I now want to offer some specific strategies and language for how to communicate and stay calm in those moments when you just want to scream “this is not my fault; this is about you—don’t you see that?!” That reaction is so natural and understandable, but it doesn’t usually go well when followed, and rarely leads to greater peace or closeness with your partner. The difficult truth is that if you want to break the cycle of projection and defensiveness, you’ll need to practice a more mindful and disciplined strategy.

Projection is difficult and painful for both you and your partner. Your partner’s core wound is re-activated and they’re deep down the rabbit hole in a negative narrative. And for you, the one being criticized and misjudged, it’s frustrating, hurtful, and infuriating. It’s also profoundly lonely because your partner is not with you in the present moment when they’re lost in projection; they’ve disappeared into a past reality that you’re not part of. So, what can you do and say to navigate this challenging situation in a thoughtful and productive manner?

The first thing to do when you smell the scent of projection is, counterintuitively, to shift your attention away from your partner and bring it towards yourself. That is, to ground yourself inside your own body. You can do this by simply placing a hand on your abdomen or heart (or anywhere that helps you feel present). From there, you can inconspicuously (or not) take a conscious deep breath, which will prepare you for the interaction and help you stay calm and connected to yourself, which can be difficult when the projection train is heading your way. Taking a conscious breath (or three) can also help create a separate, safe space where you won’t be swallowed up by your partner’s feelings and narratives, and overcome by the survival instinct to defend yourself.

When you feel grounded in your body, you can more thoughtfully respond (or not respond) to your partner’s grievances. When your partner accuses you of making them feel bad in a way they always feel bad, the best plan is to become Teflon, that is, to unstick (and make yourself unstick-able) from their projections, which involves resisting the urge to join them in their storyline. Instead, you want to empathically reflect your partner’s feelings, what they’re suffering, but (and this is important), without including yourself in the reflection. As in, “I get that, for you, the situation felt really invalidating.” It’s also helpful to use words that frame your partner’s experience as feelings not facts: “You felt invalidated” rather than “You were invalidated,” or worse, “You were invalidated by me.” In using feeling words, you highlight the fact that this is their experience (which means it’s important) but not necessarily what happened in some absolute reality.

It’s also helpful to use language like “for you” and “in your experience.” For example, “I hear that—for you—it felt like this…” or “I get that—in your experience—it felt like this…” By using these sorts of phrases, you also suggest that the experience they were living might not be the experience you (or anyone else) was living. Your mindful response is designed to unlink their experience from you and also from what is.

Your task in responding, always, is to draw the “conversation” away from the you-based storyline, and empathize with the feelings and suffering your partner is caught in, to make it clear that you see and get their experience, their pain. Your skillful language is designed to create a separation between how they feel and what you did. Ultimately, the skill in responding to projection is to be sensitive to the other person’s pain, but not bite the hook—not engage in the personal battle over who’s to blame for that pain.

So too, it helps (if you have the emotional bandwidth) to lead with an affectionate word, like “sweetheart” or “love.” As in, “Sweetheart, I hear that you felt invisible in that interaction.” Notice that you’re not saying “I hear that I made you feel invisible.” Or perhaps, “Love, I’m sorry you had to go through that pain.” If you choose to use the word “sorry,” do so carefully; be mindful that your sorry-ness is not about having caused your partner’s experience, but rather, for the fact that they are suffering at all. When projection is happening, skillful language can help you create space for yourself, between you and your partner’s narrative, which you can then maintain regardless of whether they want to collapse that space. Responding mindfully doesn’t just change the relational dynamic, it keeps you safe and saves you from having to get on the emotional roller coaster your partner is riding.

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The key “don’ts” in dealing with projection are:

1. Don’t bite the hook.
2. Don’t engage in the battle your partner is trying to wage
3. Don’t try to prove your innocence or set the record straight

All of these “don’ts” are saying essentially the same thing, and if you practice them in whatever ways you can, they will change how you experience your partner’s projection, and also change the part projection plays in your relationship.

There might also be an opportunity, not in the thick of conflict, but at a more peaceful and loving moment, to draw your partner’s attention to the fact that their feelings with you seem similar to feelings they’ve described from other times throughout their life. The key is to raise this issue with curiosity and not judgment. As in, “Do you think this feeling of (fill in the blank) might be one of those core experiences for you, one that reappears in lots of different forms for you?” You might also share a core experience or wound from your own life, one that reappears in different situations, to remove any shame, create connection, and show your partner that what they’re experiencing is something you share and part of the human experience.

