Feminine Intelligence in Personal Boundaries

by Paul Dobransky, M.D.
for Womens Psychology Magazine 2011,

Womens Happiness Magazine, all rights reserved.
Feminine Intelligence in Personal Boundaries Page 2 of 144

www.womenshappiness.com Page 2 of 144

:::TABLE OF CONTENTS:::

INTRODUCTION..4

DAY ONE: BOUNDARIES WITH MEN

CHAPTER ONE: THE MEANING OF A PERSONAL BOUNDARY.7

CHAPTER TWO: WHAT MAKES A WOMANS 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

CHAPTER NINE: BOUNDARIES AND FORGIVENESS.103

CHAPTER TEN: DEFENSIVENESS AND FRIENDSHIP..106

CHAPTER ELEVEN: BEING UNDERSTOOD ...120

CHAPTER TWELVE: BOUNDARIES IN BALANCE..135



For Laurie



:::INTRODUCTION:::

Hi, and welcome. This is Dr. Paul from
http://www.womenshappiness.com and Womens 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
womans life.

Today, were going to be talking about boundaries with men
and in relationships, specifically romantic relationships.

Then tomorrow, were going to cover career and children,
and then day three, were going to cover friends and your
identity as a woman in general, being a woman.

So these are the major areas of a womans life, and in
preparing this program and even conceiving this program, a
lot of what we were thinking is that the subject of boundaries,


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
weve 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, wed like some practical applications. Wed 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
Womens Happiness On Demand Program, we certainly
come up with those on the fly, so to speak, as we hear
womens stories, specific challenges theyre 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, thats 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 whats going on in life and in
your own psychology and that of men.



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 were going to do as a method, first, lets talk a little
bit about what boundaries even are and how they work
briefly, and if you want much, much more on that, thats
MindOS Mastery.

And then Im 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 well see how we can
combine these together to make ourselves some exercises
and some tactics.



:::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 theyre 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 youre inside the
circle.

The circle belongs to you.

Its 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 thats 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, thats all


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

Now you probably have heard the phrase thin skinned
before, or, Wow, she sure has a thick skin, or, Shes being
too thin skinned, or, That man is being too thin skinned, or
youve heard the phrase, You really get under my skin.

Theres even a song with that as a title.

Well, are they talking about a real skin? No. Theyre talking
about a psychological skin. So your boundary is like a skin,
only its 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 doesnt 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 theyre 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 persons
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 dont control.

Thats where we are bossy or pushy, or on the flip side,
were forlorn and desolate because things dont go our way.



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.

Theres 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 wont take no for an
answer or we dont 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 todays
talk is about men and romance in using boundaries.

When a man says or does something or wont do something
or say something that you wish he would, if you burn energy
and burn energy and burn time on that, youre 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.

Theres kind of a tricky balance 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


with another person. And a lot of people, both men and
women, fall into that scenario where theyve 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 dont have intimacy.

Theyve closed off their boundary, closed all the holes, shut
the doors, so to speak, and arent open to love.

So thats 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



:::CHAPTER ONE:::

:::WHAT MAKES A WOMANS BOUNDARY:::


Well be covering a first instinctual boundary, if you will, in
the form of the Greek goddess Selene. And Im going to tell
you a little bit about her in a minute, but lets 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 wouldnt last as stories.

Theyd be more like an art house film thats popular for a
year and then everyone forgets about it. Thats 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.



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 itll 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, shes 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 shes 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 daughters name means utterly shining, and the
goddess of the full moon, specifically.

Theres 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.

Its 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. Its 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


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 weve all
got passion.

Passion, and the Selene Boundary

Passion is one and the same as your level of femininity, or
as a man, its his level of masculinity. But if you could
imagine unbridled passion that isnt steered or checked, then
your own femininity or a mans own masculinity is just an
explosion that doesnt create anything new.

It doesnt do any good work. It doesnt build a life.

It doesnt 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, Id 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 lets 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 youre currently with and problems arise or
theres a lack of passion or you notice the man is not being
so friendly or youre in conflict or maybe youre 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.


And the door is silver, solid silver, and its your door, and it
needs your unique touches to it.

It makes you you.

Thats your special door, and it is your Selene Boundary,
and you can open it or close it.

Sometimes theres 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.

Lets 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.

Youre 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, youve 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 Womens On Demand Forums.



Dr. Paul: Hey there.

ArtMuse: Its a wonderful analogy. I love it. I was just looking up
some meanings just for silver in itself, and Im sure that
theres 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. Im sure theres a lot of meaning in
silver, and thats 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, Ill bring back that old film with
Tom Hanks, Castaway, where hes 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 cant grow or even have
a sense that we exist without interactions with others where
our boundary circle bounces against someone elses
boundary, and its 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 were talking
about romance here, is statements like why are you so
bold? or why arent you more excited? or do you love
me?

That kind of thing, that feedback would be a tip that oh my
gosh, Im not expressing passion.

You might feel it inside, but not be expressing it. And maybe
theres a need to open that boundary door.


Now the dangerous downside of this is if you dont grow
more skills around this, other boundary skills, you dont 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 theyre right for you.

And thats one of the reasons we have the Seventh Sense
Program. Its 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 dont just permanently be a Selene, but there is a time
and a place to open up your door to love.

The Aphrodite Boundary

Lets move onto the next one. Were going to go from being
exceptionally passionate and at risk of leaving the boundary
door open permanently weve got to remember that doors
open and close.

Lets move to mature romantic love in the form of Aphrodite.

Now theres a lot to Aphrodite. She represents a lot of
different psychological traits in women. Everything from
being a mature maternal goddess she is, after all, mother.

Shes mother to Eros, or Cupid, but shes 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 shes also a
star in the ancient sky.

So being both mature and wise and clever, but
simultaneously, shes a star in the morning sky.

Shes got both passion and boundaries at the same time.

One of the stories thats very foundational that I cover in its
entirety in the Complete Feminine Empowerment Program is


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.

Theres 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. Its the risk of death if she fails
Aphrodites 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.

Were not fit for marriage, and that means man or woman if
we cant 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.



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 didnt 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 didnt feel your passion, didnt 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 isnt permanently closed. It isnt 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 thats you. And you have two feet in the circle. The
circle is on the ground. And the man has a circle, too.
Thats his boundary.

Well, if you just keep both feet in your circle, then there is no
intimacy. Theres no communication, theres no sharing. So
if you want a romantic relationship, you have to put one foot
inside the other persons circle, and maybe at times, youll
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.



In times when you feel afraid or confused or dont know what
to do, you might briefly put both of your feet into his circle,
but you dont want them permanently in there.

You always want some grounding, one foot as much as
possible, in your own circle, so youre kind of straddling the
circles with a man. And thats the ideal balance in you guys.

Most of the time, you want one foot in your own circle and
one foot in the mans circle. Sometimes youll 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, youre 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 thats reliable
and mature the feminine passion of the Selene Boundary
and the wise, high-character behavior of the Aphrodite
Boundary.



:::CHAPTER TWO:::

::THE BOUNDARIES OF COMMITTED
RELATIONSHIPS::

Lets move on to the next one.

Demeter.

A Demeter Boundary.

Theres a great story to Demeter I covered in the Complete
Feminine Empowerment Program. But essentially, Demeter
is the goddess of agriculture and the harvest.



