Stop Pushing Love Away: How to End Self-Sabotage and Let Love In

Brett: Joe, what stops people from getting the love they want? 

Joe: One hand is saying, "Stop, get away from me," and one hand is saying, "Oh, come towards me." Whatever your parents did, then that's what you associate with love. And so if they were critical, then you know love to be critical. If they were abusive, then you know love to be abusive. But it's not actual love. It's just the thing that was wired with love, and so you recognize it to be love. To get love without that is actually quite overwhelming and it starts making us feel unsafe.

Brett: Joe, what stops people from getting the love they want? 

Joe: Yeah, that is a fantastic question. There's so many answers to that. But the question itself is also what makes us push away the love that we want? What makes us self-sabotage around love? There's just so many ways to look at that question.

Brett: What makes us scared of the intimacy that we want?

Joe: Exactly, yeah. So there is so many ways that we do it, it's amazing. I think one of the most basic ways to go through is basically some version of attachment theory, right? So if you've ever seen the stone-faced baby experiments. Basically, if you take an infant or a child, a young child, pre-verbal, and you don't give it attention It will go through a series of ways to get the attention.

If you don't give it loving attention, it'll go through a series of ways of getting attention until it just, like, stone faces, until it doesn't do anything, right? But it will seemingly get angry or yell or scream or cry or try to coo or it'll do all sorts of things to get the attention. Which I think for an infant is very much equated to love, right?

And then we grow up, and we've learnt from our families, from our upbringing, that this is the way that you get attention/love. Now, unfortunately, it's no longer love. It's just attention. And so if I learnt that as a kid or as an infant that when I got upset, I would get love, then oftentimes I'm going to get upset to get your love. I'm gonna get angry to get your love. Or if I have to be cute to get your love, then I'm gonna be cute. I have to be right to get your love, then I'm gonna be right. But it's no longer love. It's just attention. It means, oh, I'm getting some sort of validation. I'm getting some sort of attention from the parent or the authority figure who basically lets me know that I'm safe.

Brett: Mm-hmm. 

Joe: And so what happens is you're an infant, you're looking for safety, or you're a young kid, you're looking for safety. Safety is in the form of love and attention. You don't get the love, so how do I get the attention? I get the attention by yelling, screaming, cooing, being valuable, getting the job done, doing it right, being perfect.

And that's what we bring into our adulthood. And so all of a sudden, I'm doing things for attention that actually push away love. So in my family of origin, getting angry is how I got attention. If I got angry, then I was like a problem that was big enough to keep my parents' marriage together. And so me getting angry was how I got attention.

And so that was the way that I would get love if I was feeling, "Why aren't you loving me? Well, why aren't you uh, uh?" You know, and, and if you weren't running away from my anger, if you were staying with me, it meant you loved me Right? If I was getting your attention, it meant you loved me. It didn't actually, it wasn't the love that I actually wanted, but it was the love that I had been taught I could receive. 

Brett: Yeah. There's something really interesting here in that there's a sequence of strategies the baby goes through to get the loving attention. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: But then there's also sort of a sequence of what it's willing to accept.

Correct. So initially, of course, you want just straight up love. But if you can't get love, then some form of attention will do. 

Joe: Yes. 

Brett: And then maybe there's like a scale of various types of attention, like some form of attention that knows I'm at least safe and attended to if something happens or I'll be fed, that'll do if I'm not getting straight up love and cooing and delight and everything. 

Joe: That's right. 

Brett: But if I'm not even getting that, then at least maybe I can have the attention. If someone's angry with me, at least I know that I'm not totally abandoned. 

Joe: Correct. That's right.

Brett: And so there's this kind of maybe like a Maslow's kind of dissension of what you're willing to accept. And that sticks with us into adulthood as well. 

Joe: When you get to adulthood and you're carrying these behaviors that you've been trained as a young kid to get attention, which was a surrogate for love, we end up basically looking like this, where one hand is saying, "Stop, get away from me," and one hand is saying, "Oh, come towards me."

