Hello friends today I wanted to share with you the audio transcript from one of my recent podcast episodes on Awakening Aphrodite because wow, looks like it hit a nerve and was very popular with a lot of folks! Perhaps because in it we touched on some things that are near and dear to all of our hearts and got right to the core of so much of our “relationship” issues.
My guest on this episode was prolific and adored Alison Armstrong who has been a major voice in helping men and women UNDERSTAND EACH OTHER and therefore help us all live in more harmony!
I’m sharing with you the verbatim show transcript. Please forgive any grammatical errors or misspeaks. The main thing is I just wanted to be sure that you get the information (in case you missed the show)!
Keep in mind, you can always listen to the show at any time too! 😉
Amy Fournier: Alison I am thrilled to sit down with you. You are the expert on men and women with your journey beginning in the early, ’90s. Wow. What a huge body of beautiful work you’ve contributed to the world. There’s so much we could get to, but let’s just start with where are you at today with your work… Alison, with this trajectory that you’ve had, are there any epiphanies or revelations like “All right, since ’91 I’ve been doing this and here we are in 2000 … “ Where is Alison at in her work today?
Wow, thank you for that question. Instead of assuming that I am some particular period in the last 32 years. It’s actually one of the things that I teach men to ask women, what are your favorite questions? Because one of the things it helps women feel safe is when someone’s interested in us in a way that we like to be interested in. So our favorite questions usually have to do with our passions. If a man asks about, “Where are you traveling next?” Or, “How are your grandchildren?” Or, “What are you learning now?” Or whatever your favorite questions are, they get access to our passion, which frankly, when a man’s listening to a woman talk about something she’s passionate about, he can listen 10 times longer.
Amy Fournier: That’s a turn on. It’s a turn on. Somebody who’s alive inside is interesting.
Alison Armstrong: Yeah, and it doesn’t even have to be a turn on in a sexual way-
Amy Fournier: Right.
Alison Armstrong: It’s that life force is being transferred and they’re enlivened and they have a greater sense of well-being. So it’s funny what you asked me because one of the questions my husband would ask me, one of my favorite questions was, is he would say, “What’s it like to be you now?”
Amy Fournier: Oh, that’s good.
Alison Armstrong: Yeah, what I’m learning transforms the way I’m seeing men or women or human beings or what’s going on the planet now and then that affects how I see myself and what’s my part. Since I was young, I’ve always thought of my job as heaven on earth, and I used to think everything that wasn’t heaven on earth I had to fix. Then a big breakthrough in my early 50s was, what’s my part? It’s not all mine. What’s my part? There are so many other people who are driven by the same thing however they word it. Do you know?
Amy Fournier: Mm-hmm.
Alison Armstrong: So thank you for asking. I would say that if you start in the early ’90s, and it’s funny Amy, because we started recording things. I called it if Alison’s ever hit by a bus, we recorded things for archival purposes. I did not expect the recordings to be used in my lifetime, and I didn’t expect them to be so widely available all over the world. So it’s an amazing time to get to be a teacher and to discover things. I can discover something in the morning, have it recorded before I go to bed, have it available in the world within a few days. It’s astonishing. Aye, yay, yay, what a time to be a messenger. Right?
Amy Fournier: Yep.
Alison Armstrong: So the evolution has gone from thinking men are just dysfunctional, broken women to falling in love with them, to being surprised that they didn’t want to talk about work and sports. They wanted to talk about women and love and commitment and family. That had me start seeing women through men’s eyes, which is astonishing and has continued to transform me. So I wasn’t surprised, Amy, when you said you have a significant number of men who listened to the podcast, ’cause when I think of Aphrodite in that classic painting on riding in on the waves on the shell, yes, she’s all those things that are irresistible to men. She’s got curves to beat the band and there’s a receptivity in her, a softness, not just in her body but in her being.
Amy Fournier: Yeah.
Alison Armstrong: But don’t ever forget, she is a god and she is powerful. That was one of the things that surprised me the most in listening to men talk about women is they know we are all that. So many men have told me, “Oh, yeah, my wife’s smarter than me. That’s why I married her.” So all this, I’ve been searching for the good reason for what men were teaching me and then the good reason for why women do what we do, and these questions pop into my head and they have from the very beginning. Until about six months ago, I thought it was my brain until I discovered I’m even more guided than I knew and always have been. The questions popped into my brain were from a higher consciousness directing the research-
Amy Fournier: Wow.
Alison Armstrong: … starting with what if men are responding to women and then what if there’s a good reason for that? Then what if no one’s misbehaving, including you? Then what’s shaped my work since 2016 now is this thing that just burst out of my mouth, which often happens. When I watch videos, I say things I don’t know.
Amy Fournier: Me too.
Alison Armstrong: The Queen’s Code, I researched what was needed for that book for over 15 years. I needed to learn what triggered women to disempower men, all the ways they disempowered men, and then how they justified that men deserved to be disempowered and what they were afraid would happen if we didn’t keep stealing their power-
Amy Fournier: Right.
Alison Armstron…: … and there’s so many variations on it. So I studied and studied and studied that for ages until finally I knew that I knew how to write the book. But when I sat down to write the book, I didn’t write it. I didn’t write it despite the outline, despite it having been picked up by a major publisher, and then I took it back after the way they treated the manuscript. When I sat down to write it, a screen opened up and a movie started playing and I typed as fast as I could. It takes about a year-and-a- half for most people to write a book that’s almost 100,000 words. I typed it in three weeks.
Amy Fournier: Wow.
Alison Armstrong: Yeah. Keys to the Kingdom, the prequel, 46,000 words that took eight days to type because it was also a movie.
Amy Fournier: Wow, you just channeled it.
