Feminine Intelligence in Personal Boundaries

by Paul Dobransky, M.D. – M.D. – for for Women’s Psychology Magazine ©2011, Women’s Happiness Magazine, all rights reserved.

F e m i n i n e I n t el el l i g e n c e i n P e r s o n a l B o u n d a r i e s

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:::TABLE OF CONTENTS::: INTRODUCTI ON………………………………………………………………………..4 DAY ONE: BOUNDARIES WITH MEN CHAPTER ONE: THE MEANING OF A PERSONAL BOUNDARY….……………7 CHAPTER TWO: WHAT MAKES A WOMAN‟S BOUNDARY SPECIAL………..12

CHAPTER THREE: BOUNDARIES IN COURTSHIP……………………...………30 CHAPTER FOUR: BALANCING IN MALE AND FEMALE…….…...…………….39 DAY TWO: BOUNDARIES AT WORK AND WITH CHILDREN CHAPTER FIVE: FEMININE BOUNDARIES AT WORK………...………………..61 CHAPTER SIX: FACING THE WILD ANIMALS …………………...………………81 CHAPTER SEVEN: THE RIVER STYX BOUNDARIES ………………………….84 CHAPTER EIGHT: YOUR CREATIVITY AND CHILDREN ………………...…… 91 DAY THREE: BOUNDARIES WITH FRIENDS, RESOURCES AND LIFE FORGIVENESS…………… ESS……………………… ………….103 CHAPTER NINE: BOUNDARIES AND FORGIVEN

CHAPTER TEN: DEFENSIVENESS AND FRIENDSHIP……………….……….106 CHAPTER ELEVEN: BEING UNDERSTOOD ………………….………………..120 CHAPTER TWELVE: BOUNDARIES IN BALANCE…….……………………….135

www .womenshapp iness.com

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:::TABLE OF CONTENTS::: INTRODUCTI ON………………………………………………………………………..4 DAY ONE: BOUNDARIES WITH MEN CHAPTER ONE: THE MEANING OF A PERSONAL BOUNDARY….……………7 CHAPTER TWO: WHAT MAKES A WOMAN‟S BOUNDARY SPECIAL………..12

CHAPTER THREE: BOUNDARIES IN COURTSHIP……………………...………30 CHAPTER FOUR: BALANCING IN MALE AND FEMALE…….…...…………….39 DAY TWO: BOUNDARIES AT WORK AND WITH CHILDREN CHAPTER FIVE: FEMININE BOUNDARIES AT WORK………...………………..61 CHAPTER SIX: FACING THE WILD ANIMALS …………………...………………81 CHAPTER SEVEN: THE RIVER STYX BOUNDARIES ………………………….84 CHAPTER EIGHT: YOUR CREATIVITY AND CHILDREN ………………...…… 91 DAY THREE: BOUNDARIES WITH FRIENDS, RESOURCES AND LIFE FORGIVENESS…………… ESS……………………… ………….103 CHAPTER NINE: BOUNDARIES AND FORGIVEN

CHAPTER TEN: DEFENSIVENESS AND FRIENDSHIP……………….……….106 CHAPTER ELEVEN: BEING UNDERSTOOD ………………….………………..120 CHAPTER TWELVE: BOUNDARIES IN BALANCE…….……………………….135


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For Laurie


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F e m i n i n e I n t el l i g e n c e i n P e r s o n a l B o u n d a r i e s

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:::INTRODUCTION::: Hi, and welcome. This is Dr. Paul from http://www.womenshappiness.com and Women’s Happiness Magazine, and welcome to Feminine Intelligence in Personal Boundaries. We are going to divide this program into three sections, and they are going to relate to some of the major areas of a woman‟s life. Today, we‟re going to be talking about boundaries with men and in relationships, specifically romantic relationships. Then tomorrow, we‟re going to cover career and children, and then day three, we‟re going to cover friends and your identity as a woman in general, being a woman. So these are the major areas of a woman‟s life, and in preparing this program and even conceiving this program, a lot of what we were thinking is that the subject of boundaries, www .womenshapp iness.com

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which is heavily covered in a technical way, how they work in the MindOS Mastery Program, and we were also thinking about the idea of femininity and feminine instinct, and how we‟ve divided that up into all of its various traits or components, skills, and instincts, so to speak. We realized that combining these two ideas together, what are boundaries and how they work, and what is feminine instinct or femininity, combining feminine instincts with boundaries themselves would be a set of really powerful skills. And at the same time, a lot of our programs are very educational, at times philosophy-based A lot of philosophy and psychology, of course, is involved in our core programs. Very educational. And yet at the same time, a lot of women have approached us over the years and said, “Hey, we‟d like some practical applications. We‟d like some exercises to do, some specific little tricks or tactics to use.” On a weekly basis when we do teleseminars as part of the Women‟s Happiness On Demand Program , we certainly come up with those on the fly, so to speak, as we hear women‟s stories, specific challenges they‟re having, specific things they want to work on. We thought, “What about some universal exercises or tactics or tips or tricks, if you will even, to use and sort of have in your handbag just ready to pull out for the right situation.” You know, that‟s what a tactic is anyway.

So you could call our main programs, MindOS Mastery and the Complete Feminine Empowerment Program , which is what explains feminine instincts, and then finally KWML Mastery, which is about choosing friends and finding love in terms of personality style. You could think of those as strategic, meaning you understand the broad strokes of what‟s going on in life and in your own psychology and that of men.


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Add to that a Seventh Sense Program, which is all about romance and courtship. But consider this program our first outing in getting very tactical as opposed to just strategic. So what we‟re going to do as a method, first, let‟s talk a little bit about what boundaries even are and how they work briefly, and if you want much, much more on that, that‟s MindOS Mastery.

And then I‟m going to give you a little bit about what our systems involve as far as understanding femininity and feminine instinct, and you know, its counterparts of masculinity and masculine instinct, and we‟ll see how we can combine these together to make ourselves some exercises and some tactics.


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:::CHAPTER ONE::: :::THE MEANING OF A PERSONAL BOUNDARY::: Well first off, the general basics of boundaries are that they involve what is yours, and only yours, versus what belongs to others. And one of the big things in all of our programs is that they‟re highly visual. I use a lot of diagrams to explain psychology concepts, and talking about boundaries is one of the most useful, visual representations for helping you really master psychology. I use a circle to describe a boundary, and you‟re inside the circle.

The circle belongs to you. It‟s your boundary, and there are a lot of features to how it works.

It for one acts like a shield against stresses outside of you. I you have a solid boundary, the stresses bounce off, so to speak, but it also acts like a tank. Almost like a gas tank or a jar. You know, it contains your resources as a person, contains your psychological resources. Not just money as a resource, although that‟s true. But your time, your energy, your self-esteem is contained in it.

Your freedom to make decisions is contained in it. The events of your life, your life story, your identity, all the history of your life and what makes you very unique, that‟s all www .womenshapp iness.com

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contained in it as well. And so in this sense, it‟s both a tank and a shield if you can imagine a circle and you‟re inside the circle.

Now you probably have heard the phrase thin skinned before, or, “Wow, she sure has a thick skin,” or, “She‟s being too thin skinned,” or, “That man is being too thin skinned,” or you‟ve heard the phrase, “You really get under my skin.” There‟s even a song with that as a title.

Well, are they talking about a real skin? No. They‟re talking about a psychological skin. So your boundary is like a skin, only it‟s a psychological skin, a skin around your identity or around your soul or around your psyche. If you could imagine a thick versus thin skin, then obviously, we all have different qualities to our boundary. Sometimes, we say a person is a strong person even if they have a small body. Well, a strong person would be a person with a very solid boundary that is maybe thick or protective or just plain strong. It doesn‟t have any gaps or what I call holes in it.

Now a person who is thin skinned or things to easily get under their skin or you might say they‟re an irritable person or an easily overwhelmed person, any time we use vague, general terms like this, like overwhelm or confuse or out of sorts, any kind of vague terminology that we use about psychology is often a reflection of the quality of the person‟s boundary. So someone with thin skin would have a lot of holes in their boundary, and holes in the boundary are essentially places where we suffer. The definition of suffering I borrow from Buddhists, which is simply that we try to “control things that we don‟t control.” That‟s where we are bossy or pushy, or on the flip side, we‟re forlorn and desolate because things don‟t go our way.


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We really want things to go our way. We want control over the world around us, or at least over our stresses. We want stresses to go away. Well, when we have holes in our boundary, stress can get in very easily and overwhelm us, make us feel bad. People can invade our space, rob us of our time, or even our money or our energy. They can drain our energy, which I call self-esteem in MindOS, and you see the problem. There‟s a hole in the boundary. “Suffering” is when we waste our resources psychologically or our energy or time or money. Whatever it may be, and let them drain out those holes in the boundary, wishing that by letting people take from us or burning a lot of energy on the uncontrollable that somehow we could “get control. ”

That happens through those holes of the boundary. So, what the holes in the boundary end up amounting to is difficulty with the word NO , where we won‟t take no for an answer or we don‟t like to hear no for an answer from the world. An example of this, uncontrollable stresses would include traffic or weather or the actions of other people. And today‟s talk is about men and romance in using boundaries.

When a man says or does something or won‟t do something or say something that you wish he would, if you burn energy and burn energy and burn time on that, you‟re suffering. So you have a hole in your boundary for that man. On the flip side, there is no intimacy or romance or romantic love without the ability to open up the boundary to another person and to share who you really are with them and to know who they really are. There‟s kind of a tricky bala nce point with this, where if we had thick boundaries or thick skin and were never open to another person - well then, we can never have true intimacy www .womenshapp iness.com

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Feminin e Intelligence in Personal Bou ndari es

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with another person. And a lot of people, both men and women, fall into that scenario where they‟ve been burned at love and end up sort of closing off to the whole possibility of love, being self-protective, but at the same time lonely because they don‟t have intimacy. They‟ve closed off their boundary, closed all the holes, shut the doors, so to speak, a nd aren‟t open to love. So that‟s going to be our starting point in thinking about how can we be more sophisticated in borrowing a little bit from the MindOS Mastery Program, about boundaries, and borrowing a little bit from the Complete Feminine Empowerment Program about feminine instincts.

DAY ONE: BOUNDARIES WITH MEN


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:::CHAPTER ONE::: :::WHAT MAKES A WOMAN‟S BOUNDARY::: www .womenshapp iness.com

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We‟ll be covering a first instinctual boundary, if you will, in the form of the Greek goddess Selene . And I‟m going to tell you a little bit about her in a minute, but let‟s talk a little bit about feminine instincts and what are they, and why would I talk about Greek gods or goddesses or any set of mythologic figures. One of the ideas in the Complete Feminine Empowerment Program is that if we were to look at what is feminine and what is masculine, those terms apply to all women ever born and all men ever born. What is feminine or masculine is going to be a universal in each gender, and so I was thinking about how can we use literature or examples from some body of work to illustrate in story form this concept of what is feminine or what is masculine, and I thought to mythology for that reason because stories that last thousands of years, hundreds or thousands of years must certainly speak to universals about people or they wouldn‟t last as stories. They‟d be more like an art house film that‟s popular for a year and then everyone forgets about it. That‟s because it was so quirky and individual to the writer or director. But ancient myths speak to universals, and so they last as stories, and they re-interpreted and re-interpreted.

Shakespeare is all Greek mythology underneath, and modern Oscar winning films are all Shakespeare underneath and Greek mythology underneath them. So as a result, these are highly useful stories to use, these Greek myths. Now why being with the story of Selene? Well, one of the things I was thinking in preparing this is that Selene is the Greek goddess of love affairs and of crazy, stupid love, just sort of putting yourself out there. Being in love with love itself, and I thought what better a place to begin except to open your boundary in the first place.


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Those of you who have been burned in the past or have problems with men and decide to take a break, take yourself off the market, this will be useful for. But it‟ll also be useful for someone who is already in the thick of this kind of thinking, too, because we want to apply some boundaries to the story of Selene. Now a little bit about her. In art, she‟s generally shown as a beautiful woman with a pale face, long black hair, and she rides a silver chariot. Silver is her metal, her color, and she‟s known for being a great lover, a lover of love itself.

She madly fell in love with mortal men, hunters and shepherds and this sort of thing, and she had a lot of different love affairs. She also at one point bore the chief god Zeus a daughter, whose name was Pandia, which means utterly shining. So you see this shining motif in a lot of her stories. Silver is her metal. Her daughter‟s name means utterly shining, and the goddess of the full moon, specifically.

There‟s something about light and shining and intense energy to her, and that is symbolic of passion. In our program, Complete Feminine Empowerment, we talk a lot about the word passion and what does it mean. So you can go into that program to learn a lot more about the word and its importance, but passion represents this uncontrollable energy. It‟s the most powerful force in human psychology, but if you could imagine the usefulness of this whole program, why talk about boundaries and passion at the same time.

Well, passion that is just unchecked, un-braked, un-steered, misdirected or not directed at all is just an explosion. It‟s just a mess. But if you could imagine passion as the ultimate energy or force in us, if it could be directed and steered and www .womenshapp iness.com

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channeled to the right places in your life, well that would be applying a boundary to it. So one of our big motifs that we often use to explain peoples‟ behavior is that if somebody has poor boundaries, they are just naturally a passionate person because we‟ve all got passion.

Passion, and the Selene Boundary Passion is one and the same as your level of femininity, or as a man, it‟s his level of masculinity. But if you could imagine unbridled passion that isn‟t steered or checked, then your own femininity or a man‟s own masculinity is just an explosion that doesn‟t create anything new. It doesn‟t do any good work. It doesn‟t build a life. It doesn‟t build a romance to last. So we have to put a boundary on it. And in so doing, we can contain the passion, but let it out at the same time, and let it out to the right places and toward the right people, and we are vetting and checking the right people for their qualities to fit our lives and to fit into a romance. So in thinking about Selene, I‟d like to name a new kind of psychological skill for you, and we could call it a Selene Boundary, and it simply means being open to love.

It means being open to having passion and to expressing passion. But let‟s keep in mind that we have to have some wisdom in how we express it and to whom and put it to work to build our lives. So the specific skill I would like you to think of in considering when you are using a Selene Boundary, if you will, is whenever you meet a man, maybe a new man, or you think of the man that you‟re currently with and problems arise or there‟s a lack of passion or you notice the man is not being so friendly or you‟re in conflict or maybe you‟re lonely or you have a hard time meeting men, decide if you want to feel love or fear, love or anger, love or resentment, and imagine that you have the power to open a door or leave it closed. www .womenshapp iness.com

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And the door is silver, solid si lver, and it‟s your door, and it needs your unique touches to it. It makes you you. That‟s your speci al door, and it is your Selene Boundary, and you can open it or close it. Sometimes there‟s a need in your life to consciously, purposely let go and open yourself to other people and to being passionate.

So I hope you find that useful. Let‟s see if we can have some brief comments about this concept of a Selene boundary and imagine a silver door that you decorate in your way so that it is yours, and it is what you sometimes will need to open to get more passion your surroundings to express it more, and importantly, to let other people, men specifically, know that you are feminine, you are open to a relationship. You‟re open to meeting new people or to rebooting whatever is going on in the current relationship.

Do you want love or fear? If you want love, you need to open the Selene Boundary, the silver door. Do you want love or anger? If you want love, you‟ve got to open that silver door. Do you want love or resentment?

If you want love, you need to open that silver door, the Selene boundary. Any thoughts? Any reaction to a Selene Boundary? ArtMuse:

Hey, Dr. Paul. Sorry, I had to un-mute myself. This is Laura – “ArtMuse” from the Women‟s On Demand Forums.


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Dr. Paul:

Hey there.

ArtMuse:

It‟s a wonderful analogy. I love it. I was just looking up some meanings just for silver in itself, and I‟m sure that there‟s something that also relates to this idea of using that door as a boundary that you can open or close at your discretion depending on the situation and the results you desire when interacting with a man.

Dr. Paul:

Well, that sounds good. I‟m sure there‟s a lot of meaning in silver, and that‟s something that we ought to add to the program, something we could further discuss tomorrow as well and include in the workbook and the e-book version of this.

This is one of those exercises or tips that may not be naturally intuitive to you because a lot of the things that have to do with boundaries involve the learning we can only get through others, through their feedback to us. A lot of times, in some of our programs like MindOS Program when I talk about boundaries, I‟ll bring back that old film with Tom Hanks, Castaway, where he‟s stranded on an island, and he has to paint a face on a volleyball just to have human companionship. And part of the reason for that is we can‟t grow or even have a sense that we exist without interactions with others where our boundary circle bounces against someone else‟s boundary, and it‟s the learning we do through that that makes our boundaries more mature and more sophisticated in this way.

So a Selene Boundary would be an example of one where only through dating and interaction with men, if we‟re talking about romance here, is statements like “ why are you so bold?” or “why aren‟t you more excited?” or “do you love me?” That kind of thing, that feedback would be a tip that “oh my gosh, I‟m not expressing passion.” You might feel it inside, but not be expressing it. And maybe there‟s a need to open that “boundary door.” www .womenshapp iness.com

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Now the dangerous do wnside of this is if you don‟t grow more skills around this, other boundary skills, you don‟t want to just be a bon vivant, you know, out in the world, dating every man and not really thinking at all about their qualities or whether they‟re right for you. And that‟s one of the reasons we have the Seventh Sense Program . It‟s a courtship system, and the whole purpose of courtship is to screen and vet and forfeit your life and to march through the exact steps of the three kinds of attraction that we cover there. So don‟t just permanently be a Selene, but there is a time and a place to open up your door to love.

The Aphrodite Boundary Let‟s move onto the next one. We‟re g oing to go from being exceptionally passionate and at risk of leaving the “boundary door” open permanently – we‟ve got to remember that doors open and close. Let‟s move to mature romantic love in the form of Aphrodite. Now there‟s a lot to Aphrodite. Sh e represents a lot of different psychological traits in women. Everything from being a mature maternal goddess – she is, after all, mother. She‟s mother to Eros, or Cupid, but she‟s also considered a goddess of the feminine form, the female body, and she is a goddess of mature love, romantic love, and the goddess of beauty, the goddess of physical beauty, and she‟s also a star in the ancient sky.

So being both mature and wise and clever, but simultaneously, she‟s a star in the morning sky. She‟s got both passion and boundaries at the same time. One of the stories that‟s very foundational that I cover in its entirety in the Complete Feminine Empowerment Program is www .womenshapp iness.com

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the story of Eros and Psyche or Cupid and psyche, and Psyche is a representation of girlish thinking, and she marries Eros, she marries Cupid. There‟s a whole wonderful story to that. But part of the process is that Aphrodite represents the mother-in-law figure to Psyche, and she has to “school” the girl, Psyche, in the ways of marriage to make her fit for her son, fit for marriage, so to speak.

Aphrodite has all of the boundary knowledge and passion knowledge involving committed relationships and what makes them work.

She tests Psyche and tests her and puts her through trials, and Psyche hates this. It‟s the risk of death if she fails Aphrodite‟s test. But at the end of it all, it makes her a mature woman ready for marriage and fit for marriage. So a little side note to Aphrodite Boundaries are that without good boundaries, we cannot have a mature, lasting, romantic relationship. We‟re not fit for marriage, and that means man or woman if we can‟t have the boundaries.

This is a very core exercise I may have used once before in the MindOS Program, and I teach it to both women and men, but I think it really illustrates the essence of how boundaries work in relationships. The goal would be, “How can I be both loving and firm at the same time?” Firm like a mother-in-law, having standards and benchmarks and what I will accept and not accept. “What are my deal breakers? ”

But also loving and passionate at the same time.


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Those of you who have been burned before by a man and found yourself still feeling some resentment about that might have moved on to other relationships and then found one or two of those didn‟t go so well either afterward and maybe came to the conclusion that all men are jerks or came to the conclusion, “Why do I always mess this up,” or, “Why do I keep meeting the same man, same kind of man? When am I ever going to find good love?” Well, what if on the flip side, you could have still been carrying some resentment, and maybe as they say in the Bible, hid your light under a bushel, hid your passion, too afraid to that risk again. And the man, the new man that you dated just didn‟t feel your passion, didn‟t feel you express it. They needed you to have more of a Selene Boundary and open up some. With the Aphrodite boundary would be the ability to truly have a door that both opens and closes and to have some judgment to it. It isn‟t permanently closed. It isn‟t permanently open, either.

The exercise for using an Aphrodite boundary, being both loving and firm, passionate and firm at the same time is simply to always imagine a circle around yourself, and inside it is a star. And that‟s you. And you have two feet in the circle. The circle is on the ground. And the man has a circle, too. That‟s his boundary.

Well, if you just keep both feet in your circle, then there is no intimacy. There‟s no communication, there‟s no sharing. So if you want a romantic relationship, you have to put one foot inside the other per son‟s circle, and maybe at times, you‟ll put both feet in briefly to really get wrapped into his world to really feel it. And maybe also feel protected by his strong boundary. You want a man with a strong boundary.


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In times when you feel afraid or co nfused or don‟t know what to do, you might briefly put both of your feet into his circle, but you don‟t want them permanently in there. You always want some grounding, one foot as much as possible, in your own circle, so you‟re kind of straddling the circles with a man. And that‟s the ideal balance in you guys. Most of the time, you want one foot in your own circle and one foot in the man‟s circle. Sometimes you‟ll put two in his, but not for too long. Just in times when you really need to borrow his strength. Sometimes, you might put both feet back in your own circle. If you get some hurt feelings or you have a fight, you might retreat. But again, not forever. You want to spend a little bit of time with both feet in your own circle, a little bit of time with both feet in his circle, but most of the time with one foot in each, and that would be perfect intimacy. But also, you‟re having your own identity and grounding. That would be an Aphrodite Boundary. These twin forces get you completely ready to start dating, to start a relationship and the be ready for a love that‟s reliable and mature – the feminine passion of the Selene Boundary and the wise, high-character behavior of the Aphrodite Boundary.


