The Bitch, The Crone and The Harlot with Susan Schachterle
Aging Gratefully
Dr. Peter Brill
volume_up

Episode 17 - The Bitch, The Crone and The Harlot with Susan Schachterle

Many are the paths of life. Many are the challenges, and along the way we make choices about how we can be happy, esteemed by others and get what we want. Each path and each choice has rewards and costs. As we get into the Third age we begin to understand so much more about life that the accumulated costs begin to haunt and hinder us. Our author today, Susan Schachterle is Director of the Ahimsa Group.  The word "Ahimsa" denotes an attitude, a way of life that brings with it the intention to leave a situation in a better state than before. The individual who moves through life in a state of Ahimsa has developed an awareness and clarity that facilitate the effective combination of power, correct action, and compassion.  She has spent over two decades assisting individuals and organizations find and implement their inherent power, wisdom and joy.  She has given her book about women’s paths through life a title that may scare you or put you off. It’s called The Bitch, the Crone and the Harlot. It’s full of great wisdom about how the choices women made earlier in their lives need to be remade in the Third Age.

Susan says, “I wanted to use these words differently – there are gifts inherent in each word.  Bitch equals power and the possibility a woman can make things happen, create change.  An archetypal Bitch can make it happen without a self-serving agenda. A garden variety bitch doesn’t use her gifts well.”   In her book, a Crone uses her wisdom and insight and a Harlot her passion and awareness.  Filled with fascinating stories, this is a must-read book and must-hear interview for women (and men as well).

Transcript

Transcript

David Debin: Hello and welcome to The Third Age with the doctor and the man from Hollywood. I’m David Debin, the man from Hollywood. The doctor, as you know by now, is Peter Brill, MD, which stands for medical doctor. On this show we turn the myths of aging upside down, we sort out the scientific and the trendy, the medical and the cultural, and we will tell you everything you need to know about living in the third age. Remember, we guarantee if you listen to us you will never grow old.

Dr. Peter Brill: I’m the doctor, Dr. Peter Brill. The third age starts somewhere around 45 or 50. It’s a time when you start to feel a stronger desire for deeper meaning and fulfillment in your life. Your first age is childhood, your second age is building career and family. The third age is a major change or transition to a whole new set of problems, values, opportunities and gratifications. So join us as fellow explorers in this journey to discover what brings passion, purpose and joy into this uncharted time of life.

David Debin: Anyway, speaking of this period of life, many are the paths of life as you know. Many of the challenges, and along the way we make choices about how we can be happy, esteemed by others and get what we want. Now each path and each choice has rewards and it has costs. As we get into the third age we begin to understand so much more about life that the accumulating costs begin to haunt and hinder us. Our author today, Susan Schachterle has given her book about women’s paths through life a title, and it’s a title that might scare you or put you off, but it’s actually pretty tantalizing. The book is called The Bitch, The Crone and The Harlot. Are we allowed to say that on the air? Oh great, The Bitch, The Crone, you can keep saying it over and over again, The Bitch, The Crone and the Harlot by Susan Schachterle. It’s full of great wisdom about how the choices women made in their lives need to be remade in the third age. Don’t wander away from the path of our show or you may get lost in the forest of the bitches, the crones and the harlots. I love the title, we loved the title from the first moment we saw it, right?

Dr. Peter Brill: Oh I know, we did, that’s, it was fabulous.

Marisa: Yes.

David Debin: It’s got to be a best seller. It’s got to be a best seller. We’re going to do everything we can to help make it…

Dr. Peter Brill: Can to make that come true.

David Debin: That’s right.

Dr. Peter Brill: But, it’s actually, not to stay on the book too long ‘cause we don’t usually do that in this section, but the core points of the book are really very, very good. I mean, we’re beginning to think in entire lifetimes now, you  know, the pasts of somebody for what the, the Greeks used to do it in terms of the Greek tragedies, you know, someone would have a flaw at one point in their life and it would end up in the end point of their life causing their life to be tragic. And we have the ability to correct for that now in our lives. We can go part way, realize what we need to change and change direction, and I think the beauty of this…

David Debin: That’s called flip flopping, isn’t it?

Dr. Peter Brill: Now David, we promised not to talk about politics okay.