Alison Armstrong: Yeah.
Amy Fournier: Wow.
Alison Armstrong: It took a long time to own that word ’cause I didn’t know what that was.
Amy Fournier: Yeah. Wow.
Alison Armstrong: So I’m letting myself be much more guided and what popped out of my mouth in 2016 was, “Honor yourself first or all is lost.” It came out and then I had to find out what it meant. That’s really what I’ve been doing since then is finding out what does that mean in all these different domains and what human instincts, whether male or female or before male and female ’cause they’re human instincts that then have gender expressions. Then there are instincts that the expression isn’t even just gender, it’s gender modified by, you could call it state of mind.
Are you in a committed state of mind, which creates focus and intention and a lot of testosterone being spent and a lot of tension created by things like deadline and naturally screens out everything the mind is decided is irrelevant to that destination? Which is one of the things that gets so many women and men in trouble in romance because when they’ve decided they’re going to get married, they’re going to find the one, they’re going to have a family and they meet someone that they think, “Oh, this could be the one.” Then their mind screens out everything that would disprove that, so I-
Amy Fournier: Is that what happens? Okay.
Alison Armstrong: That is what happens.
Amy Fournier: Now I understand.
Alison Armstrong: Yeah, so I teach men and women first start with honoring yourself.
Amy Fournier: Yes.
Alison Armstrong: If someone’s going to be that important in your life, what are the qualities they need to generate well-being? What are the behaviors that as who they are connects with your life that you need them to generate and express and support, and that without those things, you’re literally better off alone?
Amy Fournier: Yes.
Alison Armstrong: We have such a strong instinct as herd and pack animals is one way to say it, so there’s even pre-human. There’s nature itself, and so we have such a bond to survive, this drive to couple, whether it’s to live in the same cave and defend yourselves from the tigers together, which so glad to be past the age of, “Who’s my baby daddy? Who’s going to father my children? Who’s going to protect and provide for all of us?” So much instinct just driving, driving, driving that period of our life that there are, I don’t know, volumes dedicated to what happens to women when we’re past childbearing age.
It’s being broken out of a, I don’t know, it’s not a trance, but this, “What? What was that all about?” Then we have to watch out for the new version. “Am I going to die alone? I don’t want to die alone. I want somebody to grow old with.” What happened in my work, a little over three years ago, my husband died. I thought I was going to be 81 when he died, not 58. I thought I would be past all that romance stuff and all that sex stuff and I wouldn’t need any of that stuff. Then all of a sudden, I am single and the instinct to find a new protector and provider and then God awful sex drive, which nobody-
Amy Fournier: Oh, yeah, that.
Alison Armstrong: … nobody warned me. Nobody warned me. Nobody warned me a steady diet, with A steady diet, given my commitment to how much sex has to do with well-being and how shy men get about generating sex when they’re emotionally involved with us, they can be crushed so easily. So I just watched for signs for my husband getting … and then I would initiate sex, and ’cause he was looking for signs that were all wrong. Let me talk about that in our Understanding Women and our Understanding Sex and Intimacy online courses, but I didn’t know, and then my son, God bless him, my kids are watching me. My son stayed with me for a month after Greg passed and he watched this crazed person and like, “Mom, grief is an aphrodisiac.”
Amy Fournier: Oh.
Alison Armstrong: It’s like-
Amy Fournier: I never thought of that.
Alison Armstrong: “Oh, thank you.” It also amps up the amygdala, the worry center of your brain, which is already bigger and more active in women-
Amy Fournier: Yes.
Alison Armstrong: … and the what ifs?” My best friend’s husband passed 10 days ago, and I just, getting to be with her as her mind went what if wild. So it’s been a digging deeper, if you would, like first discovery, “Maybe I knew nothing about men and I weren’t a kind of woman,” and then finding so much out about women from them and then finding things that were, “Wait, this isn’t just male and male or female. We all do this, and even children do it, and even people who don’t identify with any binary,” right?
Amy Fournier: Yep.
Alison Armstrong: It still happens. This is the human level, and then, oh, this is even before the human level. This is, one way to look at the planet is what I would call hierarchy of instincts, and procreate is the highest and then protect and then provide. Every species risks its life in order to procreate, every species. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a tree or a bug or a virus or a human, every species risks it’s life. There’s a funny video of two enormous caribou fighting it out in the middle of the ski slope here in Steamboat while people are skiing and chairlifts are running, and they’re going at it. Then protect is the priority for providing. When I started looking at that and then going backwards, like, oh, what happens with people is that we love being in an overflow of the desire to give. We love being in that space and we want people to want to give, but we don’t know, there’s an instinct I call decide and provide.
I spend most of my time telling people, “Do ask and do tell,” because we decide what other people need and then we make a plan to provide it for them. We implement the plan and then they’re not cooperating with our plan to provide for them, nevermind we didn’t check it out with them. “This is the problem I’m trying to solve, and this is what I’d like to provide for you and how I’d like to be appreciated.” No decide, provide and then be pissed at not being appreciated, and oh, my gosh, so much mischief. But then what happens is we want people to be there, but then we’ll do something that occurs to them as an attack. So a man wants his wife or girlfriend to be overflowing like Aphrodite with love, but he doesn’t know when he raises his voice, he scares the pucky out of her. She’s now in the perception of a threat in some sequence of fight, flight and freeze. If she’s a fighter, she’s going to attack. If she’s a freezer, she’s going to withdraw, which it’ll take him a while to notice.
