Summary
In this long-form conversation, Joe and his co-host map out the five reasons people push away the very love they most want. The first is attachment: as infants we seek loving attention, and when we can’t get pure love, we settle for attention in whatever form works — anger, cuteness, being right, being valuable. Those attention-getting strategies follow us into adulthood, where they actively repel the love we’re after. Jealousy is the perfect example: a desperate bid for love that drives the loved one away.
The second reason is “wired together, fired together” — whatever your parents paired with love (criticism, abuse, control) becomes what you recognize as love, so love without that grit feels foreign and unsafe. The third is identity: if you don’t feel worthy, adoration is physically uncomfortable and gets rejected, and confirmation bias has you noticing the one way you’re not loved over the twenty ways you are. The fourth is safety — your nervous system can only accept as much love as it can tolerate feeling safe, and safety itself can be wired to danger. The fifth is that love, a positive emotion, is hard to welcome unless you’ve learned to welcome all the others; love shines into the dark ocean and everything unloved rises to the surface, so without the capacity to feel anger, fear, and sadness, the love quickly turns frightening and you stop letting it in.
The back half turns practical. Joe lays out the antidotes: self-compassion, opening the heart in small reps, welcoming all emotions through emotional inquiry, and spending time in pleasure to relax the nervous system. He frames love as the meta-variable — the more love in your life, the faster all transformation and learning go. The conversation closes on the research that self-compassion predicts healthy relationships better than self-esteem, and on the caution that expansive love can be confused with sex, adrenaline, or adoration until it stabilizes in the system.
Key Concepts
- Attention becomes a surrogate for love, and the surrogate repels real love
- Whatever was wired with love feels like love, even when it isn’t
- Accepting love requires a nervous system that can tolerate safety
- Love dissolves identity, which is why it’s frightening
- Self-compassion is the meta-variable that speeds all transformation
Key Quotes
“If I learned that as a kid that when I got upset, I would get love, then often times I’m going to get upset to get your love. But it’s no longer love, it’s just attention.”
“Whatever your parents did then that’s what you associate with love. If they were critical then you know love to be critical. If they were abusive, then you know love to be abusive.”
“Your capacity to feel and accept love is very heavily based on your sense of safety.”
“Love will take away your identity quicker than almost any emotion. If I love you, my sense of self evaporates.”
“Humans would rather trade the experience of love — I will not love again as long as I don’t have to feel the loss of that love again.”
“Love is like a light shined into a dark ocean and all the things that are unloved come up to the surface to be loved.”
“If you increase your capacity to love, the more love that’s in your life, the easier transformation is, period.”
“Self-compassion is a better predictor for having a healthy relationship than self-esteem.”
Transcript
Joe, what stops people from getting the love they want? One hand is saying stop, get away from me, and one hand is saying, oh, come towards me, come towards me. Whatever your parents did, then that’s what you associate with love. And so, if they were critical, then you know love to be critical. If they were abusive, then you know love to be abusive. But, it’s not actual love. It’s just a thing that was wired with love, and so you recognize it to be love. To get love without that is actually quite overwhelming, and it and it and it starts making us feel unsafe. Joe, what stops people from getting the Yeah, that is a fantastic question. There’s so many answers to that. But, the question itself is also what makes us push away the love that we want. What makes us uh self-sabotage around love. There’s just so many ways to look at that question. It is What makes us scared of the intimacy that we want? Exactly, yeah. So, there is so many ways that we do it. It’s amazing. Um I think one of the most basic ways to go through is is basically some version of attachment theory, right? So, if you’ve ever seen the stone-faced baby experiments, basically, if you take a an infant or child, a young child, preverbal, and you don’t give it attention, it will go through a series of ways to get the attention. If you If you don’t give it loving attention, it’ll go through a series of ways of getting attention until it just like stone-faces until it doesn’t do anything. Right? But, it will it seemingly get angry or yell or scream or cry or try to coo, or it’ll do all sorts of things to get the attention. And and which I think for an infant is very much equated to love, right? And then we grow up, and we’ve learned from our families, from our upbringing, that this is the way that you get attention {slash} love. Now, unfortunately, it’s no longer love, it’s just attention. And so, if I learned that as a kid or as an infant that when I got upset, I would get love, then often times I’m going to get upset when it when to get your love. I’m going to get angry to get your love. Or if I have to be cute to get your love, then I’m going