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Why do so many strong, successful women find themselves in toxic relationships? It's a paradox that plays out time and time again, high achieving women who seem to have it all together professionally, but struggle in love, entangled with partners who gaslight, manipulate or diminish them. In this episode, we dive into the psychological and societal factors that make powerful women susceptible to toxic dynamics from the desire to fix partners to the way strong women are often conditioned to over function in relationships. We'll break down the hidden patterns that keep them stuck, and most importantly, will explore the path to breaking free, how to recognize red flags and stop painting them green, trust your intuition and reclaim your feminine power in relationships. If you've ever found yourself wondering, How did I end up here, this episode is for you. Tune in, and let's talk about how strong women can stop settling for less than they deserve. Welcome to the satisfied woman podcast. I'm your host. Alanna Kaivalya. This podcast is dedicated to helping women lean into their femininity and rediscover the power of their feminine gifts. We take a look at what it means to be a modern woman and how we can live a satisfied life on our own terms. Visit the hub at thesatisfiedwoman.com All right, podcast listeners, I am really both excited and a little broken hearted to be bringing you this episode today. I've been speaking to women more and more in the past few weeks about this topic, and wanted to bring it to you on the podcast. You see, I work with women individually, as well as in groups and in my greater community at the satisfiedwoman.com and one of the things I've been focused on is working with women in relationship, and that's for good reason. Women, no matter what stage of life you're in, all crave some kind of relationship and intimacy at some point. Now I get it. Some of us, at some points, are going to be alone or going to want to be alone, and that's all fine, but when we find ourselves looking for relationship, I want to help women make sure that they attract the right kind of masculine partner for them, because it's not easy, and it's especially not easy if we are in the wrong polarity, if we ourselves are in the masculine well, then pretty simply put, we're going to be attracting a feminine partner. But as I speak to women more and more individually, I get the impression that not only are they attracting a partner in the wrong polarity, they're attracting the wrong partner altogether. Now this is an issue that is really close to my heart as a survivor of abuse in my childhood, but also in my relationships, I found myself married to the wrong man, after having searched for years to find a compatible partner and really thinking everything looked good on paper and that this person would be Perfect for me, unfortunately, because of my own inherent capability, because I'm a high achieving, high powered individual at the time, was running my own business and incredibly successful, I positioned myself and made it look as if I was actually in the masculine polarity. Well, unfortunately, that had me attracting a feminine man, one who let me do all the work, me take care of the household and even me make all the money. Eventually, this devolved into an unbelievable level of toxicity, with not just manipulation and gaslighting, but pretty severe emotional abuse and criticism. Eventually, I did leave that marriage and that partnership. But it wasn't until I had gone through a lot of therapy of my own to recognize that what I was existing in was a relationship that was not only not tolerable, but not healthy. So having gone through this myself, it really hits home when I meet other women in growing numbers who find themselves in relationships that are incredibly toxic. And I know that we talk about abuse on different levels, and we see it, let's say on TV or in movies in these really grandiose ways, this name calling or big emotional outbursts or angry yelling or the slamming of doors, or even physical abuse, but there are more subtle forms of abuse that really we as women are unfortunately trained to tolerate and live with. And if you've ever heard that story of the frog in the pot of boiling water, it's a little bit like that. We get into a relationship where, in the beginning all of our hormones are raging, and yes, that's where. Feel when we first start a relationship and are in that lust phase, we have wonderful hormones like dopamine and oxytocin pumping through the brain telling us we're actually addicted to this person, and those feel good hormones keep us wanting to go back for more. It's what helps us overlook what we would normally see as red flags and try to eject ourselves from the relationship. When those hormones are there, they really give us rose colored glasses and get us through a relationship to the point where it becomes much more difficult for us to extract ourselves. So like I said in my work with women all over the world, again in groups or one on one, I'm finding in growing numbers that they're not just looking for the right kind of partner. They're actually wondering about the relationship that they're in. So I did an interesting experiment last week. I sent a survey to my email list, and it was anonymous. I asked them to fill out these questions, and of all the things I do in my community, I could not believe the response I got to this survey. Nothing that I've done so far has generated such a response. It was almost like these women were desperate to tell me what was going on for them. As a result of my survey, I learned that 90% of women who responded find themselves emotionally or financially drained by their current partner, 90% that's an astonishing number, and when we couple that with the fact that in growing numbers, women are initiating divorce from their marriages right now, we can understand why you see Women live at a time where