riptides winner of the pulitzer prize best short story€¦ · relationships to maintain US security for 13 years. This five foot tall dynamo teamed with U.S. agencies including the

riptides

bever ly tan

winner o f the pu l i t ze r p r i ze

bes t shor t s to ry

2

About Michelle G.

Michelle G is a Certified Dating and Relationship Specialist (CRS)®

and the author of the #1 best selling book, Relationship SOS: Seven

Lifelines to Rescue Your Emotional Intimacy Now. She is

passionate about helping couples answer the questions "What

does the word LOVE mean to me? and How can I have the

relationships I desire?" Michelle focuses on changing the way

singles and couples approach relationships--including the one we

have with ourselves.

Michelle is frequently featured in media as a relationship expert

and her articles have been featured in local and national

publications.

Prior to becoming a certified relationship expert, Michelle served

in the United States Marine Corps where she managed critical

relationships to maintain US security for 13 years. This five foot

tall dynamo teamed with U.S. agencies including the FBI, DOS,

DOD and others where she led community outreach programs and

acted as liaison with local city governments around the world.

3

Hey There,

My hope is for this book to guide you in navigating one of the most

important relationships in your life - your intimate relationship.

It's my passion and purpose to help you decipher the unique

language of relationships and how to relate to one another.

My goal was to put it in a versatile book for you to use as a

standalone guide, readable from cover to cover, or to use in a pick-

and-choose way.

May it enhance your relationship and take it to the next level!

XO,

Michelle G., CRS®

©2015 Relationship SOS

I’ve made it my life’s mission to share with you what we’re going

to be discovering in this book, so I can help you evolve and

understand your relationships and how to maintain and

cultivate them better and achieve long-lasting relationship

health and happiness.

A healthy relationship starts with you: in order for any of your

relationships to be successful, you need to start by taking a look

inside yourself. You’ve probably heard that before, but now for

the hard part: do you know what it is that you’re supposed to be

looking at? What you are looking for?

When you look inside for answers to the events that are

happening in your life, your goal is to explore a number of

things, mostly importantly your feelings and your needs. We are

all aware of the basic human needs: along with food, water and

air, we also need connections, we need certainty and security;

we need love. We long for a great many things, but what many

people do not realize is that, out of all of those needs and

longings, we each have one that is prevalent above all the

others, what I like to call the ‘core driver’.

CHAPTER 1

4

N U R T U R E Y O U R S O U L


“A HEALTHY RELAT IONSHIP STARTS WITH YOU:IN ORDER FOR ANY OF YOUR RELAT IONSHIPSTO BE SUCCESSFUL , YOU NEED TO START BY

TAKING A LOOK INS IDE YOURSELF . ”

5

Your core driver is the one need you act on above all the others,

the place where you function from in your approach to all

situations and relationships in your life. For example: a person

whose core driver is the need for connections looks for certainty

and acceptance in others, and will often seek to get it at all costs.

Other people have a deep need for security or for control. Each of

these deep needs, these core drivers, causes the people

experiencing them to act in predictable ways as they seek to fulfill

that need within.

We all experience these needs, to some degree. For each of us,

though, there will always be one that we seek fulfillment of more

than the rest; this is the need that drives the decisions we make

about how we interact with people, and that informs how we

create relationships.

“There will always be one that we seek fulfillment of more than the

rest; this is the need that drives the decisions we make about how

we interact with people, and that informs how we create

relationships.”

“There will always be one that we seek fulfillment of morethan the rest; this is the need that drives the decisions wemake about how we interact with people, and that informs

how we create relationships.”


6

Your core driver, for example, could affect your life in a similar way

to the way Eloise’s affected hers. Eloise, a client of mine, is a

woman in her 50s, and a successful business owner. She has two

children, and has been divorced twice. She is a powerhouse of a

businesswoman, but a complete mess in her personal life and she

came to me wondering, “Why?”

When we take a step in to really look at what's happening under

the surface, we see that her business may actually not be as highly

functioning as it first appears, and may, in fact, be something of a

mess as well; but there's a difference: she remains successful in her

business because she chooses not to be vulnerable. She chooses to

be completely masculine, to have the attitude that things have to

get done, so they do. She knows the level of risk to take and she is

prepared for the outcome. There are tangibles to measure in

business, which she can assess and use to make decisions and get

things done. In her personal life however, this isn’t the same –

there is nothing to measure, no litmus test – or at least (and here is

the key) this is how she perceives it to be.

