Modern Wisdom - #893 - Jillian Turecki - 9 Harsh Truths About How Relationships Work

Episode Date: January 23, 2025

Jillian Turecki is a relationship coach, teacher, writer and author. How do you create a thriving and loving relationship that truly lasts? While many may stumble into one by chance, building a deep and meaningful connection often requires more than luck. So what role does the inner work play in not just finding love, but building a relationship that continues to grow and flourish over time? Expect to learn why having a thriving relationship begins with self-work, why the mind is a battlefield in relationships, why lust is not the same as love, the critical reasons it's important to love yourself properly, why you can’t convince someone to love you, why it's important to make peace with your parents and how to do so, and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get up to $50 off the RP Hypertrophy App at https://rpstrength.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Join Whoop’s January Jumpstart Challenge and get your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Get a 20% discount on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It begins with you. They do not have the power. We do. All the disappointment, confusion, and drama of your former relationships can be traced to the universal fear that you are not enough. Yes. Everything that you do inside of a relationship

that you are really confused about, that's been maddening to you and to your former partners or anything that you are questioning, it can be boiled down to the fact that you are afraid that you're not enough for this person. And if you're not enough, that somehow love is going to be taken away from you. Because if we, when we are confronted with that insecurity that we are not good enough in some way, that's when we start to act out all our weirdness inside of a relationship, honestly. And yes, of course, there's childhood, there's conditioning, there's your

parents, all these things are influences. But when people are angry, they're afraid. When people are lashing out, they're afraid. When people are clinging, they're afraid. When people are shutting down, they are afraid. And I started the book and named it, It Begins With You, because no one is going to stand in your way more than you. No one is going to stand in your way more than you. No one is going to lie to you more than you do to yourself. Same for me, this is just everyone.

It's not about you're the only person to blame. It's not about blame at all. But if we want to change our relationship lives, if we want to change our lives at all, we have to be able to look within and see the ways in which our insecurity gets in the way of a relationship. We have to see where also not just our insecurity, but our belief system and our conditioning and the things that happened in childhood, we are the common denominator in all our relationships. That's actually really good news because it means that you can actually change something. This concept of is the problem is you, not necessarily. The problem could very well be the people who you're choosing,

but you're choosing them. So you're choosing them. Why? And so the first principle, the first truth is you have to be willing to look within. And a lot of people are not willing to do that until they are desperate. But it's the only way. It's interesting that not enough thing that it makes love and attachment and care feel contingent. It feels like if I could be more, if I was able to be dot dot dot. And, you know, if you listen to a lot of the discussions on the internet around

romance, but also around friendships and stuff like that, a lot of the time, you know, it's a hopeful and motivating message to say, pick yourself up by your bootstraps, outgrow the person that hurt you, make yourself better, take this curse and turn it into a lesson instead of a blessing that it could have been, but it wasn't. So now you're going to, you know, alchemize yourself into some better version of you, like all of that's fine. But the subtext of a lot of that conversation is still, you're not sort of worthy as you are, and there's this place that you need to get yourself to, or could get yourself to.

And if only you were there, maybe you wouldn't have been rejected by this person. Maybe they would have actually, maybe you would have been able to fulfill their desires to the point where they would have actually been happy with you as you. Yes. And that's a losing strategy. I mean, so much of, if you're reflecting on past relationships that didn't work, the best thing to do is just to let go and to surrender to the fact that life is about making mistakes and sometimes epic mistakes. And if you've got someone smart whispering in your ear telling you to take a look at this and see what you can learn from it so that you don't repeat it. That's the best case scenario. Some things just don't

work out because it wasn't right. Some things don't work out. Some relationships don't work out because you both were too immature to make it work out. Sometimes it doesn't work out because I don't know, like it wasn't supposed to, you were supposed to learn something. It was supposed to be an experience. Maybe it was supposed to be a love affair instead of it being a marriage. You know, I mean, but this is the thing that we, um, romantic relationships are what are where we feel most vulnerable.

And there's two worlds. There's two worlds where I think, um, your inner patterns show up in a very unique way, the first one is in relationships and the second one is in business. Always. Um, I think James Clear says that, uh, starting a business is a vehicle for personal growth, masquerading as a wealth making enterprise. Yes. I would wholeheartedly agree with that.

I was trying to think about this over the festive period. I guess family, you know, your whatever birth family is probably a third area as only child living a few thousand miles away from home. That's not something I have to contend with too much, but, um, I, those three areas, and I was thinking at least about the first two, the romantic thing and the business thing about why it's the case. And I guess it's because there's very few other situations you get yourself into where you're pushed so far.

That there's, if it was a person on the street, yeah, I was in New York only yesterday and there was a person on the street, I was in New York only yesterday, and there was a person on the street, obviously in a bit of mental distress, homeless guy, and he's sort of shouting and talking and pointing at you and whatever, and you go, well, I can just walk away. I don't have any attachment to this person. I don't have any sense of obligation to fulfill the needs of whatever, and then I don't need to think about it anymore. But with a business, it's got this sense of self attached to it.

It's got your self-worth embedded in it. And you were there and you look at all of the time you've invested in this thing and look at the future you could have together. And the exact same thing is true when it comes to romance as well. So yeah, business and relationships are able to expose our inner patterns in a way that very few other things can. Yeah, absolutely. Because, you know, you said something about self-worth being embedded in that.

Absolutely. It's also your belief system. It's, you know, you know, my dad never was able to make it, so I need to make it. Or my dad always put pressure on me to be a certain way and to achieve. It's who am I if I'm not achieving? Who am I if I'm not successful? And so again, it's identity, it's self-worth, it's your entire childhood being exposed basically in your entire beliefs. It's your entire childhood being exposed basically in your entire beliefs. It's your relationship with certainly at least one of your parents being exposed pretty much

and triggered all the time in business and in romantic relationships. If you're the kind of person who doesn't like to give up or you're very achievement oriented, then chances are, well, chances are you have had a lot of achievement. But on the flip side of the coin is you have a very hard time letting go. So with everything that we deal with, there's a positive and there's sort of a corresponding negative and it's going to be incredibly triggering for sure. That said, I really think that even if work is going phenomenally well, even if you have all the money you want, even if your health is good, if your relationship, specifically your intimate relationship, is struggling, you're suffering. Even if you have purpose, if that relationship is not going well, you

are going to wake up stressed. And, um, you know, for some people, you could say the same thing about business as well, but I think that, um, I think deep down in everyone's heart, uh, they want love more than they want money and fame. Well, if we think about what we've created a proxy of with business success, all of those things ultimately lead back to some form of status, which is tradable for love and acceptance from a partner and from the wider group. So it's a much more direct route to get the thing, which is the belonging, the

reassurance, the fulfillment from the partner, as opposed to all of these proxies, but the problem is that you can't really show a balance sheet of how much love and care you have. So, you know, McNamara's fallacy. Have you heard of this? No, educate me. So, um, the Vietnam war, they were trying to work out what the best metrics were to measure to work out whether America was winning or losing the war.

