Relationship expert tells people to never get married unless you're willing to do 3 things

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.upworthy.com/three-marriage-tips-from-a-relationship-expert-ex1

Ngl being American right now feels exactly like being back in the home of my deeply dysfunctional family of origin, where my parents were each using me and my siblings to try and hurt each other and blamed me for it all and also my siblings blamed me too & kept telling me that all the pain for everyone would go away if i would just stop resisting

#domesticviolence #childhoodtrauma #uspol #ipv #trauma #family #narcissism #abuse #domesticabuse

Partnership Studies 1: Dominator and Partnership Models

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/07/02

Riane Eisler, an Austrian-born American systems scientist, futurist, and human rights advocate, is renowned for her influential work on cultural transformation and gender equity. Best known for The Chalice and the Blade, she introduced the partnership vs. dominator models of social organization. She received the Humanist Pioneer Award, and in conversation with Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Eisler emphasized the urgent need for humanists to focus on values-based systems and the transformative power of caring economics. Drawing from neuroscience and history, she argues that peace begins at home and calls for a shift in worldview to build more equitable, sustainable, and compassionate societies rooted in connection, not control. The three books of hers of note that could be highlighted are The Chalice and the Blade—now in its 57th U.S. printing with 30 foreign editions, The Real Wealth of Nations, and Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future (Oxford University Press, 2019). Eisler shares her personal journey and groundbreaking systems analysis that redefines how we understand politics, economics, gender, and social change. Drawing from her childhood escape from Nazi-occupied Austria, Eisler explains her framework of the domination-partnership social scale. She argues that genuine transformation requires examining four cornerstones: family and childhood, gender roles, economic values, and cultural narratives/language. Highlighting how authoritarian structures perpetuate violence and trauma, she calls for a shift toward partnership systems rooted in empathy, equity, and relations of mutuality rather than in-group versus out-group thinking and acting. Eisler’s work invites us to rethink progress through a truly whole-systems perspective. This interview was conducted June 21, 2025.

Riane Eisler: Would you like me to begin with a personal note? Because that is what I would like to do.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Please do.

Eisler: Well, I have a great deal of passion for this work of systems analysis and for spreading what I call the partnership-domination social scale—a new way of looking at the world. That’s where it all starts: our worldview and how we live in this world. Systems can change from what I have called a domination-oriented to a partnership-oriented model. That passion is deeply rooted in my childhood.

And, yes, I include childhood and family—areas that are not usually part of the conventional discourse about politics, economics, climate change, and so on—in my analysis as fundamental. It began in my childhood. I was born in Vienna, Austria, and as a small child, I and my parents fled the Nazis after the German annexation of Austria in 1938. That experience—escaping the horrors that many did not escape—shaped me profoundly.

I witnessed cruelty and violence firsthand. I remember the night when the Gestapo came to our home and took my father away. But I also saw what I now call spiritual courage. My mother found the courage to resist out of love. She recognized one of the men as a young Austrian who had once run errands for the family business, she confronted him and demanded the release of my father. My mother could have been arrested or killed. Many Jewish people were rounded up or killed that night. It was during the November pogrom, known as Kristallnacht—”the Night of Broken Glass”—because of all the glass shattered in Jewish homes, synagogues, and businesses. By a miracle—and yes, by bribing the officials—she succeeded in having my father released.

Seeing these two human possibilities—cruelty and compassion—led me to a lifelong question that underlies my research: Does it have to be this way? Must there be so much cruelty, insensitivity, and violence when humans have such an enormous capacity for caring, empathy, and peace? It is revealing, is it not, that we do not even have a word for nonviolence that does not contain the word “violence”?

Years later, to answer whether domination is inevitable or whether an alternative is possible—given our human capacity for caring, consciousness, and connection—I embarked on a whole-systems analysis. I realized immediately that I could not answer my childhood questions using the usual categories: right and left, religious and secular, Eastern and Western, Northern and Southern, capitalist and socialist. After all, history shows us brutal, oppressive, and authoritarian regimes under every one of these labels. So, none of these categories tells us what we must build instead.

