Ghosting and silent treatment; miscommunication and the avoidance of deep intimacy

Ghosting and ‘the silent treatment’ are often framed as problems of miscommunication, or, poor communication skills. We often tell ourselves that the person simply didn’t know what to say, or how to say it, or that life got in the way. But at there core, ghosting and silent treatment are not just about a lack of words. They are about a deep avoidance of intimacy. This occurs in both intimate and platonic relationships.

For many, the ability to engage in honest, clear communication is not just a matter of willpower; it is a reflection of their nervous system’s capacity to hold emotional intensity. When someone disappears—leaves a conversation dangling, ignores a message, or cuts off connection without explanation—it’s rarely about us. It’s about their own inner world and the deep-seated discomfort they have with relational transparency. It is about not having the spaciousness inside of them, to express exactly how they are feeling.

The more we understand this, the more we can make empowered choices about who we invite into our most intimate spaces—and the more clearly we can recognise when someone’s silence is not just avoidance, but a form of emotional withdrawal known as the silent treatment. Like ghosting, the silent treatment is not a neutral act. It can activate deep wounding and confusion in the person on the receiving end, while giving the illusion of control to the one withdrawing. The truth is, the person is not doing this to get control of the situation, they are doing it to try and get some regulation back into their nervous system. They are overwhelmed by the emotions they are feeling and terrified of deep relational intimacy because they did not have the experiencing growing up where they could talk about their feelings openly and honestly.

They are using silence as a tool to resource themselves.

The Nervous System and Relational Avoidance

Our ability to communicate with honesty and clarity is deeply tied to our nervous system’s regulation. If someone has never developed the capacity to stay present with the discomfort that arises in difficult conversations, their body perceives deep intimacy as a threat. Their system does not register open-hearted honesty as safe.

For people who ghost, or struggle with direct communication, disappearing may feel like the only way to avoid overwhelm. It is not a conscious, malicious act—it is a survival response. Their nervous system is simply not equipped to navigate the vulnerability required for clear, honest communication.

It can hard to be the receiver of this. Silent treatment in a relationship can be very hard to receive, and many people who are on the end of it often feel very lonely in their relationship. They feel very misattuned to and very misunderstood because they are not receiving the mirroring or reflection of their experience back from the other person.

Image - Stockcake

Deep Intimacy Requires Capacity

Clear, open communication is not just a skill—it is an embodied experience. It requires us to feel the full range of emotions that arise when we are seen, when we express our truth, and when we hold space for another person’s truth in return. It means being with the discomfort of hurting someone’s feelings, of disappointing someone, of witnessing another’s emotional response without shutting down or fleeing.

But not everyone has built the capacity to stay present in these moments. Many have never been taught how to regulate their nervous system in the face of emotional intensity. They may have grown up in environments where difficult conversations led to conflict, abandonment, or emotional withdrawal. In these cases, avoidance becomes the learned response. Or maybe they grew up with parents who struggled to acknowledge their own emotions and learned that to express them was messy and unruly, so they would never have been able to be with their kids emotional expression. So the kids learn, we are safe and will receive love if we are very good children who do what we are told and do not complain. Over time, big emotions start to feel unsafe, so we push them away.

Some of us become masters of this and use our enormous willpower to push them down. Others soothe with food, alcohol and maybe drugs just to stay regulated. At some point, typically big life transitions, our body starts to push what has been repressed and ignored back up. This often shows up as conflict in relationships, physical health issues or the person feeling very lost and discombobulated and not knowing what is going on within themselves.

Reframing Ghosting, Silent Treatment and Miscommunication

When we experience ghosting, silent treatment or confusing miscommunication, it’s easy to take it personally. We might feel rejected, unworthy, or left in a state of anxious uncertainty. But understanding ghosting as a nervous system response can shift the way we hold these experiences. It allows us to see that this behaviour is not about us, but about another person’s limitations in holding intimacy.

This does not mean we excuse the behaviour. We can hold compassion for someone’s struggles while also recognising that a healthy, reciprocal relationship requires both people to be capable of presence, honesty, and emotional responsibility.

These behaviours are often rooted in avoidant attachment. When closeness feels threatening, the nervous system chooses distance over connection. Avoidant attachment creates a belief system (often unconscious) that says “If I get too close, I will lose myself’ or, ‘If I express my truth, it won’t be safe’ or maybe ‘If you need too much, I will disappoint you'“.

