Nathan

As a co-founder, trainer, and coach of the Center for Emotional Education, I’ve spent the last 16 years supporting my courageous clients in having more fulfilling relationships. And no matter what talk-centered, body-centered, and/or energy-centered work we’re doing — I am always aware (or made so, if I forget) that so much of the work is about how the client’s Emotional Brain was programmed by their early and pivotal experience(s).

Among other things, I got the programming to:

• Eschew/ignore/get rid of/fix all the "ugly” emotions.

• Physically discharge the unavoidable or unfixable intense feelings.

• Use intellectual prowess to overcome other deficits (financial, physical, social, emotional).

• Appease, then Fight, then Fly, then Freeze (in survival terms) in reaction to most uncomfortable situations.

• Be pleasing.

• Don’t forget to be pleasing.

• Also, be pleasing.

• Secure both connection and validation through producing, and through manipulating perception(s) of me.

Among other results, my programming got me:

• High sensitivity to stimulus

• High sensitivity to others’ emotional energy

• Personal emotional ignorance and processing atrophy

• A chain of relationships that were just to prove I mattered, including ones in which I let myself be misused

• Loss of important relationships

• “Bipolar” boundaries — flimsy or non-existent and then rigid and poky

• So sick and tired of trying to be pleasing that I receded from social engagement

When Natalie and I met, I was just awakening to really honouring and loving myself. It took a divorce, two babies, and single parenthood to jar that loose for me. I was still also new to learning (through my children) about developing a self, and all the emotional labor that goes into supporting a young child through their development.

But still, it wasn’t until we started on our journey together that I really began to dig in voraciously to discover what could be done to re-teach and re-parent myself with the secure attachment and emotional tenderness we all should have been soaking up during our early years.

Now, almost 20 years after teaming up, Natalie and I are more in love and more able to be in the experience of our love than ever before. But that’s not all, not by a long shot! We also get to have rich, rewarding relationships with our kids, and our parents, and our friends and community. And we also get to know our emotional selves, and feel into them, and own them, and operate them with skill. We’ve also deeply healed longstanding emotional wounds we had both been carrying since childhood. We’ve had more success in our businesses. And we’ve been healthier and happier than at any other time in our lives.

And now, through our years of learning and growing and enjoying, and after 16 years of supporting others on this same path — I feel so extremely grateful and pleased to be able to share all that we’ve learned with the students of Emotional Sovereignty School.

Natalie

I didn’t even know that becoming emotionally sovereign was a thing.

Now that I am an expert, now that I have over a decade of practice, and have helped hundreds of people around the world develop and leverage their own emotional sovereignty in order to have the finances, careers, families, and relationships they have always wanted, I only wish, wish, wish I had learned about it sooner.

I could have used this going all the way back to my childhood. Looking back I can see that throughout my history, my tactic for dealing with my feelings was to take some sort of action.

When I was scared, I would do something daring. When I felt sad I’d try to convince myself I wasn’t a victim. When I felt anxious about someone being mad at me or displeased by me — I realize now I felt anxious constantly — I made sure to excel. I was on time. I was smart. I was hypervigilant so that I could anticipate the needs and feelings of others and stay “safely” in a pleasing zone.

When I anticipated shame for being new to something, or not perfect yet, I ran. In fact, coming into adulthood and sure that I would do it wrong and displease my family, I ran all the way from California to Montana. Away from a family I dearly loved.

When I met Nathan, I admired Nathan so. Even though we set up our relationship with the goal of being our full authentic selves, and even though I had never before felt the level of love, devotion, and support that I received from Nathan, my fears about my lovability and acceptability did not go away.

I know now that I was trying to get away from those fears by continuing my same pattern — watching Nathan closely, anticipating possible dislikes and trying to “get it right”, so that Nathan was never upset with me. This impossible hustle seemed my only option, so that I wasn’t anxious, scared, and lonely.

I had already left all my family members, but I also (subconsciously) whittled down my friend-group so there were fewer people to please. I had to, the pleasing-others hustle was taxing, I had to save my energy.

Even though none of this worked, it was all that I had.

It wasn’t until researching a particularly strong upset my toddler step-daughter experienced that we began researching emotion and how it works in the brain. I was shocked: WHAT???!!!! That’s what’s happening? That’s why I am working so hard and still not feeling better?! That’s why my fear and sadness and anxiety is just getting bigger?

You show me something like that and I am off to the races. Once I learn there is an alternative, I do not have patience for doing things that don’t work.

I am now deep into developing my own emotional sovereignty. We have enjoyed our results so much that we have been helping others do the same for 14 years.

My relationship with Nathan, and my relationships with the other precious beings in my life — including my family of origin, are now truly authentic, relaxed, and based entirely on connection.

This is the kind of living and loving dreams are made of.

I didn’t luck into this, I gave it to myself by becoming emotionally sovereign.

You can too.