The Seductive Power of Being Yourself

In this episode, I talk about what it means to "be yourself" and why it's the most attractive and healthy direction to go. 


https://beacons.ai/justinavictoria

Transcript

  What's up guys. Welcome to the so hard podcast. I am Justina Victoria, and I am a psychosexual expert for men and couples. Today, we're going to be chatting about the seductive power of being yourself. 

This is probably one of my most favorite,  like top three  concepts. to talk about with my clients to explore within myself. I absolutely love the idea of  being liberated from all of the conditioning. We've been taught that we have to be a certain way, all of the strategies we've created. If we grew up with insecure attachment, all the strategies we've created in order to  maintain an attachment  and All the ways in which we typically abandon parts of ourselves because we think other people  are going to be, dismissive of that or disgusted with that or irritated with that, or they're going to have some negative reaction to it. 

There's so much to unpack around this. But it's such a liberating  thing to, to ponder on, to work on, to allow in to your life. So  let's talk about this from a dating perspective, and then we'll talk about it from a relationship perspective.  The seductive power of being yourself,  right? So  let's say you're dating, 

being yourself,  and we're going to talk about what it means to be yourself because everyone's always Oh, just be you. It's what the fuck does that even mean?  Being yourself means  that you are present  with  the feelings, needs, and boundaries.  That are coming up moment to moment internally inside of you,  and you're being honest with yourself and others  about those feelings, needs, and boundaries. 

That's what it means to be yourself, right? Being yourself isn't this Weird intangible idea of yeah, just keep showing all the parts of yourself that people love. I don't like, when people used to write in like yearbooks, keep being you, it's I remember it. Like people would write that in my yearbook and I would just be like, what does that mean? 

That sounds like the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life. Keep being you. What else am I going to be? Am I going to morph into a dog or something? What? I don't understand what this means. It always felt like so fake, it's like somebody who doesn't know what they want to say. 

Keep being you.  So being you, right? Being yourself is  really  connecting with  the feelings and sensations inside of your body that are giving you real time information. And instead of moving away from that, which is what we typically do, we move towards it.  We move towards it.  So  from a dating perspective,  being yourself provides to really important, like vitally important aspects. 

And this will literally make or break your dating life and your relationships. Okay. So number one,  it allows you to become a lighthouse.  Okay. So this is my visualization of this seductive power of being yourself. It's you're on the shore somewhere in the dark  and there are people out in the ocean, lots of little boats floating by.

And they can't see anything, right?  And their only ability to navigate towards what they want or what they need  is seeing that light in the dark.  And so being yourself being honest about what you feel, what you need and what your boundaries are  allows you to illuminate  yourself in a way that somebody who's looking for that.

can find.  So there's this, I think, this strange idea that we're all supposed to be a certain way in order to be loved.  But the fact of the matter is, it's everybody's different. Everybody loves something different. Everybody's attracted to something different. Yes, we have our generalized things that are attractive and whatever and models and what we've been conditioned.

over and over to believe is the thing we're attracted to.  But we have so many more things outside of that, that, attraction is really just familiarity. That's all it is. People think that there's this sort of naturally existing beauty and attraction in the world. And the reality is attraction is just what's familiar to you.

So let's say you grew up with, I don't know, Let's say you grew up with let's say very unattractive parents, and by some, by whoever's standards, but maybe by your standards  and that's familiar to you, but your family was incredibly loving, incredibly secure. You're going to grow up to date somebody who looks like them, who feels like them. 

You're not looking for somebody who's supermodel status or whatever. That's not familiar to you,  right? Now we have the capacity to be through neuroplasticity  to change our attraction,  which is really cool, actually. So we can, Make anything we want attractive. And this is why you see these like hilarious things on Instagram where people are dating their fence or their car or other weird inanimate objects.

It's that person just created a really intense, safe association within their nervous system to that thing.  And they practiced it over and over until their bodies started to produce the chemicals of love every time they interacted with it, and they became highly attached to that thing.  So we're doing the same thing just with appearances  and whatever we grew up with is typically what we find familiar is typically what we find attractive.

If we grew up and felt that our family dynamic was extremely unsafe,  even though it was familiar, then we will naturally try to seek out something that is not familiar. And then we will make that familiar. And now that thing will be the attractive thing,  right?  As far as a lighthouse, the lighthouse idea is concerned, right?