Then he’ll be like, “What happened? What did I do now?” Which is usually the wrong way to put it. “What’s wrong with you now?” So we have to teach each other about that. Then women don’t know how much interrupting a man throws the train off the track and they just stop talking and they’re disempowered, and we think they’re shallow, when no, they’re the opposite. They are deep, deep wells to the center of the earth. But you interrupt them, they stop putting the bucket down to see what else they can show you or tell you. So like a man will experience being attacked, and his instinct, even when he’s under attacked, he still has the instinct to protect the other person, which is why they disarm themselves. We talk about this in The Queen’s Code, but then if they have to protect themselves from that person, there’s no way they can provide anything for them. Then it even goes back up to procreate. Procreate isn’t just sex and babies, procreate is there are some people who never get at it procreate. They’re called entrepreneurs–
Amy Fournier: Really? Okay.
Alison Armstrong: … and procreate trumps protect. So women want this, they want to be with a type A man. They want to be with someone of high-ambition-
Amy Fournier: Alpha.
Alison Armstrong: They want an alpha male and then they’re stunned that he bet the mortgage payment on the next business deal-
Amy Fournier: Or he works all the time. They don’t see him enough.
Alison Armstrong: … and they complain about that or the priority of that, but it was predictable. I was talking to Greg early on in our courtship about women who wanted, they all wanted to marry a rich man, and he worked for rich men as a corporate accountant. He said, “Don’t women know how men get rich?” I looked at him and went, “What do you mean?” He said, “They work all the time and they don’t spend their money.” I was like, ‘Oh, women want a rich man in order to spend his money.”
Amy Fournier: Right. Yeah.
Alison Armstrong: I know that’s how my mom was with my dad, and then was flabbergasted when she had a small allowance instead of access to everything he’d grown up with. I doubt she ever forgave him probably to this day, so it’s basically that. I keep discovering something else in one domain like interacting with men in our Smart Singles Program. Then I try to drill down to where it is. If you want up-to-the-minute, just last week, I was talking to a woman who, she’s in our Smart Singles, and she thought what she wanted out of it was to learn how to keep herself full all the time, that her tanks were always full. She was always the embodiment of her highest values. She was always her best qualities. How come she wanted that strategy, because men committed to her quickly. Then when her tanks were empty and she reacted poorly, they left her. So she thought the solution was never have empty tanks, never react poorly.
Amy Fournier: Oh. Oh, boy.
Alison Armstrong: Yes, that was a strategy, and this is often where we go, “If only I were more perfect, he would treat me perfectly. If I were more perfect, he’d feel the right way about me, and then he would act accordingly.”
Amy Fournier: Wow.
Alison Armstrong: “If he felt the right way about me, he would treat me right.” We think he already knows what right is. There’s a line in Viola Davis’s autobiography, I just wanted to kiss her and I wish she said it 12 times. She said, “I wasn’t a good girlfriend. I didn’t teach him how to treat me.”
Amy Fournier: Oh, yeah. Well, isn’t that Eleanor Roosevelt who said, “We teach people how to treat us.”
Alison Armstrong: We do, and something I learned from horsemanship, what you let them do, you teach them to do.
Amy Fournier: Yeah.
Alison Armstrong: So much of my work these days is about boundaries–
Amy Fournier: Yes.
Alison Armstrong: … and how to set them, where to set them, why to set them there, when to present them, how to follow up on them and what to do if somebody doesn’t care what your boundaries are, how quickly you find that out, and how quickly the end.
Amy Fournier: Yes.
Alison Armstrong: I did a course recently called Dating with Distinctions, and the fourth session is really about how do you use dating apps, put dating apps to work for you. I have them be put to work in sorting by boundaries, sorting by does this person respect what I’ve asked them to do? Does this person read? Does this person follow instructions? Does this person honor my request? If at any point they don’t do any of that-
Amy Fournier: See ya.
Alison Armstrong: … the end, and especially the end before you’re in their physical presence.
Amy Fournier: Yeah. Why bother? Why take it to the next step?
Alison Armstrong: Oh, why-
Amy Fournier: Why be in their physical presence if they do that?
Alison Armstrong: Why amp it up and why endanger yourself? If they don’t care about what you need then you put yourself in their presence, you have endangered yourself.
Amy Fournier: Right.
Alison Armstrong: And even endangered yourself by what if in their physical presence, chemistry sets in, too much chemistry, and now-
Amy Fournier: You don’t think straight on top of it.
Alison Armstrong: Now you’re going to portray yourself and left. So anyhow, it’s just, as I was talking to, let’s just call her Lisa, as I was talking to her about what Smart Singles is about is in just saying, “I’m going to tell you straight. When your boyfriend broke up with you, you dodged a bullet, and you are dazzling. You are spectacular, and you cause in men a desire to possess and you’re mistaking possession for commitment. He wants to dib you.”
Amy Fournier: Yeah, like the trophy girlfriend or whatever.
Alison Armstrong: He didn’t leave because he saw your worst, he left because he didn’t do due diligence before that thing. He called a commitment.” I was teasing her because she calls her worst the integrity police, and he just bolted when she called him on his integrity. I said, “A right person for you, the integrity police shows up, might react like, ‘You want to handcuff me?'”
Amy Fournier: There you go. I love it.
Alison Armstrong: And she started laughing-
Amy Fournier: That’s great.
Alison Armstrong: … so hard. I’m like, “If they can’t handle your worst, it’s never going to turn out. If you can’t handle their worst, it’s never going to turn out.” The moment we finally show the other person our worst, and they don’t collapse who they are, they don’t lose all respect and admiration and affinity for us, they can have compassion for what brought it out and then be on our team for that to not happen, instead of it’s our job to never have that happen, ’cause honestly, not the worst in each other predictably, we literally have conflicting instincts. How we seek safety threatens the opposite sex. We’re doomed.
Amy Fournier: Tell us about that. How are they different? What is a man’s seek for safety as opposed to a woman?