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:::CHAPTER TWO::: ::THE BOUNDARIES OF COMMITTED RELATIONSHIPS::

Let‟s move on to the next one.

Demeter. A Demeter Boundary. There‟s a great story to Demeter I covered in the Complete Feminine Empowerment Program. But essentially, Demeter is the goddess of agriculture and the harvest.


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She‟s also the goddess of the sanctity of marriage and commitment, and I‟d like for you to think of her in brief as being an inspiration for what value investment in a relationship is.

What is “investment ” worth, and how does patience pair with that? The idea of investing in a man or a relationship with equal investment in yourself such that some day, there is a harvest. There is a feast. The feast honoring the goddess of the harvest in you. If you think about the image of a huge feast or celebration, that‟s something that‟s neither for the man or for you alone. It‟s to be shared. It‟s a feast for all. So it‟s a nice image. This Demeter Boundary.

In the story of Demeter, she has a daughter, Persephone, who we will cover next, and their story explains the seasons. Why are there four seasons? In essence, her daughter, Persephone, is kidnapped by Hades and taken into the underworld, and she is beside herself with grief at her kidnapped daughter and searches high and low for where she may be. She‟s in the underworld, and she punishes the whole earth by making all of the beautiful plans go away, and that is winter. And finally, a deal is struck: The earth is dying. There‟s no food, and all the other gods finally say, “Okay, okay, you win. We‟ll find your daughter.”

They find that she in the underworld, and she is married to Hades now. So this is another mother-in-law kind of – mother in law to the man – goddess, but the deal that is eventually struck is that her daughter will be with her www .womenshapp iness.com

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husband in the underworld for two-thirds of the year, but she will be let out to return to her mother on the surface of the earth for one-third of the year.

It‟s a two -thirds, one-third division of time spent, and it also represents the very close emotional ties that women have with each other, and certainly, with their own mothers‟ sense of identity. You could extend that to your friendships because women get a lot of mothering and give a lot of mothering within their friendships with other women. In thinking of friends, family, and your mother, a division of one-third, two-thirds of your time and resources is what this myth is recommending to us and has for a couple thousand years. Right? A Demeter boundary helps you be patient for the harvest, so to speak, and investing in a man or a relationship and striking a balance with your friendships, family, and your own mother. Certainly, boundaries are then involved in that. This brings up another feature of boundaries for us that we talk about in MindOS Mastery, which is that boundaries help us budget. Because a boundary can have “doors” in it - that door can open and close according to where we want to invest and when and how, you see. If you were going to invest in something, wisely, you‟ve got to use a boundary that is mature, or it‟ll be a faulty investment. This is setting things up for us for thousands of years here saying the perfect ratio for dividing your time, your energy, your money, your care, your interest, your curiosity is onethird, two-thirds in a lasting romantic relationship that will be around for life if you so choose.


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One-third, two-thirds. That doesn‟t mean while you‟re a single person, you suddenly jump to spending two-thirds of your time with a man of interest. You work your way up to that as you get more intimate using your Aphrodite Boundary.

Ultimately, if you want a marriage that will last, this is recommending that the right division is one-third of you with your friends, mother, and family and two-thirds of you with the man. So the exercise would simply be – since this is about patience and harvesting and investment, you could – I actually jumped ahead there with the one-third, two-third thing. We‟re just going to begin with Demeter and say that it‟s all about patience, and there will be a harvest. So when a man says or does something or doesn‟t do something that you want him to do, imagine a circle, and inside the circle, you see ten, nine, eight, seven, six all the way down to one. It‟s ten seconds of patience. It‟s a time out, but it‟s reminding you to have a boundary that actually contains your desire for instant gratification, and then at the end of the count, analyze things anew and imagine your starting over in a new season.

Imagine winter as you are counting down the numbers in that circle from ten to one, and it‟s winter. And at the end, it has become spring. It‟s a new season. So Demeter and Persephone explain the seasons, and you‟ve heard many times probably that there are seasons in relationships. There is a winter, a spring, a summer, and a fall. So this is for patience. The Demeter Boundary is to basically say no to yourself for ten seconds to reacting passionately, containing your passion for ten seconds, your anger, your resentment, whatever it is, over what‟s going on, and imagine a new season at the end. www .womenshapp iness.com

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The Persephone Boundary Let‟s move right on to number four, which is the Persephone boundary. That‟s the other side of the story. Persephone who wed Hades, living in the underworld. If you leave Demeter behind now, the mother, and you go to the daughter, Persephone, she was kidnapped in the view of her mother, but to her, she has free will. She has decision-making power. And she let herself be taken by a man. She let herself be taken by Hades. The Persephone Boundary would be, again, about this onethird, two-third balance. What we‟re going to add to it, the notion that we pull from the steps of courtship. In the Seventh Sense Program, we talk about how there are these steps to attraction, steps to courtship, and one of the steps to really get a man into you and really just crazy for you in a way that will lead to being committed to each other is that for him to feel masculine, ther e‟s certain things you do. For you to feel feminine, there‟s certain things he does.

The higher your femininity and the higher his masculinity, the more sexually attracted you are to each other. One core foundation of a lasting relationship. One of the things that men instinctually need from a woman they are going to commit to - and this is not an ego weakness, it is just a masculine instinct - is they need to lead at something. You might even take a guess that they need to lead at twothirds of things. But Persephone allowed him to lead, and that is a key balance to be able to strike using boundaries. Because if you have good boundaries and you‟ve found a man who has good boundaries, letting him lead is not betraying yourself. www .womenshapp iness.com

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You are “letting” him. You are not being subordinate or a follower, but a partner. You have the right to not let him if you don‟t want to. But then again, you have the right to not be in that relationship either if you don‟t want to. So letting a man lead is not the same thing as being kidnapped or hijacked against your will.

You have the power to say yes or no, because of boundaries, and we are so used to viewing those as only being about saying NO that we forget that we are just as strong with boundaries when we actually make a purposeful decision to say YES. You might say yes two-thirds of the time, and you might say no one-third of the time with a man. I‟d like you to imagine as an exercise for using a Persephone boundary with men the balance between friends, family, and the man, and the balance of power or the balance of leading.

You might imagine your boundary is a gas gauge with a third of it as a piece of pie segment, and two-thirds of it as another segment. And see the one-third part of it as being your friends and family third or pie piece, and the two-thirds part of your boundary is being another pie piece, if you will. See both of these gas gauges fill up with your time spend, your energy spent, your resources spent. Now one of them might be pretty accelerated and start filling up too quickly to the neglect of the other. So if your pie piece for your friends and family and your own mother is much too small, it‟s a little sliver, then you‟re doing too much for the man or letting the man lead too much. It‟s too much of a sliver. But if it starts overtaking the whole circle, then the man‟s interest and attraction for you is dying. He doesn‟t feel as masculine. And that‟s not a weakness. It‟s just a psychological feature or fact of relationships.


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A one-third, two-third pie piece boundary diagram is your Persephone boundary, and that‟s number four. We are going to move on to number five next, but I will try opening the lines to see if there‟s any commentary on the Demeter boundary, which has to do with patience for the harvest, and imagining a countdown from ten to one, changing from winter to spring, and a Persephone boundary, which involves seeing your boundaries circle as having a one-third pie piece for your friends, family, and your own mother, and for how much you lead versus how much you let the man lead. Donna:

Can you hear me, Dr. Paul?

Dr. Paul:

Yes.

Donna:

Okay, I know this is about boundaries with men, but how – as adults, how do we apply this one-third boundary for family when you have aging parents? And if you need to refer this to another talk, I understand. But do you have a brief comment on that?

Dr. Paul:

Yeah, a thought in brief is that in MindOS, we talk about having a left brain and a right-brain. Our left brain is very linear thinking and logical, and our right brain is very creative and imaginative and multi-tasking. So this question I see as a call for more right brained thinking, more creative thinking where we combine needs together. A family story I dealt with quite some time ago was husband and wife who really loved each other, but had a father, his father, who lived with them. He was aged and getting some dementia and having some problems, and needing a lot of what accounts to nursing care that they were delivering, and the woman was doing a lot of the delivering. So was the man, but she was probably doing more. It was sort of tearing up their marriage until they realized, “Wait a minute. We don‟t have to be so linear about how we


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use our time. Maybe we could get him an amazing assisted living place to be, and we could then visit him all we want, but someone else is doing the work of the medical care.” So that‟s strategic creative thinking to solve a problem where there doesn‟t have to be a conflict where I either choose husband or family or family versus myself or husband versus myself. You don‟t have to make that choice when you get creative.

Donna:

Got it. Thank you.

:::CHAPTER THREE::: www .womenshapp iness.com

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:::THE BOUNDARIES OF COURTSHIP::: Iris:

So when you‟re talking about leadership, what I‟m wondering is would men who are not taking the lead, is there a way to encourage them to do so?

Dr. Paul:

Well, that gets us into courtship itself, which is in the Seventh Sense Program, a lot of which derives from what is called evolutionary psychology, the idea that we‟re not all meant to be with every other person of the opposite gender. We fit like puzzle pieces only with certain other people, and you know, if a man doesn‟t have the ability to lead, doesn‟t have that masculine trait to him coming out and expressed, then he‟s got work to do on himself, and it‟s not your job to be his therapist or his father. You know, ultimately, that‟s something a boy learns from a father. He may be disqualified from being appropriate for you or from you feeling passionate for him. That‟s part of what we do when we court or when we date. We are screening other people for their fit to our lives and our psychology.

Iris:

Thank you.

Dr. Paul:

Yes, that‟s his job to do, in other words. But if he has it, if he has masculinity, then by all means, twothirds of the time, let him express it in the form of leading something. And it d oesn‟t mean he leads everything. He doesn‟t have to do two -thirds of the finances, two-thirds of childcare, two-thirds of career, two- thirds of where you‟re going to live.

You can divvy up who leads and at what. Maybe according to what they‟re good at naturally and what feels like a more masculine role versus a feminine role. www .womenshapp iness.com

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You decide that. Matter of taste and style. But the sum total and a feel to him and you like you allow him to lead two-thirds of things, and you definitely say no to another third of things. You say, “No, this is what I‟m going to do.” It will preserve the relationship and definitely preserve the attraction. There‟s a lot that we get into about some of the ironies and surprises of what attracts us that we cover in the seventh sense program, so do not be offended by anything that can sound like political incorrectness if you will. It‟s just biology. If we really admit it to ourselves, there are a lot of things men complain about regarding women that secretly really attracts them to women, and there are a lot of things women complain about regarding men that secretly really attracts them to men. Even if they complain about it, that‟s kind of what I‟m talking about with this leadership division. It just is what it is. It‟s instinctual, and it‟s biological. It‟s not up for fads of culture, guiding it. It‟s been this way for all time, and will for the next several hundred thousand years of us evolving.

The Nemesis Boundary All right, guys, let‟s move on to number five. It is the goddess Nemesis.

Sometimes, we do each other wrong. So another big part of boundaries is that they are not just for always getting along with every person and forgetting every transgression. Sometimes our boundaries really clearly show us what has really gone over the line, an d this doesn‟t necessarily mean the relationship has to dissolve. It‟s just that it helps us recognize what really, really has gone over the line, has www .womenshapp iness.com

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crossed the boundary, gone through our circle, and done us damage. That applies equally to women and men. Nemesis is the goddess of divine justice and vengeance. Retribution against those succumbing to hubris is specifically what her role was. So when a man is truly arrogant, not just proud. This is another feature of MindOS Mastery that we talk about, and it‟s related to boundaries. What is the difference between healthy pride and unhealthy pride, or healthy pride versus arrogance or narcissism? Boundaries have everything to do with how narcissistic we are versus how mature we are. The more narcissistic we are, the more we tend to have holes in our boundary, and the more we tend to offend others and not realize we‟re cros sing over into their boundary and offending them. So it‟s something to consider. Iris:

Dr. Paul?

Dr. Paul:

Yes?

Iris:

Does arrogance also equal holes in the boundary and offense to others?

Dr. Paul:

Yes. I mean arrogance will – you know, arrogance could be self contained, and you don‟t even realize it‟s there, or it could be expressed or forced out onto others.

Iris:

I see.

Dr. Paul:

You know, I mean if somebody is quietly, secretly arrogant, then you‟d never know they‟re arrogant if it doesn‟t ever get expressed, but it‟s through holes in the boundary that you discover it because someone else is expressing it through the holes in their boundary.


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They don‟t realize it‟s offensive, but it is to you at least. So you have to let them know.

The goddess Nemesis is divine justice and vengeance. That doesn‟t mean war like destructive vengeance. Divine justice. It‟s a parallel to a different story for men. The Count of Monte Cristo. The theme is divine justice. It‟s mature, well boundaried justice. It‟s the kind of justice that a parent might use toward a child or God might use towards humans. You know, it‟s fair, but it‟s firm.

You might think of words like karma and fortune when thinking of a nemesis boundary. Another phrase that I used for this would be high character revenge or the revenge of a lady or a gentleman as opposed to silly, Jerry Spring trash television type revenge. You know? Now one of the features to Nemesis as the punisher of hubris is her nature is described as implacable revenge. It cannot be satiated. A question I would ask you about that would be is the implacable nature of her revenge something that you would want to keep inside yourself? Like you have an endless thirst for revenge. The man who broke up with you, the man who divorced you, the man who cheated on you. Whatever the man did, the man who offended you publicly, offended your mother, offended your friends, do you want to store that in you, or do you want to use a boundary to kind of push that back out into the world and let that belong to him?


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I would wager the latter. You don‟t want to hold onto a vengeance inside yourself. So interestingly, this notion of karma and something that cannot be satisfied as implacable would be something that you put back out into the man to let him deal with.

You know, his own offense would be something you give back to him instead of you storing it to kind of toxify the interior of your boundary. So the skill would be imagine that a man has done wrong, and imagine that your two boundary circles are on the two sides of a scale, like the scales of justice. And yours weighs heavy. He‟s done you wrong, and you‟re feeling heavy. You‟re down on the scale.

Take a shovel and scoop all the bad outside of your boundary and back onto him. Some of the conversational skills you would use with this is to say the word you. Like your cheating, your breakup, your anger, your. Use the word your. That‟s you shoveling the bad back out onto him. But if you want to preserve a relationship and have a hope of forgiveness and fairness, divine justice, imagine keeping the good. Let the good that he has done in your life stay in your boundary on your side of the scale and let it have weight, too. But shovel the bad back to him because he needs to metabolize that. He needs to come to terms with it.

AYou don‟t have to be a part of it. You don‟t have to carry it. And part of your forgiveness would involve getting that toxicity out of you and back to him. And if he‟s going to grow from the experience of having done wrong, he will go shovel it somewhere else or transform it, transmute it. Maybe he needs to go to therapy. He can go deal with that elsewhere. But don‟t shovel the good back to him. Keep that part to keep the scales balanced. We can have a lot more discussion about this in the next day‟s lesson - to kind of wrap up this subject, but it‟s an www .womenshapp iness.com

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interesting one for those who have been wronged and are maybe still in a marriage or maybe go to couples‟ counseling or would like to try to find a way to forgive and get over something to be very useful, and it could also be useful to boyfriend girlfriend relationships as well if you want to see if it‟s possible to grow from wrong having been done. Because one thing that‟s true about our free will is that we are definitely destined to make lots of mistakes. There is no perfect person who has never made a mistake.

Even a terrible mistake. The ability to forgive would come out of using this nemesis boundary, this divine justice. Not brutal, war like justice, but divine justice, lady like justice, high character revenge. So you see in a way the revenge is simply giving the bad back to the person wh o did it so you don‟t have to carry it. And nemesis was described as the winged balancer of life. Not the brutal warlord of life. The winged balancer of life. The “dark-faced daughter of justice. ” So use your nemesis boundary to scoop the bad that a man has done out of your boundary and back to his and keep the good.

The Snake Goddess Boundary Let‟s move on to something a little different. We have about 15 or 20 minutes left with this section until we meet again tomorrow.

The Snake Goddess. The Snake Goddess we have never talked about in any other program, but the snake goddess is seen in a lot of different cultures.


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The Minoans, specifically, if you want to learn more and look it up. And the snake goddess would be represented by holding a snake in each hand, and there‟s a piece to her that represents fertility and the creative instinct in women. And there‟s also a piece to it that is representative of a woman‟s healing and rebirth. Snakes have represented rebirth throughout history because they shed their skin. They‟re always new. Also of note, they give birth by way of hatching eggs, and the egg motif also being a very feminine symbol is useful to us as we look at the philosophy and the mythology of this. For our purposes , I‟d like you to think of the Snake G oddess or the Minoan snake goddess as representative of what do you do after you‟re done with Nemesis? You know, after you‟re done shoveling all the bad out. And what‟s left is you maybe feeling less hurt kind of because you‟ve gotten rid of the bad, but what next? It‟s time to shed your skin, so to speak.

A redo of you. It‟s a commonly seen little story you might find in a lot of magazines out there how after a breakup or after something bad happens, a woman might enjoy going out and remaking herself.

Going and attending to her physical appearance. She might get a haircut. She might get new clothing. She redoes her exterior. And this is a snake goddess boundary, or a snake boundary. Whether you‟re already in a relationship, still in one, or want to find one, in or out of a relationship, the snake boundary or snake goddess boundary is a willingness to go attend to your own needs for the purpose of growing or changing. You might say it‟s a tem porary “closing of the boundary. ”


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Anything else but you – but working on yourself and going inside and transforming. So the exercise involved with this would be for you to imagine your boundary around you with problems having been going on, stresses, or a man doing you wrong. Imagine your boundary is actually a skin, and imagine that whatever the problem is - is printed on the skin. Maybe it‟s the face of the man. It‟s printed on it, and imagine peeling this skin off and disposing of it, and all that‟s left is a fresh new skin, like a newborn. And your face is on it.

This is the boundary that you would use when others are demanding things of you. They want your time, your energy, your attent ion. But you‟ve neglected yourself for too long, or you‟re going through a change, and you need to go inside, and you need to attend to you and only you. That might include the demands of children, the demands of family and in laws and the demands of the man. And you still need to go inside and take care of you. Even if you‟re in a relationship that will last, this is something you can still do. It doesn‟t have to be something that happens just after revenge or justice. It could be something where you temporarily – not temporarily. You are shedding the problems of today, getting that skin off of you, and underneath is a brand new boundary that just has your face on it. These types of boundaries will help you immensely as you walk through the steps of courtship that we talk about in detail in the Seventh Sense Program.


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:::CHAPTER FOUR::: :::BALANCING MALE AND FEMALE::: Tony:

In our women‟s workshops, we‟ve talked a lot about just the very beginning stages of dating and feeling feminine – feeling femininity and so forth, and with the snake goddess boundary and so forth, you know, how much of this sort of is just femininity can be amplified, a person can feel more feminine.


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Or how a man can feel more masculine without there really having to be a dating situation there, or even sort of men in the picture, that you can raise your level of femininity and feel more like a woman without having to be actively dating someone at the time or even be out in the presence of men, and that helps down the road when you finally do get into a dating situation. You‟ve recovered your femininity, a woman has, or a man has recovered his masculinity.

Dr. Paul:

Yes.

Tony:

I can see the Snake Goddess Boundary doing that for you.

Dr. Paul:

Yes, you might be able to say that this Snake Boundary or Snake Goddess Boundary skill is a universal one. You can imagine this in the career domain, too, or the personal health domain too, or any kind of stress that you deal with. You can imagine this is printed on your boundary. It‟s a skin. These challenges, these stresses of today can be shed, and underneath, there is a brand new you. So you‟re right. It doesn‟t just have to be about then.

This is a universal one. Tony:

And if a man and a woman are in a relationship, I can give you sort of the male perspective on this a little bit. If a man and a woman were in a relationship, and there are boundary holes, and I think a lot of women when they‟re in a relationship, they think everything they do or everything related to their femininity has to be sort of connected to this man they‟re with and relating to him. And sometimes, men – if there‟s a boundary hole on both sides, men may sort of feel responsible or feel charged with


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her feeling like a woman at all times in the relationship, and I think what you might be saying is that even in a relationship, even if you‟re not just alone, you‟re in a relationship with someone, there‟s still time to retreat int o your boundary like the Snake Goddess and amplify your own femininity, sort of separated in a separate way from the guy you‟re with. And then, you know, you do n‟t feel that pressure to always have it connected to him. And maybe he doesn‟t feel that pressure to always have to provide that for you. And then you bring that back into the relationship. Dr. Paul:

Yes, that‟s right. You know, one of the things that we‟re often saying when we talk about the differences, instinctually, between masculine instincts and feminine instincts when we talk about relationships or we talk about men and women getting along in the workplace is that what is masculine is different from what is feminine. What is feminine is different from what is masculine. But that doesn‟t make them unequal. It j ust makes them different. When we‟re in a relationship that‟s going to last, we actually need those differences to come out and dance with each other to collaborate with each other. We need the differences. But how are men and women to be able to come together? Well, they have the same emotions. You know how we‟re always doing these analogies in the On Demand Teleseminars, where shoes are to a woman as computers are to a man, or the body is to a woman as the job is to the man? It‟s that they feel the exact same emotion over different scenarios or different events. So in this particular case, the Snake Boundary is the exact equivalent to a man‟s Hades Boundary or his need for a Batman‟s “Bat C ave” or a Superman‟s “Fortress of S olitude ,” or a physical space to go to in order to think.