And one of the perfect examples of this is jealousy. Jealousy, it's like, clearly, I want your love. Why are you giving love to somebody else? I want your love. But the act of jealousy pushes people away. I'm going to be so annoying. I'm gonna try to be so controlling of your life. I'm gonna be, I would say, abusive in my accusations and in my control that you're gonna wanna leave, but I really want you at the same time. And that's what's confusing. So it's like, "I'm angry at you, but why are you leaving me? I'm sad at you, but why are you leaving me? I try to please you all the time. Why are you walking all over me and not, like, loving me?" So it's this early attachment that you've been trained to do that went from seeking love to seeking attention, and now the attention seeking that works is pushing away the love. 

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: And so when I say love here, I'm not only just talking about romantic love. I'm talking about love of friendships, love of parents, love of, like in a workplace. I'm talking about love available to you everywhere. Like, when we're in a Groundbreakers together and we're doing a week-long, the last one we just did as an example, you got to see everybody in this like, "Oh my gosh, like, I can be loved. I can love. It's so easy." 

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: They're not doing it, they hadn't been doing it in their whole life up until that point. Because it's not about just a romantic love, though it pertains to romantic love. It, it actually pertains in some degree to- 

Brett: Anything that has been wired together with love.

Joe: Yes, exactly. 

Brett: So money, getting what you want. 

Joe: Yeah, exactly. 

Brett: Belonging. 

Joe: Belonging. All that stuff is part of it. So one thing is to get the love that we want, to untrain those patterns of attention-seeking that actually pushes away love is like one of the big stoppers of it. 

Brett: Yeah. So what's another one?

Joe: Yeah, so wired together, fired together is another way in which we have this natural love for our parents. You can't get rid of it. Your parents could be the most abusive assholes ever, and yet you still want their love on some level. There's some part of you that wants their love. Even though you're like, "I don't want their love, I don't even want them in my life," you're still tied in.

So whatever your parents did, then that's what you associate with love. That's what gets fired together with love. And so if they were critical, then you know love to be critical. If they were abusive, then you know love to be abusive. If they were anxiously attached and making sure that everything that you did was safe, then you know love to be that. But it's not actual love. It's just the thing that was wired with love, and so you recognize it to be love. And don't get me wrong, there's like some love to it, meaning like on some level, they were criticizing you because they wanted what was best for you. On some level, they are hovering over you because they care about you and they want you to be safe. But it's just all of a sudden that's what you know love to be. 

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: And so to get love without that is actually quite overwhelming and it starts making us feel unsafe.

It makes us feel like, "Oh, wait, I don't know what this is. I'm not aware of this. This isn't the identity that I know of myself to be," and so we get a little unsafe in that process.

Brett: And if love always came with control or manipulation, then you're like, "Well, okay, there's love, there must be control and manipulation. I need to push it away." 

Joe: Exactly. 

Brett: It's not safe. 

Joe: Exactly. That's right. And then that's the other thing is if it comes with abuse or something like that, then I don't want love. And you see that often with people who are, getting later on in life, and they're like, "Where's my romantic love? I've tried everything." And typically, when I'm working with those folks, once they stop the wiring of this is what I know love to be, and they can break that wired-together, fired-together thing, then they all of a sudden are in a relationship. They think it's because I haven't found the right person. They think it's because, everybody abandoned me. But as soon as they go, "Oh, I'm just avoiding the guilt, I'm not avoiding the love, and I can separate those two things," or the abuse or the criticism or whatever it is, then all of a sudden, three months later, usually within three months, boom, they are in a relationship. But they have to break that thing apart. So that's another big thing that stops people from being. 

Brett: So another one, you had mentioned something about identity. Let's dive into that one a little bit further too. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: This is number three. 

Joe: Yeah, this is number three. Yeah. So the identity piece is really interesting.

So they've done studies that show if I see you better than you see yourself, if I give you adoration that you don't feel like you deserve It makes you physically uncomfortable. It's a physical like, "Wait, wait, I don't deserve this. This isn't good." And so clearly you're gonna reject that. You're gonna push that away, right?