Alison Armstrong: I’m happy to, thank you for asking, but I’m going to spread it out a bit because of how many of us are functioning in a committed state of mind, which could be called masculine, it spends a lot of testosterone. It exhausts us ’cause they have between 10 and 30 times more testosterone than us. They have jet fuel and they also, when they’re out of gas, they can’t not fall asleep. We’ll be out of gas and just keep going until we have literal exhaustion, adrenal burnout, which our adrenal glands produce all of our testosterone after the eggs are spent, after menopause, and even half of it do before then. So what happens is, in that committed state of mind, how we experience, and I would say secure, because men, what I’ve noticed, I just noticed this two weeks ago, I’ve only been doing this since 1991, two weeks ago, I noticed men used the word secure unless they’re talking about communication. Then it needs to be safe to tell that person that.
Amy Fournier: Wow, that’s huge.
Alison Armstrong: That’s when they use the word safe.
Amy Fournier: Wow.
Alison Armstrong: They feel secure and they’re going to be at their best, when they’re being productive, when they’re producing results, when they’re fulfilling the things they’re committed to. When we’re in an open state of mind, which is a connective state of mind, which women experience more naturally as a result of estrogen and men experience it when they’re not committed. So when they’re not committed and not resting, you could think of it as when they’re at play. When they’re at play, when they’re just relaxed, that’s when they’re the most connected and-
Amy Fournier: Wow.
Alison Armstrong: Yeah, and so in an open state of mind, we experience safety through connection, which is why your favorite questions are important because that gives you a chance to connect. If you’re connecting over your passions, then you’re connecting at a much more enlivening level than say, notice the people we have in our life that how we can connect with them is through complaints, gripes, it should be. Right?
Amy Fournier: Yep.
Alison Armstrong: So productive versus connected, right?
Amy Fournier: Okay.
Alison Armstrong: So what often happens is the person who’s in the open state of mind will attempt to connect with a person in a productive state of mind. So we’ll interrupt them because the focus, whether it’s male or female, the person who’s focused occurs as not available. So we’ll interrupt them in order to have that, “Ha, we’re here together moment,” but in order to have that moment, we’ve just interrupted them.
Amy Fournier: Yeah.
Alison Armstrong..: One of the things I learned about a focused state of mind is not only is it the access to productivity, but when you’re in a focused state of mind, especially for men, it occurs as peace. It occurs as a peaceful state. That’s why they get so frustrated when they don’t have what they need to be productive because it busted them out of this peaceful state, and women don’t know how much men crave peace. So he is peaceful and productive, and then this woman he adores pops into his home office, “Oh, honey, I just want to tell you something.” “What?”
Amy Fournier: Yeah.
Alison Armstrong: Then she’s like, “Ah?” Right? So she’s looking to connect and now she’s more disconnected, and then he was being productive and now he’s not productive and now she’s upset, “Ugh!” So these are things that can be solved easily once we’re aware of what’s happening, but most people don’t even know it’s happening. It’s all compelled by instinct. So even as something as if my door is shut, don’t interrupt me unless the house is burning down, even a boundary that’s just “This is the indication of a shut door.” My boyfriend, he’s so amazing. One thing that’s amazing about him is since the very beginning, if I were upset, he would do the opposite of what men are inclined to do.
When men are upset, they want to be alone to calm down and collect their thoughts and get clear. So when a woman’s upset their impulse is to leave her alone so she can calm down, collect their thoughts and get clear, not knowing that they may have just left her alone with her worst enemy, what I call the rage monster in her head. Yes. So Dan has always, when I’m upset, he’s always come to me. He’s always found me. He’ll be like, “Do you want to hug it out?” I can say, “I’m not ready yet.” ‘Would you like to talk?” “No, I need to do the self-cleaning oven first and find out what’s me and what’s you.”
Amy Fournier: Nice.
Alison Armstrong: “Okay, let me know when you’re ready.” But I had to teach him when we were long distance, if I am upset and I shut my bedroom door, I am protecting you from me.
Amy Fournier: Nice.
Alison Armstrong: All other times, if I leave the door open, come find me. Thank you for saving me from the rage monster.
Amy Fournier: That’s great.
Alison Armstrong: But if I close the door, I’m saving you from the rage monster.
Amy Fournier: That’s awesome.
Alison Armstrong: It is.
Amy Fournier: I love that. I love that example. That’s awesome. Yeah, so powerful. My goodness. Well, of course, time is flying by here. I just have to say, I’m so glad you went into the honor yourself first principle. That is the foundation of a lot of your work because it’s what I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older. We’re hearing about self-care these days and self-love and all this, but why do so many of us have such feelings of guilt when we do things that nurture ourselves? It seems to always be a struggle for people to have to justify their self-care.
So we know that understanding ourselves, our needs, our desires, and what it takes to keep ourselves functioning well is the primary requirement to really coming to a relationship with a full tank and honoring our own needs and then expressing them to the partner and expecting them to honor them in some regard too. Could you perhaps give some guidance for the people, mostly women, that have trouble honoring their own needs because we’re caretakers? For me, my dogs always come first. Right now, I have a new puppy and my whole workout routine is a gone out the window.
Alison Armstrong: Yes.
Amy Fournier: It’ll come back. So in other words, we’re caretakers, others first. What would be your advice for us to honor ourselves first for people who are givers and tend to sacrifice too much?
Alison Armstrong: Well, first to know that it’s not personal, as herd animals, which is one of the things I find fascinating, that human beings are both predator and prey.
Amy Fournier: Yeah.