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They‟re exactly equivalent, even tho ugh each gender uses it in a different sort of way. So this is your equivalent of the Hades instinct or a Hades boundary for men, which is an instinct to go find solitude, to think, or to transform or to be with yourself or to attend to yourself and your needs. And why would this instinct link to a boundary? Well, because you‟ll have to say no to a lot of people in order for you to get your needs met to go be alone, to go shed a skin of stress and let a new one appear underneath, a brand new you.

You know, I once went to a talk by another author, Deepak Chopra. And he‟s all into quantum physics and all this woo woo stuff, lofty stuff, but he gave this little speech. It was kind of interesting. He said, “You know, when I walk across the stage , each step I take, I have died to the last step, the prior step. There‟s a new me here. Now there‟s a new me here. Now there‟s a new me here,” as he walks across the stage.

It‟s also a kind of an interesting way of looking at our free will. Every time we do something new or make a personal change, there‟s still a nature to us that stays the same. It‟s our psyche, our soul, whatever you want to call it. But it‟s also evolved. It‟s truly something new, even though it‟s still us, and that‟s what this Snake Boundary or Snake Goddess Boundary can do for you.

The shedding of the stressful skin of the day to become a brand new you, day-to-day, if you want.

The Arachne and Ariadne Boundaries Let‟s go to our last one, which are two goddesse s that we‟re going to pair together. www .womenshapp iness.com

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And this is Arachne and Ariadne. The Arachne boundary versus the Ariadne boundary. And what is involved? The story of Arachne is a very interesting one that we tell in the Complete Feminine Empowerment Program , and the essence of it is that Arachne is a young girl who is very narcissistic, but very talented, too, and her gift is weaving. She‟s the most amazing weaver of tapest ries on earth, and she‟s young, and just very bright, very gifted. In psychology and psychiatry, we call this vertical splitting where somebody is very intellectually bright but has a lot of growing to do emotionally. The way the story goes, humans give her so much praise that she eventually starts offending the goddesses, like Aphrodite, and she ends up saying, “I‟m better than any goddess. I can weave these tapestries better than even the goddesses could weave,” and b am, lightning bolt. The challenge has been cast. And she ends up having to compete with goddesses using her weaving, and she is no match for them. She can make beautiful tapestries, and they‟re kind of girlish and perfect.

Too perfect, so as to be ignorant of the ignorance and pain in the real world of adults. Instead, she weaves perfect scenes of a Prince Charming and Snow White nature. The tapestry she weaves is of perfect romance, like a Romeo and Juliet up to the point of the tragedy. And it‟s kind of cute but silly, and she loses the contest. The goddesses, meanwhile - they weave the sunset, and they weave the moon, and they weave the wonders of nature itself.


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They don‟t even use thread or a tapestry, and there‟s no comparison.

Arachne loses, and she learns her lesson.

It‟s too late, almost, but she learns her lesson. She is doomed to die for losing this contest, but the goddesses have pity on her, and she begs them to not kill her and says, “I‟ve learned my lesson. I‟ll h onor you from now on. I realize my place in the world, that I‟m not all powerful.”

They show pity on her and say, “Okay. Instead of killing you, we will turn you into a spider,” and so she becomes a spider, and she gets to weave her web endlessly for all time as a spider.” So you know, that is a lesson for anyone, but specifically, she‟s a goddess, so it‟s a feminine lesson against hubris as a woman over very real talents that you have, and you could say this would be a universal one also in the workplace for us to discuss while we talk about career. How do you let your star shine and your talents really be known to other people? In a way where you have good boundaries at the same time, and you‟re good to other people, and you don‟t wittingly or unwittingly make them feel bad about themselves, even though you‟re so good at what you do. That‟s the lesson of Arachne.

If we were to apply this specifically to romantic relationships, that‟s why I want to bring in a second goddess here, who is Ariadne, and the sweet spot to hit with your boundaries would be somewhere in between these two. Ariadne is the long suffering wife of Bacchus, or Dionysus. And Dionysus is out partying all the time, and you know, he‟s always complaining to his wife, “Why are you being such a


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web blanket on everything? I‟m trying to enjoy life. Life is a party. Life is to be pleasurable and enjoyable.”

Ariadne goes along with it, and goes along with it, and goes along with it until she gets her heart broken repeatedly by this party animal, Dionysus or Bacchus. She is representative of kind of the opposite sort of boundary from Arachne. Arachne, you could say, has a lot of boundary holes through which she is a braggart to others, and you‟ve encountered maybe a lot of other women or men who were braggarts. And what is your reaction to other women that brag about their skills or brag about their job or brag about their looks or brag about all things they‟ve acquired in their life? They‟re being Arachne.

You also know women who don‟t brag, but also have holes in their boundary where they‟re too much of a doormat, where they let other people use them and take them for granted, take their supportiveness for granted. That would be them being Ariadne, the long suffering friend or the long suffering wife. Both have holes in their boundary. Both have weak boundaries, and both need to learn a lesson, but I want us to notice their spirit and their passions. If we could strike a balance between the two, we would have healthy pride and healthy self-respect. You don‟t want to be all Arachne , completely bragging to everyone about how great you are, but you don‟t want to be all Ariadne either, and just be an endless support to others and let yourself get taken for granted.

You also don‟t want to throw the core spirit of either of these goddesses out because of course, you ought to cultivate your talents and even express them out into the world and be proud of them with a well boundaried nature to you. One that is mutually self-respecting and respects others, too.


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You also don‟t want to be completely unsupportive of other people and just turn your back on Ariadne.

You want to be supportive of others. And if we‟re talking about romance, supportive of a man, but just with a good boundary, not to the point where it becomes unfair to you, and then you end up having to use Nemesis to get some justice, that you could have prevented harm from happening in the first place.

So if we want to apply this to your life as a final romantic boundary, we would say that an Arachne Boundary is being too much of a showoff, and it‟s something you have to recognize in yourself, but an Ariadne boundary is being too much of a helpmate to the point of doing yourself harm or betraying yourself. So how do we keep both good skills in nature without having either of them do you in or exhausting you? The skill to imagine for when you are having an Arachne Boundary is to imagine that every boast that you make is a thread, like a thread that a spider weaves, a web. And if you go about having healthy pride, and people ask you what you do with your talents, and you tell them when asked, “It‟s like the beauty and wonder of nature that a spider spinning its silk is.” So do that. But doing it too much, imagine web of boasts that actually t urns into a trap for you. You‟re caught in your own web. And that is lonely. You know, it was a lonely life through eternity that Arachne had to suffer, just weaving her web as a spider in solitude. On the flip side, imagine that being Ariadne and having an Ariadne boundary, measuring this imbalance, every time a man shows off or brags or tells of his accomplishments to a degree, a moderate degree, it actually benefits the relationship, believe it or not. www .womenshapp iness.com

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Because you‟re again allowing the man to do this. You‟re not being overtaken or overwhelmed or overcome by this. You‟re allowing it, and that‟s part of what flirtation involves, too, by the way. Letting him brag a little and giving him some honor for that.

Imagine every braggy comment a man issues is like a jewel in your own crown. But if you imagine wearing a gold crown on your head, a tiara, that could be something that you can tolerate, and it‟s an honoring of you. You‟re like a queen. But if that crown gets too heavy and too laden with too many jewels, then for all its beauty for others to see, it starts to hurt.

It gets too heavy. And so you have to measure your own crown when it‟s getting too heavy with the accomplishments of a man. At that point, you might imagine it being just right, and if jewels keep coming your way and he keeps bragging and he keeps having accomplishments, it‟s time to start saying, “Okay, that‟s enough for now. It‟s getting a little too heavy,” and give them back to them. That would be the exercise of an Ariadne boundary to prevent the crown from getting too heavy, but to not throw out the supportiveness entirely, or the relationship will just die. And the Arachne boundary, to imagine that your own accomplishments or your own rightful pride, healthy pride, is a moderate amount when you have good boundaries. If that then gets to be too much, it‟s like getting caught in a spider web that you‟re weaving. That will be our boundary lessons and skills practical applications for today. Tomorrow, we can meet at the beginning and talk more about your real stores, and I will answer the Q&A that you have submitted online.


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Donna:

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Hey, Dr. Paul. You know, when you and Tony were talking about the Snake Goddess, I was thinking you had mentioned that the snake goddess represents fertility and creative instinct to some extent, and the shedding of the skin or how a woman might go about shedding that skin with say someone‟s face on it could be represented in a creative way. You know? Whether it‟s exercising or some sort of self-improvement or new job or clothes as a different way to go about shedding the skin and different creative way of approaching that.

Dr. Paul:

Yes. Yeah, these are meant to be creative exercises for sure, but they‟re also me ant to be visual. So the – we‟ll get into this more as we go along through the weekend, and certainly when we start tomorrow, but the idea of having a visual in your head of these things, like the silver door or stepping into or out of a circle, that is meant to come to mind immediately when you‟re in a very real, every day situation with a man. You can imagine these visuals, and that will cue you to say or do the right thing. Now back to the basics of boundaries. Good boundaries give you the abilit y to say, “No,” but they also give you the ability to say, “Yes,” if you so choose. They give you the ability to say, “No,” to a man or, “Yes,” to a man, but they also give you the ability to say, “No,” to yourself if you need to.

Like the Demeter Boundary. The ability to say, “No, I don‟t have to go for immediate gratification. I can count down from ten to one and let the season change from winter to spring.” That‟s self -discipline.

So boundaries are also about self-discipline. Boundaries protect you from the stresses outside, like the stressful skin of the Snake Goddess that you need to shed, www .womenshapp iness.com

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but boundaries also contain all the goodness and the passion in you. That needs to get expressed at the right times in the right ways, and that‟ s the Selene Boundary. There are all these features to boundaries, and we‟ll keep discussing them as we go on through the weekend and into the next lesson, but I just wanted you to have new, practical applications and exercises to – and names for these various ways of using your boundaries. Tony:

We had another lady who had an interesting situation, and she had e-mailed me separately and really wanted to get her question aired, and it‟s coming right up. She‟s going to go visit this guy that she‟s ha ving a long distance relationship. This is Sonny in Malibu. It‟s a really interesting question about boundaries. Let me go through this one one more time. “Recently ,” she says, “I met a guy who seemed very attractive to me and very confident. For my nature, I am very passive, nurturing, and a person with a lot of well-being, and I like confident people, and maybe this was the reason I liked this guy, and I continued to date him and see him, and he seemed very confident with me. ” “But I noticed in his interactions with other people, he seemed less and less confident. In fact, he seemed even more passive than I am, and I didn‟t like it, and I decided not to date him anymore. What would be the reason that he acted so confident with me but not confident with others? And I suspect that he might not have showed me his real self.”

Dr. Paul:

Yes, you know, the complex situation with this is when we first meet, we‟re on our best behavior, and the way people often use their boundaries around that is it‟ s similar to the dynamics of lying. Don‟t read me wrong on this. It‟s similar to the dynamics of lying as far as boundaries go in that we‟re not granting someone complete access, either the man or the woman.


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We‟re not granting them complete access to what‟s really going on inside. We‟re just showing them the exterior of our boundary when we first meet. So it‟s almost like there is an image printed on the outside of the boundary that says, “This is what‟s me,” or, “You‟re welcome to just assume the best about what‟s me,” but then with time, we have to get more intimate with each other eventually, and like it or not, they‟re going to be able to peek through some of the windows, so to speak, in our boundary an d see what‟s really in there.

And even when we do that, we make assumptions about people. So with this question, it‟s very possible that the woman is jumping to conclusions about him. I mean she‟s only had so much interaction with him. We can‟t completely generalize and say he‟s a passive person based on say one day of knowing each other, but she‟s taking a guess, and it looks something different from how he behaves toward her.

The other thing could be sometimes our anxiety and our nervousness can come across as energetic and active as opposed to passive, and maybe the real way he is is a passive person. He wasn‟t doing anything deceptive in first meeting her. He may have just been nervous, and that was energetic in nature, and maybe he covered over that, put on his best face through the nervousness, and it came across as energetic and active when maybe he‟s not. So she says, “I suspect that he had not –” It‟s more of a statement than a question that she makes. She‟s saying, “He seemed confident, and then with other people wasn‟t, and I suspected he had then shown me his real self.”

So the second piece of this actually draws from the KWML Mastery Program where we talk about personality styles.


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One of the things I often say about our different personality styles, there‟s kings and queens, warrior s, magicians, and lovers. When we first meet a person, we might come across in a way that sort of puts on display more creative elements or more organized elements than we really are or more confident or more nurturing elements than what we really are. As a result, if a guy is actually a lover in trying times and an anxious state, he might actually act more like his opposite than what he really is. He might act like a warrior when he‟s in fact a lover and think that in so doing, this is usually unwitting and unconscious, he‟s putting on his best face, assuming that being his opposite self in what he portrays is his best self, when it‟s the opposite of his real self. The reason for that I explain in the KWML Mastery Program. It‟s that if you were sitting on that grid that I lay out for you in that program where there‟s four quadrants and you were looking across the center of the circle, and the center of the circle would be your highest potential, your most integrated self, you might make the mistake of actually behaving like your opposite to over compensate for any deficits you have. And so we often portray our opposite personality style when we‟re nervous or making a first impression.

A lot of what we were going to talk about in this program in its entirety is first impressions. So what this woman, Sylva, might have on her hands is a guy who is actually a lover but portrayed himself as a warrior at first because on some unconscious level, he thought he was being his best self to act like his opposite.

Be on the lookout for that on first dates. A lot of times, the things a guy says about himself when you ask questions about who he is, what his family is like, what he does for a living, a lot of times, he‟ll be actually unwittingly putting on a best face that is the opposite of what he really is.


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This is true for everybody. A lot of times, people will get into sort of sexual innuendo and sex talk on a first date, and somebody will say that they‟re just crazy and wild in bed. And a lot of times, when people say that on a first date, it‟ s actually the opposite of what they‟re really like, or they‟ll say they‟re tame and boring when it‟s actually the opposite. So just be aware of that as an effect. It sounds like this woman probably did a reasonable good job catching that and being accurate with it. The next one was with Athena in Anaheim, California, and says, “What advice do you have for someone estranged from their family? There‟s abuse and mental illness there, no relationship.” So she doesn‟t still communicate with them. “How do we partition our time and relating for our own good and growth?” That‟s kind of a question that could also be relevant for tonight‟s talk when we talk about career for the reason that often times, there are certain people in our lives that we can‟t get away from. We‟ll have to have an ongoing relationship with. Like family. We don‟t choose our family. We‟re going to be related to them for life, even if we don‟t communicate. We‟ll have to have some sort of run -ins here and there, and the same would be true of the workplace. If you can‟t quickly leave a job and get another job, you‟ll still have the same boss, and you‟ll still have the same co workers, so we can‟t physically get away. And by the way, that‟s probably one of the easiest ways of u sing your boundary is to get out of a physical locale.

Sometimes, when people have relationship trouble or career trouble, a complete move can be the answer. A new apartment or a new job, a new city creates a natural boundary that you don‟t even have to really attend to, psychologically.


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You‟re just physically removing yourself from the premises. But sometimes, we can‟t do that. So we‟ll have to rely more on the psychological aspects. So with parents, for example, that you have a poor relationship with or family that has a lot of drama that doesn‟t absolutely have to pertain to you, how do you minimize the damage from that?

Well, physical locale is one of the beset ways, and having a place of your own to live in is one of the best ways, and setting a schedule. If you have a very persistent family or family member who pursues you to communicate more often than works for you or your schedule, it can be a good thing to say, “Look, here is my schedule. I can only talk to you about once a week on Sundays, so that‟ll be our day to touch base.” And then if for whatever reason they can‟t make it at that day and time, then you‟ve missed that week. You‟ve missed that window of opportunity. And that‟s one of the ways that you can create distance when you need it and create an artificial boundary through distance and being incommunicado. That‟s one of the best ways for answering your problem. That way, they‟re still your family and you still have to rel ate to them, but it‟s more on your terms and on your time schedule. It‟s also good for eliminating sort of an addictive nature to relationships, whether it‟s with men or with family. If it seems like they‟re addicted to you, they won‟t leave you alone and you‟ve got to create so me space, you set a schedule.

Then if you miss an appointment on the schedule, sorry, has to wait until next week. She goes on to say, “How do we enact the snake boundary without alienating or rejecting others? How do we be diplomatic about it so they don‟t feel rejected?”

By the Snake B oundary, she‟s talking about the type of feminine boundary we were discussing last night in terms of relating to men.


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This also could apply to career as well. It‟s reinventing yourself. It‟s the process of reinventing yourself and evolving as a woman.

A snake sheds its skin, and when you use the snake boundary, you‟re shedding your skin and envisioning a brand new skin underneath so that you‟re a new person, and you need to use the boundary in a way that gives yourself some personal space to go work on yourself, be it personal growth or do some education or work on your body or your physicality, diet, and exercise, and that sort of thing. You have to make time for yourself. And a way of appealing to others about that need that we all have is to conversationally describe yourself as living in their shoes. Like how do you exercise? How do you take care of yourself? What do you do when life is crazy and you need more time? So you‟re involving them in establishing the boundary with you, and they‟ll say, “Oh, well, I shut of my phone on weekends,” or, “I shut down my computer,” or I tell people I only check e-mail once a day in the evening. That way, they don‟t pester me thr oughout the day.

You can ask for their opinion about how they do self-care, and then say, “Wow, thank you. I‟m going to take you up on that.” Then you apply it to them, and it was their own suggestion that you‟re using. That‟s probably the best way of doing this. Sonny in Malibu says, “I just met a man November 1st. We‟re both 50, never married. I live in Malibu, he lives in Dallas. We met up for two days, and I stayed at his mom‟s home, and we have only kissed. I‟m going there for Christmas for eight days, staying with his mom again. I enjoy sex, and I also want to be sure we have a good emotional fit before we get too physical.”


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“However, I know sex seems to open men up emotionally and feel more connected. Since we have this long-distance dating, how long is too long to hold us in a space of non-sex and give us a chance to see if we‟re an emotional fit?”

Well, sometimes you can describe this to men. Sometimes you can just imply it. But I found it to be pretty true: We‟re hard wired for in-person socializing, so the notion of internet dating and matchmaking and this sort of thing, it‟s an illusion to think that if we‟ve communicated online for six months that it‟s a six -month relationship. It‟s not.

In real hours and days, the relationship is exactly as long as how many days we have spent together physically. So add those off the top. You know, if you‟ve only had two weekends together in four months, that is a four-day relationship in real time, biological time. So when we do have sex with a person, generally on average in terms of how long you‟ve known then, that‟s a matter of personal preference and taste, but I most often recommend a month as being kind of a benchmark that seems average and normal in the western world. A month. A month weeds out guys that just want to get to the sex and aren‟t of the type that might be open to more than a casual relationship, a committed relationship, boyfriend, girlfriend.

They won‟t wait a month, or they won‟t work t oo hard for a month. If they‟re not exclusive with you – they might be dating other people but don‟t communicate a whole lot with you at all. So that‟s how you would know. You know? And waiting too much more than a month – and we‟re just going with averages here. It‟s up to personal preference. Some people might not have sex until marriage based on their religious or philosophical background if they‟re both of the same background. That‟s totally culturally appropriate. Or they might wait four months. But you have to kind of check this out with each other


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indirectly, maybe by asking about prior relationships they‟ve had, for example.

A month is enough time to weed out the dirty dog guys, but it‟s also the right length of time to not get a guy thi nking, “Jeez, she must not like me too much,” to get them to the part where maybe they start divesting from the relationship or potential relationship. Then finally, Sonny goes on to say, “PS, I have before been in a three-year long-distance relationship with another man who was telling me we were getting married and still sleeping with his old girlfriend and other women. How can I spot the signs to watch for and listen for this new longdistance relationship without being co- dependent?”

Again, the big trap is long-distance relationships, bad idea. Internet dating as a substitute for live, in person socializing, bad idea. It‟s not real.

Not real until you‟re physically together, and that goes for phone conversations as well. Phone, e-mail, and internet don‟t count as far as the timeline of a real relationship. You have to physically get together, which is why I recommend that if you live rural ly and you‟re single, it‟s not a good way to go. It‟s not a very efficient way to be. It‟d be better to live in the suburbs or just outside of a city where you have easy access to a city than it would be to pretend that living rurally and using the internet is any kind of reasonable substitute for real socializing. It‟s not. So just don‟t get into that situation in the first place is the answer. It could easily seem like a copout, but that‟s the real answer. Don‟t do long -distance relationshi ps from day one, and don‟t use internet dating as a substitute for physically getting together.


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Just use it as a tool to start conversations with people that immediately and quickly turn to, “Let‟s meet up,” and preferably, they‟re local, and you‟re in a large populace center where there are a lot of options. So that‟s the answer, and those are the questions from the boundaries with men training from last night. By and large, I think internet dating has a way of attracting more passive people or people that are kind of set in their ways or live rurally as opposed to people that are stacking the statistics in their favor socially. That goes for both men and women. It‟s just a useful tool for meeting people. But then you‟ve got to get in person soon thereafter.

