The Emotional Swamp
Women are insecure about many things and foremost are doubts of the physical beauty of her body. This triggers emotionality at times and can lead her into an emotional swamp. Men can learn to handle this but rather than just talk about it, I am providing an example of an actual chat discussion.
As you read this, note the aspects of leading her, compassion, teasing, dominance and patience. This need not be scary for either the man or woman. These situations are common and a man taking a bit of effort and time to handle this when it crops up can make the difference between days of hell (possibly leading to divorce) or a minor bump that can strengthen a relationship.
CL: **WARNING** Do not try this at home if you are a beta. This is advanced material that only works on women if coming from a confident man with ‘inner Game’.
Abandon all hope, ye who dare enter this wall of text. Or skip to the end for the wise lesson.
7man: In your submission I depend on you as I have with no other woman. You are not lesser than me and femDOM women cannot begin to understand this. You find great interior strength in submission. It is liberating for you.
CL: And I can look to you for whatever strength I lack. But at the same time, if you are lagging I can pull you too.
7man: I appreciate that, but I don’t always like it because then I have to confront my own failings.
CL: You don’t have to be a man-statue to be loved.
7man: I will project that to the world but let you see the soft parts of me.
CL: Big smile. You don’t have to be “on” for me all the time. That would be silly. I like your calm fortitude, but I know that you are not made of stone. Just like you say to me – I love YOU!!
7man: Ditto
CL: Women think men don’t have feelings or they are afraid of a man’s feelings – especially seen in “Angry Man” syndrome. Oh, and I figured out last night what is at the bottom of all my biggest insecurities.
7man: Good, do tell.
CL: It is that I have always been insecure about being feminine at all. So it all stems from that. I wasn’t a girly girl, didn’t have “girl” interests, my voice is deeper than most women, I played dumb to be more “girly”, both men and women find me a threat of some sort or another (which is weird), “one of the guys” kind of gal, too much sex drive… I don’t have very feminine talents and [redacted – childhood stuff].
7man: I remember your voice the first time we talked on the phone. But it is so very different when I can talk to you on webcam and in person. I choose you because I want YOU and see things in you that are so VERY feminine.
CL: All these are things I’ve hated about myself, and if you mention them, I die a little inside because of it. And I mean hated – I didn’t even talk to people some days. I hate talking on the phone. I would rather hide myself away
7man: So you have had to “suffer” thru all these things but it meant you were available for me. Yeah for me!
CL: That is why I don’t want to hear it from you – it hurts too much. I was THE most self-conscious kid you could imagine. You might not know it now….or YOU might know – and I got bullied everywhere I went and sometimes I just don’t like people very much
7man: You have to feel those hurts to heal. There is one truth that you can always hold on to… I CHOOSE YOU.
CL: I’m tired of hurt and I suppose all of this has led me to differentiate myself in other ways
7man: I have a talent for leaving people defenseless. I do this with you and I see the real you. That is who I love.
CL: Even though it hurts sometimes, I love that in you and I realise things about myself I wouldn’t have otherwise – I can articulate it better, I should say… you know me better than anyone but you still love me.
7man: At some point you will need to just accept that I love you, I will keep you and I am not concerned about the things that you find imperfect in yourself. But I think the more real this gets, the more you are afraid of losing it. Then the old fears come up to inflame your self-doubt. You have a difficult time accepting that you (of all people) deserve this. I don’t care whether you deserve this or not. I want you and if you so choose, you can be miserable in your contentment.
CL: There is truth in that. Sorry to go on and on. Oh well, you knew what you were getting into!
7man: Don’t apologize for such things. I am smiling at you!
CL: You are? LOL
7man: Yes, because you so doubt your value to me.
CL: I wish I would shut up sometimes! Stupid ball of sadness!
7man: Put on your “big girl panties” now.