Moving Toward Conscious Communication

If we want to cultivate relationships rooted in trust and depth, we need to surround ourselves with people who have the capacity to hold both their own emotions and ours. We also need to deepen our own ability to stay present in the face of discomfort.

This means:

• Strengthening our own nervous system regulation so that we can engage in honest conversations without collapse or reactivity.

• Choosing relationships where both people are committed to staying in connection, even when it’s hard.

• Recognising when someone’s avoidance is a sign that they simply do not have the capacity for the depth we seek.

• Honouring our own worth, by not chasing people who are not available for honest, clear communication.

Ultimately, ghosting and silent treatment are not about miscommunication or poor communication —they are about an inability to stay in connection when things get emotionally complex. That inability is rooted in the nervous system’s struggle to feel emotions and feelings that allow us to hold and be present to deep intimacy that we can experience with another person when we have the capacity to be with their feelings. To listen to them, to see them and be able to stay with what they are feeling.

The more we understand this, the more we can make empowered choices about who we invite into our most intimate spaces.

If you would like to expand your capacity for deep intimacy in your relationships come talk to me about relationship coaching.

Constant Striving, the hidden fawn behind 'not enough'

So many of my clients arrive with heavy hearts masked by impressive resumes. They're driven, capable, endlessly striving. And quietly, they carry a question they rarely say aloud: ‘Why do I still feel like I’m not enough?

Often what brings them to me is they desperately want something in their life and the way they currently orient in the world is not helping them get there. So whether it is a healthy conscious relationship where they can be their true selves, or wanting to overcome burnout, or to find more meaning or purpose in their life; what sits underneath all of this is a body in desperate need of rest and a new way of showing up in the world. They are so used to pushing their way through life and they have will power in spades, that fuels that constant striving toward their goals. They are so wired for productivity and to keep on going, that it does not feel safe in their nervous system to slow down.

Striving can be a survival strategy. It looks like lots of ambition but underneath it is actually an adaptation, as the nervous system has wired itself to fawn, seeking safety through performance, achievement, pleasing and perfecting. So it is just not about saying yes to others, it is about proving your worth to stay connected to them.

Where does this strategy arise from?

It often comes from having caregivers who were conditional in giving us their attuned presence, where love or safety and connection were conditional. Often we received the love we needed when we did something brilliant, or we were easy to deal with, ‘good kids’. This is not a flaw we have but actually a rather brilliant adaptive response by the body to keep us safe. The belief system that is created is “If I can just be good enough, useful enough, impressive enough—maybe then I’ll be safe, loved, or chosen”.

It’s survival through self-erasure. And it’s so deeply ingrained in many of us that it can feel like “who we are,” when it’s actually a brilliant adaptation.

How does culture reinforce the need to strive?

This isn’t just personal it can also be cultural. I also believe that productivity culture has been a major influence on this response in many adults. It’s not just personal history that shapes the fawn-strive pattern—it’s cultural, systemic, and reinforced daily in many workplaces. Productivity becomes a proxy for worth. And in that system, rest feels risky.

Productivity culture has institutionalised the fawn response. It rewards over-functioning and punishes rest. In many workplaces, people have internalised the belief: “My value is in what I produce.” “If I slow down, I’ll fall behind, or be seen as lazy, dispensable, or weak.”

So even outside of trauma histories, entire cultural systems are designed to keep nervous systems in a low-grade state of doing to survive. Especially in organisations where performance is tied to identity, job security, or belonging.

How does this striving response show up in adults?

Striving isn’t just a fawning response that is about people-pleasing in obvious ways—it can look like:

• Overachieving to be seen as valuable or loveable,

• Taking on too much to avoid being abandoned or criticised,

• Hustling for worth, because rest feels dangerous or "lazy",

• Always being the one who fixes, leads, or holds it all together,

• Adapting your identity to meet what others need or expect,

• Over functioning in relationships.

In essence, striving is a fawning nervous system response. It says: If I can just be good enough, useful enough, impressive enough—maybe then I’ll be safe, loved, or chosen.

Cant Stop, won’t stop

We joke about ‘can’t stop, won’t stop,’ but for many, it’s not a quirky motto—it’s a trauma response. It’s the body never having felt safe enough to slow down and rest. We wear it as a a badge of honour, or even an odd personality trait—but underneath it, for so many, it’s the body saying:
“If I stop, it might all fall apart.” “If I rest, who will I be?” “If I slow down, will the pain catch up with me?”