Shes also the goddess of the sanctity of marriage and
commitment, and Id 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,
thats something thats neither for the man or for you alone.

Its to be shared.

Its a feast for all. So its 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.

Shes 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. Theres no food, and all the other gods
finally say, Okay, okay, you win. Well 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


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.

Its 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, youve got
to use a boundary that is mature, or itll 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 one-
third, two-thirds in a lasting romantic relationship that will be
around for life if you so choose.



One-third, two-thirds.

That doesnt mean while youre 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.

Were just going to begin with Demeter and say that its all
about patience, and there will be a harvest. So when a man
says or does something or doesnt 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.

Its ten seconds of patience.

Its a time out, but its 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 its winter. And at the end, it
has become spring. Its a new season. So Demeter and
Persephone explain the seasons, and youve 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 whats going on, and imagine a new
season at the end.


The Persephone Boundary

Lets move right on to number four, which is the Persephone
boundary. Thats 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 one-
third, two-third balance. What were 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, theres certain things you
do.

For you to feel feminine, theres 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 two-
thirds 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 youve found a
man who has good boundaries, letting him lead is not
betraying yourself.


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 dont want to. But
then again, you have the right to not be in that relationship
either if you dont 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.

Id 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, its a little sliver, then youre doing
too much for the man or letting the man lead too much.

Its too much of a sliver.

But if it starts overtaking the whole circle, then the mans
interest and attraction for you is dying. He doesnt feel as
masculine. And thats not a weakness.

Its just a psychological feature or fact of relationships.


A one-third, two-third pie piece boundary diagram is your
Persephone boundary, and thats number four.

We are going to move on to number five next, but I will try
opening the lines to see if theres 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 dont have to be so linear about how we


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 thats strategic creative thinking to solve a problem where
there doesnt have to be a conflict where I either choose
husband or family or family versus myself or husband versus
myself. You dont have to make that choice when you get
creative.

Donna: Got it. Thank you.

:::CHAPTER THREE:::


:::THE BOUNDARIES OF COURTSHIP:::

Iris: So when youre talking about leadership, what Im 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 were 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 doesnt have the ability to lead, doesnt
have that masculine trait to him coming out and expressed,
then hes got work to do on himself, and its not your job to
be his therapist or his father.

You know, ultimately, thats something a boy learns from a
father.

He may be disqualified from being appropriate for you or
from you feeling passionate for him. Thats 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, thats his job to do, in other words.

But if he has it, if he has masculinity, then by all means, two-
thirds of the time, let him express it in the form of leading
something. And it doesnt mean he leads everything.

He doesnt have to do two-thirds of the finances, two-thirds
of childcare, two-thirds of career, two-thirds of where youre
going to live.

You can divvy up who leads and at what. Maybe according
to what theyre good at naturally and what feels like a more
masculine role versus a feminine role.


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 Im going
to do.

It will preserve the relationship and definitely preserve the
attraction. Theres 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.

Its 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, thats kind of what Im talking
about with this leadership division. It just is what it is. Its
instinctual, and its biological. Its not up for fads of culture,
guiding it.

Its been this way for all time, and will for the next several
hundred thousand years of us evolving.

The Nemesis Boundary

All right, guys, lets 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, and this doesnt necessarily mean
the relationship has to dissolve. Its just that it helps us
recognize what really, really has gone over the line, has


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 its 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 were crossing over into their
boundary and offending them. So its 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 dont even realize its 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 youd never know theyre arrogant if it doesnt ever get
expressed, but its through holes in the boundary that you
discover it because someone else is expressing it through
the holes in their boundary.



They dont realize its offensive, but it is to you at least. So
you have to let them know.

The goddess Nemesis is divine justice and vengeance. That
doesnt mean war like destructive vengeance.

Divine justice.

Its a parallel to a different story for men. The Count of
Monte Cristo. The theme is divine justice.

Its mature, well boundaried justice. Its the kind of justice
that a parent might use toward a child or God might use
towards humans.

You know, its fair, but its 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?



I would wager the latter.

You dont 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.

Hes done you wrong, and youre feeling heavy. Youre
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.

Thats 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 dont have to be a part of it. You dont have to carry it.
And part of your forgiveness would involve getting that
toxicity out of you and back to him. And if hes 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 dont 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
days lesson - to kind of wrap up this subject, but its an


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
its possible to grow from wrong having been done.

Because one thing thats 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 who did it so you dont 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

Lets 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.



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 theres a piece to her that
represents fertility and the creative instinct in women. And
theres also a piece to it that is representative of a womans
healing and rebirth.

Snakes have represented rebirth throughout history because
they shed their skin. Theyre 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, Id like you to think of the Snake Goddess
or the Minoan snake goddess as representative of what do
you do after youre done with Nemesis?

You know, after youre done shoveling all the bad out. And
whats left is you maybe feeling less hurt kind of because
youve gotten rid of the bad, but what next?

Its time to shed your skin, so to speak.

A redo of you.

Its 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 youre 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 its a temporary closing of the boundary.



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 its the face of the man. Its printed on it, and imagine
peeling this skin off and disposing of it, and all thats 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 attention. But youve neglected yourself for too long, or
youre 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 youre in a relationship that will last, this is something
you can still do. It doesnt 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.



:::CHAPTER FOUR:::

:::BALANCING MALE AND FEMALE:::

Tony: In our womens workshops, weve 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.


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.

Youve 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.

Its a skin. These challenges, these stresses of today can be
shed, and underneath, there is a brand new you. So youre
right. It doesnt 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 theyre in a
relationship, they think everything they do or everything
related to their femininity has to be sort of connected to this
man theyre with and relating to him.

And sometimes, men if theres a boundary hole on both
sides, men may sort of feel responsible or feel charged with


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 youre not just alone, youre in a relationship with
someone, theres still time to retreat into your boundary like
the Snake Goddess and amplify your own femininity, sort of
separated in a separate way from the guy youre with.

And then, you know, you dont feel that pressure to always
have it connected to him. And maybe he doesnt feel that
pressure to always have to provide that for you. And then
you bring that back into the relationship.

Dr. Paul: Yes, thats right. You know, one of the things that were
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 doesnt make them unequal. It just makes them
different.

When were in a relationship thats 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 were 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?

Its 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 mans Hades
Boundary or his need for a Batmans Bat Cave or a
Supermans Fortress of Solitude, or a physical space to go
to in order to think.



Theyre exactly equivalent, even though 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 youll 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 hes 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. Theres a
new me here. Now theres a new me here. Now theres a
new me here, as he walks across the stage.

Its also a kind of an interesting way of looking at our free
will.

Every time we do something new or make a personal
change, theres still a nature to us that stays the same.

Its our psyche, our soul, whatever you want to call it. But its
also evolved.

Its truly something new, even though its still us, and thats
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

Lets go to our last one, which are two goddesses that were
going to pair together.


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.
Shes the most amazing weaver of tapestries on earth, and
shes 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, Im better than any
goddess. I can weave these tapestries better than even the
goddesses could weave, and bam, 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 theyre 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 its
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.



They dont even use thread or a tapestry, and theres no
comparison.

Arachne loses, and she learns her lesson.

Its 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,
Ive learned my lesson. Ill honor you from now on. I realize
my place in the world, that Im 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,
shes a goddess, so its 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 youre good to other people, and you dont wittingly or
unwittingly make them feel bad about themselves, even
though youre so good at what you do.

