00:00 

Well, hey there. Welcome to Intentional Living with Tanya Hale. This is episode number 432, "The Struggle to Love." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale, and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:21 

Alright. Hello there, my friends. Welcome to the podcast. First, Talk with Tanya, if you are listening to this on the day that it comes out, is tomorrow, October 13th. You can go to my website, tanyahale.com. You can get signed up so that you can get the link for that. Been having some brilliant and really, really great conversations there, and I hope that you will take the time to join us and participate or just stand back and listen. Either way is fine. But we're having some great discussions and learning some important things, so I hope that you will take the time to come. 

00:55 

And while you are at my website, tanyahale.com, go ahead and get signed up for my Weekend Win. Most weekends, I send out an email that just is a lot of the same kind of content. So if you like this, you're going to like that. They are meant to be read in two minutes or less. Just some good information to help us stay grounded and to help us continue to put pieces together, because that's what this work is all about. And so let's jump in quick and to today's topic. 

01:26 

I'm talking today about the struggle to love. I look back at my previous marriage, and I had a serious struggle to love, and we're gonna talk today about a lot of the reasons why I struggled to love. And I was really quick to blame my ex-spouse. I was really quick to say that it was all his fault, and I believed that for about nine months after my divorce. And then after that time, I got introduced to Brené Brown, started to really learn things that I did not understand, started to put these kinds of pieces together, the stuff that I teach you, and I was blown away by how much I did not show up in the relationship. I think we were both participants, absolutely, in the mess that we made, but I could not see my part of it for a long time. 

02:15 

And once I started seeing it, I was blown away at how disengaged I actually was when I thought that I was really doing good. In fact, I was a little bit self-righteous about how good I was doing and about how terribly he was doing. And the more that I have come to understand this work and understand what it really takes to create a beautiful, dynamic, intimate relationship, the more I see that I did not show up in my previous marriage in a helpful way, in a connected way, in a way that I was comfortable loving, because I was not comfortable loving. And as a result, you can't be uncomfortable with love and show up with love. It's really difficult to do. So let's jump in here then. 

03:08 

So why would it be such a struggle to love? I mean, it seems like love is the most amazing feeling in the world. We all love love. We get married in order to feel love. We date in order to feel love. We have children in order to feel love. But sometimes the love that we allow ourselves to feel can be really shallow, and it can be difficult to feel a really deep love, an intimate love, a very, very connected love. 

03:43 

And I think that that's where I was for a lot of years in my previous marriage. My capacity to feel love was there, but the love that I allowed myself to feel had to be comfortable. It had to be easy. It didn't require very much of me. And so we're gonna talk about what love, a deep, intimate love, really requires today. And I want you to just kind of take a look at yourself and say, "Listen, am I stepping into what it takes to feel deep love, or am I playing it safe and staying shallow?" Okay? Because deep love requires a vulnerability at levels that many of us were never raised to even know existed. 

04:30 

I love that Jennifer Finlayson-Fife talks about this place of intimacy as a place of knowing and being known. Like, letting someone know us, really see our weaknesses, and learn to appreciate that, and us being able to know somebody else and really see all of their weaknesses. And the unspoken part of this is also us seeing our own weaknesses. And today, we're gonna be talking about our weaknesses in the area of love. 

05:06 

So this is a space of truly seeing another person's weakness and choosing to accept and love them even with all of their weaknesses and failings. And the space of knowing and being known requires something that many of us have never had in our lives. And it makes sense, because we don't have the kind of intimate love with our parents, with our friends, with our work colleagues, or even with our children that we have with a spouse. This spousal love that we are capable of and what it requires of us to create it is something that many of us have never experienced in...even though I had been married before, I had never experienced it. And figuring out how to step in there is scary for a lot of us, and it's difficult. There is a level of self-confrontation that is really necessary here. 