David Debin: Oh, alright. But you’re right about that. It also in some ways works with our philosophy of not backing down. You know, there’s, you can change, you can go along a path and if it’s the wrong path you can change your mind and make an adjustment. But that doesn’t mean that you have to back down, that you have to totally turn away from what your dream is or what you wanted to do.

Dr. Peter Brill. Oh never. You know what’s interesting is recent studies that have been shown about the brain that new synopsis and new cells form in the brain and we’re beginning to understand why longevity is so related to continued growth as you age. The actual brain changes in response….

David Debin: I saw that, I saw that.

Dr. Peter Brill: Isn’t that interesting?

David Debin: Yeah, yeah…

Dr. Peter Brill: So…

David Debin: You know what, I saw another one, go on, I’m sorry to interrupt…

Dr. Peter Brill: Well please don’t interrupt in the future.

David Debin: Now, you know, I saw, I saw an article yesterday that showed people who were shown computer images of what they would look like as they go, when they got older. People who had no idea that they would look so young and youthful because we’re all living so much longer changed the way they were saving and working for retirement.

Dr. Peter Brill: Wow!

David Debin: How about that.

Dr. Peter Brill: So it’s still worth it to have some money left so you can still play.

David Debin: Exactly, exactly. And speaking of playing Peter….

Dr. Peter Brill: Speaking of playing…

David Debin: I have a news story here…

Dr. Peter Brill: Wait a minute…

David Debin: Okay.

Dr. Peter Brill: The chime is back.

David Debin: The chime….

Marisa: Yes.

David Debin: of the news story. Well, you know, the people, people in the third age are really, as we’ve talked many times, thinking about their legacy that they leave behind.

Dr. Peter Brill: Yes. Oh absolutely.

David Debin: And this story comes from us, to us from your old stomping grounds, Pennsylvania. A man named Matthew McKnight hopes nobody manages to top his feet in the Guinness Book of World Records. That’s because McKnight holds the record for greatest distance thrown in a car accident. How ‘bout that for a legacy.

Dr. Peter Brill: You know, we really ought to run a contest for this. How many feet was he thrown? Zero to ten, ten to thirty?

David Debin: Well the fifty year old, the fifty year old record holder lived to tell about being thrown 118 feet by a car that hit him while traveling about 70 miles per hour.

Marisa: My gosh.

David Debin: He suffered two dislocated shoulders, plus a broken shoulder, pelvis, leg and tailbone, spent two weeks in the hospital and 80 days in rehab. But how it got into the Guinness Book of Records is his emergency room physician submitted paperwork for the record which Guinness recognized in 2003. So, now here’s a legacy: Matthew was thrown 118…

Dr. Peter Brill: I was going to ask you that; what is the legacy?

David Debin: The legacy is your grandfather was actually thrown, look at this book, here is the Guinness Book of World Records, your grandfather made the book, he way…

Dr. Peter Brill: David, David, David…

David Debin: What?

Dr. Peter Brill: I got some news for you David.

David Debin: What?

Dr. Peter Brill: That’s not the kind of legacy we’re talking about.

David Debin: Really? I was thinking about going for something like “How many teeth can I lose from a punch in the mouth?” I mean, 30, you know, 15 teeth, a good punch in the….

Dr. Peter Brill: How many teeth are there in your mouth?

David Debin: 15 teeth would be, probably get me into the Guinness Book of Records, wouldn’t you say? How ‘bout “How many floors can I fall from a building and live?” There must be a record for that.

Dr. Peter Brill: I think there’s, there is a record for that.

David Debin: There is a record for that?

Dr. Peter Brill: Yeah.

David Debin: Well, but I can break it. You know…

Dr. Peter Brill: Or die trying. I’ll break it or die trying.

David Debin: You know, it’s important, but on the serious side of it we have talked about a legacy. What do you leave behind? You leave really behind the love that others have for you and that you have for them, that’s basically what you leave behind.

Dr. Peter Brill: Or you leave behind your, well it may seem like a pebble in the waves, each person passes to the next and the ones that follow the wisdom and accumulating knowledge of life. Think of how society started from a small little band of hunters, became agricultural and now we have a huge society, how did that happen? Each generation passed to the next generation a world in some ways better than the one before. And I understand now we’re confused because we, our success has bred some problems, including the environment and so forth, but the need to pass better to what comes after is still a very deep human need and a very deep societal benefit.

