Pod Insights 10% Happier with Dan Harris How Are You Contributing To What Is Not Working In Your Love Life? Hard Truths From Relationship Coach Jillian Turecki. About this episode Why self-inquiry is the first ingredient to a healthy relationship.
Jillian Turecki https://www.jillianturecki.com/?gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAiA6t-6BhA3EiwAltRFGPViQJoM7vPWnQpInyPN4BWFL_j1cNgKWfVdwywmGOPNtrnUqFwvGxoC8Z8QAvD_BwE is a renowned relationship coach, teacher, author, and host of the podcast, Jillian On Love https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/jillian-on-love/id1640172049. Fueled by an insatiable curiosity about what makes a relationship thrive, Jillian has helped thousands over the last 20 years through her teachings, courses, and writing to revolutionize their relationship with themselves so that they transform their romantic relationships.
In this episode we talk about:
The difference between lust and love How to make the idea of self love more than an empty cliché How to be honest with your partner The myth of finding "the one" How to be your best self even after you've exited the honeymoon stage And why, if you want a successful relationship, you have to make peace with your parents
Related Episodes:
#510. Me, a Love Story: How Being OK With Yourself Makes You Better at Everything | Sharon Salzberg https://www.meditatehappier.com/podcast/tph/sharon-salzberg-510 #464. How to Keep Friendships From Imploding | Esther Perel https://www.meditatehappier.com/podcast/tph/esther-perel-464 Esther Perel on the One Thing That Will Improve the Quality of Your Life https://www.meditatehappier.com/podcast/tph/esther-perel-non-negotiables
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Transcript 12,231 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:05 Dan Harris? This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.
0:19 Dan Harris? Hello, everybody. How we doing? With Valentine's Day approaching, here is a provocative question. How are you contributing to what is not working in your love life? Let that one sit with you. That question, which comes from today's guest, the relationship coach, Jillian Turecki, reminds me of another question, one that my executive coach, Jerry Colonna, poses to people all the time. How are you complicit in the conditions you say you don't want? He usually asks that question in a work context, but either way, it's a very powerful thing to contemplate. It's one thing to complain about the dynamics in your love life or your work life, and I want to be clear, that's okay sometimes, but often, and probably more often than we're comfortable,
1:03 Dan Harris? it is incredibly helpful to take a look at our own shit, to grow up and take some responsibility. It may not be fun at first, or ever, but it often pays off. And I say this from no small amount of experience. I hope it's obvious that this is not victim blaming. Sometimes there are unacceptable dynamics that necessitate a departure. With that caveat aside, however, I'm a huge fan of skillful self-inquiry. Anyway, so back to my guest, Jillian Turecki. She has written a new book. It's called It Begins With You, and in it, she explores nine hard truths about romantic relationships. In this conversation, we talk about the difference between lust and love, how to make the idea of self-love more than an empty cliche,
1:47 Dan Harris? how to be honest with your partner, the myth of finding the one, how and why to be your best self even after you have exited the honeymoon stage where you're trying to win the other person over, and why, if you want a successful relationship, and this may be tough to hear, you have to make peace with your parents. We'll get started with Jillian Turecki right after this. If you care about supporting independent media and if you care about being a node of sanity in an insane world, there are a few quick, easy and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for. One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week.
2:31 Dan Harris? The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you're listening or watching right now. That really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit, and not for nothing, it also helps us grow. And all of these things take about 30 seconds, and they really do help. You will be supporting me and my team and our mission, and I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show. If you care about supporting independent media and if you care about being a node of sanity in an insane world, there are a few quick, easy and free ways that you can
3:15 Dan Harris? support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for. One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week. The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you're listening or watching right now. That really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit, and not for nothing, it also helps us grow. And all of these things take about 30 seconds, and they really do help. You will be supporting me and my team and our mission, and I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show.
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4:32 Dan Harris? Jillian Turecki, welcome to the show.
4:34 Speaker 02 Thanks so much for having me.
4:35 Dan Harris? It's a pleasure. If you're cool with it, I'd love to hear your personal story about how you got into this work.
4:41 Speaker 02 Sure. So I was a yoga teacher and practitioner for many years. I'm still an avid yogic practitioner and meditator for over 20 years. So I've always been obsessed with the mind-body connection, and that if we're feeling something emotionally, we're going to feel it in our bodies, and if we're feeling something in our bodies, it's going to impact our thoughts and our emotions. And as a yoga teacher, I was very happy until I just kind of wasn't. I just felt like I wanted more, and I also wanted to get married and have kids and go down that route. And I did. I ended up meeting the man who would become my husband, and then later my ex-husband.
5:20 Speaker 02 And I thought going into that marriage, because I was in my late 30s at the time, and because I was a yogi and a meditator, I thought that I had all the tools and understanding of what actually takes to make a relationship work long-term. And what I later discovered is that I had very little tools, actually. I didn't really quite understand love, and I didn't have the self-esteem or the self-awareness of my own patterns and relationships that I needed. So we got married, and I always say that before we got married, our relationship
5:59 Speaker 02 was 90% great, and 10%, 10% not so great, or actually 10% terrible. And you could say, well, no relationship is perfect. 90% is a pretty good stat. But the 10% was so incredibly profound. It was the things that you shouldn't ignore. And so when we got married, people think, okay, you get married, then your problems are going to get better. But when you get married, it's the opposite. It's like the 10% became the 90%, and the 90% became the 10%. And that was incredibly difficult, and it all kind of came to a head. The way
6:40 Speaker 02 that he ended our relationship was terrible, was like over text. It was the morning that I had a miscarriage. My mom had like two months to live. She was dying of lung cancer. I mean, it was just everything that you can think of. It was very tragic. And so that was the day that my life completely fell apart to the point where I just, it was surreal. I couldn't believe that it would fall apart to that degree. I had to figure out, one, how to survive that emotionally. And two, I became obsessed with the question of what makes a relationship work. Because I was absolutely beside myself
7:22 Speaker 02 that I was in this position that getting a divorce and the relationship didn't work. I felt like an utter failure and I felt very afraid. And so it became my mission to figure that out. And I did figure it out also through my own personal work and working with incredible mentors. And I'm so glad that it didn't work out with my ex-husband. And the couples work that we received was terrible. And one of the things that I thought as I was learning more about relationships and psychology and whatnot is that there has to be a better way. So I decided to work with couples. And then there were a lot of singles flocking to me about finding the right person and raising their self-worth
8:05 Speaker 02 and self-esteem. And I sacrificed everything just for my work. That's just what helped me heal. And I worked with thousands of people. I don't necessarily recommend that. I just, again, I, only thing that I did was that. And then a few years later, I started to think about how I had to leave these profound lessons that I learned in a book. And here I am.
