Kwik Brain Episode 108: Heal a Broken Heart with Dr. Shefali Tsabary

Welcome back, Kwik Brains. So one of the questions we get often is this subject of heartache that comes from relationships, and why do most relationships, more than half of them, quote unquote, fail? And I'm excited about this episode because I think it's gonna serve so many people at the highest level. And I'm excited about also our guest, Dr. Shefali, who's a clinical psychologist, world-renowned, and also a New York Times bestselling author. And you and I have spoken at many events together. We've had many conversations over relationships. And this is this— I feel like we grow the most. It's not necessarily meditating on some mountaintop somewhere. It's interacting in intimacy. But why are so many people having trouble?

Well, first, we don't look at it as trouble, and we don't look at it as failure. That's one of the greatest misconceptions of relationships, that they can fail. There is no such thing, right?

Mm-hmm.

Because they're always the perfect mirror for who you are. So if you look at the relationship as a mirror, every relationship is perfect. And what do I mean by a mirror? A mirror because it is through the intimate relationship that you get to see how you yet have to grow, how you need to heal your inner self. And until we are healed, and there's no perfect healing point, we're always healing, we're always evolving, but till we are you know, mostly healed, we will keep using relationships for the wrong reason. And the wrong reasons are for dependency needs, for being possessed, for possessing the other, for control, because it's a repetition of what you did as a child with your parents. If your parents kind of expected things from you, needed things from you, controlled you, conditionally accepted you, that's what you're going to repeat in most relationships until you awaken, until you heal your inner child so you don't need the other to fulfill you, right? In relationship therapy, of which I do a lot, many people come saying, you know, he didn't meet my needs, or she didn't meet my needs, and he should, and she should. And I just kill all of that right away because there's nobody on the outside who should or can meet our inner needs. It's an inside responsibility. It's your awakening.

And it's interesting because Hollywood It gives you this trance hypnosis that you complete me or my better half.

Well, it's this whole idea of romantic love which is just a delusion and it's really predicated on the inner void. It preys on our inner hunger that it fools us to believe that that hunger can be filled by somebody on the outside. It's an industry called romantic love, right? And we all fall for it because We think there's somebody perfect on the outside that's going to just patch us up, sew us up, and just feed us and quench our thirst. And it's a foolhardy endeavor, and that's why most marriages fail. I have to keep putting everything in quotes.

Right.

Because it's all a delusion. It's predicated on the wrong ideals, right? That there's somebody out there that can meet your needs. And really what it ends up being is a repetition of what you did in your childhood with your parents a reenactment of control and possession and dependency and desperate need and conditionality. Like, if you do this—

Agreeing.

If you do this and love me and make me feel so good when I'm with you and follow my prerequisites of how you should be the perfect partner, I will adore you, of course. But the moment you just— sorry, be human, be fallible, be imperfect, be struggling, be grasping, be figuring it out, And God forbid you grow and change and want to not be with me anymore, then it's so simple, I hate you, right? So the love is conditional because it's predicated on lots of prescriptions and expectations.

Wow. And so now you're also an expert at conscious parenting, and so how do you do that even right?

You don't.

You don't.

You give up that illusion that you can do it right because Consciousness is a journey, as you and I so well know. It's an awakening process that has so many layers. And as long as you realize that we are all humans here on this journey of awakening, you don't put the pressure on yourself to raise the perfect kid because there is no such thing, right? Each one of us here is on this earth in this form to manifest our unique voice. And that is the purpose of our being here. So that's easy to do if you just step out of your own way and your child's way. But so hard to do because the ego, the pain body as Eckhart Tolle calls it, our unhealed selves from childhood keeps blocking the capacity of ourselves to evolve and the child to evolve.

Hmm.

It's all about our inner pain and our wounding from childhood.

And then so where does self-love come into that conversation?

Well, often it's used in a trite clichéd way, you know, love yourself, care for yourself, but you really can't until you heal yourself. And that requires dedication and a process. You have to marry this journey and be committed. If there's any marriage we should undertake, any commitment we should make, is to walk this path toward evolving toward our greatest truth, our inner truth. That's the real marriage. We're marrying people on the outside and pretending as if that's a union. The first union that needs to occur is this deep healing of the inner self.

So where would— I know this resonates with a lot of people who are watching and listening to this. They're thinking like, where do I start? It sounds so complicated, so daunting. Like, and messy, you know, like life is.

