There’s no scarcity of love in the world – it is really quite abundant, says life coach Natalie Amber. It just takes some radical emotional honesty, and some good lessons in the language of love in order to give and receive it.
Amber will give a workshop on Sunday, March 20 that will offer participants simple tools in their quest for more thoughtful, intentional relationships.
“Creating Your Tailor-made Relationship” runs from 1-3 p.m. at the Alice Street Clubhouse, 49 Alice Street. It’s for everyone, and admission is on a pay-what-you-can basis.
Amber says she takes the principle of “radical honesty” conceived by author Brad Blanton about 20 years ago and gives it a somewhat gentler, more positive treatment.
“In his version of radical honesty the most important thing for creating in-depth relationships with others is to be as honest about your feelings and your responses to things at all times,” she said. “That could be very destructive to relationships.”
She encourages others to think about honesty in a very positive way, and to override the negative and terrifying associations we may have with what it means to be honest.
“In our culture we generally use honesty as a last resort, and we walk around on eggshells around certain issues that make us uncomfortable, or things within our relationships that we often don’t want to ruffle the feathers of,” she said.
Honesty is a very good thing in relationships, she said, a tender, gentle, and positive thing. It doesn’t have to be abrasive, harsh and mean. She helps people in her workshops to appreciate that, and gives them simple tools to activate real change in their relationships.
“I think we’re afraid of rejection, afraid of not being loved,” she said. “We grow up in a world where instead of feeling that love is abundant, we often are told that love is not abundant, that it is in short supply.”
The search for “the one” is actually a huge barrier to love, she said. It contributes to the belief that love is scarce, when really it is profuse. We will stay in relationships that are unhealthy, and lacking in love, out of fear that elusive love will not revisit us.
“We have not grown up in a society that says that love is abundant and available, but I think it is,” she said. “We are intensely loving, social animals. Of all the animal kingdom, we just display so much more desire for connectedness than any other animal. We are an animal that desires love, affection and attention, and we want to give it. We just have to be reminded of how to love, and how to be good to each other.”
We missed out on good love lessons growing up in families that didn’t know how to teach love, and in a culture that didn’t know how to express it, she said. We need love lessons.
She helps people in her workshops to think about the practice of emotional consent – forming intimate relations grounded in knowing what we like and don’t like emotionally, what our emotional triggers are, taking the time to reflect on what happened to us in the past that may be an impediment to our intimate relationships in the present.
“And we need to be able to talk about all that stuff, to articulate it to ourselves so that we can talk about it to our partners,” she said. “And a lot of people haven’t done that work, or been given space to articulate those things into a word, a sentence, or a phrase.”
The workshop will also explore what she calls the “five love languages,” learning how to engage in those languages with your partner, and understand each other better. Therein lies the giving and receiving of the affirmations of love we all crave.