Eloise's Story:

Eloise, who is this powerhouse businesswoman, could not

understand why she is so successful in her work yet cannot find

that one person to love and be loved by. When we begin to work

together, identifying the different labels of who she thinks she is

and what she is looking for, we discovered Eloise had no clear

boundaries. Eloise’s lack of boundaries existed because everything

she did was to feed her core driver-validation. She got involved

with men who were emotionally unavailable and in her business it

showed through her competitive nature.


7

Through our coaching sessions, I have identified with Eloise that

she relies heavily on the idea of tangibles, which can be measured

in order to make decisions in business, and believes that this is the

only way decisions can be made generally. Because those tangibles

do not exist in her personal life she doesn’t have anything to

measure or assess and she can’t make the same, confident

decisions as she does in the corporate world. Thus we discovered

that her core driver is for her to seek validation from men in order

for her to feel confident and loved. The problem with this is that

she keeps attracting men that are prone to manipulating her and

her need to receive validation from them leaves her vulnerable to

other relationship issues. She deeply desires validation, but she

does not have healthy boundaries in place, or the relationship skills

necessary, to make a relationship work.

So, through our conversations, we identified that Eloise no longer

has the confidence to make her own decisions. She does not trust

the decisions that she makes. The next step was to ask why: why

does she feel unable to make decisions in her personal life? Where

does her lack of confidence in decision-making come from?

Her first husband, who is the father of her children – and to whom

she was married to for a long time – cheated on her, and not just

the one time: he had a long-term, lasting affair – a full relationship

with another woman. When Eloise discovered this she felt

betrayed and stupid for not seeing what was happening right in

front of her. It shattered her confidence and left her confused

about what internal instincts she should trust.

She reacted by doing what she felt needed to be done to move

forward: she picked up her broken pieces, packed her bags, packed

her children, and moved on.


8

When she went through the divorce, a lot of people said, "Oh my

God, you're handling it great. Oh, you're doing fine.” And it did

seem as though she was; she’d made all the practical decisions,

using the tangibles she could assess – the affair, the betrayal, her

children’s needs – to make the best decision for the situation in

order for it to be concluded and resolved. However, years later she

still struggles with relationship issues. So what really happened

when everyone else thought she was doing fine?

Her quick, pragmatic approach meant that she never really dealt

with the emotional impact the affair and divorce had on her and so

it continuously returns to haunt her, leaving her with an inability to

make any decisions. Now she doesn't trust herself; she feels that

she should have seen the signs of the affair, seen that there was

trouble in her relationship, and that she should have known not to

marry such a man in the first place. That She feels she failed at all of

this leads her to the unconscious conclusion that she cannot truly

trust her own gut instincts or her decision-making skills.

Though she knows it on the surface, subconsciously she ignores

that her ex-husband did everything in his power to conceal these

things from her and that he was the one who did something wrong;

she was not wrong for taking him at his word. She feels foolish and

as if she should have known better, and those feelings make her

question whether she is making the right decision whenever she is

faced with one.

One of the things Eloise and I discovered was that every action,

decision, and choice that she was making in her life was to fulfill

her need for validation.


9

Every man that she sought to form a relationship with since the

breakdown of her marriage was just an attempt to validate her

existence, to fulfill her need to feel accepted and thereby give her a

sense of self-worth. She seeks validation – that is her core driver;

every decision she makes and everything she does stems from that

need.

Her core driver doesn't only manifest itself in her relationships

with men, it is also displayed in the way she parents her children, it

influences the ways she's able to interact with her friends; it forms

the foundation of the methods through which she approaches and

keeps all of her relationships.

She seeks out people who feed it; people who easily and quickly

validate her worth. She does things for her children that she knows

are probably not truly helpful for them – that are probably not

going to aid them in becoming fully rounded, independent

individuals and adults. On some level she knows that she is stifling

her children by the things she does. However, she continues to do

these things because of the reward she gets from doing them; that

reward is the validation that she is a good mom and this feeds her

core need.

So we see that, to the outside world, Eloise appeared to be

handling everything in her life exceptionally well; however, in her

heart she knew that this wasn’t really true and she came to me

wanting to do something about it, to try and find the success in her

relationships and private life that she had professionally. Through

our coaching sessions, I discovered that her personal life is a mess

because, at some time, she made the unconscious decision to

handle all of her challenges in the same masculine way she handles

her business.