And then I'm not gonna give it to you. You can see this in compliments. I think we have an episode on compliments where, like this, it's a huge ego dissolver of accepting a compliment because it's allowing yourself to see yourself differently. So that's a form of identity that if people don't feel like they're worthy of it, then they typically push it away.

Also, if people don't feel a sense of safety, and the studies show that your capacity to feel and accept love is very heavily based on your sense of safety. You have to have that feeling of safety to be able to experience a certain level of love. 

Brett: Yeah. Or another way of saying it, your system has to be able to tolerate a certain level of safety.

Joe: Yes. 

Brett: Which is counterintuitive, 'cause you're like, "Of course I wanna feel safe." But there's actually a certain amount of safety for anyone that feels too safe, because safety could be wired together with some kind of negative event happening. 'Cause you had an experience where you felt really safe, and then suddenly a shoe dropped, or something bad happened, and then that got wired together with a feeling of safety. 

Joe: That's true. And the other thing is that on some level, the love that you're feeling is, as an infant, the love that you want, the attention that you want is a measurement of safety.

And so if you didn't get it, then you don't feel safe. In attachment theory, the more love and attachment just for who you are without having to do anything, without anything, wired to it like criticism or abuse or anything like that, the more that you feel safe, the more you can accept love as an infant.

But if you're constantly striving to get that attention, and it's not even getting love, then this level of safety is what you get used to, which is not feeling deeply safe. And so you get the love and It's almost like, "Wait, I can't go there because I know back then if I would've felt that safe, it wasn't okay because I wasn't gonna get that love, so I have to actually have like, a level of anxiety."

And so again, they're trained together. And so identity, what happens when those things are at play, what happens is somebody gives you a certain amount of adoration and you're uncomfortable with it. Also, you start seeing how you're not loved a lot quicker than you see how you are loved. 

Brett: Yeah, you got a confirmation bias going on.

Joe: Total confirmation bias. So you see this happen all the time where somebody has a wife or a husband who does, like, 20 different things for them, and they only see this one way that they're rejected. They only see the one thing that the husband didn't do. But it's, like, different ways in which how we identify love to be, we don't recognize it, we don't see it, and we can't accept it because of our identity around safety or our identity around what we deserve, what we think we can accept, what we think is okay. 

Brett: Right. Or also, like, the values that we hold in our identity. If I was valued for taking care of somebody, in order to show love to someone, I'm most likely to take care of them. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: And if I was, at the same time, appreciation came with manipulation, then I'm not gonna appreciate people cause I'm afraid of feeling manipulated. 

Joe: Or allow appreciation in.

Brett: Or allow appreciation in. That's right. So I'm not gonna see the ways I'm appreciated. I might see the ways that someone is of service to me. 

Joe: Right. 

Brett: And then I might find a partner who does exactly the opposite, and we can dance like that for a decade. 

Joe: Yeah, exactly. So that's the identity piece is how we see it, how we view it, what we think we're worth, and we're constantly going around trying to prove that we are as lovable as we think we are. I feel like I have to earn love makes it really hard for you to see that you don't have to earn love, that there's somebody loving you.

And that's the interesting thing. It's, you know, if you watch me coach or you watch Tara coach, you can see that we're loving the person for no reason. There's no fucking reason why we love people. Like, it's just outside of the fact that it feels great in our system, outside of the fact that it's just a joy to, to love them, and in that, we receive a lot of love. Because we're loving so easily and freely, we receive a lot of love. But to do that, you can't wire love with obligation. And that's something that a lot of people suddenly have love wired with, is obligation, which means if I love you and you need something, my job is to give it to you.

Or if I love you, then you can manipulate me because you're gonna ask for something, and I need to give it to you. But love is not like that at all. Love is, like, very strongly boundaried. And so that's another- 

Brett: Obligation is fear ... 

Joe: another piece. Right. And even that has some level of identity piece to it if I'm the person who gives when I'm loved. You know, I'm not a taker, I'm a giver, so, or whatever that is. 

Brett: Yeah. Yeah. We've talked about attachment. We've talked about how love gets wired together with different things. We've talked about the identity and the sensitivity to rejection and the ways that we end up seeing what we're expecting and recreating that. What else? 

