Stop Pushing Love Away: How to End Self-Sabotage and Let Love In
5/22/202632 min
Most of us say we want love. So why do we push it away the moment it arrives? In this episode, Joe and Brett explore the surprisingly complex reasons we sabotage the very thing we say we want most; and why love, more than almost any other emotion, requires a nervous system that can tolerate it.
Together, they unpack five core patterns that get in the way of receiving love, and offer concrete practices for expanding your capacity to give and receive it.
Together, they explore:
- The stone-faced baby experiments and how attachment becomes attention-seeking
- Why "love" in adulthood is often just the attention strategies that worked in childhood
- Jealousy as the perfect example of pushing love away while demanding it
- Wired together, fired together: how love gets fused with criticism, abuse, or engulfment
- Why receiving adoration you don't feel worthy of makes you physically uncomfortable
- The identity-level confirmation bias that keeps us seeing rejection over love
- How love can dissolve the sense of self and why that's terrifying
- Why positive emotions are often harder to feel than negative ones
- "Love is a light shined into a dark ocean". Why everything unloved surfaces when love arrives
- Self-compassion as a better predictor of healthy relationships than self-esteem
- Practical experiments: emotional inquiry, opening your heart in reps, identifying what's wired with love, and noticing care you've been missing
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsBrett Kistler· Host0:00
Joe, what stops people from getting the love they want?
Joe Hudson· Host0:02
One hand is saying, "Stop, get away from me," and one hand is saying, "Oh, come towards me, come towards me." Whatever your parents did, then that's what you associate with love. And so if they were critical, then you know love to be critical. If they were abusive, then you know love to be abusive. But it's not actual love. It's just the thing that was wired with love, and so you recognize it to be love. To get love without that is actually quite overwhelming and, and it, and it starts making us feel unsafe.
Brett Kistler· Host0:29
Joe, what stops people from getting the love they want?
Joe Hudson· Host0:34
Yeah, that is a fantastic question. There's so many answers to that. It, it... but the question itself is also what makes us push away the love that we want? What makes us, uh, self-sabotage around love? There's just so many ways to look at that question. It is- What makes us scared of the intimacy that we want. Exactly, yeah. So there is so many ways that we do it, it's amazing. Um, I think one of the most basic ways to go through is, is basically some version of attachment theory, right? So if you've ever seen the stone-faced baby experiments. Basically, if you take a, an infant or a child, a s- young child, pre-verbal, and you don't give it attention, it will go through a series of ways to get the attention. If you, if