It’s not hustle culture—it’s hypervigilance dressed in productivity. It’s a nervous system that has never known true safety, only safety-through-doing. This is so deeply woven into high-functioning, heart-centred people who’ve built their worth through care-taking, fixing, over-responsibility, and striving to be irreplaceable.

The laugh we attach to “can’t stop, won’t stop” is often a nervous system trying to normalise its own exhaustion, because admitting we’re tired or scared feels too vulnerable.

Striving is often the voice of a nervous system that never felt safe to simply be.

What are the costs of constant striving?

The costs are high for many people. They include: Transactional relationships that are based on performance not presence and this leaves many people feeling lonely and disconnected from their peers at work, feeling like they are misunderstood or that they don’t fit into the organisation they work for. This sense of belonging is not there. It is also the body never getting to rest, and after many years, we see that manifest in burnout, health issues, anxiety and disconnection from the self.

What are we really longing for?

Contentment and belonging are the deep yearning we are searching for when we are striving, So often, we think we’re chasing success, or mastery, or healing—but underneath it all, we’re chasing that feeling:
That feeling can be: The deep exhale of contentment; the relief of being with people who see us, know us, and don’t need us to be any different, the safety of not having to perform, strive, or explain ourselves, the belonging that whispers: “You are enough, just as you are, and you always have been.”

It’s the nervous system’s longing to come out of hypervigilance and into co-regulation. To be met, not managed. Held, not judged. Loved, not evaluated.

And it’s not a small thing. That kind of contentment rewires us. It gives us a new blueprint for what’s possible in connection—with ourselves and with others. It helps us to feel safe enough to slow down

Where do we start with healing?

Striving may have kept us safe, but it’s not the same as being truly seen. Slowly, we begin to rebuild safety in being, not just in doing. We need to titrate our experience of slowing down because it will feel unsafe for the nervous system to just stop. So our path is to move from fawning to feel comfortable just being. This is somatic work working deeply with the autonomic nervous system because we are dealing with unconscious trauma imprints.

Imagine your body as a riverbed that has been carved deeply by years of rushing water—this water is your striving. It’s fast, focused, and relentless, always moving toward the next bend. The river believes if it can just keep flowing fast enough, it will reach some final place where it can finally rest.

But the riverbed is tired. It longs for a gentle stream. For stillness. For the moss to grow again on its rocks. It longs for a pause so life can return to its banks.

Some things you could try on your own:

The micro pause

This is a micro-practice to do anytime you feel the drive to prove, do, or fix surging up. You can try it right now if you like.

1. Settle – Let your body arrive where it is. Feel the weight of gravity. Feel the support of the earth or chair beneath you.

2. Place a hand on your heart or belly – Choose what feels most tender or accessible.

3. Say softly, either out loud or silently:
   “Right now, in this moment, I am enough.”
   (Even if part of you doesn’t believe it—just let it land and see what happens.)

4. Notice what shifts – Is there any softening, resistance, warmth, tears, numbness? All responses are welcome.

5. Stay with the sensation for 30 seconds or so. No need to fix or change it. Just witness your being—not your doing.

When your body is giving you signs to slow down, know that you are not broken. Trust the innate wisdom and intelligence of your body and what it is trying to say to you. You have adapted brilliantly but now your body is ready for something new. If you would like to explore your pathway to slowing down, to being more present, to stop being everything to everyone, to stop hustling, come talk to me about somatic experiencing or coaching.

The midlife reckoning and initiation

For women, the midlife journey is a time of reckoning and it is our menopausal journey that is often the catalyst for this for many women. It is not to say that midlife is not a time of reckoning for males but I think menopause really puts the jet thrusters on it for women in a way that men don’t experience. Sorry to talk in the binary, whatever you identify as on the gender spectrum, I think if you have ovaries and will go through menopause it puts the jet thrusters on it. Notwithstanding, I have had many male clients over the years go through their midlife reckoning in their own way.

I often talk about this process as being the Autumn season of our lives. A time where we review what works for us, work out what we need to let go of in our life and work through the process of doing that so that you can birth new parts of yourself. The rebirth is your initiation into your wise woman power that is your authentic self. This stage is called Maga which is the stage before Crone. We are the first generation of women going through this because we are living longer than the other women in our female lineage.