We need you to express your needs.  We need you to stop being so rigid around, feelings and needs in order for somebody to find you. So I'm going to give you a super simple example of this. Let's say you're on a  and  you have  Let's say, I don't know, one sentence on your profile that's just Hey, yeah I'm not sure what I'm looking for.

Maybe something casual, maybe something long term. We'll see how it goes. 

That's not a lighthouse.  Like, how is the person that you're looking for able to find you? If you don't even know who that person is, if you don't even know what you want, how  could anybody be a match for you? So this idea of just whatever happens makes no sense. You cannot build a life and relationship off of, I don't know, whatever happens.

That's literally like saying, I'm going to build a house with no blueprint and I don't know, whatever materials are there and whatever it looks like in the end. And it doesn't make any sense.  We have to have a vision.  So  that vision combined with the. The ability to honestly express your feelings, needs, and boundaries, right?

Is what's going to allow the right  women to find you,  the right person to find you. So  when you change your bio, let's say on Tinder or whatever dating app you're on to  here's what I'm looking for and here's who I am,  then people can go,  Oh my gosh, there he is.  This is what I've been looking for, right?

Or they can go, Oh no, that's not for me.  And this brings us to the second piece of this concept, which is in dating is that it's a filter.  We need you to know  what you want and what you need  because that is our natural filter and that filter is you. Vital for our health, for our well being.  A lot of people who grow up with insecure attachment have a seriously faulty filter and most people are dating just based on attraction, right?

Which is a bad thing.  If you grew up with insecure attachment, it's a bad thing because remember, attraction is familiarity. If you are going towards what's familiar, if you're feeling a spark, right? When you see somebody, oh, that's not a good sign. Cause what's going to end up happening is that you're going to reenact  your childhood with that person.

There's a reason the nervous system is lighting up going ding. See that woman over there across the room. Yes. I'm in love with her. You haven't even talked to her yet. And so the nervous system is letting you know, you just don't realize, Hey. This is great. This is familiar.

Let's reenact the childhood all over again. All the pain I experienced as a child. Let's do that all over again.  And you're not going to see it when you first start dating that person, you're going to be like, Oh wow, this person's so great. But once things settle, once those chemicals come down and we start to inhabit more of our authentic self in the relationship.

Oh man, you're going to reenact like crazy triggers are going to be flying. And it's just, emotions are going to be all over the place. And so if you grow up with insecure attachment and primarily with parents who  were not very good at attuning to, we're not very good at meeting your needs respecting your boundaries, validating your feelings.

Then your filter is going to be fucked  and that broken filter is going to allow a lot of people to enter into your life for reasons that are not  healthy. So we should never be dating based on physical attraction.  Yeah, it's a wonderful thing to be really attracted to somebody, but it's also, it also can be a dangerous thing if you had a lot of trauma in your childhood. 

So  working on  this this filter looks like  getting so deeply connected to what you need in order to be healthy. So for example let's put a visual on this so it makes sense.  If you  have, if you grew up, let's say with emotionally unavailable parents, okay, your nervous system is going to be cranked up from, all your life essentially  because the nervous system gets cranked up when our needs are not met. 

So if you have chronically unmet needs from childhood, and in this example, let's say your parents were emotionally unavailable and.  You grow up to have a broken filter,  right? Then you're going to continue to attract in people, women who are emotionally unavailable. And then you're going to start to feel those toxic, intolerable emotions from childhood.

And you're going to go insane, trying to figure out how to get out of that, how to strategize out of that. How do I make this person finally give me the needs that I need to get met, et cetera.  But what we want is to prevent that altogether. And the way that we do that is to go to be really honest with yourself really, what do I need?

And stop moving towards this direction of, Oh, I read on Instagram that I got to play it cool. I can't come off too desperate. I can't come off too needy.  So let's talk about that for a second. Okay. The difference between being needy and being honest.  So different.  So different. When we are quote unquote acting needy or desperate.

We are not being honest.  We're not being honest. What we're doing is pretending  to be something we're not.  And when we do that  internally, what's happening is chaos  because your nervous system is saying to you, Hey, I'm lonely. Hey, I need connection. Hey, I need physical touch. Hey, I need time together.

Hey, I want to be loved.  And then you are having a secondary response that where you're like, no, nobody can know that I don't even want to know that I'm going to stuff that down in. It's going to leak out energetically. It has to that energy has to go somewhere. It's like it's the exact same thing as not eating let's say you haven't eaten in weeks, and you are starving.