Thats the lesson of Arachne.

If we were to apply this specifically to romantic relationships,
thats 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, hes
always complaining to his wife, Why are you being such a


web blanket on everything? Im 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 youve 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 theyve acquired in their life?

Theyre being Arachne.

You also know women who dont brag, but also have holes
in their boundary where theyre 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 dont want to be all Arachne, completely bragging to
everyone about how great you are, but you dont want to be
all Ariadne either, and just be an endless support to others
and let yourself get taken for granted.

You also dont 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.



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

You want to be supportive of others. And if were 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 its 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, Its 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 turns into a trap for you. Youre 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.


Because youre again allowing the man to do this. Youre
not being overtaken or overwhelmed or overcome by this.

Youre allowing it, and thats 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 its an honoring of you.

Youre 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 its 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, its time to start saying,
Okay, thats enough for now. Its 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, its like getting caught in a
spider web that youre 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.



Donna: 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
someones face on it could be represented in a creative way.

You know?

Whether its 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 theyre also meant to be visual. So the well 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 youre 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 ability 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 dont have to go for immediate
gratification. I can count down from ten to one and let the
season change from winter to spring.

Thats 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,


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 thats the Selene Boundary.

There are all these features to boundaries, and well 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 its coming right up. Shes going to go
visit this guy that shes having a long distance relationship.
This is Sonny in Malibu.

Its 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 didnt 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, were on our best behavior, and the way people
often use their boundaries around that is its similar to the
dynamics of lying. Dont read me wrong on this.

Its similar to the dynamics of lying as far as boundaries go in
that were not granting someone complete access, either the
man or the woman.



Were not granting them complete access to whats really
going on inside.

Were just showing them the exterior of our boundary when
we first meet. So its almost like there is an image printed on
the outside of the boundary that says, This is whats me,
or, Youre welcome to just assume the best about whats
me, but then with time, we have to get more intimate with
each other eventually, and like it or not, theyre going to be
able to peek through some of the windows, so to speak, in
our boundary and see whats really in there.

And even when we do that, we make assumptions about
people. So with this question, its very possible that the
woman is jumping to conclusions about him.

I mean shes only had so much interaction with him.

We cant completely generalize and say hes a passive
person based on say one day of knowing each other, but
shes 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 wasnt 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 hes not.

So she says, I suspect that he had not Its more of a
statement than a question that she makes. Shes saying,
He seemed confident, and then with other people wasnt,
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.



One of the things I often say about our different personality
styles, theres kings and queens, warriors, 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 hes
in fact a lover and think that in so doing, this is usually
unwitting and unconscious, hes putting on his best face,
assuming that being his opposite self in what he portrays is
his best self, when its the opposite of his real self.

The reason for that I explain in the KWML Mastery Program.

Its that if you were sitting on that grid that I lay out for you in
that program where theres 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
were 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, hell be actually unwittingly putting on a
best face that is the opposite of what he really is.



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
theyre just crazy and wild in bed. And a lot of times, when
people say that on a first date, its actually the opposite of
what theyre really like, or theyll say theyre tame and boring
when its 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? Theres abuse and mental illness there,
no relationship. So she doesnt still communicate with
them. How do we partition our time and relating for our own
good and growth?

Thats kind of a question that could also be relevant for
tonights talk when we talk about career for the reason that
often times, there are certain people in our lives that we cant
get away from. Well have to have an ongoing relationship
with.

Like family. We dont choose our family.

Were going to be related to them for life, even if we dont
communicate. Well have to have some sort of run-ins here
and there, and the same would be true of the workplace. If
you cant quickly leave a job and get another job, youll still
have the same boss, and youll still have the same co-
workers, so we cant physically get away. And by the way,
thats probably one of the easiest ways of using 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 dont even have to really attend to,
psychologically.



Youre just physically removing yourself from the premises.
But sometimes, we cant do that. So well 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 doesnt 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
thatll be our day to touch base. And then if for whatever
reason they cant make it at that day and time, then youve
missed that week. Youve missed that window of
opportunity. And thats one of the ways that you can create
distance when you need it and create an artificial boundary
through distance and being incommunicado.

Thats one of the best ways for answering your problem.

That way, theyre still your family and you still have to relate
to them, but its more on your terms and on your time
schedule. Its also good for eliminating sort of an addictive
nature to relationships, whether its with men or with family.
If it seems like theyre addicted to you, they wont leave you
alone and youve got to create some 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 dont feel rejected?

By the Snake Boundary, shes talking about the type of
feminine boundary we were discussing last night in terms of
relating to men.



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

A snake sheds its skin, and when you use the snake
boundary, youre shedding your skin and envisioning a brand
new skin underneath so that youre 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 youre involving them in establishing the boundary with
you, and theyll 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 dont pester me throughout the day.

You can ask for their opinion about how they do self-care,
and then say, Wow, thank you. Im going to take you up on
that. Then you apply it to them, and it was their own
suggestion that youre using.

Thats probably the best way of doing this.

Sonny in Malibu says, I just met a man November 1st.
Were both 50, never married. I live in Malibu, he lives in
Dallas. We met up for two days, and I stayed at his moms
home, and we have only kissed. Im 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.



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 were 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:

Were hard wired for in-person socializing, so the notion of
internet dating and matchmaking and this sort of thing, its an
illusion to think that if weve communicated online for six
months that its a six-month relationship. Its 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 youve 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 youve known then, thats 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 arent of the type that might be open to more
than a casual relationship, a committed relationship,
boyfriend, girlfriend.

They wont wait a month, or they wont work too hard for a
month. If theyre not exclusive with you they might be
dating other people but dont communicate a whole lot with
you at all. So thats how you would know. You know? And
waiting too much more than a month and were just going
with averages here.

Its up to personal preference. Some people might not have
sex until marriage based on their religious or philosophical
background if theyre both of the same background. Thats
totally culturally appropriate. Or they might wait four months.
But you have to kind of check this out with each other


indirectly, maybe by asking about prior relationships theyve
had, for example.

A month is enough time to weed out the dirty dog guys, but
its also the right length of time to not get a guy thinking,
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 long-
distance 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.

Its not real.

Not real until youre physically together, and that goes for
phone conversations as well. Phone, e-mail, and internet
dont 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 rurally and youre single, its not a good way to
go.

Its not a very efficient way to be. Itd 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.

Its not.

So just dont get into that situation in the first place is the
answer. It could easily seem like a copout, but thats the real
answer.

Dont do long-distance relationships from day one, and dont
use internet dating as a substitute for physically getting
together.


Just use it as a tool to start conversations with people that
immediately and quickly turn to, Lets meet up, and
preferably, theyre local, and youre in a large populace
center where there are a lot of options. So thats 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.

Its just a useful tool for meeting people. But then youve 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 were 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 theyre pretty universal stories that must
apply to all men and women ever born, or they wouldnt 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.



All women are pretty much the same, same sets of instincts
that are in common. And thats not to say all men are the
same or all women are the same.

Its 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 whats called a higher brain
or your cerebral cortex and the parts of an individuals
psyche, like their boundaries, which were also talking about
throughout the weekend, theyre observing ego, your
intellect, your life story, your beliefs and values, the things
youve seen and done, your intellectual style, if youre more
right brained or left brained, thats what makes you unique
and what makes you you.

