Inspiring True Stories: Academy Members Healed From Toxic Relationships And Created Healthy New Love

So I'm Ruth Schwartz. I'm the director of the Conscious Girlfriend Academy, and I want to share a few inspirational stories with you of women who came through the Academy's programs dealing with some really serious mismatches between what they deeply wanted to have be possible in their relationship lives and what they had lived through in the past. And I want to let you know both what they were grappling with and how things really shifted for them. Okay, so let me take the first person. I will call her Mary. Now, Mary had had a couple of really problematic— we could say toxic relationships in her past. Certainly one of them qualifies as toxic because her partner became physically abusive. So the 2 relationships that Mary had had, the first one was somebody who she had fallen really in love with. She really saw this other person's vulnerability. They, they had a deep connection. And as part of the formation of their relationship, knowing how badly her partner had been hurt, As a kid by people abandoning her, Mary vowed, "I will never leave you." So, and and she meant those words when she said them, and she meant them in the best possible way. But as time went on, their relationship became quite problematic. The first thing that happened was that Mary's partner. Shortly after they met, she quit her job. She said she was really exhausted. She was burned out. She just needed some time to get herself back together. Mary, being a generous person, said, no problem, I can support us. So a number of years went by, and Mary started to feel like, wait a minute, I wasn't counting on this much time going by when I would be supporting us both. And so she started to talk to her partner about this. And her partner made some excuses, criticized Mary. Bottom line, was not getting a job. So they ended up being together with Mary supporting them both for over 6 years. Now, even that might have been okay with Mary if they'd had a really beautiful, nourishing Close relationship. But instead of that, what started happening was 2 things. One was that Mary's partner became increasingly controlling and jealous. Mary was super monogamous, but her partner started even trying to control whether she could spend time with friends, what she did the rest of her time. And her partner became super critical. So Mary told me that at one point she decided to count the number of criticisms that got levied at her in a given day, and when she reached 50 in one day, she gave up. So Mary was subject to a constant stream of criticism. She was subject to this partner that wasn't working. She was supporting them both. And she was subject to all of this control. So she was really starting to recognize— it took her a while to grapple with the fact that this was not the kind of relationship that she had intended to commit herself to forever. But because she had made that commitment, she felt a deep sense of responsibility and a deep sense of guilt and sadness at the thought of leaving this partner behind. So the thing that finally made her decide to leave was when her partner threw a chair at her. Deep inside, Mary knew physical violence was not okay and was likely to escalate. So that was the point at which she got out. But it was really sad for her. She really grappled with it, and she spent About a year and a half single after that. Maybe it was more than that. Eventually she started dating somebody again, and this person had a good job, so that part was not going to be an issue. Um, but a few weeks in, Mary was spending time at this other woman's house, and she said a really small thing, and the other woman got very upset, literally stopped talking to her. Oh my goodness. And Mary didn't know what to do. So eventually she just went home. But when she saw the woman a few days later, the woman just picked up like nothing had happened and didn't bring up the fact that she had stopped talking to Mary, or what had precipitated it. Mary didn't bring it up either, because, you know, she didn't know what to do. So she figured, okay, let sleeping dogs lie, and as we get to know each other better, this won't be an issue. Okay, you can guess what happened. As they got to know each other, the issue continued, and in fact it got worse. Mary's partner would clam up and shut down and not speak on a regular basis. And after they'd been living together for about a year and a half, she stopped wanting to have sex with Mary, but she wouldn't talk about that either. So Mary would lie there in bed next to her at night thinking, Ah, this isn't quite what I wanted either. But the worst part is we can't even talk about it. So in this case, in some ways, perhaps Mary was lucky because she was such a loyal person that who knows whether she would have left this partner either. But this partner ended up deciding to leave Mary. Mary was deeply, deeply sad. And she mourned for a long time. But somewhere along the way in her mourning process, she also realized, like, hey, I'm the common denominator here. And if I've had 2 relationships in a row that really didn't work and didn't give me what I want and need, maybe there's something about myself I need to be looking at and working with. So when she showed up in the academy, she went through some of our classes, and the biggest missing piece that she identified for herself was that she hadn't really ever known how to love herself. She hadn't even really thought that she was worthy of love. This goes back to her childhood, of course, but deep down she had a belief that. For her to be with someone, she needed to be giving them much, much, much more than she was receiving from them, just to kind of earn her keep, to earn her place on earth, because she didn't really feel lovable or deserving of love, and she wasn't giving love to herself. So this was a really painful but crucial epiphany for her, and she started working with our meta practice and some of our other self-love and compassion practices. She was really devoted. She worked with them every day for over a year, and she felt enormous shifts. And by the way, it's not surprising because neuroscience brain scans have actually demonstrated that working with practices like Metta change the brain. So the good thing is Mary experienced that in her personal life, and over time she came to really, really know and believe How lovable and deserving and worthy of love she was, and to be able to really give herself love. And so eventually, when she started dating again, she was much more discerning. It was a whole different ballgame for her. Now she is with a woman. They started more slowly. She took the time to ascertain that this woman was really self-responsible. Really had conflict resolution skills and communication skills. Um, also happened to have plenty of money, although that certainly wasn't what Mary was looking for. But, you know, very financially independent. And they have been together for over 4 years now. They got married a couple years ago. So that's a really, really happy outcome. For Mary and her now wife. So taking a deep breath in and out, and let yourself feel into whether this is the kind of outcome and journey you would want for yourself. And if so, let yourself breathe in to your power to create it and invite your out-breath as you breathe out. To help you release anything that gets in the way. So the second story I