We are next going to move onto career issues, career and children, and we have a few different stories for you that are very illustrative. One of the methods that we‟re using for this, you know, we realized not too long ago that all of our programs are divided up into different areas of the brain, if you will.

The Complete Feminine Empowerment Program really covers the feminine, reptilian brain, or your feminine instincts, and a way of explaining those instincts is for us to go way back to the Greek and Roman gods and goddesses and understand that stories that last thousands of years must do so because they‟re pretty universal stories that must apply to all men and women ever born, or they wouldn‟t last as stories. Well, the only thing about our brains that are universal are those things that have to do with what makes a man a man and a woman a woman. The reptilian brain itself is the most universal part of the brain. At that primitive, animal instinct level, all men are pretty much the same. They have the same sets of instincts that they share in common.


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All women are pretty much the same, same sets of instincts that are in common. And that‟s not to say all men are the same or all women are the same. It‟s just to say that in terms of animal instincts, the things that make us different as men and women, those are universals. What makes us unique individuals is when we get into our emotional style in the Mammalian Brain, and the KWML Mastery Program covers the emotional centers of the brain, how emotions work, and how they contribute to personality.

Then if we go all the way up into what‟s called a higher brain or your cerebral cortex and the parts of an individual‟s psyche, like their boundaries, which we‟re also talking about throughout the weekend, they‟re observing ego, your intellect, your life story, your beliefs and values, the things you‟ve seen and done, your intellectual style, if you‟re more right brained or left brained, that‟s what makes you unique and what makes you you. It‟s not a thing that is particularly gender driven. Both men and women can both have good boundaries or poor boundaries. Both men and women can have observing ego. Both of them have a left brain and a right brain and make decisions of various levels of maturity, various levels of wisdom, but that area of the brain is what makes us very unique as people. Just because we sometimes talk about male and female instincts as being universal doesn‟t mean that we‟re all identical twins and the same. What makes us very different from each other, what makes a man very different from any other man and a woman different from any other woman is not her reptilian brain. It‟s not the fact that she‟s feminine. It‟s her personality style moving into the emotional centers of the brain and her intellectual style and her exact life‟s history and tastes and preferences and beliefs and boundaries that make her different from both every other woman and from any individual man.


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Donna:

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Thanks, Dr. Paul.

DAY TWO: BOUNDARIES AT WORK, AND WITH CHILDREN


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:::CHAPTER FIVE::: :::FEMININE BOUNDARIES WITH WORK: SORTING A MILLION SEEDS::: Again in the area of work, our method is going to combine specific feminine instincts in the form of goddesses and gods from the ancient Greeks with how to use a boundary. And why would we pair these two things? www .womenshapp iness.com

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Well, we‟re pairing an irrational, illogical, and yet very normal and natural reflex in the form of what these goddesses represent. We‟re pairing that immense power, that passion, that drive and desire contained in the reptilian brain, pairing it with an organizing, steering, containing, controlling higher-level structure in us called a boundary, which really helps make us very unique individuals. It‟s like having a car that has not just an accelerator pedal, which would be useless, and not just a brake pedal, which would also be useless, but it has both an accelerator pedal and a brake pedal, and a steering wheel, too, by the way.

Then we can get from Point A to Point B with our car. So think of the accelerator pedal of life being your feminine instincts and passions and desires, and the brake pedal and steering wheel as being your boundary. And we can go from there. So any specific worries, thoughts, directions that you want us to go in in the area of career and children before we get started so we can steer this, so to speak, toward what you‟re really meaning? Alina:

Dr. Paul?

Dr. Paul:

Yes?

Alina:

Hi, my name is Alina . I‟m calling from Canada. I actually didn‟t have time to e -mail, but my question or focus at this time in my life regarding work boundaries would be in order – like for me to learn to have stronger or better boundaries in regards to work and career, I find myself in an ongoing challenge at work where I‟m bullied to the point, bullied. I‟m calling it bullying now by supervisors and co-workers, so that tells me I must have weak boundaries or something.

Dr. Paul:

Well, yes, that‟s going to be a great general topic for you to have brought up. It‟s really rampant, and it‟ s kind of a special pet issue of mine - bullying from adults to adults.


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Absolutely in the workplace. Alina:

Thank you.

Bullying in the Workplace Dr. Paul:

Yes, oh, absolutely. Absolutely that goes on in the workplace. It goes on socially. It goes on between economic classes at a cocktail party. Bullying is rampant from adult to adult, and we‟re so used to hearing it described as only an issue for children, and it is, but it happens from adult to adult, too, and it‟s not okay in that case, either.

I think one of the things that‟s unique about it, and if we set it in a career and workplace sort of motif, bullies get away with bullying in the workplace because they can do an end run around legalities instead of – you know, we have sexual harassment laws and we have harassment law in general, and we have employment law. So they don‟t do THOSE things, but they get away with EMOTIONAL abuse and bullying. And that‟s men toward men, women toward women, men toward women, and yes it‟s true, even wo men toward men which I see more and more today.

One of the ways you can think about law is that it is a boundary. It‟s a societal and community and governmental boundary in the form of a set of rules that we cannot cross or we‟ve broken the law, and yet, when we‟re talking on a psychological level, there are ways that people can be legal, and sometimes even still ethical, and yet produce harm to others, produce bullying to others, which is still wrongful in a way.

And what do you do in that scenario? www .womenshapp iness.com

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A lot of the time when I talk to men, they like a certain metaphor that I give them, which I call the Dark City Ally metaphor, and the way it goes is it‟s sort of like saying “it‟s a jungle out there.” When we‟re in certain areas of the workplace and being monitored by certain people in the workplace, the laws apply and fairness can often win out. But every now and again, if you‟re alone with a boss or alone with a co -worker or you have to take a call from a troublesome boyfriend or a child or a friend who is creating drama for you that kind of bust through the boundary of the workplace, it‟s like a dark city alley where you‟re walking down an alley, and in that alley, maybe just for five minutes, there is no judge. There is no jury, there is no police officer, and there is no law that will be enforceable in those five minutes that you‟re walking down the dark alley. Then what are you going to do? How are you going to defend yourself? How are you going to make sure that right things happen and that you are safe and secure and that you don‟t betray yourself or play the fool for anyone or get used or get abused or bullied? So it‟s the Dark Alley S cenario.

What do we do in that situation? I think we have a story that‟s illustrative of what to do, and I don‟t know how many of you take interest in philosophy and philosophers, but a very interesting one is Machiavelli from the time of the Renaissance, derided by the church and called an evil person. His book, The Prince, was banned by the church and this sort of thing as being evil and contrary to the Catholic church‟s doctrines.

I think in the end, what Machiavelli tried to do is take the human reptilian brain, both male and female – the masculine and feminine instincts - and say, “Look, this is the way things www .womenshapp iness.com

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actually work, especially in dark alleys when nobody is watching. This is how we treat each other, and this is what you need to know to survive, and even to thrive to get power for yourself.” That‟s the book The Prince by Machiavelli. I‟d recommend it to women as much as I do to men.

It‟s not a “ man thing” only, to learn about Machiavelli, but I think his intention was to explain a very real part of human behavior in an empowering way to people so that maybe some good could happen as a way of understanding that people can do dastardly things to each other, and here is what you need to do in response. I‟ll give you an example of it.

Is It Better to Be Loved, or Feared? For those of you that find yourself in a leadership position, one of the very difficult questions he asked was what do you think is better, to be loved or feared if you want to retain power? Now a part of this can certainly go against some basic feminine instincts, one of which is the need to belong and the power that comes from belonging. It’s one of the driving forces in gossip, by the way.

You‟d assume that being loved is more powerful. If everybody loves you, you ought to be the best leader, and certainly there‟s movement in the past 20 years in corporate circles that talks about servant leadership, that the best leader is really someone that really involves their employees and doesn‟t go around all boastful or arrogant and probably works harder than anybody else, and it‟s a pretty powerful way to lead, and it‟s a decidedly feminine, instinctual way to lead to be a servant leader.


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It‟s very effective.

Yet, Machiavelli‟s answer was that no, it‟s better to be feared. If you have to pick either being loved or feared as a leader, if you want to keep power, it‟s better to be feared. Now being feared doesn‟t necessarily mean you‟r e a tyrant.

It just means you absolutely command respect. So if we wanted to make this advice for Machiavelli useful to women and civilized, too, and diplomatic, we would circle back to the idea of a boundary and say what‟s one way of people fearing you? Well, it would be that they know they can‟t deceive you. They can‟t get one over on you. You know what time it is, and your boundary is responsible for that. No means no. When you say no, it really, really means no. What‟s a bully in terms of this all? A bully is a narcissist, and a bully is someone who wants power, and they may already have some power, but chances are if they have to resort to bullying – and this is intenti onal bullying I‟m talking about I‟m not talking about you misinterpreting someone‟s comments as being hurtful, and really, they were not intended to be hurtful. It was just your past influencing how you‟re seeing things. They‟re actually a nice person, and he just misinterpreted them.

This is like intentional bullying. Why would anyone ever intentionally bully someone? It must mean that they themselves feel weak. It must mean that they themselves are in danger or insecure, or they wouldn‟t do it. Somebody who is really, really powerful and knows it and really competent and kn ows it doesn‟t feel the need to bully ever. They know they‟re powerful. So a special trick or tip that you can use when dealing with a bully to have advantage over


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them, and also probably some political skills for dealing with them is to see that anyone who bullies is weak or feels in danger themselves, or might actually secretly fear you more than you fear them.

In your language to them, you might be able to take some risks that could actually turn them into a friend. For example, let‟s say a person is very overweight, and they‟re a bully, and you‟re not. And the issue isn‟t their weight. The issue is something in the workplace. A project needs to be done on time, and you feel like they‟re bullying you over that project. There‟d be the right place in time, maybe at the company social gathering on Friday afternoon or a socially appropriate place to talk a little bit more about personal things.

You could say when you hear them mention, “Man, I never find time to exercise,” you could say, “I have some suggestions. There‟s this really good gym I discovered,” and they say, “Yeah, I‟ve gained a lot of weight in the past year,” and you could say, “Well, you look good. I still think you look good. There‟s always room for us all to work on our bodies.” You know, you change the subject that really is hurtful to the person.

You try to identify – the bullying behavior is usually about an issue that they already feel they have some competence in, and the place where they‟re very insecure is probably some other area of life. Maybe it‟s in the area of relationships and they don‟t have a relationship and they‟re lonely or they don‟t like their body.

Then they bully you in an area where they do have some confidence. So look for what the other area may be that


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they feel insecure in, and you can take a stab at being supportive around that. Some people who are narcissists are just selfish and completely self absorbed, and they won‟t respond to that, either. And in that case, you just have to protect yourself from them, and this is where the feminine instincts come in. Back to the Dark City A lley. When there‟s no judge, no police, no bystanders, and nobody watching the bad things that people do to each other in that dark alley and it‟s scar y, all you have left are your feminine instincts and your boundaries. That‟s all you have left. There‟s nobody to reach out to. There‟s no advocate or protector. There‟s not even a lawyer who can help you with most cases of bullying.

You know, if y ou go to a lawyer and say, “Hey, I‟m being bullied at work,” there‟s a very good chance you could get laughed at. Because usually when people bully, they do it in a way that is legal and not even against company policy. If you‟ve ever heard of people w ho have gotten like a disability in the workplace – I knew a lady I just loved as a banker. She was a great banker for many years for me. And she got carpal tunnel, and she had to take off four whole months from work that was paid, and she was on disability. One day, I called, and she wasn‟t there anymore, and I said, “What‟s going on with my banker?” They said, “She‟s left. She left.” And then somebody sort of took me aside and said, “She got carpel tunnel, and they kind of drove her out of here.”

They have ways of getting rid of people, legally, and maybe even ethically – ethically or unethically, they can get rid of people legally, and that fits into bullying, too. It‟s unfair, and it‟s not right, and it‟s the dark alley scenario for you. But I think some of the things we‟re going to cover tonight can give you some specific skills for how do I fight against this. The only skills you have in that dark alley are your feminine instincts and your boundaries.


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You‟ve got to apply your boundaries. So let‟s talk a little bit about – let‟s go to our first set of goddesses in our first story. And it‟s a story that I use for sure in the complete feminine empowerment program.

We go deep into it in terms of how does this apply to romance, and how does it apply to the workplace, and we‟re going to connect this to boundaries as well, specifically as I reread the story to you. The story of Psyche and Eros. Psyche and her eventual husband Eros or Cupid, and Eros or Cupid‟s mother was Aphrodite. Aphrodite ends up proving to be the most troublesome mother-in-law ever, but we can also apply this to workplace situations in terms of let‟s peg Psyche as a new worker at a corporation, a woman, and Aphrodite is maybe an administrator or manager or the boss, and learn a little bit about what goes on between them. So here is how the story goes. Envious and jealous of the beauty of a mortal girl named Psyche, Venus asks her son, Cupid, or Eros, to use his golden arrows while Psyche sleeps so that when she awakens, Venus would place a vile creature for her to fall in love with. Some of these legends say it‟s death himself.

Psyche is to marry death, and Aphrodite was jealous of her because she had great acclaim throughout the world as being the most beautiful mortal woman in the world, and every man would fall in love with her, and even some of the gods, too. So Aphrodite got jealous, and where this can be illustrative right away, you know how we were talking about dark city alleys and how the rules of society don‟t apply for five minutes when we‟re alone with a bully? You know, it‟s head -to-head fighting. We have to defend ourselves. Well, that‟s the situation that happens so much in


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the workplace, too, where you don‟t get along with the boss, and Aphrodite feels jealous of this young girl. You‟ll see this sort of thing happen a lot of times in the workplace where nobody will ever admit jealousy in the workplace of – for example, your youth compared to your boss or a co-worker, or your vibrant social life compared to a boss or social worker, and yet, we‟re human beings, and that jealousy can be very real and can impact how they treat you. So as a result, one technique I‟d like to give you right off the bat that involves a boundary is what I call vague friendliness or friendly vagueness. You combine being friendly and being vague when you‟re in the workplace.

This is a good defense, a universal defense against belief and bullying and people getting too deep into your business and people not even getting a chance to be jealous of you. Vague friendliness. The vagueness is a boundary. When people come up to you in the workplace and say, “So what did you do this weekend?” You stay vague about it. You say, “I socialized a bit with my friends,” or, “I stayed at home. Got caught up on my reading. Read a really great book,” but you stay pretty vague. You don‟t say, “I went to this particular party and I met these particular people, and I had a fantastic time, and here is what I did.” That‟s too much personal information, which some people could get jealous of. Other people could just be snarky about or bitchy about for personal reasons of their own. You probably don‟t talk a lot about your poli tics or your religion in the workplace. You stay vague. And yet, you can‟t be vague and cold because of a different rule that we cover in KWML Mastery Program, which is that people like those that are like them, and people like those that like them.


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In other words, being cold or aloof can come across as unfriendly, and when we are generally unfriendly, people start to just not like us for no reason. It‟s an emotional reason. So you pair vagueness in the workplace with friendliness. “So how was your weekend?“ You smile, and you say, “Oh, it was great. How was yours?” But you don‟t really give them a whole lot of information. You‟re just friendly.

Vaguely friendly. This is the first error that happens if this were a workplace situation between Psyche and Aphrodite.

Psyche and Aphrodite Boundaries in the Workplace Psyche, everybody knows that she‟s dating all the best men, and Aphrodite is the more matriarchal, older, established, mature woman in the workplace.

If Aphrodite were a real person, she would definitely be married, have children, and in this place, she does. She has Eros or Cupid as her son, and she‟s kind of set in her ways, and she has her married life, and there‟s a certain amount of jealousy that can happen between the married and the single in the workplace.

We already have jealousy that has risen in Aphrodite, which is unfair, and life‟s not fair. Never will be. But we can work with that.


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We can make it be more fair to us by having a boundary. So the first boundary to use is “vague friendliness in the workplace.” Let‟s go on with th e story.

She wants her son, Cupid, to shoot his golden arrows into Psyche and make her fall in love with death and get married to him, thus getting her off the dating market so that she can stop feeling jealous and offended by Psyche getting all the men that Aphrodi te can‟t get anyway. Low and behold, Cupid finally agrees to her commands after a long debate, and as he flies to Psyche‟s room at night, he turns himself invisible so no one can see him fly in through her window. He takes pity on her, for she was born too beautiful for her own safety. Now this notion of being beautiful, you might make this analogy to being talented if we apply it to the workplace. Of course, physical beauty certainly can make people jealous in a real way in the workplace, but talent can also make people jealous. Money or family money or being in a relationship with a high value man, all these things would be equivalent to that. Again, vague friendliness applies. So Cupid takes pity on her. She‟s too beautiful for her own safety.

As he slowly approaches, careful not to make a sound, he reaches for one of his golden arrows. He leans over Psyche while she‟s asleep, and before he can scratch her shoulder with the arrow, she awakens, startling him, for she looks right into his eyes, despite his invisibility. This causes him to scratch himself with his own arrow, and thereby, fall deeply in love with her. So the plan fails. You can see an analogy in that to sort of the sneaky, Machiavellian plans of a boss trying to manage a staff and www .womenshapp iness.com

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trying to get the staff to do a certain thing, or a boss having a vendetta or a bully having a vendetta against a particular worker, and making this plan to embarrass her or make her look bad, and the plan blows up in the bully‟s face. The plan doesn‟t go as planned. So Cupid pricks himself with his own arrow, falls in love with her. The very person who was supposed to do damage in the workplace ends up really liking the person.

Again, we come back to vague friendliness, the friendliness part. Win the crowd is another major principle of career and being in the workplace. Borrowing from the film Gladiator, and it doesn‟t matter tha t the main character was male - this applies to women, too: You can be more powerful than the emperor, more powerful than the boss in the workplace, if you just win the crowd.

Win people over, and friendliness is the universal way of doing that. Being easy to smile at people and be friendly. So he cannot continue his mission, Cupid (Eros), and for every passing second, he finds Psyche more appealing. He reports back to his mother, Aphrodite, shortly after, and the news enrages her. Beware of being sent on assignment by a boss or bully to do their dirty work for them, it could end up biting you instead of the boss. Don‟t be someone‟s minion if you can help it!

Aphrodite then places a curse on Psyche that keeps her from meeting a suitable husband or any husband at all.

As she does this, it upsets Cupid greatly, and he decides as long as the curse stays on Psyche, he will no longer shoot arrows into the hearts of lovers, which will cause the temple


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of Aphrodite to fall. So there‟ll be no more love in the land as long as Aphrodite has placed this curse on Psyche.

You can see that happening in the workplace where a tyrannical or narcissistic boss that has poor boundaries of their own gets a vendetta against someone who is well liked in the company and tries to do them harm, and eventually, there‟s a mutiny. Everyone else likes her, and they‟re not going to let this tyrannical boss do her in. So after months of no one, man or animal, falling in love, marrying, or mating, the earth starts to grow old, which causes concern to Aphrodite, for nobody praises her for Cupid‟s actions. Finally, she agrees to listen to Cupid or Eros‟ demands, allowing him one thing to have his own way. He desires Psyche, and Aphrodite upset agrees to his demands only if he begins to work immediately.

He accepts the offer and takes off, shooting his golden arrows as fast as he can, restoring everything to the way it used to be. People again fall in love and marry, animals far and wide mate, and the earth begins to look young once again. So the workplace prospers when people are allowed to have self-respect, and when they‟re not bullied, and then we treat each other right. When all continued to admire and praise Psyche‟s beauty but none desired her as a wife, Psyche‟s parents consult an oracle, which tells them to leave Psyche on the nearest mountain, for her beauty is so great that she‟s not meant for a mortal man. Terrified, they have no choice but to follow the oracle‟s instructions.

Then Zephyrus, the west wind, carries Psyche away to a fair valley, a magnificent palace where she is attended by invisible servants until nightfall. And in the darkness of night, the promised bridegroom arrives, and the marriage is consummated. www .womenshapp iness.com

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Cupid visits her every night to sleep with her, but demands that she never lights any lamps since he does not want her to know who he is until the time is right. Cupid allows Zephyrus to take Psyche back to her sisters and bring all three of them down to the palace during the day, but warns that Psyche should not listen to any argument, that she should try to discover his true form. So he has this one rule of marriage: that she is never allowed to see his face. He always appears at night, and she never sees him, but he realizes that she needs to be allowed to have her friends, her sisters, so to speak. And two jealous sisters tell Psyche, then pregnant with Cupid‟s child, that the rumor is she has married a great and terrible serpent who will devour her and her unborn child when the time came for it to be fed. They urged Psyche to conceal a knife and oil lamp in the bedchamber, to wait until her husband is asleep, and then to light the lamp and slay them at once. Psyche sadly follows their advice. In the light of the lamp, Psyche recognizes the fair form in the bed as the god Cupid himself. However, she accidentally pricks herself with one of his arrows and is consumed with desire for her husband. She begins to kiss him, but as she does, a drop of oil falls from her lamp onto Cupid‟s shoulder and wakes him. So she‟s broken his rule: that she‟s not allowed to look at him. He wakes up, and he flies away, and she falls from the window to the ground, sick at heart.

There are a lot of little examples in this that can be applied to the workplace. The sisters of Psyche were gossips, and jealous themselves of her wonderful but mysterious marriage. And they go about convincing her that her husband is actually a monster, when in fact he‟ s a god, the god of love.


