How to Be Desire-Led Instead of Trigger-Driven

Every time I write about boundaries, expressing needs, telling the truth in love, I receive one question from women, albeit in different guises:
“How do I say it?”
“How do I say it so he doesn’t shut down?”
“How do I say it without blowing everything up?”
“How do I say it so it finally works?”
But vast majority of the time, women are asking a different question.
They’re asking how to have a high-stakes, emotionally loaded conversation without your nervous system hijacking it.
In other words, how to keep your love ish from ish-ing when it matters most.
And there is no sentence that can do that for you.
There is simply no short cut when we’re talking about relational- and attachment-blueprint healing.
When your attachment patterns are lit up, your amygdala is driving the car.
Your prefrontal cortex — the part that can hold the bigger picture where nuance, generosity, restraint, and humor preside — is in the trunk, banging on the lid.
So you can memorize scripts.
You can use the “I feel / when you” statements.
You can say all the “right” words.
And it will still come out charged, serrated, or prickly because
our state
always speaks louder
than our words.
This is why insight alone doesn’t change relationships.
This is why “knowing better” doesn’t mean “doing differently.”
This is why, when your partner does the thing and looks the look,
or you want the want you feel shame about
or feel the need you don’t feel entitled to have,
you keep landing on the same square in Chutes and Ladders, sliding right back down into the same old trigger and the same old fight.
The work isn’t learning how to communicate.
The work of relational power is learning how to stay coherent in yourself,
how to operate from a more integrated brain-state when love, fear, desire, and your history all show up at once.
There’s no hack for that; that’s a capacity.
And while ‘capacity’ just doesn’t have the same sex appeal as “igniting his masculine”, it is capacity that gives us coherence with our self.
And coherence is where we effortlessly access
self-trust,
self-love,
self-compassion,
not to mention embody our unique expression of eros and open to receive the love that is there for us.
And capacity is built slowly, relationally, over time by practicing staying with yourself when everything in you wants to either control more, grip harder, or shut down and withdraw.
This is the work beneath the “how.”
And it’s the only thing that actually changes the dance.
This is the Way of the Adored Woman.

Kristy Scher
Art: Mucha