How Love Gets Confused

Welcome to The Art of Accomplishment, where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease. I'm Brett Kistler, and I'm here again with Joe Hudson. What is love? We all have a felt sense of love and opinions around what it is. How do our feelings and ideas around love get formed? What happens when our experience of love gets confused with our complex past? And how can we unwind our conditioning and open up to the deepest, richest love available to us? This is what we'll explore in today's episode.

Good morning, Joe.

Good morning, Brett. How are you, man?

Oh man, I feel like I got hit by a truck. Uh, we just did Groundbreakers last week, and as always, afterwards just being in the space with everybody's process and everybody's emotions, and myself doing more and more of this work and just recognizing how sensitive my body is to what's going on in the room around me. I come out of it and I'm just like, oof, like my body just needs to, needs to move some stuff. Yeah, it's, it's a lot holding, holding that space. And then, you know, coming back into my own week having been away from a lot of other stuff and having catch-up to do.

Yeah, what's amazing to me is that the— I mean, it's not amazing, but the folks who leave Groundbreakers are stoked, happy, loving, refreshed, revived, and everybody who's facilitated is just going to drool on themselves for 2 days in recovery. Out of this interesting thing. Yeah, I'm, I, I'm feeling pretty recovered now, but I definitely had 2 days of doing absolutely nothing, which I think is the key.

Yeah, well, I came right out of it and, uh, found out about a death in the family, so that's just another, another load of things hitting my system. And it's really, really brought up for me, you know, as I'm, as I'm planning my travel you know, back to this funeral and reflecting, uh, it's having me just reflect on a lot of what, what this work is, is how we, we bring ourselves back to unconditional love. You know, view is one of the ways you've described the view state of being, is to be in unconditional love.

Yeah.

And I'm really curious to explore, uh, sort of the assumptions under, underneath what each of us might think love is. You know, one of the things that happens when people come into a Groundbreaker is that they, they start to recognize, oh, I, I thought love was sacrifice, you know. I thought, yeah, I thought love was abuse. I thought love was, you know, tough love, really just like pushing somebody and, or being pushed. And so there's just all these different ways that we, that we've come to recognize what we believe love to be. And to say that we, everybody, I think everybody wants to be loved and to be loving. And there's just many different beliefs around what that actually means.

Yeah, what's interesting to me too is that there's also the, there's the logical belief and then there's the somatic belief system. And so you, you just said something like some people think love is abuse. And I think most people intellectually would be like, No, it isn't.

Right.

And yet you see it all the time where somebody has abusive love relationships and so they're recreating that abuse or like in a Groundbreakers when they're overwhelmed with like this tremendous love that they haven't felt before, they'll literally say something like, "I don't understand why I think someone's going to hit me," or, you know, or, "Wow, I feel like I should be hit right now," because they've had that kind of abuse in their life. So there's— yes, we get love confused, not only intellectually, but also in the body. Our body does that. And so for me, what I see here is that, you know, that classic saying of that which wires together fires together. What I notice is that the love that was shown, like what— we are kids and we love our parents. And I don't care what happens to you. I don't care if you hate your parents. You end up loving your parents. The kid who was deeply abused by a parent still on some level wants the love and affection of their parent. They want that relationship healed. They want closure or they want to be seen by the parent. And even if they've given up on it, there's still something in all of us that wants that.

It's hardwired.

And so hardwired, right? And so we're hardwired for this. And so whatever relationship we've had with our parents or our caregivers in those early times, whatever that is, that gets wired with the love. This is what I think love is. So if my parents were really critical, then it's like, oh right, criticism is part of the experience of love. If my parents were abusive, abuse is part of the experience of love. If my Parents are avoidant, then avoidance is part of the experience of love. And we go about finding that experience over and over again, recreating that experience over and over again, knowing love to be that experience over and over again. And it isn't until somebody really stops and says, "What's the love that I really wanted?" that they can get in touch with the deeper levels of love. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, and sort of the justifications are often, if I don't, you know, if I'm not critical with my kid, the world will be more critical. I'm protecting them from something.

Oh yeah, right. Yeah, great justifications for all of it. My parents did it, and so I turned out just fine.

Yeah.

If you're just on that note, if you're saying I did it, My parents did it and I turned out just fine. I can guarantee you that's not true.

That you turned out just fine.

Yeah, exactly. If you have to say that, it means you're protecting something that was hurt. I guarantee it. So if you're listening to this and you've said that, that's a really good marker for a part of yourself that you've been hurt, that has been hurt, that you haven't addressed.