I would be remiss, however, if I ended this post here, without saying this: telling your partner they’re projecting onto you is almost never a good idea. Regardless of how certain you are that projection is at play, to assume that you know more about what’s happening in their internal world than they do, that you know the real truth, is disrespectful, unkind, and not helpful. When we do that to anyone, assume superiority and make an interpretation that pathologizes, shames, or claims to know their truth, we emotionally violate that person and rob them of their dignity. Don’t assume the role of authority in your partner’s experience; it isn’t compassionate and it won’t encourage greater awareness in your partner or serve to deepen the connection. If you want to break the cycle of projection and create a more conscious and intimate bond with your partner, mindful communication—which starts with your response—is ultimately what works.

The post Responding Mindfully When Your Partner is Projecting On You appeared first on Nancy Colier.

Bob often gets angry and accuses his wife of overlooking and dismissing him, to which she defends herself, claiming that her behavior has nothing to do with him, that she’s just being the confident and independent woman that she is. But Bob remains convinced that it’s Jan who’s deliberately disappearing him, and that she’s responsible for his feelings of irrelevance and humiliation.

Bob is a 51-year-old, highly intelligent, well-educated, and ambitious man. He was raised in a tiny midwestern town, with parents who were absent in all ways imaginable: physically, mentally, and emotionally. They took no interest in Bob whatsoever. Professionally, Bob has spent his life creating projects, both artistic and business-oriented. Despite his great intelligence, original ideas, and hard work, he hasn’t (as of yet) been able to build any of these projects into a career that provides him with recognition or acknowledgment. He also, for that matter, has not yet been able to translate his efforts into financial stability or true independence. He calls himself a “failure” and suffers with shame and low self-esteem, which makes it hard for him to form close friendships. Bob has struggled his whole life, trying to create a place for himself in the world, one where he matters and his talents and wisdom are seen, validated, and respected.

From what Bob describes, Jan is a woman in her late forties who’s built a successful career as an illustrator. An award-winning, highly-respected artist in the publishing and music industries, she’s a sought-after artist who gets to make her own choices on the projects she takes on and how much she gets paid (which is a lot).

While Bob acknowledges that Jan has worked hard for and earned her success, he’s also quick to point out that the only difference between him and her is that the “universe” has rewarded her efforts and not his.

Bob also acknowledges that Jan is a confident and highly likable woman who makes friends and connections easily. She was raised in a financially well-off family, which has allowed her and Bob to enjoy (and provide their kids with) a comfortably cushy lifestyle. There’s no question that Bob respects and adores his wife, but it’s also clear that he resents her. He believes that life has come easier for Jan and that her success is just part of her privilege. While he, on the other hand, was offered nothing—no guidance and no support.

The relational framework from which Bob operates, namely, that his wife is making him feel humiliated and irrelevant (and choosing to do so), is, in fact, very common in relationships. We blame those people we’re closest to for causing our feelings and conflate our experience with their intention to create it.

Different people trigger different feelings in us, and specifically, different feelings about ourselves. Our narrative of the other person, and most importantly, who we are in comparison with the person we’ve constructed in our narrative, then creates a particular self-experience, an identity that crystallizes in their company.

Rather than own our feelings and acknowledge the source of our vulnerability, shame, anger, or whatever else we’re feeling, we decide that the other person is responsible for making us feel our difficult feelings. We disown our own shame and insecurity and project it onto the other person; we are not insecure…they are responsible for it; they are the ones doing it to us.

Bob struggles with powerlessness and humiliation as a general theme in his life. And yet, he needs to believe that his wife is responsible for these feelings. His humiliation is not about him, and not about what he’s (sadly) experienced in his life, or for that matter, what he’s been able to generate and make happen for himself.

There’s no question that other people affect how we feel; we are not islands. And yet, when we hand responsibility off to others for our own difficult feelings, for creating them in us, we effectively escape and reject responsibility and authorship for our own life. In so doing, we deprive ourselves of the opportunity for self-compassion—to acknowledge what we’ve lived and how we got to these feelings, which would then allow the feelings to transform and heal. Simultaneously, making our suffering something the other person is doing to us deprives us of the opportunity for autonomy and ultimately, growth. If our shame, inadequacy, rage, or whatever else were to be about us, about what we’ve actually lived, then we can get on with the job of changing it, creating a different life and different experience of ourselves.