we have more agency and more options than at any other time in history. We've never had choices like this before. We've never actually been able to leave relationship. I think about that incredible scripted story, George and Tammy. Can't remember which channel it's on, but as a fan of Yes, as a fan of country music, I wanted to see the life history of George Jones and Tammy Wynette. And what I learned was that Tammy was an incredibly powerful, strong woman, and she had an original marriage where, I think she had three daughters from that original marriage, and it was in her early 20s, and she realized that this person was not just not for her, but incredibly toxic and abusive, and she wanted to leave the marriage. And this would have been in probably the 1950s or so. Now, at the time, it was considered so unusual, so outlandish, so outrageous, so crazy that a woman would want to leave a marriage, that she was actually institutionalized for that desire, and she suffered through many rounds of electroshock therapy because she was deemed so crazy and hysterical, which Used to be a an actual psychological diagnosis of women who had these irrational thoughts like leaving their husband
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that she you know, she was institutionalized and mistreated for this, for this idea that she could leave now, luckily, we don't live in that time, in that place anymore, but we have this ability now to actually eject from relationships that are harmful, but it doesn't make it any easier to do it, and it doesn't make it necessarily any easier to recognize. So what I want to point out is that women in relationships, and this is all women okay. I could be talking to you right now. You may not realize that you are conditioned to tolerate bad behavior, and we are conditioned from an early age to excuse the bad behavior, particularly of our masculine counterparts. We say, oh, that's just locker room talk, or Oh, he didn't mean it, or Oh, it'll get better if I if I do this, or if I do that, I can love him through it. From an early age, we are taught to be the emotional regulators of our household, of our families, and when the household isn't regulated, we're taught that it's our fault, and then it's our responsibility to fix it. This is cultural. It's insidious, and what I want to really stress here is that it's nobody's fault. It just is. It just is the world we live in. It's in the time and culture that we're in. And as I often say to my clients, my students, my colleagues, in my book, on my podcast interviews, this world was not built for us as feminine women, which is why we have to do a lot of work to go inside and dismantle our own understanding and belief systems of who we are and what it's appropriate to tolerate and what we can live with and what actually we deserve, because what we deserve is to be loved and cherished by the people we're with. You. PH, in this amazing survey that I sent out last week, I also learned that the majority of women have been subjected to the following behaviors, manipulation by their partner, unfair expectations, like double standards or moving the goal post. And another surprising result is that the majority of women have been subjected to financial dependence by their partners. Now, 100 years ago, that would have meant that the woman is dependent on her man for money, for bringing home the bacon, and that she was afraid to leave because maybe she didn't have a job, or she didn't have any career outside of the home, and she didn't have her own financial agency to make a life for herself. The tables have turned, and what I'm seeing is that increasingly strong, capable women like ourselves are being depended on by the man in our relationship, and we are literally guilt tripped into providing for them. This really brings me full circle to the core of my work, which is reclaiming femininity. So this is the heart of my book. This is what drove me to sell my last business and go all in on the satisfied woman.com this is why I founded the satisfied woman app. This is why I do this podcast. I'm here to help you as a woman, step back, or for the first time, step into your femininity, because when we hold our feminine power, we will know more quickly. I'm not saying immediately, because it does take practice, but more quickly, that this type of power imbalance does not serve us. So part of our cultural indoctrination in this life as a woman, in this patriarchal culture and this overly masculine culture that really values masculine principles, and not even the best of masculine principles. There's nothing wrong with masculinity. In fact, masculinity is beautiful when it's done well, but the patriarchy really distorts it in a way that is toxic for both sides, for both polarities, and that really doesn't serve anybody. But we're taught as women that our value, our greatest value, lies in how much we do for others and in giving ourselves away. And the more that we overdo, that we over produce or over give for others, the safer we are from abandonment, because the woman that doesn't provide is discarded. Now this is a really crude comparison, but I think of the dairy cow here. Did you know that dairy cows only produce milk when they're pregnant, so they have to continuously be pregnant in order to produce the milk for the dairy that we drink. And when they can no longer be pregnant, or if they are not pregnant, or if they stop producing milk, they essentially become hamburgers. Now, I'm not a PETA activist. I am a paleo eater. Do you love my steak? And I, to some extent, eat some dairy. So this is not a commentary on that particular system, but it is, again, like I said, a crude comparison to all of the feminine beings on this planet who are ravaged for what they can produce, and I want you to think about that in terms of yourself. And for those of you watching on YouTube, you can probably see that I'm getting a bit choked up because I think about it in terms of myself