When we move through this process of letting go, we are going through a process of figuratively dying. All the ideas you had about yourself, who you are, who you thought you were becoming, where you thought your life would take you. So of course there will be grief that comes with that. You will find that what used to motivate you no longer does. You will start to pull back into yourself in a way, rather than giving your energy away.

This is because you are leaving the mother phase of your life. So whether you have been the mother of children or the mother of a business, or the creator and mother of something else in your life, all that energy you put into mothering is not going to be there anymore. This is what happens when our estrogen starts to decline. When I noticed it within myself I noticed I was really tired and I just couldn’t over-function in all the ways I used to and I was not really interested in lots of things I really used to get passionate about.

I have found this to be a hard habit to break but a necessary one. I noticed one day about two years ago, how liberated I felt and not being full of estrogen and what it used to drive within me. The overarching need to connect and make sure everyone is ok. One day I was I sitting at my desk and I felt down to my bones this freedom at not caring so much anymore. Not is a sociopathic way, but in a light and carefree way, I didn’t care what other people thought of me at all. I didn’t care if I put in a boundary and others didn’t like it, I needed to put me own needs first for my own wellbeing.

The reckoning and initiation hits us all in different ways. For some of us it is our physical health, some of this may be perimenopause symptoms but it can also be in poor health. This was me. Cancer came a knocking in a small way about 8 years ago, I got better and went on with my workaholic ways and then five years ago it was back in a big way and I had no choice but to stop. It was bad, stage 3 colon cancer, a big surgery that really knocked me around and lots of chemotherapy that went on for months. I barely functioned during that time and I could not work. “I am listening” I finally said and learned to feel safe to do nothing and sit with my own misery and distressing emotions. I didn’t do it on my own. I created a circle of support around me with different health practitioners and friends. This is often what we need in midlife, to be midwifed through the reckoning process and we can do this by creating a circle of support for ourselves to get us through. Whether it is a psychologist , a coach, your chiropractor, a nutritionist, friends you meet to talk with this about, you can create this circle of support to midwife you through this change.

My healing that I needed to do was nervous system related and deep inner child work to stop the over functioning. It was somatic work that supported me through this so I could find in my body where that small child part of me that had to solve all the problems and find all the answers lived. My excess of will power has served me well in my lifetime, it has got me through some really tough times and kept me going in jobs, relationships and challenging circumstances far longer than I needed to be. It stopped me from getting stuck and left behind often. But I could not will my way through my midlife transition I had to learn to face my shadow head on and be on the proverbial meat hook that Inanna went through in her heroines journey and have faith that I would come off it when it was time.

I think that we often think that menopause will bring us some hot flashes and night sweats and maybe other symptoms but it is so much more than that. You are faced with your own emotional reactivity, your stress levels bouncing around and it is like an out of control roller coaster. What you do not face in this transition will hang around in your life until you do face it. It is a humbling experience.

It can also be very humbling when you have already done a lot of work on yourself. I have been in a constant learning process full of self reflection for the last 20 years. I thought surely I had explored most of my inner territory. No there is always more to be explored. What I can tell you is that for me is that all the tools and knowledge I had, the ones that I work with my clients on, I used them every day and they got me through the really tough times.

What this journey takes us to is our authentic self. It strips away all the strategies our ego created when we are young to stay safe, you don’t need them and they won’t work for you going forward. To step into your wise woman power you need to address all the aspects of yourself that you have repressed. The emotional reactivity you might be experiencing? That is your body telling you to pay attention and connect with what is coming up. It is our menopausal muse showing herself. I love the saying ‘when the muse arrives let them in or they will burn the house down’. If we ignore what is coming up, if we persist in ignoring it, life gets harder.

Who is the muse?

“Your muse is the part of your that you have kept hidden away to belong or fit in. The Muse is the original essence of who we are. They reveals fears, taboos and expectations that need to be explored as this powerful transition unfolds. All those emotions repressed, feelings we have smoothed over, they want them released. As estrogen declines, a veil is lifted from our eyes. All the things we kept silent about we can longer ignore. We must speak up”.