CL: Yes captain, he he he. Thank you. (for telling me to put on my big girl panties) (and not pandering)
7man: I handle you in an unconventional way. I am laughing at how well that works too. Your minor crises do not bother me or cause me to change my mind about you.
CL: Maybe I am just shit testing you, to see if my storms pull you under, but it is not on purpose or consciously done that way.
7man: Maybe so. That doesn’t matter, since it is a woman’s nature to test. I give you freedom to feel. I will enforce the boundaries and keep you safe with my assurances. This means I will not pander to you. I will tell you the truth. I will keep you. I will smile at you. I will love you. But I will not try to change your emotions by wading into the emotional swamp. I am the oak tree on solid ground and am firmly rooted.
At this point the exchange ended for several hours. There were some other discussions later not on this subject but the next morning we resumed discussion of this topic.
CL: Morning! I dreamt of [redacted]
7man: You have an active imagination.
CL: There was a lot of stuff in there – it was a cluttered kind of dream
7man: BTW, did you get your “safety thingy” fixed?
CL: Yeah, but I couldn’t do it by myself! I had a bunch of thoughts last night after I shut down my computer.
7man: Most men expect women to be linear rational creatures, but women are cyclical emotional creatures.
CL: It got me thinking last night, in the Wild at Heart book he said, “You can tell what kind of man you’ve got by simply noting the impact he has on you.” I thought about that, then about what it is that I do for you and how the two fit together. It’s easy for me to think about what you do for me, but less easy for me to think about what I do for you, but I told myself I needed to do that.
7man: I have told you but it takes time for it to sink in.
CL: I think I am mostly just afraid you will get bored with me, and won’t be so captivated. It’s not rational, I know. Yeah, it probably does take a while to sink in because I have never experienced this kind of love before and often told myself it didn’t exist.
7man: It does not need to be rational. We are making progress in that area. There are fears that must be felt. You have repressed those fears and often do not want to think about them.
CL: I was thinking of that Buddhist thing – “lean into the sharp points” – that’s what that means. So yeah, you are right that I need to face those fears and insecurities or they will become a problem. It wouldn’t be the first time that had become a problem – and the more you feel you have something to lose, the more you perversely try to protect yourself, which winds up causing you to lose because of a basic fear to love. It is that – a fear to really love someone more than you love yourself. I have to ask myself, would I rather take that risk or stay “safe” in an airless room?
7man: You have to trust more than you fear.
CL: Or you have to not let the fear grow into something that stops you from living. You can feed it or not and I made a list of all the ways you impact me and it’s ridiculous to fear with all that, but there’s always something – I could fear you dying before me! It can get stupid. I also wrote about how I inspire you, how you need me as much as I need you, which is how a man needs a woman as much (but in different ways) as a woman needs a man, and how that is what we are made for.
7man: If I mention your flaws, that brings up those fears. It is irrational, but there are a lot of old scripts ready to run in your brain. Then you feel that I might dump you because of those flaws so it is difficult to be open about those things.
CL: I’m not sure what it is since I haven’t really been dumped for those things but I have not felt loved like this and felt that someone else had more pull than I did, so I suppose it’s only natural that I see why some other woman is more beautiful than I am, and that if only I was more feminine and captivating, someone would love me. In some ways I see how I am not so at peace with it all as I like to imagine. But I don’t want to go delving into that too much today.
7man: OK. These things are addressed over time, doing too much, too fast gets overwhelming.
CL: Yeah, I just want to let it lie for now and read and let things work themselves out a bit. There’s only so much navel gazing I can stand. :P
7man: A mind can only handle so much at once and ingrained beliefs don’t change rapidly.
CL: We said the same thing in different ways.
7man: I am very patient with these things.
CL: Yes, you are. You always impress me that way.
7man: The most adventurous thing you do with me is your willingness to be vulnerable; to face the fears and to trust me with your heart.
CL: Very true and I want that adventure, even though it’s scary and painful sometimes – but if it wasn’t scary or painful sometimes, it would be hollow.