In Bob’s case, as long as his sense of failure still belongs to his wife, if it’s still her casting failure upon him, nothing can, or will, change for Bob.

This example may sound obvious, but projection in the face of the obvious happens all the time and causes unimaginable stress and conflict in intimate relationships. If the partner being projected onto is not incredibly conscious, present, and grounded in the moment it’s happening, they can easily fall into the trap of defending themselves and going into battle to prove their innocence, which is never productive or affirming.

Some of it is just biology: the ego’s survival instinct gets activated when we’re accused of something and triggers a kind of fight-or-flight response in the nervous system. Being told we’re responsible for (and intentionally creating) bad feelings in another person we care about launches us into a defense or counter-attack—into proving that we’re not to blame, and not the bad person we’re accused of being.

This cycle of projection and defense keeps our relationships stuck and keeps us stuck in our own evolution. We focus on our partner and what they’re doing to cause our experience. We devote our attention and energy to how they need to change—to fix our pain and make us feel differently. We insist that a different reality exists, one in which we don’t feel what we feel, a reality that we imagine our partner controls and could create for us…if only they were different.

In part 2 of this series, I will look at ways to break out of this cycle of projection and defense, both for the projector and the projected upon and how to free ourselves from this repetitive loop that leads to conflict, disconnection, and, in a word, suffering. We’ll look at how to move our relationships to a more evolved, conscious, and harmonious state.

The post Projection and Defensiveness: The 2 Relationship Toxins that Can Poison the House appeared first on Nancy Colier.

Carol came to see me with a serious agenda.  She and her husband had had a disagreement the evening before our session and Carol wanted to explain to me why her husband had said what upset her, and specifically, what in his personal psychology and history had made him decide to hurt her. She also wanted to lay out her theories on what was wrong with her husband in a more general sense and how she was going to explain it to him so that he would understand and be different.  Knowing what she knew about him, she was sure that once she laid out her case and helped him understand what was wrong with him, he would become different—and as a result, she would be okay once again.

My client had come up with an intricate, psychologically sophisticated and comprehensive narrative about her husband’s intentions, resentments, methodology, and shortcomings, and tying in his familial history, present psychology, and relational style.  Carol’s presentation was a multi-layered, multi-dimensional, and multi-generational storyline. Most developed in her narrative, interestingly, was her theory about her husband’s strategy and intention to hurt her.

Carol was suffering and I listened empathically as she constructed her clear case for why the experience with her husband had happened. And simultaneously, what she needed to do about it or explain to her husband so that he would understand why he was wrong, and would never do this kind of thing again.  I felt her pain and frustration; I also felt how her words and ideas were trying to keep her from feeling her pain, give her some protection from her heart’s hurt, make her pain manageable. And, I felt how desperately those words were failing her.

Everything Carol said made perfect sense. In court, she would have won her case.  At the same time, I have been listening to her theories on her husband for many years, and also keeping her company in her suffering, as none of her well-crafted theories and/or action plans have changed how he behaves or how she feels about it.  I’ve watched as none of her theories and action plans have brought her happiness or peace.

On this day, I felt we were ready and so I asked Carol to consider a few new questions in relation to her story and her experience. “What if none of the thoughts and intentions you’ve assigned to your husband are actually true—for him?” I asked.  And, “What if your thoughts only exist in your own mind but don’t really exist anywhere else?”  And furthermore, “What if your narrative, no matter how true and real for you, is of no value whatsoever in making you feel better?”

It was a risk to pull Carol out of her story.  At the same time, she had been telling me her theories on her husband for a long time and I trusted that she knew my re-direct was coming from a desire to help, and also that we’d given enough space and attention to the storyline of the moment, enough so that she would be willing to pull the lens back and examine the story-making itself.  I have learned from experience that asking someone to move out of their story before it’s received its due process is not useful or kind, but Carol and I were in a place to take a new turn in our journey.

In this moment, as sometimes happens, grace graced us and Carol had an awakening moment.  Her paradigm shifted and it suddenly dawned on her that what she had considered to be the truth, not just for her, but for her partner too, might not be the truth.  She saw that her narrative could make utter sense to her, could be un-challengeable, and yet could have absolutely nothing to do with what her husband was experiencing.