And here is something that might surprise you: I realized that what I—and much of social discourse—had long taken for granted, namely the marginalization or outright neglect of family relations and childhood, needed to be brought to the very center of our understanding of social systems and cultural transformation.

The marginalization—at best—of nothing less than the majority of humanity, namely women and children, is central. We cannot understand human societies without examining our origins and our families. Children usually spend their earliest and most formative years within families, right? As I write in my latest book, Nurturing Our Humanity, which came out with Oxford University Press in 2019, we know this from nothing less than neuroscience. We know that our brains are not fully formed at birth and that we acquire our worldviews—our paradigms, if you will—long before we have fully developed brains, much less mature critical capacities.

To make a long story short, this systems analysis led me to define two primary cultural configurations: the partnership system and the domination system. Of course, no society is completely oriented to one or the other; there is always a mix. However, these configurations encompass family, gender relations, and other domains that we have been taught—and are still taught—to marginalize. We cannot understand our past, our present, or—most importantly—the possibilities for our future, without a systems analysis that connects these dots. That is what led me to develop the partnership-domination social scale.

Jacobsen: When you are looking at this partnership-domination social scale, what are the key factors that form its core structure—the elements that everything else tends to grow from?

Eisler: Well, I will start with some examples. If you look at the Taliban and fundamentalist Iran—both Eastern religious societies—or if you look at Hitler’s Nazi Germany, or Putin’s Russia today, or even the new regime here in the United States right now, they all lean heavily toward the domination side of the spectrum. Even though they differ in religion, geography, or ideology—Eastern, Western, Northern, Southern, secular, religious, and so on—think about it for a moment: what do they all have in common?

First—and this takes us back to the fundamentals—they share a top-down, authoritarian structure in both the family and society at large, including their economic systems. Why have we not been taught to include this in our analyses? Yet, as I said, neuroscience shows us that nothing less than our early experiences shape our brains. The second factor is gender, which again has been marginalized.

Gender is not just a so-called “women’s issue” or now also a “men’s issue”—which, of course, makes it an issue for everyone, including those who do not fit neatly into either category. Gender is a fundamental organizing principle in families, societies, and economies. All of these foundational elements are interconnected, and there are four main ones.

First, we have the structure of family and childhood, which largely shapes the structure of society because the two are intrinsically connected. Second, we have gender. What do children learn in a family or culture that leans toward the domination side? They learn to equate difference—starting with the difference in form between the male and female body—with rigid gender stereotypes and strict hierarchies, leaving no room for anything in between. And they learn to rank male and “masculine” over female and feminine. They learn to equate this difference with superiority or inferiority, with dominating or being dominated, with serving or being served. 

So, what you get in domination systems—beginning with gender—is in-group versus out-group thinking. Our human capacity for empathy, which is an evolutionary trait, must either be suppressed entirely for the out-group or, at best, compartmentalized.

Now, the third element—and this is crucial—is violence. Domination systems are fundamentally maintained through fear and the threat or infliction of pain. This has numerous ramifications, as I have emphasized, because all these elements are interconnected. Domination-oriented societies have built-in mechanisms to perpetuate themselves through various forms of abuse—ranging from  violence against women and children to abuse in workplaces to organized social violence such as warfare, pogroms, and lynchings.

Consider again the Taliban: their oppression is deeply rooted in rigid gender control. The same is true of Iran under Khomeini and other fundamentalist regimes. Hitler’s Nazi regime placed enormous emphasis on controlling women and enforcing strict gender roles—though this aspect is often overlooked in mainstream discourse because, whether people lean left or right politically, our dominant economic and political theories have long marginalized gender. Marx, for instance,considered the so-called “woman question” secondary to the “working man’s” struggle –though he might have thought differently today, given the progress of international women’s movements and shifts in consciousness,.

The fourth element is what stories are considered normative. Many of our inherited stories about human nature come from rigid, authoritarian, violent dominator times. They teach us that human nature is inherently bad or selfish. But this is simply untrue. The entire debate of “nature versus nurture” is misleading: it is not nature or nurture—it is nature and nurture. Nurture determines, as some of the research I cite in Nurturing Our Humanity shows, which of our genetic potentials are expressed or suppressed.