And McNamara decided to use, I think it was the number of enemy combatants that were killed, uh, because it's very easy. It appears in a balance sheet. You can work that out. Uh, but what they should have been looking at was what was the sentiment at home. Because the reason the Vietnam war was a massive L for the United States was not only the fact that they didn't manage to make the ground and, and, and, and conquer in the manner that they wanted, but it was the way that the

sentiment at home changed. So the rule is we intend to measure what we care about, but instead we end up caring about what we can measure. And the fact that you can see your number of followers on social media or the size of your bank balance or the house that you've got or the car or whatever it might be, and then you can play this comparison game, you care about what you can measure as opposed to measuring what you want to care about. And yeah, if you, if you could somehow, if there was some dashboards that showed everybody's marital

happiness, I'm sure people would pay a lot more attention, like embarrassingly people would pay way more attention to that relationship satisfaction if they could just find a way to, to measure. Yeah, that's interesting. You're probably right. Absolutely. But you know, I mean, yeah, it's, you know, it's interesting. It's interesting how many people I know who, I think there's, people need a sense of purpose. They need to feel connected to themselves, they need to have a sense of self that they bring into a relationship and a relationship is a mirror. It is going to show you where your work lies and where your work is. I just was recently having a conversation with someone and he was just opening up to me about how he and his wife are going through a rough patch.

They have an eight month old baby and babies can really rock the foundation of a marriage or a relationship. He was just describing, he's like, we're going through a rough patch, like we're arguing about this and that, and you know, I don't know what to do. And this idea that he kind of wanted to like give up. And I said, no, no, you can't like what? No, you can't give up. You, right now you're in your head

and you're thinking that it's all her fault and you're doing everything and it's not. It takes two to tango. And so I'm sharing this story just because, you know, so many relationships end because people don't know, they don't have the tools to make the relationship work. And that's part of the reason why we feel so incredibly vulnerable. There's lots of books out there about how to make money, how to run a business and all of that. It doesn't address, a lot of the books don't actually address what we were just a minute ago talking about, which is this is what it's going to trigger inside

of you. And there's lots of great amazing books about communication and communication. Let me tell you something, that's a skill that everyone needs when it comes to a relationship. But there's not enough literature out there to address. This is like, this is what your mind is going to do to you when you are in a relationship. And if you are not careful and you let your mind get the best of you, it's done.

And so I said to him, I said, you are stuck in your head. I understand that it's hard, but you don't just leave when it's hard. You figure it out or you do your best to figure it out. And when I say your best, literally your best. And after that, you both can make a decision. And there's no abuse here. There's nothing like that. They're very committed.

But it's amazing to me how, well, I guess it's not amazing to me. I think that relationships are where we feel, yes, the most vulnerable, but what goes along with that is sort of like a helplessness, like sort of hopeless, you know, like, I don't know how to make this better. All I know is that I feel like shit. Yeah. The, the, I think people can put up with a lot of suffering. If only they didn't, if only they knew that there was a route out, right?

The, it's the reason that Uber is so good. The reason that Uber was a revolution wasn't that you could get a cab from anywhere by using a single app on your phone, it's that you knew how long it was going to take before it got to you. So it removed the anxiety of waiting. Right? That was what it was. And not having to take out your wallet.

True. Okay. Yeah. I mean, look, there's lots of reasons, but one of the things that people, one of the things people miss under, they underestimate is that this relates to the second truth, the mind is a battlefield. Our minds are always creating stories. And if we don't question our thoughts and beliefs, our heads can quickly become battlefields.

Yes. So in very ancient yogic texts and Buddhist texts, there's this idea of the monkey mind. So the, the, the metaphor is like, if you think of a monkey swinging from branch to branch, just sort of swinging and moving, that's sort of like the nature of the mind. It's just going from thought to thought to thought. And the monkey's wild. And so if we don't learn the tools and we don't practice taming the monkey, the monkey will take full control. We are story making machines. We like to make a story out of everything. We are story making machines. We like to make a story out of everything. And some people have a very, they have a knack for assigning a lot of disempowering and negative

meanings to everything. And, but none of us are immune to that. And so what's happening in a relationship when it's going well? Well, the story in everyone's head is that it's filled with a lot of positive meaning and positivity and love. The relationship that's not going well, it's two brains that are creating a lot of stories. Of course, there's other reasons that a relationship's not going well. There's very, very extreme circumstances that could happen.

But on the average, that's what's happening. And let's take this out of the context of relationships. It's like you can relate it to business or anything else. I mean, how many times have you like laid in bed at night, replaying something in your mind or replaying something in the morning. You've created a whole story about what they did, what they thought, and why they did that.

You get yourself all worked up and you get yourself in such a state and it was all in your head. And I think part of maturing is being able to catch ourselves in those thoughts and just being able to say, okay, I'm like, I'm not thinking clearly right now. I'm, you know, my mind is like, my mind is messy right now. And so this was something that I never learned until I started doing this work, which is that the story that we assign to anything determines how we feel about anything. And that our minds are designed to keep us safe. They're not designed to make us happy. And so we have to be able to discipline our minds

and question our thoughts often. This is the whole idea of mindfulness, like bringing mindfulness into your life or bringing mindfulness to your relationship is bringing more awareness. Awareness of how our thoughts can get the better of us, how our stories and the meanings that we assign to certain things.

Well, if he loved me then or if she loved me then, that's a big one. I know you meant to do this or you wouldn't have said that if you didn't do that or if you didn't feel that. These are the things that can really, really destroy a relationship and destroy our experience of a relationship. Yeah. I suppose you start after a while to not even have a relationship with the person, you have a relationship with your relationship to the relationship.

You have a relationship with the story that you have. About the relationship. Yes. And that, it doesn't surprise me that, you know, it kind of is not necessarily the beginning of the end, but certainly the beginning of a difficult period that you're going to have to get over if you want to fix it, because you're becoming increasingly isolated. You're having an experience on your own, which you're not sharing with the person that it's about.

And then you're becoming resentful. Correct. Yeah. The Neil Strauss, was this last year? I think this was two years ago. The best quote that I heard, unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments. Yes, it's brilliant. Yes.

Yeah. Fuck. Yeah. So good. So correct and so accurate. Yeah. Well, expectations and you have to really manage our expectations as well. You know, a lot of times in a relationship, we're expecting this sort of rightness from our partner.

And we seldom do we look within and think, how can I be better as a partner? How can I change something here? How am I complicit in this thing that's happening? Absolutely. And, um, you know, you take two people in a relationship who are willing to ask themselves that question, how am I complicit in whatever is going on here that is not working? Chances are you're going to have a, those people are going to have a pretty epic relationship. Honestly, accountability is the most important thing in a relationship.