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They advise her to kill the serpent with a knife and then light the lamp to make sure he‟s dead, but what she does instead – this isn‟t in the story I just read verbatim, but as the story goes, she actually takes their advice but makes it her own – she uses it in her own style, and she decides, “No, I‟m not going to stab him first beca use I don‟t know for sure that he‟s a monster, a snake. I‟m going to light the lamp first to see what he looks like. Then if he‟s a monster, well, then I can stab him.”

She lights the lamp FIRST, and discovers he‟s actually a god. This is a warning to us all about the workplace in terms of gossip and how gossip works. When we gossip about people, women especially, it‟s instinctual and normal and natural to have social information about other people and be in the know. It‟s almost like a currency. It‟s like a social currency.

The more gossip you have about people, the more powerful you are as a woman, the more feminine you are. It‟s power to have gossip. And yet, gossip itself is second hand and third hand and can‟t possibly be completely accurate about people. So if you want to be powerful in the workplace and you are privy to gossip and/or bullying, you might be an observer of it and certainly not a participant of it. Not directly. But an observer of it. Remember the importance of “lighting the lamp first ” before doing someone else harm or giving someone punishment. You really might not know them at all, or know what you are talking about. We‟ve all been there.


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If you‟re a middle manager, for example, and you hear gossip about an employee, you don‟t want to just jump to conclusions and say, “Yeah, this person needs to be fired or this person needs reprimand.” You‟ve got to interview the person first, shed light on what‟s really going on, (truly without judgment first), and that‟s a way of keeping your power, then using a boundary.

Sometimes when we use boundaries, we have to use our own boundary on ourselves. We said last lesson that one of the principles of using boundaries is when you have a solid boundary, you have the ability to say no to people. You can also use your boundary to say no to yourself. “No, I‟m not going to jump to conclusions. I‟m going to learn more about this situation first, ” and no, “I‟m not going to gossip. I‟ll be vaguely friendly, and it‟ll appear like I‟m condoning the gossip, but I‟m actually listening to what‟s really going on without directly participating in the gossip. ”

All right. Now things go further along here where Psyche has broken Cupid‟s rule of marriage that she should never look at him directly and see him, and now she‟s broken that rule. So he‟s run away, and at this point, she wants him back. She‟s glad to be married to him now, and she‟s pregnant with his child, too. And it‟s at this point that Aphrodite intervenes, and she says, “Okay, look, you‟re not fit to be wed to my son. This was all a big mistake. You were supposed to be run out of this company. You were supposed to be out of here and out of my hair and no longer frustrating me, and now you have this big drama going on. My son really wanted you, but then you broke his rule , and now you really want him. If you‟re really serious about being married to my son, you‟re going to have to pass a series of tests, or you do not qualify to be wed to him.”


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Aphrodite gives her three chances - three tests - and then one final adventurous test.

Sorting the Seeds at Work The first test is she assigns her having to sort a million seeds and separate the red from the white seeds, and when it‟s placed in front of her, Aphrodite says, “If you don‟t finish this by nightfall, you will be struck dead.” Psyche is beside herself. She doesn‟t know how she‟s possibly going to get all this done, the sorting of these seeds. And she frets and frets and cries. She even feels suicidal over this. She‟s going to die at nightfall, and she can‟t sort the seeds.

The way this applies to the workplace is especially with a new job, for example, can be so difficult to get up to speed. The learning curve can be so high. Things can feel overwhelming to you. The way Psyche eventually passes this test is in a very feminine way. She doesn ‟t immediately dive in, and through sheer muscle power somehow get all these seeds sorted from each other by nightfall. She allows nature to get involved: Ants come along and naturally prefer the red seeds. So the ants come along, and they one-by-one start removing all of these red seeds from the mixed pile until by nightfall, all the seeds are naturally sorted by these ants. And Psyche observes this and encourages it and lets it happen. So nature has come to the rescue for her. A lesson in that is if you ever get so overwhelmed in the workplace where you feel like, “Oh my God, how am I ever going to learn how to manage this all? How am I going to balance this all?”


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It feels impossible to do. Remember this lesson that you‟re not alone, but there‟s a whole system you‟re a part of, and you‟re surrounded by help, which is the natural order of how things work around here in this workplace. I‟m not a woman, and this might not directly apply to m e, but maybe you could fit into these shoes as an example:

I stated a new day job recently to challenge myself in working for an academic center, and everything is new. Everything is complex, and the computer system is just crazy and impossible to learn. There are so many things I haven‟t done in years, and I suddenly have to relearn them all or bring them back, remember them. And it felt impossible at first, but I could have stayed forlorn about it if I thought I was the only one involved, but it tur ns out there‟s a whole system around me, supporting how things work. There are dozens and dozens of people who are also challenged by the computer system, and they have tips and tricks that they‟ve taught me, and as new problems arise, I can rely on my colleagues for some answers from their experience, and their safety mechanisms and cross checking. You know, if an error gets made, the computer system or the – some other workers will spot it and let you know. The same is true of Psyche and her story and you and your workplace, that there‟s a whole system around you that has worked before you were ever there. It somehow got things done, and will go on getting things done if you let it. So when you feel really frustrated, really confused, really forlorn about your workload or the complexity of your work or your schedule or how am I going to make all this happen, how am I going to get this all done, remember that you‟re protected by nature around you and how the system works. So be observant of how it works, and the problem will get solved. www .womenshapp iness.com

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Women have a natural gift for the “cycles of life,” the “natural order of things” – a sense of harmony and balance, and this instinctual skill – the Psyche Boundary which allows you to “sort seeds” and “choose your battles” and subsist while cleverly waiting for the opportunities that nature sends your way, will guide you and protect you all your work life (and romantic life too.)


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:::CHAPTER SIX::: :::BOUNDARIES WITH WORK: GETTING GOLD FROM WILD BOARS::: Psyche‟s first test was s orting the seeds. Her second test from Aphrodite was there were these vicious, wild boars in the field, and they had golden hair. And her job was to collect a certain amount of this golden hair before sun down, and if she didn‟t do it, again, she‟d be killed by Aphrodite.

She‟s forlorn, and she doesn‟t think she can handle it. She doesn‟t think she‟ll ever solve this problem because these boars are so vicious and deadly. She can‟t run out there and directly start pulling their hair off. She‟ll immediately be gutted by these wild animals.

She once again looks to nature and gets observant and notices that as the boars pass through reeds by the river, the reeds are kind of sharp and prickly and have a way of pulling off the hair of the boars just by their passing it.

So she decides that instead of directly guiding onto the boars and trying to pull their hair off, she‟ll just watch them pass by these reeds, and she‟ll collect their hair from the reeds. And by nightfall, she accomplished the second test of Aphrodite, collecting this golden hair. Now the lesson in this for the workplace is what can a woman cleverly do about conflict? When other people get into conflict, and this is symbolized by having to fight the boars directly, you don‟t have to do that. Normal, natural feminine instinct would be for you to allow conflicts to go on around you, but then for you to be very observant and to pick and choose what side of the conflict might most benefit you or staying out of the conflict, how that www .womenshapp iness.com

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can make you rise to the top for not being a troublemaking person. This is how to handle conflict in the workplace, to let other people do the damage to each other, and then for you to look for the most advantageous place to be and position to be in when you get a clue to how a conflict between others is going to end. So that‟s the second test of Aphrodite.

The Eagle of Zeus Now the third test is one where she is supposed to get a pail of water from the River Styx, and this is a deadly prospect because the water is under a waterfall. That‟s deadly. And this one is a real zinger. She can‟t figure this one out. How in the world she‟s going to get to the center of the river under the waterfall and collect a pail of water from the River Styx.

Well, again, nature comes to the rescue for Psyche, and Zeus takes pity on her and sends his personal eagle who flies down, grabs the pail, the bucket, and goes and fills it up with water for her, and now she has her pail of water from the River Styx before nightfall. She‟s passed the third test of Aphrodite.

In this one, this is similar to the normal, natural instincts that a woman can use in the workplace in which she gets the assistance from others in a way that is not cloying or begging or needy or putting upon other people, but what is a welcomed request where other people see you trying hard, and it gives them a natural instinct to want to help. All they need in return is your gratitude for helping you out.


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This would be like having a problem with a bully or a middle manager, but having had friendly words with their superior and finding that without directly dialoguing about it, their superior kind of sees your predicament clearly and wants to help you surreptitiously and says, you know, “I‟ve seen so and so bully you, and I really don‟t like that. Maybe there is something I can do to help,” and they give you some connections and some resources that you wouldn‟t have otherwise had.

All you have to do in return with them is respect their privacy, that they‟re helping you out privately, and you don‟t want to go around gossiping again and spread the bad word about the boss‟ boss.

:::CHAPTER SEVEN::: :::BOUNDARIES IN THE WORKPLACE: www .womenshapp iness.com

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THE RIVER STYX::: We get all the way up to the final test of Psyche issued by Aphrodite, and in this one, she has gone so far as to tell Psyche that she has to travel all the way down the River Styx with Sharon, the boatman, to the lower depths of the underworld, and she has to steal the contents of the treasure chest of Persephone, the queen of the underworld. This time, it‟s like a truly, truly impossible task because this inner sanctum of Persephone is guarded by Cerberus, the three headed guard dog. So there‟s this vicious threeheaded dog guarding the entrance, and there‟s the river itself, and you have to pay the boatman to get down the river. How in the world is she going to accomplish this? And all she‟s given are two coins, two gold coins, and two bean cakes to take with her. You know, she has limited resources, and she doesn‟t know what these are going to be useful for or how she‟s going to use them, but this is what she‟s given for her journey. It‟s a meager salary, so to speak.

This part of the story, this final test of Aphrodite, makes me think a lot about what I‟ve seen in New York. People going to their jobs, taking the subway. You have to take this long journey to and from work just to get there and back, and salaries are low, and how do you make do in the big city with a small salary and you‟re pressed for time and you‟ve got to use the subway. I think of the River Styx like the subway in this story. As she goes along, here is where boundaries come in. As she goes along, she reaches the edge of the river, and Sharon, the boatman, comes up and says, “For me to ferry you across the river, you have to pay the toll.” Ah ha. She realizes this is the use of the first coin that she has. She has to pay the boatman to ferry her across the river. So she gives him the coin, and she‟s off. She‟s on her journey. And as they‟re sailing down the river, there are www .womenshapp iness.com

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drowning old women in the river, begging her for a coin to get on the boat to be saved, and once she‟s on the other side, there are old men that come up to her, begging her for a bit of her food, her bean cake. It‟s at this point that she finally has to have boundaries in a way that maybe has to keep at bay the normal, natural, feminine instinct to mother others. It‟s very normal and natural to want to help others and mother others, and it makes you feel a reward. It makes you feel more feminine to mother others. And yet, using her logic and applying a boundary, she just had to say no to these beggars, and even to these drowning women, she had to say no. Because after all, now she only has one gold coin left.

How will she cross over the river again to get home and to get free? She only has one coin left. She doesn‟t know yet what she‟s going to need these bean cakes for, but she suspects that she better not give those up. And so this is one of the most profound needs that you have to use a boundary in the workplace. It‟s that many times, others will ask you for favors or assistance or for your allegiance, for they themselves have made some mistakes or done wrong or they‟re on the outs with the boss, or even they‟re being scapegoated, and there‟s not a whole lot you c an do about that.

Giving them your last bit of resources, putting yourself at risk to fail in your purpose as a woman is not going to do anyone any good because you will fail this last test of Aphrodite. It‟s this ability to have a boundary, to say no to others, even those who need help, it doesn‟t have to be your help. This is looked at by managers and bosses as a sign of your stick-to-it-iveness and your having a purpose and your ability to not betray yourself.


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Had Psyche given away one of her bean cakes, she would have soon found that she had nothing to lure Cerberus, the threeheaded dog away from the entrance to Persephone‟s chamber. That‟s what the bean cakes were for were to feed the dog and to lure it away. If she had given even one away, she might have gotten into the cha mber, but she couldn‟t have gotten out without the dog attacking her.

So in the workplace in your career, there will be many times where you will have to say no to others who are in need for the sake of your own career progress, and in the end, your career progress, solidly done, can do a whole lot more good to people than just one coin or one bean cake could. What if you yourself are a kind person and you eventually become the leader of the company or the department? Then you can do a whole lot more good than you can by betraying yourself or making yourself look bad just for one person‟s temporary need. Heart of a Gopi:

Hi, Dr. Paul. It‟s Heart of Agape listening in on this most excellent call. I think the analogies and the advice you‟ve given us here are just crystal clear, and this has just been fascinating. I just want to thank you. I think that –

Dr. Paul:

Thank you.

Heart of a Gopi:

Yeah, it‟s good to hear from you again, too. This has just been incredible. I was thinking all the way along, “Oh, I think I do test number one. I could pass test number two, test number three,” but that fourth test in the workplace, I‟m sure I would have given away the items that I needed in order to help someone else, forgetting about the goal. I think it‟s really great that you give us permission to know that we have to take care of ourselves to that degree, and yet, I always wonder as women, it seems almost maybe perhaps men would have an easier time. As women, that is so challenging because of our need to nurture and mother.


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I know that I find as a lover type woman that that‟s very difficult for me to turn off that humanitarian thing. Can you give us even some more advice in case we are tempted by that?

How we can solve problems, perhaps, without having to get in all by ourselves? It would be hard for me as a woman to completely turn my back on this situation where others were in high need. So I just wonder if you have other suggestions. Dr. Paul:

Yeah. Maybe other people can chime in with other stories of their own. If I gave you a story from long ago, you might be able to see the – you know, the metaphor that you could use, too. One time, I was in a corporate workplace where a middle manager was decidedly bullying toward her direct underlings, and she didn‟t have direct say so over my career. She was in a different department, but she certainly was a good gossip. She was good at spreading bad rumors about people and creating bad reputations, which then can never be accurately investigated or claimed to be true or false. So she was dangerous, dangerous to everybody involved. And one day, about a month before I was already planning on leaving the position anyway and going to Chicago for a new job, a male worker approached me and told me his sad story of how things had gotten so bad with this middle manager that they were starting to threaten his job. He just tried to do a good job, and why is she harassing him and riding him so hard. There always had to be an enemy that this woman was pestering or bullying or spreading gossip about. So all people could do is sort of deflect her onto yet another victim of bullying, and she‟d keep doing it. He comes to me, and he says, “This has been through the union. We have a union, and we‟ve negotiated, and we‟re at a deadlock and a standstill, and you‟ve seen her do this.


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Could you please talk to the union, or could you give evidence? Could you give quotes of how you‟ve seen her bully me? And I‟m preparing a lawsuit. And if you‟re interested, you could be a part of this lawsuit, too.” I‟ll tell you, I felt – I definitely felt for the guy, and I felt maternal feelings toward him. And by the way, both men and women can feel maternal feelings, and they can both feel paternal feelings toward others.

Being maternal or paternal doesn‟t restrict you according to your gender, although being maternal can be a feature of personality style for males, but not necessarily feed their masculinity itself, and being paternal can be a personality style in females, but not necessarily feed their femininity. That‟s a different compartment of the brand. That being said, I felt maternal toward this guy. I felt like I wanted to help, and yet, it would be foolish and dangerous and would most certainly put me at risk to do more harm to myself than benefit to him.

He had already prepared some sort of lawsuit and he had a lawyer and he had helpers involved with his situation. I wasn‟t like his only option for help. He already had people helping. And so in the end, I just decided to say, “I validate your feelings. I‟ve seen this stuff going on. It‟s wrong. I‟ll let you know that I‟m against it and for you, but no, I can‟t get embroiled in some lawsuit. I‟m about to leave. And I really do wish you well, but it sounds like you have it handled, and I‟m not even really sure that I‟d help you all that much by saying anything, and it would just put me at risk.” I didn‟t know him that well to even owe him that level of personal explanation. But I gave him my vote of confidence and my heartfelt wishes, but I did not go so far as to put myself at risk with him, and that‟s the same as refusing to give away your coins for crossing the River Styx or giving


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away your bean cakes that you‟re going to need to lure the dog Cerberus away from the door. That‟ s an example of saying no to another person. Maybe even against your own maternal nature. It‟s what you have to do.

Heart of a Gopi:

You have to do it, and I can see, too, that maybe it‟s just a bit of a boundary hole, too, to always think that we as women have to be – or are the last person who could possibly fix something, that it‟s all on our shoulders. It‟s all about us.

Maybe we then have a little bit of a problem giving our love in the past by being that last person and always – you know, maybe that‟s how we use earning love as a really unfortunate way of getting some short-term attention, but not being able to go the whole distance because we‟d lost all of our resources. So I appreciate that. That was helpful. Thank you so much.


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:::CHAPTER EIGHT::: :::YOUR CREATIVITY AND CHILDREN::: Dr. Paul:

This even goes back to an even older example of boundaries from the original MindOS Mastery Program. There was a grandma that I once had many, many years ago who had a grandson who was addicted to drugs and lived with her. He was certainly adult in age, in the 20s, and refused to get a job, and just sort of lived on her couch, and used drugs in her home. At one point, I think even got the police involved coming to her home and this sort of thing. And for her, this was the last straw. And at this point, she comes to me and she goes, “I think this is one of those situations where I need a boundary. I need this boundary thing that you‟re talking


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about. How do I use a boundary on my grandson? On the one hand, I really love him and I wish him well.” “I want him to get a job. I want him to get his act together, and I really want to nurtu re him and mother him, but I‟m sensing here that there is something missing that I‟ve got to do that‟s going to put an end to this bad stuff that keeps happening. The police keep coming to my door. I bet you‟re going to tell me that I have to tell him to move out. Don‟t I? I have to say no.” And I was like, “That‟s right.” And she said, “So what could I start with? I guess I could say, „Either you move out, or you stop using drugs, at least in my house.‟” And I said, “That‟s right.”

Well, she made him move out, and low and behold, he found his way back into her life again by calling her and telling her how awful it is living out on the street, and he hasn‟t found a place to stay, and it really tugged at her heartstrings, and she comes in and tells me, “I can‟t do this. He calls me, and he says he‟s homeless. I don‟t want him to be homeless. I don‟t want him to be depressed. What do I do?” Well, it turns out that he was manipulating her. He found further holes in her boundary. He found weaknesses to tug on her heartstrings through, and he was pulling at her maternal nature where she wants to care. I said, “What do you think a good boundary would be on all these phone calls you get from him that are kind of manipulative, and he guilts you?” She said, “I guess don‟t answer the phone. Huh?” Well, that‟s right. That‟s one way of going about it. She goes, “Okay, I‟ll try that.” She doesn‟t answer the phone. A week later, she comes in, and it turns out it‟s worked. She hasn‟t heard from him because she hasn‟t picked up the phone, but now, she felt further guilt and further temptation to go find him and reach out to him and let him move home, drugs or no drugs.


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I said, “After doing all this work to make your life more peaceful and probably to benefit his life by teaching him some boundaries that there are limits with you that cannot be crossed, why would you even ask that question?” And she said, “Well, it‟s just that I don‟t think he has anyone. I‟ve got to save him.” I said, “Really? Are you absolutely certain you are the only person in the world who offers him a chance to change or can help teach him a boundary by telling him, „No, you‟ve got to stop drugs.‟ Really, just you and whole world?”

She goes, “No, of course not. You‟re right. There‟s the police system. There‟s the recovery programs out there, the detox programs. There‟s narcotics anonymous. There are his own friends. ” There are other members of our family. And I was like, “Yeah, that‟s right b ecause whose job is it to fix someone else‟s boundaries?” Because boundaries are also involved with addictions and substance abuse. She said, “Well, it feels like it‟s my job. I‟m his grandma.” I said, “Well, it‟s the whole world‟s job to fix up someone‟s boundaries,” because they‟ll go out into the world and do the wrong thing, and they‟ll hear a lot of, “No,” from a lot of different people. From the police, from the detox programs, from his friends, from other family, from potential employers. He‟ll get a lot of, “No,” from everyone that say, “No, you can‟t keep using drugs.” So what I‟m getting at with that is you know, when we‟re defending against other peoples‟ bad boundaries, that‟s easy for us to all understand.

What about when we have holes in our own boundary that trick us into thinking that we are someone else‟s everything? That we‟re the only ones who can fix a person, or we‟re the only one that can save a person. Where even if all these systems didn‟t exis t, like drug enforcement, law enforcement, detox programs, social


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workers and everything else, even if all that didn‟t exist, who is responsible for his livelihood and his health?

He is, ultimately.

So we‟ve got to remember that, too, about bounda ries. Sometimes we over reach and over nurture and over mother people out of the faulty assumption that we think we are their everything.

Probably a big piece of that is that we all in general, and women in particular instinctually feel a lot of gratification out of the act of mothering. It makes us feel good. It makes you feel more feminine. And it‟s just part of why you do it.

Heart of a Gopi:

Yeah, definitely. I definitely can see, but I can see that it‟s never really brought me anything other than with my own real children to be a mother. It‟s really not done any good with friends or relationships with men, not done a bit of good. So it‟s very important to hear this again. Thanks so much because it‟s really – sometimes that gut instinct to do that is really not coming from our gut, but some place where it‟s just a bad habit.

Dr. Paul:

Yeah. Well, we‟re going to – in tomorrow‟s session, when we talk about – and we‟ll also talk about just being a woman in general. We‟ll talk about fr iendships and specific boundary skills related to those things.