It's  But in order to get food, you have to pretend like you're not hungry. If somebody puts a steak down next to you, Oh my God.  You know how hard it's going to be for you to pretend like you don't want to swallow that thing whole.  It's the same thing with our connection needs. And, I probably should have started this episode off by explaining to some of you who maybe have not heard me speak a lot on this topic. 

Connection is a vital, Need emotional availability is a vital need physical touch sex being seen being heard being cared for feeling like we matter feeling that we are significant.  These are vital needs, meaning they are hard wired into your brainstem.  It is an essential integral part of being a human being and you can't get out of it. 

You can't get out of it. And just in the same way, you can't get out of drinking water and eating food on this earth. You can't get out of your connection needs.  So we have to get to a point where we stop denying our own needs, starving ourselves to death, and then pretending like we're not starving.

So neediness comes, it's like an energetic leakage.  Okay. It's like this. I'm trying to pretend like I'm cool, but I'm actually sweating bullets and I'm wiping the beads of sweat away. When, whenever she's not looking at me, people can tell that, we're energetic beings. We know when you're hiding something, when you're not being yourself.

And even if it's just at a, like a cellular, Like a gut level of Oh no, something's off with this person. I can feel it, but they see their words and actions are aligned. I don't know. Something just doesn't sit right because we know when someone is lying.  So the difference between being needy and honest  is that there's no energetic leakage spilling all over the place, like getting mess everywhere. 

When you're honest.  And when you own it, see neediness is where we have something happening inside of us. We have a need inside of us that we are denying and we are pretending to others does not exist for us.  When we're honest,  that means that we accept that we have that need.  There's no flailing around.

There's no energetic leaking all over the place. There's no, Desperation of this person can't know. And if they do, it has, I have to try to get this met in like a manipulative way. I can't really tell them that I need this, but I'm going to ask them for this, or I'm going to try to go and do that.

I'm going to try to run into them here and get the need met.  Honesty is where we go, wow, you know what, I really need  emotional availability. And that's normal.  That's normal. That's number one. That's where we start.  We understand and we change the relationship, the core relationship that we have with our own needs to say,  this need is not anything to be ashamed of, that's like saying I should be ashamed of being hungry or thirsty.

This is literally our, the human body is designed.  And then we move from that  to.  Just communicating that need to people, a  week in, first date, three weeks in, we say, You know what, I'm a person  who really thrives when I have connection. And for me, connection looks describe the lifestyle you want to live with your person. 

What do you think about that? Does that feel aligned for you? Does that feel like it resonates with you? Now I'm being very clinical on the way I'm speaking, right? But you put it in your own words Oh my God. Like from personal experience and from experience working with my clients, this can feel almost impossible  for a lot of people.

What? You want me to tell the truth? What am I, a loser? No fucking way. No fucking way. This person is going to laugh in my face. They're going to reject me. I'm going to be humiliated. I'm going to be emasculated  by doing that. And it's Oh my gosh, no. What actually happens is there's a feeling of liberation, even if you get rejected.

Even if that person goes, you know what? Nah, it's just not me.  I'm not like that emotionally available or I'm just not lovey dovey. I don't think it's going to work for me.  And  we can move on to find somebody that  actually meet your needs will actually make sense for you. And the liberation that comes every single client, including myself doing this exercise, every single client I've ever had, who was just like, okay, I'm sweating bullets, but I'm just going to tell it like it is, Hey, we've gone on a few dates.

Here's where I'm at. I like you want to continue seeing it. Or I, I'm really looking for somebody who is. They want this they're ready. They want a best friend. They want to be really  dovey touchy feely. And  even if the person comes back and says, no, it's not for me, but I wish you luck. 

The result is always the same. The client takes a big, deep breath and they're like,  Oh my God. Like I actually feel free.  Yeah, it didn't work out, but.  Gosh, I don't have to like overthink about it anymore. I don't have to ruminate on it. I don't have to analyze it to fucking death anymore. It's freedom.

It's liberation. It's amazing. So in dating you're being both a lighthouse and a filter.  And I suppose that's what a lighthouse really is, right? People might see that light in the distance and go, Oh, you know what? That's that island over there. That's not where we're going. I'm glad that I am glad that lighthouse is turned on because in the dark now I know I need to take a left here. 

