Dear Women, Red flags are within us, in our bodies. Listen to her. Ask yourself do you listen to her each time or do you let it be, let things pass one time and another? Can we begin to LIGHT A CANDLE each time we allow that to happen inside our homes, in our families, in our neighbourhood, at our work spaces. We will notice how our lives either light up or Catch fire! YEP! You heard that right!

If every single one of us spoke up did not be okay with what we knew was not okay within us but kept silence for the sake of peace or for the sake of children or for the sake or whatever else. For your own sake, nobody is coming to save you. We’ve got to speak up at the get go.

In relationship we are taught to look for red flag outside of us, in other people, or places or things

This is skewed, I think. Shouldn’t we learn to trust ourselves? Trust our bodies? And listen to what we feel and what we think instead of getting hypervigilant and constantly be prepared for an act of violence? – Emotional, Psychological, Financial, Verbal, Physical or Sexual.

Even terms like gas lighting, love bombing, grooming, hovering, stalking and so on is all about what the other person is doing ‘to us. This makes almost all of us slip into being in “survival mode” all the time and hyper alert. Of course, we will be the ones landing in therapy more and more to learn how to “live” and not “survive”

While it is of course necessary to Make our lived experiences Matter, but if we need to make changes in our specific contexts, we need to be able to listen to the lived experiences of the ones that abuse us to. What are they thinking and feeling and sensing. When we zoon in to specific narratives of both sides is when we get to see the stark differences in both experiences. Where we cannot say either as right or wrong, place blame or shame as these are just significantly different.

Each time there is a heinous crime such a rape and murder and that too in a brutal manner, are we listening closely to the one’s that engaged in the crime to understand deeper what happened. What were they thinking, or where they even thinking? What was the motive and their entire narrative before we hurry to kill them and lose all the insights?

Making lived experience matter is not one sided. Your experience matter, but when your experiences are enmeshed with another, their matter too and we’ve got to listen and figure out where things slipped so bad. Let us also remember that placing responsibility is not the same as placing blame and placing accountability is not the same as placing shame.