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Love Doesn’t Always Feel Like Love · Understanding Yourself: A Framework For Change

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Understanding Yourself.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Ben Lemmon.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: This is a collection of stories, ideas,
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: and conversations designed to help us better understand ourselves
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: and maybe experience life a little differently.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for being here.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: Let's begin.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: Love doesn't always feel like love.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: When I work with clients,
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: I often tell them that my goal is not to help them reach a place
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: where they no longer have problems.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: That place does not exist.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: As an adult, you're going to have problems every day.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: My hope is that you become an adult who solves problems every day.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: I certainly didn't always see life that way.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: When I was a kid,
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: my dad once asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up,
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: and I replied, a lottery winner.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: I was not an incredibly ambitious child.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: I remember hearing adults say money can't buy happiness
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: and thinking that's probably true but I'd really like to find out for myself.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: Even then I think I had a very specific idea of what freedom looked like.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: Freedom meant not having to do anything I didn't want to do.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: No alarm clock, no boss, no bills, no responsibilities.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Apparently,
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: if I could just win enough money,
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: I could spend the rest of my life on some sort of permanent vacation.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: The problem is, vacations aren't supposed to be permanent addresses.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: I love imagining winning the lottery as much as anyone.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: I can tell you exactly where I would travel and probably spend
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: an unreasonable amount of time deciding what kind of house I would buy.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: But when I ask people about vacations, I hear the same thing over and over.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: It was amazing, but I was ready to come home.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: There's something interesting about that.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: We need rest.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: We need things to look forward to.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: We need opportunities to step away from the stream of life.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: Recharge and fill our cup, but eventually we seem to want back into the stream.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: We're designed to build things,
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: solve things,
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: participate, contribute, struggle with something and occasionally overcome it.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: Some of the experiences that give The thing I spent nine months
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: Not responsibility in the sense that everything that happens is my fault.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: It isn't.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: I mean responsibility for what belongs to me.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: My beliefs, my thoughts, my feelings, my choices, my response to what's happening in my life.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: My dad is a retired mechanical engineer.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: He is also a fixer.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: If you call my dad and ask if you can borrow
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: I just had to make him aware that the problem existed, and somehow the problem would disappear.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: As I got older, the problems became bigger.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: Eventually some became too big for my father to fix.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: I imagine that must have been incredibly difficult for him.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: But I think something else may have been even harder.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: There came a point when I would bring him a problem he absolutely had the ability
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: to fix, and he chose not to.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: I would tell him what was happening,
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: probably expecting the usual response,
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: and occasionally I would get something like, I'm sorry to hear that.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: That was it.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I didn't have the audacity to follow it with, okay, but are you going to fix it?
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: So I had to figure it out.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: At the time, I'm sure there were moments when that felt like less love.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: Today, I believe it was more.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: My father stopped fixing certain problems not because he had stopped loving me,
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: but because he loved me enough to allow me to become someone capable
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: of solving them.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: I can only imagine how difficult that must have been for him.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: Fixing the problem would have made me feel better immediately.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: It probably would have made him feel better too.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: Instead,
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: he occasionally had to watch someone he loved struggle
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: with something he could have made disappear.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: That's a very different kind of love.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: It took me years to recognize it.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: I had another person in my life who taught me something similar,
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: although his delivery was considerably less subtle.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: When I first started getting sober, I had a counselor named Sonny.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: Sonny was a Vietnam veteran and not a man of many words.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: At the time, neither was I.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: During our morning feelings group,
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: he would sometimes set a timer for three minutes and tell me I had to talk
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: until it went off.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: Three minutes can feel like an eternity when you've spent most
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: of your life avoiding talking about how you feel.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: As I slowly started opening up,
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: Sonny would occasionally raise his voice at me and call me a liar.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: If I started a sentence with I think, he would interrupt me.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's the problem.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: You're thinking.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: Stop doing that.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: I did not experience this as loving.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not even sure I experienced it as particularly nice.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: The frustrating part is Sonny was often right.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: There were things I said that simply weren't true.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: The strange part was that I wasn't consciously trying to deceive anyone.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: I had repeated some of my stories for so long that I believed them.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: My thinking had become distorted enough that I could Sonny was trying to interrupt that.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: Years later I attended his celebration of life and found myself telling those exact stories.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: The stories about him raising his voice,
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: calling me a liar,
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: interrupting me every time I said I think,
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things Sunny spent a lot of time doing
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: I fought that idea for months.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: I would say I believed I was powerless.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: While simultaneously having an internal conversation that sounded something like,
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: what the fuck is wrong with you?
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: You said you weren't going to do this again.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: You ruin everything.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: Why are you like this?