Yeah. Okay, so let's look more into this. Uh, we, we grow up, we naturally love our parents, we want their love, we need connection to survive. And so we just end up— our bodies, our emotions, and our thoughts get conditioned from whatever love was available to us or whatever connection was available, and we just assume that that's love. And then that becomes the way that we experience, expect, look for it. In the rest of our lives? What are some of the practical implications of this phenomenon?

Yeah, well, one is when somebody says, "Oh, you should love that part of yourself," or, "You should love yourself," one of the basic ones is they'll say, "How do I do that?" It's literally that. But the thing that actually affects people's lives in a real way is that we become attracted to people who fulfill that concept of love. And, um, we— the things that we think we have to do for love are, are part of that. Is like, that's, that's how it, it's trained us. So what we learned love to be is what is also our list of the things we think we have to do for love. And it also is what tells us we have to close down our heart incorrectly, but it tells us what we have to close down our heart for. So the things that we think like, oh, This is what love is. If I don't do that, then I have to close down my heart. And we get a false, false causation, false correlation. And all those things really screw up relationships. So the effect is like really screwed up relationships through— because of these things.

Yeah, got it. So there were a couple of different points that you mentioned there, so let's go into each of these and describe how they play out. Uh, the first one you mentioned is what you're attracted to.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

How love, how your conception of love affects what you're attracted to, who's attracted to you and what you're looking for. Say more on that.

Yeah. So I cannot tell you how many clients I've had who like part of what they want to do in our work is to find that relationship. And they'll just say, well, I can't control what I'm attracted to. And it's like, not in the short term maybe, but definitely in the long term. And so there's this thing that sparks us, the thing that says, "Oh, wow, here's this person that I'm attracted to." It's typically because they play the role that we had as a kid around love. And we've touched on this in different ways in the podcast. And I think I've told the story, but I can't remember. But I've had this great occasion to be able to listen to people on their first dates. And I can literally tell you what the patterns are going to be by listening to the the unknown negotiation that they're having with one another during it. Yeah. So as an example, if you knew love to be deeply critical, which we just talked about, then most likely you're going to have somebody— the person that you're loving is going to be highly critical with you. Or you're going to be critical to them or both. And so that's how the system works is that we, whatever was wired with that love is what we're gonna be attracted to. And what I notice is that over time, my clients will often, or the people who take the courses will often change what they're attracted to. Like that natural, oh my gosh, I'm attracted to that person completely changes because they have learned to create non-correlation, non-space between the idea of love and the idea of what was wired in as love when they were young. And that often requires a step of not treating yourself that way. So, "Oh, this is love. Love is criticism. Therefore, I criticize myself a lot. Therefore, I criticize the people who I love a lot." And it's when they can start separating criticism from love, then they stop it in themselves. And that process can be quite scary because when you're separating the criticism from yourself, you're like, "Oh my gosh." Then it's a very subconscious thing, but there's this fear that, "Oh, I'm going to have love pulled away from me." That's the other way that it works is that if it was wired like that, if it turns away, you're like, "Oh, love's going to go with it." So I have to accept that. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. If I don't accept, if I don't take criticism or accept criticism in my life, then I won't receive love. People will leave me. Yeah. Because I got the most criticism and attention and love, and therefore what I experienced as love when I was being criticized. And then so that also kind of interacts with a self-concept of like, like let's say the self-concept might be, I need to be criticized or I need to be pushed or I need somebody else to tell me what's best.

Yeah.

And I don't feel like I'm getting my needs met if I don't have somebody fulfilling that role. So then I would then, that's how I might recreate the patterns so that somebody who's in relationship with me finds themselves criticizing me because I'm inviting it.

Yeah, and I would say just like, The easier way to feel this for anybody who's listening is just say to yourself out loud, "I don't need to accept criticism to be loved." Many people who just said that to themselves are immediately— Go ahead if you're listening and do that. Then you'll notice the thoughts that arise. "Oh wait, no, I can't." "People will think I'm arrogant. People will think I'm not open to feedback. People will think blah, blah, blah." You'll have 1,000 thoughts that justify that criticism.

How will I improve?

How will I improve? Yeah, exactly. As if criticism is required for any of that stuff, right? And then you'll hear the thought, "Yes, criticism's absolutely required for that stuff." And so feedback is, but criticism isn't. And so it is literally that process of getting to the point of seeing that clearly. Oh yeah, criticism in the body and in the mind, criticism is not necessary. And, and that will happen with anything that you taught— were taught love was. Yeah, I have to put up with somebody leaving all the time, I have to put up with avoidance, I have to put up with blah blah blah blah blah.