Joe: Yeah. When we talked about a level of safety, one of the ways that that plays out is the negative emotions are challenging to feel for some people, but they're not as challenging as the positive emotions, and one of the positive emotions is love. So my experience is that learning to feel enough safety to feel sadness, feel enough safety to welcome sadness, to welcome fear, to welcome anger, you need that same thing for the feeling of love. And people say, "Well, why is that? Because love is what I want. Why would that be not easy? Why do I need a certain level of safety? Why do I need to learn to love all these other emotions?"

One of the reasons the negative emotions are often learned to be loved first is because of exactly what you said. I'm feeling love, I'm feeling ecstatic, and all of a sudden somebody's angry with me, and now I've wired love together with anger. Like, it's the other shoe is gonna fall. So as soon as you love the other shoe falling, "Oh, that's anger. I can love that too." 

Brett: Yeah. Or to see the love behind the anger, to see how they're scared and trying to take care of themselves. 

Joe: Right. 

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: Then all of a sudden, the other foot can't particularly fall, and so you don't get that shock or that, "oh my gosh, I'm gonna lose this love" thing. 

Brett: Also, falling in love with your own anger makes it that you can find the clarity of your wants and draw the boundaries that make it easier to open your heart to the person and know that you're safe. 

Joe: Exactly. Yeah. So all of that is, is critical, but there's also...

Love is far more than anger, far more than fear. Love will take away your identity quicker than almost any emotion. I think maybe any emotion. I'd have to really think about that. But meaning, like, if I love you, my sense of self evaporates. You know? My sense of self becomes universal. And that doesn't mean that I don't have a boundary with you, but there's a way in which, it's like, you know, people talk about getting lost in sex or getting lost in, like, doing great art or something like that or in air sports. You're like, "Oh, I can just get lost in my work." Love is one of those things where you can get, the sense of I starts dissipating, and so that's really, really scary for a lot of people, scary for all of us at some point, and so that deep level of safety is really important. And so it's weird because people think that the constriction of anger and fear is, like, what we don't want, but the feeling of expansion when it gets to a certain level, when you're like, "Oh my gosh, it's getting, oh, what, what's happening to me?"

It can be also incredibly scary. So that's also part of what makes like, if people haven't gone through welcoming and loving all of their emotions, and accepting and welcoming all of their emotions, love is a very hard thing to feel for more than two or three minutes. You know, it's not a state that can be maintained for a long period of time.

And it's weird because what you see happen is people are like, "Oh, I felt this love, and now it's gone," and it's like, well, how long was that love really? And outside of the romantic love that has, like, that three to five-month spell that gets us attached to people, like, most people experience love, if they feel it at all, they feel it for, like, a minute or two minutes. It's not, like, a sustained thing. And that's where you see most of the positive emotions is that people can only sustain them for one or two minutes. Whether it's pleasure or joy or exuberance or excitement, they're very short-lived. 

Brett: And how much can you love the experience of it going away?

Joe: Exactly. That's right. That's part of, 

Brett: Or the experience of it changing. 

Joe: Exactly. That's all part of it. Yeah, so that's another reason that we're pushing away love or that we're sabotaging love is because it's actually really quite overwhelming, and we haven't actually helped our nervous system learn how to feel safe enough to allow it, and to invite all the other emotions in. So that when the love goes away, we're not like, "Oh, my God, I never wanna feel that experience again." Typically, what I see is humans would rather trade the experience of love, "I will not love again as long as I don't have to feel the loss of that love again." Like, you see that happen a lot. It takes a long time for people to recover from the loss of love, whether it's, like, a divorce. But there's the loss of love in a moment. There's a loss of love of I'm sitting here loving you and then you're mean to me. You know, there's the loss of love of, oh, I'm just, like, in love with the universe, and all of a sudden I'm in this shitty mood. What the hell happened? I don't wanna experience that loss again. 

Brett: Yeah. Or just the very fact that we need to be reminded that it's better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. Like, the fact that's a saying- 

Joe: Yeah, it tells you ... 