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't simply disappointed in myself.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: I was attacking myself.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: Every reoccurrence became more evidence in a case I had been building against myself for years.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: There was an endless debate happening inside my head.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: Am I going to use?
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: Am I not going to use?
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe I'll use.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: No, absolutely not.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: And often the only thing that made the debate stop In fact, I was
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: I have an example that eventually helped me understand what Sunny was trying to teach me.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: I can tell you that I was never particularly excited about walking
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: But I also never remember standing there soaking wet thinking, Ben, you idiot.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: You knew you had to walk this dog.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: Why did you make it rain?
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: I never blamed myself for the weather because I understood that I was powerless over it.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: That didn't mean I liked the rain.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: It didn't mean I couldn't respond to it.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: I could grab an umbrella,
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: put on a raincoat,
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: wait for it to slow down,
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: but I didn't waste my time hating myself for making water fall out of the sky.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: When I finally began to understand powerlessness in that way,
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: something inside me I remember rushing to Sonny
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: and telling him I finally understood what he had been saying.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: Then naturally I immediately came up with a great idea.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: I need a new sponsor.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: I had been working with the same sponsor for years and had repeatedly failed
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: to put together even two weeks Sunny
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: calmly asked me how long my sponsor had been
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: sober.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: I told him he was preparing to celebrate 30 years.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: Sunny looked at me and said something along the lines of, you don't need a new sponsor.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: You need to take the suggestions he gives you.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: There are few things more irritating than someone dismantling your brilliant plan
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: with one sentence.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: Until that moment, I would have told you that I was taking suggestions.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: I was listening to suggestions,
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: selecting the ones I liked,
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: ignoring the ones I didn't, and then complaining that nothing was changing.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: Once I truly began to understand that my own thinking had repeatedly brought me to
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: a place I desperately did not want to be,
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: I became more willing to invite other ideas into my life.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: Recovery became less like a case study where I reviewed the evidence and decided
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: which recommendations seemed reasonable.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: It became more like an experiment.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: What would happen if I actually followed the directions?
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: That meant doing something I had spent most of my life resisting.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: It required my ego to move out of the driver's seat.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: I think ego often gets a bad reputation.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: We talk about destroying it, defeating it, crushing it.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not convinced that's necessary.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: I think it serves an important purpose.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: As children, we're almost completely dependent on other people.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: We can't drive to the grocery store.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: We can't earn enough money to provide shelter.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: We can't prepare every meal, pay the electric bill, or navigate the world by ourselves.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: But children don't walk around contemplating the terrifying reality of their dependence.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: We give children choices because it helps them develop independence.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: Do you want the blue cup or the red cup?
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: Do you want to wear this shirt or that one?
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: The problem is that might
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: My ego occasionally seems unaware that I made it to adulthood.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's still trying to protect me from anything it believes I cannot handle.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: Criticism, embarrassment, being wrong, someone seeing something in me that I don't want to see.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: A father saying I'm sorry to hear that when I desperately want him to solve the problem.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: A counselor calling me a liar when I desperately want him to validate my story.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: A counselor telling me I don't need a new sponsor when I desperately want
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: the problem to be someone other than me.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: In those moments love
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: and comfort can look very different comfort often tells me what I want
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: to hear love sometimes tells me what I need to hear comfort removes
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: the immediate difficulty love occasionally allows me to struggle long enough
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: to discover that That doesn't mean every person who hurts us is loving us.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: Cruelty is still cruelty.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: Control is still control.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: Someone being harsh does not hurt me.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: Some of the most loving things people have done
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: for me were things my ego desperately wanted to rich in.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: My dad stopped rescuing me from problems I needed to learn how to solve.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: Sunny challenged stories I desperately wanted to believe.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: My sponsor asked me to stop evaluating every suggestion and actually try one.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: None of those experiences felt particularly loving in the moment.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: Today I see them differently.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think my life got better because I finally sat quietly long enough
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: to come up with a collection of brilliant ideas.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: Quite the opposite.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of my life changed when I became willing to get out of my own way long enough
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: to receive what other people Maybe that's one of the strange transitions
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: of adulthood.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: As children we need our ego to help us discover that we're separate people capable
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: of making choices and eventually standing on our own.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: But adulthood eventually asks something else from us.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: It asks us whether we can be Maybe there comes a point when it has done enough of the driving.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: The heart can take the wheel for a while.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I have found the heart is capable of taking me places my ego,
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: with all of its plans to protect me, would never have allowed me to go.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for spending this time with me.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: If this resonated with you,
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: you can find the written version on my substack, Understanding Yourself.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: And if you've been following along with these essays and podcasts, thank you.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: I really appreciate you continuing to spend some of your time with me.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: Until next time, keep asking better questions and keep understanding yourself.