Its 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 doesnt mean that were 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.

Its not the fact that shes feminine. Its her personality style
moving into the emotional centers of the brain and her
intellectual style and her exact lifes history and tastes and
preferences and beliefs and boundaries that make her
different from both every other woman and from any
individual man.



Donna: Thanks, Dr. Paul.

DAY TWO: BOUNDARIES AT WORK,
AND WITH CHILDREN



:::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?


Well, were pairing an irrational, illogical, and yet very normal
and natural reflex in the form of what these goddesses
represent.

Were 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.

Its 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 youre
really meaning?

Alina: Dr. Paul?

Dr. Paul: Yes?

Alina: Hi, my name is Alina. Im calling from Canada. I actually
didnt 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 Im bullied to the point, bullied. Im
calling it bullying now by supervisors and co-workers, so that
tells me I must have weak boundaries or something.

Dr. Paul: Well, yes, thats going to be a great general topic for you to
have brought up. Its really rampant, and its kind of a
special pet issue of mine - bullying from adults to adults.



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 were so used to
hearing it described as only an issue for children, and it is,
but it happens from adult to adult, too, and its not okay in
that case, either.

I think one of the things thats 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 dont do THOSE
things, but they get away with EMOTIONAL abuse and
bullying.

And thats men toward men, women toward women, men
toward women, and yes its true, even women toward men
which I see more and more today.

One of the ways you can think about law is that it is a
boundary.

Its a societal and community and governmental boundary in
the form of a set of rules that we cannot cross or weve
broken the law, and yet, when were 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?


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 its sort of like saying its a
jungle out there.

When were 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
youre 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, its like a dark city
alley where youre 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 youre
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 dont betray
yourself or play the fool for anyone or get used or get
abused or bullied?

So its the Dark Alley Scenario.

What do we do in that situation?

I think we have a story thats illustrative of what to do, and I
dont 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 churchs 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


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. Thats the book The Prince by Machiavelli.

Id recommend it to women as much as I do to men.

Its 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.

Ill 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.

Its one of the driving forces in gossip, by the way.

Youd assume that being loved is more powerful. If
everybody loves you, you ought to be the best leader, and
certainly theres 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 doesnt go around all boastful or arrogant and probably
works harder than anybody else, and its a pretty powerful
way to lead, and its a decidedly feminine, instinctual way to
lead to be a servant leader.



Its very effective.

Yet, Machiavellis answer was that no, its better to be
feared. If you have to pick either being loved or feared as a
leader, if you want to keep power, its better to be feared.

Now being feared doesnt necessarily mean youre 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 whats one way of people fearing
you?

Well, it would be that they know they cant deceive you.
They cant 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.

Whats 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 intentional bullying Im talking about -
Im not talking about you misinterpreting someones
comments as being hurtful, and really, they were not
intended to be hurtful.

It was just your past influencing how youre seeing things.
Theyre 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 wouldnt do it. Somebody
who is really, really powerful and knows it and really
competent and knows it doesnt feel the need to bully ever.

They know theyre powerful. So a special trick or tip that you
can use when dealing with a bully to have advantage over


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, lets say a person is very overweight, and theyre a
bully, and youre not. And the issue isnt their weight.

The issue is something in the workplace. A project needs to
be done on time, and you feel like theyre bullying you over
that project.

Thered 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.

Theres this really good gym I discovered, and they say,
Yeah, Ive gained a lot of weight in the past year, and you
could say, Well, you look good. I still think you look good.

Theres 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 theyre very insecure is probably some
other area of life.

Maybe its in the area of relationships and they dont have a
relationship and theyre lonely or they dont 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


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 wont 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 Alley. When theres no judge, no
police, no bystanders, and nobody watching the bad things
that people do to each other in that dark alley and its scary,
all you have left are your feminine instincts and your
boundaries.

Thats all you have left. Theres nobody to reach out to.
Theres no advocate or protector. Theres not even a lawyer
who can help you with most cases of bullying.

You know, if you go to a lawyer and say, Hey, Im being
bullied at work, theres 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 youve ever heard of people who 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 wasnt there anymore, and I said,
Whats going on with my banker? They said, Shes 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. Its unfair, and
its not right, and its the dark alley scenario for you. But I
think some of the things were 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.



Youve got to apply your boundaries. So lets talk a little bit
about lets go to our first set of goddesses in our first story.
And its 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 were
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 Cupids 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 lets 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 its 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 dont apply for five
minutes when were alone with a bully?

You know, its head-to-head fighting. We have to defend
ourselves. Well, thats the situation that happens so much in


the workplace, too, where you dont get along with the boss,
and Aphrodite feels jealous of this young girl.

Youll 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, were human beings, and that
jealousy can be very real and can impact how they treat you.

So as a result, one technique Id 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 youre 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 dont 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.

Thats 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 dont talk a lot about your politics or your religion in
the workplace.

You stay vague. And yet, you cant 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.



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. Its 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 dont really give them a whole lot of information.

Youre 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 shes 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 shes kind of set in
her ways, and she has her married life, and theres 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 lifes not fair.

Never will be. But we can work with that.



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.

Lets go on with the 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 Aphrodite cant get anyway.

Low and behold, Cupid finally agrees to her commands after
a long debate, and as he flies to Psyches 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. Shes 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 shes 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


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 bullys face.

The plan doesnt 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 doesnt matter that
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.

Dont be someones 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


of Aphrodite to fall. So therell 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,
theres a mutiny.

Everyone else likes her, and theyre 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 Cupids 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 theyre not bullied, and then we treat
each other right.

When all continued to admire and praise Psyches beauty
but none desired her as a wife, Psyches parents consult an
oracle, which tells them to leave Psyche on the nearest
mountain, for her beauty is so great that shes not meant for
a mortal man.

Terrified, they have no choice but to follow the oracles
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.


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 Cupids 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 Cupids shoulder and wakes him.

So shes broken his rule: that shes 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 hes a god, the
god of love.



They advise her to kill the serpent with a knife and then light
the lamp to make sure hes dead, but what she does instead
this isnt 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, Im not
going to stab him first because I dont know for sure that hes
a monster, a snake.

Im going to light the lamp first to see what he looks like.

Then if hes a monster, well, then I can stab him.

She lights the lamp FIRST, and discovers hes 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, its
instinctual and normal and natural to have social information
about other people and be in the know.

Its almost like a currency. Its like a social currency.

The more gossip you have about people, the more powerful
you are as a woman, the more feminine you are. Its power
to have gossip.

And yet, gossip itself is second hand and third hand and
cant 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.

Weve all been there.


If youre a middle manager, for example, and you hear
gossip about an employee, you dont want to just jump to
conclusions and say, Yeah, this person needs to be fired or
this person needs reprimand.

Youve got to interview the person first, shed light on whats
really going on, (truly without judgment first), and thats 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, Im not going to jump to conclusions. Im going to learn
more about this situation first, and no, Im not going to
gossip. Ill be vaguely friendly, and itll appear like Im
condoning the gossip, but Im actually listening to whats
really going on without directly participating in the gossip.

All right. Now things go further along here where Psyche
has broken Cupids rule of marriage that she should never
look at him directly and see him, and now shes broken that
rule.

So hes run away, and at this point, she wants him back.
Shes glad to be married to him now, and shes pregnant
with his child, too.