David Debin: That’s great, but there’s one person I can think of that missed out on that chain of messages. I won’t mention it because we’re not talking politics but, but there’s one person who definitely missed out on that change.

Dr. Peter Brill: Let me guess….

David Debin: We have a fabulous guest. Her name is Susan Schachterle. She’s the director of the Ahimsa group, which believes that we have only scratched the surface of the power and possibility inherent in the human mind and heart. Susan has spent over two decades assisting individuals and organizations to find and implement their inherent power, wisdom and joy, and in her new book The Bitch, The Crone and The Harlot, she uses her wisdom to present a compelling new vision of the possibilities for women at midlife. So welcome to the show Susan Schachterle.

Susan Schachterle: Thank you so much for inviting me. I’m so glad to be here.

David Debin: Well we’re happy you’re here to. What inspired you to write this fabulously named book?

Susan Schachterle: Well thank you. Several things inspired me. One of them was that as I moved into midlife myself I realized that people had begun to call me ma’am. And, you know, I had never, I had never been ma’am before. Ma’am was something you called my mother or my grandmother. Suddenly people we’re looking me up and down and then calling me ma’am, and at first I blew it off, I thought I was just running into a number of folks who were especially polite, but the more people who did that the more I had to realize that at midlife things do change whether we want them to or not and we really can’t resist those changes but we can learn to use them to our maximum benefit.

David Debin: Wow!

Susan Schachterle: Another thing, another thing that inspired me, if I can just mention one other thing….

David Debin: Yeah, go right ahead.

Susan Schachterle: I have had a counseling practice for about 25 years or so and I work with both men and women but primarily with women, and one of the things that I have noticed through the years is that a number of women that I have worked with as they reached midlife, even though they were educated, intelligent, articulate, in many cases very accomplished, that sort of thing, as they began thinking of themselves as middle aged, they began to change. They began to say things like, “Well, you know I’m getting older, I just don’t have the energy I used to have” or “I just can’t do all the things I used to do” or “It’s time for me to move aside and let younger women take over” or my favorite, “Well back in my day…” and you know, when I would hear that one, “back in my day”, I always said, “Well which day was your day and how come you only got a day? And if you only got a day, what have you been doing with the rest of your life as a vibrant, dynamic human being” And as I began realizing these women were starting to fade into the background of their own lives at the very point in life at which they had more to offer than they had ever had before. It made absolutely no sense.

Dr. Peter Brill: Can I quote something…

 Susan Schachterle: And it was all based on a perception.

David Debin: Wow!

Dr. Peter Brill: Can I quote something from your book?

Susan Schachterle: Please.

Dr. Peter Brill: “This becomes even more frustrating at midlife”, they’re talking about the good girl, the women who try to please and so forth, “at which point we continue to live as good girls. We become invisible, get rolled over by those who consider us a quiet, well-behaved part of the back drop of life. If we choose to look for respect for being, being demand, if we choose to look for respect by being demanding and flexible, we’re regarded as prissy old, older women who must be placated but not taken seriously.”

Susan Schachterle: That’s right.

Dr. Peter Brill: What a condemnation of that path, of that way of going forward.

Susan Schachterle: Absolutely right. It, that, that way of going forward is indeed a path that leads directly and relentlessly into invisibility and often depression, resentment, bitterness….

Dr. Peter Brill: And a lot of physical complaints is what I see.

Susan Schachterle: I was going to say, a number of physical problems also.

Dr. Peter Brill: And, you know, they’re constantly, a lot of them go to the doctor all the time and so forth. Well I, you know, I wanted to talk about, we have two different things to relate to each other and it can get a little confusing. Maybe we should talk about the paths of the three ways out of midlife that you present here.

Susan Schachterle: Okay.

Dr. Peter Brill: The Bitch, The Crone and The Harlot, as you present to me, as I read them, that they look like to me kind of not necessarily mutually exclusive, but different paths that women could take out of this midlife period. Is that fair?