Her mind opened to the possibility that her idea (and certainty) as to why her husband was intentionally hurting her might be false, for him, or just an idea in her head.  In an instant, Carol literally unstuck from her most tightly held thoughts, she surrendered to the freedom of not knowing what’s true for anyone else.  Carol realized that just because she had a thought didn’t mean she had to believe it, even if it made perfect sense in her own head.

It’s revolutionary and profoundly liberating when we grasp that our version of the truth, which not coincidentally always places us at the epicenter of what’s motivating everyone else’s behavior, may not and probably is not the truth for anyone else.  Tragically, in an effort to help ourselves feel better and make sense of our pain, to know and be able to control what hurts, we construct elaborate stories on why others are doing what they’re doing to us.  We lock in a truth, one that applies to everyone and everything, and no matter how painful that truth might be, we hold onto it, believing that knowing is far safer than not knowing.

The narrative we are living and suffering however, is unreal and unnecessary.  It’s made up by our particular mind, with its particular wounds, conditioning, experiences, thoughts, and everything else we’ve ever lived.  In the end, we suffer alone, trapped in the certainty of our story, the story of what’s inside everyone else’s head—inside a pseudo-reality of our own damaging design.

It’s also remarkable to discover that our theories on why what’s happened to us has happened, and what we need to do about it, that none of them, none of our beautiful, logical works of mental art, will ultimately lead us to peace.  If peace is what we want, our mind and its theories will not take us there.  Trying to find peace with our mind is like trying to open a lock with a banana.  The mind is simply the wrong instrument if peace is what we desire.

That said, the next time you find yourself convinced of and grasping onto a storyline about how you’ve been wronged or any such thing, ask yourself, What if all my ideas on what’s true for this other person, the world, or whatever else is the protagonist of my narrative of the moment, what if they’re not actually true—for the other, not true outside my own mind?  What if my truths are only true for me?”  See if it’s possible to loosen your grip on the “big T” Truth.

Paradoxically, when we give ourselves permission to not know what’s true, to turn in our badge as master-interpreter of everyone else’s behavior, surrender our throne as judge and jury of universal truth, blessedly, we discover the very peace we believed we could only find through our storylines and certainty.

We get there when we get there, but usually, with enough mental fatigue and smart storylines under our belt; when we’ve tried long and hard enough to find peace through the mind’s gymnastics and found ourselves again and again at pain’s door, suffering within our brilliance and certainty, knowing so much but not how to be happy, we start to recognize our banana without having to shove it in the lock for too long.

The post Because Our Thoughts Make Sense Doesn’t Mean They’re True appeared first on Nancy Colier.

Neuroplasticity, neural networks, neurotransmitters, neurochemicals, neural cortexes, synaptic reactions, the amygdala, the cerebral cortex, bi-naural beats, brain waves… these are the words we now hear when discussing life.  Science has officially kidnapped the human experience.

A few examples: neuroscience has now proven that meditation leads to increased gray matter in the brain, and thus to better learning and memory.  Also, that meditation increases the part of the brain that produces feelings of love, compassion and forgiveness.  Love, on the other hand, has been scientifically shown to produce the hormone dopamine, which creates pleasure, and also stimulate norepinephrine, which raises blood pressure and heart rate. In addition, love lowers serotonin, the chemical associated with feeling in control, and thus we now know that instability and anxiety are neurologically induced by love.  In another laboratory, scientists demonstrated that courage is created when the prefrontal region called the subgenual cingulate cortex is activated, thereby dampening bodily-related responses to fear.  Name the experience, we can now prove that it exists biologically, how it exists and why it exists.

I have been meditating for many years.  I know, from my own experience, that the practice makes me feel more compassionate, spacious, grounded and present.  I’ve also fallen in love.  I know that love makes me feel happy, and also short of breath at times.  I know that when I am courageous, I feel willing to face my fear, proud, and also connected to a sense of personal growth.  I don’t need neuroscience to tell me that any of this is happening, my own experience tells me what is inarguably true.

Truth be told, we don’t need our own personal experience or felt senses any longer, we have science to tell us what we are experiencing, and to confirm that it is real and believable.  We don’t need to know God any longer, science itself is our new God.

Why suddenly do we need to prove or demonstrate that what we are living is really happening, and explainable, rational, concrete.  Why do we now need neuroscience to validate that what we are subjectively experiencing is actually objectively occurring?  Do we believe that by knowing what love looks like in the brain, how our brain responds to love, we will be able to recreate it?