8:34 Dan Harris? Once you realized that you're, the cure to your heartbreak was figuring out how to make relationships work and then helping other people make their relationships work. And then you realized that you were dedicating all of your bandwidth to that, which wasn't healthy. Was there a beat that happened between that and writing this book? In other words, did you slow down and get into a relationship yourself?
8:55 Speaker 02 Sure. Yeah, I actually got into a couple of relationships and they were all actually really lovely. And I also, like, in the beginning, got to practice sort of what it is that I'm learning. And the relationships that I got into didn't work, but they didn't work because they didn't last, I should say. And it's not because they didn't quote unquote work, but it was just more, I had a better understanding of what it is that I really wanted. And that's like why a big message of mine is, you know, don't settle, choosing the right partner and how to make a relationship work. And also how to raise your self-esteem so that you can have a voice in your own relationship. So, yes, my life did become more balanced.
9:37 Speaker 02 But yeah, I've just been in this pretty hefty pursuit of understanding this and then sharing that message, for sure.
9:44 Dan Harris? It has to be intimidating to be in a relationship with a relationship guru.
9:49 Speaker 02 You know, it's so funny because as a yoga teacher, I would be put on a pedestal. Oh, you're a yoga teacher, you're a meditator, you know, you must have all the answers. It's like, no, actually, most of the people who get into meditation and yoga actually have, we all have a lot of problems that we're trying to heal, you know? We get into it mostly because of pain. Yes, I have to be with a very self-assured man. But that being said, I don't bring this into my relationships. I wear a different hat in my relationships.
10:21 Dan Harris? Got it.
10:22 Speaker 02 Yeah.
10:23 Dan Harris? Just to go back to a point you were making, or at least alluding to, and a point that you make quite explicitly in the introduction to your book. And this is something that I've wondered about aloud many times. Some of my close listeners might feel some deja vu here. But it's so interesting to me, and I think to you too, that we are intensely social animals. That's like a cliche to even point that out. And yet, nobody teaches us how to do relationships. writ large, nobody teaches us how to do relationships. And specifically, nobody teaches us how to do romantic relationships. And we learn from our parents, who are often really shitty teachers in this regard.
10:59 Speaker 02 Yes. You know, it is quite an irony that relationships really do shape the quality of our lives, but I don't think as far as the school system or even as far as society and culture is concerned, it's fairly recent that it is being more recognized that relationships are really what contributes to our longevity or maybe a lack of longevity. And that when we have strong friendships, strong romantic relationships, strong familial relationships, we're only now really recognizing how that impacts our physical health, that our mental health and our physical health are intricately connected.
11:43 Speaker 02 And so the fact that it hasn't been in the school system is because we haven't recognized the true like depth of value that relationships actually have on our lives and how impactful they are. And so I'm hoping that continues to change even more, certainly all relationships, but especially a romantic relationship. I believe that, you know, you could be a rock star at work, you could have all the money that you want in the bank, you could have your physical health, but if you're in a relationship and that relationship is not going well, you are going to wake up totally anxious and feeling empty inside. Do you agree?
12:22 Dan Harris? Yeah, it's a really exquisite form of loneliness when you're with somebody and it's not working.
12:28 Speaker 02 Yes, it is. It's deafening and it's far worse than being lonely, like alone.
12:34 Dan Harris? Yes. Okay, so your book goes through nine hard truths about romantic relationships. I feel like all the truths about relationships are hard. But if you're cool with that, I was going to kind of march through the nine.
12:47 Speaker 02 Let's do it.
12:49 Dan Harris? So truth number one is it begins with you. What does that mean?
12:53 Speaker 02 It means that you have to be the change that you want to see in your love life. I mean, you could apply this to your life in general, but we are the common denominator in all our relationships. Now, that does not mean that, because it's very popular right now in the zikai to say, "Oh, the problem is me." It doesn't necessarily mean that you are the only problem, or that the problem is you. But it does mean that anything that is going well in your life, or in your love life, you are the common denominator. And if you have a series of relationships and things are not going well, the first place to look is you have to look in the mirror. And what you will see, if you are willing to look,
13:35 Speaker 02 is certain patterns, beliefs, fears. And the number one fear is that we are somehow not going to be enough. Because there is nothing other than a romantic relationship of any kind that is going to trigger inside of us our deepest fears that we are unlovable in some way. Even if you're in a good relationship, that it's going to surface. And fortunately, we live in a society and a time where we're not walking down the street fearing for our lives. So the greatest threat is really that we are not going to be enough for someone who we love, and that somehow someone is going to stop loving us.
14:18 Speaker 02 And it's the great irony of life, which is that nothing is permanent. Nothing is permanent. You know, even if you are with the right person, you change, they change, life happens. And so uncertainty is built into the very fabric of a romantic relationship. And how we cope with that uncertainty, I think, determines the health of the relationship. It determines the quality of the relationship. But it begins with you, is understanding that fear that you have.
14:48 Speaker 02 That makes you absolutely not unique. It makes you like just the rest of us. And how that fear is manifested through certain behaviors and beliefs and is impacting your life and your relationships. And that if you want to change it, the first place is to look within. Look, you sit, whether it's like on Zoom or on the couch, and a couple comes to see you. What they're coming in with is fix them. Everyone is thinking that. Whenever you work with a couple, like this is like a running joke with people who work with couples, or even when I work with singles, it's like they seek out therapy or they seek out counseling, even if they don't know this consciously, with the hope that the other person will change so that they can be happier, so that they can feel more content inside of the relationship.
15:33 Speaker 02 And every single time, what people have to recognize is that if you change something in you, you have the power to change something in the dynamic of the relationship. Now, that doesn't guarantee that the relationship is going to transform necessarily or stay together. You cannot change another human, but you can change yourself. And I want people to recognize that they have far more influence over the state of their love life and their relationship than they think they do.
16:06 Dan Harris? You talked about the number one fear being unlovable or being alone because you're unlovable, which makes sense, given how we evolved. You know, the lonely human on the savanna was likely a dead human. Now, to be clear, there's a subset of people who are happiest alone, and that's totally cool. But as you were talking about that being, you know, like a pretty common, if not universal fear, I was thinking about this very funny cat sitter my wife and I had back when we lived in the city. And she said, if you have one cat, it's fine. If you have two, it's a little suspect. If it's three, it's really embarrassing. And if it's four, it's die alone. I always loved that.
16:44 Speaker 02 That's good.
