152: How to Attract the Right Man in Your Life

Women are responsible for opening, shifting, and at times veiling their energy. In many ways, it can be a familiar and comforting prison to be with somebody who is unattuned, who is possessive, who is passive. I like to distill down the father wound as being an experience of unsafety. If your father is responsible for supporting your experience of safety, When that doesn't happen, there's a subsequent eroticized energy to bring you back to the potential for completion of what was started back in your childhood. You have not yet learned to command your vessel. Speak from your cervix. Maybe you're doing a lot right. You're working out, you're eating decently, and still your body feels puffy, your hair feels thinner, and your skin feels crepey. You were taught to call that aging, but I am choosing not to. I don't believe that beauty is vanity. I believe it's a hobby. It's a skill. It's something that you can practice and learn at any age. So I'm hosting a free beauty backroom live stream event for midlife women who are ready to glow up and feel leaner, stronger and more radiant than they have perhaps in their entire life. I will be sharing exactly what I've done over the past couple of months to do just that. So if 2026 is your rebrand year, come play with me, kellybroganmd.com forward slash BB. Hi, and welcome back to Reclamation Radio. I am Dr. Kelly Brogan. And today I would like to invite all y'all ladies to gather around for another installment of what women want and why they may not be getting it. To that end, I am going to be exploring some archetypal themes, including what I see in the zeitgeist right now, especially in Gen Z population. And also my high level insights and takeaways from the David Data teacher training that I attended this year. So let's get into it. So one of the most uncomfortable realities, I believe, is that the men you attract and become energetically entangled with, and that's typically because you offer them some sort of access, they are a reflection of where you are at in your maturational journey. So the plaintiff whale that often arises from the collective of women that says, men don't meet me. I am constantly disappointed by them. Where are all the good men? Where are all the real men? It may be a distraction from the deeper truth that is you have not yet come into your power. You have not yet learned to command your vessel to the extent that your heart yearns for. And because your heart yearns for it, it is possible. And that's why I often explore these archetypal themes and I look to these patterns that are universal. because they encode so much of the mapping of this journey that once you see it, the North Star is bright and you know exactly where it is that you can begin to start to walk. And it's not to imply that you need to change or you need to do anything. In fact, resolving that pick-me energy is actually exactly what the result of this reorientation often is. So it is my belief that women are responsible for opening and shifting and at times veiling their energy and also for revealing, ideally with an open heart, their no energy, their disappointment, their resentment, their bitterness in the moment. And I have learned most of what I've come to believe around this from David Data's work. I've been studying his work. You know that I gave it a decent summary in my last book, if you read it, The Reclaimed Woman. And he talks, if I'm at liberty to attempt to summarize, about these stages that a woman and a man, but let's just focus on the feminine journey, moves through in service of moments of polarity. right so the way that a woman can access her feminine essence in complementarity with a man who is in his masculine and perhaps she can even induce that in him invite that from him and also how we might begin to orient spiritually towards dyadic relationships between a man and a woman or he would offer the caveat which i'm not really want to do a feminine essence woman and a masculine and essence men, how we can orient towards that relationship as a spiritual technology. So in the first stage, we are seeking external validation. So we might, as women, flaunt our sexuality. We might be very preoccupied with self-objectification and recruiting even the objectifying gaze of men. So we work a lot on our physical appearance. We might use our sexuality manipulatively. And in kind, men at this stage are focused on external validation of their masculinity. So they are accumulating the trappings of a man, right? The Rolex watch, the Porsche, and focused very much on wealth accumulation, success, ambition. that kind of thing. In this stage, it's about what I need, right? What I need and how my partner might be an obstacle to what it is that I need. So this is, in my perspective, the most childlike and the most disempowered and codependent of the stages, of course, right? And remember, it's not about, oh, then there's a better stage and then there's a better stage. they're complex and dynamic and you can flow in and out of them. And I like to see it as really maturational. So in the second stage, women recognize that they can be unto themselves, right? Marian Woodman, the Jungian analyst would call this the virgin phase where