Dig into that for me. What do you mean when you say accountability? Being willing to be a hundred percent responsible for your experience. So you're responsible for your thoughts, you're responsible for your perspectives, you're responsible for your behavior. That does not mean that two people come in, let's say they want couples coaching. It's not like, well, 50% is your fault and 50% is your fault. It could be that one person is actually causing more of the problems,

but oftentimes we have to be very accountable for our projections. So something that we do in relationships is we project. So before we become more mindful and more conscious, we think that we're looking at the person that we love. When really what we're looking at is our ex, our mom, our dad, we're looking at them through the filter of our past. And instead of actually seeing the person, our unconscious is reminded of something that our mom or dad did that we couldn't stand and then all of a sudden we are, you know, we're blaming them as if for all our unfinished business and resentment against one or both of our parents. That's projection. Or we get into a relationship with a certain level of insecurity and low self-esteem and then when our partner is not

making us happy, we think, you're not loving me well when you came into the relationship insecure. came into the relationship insecure. So we have, so accountability is being able to say, all right, we have a problem, there's something that's upsetting us, or there's something that's upsetting me. What am I, how am I complicit? Am I projecting here? Do I even know what their needs are? Have I even been expressing my needs? So it really truly is in my view the most important, it's not the only one that matters, but it's the most important relationship skill is to be able to take full responsibility. That is a very good measure of someone's emotional intelligence and of someone's character.

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That's rpstrength.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. And yeah, yeah. Characters so interesting to think about. Yeah. Are you able to, are you able to put yourself to one side, sort of your narrow need for, to be right, uh, to put yourself first ahead of this thing that's supposed to be the thing that you care about. You know, if, if what I think both of us believe is true, which is you can have

a great career and a crappy relationship and be pretty miserable. You can have an average career and a great relationship and have a delightful life. Yes. So what we're saying is the most important thing, if you're going to couple up, the most important thing is who you couple up with. Absolutely. Okay. That means that everything comes second to the relationship. Well, in many ways, yes. I mean, you need to look after your health so that you can show up.

Yes. Health is obviously the most important thing and our relationship to ourselves is the most important thing, but you can't, it's not so separate from the relationship from the other because you're constantly going to have to, you know, I don't know, there's going to be a lot of, if you're in a relationship for the longterm, there's going to be a lot of times you're just going to be like, it makes so annoying. I don't feel like dealing. Is it really about them or are you just in a bad mood?

Okay, you don't really feel like having this conversation with them. It's bringing up a lot of discomfort for you. Are you going to go for the temporary comfort in not having the conversation or are you just going to continually make things worse? We are constantly being asked to transcend ourselves and our egos in a relationship. But yeah, I think all relationships are the most important thing. They really do determine our lives. And a romantic relationship, look,

it's the person you are naked with emotionally, physically. It's the person who could leave you. person who could leave you. You have friendships that there's a level of certainty that we have with certain friendships and with family members that they're not going anywhere. Or if we don't speak to them for a week, our relationship is still strong. Those rules don't apply. It just doesn't apply in a romantic relationship. Everyone fears on some level being left, being unloved, being abandoned in some way. In writing this book, I really wanted people to ask themselves, well, and to reflect on well, what are some of the things that you do when you're afraid in a relationship? You know, because you got to know.

What would you say to someone who is in the middle of the mind as a battlefield world, how do you advise them, especially when it's to do with relating to somebody else, the person that they care about the most, the one that they're most scared of, that's going to leave them, how can they just fix that, get out of the head a little bit, get back to some rationality? Um, to get out of the head is to, it's the, the pathway is always to get into your body. So you want to deepen your breath because whenever you're in your head, like really

in your head, like in the thick of the battlefield of your mind, um, your breath is shallow and your muscles are very tight. So the first thing is to just, to, to take a timeout and connect your breathing and to take a deep breath in and deep breath out and let your exhalation be longer. You first have to do that so that you can calm your nervous system, if you will. And then you can ask yourself some questions. I love the work of Byron Katie where

she says, is it true? Are you sure that it's true? You can ask yourself these questions, but it always starts with when you're in your head, you're reactive. In order to transition from a reactive state to a more responsive state, or use the word a more rational state, you use the word a more rational state, you have to incorporate your breathing. You may need to do a little movement.

You may need to just go for a walk. You may need to call a friend. You may need to work out. You may need to take a shower. You may need to eat something. Because when we eat, it changes our nervous system. It changes our physiological state. You get more grounded when you eat, you get more satiated, you get more full.

The energy starts to go down. So, um, that's a first and foremost. Yeah. I, um, I know the fact that people get so, so stuck and so caught up thinking and thinking and overthinking, which makes the overthinking worse and doesn't allow them to get out of it. I know it's, it's a ruthless bind and especially the sort of people that listen to shows like this, who are a bit thoughtful and maybe introspective

and, you know, they really want to, they want to do well. And they see their own failings from a front row seat. They think, oh my God, like, look at how viscerally I'm able to experience this horrible sensation. I can't stop thinking about this thought loop I'm caught up in. Or, oh my God, my brain's about to tell me that same story that I've told myself about the situation. I'm bored of my own thoughts. I'm bored of myself telling thoughts. I'm bored of myself telling me this thing. That's a good place to be. It's good to be bored with yourself because typically that's

when we start to change. When we can't stand it anymore. Otherwise, we're just kind of like the loop keeps happening because it's so comfortable and it's so familiar and we're so unconscious about it. Once we're conscious and we're just like, I'm so bored of this, that's when we actually start to make a change, actually. Truth number three, lust is not the same thing as love. Knowing the difference is essential for building long lasting love. Yes. So when we first meet someone and we're really excited about them, we enter a sort of euphoric state, some sort of euphoria a feeling of novelty, adventure, freedom from

the monotony of our lives, or freedom even from overthinking sometimes. It's like all of a sudden, if we've been living up here in our heads and then we meet someone we're really excited about, all of a sudden we feel like we're in our hearts more. And that's always a more comfortable place for human beings to live. We're always happier when we are living it, when we're more in our bodies and less in our heads. Always. And so, and then we get, you know, people in this stage of meeting someone in a relationship.

There's a spectrum, but some people we can get really crazy during this time. We can get incredibly obsessive. And we're not taught in school how to process our enthusiasm. So then we start, you know, the crush begins and we start thinking that we can't live without this person and they are the one and that whole narrative. When really what is happening is that you have chemistry with someone and that rush of hormones and that rush of excitement has very little to do, as I said, with them. And love is not just a feeling.

Love is actually a verb. It's an intentional practice. We do love. We don't just feel love. And that thing that you feel in the beginning is not love. You know, people are like, oh, we have such an amazing connection. Well, great. I don't want to rain on anyone's parade. I mean, we have a very fleeting experience on this earth. And you know, that's a lot of fun. But we also have to adapt. And we have to process the fact that what we're experiencing is, you know, it's

not love, it's chemistry, it's attraction. And people think, so let's say the honeymoon stage of a relationship, say it lasts anywhere three months to six months, maybe nine months, it's depending. When we start to wake up from that drunkenness, we're like drunk on lust and excitement. When we start to emerge, we start to sober up. Then we realize, oh, you're a person and you have flaws and you're not coming to save me. You're not better than me because sometimes we want to meet that person who's in some way better than us when the truth is you're just going to meet that person who's in some way better than us when the truth is you're just going to choose the person who's on a similar level of consciousness as your own. And even if you did meet someone who's better than you, they're not going to want

to be in a relationship with you. So, and no one's inherently better than you, but you know what I mean. Someone who maybe has dealt with their childhood stuff and has their life in order and maybe you don't. So we wake up from that euphoria and then we think, oh, this isn't fun. And then all the expectations come and you're like, well, you're not making me happy. And that depression that I had, you know, two days before I met you, that magically went away when I met you, it's come back. There must be something wrong with you or this must not be love. And people are operating like this more than you think. I, I know exactly what you're talking about.