10

She approaches her personal life from the standpoint of tough

decision-making, of always moving forward, of getting things done.

Everything is a transaction to validate her self-worth. This hard-

nosed kind of attitude served her well in business, and up until this

point in her life there’s been every appearance that this attitude

has worked well for her personally too, however she’s now

reached a stage where it is no longer serving her, especially in her

intimate relationships and is looking for a different outcome.

If we go back to focusing on you for a second, and your own core

driver: when you don't know what your core driver is then you

aren't able to fully understand why it is that you continue to act or

react with the same behavior patterns over and over and over

again. You become stuck in behavior that stems from a need that is

subconscious and one that may actually conflict with your desires.

Often, core drivers protect us from hurt, but they do it without

healthy boundaries. Those healthy boundaries allow us to take

healthy risks to achieve our deep desires while respecting our own

set of unique needs.

To identify your core driver and begin to heal, take a look into your

life and needs and think about what types of behavior patterns you

are allowing to happen, or you are being an active participant in.

What do you think those behavior patterns are trying to fulfill, for

you? What core need do they stem from?

“WHEN YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOUR COREDRIVER I S THEN YOU AREN 'T ABLE TO FULLYUNDERSTAND WHY IT I S THAT YOU CONTINUETO ACT OR REACT WITH THE SAME BEHAVIORPATTERNS OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN . ”


11

Another of the things Eloise discovered was that she has no real

boundaries. She has the two basic rules, which stem from her past

hurt, "I'm not going to let anyone step all over me, and I'm not

going to ever be involved with a person who's married.” but those

are about the only two clear boundaries she has, and they do not

serve her well when it comes to pursuing relationships. She doesn't

have healthy boundaries that allow her to nurture a relationship;

she doesn't know how to say, “No,” because her constant need for

validation insists that she always try to please everyone.

Are you also seeking validation?

The feelings that drive your core need can take many different

forms, whether it is the tearing down of your self-worth, the fear

and embarrassment over how you think others perceive you, or

your perceived lack of abilities leading to low self-esteem. At some

point, each of us feels one of these many things much more

strongly than all the other ones and the need to ease that feeling of

discomfort is what pushes our core driver to the surface. It is the

core driver’s job to ensure that we are never again in a position

where those feelings are felt so strongly.

I also discovered that there is a lot of guilt driving everything Eloise

does, which leads me into the second point of this chapter: The

importance of clearing out our emotional baggage. Without

realizing it, in the early stages of her divorce, Eloise felt guilty for

the failure of her marriage, for not being able to make a marriage

work, and for not being able to heal it when it was going south.

Interestingly, as women, we are more likely to repress our

emotional baggage, and stuff it down to a place where we can try

and forget about it.


12

What I discovered with Eloise, through her coaching sessions, was

that when you don't clear that emotional baggage away and you do

stuff it down somewhere and repress it, you eventually start

building up resentment. We don't identify it initially as resentment,

we identify it as irritability, as being annoyed or frustrated, but

when you don't clear that emotional baggage and resentment

away, it starts manifesting itself in all of the different parts of your

life, particularly in relationships. The people that we are the closest

to, that surround us day in and day out, are the people that we feel

most comfortable being ourselves around – being irritated, being

angry – because on some level we believe that they are not going

to go anywhere. We have this subconscious thought that they are

going to stay there, that they're going to take whatever we throw

at them, and then later on we can come back like a dog with our tail

between our legs, and say we're sorry. Naively, we subconsciously

believe that this will always work; that it will always erase

whatever hurt we cause in the process of our anger or irritability.

In order for Eloise to nurture her soul, it was important for her to

be able to begin dealing with her emotional baggage – to learn

from the experiences that she had been through in order for her to

heal and move past them.

You see, the experiences never leave us, especially the ones that

nurtured the development of our core driver: they happened, we

cannot get around that fact; they cannot leave, they can

only become a part of us. The thing you must decide is how much

power you want to give to those experiences. Deciding that they

do not deserve all the power that we initially give them is a big part

of clearing out emotional baggage and letting go of resentment.

That decision is the place you begin to grow from.


13

Dealing with your emotional baggage is very much like going

through the seven stages of grief: you start with denial; you get

angry; then you have resentment, and so on. The stage people

hardly ever manage to reach is that of acceptance, it's one of the

things that humans struggle with the most. We struggle to look

inside, to get to know ourselves fully and to accept what we find;

we struggle to get to know others fully and to accept them for who

they are.

