Transformational Teachings from Counselor Jane Ilene Cohen

Transcript Excerpt of Jane’s Teachings
during the “Shifting into Your New Consciousness” group 10-1-09

(Participant’s name is changed to protect her privacy.)

(To Laura) “You have a distorted idea of what women’s relationship with men are, or women’s value in relation to men, or just the nature of how men are.  It’s an old paradigm that has been pretty widespread, but it seems to be stronger in certain cultures.  There is probably some impossibility that you see in relation to relationships with men, based on what your father was like, on what the whole male-female culture was like in your culture, the way your mother related to your father — the whole macho thing, the whole man is to be worshiped kind of thing.  But it’s not something that’s really tolerable, especially to a woman who has outgrown it.  You have outgrown that old paradigm.  You can’t go backwards.  You’re too much in your power. If you have limiting decisions holding that structure in place, then you wouldn’t have a concept that it’s possible to have a relationship with a man that’s different. There are men who don’t fall in that category that aren’t like that.  There are men who are emotionally available.  There are men that don’t demand to be treated like they’re the center of the universe. This is not inherent in the nature of men.  This is the nature of your limiting decisions based on cultural limiting decisions.  And so until you clear those, you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place.  You know that it doesn’t work for you, but you don’t really know, on an unconscious level, that there’s an alternative.

This old paradigm is actually just as hard on men as it is on women, because it’s a huge burden the men have to carry. In this paradigm the man has to be the one in power, and has to be the strong one, and has to support everybody, and bring in the money, etc.  I had a client who was from Italy and he told me, in the Italian culture, the father has to buy a house for each of his children.  It’s just a huge burden.  And if the man doesn’t do those things a man is supposed to do, he’s not considered a man, and he doesn’t feel good about himself.  And the women think he’s not a man if he’s not this macho guy.  So that puts you in a bind, because you think that men who act like this, you don’t really want to be with them on the one hand; but if they don’t act like this, you don’t have respect for them.

The whole paradigm is not in relation to truth.  It’s not in relation to the way people really are.  It’s not in relation to how men really are.  It’s not in relation to how women really are.  It’s not in relation to the real dynamics between them, so it doesn’t really work.  It only works when people force themselves into a mold, which means they have to repress and disempower themselves.  And eventually when people evolve past that, where they can’t stand it any more, that whole form of relationship starts falling apart. And you’re right in the midst of that, so you have to heal those issues in order for you to be able to be in a relationship with a man that will work for you, because you can’t force yourself into the old mold any more. You’ve gone too far.

If you have to be a lesser power in relation to men, that means you can’t be fully in your power.  But you’re a powerful woman, and if you really stood where you are, that would be obvious. And you keep giving your power away, by trying to be something you think men will want.  But when I look at you, I see so much value just in who you are, without you doing any of that stuff.  And if you were to function out of that, you would be in your strength and you would be directly relating to life and to people from that direct experience. So there’s some switch in there that needs to happen, allowing yourself to be fully in your power.

Giving your power away is the same thing as giving yourself away. It means rather than you being there in your experience, defining your reality, you are forfeiting it to the other person.  It’s you letting them define reality.  So instead of you being out there seeing this, doing this, whatever — you now are looking at them as if they’re supposed to define reality for you, and they’re supposed to tell you whether you’re valuable or not. So rather than directly engaging in life, you let go of your perceptions.  You let go of what’s important to you.  You let go of what you value.  And instead you’re valuing what they think of you, rather than valuing life, or whatever you’re engaged in.”