Brett: tells you. 

Joe: Yeah. Exactly. 

Brett: So I wanna enumerate the list again.

Joe: Yeah. Let me see if I can summarize it. So the ways and the reasons that we push away love is, one is our attachment style had us push away love by the way that we sought attention as a kid, sought safety as a kid. The second way is that our identity of not good enough often pushes away love because we can't accept that we're gonna get the love.

Another way is that what's wired together is fired together, so the things that we're wired with love, fire with love, and so we're pushing love away that way. Another one is that we have to feel a certain level of safety to be able to accept love into our lives. And then the last one is if we're not willing to welcome all the emotions, love is a really challenging one to welcome because after love is always something, and if it's always something...

And even to say it like this, I think I still say it like this sometimes, which is love is like a light shined into a dark ocean, and all the things that are unloved come up to the surface to be loved. So as soon as that love starts really happening- 

Brett: Cuttlefish ... 

Joe: in your life, yeah, the cuttlefish.

As soon as love starts happening in your life, all the unloved stuff comes up and you're like, "Wait, I was so loving and now I'm angry." It's 'cause that anger is getting loved. And so if you're not good with feeling all that other stuff, then the love goes away quickly and you get scared to love again.

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: So those are the five basic reasons why people often are pushing away love or sabotaging love or not able to accept the love that's in their life, not able to recognize the love that's in their life. 

Brett: Okay, so we've got these five classic ways. I'm sure listeners are like, "Okay, great. I get it. I do that one, I do that one, I do that one. And now what do I do?"

Joe: Yeah. So the obvious things, and I think the most effective things are, one is any kind of self-compassion you can bring to yourself is great. So your capacity to love the different parts of yourself is going to reflect your capacity to receive love and to give love.

Another one is to actually just learn how to have an open heart. To constantly, the way you would do reps on at a gym, it's like, "Oh, how do I open my heart a little bit right now? How do I open my heart a little bit right now?" Because as you open your heart a little bit towards other people, towards yourself, you start to learn that you're relatively safe or a little more safe or a little more safe.

So that's a great one. Doing that for yourself, closing your eyes, imagining a love that you have for anything that you love deeply, and then turning that love towards yourself, feel what that experience is like. All of those are really useful. Those are all in that category of loving yourself.

The other one that I would say that's really important is to learn to welcome all the emotions. We have emotional inquiry for that, but any way that you can welcome all the emotions, that's gonna help you get to love. And then the last one is just, like spending time in pleasure, allowing your nervous system to feel safe, ground, slowing down, walking in nature, and really learning to enjoy having pleasure in the moment relaxes the nervous system so your capacity to receive love will increase.

The other thing, obviously, that you can do is notice the patterns that are wired to get the attention instead of love, and then taking the action to change your patterns of pushing love away, whether it's jealousy or anger or getting mean because you feel abandoned or whatever it is. 

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: So the, all of those things are gonna increase your capacity to love. What I notice is if you increase your capacity to love, the more love that's in your life, the easier transformation is, period.

Brett: Yeah, it's kinda like the meta variable the fuel that increases the speed of everything else. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: Because even in this, you said the level of safety that your nervous system can tolerate is a rate limiter for how much love you will let in. 

Joe: Yes. 

Brett: So it's compounding. 

Joe: Correct. 

Brett: This is why this work has such compounding effects in the rest of life, including learning some skill or learning some rote thing or practicing. Because the more self-compassion and the safer you can feel with yourself, and the more you can allow yourself to receive love, appreciation, the love that critical feedback can be. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: All of these things can change your life and accrue to your experience in a much faster and more fluid way with more capacity for love. 

Joe: Yeah. We learn quicker if we're feeling safer, if like, we're, we're not at fear. We're not worried about losing love. We speak our truth quicker, which then creates a world around us that is more aligned with our truth quicker if we're not worried about losing love. And once you recognize that the love that you have, once you recognize that love isn't based on what you do, once you recognize that love is always accessible to you, that you can always give yourself compassion, and that the more you give yourself compassion, the less you do things that are, quote-unquote, "unlovable," the less you do things that are, that you judge yourself for. The more loving acceptance you have, the more you are the person that you wanna be. Once you recognize that, then the whole thing just snowballs. It's quite lovely. Yeah. 