Susan Schachterle: You know, that’s absolutely fair, and the optimum way to move into and through midlife and the second path of life is to incorporate all three of those at the same time. Any life led with focus more on one or two of them than on all three of them is a life out of balance. And so, each of them has its own place and has those situation in which it is the absolutely most effective way to address whatever the situation may be. The woman who works on developing, discovering if you will, each of those three within herself has access to all three of those elements; tremendous power, profound wisdom, a kind of sensuality that brings with it a depth, with it a depth of awareness that we don’t have otherwise, a woman who discovers all three of those within herself has access to those elements at all times.

David Debin: Why such provocative words to describe them? I mean, when you say ‘bitch’ it has normally for most people a progoritve meaning, crone, most people don’t know what that means, but harlot has also got that kind of meaning. Why if a fulfilled third age for a woman is a combination of these three, why is, what are they?

Susan Schachterle: Well that’s an excellent question, thank you. And might I throw in the fact that I think that the people who do know anything about the word ‘crone’ have applied to it a progoritive meaning also.

David Debin: Yes, right. Margaret Hamilton in The Wizard of Oz.

Susan Schachterle: Yes, yes, thank you. Thank you very much.

Dr. Peter Brill: The wicked witch from the.

David Debin: Yeah, right. Exactly.

Susan Schachterle: That’s right, exactly. I mean when people ask me, when I ask people, you know “What do you think of when you hear the word ‘crone’?” they say things like “ugly”, “dried up”, “withered”, “gross”, “old”….

Dr. Peter Brill: Alright, so you’re giving models for women, we’ll admit, all three of which have negative…

Susan Schacterle: Yes.

David Debin: But what’s the positive that you’re using for these?

Susan Schachterle: This is the very reason that I use those words: those three words have been used throughout the ages to denigrate women, and in a very real sense to keep women in their place, you know what I mean? Now I want to, I want to stop here and say just for a moment this book is not a feminist rant….

Dr. Peter Brill: That’s for sure. That is absolutely for sure.

Susan Schachterle: It’s not a, thank you. It’s not a manifesto or anything like that, I’m thoroughly in favor of men. But what I wanted to do is take these three words and use them differently because when I thought about each of the, the kinds of women who tend to get labeled with any or all of those words, what I had to realize was there are gifts inherent in each of those.

Dr. Peter Brill: Yes.

Susan Schachterle: Now the women who, and in the book as you have noticed through reading it, the archetypes, bitch, crone and harlot, I use capital b, capital letters on it, excuse me, but when I talk about the everyday garden variety bitch, crone or harlot, I use the small letters. And the garden variety bitch doesn’t use her gifts well but the gifts are there. The gifts of the bitch are power and possibility. The bitch, even the garden variety bitch, the one that people swear at and point at behind her back and say mean things about, she is very likely a woman who uses her gifts with a self-serving agenda which is not healthy, but the gifts are there anyway. The bitch is a woman who can make things happen, who can create change, who knows how to shake things up when they need to be shaken up. The archetypal bitch does it without the self-serving agenda. She knows how….

Dr. Peter Brill: Okay, so we got the positive for one of them, and our listeners out there are going to have to wait all the way through our commercials, although they’re very interesting,  to hear the positives of the other two. So we’ll be right back in just a minute. You’re listening to Third Age. I’m Dr. Peter Brill.

David Debin: Wake up. We’re back. Here we are. It’s the Third Age with Dr. Peter Brill, the doctor and the man from Hollywood, me, David Debin and Marisa Scobasi and Lisa are here, and we’re talking to Susan Schachterle who wrote a fabulous book called The Bitch, The Crone and The Harlot, and just before we go on where do we get this book, how do we get this book? Susan are you there?

Susan Schachterle: Yes, I’m here. It’s in, it’s in all the bookstores.

David Debin: Uh huh.

Susan Schachterle: And…

David Debin: And online?

Susan Schachterle: It’s also available through Amazon.

David Debin: Great. I hope you’re selling a lot of copies of it.

Susan Schachterle: Thank you. We’re excited about it.

David Debin: Good. Peter you have…

Dr. Peter Brill: Well we just wanted to finish up the other two terms…

David Debin: Right…

Dr. Peter Brill: What’s positive and negative…

David Debin: We got bitch down now.

Susan Schachterle: Sure, let me…

Dr. Peter Brill: David’s having trouble getting off that term. But we’re going to move on now David to crone.

