This LOVE WARRIOR Explains Why LOVING YOURSELF Will Lead To GREAT RELATIONSHIPS | Glennon Doyle

To get back to your own wild just means to be the person that you were before the world told you who to be.

Welcome back everyone to the School of Greatness podcast. We have the lovely Glennon Doyle in the house. I'm so grateful you're here. Thank you.

Thrilled to be here. Well, to be here, Stephanie.

I know. I'm so bummed because I wanted to do this in person, but we had to postponed. And then I was like, well, I want to wait to do it in person. I don't want to do this, this video conferencing stuff. I want to see you. I want to give you a hug, which I don't even know if I'm allowed to hug anyone in the future. I saw something come out this morning that said there, there, there's the person who's like the virus expert is saying that we should never shake hands again. And I'm just like, as an affectionate human being, I don't understand that personally. You can't hug someone. You can't shake their hand. I don't know.

No, and I feel like that's catastrophic thinking too for me. I can't go there. I can barely make it to dinner with these children. I am just one freaking hour at a time and then we'll deal with the after, the next life after this.

Well, you've had a crazy journey over the last lifetime, but over the last four years specifically since I've seen you last and you've written a number of books. We were talking about this beforehand that you said this is probably the the last book you need to write. I'm sure you'll write many more because you're too talented of a writer not to write more. But I was reading something that really blew me away when I was reading part of this. And I just want to read a couple things to set the context. You said, Mothers have been martyring themselves and their children's names since the beginning of time. We have been trained to prove our love by Ceasing to exist, proving our love by ceasing to exist. I was like, I started opening my mouth and just highlighting this and starring. And I was like, this is something every mother needs to hear that line. And I watched my mom do this for 30 years and be in a marriage where she felt voiceless, where she felt unseen, unheard. And I eventually saw my father transform and go through his own emotional intelligence training and start to change. But I think with the tools that they had, there was very limited options for her or seeming limited options. And I feel like there's millions of women who probably have felt that way or feel that way right now. And you're saying we don't need to prove our love by ceasing to exist.

No, because it's just such a terrible legacy to pass on.

Right.

I mean, I The reason that story is in the book is because I was in a bad marriage to a good man.

Yeah.

And that's a tricky place to be for a woman because we are touched.

Really hard. And you have kids, you feel... And.

We'Re supposed to be grateful for good enough. I mean, I had a good enough life, I had a good enough marriage, I had the kind of marriage that women are trained to be grateful for, right?

Which is what? How was it good?

Because, I mean, well, as you know from Love Warrior, there was a lot of infidelity. that I didn't know about. But also, Craig was and is a fantastic father. There's no kinder person. He's just wonderful in so many ways. And still, in that marriage, I was full of rage. I didn't act like it on the outside, but I was just this low-level river of rage all the time.

And I just- Boiling up just like-.

Just right under the surface, like a dormant volcano just ready to- Just like, I'm fine, I'm fine. And I had this longing, you know, for a deeper, truer love that I couldn't let myself admit. And then as you know, I met Abby and fell madly in love.

And she was out of her mind. But I almost didn't, yeah, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I almost didn't follow my heart with Abby because I was trained to believe that a good mother does not hurt her children, right? So one day I was braiding my middle daughter's hair and I just looked at her and I thought, oh my God, I am staying in this marriage for her. But would I want this marriage for her?

Oh, you wouldn't. If your daughter came to you 20 years later and said, this is what I'm going through, Mom, you would ferociously say, Do not do this. Get out, right?

So.

I was modeling bad love and calling that good mothering.

Right?

Because, I mean, really what Untamed is about is about figuring out these root beliefs that are planted beneath us that control us and we don't even think about them, right? They're planted in us by culture and for women, all of these root beliefs have to do one way or another with disappear, right? A good girl is quiet, pretty, submissive, accommodating, pleasing, right? A good wife is supportive, sacrificial, a good mother is a martyr, right? A good mother slowly, she just buries her feelings, her emotions, her ambition, her dreams, and does that in the name of her children, right? Which is such an unbelievable burden for the children of mother Mother of Martyr Mothers to bear.

Is it in the name of children or is it in the name of appearances of what you're doing for your children? Like your social circles. It's the name of showing that you're a good mother to other people.

I think a lot of what we show, I think a lot of things have to do for show. I don't think this is one of them. I think that the mothers I know, that the way I feel that it was deeper than that. It was truly that I truly believed that my calling as a mother was to put everyone else's needs in front of mine. That that was the way that I proved my love.

Where did you learn that?

Well, from culture, right? Just, it's social conditioning. You know, we are all born with these beautiful individual selves and then right around 10 years old, we start to formalize our social conditioning and our social programming. So very early, this is what, you know, your last book is about, very early, you're told, You're a boy. Here are the things that boys do.

Don't cry, don't do this, do this, yeah.

Right, so that's your taming, right? You start to lose your wild, you start to lose who you're born to be.

Don't tame me, come on, Brennan.

That's right. And I mean, then we hit this certain time and we're thinking, why do I feel so caged? Like, why do I feel like I'm never being myself? I'm always acting, I'm always, what I say on the outside is different than what I feel on the inside. And that's because we're all being stuffed inside these little cages of gender, of religion, of sexuality, of roles. Right? So, and that's why, you know, when I looked at Tish and figured that out, I realized the role of a mother is not to be a martyr, it's to be a model.

Right?

Our children will only allow themselves to live as fully as we allow ourselves to live.

That's true.

Of course, so we have to refuse to settle for any relationship or any community or any nation less beautiful than the one we want for our babies. I love what you said before this.

On the page before, which I think is an exercise. You should actually create an exercise somewhere online, unless it's at the end of this chapter, I didn't see it. But you said it's important to take a look at yourself every once in a while in the mirror. And you said you had a mom where you just sat in the mirror and looked at yourself. And I've had a few of those moments in my life where not where you're just putting, you know, cream on or your makeup or doing your hair, but actually just sitting and asking yourself the question, who am I? And is this the life I want to be living? And do I respect the person I'm looking at in the mirror? I had this a couple times in the last seven years with myself, and I was not happy with the person I was looking at, or I was, something was off in some area of my life. And you said you did that. and we all need to make sure we look ourselves in the eyes and see if we're proud of who we are. I think that's something we should do every morning or even a quick moment. I'm just like, am I proud of how I showed up today? Not needing to be perfect, but am I proud of my values and how I want to live in the world? And I think that's these three pages.