Our increasing deference and dependence on science is in part a result of our ever-deepening relationship with technology.  In the digital age, our attention is perpetually focused externally, at a device and what that device provides, and rarely if ever turned inward, into ourselves.  That which we value and are interested in is now located somewhere outside us, but no longer within us.  Our own personal experience, internal truth, is no longer something we consider important, worthy or even reliable.  The tether into our own felt sense, intuition, and deep knowledge has been cut.

Furthermore, in the process of figuring out the science of our experience, intellectualizing and objectifying the subjective and emotional world, we are relinquishing supremely important and joyful parts of being human.  To name a few: mystery, wonder, awe, humbleness of the sort that comes from not knowing how and why life works—the unfathomability of living this human experience.

This summer I watched a breath-taking sunset with someone who educated me on the neuroscience of beauty, and how we determine it, just as the sky was fading into a shocking pink and shimmering lavender.  What I really wanted in that moment was to be breathless, and feel beauty—not hear about its synaptic reactions.  For me, the fact that there is a sky, one that turns pink and lavender, that pink and lavender exist, and that there’s an “I” who gets to see all of it—is plenty.

I personally love mystery; I love knowing that I don’t know everything, that there is something larger than me in play.  I love the sense of surrender that comes in accepting my smallness in the vastness.  With technology however, has come a need to know everything, to break life down into knowable and provable facts.  But sadly, the knowing about life can hinder and even replace the experience of living it.  Cracking the code on life, knowing that an experience is happening, and why, is a paltry substitute for living it directly and experiencing it for ourselves.

Fact is, there’s nothing wrong with understanding neuroscience and how it relates to life—it’s fascinating and wonderful.  And it’s not about burying one’s head in the sand and avoiding knowledge.  The problems arise however, when we:

1.  Start believing that we need to prove how and why our experience is happening in order to trust and know that it is happening.

2. Defer to science and award it with authority, over and in place of our own experience, heart and gut.

3. Substitute our knowledge about the experience for the (felt) experience itself.

In addition, when science proves the existence of an experience, say, that love generates dopamine, which then brings pleasure, it is also suggesting that the experience is the same for everyone.  But this is false.  We all experience love, pleasure, and every other emotion differently.  By suggesting that our experience is just a scientific event, just cause and effect, we are robbing ourselves of the exquisite subtlety of our own experience, and denying what makes us special as individual human beings.  While the chemicals released might be similar for each person living a particular experience, how we live it, which is so much more than chemicals, is what makes the experience meaningful, and is part of what makes us who we are.

Something remarkable and indescribable happens when we investigate and marinate in our own truth—what the body knows.  And even more remarkable, when we value and trust that truth, prove-able or not, to be our guide.

Our own experience is our greatest teacher and source of wisdom.  Don’t turn away from what is for you just because science tells you it has the answers, your answers.  Don’t turn away from your own knowing in deference to a magnetic resonance image.

Right now, ask yourself, What are you experiencing? What does your body know?  What is true for you? Turn your attention back inside yourself, into your own unique experience.  Remember that you already hold the answers to what is real and true—for you.

The post The Neuroscience of… Everything appeared first on Nancy Colier.

Most of us are defensive in close relationships. If we’re not, we have to interact with people who are. It is the relational disease of our culture and the one that imprisons and destroys intimacy, and prevents love and connection between partners and friends. Why are we so defensive and what are we so afraid of?  And… how do we make it stop?

Recently I witnessed a married couple interact in a way that was not only tragic but tragically familiar. In this example, the woman was telling her husband that something he had done had hurt her, just in that moment. The pain was evident in her face, and tears were coming. His immediate response was to angrily accuse her of (frequently) doing the same thing to him. ‘How dare she feel upset when she was guilty of exactly same behavior.’ She then began defending herself, needing him to understand that she was not a person who would ever do such a thing to someone she supposedly cared about. Without responding to her claims, he moved on to his next defense/attack. If she was hurt by what he had done, it was because she was overly sensitive. It was her problem not his. Desperate now, the woman pleaded her case, explaining why it was reasonable for her to feel pain—that “anyone” would feel the way she did. She was not overly sensitive—his behavior was insensitive. Her case was a good one but he didn’t hear it, and couldn’t hear it. Sadly, with her original pain rejected and attacked, she now had a second layer of pain and misunderstanding to contend with, a second layer of feeling unknown and un-loved as a result of the interaction. In the end, nothing was resolved, no connection was formed, and eventually they went their separate ways.