Yeah, so this is— this was the piece around what we're attracting and what we're attracted to. Uh, the next one that you mentioned was what you have to do for love, the assumptions around what we have to do to be loved. Yeah, wired together.

Yeah, so that's what we're— that's what we're— we've actually drifted into that is like, oh, we have to accept that criticism as an example of that. Um, so, so that one is That one's interesting because it's also how we lose our power in a relationship. So, right, for instance, let's say there's two people and they both date a jealous person. The first person didn't learn that jealousy was something or possessiveness was something to be accepted. And so it's just like, yeah, no, I'm not taking that on, forget it. And it's just very clean and simple. And either the person meets them or doesn't meet them. The other person who was taught that they were responsible for other people's emotional states, and they say, "Oh, yeah, I will accept this jealousy, even though it sucks, even though I'm not saying the thing that I want to say, because I'm scared of the jealousy, even though it feels horrible to be in this interaction with this person." And in that, they start losing their power, and then the attraction dies. So everything that we do to get the love, which is a false sense of love, to maintain the love, which is a false sense of love, erodes our power and reduces the attraction in the relationship. And so you see that all the time. Two people who've been together for a while, the attraction's gone, the sex is gone, because they're taking care of each other, because they think they have to take care of each other in different ways. To maintain the love. And that is all based on a false sense of love.

Yeah. And by take care of, you mean sort of the caretaking, like they're, they're, they're taking responsibility for the other's emotion and choosing, believing that they need to abandon themselves and their power in order to receive love.

Exactly. That's right. Yeah.

Yeah.

And so this is, this is what creates the dysfunction in the relationships. This is what creates the fights in the relationship. This This is what creates the loss of power in the relationship. So the way it creates the fights is, let's use that another example of somebody who learned that their job was to make sure that the other person doesn't get mad, right? So they're in a relationship where they think to maintain love, they have to make sure that the other person doesn't get angry. And when they'll be confronted at some point where it's between doing what they want to do and doing something that might get that person angry, and the resentment starts building, and that resentment either becomes aggression or passive aggression, and that starts tweaking the relationship to a point where fights start occurring, whether they're passive fights or aggressive fights.

And the fights get stuck because the sort of the, the meta process in the fight is trying to minimize the other person's anger rather than hearing them and being with them and fully receiving them and staying within oneself and one's needs.

Right.

And so then the communication drops in the relationship. It becomes a management process rather than a relationship or a joining of two wisdoms.

Yeah. And so, right, so this, like, here's something you've never heard. Oh my gosh, I just met the most beautiful person. I'm totally in love with them. It's like, I'm just, awestruck by them because they're going to need a lot of my management. Like, you never hear that. You do subconsciously, but then like a year later it's just constantly managing one another, as an example. So yeah, so, and all that happens because of that false sense of love, that, that confused, confused love.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, so another thing that you had mentioned in the practical implications was that the way that we, the way that we perceive or assume love to be can determines where we will close our heart. Can you say more on that?

Yeah, so I'll give you a really great story that's happened recently. Um, one of my clients, uh, was, um, questioning their marriage and they were, he was just not being loving. And I was calling attention to him like, what's going on? And what we discovered was that he thought that he couldn't leave and love them because that would be disloyal. That would be, it would be leading them on. And as soon as he realized, "Oh, I can love this person even if I leave. I can love this person in the leaving. I can love this person in the staying. I can love this person." That that's actually where my freedom is, is to love them unconditionally. And that doesn't, loving unconditionally, even that thought process, somebody who's listening to this and wait, you can't leave somebody and love them unconditionally, right? And so, As soon as that person realized it, they were able to love their wife in the way that was actually really appealing. It fixed the whole relationship. That the thing that was stopping the love was the idea that I might leave the person, and therefore that was actually creating the reality of leaving the person. And as soon as it was like, "Oh, I can love you and I don't need to manage you." Then the other person felt seen and heard for the first time and started relaxing and unfolding and being vulnerable and the whole thing worked. It wasn't an overnight process by any stretch. There was months of work that came out of it. But all that work was allowed because all of a sudden people could feel seen and heard in whatever was happening for them. Whereas before that they couldn't and therefore it wouldn't work because there was that closed heart. So that's what it means. It means anything that you think you have to close your heart for, like, if I open my heart, then I have to stay with them. If I open my heart, then I have to put up with the abuse. If I open my heart, then I won't hold my boundaries. If I open my heart, then I won't stand for the thing that's important to me. If I open my heart, then I won't be able to get my sexual desires fulfilled, whatever it is. That creates this closure of the heart and then that doesn't allow the relationship to heal.