Are there any lies there?

Are there any lies? What are you hiding?

Hide stuff from ourselves, man.

All the time. How long did you hide stuff from yourself?

Oh my god, well it's like, you know, in the book I describe it as, it's like we're the snow globes, you know? We just like keep everything shaken up around ourselves, like with busyness and you know, all the distractions that we use so we never have to like see that little immovable object in the middle of the snow globe. That's what sobriety was for me. It was just a settling of all the snow, like there's no more flurry, there's no more distractions and I'm just left with this like, Eye to eye, me and you, just us, like no lies anymore.

And no one's saying how good you are, how amazing you are, no book to put out and be like, oh, you're doing great, you're an amazing mother, you're amazing writer, all those things, right?

Because all of that is just flurry.

It is, yeah.

Right?

What's the thing that you're most.

I.

Would say, the least proud of? since being married and having kids with your first marriage. And the thing you're most proud of since ending it, I was gonna say ashamed, but I. I'm not saying you should be ashamed of it, any. But just thinking you're like, for looking back, you know what? I'm just not proud that I did this.

Yeah, not proud of. This is so crazy because I am, like, the queen of. of revelation, like revealing things. But I would say that, I mean, I think there's ways that Abby and I kind of rushed the kids a little bit that I wouldn't do differently now.

In what sense? How did you rush them?

I think that we've had talks since then that maybe we were openly affectionate a little bit before they were ready.

Like day one, like, hey, we're hanging out and now we're all.

No, I mean, we weren't like that. We were actually very careful. very careful.

Got it.

And slow for what I thought. And yet, and this is my middle daughter who tells us every single thing we've ever done wrong in our life constantly. She's a feedback daughter, you know? As was I.

Sure.

So I think maybe I would have done things a little bit slower there. I think the thing I did.

It's hard to contain love. It's hard to slow down appreciation, affection, you know, the feeling of, wow, this is a magic. It's hard to be like, oh, let's contain our magic.

Yeah.

And especially when you're 42 and it's the first time you've ever been in love before.

I was like, oh, oh, my goodness.

I'm a 12 year old. I mean, I've never been in love before.

Never. What's the difference between loving someone and being in love?

Okay. First of all, I don't know. I still can't tell people like, okay, well were you like gay the whole time? Were you just, I don't know. Like I don't know but I do know that I always just matched myself with people that it made sense to match myself with. Okay? Here's a person that checks the things off on the list that I should want that I should want.

Not that you want, but that you should want.

That I should want. That makes sense, right? And that's what I did in high school. It's what I did in college. It's what I did afterwards. And I never felt like a deep burning passion ever. Like the only deep burning passion love I ever had before Abby was for my children and for my activism. Literally it. I mean, my family used to joke about they'd call me the ice queen because I just didn't have that romantic, I thought there was something wrong with me. I used to say, Louis, you know, love is like a light and some people are good at laser love and I'm more of like a floodlight.

Oh, wow.

I just never. So when I fell in love with Abby, It was like, I was so excited about being in love, but I was so excited for myself because I thought that I was gonna die without ever having a success.

Oh my God. You hear other people talk about it. You see Disney movies with your kids show it, but then you're like, well, I guess I'll never have it.

And I used to not even want to see it. Like, I'd be-- I was like one of those sour grapes people.

Turn that kissing off. Shh. Fast forward this part. Yeah.

Yeah, right. So, and I think it's so fascinating, Louis, because one of the reasons why I trusted it, trusted the love that I felt, was because it was the first time I wanted Abby so much. And it was the first time I had wanted anything beyond what I had been conditioned to want. And I loved her, and it was the first time I had loved anyone beyond who I had been expected to love.

Or when you thought you should love.

Yeah. Yeah.

And that's sometimes how you know that your true untamed self is coming out because the whole rest of the world is going, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Is it good to be untamed all the time and be a wild, wild beast just frolicking in the streets? You know, I'm untamed here in my love life, and I'm untamed in my business, and, you know, all my relationships in my family, you know, Well, I.

Mean, first of all, I don't think anyone is all the time. I think the important thing is to define what untamed means.

Okay, here, let's hear it.

Untamed just means living an examined life, right? It means doing what Walt Whitman suggested, which is re-examining everything you've been taught in a book, in church, in school, in the world, and dismissing whatever insults your own soul, right? So there's a hell of a lot of people that desperately need to untame from their religion. My wife is somebody who was taught very early that she was an abomination to God. She was raised in the Catholic Church and she has spent her entire life feeling alienated from, feeling angry with, feeling left behind by God because that is who she was, that's what she was taught. And it has taken me five years to convinced her that she did not choose herself instead of God and church, that she chose herself and God instead of church, right? Church and God are not at all the same thing.

Yeah, church is man-made.

Oh, God, right? So, untaming yourself from religion and returning to the idea that everyone was born with, that everyone is equally, made up of the divine, right? Yes, I feel like everyone needs to do that. And also the un-taming from these gendered ideas. That's what you've worked on for much of your career.

Yeah.

Boys are so caged and boys are caged. Oh my god, in our culture, we wonder why all these problems in the world, right? And one of the reasons for all the problems in the world is because we have raised men who express no emotion other than rage and anger, right? Who are completely invulnerable, who think they have to be certain in every scenario.

Right.

When their power is through conquering women and being completely narcissistic, like our, the way we have created little boys in terms of toxic masculinity is going to take our planet down if we don't undo it.