16:45 Dan Harris? We went on to have four cats, but we're a couple. So, and then the other thing you said, and this will all build up to a question. If you're in a relationship and you have struggles, which all relationships do, you know, this may be counterintuitive. Instead of trying to cajole your partner into changing, you can actually do some work on yourself and that may affect the changes you're hoping to see. And that reminds me of something that for six years now, I've been working with these communications coaches, really helped me with my interpersonal hygiene. And they often say that it only takes one person to have a successful conversation. And I think that may not be entirely true in a relationship, but there's some element of truth to it in relationships.
17:26 Dan Harris? And in that, if you do the requisite introspection and the right practices for you, that you can really have an impact that wouldn't require so much change from the other person. Of course, you know, there are some limits to this. And so this leads me up to my question, which is, what do we do about this insight? If it's true that it starts with us, what happens next? What does that mean? How do we get the introspection that is required for this? And then, once we have some insight, what do we do about it?
17:57 Speaker 02 Sure. Well, first I wanted to say something about it takes one person to have a good conversation or to make the communication good. What is actually really interesting about that and true is that how you begin a difficult conversation, how you initiate a difficult conversation will impact the whole flow of the conversation. So people need the actual skills. You know, there's a difference between saying, "We need to talk." The moment you tell someone, "We need to talk," is the moment that the conversation is already gone. So I just wanted to add that because I think it's interesting.
18:32 Dan Harris? Well, let me just jump in on that just because, you know, I think about these communications coaches, they've been on the show before. I'll drop a link in the show notes for listeners. And many listeners will have heard me talk about Mudita Nisker and Dan Klerman many times before, because they've had such a big impact on me. And I think about their work, they don't describe it this way, but I think about it as... Teaching people how, in conversation, to avoid activating the amygdala, or the stress and fear center of somebody else's brain, and keep the prefrontal cortex, the locus of logic and reason and creativity on board. And actually, if you frame things correctly, if you learn how to make sure that the other person feels heard and understood, you know, so if you start the conversation well and then make sure that throughout the conversation,
19:17 Dan Harris? you stay in the same loop, you can really, even if the other person has no skills whatsoever, you can get to a win.
19:24 Speaker 02 Yes, absolutely. And part of getting to that win is also understanding the way that our brains work, and people, and understanding people, and also being able to read people. That's a very big part of it. If you're pay attention, you can tell when someone is actually starting, when the amygdala is starting to fire up and whatnot. But yeah, "And we need to talk" is going to trigger the fight or flight response in someone like that. And then they're gonna wanna avoid you. The question was, how do we actually put this into practice? What do we do now once we know these things? Well, it depends on the individual, but sometimes it's as simple, and I put that in quotation marks, as just understanding that your mind is creating a lot of stories.
20:08 Speaker 02 Maybe your ego is getting in the way, and you need to take a deep breath and start to learn some skills like we were just talking about. Sometimes, learning just that, those simple communication skills so that you can speak differently to the person who you're in a relationship with, or even the person who you're starting to date, then that could be huge. For some people, it's learning how to work on their emotional states. It's learning how to find a sense of purpose and meaning in their own lives, because the fact that they don't feel connected to themselves, and what I mean by that is that they don't really know what their needs are. They don't know how to meet their needs. So this is what's in the book, is learning how to meet their own needs.
20:52 Speaker 02 It's learning to understand, to figure out what they need to do to build their self-esteem. What are some of the hard things that they need to do? What are some of the things that they've been procrastinating on? For others, it's understanding...
21:07 Speaker 02 It's softening their reactivity to their partner, or softening their reactivity in dating. And part of softening their reactivity is recognizing, which is the second truth, that the mind is a battlefield, and it certainly can be a battlefield, and learning how to mitigate that. And to understand that sometimes people are really good at coming up with very disempowering meanings about everything. And when you're in a relationship and you fall into the trap of, "They don't love me because," or "They did that, which means this and this and that, and now, you know, they don't care about me." These are actually the things that destroy relationships.
21:51 Speaker 02 So this might mean working with a therapist, maybe not. Maybe it's going to the gym every day, maybe it's meditating. But it's building the self-awareness and then having the courage to do it differently. I think that in a relationship, there's always endless opportunities to transcend our egos and to ask ourselves, is what I'm about to do loving? Or is it not? Am I speaking my truth? Or am I suppressing my truth? So there are many different roads to healing, but putting things into action right away is very important. If communication is your thing, like you said, work with some people
22:35 Speaker 02 or buy some books and work on communication. If your self-esteem is the problem, then need to figure out how to meet your needs, how to find more meaning in life, how to do things that are difficult, maybe build community. So everyone has perhaps a different task, but I think the first step is having the awareness of, what are my patterns? How is that impacting? And what is it that I actually need? I hope that answered your question.
23:02 Dan Harris? Yeah, I mean, I think what I'm taking from that is that this is a big and kind of individual project. It starts with you, or it begins with you. There's not a one-size-fits-all recipe for figuring your shit out when it comes to how to be effective and healthy in a relationship.
23:21 Speaker 02 You know, yes, it's individual, but there are actually some principles. And one is understanding that love is not just a feeling, but it's actually an action, it's a choice, and it's a verb. Another principle is that you have to tell the truth in your relationship. If you keep avoiding the truth, what's going to build is resentment and resentment destroys all relationships. So there are definitely certain principles that if we don't follow, it's like there's certain principles if you want to get in shape physically, there's certain things that we have to do and that's, everyone kind of knows that, but people don't really know that about relationships. And there are definitely certain principles, but everyone's healing journey is unique to them, for sure.
24:04 Dan Harris? You have a self-reflection practice that I like because it reminds me of something that my executive coach often gets people to ask themselves. My executive coach is Jerry Colonna, who's also been on the show. I'll drop some links to Jerry. Yeah, he is great. You ask people to ask themselves, how am I contributing to what is not working in my love life? Jerry, in a different context, more in a work context, asks people to ask themselves, how am I complicit in the conditions I say I don't want?
24:33 Speaker 02 Yes, that's exactly it. And it's a very difficult question to ask oneself, but accountability is probably the most important thing to any relationship, including the relationship that we have with ourselves. And so we have to be able to see how we get on our own way, how we are complicit in the things that we say we do not want, how we are contributing to our own suffering. These are not questions for the people who don't want to change, you know?
25:14 Speaker 02 These are not questions for the people who want to stay feeling like a victim in their own lives. But this is literally the path to a better life and to freedom. And the reframe is that this isn't about blame. There's so little in life that we have control over. And I want people to feel empowered to understand that there are things that they actually can change in their lives. But you do have to be able to kind of look within. And it's never a reflection of who you are as a human being, but it is a reflection of the things that kind of make up like your ego, you know, your beliefs and your patterns.