Does this, it's so funny listeners of the show, the OG OG listeners from seven years ago, when we first started it, um, you know, you're talking about. There's this, it's so funny listeners of the show, the OG, OG listeners from seven years ago when we first started it, uh, we'll know a friend of mine, Johnny, who was being on the show quite a lot. And he once said this thing to me and it's taken probably until now for me to actually realize that it was true. He said he saw a lot of his friends kind of going through the same cycle, which was between a 12 to 18 month relationship

that had a good amount of commitment. And then they got toward the end of that and things just didn't seem as exciting anymore. And there was some conflict and then they assumed that that meant that it's because well, we're not compatible and there's something wrong. And then they'd sort of kick the can down the road and then just restart the whole thing over and over again. And yeah, I think we really need to look at ourselves during the first six to 12 months of a relationship, more like drug addicts than people able to make rational decisions. You know, you're a drug addict, but you also happen to be the dealer and the user. Yeah, exactly.

That's actually well said. It's very true. And yeah, that's very true. Unless, unless, you know, you get into a relationship and you're someone who realizes this, unless you read my book or unless you read other people's books, right? And you're like, I understand that what I'm actually looking for is not just this feeling. I'm looking for someone who will challenge me in the best possible ways. Not challenge me to the point where every single wound in my body is triggered because of whatever is going on between the two of us.

But they challenged me to actually step up. They challenged me to be a better person. And we have the same values. And this is someone who I can build with. And immature love. Immature love says, I am in love with my projected idealization of you. And the moment you show me that you're real, I'm going to pull away. The moment you show me that you're real, I'm going to pull away. And mature love says, I see all of you. I see your nuance. I see your shortcomings. I see your brilliance.

I see your quirks. I see your past and I choose you. People don't often talk about this. There's a lot of criticism around, uh, giving up too easily. Uh, you're not sticking about whether it's in a marriage or with family or just in a relationship that's maybe going to turn into one of those things. Uh, but very few people are saying, or coaching people on how to bring yourself back down to earth during the first few months. It's like, don't work harder. You almost need to sort of be less enamored with your partner as opposed to more enamored

with your partner somehow. But one of the things I think a lot of people will feel is that deceleration as they move from the passionate to the companion at attraction system or go from lust to love or get out of the honeymoon fear period or stop infatuation, whatever terminology you want to use. How do you advise the people that you work with? how do you come to think about sort of managing that altitude change? Because you are going to feel it. Yes. It wouldn't work for you to be infatuated with your partner for the rest of time.

You get nothing done. You get nothing done and actually you get pretty bored because we just don't want to be in one state the entire time. It's very destabilizing to feel that way. It's not exactly happiness. Like we feel that euphoria in the beginning, but in that euphoria also comes a lot of instability. And so that's where people get also very stressed out.

And so you're right. How people cope with the transition from the honeymoon stage to the more committed, comfortable stage of a relationship largely determines the longevity of that relationship. And so, what do I tell people? Well, it's funny because I love that comfortable stage of the relationship. I don't want it to be too comfortable, but I like that. So I just try to tell people, look, now you can focus on work as well.

You get your life back, hooray. Yeah, you get your life back. And now you can actually, now's when you can explore real emotional connection and intimacy. Now's where you can actually build trust and camaraderie. Now, and it doesn't mean you're always going to have to work to keep the passion alive, but now you can actually explore things that you can go deeper. You can go deeper and you can explore what a true

emotional connection is, what it means to build safety and trust and respect inside of a relationship, what it means to have someone really be in your corner. And not just because they're afraid to lose you, but because they truly, truly love and support you. And I think that's exciting. This episode is brought to you by Whoop. I've worn Whoop for over five years now, since way before they were a partner on the show and it's the only wearable I've ever stuck with because it is the best. I've actually tracked over 1600 days of my life with it,

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You can get the brand new whoop 4.0 and that 30 day free trial by going to the link in the description below or heading to join.whoop.com slash modern wisdom. That's join.whoop.com slash modern wisdom. Yeah, I think. I had something else I want to say, but after you said it, but this is important. Just that people who want to, who can see the spark or the excitement in that way, that kind of like high euphoria state, to reframe it as look at all of the things that now opens us up to do that we couldn't do previously, I think

is a really lovely reframe. Yeah. And it's very true. And one thing that I will add is this. Um, this is also what you're at great risk of is taking your partner for granted. And, um, this is, you know, stop, don't stop pursuing your partner. Don't stop being curious about this person. partner. Don't stop being curious about this person. Yeah, maybe you're not in that crazy stage, but you still, because you can go deeper and because actually love and trust can really

grow, you still have to be very present and you still have to, you know, in the beginning, we're all the ambassadors of ourselves. We're like, let me just bring, like, you know, in the beginning, we're all the ambassadors of ourselves. We're like, let me just bring, like, you know, let me put my best foot forward. What if you continued to want to or to try to put your best foot forward years in? What would that look like? And what would that feel like? Number four, you have to love yourself. Self-love is actually all that it's cracked up to be. We need it to thrive in a relationship. So there's two camps of thought that's sort of percolating in the Zeichais.

One is you don't have to love yourself to love anyone else. You don't have to love yourself to be loved by someone else. And all of that is true. You learn to love yourself while you're in relationship. Then there's another camp that says you have to love yourself in order to love someone else or in order to be in a relationship. Both are wrong and both are true in their own way. You don't have to completely love yourself in order. There's lots of people who don't love themselves who love plenty of people. And there are lots of people who don't love themselves who are loved by others. But you better believe that if you don't, if you really struggle to see your value,

that you allow and you tolerate crappy things in a relationship, you're in trouble because our relationships reflect how we feel about ourselves. I think of self-love as self-acceptance. I see it as straddling that very delicate line between understanding that you have work to do and there are things that you can improve on and quite possibly absolutely need to improve on and yet that doesn't diminish your value as a human being in any way. That doesn't diminish your worth.

And self-acceptance is learning to sort of hold ourselves in high enough regard without even though there are things about ourselves that we may not like. Self-esteem is critical for a relationship. If it's too high, you have the narcissist. But in my world, what I see a lot more of is too low. And if it's too low, then you are pretending to be someone who you're not running away from intimacy, tolerating abusive or borderline abusive behavior. So it is a very important conversation to be had. What, how much is it the job of the other person to help you build you up and build your self esteem up?