Susan Schachterle: Well the gifts of the crone are wisdom and insight. This is the woman who at midlife has reached a depth of wisdom that is literally not available in the first half of life. And the gifts of the harlot are passion and awareness. And this isn’t just sexual passion, although I’m certainly in favor of that, this is passion in general, passion about being alive and a depth of awareness that makes the harlot more informed, better informed than the people around her.

Dr. Peter Brill: This may sound self-serving, but I read recent articles showing increased longevity with more frequent sexual intercourse and more, a benefit to the immune system, the immunoglobulance.

Susan Schachterle: I’m all for it.

Dr. Peter Brill: So frequent sex, you know, harlot out there, okay so….

Susan Schachterle: Frequent good sex.

Dr. Peter Brill: Good sex, okay, frequent good sex, that’s a good addition. Alright….

Susan Schachterle: Thank you.

Dr. Peter Brill: So, lets take Dorothy for an example because this is, I must, we must you and I see lots and lots of Dorothy’s out there, so lets talk to them.

Susan Schachterle: That’s right. Sure.

Dr. Peter Brill: Dorothy’s this lady whose, you know, she goes to her, she’s always been nurturing and supportive, you remember that…

Susan Schachterle: Yes.

Dr. Peter Brill: for your book? Tell us the story.

Susan Schachterle: Well Dorothy came in to see me because, she was 58 when she came in to see me and she had really begun to feel in her own words ‘old and invisible’. She said that she figured she wasn’t really as much value anymore because of her age and her role in life, and her children, although she loved them and they loved her and all that, they really had begun to treat her as, well almost like a piece of furniture, you know, they’re only really noticing her when they needed something from her, and Dorothy really wanted to be okay with feeling invisible and unimportant. And as we worked together, she came in and asked if I could help her feel better about being treated this way by her children and I said, “No, I cannot. But I can help you learn how to live differently so your children treat you with the respect you deserve.” And as we worked together, she was a wonderfully nurturing woman, very kind, very giving and generous, but she had put herself on the back burner for most of her life. As I said in the book, she was almost 60 years old and still in many respects unformed. She’d never really given herself permission to express her opinions or preferences or desires and certainly had not given herself permission to live them. This was a woman who was in pretty desperate need of what I call in the book ‘bitch energy’, which again is not bitch with a small b. This is the energy that moves forward and makes things happen.

Dr. Peter Brill: The power in yourself…

Susan Schachterle: Absolutely.

Dr. Peter Brill: owning your own power, owning effectiveness, getting out there and getting stuff done, impacting on other people, but always with compassion and….

Susan Schachterle: Exactly right, without that self-serving agenda that happens so often in the first part of life, but rather….

Dr. Peter Brill: So you describe in your, yeah, you describe in your book, she finally goes to the family gatherings and people, you know, start interrupting her and she pushes back.

Susan Schachterle: That’s right and it was wonderful. It was absolutely wonderful. She had been at a family gathering and she said her children had interrupted her as they always had as if she wasn’t particularly important to listen to and she spoke up, and she told them they were no longer allowed to interrupt her, they had to treat her with respect from that point on and I mean this is quite a huge shock…

Dr. Peter Brill: What if she loses her children? What if her children won’t tolerate this?

Susan Schachterle: Well, you know, first of all rarely I think do you lose your children, it’s one of the reasons children can act out toward their parents because parents aren’t going to divorce them, and the same thing with mothers and their children. But you know Peter the other point here is that in regaining herself she filled a huge gap in her own spirit, in her own soul, and from that point she actually was perceived differently by her children…

Dr. Peter Brill: Valued more.

Susan Schachterle: And valued a great deal more.

Dr. Peter Brill: Lets do, see if we can get one more in before the break. We’ll do it quickly. Shauna, who is a lady who always used her sexuality to get…

Susan Schachterle: Absolutely. Yeah, Shauna was…

Dr. Peter Brill: Kind of quickly, you know, a minute or two.

