That morning, we woke up in our decorated apartment, and I cooked us a special breakfast before we sat down to exchange gifts. I was thrilled when I opened an envelope from Sara that included two tickets to see a Cirque du Soleil show—my favorite!—later that day. She wants to spend more time alone with me! She remembered how much I like Cirque du Soleil! She loves me! I thought. It was the ultimate romantic gesture. But as we got ready to leave, I started to feel the same gnawing sense of disconnection.
Several hours later, as I sat next to her in a dark, crowded theater, I didn’t feel any differently; in fact, I felt even more alone than I had earlier in the day. We weren’t speaking or making eye contact, and instead of feeling connected by some invisible band of love that I expected to flow silently between us, I felt as though I were sitting next to a stranger. To deal with the discomfort, I ordered a beer and continued to drink throughout the performance, hoping it would break down whatever wall existed between us.
At the time, I was in the second year of my clinical psychology program and seeing my own therapist. I was working on myself and becoming more self-aware—or so I thought—and communicating my learned insights to others. That only compounded my belief that the problem in my relationship with Sara must be her unwillingness or inability to connect.
The longer I stewed in my familiar loneliness and increasing feelings of disconnection, the more I began to think that maybe I had something to do with my unhappiness after all. As I had many times before with many other people, maybe I felt alone with Sara because, emotionally, I was alone. Though it pained me to recognize that I might be unknowingly creating my deepest suffering, it also sparked hope that, as the one responsible, I might also have the power to break these repeated cycles.
Like many of the relational patterns we repeat as adults, my emotional loneliness began when I was young, as a result of my earliest relationships within my family. In childhood, I never learned how to emotionally connect with anyone because no one around me was emotionally connected, either—they didn’t learn how. In order to emotionally connect with another person, as I discovered years later, you have to be emotionally connected with yourself. And to be emotionally connected with yourself, you have to be able to authentically feel and express your emotions. Authentically expressing our emotions allows us to feel truly seen, known, and supported by others—core emotional needs we all share.
Because I continually held others responsible for my relationship problems and expected them to change for me, I couldn’t see the role I was playing in my own unhappiness. I couldn’t see how disconnected I was from my own wants and needs. Though I was working to understand myself better, I wasn’t fully aware of how I was showing up in my relationships. Like many of my clients, I expected others to tend to my emotions or make me feel better, without knowing how to do so myself. Believing that the “right” person would “just know” how to ease or take away my deep-rooted feelings of loneliness, I felt disappointed when they didn’t, no matter what they did or who they were. Looking to others to meet my needs was sabotaging my relationship satisfaction, yet I continued to repeat the same behaviors, not just in my romantic partnerships but in all of my other relationships, too.
Slowly, as I started to see that I was the one constant in all my relationships, I began to realize that I could never really control what others would or wouldn’t do, let alone how quickly, effectively, or comprehensively they could or would support my needs. And, I started to understand that expecting or demanding someone else to change who they were or how they authentically expressed themselves would only leave us both feeling unloved. To be loved for who we are is a universal human need—and one that I definitely didn’t want to deny my loved ones.
What I hadn’t been taught by my family or in my clinical training was that in order to change how we relate to others and experience our relationships, we have to first change how we relate to and experience ourselves. How we relate to and experience ourselves as adults is directly impacted by how others related to and experienced us in our earliest relationships. Whenever our care was unpredictable, inconsistent, or neglectful when we were young, we formed the core belief that we were unworthy of being cared for or getting our needs met. Feeling intrinsically unworthy, we then began to modify how we expressed ourselves and related to others. Over time, we started to show others only our “acceptable” parts by playing certain roles—what I call conditioned selves in this book—to protect ourselves and fit into our earliest environments. As adults, we’re still driven by our deep-rooted fears of unworthiness and continue to repeat these habitual patterns within our relationships.
Playing these familiar roles disconnects us from our unique essence, or our individual way of being with others, inevitably leaving us to feel undervalued in our relationships. In order to authentically express ourselves with others, we need to feel safe and secure enough to do so. And in order to feel safe and secure, we first have to feel truly safe and secure in our own body. Many of us, however, can’t actually access this sense of safety, because our body can’t access it. With chronically unmet needs, our nervous system remains chronically stressed. We get stuck in survival mode, physiologically unable to feel safe in the presence of others.