Is this not supposed to be a dyad? Should it not be a case that we can go to them flawed and broken as we are and they will help us to put the pieces back together? It seems like there's a degree of reliance on the other person, but also you have to sort yourself out first. How do we balance that? Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's not an easy answer. Um, I believe that the best relationships involve people who have a strong sense of

self, but that doesn't mean that they don't have parts of them that are, are wounded. mean that they don't have parts of them that are wounded. But we can't get into a relationship and expect another flawed person to put all the pieces back together. But I do believe that we can get into a relationship with the expectation that we are going to hold each other's hands and help each other out as we face our own demons and we face our own challenges. And so look, there's a difference between someone needing to be built up by their partner all the time because they don't do anything, because they're not doing that thing that they need to be doing to help themselves versus someone who's going through a really rough, just having a rocky month and needing their partner to be their

greatest fan in that moment. Context matters and I know that that's not popular because so many people want the black and white answer and they want the like how to, but there's nuance here, but know that no one can actually fill all your voids. It feels like this is related to your fifth point. You need to speak up and tell the truth. If we hide what we see, feel or need, a relationship will spiral quickly. Yes.

Um, I've lied a lot in my relationships. And what I mean by lied is, um, I'm not, I don't think of myself as a liar. I don't like lie. I don't tell, I don't say something that isn't true, but I haven't divulged the whole truth of what I was feeling in the past because number one, I didn't even know that it was okay to have those needs. I didn't know how to express those needs. I was so disconnected from that.

It wasn't like, oh, I'm going to not tell the truth on purpose. But every time people are strategizing to get someone to be interested in them, the mass, the ambassador of ourselves, people don't tell the truth because they're having a hard time processing something or they're just so afraid if I say what I feel she's gonna be so hurt and she's gonna leave me or he's not or he's gonna become so defensive and not be able to have a conversation with me so I'm gonna bottle it up and I'm just going to be easy. Or I'm just going to repress how I feel because, you know, who am I to have feelings, who am I to have needs?

So people aren't doing this consciously and they're not necessarily doing it on purpose, they're doing it because they don't know the alternative. How can people become more comfortable with speaking the truth? Well, one, by recognizing that the alternative is worse. By not speaking the truth, you become resentful. By not speaking the truth, your relationship deteriorates. By not speaking the truth, you betray yourself. By not speaking the truth, in many ways, you betray your partner because then they don't know how to

contribute to your happiness. They don't know how to contribute to the emotional bank account of your relationship. There's a very big price to pay in not speaking the truth. And the way to do it is to be direct and truthful and also, you know, sometimes you'll have to be very vulnerable. I'm not into the whole stoic thing, you know, it's not about being stoic. In a romantic relationship, stoic doesn't get you very far. Vulnerability gets you far.

And that is the case. Why, why does this sort of stiffer, stronger self-sufficiency thing not get you far in a relationship? Well, not when it comes to difficult conversations. I mean, it has a place, you know, when you have to make a decision about something, sometimes bringing that to a relationship can be very useful, you know, but when it comes to difficult conversations about feelings and about needs, you have to, you have to be able to...

You have to be able to... People bond when they open up their hearts to each other and they open up their inner worlds to each other. If you're always hiding behind the mask of stoicism, then it's just a wall. It's just another self-protective measure and it's like, it's emotional and availability. It has its place in life. another self-protective measure and it's like it's emotional and availability. It has its place in life.

It has its place in pockets in a relationship. But that's not how people build trust with each other. They build trust when you are able to open up about something that's important to you and then it's received. It's received with care. It's received with care. It's received with interest. It's received with love. That's how you build trust with another person. Does it mean sometimes we're going to have to sort of move at the same speed as our

partner that we can't say more to them than they're able to receive. And if we try to do that and it is kind of unrequited or it's, it's not very well absorbed, that's going to make us more scared about doing it next time. So we kind of, we need to tolerate that and regulate how quickly and how much we do. So let me backtrack a little bit. We're training our partners all the time. All the time. Every time your partner opens up to you about something

or just wants to share about their day and you're just like, you know, reading something and barely looking up, you're training your partner to not do that anymore. You're training your partner to not do that anymore. You're training your partner to now start to withhold their experience. So I think that if you're sharing something and someone is not able to receive it, again, that feeds into the conversation. You could say something like, it seems like, or it appears that this is difficult for you

to hear right now. Is that true? And part of being a mature, high functioning adult in a relationship is being able to have that kind of conversation. And you might say, you know what? Yeah, like I think that was really hard for me to receive. Maybe I just need a moment or maybe I didn't need to ask you some questions. When you're getting to know someone, like in the beginning, you're sort of testing the

waters and maybe opening up a little bit to see how they receive you opening up. And then maybe you see that they don't receive it that well. And then you might be in the, you might be, it's not a guarantee, but you might be in the presence of someone who's A, not actually that interested in you as you would hope them to be or B, they're not what is so commonly and popularly referred to as emotionally unavailable. Now that doesn't mean that everyone is going to be as emotive. There's lots of men of a certain generation who are just not as emotive as women are. I think that there needs, there has, men has to learn how to become more emotive, but what's

more important is that they become very good listeners. And, you know, I think we all have to, we all have to figure out what we can and cannot tolerate in a relationship. But have, you know, it's called a heart to heart for a reason. You know, when two people have a heart to heart, they're opening up their inner worlds to each other. And typically what is associated with a heart to heart is after that heart to heart, there's closeness. There's more love. So it's important. In other news, creatine is one of the most researched and effective supplements for improving

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from Momentus plus that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentus.com slash modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's L I V E M O M E N T O U S dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. You've worked with a lot of women, thousands of women. Yeah. And a lot of men actually. of women, thousands of women. Yeah. And a lot of men actually.

What is it that, you know, there's a lot of rumors around on the internet about what it is that women are really looking for, and this is what they're publicly prepared to say, you know, this is what, this is what's acceptable, but really what they want is this behind the scenes. I would imagine somebody that works from a relationship coaching, counseling perspective has about of a transparent view into what it is that women are actually saying that they wish that they could have had in that relationship or what they're looking for

in this next one or what the partner that they're just starting to date is or is not giving them. And this is why it makes me feel good or bad. What is it that you wish more men knew about what women want from relationships? Women want safety. This is very important. Men do not understand the role that safety plays in a woman's life. We could be in the best neighborhood in the world. We could be in a safe town. We could be in a city.

If we're walking down the street and it's empty, our antenna is up. It doesn't even matter if it's broad daylight. That's something that a man, that most men, can't even begin to wrap their heads around. I'm going to go to an empty parking lot by myself? No way. I don't care if it's 12 o'clock in the afternoon. If I don't see anyone around and the parking lot is empty, am I walking to my car alone? I might be running. This is the reality of women. Biologically, women, it's like we have the babies. We want to make sure that the babies are protected. We want to make sure that we're in a relationship with someone who will protect us. This is partially biological. So how does that translate into the modern world? Well, women want a partner who is, and we're talking about male

partners, right? So we want your presence. So this is going to sound very simple and maybe you've heard it before, but you fixing the problem is not what you think it is. Because a lot of men, there's a problem, they want to fix it. Or, you know, we're having, maybe we're having, we're overwhelmed. And what most men do is they come to, they want to come to the rescue and say, I know how to make it so that you're less overwhelmed. You just have to do one, two, and three. You'll be less overwhelmed. And the funny thing is he's right.