It is taking our planet down. I mean, you know, when I came out with masking masculinity a few years ago, it was, I didn't plan this, but that was the height of me, too. That was the height of all the, the Vegas shootings and all the racial marches and all these. And I was just like, the common denominator is everything bad that's happening is by angry men at this moment. You know, angry men or men in power that are expressing some type of masculinity they think is okay. And I'm one to blame that's had these, these beliefs my entire life. I wasn't that extreme of killing people, but it was just like, I would get angry, I would react, I would want to fight in situations as opposed to assess the situation and be a true man, which is a man of leadership, a man of vulnerability, a man of calm and assessment first before just reaction mode. And I think that's, you know, something I had to learn the hard way many different times in my life, that being this way gets you certain rewards, needing to be right, needing to win at all costs, making yourself bigger, faster, stronger. There are certain benefits and rewards having sex with lots of women. There's certain benefits to going after that lifestyle. But there's also a lot of prices you get to pay in the journey of doing that as well. There's pain you cause in yourself, hurt you cause on others, relationships that suffer. And that's just part of the journey that I think we all need to learn, how to untame any type of role we've lived or any type of societal thing we've lived our lives. I feel ya.

There is a price to pay for it. Absolutely. We're gonna get to the point where we're not going necessarily, I think, I do think we will get to the point years from now where we won't even say, How do you be a real woman? Or how do you be a real man? Like, I think that's gonna sound so weird to us a decade ago, because certainly we are starting to understand that personality characteristics or character traits are not gendered. There is no list of character traits that are male and list of character traits that are female. There is only permission to express certain character traits. Right, so women are just permitted to express gratitude and sweetness and deference and whatever.

Vulnerability, yeah.

We have just as much rage and certainty and ambition and experience that. All the things, right?

Yep.

So soon we're just gonna get our little babies and we're not gonna say, how do I turn this into a real man? We're gonna say, how do I encourage this being to have the entire human experience?

Yeah, and be a leader of love and learn multiple things in the world. Yeah, you're preaching to the choir for me. This is my jam. And I'm curious, what has been the biggest challenge for you then with your relationship and untaming things and stepping into the person you've always wanted to be, the person who's always been there that you've never allowed to come out?

Yeah, good question. So the funny thing is, I mean, you know, Louis, that I didn't announce my divorce and my love for Abby. Six weeks before my epic marriage, my epic marriage story, Love Warrior came out.

Yeah.

Which was Oprah's Book Club pick. It was like the world as like a redemption story. I mean, it was unbelievable timing, right? I mean, I announced my wedding to Abby while I was on a nationwide church tour.

So wait a minute, the book was telling one thing, And then you were saying to the world, it's the opposite.

No, not at all. I've never, ever been anything except unbelievably fiercely inclusive. I've been an LGBTQ activist for a decade and a half. I've been to more gay pride parades than Abby has.

Not about that, I mean about the love story.

Well, I mean, it's timing, right? As you know, it's so wild because.

These books you finished-- oh, it's two years later, yeah.

It's two years later.

Yeah, you're a different person, you're a different human being. So how do you navigate that? How do you navigate that when the world is reading one thing that came out and then you're saying, well actually, this isn't true anymore for me and here's what I've discovered. How do you sell a book that's not what you think anymore totally and then go and speak about it? Well, this is actually, go get my next book, it's just what some real truth is.

Yeah, well, tragically for my agents, and my entire publishing team of Love Warrior, I am the only rule that I have for myself in all things marriage, family, career is related to my sobriety. Okay, so my sobriety is the point from which all other good things come in my life. So if I don't keep my eye on sobriety, then I have nothing else.

Everything falls.

Right. So my rule for sobriety is that I will live in integrity, which for me does not mean doing the right thing. It just means that my inner self, my feelings and my desires and my experience will match my outer words and actions so that my outer self and my inner self will be integrated, which is what integrity means. So what I knew at that time was that it was wildly inconvenient for the book But that I was gonna go ahead and tell everybody the truth the whole time.

Wow, gosh.

And Louis, I mean, the meetings about this, like just, you know how this goes. I mean, I would be on calls to New York. There would be 17 people on these calls. They would be saying, just wait six weeks, just please wait.

No way.

No one's gonna buy this book if, you know, they're gonna, and I was like, I'm sorry. Like, I don't, that's not my one thing.

Yeah, and this was two years ago and you guys took too long for me to put it out.

You signed a truth teller, man. Like, what can I tell you?

So, I mean, how do you feel about, how do you give yourself grace of, you know, we all learn and grow and evolve into different human beings. How do you give yourself grace from what you preached from the rooftops two years ago, five years ago, 10 years ago in whatever book or article that you wrote at times to saying, you know what, it's okay. That's where I was at in my life now and this is where I'm at now. How do you give yourself that grace and kind of like, oh, you know, was I steering people in the wrong way or?

Yeah, no, I never, I thought of it more as a kind of culmination of everything that I've been teaching as opposed to like a difference in everything that I've been teaching. I mean, Love Warrior was a book that was largely about me learning how to not abandon myself.

Uh huh.

Right?

So I think if you're not gonna be somebody who's okay with living one story, one season of your life, writing about it, and then living another season of your life and writing about it, that's cool. You just can't be a writer.

Right. You have to stand by one thing that you've done is like, this is the truth forever.

And there's nothing I hate more than that. I feel like that's everything that's wrong. If you're a person who's stuck in your beliefs and stuck in your place and sticking by your and not paying attention to the evolution of being human, I don't want anything to do with you anyway. So I'm completely, completely fine. with living a decade of my life. I think of it as like, you know, Louis, when you go to the eye doctor and they like put those little things on you and you can see more clearly each time and they're like, one or two? One or two. Like that's me looking back at every decade of my life. I'm like, oh, maybe a little clearer I can tell what that part was about. A little clearer I can tell it. I mean, I just read this review on Amazon that made me laugh so hard.

It was a really funny review.

It said, all I could think of when I read Love Warrior was, girl, you're gay. And I was like, oh my God, oh my God, they knew it before I did.

Well, I mean, let's talk about this for a second because if you never liked to make out with your husband and if you never, I don't know what your sex life was like, but I'm assuming it wasn't this passionate, romantic, you know, fairytale type of experience. and I'm not saying that's what love needs to look like either, but if you weren't fully attracted to your husband and he wasn't feeling fully desired by you or attracted, when you look back now and you know that he had a lot of infidelity, are you still, you know, feel like he should have just ended it and not done that, or he was doing the best he could do because he wasn't getting what he desired from his wife, that was the person he loved. What do you How do you reflect on that now? And yes, and all of it.