Genes do play a role, but they constantly interact with what is fundamentally a human creation: culture. Look at stories like blaming Eve or Pandora for all of humanity’s ills—these myths perfectly reflect the marginalization of women and reinforce the domination system’s worldview. So, we must begin questioning these stories, connecting the dots, and bringing back into focus what has long been ignored: childhood, family, and gender.

Once we do this, we have a framework for both tactics—addressing the constant crises domination systems produce—and for strategies—building long-term change. This is why my work identifies four cornerstones: family and childhood, gender, economics (specifically, what we reward and label as productive or unproductive work), and story and language.

It is so telling, is it not, that so much of what we consider “productive” ignores what sustains life? Caring and connection are vital from the moment we are born. Yet, in many economic models, this essential work is undervalued or invisible. Therefore, redefining what we consider productive or reproductive labour is crucial. And, of course, how we use stories and language shapes everything.

Jacobsen: So, what about the axes of individuals? Do you feel or think that we need to create new stories when many freer societies are, in various ways—though not in every respect—moving away from dominator structures and processes, whether you are talking about individuals or how society sees itself and functions?

Eisler: Absolutely. But before we can present or create new stories, we need a transformation of our worldview. I know that is possible because it happened to me. I have a background also as an attorney. One day, the partner in the Beverly Hills entertainment law firm I was working for called me into his office to compliment me—or so he thought. He said, “You don’t think like a woman.”

I took it as a compliment at the time. That shows you where my consciousness was—I identified with the so-called masculine. This segregation into so-called “feminine” and “masculine” qualities is something we need to reexamine. And we are seeing this change all around us again and again. Think of all the men today who are fathering in ways that were once seen as exclusively mothering—diapering babies, feeding babies.

This is fundamental. As I have mentioned, it serves as an organizing principle for families, societies, and economies.

Jacobsen: Are there areas that you find are still understudied about this theoretical framework for analyzing systems of partnership and domination in the world?

Eisler: You have to consider what real whole-systems analysis entails—and what often passes for it. I was, by the way, exposed to that very early in my career. One of my first jobs was with an offshoot of the RAND Corporation, the Systems Development Corporation. This was eons ago. They thought they were doing systems work, but, of course, they were leaving out gender. They were leaving our family. They were leaving out childhood. They were not connecting the dots. But the concept of systems stayed with me.

Even being trained as an attorney, which I am, taught me systems thinking. In law school, you are taught how to brief a case. But in reality, a client does not come to you and say, “Please apply Section 1222 of this or that code to my situation.” The client comes with a story, and it is up to the attorney to determine which laws, precedents, regulations, and statutes apply.

I had extensive training in systems analysis. When I discovered feminism—which I fully embrace, though I often avoid the term because it can sound separatist—I realized we need to transform gender stereotypes for both women and men. Men do not have it so good in a domination system either. Just think about it.

You have to give your whole self—nothing less than your life—because some man at the top, like Putin, demands it. Right? And this is fundamental: to be considered a “real man” in domination systems, you have to suppress your humanity.

Jacobsen: Yes. So it is not only women who suffer—it is men, too. Would you argue, then, that in domination-oriented societies, this suppression of men’s humanity is not only required but is actually at the root of the system?

Eisler: Oh, it is required, and my analysis shows how it is systematically suppressed. I was interviewed by Scientific American, for example, not long ago about why there is such a strong connection between trauma in families—where it all starts—and authoritarian societies. Yes, many leaders of institutions that are regressing toward domination are themselves deeply traumatized. But really, we are all traumatized to some degree in domination systems.

Domination systems are trauma factories. They begin with the misallocation of resources. There is always money for the so-called “masculine”—for wars, for weapons, and so on. However, there is somehow never enough money for caring for people, particularly for caring for children. This makes no sense. Yet, it is deeply embedded in the system.