And its at this point that Aphrodite intervenes, and she says,
Okay, look, youre 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 youre really
serious about being married to my son, youre going to have
to pass a series of tests, or you do not qualify to be wed to
him.


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 its
placed in front of her, Aphrodite says, If you dont finish this
by nightfall, you will be struck dead.

Psyche is beside herself. She doesnt know how shes
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. Shes going to die at
nightfall, and she cant 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 doesnt 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?



It feels impossible to do.

Remember this lesson that youre not alone, but theres a
whole system youre a part of, and youre surrounded by
help, which is the natural order of how things work around
here in this workplace.

Im not a woman, and this might not directly apply to me, 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 havent 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 turns out theres 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 theyve 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 theres 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 youre
protected by nature around you and how the system
works. So be observant of how it works, and the problem
will get solved.


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.)



:::CHAPTER SIX:::

:::BOUNDARIES WITH WORK:
GETTING GOLD FROM WILD BOARS:::

Psyches first test was sorting 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 didnt do it, again, shed be killed by Aphrodite.

Shes forlorn, and she doesnt think she can handle it.

She doesnt think shell ever solve this problem because
these boars are so vicious and deadly.

She cant run out there and directly start pulling their hair off.

Shell 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, shell just watch them
pass by these reeds, and shell 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 dont 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


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 thats 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.

Thats deadly. And this one is a real zinger.

She cant figure this one out. How in the world shes 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.

Shes 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.



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, Ive seen so
and so bully you, and I really dont like that.

Maybe there is something I can do to help, and they give
you some connections and some resources that you
wouldnt have otherwise had.

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

:::CHAPTER SEVEN:::

:::BOUNDARIES IN THE WORKPLACE:


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, its like a truly, truly impossible task because this
inner sanctum of Persephone is guarded by Cerberus, the
three headed guard dog. So theres this vicious three-
headed dog guarding the entrance, and theres 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 shes given are two coins, two gold coins, and two
bean cakes to take with her. You know, she has limited
resources, and she doesnt know what these are going to be
useful for or how shes going to use them, but this is what
shes given for her journey.
Its a meager salary, so to speak.

This part of the story, this final test of Aphrodite, makes me
think a lot about what Ive 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 youre pressed for time and
youve 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 shes off. Shes on her
journey. And as theyre sailing down the river, there are


drowning old women in the river, begging her for a coin to
get on the boat to be saved, and once shes on the other
side, there are old men that come up to her, begging her for
a bit of her food, her bean cake.

Its 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.

Its 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 doesnt know yet what shes 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.

Its 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 theyre on the outs
with the boss, or even theyre being scapegoated, and
theres not a whole lot you can 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.

Its this ability to have a boundary, to say no to others, even
those who need help, it doesnt 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.



Had Psyche given away one of her bean cakes, she would
have soon found that she had nothing to lure Cerberus, the
three-headed dog away from the entrance to Persephones
chamber.

Thats 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 chamber, but she couldnt 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
persons temporary need.

Heart of a Gopi: Hi, Dr. Paul. Its Heart of Agape listening in on this most
excellent call. I think the analogies and the advice youve
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, its 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, Im sure I would have given
away the items that I needed in order to help someone else,
forgetting about the goal.

I think its 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.


I know that I find as a lover type woman that thats 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 didnt 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 shed keep doing it.

He comes to me, and he says, This has been through the
union. We have a union, and weve negotiated, and were at
a deadlock and a standstill, and youve seen her do this.



Could you please talk to the union, or could you give
evidence?

Could you give quotes of how youve seen her bully me?
And Im preparing a lawsuit. And if youre interested, you
could be a part of this lawsuit, too.

Ill 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 doesnt 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.

Thats 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
wasnt 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. Ive seen this stuff going on. Its wrong. Ill let
you know that Im against it and for you, but no, I cant get
embroiled in some lawsuit. Im about to leave. And I really
do wish you well, but it sounds like you have it handled, and
Im not even really sure that Id help you all that much by
saying anything, and it would just put me at risk.

I didnt 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 thats the same as refusing to
give away your coins for crossing the River Styx or giving


away your bean cakes that youre going to need to lure the
dog Cerberus away from the door.

Thats an example of saying no to another person. Maybe
even against your own maternal nature. Its what you have
to do.

Heart of a Gopi: You have to do it, and I can see, too, that maybe its 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 its all on our shoulders. Its 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 thats 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 wed lost all of
our resources.

So I appreciate that. That was helpful. Thank you so much.



:::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 youre talking


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 nurture him and mother him, but Im
sensing here that there is something missing that Ive got to
do thats going to put an end to this bad stuff that keeps
happening. The police keep coming to my door. I bet youre
going to tell me that I have to tell him to move out. Dont I? I
have to say no.

And I was like, Thats 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, Thats
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 hasnt found a
place to stay, and it really tugged at her heartstrings, and
she comes in and tells me, I cant do this. He calls me, and
he says hes homeless. I dont want him to be homeless. I
dont 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 dont
answer the phone. Huh? Well, thats right. Thats one way
of going about it.

She goes, Okay, Ill try that. She doesnt answer the
phone.

A week later, she comes in, and it turns out its worked. She
hasnt heard from him because she hasnt 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.



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, its just that I dont think he has anyone. Ive
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, youve got
to stop drugs. Really, just you and whole world?

She goes, No, of course not. Youre right. Theres the
police system. Theres the recovery programs out there, the
detox programs. Theres narcotics anonymous. There are
his own friends.

There are other members of our family. And I was like,
Yeah, thats right because whose job is it to fix someone
elses boundaries? Because boundaries are also involved
with addictions and substance abuse.

She said, Well, it feels like its my job. Im his grandma. I
said, Well, its the whole worlds job to fix up someones
boundaries, because theyll go out into the world and do the
wrong thing, and theyll 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.

Hell get a lot of, No, from everyone that say, No, you cant
keep using drugs. So what Im getting at with that is you
know, when were defending against other peoples bad
boundaries, thats 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 elses everything?
That were the only ones who can fix a person, or were the
only one that can save a person.

Where even if all these systems didnt exist, like drug
enforcement, law enforcement, detox programs, social


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

He is, ultimately.

So weve got to remember that, too, about boundaries.
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 its just part of why
you do it.

Heart of a Gopi: Yeah, definitely. I definitely can see, but I can see that its
never really brought me anything other than with my own
real children to be a mother.

Its really not done any good with friends or relationships with
men, not done a bit of good. So its very important to hear
this again.

Thanks so much because its really sometimes that gut
instinct to do that is really not coming from our gut, but some
place where its just a bad habit.

Dr. Paul: Yeah. Well, were going to in tomorrows session, when
we talk about and well also talk about just being a woman
in general. Well talk about friendships 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


and your competence, your ability to get things done on
time, get the project done on time, for example.

While theres a certain amount of intellectual competence
involved with that, theres 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.

Weve 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 dont 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.

Its 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 thats 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.



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. You know, thered 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 youre complaining a lot or
youre pointing things out to people that have to be done that
are mission critical, and if people slack off, bad things will
happen for everyone at the company.

Well, its time to have a Hara boundary and remember that
while you criticize others constructively, even though they
might not like it, they dont 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 dont, the whole
purpose of the company fails, and you fail as a leader.

So thats 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 youve got to do it anyway.

Youve got to say no to yourself, that yes, you want to be
well liked by people, but if you dont point these things out,
no good will happen. And thats a feature of feminine
leadership, too.