We need that. But at the same time we need Oh, very clear crystal clear. There's the lighthouse there's the island. That's what I've been looking for here I'm going straight for that.  Okay,  so  what's so seductive about this. 

I can attest  that as a woman,  there really is nothing sexier than a man owning  his own honesty, his own vulnerabilities, right? And to understand also what vulnerability means, because there is this equation to vulnerability as weakness or like being compromised in some way.  But in reality, being vulnerable is just being honest  about your needs, about your feelings.

That's it. That's all it is. 

It's being open. It's being truthful.  That's all it is. And so from the female perspective we're relying on you for safety,  for protection, right?  And  if you lie about your feelings and your needs and your boundaries,  On a cellular level, it's going to be very difficult for a woman to 

relax 

because our nervous system is really dependent upon your nervous system. Because you're our protection, right? So if in, in remembering  that, our nervous systems as humans regulate off of each other,  this is one of the reasons why we pick a baby up, babies cannot down regulate the stress response in their nervous system.

Impossible. So we pick a baby up and we place it on the chest, right on top of the ventral vagal nerve,  which is the nerve in our body that produces elevated emotion and feelings of safety and connection to others.  We never outgrow that,  especially as women, we feel very vulnerable and we are vulnerable. 

And and so when we have a man who  really does not fear  Saying what's true for him, no matter what the consequences  is, confident in saying what's true for him, regardless of the consequences. That is an amazing thing for a woman. Most guys think that women don't wanna hear the truth 'cause they're gonna get pissed off, but the reality is that you're afraid of a woman's emotions.

Let her have her emotions. Just be honest.  That's the path that men need to take to say,  I'm going to be honest and truthful about who I am and what I feel and what I need.  And I'm going to let her feel however that makes her feel. I'm not going to change it. I'm not going to manipulate it. I'm not going to try to control it because you try to control it by withholding information. 

What we want instead is to go, Here's what I need. Here's what I feel  placing it on the table. And that's it. Not going so there's something that I need to tell you.  I just, I don't want to upset you.  No, just going, Hey,  here's what I need. Here's what I feel. How does that land with you?  How can we work together?

How can we come to a compromise? And this is talking within the terms of a relationship,  this, for us, when we know that you're going to tell us the truth,  even if it's hard for you.  My God, there's so much respect there. There's so much love. There's so much trust. There's so much safety. 

We need that to feel safe.  Let us have our emotions. Let us get pissed off. Let us make decisions for ourselves. If you're the right person for us for whoever you're dating,  stop trying to keep somebody around because. It makes you feel safe.  Let that person decide what's right for them. That is a gift that you can give somebody.

Okay, so going back to this idea of what's so seductive about it, right? A lighthouse is magnetizing, isn't it? We see it in the distance and we're like, ah, that can provide me with what I'm looking for. I'm going to move towards that. If it  makes sense for that person,  it allows you to become a magnet for the people that makes sense for you, the people who can truly meet your needs. 

And then on the flip side, like I was saying before about, us as women, when we feel safe,  Oh my God, that's when we're most open. That's when we're most loving. That's when we're most sexual.  That's when we're most happy. Those are all the things you're looking for as a man,  that's pretty much all you're looking for out of a woman, right?

Is a woman's happiness and love and warmth raining down on you  and her sexual availability. 

So honesty is really key and there's nothing needy or desperate about it unless you are coming from that energy of, I'm so afraid to say this because I'm going to get rejected. So let's talk about the energy underneath the way we communicate. And we'll use three different scenarios.

Okay. So one, let's say one guy is scared to be rejected.  Another guy is comfortable with not knowing.  And another guy is certain that he will not be rejected.  Okay. So let's just say  fake scenario,  guys asking for something that he wants or needs in the relationship  or with somebody he's dating.  So the first guy Again, his own relationship to his needs is impaired.

And his deep core belief of what was modeled to him as a child is that his needs are an inconvenience to others. They piss people off, they push people away, and they threaten his ability to stay attached to others. Okay,  so the way that he's going to communicate If he does, let's say somebody like me is pushing him to do he's going to communicate in a way that is extremely nervous because his relationship with his needs is, I'm going to get rejected or abandoned.