you are this self-sufficient entity. So this represents also the fruits of feminist ideology, right? So So as a woman, when I recognize that I can do for myself what I thought I needed to manipulate a man into doing for me, I am secure and safe. And a man may recognize that he can access his feelings. So data talks about this is the stage where men go off to Bali and do yoga and grow their hair along. So they can access their feelings and they can soften into a different dimension of themselves. So through a Jungian lens, this also could be the reclamation of the animus and anima. It is a necessary neutrality, and it's often erotically quite a dead zone. So in relationship, this could be considered a very mature, progressive, even conscious relationship because in these moments, and again, you can have second stage moments or even a second stage characterized relationship, you will talk out your feelings. You'll say things like, you know, when you did this, I really felt this and I would love it if you would do this. And while connecting and respectful, this is not erotically supportive because of how neutral the ground is. So a little illustration that I like is, you know, if you're out in the rain as a woman, you might in your first stage, right, like sort of squeal and like worry about your hair getting messed up and ask if anybody has an umbrella for you, right? Like sort of this chaotic damsel in distress energy. In the second stage, you have your own damn umbrella and you don't need anybody to help you out. But in the third stage, you recognize that to allow the man standing with you to put the umbrella over your head serves both of you in closing the loop of that polarity circuit. But in this third stage, or what other teachers like Laura Doyle might refer to as a surrendered comportment, there is a recognition that you don't need to recruit safety, security, attention, presence from this man. But the deliciousness of what occurs in your body and in his and in your shared circuit is something that brings you closer to God. So you recognize that your role is to work with your energy in your body as a woman and to reveal through your body whatever is coming through. often in an amplified way. So as somebody who has a very intellectual defensive construction, learning nonverbal expression in the setting of sometimes intense emotionality is quite a steep curve. So it's required a lot of practice on my part and a lot of identity diffusion, which I'll touch on in a moment when I talk more about the experience, the training. But it's only as willing as you are, as practiced as you are, as available as you are, to open your energy, to reveal the truth of what's moving inside of you, right? Whether that's longing, anguish, playfulness, and to also feel into what's needed in the moment. what would bring more love into the moment and let's say we're talking about playing with a partner to the extent that you're available for that you will attract somebody who is aligned with conscious presence as a man who is deep because if there is something that characterizes the masculine energy field that immediately polarizes a woman into her feminine it is a still man with a steady gaze whose attention is so encompassing and so large It's such a huge field of presence. that you can feel his depth. And you know that your love and the energy moving through your body is the perfect complement to that depth. And what becomes possible there is truly ecstatic. And it can be sexual in nature, or it can simply be an energetic, and or, I would say, an energetic exchange. So that means that when you protest, that your partner constrains you and constricts you and that he can't handle you. Right. So this is a very common trope among jilted women that that he can't handle you. It means that it's possible that you are partnered with a man who keeps you in a narrow bandwidth of your expression because you are not ready, willing and able to feel the fullness of your expansive energy. That that actually scares you and that if you were with a man who opened the permission field wide, wide, wide, wide so that you would have to encounter your own limits, that that would be scary for you, right? It's the terrifying nature of bliss and ecstasy. And so in many ways, it can be like a familiar and comforting prison to be with somebody who is unattuned, who is possessive, who is passive, who is not otherwise able to hold a container wide enough for us as women to encounter our own limits rather than needing the limits of another imposed upon us. Okay, so I want to take a moment to talk a little bit about female fantasy because I have another episode I'll link to in show notes on the book Erotic Mind, which I think is a really, really powerful framework through which you can begin to observe and analyze your fantasies, even from childhood, right? However, we are in a zeitgeist and I have my eldest daughter, Sophia, to thank for, I don't know, a billion things, but namely for introducing me to romantic fiction, right? Romantic fantasy. I did not myself read fiction for 15 years, not one single fiction book. And I used to be a total, I've been a bibliophile my whole life, and I was a total fiction junkie up until I began my, shall we call