25:58 Speaker 02 And it's only when we're able to say, okay,
26:03 Speaker 02 How am I complicit in the things that I say that I do not want? Because it's, you know what's suffering? You know what drives us mad? Is we say we want something. And yet, we keep doing that thing. That's making it so that we are farther and farther away from our goal. And it's a maddening thing to think about. You know, it's like, why do I keep doing this thing? I say I want the relationship. But I keep dating the emotionally unavailable person. I say I want to achieve this in my work. But I keep doing the exact opposite. And it's very painful.
26:43 Speaker 02 And so, in my book, I try to reveal to people that that's sort of what they're doing. That they say they want that, but they're doing something else. Well, why might that be? Well, underneath it all, you will always find an internal conflict. And sometimes that internal conflict is, I want that, but my mom, when I was growing up, always expected me to be like this. You know, like, I'm an artist. But I was raised in a family of lawyers. And I was expected to be a lawyer. So, I say I want to be the artist, but I'm doing everything to prevent myself from being the artist. And that's because of the internal conflict
27:28 Speaker 02 of seeking out the approval, understandably, from your family. So, it's really about understanding like what that internal conflict is. Because often, that's what you will find.
27:40 Dan Harris? And just to put a fine point on this, because I think you nodded in this direction. This is not about blaming the victim if you're in an abusive relationship. Whatever, it's not about making, and I know you have some experience with abusive relationships.
27:51 Speaker 02 I do.
27:52 Dan Harris? It's not about saying, oh, it's your fault, the abuse is happening. It's about accountability where that is healthy and appropriate.
27:59 Speaker 02 Yeah, so, look, as you said, I feel very qualified to speak about abusive relationships because I was in one many years ago. And I had to really ask myself those difficult questions. Why did I let this happen? And by the way, anyone who's in an abusive relationship, the worst is being brought out on you too. So, you have to look very, very carefully at the kind of people you choose, why you choose them, where your self-worth is. Always look at it with great compassion. And I have a lot of compassion and empathy. And I hope that it's conveyed through my writing. It's very important to me. But, look, if you were in a abusive relationship, let's say you were in a relationship with, you know,
28:44 Speaker 02 a so-called narcissist who manipulated the hell out of you. Or you were even in a relationship with someone who hit you, who hurt you physically. When you get out of that, part of what your mission has to be is that you never again, ever, get in a relationship like that again. And so, to make sure that never happens again, there are some things that you're going to have to address, such as family, self-esteem, standards, beliefs, naivete, all of the above.
29:23 Dan Harris? It's interesting, in this chapter about, it begins with you, and you referenced this earlier. Some of what you recommend to people is very simple self-care, you know, exercising, resting, and things like that. And, you know, that may seem obvious in some way, but I think what you're, and this harkens back to another thing you said earlier. It's like, figure out like, what is gonna make you a healthy and whole person so that you're not relying on your partner for absolutely everything?
29:49 Speaker 02 Yeah. So, the first thing is, you're never gonna feel 100% whole and 100% love yourself before you're in a relationship. The school of thought that you have to feel whole and then you can be in a relationship. I mean, if that were the reality, we'd all be doomed. But, or, and, how we feel about ourselves definitely is reflected in our relationships. So, I think the main thing that I try to convey is that we've been sort of hypnotized by this notion that there is the one. There's this one person who's gonna come into our lives, and when they do... Everything's gonna kind of fall into place.
30:32 Speaker 02 And even though we might think of that, and our logical brain would be like, yeah, you know, we know that's not true. I think that we all have, and this is before you get into a relationship, and even if you've been married for several years, we have to really, really be on top of ourselves to not expect the person who we love or who we're in a relationship with or who we're starting a relationship with to make us happy. I believe that we should be adding happiness to another person's life. Why be in a relationship with anyone if you're not adding value to each other's lives and making the road, the road that we call life, easier in some way?
31:15 Speaker 02 But no one can actually fulfill you. No one outside of yourself can fulfill you. And we get into relationships and we think, with this person, with the one, I'm going to be fulfilled. And it's a lie. The truth is, there are definitely people who are a much better match for you than others. But love really is an action and it is a choice. And you decide who the one will be. And over the course of a long-term relationship or a marriage, you're gonna have to make that choice many, many times throughout your relationship. And so you have to understand
32:00 Speaker 02 that the onus is really on you to feel as whole as possible or to do the work and that no one can actually do that for you. I really hope that everyone chooses the person who is their greatest fan and their biggest supporter and wants to see the other person and wants to help the other person.
32:25 Speaker 02 But it's on us and no one else can fulfill you. And this goes very deeply against the whole notion of romanticism where we're told that with the right person, everything is just great and that we don't really have to do anything and that love is just a feeling that we're going to feel spontaneously when we're in the presence of this person. And when we're not feeling that love, there must be something wrong with the relationship or it must be something wrong with them. When, yes, of course, if you're not feeling the love, maybe something is wrong with the relationship, but most of the time it's because no, somehow the light is dim inside of you
33:05 Speaker 02 and you're in a bad mood or you're going through a hard time and that creates the filter that covers your eyes and then you see your relationship through that filter when really something has to change inside of you. Does that make sense?
33:20 Dan Harris? It does.
33:24 Dan Harris? Coming up, Jillian Turecki talks about the difference between lust and love and the role of self-love, which is often delivered as a sort of gooey cliche, but it's way more than that.
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34:13 Dan Harris? Let's keep going with these hard truths.
34:15 Speaker 02 Okay.
34:16 Dan Harris? Truth number two, which you referenced before, is that the mind is a battlefield. Can you say a little bit more about that?
34:21 Speaker 02 We are story-making machines and we are meaning-making machines. And in ancient yogic texts, there's this metaphor of the monkey mind and that's the metaphor of the monkey swinging from branch to branch. And our minds can kind of do a lot of gymnastics. And if we do not question our mind and our thoughts often, our mind will easily convince us that the other person is bad because the mind is trying to keep us safe, but it's not really designed to make us happy. And so the amount of times that I've worked with people where they've created
35:00 Speaker 02 an entire story, an entire narrative about their relationship and their partner. And it builds up all this resentment. It also builds up pain and hurt. And the story is actually not true. Like, the meanings that they are coming up with are not actually true. And I think, no, I know that there's a lot of freedom in understanding that when you have to become aware of and practice becoming aware of when you are sort of like in that loop and to communicate instead and to just even say to yourself, okay, my mind is like getting the best of me right now.