to be cute. I have to be right to get your love, then I’m going to be right. But it’s no longer love, it’s just attention. It means, “Oh, I’m getting some sort of validation. I’m getting some sort of attention from the parent or the the authority figure who basically lets me know that I’m safe.” Mhm. And so, what happens is you’re an infant, you’re looking for safety, or you’re a young kid, you’re looking for safety. Safety is in the form of love and attention. You don’t get the love, so how do I get the attention? I get the attention by yelling, screaming, cooing, being valuable, getting the job done, doing it right, being perfect. And that’s what we bring into our adulthood. And so, all of a sudden, I’m doing things for attention that actually push away love. So, in my family of origin, getting angry is how I got attention. If I got angry, then I was like a problem that was big enough to keep my parents’ marriage together. And so, me getting angry was how I got attention. And so, that was the way that I would get love if I was feeling, “Why aren’t you loving me? Well, why why are you you know?” And And if you weren’t running away from my anger, if you were staying with me, it meant you loved me. Right? It means if I was getting your attention, it meant you loved me. It didn’t actually It wasn’t the love that I actually wanted, but it was the love that I had been taught I could receive. Yeah. There’s something really interesting here in that there’s there’s a sequence of strategies the baby goes through Yes. to get the loving attention. Yeah. But then there’s also sort of a sequence of what it’s willing to accept. Correct. So, initially, of course, you want just straight-up love. Right. But if you can’t get love, then some form of attention will do. And then maybe there’s like a scale of various types of attention. Like some form of attention that knows I’m at least safe and attended to if something happens, or I’ll be fed is that’ll do if I’m not getting straight-up love and cooing and delight and everything. That’s right. But if I’m not even getting that, then at least maybe I can have the attention if someone’s angry with me, at least I know that I’m not totally abandoned. That’s it. And so there’s this kind of maybe like a Maslow’s kind of dissension of right of what you’re willing to accept, and that sticks with us into adulthood as well. When you get to adulthood and you’re carrying these behaviors that you’ve been trained as a young kid to get attention, which was a surrogate for love, we end up basically looking like this where where one hand is saying stop, get away from me, and one hand is saying oh, come towards me, come towards me. And the one of the perfect examples of this is jealousy. Jealousy, it’s like clearly I want your love. I want your love. I like why are you giving love to somebody else? I want your love. But the act of jealousy pushes people away. I’m going to be so annoying. I’m going to try to be so controlling of your life. I’m going to be I would say abusive in my accusations and in my control that you’re going to want to leave, but I really want you at the same time. And that’s what’s confusing. So, it’s like I’m angry at you, but why are you leaving me? I’m sad at you, but why are you leaving at me? I I try to please you all the time. Why are you walking all over me and not like loving me? So, it’s this this early attachment that you’ve been trained to do that went from seeking love to seeking attention and now that ten the attention seeking that works is pushing away the love. And so when I say love here, I’m not only just talking about romantic love. I’m talking about love of friendships, love of of of parents, love of uh like in a workplace like that I’m talking about love available to you everywhere. Like when we’re in a Groundbreakers again, we’re doing a week-long the last one we just did as an example, you got to see everybody in this like, “Oh my gosh, like I I can be loved. I can love. It’s so easy.” But they’re not doing it. They hadn’t been doing it in their whole life up until that point. Because they were it’s not about just a romantic love. Though it it pertains to romantic love. It actually pertains in some degree to anything that has been wired together with love. Yes, exactly. Money, getting what you want. Exactly. Belonging. Belonging, all that stuff is is part of it. So one thing is to to get the love that we want, to to untrain those patterns of attention seeking that actually pushes away love is like a like one of the big stoppers of it. Yeah. So what’s what’s another one? Yeah, so wired together, fired together is another way in which we were we have this natural love for our parents. You can’t get rid of it. Your parents could be the most abusive ever and yet you still want their love on some level. There’s some part of you that wants their love. Even though you’re like, “I don’t want their love. I don’t even want them in my life.” You’re still tied in. So whatever your parents did then that’s what you associate with love. That’s what gets fired together with love. And so if they were critical then you know love to be critical. If you are if they were abusive, then you know love to be abusive. If they were um like uh anxiously anxiously attached and making sure that everything that you did was safe, then that’s engulfing yet then then you know love to be that. And so but it’s not actual love. It’s just a thing that was wired with love and