it, awakening journey, and became obsessed with the theory of everything and trying to decode reality. And so every waking moment, I would be reading something that would help me to understand better the nature of this reality that I was in, right? So whether that was from a scientific perspective, of a spiritual perspective, I was always steeped like five books in to broadening my knowledge. And I summarize a lot of these books. There are many, many, many book reports on Reclamation Radio. You're welcome. And I thought I would sort of carry on that way, always having a new curiosity, always having a new wonderful treasure trove to explore when it comes to learning, right? So she told me that I needed to read this series of Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas. And she told me a little bit about it. And of course, you know, I'm familiar with Harry Potter and The Hobbit and like that kind of a thing, right? But it's only because I am in the habit of taking recommendations from my daughters and in interesting myself in what they're interested in that I said yes. And so I walk a lot. I walk like, well, I don't know what a lot is, but I walk about four miles a day and I listen. Sometimes I walk silently. That's a whole other topic about how we can get so lost in these fantasy worlds that it's probably good to just be with yourself while you're out in the natural world. But regardless, I do walk a lot. And so she had me listen to the cinematic audio. Okay. I don't know if you all know about this. Let me put you on if you do not, because it is essentially listening to a movie. I don't even know if this counts as reading a book. I'm not sure what this is. Maybe it counts in the movie consumption column. Regardless, you are in this immersive experience of a novel. I have gone on to listen to many, many of these books because in this culture, it's often referred to as book talk. In this culture, women will tear through these books. They're like Bible level thickness and will tear through these books in days. So if a series has four or five books, you'll be done with it in two weeks, which was the case for me. And then I moved on to Fourth Wing and the Plated Prisoner series and Throne of Glass. And anyway, so the list goes on. And because I've already, I have an episode on here about Outlander, I've already been, as I reintroduced myself to television after 10 years of no television, I've already been exploring these different romantic archetypes, most of which are written from the point of view of a woman, right? And the patterns are pretty easy to pull out. In fact, I recently saw a video from Jordan Peterson where he was talking about and deconstructing very briefly high level Beauty and the Beast and how a woman in her maturational journey has the choice between the narcissist who appears to have the trappings of masculinity, so Gaston in the story, or the beast and what it means when she can connect to the heart of the beast and enjoy the safety that is conferred by his bestial nature, by the monstrosity that he can show the world, that he will slay for her on a moment's notice, but that he will never bring that energy to her, I think is the characterization of the integration of the negative animus, meaning the resolution of the father wound, right? Because I like to distill down the father wound as being a feeling, an experience of unsafety, right? If your father is responsible for supporting your experience of safety, literally, bodily, spiritually, emotionally in this world, when that doesn't happen, there's a wound and a subsequent eroticized energy to bring you back to the potential for completion of what was started back in your childhood, where the injury stems from. So if that is the father wound, it means that in some way, your father either didn't possess that monstrous energy, right? He wasn't in touch with his dark masculine or that he did, but he showed it to you, right? He imposed it upon you. It wasn't just aimed outward at the perilous entities in the world around you. So in these books, the female main character, the FMC, we often meet her in her sort of like just post-adolescent phase. And she has been in a slumber, right? Like she's been in some sort of unconscious damsel in distress energy of ineptitude and chaos. And she is in survival, right? So she's in a trauma field, pretty much, of varying descriptions. and there is almost always a triangle between her and a light-haired, interestingly, usually a light-haired man, and the monster, so to speak. And in this triangle, the monster, there's even a theme called enemies to lovers, right? So you'll see this over and over again in erotic fiction that women consume. So in this triangle, she gets entangled with the promise of the nice guy, right? So he's either the nice guy or he is the narcissist, right? Or he seems to be this masculine protector. However, he turns out to be somebody who is using her to bolster his own sense of self, who is otherwise aiming his dark masculine energy outward and towards her. So this bidirectional energetic, which is the trauma signature that many women experienced at the hands of the masculine as children. And the enemy, this darker character who invariably has dark eyes and, you know, onyx