too. You know, this is the same culture that I was raised in, and this is why I talk about this and write about this so much, and this is why I'm bringing these results to you here in the podcast, so that you know that you're not alone, and that you know that that isn't right, that for the feminine, our value doesn't lie in our giving our value doesn't lie in our production. Those are not feminine values. And so for the men who depend on us for financial productivity, or really productivity of any kind, we on both sides of that relationship equation are getting things wrong. The feminine receives. The feminine is meant to be receptive. The feminine is meant to be the recipient of the generosity of the masculine. Now, that doesn't mean that we can't make our own money, all right, ladies, that does not mean we can't make our own money. I love making money. Money is great. Money is how we express ourselves in the world. We fund our values, oftentimes based on money and women. The feminine has an incredible ability to make money through abundance, through her creativity. The way that we are able to really be generative in terms of cash is different than the way that the masculine is able to be generative in terms of cash. Cash. But it doesn't mean that generativity can't happen on both sides. It's just going to have a different flavor. Okay, so in no way am I suggesting that as we as women are to go backward in time, stop working and let the man have the job and run the household finances with bills. No, no, no. What I'm saying is that that dependence, that guilt tripping kind of dependence isn't okay where we are put upon to produce. Now my story is that the person I was married to who deeply relaxed into his feminine because I was so capable of being in my own masculine I was starting a business. I he moved into my apartment in New York City. He relied on me for everything. I was the one cooking. I was the one cleaning. I literally did everything. And then he lost his job, and he didn't get a new one. He was unemployed for 17 months, while I quite literally busted my ass to get my business up and going. I would work 12 to 14 hour days. There were days, many days in a row that I wouldn't even leave the apartment because I was so focused on forcing my business to succeed at all costs in order to make sure that he and I would be okay. And all the while, he was not looking for jobs, he was going deeply into a depression, sitting on the beard, sitting on the couch, growing his beard. I'm not even kidding. That's real.
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I share this story because I want you to know that I've been there, and I want you to know that smart, strong, capable, successful, entrepreneurial, amazing women can have this happen to them too, and I believe it's because one of the qualities of femininity is true, empathy and connection. We want to empathetically connect with, especially with the people that we love, and we want to help them. You see, for the feminine, our connection and our collaboration and our focus on community means that if those in our immediate circle that we love aren't happy, we also are not happy, and we will work to try to alleviate the stress and discomfort of those that are around us, especially those that we love. But when our partner is in a toxic mindset or a toxic state, they will not help. They will not see or respond to our distress, and because we're high achieving and capable, they will see that as a free pass to just let us do the work, and that creates a further imbalance. And what happens in toxic relationships like this, whether it's financial dependence of this, of this type, whether it's manipulation, whether it's gaslighting, whether it's emotional abuse, whatever kind of toxic behavior you're dealing with, we will want to believe the best in people. In fact, the number one response I got from the survey, and I mean, this is number one by far. The reason, the biggest reason why women don't leave is because they hope things will get better. They hope things will get better. They believe that through the power of their love, through the power of their agency, their hard work, that they can love the relationship through this. They can love their partner through this. Now I want you to hear this, because it comes from a good and beautiful place, but in toxic relationships, it is taken advantage of. And what happens in these toxic relationships for us as women is we become dysregulated. And I just want to acknowledge that I see you, I see you, and I understand and this dysregulation actually takes you out of your incredible faculties of intuition and good decision making in a dysregulated state, you don't have the capacity to make good decisions for yourself or to hear your intuition, those go offline in a dysregulated state. In a dysregulated state. This is one of the symptomologies of PTSD, things like PTSD. And I'm not saying necessarily that your relationship is creating PTSD for you. It very well may be that it is. I'm just making the comparison that PTSD the triggers when they happen, they cause the person to become dysregulated, and then their their high functioning brain, their prefrontal cortex, goes offline, and it basically becomes a downward spiral. So those of us in toxic relationship, the same thing happens to us. Our faculties of good decision making go offline. We start to believe the manipulative narrative. We start to believe the gas. Lighting, and that's why gaslighting is so effective. So it's not hard to think or to make the leap that smart, capable, strong, high achieving women like yourself, like me, can get themselves into these incredibly toxic relationships. Number one, we're all raised in a culture that wasn't built for us and didn't center and value our femininity. Number two, we are taught by that culture that our singular value is in how much we give and produce. And number three, we're taught to believe that if we don't continue