Some of these Greek goddesses do dual duty in the workplace and in other areas of your life. For example, the goddess Artemis is the huntress, and she hunts at night. She is very accurate, and sometimes you need to cultivate boundaries in the workplace that pertain to your accuracy www .womenshapp iness.com

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and your competence, your ability to get things done on time, get the project done on time, for example. While there‟s a certain amount of intellectua l competence involved with that, there‟s also definitely boundaries involved in it, too, because if we have poor boundaries, we can have a tendency to be lazy, to let things slack, to not stick to our schedule, to let go of duties and responsibilities we have. We‟ve got to have good boundaries to stay accurate in the workplace, and I think Artemis is one example of that. If you can imagine that your boundary has a whole bunch of doors in it, and that those doors can be opened or closed, and that each one of those doors might apply to a different type of role or task at work, you have the opportunity to simultaneously say, “No,” to some things and put them on the back burner. “I can do those tomorrow or next week. I don‟t have to do them today.”

Other things that are sort of higher level, more urgent and more important and have to be done today and prioritize those to be first. It‟s almost like how you arrange your to -do list.

The Artemis Boundary at Work Artemis is all about that, and having good boundaries is crucial to be able to do that as well, so that‟s another example of a type of feminine boundary, the Artemis Boundary for accuracy and scheduling and following through on your promises, and even prioritizing the degree of urgency of things.


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The Hera Boundary at Work Finally, Hera, the Hera Boundary that we did talk about a little bit last night. This is the feminine leadership boundary. Hara was known to really be the power behind Zeus on Mount Olympus running everything because she would monitor everything that goes in, including her husband and his dalliances. She was known to kind of bicker and complain and be kind of a pain in the butt to other people, including Zeus, and yet things only went well because of her. Y ou know, there‟d be total chaos if not for her monitoring things, checking on things. If you ever are in the workplace and find yourself in a situation where you know that you‟re complaining a lot or you‟re pointing things out to people that have to be d one that are mission critical, and if people slack off, bad things will happen for everyone at the company. Well, it‟s time to have a Hara boundary and remember that while you criticize others constructively, even though they might not like it, they don ‟t want to hear the constructive criticism, you still have to do it anyway, and you have to say no to their disagreement because if you don‟t, the whole purpose of the company fails, and you fail as a leader. So that‟s the Hera Boundary.

Sometimes you have to call people out or complain about their behavior or their performance, or you have to give constructive criticism, and nobody ever likes any kind of criticism, but you‟ve got to do it anyway. You‟ve got to say no to yourself, that yes, you want to be well liked by people, but if you don‟t point these things out, no good will happen. And that‟s a feature of feminine leadership, too.

So let‟s go to your online -submitted questions. www .womenshapp iness.com

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There‟s one from someone named Anna, and she says, “I‟m an artist, and the man I‟m dating has owned his own business in marketing and accounting. He and I are in the friendship phase of courtship, having dated for about two months. I am now dating him exclusively as of this past week. There have been several t imes where he‟s offered to help me with more left brained aspects of my work. He asks carefully if I would like his help and seems very mature and aware about not getting into my boundary.” Let‟s see here. “So he asks carefully if I‟d like help. I beg an to reveal to him last night that this organized state of my bookkeeping, and he saw how little I knew about financial management. It was interesting to me that since he loves my art, he did not seem too bothered about my financial lack of expertise. I, however, felt embarrassed. Should I let him help me, or will it make me seem less attractive to him if he continues to see how untogether I am at business? Again, he thinks I‟m totally brilliant artistically.” That‟s a great question. That‟s somet hing that is interesting because it kind of bridges a gap between business and a workplace and romance and feminine and masculine instincts, and even bring some boundaries in there.

Well, you say this is kind of a new relationship. At least you‟re newly exclusive, so remember at the outset, we talked about how we all liked to put on our best face when we first go on a date or get into a relationship, and you‟re trying to put on your best face. You want to be seen as really good at everything, including the financial part or business part of what you do.

Ironically, if you give a man a chance to help you for real, he will admire you way more for giving him that chance to masculinize and become a little more intertwined with your www .womenshapp iness.com

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life than if you somehow demonstrated perfection at everything in your business. Part of the way he will feel is, “Well, what room is there for me in this woman‟s life if there‟s nothing about me tha t she needs?” And one of the ways that we feel most needed is when you let us do physical labor or intellectual tasks where we help you in some sort of career competence way. That‟s one of the best things you can do to make a man feel loved is to let him help in some technical way. That‟s exactly what there‟s the opportunity for here. So it‟s probably better, at least for the relationship to progress, for there to be something he actually could be helpful at, and if you put on a picture of perfection for him, you know.

If you were going to be his business partner and were male – well, male or female. Doesn‟t matter. Then of course, you would want him to think that you really have all of your ducks in a row, or maybe he wouldn‟t „want to do busi ness with you. But this is not a business arrangement. We‟re talking about a romance. And that‟s a whole different scenario. Having there be a place for him to contribute is a very, very good thing. Now one of the things we sometimes forget as far as boundaries go, I like to use the phrase what hat am I wearing. You know, what hat are you putting on here? It‟s good to know the difference between what is business and what is personal. That‟s a boundary, professional boundary. The difference between what is business and what is romance, the difference between is casual and what is serious. These are all boundaries. And one of the ways of describing boundaries across the different departments of life, I guess, would be to say, “What hat am I wearing?” Am I wearing a business hat right now where we‟re thinking of starting a business together?

Well, then yes, you want to do your best in all areas to be a good business partner.


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But am I wearing a romantic hat? That‟s what you‟re wearing in this situation. You could get an accountant anywhere. So it‟s not about the technical expertise that we‟re interested in here. It‟s about how can you make him feel valued and loved, and how do men sometimes show love to you in the form of labor or in the form of advice and expertise? That‟s one of the prime ways that men feel they love women is by doing something for you.

It‟s not all about his ego, and it‟s not all about your need. You‟re doing a dance together wher e he gets to be helpful, and you get to get a need met simultaneously. Alright. Our last question is is it politically correct to have sexual attraction for a co-worker, and until what phase should it go? Well, there‟s another professional boundary .

Ironically, even as we are all trained in corporate workplaces against sexual harassment and against dating in the workplace, the workplace also proves to be probably the most common place that men and women meet today and end up married. You might almost say it‟s the flip side of the dark city alley. It‟s yet another one of those areas where there are no rules. Rules don‟t really apply. It happens in little snippets of time where nobody is watching, and it‟s invisible. This attraction is invisible, and yet, a deposit is made. So at the same time that they say the old advice in the workplace, “Don‟t crap where you eat,” so to speak, that it can be a bad thing to start dating someone and then have it go south, and then you‟re stuck in the same ph ysical environment everyday. You have to watch out for that.


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At the same time, there‟s got to be a way to navigate into investigating each other further if you sense that there is some chemistry.

One of the best ways of doing that is if you have any choice in the matter, to date someone in a different department at least. Then you‟re at least insulated by physicality and the line of hierarchy and power in then workplace. Try to date across a different department or at least date somebody who is in a total different job role than you. Again, with sexual chemistry, we don‟t have a lot of say so about that. It‟s irrational and illogical and random when we encounter people. I‟d say beyond that, try to keep the socializing outside the workplace. It probably would be fine to go on dates together, but have the social interaction be outside, and then when you‟re at work, it‟s all business. That‟ll help you, too, to have that kind of boundary. And then the concept of sexuality arises not as a question about workplace politics, but a question about how far through courtship together are you.

Does it seem like it has the potential to be much, much more than just a fling? If so, then you keep progressing along. And there it is.

So more on some of these other goddesses in lesson three as we wrap up the rest of career and the workplace, as well as children. The myth of Demeter and Persephone applies there, and the myth of Aphrodite and Eros applies, having a son versus having a daughter. Those two myths say a lot about how to have boundaries with each gender and your own children. And then we‟ll also get into friendship and just being a woman in general.


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General personal growth boundaries for women tomorrow night. So thank you guys for being here for the second session, and I will look forward to talking to you further about feminine intelligence and personal boundaries in the last lesson – lesson three.

DAY THREE: BOUNDARIES WITH FRIENDS, www .womenshapp iness.com

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AND BEING A WOMAN IN GENERAL

:::CHAPTER NINE:::


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:::BOUNDARIES IN BEING A WOMAN::: Dr. Paul:

Dr. Paul here again from http://www.WomensHappiness.com and Women‟s Happiness Magazine with part three of our Feminine Intelligence and Personal Boundaries Program, which is essentially going deep into the MindOS Mastery Program with a special coverage of boundaries here. We‟ve been looking at boundaries for the past two days in terms of all the various aspects of a woman‟s life, and tonight, we are going to be ending with some other special topics, one of which is children and child rearing. Another is friendship, a really major one, and we‟ve covered romantic relationships with men as well as career issues in our last talk of lesson two. Let‟s talk a little bit about some of the aspects of boundaries that we haven‟t really covered the techni cal points on just so that we can remember some of the more high tech aspects of the MindOS Mastery Program.

A lot of the time, when we talk about in MindOS things called ego defenses where we‟re talking about what amount to social habits. These are things that are ingrained in all people and tend to be appropriate to the right maturity level, right developmental stage of life. Some of these things called Ego Defenses are more immature. For example, denial and projection. A lot of these have gotten into the popular lexicon.

Denial


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Somebody who is “in denial ” has some pretty big boundary problems where they can‟t see their own behavior, and technically, they‟re in denial of the limits of what they control. They don‟t know what their limits are. They don‟t know where the boundaries lie.

By definition, they have a lot of holes in their boundaries, so being in denial is one example.

Projection Another one is projectio n, and that‟s also an immature Ego Defense. Projection is where we sort of erroneously or falsely attribute to somebody else some sort of negative trait. It also can apply to positive traits, too, such as when we have heroes, we project good things onto our heroes that they might not have, or when we engage in hero worship, per se, or we overly idolize someone or idealize someone. That‟s an example of pro jection. If you can imagine a boundary is like a circle around you, and the imperfections of the boundary are holes in the boundary, and if you could also imagine that all people have a lot of good and some bad to them, too. Things they don‟t like about themselves or things that are perfect that need a lot of work, for example, then we have a tendency to want to project out the bad things onto other people and keep the good things about ourselves in us, and that happens through holes in the boundary.

Again, boundaries are involved with a lot of these things that psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychoanalysts call Ego Defenses or “social habits ” that are universal to people and give you clues to how mature people are. A lot of you who have the MindOS Mastery Program know that there are a lot of features to that that you can use to assess the maturity level of a man or a friend or a co-worker www .womenshapp iness.com

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or boss or your own maturity level, and in the process, we say the boundaries weigh heavily in giving you a lot of power to assess somebody‟s maturity level. Their ability to commit to you - or keep their word, keep promises or be a good partner, somebody you would do business with, or somebody you would have a relationship with - a good, good friendship with - depends on how mature they are so that you can know how good at commitment they are.

:::CHAPTER TEN::: :::DEFENSIVENESS AND FRIENDSHIP::: This is a more technical way of knowing exactly how mature people are.


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If you knew about all the Ego Defenses, it would tell you a lot. So just like anything we do in our programs in MindOS Mastery or in anything else that we offer you, there‟s a spectrum that you can use, and in this case, it would be a spectrum from immature all the way up to mature. I mentioned a couple of the immature Ego D efenses. Let‟s talk a little bit about the other end of the spectrum on the mature Ego Defenses.

The Defense of Humor These are things you know well. One of them, believe it or not, is humor. The ability to use humor as a social habit for alleviating anxiety, changing perspective, shaking yourself out of negativity is a decidedly mature Ego Defense.

When somebody is able to laugh at themselves or laugh at a situation or laugh at a challenge, you have a reasonable assessment that this person is capable of commitment and maturity, that they have good boundaries because they use a mature ego defense. And I don‟t mean a sort of juvenile use of humor. I mean a mature, responsible use of it, saying, “What am I going to do? Might as well laugh about this. It‟ll all blow over.”

Something like that. That‟s one mature ego defense.

The Defense of Suppression Another one is called suppression. Suppression means you‟re going to back burner something, and to do that, you have to have good boundaries. One of the features of boundaries that we‟ve been covering through the course here is that it works as a “budgeter. ” www .womenshapp iness.com

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It‟s good at putting up partitions between different areas of life and having different sets of rules for all of them.

The ability to suppress something that‟s a challenge or negative so that you can function is a mature ability. To back burner something or table something, usually because there is no answer or cure or solution right now. This speaks a lot to the feature of boundaries that we often talk about where when we have holes in the boundary, those are places where we suffer. Borrowing from the Buddhist definition of suffering, we burn energy on the uncontrollable, we have to learn to let go of control of things that we don‟t control, so… …we suffer through holes in the boundary by burning resources like time or energy on things we don’t control.

For example, rush hour traffic or bad weather or other peoples‟ actions. We never absolutely control other peoples‟ actions. If we burn a lot of energy on that, if we get overly upset and clench our fists when we‟re in traffic, if we waste a lot of tim e on waiting for someone to change their behavior and then they don‟t, we‟re suffering. We‟re burning our resources on things we don‟t control.

Suppression recognizes this suffering that we do and says, “You know, I don‟t control anything about this right now, so why don‟t I table it or backburner it, just drop it for now, surrender – the power of surrender, and maybe I‟ll have more tools for dealing with it in the future, or maybe a solution will appear.” If you recall the story of Psyche being so useful in women‟s development, there was a lot of that going on, building boundaries around things she didn‟t control and letting nature take its course in her favor.


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You remember in the second lesson when we talked about all the trials that Aphrodite - the mature adult, maternal woman and mother-in-law figure that she gave Psyche - one of them was sorting the red seeds from the white seeds. She‟s very upset about this because it was an impossible task to finish sorting a million seeds by nightfall. But when she cried and got upset and eventually surrendered, nature came to the rescue. An army of ants came along and sorted the seeds for her.

So this is an example of how to have good, feminine, mature boundaries and to be able to surrender to t hings we don‟t control for now, and often times, use what nature offers us, use what the environment offers us, and look for solutions and allow them to occur. That would be suppression.

The Defense of Altruism Another mature one is altruism or charity. A mature Ego Defense. We take some upset that we have or some anxiety we have, and we metabolize it into doing good in the world in response to the bad that we don‟t control for now. Great example of this, Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Two middle-aged moms lose their teen kids to an auto accident, a drunk driver. Rather than just suffer over it endlessly and be bitter at life or at motherhood, they decide to take all that bad and turn it into a good, and they do the altruistic move of starting a nonprofit organization that helps cure the very thing that took their kids away from them.


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So that‟s an example of altruism as an ego defense. Another example of it in every day let‟s say romantic life would be if you have bad times with a man or breakup or a fight or something like this, you take all the anger, all the negativity involved with that, and instead, you go out and do good with all that energy.

So maybe as bad as a relationship has recently treated you, you take that same amount of negative energy, and you treat someone else that exact amount. You treat them well. Maybe you take that into the process of being assertive in exactly equal amounts and meet some new male friends, for example. Doing good in the world, metabolizing the bad into good through charitable acts and other mature ego defense.

Dyadic and Triadic Relationships There‟s a third immature Ego Defense that‟s a good example, which again, uses boundaries.

If you recall ye sterday where we‟re talking a bit about the difference between dyadic and triadic relationships, that people who are only able to relate to others one-on-one or one person at a time, and they tend to apply the same rules to everybody, like everybody is wonderful or everybody is terrible. You could call it sort of “black and white thinking ,” where the same rules always apply. You know, either everybody is out to get them or everybody is their best friend. There‟s a positive and negative angle on it, but it‟s both views are poor boundaries because there are all kinds of people in the world, and they don‟t all fit into the same roles in your life.

That‟s dyadic relating. And it‟s a sign of less mature boundaries. www .womenshapp iness.com

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Triadic ability in socializing and relationships is something that only people with mature boundaries that have doors in them can accomplish. So as a result, there are different sets of rules for different people, specific individuals, and different kinds of people. The person is able to have solid politics and diplomacy with multiple different people and kinds of people. That‟s triadic relationships.

The Defense of Displacement Well, there‟s an immature Ego D efense that goes a little deeper into this concept called displacement.

Displacement is where you have a negative experience, and the person that‟s really most involved or even to blame is an unacceptable person for you to cast that blame on, and so you find a convenient alternate target. We see this defense going on in corporations when there is a blacklisting or scapegoating of someone unfairly based in gossip. It‟s members of the corporation displacing their negativity onto the easiest target as opposed to the right target or no target at all if something is nobody‟s fault. Like it‟s a bad economy, for example, or a whole team didn‟t meet their targets. Well, the whole team is responsible. But in corporations, we tend to pin the blame on one individual because it‟s easy and convenient, and immediate gratification for getting rid of our negativity. It‟s the same principle that was involved in such things as the Spanish inquisition and the Salem witch trials. The easiest target is the person who gets the blame or the person who shows the most guilt, even if they‟re not guilty.

The most easiest to guilt person tends to get scapegoated. So they are the victim of multiple other peoples‟ displacement.


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A medical example of this would be grandpa has cancer, and you love him, a nd he‟s going to pass on. E verybody in the family is angry that they‟re losing grandpa. It might be something unavoidable and incurable, so they may pass the blame onto the nursing staff, for example, and say they did a bad job. That explains why we‟re losing grandpa. That‟s displacement onto the easiest target instead of blaming grandpa himself, who is unacceptable as a person to put the blame on. He‟s fighting an illness. So displacement. So you start to see a list of these immature Ego Defenses and mature ego defenses, and they all connect in one way or another to boundaries, so that‟s a little more high tech way for you to use boundaries to judge other peoples‟ maturity level as well as your own, whether it‟s in relationships that ar e romantic or in the workplace so that you know what you‟re dealing with, and you can talk to people on their level and know what to do according to how mature they are.

Karen:

Yeah, I have a question.

Dr. Paul: Paul:

Sure.

Karen:

Dr. Paul. Can you give me a really like bargain basement definition of Ego D efense? Because I know when I‟m hearing you say it, I‟m misconstruing what you actually mean.

Dr. Paul:

What do you mean bargain basement?

Karen:

When I hear defensiveness, it‟s getting me hooked into other than what you‟re saying.

When I hear the term defensive, I have sort of an automatic way of thinking about that in psychological terms, and I can get that‟s not what you mean when you‟re sayi ng ego defense, so it leaves me clear that I don‟t understand what the term ego defense means.


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Dr. Paul:

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Sure, that‟s great for us to be able to decode a word or phrase in a popular vocabulary.

Defensiveness. What do we mean when we say someone is defensive? Is that necessarily a bad thing that somebody defends themselves, and what is the circumstances when someone is defensive? Is it always a bad thing or always a good thing, or it depends? Because I think it does relate. It does relate to Ego Defenses. Karen:

Yeah, it definitely depends on the context and the situation and what‟s going on with that actual exchange that they‟re in.

Dr. Paul:

Sure, it depends on context. This is a great thing you‟ve brought up. Are you yourself yourself in the mental health field, or are you a psychologist or therapist?

Karen:

I do a lot of healing work, and I had two traumatic brain injuries, so I‟ve had to sort of rebuild my brain from the inside out, so it‟s taken a lot of years to – you know, I have a degree in music. I don‟t have a degree in psychology, but I‟ve really had to work hard at understanding a lot of these concepts to be able to deal with what the brain injury did.

Your Ego is Good Dr. Paul:

There are a lot of misconceptions about popular phrases that we all use that actually kind of twist the psychology meaning into something it really isn‟t. A second example of that is the word, “ego.” A lot of times, people in public talk about someone having too much ego, or that‟s ego based or ego driv en, and I get what they mean when they use it always as a negative.


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They‟re meaning really narcissism, not ego in the literal way the word is used in psychology.

In psychology and as far back as Freud, the word, “ego” is very, very good. It‟s essentially your ability to reason. It‟s your ability to solve problems and calculate things and use information and make decisions and reach conclusions.

It‟s a very positive and needed thing for us to use our ego. It means our conscious mind, including our intellect. When people like Deepak Chopra use it or people who are in like woo-woo, spiritual alternative medicine type stuff use it, you‟re using it as a brand word to really mean narcissism. They‟re meaning egotistical as opposed to just someone using their proper intellectual abilities to solve problems. So that‟s another word out there, and defensiveness, I think, is kind of a similar scenario with how we kind of misuse certain words always as a negative. I‟ve heard people get in arguments, and the person on the losing end of the argument is starting to feel unfairly treated or attacked - not listened to, and they might start engaging in some automatic behavior to lower their own anxiety, or to kind of table things or put things aside or say, “Hey, why are you attacking me? Let‟s kind of drop this. There‟s no need to get upset.”

Then the person winning the argument, or really trying hard to win the argument wi ll say, “You‟re being def ensive. ” They‟ll mean it in a way that implies you‟re wrong. There‟s the evidence because you‟re being defensive. While it does depend on context, and it all depends on how good are the boundaries of the two people involved in this argument. If the person who is being attacked has excellent boundaries and the person who is doing the attacking has juvenile, immature boundaries, the one who is doing the attacking www .womenshapp iness.com

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might very quickly jump to saying, “You‟re being defensive. That means I win,” when in f act, the person is just being a mature person, feeling attacked, and rightfully defending themselves against a rude, bully-ish person. On the flip side, let‟s say a teacher trying to instruct a student at school in grade school or something is chastising a student, and the student gets, quote, defensive, and uses an immature ego defense to explain why they stole a cookie from the cookie jar, and the teacher says, “You‟re being defensive. You‟re using denial. You‟re denying that you just took the cookie that I watched you steal.” In that case, they‟re right. They‟re being defensive in a juvenile, immature way, using an immature ego defense. So the word defensive is very, very vague, but is so often used by people as a club to beat each other over the head with as somehow being evidence of wrongdoing when in fact it depends on whether the Ego Defense is mature, and therefore well-boundaried, or immature. It‟s too vague of a word to really mean anything. It‟s sort of like when people beat each other over the head with various ideas from religion, and they say, “My heavenly father is bigger than your heavenly father, so you lose.” Well, let‟s have some boundaries and be respectful of each other, have more mature Ego Defenses. So yes, the word relates to what I‟m talking about, but it‟s such a vague word that without context and an assessment of the maturity level of the people involved, it‟s nearly as useless as watching TV commentators trash talk each other on TV.