Midlife and Menopause ebook, Kellie Stirling

Everyone goes through this journey in their own unique way. We often parse out challenging life experiences at this stage as something else, something tough that is unrelated and just bad luck. it is all part of the journey. it may not be your health that suffers. You may experience a relationship falling apart, or having to stop everything to take care of an ailing parent, maybe it is a teenager going off the rails or suffering and you need to stop everything to focus on them. Maybe you have a big career change and you know that you need something different and you don’t know where to start. Something will initiate you into this journey. It will mean you cannot go on the way you have been and you have to actually stop and learn to do life differently.

There is something for all of us in this transformation and it offers us an extraordinary opportunity to do it consciously. When you choose to pay attention to your experience and consciously focus on it, you are not only doing your own healing work, you are healing ancestral trauma, the trauma that has been carried down through family lines.

This is the time to learn to choose what you want in life. To move away from your reactive patterns, to learn to sit back, metaphorically and physically and observe. To be able to sit in your chair, in your back body, in a neutral position, back into the chair, feet on the ground, feeling the stability in your body and not lean forward and react. To learn to observe and watch as a wise elder would and then choose which course to take. You don’t have the high energy lots of of estrogen brings anymore, so taking care of your energy is so important. You don’t have to go in and react and clean up every mess. The lesson here is learning to put your needs first which means sitting back and watching. The thing is when we sit back and watch, we often have a clearer view of what is actually going on and we make better choices every time.

Once you move through this, you are naturally drawn to pursue more meaning and purpose in your life in everything that you do. Whether it is your work, your hobbies, the relationships in your life. This is because our purpose is to be our most authentic selves, lead from the our soul, and every aspect of our life wants to align with that. Because after going through the reckoning and initiation we can be nothing else but ourselves.

Slow down to speed up

I write a lot about slowing down. It has been one of the big learnings for me in my life but overall, if I think of all the people I’ve coached over the years I think on of the biggest issues most of us face is the disconnection from our bodies. This is pretty serious, it is causing lots of health issues, combined with the crazy pace that most people are expected to work at now, it is causing lots of dysregulated nervous systems. This causes some pretty poor decision making and poor behaviour to emerge.

When we slow down we are able to be more present with our life, with what is happening right now. That is where life is happening.

I think one of the most important skills we can learn is to recognise our stress responses and what our habitual patterns are when it comes to reacting to stress. Fight, flight, freeze or fawn? What do you do? Do you get angry, do you want to move, can you not stop talking, do you go into people pleasing mode, do you words escape you and your feel overcome with brain fog? These are all typical signs of a stress response. I generally want to argue or walk away. Sometimes I please, although this is a very atypical for me and the times I have done I’ve been able to observe myself in the moment and thought why are you acting like this?

When we are in overdrive we are making decisions and choices that often are not well thought through, may come from a child part of us, or we spray our emotional response all over people and that takes time to clean up. Or some of us just collapse and withdraw and this is not a great place to be stuck in your nervous system.

When you can start to be aware of your stress response in action this is when you can start to take put practices in place that help you regulate yourself back to a place in your autonomic nervous system that is a bit more grounded and calmer. Practices that help you soothe yourself in the moment. One of the best ways to do this is by learning how to listen to your body and identify the sensations that you are feeling right in the moment of the trigger.

When we slow down and check in with our bodies, take the time to ourselves each day for time out, we are actually able to access so much more information than we would guess. Do you know our body takes in 90% more data than our brains. In truth our body and brain are one but our body is reading our environment all the time. 90% is quite unbelievable isn’t it? When we don’t check in with ourselves we miss all of this.

This becomes super important when we are going through big life transitions because they are generally times of great change so we can easily get overwhelmed. Slowing down has a tremendously positive impact on our quality of life because we start to be aware of what is going on around us all the time. All those parts of life happening that we were missing, we start to notice. We start to build a bit more capacity to regulate ourselves in our nervous system when we practice slowing down techniques like using our breath, or body check ins and that brings us into presence. It is a good place to be.

What I notice in people I coach who are in midlife is that when they start to slow down, their health and wellbeing improves, their perimenopause physical symptoms often dissipate and this gives them more time and confidence to explore the existential questions that they find themselves facing. It gives you more time to reflect on how you can set yourself up to live well in your second half of life. It gives you more time to think and feel into what feels meaningful and purposeful to you.

This is why we can speed up when we slow down, we have more clarity, we are more conscious and deliberate and can take in more perspective.

What would happen if you gave yourself permission to have thirty minutes each day of slow time?

