After cataloguing the five reasons we push love away, Joe turns to the antidotes, and the most important one is self-compassion. Your capacity to love the different parts of yourself directly reflects your capacity to receive and give love. Alongside it: opening your heart in small reps the way you’d lift at a gym, welcoming all emotions through emotional inquiry, and spending time in pleasure to relax the nervous system into safety.
The larger claim is that love is the rate limiter for everything. The more love in your life, the easier transformation becomes — and it compounds, because love increases safety, which increases your capacity for more love.
“If you increase your capacity to love, the more love that’s in your life, the easier transformation is, period.”
This is why the work has such outsized effects across the rest of life, even on rote skill-learning: with more self-compassion you feel safer, speak your truth faster, and stop managing yourself, which frees up space to simply be who you are. Joe also flags the research that self-compassion predicts healthy relationships better than self-esteem — a brittle, highly-protected self-image often masks low self-compassion underneath.
“Self-compassion is a better predictor for having a healthy relationship than self-esteem.”
Related Concepts
- Self-compassion is the real outcome of healing
- Welcoming all emotions is what makes sustained love possible
- Accepting love requires a nervous system that can tolerate safety
- Pleasure signals safety to the nervous system
- Self-love sets the capacity limit for loving a partner
- Love requires willingness to be hurt
- The expansiveness underneath resistance to love is overwhelming and amazing