And more. And I mean, Craig and I are close. Like, he's one of my best friends. And I have so much empathy for both of us.

Right. Both of you.

For both of us. I mean, we got married so young. I had been sober for maybe a hot second. Like, I got pregnant. And so we got married.

Yeah, you didn't know each other.

We didn't know each other. And we got married because it was the right thing, not because we were the right ones, right? And he did, you know what we did? We got married because we thought we were supposed to. And whenever you make a huge decision in your life, because you think you're supposed to, it's never ever gonna be like the wild, true, beautiful decision you were supposed to make, right? So, you know, I'm not one to be like, well, he should, I do think that we have learned that you don't abandon yourself like that. Like, I should never have stayed in a relationship where I hated sex. And he never stayed in a relationship where he needed to go elsewhere for it. Like, that's what not abandoning yourself is, right? I mean, I learned from it, you know, when I fell in love with Abby, We were only, we were in a room together for 10 minutes and then we spoke on a stage together for an hour. That's all the time we spent together before we separated from each other, never saw each other again and dismantled our entire lives to be together. I don't know if you know that part.

I know it's crazy.

We never touched.

I remember, I read in a book how you like called each other and she was like, Are you sure you're ready to do this?

Yeah. So, so I told craig the minute I knew.

Yeah. And that's after you looked in the mirror and you were like, okay, I feel like this is not true anymore.

Yeah.

Because I knew how it felt to, like, well, I just remember thinking, I don't owe this man the rest of my life, but I do owe him my honesty when I know it.

And that's one of the hardest things to do, is to tell the truth and to be honest about how you truly feel in a relationship, especially. I can imagine if you've been together for a decade or more and you have kids, it's got to be the scariest moment of your life.

It was.

I can only imagine.

Yeah.

And for him, I mean, we had been through so much, Louis.

So much, publicly, intimately, everything.

Right. And we had been through the infidelity and we had fought to forgive each other for that. And I thought that I was doing all of that work with him so that we could be happily ever after. But I was doing all that work with him so that we could separate and love and respect and have each other.

Right?

And not hate each other right now.

No, because the way we are able to co-parent now with Abby, we earned all that.

Right?

You went through five, six, seven years of therapy and stress and tears and pain.

Yeah. And it's so interesting because we don't tell each other things. When we don't tell the truth in relationships, because we think, oh, I'm going to hurt them. I'm going to hurt them. But like, what I've learned is that there's no such thing as one way liberation, right? When I finally stopped abandoning myself and I got the nerve to say the thing and set myself free, I also set Craig free.

Yeah.

Now he's out there dating a woman who wants to make out with him.

Exactly. And he was, he was abandoning himself the whole marriage, it sounds like, because if, if it wasn't working or if he wasn't getting what he wanted or whatever, that it's like he wasn't being honest with himself or with you. You weren't being honest with yourself or with him. And you both were hurting. And the kids are essentially seeing a model, like you said, that is they're probably going to follow in some way, shape or form in the future until you break it.

That's right. And I think one thing that women are told often is we think that we cannot you will hear this all the time, like people will say it in response to this interview. Well, women can't just do what they want. We can't do what we want. That's selfish. We can't just do what we want. Like our people will hurt our people. We are told we are brainwashed to believe that if we do what is true and beautiful for ourselves, then it will hurt our people.

Right?

It might hurt for people.

Well, yeah, but like for women especially, like we are trained that what is good for us and what is good for our people are mutually exclusive. that is what women believe. And I, if there's one thing that I've learned from this experience, it is that that is not true. When we allow ourselves to live as ourselves, right? When we give ourselves permission to exist fully, we automatically grant permission to everyone in our world to exist fully too.

Right?

That's what I mean by one-way liberation. Like, if you are a woman, you can continue to hide and you can continue to, to, use our children as excuses not to be brave with our lives, right? Or we can demand to set our own selves free, to live fully, and our children will look at us and go, huh, I guess I have permission to do that.

Yeah. It's like being in a high school dance where everyone's just trying to look cool on the outside and just have their own conversation. pose up against the wall and talk with her, listen, man, you know, until one person decides to untame on the dance floor and say, hey, I'm gonna let myself loose. You can look at me, you can laugh at me, but eventually you're gonna be joining me and be grateful for this.

That's what it's like. And I think the idea of untaming, it isn't, I think sometimes when people hear the words like tame, it makes them think of wild. And then when they think of wild, they think of, oh, to untame means to come in, to be just crazy and bold. And that's not what it means at all. All. To get back to your own wild just means to be the person that you were before the world told you who to be.

Right. Yeah.

To be yourself. To be yourself. This is who you are. It's not to get back to yourself, it's just to be who you've always been.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Be the self that's just hidden underneath all of these cultural expectations and conditioning and all of that. I mean, I've got two little girls. One of them is wild AF, like, she's like you. Yeah, I am. And then I've got this other one who's quiet and cautious, like that is her wild, right? You have to shame her into being loud and whatever like everyone else, 'cause that's not who she is. So I think it's important to know, like, our wild inside of us doesn't have to do with volume, right? It has to do with who we actually are.

Yeah. Why is it so hard to forgive ourselves and other people? And if you could go back in the marriage or in divorce or any of these, any of this time, and you could forgive yourself or other people faster, would you choose to do that?

Okay, well, I have some different thoughts about forgiveness.

Sure.

I just think our idea of forgiveness is kind of bullshit. Like, I think we have this idea that forgiveness is like a linear process that we're just like doing, we're like holding our breath, somebody's done something to us and we're like holding our breath and we're just like waiting for the moment that forgiveness is like bestowed upon us from the sky and then we're gonna forever feel fine about that person.

Mm-.

Right? But that's not my experience with forgiveness. I think forgiveness is circular, right? It's like walking a spiral staircase and we're still gonna run into our rage and our unforgiveness.

I forgive you, I hate you, I forgive you, I'm mad at you.

I think that Craig and I are in a very evolved place. Like we respect each other deeply. We get it, we forgive each other and every once in a while I still want to stab them. and I think that we will always have that. We will come back around to forgiveness. But I don't think it's linear. I don't think it's a check done and done. I think it's a repetitive process over and over again. And I will tell you this. I spent so much of my marriage angry, like deeply.