so you recognize it to be love. And don’t get me wrong, there’s like some love to it meaning like on some level, they were criticizing you because they wanted what was best for you. On some level, they are hovering over you because they they they care about you and they want you to be safe. But it’s just all of a sudden that’s what you know love to be. And so to get the actual love to get love without that is actually quite overwhelming and it and it and it starts making us feel unsafe. It makes us feel like oh wait, I don’t know what this is. I I’m not aware of this. This isn’t the identity that I know of myself to be and so we get a little unsafe in that process. And if if love always came with control or manipulation, then you’re like, okay, there’s love, there must be control manipulation. I need to push it away. Exactly. Exactly. That’s right. And then that’s the other thing is if it comes with abuse or something like that, then I don’t want love. And you see that often with people who are you know getting later on in life and they’re like, where’s my romantic love? I’ve tried everything and typically when I’m working with those folks, once they stop the wiring of this is what I know love to be and they can break that that that wire together fire together thing, then they all of a sudden are in relationship. They think it’s because I haven’t found the right person. They think it’s because you know, everybody abandoned me. They think it’s because but as soon as they go, “Oh, I’m just avoiding the guilt. I’m not avoiding the love.” And I can separate those two things or the abuse or the criticism or whatever it is, then all of a sudden 3 months later, usually within 3 months, boom, they are in a relationship. But they have to break that thing apart. So that’s another big thing that stops people from being So another one, you you had mentioned something about identity. Let’s let’s dive into that one a little bit further, too. This is number three. Yeah, this is number three. Yeah, so the identity piece is really interesting. So they’ve done studies that show if I see you better than you see yourself, if I give you adoration that you don’t feel like you deserve, it makes you physically uncomfortable. It’s it’s a physical like, “Wait, wait, that I don’t deserve this. This isn’t good.” clearly you’re going to reject that. You’re going to push that away, right? And and and then I’m not going to give it to you. So this is You can see this in compliments. I think we have an episode on compliments where like this it’s a huge ego dissolver of of accepting a compliment because it’s allowing yourself to see yourself differently. So that’s a form of identity that if people don’t feel like they’re worthy of it, then they’re then they typically push it away. Also, if people don’t feel a sense of safety, if they they’re and the studies show that your capacity to feel and accept love is very heavily based on your sense of safety. You have to have that feeling of safety to be able to experience a certain level of love. Yeah, or another way of saying it, your system has to be able to tolerate a certain level of safety, which Which sort of counterintuitive cuz you’re like, of course I want to feel safe. But there’s actually a certain amount of safety for anyone that feels too safe. Because safety could be wired together with some kind of negative event happening. Cuz you had an experience where you felt really safe and then suddenly a shoe dropped and the other shoe dropped or some something bad happened and then those that got wired together with a feeling of safety. That’s true. And the other thing is that on some level the love that you’re feeling is as an infant, the love that you want, the attention that you want is a is a measurement of safety. And so if you didn’t get it, then you don’t feel safe. In an attachment theory, the more love and attachment just for who you are without having to do anything, without anything you know, wired to it like criticism or abuse or anything like that, the more that you feel safe, the more you can accept love as an infant. But if you’re constantly striving to get that attention and it’s not even getting love, then this level of safety is what you get used to, which is not feeling deeply safe. And so, you get the love and it like remind it’s almost like wait, I can’t go there because I know back then if I felt that safe like it wasn’t okay because I wasn’t going to get that love. So I have to actually have a like a level of anxiety. And so, again, they’re trained together. And so identity, what happens when those things are at play, what happens is somebody gives you a certain amount of adoration and you’re uncomfortable with it. Also, you start seeing how you’re not loved a lot quicker than you see how you are loved. Yeah, you got a confirmation bias going on. Total confirmation bias. So, you see this happen all the time where somebody has a wife or a husband who does like 20 different things for them and they only see this one way that they’re rejected. They only see the one thing that the husband didn’t do. But it’s like different ways in which how we identify love to be, we don’t recognize it. We don’t see it and we can’t accept it because of our identity around safety or our identity around what we’re we’re we’re what we deserve, what we think we can accept, what we think is okay. Right. Or also the like the values that we hold in our identity. Like if if I was valued