35:44 Speaker 02 I'm totally in a story. I'm in like my anxiety. I'm in this sort of pattern that I do all the time because usually it's quite familiar to the person. What do I have to do instead? Like, is that really true? Like, I love the work of Byron Katie where you're just like, is that true? And this idea of bringing mindfulness to a relationship is rooted in understanding that the mind can be the monkey, that it can swing from branch to branch and not make a whole lot of sense. And we have to tame that wild monkey. And part of that is through mindfulness.
36:20 Dan Harris? Yeah.
36:20 Speaker 02 You know, another example is, oh, you know, my partner, wife, my husband, they're just really annoying me right now. And, you know, all of a sudden, then you go into like a whole thing about how they didn't do this and how they didn't do that. And then all of a sudden, you're looking at your partner with a little bit of disgust and a little bit of contempt. Is it them? No. Maybe sometimes it is and you just haven't been speaking the truth in your relationship and you need to deal with the monkey, or the elephant, I should say, different metaphor in the room. But oftentimes, it's like, no, it's because you're just in your head and you're creating all these stories. And so this is a really big challenge for a lot of people. And it's in dating. Oh, they didn't call back. They must not like me.
37:05 Speaker 02 Or they're seeing someone else. You know, that thing that we do, it's neurosis and it will bite you in the butt.
37:12 Dan Harris? I have plenty of bite marks. The opening line of my first book was, "The voice in my head is an asshole and the monkey is real." So you mentioned mindfulness meditation. What are some other ways that we can learn how to tame the monkey mind?
37:25 Speaker 02 So number one is practice becoming aware of when it's happening. So most of awareness is really just taking what is unconscious and bringing it into conscious awareness. So you have the awareness that this happens. When you practice it, you get better at catching yourself mid-story, mid-thought. You take a deep breath and you think, "Do I need to have a conversation with this person? Do I need a glass of water? Do I need to go for a walk? Do I need to change something in my physical state so that I can think more clearly? Do I need rest?" So these are some of the things that we can do, but oftentimes it's communication.
38:08 Speaker 02 And a great way to start a conversation about this is, "Look, I'm having all these thoughts and I realize my mind is getting the best of me. Here's some of the things that I've been thinking and I really don't want to think these thoughts anymore. And I just want to kind of get it all out on the table. Can we talk about it?" And then you can say, "I've realized that this is probably me. And I've realized that my mind really is just kind of going a little nuts right now. And I would just love if we could talk about it so we can clear the air."
38:37 Dan Harris? Brene Brown, who I'm a big fan of, has this little hack, speaking of communications skills, that you can often start a conversation by saying, "The story I'm telling myself is..." dot, dot, dot.
38:50 Speaker 02 Yes. That's a good one. "The story I'm telling myself is this." Yeah, it's a great one.
38:57 Dan Harris? I just want to point out, you do recommend throughout the book, a lot of exercise and movement. And I actually just want to plus one that because I do think that, and there's evidence to suggest this, that it can really relax your nervous system and help turn down the volume on discursive thought. Another thing you recommend is to call trusted counsel.
39:15 Speaker 02 Yes.
39:16 Dan Harris? And it kind of goes to a point that previous guests have made on the show, which is that if you look to your... Romantic partner as the be all, end all, the only real relationship you have, you're likely to suffer because you're putting too much weight and pressure on the relationship. And so if you have friends and advisors, they can give you advice and context and perspective on your relationship. And again, it takes some of the pressure off your person being the only person and everything to you.
39:47 Speaker 02 Yeah, your partner can't be your only confidant. You know, I had an interesting conversation with someone recently and she's in a really good marriage, a great marriage. And they are very transparent with each other and they're greatest fans and whatnot. But she said something which I wholeheartedly agree with. He doesn't need to know everything that goes on in my head.
40:10 Dan Harris? Yeah.
40:10 Speaker 02 Because first of all, that's not really good for a couple's sex life. And I want to say something here because this is important. So much of my message is having the hard conversations. And the worst piece of advice, relationship advice I ever got was from a therapist. And that was when there was the first miscarriage when I was married. Basically, there was no heartbeat. And they told me that and they had to schedule a DNC to basically abort the fetus that was no longer living. And I remember, this was one of the hugest red flags, that I was obviously very upset and I really wanted my husband's support and solace in that moment.
40:53 Speaker 02 I didn't want anyone else's, I want his. And her advice was, this is a scenario where you should be going to your sisters or to your mother or to your friends. To this day, I always say that's the worst piece of advice I've ever received on relationships, ever. Because you have to be able to talk to your partner about really difficult things.
41:13 Speaker 02 And to our point just a few minutes ago, everything that's bothering you, everything that's ailing you, every obstacle or mental thing that you're trying to overcome, don't have that be your partner's responsibility to solve. And you don't have to tell them everything that's going on in your mind because, and this is where it gets very nuanced and difficult to kind of pinpoint, but there has to be a little bit of mystery, just a little bit. And it's so hard. It's because curiosity about your partner, I wonder what they're thinking right now. Not the constant, I wonder what they're thinking because they're so shut down from me, but just a little bit of curiosity and like, huh, I wonder.
41:57 Speaker 02 And just not knowing the contents of their brain every five seconds is what keeps chemistry sort of brewing. And so to your point, yes, speak to trusted counsel. And even though your partner can be trusted counsel with certain things and should be, I think you should be able to. It's important to like, when you're trying to clean up some of the messiness in your head, that you don't bring that to your relationship all 24/7.
42:28 Dan Harris? Well said. Truth number three is lust is not the same thing as love.
42:33 Speaker 02 Yeah.
42:34 Dan Harris? Say more.
42:35 Speaker 02 Well, we think that that's obvious, but I wouldn't have a business if it were really that obvious to people because it's just not. When we first meet someone and we're really attracted to them and we're feeling all these things and it's like the first couple of months and you're just so excited and everything is perfect about it. And you think, I just love this person. I'm falling in love with this person. No, that's lust. When you think that this person is perfect, your connection is perfect, you're getting all excited. And I don't want to rain on anyone's parade. That enthusiasm that we experience when we first are interested in someone is one of the great delights of being a human being.
43:19 Speaker 02 This fleeting experience on this earth. But they are simply the stimulus that is triggering inside of you, something that actually resides inside of you already, which is aliveness. And when you feel that aliveness and that novelty, it's a wonderful feeling. But that's lust. And so a lot of people will rush into playing house with someone who they barely know because they haven't learned how to process their enthusiasm, which I will get to in a moment. But they get so excited. They get so excited. And so it's like, oh, let's spend every day together. Let's have sleepovers. Let's do this. And my reminder to people is, you know what? You're in lust, not love.