So, when you do accurate systems analysis, you must connect the dots. You cannot just point at one factor and say, “This is the cause.” We are hosting a summit called “Peace Begins at Home” on October 29, 2025. We will feature speakers from around the world. It is an amazing virtual event—and you, of course, are invited. The point of it is to emphasize that we cannot keep using only linear cause-and-effect thinking. For complex living systems, we need to draw on newer theoretical frameworks, such as chaos theory, nonlinear dynamics, and self-organization theory.

My work relates to these. That is not to say that linear analysis has no value, there are always intervening variables. But if we study living systems like societies, we miss the point if we fail to connect their key components. I have introduced a new methodology: the study of relational dynamics.

First, what kinds of relationships does a given type of society encourage or suppress? That is a fundamental question. Second, how do the major components of that society interconnect to either support or inhibit a particular pattern of relationships across all its institutions? That is genuine whole-systems analysis—and it is not as complicated as some think.

The real struggle for our future is not between right and left. Look at Stalin’s regime, for example—his wife committed suicide because of how deeply entangled he was in maintaining a domination system. This connects to the larger structure. The real struggle is between the regression and perpetuation of domination systems and the advancement of partnership systems.

Those invested in domination have a very coherent worldview that starts with controlling family and childhood—how you”raise” your children. Gender is a massive piece of it, yet it is so fragmented in our mainstream discourse. We must integrate all of this to see the whole picture.

Jacobsen: Including economics?

Eisler: Economics, as practiced in domination systems, is domination economics—whether it is an ancient Chinese emperor, an Arab sheikh, an Indian maharaja, a feudal lord, or so-called neoliberalism, which is neither new nor liberal. They are geniuses at co-opting terms and coining phrases that mask reality. What is neoliberalism? It conditions people to accept a system in which those at the bottom must content themselves with the scraps that, quite literally, in feudal times fell from the opulent tables of those at the top.

Jacobsen: Do you have any final thoughts for this first session based on the overview we have just covered?

Eisler: Well, this overview must end with the four cornerstones. Because without addressing them, we are just treading water. I was speaking to a friend of mine who now works to help progressive NGOs defend themselves against hacking, surveillance, and appropriation. This is true—it is big business under the current system. But it does not fundamentally change anything.

We have to understand, as I said earlier, that the real struggle for our future is not between right and left, religious and secular, Eastern and Western, Northern and Southern. There are religious movements, such as Unitarian Universalism, which are very accepting. The Baháʼí Faith tries to move in that direction. Some mystical traditions focus on the core teachings of Jesus—on caring and compassion, the so-called feminine principles. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. But in most religions, scriptures also contain overlays of domination teachings.

The struggle for our future lies between regression to domination—anchored in a concrete framework that encompasses childhood, gender, economics, narrative, and language—and the move toward a partnership system. Examine our fragmented movements: the gender equality movement, the environmental movement, the relatively recent children’s rights movement, the push for economic equity, and the movement to value diversity. Why do you think there is such an effort now in the United States to dismantle diversity policies? It is all related. The opposition has a coherent frame. We, so far, do not—and we are scattered. Without a coherent worldview, without a cohesive frame, we are floundering.

Jacobsen: Riane, I just wanted to say—thank you so much for your time today.  

Last updated May 3, 2025. These terms govern all In Sight Publishing content—past, present, and future—and supersede any prior notices. In Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons BY‑NC‑ND 4.0; © In Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen 2012–Present. All trademarks, performances, databases & branding are owned by their rights holders; no use without permission. Unauthorized copying, modification, framing or public communication is prohibited. External links are not endorsed. Cookies & tracking require consent, and data processing complies with PIPEDA & GDPR; no data from children < 13 (COPPA). Content meets WCAG 2.1 AA under the Accessible Canada Act & is preserved in open archival formats with backups. Excerpts & links require full credit & hyperlink; limited quoting under fair-dealing & fair-use. All content is informational; no liability for errors or omissions: Feedback welcome, and verified errors corrected promptly. For permissions or DMCA notices, email: scott.jacobsen2025@gmail.com. Site use is governed by BC laws; content is “as‑is,” liability limited, users indemnify us; moral, performers’ & database sui generis rights reserved.

#CaringEconomics #ChildhoodTrauma #DominationModels #genderEquity #PartnershipSystems

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