A lot of the time he's right. But we, but we know that already. What we need in that moment is someone just to listen or to give us a hug and to have presence with us. And then we can maybe calm down and enter our more rational minds because women are perfectly capable of rationality. But at first, we might be feeling like that intensity of emotion. And here's a thing about emotions that probably the number one thing that women complain about,

if you will, their male partners, that they wish that they had more of, that men need to know is, I wish my emotions didn't scare him off. If I had a dime, for every time I've heard that phrase in some way spoken to me and that I've thought it, I would have so many dimes. I would have enough dimes to feed the world kind of thing, that kind of thing. I wish that I could be in a bad mood and he wouldn't take it personally. I think, and this is my experience, and I would love to hear your thoughts, Chris, is that a lot of men, when they get into relationships with their female partners, there's an unconscious need for their woman to be happy because they feel so responsible for our happiness.

And I think that, you know, what I've been told by many men, personally and professionally, that what he's most drawn to is when we're relaxed and we're smiling and we're happy. But we can't, we women, we can't be happy all the time. And sometimes we get anxious and stressed and we have a very delicate hormonal system. And we have a different mind. We have something called diffuse awareness. We feel responsible for everyone and everything. Women have the capacity to go into the part of the brain that's very singular focused, but we also have this incredible curse slash gift to just juggle like 50 million things at once. We're not always going to be happy also because we're a human being and a lot of women

have said he can't handle it. He gets very reactive when I'm not happy. And so that's it. Those are the things. It's interesting. I'm not sure about the happiness thing but I certainly know that peace is something that I think a lot of guys try to optimize for and that, yeah, dealing with the whirlwind that can be a woman's emotions disrupts the peace sometimes and learning how both people can regulate to kind of bring that back down to earth. Yes. Is very important. But a world of emotions doesn't always have to be drama.

You know, I've certainly worked with a lot of women to stop bringing drama. There's a lot of men who bring drama, but yes, optimizing peace. But do they really want peace? I mean, depends who you want,ends what your nervous system set point is. I have some friends that like the chaos. I have some friends that use that as a proxy for excitement, for love, for why they feel the most engaged. It's something that's interesting.

Uh, I'm, I'm firmly in camp peace. Uh, but that's not necessarily for everyone. That being said, uh, Whitney Cummings told me this story, which was really great. She was, um, stress checked. I guess stress tested, uh, by a football player that she was dating maybe a few years ago, I don't know how long ago. And she'd been sort of yapping and yapping and yapping and sort of playing this, playing up this kind of like Hollywood starlet style thing.

And there'd always be something, there was always something going on. There's always something fiery happening. And she turned to him and she said, well, like, you know, if you're dating me, it's because you want a challenge, you know, like I'm the girl that you come to, if you want a challenge, and he turned to her and he said, what sort of guy wants a challenge in his longterm relationship? And she was like, he's a guy that spends his days at the training ground and his evenings playing a difficult game. He has enough challenge already. He's delivering the maximum amount of challenge

that he wants. Coming home and finding that there is more challenge being put on you than this person needs, that they're playing up some additional level of, you know, they're choosing to not do any of the regulation themselves. I think, um, no, no, that's a problem. I don't, I don't believe that she, but her saying that is, I don't believe that, you know, it's not, it's not necessarily true. In other words, that she had the choice? I mean, it's like, well, if you say, put that aside, if you're saying, well, the men who want me want a challenge, what does that actually really mean?

To me, that's saying, well, you're not willing to actually do the work to actually bring some harmony into this relationship. I'm not speaking about Whitney, I'm just saying in general. That's a lovely excuse. I mean, we're all challenging. You have to ask yourself, how am I difficult to live with? Because we're all difficult in some way to live with. And I think that having some level of awareness of how we are difficult to live with and then, and being able to say to our partner, like, I love you for putting up with this part of me, like that's where it's at.

It's one of the most beautiful things that you could say. Yeah. To be able to see your own floor and then to appreciate the fact that this person has just wordlessly, wordlessly decided that they are going to continue to swallow whatever it is that you do. Yeah, two Alain de Botton quotes, the first one being he says on every first date, you should ask the other person in what ways are you mad? He says that one of the greatest delusions that single people have is that they're actually perhaps quite an easy person to live with.

Yeah. Look, and some people are easier to live with than others. They just are. But we all, we are, we all come to the table with stuff. And I think that it's just a matter of when it comes to choosing a partner. You know, a lot of people don't, don't know how to differentiate between the tolerable and the intolerable, because they didn't learn that.

They saw one or both of their parents tolerate a lot. So one of the things if you keep having, if one keeps having these sort of disappointing relationships, these very painful relationships, one of the things to explore is knowing where your limit is in terms of what you can tolerate. Because we should have a lot of flexibility and tolerate a lot in a relationship, but you need to know that chunk of whatever that you just won't tolerate. You know? You need to be your best self even after the honeymoon. Stress and fear can turn a secure relationship into a dysfunctional one.

We have to make it a priority to show up as our highest selves as much as possible. Yeah. Well, this is what we were talking about a little bit before, which is that, um, we put on, we are their best selves in the beginning and then we get comfortable. And then we have this unconscious belief that this person that loves us should love us no matter what. So even if I'm coming to the relationship consistently, and I really want to emphasize consistently because we'll do this sometimes, consistently stress, moody, irritable, cold, why would you expect anyone to put up with that on a consistent basis?

And relationships are what we make of them. And they need attention. And they need attention in the form of our mindfulness. mindfulness and that means that we're not going to be perfect but you can't do all these wonderful things in the beginning and then stop doing them and expect your relationship to be a good relationship. It's really as simple as that. And this is what people do. This is what I've never met anyone who hasn't done this.

Who hasn't. It's a lot of familiarity. We get used to something and we start to take it for granted. We think, you know, comfort is a wonderful thing in a relationship. Too much comfort often leads to the demise of a relationship. It gets so comfortable that we think, you know, it's like how a lot of us can be around family. We can regress to our seven-year-old self and be a total shit and we know we're going to be loved anyway. People do that in their romantic relationships and it's a mistake. It's a mistake to do it

anyway, but it's really a mistake in your romantic relationship. We think, we do forget, and I've said this before, we forget that the person that we love is a gift and we think that they're a given. That is just the law of familiarity. It's because we become unconscious and mindless in our relationships. We think that you go into a cave or you go into an ashram or you do some sort of psychedelic trip that that's the spiritual work. No, the spiritual work is in a relationship.

What's the stress and fear bit turning a secure relationship into a dysfunctional one? I understand that, yeah, familiarity breeds like laziness in a way, but how does stress and fear play a role there? In the honeymoon stage of a relationship, there's this illusion that all our stress goes away because this person has come into our life and we feel that euphoria and we feel so excited and it's new.

And then our stress comes back and we might put on a really brave face or we treat our coworkers great. We smile at a stranger on the street. And then we come home and we're like, let me just unload all my stress on you. Or we come home and we think, I don't have to actually be really that nice to you. Law of familiarity. Very, very hard, sad and stressful things can happen in life.