Give me a percentage. 50.

Wow. I mean, I'm like, after the infidelity. Yeah.

Yeah.

80 to 85. You were like, he's punished all day long.

I mean, I tried not, you know, I just, I think it came across daily as just cold. Well, you know how a person acts when they need to get their boundaries back, right? But I think that what I learned, I kept raging, I kept internally raging, like how could, the repetitive loop in my head was, how could he abandon me like that? How could he abandon me like that? Until I figured out that the actual question I should have been asking myself is, Why do I keep abandoning myself? Why, if I am trusting myself, if myself, if this anger inside of me is telling me over and over again that I am not safe, why am I abandoning myself?

Why are you staying in it to stay a parent or for the kids or what?

I mean, we actually believe that it is kinder to keep people close and.

Hate them To set them free.

To set them free so we can love them, right? I realized my job was to forgive the husband of my children and I needed to do whatever it took to make that happen. And what it took for me to be able to forgive the children of my husband was to divorce him.

Wow.

When I, the first time I remember feeling tender, Safe, loving feelings for Craig was when I was in the elevator going downstairs after our divorce mediation.

That was the first time.

And I looked at him and I felt safe and I felt tender feelings and I felt forgiveness and I felt friendship. And that is because I had done what it took to make myself safe again to restore my own boundaries. So what I'm saying is, first of all, I don't think forgiveness is a before and after. I think it's a process again and again forever. and I also don't think forgiveness is something that just falls from us to us from the sky. I think sometimes we have to forge forgiveness by restoring boundaries. Wow.

How do we create those boundaries?

You ask yourself what you need, and then you don't tell yourself you're being dramatic or you should be grateful or you should, should, should, should. You say to yourself, what do I need to feel safe again? and then you do that shit.

I think what about the relationship? Here's a question for you. I think like, you know, I'm still this uneducated human being that is always learning and asking questions. So forgive me if I sound uneducated. But sexuality is on a spectrum where, you know, you may not be fully fully gay, you might be part gay, you might have tendencies, whatever, right? And excuse me if I mess up terminology.

You don't have to be worried about that with me. I'm brand new to the gayness.

I know that I'll speak for myself. I know that I love women and I'm sexually attracted to only women. But I also know that I love to Put my arm around and be affectionate with a buddy of mine, a couple of guy friends of mine. I like to hug people in general, but I would never, I shouldn't say never, but I've never thought that I would ever cross a line and want to be sexual or kiss a man in any way, period. It's never crossed my mind as something I'm even curious to attempt. So that's just where I'm at. But there's probably some tendencies of like, well, but I'm affectionate and there's men that would never want to touch. another man. So, there's a spectrum there. There's also a spectrum of love that couples have for each other. And this is something that you said a few minutes ago about I was in a good relationship or a good marriage.

A bad marriage with a good man.

Yes, a bad marriage with a good man. What about the people who have good marriages with good partners, but it's not great. It's a 78% marriage, not an 88 to 90%. And sometimes it drops down to 69, 68%, goes back up to 70. It's a good marriage with a good person, but it's still not everything that that person wants. It's still, I'm missing something. There's something a little bit that's missing. What are the people that have really good marriages, but it's not great? What do those people do? It's like having the great, good corporate job that's making you 250 grand a year, but there's something that's like missing. Do they get out of that relationship? Is it, you know, a process of communication and therapy? What is it to get to the level that we truly want that it looks like It sounds like you're experiencing right now.

So I think that, I mean, first of all, the thing that I would say is like, this isn't a Cinderella story, except like a girl replaces the prince. Like it's not like I'm skipping around in daisies all day. Like marriage is still marriage and being human is still human and all the things. Like there's no Disney shit here.

Yes, yes.

Secondly, I think that one of the bravest things that people can do is to even admit that discontent. I think that- But it's good.

It's 80% of the way there.

Or they won't even tell themselves that. They won't even- because I think that admitting that you have any discontent or longing for more means that you have to then do something about it. Like it's easier just to deny that longing.

Because I think you're talking about- and be grateful for what you have.

I mean, and Louis, this wasn't part of your particular indoctrination, but women are trained from the minute we're born to be scared to death and ashamed of wanting more. The original sin for women.

Is to want.

Right?

Is, gosh, that's so...

Think about Eve. Like, the first story I ever learned about being a woman and God is the chick who showed up on the earth wanted more and got punished. Effing world fell apart.

Man, that's a tough pill to swallow.

Right, and that story is told to women in every situation across the corporate world, across the family worlds. Do not want more. Smile and be grateful for what you have. And if you do ask for more, why is that? You will fuck it all up.

Why is that? Why is that story?

Because we live in a patriarchal culture. So of course women have to be scared to death to demand what they deserve. 'Cause if we demanded what we deserved, power would be threatened, right? So the clearest way we can get women to stay in their place is to have them terrified of wanting more.

Wow. By telling a story of the past, yeah.

Right.

And it's the story of today. So that's why when you hear a woman be ambitious, look at every woman who's ever run for political office. Oh, she's ambitious. She wants power. We won't have it. We will not have it. We will not have a woman who wants power. We hate her. We say things like this. I don't know what it is. I just can't put my finger on it. She's just not likable. Right?

Yeah.

I can put my finger on it. It's because we have been culturally conditioned to the more successful, the more successful, the more confident and the more happy a man becomes. the more people like him. And study after study have proven that the more successful, the more confident, the more bold a woman becomes, the more people dislike and mistrust her.

That's not the case for me and my girlfriend. She goes after what she wants and she is passionate about it. I'm like, for once I'm with someone who I feel like is a match, who's like, has the same type of drive for her dreams.

Whether it's- and that's the way that you react to her. But ask her if she thinks that the world ever thinks she's getting too big for her britches. Ask her how many times she's put in her place for being beautiful and strong and powerful. Because there will be a difference in the way that the world reacts to her than the way that you react to her.