hair, this darker character lays claim to her. But she enters into her independent woman phase. And so she has this like whole era of petulant, defiant, cringeworthy behavior. And it really is interesting, right? Because women in our I got me energy, as much as we might feel empowered and we might feel secure, there is something on a primal level, I think, for men and women alike to witness that, that is absolutely cringeworthy, right? There's something that just doesn't feel quite right. So as you are listening to this woman fumble every opportunity to forge intimacy with this darker character who is usually all right? And who is often some sort of animal hybrid, right? He's got scales or is a fairy. And when we're talking about fairies, we're certainly not talking about twinks, okay? We're talking about an amplification of magical powers such that he commands, you know, extraordinary presence. So she fumbles all these moments because she's too busy being in her self-establishment experience, her second stage, so to speak. But as she comes to recognize that this man has the capacity to offer her a level of safety that as she is developing her own power, she really needs. So these women also recognize that in trusting the leadership, in choosing to trust the leadership of this darker masculine man, that they can create more powerfully in the world, that they can serve a shared mission with greater impact. So most of these FMCs are altruistic to the point of defiance. Like they're always trying, they're putting themselves in dangerous positions. They're not listening to the commands of these darker masculine figures because they're too busy helping all the time, right? And so my sense is that the insinuation and implication is that the women are the moral compass in this dyad. And when she allows herself to be claimed and to claim this beast, this darker man, this monster on the outside, that she is tamed and he is tamed. So this mutual choosing of one another facilitates a kind of shared amplification of their individual powers. And they become this extraordinary Taurus field of magic. Another important detail is that these darker masculine figures often seek to empower the FMC to generate more of her own safety, right? So they will literally train her to fight. They will make sure that she is her most expanded self because they know that as she comes more and more into her self-mastery, that she is a more powerful companion to him, right? So they're not trying to keep her in a cage, literally or figuratively. They're equipping her to stand on her own and also looking out for her all the time at every turn. So it's that kind of hole of fractal safety where she is learning how to provide it for herself. He is empowering her to do so. And also he is providing and protecting very meaningful way. So I go into this choice point that we have as women when it comes to marriage specifically in far greater depth in my masterclass, Reclaims Relationship. However, it is the yearning of the youthful female heart to imagine that you get to be whoever you are, your bratty self, your petulant self, your lovely self, your nasty self, your glorious self. Like you get to let your freak flag fly and somebody out there is going to love you just as you are. And often referred to as the girlfriend archetype. This archetype is not suitable for marriage. is not actually oriented towards the egregore of a union, that shared entity, the entity, the third entity that emerges from the devotion of the two. Whereas the wife archetype recognizes that the union is the spiritual technology. The union is her portal for expansion. This is actually how she gets to feel the freedom that she thought would come from just expressing herself impersonally and hoping that somebody embraces all that she is. So there is an I-thou gaze between the two individuals in that kind of more mature dyad that says, I see you, I'm devoted to you, I'm submitted to you in this sense of choice and prioritizing the union, really over all else. So in my many years of studying David Data's work, I feel that this is the most powerful rubric available for guiding us through these different stages and helping us to know when we might be collapsing into a more, he would say, first stage, even second stage comportment, a more immature orientation towards the fantasy of what a man can be in a moment, in lieu of taking responsibility for what it is that we can evoke from the moment, invoke from a man, and that we can shape any given moment based on our choice to open or close our bodies. So I have been waiting for an in-person experience with Data for many years. And so when he offered for the first time ever, I think in like 40 plus years of teaching, a B2B, a teacher training, your girl was probably the first to sign up. And it's interesting because in many ways I have idealized him, his teachings. and when I went there, I expected to sort of see a bit behind the curtain, you know, and to see that there's more nuance to, you know, who he is as a teacher, you know, let alone as a man. Anyway, he is a legend. That's my conclusion. And I had the opportunity, almost like if I was, you know, able to sit in an Alan Watts salon when he was alive. I had the opportunity to be