Relationship Expert: Your Relationship Changes When You STOP Trying to Change Him

In This Episode, Kristy Scher Uncovers:

[01:16] The Power of Self-Reverence

• How a walking meditation in a Northern California redwood forest changed the entire direction of Kristy’s life.
• What the voice in her mind said while she watched a hawk soaring on the wind currents, and what she thought the moment she heard it.
• Why a woman who has been struggling for decades can still receive a message about self-reverence even when she feels nowhere near it.
• How the mold illness that decimated her physically was also the doorless hallway that finally stopped her from outrunning her life.
• What she heard during her illness that was not her voice and yet was hers, and why she trusted it.
• How Kristy describes the feeling she had at five or six years old riding her bike in a flowered bikini as the feeling of being indomitable.
• What she now understands that feeling to be: self-possession.
• Why the unselfconscious joy of being has nothing to do with achieving anything, looking any particular way, or having a story about yourself.

Resources:

• Kristy Scher

[13:34] Liberate Yourself from Shame

• How liberation can only live where there are no dark secrets, and how the false beliefs we hide become the walls that keep that girl away.
• Why shame is not just a feeling but a mistaken sense of self that results from a child’s needs not being met with presence and contact.
• How a somatic introject is an idea swallowed whole by a nervous system too young to question it, stored as sensation rather than thought.

[16:54] Your Need Is Holy

• Why a need is the invocation to love, the signal that calls love forward.
• What happened when Kristy held her first son and felt something flood through her that she realized she had never felt before.
• How a woman breastfeeding her child demonstrates the circuit that most people have backwards.
• Why receiving is not passivity but a full circuit that gives the other person the opportunity to offer what they were built to offer.
• How people want to give to others.

[21:04] You Can Either Be in Your Story or in Your Life

• Why contempt, criticism, nagging, and controlling are fundamentally inconsistent with love, not because they are impolite but because they block the very circuit love requires.
• Why self-reverence is simply being present in the moment and enjoying it.
• How presence is the currency of love, and how that makes the standard for relationship not about performance but about what you are actually putting into the space.
• Why Kristy’s father arrived at the hospital and screamed that girls were disgusting, useless, and pathetic, and who reportedly did not touch her for the first year of her life.
• How hearing that story in her early thirties brought relief because it finally named something that had accompanied her her whole life.
• What it felt like to make a pilgrimage to the hospital in Ohio where she was born, take off her shoes, put her feet in the ground, and say aloud that the story ends here.
• Why she chose to no longer carry the story of being unwantable in any form.
• How you can either be in your story or you can be in your life and your relationship, but you cannot be in both at the same time.

[31:40] Alchemy and the Story You Carry

• Why asking ‘why’ something happened is an addict’s question and will not take anyone anywhere useful.
• The more useful question is ‘what would it look like to alchemize this story,’ rather than simply excavate it.
• How Kristy came to ask herself what the inheritance from her absent father actually was, and what the answer turned out to be.
• Why she now considers herself a relentless student of love not in spite of having had no fathering but because of it.
• How a woman can look at an inheritance that looks purely like a wound and discover the gift inside it without denying the impact.

[38:06] Fluency VS Mastery

• How emotional epigenetics works in the body.
• Why genes being turned on and off means that the impact of what happened to us is not fixed, and neither is the story it created.
• Why Kristy uses the word fluency instead of mastery, because fluency is something that can always expand and always implies motion.
• Why the evidence of having genuinely done the work is always humility, because humility comes from the Latin word humus meaning earth.
• How humility and dignity are two sides of the same coin, and why anyone who claims mastery has likely stopped growing.

[45:33] The Three Fluencies

• How self-fluency means knowing what you want, feel, think, and believe, and being able to bring that forward in all areas of life including self-forgiveness.
• How emotional fluency means being able to feel feelings without spinning out or shutting down, and knowing the difference between what is yours and what belongs to someone else.
• How relational fluency is built on those two and means communicating clearly without weaponizing emotions, and collaborating in a way that makes it about the two of you versus the problem rather than versus each other.
• Why relational fluency is the foundation of earned secure attachment, and why everything that a woman wants in her life will come to her through a relationship of some kind.

[48:28] The Dance of Masculine and Feminine

• What happened when Kristy went to a David Deida retreat and asked how to make her marriage more polarized, and why the instruction she received sent her down a rabbit hole of performative femininity.
• Why a fantasy of submission that seemed completely divorced from who she was turned out to be a map of something real she was longing for.
• Why the freedom she was looking for could not be given to her by containment, by any man, or by any external practice, it had to become something she could find in herself.
• How her marriage at the time had no emotional connection, no sexual heat, and felt like living with a roommate despite deep love and compatibility.
• Why she began asking herself one question daily: who would I have to be as a woman who is adored by a man she desires, and how would she move, and how would she show up?
• How her husband began using words he had never used in the marriage, looking her in the eyes when she spoke, and initiating physical closeness.
• Why he could finally feel her heart, and suddenly he could feel his own.

Resources:

• David Deida

[01:00:07] Change Can Only Happen Through You

• How the phrase paying the daddy bill names what happens when a woman unconsciously looks to her husband to make up for everything her father never gave her.
• Why the debt in Kristy’s case was, as Josh put it, stacked in gold bars: a father who screamed in the delivery room and left before she had words.
• How the biology and the reality aligned for Kristy meant that she had to actually reorganize her inner world first, not wait for her husband to change.

