Reassuring Insights

By understanding how women are like waves, Tom realized that the recurrence of Susan's neediness and insecurity was natural, inevitable, and temporary. He realized how naive he had been to think that his loving response to Susan's deepest core issues could permanently heal her. Tom learning successfully to support Susan when she was in her well not only made it easier for her to do her inner healing but also helped them not to have fights at those times. Tom was encouraged by the three following realizations:

1. A man's love and support cannot instantly resolve a woman's issues. His love, however, can make it safe for her to go deeper into her well. It is naive to expect a woman to be perfectly loving all the time. He can expect these issues to come up again and again. Each time, however, he can get better at supporting her.

2. A woman going into her well is not a man's fault or his failure. By being more supportive he cannot prevent it from happening, but he can help her through these difficult times.

A woman has within herself the ability to spontaneously rise up after she has hit bottom. A man does not have to fix her. She is not broken but just needs his love, patience, and understanding.

WHEN A WOMAN DOESN'T FEEL SAFE IN HER WELL

This tendency to be like a wave increases when a woman is in an intimate relationship. It is essential that she feel safe to go through this cycle. Otherwise she works hard at pretending that everything is always all right and suppresses her negative feelings. When a woman doesn't feel safe to go into her well, her only alternative is to avoid intimacy or to suppress and numb her feelings through addictions like, overeating, overworking, or over care taking. Even with her addictions, however, she periodically will fall into her well and her feelings may come up in a most uncontrolled fashion. You probably know stories of couples who never fight or argue and then suddenly to everyone's surprise they decide to get a divorce. In many of these cases, the woman has suppressed her negative feelings to avoid having fights. As a result she becomes numb and unable to feel her love. When negative feelings are suppressed positive feelings become suppressed as well, and love dies. Avoiding arguments and fights certainly is healthy but not by suppressing feelings. In chapter 9 we will explore how to avoid arguments without suppressing feelings.

Дата добавления: 2015-07-19