I received an email from one of the Projectors in my community a couple of weeks ago. As someone who has been following my work for a while, she knows I don’t answer individual questions outside a paid coaching session.

But she also knows that, if I can address the question, concern, or confusion without having to see a person’s individual chart and I think it will help many other people at the same time, I’m happy to do so.

Historically, I have been answering such questions via videos on my YouTube Channel; I’m going to start sharing some of these lessons in writing here as well.

Here was her question:

How do I cope/deal with a manifesting generator partner that resents my “lack” of energy? He talks about it as if there is something wrong with me, often suggesting that maybe I have long covid or a nutrient deficiency. He feels that I do not contribute equally to the relationship, but I honestly don’t know how I could contribute more.

P.S. I have spoken to him about human design, and he thinks that it is woowoo.

If this question resonates with you at all, regardless of your Human Design Type, then this article will probably be helpful for you.

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When I first read this question, it hurt my heart. I immediately felt compassion for this woman and how this must feel to have a partner say, essentially, “You’re not good enough as you are.”

Ouch.

Of course, there is so much about this person and their relationship I do not know. I don’t have her chart. I don’t have her partner’s chart. I don’t know what she went through in childhood, nor do I know what he’s been through. And I don’t know how all of these things are playing out in their day-to-day lives beyond the one paragraph she wrote in her email.

For me to do this question justice, all of these things matter because they impact their way of being, what they’re doing, and the results they’re experiencing in their lives and their relationship.

With that said, there are some questions I can ask you, the reader, to ponder.

Some of these might cause gentle shifts in understanding. Others might be a dramatic wake-up call. None of them is intended to hurt; however, sometimes the exact truth we need to hear does hurt and realising a question or statement hurts is a great entry point into resolving something that’s been keeping you stuck.

And, if you don’t like something I’ve asked or shared, or you simply don’t have the capacity today to think about it, feel free to skip it and see if there’s something else in this post that you can work with today.

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First question (and it might surprise you, but bear with me. Remember, the aim is to solve the problem and for you to feel better. So let’s journey through these together):

Is it possible that they’re right?

As in, is there an underlying health condition that needs addressing?

Now, if this question made you super cranky, remember I’m here to help. I’m not making you the bad guy; we’re solving a problem here. So yell at the screen if you have to and then, when you’re ready, keep reading.

Many, many of my Projector clients (as well as many of my clients with a lot of open/undefined centres of all HD Types) have chronic health conditions. Your chart is not a life sentence. Certain energetic configurations do not need to be expressed as a ‘lack’ of energy.

Example: I will never forget the first Reflector I ever met in real life. (I’m using a Reflector as an example here because, by definition, they have no motors defined and have even less to rely on to get through their day-to-day than any Projector does.)

It was 11 years ago, when I was living on the island of Bali, and this kind, gentle, sensitive man was vitally healthy. He went to the gym for 2 hours every day, was a published author and ran a successful company remotely from whichever island he happened to be on that month.

Did he have his limits when it came to being around people? Sure.

Did he choose his personal company carefully? For sure.

Did he deliberately create a lifestyle that suited his design? He sure did.

Now, back to you and your design…

If you’ve been living in a way that runs counter to how you’re designed, eventually that’s going to express itself in the body.

We cannot ignore our innate design forever; at some point something will break.

So, maybe, if you haven’t already, consider if your partner could be right. (Also, feel free to yell at your screen some more if it makes you feel better. But then keep reading…)

This perceived ‘lack’ of energy might be something that your body is telling you: something is out of whack. Maybe there is a nutrient deficiency, or a parasite, or a condition expressing because of nervous system dysfunction.

Or maybe you’ve already gone down all those rabbit holes, and you’ve figured out, “Actually, there is nothing f*cking wrong with me. My partner just needs to stop expecting me to be like him and I’ll be just fine.”

Which brings me to my next question…

If you feel generally healthy and you think you’re actually doing just fine for your Human Design configuration and you’re in a relationship with someone who is subtly suggesting, or even outright declaring, that there must be something wrong with you, my next question is:

Is there some part of you that still believes them?

That is, do you think, deep down, that there is something wrong with you as a person?

If you’ve been tolerating this idea for any real length of time, my guess is that the answer is ‘yes’. Maybe you’ve not been conscious of this belief.

Maybe it was hidden waaaaaaay down inside of you.

But here’s what I can tell you about a person who has a really robust self-esteem: if someone tells them there is something wrong with them, they either laugh at the ridiculousness of it, or they look at the person like

they’re crazy.

Because the other person’s statement doesn’t land in their system; there is no place for it. It simply doesn’t fit.

Now, if you’ve just realised that ‘yes’, actually deep down you do believe there’s something wrong with you - this is great news.

