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*Editor’s Note: This piece is the last in this series. Follow Galina to check out the whole series and get notified when her next article is available to read. And read Harsh Truth #9 here.
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Learning your love language.

Attachment theory.

Insta couples therapy.

Popular marriage advice.

Nearly everything we’re taught about relationships is BS!

Because it’s based on the Old Paradigm for love.

These 10 Harsh Truths have felt like a crystallization of many years’ work for me. What an exciting few weeks it’s been.

“I get it but it’s really, really hard to live this way. It’s about tearing up the rule book and starting from scratch. It’s never an easy thing to do,” a reader responded to my messages.

Easy?

No, this will not be easy.

What I’m proposing means going against centuries of rules and expectations.

Questioning tradition and tribal allegiance.

Looking at generations of insidious patterns, painful wounds, survival fear.

Clearing cobwebs and opening rusty, neglected inner doors securely protecting our hearts.

Staring fear in the face and learning not to be afraid of it.

Stretching our comfort zones and learning to tolerate the discomfort it causes.

Finding safety in being visible, rather than safety in hiding who we are.

Questioning what we believe as truth, rewriting our stories, and redefining what safety means.

Breathing, meditating, opening hearts, moving and loving our bodies, sharing what has been difficult to tell anyone, and learning to forgive (first of all ourselves)…

So no, this will not be easy.

But neither is spending our lives in survival mode.

Very few of us thrive in the status quo. We’ve been angry for generations.

Transformation and growth are disruptive.

Tearing up the outdated rule book and making our own rules is not comfy.

It forces us out of our stuckness and makes us feel what we’ve been avoiding for decades.

My mother could not leave a miserable and destructive marriage for over 40 years because she did not know she had the power (the right?) to edit the rule book!

Because the Old Paradigm taught us that a woman alone is damaged goods. An aging woman, a woman who is angry or free or in touch with her desire, a woman who dares to dream and stay true to that dream is bad. Wrong.

And my generation?

We thought we had so many choices, but really we only had two: compromise or leave.

Well, I’m giving myself more options: I am learning to be free while in a relationship.

So yes, we need to tear up the rulebook inherited from our mothers. And yes, it will be hard. But we can still have fun with it.

Imagine making up your own rules for happiness?!

And this doesn’t mean throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Not everything about our relationships is dysfunctional.

This is the beauty of being the ultimate authority in our own lives: we get to choose what we like. What feels good. What to keep and what to release.

Yes, doing this work might feel scary.

But isn’t any road not (yet) taken difficult?

Isn’t any adventure (worth taking) unknown?

Will you join me on this journey?

I hope to see you on the other side…

Safe to Be Me is my contribution to the New World. The world I want to leave my children and yours. A world that is neither good nor bad, right nor wrong. A world where we can be all that we are, learning to love the parts of us we are proud of and the ones we were taught to be ashamed of, so that we can learn to love others in that same inclusive way.

Get started with feeling Safe to Be Me: Download my “Healing the Inner Child Mini Guide” to help you free yourself from family and cultural expectations to live the life you long for.

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