So lets go to your online-submitted questions.


Theres one from someone named Anna, and she says, Im
an artist, and the man Im 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 times where hes 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.

Lets see here. So he asks carefully if Id like help. I began
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 Im totally brilliant artistically.

Thats a great question.

Thats something 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
youre 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 youre 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


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 womans life if theres nothing about me that 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.

Thats one of the best things you can do to make a man feel
loved is to let him help in some technical way.

Thats exactly what theres the opportunity for here. So its
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. Doesnt matter. Then of course, you
would want him to think that you really have all of your ducks
in a row, or maybe he wouldnt want to do business with
you. But this is not a business arrangement. Were talking
about a romance. And thats 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? Its
good to know the difference between what is business and
what is personal.

Thats 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 were thinking
of starting a business together?

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



But am I wearing a romantic hat?

Thats what youre wearing in this situation.

You could get an accountant anywhere. So its not about the
technical expertise that were interested in here. Its 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?

Thats one of the prime ways that men feel they love women
is by doing something for you.

Its not all about his ego, and its not all about your need.
Youre doing a dance together where 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, theres 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 its the flip side of the dark city alley.
Its yet another one of those areas where there are no rules.
Rules dont really apply. It happens in little snippets of time
where nobody is watching, and its 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,
Dont 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 youre stuck in the same physical environment
everyday.

You have to watch out for that.



At the same time, theres 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 youre 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 dont have a lot of say so
about that. Its irrational and illogical and random when we
encounter people.

Id 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 youre at work, its all business.

Thatll 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 well also
get into friendship and just being a woman in general.



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,


AND BEING A WOMAN IN GENERAL

:::CHAPTER NINE:::



:::BOUNDARIES IN BEING A WOMAN:::

Dr. Paul: Dr. Paul here again from http://www.WomensHappiness.com
and Womens 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.

Weve been looking at boundaries for the past two days in
terms of all the various aspects of a womans 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 weve covered
romantic relationships with men as well as career issues in
our last talk of lesson two.

Lets talk a little bit about some of the aspects of boundaries
that we havent really covered the technical 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 were 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



Somebody who is in denial has some pretty big boundary
problems where they cant see their own behavior, and
technically, theyre in denial of the limits of what they
control.

They dont know what their limits are.

They dont 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 projection, and thats 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.
Thats an example of projection.

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 dont 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


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 somebodys 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.



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, theres 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 Defenses. Lets
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 dont 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. Itll all blow
over.

Something like that.

Thats one mature ego defense.

The Defense of Suppression

Another one is called suppression. Suppression means
youre going to back burner something, and to do that, you
have to have good boundaries.

One of the features of boundaries that weve been covering
through the course here is that it works as a budgeter.


Its 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 thats 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 dont control, so

we suffer through holes in the boundary by burning
resources like time or energy on things we dont 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 were in traffic, if we waste a lot of time
on waiting for someone to change their behavior and then
they dont, were suffering.

Were burning our resources on things we dont control.

Suppression recognizes this suffering that we do and says,
You know, I dont control anything about this right now, so
why dont I table it or backburner it, just drop it for now,
surrender the power of surrender, and maybe Ill 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 womens
development, there was a lot of that going on, building
boundaries around things she didnt control and letting
nature take its course in her favor.



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.

Shes 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 things we dont
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 dont 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 non-
profit organization that helps cure the very thing that took
their kids away from them.



So thats an example of altruism as an ego defense.
Another example of it in every day lets 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

Theres a third immature Ego Defense thats a good
example, which again, uses boundaries.

If you recall yesterday where were 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.

Theres a positive and negative angle on it, but its both
views are poor boundaries because there are all kinds of
people in the world, and they dont all fit into the same roles
in your life.

Thats dyadic relating. And its a sign of less mature
boundaries.


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. Thats triadic
relationships.

The Defense of Displacement

Well, theres an immature Ego Defense that goes a little
deeper into this concept called displacement.

Displacement is where you have a negative experience,
and the person thats 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.

Its 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 nobodys fault.

Like its a bad economy, for example, or a whole team didnt
meet their targets. Well, the whole team is responsible. But
in corporations, we tend to pin the blame on one individual
because its easy and convenient, and immediate
gratification for getting rid of our negativity.

Its 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 theyre not guilty.

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



A medical example of this would be grandpa has cancer,
and you love him, and hes going to pass on. Everybody in
the family is angry that theyre 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 were losing grandpa.

Thats displacement onto the easiest target instead of
blaming grandpa himself, who is unacceptable as a person
to put the blame on.

Hes 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 thats a little more high tech way for you to
use boundaries to judge other peoples maturity level as well
as your own, whether its in relationships that are romantic or
in the workplace so that you know what youre 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: Sure.

Karen: Dr. Paul. Can you give me a really like bargain basement
definition of Ego Defense? Because I know when Im
hearing you say it, Im misconstruing what you actually
mean.

Dr. Paul: What do you mean bargain basement?

Karen: When I hear defensiveness, its getting me hooked into other
than what youre 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 thats not what you mean when youre saying ego
defense, so it leaves me clear that I dont understand what
the term ego defense means.



Dr. Paul: Sure, thats 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 whats going on with that actual exchange that theyre
in.

Dr. Paul: Sure, it depends on context. This is a great thing youve
brought up. Are you 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 Ive had to sort of rebuild my brain from the inside
out, so its taken a lot of years to you know, I have a
degree in music. I dont have a degree in psychology, but
Ive 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 isnt. A second example of that is the
word, ego.

A lot of times, people in public talk about someone having
too much ego, or thats ego based or ego driven, and I get
what they mean when they use it always as a negative.



Theyre 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.

Its essentially your ability to reason. Its your ability to solve
problems and calculate things and use information and make
decisions and reach conclusions.

Its 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,
youre using it as a brand word to really mean narcissism.

Theyre meaning egotistical as opposed to just someone
using their proper intellectual abilities to solve problems. So
thats 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.

Ive 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? Lets kind of drop this. Theres no need
to get upset.

Then the person winning the argument, or really trying hard
to win the argument will say, Youre being defensive.

Theyll mean it in a way that implies youre wrong.

Theres the evidence because youre 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


might very quickly jump to saying, Youre being defensive.
That means I win, when in fact, the person is just being a
mature person, feeling attacked, and rightfully defending
themselves against a rude, bully-ish person.

On the flip side, lets 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, Youre being
defensive.

Youre using denial. Youre denying that you just took the
cookie that I watched you steal.

In that case, theyre right.

Theyre 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.

Its too vague of a word to really mean anything. Its 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, lets have some boundaries and be respectful of each
other, have more mature Ego Defenses. So yes, the word
relates to what Im talking about, but its such a vague word
that without context and an assessment of the maturity level
of the people involved, its nearly as useless as watching TV
commentators trash talk each other on TV.

Who knows who is really right?

Whoever yells the loudest?

I dont know if that explains the concept more fully.



Karen: I get it. Its 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, youve
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, Youre being defensive. It must mean youre guilty.
Thats ridiculous. It depends on the context. You know, one
of the things we learned about yesterday, too, is that almost
always when youre 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, lets say, in a
relationship as opposed to having to be right.

Because usually, when you have to choose to be right,
youre going to be alone, and boundaries have a lot to do
with that because one of the things thats going on inside our
boundaries is that we dont 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.