in this intimate experience with him and his facilitators, Eli Buren and Nina Lombardo and Eli's partner, Alexandra. And it was an extraordinary, life-changing experience for me. So I'd love to share a little bit about why and also leave you with a practice that I learned there. And you'll be hearing more from me on this training because I'm sure it will weave its golden threads into so much of what I have to say and share going forward. So in the setting of this training, so it was men and women, most if not all of whom are teachers in some capacity, practitioners, and pretty well studied, I think, in this work. So that was a very cool shared foundation. he talked about how the role of the men in this setting is to be aware of awareness, right? So to invoke that meta conscious present attention and the role of the women is to love, love, right? And to, to act as energetic custodians of light and love energy. So what the hell does that mean? Okay. The basic practice was that we did with women, you know, for many hours a day before partnering. The basic practice was for the women to begin to feel and attend to their cervix, right? So this might also be sort of like a figment or something that you invoke in your imaginal realm. Or you can do a couple of kegels to sort of geolocate your attention into your vaginal and womb space. So you're feeling that nidus of energy there and tracking it up this channel that goes through your heart, through your throat, your open, soft jaw and sparkles up into your eyes. and as you breathe in a way that allows the energy to move through that channel, it becomes inherently pleasurable. And I have often talked about, when I talk about biological reunion with ourselves, I've often talked about this inbuilt pleasure of how you can run your nails over your forearm. You can walk out into the breeze. You can go from having to pee to not having to pee. And there's all of this inbuilt pleasure available all the time. I mean, take a bite of a juicy mango. It's just the ecstasy of the mundane is always there. And when our skin and our breath are routinely neglected as sources of this pleasure, it can take a minute to bring it back online. So in moving that energy, there can be a movement of the hips, undulation of the spine, the neck, and you can then layer on or move through different energies. So playful, mischievous energy or dark, exacting energy or rageful energy or seductive energy, sweet devotional energy. And we know how to express these energies as women. And the trouble is when we suppress it in the moment and it becomes, as he calls, residue, that you then try to articulate and explain and you engage the shadow of, I'll get him to see. All of that is depolarizing. All of that is a wet blanket on the erotic potential. of a given connection. So that's the practice essentially for the women and the practice for the men It seems quite simple actually but I imagine it requires a lot of nervous system training to arrive at the place where this is even available is to be still and present and to allow that presence to encompass the entire room. And so a big part of our responsibility as the feminine practitioner was to reflect when we would feel the presence of the man or woman, whoever's in front of us in the practice, you know, sort of getting distracted or falling away. And how could we wordlessly inspire them to come back online, right? With like a wince or a nose crinkle or a scream, you know, how could we call back to the present moment what is possible through that man's body? So the responsibility is really on the feminine practitioner to move the energy and set the conditions for the energetic connection that is contained by the masculine partner. So I witnessed a lot of women getting feedback that the men in the room wanted to feel more of our lower body activated, right? So what does that mean? It means that we are often talking from like our neck up, right? And really disconnected energetically as women from our whole torso, but specifically our hips and this kind of figure eight that can come when you're moving this kind of energy, even if it starts just as an imagination through your body. And I had the opportunity to ask a question of David. And when you ask a question, you have to be prepared to also get up and demo. So mine was actually quite merciful, although still was an edge practice for me. And in response to my question, he had me walk across the room with different energies, because a lot of us gals were curious about how to work with our sexual energy out in public, right? Because if it's the case that when you are open as a woman, you can make eye contact with a married man at the farmer's market and destroy his marriage. Okay. Like, you know, it's hyperbole perhaps, but perhaps not also. So what is your responsibility out in public for your energy being open or veiled? How do you toggle between it? How do you expand the poles from full attention on you to invisibility? And so he had me walk across the room in these different energies. And then the room, specifically the male half of the room, would rate me, right? Rate. Sounded like it came out wrong. They would rate me in terms of fuckability, in terms of invisibility, and the women would help coach