Uncomfortable? Painful? Confronting?

Sure.

But also really, really good news. Because now you’ve found it, you can do something about it.

We can’t heal what we can’t see.

For the record, you didn’t put that shitty belief there. Someone else put it there when you were a wee child without asking your permission first. (How rude!)

But now that you’re an adult, it’s your job to clean it up. (Annoying. I know. But that’s life.)

While it will take a bit of time, the process is actually fairly simple: take your deconditioning tool of choice and use it regularly until you no longer believe the stupid lie that something there is wrong with you.

(As far as deconditioning tools go, I like the Trauma Informed Tapping process I created over the last decade, but you pick any one you like, as long as it works!)

While you might be carrying shitty beliefs, dysfunctional patterns, and/or unhelpful ways of behaving, I know that at the core of who you are is an incredible, magical, fucking amazing human.

And if you don’t also believe that, then please prioritise your deconditioning until you can say, out loud, “I’m an incredible, magical, fucking amazing human” (or words to that effect)… and mean it ;-)

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Next question!

You mentioned that he feels that you don’t contribute equally to the relationship, and that you don’t know how you could contribute more.

Do you feel like you’re contributing enough?

Does it feel fair to you?

If I were a fly on the wall in your home, do you think what I would see would look reasonable to me?

This one can be tricky because not only are you dealing with two very different energetic designs, where one person is built to do more work, but also every single relationship is different in terms of how much a man wants to provide for his woman (as it is in this case).

Not that long ago, it was completely normal for the man to work and the woman to stay home. For the man to provide and protect and the woman to nurture and receive. Our cultures and societies have changed immensely in only a few generations, but our human biology hasn’t.

So, as Ra would say, “What to do?”

I’d suggest pondering the questions I raised a moment ago:

Do you think it’s fair what your partner is asking of you?

And if you do, but you already feel maxed out, then what would allow you to contribute more without having to sacrifice your health or sanity?

If you feel like you’re contributing enough already, and therefore him asking for more doesn’t feel fair—assuming you’ve shared your perspective with him and he hasn’t changed his tune—then what do you want to do about that?

Let’s continue…

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Let’s say you’ve pondered all these previous questions and you:

• Are quite healthy and have no reason to believe you have any underlying health conditions,

• Don’t actually believe there is anything wrong with you as a person, and are actually wondering why you’ve been tolerating this accusation all this time,

• Have worked out that you are contributing as much as you’re physically able to and cannot give any more

Then, my next question is:

Do you want to stay with them?

Or do you want to let this person go to make space for something better?

If this idea scares the bejesus out of you, take a moment to feel your bum on the chair or your feet on the ground. Anchor into a sense of safety, however you need to do that.

Reminder: My goal here is not to see you leave your partner, per se. It’s to help you find the root of the problem you came here with and see if there’s a solution amongst these (far too) many words. If staying with your partner is the order of the day, then please know there are ‘ways to cope’ coming very soon.

Now, if you’re ready, keep reading.

There are really only three things that would stop a person from leaving a partner who insists there is something wrong with them:

1. You don’t feel safe to leave (either because you can’t afford to support yourself financially or they would threaten to harm you if you left),

2. You can’t handle the impact it would have on your other relationships (especially if you have small children, but you may have other relationships with friends or neighbours who you love that you know would shift or end if you left your partner), and/or

3. You don’t believe that anything better exists or that you can attract anything better into your life than you already have.

Let’s tackle these one at a time:

• If you don’t feel safe to leave because you can’t afford it, your number one job is to decondition your beliefs about money so that, over time, you have the freedom to leave if you still choose to do so.

• If you don’t feel safe to leave because your partner would threaten to harm you, then your number one job is to look up local organisations that support people in domestic violence situations and get their expert help to safely get the fuck out of there asap.

• If you can’t handle the idea of the impact you think this would have on your children’s lives or the other relationships in your life, this is where you point your deconditioning efforts. I’ve put ‘idea’ and ‘think’ in italics here because you don’t know for sure what kind of impact this change might make to their lives. It will make a change, for sure. But it might be the best change of their entire lives, and you’ll never know if you’re being controlled by the fear of ‘making the wrong decision’ or ‘being a bad mum’ or ‘upsetting people who like/love you’.

• If you don’t believe that better exists in the world, then I invite you to ask ‘God’ (The Universe/Source/insert your preferred name for that higher power) to show you examples of people with better relationships than you have. For us to see something that contradicts our unconscious beliefs, we have to directly ask for that experience. Otherwise, we will keep seeing what we’ve always seen. And sometimes just seeing that something better exists is enough to help us take a leap of faith in our own lives.