Thats 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.



There is never a right answer. Not in the world of opinion
because were 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 say, Science isnt always right because
another theory comes along, and thats 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 measure itself doesnt ever change
unless you change things like your altitude level if were
talking about gravity.

If youre in outer space, theres less gravity going on, but if
youre 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 its only with
science that we have absolute agreement, forced
agreements between us on whats 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,
thats not science based. I mean thats pure opinion.


I like blue. And for me to stay blue is the best color, that is
very true for me.

Me and only me.

Its 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.

Thats just the world of opinion. And opinions are useful and
valid and we need them, and they describe who we are.

Theyre part of our identity since were 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, were bullies when we force our opinions on
others. And Im sure 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 youve got to work on some of your
boundaries as far as blocking other peoples ideas at the
door if they do not fit what you value or what you believe.

Its all about the boundary.

Thats 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, theyll never go away as
long as we are a species, thered be less war because
thered be proof of how things are going to go.



We would know ahead of time that its 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
thats 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 womens 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. Pauls 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
someones style or tastes are accepted as if they were fact.

I wasnt 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 didnt work that way.

In my opinion, itd 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 weve composed about romance that always
seem to hold water, always seem to work exactly the same
way.



:::CHAPTER ELEVEN:::

:::BEING UNDERSTOOD, AND GOOD
RELATIONS:::

We can come back to some of these ideas, but lets think
about some other goddesses that we havent 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 friendships, but were 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 its like an explosion.

Itd be like having a car that only has an accelerator pedal
and no ability to brake or steer. What good would that car
be? Itd be a very passionate car, but itd 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


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 theres danger or
something offensive.

We all have the instinct to cover our noses when theres 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 dont. There are features to being a man instinctually
that only men have and you dont. And its 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 dont
speak that language, and so then we dont 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. Theres a very valid,
instinctual reason for why.:

Its very normal for them but not for men. There are many
things that men do that dont make any sense, like when a
man is feeling emotionally hurt, why does he go isolate?
Why wont he just talk it out?
Why wont men ever individually seek out couples
counseling, unless theyre afraid of completely losing their
relationship?

They never seek it out as a positive. Why? Its a very valid
reason for why. Its instinctual for them. It makes them feel
weak, and thats not an ego weakness.



Its 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, hes a weak hunter. Youve 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 have. Thats not what makes us bad.

What makes us do harm and be misunderstood is when we
dont also have boundaries, too. When people do wrong is
because theyve 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, lets 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, theres
probably some universal nature to them, and if theyre
stories about males and females, then it probably says
something universal about all males and about all females or
they wouldnt last so long.

They wouldnt be popular. They wouldnt inspire if it wasnt
common throughout all cultures and throughout all time.
Stories like this would not last, and thats why they do.

The most universal feature of being a woman is what is a
feminine instinct. Thats whats 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.


With the Iris, goddess of the rainbow, and responsible for
communication between heaven and earth.

You know, one of the things that Im 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 were 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 youve 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 didnt about a career skill and a career related
feminine boundary.

It would be an iris boundary.



One that seeks balance in terms of peoples input or
involvement. Its 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 werent enjoying life quite as much
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 shes 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 theyre also all from really different
economic backgrounds from what I was brought up in. I feel
a little excluded, even though theyre 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, its diversity in friendships. And its something
you have to wake up to. It wont 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.


If you combine all the colors of the color wheel together, you
get white.

Did you ever take an art class?

Youre 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?

Its understanding and illumination, so theres 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.



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.

Theres 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, its powerful. Its 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.



Youve 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 Adams 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 didnt 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 couldnt 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 didnt go so well.

If theres 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
youre defiant of God and I am not a theologian. Im using
this scientifically.

Conflict of God would imply that you think youre as powerful
as him, which is by definition, narcissistic. And its one of the
reasons that psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, psychologists will
sometimes use a term for people with poor boundaries and
narcissism. Theyll use the term omnipotence. Theyll say,
That person has a lot of omnipotence, and its similar to
arrogance or bragging or similar to feeling that youre all that.
Okay? Narcissism in the vain kind of way. And
omnipotence is a form of denial where you feel as if youre
all powerful or you feel as if youre always right, and
everyone else is wrong. Thats omnipotence.

So when you encounter a person thats sort of braggish in
that way or always has to be right, even if theyre kind of a
meek, mild, shy person, but theyre always letting you know
they think theyre 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.



By the way, perfectionism, if youve ever been called
perfectionistic or have known people who behaved in a
perfectionist way, thats 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 dont, and youre 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
theyre 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.

Thats perfectionism, and a feature of it is omnipotence, and
thats Lilith.
Now when we get to Liliths relationship to Adam
symbolically, thats a little bit trickier because no gender is
better than the other.

Were 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 theres a lot of pain instead
or loneliness. In other words, we come face-to-face with the
fact that we are different instinctually, and theres no way to
make the other gender be just like us. And theres no way to


make them literally be in our shoes except through empathy
and to learn to translate language.

So thats Lilith.

The Hestia Boundary

Lets 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.

Its 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 shes 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 womens
friendships with each other are so needed and instinctual for


feeling good as a woman, its a really profound thing that we
almost forget in todays unisex society where everybody is
equal, and we assume that means were identical twins
when were not.

Everybody is equal, but theyre different at the same time.

Males, a lot of times in their friendships, dont mind being on
the outs because they can feel like theyre the lone wolf or
theyre the top dog and can go without interacting with others
for a long period of time. But theres 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 youve ever seen examples of women who have been
offered promotions from maybe middle manager to the
executive suite, and something in them just doesnt want to
do it, and they dont know why.

It just doesnt feel right.

It doesnt feel like itll be satisfying, even though its 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, theyll say, I dont 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 dont get the social
connection as much as I do when Im in the thick of things as
a manager. And its this Hestia instinct and Hestia
boundaries that are involved here.

As an exercise for measuring this part of your life and as a
tool, Id like you to imagine a lasso 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


Program about this because its 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
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. Its finding commonalities with
people as opposed to just differences. And its 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 theyve 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, its sort of like you throw


the gift through the window, and theyre 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. Its mine. And they never see you standing
there outside as the originator of the gift. Okay?

Thats caused by holes in the boundary. When somebody
cant appreciate or have gratitude. Its 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 youve 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 the whole 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 thats an
example of this as well.

The lack of a Hestia Boundary.

This is the kind of girl that probably didnt 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.



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 womens friendships
with each other are. I even go so far as to say that there
cant be peace without womens friendships with each other,
that its 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 dont have connection to each other
freely.

Theres a lot of squelching of womens friendships 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.



:::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 hes 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.



Dr. Paul: Yes.

Laura: So I saw it, and God, it was so incredibly valuable because
when youre dealing with the brain injury and all that, its 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 hes 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 arent mothers, and someone recommended to
me the recent version of The Thomas Crown Affair, but shes
the only female character Ive 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 youre saying juvenile
behavior, adolescent culture is simply advertising. If you


then look at who are the biggest consumers in society,
women, and why are they the biggest consumers. Dont
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 its deep in their nature as women, and it
goes back to numerous stories, one of which is the story of
Psyche. Theres a lot of that shopping 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 bodies, and as a result, theyd go out and
be the killers of society, and theyd kill animals for food and
fend off warring tribes, and the women, the survival instinct
thats uniquely feminine in the women would be if they cant
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 genders role is equally important and yet different. So
I think thats where the shopping 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?