On a practical level, at the moment when her husband claimed that she “did the same thing” to him, it would have been wise for her to bring his attention back to the present and to the experience that right now was causing her suffering. She might have asked him to point out her “doing it” when it actually happened, to request that he not use it as a weapon against her, but rather as an opportunity for healing his pain about it too. This small insertion might have kept the dialogue from devolving into a battle for rightness. Unfortunately she also got caught up in defending herself and thus lost sight of the original suffering for which she was needing his attention. As an aside, I must say that I have never quite understood the “You do it too” argument. If the same behavior upset him when it happened (to him), why then would that invalidate his wife’s pain or justify his actions? In truth, husband and wife seemed to be on the same side, both feeling un-heard and unknown in the relationship. Blinded by their identities however, neither could see it.

The interaction was tragic and painful to witness, not only in its unkindness, but also in its lost opportunity. Instead of truth and pain serving as a doorway—an opening into intimacy and understanding—truth and pain were used to inflict more pain. Instead of easing their loneliness, the truth brought them deeper into isolation.

At no point in the exchange did the man pause to hear his partner’s suffering. In fact, it appeared that just allowing her pain to exist, letting it be true for her, presented (in his mind) a threat to his very survival. He did not believe that both he and his wife’s experience could co-exist. In order to survive then, it meant that her suffering would have to be destroyed, or at least radically undermined. It was nothing less than a fight for existence.

While this exchange may sound like something that should have happened between eight year olds, in truth, its sort is more prevalent with adults. As compared with children, adults have far more complex and sedimentized self-stories (to defend) and more rigid and firmly entrenched egos (to protect). So too, adults are more attached to and identified with their past hurts, and thus more vigilant about preventing them from re-occurring. Like a perfect storm, all of these factors then come together to create the defensive interactions that pervade and destroy grown up relationships.

So often, when we learn that someone we love is hurting, our immediate response is to start fighting for ourselves, but not to attend to, comfort or understand their hurt. We set out to prove that the other is wrong for feeling the way they feel, even though it is the way they feel. We have been taught that in the face of pain or conflict, what’s most important is that we survive as the one who is justified and right. Fundamentally, we do not view pain as something that is safe to engage with or that can lead to growth or healing. Instead, we see pain as something to survive and defeat.

When someone tells us that we caused them pain, we get angry at them. Often, the more hurt they are, the more hurtful and vicious we are in response. It is strange behavior really. And yet, it is not so strange when we consider that we have been conditioned to believe that who we are is our self-story, the carefully constructed version of me that we have assimilated over a lifetime. And simultaneously, we are conditioned to believe that our selfcan be altered, harmed and ultimately annihilated by another’s experience of us, particularly when that experience is inconsistent with our self-story. No wonder we are so afraid and defensive when conflict arises! While our conditioning has taught us that who we are is remarkably fragile, in truth, who we are is fiercer than anything we know.

The next time the opportunity to know another’s experience presents, try out what it feels like to listen without strategizing to keep yourself positively positioned—without defending the story of who you are and what you have or have not done. See if you feel worse or better.  If only for a moment, fire yourself as the client of your own public relations campaign—surrender your title as your own brand manager. Connection is not born from successfully proving that you are a good person, coming out looking like a good person, or being right. When you make use of another’s suffering to champion your identity, you indeed emerge as a champion me. Despite all the effort however, your true identity remains isolated. You go home with your badge of rightness, your champion ego, while the experience of love and connection are lost.

It is counter-intuitive really… the less we defend our wellbeing, the more well we feel. When we stop trying to protect me (at last) me feels safe and without the need for protection. We are conditioned to believe that strength means coming out on top and winning the fight. But in fact, real strength means having the courage to put our swords and shields down, and to risk being open and un-defended. When we truly listen to another, without our self-story in the way, we not only offer the greatest gift one can offer to another human being, but we get to jettison the shackles of this fragile identity and realize our true being… that under all the defending, who we are is love itself, which is indestructible, and so fierce as to need no defense at all.

The post How to Heal Defensiveness in Close Relationships appeared first on Nancy Colier.