06:01 

So self-confrontation is the honest and the direct examination of our own behavior of our own beliefs, our values, our motivations, and we generally do this to recognize our own personal contradictions and to foster positive growth. And we wanna make sure that we're doing this without a lot of self-loathing, a lot of self-criticism. So it's the ability to really look at ourselves and say, "Okay, where am I showing up? Where am I not showing up? What of my behaviors is hurting instead of helpful, and what's going on?" So it involves stopping excusing, excusing ourselves and blaming other people, and instead looking inward at our personal patterns and our own reactions. 

06:49 

And it's not self-criticism, because instead of asking, "What is wrong with me?" A self-confrontation will ask, "What happened to me? Why do I behave this way?" Okay. It focuses on objective awareness rather than on shame that something is wrong with us. And choosing to really see how we are engaging and determining if it is in alignment with our values is the work of learning how to love better. It is choosing to see how our behaviors are impacting others, regardless of our intent. 

07:29 

I know in my previous marriage, I didn't intend to be mean or unkind or dismissive, but my impact was that, because my capacity to really self-confront was not there. And without the self-confrontation, I could not step into truly loving. And this self-confrontation is about us honoring and loving ourselves enough to know ourselves, and choosing to show up honestly in our relationships, even when it's super difficult. Because when we don't show up honest, it almost makes it certain that we won't have peace in our relationships, that we won't be loved for who we are, because we're instead known as the pretend version of ourselves that we allow our spouse to see. 

08:22 

I remember hearing something when I was in young women's, you know, back in the day when they taught us really crazy things in there about a woman who slept with a brush by her bed, and every morning before her husband woke up, she would wake up and brush her hair, so her husband had never seen her with messy bed hair. And though I thought that was ridiculous, I realized years later that I did the same thing, but just not with a brush. I struggled to allow my spouse to see my weaknesses, and I tried really hard to be perfect and to pretend like I was perfect and all of these things because I was scared to let him see the real version of me that was a hot mess. So he really in many ways only saw this pretend perfect version of me instead of the real messy piece of me. 

09:20 

And so we move into this place where we very often want to blame our spouse for our struggle to love. And maybe we don't feel like they love us, and so we blame them for our bad behavior. But even if they don't love us, it does not give us a right to be unloving. Our sense of self is impacted when we do show up unloving, because our sense of self is grounded in our self-respect, our self-love, and the self-acceptance of our humanity and our capacity to offer ourselves grace for all the human frailties that we have. 

09:57 

And when we have a struggling sense of self, we are looking to outside resources, outside people, outside things to validate us. And so very often in a marriage, if we have a struggling sense of self, we will look to our spouse to validate us, and that can be validation in a lot of different ways. In the ways that they look at us, the way they treat us, the way they speak to us, the words that they say. Are they complimentary? Are they doing all of the telling us that we're fabulous, okay? And when they don't validate us, we often feel very justified in our unloving behaviors, because my sense of self is struggling. I feel  unlovable, and because I feel unlovable, I start blaming my spouse for not doing the things. 

10:48 

And this is a dynamic that I've talked about before, when we are expecting our spouse to build our sense of self, and they cannot do it. And we might say, "Listen, I would feel better about myself if you would compliment me 10 times a day." And our spouse might even say, "Okay, I can do that." And they might keep track and they might make sure that they validate us 10 times a day. And yet it is never going to create a strong sense of self for me, because that is my job. It's not their job. 

11:18 

And so they might, as they show up every day validating us, complimenting us 10 times, eventually we're gonna say, "Listen, this is not working. You're doing it wrong." And we blame them for them, their outside opinions and compliments not impacting us inside. But that's because they cannot do that job. They cannot build our sense of self. That is us. And if we don't have a strong sense of self, we really, really struggle to love. And when we don't feel love, we blame. 