That realization opened my eyes. If I never felt truly safe in my own body, how could I be open to feeling safe enough to experience the moments of joy, ease, and connection that authentic love can provide? If I’m constantly focused on how I measure up to others or to society’s standards, suppressing my authentic needs and desires in the process, how can anyone around me have the opportunity to connect with the real me? If I don’t know and love all of me, how can I expect myself to allow someone else to know and love all of me?
I’m sharing my story with you because it’s a common one. Regardless of the unique aspects of your story, few of us feel worthy or lovable on our own, without receiving another’s validation or approval. As we did when we were children, we constantly look to others to make us feel safe and secure. We continue to suppress the parts of ourselves we once learned were shameful, confirming our deep-rooted fears that those parts are as unworthy as we were originally led to believe. Our stress level increases as we avoid, deny, or modify our authentic expression alongside our resentment toward others. Feeling overwhelmed, we often end up yelling at our loved ones when they don’t ask about our day, avoiding difficult but important conversations with our family, or shutting down when our friends try to support us—common habits many of us have as we continue to reenact our childhood coping strategies, even if they only continue to cause us pain and suffering today.
When we reconnect with who we really are and our inherent worthiness, something beautiful happens—and not just to us. The more safe and secure we become in our own Self-expression, the more readily we can create safety and security for others to vulnerably and authentically express themselves, too. It wasn’t until I became more connected to what I needed and wanted that I was able to truly be my authentic Self with others, allowing me to offer the love I thought I’d been giving them all along. And, to understand what I needed and wanted, I had to connect with my physical body, exploring how it felt in that moment.
As I began to reconnect with my physical body and feel more comfortable curiously exploring its sensations, I became better able to handle stressful or upsetting experiences and share my feelings rather than checking out or shutting down, as I’d done for years. Feeling more comfortable with my emotions and more confident in my growing ability to express myself, I found myself better able to tolerate the discomfort I felt when being emotionally vulnerable around others. Over time, I found myself sharing more honestly with others, even with those I had just met. Opening myself up to my own emotional experiences in relationships allowed me to then be more present to, or to empathize with, the emotional experiences of another.
The reality was, I had to teach myself how to feel safe and secure enough in my own physical body to open my heart and be able to both give and receive the love I craved. Embarking on this life-changing journey has shown me how deep, fulfilling, and expansive love can be, and has taught me that the goal is not only to find love, but also to find and remove all the protective barriers that have been built against it. Love, I have learned, is not about showing up in any particular way but about embodying the feeling itself, offering others the support and opportunity to be themselves, exactly as they are.
In this book, I’ll share the information and tools I’ve learned to help guide you on your own journey back to your heart. Throughout these pages, you’ll discover how to reconnect with all of you: body, mind, and soul. You’ll learn how to recognize the different conditioned selves you play in your relationships, how to identify and meet your needs, how to soothe overwhelming emotions, and ultimately how to reconnect with your heart’s innate and limitless capacity to love. Your journey, and this book itself, is about healing your connection to and relationship with your own heart as much as it is about healing your connection to and relationship with the hearts of those around you. As you too will come to learn, it is not until we are connected to and in care of our own hearts that we can truly connect with and tend to the heart of another.
Reconnecting with the infinite wisdom and intuition that lives in your own heart will guide you to make choices that will bring you joy and fulfillment, both within and outside your relationships. Your journey will help you spread love to the spaces between and around you, granting you access to your deepest potential as individuals, partners, and families, and will ultimately benefit all of our shared communities. Being the love we seek is the greatest and most healing gift we can give to ourselves, those around us, and the world we all share.
Within your heart is the power to change your relationships, as well as the environment around you. It’s the love that lives inside each of you that is the true source of all healing.
1
The Power of Your Relationships
Most of us view relationships as happening to us rather than with or even because of us. We “fall in love,” getting swept up in another person’s passion or power. We pick the wrong people over and over again, missing the “red flags” repeatedly, even if we think we know better. When a relationship falls apart or ends, we often blame the other person, believing that they were unwilling or incapable of making us happy.
It’s often difficult to recognize the active role we play in our relationships, including the fact that we may instinctively choose certain people for specific reasons. Many of us “fall in love” with someone not because they’ve awakened our heart’s desire, but rather because that person satisfies unconscious needs we’re not even aware we have. And most of us unconsciously choose to surround ourselves with people who enable us to reenact familiar interpersonal habits and patterns from our earliest relationships.