Alison Armstrong: As prey, we’re self-oriented, as a predator, we’re pack oriented. That’s where alpha male comes from. But both pack and herd have status as a component of survival. What’s your status? The lead mare in a herd is paying attention to the well-being of the herd, so food and water and shelter, and somebody needs some support, they’re paying attention to that. I got to witness this firsthand. The stallion, if they’re in the wild, the stallion is constantly circling the herd in protect mode, looking outward for threats. So he’s not paying attention to well-being, he’s paying attention to surviving wolves and mountain lions, etcetera, and so he’s looking outward to protect the herd from outside threats. You can see this in the difference between men and women, where most men are wake up and check the news. Most women need to be protected from the news-
Amy Fournier: Yes.
Alison Armstrong: … and allowing ourselves that, like, “No, I’m not going to disempower myself by knowing about something I can do nothing about. That just sucks the life out of me. I’m going to do my part. I’m going to leave all the rest to other people who it’s their part.” But also, if you watch a stallion, the only time he’s distracted from protecting the herd is when he catches a whiff of a mare in heat. I’ve got to witness this too, they go bananas. They completely lose their brains, and then they rest their lives to mate, and they rest the lives of the entire herd to mate.
So it’s just part of who we are, whether we’re paying attention to threats from within or threats from without. When I started paying attention to women being the qualities that they most wanted to be, and this was back in 1997, the first time I did a course on it, I like to work with the design instead of us having to overcome it. So how we help women figure out what they need is first to choose the qualities that they most want to embody for the people they love.
Amy Fournier: Wow.
Alison Armstrong: So as a mother, which mothers are famously exhausted, and then we get snarky, and then we hate ourselves for being snarky, the quality I most wanted to embody for my young children was patience. So you start with whatever qualities you most want to embody, and then you look at what puts that quality in your body. Because if it’s not in your body, it’s not accessible, and you can fake patience. But we actually unconsciously, “Oh, I need to be patient,” we’ll look in our bodies for the feeling of patience, “Oh crap, I’m all out of patience. Well, I’ll just act patient,” right?
Amy Fournier: Yeah.
Alison Armstrong: “I’m all out of compassion.”
Amy Fournier: Act as if, but you really not.
Alison Armstrong: Act as if, and pretend. Pretend sucks, which is why everyone around me is taught to just say, “I’m sorry, I have diminished capacities. We shouldn’t try to do this now.”
Amy Fournier: Yeah.
Alison Armstrong: “I don’t have what it takes to do it well.” So when I connected the dots between what puts patience in my body, number one asleep, and there’s a certain amount of sleep that if I get it, I will have patience. But then you have to pay attention to how long will you have patience? “Oh, I’ll have patience till about nine o’clock at night.”
Amy Fournier: Yep.
Alison Armstrong: So God bless my husband, he put the children to bed. Then as they wanted to stay up later and later we said goodnight to them and we went to bed. So it’s first you identify the quality you want to be, then you identify what is it, what need when you haven’t met puts that quality in your body. Find as many things as you can be self-sufficient about, but also look for ways that that tank can get filled from somebody else, ’cause it’s often more potent. Then, yes, it needs to be presented. The only thing I would change about what you said, Amy, is you said, and then expect them to fulfill it or expect it to be fulfilled, and that’s where we go haywire. Expectation is our enemy. We think if we have higher expectations, people will perform better.
Amy Fournier: Just to clarify, I just mean that you expect someone to respect your needs, not to fulfill your needs. It’s up to them if they want to, but to have your own back to communicate, “This is something that’s important to me.” Like you said, with the boundaries, with the online dating, if they’re just ignoring-
Alison Armstrong: I’m still going to say, be aware of everything that comes after the word expect.
Amy Fournier: Okay.
Alison Armstrong: Thank you for hearing me. It has in it, “This should happen without me having to do anything.”
Amy Fournier: Okay.
Alison Armstrong: “So now that I’ve told you what it is, that’s all that I should have done,” or, “Even I shouldn’t have to tell you. Any decent human being would understand that I need that and do it without asking.” So there’s expectation what should happen, and then it’s even worse, Amy. We judge the quality of our relationships by how well is someone fulfilling our expectations, whether we’ve stated them or not, whether they’ve agreed to them or not. Then we also judge it by how well do we think we’re fulfilling their expectations, whether they’ve stated them or not, and we’ve agreed to them or not. I encountered this, when I became single again. I had men saying, “I am sorry, sorry, sorry.” I’m like, “Why are you saying that?” It was disgusting to me. I’m like, “If you haven’t agreed to behave in particular way with me, I have no right to expect it.”
Amy Fournier: Yeah. Yeah.
Alison Armstrong: They’d be shocked because women had shoulded them to death, all these things they should do that they hadn’t agreed to. Then it gets even worse because let’s say that we think we’re failing at someone’s expectations, but they’re exceeding our expectations. Then we’re madly in love with them and want to keep them, but we’re trying to figure out what to change about ourselves. So they’ll be the same way about us, but oftentimes, it’s what we expect them to expect of us because we didn’t verify.
Amy Fournier: True. Amen.
Alison Armstrong: Yes, and men do the same thing. There’s things they expect us to expect of them, and they’ll be like, “Oh, man, I can’t live up to that. I can’t afford her.”
Amy Fournier: So are these assumptions? Is it safe to say these are assumptions about the others?
Alison Armstrong: And they’re huge and they’re invisible-
Amy Fournier: Right. Yeah.
Alison Armstrong: … and they’re uncommunicated-
Amy Fournier: So clarify…?
Alison Armstrong: Yes, and one of the things that we expect we shouldn’t have to do, and I’ve done informal surveys on this with hundreds of people, is we think we shouldn’t have to follow up.
Amy Fournier: Oh.