What often happens – as in the case of Eloise and so many other

people like her – is that people who have had something traumatic

or something that was very difficult happen to them do go through

the stages of grief, in a way, but they become stuck at the guilt

stage. Assuming a linear progression or a linear grieving process, it

is very difficult to go from the guilt stage to acceptance, and so

what happens in the guilt phase is that people create the behaviors

that are going to protect them and continue to repeat those

behaviors, rendering themselves unable to move forward.

Stuck in the guilt stage, a person like Eloise often acts on her

masculine nature – becoming very defensive and appearing to

those around her to be very strong. This is the way many people

act out repressed feelings of guilt without truly understanding

what is happening and why things are crumbling around them.

Healing that part of such a person requires walking them through

some deeper spiritual exploration to help them move into a state

of acceptance. Only once that healing has taken place, and the

acceptance stage has been reached, can the person in question

truly see their lives and relationships thrive and their businesses

succeed, ten times more than they could ever imagine.


14

Our childhood environments are immensely influential of our

personalities and experiences in creating relationships with

others. They are really our first exposure to what’s right and what’s

wrong, how to decide what you value and need from others, and

how to go about getting that need fulfilled. The first relationships

we have, while we are still in that vulnerable, sponge-like,

childhood stage, are the foundations on which all later

relationships are built on, they help us define what relationships

are at a very young age.

The assumptions that we make about relationships through the

relationships that we see, through the roles that the people we

grow up around play in our lives, are assumptions that we carry

with us right into adulthood and become expectations of how

others will behave. If we take the most obvious childhood

influential roles: the mother and father, and think about what they

represent to us, we realize that we make assumptions about the

roles of mothers and fathers based on the way our own mothers

and fathers acted when we were children.

This idea is not just relevant to mothers and fathers; it can also be

extended to any person who played a role in your life when you

were growing up. These people influence us because of two things:

how we think, because they teach us how to think, and they teach

us how to challenge thoughts and opinions, to ask questions, and

therefore teach us which questions should be the ones to ask. The

first time we learn to make decisions, the decisions are based on

the environment we are in, and so our adult decision-making

process is irrevocably influenced by that childhood experience.


15

Similarly, the needs created in us through our own childhoods –

for example the need for validation created by a family that

seemed to prefer a sibling over you – are needs we take with us

into adulthood and greatly impact the way we form relationships.

Rosa’s Story:

This leads me to another client of mine: Rosa. A beautiful woman,

who has been married for twenty-two years, she has wonderful

children, a great job, and a devoted husband. However, she

experienced some distressing, difficult occurrences in her

childhood: she grew up alongside her brother and although

her family was somewhat nurturing, she was always made to feel

that they favored her brother over her.

Rosa experienced some more traumatic events in her adult life,

and instead of dealing with them and working through her feelings

about them, all she did was stuff, stuff, stuff: pushing the bad

feelings and emotions away so she could carry on without having

to work through the distress. After years of this repressing, when

she came to me, her first complaint was, "I can't connect with my

husband in my relationship. I don't know why, but I feel like I'm

looking for this connection, and I can't achieve it with him.” She did

not make the connection between habitually stuffing all of her

memories and her feelings about past experiences and not being

able to connect emotionally with her husband. One of my first

questions to her was, "Do you have resentment? Do you resent

him in any way?”

After some consideration she admitted, “Well yes I do.”


16

So I asked her “Why?” and she explained that, “Well because at

one point in time, he used to slap me around”.

Just like with Eloise, this was not the appearance of happy family

life that Rosa kept up outwardly. “Okay,” I said, “he used to slap you

around. What happened?”

Well,” she answered, “we separated, and when we got back

together, I decided that was a non-negotiable.”

Already you can see that Rosa went straight to telling me about the

way the problem was solved, not about the process that happened

surrounding her husband’s violent behavior. I knew that if I

continued I could help her explore why she ended up in that

situation to begin with, so I asked her, “Why do you think you

allowed it to happen in the first place?”

I wanted to coax her into looking into herself a little more, into

considering what needs might be there that could have caused her

to allow the destructive behavior to continue for the time that it

did.

“Well,” she replied, “because when I was younger, the one time that

I told my parents that someone hurt me, they didn't believe me.”

“So what did that lead you to believe?”