7man: And there was a fear I needed to face with you and to just trust you in this too.
CL: Can you tell me what that is? I’m not sure I understand.
7man: I can, as long as you don’t let it bug you or withhold because of what I tell you.
CL: Well I don’t know what it is so how can I answer that? I won’t withhold….
7man: When you get very emotional and insecure, I fear getting sucked down and losing myself in it. I worry that it will get worse and that it will escalate into a BPD type thing. I just had to be strong and go there enough with you and trust that you would find your way out and it would not become a permanent thing. The only way I could know this was to just trust you. I did that and it turned out good.
CL: I know you have that fear… That’s why I apologise sometimes – I don’t like to bring that up in you either. I have to manage myself but sometimes I need you to help me. I fear you getting sucked down into it too! I don’t want that!
7man: Don’t withhold because we both need to deal with these things. It would be much worse if we repressed things out of fear of pushing the other away.
CL: I know, I understand that. When I get kind of emo over something it’s hard for me to NOT tell you – it’s actually impossible because you’ll see it all over my face eventually anyway. And withholding builds walls. So don’t worry, it doesn’t bug me and I won’t stop blubbering about some crap every so often : P I know what you’ve been through and it’s only natural that you would fear things going downhill into that again, but I don’t see that happening with us.
7man: Every time we deal with this stuff, our relationship gets stronger and we trust more.
CL: This is how rational adults deal with things! LOL. Not by turning off the lights. I realised last night that while you have all this positive impact on me, I do the same for you. My life would be less without you; your life would be less without me. So I have to buck up and put on my big girl panties. I can take them off sometimes, but mostly I need to stop. Some things will always be there and picking at it doesn’t do a lot of good. I think our little internal storms are not a huge deal.
7man: You have to take off your big girl panties to heal these things. I disagree that you mostly need to stop. It doesn’t happen that often. Be naked and I can tell you when to put your big girl panties back on.
CL: Yeah, OK. I trust you. Humans are some messed up creatures! LOL
7man:
Unless you go into the emotional swamp and come back out, you will fear that the swamp will suck you under.
CL:
Can’t I just go into the wilderness, shoot a deer and come back a man? LOL
7man:
No, you must get naked and go into the swamp. Then I will call to you and tell you to come back out and put on your big girl panties.
When a woman goes into the emotional swamp she becomes neurotic. Then when she comes out, she becomes more rational. If a woman avoids the emotional swamp or a man tells her that she is not to go there, then she will become neurotic all the time. That is when he will become more distant and she will become more needy. The constant neurosis is what men fear. That is the situation that many men create in marriage by expecting his wife to think rationally and fix her “safety thingy” on her own. Therefore the answer is to not fear or avoid the emotional swamp. It is another paradox, but it seems that a woman periodically needs to wallow in the emotional swamp mud.
CL:
You’ve just described the cause of many divorces!
CL
7man
Continue please! To just say this is the cause of many a divorce leaves of the value judgment that should fallow that, meaning if a woman files a divorce over that, and thats OK, we may as well roll up all these blogs and whatever else we do that is aimed at slowing the apocalypse coming because of frivolous divorce.
That this cause divorce needs to be literally shouted down. If it causes fristion, whatever….fine….but divorce, sorry, cannot go there, hence I return to no, its not necessary that a man wade the swamp on demand
You cannot shout down a woman’s emotional nature, but you can temper it. That was the point of this post. You are still refusing to accept reality. All women are like this. Some are indeed nuts and incorrigible, but even the sane ones are still emotional creatures who need to be calmed once in a while. This is not appeasement or pandering, or “going into the swamp on demand”; the whole point here is that you can be with her without getting sucked under. You stay on the shore and she hears your voice. You are a beacon showing her where the shore is.