Yeah, of course. Well, it's interesting you say that because I remember getting notified of an interview I did on a podcast. It was like eight years ago. And something around the title was like, I can't remember exactly what it said, but something like Lewis Howes' definition of winning success is like winning at everything. And this was pre Lewis on a journey of evolving and trying to discover myself. But I remember reading the highlights from it where I was like, the whole mission of my life is to win at everything and to be the, it was like to be the best. That was before I went through a journey of talking about sexual abuse and discovering myself and healing and forgiveness and everything, which you were a huge part of my journey because I reached out to you and said, how do I share this with the world? I have no clue what I'm doing and I'm terrified. And you guided me. So thank you. I'll be forever grateful for your guidance on how to share my story seven years ago, six years ago now. And it's funny to look back and see my mindset was just like, no, I have to be the best. I have to win. And if not, I'm worthless and no one's gonna love me and I'm gonna feel like a loser. All these things that I was taught and conditioned. But I felt like, man, this is not a good place to come from. It does not support me. It makes me feel so lonely. It makes me feel insecure. It makes me feel like I'm never gonna be good enough. And now I come from such a place of collaboration and yeah, sure I'm just kill competitive at certain things, but it's like I want everyone to win. I want to promote everyone. I want everyone's voice to be heard. It's not only me, it's how can we all support and collaborate as opposed to be competitive and win. And it's amazing when you shift that, you can get so much more done when you try to collaborate as opposed to competing. when you try to lift others up as opposed to win at everything. It's amazing what you can create. It's amazing how much better you can sleep at night. I've slept so good over the last five years. It's crazy.

Oh, I love that. It makes you feel so much less alone because doing anything, like doing this work alone, forget it. You can just spend all of your minutes on earth just feeling like you have to earn your existence. I used to just feel like if I wasn't producing something, the day wasn't even worth, I would just be like complete crap about myself.

If you didn't write an article that didn't get shared by thousands of people and whatever comments and views, then I'm not enough.

Right, right, right. And that's so wonderful to have a team of people now that you can celebrate with. Everything's just about, and at the end of the day, it really is just about community.

What is your greatest hope for your children through witnessing the lifestyle that you had pre-Abby to the lifestyle you have now? Do you feel worried that they were so conditioned to see one model and now they're learning a new model that may be, you know, unique in itself because they're not seeing a lot of that in society, I guess, maybe but now they're seeing a new model with two women together in a different type of union. What's your hope for them as they grow up and evolve?

Well, I remember when I sat them down to tell them about the divorce and later when I sat them down to talk to Abby, I remember I said, I have always told you that in this family we tell the truth about who we are. Even when it feels scary and even when it could disappoint other people and I'm about to show you how that's done and I told them and what I want, I talked to my girls and chase a lot about the word confident. I'm not obsessed with the word brave because I feel like everybody on earth has a different freaking idea of what brave brave is, right? Or just brave is like, but I love the word confident because it's Latin roots are con and fid, which means with fidelity, right? With loyalty. So confidence means loyalty to self. And I talk to the girls about and chase about this all the time because what I want for them is that they live lives of confidence, meaning that they are willing to disappoint everybody else on earth so that they don't have to disappoint themselves.

Oh, that is strong.

Yeah, I want them to disappoint as many people as humanly necessary. Including and especially me, especially their parents. Because I learned during my own unteaming that it was easy for me to tell the entire world about Abby than it was then it was for me to tell my mom, okay? Like, you can think you're untamed until you have to call your parents.

And you go back into a certain. Yes, mommy, yes, daddy.

I'm sorry, tell me what to do.

Well, how did your mom react to it?

Well, this is interesting. So this is my situation with my mom during this time is when I became an adult. I had to pinpoint the moment I actually became an adult. It was during this time.

Why do you say that?

Because I told my mom and she. My mom's my best friend. Okay? We talk four times a day.

Well, she was before this, huh?

No, no, she didn't. And she was scared shitless. Okay? She was. She was worrying to death and calling that love. she was repeating and repeating all of these questions, well, what are the kids' parents going to say? How is the world going to react? She was so fearful. And every time I talked to her, I'd find myself getting defensive and afraid and shaken. Because it's not the hate from the people. It's not like the rage from the people who hate us that shakes us from ourselves. quiet concern from those who love us, right? That shakes us.

Wow.

That's always it. And so I remember one day, Louis, my mom said to me on the phone, We're coming to visit. And I found myself saying, no, you can't come because you are afraid. And my children are not afraid, right? We've taught them that love in any form is to be celebrated and that it is best to be yourself and let the world catch up so they don't carry the fear that you carry. But if I let you bring it to this house, they will see it in your eyes and they will help.

You carry it because they start to question, they'll start to.

So I said, I have to tell you this hard thing, Mom, which is that your fear is not my family's problem. And it is my duty as their mother to make sure it never becomes their problem. So go figure out your problem. And when you are ready to come to the island of my family with nothing, But love and celebration and respect, we will lower the drawbridge for you, but not one second sooner.

That's profound. Now, would you need your mom? What if your mom was like, well, I can just never accept this. What if I'm just hypothetical? I can never accept this, but I can be neutral and still love you. And I'm not gonna say I like it and it's okay in my beliefs, but 'cause that might shatter her or who knows, I'm just saying for anyone else watching. But if she said, but I'll have a neutral stance and I won't make you wrong for it. Would you be, is that something?

I don't know. And all I can tell you is that I feel very lucky that that wasn't, isn't my, what you just said, I know a lot of people hear, but it sounds like a bunch of bullshit to me.

Yeah, yeah.

I will never understand, like, I love you, but I disagree with you. you know, like opinions are something you disagree with, but people's families are not something you disagree with. Like, you don't get to disagree with the love of my life. Like, if you disagree with the love of my life, that's great, but you're sure as hell not coming to my house.

Right.

So I'm glad that that situation has never arisen for me. And maybe one of the reasons it hasn't arisen for me is because I would not have it.

Well, she wouldn't be in your life in this way.

No.

What about Abby's?

I think that what people do is that they decide who gets to be in their life.

Even if it's family, even if it's parents, even if it's... And what we.

Decided early on was we were going to do something different. We were going to decide what is not let in our life. And homophobia was one of those things. So no matter who brings it, even if it's my mom, you don't get to come. Wow. No matter who's holding it on the other side of like our island drawbridge.