But more times than not, people are not reacting to something difficult. They are in a habit of just being reactive to everything. So their threshold for stress is really low. And maybe there is something stressful like money and children. People don't know how to manage their stress and so they start to fight with each other. And they start to create negative stories about each other. Or they start to look at their partner and see everything that is wrong about them. When what's really going on is a turbulent mind. What's really going on is a turbulent nervous system.

What's really going on is stress in that person's body that is making it so that they are not seeing life and their partner clearly. This is what ends relationships is not knowing how to handle stress and not knowing and not identifying when stress is the problem versus the actual relationship. And I suppose because that person's so close to us and because we're familiar and because we hope slash know that they're not going, we can use them as an emotional crutch, punching bag. Yes. Crutch punching bag. Yes. And, and also because, you know, it's very common if a family is going through,

let's say money problems for that to tear mom and dad apart or mom and mom apart to tear the couple apart. mom and dad apart or mom and mom apart to tear the couple apart. It's not, so it's the, it's how they were reacting to life, which I have nothing but compassion for one of the things that we just don't learn in school. It's how they were reacting to life that made it so that they were, I mean, think about it when you're really stressed, you don't want to be touched. You don't want to be told what to do. You're not feeling sexual. You're not feeling sensual. You're not feeling open. You're not feeling loving. You become totally self-involved and emotionally unavailable. And you've got two people like that on a consistent basis.

Then this is what's going to happen. The relationship is going to suffer. And it's because of how they're actually dealing with the birth of their first child. It's how they're dealing with the money problems. It's how they're dealing with certain things that, and these things might be real problems that are highly systemic, but we think that once the stress gets better, that the relationship will get better when the truth is how we respond or react to what's happening in life that will ultimately improve the relationship. Sometimes, families and couples really need help to deal with very big things. But like I said, you'd be shocked to learn that often it's not something legitimately stressful like you lost all your money or you can't buy groceries or your child is sick.

These are real things. I'm seeing it all the time in couples who are just like, stress out about nothing. You cannot convince someone to love you as much as we try. Yeah, it's the law of the land. You cannot convince anyone to love you. You can't beg them to love you. You can try to jump through whatever hoops you want to get them to love you. You can try to change yourself to get them to love you or to choose you. You can use your kids as pawns to get them to stay. You could try all you can, but it's impossible to

convince someone to love you. The ruthless are the side of this. Uh, and I was texting Connor Beaton about this 90 minutes ago. Oh, love Connor. We were, we were just talking about this on the way in. And, uh, I was basically talking about the same, but in reverse that it's true. You can't convince anybody to love you, but you also can't convince yourself to love anybody either.

And I said, if you can't get what you want, you can will yourself to get what you can get, but you can't will yourself to want what you can get. You don't get to make yourself. And there's a lot of times, you know, I've spoken to friends that have been in relationships previously. Dude, you know what it is? She's so amazing for me. She takes all of the boxes. I, I don't know what it is.

I've tried and I've tried and I feel awful and guilty and I'm racked with fear and shame about it. And I'm probably going to move on to some chick that is going to be. None of the things that I think that I'm supposed to want, but I can't help the way that I feel and I just don't feel the right way about this person. Relationships, the way that we feel about people and desire happens bottom up, not top down. And yeah, as much as we wish that it was a dictatorship a lot of the time, unfortunately, it's a democracy. Yeah, it's very true.

Although we have to use a little bit more of this head for sure when we're making these decisions. Yeah, it's very true. I mean, you just can't, you can't make yourself love someone. You can't make yourself feel those feelings and you can't convince someone to choose you and people are doing it all the time in very subtle ways. They're trying to seduce, they're trying to convince, they're trying to change themselves.

There's so much grace in accepting, even if it shatters your heart, accepting when, um, accepting this truth. And life becomes a lot easier when you, um, adopt this law into your DNA, basically. No one is coming to save you. A relationship is meant to make us happier, not happy. Yeah. So, um, I think that people intellectually understand this, but people do get into relationships thinking that the relationship is going to be the thing that fulfills them and that the person is going to be the thing that fulfills them and that the person is going to be the person who fulfills them, that there's this perfect person who's

going to come in and rescue you. And again, even though we know logically that's not the case, we do in many ways have this fantasy that when this right person comes into our lives, everything's going to be better. Or when our partner is not able to, it's just not making us feel all delightful and happy one day, that somehow it's their responsibility to do that. Fulfillment can only come from the inside. We get fulfillment and happiness from various sources and from doing various things. But there's no one who is coming, there's no knight in shining armor, there's no one who's coming to save you. And look, we've seen so many movies. There's a movie that I reference in the book

because I think it is so perfect. And it's interesting because it's a guy expecting to be rescued, which I think goes against what's more commonly thought about is like the woman in the damsel in distress. I don't know if you ever saw the movie 500 Days of Summer? No. It's a fantastic movie that really incredibly illustrates this point, which is he's a guy,

he's got, he's totally depressed. He's got no purpose in life, he hates his job, he has a passion that he's not pursuing. So he's in this job, but he can't stand. And then this girl comes in and she's like, you know, beautiful and cute. And he's just like, from the moment he sees her, he's just like, he's done. Right? And so his whole the whole movie is him trying to convince her to love him because she's just not that she's like dates him and sleeps with him, but she's just, you can tell she's not all in. And on the surface, what it looks like is, Oh, something's wrong with her.

She's totally avoidant. Um, you know, what's, what's wrong with her. She's totally avoidant. You know, what's wrong with her? You know, he's such a nice guy. And what's really going on is that she's not even a fully formed character. She's a metaphor for him needing to be rescued. rescued because then and what she does is she mirrors back to him why she doesn't choose him like she never says it but of course the reason is is because he's desperate for his happiness in her. And he's desperate to use her. He's the user. He's using her to escape his own misery. And it's only after she breaks up with him

that he is able to actually confront himself. And so it's a great movie to watch that illustrates the point that, you know, we do try to escape ourselves through relationships. That could be someone's pattern that's more than someone else's pattern. A relationship can't actually make you happy. No one can really make you happy. No one can really make you happy. But the expectation, the healthy expectation is this person is adding to my life. They're making my path a little better. But they're not, but no one can walk the path but me.