Alison Armstrong: People are afraid that if they follow up on a yes that hasn’t been made real yet, that then someone will turn it to a no. They’ll get pissed about the follow-up and they’ll turn into a no.
Amy Fournier: Oh.
Alison Armstrong: But then I asked groups, “Okay, how many of you hate to follow up? Do I want to have to follow up? You’re afraid to follow up.” Almost everyone raises their hand. “Okay, how many of you have said yes to something? You meant the yes, and then something happened and you had a good or bad reason for not doing it. When the person didn’t follow up, you were glad you didn’t waste the time and energy because it clearly wasn’t important to them.”
Amy Fournier: Wow. Oh, boy. Wow.
Alison Armstrong: So the trick is to follow up in a way that’s not crappy, which expectations have us be crappy. “I shouldn’t have to do this,” to follow up in a way that is gracious, meaning we do it before we’re furious. We can’t be gracious when we’re furious and that we assume they had a good reason for not doing it yet. One of the things that we teach in, we start at the beginning. We just keep going that always if you’re going to follow up, you need to increase your pressure so it registers in their consciousness. When we don’t increase our pressure, it it becomes nagging and people become numb. We have to increase our pressure, and whenever you increase your pressure, you have to provide more clarity.
Amy Fournier: What does increased pressure look like? Just to clarify, what does that mean, increased pressure?
Alison Armstrong: No, no, not necessarily. So if you look in your body, and we do this, and I’m going to get to do this sometime in the fall in a live in-person program, so excited, if you look in your body when you really need something, you require it in order to be who you’re committed to being, and you’ve got to ask for it. As you’re thinking about doing that, pressure is building in your body. Often, the location of that pressure comes with emotion. It may come with anger, it may come with dread. It may come with with fear, it may come with despair. It may come with hopelessness, it may come with disdain, it may come with disbelief. So the pressure, human beings are so much more sensitive than we know, the other person feels the pressure and they feel what’s attached to the pressure, the way it’s colored, if you will.
Amy Fournier: That’s true.
Alison Armstrong: Often, people will say no to what you’re asking for, not because of a problem with what you’re asking for, it’s because of the flavor of the pressure-
Amy Fournier: The feeling.
Alison Armstrong: … yeah, that has them be like, “Well, for whatever reason this is-
Amy Fournier: Yeah, it doesn’t feel good. Yeah.
Amy Fournier: Wow.
Alison Armstrong: It doesn’t feel good. So if you can find in your body where the yucky pressure is, when you’re afraid to ask or you’re mad to have to ask where does it occur? Then notice, and this goes back to honor yourself first and finding the feeling you want, what is the feeling that you want the pressure to come with? How do you want it to be colored? This is the whole mind body stuff you’ve been working on for so long, you can actually don’t ask when it’s in the yucky place. Then draw your mind’s attention to the part of your body where you’re feeling the feeling you want the pressure to come with, and then put the pressure there. Literally send it-
Amy Fournier: Speak from the heart.
Alison Armstrong: … the ask from that part of your body. I don’t know how I got it, but I have the ability to find in other people’s bodies where their best qualities are, and they can tell me how they want the pressure to show up. Then I’ll ask my body to show me where it is in their body, and that doesn’t just show a place. It has colors, it has movement. It has an association to something about them that’s priceless and precious in spirit. It’s an extraordinary thing to get to be with. I have to warn them, “I’ll provide this for you, but I will see things about you you may not want me to know.”
Amy Fournier: Whoa.
Alison Armstrong: Yeah, because it’s in their bodies, right?
Amy Fournier: Sure.
Alison Armstrong: They may have this beautiful place for their pressure to come from, but it’s cloaked in potentially a trauma that’s had them shut down that-
Amy Fournier: Of course.
Alison Armstrong: … that place as part of their body.
Amy Fournier: That’s what would definitely happen if you read me, I can tell you right now. Yeah. Wow.
Alison Armstrong: Release, release, release.
Amy Fournier: Yeah, release.
Alison Armstrong: I do a ton of release work, and so the thing about expectation is there are things we expect that I call them dog hairs and fox tails. We didn’t decide that we’re going to require this in order to be an important part of our life. We just sat down on a couch and stood up with dog hairs on our ass. It came from our mother, our father, some article we read, some stuff spewed in movies and songs. We didn’t mean to adopt it. Some of these things are fox tails that attach to our socks while we’re meandering through a beautiful field. Then it’s worked its way into our bloodstream and is on our way to our heart, and it’s shutting down our ability to love because people aren’t doing what they should be doing. What should they be doing?
I …know someone who they were raised with, please, thank you and you’re welcome, and they are incensed when people don’t say, please thank you or you’re welcome. There’s so many people who expect honesty, who are enraged when someone isn’t honest, like they deserve, they’re entitled to people being honest. But they don’t examine what do they do with other people’s truths? Do they stomp on them? Do they disparage them? Do they reveal them to other people who aren’t safe? Do they turn it back on them and use it against them as a manipulation?
Amy Fournier: Wow.
Alison Armstrong: The truth is a very dangerous thing to tell and it takes courage to tell it.
Amy Fournier: Yes.
Alison Armstrong: It’s a huge part of honoring yourself first, telling the truth-
Amy Fournier: Truth.
Alison Armstrong: … or not telling the truth, “That person has proven they’ll use it against me. They don’t get my truth.“
Amy Fournier: It’s not safe.
Alison Armstrong: In fact, I don’t even want to be around people who aren’t going to honor my truth. It’s a big part of our curriculum is learning to change the question when someone else is speaking from, “What do I think about that? How do I feel about that? What do I want to say about that?” To, “What’s true for them? What’s true for them? What do they care about? What matters to them?” You can literally listen to a man talk about golf and discover five or 10 of his highest values.