But life is daunting and their suffering is daunting already. Most of us are suffering and we don't know the way out of it. Actually, the way— the path out of suffering is the most eloquent, elegant, simple path you can take. It's the unawakened self that's really the scary self. So how do we start? We start by looking in the mirror and being brutally transparent with ourselves that we're living a false self. We're living many false selves and a masquerade really because we're afraid to really show up as our truth. When I ask people, how many people in your life can you be transparent with? The answer is maybe one, maybe one, but often not even. And isn't that sad that we cannot bare ourselves to even one person? So we go to therapy where the therapist is sworn to confidentiality and only then perhaps we feel safe.

Safe.

We're all human and we're all suffering the same predicaments, but we cannot be transparent. So the first step is to be willing to say, I have been inauthentic, I don't live my truth, and own to that, and then go on this path to start. So how— what is that path? Well, you start reading self-help books, you come, you know, you visit podcasts like yours, and you begin to open your mind to the fears that have been blocking you. And there begins the process of healing. It's— you have to begin it by searching. You have to be a seeker. You have to be a seeker. Everyone wants to change while sitting exactly where they are. You have to journey. You have to traverse. You have to take an often solo adventure within yourself, within your soul. You have to go to retreats. You have to read books that are hard and confrontive. You have to really dig deep. You have to seek help. I mean, this is not easy, but we spend hours and decades going to school, getting external information. We spend hours every day on our face and our appearance. What if we channeled all that into self-work?

So what would you say to somebody who's watching this and listening and they're in a relationship, it's a committed relationship, maybe they have children also as well, And they're listening to these podcasts and they're reading these books, but their partner is not. And, you know, you're familiar with that situation. It's just they're trying to change them, and then they go off to an event and they have to explain, and they don't understand why.

But you know why that happens is because when we were young and in love, we fell in love with the persona of that person that we thought would fill our inner void, right? So our persona, our unhealed false self fell in love with their false self. No problem. All of us have been there, done that 100 times. But when one then awakens and then the other is not, it creates a discrepancy, right? There's a shift in vibration.

Right.

And now what? And it's difficult. And typically, typically, women kind of move towards consciousness a little bit faster than the guy because I think because women are more inherently emotionally literate, because they have to be more in touch with their emotions. They've been allowed to be more in touch. Men have typically been told, don't be in touch with your inner world. And then women typically are more the nurturing, oxytocin-filled, the bonders with the children. So that automatically creates some sort of emotional inner connection than men, typically.

Okay.

So typically I have a lot of women saying, what do I do? How do I change my husband? And really the answer for either gender is that you can't. People will awaken when they're ready to awaken, and that creates chaos in our lives. And then we have to make tough choices as adults, you know. What do I do here? What is more important to me now, following my truth or living conforming to an ideal of the happy relationship or the happy marriage or the happy family?

So you can't change another person. I mean, think about how hard it is to change yourself, much less change another human being.

If they're ready for inspiration, maybe you could by being yourself, right? But you cannot ask them to change and expect them to change because you've changed. It's like you've become vegetarian or you now like eating boar's feet for— as a pudding for breakfast and now you want your partner to change. It's as alien a concept as that. Um, but consciousness allows you to understand that we are not meant to all change at the same pace. And when you realize that— this is what I teach in Conscious Parenting— that each being is here to evolve exactly when they're ready, you just gracefully let go. You release it. That's the work of consciousness. It teaches you to release expectations. That's the first thing you learn in consciousness. Release all your expectations. They're coming from your mind. You're projecting onto the other for your inner need. Once you get that, you release, and then you free everybody to be themselves.

So what's the biggest mistake you feel like people make either as individuals or in relationships?

I think the biggest delusion that we fall under is that people are here to meet our needs and we can control them and tell them how to meet our needs.

And that's definitely not the case.

It's just the biggest lie, and the quicker you get out of that way of thinking, you release your children, you release your partners, and you release yourself From thinking you are superior enough to meet other people's inner needs, because you can't.

And you can feel free, because there's freedom that comes with that also as well.

There's liberation. I'm doing a course right now called Free to Be. It's exactly about liberating the self within the relationship.

Dr. Shefali, thank you so much. How do people stay in touch with you?

Well, they can find me through my Facebook page and on my website. I have all these courses on awakening consciousness, meditation, all online, all recorded. And on relationships and parenting. So they can find my courses through my website, and we'll put the link down below.

Okay, fantastic. We'll always put all the links in our show notes like we always do at jimkwik.com/notes. I offer everybody a challenge to this episode, a special challenge to take a screenshot of this episode or this video, whatever platform you're watching this at, tag myself, tag Dr. Shefali also as well, and share your big aha. Your big aha, because when you teach something and you share it, you get to learn it even better and you begin to own it, and that begins the process with you. And as always, I'll share some of my, my favorite and we'll repost those as well. Thank you so much. Thank you.