11:57 

So oftentimes we get what we, what we might refer to as a prince and a princess dynamic at play in our relationships when they're, when we're in this space. We feel like we need another person to complete us, to make us whole. When he loves me, then I will have my happily ever after, right? And this is just not how it works. There's a lot of entitlement in this concept, and it makes it very easy for us to become the victim, to blame the other person, to say, "When he loves me better, then I can show up as a better spouse. Then I can be more loving." There's a part of this entitlement that says, "If I've been offended, I have a right to offend. I would love you if you loved me," or, "I will love you better when you love me better. If you love me the way that I want to be loved, then you are worthy of my love." Do you see all of the entitlement in these concepts and these ideas? It is saying really that our relationship is transactional, that I can only show up loving if you love me, and it blames my lack of engagement on their behavior. 

13:14 

That's a classic victim mentality because it's saying they have to change in order for me to do a certain thing. And we're often so focused on the other person's inability or their struggle to love us that we actually don't address what we can control, which is our ability and our desire to love them. So to step into hero mentality, we stop focusing on the problem, which is, I don't feel loved, and we start focusing on the solution, which is, what can I control here? Well, what I can control is, how much am I loving? How much am I engaging in loving behavior? 

13:58 

But when we're in victim mentality, when they don't love us just right, we feel justified in our anger and in our contempt, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because when we are dysregulated about not getting what we want, we feel very justified in our bad behavior, and really, it's just our primitive brain trying to get what we want. And so we start blaming, we start criticizing, we start accusing, we start attacking, right? The AABC. And we often find ourselves in a place of wanting the other person to make the first move to show that they love us and that it is safe for us to love them, and that is a victim mentality place. 

14:45 

But the more mature response, the hero response, is choosing to love first, choosing to be vulnerable first, and not expecting them to show up in a particular way in order for us to show up in a way that feels genuine and in alignment to us. We have to be willing to tolerate not being validated by them, which is why it's so important that we have a strong sense of self, so that we can validate ourselves in our vulnerability. Even if I show up vulnerable and my spouse dismisses me or doesn't get it or doesn't respond the way that I would hope, I can still validate myself and say, "Look at me showing up like a badass boss," right? "Look at how powerful I am. Look at me being the person that I wanna be." 

15:36 

And this place of real love is being able to let go of the need to be validated. This place of a strong sense of self is also the birthplace of validation within the relationship. Because only showing up in a certain way in order to get a certain behavior from them, that is manipulative and controlling. It is not what I like to call clean love, and this is the struggle to love. The struggle to love in not having a strong enough sense of self to show up in alignment with my values, but needing them to show up first, needing them to validate my worth before I can step into the vulnerability to really love. 

16:29 

So oftentimes this shows up. We have a desire to love, but it's kind of shallow. So we try to do what will make the other person happy, but this does not create love on either side. It's what I would call a fake intimacy because they can always tell when we're just going through the motions, just as we can always tell when somebody's just going through the motions, right? And it does not create in us the change of heart necessary to show up honestly. What the other person needs is someone to really care about their experiences enough to really seek to understand them. Isn't that what we all want? We want somebody to really know us, to really care about us enough to understand what's going on for us. 

17:14 

And when we have clean love, we will honestly seek to understand them because we love them and for no other reason. We're not trying to, um, manipulate their behaviors or control the outcome. We literally and honestly just desire to know them. Intimacy intolerance in marriage is a fear of really knowing them and a fear of being known. What if they've become someone I didn't anticipate? What if they think differently than I do? What if they don't accept me for who I am? Learning to show up honestly and openly is the way to create the intimacy that we are seeking. What won't create intimacy is showing up seeking to manipulate in any way. That just creates disconnect, and people can feel that. We can feel that. Learning to embrace the differences in who the two of us are and learning to face them head-on with open and honest discussions, learning to love the differences, this is how we create intimacy. 

18:25 

Now, because women are often better at relationships because of societally how we're trained, we will often confuse that with being more open and invested in the relationship, and this is not necessarily the case. Sometimes it just puts us in this one-up place that then keeps us from investing with genuine openness and honesty, right? It creates this self-righteousness that feeds disconnection, and it makes it difficult for us to see our own dysfunctions. We see ourselves as being better at relationships because we might have a little bit more insight and understanding just because of how women are. 