Amy Fournier: That’s true.
Alison Armstrong: But if you think golf is stupid, what do I think about that? Golf is stupid. But if you’re listening for what matters to them while they talk about golf, you’ll hear friendship, loyalty, how they’re nurtured by nature.
Amy Fournier: Yeah.
Alison Armstrong: How inspired they are by excellence.
Amy Fournier: Challenge.
Alison Armstrong: Determination with small refinements. Honestly, for a lot of men, golf can provide almost as much as yoga-
Amy Fournier: Wow.
Alison Armstrong: … which yoga, I have found, is one of the highest. Yoga’s probably better than sleep.
Amy Fournier: Wow.
Alison Armstrong: Yeah, and golf’s right up there for someone who’s passionate about golf.
Amy Fournier: Sure.
Alison Armstrong: So that’s why just in our program called LUX, which is where most people should start right now-
Amy Fournier: LUX. Okay.
Alison Armstrong: … because it isn’t male, female, it’s human and why it’s so important that we honor ourselves first or all is lost, that if we’re not honoring ourselves, we are not modeling how to treat us. If we’re not honoring ourselves, this goes back to you brought up self-love, I’m looking at the clock. Okay, I’m going to say this because when you said self-love, I was given the assignment October 2020, I was given the assignment. It was a shift from something I’d practiced for about 15 years, which is to let go of everything that isn’t love. Every year, it’s been something different and so that I had to stick my face in and it was just awful. Then I was given the assignment, let go of everything that isn’t love, especially for myself. I was like, “Oh, God, anything else but that.” Fortunately, I’d been studying love for a long time, what has this experience more less love, when love itself is infinite and eternal, how can we experience more less?
Something I’d seen that was about others, I got to apply to myself that when we put up with behavior in other people that causes us to lose respect, admiration or affinity for them, like liking them. We experience less love for them. All three of those matter, and I turned it on myself. “What are my behaviors or my ways of being that I lose respect for myself? I lose admiration for myself, I like myself less.” When I started paying attention to that, it all clicked. When we do things that cause us to lose respect for ourselves, we won’t require what we need from other people. We don’t respect ourselves enough to think we deserve it, to think we’re equal to it. Actually, it’s even worse than that. We won’t let someone treat ourselves better than we’ll treat ourselves. Once we stop behaving in the way that has us lose respect and admiration for ourselves, we stop putting up with behavior in other people that has us lose respect, admiration and affinity for them, and that is the foundation of boundaries.
Amy Fournier: Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Alison, wow. Wow. I can’t even talk. That’s just like my mind is totally blown off my speakers here. I know we’re at the end here. I just am so grateful for your wisdom. Incredible. We’re going to talk about how people can find these amazing courses. But final question for you, any parting advice for what you feel each gender wants the other to know? What would men just love for women to know, and what would women love for men to know?
Alison Armstrong: Men would love women to know that they already love us. We don’t have to work for that. In fact, the harder we work at it, the sadder they are, they see us contort. They’re not intimidated by our strength, they’re looking for it. When they say they’re intimidated, it doesn’t mean, “You’re too strong for me.” It means, “I can’t find anything I can contribute to you.” So one of the biggest things that women can do is make a list. What do you really need from a man? What will you let him give you? Because if he can’t find something of value to him that you’ll let him give to you, he has to go find somebody who will.
Amy Fournier: Yeah. Wow.
Alison Armstrong: For men, and I encourage everyone on the homepage of our website, at the bottom of the page, it says, why are men and women so different? It’s a free sample of our Understanding Women course, a half-hour out of our Understanding Women course that is fundamentally where gender divides-
Amy Fournier: Okay?
Alison Armstrong: … and it’s about safety.
Amy Fournier: Yes.
Alison Armstrong: As a woman watching, because you’re seeing a video where I’m teaching a co-ed group about men and women and safety, if you watch the men and their reactions, that’s the reaction of every man. I’ve never met a man who wasn’t shocked by how safety is for us-
Amy Fournier: Oh, yeah.
Alison Armstrong: … and why we have to pay attention to it so much and why we already do. Then you’ll get to see how safety is for men and why they are clueless, meaning they have less clues than they need about how to help us. They can’t make us feel safe, but help us feel safe. Yeah, so that’s what I would say to answer to your question. @alicearmstrong.com is where you’ll find The Queen’s Code audiobook, which it’s so much better than the written book because I am reading, I’m narrating the movie I watched. We found out that everyone has read the written book since 2012, which is 90,000 people, unthinkable for a self-published book. But they all read it with their filters. So the tone of voice, the intensity of emotion, the sincerity was all filtered through what they thought these men and women would sound like.
Amy Fournier: They need to do something before listening to it then?
Alison Armstrong: They should listen to it instead of read it.
Amy Fournier: Oh, right.
Alison Armstrong: If they’ve read it, they should listen to it.
Amy Fournier: Oh, okay.
Alison Armstrong: you can get the audiobook is on our website.
Amy Fournier: Yes.
Alison Armstrong: If they wanted to start with a program, I would say to start with LUX-
Amy Fournier: LUX.
Alison Armstrong: It stands for Liberation, Understanding and Xtraordinary Relationships. The liberation is because not only are the ideas fee freeing and healing, but we actually use three of the Sedona Methods to release basic human compulsions that ruin our relationships, and it works. It also will teach you to watch for how we’re listening because how we’re listening is more important than what we’re saying, and how we’re listening is associated with how we’re being. How we’re being is more important than anything. It’s the loudest language and what everybody’s reacting to, and why it’s so important to honor yourself first. It makes a very good argument for that.