After some hesitation, she stated, “It made me feel like I wasn’t

important enough. As though I am not worthy enough to have

someone protect me. I feel like I have to take care of myself; that I

have to fight for my security because I can’t really count on any

one else to provide it.


17

So now, because I can’t trust that he will keep me safe, everything

that my husband does leads me to think that he's going to hurt me

or allow me to be hurt by someone.”

So we see that holding that train of thought in her mind, even

subconsciously, without ever working through the feelings

involved, has actually led her to build resentment towards her

husband Everything that he does bothers her because it makes her

feel threatened.

Now, is this her fault? Well, part of it came about because of the

environment that she grew up in, and shows us how influential the

emotional baggage garnered through our childhood experiences

can be, but that is not all of it, and the other part of it is the more

difficult notion that we have to take responsibility for the things

that happen to us and the decisions that we make as a result of

them, even if we do not understand them.

So what does this mean? How do we take responsibility for

something we don’t even seem to understand? It's essential to sit

down and reflect. We rarely take enough time to reflect on

experiences. When we do reflect on them, it opens up the

opportunity for reaching that elusive stage of acceptance. And

when we finally manage to reach the point of acceptance,

something magical happens: we have this big “Aha!” moment of,

“Oh, now I can connect the dots. This is why that happened. This is

why I am that way. This is why I don't like this.” Then you begin to

question your behavior and your actions, and you can begin

to make changes. Being in the place where you start to question

your behaviors and actions allows you to actually start establishing

healthy boundaries.


“HOW DO WE TAKE RESPONSIB IL ITY FORSOMETHING WE DON’T EVEN SEEM TO

UNDERSTAND?”

18

Healthy boundaries are vital as they enable us to nurture our souls.

You need to look within yourself to discover and become

comfortable with what is okay and what is not okay for you;

because when you understand those boundaries in yourself, it's far

easier for you to communicate them to other people, and your

whole behavior: your body language, the ease with which you

connect to others, and your healthy perspective on life all shine

through.

Rosa sets a great example of this. After she separated from her

husband, she discovered that she really was not willing to put up

with him slapping her around anymore, and she came back to the

marriage saying, “This is a non-negotiable for me, because not only

does it hurt me, but I know that, inside, it kills me as a person. It just

eats at me. It makes me just crumble as a person. I can’t be your

partner when you’re over here treating me like I’m your child, or as

if I’m worthless.” When she made that declaration, took that stance

and put the stake in the ground, she acknowledged and asserted

one of her healthy boundaries. It changed her relationship and it

changed how she connected with her partner.

Throughout these stories we see some consistent, interconnecting

threads emerging. We see that a healthy relationship starts with

the self, with being happy in ourselves.


19

In order to achieve a healthy, happy relationship you need to

nurture your soul, which involves introspection: discovering and

examining who you are and what makes you happy and how to

communicate that and reach it, and trying to understand the

experiences of your past and the decisions you made as a result of

them. The goal is not necessarily to understand why things

happened to us; many things could have been beyond our control.

The goal is moving past the things that happen. We cannot control

how someone else acts, but we can reflect on the things that

happened, and as adults we can ask, “What can I do to find

significance in these experiences and discover a different meaning

and perspective on what happened?”

You can make the decision to not get stuck in that cycle of being a

victim, or thinking that bad things happened to you because of a

weakness, or a fault in you, or as a result of something that you did.

Understanding that they were not your fault and that you are not a

victim is a big part of nurturing your soul. You can make the

decision to move forward and leave that emotional baggage

behind, because it does not serve you in your current relationships,

and it cannot help you build future ones.

Action Steps:

1. Take some time to think through and identify your core driver

(acceptance, connection, control, growth, safety, validation)

2. Identify the emotional baggage you are holding on to and

observe how it is affecting you. Begin to release through reflection

and acceptance via journaling

3. Establish and implement healthy boundaries


20

Love This Chapter? Buy The Book!

©2015 Relationship SOS: 7LifelinesTo Rescue Your Emotional IntimacyNow is available from Barnes & Noble,Amazon and on Nook and Kindle.


https://www.amazon.com/Relationship-SOS-Lifelines-Emotional-Intimacy-ebook/dp/B00TT0NIX8#navbar

Documents

riptides winner of the pulitzer prize best short story€¦ · relationships to maintain US security for 13 years. This five foot tall dynamo teamed with U.S. agencies including the