to give and produce, we are discarded and abandoned, and no one wants that. And that kind of tension creates a level of fear that makes us respond, that makes us respond to and believe, the manipulation, the gaslighting, the emotional abuse, the name calling, the criticism, all of the things that are leveled on us by partners who are supposed to love us. Now I'm not saying that all these guys are bad. I'm saying that they're a product of their culture too. They might also be dysregulated. I do not want to excuse their behavior. Okay, that's not what I'm doing here. I'm just also not villainizing them, and I'm not saying you can love them through it. What I need you to do is to love you through it. What I need from you, and I do, I do express it as a need, because my work is in helping women become more satisfied. And I'm starting to really understand that the greatest source of dissatisfaction really lies in our relationship. I mean, yes, that we want to be satisfied in career as well, and I coach women through that too. We want to be satisfied financially. And I coach women through that too. We want to be satisfied in our family relationships, and I coach women to that through that too. Absolutely, I've coached women in all different areas of their life to increase their level of satisfaction. But the number one thing that women need support and help with is relationship. And if 90% of women are reporting that their relationship has a level of toxicity, then then this really is critical. So I see you understand that you might be in a dysregulated state, and that's going to make it more difficult for you to realize and see the toxicity. It's gonna make you believe the gaslighting. When you're told that you have to work harder, when you're told that you're not good enough, when you're told when you're questioned about the way you spend your money, this is another, another thing that I'm seeing a lot of is that even when we make our own money, we are criticized for how we spend it or what we do with it. You know, imagine if the tables were turned and the criticism went in the other direction. I don't think it would go over very well, do you? No, I don't think so. We stay because we don't want to hurt our partner. We stay because we don't want to be abandoned and alone. We stay because we feel so emotionally drained, we don't have the capacity or the resilience to rise up and stand up for ourselves. These are all the reasons we stay, and sometimes even we become strong enough, and we leave and we are manipulated back. In fact, as a result of my survey, I know that at least 50% of women either just don't have the capacity or emotional strength to leave, or they end up going back to the relationship. So there's a deep sense of D right dysregulation here in these toxic relationships. And look, I don't care what the level of toxicity is, okay, one of the things that I that I notice in these responses from this survey and the women that I talked to is that a lot of them try to gloss over it, and I know that I did the same thing for a long time. Oh, it's not that bad. Again, like the the frog in the boiling pot of water, oh, it's not that bad, right? The heat goes up a little bit each time, and oh, it's not that bad. And it was so good in the beginning. It was so good in the beginning. And those are the amazing, sweet, beautiful stories you remember and you tell yourself about this person, because you believe he can get back there and look, I want to believe that too. And you know, let's hope that men do the work and rehabilitate themselves. And I know that there are good men doing good work, it is possible, but they need to do the work. No change or shift in these toxic patterns is possible. If you are the only one doing the work. People only change when they want to and when they actually apply themselves. So if they're not there. There's only so much you can do. Then the first thing that you can do, because I promise you in this podcast that I would give you some strategies and some hope, and I will, okay, it's not easy. I understand, but the first thing that you can do, and trust me, this isn't a trite piece of advice, because I wrote the book. It's. Curious, because I've done the research and I wrote the book, and I've been through it too. The first thing you can do is reclaim your femininity. It is not in the feminine to give yourself away. The feminine is designed to receive the incredible generosity of the masculine, who is acting in your highest interest and with his big, big heart, the healthy masculine thrives when he is applying his big, big heart toward generosity for those that he loves, especially his cherished feminine partner. The Healthy masculine is out there. The Healthy masculine will do that, and the healthy masculine feels energized and affirmed and strong and even more empowered when he is being generous with the feminine he cherishes. If your masculine partner is not doing that for you, he is not in his healthy masculine and you cannot default out of your feminine and into the masculine for him, because as soon as you step into the masculine for him, you become his mommy. You become his caretaker. You say that it's okay that this over giving, this over production, this exhausting yourself, this level of burnout, is okay by you, and it should not be,
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because in the end, guess who loses
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always, it's the woman
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in this case, and it