The developmental challenges for our rites of passage

As we go through life there are different rites of passage we go through. In days gone by, we used to celebrate these transitions and create community support around our friends and loved ones who go through these passageways. This is not something we’ve paid a lot of attention to culturally from many years and I can’t help but wonder how that impacts on the shape of how we grow?

For each stage has a developmental challenge that we must address. If we do not, it hangs around at the next stage of life. For some people it retards their growth, particularly into adulthood or into their second adulthood. This is one of the biggest challenges for most people going through these transitions and it is why many people can get stuck. Particularly when the haven't explored themselves in their teenage years or their early adult years.

The rites of passage we go through are our teenage years, our early adulthood where many of us become parents and put our creative energies into the world, our midlife and our elderhood. Another way some people write about these passages are Rite to Birthright, Rite to Adulthood, Rite to Marriage, Rite to Eldership and Rite to Ancestorship. The latter being the rite of passage that is death.

When we go through a passage, which can take a number of years, we go through a separation phase, then a liminal phase, then an integration or incorporation phase. For most of the people I work with in coaching, the liminal phase is often the hardest because our foundations are shaky due to our changing identity. It is in the presence of community that we are able to transition with greater ease through these phases as it offers support and our space being held by others.

For females, we sometimes refer to these stages as Maiden, Mother, Maga or Queen and Crone. The third stage, the Maga/Queen is relatively newer, really only having been talked about a lot in the last 15 years. It has come about because women are living longer and we can clearly see there is a stage that they go through in Midlife where they are really expressing their gifts to the world in a big way and being their most authentic self.

The developmental challenge for each rite is:

Maiden/Teenager - to explore the world and ourselves whilst being held in the container of the community.

Mother - to express our spirit in the world through our creativity to the world. Whether that be in the form of creating a family, creating our vocational gifts through our work and to receive recognition for that. To say yes to life with all of our energy and vitality behind us.

Maga/Queen - To discern your truth within you and to be radically honest with yourself, to stay present and to learn to be kind to ourselves.

Crone - to let go, rest, receive and trust.

When we don’t express these challenges or explore them they show up in the next phase. So the young woman who perhaps lives in a family where there is high control and she is not able to explore her sexuality in her teenage years, will do that in her twenties, in her next phase. For women in mother phase, many women are focused on looking after young children and don’t get to explore their life’s work at this phase. This can also happen to all of us. For many people in the late teenage years they explore areas of study that have been pushed onto them by their parents; it is not really what they are passionate about. So it is not surprising for many women and men, once they hit midlife to explore alternate career choices and hobbies that might be aligned to what they loved to do in their teens. This is very common now days. It requires some discernment on our part, as we squish a lot of stuff into our life at midlife and we can easily become tired and burned out.

At midlife, where radical honesty with ourselves is the challenge, it is not surprising that many people are faced with working through old trauma, slowing down because their body tells them through physical health issues or pain and learning to create a more grounded relationship with their emotions and how they express them. Come back to the truth of who you are is what our psyche whispers to us.

Finally in our crone years, as we wind down and really enjoy life it is hard for many of us to trust and receive when we have been in a constant spin of productivity for years. These are great years when we can offer mentorship to others and enjoy the flow of life.

So if your teenager is driving you crazy think back to your years and know that they are here to explore themselves in this stage in every way. Let them go, to a point. Our role is to keep them safe as parents but that doesn’t mean locking them up. When it comes to our midlife selves, it’s OK to reconnect to passions you had as a kid, explore it, it is normal. What is important is to acknowledge what is going on and speak about it openly.

The verbs that support our relationships

When it comes to the relationships in our lives, there are some very important verbs that are actually skills we need to learn to thrive in our relationships. It can be challenging to learn how to do these skills because we don’t have many good role models of healthy relationships in our lives. Well some of us do, but many of us haven’t had good role modelling. This is because many of our parents, grandparents and great grandparents are of the generations of people who have been in survival mode for a long time. In the past two centuries we have had the industrial revolution, a couple of world wars, mass migration of displaced people all over the world. Just to name a few traumatising incidents. So learning how to thrive in their relationships was not top of their priorities; they were just trying to stay alive.

I feel like we are at a very good point in time where we can start to thrive in society. There is a lot of damage to marginalised groups that has caused a lot of harm, that is going to take a long time to repair. I feel like we are at the stage where we can really start to focus on learning to have better relationships with ourselves and with others.