That's the only reality. If I speak my needs to this person, so he's going to be really nervous. He's going to be acting as though his needs are not a big deal. Hey so I was just wondering can we just chat about something? And if you don't have time, it's no big deal. Okay, cool. So I'm going to tell you here's what I need.

Could we do that? Or would that, that be an issue for you or, and no, no big deal if you can't,  That is so wishy washy and so all over the place and so dishonest, Pete, a lot of guys who are very stuck in being the nice guy, the people pleaser, they think that they're like,  nice. 

They think they're like good,  but it's such a manipulation to communicate in that way.  And the manipulation is you're trying to worm your way out of someone's natural response to you.  And when I use the word manipulation, I don't mean like  malicious. Strategizing,  right? I'm going to word this in a way that's going to prevent me from ever having to feel the intolerable feeling of rejection. 

And people don't know how think about being the receiving end of that, right? Somebody is downplaying their own needs. They seem extremely nervous  about communicating their needs to you.  And you're probably going to pick up this, Thing like this person isn't really like this person that really doesn't is lacking confidence.

This person is like  really  not prioritizing themselves. So they must think that they're just not really worth anything internally. This person is more concerned with me sticking around than making sure that they're healthy, that they're getting what they need in order to thrive. This person is like denying themselves.

Like they clearly have this sort of internal battle going on. That's how it's going to come across. And it's going to also, because people pleasing and stuff is such a lie, it's going to make women feel uncomfortable. They're not going to feel like they can trust you. They can downregulate. They can feel safe to be vulnerable around you. 

The second guy is the guy who is comfortable with the unknown. I don't know what's going to happen. And I'm going to. I'm going to share what I need,  but I don't know how she's going to respond and I'm okay with that. However it unfolds, we'll take it from there.  And so the way he communicates his need is very neutral. 

It would be very much the same energy as telling somebody like, Hey, I'm hungry. Can we get something to eat?  If someone said no, I'm really busy right now. You would be like, oh, okay I'm going to run down the street and grab something. Let me know if you want anything. They wouldn't be like,  Oh my God, I can't believe it.

This person doesn't love me. I don't know what this means. They would just be like okay you're in a different page right now, which is fine. I'm going to go get some eat. This is what I need. It's so neutral. There's no big emotion. There's no big fear underneath it. It's just neutral. 

And then finally, we have a guy who knows for a fact that He's not gonna get rejected.  Okay. And we could play out a co a couple different scenarios with this. Let's say we have a guy who knows, he's got a woman wrapped around his finger, right? And in this scenario, he's essentially telling her what's going to happen,  right? 

So here's what you're gonna do,  not can you do this, et cetera. It's.  This is what you're going to do.  And this is we start to get into kind of a bit of abusive territory when we're talking about this. But there's also  the guys who I think are on the other end of the spectrum with manipulation, right?

It's still a strategy, in my opinion. Let's say that you have all of those things that we talked about before the fear of rejection, abandonment, worthlessness, not being good enough, et cetera. But instead of being Afraid you over inflate your strategies to over inflate your ego  and to pretend like you're cool to pretend like whatever.

I don't give a shit. Oh, whatever. You can reject me. I don't care.  And practicing over the years, just really going out women and communicating in your needs in a way that  almost convinces the woman that it's also what she wants, or that she would be missing out if  she didn't go along with it. So those guys who are very,  Like coaching,  right?

So it might be something like, I don't know. I want to, I want to stay home with you tonight and watch a movie  and like whispering in her ear and touching her very seductively and stuff. And because he knows on some level that he's not going to be rejected.  He's really going for it.

He's really saying this is what I want, but it's also a manipulation  because underneath all of that, even if he thinks he's not going to get rejected,  he's the other side of the coin. from the first guy. So he wants to make sure  that  he's going to do whatever he can in order to pull that person towards him.

So he never has to feel those intolerable feelings. 

And then we have another scenario where let's say you've been with somebody for a long time. They're not going to reject you. You have a secure attachment, right? And you might communicate your needs in a way that's for a fact that your partner is going to say yes to it. And you're and you might just be like, Hey, honey I really need to spend time together tonight.

Can we do a couple of those breathing exercises together? I would just really love that. And the partner's yeah, of course. And it's okay,  so we have these different.  Versions, right? And all of the versions are based on our own internal relationship  to our feelings and our needs.  If there are feelings that are intolerable to you,  there are feelings that you are actually afraid of.