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may not be that you lose your financial well being. It may not be that you lose the comfort of your home. It's going to be that you lose your sense of self and your belief in yourself as a powerful, capable and strong feminine woman, and that that really is the greatest loss. So for you to step into your femininity, one of the greatest things, one of the first things that you can do is listen to your intuition. It is there. It is there. Even in the dysregulated state, your intuition will be speaking. Your dysregulation will make it difficult to hear it and listen, but if you turn your focus to it, if you trust it, it will guide you at least in the right direction, at least in the right direction. So number one is reconnecting to your intuition. I cannot overstate the importance of this enough, because I think about intuition, and I've said this many times, and hopefully you've heard it before, because I really want it to sink in,
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your intuition is the voice of
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your intuition is the voice of your foremothers coming through time to speak to you. Now, I had a really powerful relationship with my grandmother. I should do a podcast on her at some point. And I think about it as her voice, because I know what kind of life she went through, and I guarantee you that the women who have gone before you, before you, have lived in this time, in this day and age where we actually have some power in agency. They had it much harder. My grandmother didn't have a choice on who she married. My grandmother didn't have the option to divorce and leave. My grandmother never had an ability to have the kind of career that could have supported her and her two children. She never had that, and she had an incredibly abusive relationship as well, I think, about what she went through, and when I hear my intuition speak, I hear her voice, and I hear what she would have wanted for me. So my friend, if you don't have the strength to recognize the toxicity, if you don't have the strength to recognize your own value in relationship, if you don't have the ability right now, because of the gaslighting, the manipulation being that frog in the boiling pot of water to understand that what's happening is really not acceptable, then listen to your intuition and let your grandmother speak to you about it. Let her tell you, because she will. So that's number one. Is reclaiming, reconnecting to your intuition by shifting more into your feminine what will happen is that it will shift the energy and the balance in the relationship, and something must change under those circumstances. Now this is what I coach women with individually through these experiences, because when they start to step into their femininity, when they start to really reclaim who they are, and reconnect to that sense of receptivity, intuition, their emotional depth, when they affirm their emotions, their creativity, their joy, their pleasure, when they slip back into that. It changes the dynamic in the household. It changes the dynamic in the relationship. And what can no longer exist is a partner hopelessly in his wounded feminine role. You. Not accept it, you will no longer accept it. And in terms of intimate partnership, when you're in that kind of container, it must be filled with opposite polarities. And if you've been stepping into the masculine in order to provide for him, in order to protect him, in order to take his abuse and you suddenly shift out of that, then whatever else is happening can no longer exist. It can no longer survive. And so as a result of that, you will either realize that this is not the relationship for you, that he is not in a place to step up and into something healthier or different, that the toxic patterns are too they're they run too deep. They cannot be helped or by you. Shifting that polarity, it may inspire some shift and change in him as well. Now we can never change other people. Okay, we can never hope for people to change because we don't know if they will or they won't. They will do it of their own accord, in their own time, but the best chance for a shift in any direction, and we're just looking for a positive shift, is for you to hold that feminine post. So I know this podcast has been a lot. It's been heavy. I think I've basically cried about three times, and I hope that in some way it resonates with you, not because I hope that you're in a toxic relationship. I certainly do not. But again, based on this research, this survey, my experience nine out of 10 of us in relationship believe that we are. So it's likely that you have some patterns in relationship that need to be shifted. But if it resonated with you in any way, whether presently or past or because you know someone, then I hope that you'll share this with them, because my work is to create satisfaction on all levels for women, because we deserve it, because we do have the opportunity in this time, in this place, in this age Right now to have the kind of agency and power to step up and in to our own satisfied lives, but we need to know how, and my work is to give you the how it's to show you to give you the steps to enliven and awaken that within you so that you can be the satisfied woman. So for more information on all of this, any of this, to connect with me, to join my community, to learn more about what it means to be a satisfied woman. I hope that you'll join me at the satisfiedwoman.com and as always, for my podcast listeners, I have a special page for you where you can get started right away with a satisfied woman starter kit, and you can find that at the satisfied woman.com/empower Me. And of course, there is the book you're watching on YouTube. I'm holding it up right now. The way of the satisfied woman reclaiming feminine power. Pretty much everything I ever have to say about all of this is in here. But of course, working with me directly helps to bring it to life. So plus, as females, as feminine women, we love community. So I want to connect with you. I want to get to know you. And a good way to do that is to join my community through my app. And unsurprisingly, it is the satisfied woman app. So go download that. You can download that via Apple or Google Play, and in all ways, my friend, I wish you the greatest satisfaction. You.
