Summary
Joe and Brett explore how our childhood experience of love gets wired together with whatever conditions accompanied it—criticism, abuse, avoidance—and how we then spend our adult lives recreating those same conditions, mistaking them for love itself. We become attracted to partners who fulfill our conditioned version of love, we do things we think we “have to” do to maintain love (losing our power in the process), and we close our hearts when we believe love requires it.
The practical implications are enormous: attraction patterns that keep pulling us toward dysfunction, relationships where both partners manage each other instead of truly connecting, and a felt sense of being trapped. Joe describes how one client’s marriage transformed when he realized he could love his wife whether he stayed or left—that unconditional love was the freedom, not the trap.
The way out involves three things: learning to love yourself the way you always wanted to be loved, allowing heartbreak (which is actually a “breaking open,” an expansion of capacity), and taking contrary action to break conditioned patterns. Joe emphasizes that heartbreak doesn’t break you—it expands your capacity to love.
Key Concepts
Key Quotes
“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.”
“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.”
“As soon as he realized, ‘Oh, I can love this person even if I leave, I can love this person,’ the leaving, I can love this person in the staying… that’s actually where my freedom is, is to love them unconditionally.”
“Heartbreak feels like it’s a breaking apart, but it’s actually a breaking open. It’s actually an expansion.”
“Every time our heart’s broken, it increases our capacity to love.”
“The experience is, when you actually find the real love, the experience is it’s everywhere all the time.”
Transcript
thank you [Music] 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 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 weak uh having having been away from a lot of other stuff and having 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 then and everybody’s facilitated is like just gonna Drool on themselves for two days and recover scattered as interesting thing yeah I’m I I’m feeling pretty recovered now but I definitely had two 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 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 an 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 groundbreakers 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 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 gonna hit me or or you know or wow I feel like I should be hit right now because they’ve they’ve had that kind of abuse in their life
um so there’s yes we get love confused not only intellectually but also in the body our body does that and and so for me that what I see here is that you know that classic saying of that which wires together fires together what I notice is that the the love that was uh shown like what we are kids and we love our parents whether and I don’t care what happens to you I don’t care if you hate your parents you know you end up loving your parents they they the kid who was like deeply abused by a parent still on some level wants the love and affection of their parent they want that relationship healed they want um 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 are 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 what’s the love that I really wanted that they can get in touch with the like the deeper levels of Love yeah
yeah yeah so and sort of the 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 I was I turned out just fine yeah if you’re just just on the 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 yeah yeah exactly if you have to say that it means you’re protecting something that was hurt I guarantee it so if you 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 let’s look more into this so uh we we grew 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 of this phenomenon it will one is when somebody says oh you should love that part of yourself or you should love yourself one one of the basic ones is there they’ll say how do I do that you know that’s literally that but um but the more 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 learn 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 the first one you mentioned is what you’re attracted to uh yeah yeah how how love how your conception of Love affects what you’re attracted to what who’s attracted to you and what you’re looking for
yeah so so I 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 uh not in the short term maybe but definitely in the long term and so there’s this this thing that like Sparks us the thing that says oh wow here’s this person that I’m attracted to it’s 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 in 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 and yeah so as an example uh if you knew love to be deeply critical which we just talked about then most likely you’re gonna have somebody your other the person that you’re loving is going to be highly Critical with you if you know or you’re going to be critical to them or both and so that’s that’s how the system works is that we whatever was wired with that love is what we’re going to be attracted to and I and what I notice is that over time my clients will often are the people who take the courses will often change what they’re attracted to like that that natural oh my gosh I’m attracted to that person completely changes because they have learned to create like non-correlation non-space between the idea of love and the idea of what was wired in as love when they were when they were young and 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 then yeah they stop it in themselves and and that process can be quite scary because when they when you’re separating the criticism from yourself you’re like oh my gosh then I’m it’s a very subconscious thing but there’s this fear that oh I’m this is that I’m going to have love pulled away from me right that’s the other way that it works is that if it was wired like that if it gets it turns away you’re like oh Love’s Gonna Go With It so I have to accept that yeah yeah yeah if I 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 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 that also kind of interacts with a self-concept of 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 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 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 the anybody who’s listening is just say to yourself out loud I I don’t need to accept criticism to be loved and it many people who just said that to themselves are immediately so go ahead if you’re listening and do that and 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 