for taking care of somebody, my I’m in order to show love to someone I’m most likely to take care of them. And if I was at the same time appreciation came with manipulation then I’m not going to appreciate people. Right. Cuz I’m afraid of allowing appreciation in. Or allow appreciation in. I’m not going to see the ways I’m appreciated. I might see the ways that someone is of service to me. And then I might find a partner who does exactly the opposite and we can dance like that for a decade. Yeah, exactly. So so there’s so that’s the identity piece is how we see it, how we view it, what we think we’re worth. And we’re constantly going around trying to prove that we are as lovable as we think we are. I feel like I have to earn love. Makes it really hard for you to see that you don’t have to earn love, that there’s somebody loving you that you don’t earn it. And that’s the interesting thing. It’s you know, if you watch me coach or you watch Tera coach, you can see that we’re loving the person for no reason. We don’t there’s no reason why we love people. Like it’s just outside of the fact that it feels great in our system. Outside of the fact that it’s just a joy to love them. Um I’m and and part of that and and in that we receive a lot of love because we’re loving so easily and freely, we receive a lot of love. But to do that, you can’t wire love with obligation. And that’s something that a lot of people subtly have love wired with is obligation, which means if I love you and you need something, my job is to give it to you. Or if I love you, then you can manipulate me because you’re going to ask for something and I need to give it to you. But love is not like that at all. Love is like very strongly boundaried. And so that’s another Obligation is fear. another piece, right? And and that even that has some level of identity piece to it if I’m the person who gives when I’m loved. Yeah, I’m not a I’m not a taker, I’m a giver, so, you know, whatever that is. Yeah. Yeah. We’ve talked about attachment. We’ve talked about how love gets wired together with with different things. We’ve talked about the identity and like the sensitivity to rejection and the ways that we end up seeing what we’re expecting. And recreating that. What else? Yeah, when we talked about a level of safety, one of the ways that that plays out is the negative emotions are challenging to feel for some people. But they’re not as challenging as the positive emotions. And one of the positive ism emotions is love. So, my experience is that learning to like feel enough safety to feel sadness, feel enough safety to welcome sadness, to welcome fear, to welcome anger, you need that same thing for the feeling of love. And people say, “Well, why is that? Because love is what I want. Why wouldn’t I just Why would that be not easy? Why do I need a certain level of safety? Why do I need to learn to love all these other emotions? Well, one of the reasons the other the negative emotions are often learned to be loved first is because of exactly what you said. I’m feeling love, I’m feeling ecstatic, and all of a sudden somebody’s angry with me, and now I’ve wired love together with anger. I’ve love like it’s the other shoe is going to fall. So, as soon as you love the other shoe falling, oh, that’s anger. I can love that, too. Yeah, and then you have to see the love behind the anger to see the see how they’re scared and trying to take care of themselves. Right. And then all of a sudden this other foot can’t particularly fall, and so you don’t get that shock or that oh my gosh, I’m going to lose this love thing. Also, falling in love with your own anger makes it that you can find the clarity of your wants and draw the boundaries that make you feel make it easier to open your heart to the person and know that you’re safe. Exactly. Exactly. So, all of that is is critical, but there’s also love is far more than anger, far more than fear. Love will like take away your identity quicker than almost any emotion. I think maybe any emotion. I’d have to really think about that, but meaning like if I love you, my my sense of self evaporates. You know, my sense of self becomes universal. My sense of self is And that doesn’t mean that I don’t have a boundary with you, but there’s a way in which it’s like, you know, people talk about getting lost in sex or getting lost in in like doing great art or something like that or or in or in air sports. You like, oh, I can just get lost in my work. Love is one of those things where you can get like you the the sense of I starts dissipating. And so, that’s really, really scary for a lot of people. Scary for all of us at some point. And so, that deep level of safety is really important. And so, it’s weird because people think that the constriction of of anger and fear is like what we don’t want. But, the feeling of expansion when it gets to a certain level, when you’re like, “Oh my gosh, it’s getting Oh, what what’s happening to me?” It can be also incredibly scary. So, that’s also part of what makes like if people haven’t gone through welcoming and loving all of their emotions and accepting and welcoming all their emotions, love is a very hard thing to feel for more than two or three minutes. You know, it’s it’s not a state that can be maintained for a long period of time. And it’s weird because what you see happen is people are like, “Oh, I felt this love, and now it’s gone.” You know? And it’s like, “Well, how long was that