We often feel powerless in our relationships because we spend most of our time and energy focusing on the things we can’t control: other people. Though you may currently feel helpless or hopeless to change your relationships, it’s empowering to realize that you can, in fact, have agency. We all can. We can all find and create healthy and happy relationships. We can all be the love we seek, regardless of what others are doing or what’s happening around us.
MY ROLE IN MY RELATIONSHIPS
Until my early thirties, I often felt powerless and passive in my romantic relationships. I jumped from partner to partner, blaming each one for the dissatisfaction I inevitably felt and believing that I could remedy the situation by finding someone who was a “better match” for me. That pattern started when I was sixteen years old and started dating Billy. He was my first romantic relationship, and I was in love—or so I thought.
As in any typical teen romance, we spent most of our time together on the weekends watching TV, hanging out with friends, and going to movies. My family knew about Billy and were supportive of us spending time together. Even so, I never talked about him with my family, only grumbling a short response if my mom or sister happened to ask about him or complaining if he had recently done something to upset me. I didn’t talk about our relationship in detail with my friends, either, not because I didn’t like him or have strong feelings for him; quite the opposite, I thought I was in love with him. But in my family, we didn’t share our feelings unless we were upset or worried about something. And I continued that pattern, feeling comfortable talking (or really complaining) about Billy only if he’d hurt or bothered me.
A year and a half into our relationship, Billy and I broke up. I was devastated. One reason was that we were going to go to different colleges the following fall, two universities that were separated by thirteen hours of interstate highway. But another reason was that I was, in Billy’s words, “emotionally unavailable,” a description that has stuck with me to this day. At the time, I was shocked: I didn’t feel emotionally unavailable. I felt very loving toward Billy. From a young age, I had always prided myself on worrying about others and being a good, caring person.
A year into college, I was surprised to find myself attracted to the possibility of dating women. Suddenly I saw the whole Billy incident in a completely different light. Of course I was emotionally unavailable! I thought. I’m gay! I met my first girlfriend, Katie, while playing sports. We had the same friends and the same interests, and we spent a lot of time together at practice, traveling to games, and going out with our teammates. That was the basis of our connection: proximity and similarity. We spent most of our time together doing various activities, but I had the nagging feeling that something was missing. Though I desired a deeper connection, I shared very little of my emotional world with her—or anyone else. The truth was, I wasn’t actually open or available for emotional connection. Unaware of how I was contributing to our disconnection and without feeling the spark I was looking for, we broke up after a year and a half together, and I started seeing Sofia.
Sofia and I dated on and off for the rest of college, eventually both choosing to move to the same city after graduation. She was different from Katie in many ways, but our co-created dynamic would still allow me to keep myself emotionally distant in order to avoid any deep or authentic emotional connection. I knew it, too. Or rather, my subconscious mind—the part of our brain that drives all our instinctual, automatic thoughts, feelings, and reactions—knew it. This deeply embedded part of our psyche is where we store all our memories, even those we can’t explicitly recall, along with our suppressed feelings, childhood pain, and core beliefs.
Sofia had been raised by an emotionally reactive mother who had frequently exploded at her when she was young, yelling and screaming or criticizing and cutting her down. Soon into my relationship with her, Sofia started treating me the same way, yelling when she didn’t agree with what I said or did and calling me names or judging me when she disliked aspects of my appearance. Knowing some of what had happened during her childhood, I justified her behavior by telling myself that she didn’t mean what she said or how she treated me, that she was just acting out old childhood wounds. And though that was true, I found it incredibly difficult to set boundaries or limits around what I would tolerate with her. Unable to stand my ground or communicate my hurt and upset feelings, I began to notice a growing sense of resentment toward her.
I continued to blame Sofia for my unhappiness without realizing what was really wrong—that I was deeply upset with myself for explaining away my pain and making excuses for her hurtful behavior.
After Sofia and I broke up for the final time, I met a woman named Sara, whom I dated for the next four years. Sara was a happy-go-lucky person who liked to party and have a good time, subconsciously drawing me to her: with Sara, there were always so many events and experiences to distract attention away from any negative feelings. Since she always seemed so carefree, I felt ashamed when I felt anything other than easygoing and untroubled. I started partying with her and joining her in her calendar of near-constant social outings. Attempting to soothe the growing pain and emptiness I felt in absence of a deeper emotional connection, my subconscious continued to rely on its old, ingrained habits as I stayed busy and used substances to distract myself. Though Sara never expressed displeasure with our relationship, she was frequently mean when she drank, which was often. Just as I had done with Sofia, though, I rationalized Sara’s behavior by telling myself that she had just had too much to drink or didn’t really mean what she was saying or doing. In those moments, I continued to suppress my emotions to try to calm or please her, putting her feelings before my own. As the months turned into years together, I began to feel the same resentment that I had felt with Sofia. Once again, I blamed Sara for not giving me enough attention and not caring about my feelings. Eventually the relationship ended.