There are feelings that you deny that are, there are feelings that you try to get away from because they feel shameful. If there are feelings that are irritating to you and you're sick of them, right? That's the relationship to those feelings. How can you possibly communicate and be honest about what you feel in a neutral way? 

If that's the relationship that you have with those feelings in same with your needs, if you feel that your needs are shameful, if you feel that your needs are too much, if you feel that your needs are never going to get met anyway, you feel that your needs are an annoyance to you,  then  how could you be an honest person?

How could you be yourself? So to recap  the seductive power of being yourself, right? So being yourself means that you are connected to what you feel, what you need and what your boundaries are, and that you're capable of communicating those things to other humans in a neutral way.  Okay.  And  being able to do that provides several. 

Benefits.  Number one, you become a lighthouse. You become a magnet for the people who are looking for you. Remember, and this is what I say to my clients all the time. Ones who are like, I don't know, am I ever going to meet somebody? And they just have a regular dream. Their dream is just I just want to meet.

The love of my life and have a great life and travel and make good money. We're talking like just the most neutral  run of the mill dream, right? And you have people who are  pretending to be vampires and sucking each other's blood.  They're finding other people who are dressing up like vampires and sucking each other's blood.

They literally do this. And so if you think about back in high school and maybe not for some of my my Irish people listening to this because you all had to wear uniforms and stuff, but here in the US, we had a lot of like self expression going on in high school and And, the goths sat with the goths and the jocks sat with the jocks and the, the hipsters sat with the hipsters and the 420 guys sat with the 420 guys. 

But how did they find each other? They made it so clear,  right? If you were goth, you're wearing all black and you get your lip pierced and you get the eyeliner on, they're making it clear. So other people like them can find them.  And they really moved towards that.  They really said yeah, some people might make fun of me for this. 

But don't give a shit because I think this is cool.  And other people who felt the same way were able to find them.  So that's being that lighthouse. That's being the magnet, like really lean in to what you want and who you are. You're a guy who needs tons of physical touch, who needs words of affirmation, who, loves spending time with his loved ones or his partner or whatever.

lean into it, make it cool. How do we make stuff cool? Really think about it.  Like, how does something become cool? So I don't know, 10 years ago, wearing fanny packs and like silly wolf shirts and stuff like that was ridiculous. It was laughable. If somebody was wearing that, It was like, Oh my God, look at that loser over there.

And then the movie, the hangover came out and Zach Galifianakis was wearing all that, his little fanny pack and his weird sandals. And, oh my gosh, now it's like actually really funny. And then over time it became ironic. All the hipsters are like, okay, cool. I'm so ironic and I'm wearing my weird sandals and I don't even care what you think of me.

Like I'm cool. And then over time it actually became cool. Now we have like little,  we have like  chicks wearing shirts or sweatshirts with like wolves on them and like the full moon and like these silly little sandals, but all of a sudden it's like kind of sexy.  How does that happen?  Somebody just starts leaning into it. 

That's it.  Like cool is not a thing.  Cool is just somebody leaned into something and was like, Yeah, I'm going with this.  I'm going with this. I don't care what anyone thinks.  We gotta get you going with you. We gotta get you taking all the stuff that you've been afraid of  and saying,  I'm going with this. 

I'm going with, I'm a man and I need a lot of attention. I'm a man and I need, I  want to hear my, I want to hear someone tell me that I matter to them. Like a lot. I'm going with it. I'm a guy who,  I don't know I'm, I hide certain parts of myself because they think that the woman I'm dating will reject me lean into it.

Hey, you know what? I  want to tell you something. I told you that I'm not a drinker, but the truth is I have one or two beers a month 

and that's who I am. And  I really hope you can accept that because I really like you a lot. I want this to go somewhere. Just want to be honest with you. Whatever it is. Just say it, lean into it  and make it cool. That's how we make something cool. That's how we become once we're okay with something, then everybody else is going to be okay with it.

Even if they're not a match, they're going to be like, you know what, I appreciate you. It's not for me, but I appreciate you. 

And so  in relationship, 

being yourself  is  telling the truth in a neutral way.  And really relaxing into not knowing how your partner is going to respond to it. To say, I'm going to allow her to have whatever emotion comes up for her, because that is offering her free will.  I don't want someone to choose me because I've manipulated my image of myself, or twisted myself into a certain shape to get that person to stay.