44:03 Speaker 02 That connection that you feel is actually sexual attraction. And that true connection is made up, I should say, of emotional safety and respect and trust. And that connection, which really serves as a foundation, that takes time to build. And so when you're busy playing house with this stranger and you're in la la land, great. But recognize that that really, that is not actually love. There's still a stranger. You could find out in a couple of months that they are actually terrible for you. And so you have to slow down and enjoy the lust, but see it for what it is. And what we do is we get into teenage mode and we project.
44:46 Speaker 02 When we're in heavy lust, and some people have a pattern of getting so entrenched in the lust that they do not know how to see things clearly, can't see things clearly, because we can't when we're in lust. They'll get themselves very entrenched in this person, very attached very quickly. And I just want people to slow down because when that happens, what we're doing is unconsciously, we are projecting our 15-year-old, 14-year-old fantasy onto this person. And we put them on a pedestal and we idealize them.
45:23 Speaker 02 And then as soon as things get real, so when we transition out of the limerent stage of a relationship, the newness and the novelty, and then we're transitioning into the more comfortable stage of a relationship, moving towards commitment, then we're like, oh, this person is not as perfect as I thought they were. This person is just as fucked up as I am. Or this person has just as many flaws as I do. And then the person who does not have the awareness and the maturity to realize that there's lust and there's love, that person will be like, mm, I guess they're not for me. Or they'll be crushed by the weight of their expectations on their shoulders. And so you have to know that there is a difference between love and lust
46:04 Speaker 02 to really, just so that you can save your own ass in relationships, honestly.
46:09 Dan Harris? Yeah.
46:11 Speaker 02 Sorry for my potty mouth.
46:12 Dan Harris? No, potty mouth is fine here. This is a comfortable place for the word fuck.
46:17 Speaker 02 Great.
46:17 Dan Harris? The couples counselor that my wife and I have seen intermittently over the years is this incredible guy, Michael Vincent Miller. And he has this line about the immaturity of our modern conception of romantic love, where he says that assume it's going to go from one enchanted evening to happily ever after, and we skip over the hard work that is in the middle. And that really rhymes with everything you just said. In the interest of time, I'm going to just keep us going through the hard truths of your book. Number four is you have to love yourself.
46:49 Speaker 02 Yes, two schools of thought. One is you learn to love yourself through relationship. The other school of thought is you have to love yourself and feel totally whole, and then you're ready for a relationship. I think it's somewhere in the middle. One is, yes, we are social animals, and we get our sense of self through our relationships with others. We can't really know who we are if we're not in relationship, of all relationships with others, because everyone's holding up a mirror. So we don't really get a sense of self. And also, it's quite impactful for a person's self-esteem, in a good way, when they're in a relationship and they're doing the work. That's actually really good for a person's self-esteem, because it gives you a sense of accomplishment,
47:34 Speaker 02 and it gives you a sense of validation. When someone loves us selflessly, it's a beautiful thing when love is to see something in someone that they perhaps don't see in themselves. And that's a very real thing. And the way you feel about yourself is going to be reflected in your relationships. If you're in a marriage and you're feeling terrible about yourself, you could easily sabotage the relationship. You could make it so that it's impossible for you to receive love from your partner. You could be showing up in a bad mood all the time, making you impossible to live with. And then there are the people, and these are many of the people who I've worked with,
48:16 Speaker 02 whose standards are so low, you know, your self-esteem matters. Your self-esteem is very relevant to the quality of your love life. If you can't hold yourself in high regard in spite of the fact that there are going to be parts of yourself that you feel ambivalent towards, then you are going to be in relationships with people who don't treat you well or who don't have their shit together at all, even though you totally have your shit together. And you think, maybe, you know, I'm not worth being with someone or having someone love me. So self-love, sort of a nuanced topic. The way that I like to think about it and the way that I describe in the book is really self-acceptance. I do believe that the road to true self-acceptance is lifelong.
49:01 Speaker 02 But learning how to hold yourself in high regard in spite of the fact that, again, there are things that you're not going to totally love about yourself. You have to know that you are worth being loved. And there are millions of people who don't know that. And so I tried to convey in the book, how to actually love yourself more and to see yourself as more worthy and to see your value. And one of the things that I talk about is, first of all, yes, you can look in the mirror and tell yourself that you love yourself, which, by the way, can be a very powerful practice for some people. For some people, it doesn't land. It just doesn't work. For other people, it lands really well. For some people, affirmations work really well, for others, not.
49:46 Speaker 02 But if you think about children and what builds the self-esteem of a child, the first time that a child goes potty on their own, that builds their self-esteem. That gives them a sense of accomplishment and autonomy. The first time, I grew up in New York City. So it's like the first time I got on the public bus or I got on the subway, you know, without having my mom to be there. That gave me a sense of... Self-esteem. It's the same thing as adults. We have to challenge ourselves to do things that are hard in order to feel better about ourselves.
50:22 Dan Harris? Yeah, that makes sense. And I don't think it's intuitive to a lot of people because self-love can seem so gauzy or
50:29 Speaker 02 Yes.
50:29 Dan Harris? out of reach. But it's a little bit grittier than that in the way you're describing it. And one way to develop it is to consistently set goals and then to achieve them to the best of your ability. And even just the trying can boost the regard that you have for yourself. Are there other strategies that you would recommend?
50:47 Speaker 02 Yes. The first sentence of your first book was, can you remind me again?
50:52 Dan Harris? The voice in my head is an asshole.
50:53 Speaker 02 So that's it. The voice in your head is most likely a big asshole. And so one of the biggest things that I did to help myself is noticing the way that I talk to myself and then making a conscious effort when I'm starting to say really shitty things to myself to be like, no, I am not doing that today. I am not going to talk to myself like that today. One thing that's really helpful, and some people might think this is kind of narcissistic, but I think that this has been very impactful for me and many people I've worked with and many people I've talked about this is sometimes just having a photo of yourself as a child is really impactful and just looking at that photo and trying to throw that photo some love and compassion.
51:38 Speaker 02 And because we can dissociate so easily from that child. And so being able to see that that child is sort of still sort of inside of you and can you speak to that child with more respect? So the way that you talk to yourself matters. The way that you talk to yourself about your partner or about your mom or about your dad or about your friends matters. So the voice in our head really matters and it can definitely be an asshole.
52:09 Dan Harris? Just to riff on that briefly before we move on to truth number five. Having personally done some writing and speaking on self-love. There's one point of confusion, and I think you've navigated it well, is that this isn't just like unbounded egotism, that that's not helpful at all. It's, as Kristin Neff, the godmother of self-compassion, talks about it. It's like moving from an inner drill sergeant to an inner coach. And a coach does call you out on your bullshit, but also sees your potential. And you can channel your capacity to be a coach and mentor and direct it toward yourself. And just on the thing about the image of yourself as a child. In Buddhism, there's this practice called metta or loving kindness, where you envision people, starting often with yourself,
52:54 Dan Harris? and send phrases like, "May you be happy, may you be safe,"
52:57 Speaker 02 Yes.