Susan Schachterle: Okay. Shauna, as you said, had always used her sexual power to get what she wanted. She had no real sense of her own value as a person aside from the way she looked and how seductive she had learned to be. The thing is she continued doing that as she moved into her, into her 50’s, and you know, what seems sexy and seductive and flirty when you’re 22 doesn’t quite seem that same way when you’re 50. And she continued wearing more and more seductive clothing, more and more makeup, that sort of thing, trying to recapture the sense of sense of her power that she had gotten earlier in life from her sexuality. This is a woman who had been terribly afraid to explore herself, to face her own inner being and had a lot of fear about what she would find if she really looked at herself and the deeper aspects of herself. So her perception of herself was very sad and very limited. As we worked together, this woman took on a very different kind of energy that allowed her to present herself to the world as a woman with much deeper things to offer than simply her cleavage. And as a result of her beginning to recognize those deeper things in herself, the people around her began to recognize her as a much deeper being and her relationships changed entirely.

Dr. Peter Brill: Well that’s wonderful. Maybe we can start the last one, which is, what’s her name, Dolores?

Susan Schachterle: Dolores.

Dr. Peter Brill: Dolores.

Susan Schachterle: Dolores. Dolores was a really fascinating person to work with. Dolores was a well-educated woman at a very high level in a corporate structure. She had an MBA, had started out very young about 24 years old with, or 23 perhaps with her MBA, had really been a golden child, and early in her career, in her early 20’s when she got started, she was young and cute and perky and flirty and all those things and she had the MBA and a lot of ambition and she was regarded as an intriguing sort of a challenge in that corporate structure. However, as she got older and her cute and flirty persona no longer worked, she dug in her heels and worked very hard at ruling with an iron fist thinking that she could regain what she had regarded as respect from early in her career, which really hadn’t so much been respect as just intrigue. She worked very hard to away her own feminine inclinations, and what I mean by that is the unique way in which women lead and was trying hard to lead the same way men lead, but trying to do it with this, the same sort of reaction that she got when she was young and cute and wore mini skirts.

Dr. Peter Brill: Okay, we’re going to have to figure out what happened to Dolores after a break here. I just want to ask the people that are listening, women that are listening to this show, do you recognize yourself in any of these women? Do you recognize your lifetime in any of these women? Are any of these issues in you or your mother or people that you know? Aren’t these life patterns that women follow? We’re going to talk after we get back about what to do about this, we’ll hear the end of Dolores, you’re listening to the Third Age. I’m Dr. Peter Brill.

David Debin: Hi, we’re back to the Third Age. David Debin here, the man from Hollywood with Dr. Peter Brill and Marisa Scobasi, and we are talking to Susan Schachterle whose written a book called The Bitch, The Crone and The Harlot. Susan is director of the Ahimsa Group, and she believes that we’ve only scratched the surface of power and possibility inherent in the human mind and body.  And you were just hearing the story of Dolores, which Peter had introduced and Susan was telling us about.

Dr. Peter Brill: We heard all about Dolores, so what did you do for her? Hello? Oh, you got to put her on.

David Debin: She’s still on hold.

Dr. Peter Brill: She still on hold there. You can’t speak until they push the button, Susan.

David Debin: Are you still, are you back Susan?

Susan Schachterle: I’m here.

Dr. Peter Brill: I’m back.

David Debin: This is actually a very professional operation. We actually are working out of a van in the desert.

Dr. Peter Brill: And the police were chasing us for a license.

David Debin: Right.

Dr. Peter Brill: So tell us about, what did you do?

Susan Schachterle: Well the issue for Dolores was learning to integrate personal power. Let me just say quickly that women tend to focus on connection in relationships. Men tend to focus on information and action. Dolores had tried to put her natural inclination toward connection on hold and had tried to function the way she saw successful men functioning. That can never work for a female. We have our own brand of power and we must learn to step into it. That’s what Dolores needed to do; to integrate that personal power with compassion and to create a kind of balance in her life that was absolutely unwavering. So as we worked together, she was able to begin to see that her entire lifetime, her behavior especially on the job, had really been shaped by great sorrow and great loneliness and she was working hard to hide those things by pushing people around. We worked together to help her access that inclination to connect and to create relationships and to, first and foremost to create a relationship with herself which she had never done. As a result of the work that we did, and she worked very hard and we only….

Dr. Peter Brill: She’s running for president now, right?