So what are these verbs? Well I am just going to go through and explain each one. I want to say to you though that each verb, that is a skill, is really essential to your relationship with yourself and is a key foundation of healthy adult relationships with other humans. With everything around you really.

So here we go…

To want. What do you really want? I think this is one of the most important verbs. When you get clear on your desires, boundaries become easier, purpose and the big questions in life become clearer. Here is the kicker. Culturally we have been brainwashed to believe that to want anything is a terrible thing. If you put your own needs before others you are not a good person. I think that so many women in particular do not know what they want and it is affecting their relationships, their sexuality and their erotic life. Desire is sacred. It is a good place to start when it comes to your relationship skills and getting your needs met. You have to practice this though. Start by writing a list, what do you want? Do it every day for a week and see what comes out.

To Ask. Once you know what you want you can ask for it. Sounds easy enough. So many people struggle to know how to ask for what they need. Your partner is not a mind reader they will not know unless you tell them.

To Receive. This is a hard one. I have had to practice this a lot because I am a very independent person. Being able to receive is a key to abundance. I am talking about material and non-material things. Learning how to receive help from others. In your intimate relationship if you cannot receive, surrender is really difficult. Surrender is important when it comes to orgasm. If you cannot and relax and surrender, if the nervous system does not feel safe to surrender and receive, orgasm can be challenging.

To Take. Don’t be afraid to reach out for what you want. Many of us have been culturally conditioned that to take is selfish, that we are not a good person. Learning to take what you want when it comes before you is definitely a skill. Many of us have developed protective strategies to protect us from doing this. We dim our inner radiance so that we are not offered opportunities, we reject new friendships or intimate relationships so we don’t get hurt. It is OK you can reach out and take what you want.

To Share. Sharing parts of ourselves, being vulnerable can be really scary. I understand why because maybe when we were younger we did this and our confidence wasn’t kept. Maybe we have grown up in environments or worked in places where it has not been safe to share our innermost thoughts, to be really open to how we are feeling. Try with a friend or partner. Then think about the actual experiences you have shared wth others. Whether it has been a friend, a lover, your kids. Something that really lit you up inside, write down how you felt. Sharing life with others and co-creating experiences with others is one of the foundations of being a human. We are not meant to do it alone. Our nervous systems are wired for connection. That ventral vagral part of our nervous system which susses people out when we meet them; that’s the part that is curious and wants to connect to others.

To Refuse. This is challenging when you want to please people all the time, or if your nervous system response is fawning. To refuse is also really dependant on understanding desire. When you know what you really want and what you don’t want, refusal becomes easier. Refusal is also important when it comes to boundaries and enforcing them.

To Play. Why do we stop playing? Play is such a huge part of our learning process, of bonding with other humans. We are so good at it as children, it is how we learn as children. As teenagers we are great at playing but sometimes we stop because we don’t want to lose face. Foreplay is play. It is a really important part of arousal, of your intimate life. Playfulness is a beautiful part of being human. It allows us to try make mistakes, try again, refine, try again. To live is to play. To learn is to play. To have a thriving erotic life with another is to play. To have friendships we like to play. The spirit of play brings us into presence, when we play we are being human.

To Imagine. Maybe this should have been before play? Our imagination drives our creativity. Do you know the sacral area in your body is where you creative energy and your sexual energy come from. Yep same place. Our imagination is fuel for play. Our imagination is fuel for what is possible in life. When you share the imaginations of your inner world with your partner, anything is possible. But that can be a little scary some times can’t it? Try it. Practice sharing one thing a day. Start with something small and easy the each day, just push the boundary a little. Titration - drip by drip, baby steps. We don’t want to freak out your nervous system. Act out your imagination when it comes to your creativity. Draw, make, bake do something with those creative energies coming from your inner world.

I am sure there are far more verbs that are helpful for us in our relationships but I feel like these are a good start. It can be hard to start when you haven’t been doing these and for those of you with trauma it might be harder to partake in some of these skills. Baby steps, start with the one that feels the most comfortable and see how you go.

If you want some support and to explore these skills, you can work through these in coaching. One on One coaching offers deep exploration into many different parts of us that might be getting in the way or protecting us from branching out into these new skill areas. If you would like to explore coaching with me, head on over and book a clarity call with me to explore further.