Yeah, it creates a feeling of trappedness too.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah, if you, if you don't feel like you can leave and be loving and love yourself because it would be bad for you not to be loving this person in the way that you've been conditioned to believe love is, then all that's left is to feel trapped, and that's a fear state. And so now you're bringing a whole bunch of fear into where, where love could be.

Yes.

And that shows up everywhere in the relationship.

Yeah. I, you know, we all want to be loving and we all want to be loved, and yet we don't. And that's usually based on that confusion of what love is. We often don't even see when we're being loved. I was having a conversation just the other day with one of my clients, a person that they work with, and the person was describing the problems that they were having with my client, and she kept on saying something to the effect of, "I know that sounds harsh." And I kept on saying, "No, that sounds like compassion." Now, my client couldn't hear it because of their version of what love is. And she, this woman I was talking to, she was in a situation where so many people in the world had told her that's not what love is. But she was just very direct, very straightforward, and very clear about how to be with somebody. And it was deeply compassionate. It wasn't refined, it wasn't skillful, but there was compassion behind it. And that's the same thing that happens is that we have this idea of what love should be and therefore we can't even see the love that's coming at us. Like different languages of love.

Yeah, we're listening on the wrong channel.

Yeah, we're listening.

So we feel like our life is loveless or lacking in love when we're just not seeing what is available and we're chasing, chasing something that's not really love, chasing something that comes with all kinds of other stuff— fear, threat, control.

Yeah, the experience is when you actually find the real love The experience is, is that's everywhere all the time. And it's, it's like the, the, it, it almost feels like it's creating the entire reality. It's an amazing thing when you're like, oh right, it's that, it's the thing that's, that's like animating everything on some level, is the experience, is a felt experience of it. And, and it's like, wait, how did I ever chase this when it's just there? Yeah.

So let's say, let's say we're in one of these dynamics and we recognize this, and yeah, uh, or some other, some other dynamic around, you know, that, that derives from our assumptions of what love is. How do we, how do we change it? What's, what's the way out of the pattern?

Yeah, that's a great question. So learning to love yourself unconditionally is a huge part of it. Um, And the best pointer I can give you there is to love yourself the way you've always wanted to be loved. Literally go into a 3-year-old version of yourself. Say, "How do I want to be loved? How did I want love then?" And give that kind of love to yourself. It's a felt sense. It's an experience. So that's one of the things. The other thing is to really allow the heartbreak. So because in that middle piece that we talked about, you feel trapped where, "Oh, I'm going to either lose the love or I'm going to have to sacrifice a part of myself." And then I lose the power and then I get in the fights, et cetera, et cetera. At that moment, the choice is heartbreak. "Oh, I might lose something that I love." if I'm myself, and I'm going to be myself, and I'm going to let my heart break if I lose the thing that I love. And maybe that allows the person to meet you in a different way, but it definitely makes it so the next person you meet will be a different way, and you'll be attracted to something very different. It's like 80/20, typically, if someone's really consistent about it. 80% the person will meet them, 20% They'll have to, you know, the relationship will end and a new relationship will begin. So it's like allowing that heartbreak. So really when we say we feel stuck in a relationship, "Oh, because if they might get angry, I'm either going to have to feel fear or I'm going to have to feel heartbreak." And beneath the fear that I have to feel is heartbreak. So, "Oh, I can't say that to the jealous person because if I say that to the jealous person, they're going to just fucking go crazy." And so maybe I'm scared because they're going crazy, assuming they're not violent or anything, right? They're going crazy. Maybe there's some fear in me, but underneath that fear is this deep heartbreak of, holy crap, I have been putting up with this and they're in so much pain. There's this deep heartbreak and sadness. And so allowing that every chance you possibly can will increase your capacity to love. So every time our heart's broken, it increases our capacity to love. And then the other one is just to take contrary action. So today I was talking to one of my clients and they were talking about their relationship with their mom. And what became really obvious is that the mom was doing fear at the person, right? Like the way you can be angry at someone, they were being fear, like they were putting anxiety at the person. So it was like, "Oh my God, what am I gonna do?" Da, da, da, da, da, da. I was like, "Will you hold some of my fear so that I can feel better?" And it was consistent and it was ridiculous. Like, "But what? I don't know how to Google." "Yeah, you know how to Google, Ma." You know, that kind of thing. And in that, she always was trying to make the fear better 'cause she learned at a young age that making mom's fear go away or caretaking mom's fear is part of what love is. And so she was just caretaking it. And then all of a sudden when she's like, "Oh, right, I can have freedom. What's the contrary action that I can take here when she has fear?" And I could just be like, "Oh wow, that's a lot of fear, mom." Or I could be like, "Oh my gosh, and then what will happen? If you can't Google, then what's gonna happen?" like, oh, you like play into it, or like even like up the ante the other way. You call up her mom and say, oh my gosh, I don't know what's going to happen if you like get lost at the airport on the way to see me, or whatever that is. So like, it's like finding that flexibility to act in a completely different way is part of allowing yourself to see that you're unstuck and that you can actually be in love.