love really?” And outside of the romantic love that has like that three-to-five-month spell that gets us attached to people, most people experience love, if they feel it at all, they feel it for like a minute or two minutes. It’s not like a sustained thing. And And that’s where you see most of the positive emotions is that people can only sustain them for Yeah. One or two minutes, whether it’s pleasure or joy or exuberance or excitement. They’re very short-lived. And how much can you love the experience of it going away? Exactly. That’s right. That’s part of it changing. Exactly. Yeah, it’s all part of it. Yeah, so that’s another reason that we’re pushing away love or that we’re sabotaging love is because it’s actually really quite overwhelming. And we haven’t actually helped our nervous system learn how to feel safe enough to to allow it and to invite all the other emotions and and so that when the love goes away, we’re not like, “Oh my god, I never want to feel that experience again.” We We would rather, typically what I see is humans would rather trade the experience of love “I will not love again as long as I don’t have to feel the loss of that love again. Like you see that happen a lot. Like it takes a long time for people to recover from the from the loss of love, whether it’s like a divorce, but but there’s the loss of love in a moment. There’s a loss of love of I’m sitting here loving you and then you’re mean to me. You know, there’s a loss of love of oh, I’m just like in love with the universe and all of a sudden I’m in this shitty mood. What the hell happened? I don’t want to experience that loss again. Yeah. Or just the the very fact that we need to be reminded of that it’s better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. Like the fact that that’s a saying Yeah, it tells you. Tells you. So I want to enumerate the list again. Yeah. Let me Let me see if I can summarize it. So the ways and the reasons that we push away love is one is our attachment style had us push away love by the way that we sought attention as a kid, sought safety as a kid. The second way is that our identity of not good enough often pushes away love because we can’t accept that we’re going to get the love. Another way is that we’re wired What’s wired together is fired together, so the things that were wired with love fire with love, and so we’re pushing love away that way. Another one is that we have to feel a certain level of safety to be able to accept love into our lives. And then the last one is if we’re not willing to welcome all the emotions, love is a really challenging one to welcome because after love is always something and if if it’s always something And even to say it like this, I used to I think I still say it like this sometimes, which is love is like a light shined into a dark ocean and all the things that are unloved come up to the surface to be loved. So as soon as that love starts really happening in your life, yeah, the cuttlefish. As soon as it love starts happening in your life, all the unloved stuff comes up and you’re like, wait, I was so loving and now I’m angry. It’s cuz that anger is getting loved and so if you’re not good with feeling all that other stuff, then the love goes away quickly and you get scared to love again. So those are the five basic reasons why people often are pushing away love or sabotaging love or not able to accept the love that’s in their life, not able to recognize the love that’s in their life. Okay, so we’ve got these five classic ways. I’m sure listeners are like, okay, great. I get it. I get it. I do that one. I do that one. I do that one. And now what do I do? What? So the obvious things and and I think the most effective things are one is any kind of self-compassion you can bring to yourself is great. So your capacity to love the different parts of yourself is going to reflect your capacity to receive love and to give love. Another one is to actually just learn how to have an open heart, to constantly the way you would do reps uh at a gym. It’s like, oh, how do I open my heart a little bit right now? How do I open my heart a little bit right now? Because as you open your heart a little bit towards other people, towards yourself, you start to learn that you’re relatively safe or a little more safe or a little more safe. So that’s a great one. Doing that for yourself, closing your eyes, imagining a love that you have for anything that you love deeply and then turning that love towards yourself. Feel what that experience is like. All of those are really useful. Those are all in that category of loving yourself. The other one that I would say that’s really important is to learn to welcome all the emotions. We have emotional inquiry for that. But any way that you can welcome all the emotions, that’s going to help you get to love. And then the last one is just like spending time in pleasure, allowing your nervous system to feel safe, ground, slowing down, walking in nature, and really learning to enjoy having pleasure in the moment relaxes the nervous system, so your capacity to receive love will increase. The other thing, obviously, that you can do is notice the patterns that are wired to get the attention instead of love, and then taking the action to change your patterns of of pushing love away, whether it’s jealousy or anger or getting mean because you feel abandoned or whatever it is. So, the all of those things are going to increase your capacity to