Susan Schachterle: Well, change the names and that could be. In any even, we worked together, she worked very hard, she had a brief period of time within which to do our work, and the transformation in her was absolutely extraordinary. I mention in the book that in our final meeting together she actually called in the people in her department and asked their forgiveness for having been an unkind and intolerant manager and asked them to help her develop her compassion and her wisdom more deeply. It was an extraordinary and very moving meeting that she had with these folks and she asked me to be there. It was a thorough transformation and it happened when she was able to create as I said earlier relationship with herself and then embrace the female inclination toward connection in relationship.

Dr. Peter Brill: David you had something you wanted to….

David Debin: Well I’m just wondering, very honestly, or as honestly as you want to be, when women at this stage of life go through these radical changes, and it’s sort of like a metamorphosis where they come out full formed in the most positive way, that doesn’t mean that the, their partner or the person in their relationship is going to change as well. It’s often a lot harder to get a man to change or understand this kind of thing. So how have you found in all the women that you’ve worked with on the whole their relationships have fared and…

Susan Schachterle: You know…

David Debin: Go ahead.

Susan Schachterle: I’m sorry. It’s a very interesting question, I’m glad that you brought that up because you’re absolutely right. When one part of a relationship begins to change there is always that risk the other partner will not be able to adjust to the change. What I have found pretty consistently David is that when women go through these transformations if they will use their wisdom to be a living role model for the kinds of changes and transformations that are possible in life, it makes it much easier for their partners to understand and explore and accept those changes than if the woman begins preaching, preaching transformation. Am I clear here?

David Debin: Yeah, she takes herself so seriously that it turns into, as you once said, I don’t know, you used the word ‘self aggrandizing’, ‘self referential’, however, if it turns into that kind of person, that she needs to be a proselytizer for her particular kind of change, then it does, it’s going to put everybody off I think.

Susan Schachterle: That’s exactly right. I was working with a couple recently where the woman kept telling her husband that he needed to do something in the area of personal growth. She was doing hers, he needed to do his. And he was resisting, you know, a hundred percent. And as soon as she realized the importance of simply releasing that and living her life as a living breathing dynamic example of personal growth, he began seeking his own growth.

Dr. Peter Brill: But sometimes that doesn’t work on us.

David Debin: But that doesn’t, see I’m thinking, I’m, Susan, I’m thinking in terms of the woman who became, who was invisible most of her life, a people pleaser….

Dr. Peter Brill: Yeah.

David Debin: a people pleaser who began to reach into herself and find herself and assert herself as who she really was with her power. A man and a family who have, who have been trained by her and have trained her to act in this way over all these years, are they really going, is he, lets say, the children are a different thing lets say, is her husband after all that time really going to accept that change and try and live with it?

Susan Schachterle: You know, I think it depends on so many factors David. It depends on the nature of their relationship and how they have come to relate to each other over the years. It also has a great deal to do with the kind of man we’re talking about and how secure or insecure he might be. And it has to do, I think, in great, great part with the wisdom the woman uses in how she manifests these changes. When she can manifest them with great wisdom and with great compassion for the people around her who are confused at who she seems to be becoming, then she can manifest these changes in ways that are easier for these people to understand and to not be threatened by.

Dr. Peter Brill: You know, one of the things I like most about what she says in this book is the fact that you marry together power and compassion.

Susan Schachterle: Very important.

Dr. Peter Brill: Because power without compassion is brutality.

Susan Schachterle: Exactly.

Dr. Peter Brill: And compassion without power is being inept.

Susan Schachterle: That’s exactly right, and with the two together we can accomplish whatever needs to be accomplished on the planet, and there is so much that needs to accomplished and so much that will and can only be accomplished or can be accomplished primarily by women.

David Debin: Yup.

Susan Schachterle: We must have…

David Debin: Are you voting for Hilary, Susan?

Susan Schachterle: Well, you know, I’m not talking about that David but I’ll tell you what, I’ll tell you what…

David Debin: Yes.

Susan Schachterle: Hilary, if Hilary’s listening I want her to pay attention.

David Debin: Good.

Susan Schachterle: I would love to meet with her and talk about her leadership style.

Dr. Peter Brill: Yeah, yeah, I would too. I would too. You can’t…

David Debin: And if you did, where was, where was Hilary….