Brett: Yeah, and then also the, the less you manage yourself, 

Joe: Yeah, exactly ... 

Brett: which gives you more spaciousness to be who you are and be who you wanna be.

Joe: And love more easily. Yeah. That's correct. 

Brett: I also recently saw some research that showed that self-compassion is a better predictor for having a healthy relationship than self-esteem. 

Joe: Oh, yeah. 

Brett: And there's a lot of to-do to be made about self-esteem, and it's- 

Joe: A lot of good stuff ... 

Brett: great and all, you know, unless, to the extent that it doesn't become a identity that you're stuck in. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: But self-compassion is a better predictor. 

Joe: Yeah. What's interesting to me, I would love to see if there's any research that shows that self-compassion leads to higher self-esteem. Like, here's a whole bunch of people have self-compassion, here's a whole bunch of people that don't. Who has the higher self-esteem?

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: I would like to see that. 

Brett: Yeah. Or I'd see maybe an inverse correlation where the lower the self-compassion, the more likely there's a brittle self-image that is perhaps a high self-image but highly protected and covering a deficiency. 

Joe: Yeah.

Brett: So what can go wrong with all this? 

Joe: Not a lot. It's one of those things where not a lot can go wrong. The way you do it can kinda go wrong, but what can go wrong is that in the journey of love showing up, so when love shows up in your system and you start getting these very expansive feelings- Those expansive feelings are often confused with other expansive feelings.

So it's, I remember when it started happening to me, and I was, like, in my early 30s, and I would be, like, at a bar, and I would, like, have this uncontrollable urge to kiss people, like old women and men. And I was like, "What the f- is happening?" And it was my system was just confused.

Like, "Oh, the only way I know this feeling is, like, as a sexual thing, not as a cosmic thing or a transcendental thing." And it can happen the other way, too, where it's like, um, oh, I'm feeling, I'm feeling sexual and I'm confusing that with, like, a transcendental love. So there's a lot of confusion whether that's I can get this thing if I'm skydiving. I can get this thing if I'm sexual. I can get this thing if I'm on stage and a whole bunch of people are adoring me. And so there's a lot of confusion that can happen there. But that just dwindles as you get, as it becomes more and more stable in the system. More and more stable you are in that love and self-compassion and compassion for everything.

Brett: So we, we've talked about in general what people can do. I'm curious if there's a couple of really concrete takeaways. Like, somebody could walk away from this podcast, and specific actions they might take or experiments they might run that can begin this. 

Joe: Yeah, do emotional inquiry every day for two weeks would be incredibly useful on everything that they are, have wired together with love. That would be a great one. Identify everything that they've wired together with love. That'd be a great one.

Brett: How about practicing compassion for others? 

Joe: Practicing compassion for others, practicing compassion for yourself, all of those things are great really practical ways to do it.

Brett: What about looking for or enumerating ways that you are receiving care and love that you're not currently seeing? 

Joe: Oh, fantastic. That'd be a great one. Yeah. Like, every day say, go through each of your interactions and point out how somebody cared for you. 

Brett: And then let it in. 

Joe: And then let it in. Obviously, receiving compliments is another really great one. It's a really- really good one. And I think we have a whole podcast on that as well. 

Brett: Yeah. Awesome. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: Well, this was fun. Thank you, Joe. 

Joe: What a pleasure. Yeah, man. I really liked this one. Yeah. Great. Thank you. 

Brett: Thanks, everybody, for listening to The Art of Accomplishment.

If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend. Share it with somebody who you think would get a lot out of it. And as always, we'd love for you to rate and review the podcast, and you can always find us on YouTube. If you're listening to this on audio, there is the whole video of this session is on YouTube, and we'll put that in the show notes.

This show is hosted by myself, Brett Kistler, and Joe Hudson. Mun Yee Kelly is our producer. This show is edited by Charlie Garcia.

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