Charging neutral is a skill I teach that is at the core of presenting self in a way that often generates powerful results.

Here are two examples of charging neutral in action:

My husband likes to party at the beach with his “friends” who happen to be girls in their mid to late twenties. He is in his mid fifties. He knows I do not like it. He needed to spend the night and he said he would stay at one of the girls’ houses. I said, “That’s not appropriate,” and walked out of the room. I came back later and said, “If you want to go to the beach, go ahead. I don’t want you to stay home if you don’t want to.” I went into the bathroom to get ready for bed and did not say anything more about it. My tone was level and matter of fact. The next day he decided not to go.

When I had been in a car accident and didn’t recover instantly, my spouse justified dating by, of course, “the marriage made me do it” reasoning. “My girlfriend can do things with me that my wife can’t. She admires me for all the athletic things I can do that my wife doesn’t want (!) to do with me anymore, etc.” When he screwed up our taxes by filing a joint return and faking my signature on it, making me liable for his immense taxes, which I could never pay, this was too much. He also kept saying he had cut off communication with the woman and I found evidence that he had not. When I asked him about this, he said, “She admires me more than you do!” I simply said, “You haven’t done her taxes, have you?” And he said no more about it, and their association began to get some reality into it and after a few more truth-seeking expeditions, was evaporated.