I mean, you can't do that because that's negative energy. Yeah, it's negative energy.

It's a lie. It's just like you're not going to bring your racism into my house. You're not going to bring your racism, you're not going to bring your homophobia, you're not going to bring lies into my house while I entertain it and try to make space.

For it.

No, I can't control the whole world, but this is my island. I'm not gonna bring that shit into my house and let my kids see it. Then my kids look at me and think, oh, I see in our family, we make room for racism and homophobia. We try to make nobody uncomfortable.

Right, we try to not say what needs to be said. Yeah. My mom.

It's amazing, Louis, when you do stand in who you are and you do make your non-negotiables.

You create your boundaries.

You do make your boundaries. People come around.

They either gonna come around or they're gonna be alone and upset.

They come around or they don't come around anymore. Either way, lovely. Because I think what we do is we go around trying to convince everybody we're okay. But the only way to convince other people that we're okay is to just go about being okay and let them witness it, right? I think in the end, my mom was just really scared for me. Yeah. And now she saw, she respects what I decided. She realized, oh my God, their family is as beautiful as she thinks it is, right? And now she likes, Abby is her favorite daughter now.

She likes her more than you, yeah. What about Abby's parents? I haven't seen a lot about her. Is she, her parents accepting of stuff? Are they out of the picture?

Is it... No, no, no, no. Actually, we were just on an hour long Zoom call with her entire family because she has seven brothers and sisters and I don't know, something like 49 million. We have 49 million nieces and nephews.

No.

Abby's parents are lovely, wonderful and very Catholic. so we, they love us as human beings. I don't know if they will ever get to the point where the real come to Jesus discussion come to Jesus. It's a funny way to describe it. The discussion about, like, do what you really accept.

Right.

I don't know.

So if there, so if there are. lovely to you and lovely people, but they're not fully accepting of this belief. Is it okay to still have a relationship and have people in your lives who are?

Well, part of that's Abby's decision.

Gotcha.

Right, because every relationship is so different. And I, Abby, I'm a little bit more scary spice than Abby is. She's much nicer than I am.

It's black or white, yeah.

Right, right, right, right. So, like every family, we have different situations with everybody. Yeah.

What's the thing that you admire about yourself in the last five years the most?

Oh, I like that question. I admire that I have always, so far, till this minute, I don't know what will happen next hour, but I really have been able to honor the commitment to just do the next right thing. Even if the next right thing is not the most easy or profitable or, you know, even when the next right thing has been, okay, that's great, but if you do that, your career is going to be over. I've been able to look at groups of people and say, okay, I guess my career will be over.

And.

Yeah, that's been pretty fun and badass. And like, I've never, I have never had to abandon myself. And I've been able to see over and over again that the fear that people bring to you is never true. The only thing you really have to be afraid of is losing your integrity and losing yourself. The rest falls in line when you do.

Yeah, that's beautiful. I love that. And what's the thing you admire the most about Craig? in the last five years.

I mean, I guess his constant grace, I mean, he supports, he's over here a lot right now because we're in blended family quarantine, the whole thing.

It's gotta not be easy. Even if it wasn't the right thing anymore to be together, it's still gotta be challenging for anyone, man or woman, to see someone within a finally happy. I couldn't make them happy, but she's finally happy. It's still gotta be somewhat challenging to the ego or the heart or anything, right?

Absolutely. And I'm sure it is. And the fact that he shows up so relentlessly and still has such deep kindness. I think that's what I respect so much about him because you're right. It can't be easy. I think that it's a little easier for Craig and I than it is for a lot of couples. And this is what I figured out. I think that there is like a very thin line between love and hate. Like they're both passion, right? So it's like who cares whether it's on this side of this day or this side of this day, whether you are crazy about each other or hate each other, it's just the same. It's all just passion, right? So I think that's why it's so hard for a lot of couples who fall deeply in love and have deep passion to divorce and co-parent. because those things are so close.

That's the analogy, yeah.

When my friends who can't be in the same room as their people, they can't even understand me and Craig's situation, because they can't be in the same room. It's because they have deep passionate love that it's taken a while to move over to the friend zone. And I think Craig and I were.

Kind of never kissing. You weren't having sex, you were-.

So.

It'S like you can have a fairy tale marriage or a fairy tale divorce, but maybe you can't have both.

Like, yeah. And, and it's also, I mean, who knows? I dated a girl in high school who, you know, she's an amazing woman, and she ended up being in love with a woman. She dated another guy after me and then dated a woman for, like, 10 years. And I remember being like, there's something. It's a different energy. I'll speak for myself. I don't want to speak for Craig or any other man, but it's a different energy, I think, where it's like they're with another man and they're happy and they're with a woman. I don't know what the energy is, but it's who knows if he'd be so kind and loving if he was like in a house with you and another man with his kids all day, there might be some type of energy.

I don't know. I remember this is what something that Oprah said to me. She was like, well, you know, most guys have to feel like they weren't man enough. But at least Craig can say, I wasn't woman enough.

There you go, yeah.

But also, Louis, for real, I think the energy, like for me, watching Craig, he had a very serious girlfriend who was wonderful, but I had to go through the pain of watching another woman with my children. He never had to watch another man with his children. It's different, I'm telling you. Like Abby is not, you know, that's not like watching another dad figure come in.

Right, it's like, oh, is she a better mom than me? Is she the fun mom? Is she the this mom? Is she evil or whatever, yeah.

And she wasn't, she was wonderful. So that made it work.

You're like, oh, she's perfect, I hate her.

She was perfect and wonderful and lovely and nice, and she knew how to do perfect braids in the kids hair. It was like, I mean, it was actually a wonderful experience for me because I really had to face all of the talk about making yourself feel worthy. Like I had to be like, will my kids still love me? Am I enough? Like I had to go through all of that. It's complicated, man. Parenting, no matter what, family, love, all of it's complicated no matter what form you have.

Even if you have the perfect marriage, the perfect partner, and you're, loving it. It's still gonna be hard. Being a human being is challenging. You add another human being in your life all day long, that's more challenging, learning and growth. What's the thing you admire most about Abby?

Oh, Jesus.

In the last five years.