love. What I notice is if you increase your capacity to love, the more love that’s in your life, the easier transformation is, period. That’s I just It’s kind of like the meta variable, the the fuel that like increases the speed of everything else. Because even even in this, you said the level of safety that your nervous system can tolerate is uh a rate limiter for how much love you will let in. So, it’s compounding. This is why this work has such compounding effects in the rest of life, including learning some skill or learning some rote thing or practicing because the more self-compassion and the safer you can feel with yourself, and the more you can allow yourself to receive love, appreciation, the love that feed feedback is, the love that critical feedback can be. All of these things can change your life and accrue to your experience in a much faster and more fluid way with more love, with more capacity for Yeah. We learned We learn quicker if we’re feeling safer, if we’re feeling Like we’re not a fear, we’re not worried about losing love. We speak our truth quicker, which then creates a world around us that is more aligned with our truth quicker. If we’re not worried about losing love. And once you recognize that the love that you have once once you recognize that love isn’t based on what you do. Once you recognize that love is always accessible to you. That you can always give yourself compassion. And that the more you give yourself compassion, the less you do things that are quote unquote unlovable. The less you do things that are that you judge yourself for. The more loving acceptance you have, the more you are the person that you want to be. Once you recognize that, then the whole thing just snowballs. It’s quite lovely. Yeah, and then also the the less you manage yourself, which gives you more spaciousness to be who you are. Right. Be who you want to be. And love more easily. That’s correct. I also recently saw some research that showed that self-compassion is a better predictor for having a healthy relationship than self-esteem. Oh, yeah. And there’s a lot of to do to be made about self-esteem, and it’s a lot of good stuff. Great and all. You know, unless to the extent that it doesn’t become an identity that you’re stuck in. Yeah. But self-compassion is better predictor. Yeah, what’s interesting to me, I would love to see if there’s any research that shows that self- compassion leads to higher self-esteem. Like it Here’s a whole bunch of people who have self-compassion, here’s a whole bunch of people who don’t, who has the higher self-esteem. You know, I would like to see that. Yeah. All right, so you maybe have an inverse correlation where the lower the self-compassion, the more likely there is a brittle self-image that is perhaps a high self-image, but highly protected and covering of deficiency. I’d be curious to see that. Yeah. can go wrong with with all this? Not a lot. It’s one of those things where not a lot can go wrong. The way you do it can kind of go wrong, but what what can go wrong is that in the journey of learning of love showing up. So, when love shows up in your system and you start getting these very expansive feelings, those expansive feelings are often confused with other expansive feelings. So, it’s you know, I remember when they started happening to me and it was like in my early 30s and I would be like at a bar and I would like have this uncontrollable urge to kiss people, like old women and men. And I was like, what the is happening? And then my system was just was just confused, like, oh, the only way I know this feeling is like as a sexual thing. Not as a cosmic thing or a transcendental thing. Or and it can happen the other way, too, it’s it’s like um oh, I’m feeling I’m feeling sexual and and I’m confusing that with like a transcendental love. there’s a lot of confusion whether that’s like I can I can get this thing if I’m skydiving, I can get this thing if I’m sexual, I can get this thing if I’m on stage and a whole bunch of people are adoring me. And so, there’s a lot of confusion that can happen there. And but that just dwindles as you get as it becomes more and more stable in the system. More and more stable you are in that love and self-compassion and compassion for everything. So, we we’ve talked about in general what people can do. I’m curious if there’s a couple of really concrete takeaways, like somebody could walk away from this podcast and specific actions they might take or experiments they might run. Yeah, you do emotional inquiry every day for 2 weeks would be incredibly useful on everything that they are have wired together with love. That would be a great one. Identify everything that they wired together with love that would be a great one. What about practicing compassion for others? Practicing compassion for others, practicing compassion for yourself. All of those things are are great, really practical ways to do it. What about looking for or enumerating ways that you are receiving care and love that you’re not currently seeing? That would be a great one. Yeah. To like every day say go through each of your interactions and like point out how somebody cared for you. And then let it in. And then let it in, obviously. Receiving compliments is another really great one. It’s a really, really good one. And I think we have a whole podcast on that as Awesome. Well, this was fun. Thank you, John. Yeah, man. I really like this one. Great. Thank you.