For the one who keeps everyone happy and cannot say what she wants. The one who explains until they agree and is exhausted. The one who leaves rather than hold a line. Anyone who has said “you made me feel” this week.
You are a circle. So is everyone else. What is inside yours is yours. The brackets in the name are the whole point: you first, then the other person.
Seven questions, two minutes, no email. It names the way your circle gives way, and the first move.
So your brain drew the edge wherever it learned to as a child, usually too far in or too far out. Every problem you have with people is one of three things.
Your circle is your reality: what you feel, think, value, decide and do. It is drawn by your brain, and nobody else has the pen. Other people are their own circles. Overlap is the point of relationships. The problem is never overlap; it is overlap that was not chosen.
Put back inside your circle what is yours: your feelings, your wants, your choices. Put outside it what was never yours: their feelings, their opinions of you, their choices.
Everything inside it is yours to carry and yours to decide. Nobody made you feel anything. If you moved, you chose to move, which means you can choose differently.
Decide, on purpose, where your circle touches theirs, how much, and on what terms. Then hold that shape without needing them to agree.
The picture is simple on purpose. The programme is how to hold it when it is hard.
Each module is a ten to twenty minute read with a worksheet at the end. Do one a day, or one a week. Come back to the one that matches the situation in front of you.
Every feeling you have is manufactured inside your own head from what your brain sensed and predicted. Their words landed; your brain read them and fired a feeling to match. Anger is the feeling of your edge being pushed. Dread is your brain reading a bond under threat. Flatness is your own drive with nowhere to go, the signature of a circle that has folded into someone else’s.
Their feelings are made the same way, inside their circle, which you have never been inside and never will be. You can offer someone your view once. You cannot make them understand it.
The programme was written by me, Alissa, from years of coaching conversations and from my own history of managing everyone’s feelings before my own. It is not “other people are dangerous, protect yourself.” Most people in your life are in their own circle doing their best. This is about you being in yours.
One session of therapy or coaching costs more than the whole programme, and the picture it gives you does not expire.
Opening once the first founding readers are through. Email to be first.
Why is it not free? Because your brain values what costs something, and paying for it is the first thing you do inside your own circle: a choice, made for you, by you.
Before anything else. If you are frightened of someone at home, or someone controls your money, your movements or your children, this programme can help you keep yourself, but it cannot get you out. Speak to the National Domestic Abuse Helpline (0808 2000 247, free, 24 hours) or, in immediate danger, call 999.