[01:01:25] The Doorless Hallway

• How Kristy rebuilt her capacity to be in her body through meditation, the Safe and Sound Protocol, therapy, and breathwork while simultaneously being too ill to walk around the block.
• Why the doorless hallway is the place where life eventually gives you something you cannot outrun, and what that experience of having nothing left to distract yourself with actually opens.
• What happened when she stopped having the energy to prop up all the stories she had been carrying.
• Why the question “can I love myself for absolutely no reason” is both the simplest and the most devastating question to actually sit with.
• How a Louise Hay meditation containing two sentences changed something in her body that years of other work had not been able to reach.
• Why she would no longer withhold her own love and approval from herself for any reason.
• Self-forgiveness is the specific mechanism through which shame, understood as a mistaken belief rather than just a feeling, finally begins to move.

Resources:

• Safe and Sound Protocol
• Louise Hay

[01:13:20] The Law of Correspondence in Marriage

• How the hermetic principle of as above so below describes what happened in Kristy’s marriage.
• Why relationships are systems of mutual influence, and why what you put into the space between two people is the only thing you actually have the power to tend.
• How her husband’s withdrawal was not a lack of love but a trauma response that she reflected back to him.
• Why relational power is the natural outcome of self-possession, not of strategy.
• What the difference is between self-possession for the feminine and self-containment for the masculine.
• How a woman who is self-possessed, not needing anything from the men around her but relishing receiving, creates a completely different quality of response in the men in her life.

[01:21:30] Polarity Is the Natural Outcome of Differentiation

• Why pursuing polarity produces conflict instead of desire, because polarity is never a strategy but the natural outcome of two people who know themselves.
• What good communication actually looks like.
• Why bringing your needs, wishes, and longings forward and tolerating not knowing whether they will be met is the precise definition of relational courage.
• How differentiation means being able to stand in a different place than your partner and still feel closeness rather than distance.
• How symbiotic enmeshment, the belief that you are the same person, is the early stage of love and cannot sustain polarity or Eros long term.
• Why the path to a passionate and alive relationship requires becoming more differentiated, not more alike.
• How oxytocin and cortisol are antagonistic hormones, meaning that when stress goes up, the hormone that creates relaxation and lovingness goes down.
• Why a woman’s nervous system is specifically regulated by oxytocin and what that means when she is carrying any amount of sustained stress.
• How a woman’s mother story, meaning any experience of inaccurate or inconsistent attunement from her own mother, is activated the moment she delivers her first child.
• Why Kristy could walk into a postpartum room and immediately feel the mother story operating in the woman’s body before a single word was exchanged.
• What she realized she was actually teaching how to attune to the self enough that the body could finally let down.

[01:31:45] Children Inherit What Has Not Been Processed

• Why children are the unfinished business of their parents.
• How the body does not distinguish between then and now.
• Why being a cycle breaker is not glamorous and she would never announce that she was one, because calling it on yourself means you will get it.
• How her great-grandmother came to America from Wales at 14 and enrolled in nursing school the next day.
• Why the day she made the pilgrimage to the hospital where she was born she made a commitment to stop participating in self-hatred.

[01:35:55] Men Have Relational Needs Too

• How the narrative that women want more in relationships and men just want sex or are always taking does a profound disservice to everyone in the room.
• What raising two sons taught Kristy about men that her women’s college education could not.
• What the shaman psychotherapist told her when her boys were five and three, framing the three questions of the masculine as: can I eat it, can I penetrate it, can I kill it.
• Why those three questions point to a man’s desire to take in, to merge with, and to come to the still point inside intensity, and why none of that is actually threatening when understood correctly.
• Why demonizing male desire has real costs, and why a man’s longing for warmth, tenderness, aliveness, and being truly known by a woman is one of the most real and underacknowledged relational hungers there is.

[01:41:25] The War of the Sexes Is an Illusion

• How social media and Hollywood actively profit from keeping men and women at each other’s throats, and why that makes what you consume a genuine health question.
• Why so much of the conversation in the relational space about masculine and feminine is focused on performance when the actual answer is self-possession and honest presence.
• How the relief Josh feels hearing that it is not all on the man’s shoulders points to a truth that men almost never get to say out loud.
• Why for most men, having done everything they know how to do and still having it perceived as not enough is one of the most quietly devastating experiences in a marriage.
• How the path forward always begins with withdrawing attention from what the other person is doing and returning it to your own side of the relationship.
• How the question is not whether you are doing enough for your relationship but whether you are full enough of your own love to have anything genuine to offer.
• Why self reverence looks like finding out what is draining your life force and taking that seriously.
• Why asking where you are withholding your own love and approval from yourself is a more useful question than asking what your husband needs to change.
• How nervous system regulation, learning to tell the difference between a feeling and a perception, and coming back into the body are the practical tools underneath everything else.

Leave Wellness + Wisdom a Review on Apple Podcasts

All Resources From This Episode

• Kristy Scher
• David Deida
• Safe and Sound Protocol
• Louise Hay