Soulmate Skills

My beloved soulmate, Jim, has died.  I was right beside him; my head touching him, my hand holding his.  He was surrounded in love as his heart fluttered and stopped.  To have had him as my husband, colleague and soulmate was the greatest gift of my life.  I am so grateful.  We are planning a Celebration of Jim’s Life for later this week.  I will keep you posted.  With love and gratitude, Kathryn

“Stay near me.  Speak my name.”  Those lines are from the poem, “Midcentury Love Letter;” very special to us.  That second sentence is what we want to point out to you today.  Specifically, that there is power in speaking your partner’s name.  Business people know this principle.  We all love to hear our name.  Now here’s a variation on that for lovers.  Get in touch with your adoration of your beloved, and then whisper–yes, whisper their name in their ear–four times.  It’s magical.  Here’s how I wrote in in my letter to Jim a month before our marriage:  “Oh, Jim, I hold you in my arms and hear you lose yourself in a litany of whispered ‘Kathys.’”  It was profound.   If you try this, you’ll experience the deepest power of speaking their name.

Quiz Question:  Have I ever felt taken advantage of?  If you answered “Yes,”  we have help for you.  We’re drawing here from p. 102 of our book, Disarming Your Inner Critic (James Elliott with Kathryn Elliott).  “You may give more than you want to give, and your own needs may go unmet.  You feel used and taken advantage of.  You’ll have plenty of resentment and anger, because you know deep down that you must really be defective if you have to give so many things just to get someone to like you and stay with you.”  Of course, you suppress the anger because your Inner Critic tells you it would surely drive the other person away.  Now, there’s the heart of the problem.  It’s your Inner Critic driving all this.  The good news is, we’ve just exposed your Inner Critic’s hidden role in your allowing yourself to be taken advantage of.  You can get free.  Label it first.  “That’s my Inner Critic telling me I have to say yes, to give more than I really want to.”  Then get released, using one of our powerful challenging statements to the Inner Critic.  We love it when people get free.  You will too.

For the first time ever, we have a vegetable garden!  A wonderful friend planted it in our back yard as a gift to us.  Now, we have a profusion of cucumbers and tomatoes.  It’s the extravagance of spring right before our very eyes.  In this very intimate experience of nature we see a metaphor for the nature of love.  At the heart of love is extravagance.  In reading through our 1989 love letters, I found my meditation on this.  I wrote Jim, “Love in all its Extravagance has open hands.  It gives and doesn’t fret or point the finger at motive of the receiver.  No chiding, no tight-lipped, parsimonious welcome.  It has open arms.  It runs to meet its beloved.”  So, go ahead.  Be extravagant in your loving.  It’s the nature of love.

You’ve seen baboons charge, right?   Arms rigid.  Chest out.  Nostrils huffing.  We humans do that too–or some version of it when we’re angry.  It’s scary.   And it’s meant to be.  Translated it says, “I’m feeling threatened.  Afraid I’m being attacked.  I’m going to protect myself by scaring you with my anger.”  Hmm.  Sound familiar?  That’s because we humans do this too.  When feeling threatened, we puff up with anger also.  Did you know that the reason you feel scared of the other person’s anger is because their anger is meant to scare you?  Want to know what their anger is really about?  It’s that they’re trying to ward off an Inner Critic event.  I learned this personally by experiencing it myself.  And we help our counseling clients make this connection in themselves.  When our Inner Critic pounces, it makes us feel guilty, defective, shameful, inferior, and, of course, scared.  That feels so awful, we’ll do anything to stop it.  That includes resorting to anger to scare our partner who is triggering our Inner Critic, often by such innocent behavior as making a request of us.  We have a solution the baboon does not:  We can use our evolved brain to challenge our Inner Critic.  Then we don’t have to resort to anger.  Ah!  Peace will reign.*

For more on anger and the Inner Critic, read Ch. 7 of James Elliott and Kathryn Elliott’s book, Disarming Your Inner Critic, available here on our Products page and at amazon.com.

Once you find your soulmate, you’re going to want to make that love last.  We know.  When we found each other 22 years ago, we valued each other so highly, we wanted an eternal love.  Jim was wise enough to know the key ingredient it would take.  It wasn’t our white-hot attraction to each other (though that helps).  It wasn’t just that we were compatible (though that was important too).  It was skills.  We’ve needed very specific and unique skills, like requesting, challenging our Inner Critic, retrieval skills following a glitch, and more.  You’ll need these too.  We’ve shared some with you on our Skills page of this website.  There are more in our book, Disarming Your Inner Critic (James Elliott, Ph.D. and Kathryn Elliott, Ph.D.).  We teach more in our seminars.  We use them in our counseling with couples.  Yes, you can make love last.  In fact, if you use these skills, your love will grow.  Now, that’s a formula for bliss.