Theres going to be a big push, even unwittingly, because its
good marketing to encourage women above all to have


terrible boundaries because theyre the shoppers. And I
think thats 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 mens product because thats
a product that kind of sort of was to help men with their
dating. And since that time, since Im a psychiatrist, I help
men and women equally.

Its unfair to just have things just for men. So we made an
equivalent program for women, MindOS Mastery on the
Womens Happiness site. And in the original mens 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 womens 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. Its a
Gaelic name. Saoirse. It looks like Saoirse Ronan is her
name.

Twelve-year-old blond girl in the movie is it called
Redemption? Whats it called? Its a one-word title. Almost
won an Oscar about World War I.

James McAvoy is in it as well. But thats 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, thats the equivalent of The
Count of Monte Cristo for women.


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 shes sleeping.

So theres Judith. Theres 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 Psyches story under the
thumb of Aphrodite is a massive hero story for women.

Shes 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, shes just given
two gold coins and two bean cakes, and she doesnt know
why shes given these things, and thats all shes got to work
with.

You know? Shes 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


begging her, everybody is wanting one of the coins. Please
give me a coin. Im hungry. Please give me a bean cake,
and she intuitively knows she better not give those up. She
might need them.

Thats 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 its the creative spirit in womens instincts, in
feminine instincts, that is simultaneously the mothering spirit,
the mothering instinct.

So for women who dont have children or dont want them or
wont 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 dont 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. Oprahs life story. She is maternal as all get out,
and she created, gave birth to a company and a network.

Thats her child, so to speak. Its 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.


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 creating. Thats 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 thats certainly the case with 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 Hestia.
Since were 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
worlds 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


the living for one-third of the 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. Theyre 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 its 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 girl. Its 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 youre keeping it hostage, your 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 one-
third of your week or month or year creating the art and
loving it, being alone with it. But you might think of two-
thirds of your business time or your day, your week, your
month, or your year promoting it.


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 thats Demeter, mothers and daughters.

Aphrodite has a different story with her son, Eros or Cupid.

She didnt 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, its very interesting. She withers
and dies away when he doesnt go do his work of love, when
he doesnt go shoot arrows into people. She gets less and
less honored, so to speak.

Aphrodites temple starts to crumble when Cupid, her son,
Eros, her son doesnt go do his work. So the kind of
boundaries you have with a son, whether youre 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, flying around,
doing his work of love, shooting arrows.

And thats the way Aphrodite wanted it. But at 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 girls intent.

In fact, she was very jealous of Psyche and her beauty, and
thats when she started putting her to the test. All these


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 whats going on.
But you also dont want him laying around on your couch,
eating Cheetos, until hes 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 dont think this is what
you should be doing. I dont 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 wed 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 with boundaries, what wed get is an Artemis
boundary.

Did you ever notice that no matter how artistic your female
friends are, theyll 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.

Theres an orderliness. A built in accuracy to women, if you
will. No matter what their personality style is, its deep level
instinct.

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


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 childs life, Ill often
say that the fathers 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 mothers role is to teach the children about no, this
is a very primitive role. Its not all you are, obviously. But a
very primitive way of seeing this is a mothers role is to teach
their kids to name emotions.

Imagine a mother holding a baby, and the baby is crying.
Well, thats not the end of the story. She might look into the
babys eyes and say, Oh, youre sad, or, Oh, youre
angry, or, Oh, you pooped your diaper.

Shes giving words to emotions. And if you think about the
mind of a small child, these things called emotions overtake
us, and theyre invisible. Theyre not an object. You cant
hold onto them, and that can make them scary. We cant
master them without mothers to give labels to these
emotions.

Well, thats the Artemis Instinct as well in there. Its the
accuracy of labeling things, sorting things, categorizing
things. And through so doing, achieving power.

Its 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 Ive published a few books. And
one of the things you notice is almost every executive and
editor is female in the entire industry. You dont see a lot of
males in it, and you wonder why.

Its like the power of language, and emotional language, a
novel. What do emotions mean and getting power out of
that.

Uniquely feminine. Its the Artemis instinct and Artemis
boundaries. So any time goint to bring in one more feature


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 theyre overwhelmed, it means they
have a lot of holes in their boundary, and stress is getting in
everywhere.

Someone says theyre confused. Ideas are flying through all
the windows of your boundary, the holes. Somebody says
theyre really stressed 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 somethings nature and giving
labels to it. Its 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 its in the dark, thats when she does
her best.

Thats 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
weve 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.



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.

Youve got to watch out for those people, but if you have to
relate to them or you employ them or maybe they employ
you, youve 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 dont 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 cant run a kingdom without
analyzing and commenting on whats working and whats not
working.

So any time people get back to defensive, when people get
over defensive at constructive criticisms you make, its time
for the Hera boundary of diplomacy and remembering that
they may not think like you, the person youre criticizing.
Maybe its a male. Maybe its a co-worker who is female.
Maybe its a female friend.

They dont 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 hed also talked about


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 its sexual seductiveness. Thats not exactly what
Im 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? Its because it works. But Im saying
something deeper than just whats 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.

Theres a way of being flirtatious to get more of your way in
how things go. Theres 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 its real, it happens, and it
naturally happens. But Im 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 vinegar. Its sort of like
that.

Its 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 dont want people to
see, so long as you have good ethical ends in mind for the
outcome. Thats the gift the sirens. So I thought I would
mention the sirens. They were these creatures that would


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? Shes 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 youre 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, theres 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 youre better 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
youre going to keep using drugs, Im going to have to not
have you live here, or if you keep that up, youre going to
lose your job. Not shouting. Not losing it. But wisely setting
a boundary that is confrontational, and thats Athena,
goddess of wisdom and war.

I thought Id throw in one last little tip associated with
Athena. Lets borrow from the world of men and the United
States Marines.


Theres a thing I teach men marines use called the 70
percent solution. If youre going to go into direct combat and
you dont have data and you dont have intelligence by way
of computer analysis, youve got to use your gut. And
marines, I used to talk about what they called the 70 percent
solution. And what that meant was if you feel a 70 percent
assurance in your gut that you will win, then go at it.

Fight.

Chances are youre going to win. Youre never going to get
90 percent assurance of anything that has randomness to it.
And thats most of the world.

Youll never get it, so 70 is good enough. But if you feel less
than 70 percent certain about a fight, about winning a
conflict, then maybe you need to not enter the fight yet, and I
think thats an Athena kind of gift. Its wisdom to your
conflict.

You dont have enough data yet. You need to wait. Like
Psyche. You need to let the nature around you serve up
more data.

If Psyche hadnt noticed the ants coming along and that
they could sort the seeds, she would have died. She would
have failed the test.When you learn to use your feminine
instincts, desires and pair those with great boundaries, you cant go
wrong in life.

Thanks for joining us at Womens Happiness Magazine.

You can also write me directly at [email protected]

Dr Paul Dobransky
Publisher of Mens Psychology Magazine

Feminine Intelligence in Personal Boundaries

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Feminine Intelligence in Personal Boundaries

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Feminine Intelligence in Personal Boundaries

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

by Paul Dobransky, M.D.

for Womens Psychology Magazine 2011,

You might also like