If you abandon her when she needs your calming influence, she will be irritable and neurotic – she will be more emotional or she will withdraw and you end up in either a hot hell or a cold hell. She wants you to tell her after a time to put on her big girl panties; this is not some deliberate ploy to make your life miserable but how she is made. Ask yourself why you think she should meet your needs if you refuse to meet hers.
Try this experiment: light a fire under a steam boiler without a relief valve, starve the boiler of water and work her hard until she goes dry. No, she won’t explode. (But I will be miles away from that experiment).
If the boiler explodes, is it because of poor boiler design, a flaw in the boiler or a stupid inattentive boiler tender?
The design is not the problem and a flaw might be non-fatal, if the boiler tender watches the gauges and keeps the water injectors working so she doesn’t run dry and expose her crown sheet to the intense fire. Then again it could be a fatal flaw that is the problem.
I will continue to learn the fine art of boiler tending. I have done a careful and thorough inspection. Since I have a quality boiler, of course not totally perfect, with care it should provide many years of service. It takes a skilled hand to get the most out of my boiler and unsafe operation can endanger many innocent bystanders!
@empathologicalism
The proper care and feeding of women is one issue. The legal climate that allows them to run amuck is another. The legal regime must, of course, be fixed, and it’s not right that women can use it to inflict so much misery and destruction when they’re not cared for properly, but that doesn’t alter the fact that they do need looking after.
Even if frivolous divorce were eliminated, it would still be in a man’s interest (as well as that of his children, and, obviously, his wife) to handle his wife properly.
1. Women are nuts. All of them. If a man is reading this, and thinks that he was unlucky to get a nutty one. Nope. They are all nuts.
2. Keep calm when they go nuts. Tease, laugh, ignore, or shout (once, very loudly). Whatever. Don’t bicker, don’t hit her. Don’t say “Yes, dear”.
3. That’s all.
I get the “handle properly” stuff. I refuse to let the swamp run the home, set the temperature so to speak…..and if its manifest so much it interrupts life regularly…..and my calm influence isnt helping (you seem to be saying that this is formulaic, sorry, it isnt) then it gets into the hold responsible arena.
With the law on her side, she can act with impunity on her swamp feelings. The woman who cannot grap the life preserver will end up divorced, or w/ a miserable husband. It can be narcissistic – this emotional blob, it CRAVES empathy, its a bottomless empathy sink. The craving of empathy, of feeling that hey, wow, you been in this same swamp before lets dwell, lets talk it thru, lets spash and wallow together, is bad news
By the way, saying “handle her properly” is a bit evasive. It feeds the nebulous notion of the very thing it attempts to address, because “properly” differs from hour to hour in the swamp
@empath
“I refuse to let the swamp run the home”
The swamp should not, yet there must be recognition that she will go into the swamp sometimes and a man should not panic about it or wade in to rescue her. It is her swamp, not his.
“It feeds the nebulous notion of the very thing it attempts to address, because “properly” differs from hour to hour in the swamp”
I disagree, the proper way to handle her does not not change. A man does have some options for things he can do but the options are always the same. A man can be present without reacting to her and letting her set the frame. The way to handle her is by being a stable leader and not reacting to her. It does no good to tell her to stay away from the swamp or shame her for going into the swamp.
@DC
“Keep calm when they go nuts. Tease, laugh, ignore, or shout (once, very loudly). Whatever. Don’t bicker, don’t hit her. Don’t say ‘Yes, dear’.”
Yes, only when a man reacts to her is he feeding the nebulolus nuttiness and that is when the marriage gets more unstable. A man can control himself by not reacting or he can attempt to control her swamp wallowing which will fail and both will then go nuts together. The options you mentioned are what a man uses to keep the frame and not react to her. This is simple but such a hard concept to grasp (it took me years). The key is to get her reacting to him, which is not difficult once the concept is understood.
Yes, you, the husband, set the tone.
We are not disagreeing. I may be a tad bit less accommodating to the swamp, meaning I like compromise and Im more inclined to be the rock so to speak if I see SOME self analysis once in awhile.