Abby is hands down the kindest person I know. She's the kindest person that everyone knows who's in her life. I think one of the things, one of the, what came to mind when you said this is that Abby, more than anyone I know, brings 100% of who she is to every scenario, every person, every moment. She is the most present, I would say she's the most generous with her being person that I've ever met. Meaning, if you're in a room with her, she is giving you 100% of who she is. and I don't even understand it. I mean, as a raging introvert, like, I'm usually not even in the room when I'm in the room. Gone. And she just has this ferocious presence that really comes across to me as just complete love, just generosity of spirit. She just makes every room, she makes everybody feel seen, she makes every room more fun and more alive. She's just, I don't know, she's just magic to me.

That's beautiful. I feel like I could get lost listening to you and learning from you for hours, but I want to ask you a couple of final questions. What advice do you give to people who are in, whether you're blended, mixed, normal family, whatever you want to call it, any type of family with kids and challenges? What advice do you give during quarantine of how to keep Peace and love and boundaries in confinement.

First of all, I just think that every parent on earth needs to lower their freaking expectations, right? Just stop.

Be flexible.

Oh, all this like, oh, we'll just teach our kids Spanish during this time. We'll all learn jujitsu and we'll like all this freaking hustle and like just no, we are in a freaking global pandemic. Like let's lower our expectations. We are just trying to survive. Right? People are being asked to do impossible things right now. Like, you cannot do your job, homeschool your children, deal with your own grief and their grief and everybody. You can't. Nobody's nailing it. Nobody's nailing it. We're all just trying to survive it. Don't mom shame yourself. Don't dad, turn on the freaking TV.

Watch some Disney Plus.

All day. If you need a reading lesson, just Push mute and turned on the closed caption.

There you go.

Reading lesson check, right? Just lower your expectations. And then I also think that a really, I think this is a hard time for families because especially in my parenting generation, we were taught to fix everything. To not let our children feel any pain at all.

Can't fix this.

Can't fix it, right? These kids are in a place that we have never been in. Like they have just lost the illusion we've tried to sell them which is that we are in control and we can protect them from things. Poof! That's gone, right? This is a weird time for these kids and they're going to have weird feelings and so are we and I think we need to practice not fixing each other. When our kids tell us that they're afraid, when our kids tell us that they're angry, when our spouses do, we don't move to solution. We just move to connection, right? We don't say, Here's how I'm going to fix this for you. We just say, I see you, me too. We practice allowing everybody to have their pain. I think that this is a good time to practice that since we can't fix anything anyway.

I want to acknowledge you for a moment, Glennon, for being loyal to yourself and for expressing confidence with yourself and integrity with yourself and sharing all this with the world by first doing it yourself and practicing something that's very, very challenging and was probably one of the scariest things you've ever done. And I also want to acknowledge you for being a voice for so many people that need this message and for also being there for me when I needed to go through something really challenging. and really scary for me to share with people. You were the person that got on the phone and guided me. I was clueless of what I was doing, terrified, so scared, and you gave me a sense of peace. You gave me a sense of everything's gonna be okay. It's gonna be hard and scary, and you're gonna deal with lots of emotions, but you were really there for me in a big way. And I'll always be grateful for your time, your energy, your presence, your your truth and your wisdom. So I'm just very grateful for you and the person that you are, the person you've become over the years and for untaming yourself. And I want to make sure everyone gets this book because there's some stuff in here when I was going through it that dropped my jaw. So make sure you go check this out in a positive way, in a powerful way that will support you in your life and give you more courage in your life to be who you've always been. which it seems like you've gotten back to. So I want to make sure everyone gets this book. There's something I asked you the last time you came on, but I think that your truths might be different. I asked this to everyone at the end. It's called the Three Truths. It's a question, hypothetical question. I want you to imagine it's your last day on Earth, a couple hundred years from now. But one day you got to go. And you've accomplished every dream you could imagine. You have the most beautiful relationship, life, kids have done everything. You've done it all, written all the books, anything you want to do, you've done it. But for whatever reason, you've got to take all of your work with you to the next place. And so your writing, your books, your movies, your interviews, speeches, they're all to the next place. No one has access anymore. But you got a piece of paper and a pen to write down three things you need to be true about life. Three things you would leave behind to your friends, your family, your loved ones into the world and this is all we would have are these three truths from you. What would you say are yours?

Be still. These are the three things I would tell my kids. That's how I have to think about them. Be still because I truly believe the only way we end up living the life we were meant to is if we practice not looking outside of ourselves but inside. There's a guide in here we can only get to in stillness. The second one would be feel all your feelings. Not just the easy ones. Feel them all because feelings are alchemy that turn us into the next version of who we're supposed to be. And the third one would be imagine. I believe so strongly in the power of imagination. I think Our imagination is not where we go to escape reality, but it's where we go to discover the deepest reality that we were meant to birth.

Ooh.

So be still, feel all your feelings and imagine.

That is beautiful. One final question for you before I ask it. Where can we support you besides getting the book? How can we follow you online, your website? Where can we go? There's no book tour right now, so how can we see what the Go.

To Glennon Doyle on Instagram and then go to Together Rising. Together Rising is my nonprofit, which is really my baby. We've raised $25 million for women and children in need all over the globe. Yes. All grassroots, the most frequent donation is $25. So this is just a completely grassroots revolutionary activism crew. So come to Together Rising, come to Glennon Doyle. Mostly on Instagram, I'm on Twitter, but I don't understand Twitter, I suck at it.

Instagram is great. You show a lot of your lives, you show a lot of the stuff you're doing behind the scenes, so make sure to check it out there. I love what you're doing there. Glennon, you're amazing. My final question for you is, what is your definition of greatness?

Of greatness, to thine own self be true. Ooh.

You're the best, Glennon. I can't wait to hopefully hug you in the future if we're allowed to.

We will, we will.

High fives, shake hands, all that stuff. so thank you for all your time. I really appreciate it.

Thank you, Louis.

Thank you so much for watching this video. And if you're looking for more greatness in your life, then check out this next video right here.

Many people who appear to be perfect and they are always the unhappiest of all my clients and always the loneliest too. Because that's a lie that there isn't a perfect person on the planet.