• Finally, if you don’t believe it’s possible for you, this is also something that deconditioning can help with. Use the tools you have, or learn a tool like Tapping, and spend a bit of time each day breaking that belief into pieces until it no longer has any power over you. Reminder: Just because it feels true for you, and you have lots of evidence of why it must be true, doesn’t mean it is actually ‘The Truth’. And anything that is not The Truth can be broken apart or dissolved and replaced with another belief that is actually far more freakin’ helpful…

Like believing that you are worthy of love, exactly the way you are.

Final thoughts:

The question that was actually asked was ‘how do I cope with this situation’?

And while it felt immensely important to spend 2,000 words to address some of the potential elephants in the room first, if you’ve gotten this far, I’m going to assume you’ve decided that you are actually going to stay in that relationship.

You know what’s best for you. I’ve poked and prodded, and hopefully you have pondered the questions I’ve raised. And maybe, for any number of reasons, you have to or want to stay with your partner.

Heck, maybe you love them so darn much that despite how painful it is, you believe it can get better and you think the relationship is worth fighting for.

Or perhaps you know that you need to stay with them for now, and you need some ways to cope until it’s time for you to end things.

Either way, here are some practical things that will help:

1. Connect with other people whom you enjoy

Whether it’s friends or just friendly acquaintances, people at your favourite gym class, or members of your church or place of worship… spending time with people who like you and accept you for who you are will be comforting for your body, mind and soul.

(Note: If you do want to leave your partner, this is also going to show you that there are other people in the world and that maybe you can have a relationship with someone who treats you better.)

2. Create time alone

If you don’t feel like you have sufficient time on your own, away from your partner and/or children, carve it out somehow. Even five minutes in the car before you start the grocery shopping, or sitting on the toilet longer than you actually need to. However, you need to fit it in. It will help you think more clearly, give you a break and give you a chance to process how you’re feeling.

(Note: If you think you might want to leave your partner, it will also allow you to think about what you might need to do, in a practical sense, to leave this relationship at some point, if that’s what you choose.)

3. Take up Tapping

If you haven’t got a way to actually process how you’re feeling, then tapping is a really easy way to start doing bite-sized chunks of it. You can learn really tailored, beautiful, easy Tapping with me, the way I teach my clients in a 1:1 session, AND if you don’t have the time or money to do that, then look up tapping videos on YouTube.

If you choose this route, pick a person who feels ‘good enough’ to you, and tap along to any video where they’re tapping on stuff that seems relevant to your situation. If you feel better after tapping along with them, then keep looking for more of their videos and make tapping a daily habit, if possible.

(Note: And if you’re trying to cope while waiting ‘til it’s the right time to leave, tapping will help you process the emotions you’re experiencing during this time. To make a big change requires courage and clear thinking; regularly processing your emotional reactions will help to make more space for both of these.)

4. Find the good

If your partner isn’t abusive or even ‘that bad’ and you can’t leave anytime soon, or you just don’t want to, you can look for the things in them and in your relationship that are good.

Where are they helpful? Where are they kind? Do they make you laugh? What things do they do that make you love them?

While it can be a trap to just ‘focus on the positive’ and keep ignoring the elephant in the room (if that elephant is slowly swallowing you whole), if you can not leave at all or you can’t leave yet, then this is an excellent way to cope.

5. Read stories from people who have transformed their relationships

Sometimes, to make a big, scary change, we need to see other people who have done the same. Listening to or reading stories from other people who have gone from where you are to where you want to be can be the very thing we need. Sometimes, we just need to find a way to access hope; to know that things can get better, even if it feels impossible right now.

There are countless stories of people who have transformed their existing relationships, making their relationships with their own partner better than they were months or years ago.

There are also plenty of stories from people who have transformed their relationship patterns after leaving one partner and before attracting someone who was a much better match for them.

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My hope in sharing this very long post is that you, the person who feels disempowered, unappreciated or somewhat unloved in your current relationship, now feel a little more hopeful. I trust that at least one of these questions gave you something to seriously ponder, and please know if any of them felt like you were punched in the gut, that’s going to be the one where you can unlock the most power.

Whether this post causes you to leave your relationship to create something better, or rework your relationship with yourself and them from the inside out, either outcome is excellent as far as I’m concerned. You do you.

Hopefully, you’ve seen that the Human Design configurations of each person in the partnership have little to do with how healthy it is. Any Human Design Type can work with any other Type, but there has to be love, respect and acceptance of the other.

Our partners do not need to be into Human Design for our relationships to be healthy. (Though it’s nice when they are!) But they sure as heck need to be willing to see and accept our natural human limits and not expect us to be like them.

We are all different. And the more we can love and accept each other for the immense and magical differences we each have, the better the world will work.

Caroline x