want to share with you is about somebody I'll call Cindy. Now, when Cindy came to the Academy, first of all, she was a late bloomer. She had been married to a man for a long time, and this is not such an uncommon story. She had left the man when she felt. Madly in love with a woman, and she had had a very intense, passionate relationship with that woman that ended up becoming super toxic, super painful, excruciating. So she was still trying to figure out what had even happened there, because she knew she was a lesbian, she knew she wanted to be with a woman, but she'd had a fairly you know, unsatisfying but sane and stable relationship with a man for a long time. And then this relationship with a woman, it had been a whole new ballgame, which was not the ballgame she wanted to be playing. So, um, that was her history. And when, when she first showed up at the Academy, she had just started dating somebody. They just had a few dates. She saw some big red flags. Including that after the first date, the woman was really insistent about Cindy calling her when she got home. The woman had also talked way too much about her ex on the date. There were a few other things that she wasn't feeling comfortable with, but she said, you know, I'm so attracted to her. I have so much chemistry with her. What do I do? So we actually did some one-on-one coaching, Cindy and I, and what we encountered as we kind of went spelunking through her attraction patterns and her attachment history was that in her childhood she'd grown up in a kind of scary environment and She had the realization that she had learned to link that experience of being on edge and, and being afraid, being around somebody who was mean and controlling. She had learned to link that with erotic arousal. And so she realized, oh my God, on that first date, I remember the moment When that, that woman said something and it actually scared me. And then I remember starting to think I was super attracted to her. And, you know, this might sound far-fetched, but it's actually not uncommon that we eroticize fear. Fear makes our hearts beat faster. It creates some other physiological signals. And so Mary realized that in a way, part of how she had dealt with fear was to learn to experience it as a positive signal of attraction. She realized this was not something she wanted operating in her life. So we went through a number of experiential practices, and she also did some, you know, deep thinking, journaling, processing inside herself to decouple Her fear response from her attraction response, because she knew that going forward in her life, she wanted to be able to have a really, really different experience. She wanted to be able to feel great chemistry with someone who was also really available and solid and stable and kind and safe. And she realized that You know how she was when she showed up, she would not have felt such a strong attraction to that person, or maybe wouldn't have felt attracted at all. Maybe you've been in the same boat. It's actually pretty common. So I am really happy to report that the work we did together and the work she did on her own with, with the mentorship and support and community of the Academy Turned this around for Cindy. So about 6 months later, she was at a party. A friend introduced her to somebody that she had thought might be a good match for Cindy, and Cindy recognized right away that this person was not her usual type. This was not the person that normally would have made her head turn. But because of the work we'd been doing, she thought to herself, okay, I'm gonna just Go with this a little bit, and you know, get more information, investigate further, see what feels possible. So she did. She had a number of dates with this woman. She was getting to know them, getting to know her, and with time, as the intimacy built between them, the emotional intimacy, Cindy recognized that she was starting to experience a different kind of arousal. Than she had ever felt before. And I got chills just now as I was talking about it, because this was a kind of whole-body sexual arousal that actually was based on feeling safe. She had never felt that in her life before, and it's not uncommon. A lot of us haven't, because what she had experienced intense attraction before was always based on some feeling of not feeling completely safe. So this was a whole new experience for her. And the amazing thing was, because this was a safe person and it was a safe connection, they were able to talk about all of this really openly. And Cindy was able to ask for what she needed in terms of their progressing into a sexual relationship, ask that it go slow, ask that she be able to hit the pause button at any point that she needed to. The other woman was totally receptive and open to that, and they formed a really beautiful sexual relationship. And about a year after that, they got married, uh, and they're very happy together. So these are 2 stories that I thought would be really important to share with you, because let's just breathe out some of the despair and discouragement that we might have felt in the past, that you might have felt. It's super common, and it does not have to be the reality that you live with going forward. Whatever your history has been and whatever your attraction patterns have been, it can change. Your past history can become a different present and a very different future. And yes, it is absolutely possible to rewire your attraction patterns. If you happen to be one of those people that mostly feels chemistry with people that are bad for you, you are not stuck that way. You're not stuck choosing either somebody who's bad for you in familiar ways or choosing somebody who's good for you but you feel no attraction to. You can actually rewire your brain and your nervous system to develop different attraction patterns, just as Cindy did. Whoo! So these are just a couple stories about what's possible for you if you really embark on the journey, which is the Conscious Girlfriend Academy. We have world-class, cutting-edge mentorship, teaching, coaching, and community here. All of our work is based on conscious, compassionate, Curiosity in our approach. It's also based on neuroscience and leading relationship research, psychology, attachment theory, and it's based on my 42 years of lived experience as a lesbian, and many would say thousands of other years of lived experience as lesbians. When you think about all the many thousands of women and non-binary people whose lives we've touched. And I— one way I like to describe the Academy is that it's a think tank and a feel tank for lesbian love. So if you want to have some of the kinds of shifts that Mary and Cindy experienced, this is the place. I hope you will join us as an Academy member. I would especially recommend you consider the Deep Dive membership because in that level of membership, you get weekly group coaching with me much of the year, and it's really a chance to take the Academy learning so much deeper because you can apply it to your own situation week after week. But even if you don't go to the deep dive, uh, you can come to tons of live classes with the basic Academy membership. And even if you're not ready to start there, you can get a lot from signing up for one of our à la carte classes. So I really look forward to seeing you one way or another in the Academy sometime soon. And I am here, by the way, to support lesbian and queer love.