I’m I’m I I’m not open to feedback people will think blah blah blah you’ll have a thousand thoughts that justify how will I improve criticism 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 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 to put up with avoidance I have to put up with 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 that one’s interesting because it’s it’s also how we lose our power in a relationship so right for instance uh let’s say there’s two people and they both date a jealous person the first person didn’t learn the jealousy was something or possessiveness was something to be accepted and so it’s just like yeah no I’m not taking taking that on forget it and it’s just very clean and simple and neither 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’m I will accept this um 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 uh 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 others 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 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 person 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’re 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 it fights start occurring either whether they’re pacifieds or aggressive fights and 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 right yeah a joining of yeah adjoining of two wisdoms
yeah and 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 gonna need a lot of my management like you never hear that you do subconsciously but then like a year later it says it’s 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 uh just not being loving and I was and I was calling attention to him like what’s going on and and what we discovered was that he thought that he couldn’t leave and love them because that would be disloyal that would be um 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 the leaving I can love this person in the stain I can love this person that that’s actually where my freedom is is to love them unconditionally you 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 a in the way that was actually really appealing it it fixed the whole relationship that the the thing that was 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 in the whole thing
yeah it was it wasn’t it wasn’t a like overnight process by any strikes there was 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 and 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 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 um 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 the 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 um one of my clients uh a person that they that they work with and and the person was describing the problems that they were having with my client and she kept on saying like something to the effect of like I know that sounds harsh and I kept on saying no that sounds like compassion now my client couldn’t hear it because because of their version of what love is and she this this woman I was talking to she was in us 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 it was deeply compassionate it wasn’t it wasn’t refined it wasn’t skillful but it was there was compassion behind it and and that’s the same thing that that happens is that we we have this um idea of what love should be and therefore we can’t even see the love that’s coming at us that like different 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 experiences is it’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 it’s about 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 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 I can give you there is to love yourself the way you’ve always wanted to be loved like literally go into a three-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 if I like so because in that middle piece that we talked about you feel trapped where oh I’m gonna either lose the love or I’m gonna have to sacrifice a part of myself and then I lose the power and then I get in the fights etc etc 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 gonna 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 eighty percent the person will meet them 20 percent they’ll have to they’ll have to you know the relationship will end a new relationship will begin um so so it’s like allowing that heartbreak so really when we say we feel stuck in a relationship oh because if I they might get angry I’m either gonna have to feel fear or I’m gonna have to feel heartbreak and beneath the fear that I have to feel is is heartbreak so oh I can’t say that to the jealous person because if I say that to the jealous person they’re gonna just go crazy right and 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 is 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 um action so today I was talking to one of my clients and they were talking about their um 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 going to do as 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 them all you know that kind of thing and um and in that she always was trying to make the fear better because she learned at a young age at 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 all of a sudden when she’s like all right 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 if you 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 gonna 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 and then so the whole Space opens up and one 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 want to kind of point out what what is this 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 it and it which is weird because I’ve never done this but in childbirth Tara stop calling contractions contractions and she called them expansions because that’s what they’re actually doing in the body they’re actually expanding 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 an it’s like the contraction it’s an expansion and it’s just to expand like just 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 I’m talking about breaking open and what’s interesting is um 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 offer or ending they’ll be a lot more in their 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 that’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 um 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 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 so that’s the path like I want to just make that like super concrete so it’s it’s not it’s not just like okay I’m gonna just be loving all the time that doesn’t work that’s like 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 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 at Art of a comp or on our website at Art of accomplishment.com which is also a great place to check out our courses and coaching see you next time