19:06 

But we often use that as, "See, I'm more invested than you," and we downplay the efforts that they put in, and we refuse to step in with the vulnerability necessary to create the intimacy. And then when they don't show up in a way that we would expect them to, then we feel justified in our anger and our frustration and our judgments. Our demands in how they should, notice the S-H word, in how they should be showing up is a covert contract, and there is a, there is demand in the way that we relate and our expectations of how they should respond. 

19:47 

And we are only loving in order to be loved, and this is transactional and shallow. We will do things and show up in the relationship in pursuit of a response, and then when we don't get the love that we think they should be giving us, we become punishing. I know that in my previous marriage, I did a lot of things thinking that I was being loving. I was doing laundry, and then I would even go the extra mile and iron all of his shirts because I would, in my head, think, "This is what a loving wife would do." But I was not doing it from a loving place. I was doing it from a controlling, manipulative place, thinking that if I do this, he will show up in a certain way. 

20:35 

And that can be with any task. It can be with are we engaging in sex that way? Are we running errands for them? Are we doing anything? If we are doing it in the pursuit of a response, it is not clean love, and we are struggling to love. Because then when we don't get the love that we think should be forthcoming from them, we feel justified in punishing when we don't get it. We move into this one-up place because we are more interested in control than we are in learning how to love better. 

21:13 

'Cause let's be honest, control feels safe. Control feels powerful. Whereas loving without expectation, this clean love, it feels vulnerable. It feels out of control, and it freaks us out a little bit. Our primitive brain is over there saying, "Wait a minute. I'm loving, and there's no guarantee I'm gonna get anything back." And then we might just think, "Well, wait a minute. If I'm showing up loving with getting nothing back from them, am I just gonna have to live with this person's crap forever?" And this kind of pursuit makes it almost certain that we will get crap in return from them. We often think we're not supposed to put up with crap, but this is the first step to creating what's not crap, is learning to show up with clean love. 

22:08 

This kind of transactional behavior just sets us up for a marriage that is a power struggle rather than something that is truly connected and intimate, right? It gives us a momentary feeling of control, but it sets us up for long-term disconnection and disrepair. It pushes the other person farther away. It doesn't create safety. And when they don't feel safe, they are more likely to continue to not show up. And we can often feel like it is so difficult because our partner is unwilling to open up. They just won't share anything. They won't do anything. When in reality, we are not creating a safe space for them to open up. They know that if they do open up, that we will get judgmental, that we will tell them that they're doing it wrong, that we will blame them for things coming up. Of course they're not gonna open up. 

23:05 

Until we can truly show up with a clean love, dropping the expectations, learning to honor and appreciate who they are, they will not feel safe opening up. And we will find ourselves asking questions from judgment, from control, and not really with a desire to understand, but with a desire to validate our own bad behavior. "See? I show up this way, and you see how they behave," right? 

23:38 

Gosh darn it, if I could count the number of times that I had those kinds of thoughts in my previous marriage, right? I would do these actions that I would be trying to manipulate his behavior. In some instances, those could have been loving behaviors, but I was not doing them from a place of love. I was doing from them from a place of wanting to control, of wanting to stay in a one-up place. So what can we do? How do we start self-confronting here? How do we start really showing up? 

24:14 

Here's a question: have you ever thought about asking your spouse this? "What is it like being married to me?" That might be a hard one to get some answers to. Maybe if it's too difficult, we start off by just asking ourselves, "What would it be like being married to me? What do I think it's like for him to be married to me?" But if you were to ask your spouse that question, and then if they answered honestly, and you just took it all in and just said, "Help me understand that. Help me see that more. How do I do that? What's going on?" Because we really are trying to self-confront. We really are trying to see ourselves for who we are. This is the place that we have to get to in order to love better. 

25:04 

But most of us, our egos are so resistant that this creates the struggle to love, because my ego does not want to be vulnerable. But if you ask the questions, like, "What is it like being married to me?" And then you get upset if they don't ask questions in return, if they don't turn around and say, "Oh, well, okay, so now tell me what it's like being married to me. How can I be a better spouse?" If we're upset that they're not asking questions in return, that is not the kind of love that is necessary to create intimacy, because then we're still just having expectations. We're still just trying to control them. We ask the question so we can control ourselves better and show up more the kind of person that we want to be, not to covertly try and influence them to do something different or to become someone different. 