Yeah, so it seems like each of these are different layers where there's the taking the contrary action to the pattern will bring you into the heartbreak because you're going to end up bumping up against the resistance and the fear.

Yeah.

Also, feeling the heartbreak opens up your capacity to take those contrary actions because you've felt through the— those consequences. And all of this brings you into the deeper unconditional love because you can be with yourself. You could be with your partner. You could love your partner even if you're leaving. And then so the whole space opens up. And one curiosity that I have, just that listeners might be curious about, when we talk about feeling the heartbreak fully, I feel like there's a, often in sort of the culture, heartbreak is considered something that breaks you. You know, you have, you've had a heartbreak and now you're broken and you have baggage. And I just wanna kind of point out what is the distinction between when we say feel the heartbreak all the way through and, uh, a broken heart in the way that people talk about it as something that's like damaged.

Yeah, that's great. So it's, it's the best metaphor I have is that in it, which is weird because I've never done this, but in childbirth, Tara stopped calling contractions contractions and she called them expansions because that's what they're actually doing in the body. They're actually expanding, right?, right? And so she's like, oh, these are expansions. And it totally changed the way she related to childbirth. Similarly, heartbreak feels like it's like a breaking apart, but it's actually a breaking open. It's actually— and it's like the contraction, it's an expansion. And it's just to expand, like, take a huge deep breath in and then take a little more breath in and take a little bit more breath in. There's like, there's a pain to it, right? There's like a little bit of a discomfort that comes with it. Expansion has that discomfort as well. So when I say heartbreak, I'm talking about breaking open. And what's interesting is I just recently heard something that neuroscience shows that women compared to men in our society, in Western society anyways, women are far more open to the experience of heartbreak and therefore they will take the relationships like In the early days of a relationship breaking off or ending, they'll be a lot more in the emotional patterns of it. They'll have a lot more feelings, but they'll recover quicker. Whereas the men won't be so much in that emotional experience. They won't have that feelings of— won't allow those, the hard feelings, and then they won't recover for years and years and years. And so—

Fascinating.

Yeah. So it's, it's, that's what I'm talking about.

Yeah, yeah, awesome. Yeah, was there anything else you'd like to add?

Yeah, I— the thing that I would like to say is that, you know, it doesn't matter what kind of religion or, or philosophy, like, so many of them come down to, like, love is, like, a cure, and love is the solution, love is the way. There's so many things about that, and Oftentimes what that gets translated to in the mind is either like, that's some sort of fluffy thought process, it's not practical, or it's like, oh, love just means feeling good, and so feeling good is the way, and so like, that's not very actionable. This is the action. What I'm trying to describe here is the action of love. It is loving And learning to love in a way in which it is not— that it's in the pure sense of love, not in the learned sense of love. And allowing ourselves to feel love in a more and more pure sense is, um, something that actually frees us incredibly deeply. And the way to do that is to look for the ways that you are Managing others. Look for the things that cause you fights. Look for the ways that you are defending yourself. And when you find them, see what kind of heartbreak is required so that you can get back to unconditional love for the person. See what kind of ways that you have to love that you didn't think love was at all— had anything to do with, right? Like, love might be leaving somebody. Love might be being very brutally honest with somebody. Love might be You know, just playing with somebody. There's lots of things that love can— that you can love while you're doing those things and that you don't think are true. And as you learned that, then all of a sudden love doesn't have to be restricted by fear or love doesn't have to be constricted by— like fear in itself can be loved. And so that's the path. Like, I want to just make that like super concrete. So it's not just like, okay, I'm going to just be loving all the time. That doesn't work. That's like attempted self-brainwash and it doesn't work. It's literally just finding the ways that you defend and feeling the heartbreak that you need to feel so that you can love unconditionally and take care of yourself. Awesome.

Thank you, Joe.

You're welcome. Thank you, Brett. It's a pleasure as always.

Thank you everybody for listening. Take care. Until next time.

Yeah.

Thanks.

All right. Thank you all for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, send it to someone you think would like it. We love your feedback. You can reach out to us on Twitter @artofacomp or on our website at artofacomp.com. Accomplishment.com, which is also a great place to check out our courses and coaching. See you next time.