52:57 Dan Harris? etc., etc. And one of the instructions that's often given is when you're sending metta to yourself, which again, it's not affirmation. It's more like basic goodwill
53:08 Speaker 02 Yes.
53:08 Dan Harris? and friendliness, which I think is meaningfully different from like, "You're the best." "May you be healthy, may you be happy, may you be
53:15 Speaker 02 Yes.
53:16 Dan Harris? protected and safe, and may you live with ease." You can, many teachers will instruct people to bring to mind a picture of yourself as a kid, because that, often directing any sort of benevolence toward ourselves is so hard, that one way to do it is to imagine yourself as a kid. So I just wanted to say that for anybody who had a reaction to your idea of having a picture of yourself around. But having said all of that, let's move to truth number five, which is, you must tell the truth, which seems so obvious that it doesn't even need to be said, but I think it actually does need to be said.
53:47 Speaker 02 Yeah, people are lying all the time to themselves and to the person they're in a relationship with. And they're even lying to their date. "Oh yeah, you know, I don't care that we're not serious."
53:58 Speaker 02 "I don't care that, you know, you're dating other people, that's okay with me." "I'm okay with the fact that you really hurt my feelings yesterday, that's okay."
54:07 Speaker 02 I'm terrified of losing you and that's why I'm having performance anxiety in the bedroom. You know, there's lots of things. No one's gonna lie to you more than you lie to yourself. And people avoid the hard conversations all the time because they want to keep the peace. But peace is not the goal of a relationship. Love is, and we have to have the hard conversations in service of that love. And I withheld the truth all the time, especially when you are afraid that someone might leave you. If you are terrified of abandonment, rightly or wrongly in the relationship that you're in. There are lots of people who have mastered
54:48 Speaker 02 the art of not telling the truth and suppressing the truth. And no relationship is worth keeping if you have to lie to maintain it. And so I think that this truth in particular is going to land really hard for those who have that fear of abandonment. Or maybe we're raised in homes where you just kind of avoid the reality of what's going on to keep the peace. Or you sweep things under the rug or whatever that, you know, the ethos was in your family of origin. But the truth is extremely important. It's not the same thing as, oh, does my ass look fat in my pants right now? Yeah, you know, a little white lie around there might be good.
55:33 Speaker 02 It's not like emptying the contents of your brain, like we were speaking a little bit earlier. But it's about removing the elephant in the room. And it's about saying when something really hurts you, sometimes it's self assertion, you know? And a lot of women in particular will silence themselves to be cool or to be the good girl. A lot of men will do that because they want to make sure that their partner is pleased and happy. And so if they say this thing that's the truth, that might put a frown in my partner's face. And so I'm not going to do it. And so what's going to happen is that I'm going to lose my voice in the relationship and the relationship is going to lose its authenticity. And then I'm just going to hate my partner and blame them for the fact that I've been a people pleaser.
56:16 Speaker 02 So there's so many things that can go wrong with not telling the truth. And it is scary.
56:23 Speaker 02 And it can be particularly frightening as hell for certain people. And everything that I'm suggesting, rather, is going to require some courage. And for some people, it's going to take everything they have. But it is going to transform whatever the situation is. And certainly by lying to ourselves or lying to the others. I mean, even people who are dating, it's just like, yeah, I can have sex with you and not get attached. Or, you know, whatever it is. So telling the truth and having the courage to tell the truth is everything.
56:56 Dan Harris? Coming up, Jillian talks about one of the biggies from my perspective, perhaps the biggie in this conversation. Her argument that if you want to have a healthy romantic relationship, you need to make peace with your parents.
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57:42 Dan Harris? Truth number six is you need to be your best self even after the honeymoon.
57:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, we tend to be the ambassador of ourselves in the beginning of a relationship. And then what happens is, you know, we get comfortable. And with that comfort, we sometimes like stop taking care of ourselves. We take each other for granted. It's sort of the law of familiarity. And if you want a great relationship, then you have to continue to do a lot of the things that you did in the beginning of the relationship. And then your relationship won't suffer. It's kind of not so easy, but it's quite simple. And so I don't know if this resonates with you, Dan, but like for me, I can think of lots of times where it's like,
58:30 Speaker 02 oh, I'm not really like being that person that I was. Like, I'm not bringing...
58:36 Speaker 02 Look, life can be hard. We're human beings. You don't have to be some saint in your relationship. And you deserve to have bad days. And for the person who claims to love you to love you through those bad days, you don't have to like always be perfect. God knows that would just be a recipe for disaster. But that effort that we put in, in the beginning, it has to continue. We have to at least attempt to bring more of our higher self to the relationship. And maybe that is telling the truth. Maybe that is just the mindfulness. Maybe that's taking care of our bodies, you know,
59:18 Speaker 02 in such a way that we are, it's like, hey, I care about myself and I care that you care about how I look. You know, so I'm gonna like, take care of myself. It's these things, you know? But more than anything else, it's not treating your partner as though they would never leave you.
59:38 Dan Harris? Yeah. Number seven is that you cannot convince somebody to love you.
59:41 Speaker 02 No, you can't. It's a law of the land. You can't convince someone to choose you. You know, a lot of people, they'll meet someone and they want to get chosen by that person. And what they do is that they abandon themselves. They become whoever they think the other person wants. And that in its own way is trying to convince someone to love you. There's also someone wants out of the relationship. Like they have made the decision, they want out. You trying to convince them to stay is never going to work. It holds a person hostage emotionally and then you imprison yourself in a hell that you don't want to be in, which is your relationship. It's what your relationship becomes when you know that you had to convince someone to stay with you.
1:00:24 Speaker 02 And so this is a very hard truth. It corresponds with surrender and letting go. And that love truly is a choice. And so you can't convince someone of a choice that they don't want to make.
1:00:41 Dan Harris? Number eight is "Nobody's Coming to Save You."
1:00:43 Speaker 02 Yes, especially in literature and films, we see this all the time. Let's say there's a male protagonist and he's depressed. And he has no purpose in life. And then this woman comes into his life and awakens that dormant beast inside of him that, you know, knows what he wants and has purpose. And they think, "This person is the reason why I feel alive." They were the stimulus. But they're also going to, when you get to know them, they're gonna fart, they're gonna pick their nose, they're gonna poop, they're gonna do all these things. And then all of a sudden, you're gonna be like, hmm, where is this person? The onus is on you.