26:03 

We really have to wake up to the reality of what we are actually doing versus the person in our brain of who we think we are and what we think we're doing. We will lie to ourselves all day long and pretend that we're not. It is painful to see our real, honest, true desires sometimes in wanting to be one up and in this self-righteous place. It is painful, but it is necessary to create something different. 

26:38 

And I'm gonna be honest, when we do this, it actually increases our agency. It opens us up to growing into the person we really wanna be. We have to be willing to look at the data concerning ourselves as well. I know in this podcast, I talk a lot about, listen, you show up well, you show up well, you show up well, and how your spouse over time shows up, well, that's good data. But here's the deal. There's not just data on them. We have to be willing to look at our own data. How am I showing up? Is it with clean love, or is it trying to be controlling and manipulative and with expectations? Am I creating a safe space for them, or do I get judgmental and unkind? Right? How am I honestly showing up or not showing up, and how is it impacting the relationship? 

27:37 

When we can start asking those types of questions, then we can start collecting data on ourselves, and we can start saying, "Is this the data that I want out in the world? Is this the person that I want to be? Is this how I want to be treating people in my life that I say matter to me?" It is so important during this process to own our piece of every situation. We can spend all day long blaming our spouse for the difficult situation. And I'll tell you what, I did that for a lot of years, where I thought that my previous husband was 100% of the problem, and yet he wasn't. It was a good 50/50. Let's be honest. It almost always is, right? I have to be willing to see my part. I have to be willing to self-confront and start cleaning up my love. 

28:42 

One other thing I need to do in owning my piece of the situation is, let's say that I'm feeling anxious and I start getting on my husband's case for not doing something the right way. Well, it's not that he's not doing it the right way. It's that I'm feeling anxious about how he's doing it. I'm feeling upset because of the situation, and rather than blaming him, I need to take responsibility for what I am feeling, take responsibility for my emotional response. 

29:16 

This is a huge piece of loving better. If at any time we find ourselves in judgment, that is a clear indication that we are not loving well. That is a clear indication that we are struggling to love. It shows that we are focused on their behavior rather than our own, and our frustration and resentment is not theirs to manage. It is ours. And again, when we are focused on them not doing what we think they should do, we're in the wrong lane. 

29:57 

To love better, we have to stay in our own lane and drop all judgment and expectation of how they should be showing up or even how they should be responding to us showing up in a better way. "I'm showing up better, so they should be..." fill in the blank. We gotta just stop all of that. That is keeping us from loving. It does not have us showing up from a loving space. 

30:25 

If we genuinely feel and believe that we are showing up super clean, and that we've really cleaned up all of this, and their consistent behavior continues to be hurtful and disconnected, then we can make choices with that information. But we have to confront our own self-righteousness first. Peace in your relationship is available here, and discussing all of this and all of your bad behaviors with your spouse is an important part of the puzzle. Being able to say, "I see that this is what I do. I see that this is the impact," that's an important part of the circling back around piece. 

31:08 

Remember in circling back around, we talk about how, "Listen, this is the behavior that I see I'm engaging in, and this is not the person that I want to be with you." We have to start stepping into seeing what we don't want to see. And I'll tell you what, your primitive brain does not want to see this. It does not want to see where you struggle to love. It wants to blame your spouse. But we have to address it within ourselves, and then we have to circle back around with our spouse and address it with them. 

31:40 

It can also be a place where you can ask for other ways that this behavior may be impacting the relationship that you're not aware of. You know, "I see that this behavior I'm engaging in is doing this and this and this to our relationship. How else is it impacting? How is it impacting our relationship? How is it impacting you?" This is a vulnerable space, to be sure. But the more information that we can gather on our own dysfunctional behavior, the more that we can create an impetus to change. And then the place that we respond is by making a commitment for change and then showing up with integrity. 