Who knows who is really right? Whoever yells the loudest? I don‟t know if that explains the concept more fully.


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Karen:

I get it. It‟s like you just freed me of 30 years of drama, pain, and nonsense, so thank you.

Dr. Paul:

If you have ever been accused of being defensive, you‟ve really got to step back from that a second and wonder, “Wait a minute. Is this person trying to do what they used to call decades ago crazy making or gas lighting?” Spin. It could be spin, like inter personal spin when somebody says, “You‟re being defensive. It must mean you‟re guilty.” That‟s ridiculous. It depends on the context. You know, one of the things we learned about yesterday, too, is that almost always when you‟re using good boundaries, you have a choice between do you want to choose to be happy or to be right? I would personally choose to be happy, let‟s say, in a relationship as opposed to having to be right.

Because usually, when you have to choose to be right, you‟re going to be alone, and boundaries have a lot to do with that because one of the things that‟s going on inside our boundaries is that we don‟t control another person or their mind or their beliefs or their values and what they think is true. We never control that.

Opinion Versus Fact The most we can ever do is offer ideas for consideration or influence or diversity or a menu. That‟s the most we can ever do in the world of ideas with other people because of boundaries. Whenever somebody really is dead set on making you believe something or making you change your mind, which certainly leads us into argument or who is right or who is more right.


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There is never a right answer. Not in the world of opinion because we‟re all entitled to our own opinion of just about anything that is up for interpretation.

The only area of life or the universe that we have, you know, absolute truth about is probably what we end up calling science where you do an experiment and I do an experiment, and a million other people do the very same experiment, and we all get the exact same results. Like you drop an object, and gravity will make it fall if we are at sea level. So science is always absolute truth until a better theory comes along and reinterprets it. But what you see on the surface is still what you always get with science. People in alternative fields a lot of times will argue about science and will s ay, “Science isn‟t always right because another theory comes along,” and that‟s true, but the other theory that comes along is you can get an alternate, more accurate explanation of something you can actually see and measure. The thing you see and measu re itself doesn‟t ever change unless you change things like your altitude level if we‟re talking about gravity. If you‟re in outer space, there‟s less gravity going on, but if you‟re always at sea level and we all do the experiment, yes, the object will always drop. Whatever the word is that you want to call that effect. Gravity or magic, the object drops. And so it‟s only with science that we have absolute agreement, forced agreements between us on what‟s true.

Then we call it fact, but everything else is opinion. This is right out of MindOS Mastery - good, juicy, boundary stuff. If I were to say, “You know, blue is the best color,” well, that‟s not science based. I mean that‟ s pure opinion.


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I like blue. And for me to stay blue is the best color, that is very true for me. Me and only me. It‟s true for a lot of other people, too, but it may not at all be true for your.

Red might be the best color or yellow or green might be the best color. That‟s just the world of opinion. And opinions are useful and valid and we need them, and they describe who we are. They‟re part of our identity since we‟re talking tonight on being a woman.

Your identity really, really matters. So your opinions matter, but if we just have opinions without boundaries, then we are rude and potentially bullies. Intellectually, we‟re bullies when we force our opinions on others. And I‟m sur e that could be a big topic of discussion in general for everyone.

You know how many different ways you get bullied with ideas because someone else has poor boundaries, or maybe because you‟ve got to work on some of your boundaries as far as blocking ot her peoples‟ ideas at the door if they do not fit what you value or what you believe. It‟s all about the boundary.

That‟s one of the reasons that sometimes I talk to people about conflict fights and even war. Boundaries are behind all that. If the whole world could learn really good boundaries and that they are just a fact, they exist, they‟ll never go away as long as we are a species, there‟d be less war because there‟d be proof of how things are going to go.


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We would know ahead of time that it ‟s useless to try to force people to believe what we believe or think the way we think, and so we have to compromise because of boundaries. So that‟s my little rant about the difference between opinion, and opinion is very valuable for our identity, but it is not fact. One time, I gave a charitable talk to a women‟s group in Chicago, and this was put on by a publicist I know.

I talked about some of the hard facts of romance and the dynamics of what goes on, and how men think versus what women think, what the steps of attraction are and this sort of thing. And oh God, it was a lot of labor, and it was free, and why not. I did it. After all this, this woman kind of raises her hand and says, “You know, I disagree with Dr. Paul‟s science.” There was just nothing I could say to that because she was living in the world of YouTube and Facebook and Paris Hilton where everything is just a sea of opinion – where someone‟s style or tastes are accepted as if they were fact . I wasn‟t just giving my opinion. There were a lot of things that I have to talk about that are just a pain in the butt to have to do in life, and I really wish it di dn‟t work that way.

In my opinion, it‟d be nicer if our psyches worked a little different than how they do, but I was just putting out there the latest of the late research I had seen. The ideas that we‟ve composed about romance that always seem to hold water, always seem to work exactly the same way.


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:::CHAPTER ELEVEN::: :::BEING UNDERSTOOD, AND GOOD RELATIONS::: We can come back to some of these ideas, but let‟s think about some other goddesses that we haven‟t quite finished up with. Some of these will relate to men and your career. Some of them will relate to raising children. Some of them will relate to fri endships, but we‟re going to wrap up a sampling of some of these female goddesses from ancient Greece as a way to talk about how do we combine feminine instincts, what makes you uniquely a woman, not a man, with the idea of boundaries, which both men and women have. And think of it in terms of if we only had one or the other, life would not go so well. If we only had feminine instinct and masculine instinct just running rampant and unsteered, unchecked, undirected, then it‟s like an explosion. It‟d be like having a car that only has an accelerator pedal and no ability to brake or steer. What good would that car be? It‟d be a very passionate car, but it‟d be a very dangerous car, and I think this is one of the reasons men and women get so upset with each other and their behavior


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because our instincts are decidedly different. We all have similar survival instincts. We all want to survive. We all have the instinct to cover our faces or duck when we hear a loud noise. We all have the instinct to wince when there‟s danger or something offensive. We all have the instinct to cover our noses when there‟s a foul odor, and this is all survival based.

We all want to survive, no matter the gender, and yet, there are also gender based instincts. There are features to being a woman that only you have and men don‟t. There are features to being a man instinctually that only men have and you don‟t. And it‟s almost like trying to learn a different language in order to communicate and get along with each other. Whenever we hear of the other gender doing something that we think is distasteful, part of it is probably that we don‟t speak that language, and so then we don‟t understand why in the world they would do that. For example, a lot of men wonder why women love shopping so much or why do they like shoes. There‟s a very val id, instinctual reason for why.: It‟s very normal for them but not for men. There are many things that men do that don‟t make any sense, like wh en a man is feeling emotionally hurt, why does he go isolate? Why won‟t he just talk it out? Why won‟t men ever individually seek out couples counseling, unless they‟re afraid of completely losing their relationship?

They never seek it out as a posi tive. Why? It‟s a very valid reason for why. It‟s instinctual for them. It makes them feel weak, and that‟s not an ego weakness.


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It‟s an instinct that actually helped the species survive long ago. If you had a man out hunting in the woods with the other warriors, and he started crying and expressing his emotions, he‟s a weak hunter. You‟ve got get him out of the hunting team. We could all die from starvation for having no meat. There are valid reasons why the two genders have the instincts they h ave. That‟s not what makes us bad.

What makes us do harm and be misunderstood is when we don‟t also have boundaries, too. When people do wrong is because they‟ve made bad choices with their boundaries or lacked boundaries, or lacked another feature of the psyche we talk about in MindOS called observing ego. We need to be observant of our own behavior and how it works. So with that in mind, let‟s combine some of these ancient Greek goddesses with the idea of boundaries so we have some balance and these tools that we can build for ourselves. We have both an accelerator pedal and a brake pedal for life and steering wheel for life instead of just one or the other, and why use ancient Greek gods and goddesses to learn about what is masculine or feminine? Well, because if stories last for thousands of years, there‟s probably some universal nature to them, and if they‟re stories about males and females, then it probably says something universal about all males and about all females or they wouldn‟t last so l ong. They wouldn‟t be popular. They wouldn‟t inspire if it wasn‟t common throughout all cultures and throughout all time. Stories like this would not last, and that‟s why they do.

The most universal feature of being a woman is what is a feminine instinct. That‟s what‟s shared by all women, and the same is true with men with masculine instincts. I thought some of the goddesses that I would mention just to put out there and let you think about a bit and see what they mean and how could we use these, the first one that comes to mind that I wanted to mention about the career area that applies to careers, and your personal life too. www .womenshapp iness.com

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With the Iris, goddess of the rainbow, and responsible for communication between heaven and earth. You know, one of the things that I‟m always talking about trying to get men and women to understand each other is that how do we understand each other if we have these completely different gender based instincts. Well, one way is we all have emotional capacity. We all have – we both have the ability to feel angry or sad or happy, feel friendly, feel inspired. We all have emotions, and so we‟re capable of feeling the same emotions to the same degree, but we tend to feel them about different scenarios in life.

The Iris Boundary If you‟ve looked at the Greek gods and goddesses, there are often analogous gods for every goddess. Analogous goddesses for every god. If Iris was the – and you think of the iris of your eye, the colors of the rainbow. If she was the goddess of the rainbow and also of communication between heaven and earth, she would be very similar to the male god Hermes who is the god of communication. So communication between heaven and earth, goddess of the rainbow. One of the things that you might think about in terms of Iris and her role is the uniquely feminine instinct of seeking harmony in groups. Acceptance and tolerance and welcoming ability to people of all stripes. And that was one thing I had wanted to mention yesterday and didn ‟t about a career skill and a career related feminine boundary. It would be an iris boundary.


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One that seeks balance in terms of peoples‟ input or involvement. It‟s kind of a diversity instinct that you could see used in the workplace, but you could also see that used in your choices in friendships.

Have you ever been in a situation where you kind of looked around and noticed you weren‟t enjoying life quite as muc h lately, and you noticed the people you spent time with and the friends you had, and a lot of them were very similar. A lot of those friends came from a similar background. I knew a woman a little ways back who was a very earthy person, Midwestern person, but kind of fell in with a group of women that were more from wealth and sort of highborn women, and she‟s a friendly person and could get along with anybody, so she did. She looked around and noticed life was missing something of late, and part of it was because she noticed, “Wow, all my friends are the same as each other, and I find a lot of similarities to them, but they‟re also all from really different economic backgrounds from what I was brought up in. I feel a little excluded, even though the y‟re not doing it on purpose,” so she felt a little bad about this. She realized a need to have more diversity in friendships in her life. So your use of a special boundary that we could call the iris boundary would be one of using your boundary to find more balance in life where you have more diversity in something. In this case, it‟s diversity in friendships. And it‟s something you have to wake up to. It won‟t smack you in the face all the time like it did to my friend.

You might need to look around and survey your life a little more and say, “Is there enough diversity? Is there enough of a broad input of ideas and people in my life? Maybe I need to build more of that.” So you can imagine as an exercise an iris boundary being one that is like the color wheel. Like a rainbow of color around your boundary where you want an equal amount of each color. And notice something. www .womenshapp iness.com

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If you combine all the colors of the color wheel together, you get white. Did you ever take an art class? You‟re in music, I thought you had said.

Have you ever taken an art class where you learn about color? I once took an art class in color, and we did all these little experiments with color, combining them together, and what do you get. When you combine all the colors together, you get white, which is illumination. Right? It‟s understanding and illumination, so there‟s a symbolic way of looking at the iris boundary, and black is the absence of all color, the absence of everything. All right. So an iris boundary.

The Medusa and Lilith Boundaries Another example that can sometimes come up in the workplace, and definitely with men, and we can cover it a little more tonight. There are two goddesses from different traditions that are, I think, related a lot. The one from the Greeks is Medusa, and the one that is actually more biblical from Christian lore is Lilith.


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Medusa was the young maiden who was attacked and raped by Poseidon in the temple of Athena, and no other goddess came to her aid. She was betrayed by her sisters. Nobody helped her. After the fact, Athena – or no, Aphrodite granted her special power as a consolation for her tragedy of being attacked and gave her the ability to turn men to stone, and her hair turned into snakes. If you met her gaze, you would turn to stone. This is a negative aspect of life where you have been harmed or shamed, ultimately. And remember, in our definition, shame is the diminishment of your femininity for women, and shame is the diminishment of masculinity for men. So the word shame traditionally has been thought of as just a form of anxiety, but I actually kind of like to think of it as gender based. There‟s female shame and male shame, and I think what they are analogous to is a drop in your femininity level or masculinity level, so certainly being attacked like that shamed Medusa horribly.

Nonetheless, having been harmed in that way actually also led to incredible power. So even when negative things happen to us, it‟s powerful. It‟s energy that can be metabolized into something else. Remember that when we were talking about the ego defenses and how the mature ego defense is using your boundary well and with strength, you can do such things as suppression or humor or altruism, charity. The lesson of Medusa is that all of the negative things that can happen to you in life, those can be metabolized into great good, eventually, and she is a reminder of just how powerful it is. You are not powerless when you have suffered really big challenges or hurts.


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You‟ve very powerful, and what you do with it is what matters. Medusa had the power to turn men to stone. Lilith is analogous to her in the bible. Lilith was supposedly Adam‟s first wife, and she was his equal, and she was taken from the ground the same as he was instead of from a rib. She became very defiant and decided she didn‟t want to be married anymore.

She wanted to do her own thing, and she kind of turned against God and got punished in the form of having to live on earth, and she couldn‟t live in heaven anymore. And she became a monster and ate babies and things like this. So she was a negative representation that came out of conflict with God and conflict with man, and it didn‟t go so well.

If there‟s a positive that we can pull out of her story the same way that we do out of the Medusa story, it would be two fold. Since God was involved and her husband Adam was involved somehow, conflict with God in this way where you‟re defiant of God – and I am not a theologian. I‟m using this scientifically. Conflict of God would imply that you think you‟re as powerful as him, which is by definition, narcissistic. And it‟s one of t he reasons that psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, psychologists will sometimes use a term for people with poor boundaries and narcissism. They‟ll use the term omnipotence. They‟ll say, “That person has a lot of omnipotence,” and it‟s similar to arrogance or bragging or similar to feeling that you‟re all that. Okay? Narcissism in the vain kind of way. And omnipotence is a form of denial where you feel as if you‟re all powerful or you feel as if you‟re always right, and everyone else is wrong. That‟s omnip otence. So when you encounter a person that‟s sort of braggish in that way or always has to be right, even if they‟re kind of a meek, mild, shy person, but they‟re always letting you know they think they‟re right, then they have this omnipotence, and that would be the Lilith instinct for women specifically. Kind of rebelling against God, and therefore, rebelling against perfection, which none of us have.


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By the way, perfectionism, if you‟ve ever been called perfectionistic or have known people who behaved in a perfectionist way, that‟s a boundary problem, too.

Entitlement, denial and perfectionism are caused by looking out holes in your boundary. And when you look out a hole, what do you see? You see everything. If the boundary itself marks what we control in life from what we don‟t, and you‟re looking out a hole in it or someone else is looking out a hole in their boundary, then you see everything, and you think you own all of it. You think you control it all.

Perfectionism When you encounter someone who is a, quote, perfectionist, you can also count on them having a tendency to think they‟re always right and to kind of over reach other peoples‟ boundaries and be bossy or feel like they have a right to tell other people how to feel or who to be. That‟s perfectionism, and a feature of it is omnipotence, and that‟s Lilith. Now when we get to Lilith‟s relationship to Adam symbolically, that‟s a little bit trickier because no gender is better than the other. We‟re just different.

But maybe you have encountered male equivalence of Lilith in reverse as well where when a man has no interest in learning about women and how they think, or a woman has no interest in learning about men and how they think, nothing good happens. No relationship can happen, and there‟s a lot of pain instead or loneliness. In other words, we come face-to-face with the fact that we are different instinctually, and there‟s no way to make the other gender be just like us. And the re‟s no way to


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make them literally be in our shoes except through empathy and to learn to translate language. So that‟s Lilith.

The Hestia Boundary Let‟s go to a third one, a really crucial one. I covered this goddess in my first – or no, my second book with Penguin. The power of female friendship. Talk about this one a lot. It‟s Hestia.

Now what was interesting about Hestia as far as the ancient Greeks go is that she was a kind of martyr goddess in a way, but she ended up immensely powerful in so being. I suppose in a way she‟s kind of similar to Christ, only female, in that she went to the chief god, Zeus, and said, “Hey, I want to be this really good being. I want to help everyone on Mount Olympus. I want to forego relationships. I want to give up having relationships for the sake of helping others. I want to be devoted to everybody.”

Zeus was so impressed by this, he made her the middle manager of everything, of Mount Olympus, and nobody get to her equipment or resources without her getting them from the storehouse. She was the manager of Mount Olympus. That was her reward. And she also is considered the goddess of heart and home as well as the only goddess of friendship, officially. So there was an aspect to Hestia that was about really honoring friendship. Non-romantic social interactions and promises with people. She is someone reliable where there is not a romantic connection, which is more of a friend or a parent. So Hestia is the goddess of friendship. And women‟s friendships with each other are so needed and instinctual for www .womenshapp iness.com

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feeling good as a woman, it‟s a really profound thing that we almost forget in today‟s unisex society where everybody is equal, and we assume that mea ns we‟re identical twins when we‟re not. Everybody is equal, but they‟re d ifferent at the same time.

Males, a lot of times in their friendships, don‟t mind being on the outs because they can feel like they‟re the lone wolf or they‟re the top dog and c an go without interacting with others for a long period of time. But there‟s a deep need, generally, in women for a sense of belonging and sisterhood. Hestia really represents this. Sometimes in your life, you may notice this might relate to the workplace as much as it does to just friendship itself. If you‟ve ever seen examples of women who have been offered promotions from maybe middle manager to the executive suite, and something in them just doesn‟t want to do it, and they don‟t know why. It just doesn‟t feel right. It doesn‟t feel like it‟ll be satisfying, even though it‟s better salary, bigger responsibility, more important, prominent position. Some of them will say no to the promotion, and a lot of people end up scratching their heads about it. But when you interview them and ask them, “Why did you turn it down,” they‟ll say, “I don‟t know. I feel more valuable and valued being at the center of things as a manager than being alone in that lonely corner office where I don‟t get the s ocial connection as much as I do when I‟m in the thick of things as a manager.” And it‟s this Hestia instinct and Hestia boundaries that are involved here.

As an exercise for measuring this part of your life and as a tool, I‟d like you to imagine a lass o in the shape of a circle where you can throw the lasso and gather people to yourself. Sometimes you need to gather more people in friendship. And we need to borrow a little bit from the KWML Mastery www .womenshapp iness.com

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Program about this because it‟s everything to do with friendship and best friendship. The idea that to make friends means that we like each other and are liked, and for people to like each other, one of a few things happens. We like those who are like us or similar to us, and we we like those who like us or are good to us. Those are the two ways to make friends, generally speaking. We like those who are like us, and we like those who like us. Two different ways of liking. Want more friends? Then be likeable and like people back. Be like them in the sense of find similarities with them. You can apply this in the workplace. You can apply this with men. It‟s finding commonalities with people as opposed to just differences. A nd it‟s also just being friendly to people, being good to people.

In being good to people, we need to have good boundaries, too. So another piece of the Hestia boundary would involve a judiciousness about who to invest in, who to like because there a lot of people we like who might just suck it up and not give anything back. J ust suck up the spotlight or the attention and not be good back to us. And why would they not? Because they‟ve got more narcissism than us and lesser boundaries than us.

If you can imagine a person with solid boundaries and you offer them a gift, you have to knock on the door, and they hear the knock on their door, and they open it, and they see you with a gift, and they feel gratitude and say, “Thank you,” and accept the gift.” But if you can imagine a person with big holes in their boundary and you gave them a gift, it‟s sort of like you throw www .womenshapp iness.com

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the gift through the window, and they‟re inside, self absorbed, and they see this gift dropped through the window, the hole in their boundary. They say, “Gee, the universe just threw me a gift. Awesome. It‟s mine.” And they never see see you standing standing there outside as the originator of of the gift. Okay? That‟s caused by holes in the boundary. When somebody can‟t appreciate or have or have gratitude. It‟s because they have this omnipotence where they think they already own everything outside the boundary.

You remember a classic example from film of an ungrateful person in the film, if you‟ve ever seen it, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Remember that old film with Gene Wilder where there was a girl that turned into a giant blueberry, and she kept getting bigger and bigger, and she was kind of gluttonous. She was a classic narcissist with this lack of gratitude for things in life. And you remember the song she sang in that film was, “I want the world. I want want the whole world.” world.” An endless appetite for everything, but no gratitude for any amount of it. Sorry to put that in your head. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, but that‟s an example of this as well. The lack of a Hestia Boundary. This is the kind of girl that probably didn‟t have a lot of friends. She was unappreciative and had a lot of omnipotence, a lot of narcissism to her boundaries.