Dr. Peter Brill: And what would you say to her?

David Debin: Yeah where is she, harlot, bitch or crone?

Dr. Peter Brill: What would you say to her?

Susan Schachterle: Well, I would urge her to more and more deeply explore her own feminine power rather than manifesting power the way her husband manifested it or the way the men around her manifested it.

Dr. Peter Brill: Exactly.

Susan Schachterle: She has her own unique gift….

Dr. Peter Brill: Yes.

Susan Schachterle: and if she were to step deeply into that it would be world changing.

Dr. Peter Brill: Let me just one more time, it’s called The Bitch, The Crone and The Harlot, I get, you know, nervous every time I say it, but…

David Debin: You’re sweating.

Dr. Peter Brill: I’m sweating. You can find it at the bookstores or in amazon.com. We want to thank you Susan for being on the show today. It’s a wonderful book and you’re obviously a very counselor.

Susan Schachterle: Thank you so much. I appreciate the invitation to be here.

Dr. Peter Brill: Good luck. We’ll be right back.

David Debin: You’re back, we’re back, we’re all back, everybody’s back. It’s the Third Age and I am the man from Hollywood (mimics music), and we have, what…

Dr. Peter Brill: We can’t stand it without the…

David Debin: What kind of, and the doctor, Dr. Peter Brill is here with me and, what kind of music do they play for doctors? Pomp and prejudice doctors…(mimics music).

Dr. Peter Brill: That’s the president.

David Debin: Oh, that’s the….Thank you Jaren, perfect. That’s absolutely perfect. The doctor is not flat lining at this moment.

Dr. Peter Brill: My hearts still beating if you hear it.

David Debin: Which bring us to…

Dr. Peter Brill: Or maybe yours is, I don’t know.

David Debin: Is my heart beating? I can’t tell. I’m breathing, but I don’t know if my heart is beating.

Dr. Peter Brill: So were we going to have like an intro to…

David Debin: Well we’re going to talk, we’re getting into our, the little thing that we want to do on our show to encourage everybody, which is our segment called ‘I Won’t Back Down’. Remember, you won’t back down. Lets hear that one more time so you don’t forget. I want you to say that to yourself when it comes time to make the changes that are going to make your life better and that are going to make you better, and no matter who’s in your way or who tell you you can’t do it or who tells you you’re too old or who tells you you’re too stupid or whatever it is…

Dr. Peter Brill: Including yourself.

David Debin: Including yourself, right. You got to turn around and say to that person or look in the mirror and say to yourself, “I won’t back down”.

Dr. Peter Brill: From the challenges of life, from the challenges of myself. You know, the learning I had from today David was, you know, what, the question I’d ask you to think about out there is what roles do you play in your life? What, you’re the mother, you’re this, you’re the pleaser, you’re the, what, what role do you, the sexual seductress or are you the person who’s the achiever, is the one everybody depends on, and how do you play them? What do you use to play them? And in what ways are those roles that you’ve been playing in your life successful? What success have they brought you and to what extent are they in your way? What ways are they not successful for you? Because I think that’s what we don’t often think about, what, our greatest strength sometimes is our greatest weakness, and it’s only by filling in in spaces where we have strengths but we don’t think about the weakness that bring about us sometimes that our growth occurs.
David Debin: I do love, that’s very true and I do love in the book where she differentiates the different words with a capital and a non capital and tells us the bad side, the downside of what that is and also the, but has inherent possibilities that you can use and turn around and bring yourself up into the good side of whatever that is. But it’s not easy, you know, I don’t know if you can do it by, with that, on your own. I don’t know if you can do it on your own.

Dr. Peter Brill: Thus we have some groups for people in our area, in Santa Barbara, 969-9794 or you can visit our website at www.thirdagefoundation.com. I’d like to thank Jaren Phelps, I’d like to thank….

David Debin: Les Carroll.

Dr. Peter Brill: Lisa…

David Debin: Like to thank…

Dr. Peter Brill: What’s your last name? Henley, that’s right….

David Debin: Lisa Henley.

Dr. Peter Brill: Lisa Henley.

David Debin: I’d like to thank my agent, that William Morris for getting me the gig.

Dr. Peter Brill: And tune in next time to The Third Age. This is Dr. Peter Brill.