32:22 

This is what creates trust, and trust allows for vulnerability, and vulnerability allows for greater connection and intimacy. But awareness around our own dark behaviors is incredibly valuable, because this is what is shaping our relationship into dysfunctional patterns. And waking up to ourselves can be hurtful. It can be disorienting, and possibly even discouraging. And yet it is the only way to really learn how to love better, to face our own demons, to look at our own darkness. And until we see our own incapacity to love, our own inability to love, and our fear of love, even our fear of intimacy, we cannot love better. 

33:16 

Listen, we are not perfect, and we never will be. We were raised by imperfect parents, and in those developing years, we developed patterns of thinking and behavior that our primitive brain relies on to this day very heavily to create reactions and to create what it believes is the reality. But these reactions are hurtful, and the reality is actually not true. Listen, we're all fumbling and bumbling and making messes of it all, and being able to offer ourselves grace for our dysfunctional and hurtful behavior is the first step. And then being able to move toward cleaning it up and learning how to love better, this is the next step. This is our next place of true growth. 

34:07 

The way to grow to learn to really love is to tolerate the discomfort of seeing our own dysfunctional behavior and what is truly holding us back and how it is impacting our relationship. It is when we deny our dark side that we become dangerous  and hurtful and unloving. Because until we see it and until we address it, we cannot create the intimate relationship and the life that we want. 

34:41 

I believe that you are here every week listening to this podcast because you desire connection. You want to feel and experience love in a deeper, more significant way. And this is the first step, being willing to see your darkness, being able, being willing to see your own dysfunctional patterns of behavior. 

35:07 

And this is what we do in coaching, one-on-one coaching with me. We seek to see, we seek to understand, and to clean up and get into alignment and integrity with your own values. I help you see and face your dark side with courage and with conviction to change, with the ability to acknowledge and address your own dysfunctional patterns that are wreaking havoc in your relationships. 

35:39 

Listen, let's get these things cleaned up. This is the stuff we can control. Let's clean up what we control, what we can control, and let's see what happens. We might find that our dysfunctional behavior was throwing the whole relationship out of whack. I found that with one of my clients, who after six weeks of coaching, she was like, "Oh, my gosh, I can't believe six weeks ago I wanted to get divorced," because she thought that it was all her husband's fault. And once we started finding and addressing and cleaning up her bad behaviors- It was amazing how her husband was not the villain that she thought he was. 

36:19 

This is the first step. Even if you think you want to get divorced, this is the first work that I do with you. Cleaning up your own stuff, because then we can see clearly what's going on. And if you don't think you want to get divorced, but there's just so much mess going on, this is again, the first work that I do. Let's clean up your dysfunctional behaviors. Let's clean up where you are not showing up in alignment with your values. Where are you being hurtful and unkind? Where are you struggling to love? Let's clean that up and have you showing up with some real clean love. And then let's move forward. This is the work I do. I would love to work with you. 

37:06 

If you find yourself in this place of disconnect in your relationship, I would love to work with you. Go to my website, go to the free consultation tab, and you can sign up for a 45-minute free consultation where we will get some coaching done and talk to you about how coaching can help you see this dark side, how it can help you clean it up. And I promise you, you clean this up in one relationship, every one of your other relationships will get better. This is the process of coaching. I love growing up. I love that I can now create a relationship that is meaningful and deep and intimate rather than just struggling along in surface relationship as I did for 24 years in my previous marriage. It's a totally different experience. And I want to invite you to step into creating what your soul desires. 

38:12 

If you want to learn more about this, go to the show notes. Look down there. I will have several podcasts, usually more than several. I put a lot of podcasts down there so that you can continue to push and grow and develop yourself. And then get on a call with me. Let's get you signed up for coaching. Let's do some work so that you can no longer struggle to love, but instead you can lean into love and you can experience the beauty of clean love. Have an awesome, awesome day, my friends, and I will see you next time. Bye. 

38:49 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "Weekend Win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.