, not demanding anything of anyone else and not foisting anything on them. It's a vulnerable way of loving and showing up. It's deeply delicious and it's the most nourishing way of exchanging love I've ever found. So enjoy. I look forward to hearing more from you inside the Conscious Couples community and I will see you again with the next episode. I'd love to hear what you're taking away from this episode and what questions you have. Where do you feel this conversation in your body? My free Conscious Couples Circle is the place to continue our conversation. You can share your experiences, ask questions, and get more actionable ideas for creating the love and sex you deeply desire in ways that evolve you both. It's all happening@society.lizandary.com that link is in the show notes for you. You know, new listeners need to hear what you're taking away too. Podcast reviews are what really help others recognize how this podcast is different from other relationship and sex podcasts. So thank you in advance for leaving a review right now in your podcasting app while you're thinking of it. Before you forget, with just a few words about what this show gives you. And hey, have you subscribed to the podcast? You're gonna want to so you never miss an episode. Please go to the app where you listen, hit that subscribe button, and then you'll always get notifications of new episodes when they drop. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Michelle Lisenberry Christensen, and this has been Sex Love Power. I will see you on the next episode, and until then, may the light within you illuminate the world around.