I want to be liberated. I want to just. Say, here's what I feel. Here's what I need. Here's what my boundaries are. And it might piss her off or she might leave or she might laugh or she might whatever. I don't know what she's going to do.  The most important thing for me is being myself, truly being connected to my feelings, needs and boundaries and working tirelessly to communicate, learn to communicate those things to other humans.

We have so much wrapped around that stuff.  And so that's pretty much it. That's what I have on this topic. I hope this was helpful to you. I hope this was liberating for you because. I spent so many years of my life feeling like I needed to be perfect.  I'll actually, I'll end this, I'll end this episode with a little personal story.

 So after my first long term relationship, which was eight years,  I felt really, Quite defeated. I had a good relationship with him and and we were really like best friends. We never fought. Honestly count on one hand, how many fights we had in eight years. We were just, we were pretty good at, getting along and laughing and joking and things like that, but  the big issue in that was. 

it felt like he wasn't there for me in the ways that I needed him to be there for me. I was the breadwinner and things like that. And at the end of that relationship, I just felt really let down. Like, why wouldn't that person just get a job and help me with the bills? Why wouldn't that person just, look out for me in certain ways.

And I felt really like it was a me thing. That person just didn't want to do that for me. And after  we had split up, he had, he ended up going back to school to practically become a doctor  and provide for his new girlfriend and take care of her and stuff like that. She had some health challenges  and that was really like rubbing salt in the wound of wow, I put my heart and soul into this relationship  and this person just couldn't be bothered And what else could I have possibly done to  feel like this person was there for me?

I put everything I could into that.  So after that I started dating  and I met a guy and we dated for probably, I don't know, eight months or so. And I went away to Greece. And while I was away, he was like, Hey, I want to talk about like the possibility of being in a relationship, like a real relationship together. 

And I was like, Oh my God. Okay. Like I was a little bit like one foot in one foot out.  And I worked through that while I was gone. It was like, you know what? Okay. I want to do this. I need to get over my fears. I need to get beyond all this stuff that I experienced the last eight years and really lean into this.

So I get home  and I'm excited to see him and talk about it and yeah, he just won't see me. And I'm like what the hell is going on? And so he finally tells me that he met somebody else. And I essentially told him like, no, you can come say that to my face. You're not going to tell me this via text.

So he comes over and he sits on the couch across from me and  he says to me  that while I was gone,  he.  essentially wrote down all the women he's dated in his life.  And he wrote down like what they brought to the table, essentially.  And he said, he wrote my name down and he wrote, all of my qualities and things down.

And he w he looked at me and he said, you won  hands down.  You're perfect.  But,  and  I don't remember what he said after that, because in my mind, I was just like, all I could think was.  What do I need to be  in order to be loved?  What do I need to be in order to get someone to stick around or to have my back or to be loyal? 

This person is telling me I achieved what I thought I was supposed to be in order to get that, which is perfection.  And he's telling me instead  that he's choosing someone who is  deeply flawed.  So the girl he actually ended up with, I won't go too deep into it for privacy, but she was a mess. She was a mess and very toxic and very disloyal.

And very hurting or hurtful, I should say.  And I just couldn't, I couldn't understand at the time. I couldn't understand,  okay, you're telling me I'm perfect. That's what I thought people wanted. They wanted a men wanted a perfect woman. I'm perfect. You're saying I'm perfect. I win hands down above all else,  but you're going to go with this mess over here. 

I don't understand.  And I really felt so hurt and I felt so worthless. 

But what I didn't understand at the time was  the stuff that we talked about today, right? It was  Nobody wants a perfect person.  Everybody wants an honest person  and I was not honest. I was never honest with that guy ever. I was just always pretending to be perfect.  He didn't know me.  Whereas the girl who was, utter mess. 

He could trust that  actually, which sounds crazy, but he could trust that.  And she was just letting it all hang out.  And me on the other hand, I was constantly trying to impress him and be pretty enough and good in bed enough and this and that, and, and look at me, look at, look how easy I'm going to make your life and how much I'm going to add to your life.

And  look at my resume.  Nobody wants that. Nobody wants your resume. They want to know tell me the truth about you so I can see if this makes sense. 

And that really haunted me for a number of years, I have to say, because I just couldn't understand.  And looking back now, it's wow, it makes so much sense. And it's so liberating.  And  yeah,  be yourself.  I'll see you guys next time.