After Sara and I broke up, I moved into a three-bedroom apartment with a roommate named Vivienne, who was older than me. Immediately, Vivienne seemed more mature than the other women I had known, and we quickly became friends and then lovers. I was attracted to her independence and emotional self-sufficiency, and we quickly bonded over similar tastes and common interests. Over time, we started sharing our worries and fears with each other deepening our connection.
Like Sofia, Vivienne had grown up in a stressful and unstable home, and she had moved out on her own when she was still a teenager. Priding herself on never needing anyone she insisted from the onset of our relationship that she wasn’t the “marrying type.” So, when she started talking about marrying me a few years later, I felt extremely special: She doesn’t want to marry, but she wants to marry me! I gushed privately. We hopped a flight to Connecticut, where our same-sex partnership was legal at the time, and within a year, we moved back to my hometown as a married couple.
Shortly after we moved, my perspective on romantic relationships began to shift. Having just graduated with a doctorate in psychology from the New School for Social Research, I started to work toward my licensing hours, the hands-on training all psychologists need to complete before they can practice privately. The training was full-time and intense. For two years, I attended individual and group sessions in psychoanalysis, a branch of psychology that examines the different ways our unconscious mind drives our thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and relationship dynamics.
Suddenly I found myself immersed in a percolator of self-analysis and evaluation. During individual sessions, I began to explore my subconscious thoughts and feelings—something I had never done before—and spent group sessions evaluating how I interacted with the other students in the class. Within weeks, I realized that there was an immense emotional rift between Vivienne and me; we never talked about our deeper feelings or actual relationship dynamics, but now there I was, discussing both with total strangers. I started to think that I wasn’t happy in the marriage and that the relationship didn’t provide the emotional connection I so deeply craved.
In our new city, we didn’t have as big a circle of friends as we’d had before, which narrowed our world to just the two of us. Without the distractions of social outings, the dynamics of our relationship became more evident, coming to the surface like air bubbles escaping from someone underwater who’s held their breath far too long.
I started to regularly complain to Vivienne that I didn’t feel connected and didn’t think our relationship had the emotional depth I wanted and needed. I blamed her for being too independent and told her that she was the reason we couldn’t connect on a deeper level, which sent us into cycles of heated conflict. Looking back on it all now, I cringe. Just as in my prior relationships, I failed to recognize the role I was playing in keeping our relationship on an unsatisfyingly superficial level. Because I was so largely detached from my emotions, I couldn’t honor my emotions. I didn’t even know what my emotions were.
As I became unhappier, Vivienne began to fight harder for our marriage. Her determination frightened me, and when I realized that I wanted a divorce, I was petrified: for the first time in my life, I felt a strong desire that directly opposed the wishes of someone I deeply cared for. I struggled for months to find a way to ask her for a divorce, trying instead to push her away with my actions. When I finally voiced my true feelings, I felt terrified and empowered at the same time: it was the first time in any relationship that I had prioritized my own desires over someone else’s.
My divorce marked the first time I began to see the active role I was playing in creating the relationship dynamics that didn’t serve me or those around me. On the surface, my subconscious habits of ignoring my needs, suppressing my feelings, and putting others’ wants or needs before my own had led me to believe that I was a “good” and “selfless” person. But those habits weren’t making me or anyone else happy. In reality, because I hardly ever expressed my true feelings, many of which I didn’t even allow myself to have, I only increased my emotional distance from others. Putting others before myself wasn’t selfless; it was self-abandonment. Deeply unsatisfied, I often felt agitated or upset, and I began to pick fights and cause arguments about daily issues, which had increased the feelings of resentment between Vivienne and me.
At the time, I couldn’t see my own role in these repeated conflicts because my relationship habits had been ingrained in my subconscious since childhood; they were part of my instinctual way of relating to or interacting and connecting with others. I had developed and relied on those habits in my very first relationships: the ones I’d had with my family.