And I think that this is going to be the hardest truth in many ways, except for the last one, for people to face because people are very resistant because they think, oh no, I don't expect that. No, I understand that. But then watch, look at your relationship history or look at your current relationship. How many times have you been resentful towards your current partner because they're not making you happy in that moment? The final one, which you say, and I, it's kind of interesting, you know, we talked about relationships throughout this, some inner work who sort of nodded toward

detachment stuff, previous patterns, breakups, expectations, even romance culture. nodded toward attachment stuff, previous patterns, breakups, expectations, even romance culture, uh, and then for no reason you decide to assault everybody's most raw wound, um, which is we must make peace with our parents, grieve the parent you never had, be open to looking at them differently, have a conversation with them. Yeah. So, um, making peace with your parent is making peace with is reframing and

investigating the story that you've had about one or both of your parent that may be, um, that may have a choke hold on you and release emancipating yourself from the prison of your own mind and of this story that you have about them. You can have a great relationship with your parents and peace with your parents might mean that you break up with your parents metaphorically as the leaders of your belief system. They always wanted you to be a doctor, but in your heart you are an artist and you've been living your life as a doctor miserable because that's

what your parents wanted and you decide, you know what, I love mom and dad, but I'm going to become an artist because the best way to really honor myself and my family is to be happy. So that's making peace with your parents. I put a disclaimer in this chapter if there's been severe abuse, if there's been any sort of molesting, I in no way put that expectation on you. I had an extremely troubling relationship with my father and much of my life was about trying to find some resolve there, which I was able to mostly do before he died a year ago. Our adult relationships will very much reflect our relationships with our parents. It's important to look at your parents and to explore the relationship that you have with one or both of your parents through will absolutely change your life. I wrote that chapter as he

was dying. He kind of died unexpectedly, but he died. I was writing that chapter and I have a lot of case studies in there of all sorts of experiences with parents. You have to start to think of them differently. I lost both my parents and I was close to my stepfather and I lost him too. And one thing that I learned about, and I was very close with my mom, but of course I, there's certain things that, you know, that mother daughter relationships can be kind of complicated. And I learned something profound about relationships with parents after they died, which is that you kind of let go of some of the resentments that you had when they were alive and you build a little compassion, you could decide to never speak to your parent again. But you have to do that from a clear head, not from a place of reaction. reaction because I was estranged from my father for 13 years or something and it did not help me.

What helped me was learning how to not be afraid of him and to start to stand up for myself and to also start to examine the story that I've had about him for so many years. And that's what I try to explain in this chapter. What do you say to the people that sort of still, they're worried that their parents are sort of coming toward the end of their lives. Maybe they've tried to approach conversations not too dissimilar to these previously, even the first couple of steps and maybe they've not been received particularly well and they've got this sort of balancing act in their mind where they go, can I even sort of bring this into land over the next, you know, five years, 10 years, I don't know, however long they've got left.

Yeah. Am I just opening a can of worms that is going to have their parting memory of their role as my parent being one of failure and dissatisfaction and I'm going to bring up all of this stuff and it's going to feel like an attack on them. And, you know, this is, this is how I'm going to the swan song to mine and my parents' relationship is maybe going to be me trying to do this selfish healing in a child bullshit. Can I not just put up with the piece and, and sort of leave it on the table?

Yeah, I would say a third option, which is even better, um, let go of whatever story you have. And start to accept them for who they are. And grieve the parent that maybe you wish you had, but didn't have. And maybe ask them some questions about their life and their experience. And start to relate to them differently. One of my friends this Christmas recorded, I think he did it with, maybe did it with both his mom and his dad, but separately, uh, he recorded a two hour podcast with each of his parents, um, where he just said, tell me about your life.

So what was growing up like, and he's recorded it in, I would not exactly publishable quality, but you know, it's more than good enough for him. And he just wants to keep doing that. And he set himself a task of doing that every year now that he wants to have this archive of him talking to his parents about them and what it was like raising him. And, you know, he wants to have this sort of self-knowledge library, I guess. I love that. Pretty cool.

Yeah, very cool. The most podcast solution ever is to record a podcast with your parents to come up, to heal your inner child. Yeah. And it's, you know, the whole healing your inner child thing. I mean, it's really about, yeah, well, again, you know, learning how to, it's hard. it's hard, you know, your parents as children, they're supposed to be our heroes, but then you grow up and you realize you're just a person, just like me.

And maybe there can be some compassion there because of that. Well, if you know that, or if you have this sense, it's unfair. If not for the way that my parents raised me, I would have been dot dot dot. I would have been more balanced. I would have had secure attachment. I would have not had my fears. I would have not had all the rest of it. And you go, okay, well, just go back one generation.

If you say that you're at the mercy of your parents, who are they at the mercy of? Yeah, absolutely. Well, no, that's different because I, I'm, you know, they were supposed to look after me and it's like, yeah, I, you don't get to have it both ways. You don't have to have it both ways. And I know, you know, this might come off as corny, but you know, fuck it. It's really true. Which is that, what did you it's really true, which is that

what did you gain by not getting what it is that you needed? You know, I, life is very mysterious. I know people who've had great parents and great upbringing and had got everything that they want and they ended up being drug addicts. How does that happen? And I know people who've had real abuse, like really messed up stuff, and they're very successful in their marriage. How does that happen? So life in many ways is a mystery.

And I certainly would not be sitting here today had I had the father that I wish I had. I just wouldn't be. I am convinced because I never would have had the marriage that I had. I wouldn't have chosen that man and I wouldn't have had that relationship that led to so much heartbreak that led me to delve into this work that led me here. I don't know if I ever would have, I have a long history in teaching yoga and yoga practitioner over 25 years. I don't know that I would have been seeking out that in my life had I not had the pain that I endured in childhood.

I don't know. But I think that there is a resilience that comes with not getting what you deserve sometimes. It's an interesting double edged sword. I think a lot of the time people think, well, I wouldn't have this success, all this sort of the work ethic, the resilience, all of that stuff, uh, which has brought me all of these things that I really value in myself. I think an uncomfortable, deeper question is to say, well, would I have needed that had I have not been exposed to the difficulties in the first place?

And you go, right. Okay. So I, I, I don't get to go back. And so I can't change it. So it's pointless. It's kind of a moot point in any case. So what you say is what are the things, how can I take this thing that was bad I don't get to go back. So I can't change it. So it's pointless. It's kind of a moot point in any case. So what you say is what are the things, how can I take this thing that was bad

and turn it into something that has lots of light sides to it, where the lighter side of the edge is better than the dark one. And then if I can get rid of that, then I get, I do get to have my cake and eat it too. I get to get all of the advantages of the additional resilience and the self-supporting nature and the fact that I've had an impact and it's driven me to do things that I'm very proud of and so on and so forth. And I've let go of the trauma that, that sort of drove it in the first place. But if you don't do the second bit, if you don't do the going back and the healing bit,

what you're stuck with is this sort of double-edged sword. Yes, absolutely. And look, that's life. I mean, it truly is about making lemonade out of lemons. I mean, I hate to say it, but it is, I mean, that's what leads to a more fulfilling life is being able to take the things that have been hard and create some sort of meaning out of it. Um, that's what it's all about.

Gillian Turecki, ladies and gentlemen, Gillian, I really appreciate it. I think it's, uh, very much of the moment, um, touching on all of the things that everybody's interested in and stepping into the new year as well as a lot of, uh, winter relationships and spring relationships, maybe beginning it's, it's very timely. Why should people go? They want to keep up to date with everything you're doing and spring relationships maybe beginning. It's very timely. Why should people go? They want to keep up to date with everything you're doing and check out your work? Yeah, well, of course, my book, it begins with you, which I believe will be, is out. And you just need to know my name, Jillian Turecki.

Find me on Instagram, all over social media, my podcast, Jillian on love. And yeah, that's where people can find me. Okay. Jillian, I appreciate you. Thank you. I appreciate you.