1:01:27 Speaker 02 Or lots of women waiting for their knight in shining armor, whether that's in the form of a man or a woman. They're looking for someone, for love to save them. And so many of the people I worked with, it's like, no, actually, make your own money. Find safety in your body first. Learn how to meet your needs. And then you can be in a relationship that, as Eric Frome refers to, where you need someone because you love them. You don't love them because you need them. Become self-sufficient.
1:02:02 Dan Harris? All right, this strikes me as a biggie.
1:02:05 Speaker 02 Yes, it is. It's a huge one.
1:02:07 Dan Harris? The truth number nine, and I didn't see this coming, but I think it's really interesting, is you must make peace with your parents.
1:02:13 Speaker 02 So there's a disclaimer in there. If you were molested, if you were severely abused, I don't believe that you need to make peace with your parents. I have worked with people in that position before. And honestly, I don't think you should ever talk to that parent again. And so I just wanted people to understand, to open their minds, to think of this more metaphorically. You could make peace with your parents and they could be dead, not living. You can make peace with one or both of your parents and you have a great relationship with them. And making peace with them means that they no longer are the chief of your belief system. You are able to have your own beliefs, your own path in life. You're becoming the artist when, you know, you thought that all they wanted from you
1:02:58 Speaker 02 was to become the lawyer. You could have a terrible relation, a very troubled relationship, I should say, with a parent. And make peace with them even though you continue to keep them at arm's length. That was very much my story. Much of my life has been controlled by this narrative that I've had with my father, who had bipolar psychiatrist, diagnosed narcissist. And I was very afraid of him for most of my life. He never laid a hand on me, but his energy was very dark and I was very sensitive and I felt that. And when I was 21 years old, I decide, right when I graduated college,
1:03:43 Speaker 02 I made a very life-altering decision. I decided to never answer his calls again. So I ghosted him. I don't know if you're familiar with that terminology, Dan, but okay. So I ghosted him. And in the beginning, it felt like a relief to just not have to pick up the phone because I was just, I didn't, I didn't know how to be around him. I didn't know how to stand up for myself. I was scared of him. And as the years passed, it started to become more obvious to me that estrangement was not the solution in my case. It was actually, I could deny, I can avoid the monster and I could deny the monster.
1:04:28 Speaker 02 But that means it only gets bigger inside of me.
1:04:31 Dan Harris? Uh huh.
1:04:32 Speaker 02 And even though I had some, I start the chapter with saying that your relationship with your parents is going to show up in your adult romantic relationships. And that's not necessarily all entirely bad, but it can be quite troubling. I was in few really beautiful, loving relationships that did not in any way highlight my troubled relationship with my father. Why is that? I don't know, you know, whoever can figure that out will get the Nobel Peace Prize because no one really, truly has all the answers, no one. And why I was able to be in lovely relationships and then after my 30s, my relationships started to really signify, you know,
1:05:14 Speaker 02 my relationship or manifest in such a way that all my stuff with my father start to show up. I think there's a lot that goes into it. It's context, it's age, it's where you are in life. But I started to have relationships that it started to dawn on me like maybe there's some daddy issues here. And by my avoiding him, didn't make those issues go away. And so I had to really learn how to be in relationship with him, even if it's in my own nervous system differently. And that has been the biggest obstacle spiritual journey of my life. And so I felt that I absolutely had to write about it.
1:05:54 Dan Harris? So it didn't mean that you went back and started having long dialogues with him? It was more, I imagine, like you were having long dialogues with your confidants and shrinks, et cetera, et cetera?
1:06:04 Speaker 02 I was put in therapy as a child to work this out. But no, therapy did not help me with this at all. This came with the work that I did as a coach and the work with my mentors and coaches. I'm not saying that therapy cannot help. Therapy can be a wonderful resource, but I can't credit something that does not, in my experience, deserve their credit. So therapy did not help me with that. But growing up and understanding belief systems and the stories that we create, and me deciding that I didn't want to be controlled by a story anymore, and having the awareness to see that how this was controlling my life. No, it didn't mean I ended the estrangement. Estrangement was not the answer. It can be
1:06:47 Speaker 02 the answer for some people where their very survival depends on it. But estrangement was not the answer. It was having conversations, but it wasn't rainbows and lollipop and unicorns. It was I needed to learn how to actually have conversations with him where I wasn't filled with dread, fear, and vitriol. And the only way that I could do that was to start to look at him through the lens of who I am today versus my little girl self. And so what that looked like at first was like all ego, like let me, let me tell him, like, you know, let me tell him, he can't do that to me. He can't talk to me that way. And then I realized, you know, the pendulum swung in the other direction. And so now
1:07:29 Speaker 02 it was like, how can I have some more understanding and some more compassion? How can I be the wisest person in the conversation? How can I let go of this? And he died while I was writing that chapter, actually. So you're healing with a parent, whatever that healing looks like. They do not have to be alive for you to do that.
1:07:50 Dan Harris? But if you don't do it, you're going to take those ghosts into whatever relationship you find yourself in.
1:07:56 Speaker 02 100%.
1:07:58 Dan Harris? Gillian, two questions I ask at the end of every interview. One is, is there something you were hoping we would talk about that we didn't get to?
1:08:04 Speaker 02 We're good.
1:08:06 Dan Harris? Second is, can you please shamelessly promote your new book and anything? I know you're on Substack. Anything else that we should know about that you've put out into the world?
1:08:14 Speaker 02 Sure. So my book, It Begins With You: The Nine Hard Truths About Love That Will Change Your Life, available at GillianTurecki.com/book, at all major resellers and independent resellers and available internationally. I have my podcast called Gillian on Love that you can listen to on Spotify, Apple, anywhere, on YouTube, and my Substack, Love Weekly. And then I have a community called The Conscious Woman, which is basically a community of women all trying to raise their level of consciousness and get better at relationships.
1:08:44 Dan Harris? Thank you very much, Gillian.
1:08:46 Speaker 02 Thank you, Dan.
1:08:50 Dan Harris? Thanks again to Gillian. Don't forget to check out her podcast, Gillian on Love. And don't forget to sign up at DanHarris.com. Free subscribers will get an email from me twice a week with my top takeaways from each episode, and then a third email on Fridays with a list of my favorite TV shows and books and things like that. Paid subscribers will also get a cheat sheet for every episode, which includes time stamped highlights and a full transcript. Paid subscribers also get live Q and As with me and the opportunity to chat with me directly in the comments and in the chat section over at Substack. Check it out. We'd love your support. Before I go, I just want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show.
1:09:33 Dan Harris? Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.
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