As always pass this onto a friend if you feel it might be helpful to them.

Growing all the parts of us

In every system on earth, one pattern you see is the pattern of contraction an expansion. It is the natural ebb and flow of any system. When they are growing in complexity they expand out, and then they contract back in, before they find their new rhythm.

What does that look like in a human? Well I am glad that you asked. Ever shared a really vulnerable comment in a group or online and then wanted to go and hide in a cupboard in the dark? Yes that is when you have really pushed on your edges. Whilst it may feel incredibly uncomfortable you should celebrate yourself because you have just stretched yourself a little bit. Doing it in little titrated bursts is a good thing for your nervous system too. Then the expansion doesn’t feel so overwhelming.

We often see this other systems too. Our natural environment has swings and natural patterns and rhythms to it. Fire, flood, drought, cyclones they are all natural occurrences that some might say are over corrections. However when I look at indigenous Australians and the way the work the land, the use of fire in a controlled way is a natural part of the healthy growth of the natural environment.

One thing that I find super disturbing is the increase in mental health issues in society. It seems a big swing out don’t you think? At the moment, in the pandemic context it is understandable because it is hard to be isolated from our friends and family. Our nervous systems co-regulate each other. The ventral vagal part of our nervous system which is predominantly in our face and upper chest and shoulders and neck is all about connection. Being curious. When we are in our ventral vagal state we are curious and connected. Wearing masks at the moment is necessary, but that can be challenging because when we look at people, at their faces, it’s the ventral vagal part of our nervous system that is sussing that person out. Feeling into their system and asking, can I trust them, are they safe? Combine that with not being able to be around each other too much, so missing out on that co-regulation, it makes sense that people are suffering. In particular, women like to be around each other and tell stories, that is soothing to us. I think men like it too, the like to tell yarns and have a laugh with each other.

Current context aside, the mental health issues have been around for a while. I think one of the reasons is we have been encouraged for a really long time to disconnect from our bodies as a source of wisdom and intuition in favour of rational and logical thought. The part of our brain that controls the logic and rational stuff is the neo cortex. From an evolutionary perspective this is a newer part. We have two other parts that we are really not hanging out with so much, the primal part of our brain and the limbic part. The latter runs our nervous system and the limbic, emotions, feelings, orientation toward pleasure and pain, reward. There is so much benefit from inhabiting those other two parts. When we ignore them we are cutting ourselves off from the message from our emotions and the intelligence of the nervous system.

To access these parts of your self, your inner world, you need to practice focusing in on them, feeling sensations in your body and describing them. There is so much to be gained from doing this. This is our unconscious, it is very clever. Steph Biddulph in his new book Fully Human describes it so well. “When you listen to your insides, they inform you how to change, where the answer might lie. And when you have really ‘got the message, even just wordlessly, making space for it, it very often shifts. You feel a change in your body that is positive, releasing, enlivening, and you know that something has moved and you are different now”.

“If you don’t practice going inside yourself, pretty soon you forget you even have an inside. And this is a problem”

Steph Biddulph, “Fully Human”

I use tools in my coaching to bring people into these parts of their brain and this is what I find; when people focus on their inner world, their unconscious, they realise that they have a wealth of information in there that can help them find the answers they are seeking. This improves their sense of self-confidence and efficacy. They feel a sense. of coming home to themselves. They learn to love their emotions and to be with them and listen to their messages, they stop pushing them away. They stop getting stuck in stories about what happened to them in their lives to explain the way they are. They are able to move on from them and are able to step into their personal power. They learn to trust their bodies as a source of wisdom. They start listening to their body, talking to it and giving it love and attention. They realise that their mind and body are not separated but one. They realise they are multi-dimensional beings with different parts and stop being at war with themselves. They learn to love all the different parts of themselves. When we love and accept ourselves, we start to accept and love others for being just the way they are.

I want everyone to have these skills, so people stop suffering so much. I want people to thrive because given the level of comfort we live in we should be. I want adults to have adult conversations with each other, that are rich, rewarding and vulnerable. I want adults to step into their leadership roles and be able to make tough decisions. I want children to have hope. I want children to be able to be children and have fun and play. I want humans to stop looking outside of themselves for answers, giving their power away to materialism and consumerism and realise they have the answers within. I want the planet to thrive. I want to deal with climate change. My desires are big but I think achievable.

What do you think?