When you know that honoring yourself first is how you give the best gifts to other people and that when you’re sacrificing yourself, they end up with the trash. They end up with the leftovers. Too many romantic relationships are half empty swimming pools trying to fill up from the other, and we wonder why we’re diminished by them. So much of my work happened being in a traditional, in many ways, marriage with children and incredible support from my husband who didn’t expect me to ever make a nickel. When we published Keys to The Kingdom, he wanted me to print 100 of them, but he still wanted me to publish it, but start with 101.
Amy Fournier: Wow.
Alison Armstrong: It’s hilarious. But after he died and I realized I wanted to be in a relationship again, which took a while to want to do that, I didn’t think I ever wanted to live with somebody again. We have such an instinct to hide in the cave together. We talk about this in Understanding Women, how men drive women crazy by how many times they leave the house and come back and go out and come back and go out and come back and, “Don’t you know you’re laying down scent for the tiger to find me?” Make a list, leave once. Right?
Amy Fournier: That’s funny.
Alison Armstrong: It’s really funny. Our instincts are hilarious, but-
Amy Fournier: I never thought of it like that, you’re leaving the scent for the tiger.
Alison Armstrong: Oh, God. Oh, God.
Amy Fournier: Oh, boy.
Alison Armstrong: I’ve surveyed women, how many times can you leave the house without getting anxious about you’re leaving the house again in the same day?
Amy Fournier: Wow.
Alison Armstrong: The most I’ve ever seen is someone can go out three times. The least I’ve ever seen is zero.
Amy Fournier: That’s a lot.
Alison Armstrong: It’s common one or two times.
Amy Fournier: Okay.
Alison Armstrong: But it’s so funny, as you can tell, I can go on and on and on and on. I really just want to say thank you for how you started. So many people come into a sliver of my work, either through Instagram or they listen to something on Audible, which everything on Audible was recorded before 2007.
Amy Fournier: Yep.
Alison Armstrong: Right?
Amy Fournier: Yep.
Alison Armstrong: Although we gave it to Audible in 2013, but all the new stuff is on our websites. There’s always new stuff ’cause I can’t stop learning, and I didn’t mean to be prolific, it just turned out that way. So some of the conversations you and I have had Own Your Ultimatums is a really good place where my work on boundaries has arisen. In Sync With the Opposite Sex, which is on Audible. We did that in 2006, and it’s still a cornerstone of our Smart Singles program. It’s still completely valid, and starts with what kind of situation do you want? You don’t have to pick one of the three options. I’m in an adoring, uncommitted relationship living in my boyfriend’s backyard-
Amy Fournier: Yes.
Alison Armstrong: … and I will not live with him.
Amy Fournier: Sounds great.
Alison Armstrong: I’m fabulous.
Amy Fournier: That’s right. Oh, geez.
Alison Armstrong: But I haven’t committed because I have minimum requirements that it’ll take a couple of more years to satisfy. That’s my due diligence. I will not commit. I’m not going to give up the right to go, “This isn’t good for me anymore, and this isn’t good for you anymore.” So anyhow, Own Your Ultimatums, In Sync With the Opposite Sex, A Great Ask and Beyond, that’s about how do you turn a yes into reality in a methodical way and why it’s important to do that and why people don’t live in false hope instead. All this would be Get Started, under Online Courses. Shop is all short form kinds of things.
Amy Fournier: Yeah.
Alison Armstrong: We have 11 audios on our app now, so you can have me in your pocket or in your purse-
Amy Fournier: Your own app, that’s crazy. Then you have the Intensives-
Alison Armstrong: Frightening.
Amy Fournier: The Graduate Program, wow, and the live in-person events. So much.
Alison Armstrong: Yep. Yes.
Amy Fournier: So much.
Amy Fournier: Well, you better be around for another 300 years because it’s just is pouring through you. I feel like in so many ways, I don’t know if refreshing the right word, but it’s just so spot on. You’re obviously just dialed in and no wonder you’re so well known, so just, thank you. Thank you for taking the time-
Alison Armstrong: You’re welcome.
Amy Fournier: I have no doubt this is going to help so many people. My audience, please everyone listening and watching do check out Alison’s website. It’s her name, Alison Armstrong with one “L”. Everything as she explained is right there for you. You might see me at one of the online groups myself. I think I definitely, sounds like I have to join at least one, if not multiple.
Alison Armstrong: That’s awesome. May I say one other thing that came-
Amy Fournier: Please.
Alison Armstrong: … up when you asked what man wish women knew?
Amy Fournier: Yes, please.
Alison Armstrong: I love what you’re doing. I would challenge women to go from Awakening Aphrodite to owning Aphrodite-
Amy Fournier: Ah, okay.
Alison Armstrong: … because it’s our birthright to be that amazing. Even birthrights don’t get fulfilled through expectations. Many crown prince has been deposed by acting entitled. When we do the work, the conscious work that there’s to do, every one of us can be that amazing. We’re not born that way, even though it’s our birthright, we’re we’re born human. So we have to keep discovering ourselves what I would call human spirit and bring it into this very physical domain run by instinct.
Amy Fournier: I love it, wise words.
Alison Armstrong: Yeah, so thank you.
Amy Fournier: Thank you for sharing that piece, which is a critical piece. It’s not enough just to poke the bear, you got to then live it, embody it. It was fantastic.
Alison Armstrong: Thank you, Amy.
Amy Fournier: Alison Armstrong, yes, thank you. Alison Armstrong, thank you. Thanks, everybody for listening and watching. If you want to support Alison, you know what to do, check out our work. If you want to support me, all you have to do is subscribe to the show, share the show, and wow, take it to the next level by leaving a review. Thank you so much. We’ll see you next time.