me. And it was very powerful to witness that when you don't have command of one end of the spectrum, right? So if I'm really good at walking cloaked or invisible, but I'm not actually good at walking with seductive energy and moving that energy through my hips and full body playfully, invitingly, then I won't be able to toggle at will, right? It's not likely to happen. It was also really powerful because there were opportunities for us to give feedback, women to men and men to women, about the, let's say, marriageability of a woman, just looking at her, right? And the trustworthiness of a man. And initially, as women, we rated, so let's say there's three men standing in front of the room, We would rate the men and sort of pick the hottest guy kind of a thing. But over the days of the training, we were better able to discern a man's depth. And it had little actually to do with his appearance and a lot more to do with the stillness of his body, the tenor of his and depth of his voice and his capacity to hold presence with. It's something that you feel in your body as a woman. And it's something that men can actually feel in each other's bodies. And there were exercises where, you know, the men would kind of like, I don't know, like slap each other around and bring each other to more attuned presence because of it. So a lot of this practice is about what women can do with women to amplify our gifts and take more responsibility for ourselves. And of course, what men can do with men. It was extraordinarily healing for me as a yapper and as somebody with a mission and a business and all sorts of opinions and achievements to be experienced for an entire workshop. The professional integrity with which this training was run, I think everybody would agree, who attended was extraordinary. and there was no yapping, right? Like I didn't, nobody even knew my name the entire experience and I didn't share my opinions about anything or, you know, try to work my charisma into the room. It was really an opportunity for me to be experienced energetically and also obviously, you know, physically, right? So people could see and feel me and I think for many of us women, that's a very, very healing opportunity to simply be valued and to be given feedback on how we are experienced energetically by a man or woman in front of us. It was really, really, really powerful. So a practice that I will leave you with that I took away was, for the women listening, to simply, for a sentence or two a day, let alone an entire conversation, speak from your cervix. So we were encouraged to practice this with the other women and to talk about what we had for dinner last night, right? So you might be used to telling this story. So I'll try to demo it a little bit, right? So if I'm telling this story from my habitual body, right, I would say, I had stew and it had grass-fed beef in it and this and that and carrots and that. It was really pretty good, a little spicy, whatever. So I tell the story basically from my neck up. And my energy is fast and sort of clipped. And it feels like it's coming from my head. But if I tell this story or any sentence, it doesn't matter, from my cervix, quote unquote, then I'm feeling the information arise from my body and it's almost like it's enjoyable. Right. So I'm not saying that's like a professional demonstration, but that's sort of how I played with it. And when I'm in conversation, every once in a while, I'll just do a couple of little pulses and ground myself in that lower body anchor and see what happens if I speak from there. What happens is invariably my voice is softer, it's more intentional, it's slower, And it's more for me. And yet an offering. It's an experience of grounded feminine energy that invites that masculine presence and really fascination. I mean, so much of what I saw in the men in this room was just the awe and devotion and absolute rapture with which they regard women, right? That that is the default. And how did we get to this place where there is competitiveness and disappointment and a kind of critical transactional exchange? Well, I wrote a book on how we got to this. It's called The Reclaimed Woman. However, it is a thrilling, thrilling moment in our collective history to recognize that we are now moving into third stage potential from and through the psyops that brought us to egalitarian, neutralized depolarization, right? the masculinized woman and the feminized man and all of our emotional immaturity across the aisle, that we are recognizing that when we practice in our own bodies, we regulate our own systems and we offer our energy, our consciousness to each other, either in practice or through marriage, through sacred union, that we can open up a portal that is not otherwise available to us. That through the complementarity of the man-woman polarity, we can access something so ecstatically profound that we would never dream of collapsing back into our habitual shapes again. So I'm excited. I love working with these templates. And I love that we now are beginning to recognize what the shades of femininity can look like expressed through an open hearted body and that we can command forth deep, present, attuned, and attentive men. I'll talk to you on the next episode. not you