So value your friendships. Now in exchange, what Hestia got back from the Greek people was she was to be honored at the meals before any other gods or goddesses.


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She was honored. She was, in a way, the most important before anyone gave thanks to any other god or goddess. They had to honor Hestia. I think that shows how very important women‟s friendships with each other are. I even go so far as to say that there can‟t be peace without women‟s friendships with each other, that it‟s the force of diplomacy and good politics and anti -war in its nature.

You see that a lot around the world, and some of the most war torn areas, women don‟t have connection to each other freely. There‟s a lot of squelching of women‟s friendship s with each other.

We are up to some examples of child rearing boundaries. Demeter and Aphrodite, the goddesses of being mother to a daughter versus mother to a son.


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:::CHAPTER TWELVE::: ::BOUNDARIES IN BALANCE: PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER:: Laura:

Yes, absolutely life altering, fascinating program. It was so incredible, and after that, since then, I told a friend about that, and he went and got MindOS, so I have a different program of yours , and he‟s seen MindOS, so we kind of swap back and forth with these. And in deep inner game, we recommend to the guys that they see Count of Monte Cristo.


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Dr. Paul:

Yes.

Laura:

So I saw it, and God, it was so incredibly valuable because when you‟re dealing with the brain injury and all that, it‟s just hampered me my whole life. So I got a really good handle on what you guys were talking about with like mature masculinity and seeing the journey he goes through and how you grow yourself up internally. Like he‟s a great – he embodied for me a great example of an adult who figures out how to grow themselves up because he had to.

When I look at culture, like American culture, we have a crisis of immaturity because we have such an adolescent culture. When I think about the impact that it made to watch that film, I keep looking for film examples of mature, sexy, adult women who ar en‟t mothers, and someone recommended to me the recent version of The Thomas Crown Affair, but she‟s the only female character I‟ve seen recently who embodies like a real mature, feminine instinct without motherhood involved, but she had intimacy issues. So it was like are there any film characters who like give an equivalent for women? Dr. Paul:

Yes, well, I think part of the reason for that is economic in our culture. It pays corporations well to discourage good boundaries for the reason that the worse peoples‟ boundaries are, the more they open their pocket books. Right? So every sale is buy now, this is the last day of the sale. I always feel like asking people, “Really? Is it really the last day of the sale today, or is the last day of the sale tomorrow or the next day? Really? Do you expect me to believe that?” I think one of the big forces in our culture that has really promoted bad boundaries and what you‟re saying juvenile behavior, adolescent culture is simply advertising. If you


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then look at who are the biggest consumers in society, women, and why are they the biggest consumers. Don‟t men buy things? Yes, they buy razors and condoms and deodorant, Axe deodorant body spray. Why is it like this? Well, it makes perfect sense. Women have the shopping instinct. Women have the instinct to be the discriminating shoppers of society because it‟s deep in their nature as women, and it goes back to numerous stories, one of which is the story of Psyche. There‟s a lot of that shoppi ng instinct in Psyche in her story. The ability to discriminate between red seeds and white and to separate them. Probably where this goes back to instinctually is all the way back to ancient hunter gatherer tribes where the males would have bigger bod ies, and as a result, they‟d go out and be the killers of society, and they‟d kill animals for food and fend off warring tribes, and the women, the survival instinct that‟s uniquely feminine in the women would be if they can‟t sort of out the rotting food from the good food in the store house or count the grain, know how much grain there is in the silo for the rest of the winter, we also could die as a species. Each gender‟s role is equally important and yet different. So I think that‟s where the shoppin g instinct comes from. Being a discriminating shopper is a survival level instinct from ancient, ancient times in women. So cut to the current state of things. If women are the shoppers and consumers of society and if good boundaries are bad for profit, then what do you think is going to happen? There‟s going to be a big push, even unwittingly, because it‟s good marketing to encourage women above all to have


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terrible boundaries because they‟re the shoppers. And I think that‟s a lot of times what you see happen. Now one thing I know about you right away is first off, you somehow got your hands on a men‟s product because that‟s a product that kind of sort of was to help men with their dating. And since that time, since I‟m a psychiatrist, I help men and women equally.

It‟s unfair to just have things just for men. So we made an equivalent program for women, MindOS Mastery on the Women‟s Happiness site. And in the original men‟s version, of course I told them about this Count of Monte Cristo movie because it is a male main character, but what would an analogous character be for women?

It would have to be one in which it respected feminine instincts and the suppression of some feminine instincts, and the female here has to rise to the occasion of getting her femininity back somehow. Part of what the Count of Monte Cristo did is he got his masculinity back. But in the process, he worked on some higher-level intellectual skills and skills of character. There are women‟s stories that do that as well. Sometimes when you see stories like – what was the story about World War I with the young girl, the blond girl? Saoirse Ronan. I forget how to pronounce her name. It‟s a Gaelic name. Saoirse. It looks like Saoirse Ronan is her name. Twelve-year-old blond girl in the movie – is it called Redemption? What‟s it called? It‟s a one -word title. Almost won an Oscar about World War I. James McAvoy is in it as well. But that‟s an example of a female hero story where a woman learns incredible lessons about life through the process of being shunned. The need to belong is indeed feminine instinct, so any time you see a story about a woman banished who finds justice and returns to the tribe, returns to society, that‟s the equivalent of The Count of Monte Cristo for women.


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A prime example is the film, The Scarlet Letter , Hester Prynne. I think Winona Ryder unfortunately was – she starred in a version of that film a few years ago.

The Scarlett Letter is a woman vanished who finds heroism, gets rid of shame, finds justice, divine justice, and returns to the land of the living, and to belonging. So The Scarlet Letter is another example. There are lots of examples in the bible. The story of Judith in which she finds justice. I think she drives a stake through the head of a tyrannical king who is trying to sleep with her while she‟s sleeping. So there‟s Judith. There‟s all these stories of female heroes, and a lot of them will tend to be based on classic mythology, like the story of Psyche. I mean Psyche‟s story under the thumb of Aphrodite is a massive hero story for women. She‟s gone through all these trials that she has to pass, and each one of them addresses a different feminine instinct that she has to master. And master with maturity, grow maturity in the process.

All the way up to the final test we talked about last night where we applied it to the workplace where she has to travel up the River Styx basically into hell itself and steal the jewel box of Pandora, the queen of the underworld. Not Pandora. Persephone. And in so doing, she‟s just given two gold coins and two bean cakes, and she doesn‟t know why she‟s given these things, and that‟s all she‟s got to wo rk with. You know? She‟s a poor working girl with a meager salary. She somehow has to make it work for being a hero in the world. And low and behold, she finds that everybody is


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begging her, everybody is wanting one of the coins. “Please give me a co in. I‟m hungry. Please give me a bean cake,” and she intuitively knows she better not give those up. She might need them. That‟s good boundaries.

She has to hold onto her resources, even forsaking others so as to not betray herself. One of the master lessons of boundaries for women. Why? Now you talked about why are mothers always represented in hero stories. The mothering instinct is obviously a huge, huge part of identity in women, and we even include that in what we call the equation of femininity that we talk about in the complete feminine empowerment program, a bigger program than this, that deals with feminine instincts. Part of that definition is finding a purpose greater than yourself to belong to, and that purpose tends to be a creative purpose, and it‟s the creative spirit in women‟s instincts, in feminine instincts, that is simultaneously the mothering spirit, the mothering instinct. So for women who don‟t have children or don‟t want them or won‟t be having them, you are no less a mother than actual, biological mother because you are a woman. And as a woman, you have this creative spirit no matter what, whether you have biological children or not.

The kind of story you would want to look for as hero stories, if you don‟t want them to always have saving children involved or saving her children or being a mother would be one in which a woman has a great devotion to creating something. Oprah‟s life story. She is maternal as all get out, and she created, gave birth to a company and a network. That‟s her child, so to speak. It‟s the creative, mothering instinct in a woman. Any time a woman has a great devotion, maybe an artistic one or whenever you see a story of a girl that really wants to get into Julliard or wants to play the violin or wants to do something that seemed impossible, wants to be a ballet star.


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Black Swan, thee film, has that kind of element to it, only it has the dark side of it, the negative side. The Medusa and Lilith side of things. The desire to shine through creatin g. That‟s the mothering instinct. So you would just find a story that involves banishment and/or strong desire to shine in the world creatively, and you would have your feminine hero story. And that‟s certainly certainly the case case with Psyche. Psyche.

A lot of these stories originate with her. The myths kind of translate out through history, through Shakespeare. You know, all Shakespearian plays are based on these Greek myths, and then a lot of Shakespearian plays are the ground material for modern films. It all goes back to these basic instincts. So that was was Hestia. Since we‟re talking a little bit about children, and I felt we ought to pay homage to literal biological children, but you could apply these equally to your devotion to an art or to a creative work, a creative purpose in your life. Demeter, mother to a daughter, and Aphrodite, mother to a son, have interesting dynamics with their children. You might apply these equally to the dynamic you might have to your great devotion to a creative purpose. The story of Demeter we covered a couple sessions ago where she is the goddess of the fields and of the flora of the world. The goddess of the harvest. And there will be no harvesting that happens if she is pissed off, which she does get when her daughter Persephone is kidnapped and stolen away by Hades and made his wife in the underworld. So Demeter blights the whole earth with winter, and it is the world‟s first winter where no plants will grow and people are starving, and the world is bad because of her wrath at the loss of her daughter, the kidnapping. Finally, a deal is struck between all the gods and goddesses that Hades will return his bride, her daughter, to the land of


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the living for one-third of the year. year. She will come back to be with her mother.

So this is looking at the boundaries involved with a daughter from a mother are going to be a little different from the boundaries with a son. They‟re going to be colored by the difference between these two dynamics. You always have a bond with your daughter as a mother, a really close bond, and it‟s a different kind of thing than the bond with a son. The son needs to be pushed out into the world. We get into the Oedipus, talk about myths. The Oedipal period of life for a boy versus a gi rl. It‟s a different dynamic that occurs. The same sex parent versus the opposite sex parent, and daughters always have this unique, really close tie to their mothers that almost forms like a blended identity of sorts. But your way to use your Demeter boundary on relationships with daughters or your relationship to your art is that you have to let it go or let her go two-thirds of the time, if you want an actual number recommended by this myth. But you are bonded with her or it one-third of the time. If we wanted to extend this into artistic careers or great devotion to an artistic pursuit that you have, I would say look at it in terms of you create a work of art, like a painting, and you love it so much, you never show it to anyone. And you would never think of selling it. And you keep it confined to your studio. That would be too close of a bond with your art. It never gets out into the world. It never makes love, so to speak. It never marries, and you‟re keeping it hostage, y our daughter, so to speak, metaphorically. Two-thirds of the time, you have to let it out there. If you were in an art business or a musical business or a dance business, you might want to think of this one-third, two-third rule of the Demeter boundary and think of spending onethird of your week or month or year creating the art and loving it, being alone with it. But you might think of twotwothirds of your business time or your day, your week, your month, or your year promoting it. www .womenshapp iness.com

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You know, if there could be an ancient recommended ratio for modern business, modern creativity, and modern art for women, it would probably be this one-third, two-third ratio. One-third of your time creating and two-thirds of your time promoting, getting who you are, your creativity, your daughter out into the world to marry the world. Technically, to marry the unconscious of the world because it is art. Hades is the god of the underworld, the unconscious. So that‟s Demeter, mothers and and daughters. Aphrodite has a different story with her son, Eros or Cupid. She didn‟t want him hanging out on the couch until he was 35. She wanted him to go to work, the work of love. She wanted him out there in the world shooting love arrows into people and making them fall in love. In fact, as the myth goes, it‟s very interesting. She withers and dies away when he doesn‟t go do his work of love, when he doesn‟t go shoot arrows into people. She gets less and less honored, so to speak. Aphrodite‟s Aphrodite‟s temple starts to crumb le when Cupid, her son, Eros, her son doesn‟t go go do his work. So the kind of boundaries you have with a son, whether you‟re a single mom, married mom, or adult mom to an adult son, your boundaries need to love him, but maybe to quite a degree from afar.

Eros was almost never at home on the couch talking to mom. He was almost always out in the world, world, flying around, doing his work of love, shooting arrows. And that‟s the way Aphrodite wanted it. But at the the same time, she wanted to hear about his exploits out there, and in the case of Psyche and the mistake he made pricking himself with his own arrow and falling in love with a mere mortal, she was very suspicious of the girl‟s intent.

In fact, she was very jealous of Psyche and her beauty, and that‟s when she started putting her to the test. All these www .womenshapp iness.com

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trials she put her through as the ultimate mother-in-law to the girl and a girl becoming a woman. She wanted to make sure that this girl became a woman fit for marriage to her son. So even from afar, the mother of a son is monitoring things. You want your son to e-mail you or call you once in a while. You want to know what‟s going on. But you also don‟t want him laying around on your couch, eating Cheetos, until he‟s 35. Does that kind of put it into a modern context a little bit? Daughter Boundaries versus Son Boundaries, and the daughter being closer in a way, at least physically so. It feels like part of you, physically, where as the son needs to be out there in the world, doing his thing. But not without communicating back to you, because you will rise to his defense, say, “Wait a minute here. I don‟t think this is what you should be doing. I don‟t think this is who you should be with.” Okay? So those are the Demeter and Aphrodite Boundaries of relating to sons and daughters. I thought we‟d make mention of Artemis here. Artemis the huntress is also a universally useful feature of being a woman, and an instinct in being a woman, and if we were to pair her wi th boundaries, what we‟d get is an Artemis boundary.

Did you ever notice that no matter how artistic your female friends are, they‟ll still have an instinct for orderliness of a sort? Like the order of your home. Even if their art studio is a complete wreck and messy, things are strewn all over the place, there will be aspects to their home where it makes sense, knowing where everything is. There‟s an orderliness. A built in accuracy to women, if you will. No matter what their personality style is , it‟s deep level instinct.

Well your boundary is useful for sorting things. Psyche used it to sort the seeds. The accuracy of sorting. The accuracy


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of labeling things, and thus, giving yourself power as a woman. The brief mention of mothering again. When I talk to groups of men and they ask about mothers versus fathers, what are their roles in a child‟s life, I‟ll often say that the father‟s role is to teach you about the body, how to use the body, how to go out and fix a car or meet a girl. But the mother‟s role is to teach the children about – no, this is a very primitive role. It‟s not all you are, obviously. But a very primitive way of seeing this is a mother‟s role is to teach their kids to name emotions. Imagine a mother holding a baby, and the baby is crying. Well, that‟s not the end of the story. She might look into the baby‟s eyes and say, “Oh, you‟re sad,” or, “Oh, you‟re angry,” or, “Oh, you pooped your diaper.” She‟s giving words to emotions. And if you think about the mind of a small child, these things called emotions overtake us, and they‟re invisible. They‟re not an object. You can‟t hold onto them, and that can make them scary. We can‟t master them without mothers to give labels to these emotions. Well, that‟s t he Artemis In stinct as well in there. It‟s the accuracy of labeling things, sorting things, categorizing things. And through so doing, achieving power. It‟s a uniquely feminine kind of power to know what things are called and to know, therefore, what they can be useful for, and what things mean. One of the things we see today in the publishing world – I‟ve published a few books. And one of the things you notice is almost every executive and editor is female in the entire industry. You don‟t see a lo t of males in it, and you wonder why. It‟s like the power of language, and emotional language, a novel. What do emotions mean and getting power out of that. Uniquely feminine. It‟s the Artemis instinct and Artemis boundaries. So any time – goint to bring in one more feature


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of boundaries that are poor. Any time you hear a person say they are overwhelmed, confused, traumatized, any vague language that has negative emotion to it, usually it has something to do with holes in the boundary. When someone says they‟re overwhelmed, it means they have a lot of holes in their boundary, and stress is getting in everywhere. Someone says they‟re confused. Ideas are flying through all the windows of your boundary, the holes. Somebody says they‟re really s tressed or traumatized.

It means a whole bunch of negativity has bust in, made holes in the boundary. What is a uniquely feminine power of this Artemis organization sorting and labeling, and you might say therapist. One of the reasons there are far more female therapists than male therapists is probably this ability, this instinct, the Artemis boundary to sort and label and categorize and achieve power through labeling. You use your boundary in this way. Like a filter to boundary as a filter. Useful in business, useful in friendships, being discriminating, investigating something‟s nature and giving labels to it. It‟s the huntress, Artemis. A goddess of the moon. She hunts by night. And that feature of her hunting by night is interesting, too, because when the world is confusing and when it‟s in the dark, that‟s when she does her best. That‟s when she hunts with great accuracy, that labeling things, sorting things, categorizing things can make the darkness safe.

There are a few other goddesses that are universal that we‟ve already covered. One of them is Hera, the leader, and one of her gifts is the ability to give constructive criticism to others without producing harm or injuring peoples‟ narcissism.


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When people are too over sensitive, another boundary feature. When we say someone is over sensitive, it just means they have a lot of holes in their boundary, and very neutral comments can be taken as offensive by them. You‟ve got to watch out for those people, but if you have to relate to them or you employ them or maybe they employ you, you‟ve got to notice the holes in their boundary by how, quote, sensitive they are or fragile or what thin skin they have.

Your Hera boundary, your Hera instinct, has the diplomatic queenly ability. And I don‟t mean that in a personality style way. I mean Hera was the queen of Mount Olympus. She was the female leader of everything, and also, the goddess of territory and property. She had the ability of diplomacy. She could talk in the same language as the people she had to lead, and she was also known to be very critical because after all, you can‟t run a kingdom without analyzing and commenting on what‟s working and what‟s not working. So any time people get back to defensive, when people get over defensive at constructive criticisms you make, it‟s time for the Hera boundary of diplomacy and remembering that they may not think like you, the person you‟re criticizing. Maybe it‟s a male. Maybe it‟s a co -worker who is female. Maybe it‟s a female friend.

They don‟t think just like you, and you have to remember that you need to drop down to their level or rise up to their level and speak their language in their words in a way they can understand that you are being constructively critical. The sirens are an interesting one, very powerful goddesses. They had the ability to use seductiveness to get what they wanted and to defeat enemies through seductiveness and trickery. You might say they are a Machiavellian equivalent. You know, we talked last night a bit about Machiavelli as a decoder of the reptilian brain of the basic gender instincts. He dealt a lot with male instincts, but he‟d also talked about www .womenshapp iness.com

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feminine instincts in political trickery for utilitarian reasons to cause good to come to a community. How to lead through subterfuge to have good things happen in the end, and the sirens are an example of a unique gift that women have to show people beauty. Taken too literally, we say it‟s sexual seductiveness. That‟s not exactly what I‟m encouraging. Certainly, you see it happen. Sex sells, and the female form sells. You know, you always see bikini models selling cars. Why is that? It‟s because it works. But I‟m saying something deeper than just what‟s on the surface and being sexy as a way of getting what you want, even though in your relationship with me, you know this is true. There‟s a way of being flirtatious to get more of your way in how things go. There‟s a very appropriate place for that in the human courtship process that we talk about in the seventh sense program.

When we talk about that, some women kind of bristle against the idea of being flirty or sexy as part of courtship for women, and yet we all know it‟s real, it hap pens, and it naturally happens. But I‟m talking about something more universal than just the body.

The female body as representative of beauty itself. You may have heard from your grandma the old phrase, “You can catch more flies with honey than vine gar.” It‟s sort of like that. It‟s a unique gift women have, where as men, by and large, will often try to use more what they have, the Aries instinct, more war like, threatening instinct, to try to get what they want. Women have the gift for seducing with honey as opposed to vinegar and knowing the difference. So impressing people with beauty to get what you want. Sometimes to distract from what you don‟t want people to see, so long as you have good ethical ends in mind for the outcome. That‟s t he gift the sirens. So I thought I would mention the sirens. They were these creatures that would –


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that had beautiful female bodies that would lure sailors to their death on the rocks and defeat enemy armies.

The Athena Boundary Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war. Counterpart to the male god of war, who is Aries. Athena is interesting because she has just as much the power and the brutal weapons and force ability that Aries had. In fact, the city of Athens named after her. Wisdom and war. Why would the female goddess of war be not just brutal or a bit war and wisdom? She‟s a force of politics and diplomacy in winning wars. Cleverness to war, strategic cleverness. And one thing that thinking about her as a boundary, when you have to face direct confrontation, like you‟re called into the boss‟ office, or you have to directly confront a child with substance abuse, or you have to directly confront a friend on being a little too flirty with your husband, there‟s no nicey nicey way to make things go well, sometimes, with certain situations. You want to remember to have an equal balance of aggression mixed with wisdom as to when to use it. In other words, to not completely lose your cool and to fight through shouting, that you‟re be tter off with fighting with words of wisdom and calmly stating your case, diplomatically stating your case. You need to stop flirting with my husband so much, or if you‟re going to keep using drugs, I‟m going to have to not have you live here, or if you keep that up, you‟re going to lose your job. Not shouting. Not losing it. But wisely setting a boundary that is confrontational, and that‟s Athena, goddess of wisdom and war. I thought I‟d throw in one last little tip associated with Athena. Let‟s borrow from the world of men and the United States Marines. www .womenshapp iness.com

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Feminine Intelligence in Personal Boundaries

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